FALWELL DEAD. And my first reaction to that was pretty much like this.

But I feel bad about that now. I make it a rule to try and muster a little respect for any man at the point of dying, even if I despised him in life. In the Church in which I was raised, we were taught that no man living knows the disposition of departed souls. I have abandoned most of the paternostrums the Catholic faith bestowed upon me, but I have retained this one because I think it has a nice tinge of existentialism about it.

For one thing, I believe in doubt, and death is the certainty that concentrates doubt most powerfully. The undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveler returns -- the Bible may be more certain than Shakespeare, but it is nowhere near as convincing. I can tally up costs and make judgment upon lives, and have; but at the very moment the portal opens and sucks out a soul, the chill wind it leaves behind dispels all judgment. I can't say then which of us was right -- only that we were both born to die:

It was in the reign of George III that the aforesaid personages lived and quarrelled; good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor they are all equal now.

For the time being, Horseman, pass by.

LET'S YOU AND HIM FIGHT. For quite some time, religious conservatives have complained that Democrats do not show them enough respect. Now apparently some religious conservatives are angry that "secular conservatives" do not show them enough respect -- so angry that they take a mild joke by the Perfesser as an occasion for low dudgeon:

Three of the most murderous men of the last century — Pol Pot, Hitler and Stalin — were all atheists/occultists. Should we start expecting effette latte-drinking Utne reader types to start engaging in terrorism if they don’t get their way?

"Start expecting"?

...secular humanists constantly conflate Pat Robertson with the Taliban thereby demonstrating that they don’t get it, and most of our pundits and most of our major bloggers obviously don’t understand it either. Our dominant strains of voluntary ignorance may literally kill us.

This time the threat is merely mutual extinction. Next time, maybe, the author will remind the Perfesser that when that holocaust comes, he and his kind will descend into Hell.

The brawl crashes through a thin partition into Ace O. Spades territory, where one Jack M ("I am this site's resident 'social conservative'") declares:

...the Secular Cons often make no bones about their disdain for the Social Cons, going so far as to adopt the same sneering rhetoric as the militant left in deriding the very people without whom the secular cons would have no viable national platform at all. It's one thing to constantly confront outright bigotry from the left; it's quite another to have to brook it from people who are ostensibly on your side.

Well, now he knows how us Nutroots feel!

This is too good to last, I'm afraid. It is a symptom of the Rudy dilemma, whereby fundamentalists have been horrified to see widespread support going to a Republican who won't read the anti-abortion script with sufficient enthusiasm. But I expect soon enough secular cons and social cons will unite, mindful of their mutual devotion to the greatest con of all: the continued gutting of the Federal Treasury, and guns for everyone! Yeeee-haw!

Or it may be that the Lord takes pity on America, and allows the brawl to rage unabated in the Big Tent as horrified non-combatants run for the exits.

HOPE FOR AMERICA'S FUTURE. I know it doesn't count as journalism, but surely I have employed some sort of skill (shared with Ed Norton, who referred to himself as a "subterranean engineer") in digging through The Anchoress and Sigmund Carl & Alfred to get to a new and wonderful lunatic: "educator" Mamacita, who tells of life on the front lines of the teen sexual revolution, which -- despite everything you may have read in such Evil MSM outlets as Beliefnet -- is apparently raging out of control:

My last few years in the middle school were spent largely chasing kids out of the bathroom of the opposite sex. Blowjobs were all the rage. It was all they could talk about. They even drew pictures and diagrams, of kids ‘doing it,’ or ‘how to do it’ for the uninitiated.

Unpopular girls became suddenly popular. Early-developing boys were chased down the halls and solicited. It was sick. A time or two someone was actually caught in the act, but our principal had a hard time believing such things could happen at that age, and we had a really difficult time convincing her that yes, it was happening two or three dozen times a day. Nothing was ever done, because ‘the teacher must have just misinterpreted the situation and assumed the worst.’
Yes, it happened like that over and over. The parents were our worst problem, because they simply refused to believe their innocent child could possibly do that, and they became furious at the implication.

And the middle school kids were giving, and getting, blowjobs all day.

As a great man once said, bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.

I spent my adolescence and young adulthood in the 70s, which era is generally considered to be the apotheosis of sexual license, but this shit has my shit beat cold!

The good news doesn't stop there:

Maybe if people realized that all of these under-thirty girls who are hooking up with old men are someone’s daughter. . . . . it could be YOUR daughter. . . . is that really what you want for your child? To be the mistress of a dirty old man?

Did she say "all these under-thirty girls?" Looks like I should postpone my gun-in-a-roominghouse "retirement" plan! Let me roll down to the bodega for some Paco Rabanne, Zima, and Just for Men.

The fun doesn't stop there. Alright, class, whenever a wingnut says "blowjob," what proper noun may we expect to hear?

I know that people are tired of blaming Clinton for the rise in blowjob popularity, but it can’t all be a coincidence. When the President is able to rationalize his propensity for uncontrolled activities right within the White House walls by resorting to “I can’t help it; I have a problem; I’m an addict,” I believe the door was opened for a lot of other people to rationalize their behavior with that same pathetic excuse.

I don't remember Clinton referring to himself as a sex addict, but I might have just missed it: I'm sure I haven't spent as much time investigating him as Mamacita has.

If you want to go straight to the crack rock, you may click through to Mamacita's own site, though I must warn you it contains unironic references to Harry Potter and Les Miz. I won't follow, though; I've done my part.

BLOW UP AT SHEA. Thanks to the generosity of Scott Lemieux (or, more properly, one of his colleagues) I got sunburned in the good seats at Shea Saturday. The Mets themselves got plain old burned, 11-3, by the mighty Brewers. You will be pleased to hear that class distinctions are not so huge between the field-seated and the upper-deck-dwellers among whom I normally enjoy these games: many of our neighbors started calling emphatically for Mike Pelfrey's ejection in the middle of the first inning. He didn't pitch so bad -- he was quick, coming back from disappointing results with vigor and intelligence, but then he lost his location and was done after five (in more ways than one: the Mets sent him down today).

In relief Aaron Sele did okay but got in a jam and yielded to Joe Smith, then sporting a 0.00 ERA. Smith promptly gave up an RBI. "There goes his scoreless streak," I said.

Guy in the seat behind, lounged back and florid-faced like the late actor Kenneth McMillan, said quietly, "That's not his run."

Shortly thereafter Smith gave up a grand slam to J. J. Hardy.

"Those are," deadpanned Kenneth McMillan.

The Mets' fielding was dismal: the normally sharp Gotay and Reyes approached grounders up the middle as if they were black cats crossing their paths. Maybe they'd had a late Friday night.

Well, it's early yet. The park was a pleasure. The dogs were hot and the beers were cold. We yelled Charge and Let's Go Mets and various insults. Willie ran onto the field to dispute a call and then, as long as he had the ump's attention, pulled out his lineup card to make a switch. The Brewers -- tip your cap -- played great and their two sons of stars, Prince Fielder and Tony Gwynn, looked pretty stellar themselves. Homerism and bitter accusations will come later.

ONE THING PERFECTLY CLEAR. Saw Emile De Antonio's old Millhouse documentary on Richard Nixon last night. Crude as hell, starting with the name, though the crudity works for it in places. De Antonio's lingering attention to the doughy middle Americans over whom Nixon put his line of bullshit comes straight out of old underground comics: lookit the squares gobbling it up! But there's a great passage from the '68 Republican Convention in which Nixon orates from the podium on his "dream" for the American people to the rapt honkies in the folding chairs. De Antonio strategically cuts into the soundtrack with the recently-assassinated Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech. But he never cuts away from the Convention visuals. In this context, the attentiveness of the massively white Conventioneers to Nixon's knockoff isn't a cheap shot at all. It is, for one thing, a tribute to Nixon's cunning at extracting the saleable parts of the zeitgeist. (I remember the moment in Nixon's '72 Convention speech when he told Democrats disaffected toward Democratic nominee McGovern, whose "Come Home, America" theme has just been launched, "we say come home -- not to another party, but we say come home to the great principles we Americans believe in together." Nixon carried 49 states.) For another, it attributes to Nixon's auditors a yearning that is perfectly understandable. There is an implied criticism here, but the mind has to work a little to figure upon whom it is really implied. This lifts us, for the moment, out of the realm of propaganda and into that of art.

But there's not enough of that. De Antonio keeps laying in negative commentary and burlesque intertitles to show us what a bastard Nixon is. That's often very entertaining. But outside this razzing, Nixon also exists as a character, which invites a curious reaction. In film as in life, nothing succeeds like success. The hard work Nixon put into mastering his game -- and "Iron Butt" was nothing if not hard-working -- is perversely admirable. Even the ridiculous "Checkers" speech -- so humiliatingly crass that John Ford saw fit to parody it in The Last Hurrah -- moved Nixon's ball forward. And though we are shown victims of Nixon's heedless rise, and proof of his mendacity, we can't help but notice that in the end (so far as the film knows) Nixon finally got to exactly where he wanted to be. Being Americans, how can we not be sympathetic to this triumph over adversity?

It is often said that some subjects are beyond parody. It may also be that some are beyond exposè, at least on the limited terms of documentary film. For a poetic perspective on Nixon, see Robert Coover's The Public Burning.

A FAN'S NOTE. I never read ballet criticism, but I may have to start. From the Observer's Robert Gottlieb on Peter Martins' new Romeo + Juliet: "Nikolaj Hübbe was a convincing Friar Laurence, but he and Juliet did so much hugging that I began to wonder about the nature of their relationship."

Somewhere on the other side, Dorothy Parker smiles.

A GOP HAS TURNED. NO ONE IS SAFE. Rudolph Giuliani has not taken the Cornerites' lying lessons to heart, and plans to stick to a mildly pro-abortion line. I thank our former Mayor for making it interesting. He of course had little choice. After the late Republican debate and the Pope's hard line on excommunication, it's clear that further waffling on the subject would have remained the focal point of his candidacy until he was (inevitably) forced to drop out. I think a sudden anti-abortion conversion would have been just as bad because no one would believe it.

In these cases, persistent doubts can be worse than an unpleasant certainty: so Bill Clinton correctly intuited when he admitted to "causing pain in my marriage" instead of trying to deny everything in 1992. By sticking with his known position, Giuliani invites voters to get over it or get lost.

We'll see which option Republican primary voters will take. Kevin Drum and Scott Lemieux, among many others, think Giuliani's finished. Wonderful if true, but let's consider another bright side. If Giuliani wipes out early after his long stint as front-runner, abortion will be the presumed reason, and we won't have to listen to any more guff about what a big tent the Republicans have compared to us lockstep Dems. If, on the other hand, he stays competitive for even a few primaries, think what shock-waves will roll through the GOP! Once it gets out that you don't have to bow to the Religious Right to stay competitive in the Republican Party on a national level, other Republican up-and-comers will get the message, and the Party will begin to lose some of its crypto-theocratic cast.

And -- why shouldn't I take this rare opportunity for concern trolling? It looks like such fun when they do it -- that would be good for all Americans.

UPDATE. Rightwing commentators rise (or, more properly, descend) to the bait! Split decision at RedState: while "Alexham" declares that "If Rudy becomes the Republican Party's presidential candidate, it will destroy the party for the foreseeable future" (yes, that's actually in red boldface*), one "Adam C" disagrees, claiming that "the best thing about Giuliani from my perspective is his ability to shift people's thinking on school choice." Yeah, our public schools are a model for the free world thanks to Rudy, and worth any number of extinguished fetuses.

No reaction yet from the religious maniacs, whose cherubim and seraphim are probably still helping them paste their heads back together.

UPDATE II. I'm so happy I started paying attention to RedState again! Look what they've come up with:

An Open Declaration of War Against The House Republican Leadership

The House Republican Leadership just does not get it and they will not take us seriously until we flex our muscle against them. We must fight the House GOP and we must fight today.

Today, I declare war on the Republican Leadership of the United States House of Representatives. We must scalp one member. That member's name is Ken Calvert.

Random b/f in the original, of course, or perhaps it was added by the stenographer who took down this peroration when "Erick" gave it to his platoon of plastic army mans.

The hilarity resounds in the drafty mountain cabin inhabited by Ace O. Spades, who objects to Erick's approach, resulting in one of Mr. Spades' finest sentences:

I don't think the leftist hijacking of the Democratic Party is good for that party's health; sure, they won back the Congress, but largely on the back of conservative Democrats and just slightly aided by the Republicans' corruption, incompetence, and lack of principle.

Or: If it weren't for the fact that we suck, you guys would have totally lost.

Oh, but wait -- I think Armed Liberal has topped him, at the end of a long rant about how we have to stay in Iraq because Saddam was Hitler:

Those who choose to stand elsewhere today will find that they will have harder choices to make tomorrow. Sadly, I think that all of us will.

So if I stand here (jumps left) I will have to make harder choices tomorrow, and if I stand here (jumps right) I will have to make harder choices tomorrow. So where do I have to stand to avoid making harder choices tomorrow? Nowhere, my friend; nowhere. (laughs, smokes a cigar like Michael Dunn at the end of Ship of Fools.)

All things being equal, I think we should get the hell out of Iraq.

*UPDATE III. In comments Alexham writes to inform me that the red is RedState linkstyle. That's too bad. I enjoyed RedState's resemblance to an old missal, and wanted to believe it was intentional.

SHORTER JANE GALT: I like gay people, but I hate this liberal guy worse!

(Actually, this could be a Shorter template for any post that starts out "I like gay/black/Muslim/whatever people, really," and within seconds veers into a tangent that reveals a totally different agenda. We'd probably wear it out pretty quickly, though.)

UPDATE. O, the comments are a joy. My favorite so far:

When I was in the Army there was a situation where the food that was being stored for use in case of a nuclear war was reaching it's expiration date. Instead of just throwing the food away, the Army gave it away for free.

Our post had cheese to give away. Lots of cheese. If you were so minded, you could get one or two 10lb blocks of cheese. The cheese was 35 years old.

Thousands of people stood in line for hours to get 20lbs of 35 year old cheese.

Does that sound like something you would do? I wouldn't.

My point: Just because legalizing something (gay marriage, polygamy, men doinking trees) doesn't affect you, that does not mean that it would not adversely affect society.

A fatally defective reasoning mechanism, AND an inability to understand that poor people need things! He's the sort of reader Jane Galt was born to write for.

CHOC-O-MUT ICE CREAMS IS CONSERVATIVE BECAUSE I LIKES CHOC-O-MUT ICE CREAMS, PART 45,773. Culture clown Stanley Kurtz takes time off from his polygamy obsession to be young with the young:

Watching music videos for a talk on the twentieth anniversary of Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind, I’ve stumbled across a hilarious production called Alfie, by Lilly Allen. Here’s the clip and here are the lyrics. I haven’t actually seen this on either MTV or MTV2 (which show relatively few videos now), but Alfie does appear on MTV’s recommended video list. This is probably as close as MTV has ever gotten to criticizing its core audience (and implicitly, itself). Alfie is certainly not coming from exactly the same direction as Allan Bloom, but it is an internally generated (and wonderfully clever) "conservative" critique. Should we open up a new spot on John Miller’s list of the greatest conservative videos?

The video in question is about Lily telling her stoner brother to get a job, a position totally antithetical to liberal ideology, which dictates that all Americans must be stoned all the time and not work, especially the ones played by puppets.

We may expect future conservative classifications to be granted to "Livin' On a Prayer" because of its Reaganesque optimism, and "Money for Nothing" because the guy says "faggot."

Is there no corner of life that cannot be spoiled by their leprous touch?

LOW STANDARDS. Ross Douthat says that when it comes to the Presidency, character counts, except when it doesn't, and it doesn't when his own former belief in the leadership skills of our brain-damaged dry-drunk President comes back to bite him in the ass. Behold his lovely I-meant-to-do-that statement:

In hindsight, for instance, it's clear that certain of George W. Bush's personal attributes - his intellectual incuriosity, his sense of personal calling, his abiding loyalty to friends and allies, his stubborness when challenged - have led his Presidency into disasters. But it's perfectly possible to imagine a Presidency in which those same qualities in the chief executive turned out to be great advantages that led to great successes.

Similarly, I could get rich selling turkey gizzard gelato, or by hanging out in Flatbush with a tin cup and a sign that says FUK YOU. Or I could, you know, make better choices.

SHORTER PATRICK HYNES: I'm proud to say I don't believe in evolution, but I wish the media would conceal the fact that three Republican Presidential candidates don't believe in it either.

LOSERS. Jonah Goldberg hears from Jon Chait that Markos of Daily Kos is using the tools of the Right to win results for the Left, and disputes:

For the better part of a decade now, liberals have been trying to recreate the media of the American Right — talk radio, think tanks, etc. — without spending much effort trying to replicate the message.

One might argue that the DLC and the neo-liberals did a pretty good job of replicating the conservative message, but never mind.

The conservative infrastructure that arouses so much envy among liberals today was an afterthought. It was created because the far more valuable real estate — universities, foundations, newspapers, and TV networks — were held by liberals. Conservatives used their institutions to have serious arguments about what conservatives should believe.

The netroots crowd seems determined to skip the serious argument part and settle on the idea that liberals should simply all believe the same thing, first and foremost on the Iraq war.

This is Goldberg's traditional rhetorical gambit -- make outrageous negative claims about the opposition ("determined to skip the serious argument part") and declare his side superior, then momentarily float above his seat on a cushion of methane gas.

But this argument isn't even worth having. Goldberg only engages it because, one, he has to produce something every so often to justify his Cheetos allotment, and two, he obviously expects the Democratic resurgence to continue through 2008, and is reduced to arguing that winning doesn't mean the Democrats are better -- much as I have argued, when drunk, for the moral superiority of the New York Mets over teams that were beating the crap out of them.

Goldberg wouldn't admit that, of course, but why else be so defensive about the glory that was Grover Norquist? It's a loser's gambit. And small wonder -- because the fact is, the best arguments for defenestrating Republicans are not coming from Daily Kos, nor from the DLC, nor from any such like. They're coming from the Republicans themselves -- not in their words but in their deeds: feats of astonishing and self-evident incompetence, greed, and corruption.

It is amazing to contemplate that, after years of successfully bashing anti-war Democrats as traitors, the Republicans find themselves outpolled by Nancy Pelosi on the prosecution of the war. Nancy Pelosi! A San Francisco Democrat! Despite all the lies about her that have been dutifully parroted in the press, despite all the bullshit about her scarf, Joe and Jane Sixpack still prefer the approach of Nancy Pelosi to that of this Administration.

That's how badly they've fucked up. You can feel the unease throughout rightwing media outlets. Operatives such as David Frum are busily lining up excuses for what he surely sees as a coming Republican debacle. As for the intellectual types, they are either rocking in place, repeating comforting banalties to banish their fear, or wrapped up in self-isolation fantasies, or planting a Jesus flag on the hill in their backyard and declaring war on the Enlightenment -- none of which approaches, however entertaining to the gimlet-eyed, offer much promise of renewing the Party's electoral hopes.

This is not to say that I share their expectations. Fate is cruel, people are stupid, and Fred Thompson may yet lay out a sufficiently engaging line of horseshit to flummox the electorate into four more years of this stuff (assuming the Republic lasts that long). But increasingly it appears that they think so. As I have learned from working in corporations, that's the kind of thinking that is usually behind any epidemic of ass-covering.

PREVARICATION CONSULTANTS. National Review continues to give lying lessons to St. Rudy. The latest seminar comes from Rich Lowry, and contains several corkers -- this is my favorite:

Giuliani apparently thinks that saying he hates abortion is enough. But pro-lifers will want to know why he hates abortion. Because it’s taken the lives of 48 million unborn babies since Roe? Giuliani’s “hate” line rings so false because, temperamentally, he is not one to hate something without outlawing or attempting to discourage it.

That last bit is lovely and accurate. Mayor Giuliani, fellow citizens will recall, actually cracked down on dancing in bars, availing a disused Prohibition-era law. There is some dispute as to whether he did this as part of a crusade against underage drinking, or just because he's a miserable son of a bitch. But yeah, Giuliani does indeed seem to believe that what he doesn't like should be banned. That's why he would be a disastrous President.

Lowry closes that, if the insufficiently insincere Giuliani would only attend their lying lessons, "[his] position would still be a contrivance, but at least it would be a coherent and shrewd one." That's a winning strategy! Vote Giuliani -- he may be full of shit, but it's our shit!

UPDATE. New spin from Ace O. Spades:

I wonder if Giuliani could have cast his [abortion] flip-flop as simply deferring to the wishes of the city he wanted to manage... wouldn't it have been better for him to have announced he was "functionally pro-life," but had to make strong assurances of defending abortion rights to NYCers in order to get accomplished what needed to be accomplished?

In other words, he nobly lied because otherwise we wouldn't have voted for him, thereby depriving New York of his much-needed leadership.

How unselfish of him! If only I'd thought of this tactic at key moments in my own life: "Honey, if you'd found out that I was cheating on you, you would have broken up with me -- and I just couldn't let you make that mistake!"

SHORTER HUGH HEWITT: The Star-Tribune is making Lileks get up off his ass! Cancel your subscriptions!

I don't get it. They're always bitching about how evil liberal reporters twist the news. Now one of their favorite operatives has a chance to bring fair 'n' balanced coverage to whatever the hell goes on in the Twin Cities, and they're complaining.

Maybe Jimbo can camp out in front of a madrassa and wait for someone to look at him cross-eyed. Hot copy, that!

These guys always want everyone else to work harder; let's see how they like it.

(Also, Hewitt says, "Imagine The New Yorker asking E.B. White to manage the restaurant listings." I say, imagine E.B. White writing endlessly about his trips to the hardware store and the cute things his widdle girl says, and trying to get that past Harold Ross.)

UPDATE. Lots of good commentary but Nancy's is the best.

UPDATE 2. Jimbo's fan club says covering news is demeaning, MSM is for fags, Lileks is being censored, and a bunch of other really stupid shit.

Again, I don't know why Lileks and his fellow he-men aren't tickled to have him transformed into a real live newshound -- such a hardboiled profession, and it goes so well with a fedora! Why would they prefer he remain in his ivory rec-room, spinning out deepthink on Why I Like Pie and such like?

I guess because his new job will require some actual work -- e.g, the lifting of phone receivers -- and contact with people who are not store clerks, on premises that are not Target or Chuck-E-Cheese. As with their pet war, they only like the rough-and-tumble parts of life when there's a nice, thick plexiglass screen between them and the reality.

Someone told me the guy's salary is just a few COLAs from six figures. And I'm supposed to cry bitter tears because he has to get up and walk around? Fuck him.

DOPE, GUNS, AND FLASHING IN THE STREETS. (UPDATE -- GFR has complained, and I have made two corrections. They are marked with an *.)

I thought agreeing to "vlog" with the horrible Ann Althouse was Garance Franke-Ruta's worst possible mistake, but she has topped it by declaring that, rather than expose themselves to the statistically insignificant chance of posterity in a "Girls Gone Wild" video, women between the ages of 18 and 25 21* should be prohibited from allowing their breasts to be photographed (insert) by certain people*(/insert):

It is time to raise the age of consent from 18 to 21--"consent," in this case, referring not to sexual relations but to providing erotic content on film.

Old enough to fuck, not old enough to flash! The slogans just write themselves.

I am sorely tempted to play the jaded roué here, but fun as that might be, I will for the moment take the high road. Franke-Ruta's argument is based on the harm that may be done young women whose bodies may be caught on film in a moment of animal high-spirits:

Once upon a time, a picture was just a picture. Today it can be wirelessly beamed to computers that can email it to networks where, once it is posted, it can be downloaded and endlessly reproduced by anyone who wants it. The detritus of 50 years of television is now available on YouTube, as are highlights from many DVDs. Just as Google transforms us all into archivists of previously fleeting moments, so too does the new digital recording technology give youthful acts a permanent life. In the case of Mr. Francis and his empire of imitators--not to mention angry ex-boyfriends with digital flash cards and a long memory--it can transform the playful exhibitionism of young women into scarlet letters that follow them around for life.

Lord knows our discourse is distorted when it comes to sex. It is my observation that it is distorted because of our misperceptions about sex and the body, not because sex and the body are themselves noxious. Popular R-rated giggle-fests from Porky's to the American Pie movies are, to me, dirtier than a typical porn film, because they posit sex as something you get away with, like theft or vandalism.

The appeal of "Girls Gone Wild" is based on that social malfunction. It's not the sight of 18-year-old tits that's gross -- O, far from it! -- but the idea that the filmmaker and the viewer have stolen the view because the nubile was, in Franke-Ruta's words, "intoxicated by both a Scorpion Bowl (illegally served) and her own newly developed form."

To worry as Franke-Ruta does that "Girls Gone Wild" participants will suffer lasting damage when their videos "follow them around for life" is to acknowledge that this fucked-up American sex-madness is unavoidable and undefeatable. Why else prevent women who are otherwise judged capable of sexual freedom from exhibiting their lady-parts? Elsewhere Franke-Ruta explains that she doesn't complain if young women (and men, she suddenly adds) privately enjoy "photos for personal use." But what is the meaning of the "privacy" concerns she claims to support if she wants private citizens to be legally enjoined from exercising or disposing them?

Exploitation, alas, exists. But this is no reason to fold the tent of liberty. All our rights -- the right to free speech, the right to bear arms, the right not to incriminate ourselves, etc. -- can be exploited, and indeed are exploited every day, but we try to find (or should try to find) the least restrictive way to limit those abuses, rather than allow those abuses to limit our rights.

So if the brain-damaged idea of sex as explotation is the problem, I say let us militate against that idea, not against the sexual autonomy of legal adults. Let us have wide and unapologetic dissemination of sexual imagery. Let us preempt the Joe Francises of the world by having fully empowered girls (and boys) go wild on their own terms -- there's a vlog subject more linkworthy than Fatso v. Ratso! Let the idiots among us hoot and holler and wank; the tide of history is against them. Isn't it?

SHORTER PEGGY NOONAN: If one of you gentlemen had hired me, I wouldn't be ratfucking your campaign in my column.

DEFINING JACKASSERY DOWN. "Giuliani is going to get whacked around a lot for his performance tonight... Although honest to God, if Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama had been given the same question on differences between Shia and Sunni, I'd bet either of them would have/could have fumbled as badly. Really unfair that he got hit with that one." -- Jim Geraghty

Tomorrow Saint Rudy will beat up Al Sharpton or something. The real losers in tonight's Republican Presidential debate: Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama! Look up, Hannah, look up!

ARTS POLICY. I've been on a tear lately about rightwing dabblers in the arts-criticism racket, but I feel it behooves me to go into negative space to better define my territory. Here is the beginning of a recent book review in the New York Sun by Otto Penzler:

Let me make something clear. I'm prejudiced: I don't like people who don't like America, and I especially don't like Americans who don't like America. I've never met David Ignatius, but I don't believe I'd like him, though I hope I'm wrong because he sure can write. I just find it impossible to separate the political tone (it's all our fault) from the novel, just as I can no longer be enchanted by Barbra Streisand's voice or Sean Penn's thespian skills.

Now, if you're more open-minded than I am (I won't say liberal, because no one is more closedminded than liberals, thereby ruining a wonderful word and an outstanding concept), just skip this column and go out and get a copy of "Body of Lies" (Norton, 349 pages, $24.95) because it is an exceptionally exciting thriller.

I have no objection to this, nor even to the fairly politicized (but still analytical) body of the review that follows. In fact I admire it. Penzler lays his prejudices on the line right up front, so we know what his terms are. I may be suspicious of his conclusions, but I feel so because I have been warned, not because I smell a rat.

I suspect Penzler's rigor has much to do with his genuine interest in the material. Penzler knows from thrillers, being the proprietor the excellent Mysterious Bookshop, and I sense in his caveat a tinge of embarrassment that his personal preferences interfere, in this case, with his keen appreciation of cracking good yarns.

That isn't a bad way to approach any task of criticism that engages our dual loyalties when we come across a subject we find aesthetically interesting but abhorrent for other reasons. I try to do it myself -- see for example my review of The Passion of the Christ -- and I find it requires a good deal of doubt.

I was going to say "self-doubt," but isn't all doubt self-doubt? The religious think doubt is a demon, because it feels that way -- burning, confusing, easy for the simple to pin on the Father of Lies. I think of it as a safeguard. I think of the late adman Bill Bernbach, who carried in his pocket a piece of paper that said "Maybe he's right," which I imagine served for him a function similar to that of the crown-bearer who whispered in the Roman general's ear "Victory is fleeting": a guard against hubris fatal to his true purpose.

Doubt is not always easy to summon. Life is easier (I imagine, not having had the experience since I was a little boy) when every intellectual decision is binary and predetermined. Doubt makes us work, and allows error. It's usually inconvenient, it can wreck your career, it looks bad on your face, it invites others to doubt you.

But I think doubt is absolutely necessary -- not in politics, so much, as I fear this blog demonstrates regularly, but in matters of art, which I find much more important.

In politics, certainty is a winner. We can't elect candidates or win favor for ideas, on the platform "On balance, I think we might be right." I see its utility. But I fear that if I let such relative externalities as politics sink so deep into my own bedrock that I would let them affect my ability to appreciate the things in life that are really beautiful -- the things that make life worth all the tedious business that goes with it -- that I had to say, no, I reject the appeal of this character, this melody, this gesture, because it conflicts with my political program, then I will have lost my soul. Maybe if the compensation of gaining the world were available -- if I were a Presidential candidate, for example -- I would feel differently. But, for good or ill, I don't have that option.

That's probably why I'm so annoyed by the culture cops. They don't seem to know that there is anything more important than their smelly orthodoxies -- little, as Orwell had it, or big, as in the case of megachurchmen and other such fixers who seek to herd every true desire for transcendence into promixity to their ancient buncombe and collection plates. That's why any encounter with a work of art, however unpropitious its aspect, however contrary it may at first blush seem to the other thoughts I have rattling around in my head, is something to which I want to be available, and which I would rather enjoy than condemn. Wherever else I may be forced to hold the line, let my heart and soul be open.

IF I COULD GET PAST HER BODYGUARDS, I BET SHE'D REALLY, REALLY LIKE ME. Ha! No sooner do I finish dealing with Ross Douthat's complaint that the mean liberals won't write novels about Republicans than Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley complains that the mean liberals won't make anti-Communist movies for him.

(Like Douthat, Billingsley is one of those guys who goes over works of art with an ideological spectrograph, looking for wavelengths of wrongthink. He also thinks the Hollywood blacklist was no big deal because the "free market" took care of it. That's why this piece of shit appears in Reason, I guess.)

I keep saying it and saying it but I never get a satisfactory answer. Why don't you make your own fucking books and movies? Pen and paper are cheap, and I'm sure Murdoch, Scaife, and Sun Myung Moon will be happy to bankroll The Joe McCarthy Nobody Knew or Red Dawn II or whatever stupid shit you want to make.

I guess the opening aria, in which Billingsley imagines top Hollywood stars acting out one of his favorite Stalin exposès ("Harvey Keitel turns in a powerful performance as American Communist boss Earl Browder"), really shows us where he's at: he wants celebrities to validate him. He wants those figures on the posters on his bedroom walls to tell him, "Yes, Kenneth, we agree with you, only under capitalism can the soul of man thrive; and you look really cute in those pajamas." Maybe that's what's eating all these morons. Maybe they're all secretly 12 years old. Their prose certainly supports this theory.

UPDATE. The Perfesser hehindeeds. He really surprises me. Weren't blogs and nanobots and home recording studios supposed to make Hollywood obsolete, like they did newspapers and traditional medicine and everything else?

I forgot -- nothing the Perfesser says means anything except what he, at some future date and depending on circumstances, retroactively wishes it to have meant.

UPDATE II. The New York Times hears from a successful screenwriter who was first drawn to cinema as a boy by a love of slasher flicks ("We devoured them and they, in turn, juiced us up"), and derives from this experience that slasher flicks turn people into deranged killers. Is this some sort of coded confession to some as-yet-unsolved serial murders? I hope the FBI is profiling the shit out of him. This could be bigger than Zodiac!

ATTENTION WHORE. Ross Douthat, incomprehensibly installed at the Atlantic Monthly now, bitches that no one's writing great works of literature about the Bush Administration:

If Soviet Communism didn't make "the aesthetic feel insufficient" for Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, then I don't want to hear a peep from the poor delicate darlings who think they're too traumatized by the Bush years to write anything that's any good...

No, the fact that none of our artists have managed to make something out of this Administration tells us way more about the artists than the Bushies. It suggests that there aren't any interesting Republicans in our fiction not because Republicans aren't interesting, but because our intelligentsia's political prejudices blind them to the possibility that a Republican might be, well, a complicated human being rather than just the sum of every liberal's fears.

He seems awful mad that none of us wants to write about him and his buddies. But are Douthat's arms broken or something? No? And he's supposed to be some sort of a writer, isn't he? Then why doesn't he write the goddamn Great Republican Novel himself instead of crying because no one else will do it for him?

First possible answer is, by his own admission, Douthat isn't the greatest judge of Republican character. More likely, it's because Douthat is, despite his ornamental pretensions to aestheticism, really just another culture warrior who thinks of art as a commodity to be turned out according to the specs of the Central Planning Committee he hopes to run someday. It's not something he would dirty his own hands with.