TRUE SON OF LIBERTY. Garance Franke-Ruta follows up on her famous call for new laws against consensual nudity:

Others liberals, finding the present raunch culture wanting, posited a need for an even more sex-saturated media environment. “If the brain-damaged idea of sex as explotation [sic] is the problem, I say let us militate against that idea,” wrote thespian Roy Edroso at Alicublog. “Let us have wide and unapologetic dissemination of sexual imagery."

Son of a gun, she's right: There are two i's in "exploitation." (Also, it should be "other liberals," shouldn't it?)

GFR is also right, in a way, about the sex saturation thing, though I must say it is not my goal, but rather a thoroughly acceptable means to a noble end.

As I said before, the problem in our current plague of dirty-mindedness over sex is not the sex but the dirty-mindedness. "Girls Gone Wild" is not a hit because tits are a hit -- why, tits may be had by the bushel from any self-respecting internet pornographer! -- but because it combines tits with trickery, which indulges the sad conviction of many, many customers that tits do not spring easily and happily from their hiding places, but must be lured with snares (in this case, the promise of cheap fame and beads).

GFR's attitude -- eternal vigilance over breasts under 21 is the price of female empowerment! -- feeds into that gnarled and tragic world-view. I would much prefer an everybody-wins scenario, whereby the ubiquity of hardcore pornography makes the very notion of Girls Gone Wild and all such sniggering simulacra ridiculous. It may take a couple of generations, but I'm willing to see it through.

I doubt this clarification will persuade GFR that I am not in fact a "leering lout eager to ogle 18-year-old girls and transform society into a deregulated libertarian paradise where low-income women are routinely exploited," but, really, whatever would?

THE LOST CAUSE. David Brooks (TimesSelect, sorry*) has an plan to revive the Republican Party: "A Human Capital Agenda." The basic idea: imitate George Bush back before everyone hated him:

In fact, it was Bush in 1999 who single-handedly (though temporarily) rescued the Republican Party. He did it not by courting Republican interest groups, but by coming up with something new. On July 22, he delivered a speech in Indianapolis in which he explicitly distanced himself from Washington Republicans and laid the groundwork for compassionate conservatism.

After brushing off the "substantive problems" with the old comp-con agenda, Brooks proposes a new round of social program perscriptions that he believes will fire the imaginations of voters:

It means increasing child tax credits to reduce economic stress on young families. It means encouraging marriage, the best educational institution we have. It means a national service program, so young people can experience the world.

None of these ideas are new. In fact, versions of them -- permanent child tax credits, $1.5 billion for staying-married lessons, and the USA Freedom Corps -- have been tested, and found wanting, at least as political firestarters.

The real problem is that, when Bush pulled the compassionate conservative dodge, he was working to negate the natural Democratic advantage in social issues. Today, thanks to the gross incompetence of the Bush Administration, no one believes that Republicans, at the Federal level at least, can be of any assistance at all in such matters, except perhaps to help us drown faster during national emergencies.

Our current crop of Republicans candidates recognize this, and only briefly allude to the sort of social programs that define compassionate conservatism, instead using their bully pulpits for actual bullying: endorsing torture, threatening double-Gitmos, pledging to protect us from Mexicans, etc. I doubt that most voters think these candidates can achieve much in those areas, either, but their battle-cries may invigorate a certain class of Republicans that turns out for fundraisers, rallies, and primaries.

Under such circumstances, I doubt any candidate will dare a shift toward a Brooksian Human Capital Agenda. In fact, I expect they will go further in the other direction. Witness the most credible unannounced candidate, Fred Thompson (R-TV), who ladles boob bait even more generously than the others in "viral" videos such as this one, in which he flourishes a big cigar and appears to threaten Michael Moore with incarceration in a mental institution.

I fully expect that, when the next debate rolls around, the standing candidates will bring their own stogies, or suspenders, or golf clubs, and lean into the cameras to promise rough justice to Jimmy Carter, Barbra Streisand, et alia, leaving social uplift to the Democrats, who do it much better.

*UPDATE. Thanks to Stephanie who points out that you can get Brooks' column here for just the price of your attention. Which is still too much, but that's the world we live in.

MOVIE NIGHT. Finally saw An Inconvenient Truth. It's a nice primer for the mainstream POV on climate change. It goes down smooth enough, and I am very impressed with Big Al's voiceover skills. But admirable as it is as a presentation, as a movie it's not much. Maybe my standards for the documentary form are too rarefied, but the ones I admire -- Nanook of the North, High School, Harlan County U.S.A., God's Angry Man, Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control, et alia -- have something in common with my favorite fiction films: they carry a wealth of meaning that can't be conveyed by talking points. In An Inconvenient Truth we learn a lot about environmental science and about Al Gore, but there's no room to wonder about either. Even the details of Gore's life, nicely rendered as they sometimes are, lead us only to expected conclusions, as any campaign bio or convention speech might. It's nice that they want to save the planet, but I don't think I'll be taking in An Inconvenient Truth or Dare or whatever they call the sequel.

SHORTER ANN ALTHOUSE: Schools should get serious and stop teaching ridiculous, new-agey subjects such as Literature.

UPDATE. While it is amusing to take this as, in Amanda Marcotte's pithy phrase, "a novel idea for [Althouse's] endless quest to make everyone else as small-minded and stupid as she is," it may also be the harbringer of a new culture-warrior strategy. Rather than just bitch about how awful liberal artists are, they may shift to bitching about how awful the arts themselves are. From that POV, literature's a good place to start: for one thing, it is more civilizing and intellectually strenuous than, say, video games, so neither they (with the possible exception of Richard Brookhiser) nor their followers would ever miss it.

Althouse's claim that fiction offers nothing that can't be had from technical manuals or textbooks would be sad -- betraying, as it does, a heart immune to transcendence -- if she were not so well rewarded for her ignorance with an academic sinecure and waves of wingnut approbation.

AMERICAN PRIMITIVE. Here is a post by Ace O. Spades about how "liberal men are simply too pussy to get chicks." Here is another post by Ace O. Spades about a feminist who enjoys sexual domination, a phenomenon apparently brand new to Mr. Spades, who becomes quite excited by it ("dirty filthy whore... dirty filthy whore... Amanda Marcotte...").

In between, a post about beating off.

I don't understand why Mr. Spades posts 90,000+ words a day when he could communicate his thoughts just as well with a handful of sound files from 300, I Spit On Your Grave, and One Million Years B.C..

FORGET FALWELL, LET'S BEAT UP GOLDBERG AGAIN. I'm ready to say bad things about Falwell now, but why bother, when there are so many living, breathing imbeciles sticking up for him? The expected winner of the Most Fartalicious Fallen-Falwell Fluffer is of course Jonah Goldberg, who defends the late Reverend's insane claim that Tinky-Wink of the Teletubbies was designed to promote Gay Pride:

The liberal media loves — loves! — casting evangelicals as sexually hung up prudes. It should not detract from the basic unfairness of this bias to also concede that some evangelical leaders have supplied their enemies with ample ammo in this regard.

Try it this way: "The liberal media loves -- loves! -- casting Mars as the fourth planet from the Sun. It should not detract from the basic unfairness of this bias to also concede that the Earth is third from the Sun, Jupiter is fifth, and Mars is between them." I sometimes get the impression that Goldberg learned how to argue from a roomful of Furbys.

The problem with all of this was that Falwell didn't get the idea from watching the show, he got the idea from gay people. Tinky-Winky was a campy icon of gay clubbers in London and New York long before Falwell even knew who Mr.(?) Winky was. At least according to sources such as the Washington Post.

I'm suspicious. For one thing, I have been a New Yorker for nearly 30 years, which makes me an honorary homosexual -- hell, for all I know it may make me an actual homosexual, albeit one who uses frequent sex with women to conceal his true identity -- and I never heard of such a thing. But even if it were so, does that mean that all icons associated with gayness were designed to be so? Was that really why Mervyn LeRoy made The Wizard of Oz? "We gotta make America love fags! Get me a confused young woman I can make into a pillhead! It'll take decades for the caper to pan out -- but it'll be worth all the trouble if only my children's children can suck cock!"

I used to think Goldberg was just intellectually lazy -- that he just couldn't be bothered to do anything so hard as thinking. But consider: While most rightwing guys are just stubbornly insisting, against all evidence, that Jerry "9/11 was Punishment for Fags" Falwell was a great American -- which requires nothing more than a thesaurus and a lack of normal shame -- Goldberg pretends to have a point, and even fashions crude simulacra of arguments to enhance the fantasy. That takes real effort, or maybe the sort of genius that I thought passed from the world with the death of Junior Samples.

DEAD DRUNKBLOGGING POST-DEBATE. Round one

McCAIN: We're fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them blah blah blah. Iraqis are disappointing.

THOMPSON: I too believe Iraqis are disappointing.

ROMNEY: Iraqis should do what I say.

BROWNBACK: Iraqis and Democrats should do what I say.

GIULIANI: Democrats and Republicans should do what I say.

TANCREDO: I agree with Bush.

PAUL: I agree with Reagan.

HUNTER: The Iraqis agree with me.

HUCKABEE: Gotta get it right the first time, that's the main thing. Wo ho, wo ho, wo ho, wo ho ho ho-o-o ho.

GILMORE: America, whattaya think about Iran?

Round two

ROMNEY: I won't raise taxes.

McCAIN: Here's a joke! (laughter)

HUCKABEE: Here's a crazy idea, and a joke! (laughter)

GIULIANI: I cut taxes in New York, and they're all commie bastards.

BROWNBACK: Biofuel will defeat Hugo Chavez.

THOMPSON: I did 1,900 vetoes, and I'll cut into that useless agency, the Centers for Disease Control.

PAUL: I'll cut everything.

GILMORE: I'm a conservative. You other guys, not so much.

HUNTER: Fuck China, help American businesses, especially war profiteers.

TANCREDO: I'll cut everything too.

Round three

GILMORE: Giuliani loves abortion, Huckabee hearts taxes, Romney loves health care for God's sake.

GIULIANI: Well, at least I'm not a liberal.

McCAIN: I was in Vietnam.

HUCKABEE: I actually cut taxes. I'm doggone good and I have a moniker.

ROMNEY: I hate the state I used to be governor of.

BROWNBACK: Yay Reagan, boo Mexicans.

THOMPSON: Yay stem cells, boo destroying embryos.

GIULIANI: Abortion? Goddamn New Yorkers. What could I do?

HUCKABEE: Giuliani celebrates death, I look for lost boy scouts.

BROWNBACK: If you're raped, you should have a baby.

ROMNEY: I am recently and totally pro-life.

TANCREDO: I hate Mexicans. These guys love Mexicans.

McCAIN: Well, at least Mexicans aren't Muslims.

ROMNEY: Mexicans shouldn't get a special pathway. Or doorway. Citizenship! (applause)

McCAIN: Why's everyone looking at me? Abortion!

GIULIANI: I'm not soft. I'm hard! I'm America's Mayor! We need tamper proof IDs! And a fence!

HUNTER: I built a motherfucking fence.

PAUL: We really fucked up in Iraq. (applause)

GIULIANI: 9/11! 9/11! (cheers, gunfire)

PAUL: Fuck you.

McCAIN: I'm sorry about the Confederate flag, but not as sorry as you should be for asking me about it. (cheers, "Dixie")

HUCKABEE: That murderer? Everyone makes mistakes. If I'm elected, no one will go free.

TANCREDO: Global warming is bullshit. Ron Paul is a traitor! (cheers)

Round fucking four

McCAIN: I'm against torture. I was tortured myself. (No applause)

GIULIANI: I'm for torture. (applause) 9/11!

ROMNEY: More imprisonments without trial! Fuck habeus corpus! (applause)

THOMPSON: Colin Powell! Confused you, didn't I, bitches? Asking me about Africa! Sheeit.

BROWNBACK: Fuck the U.N.!

HUNTER: Whatever I did, I wouldn't think about it, thinking's for pussies.

McCAIN: I'm still against torture, despite your invitation to get with the program.

GILMORE: 9/11, Virginia stylee! Fuck the U.N., but with foreplay. I was a prosecutor!

HUCKABEE: Bush said "keep shopping," which was great, but let's all pretend we're making sacrifices, and voting for me would be a good first step.

PAUL: Forget taxes, let's talk torture. I mean, let's get Bin Laden. (deafening silence)

TANCREDO: Jack Bauer! (cheers)

Bullshit minority afterthought

GILMORE: I like black people.

ROMNEY: No Child Left Behind is good for black people.

I don't even know what this is supposed to be

HUNTER: Expanded trade with China may not be an unmixed blessing.

Conclusion: This country is fucked. Our only hope: THROW BATTERIES!

UPDATE. Andy McCarthy says, what does that pussy McCain know about torture? Ace O. Spades sez "Fuck Ron Paul. If I ever see this cocksucker in person, I'll take a swing at him." The Reasonoids go another way. That Big Tent seems to be leaking some air.

THE GENTLEMAN FROM JASPERWOOD, PART ONE. The Gentleman from Jasperwood -- neither at Minneapolis St.Paul International Airport nor at Orlando International Airport could any one recall his name -- with his wife and daughter, was on his way to Disney World, where he intended to stay for one whole week, solely for the pleasure of it.

He was firmly convinced that he had a full right to a rest, enjoyment, a long comfortable trip, and what not. This conviction had a two-fold reason: first he was rich, and second, despite his forty-eight years, he was just about to enter the stream of life's pleasures.

Not to spoil the story, but having spent four days in the realm of the Mouse, you could cut my wrists and I’d bleed Disney Kool-Aid. Because that’s how much I drank. This is going to take a few days, so let's begin.

Of course, it was first of all himself that he desired to reward for the years of toil, but he was also glad for his wife and daughter's sake.

If you have any doubts about anything in the world – the purposes of money, the transience of joy, the point of it all, frankly – it is swept away the second you watch your daughter running barefoot through the grass in the dusk to see the fireworks burst over the lagoon.

It’s the best place ever she says, awestruck.

It’s Disneyworld...

The manner of living was a most aristocratic one; passengers rose early, awakened by the shrill voice of a bugle, filling the corridors at the gloomy hour when the day broke slowly and sulkily over the grayish-green watery desert, which rolled heavily in the fog. After putting on their flannel pajamas, they took coffee, chocolate, cocoa; they seated themselves in marble baths, went through their exercises, whetting their appetites and increasing their sense of well-being, dressed for the day, and had their breakfast.

It’s clean. It’s so clean and perfect you wonder why everything doesn’t look like this. But why is it clean? You see no one picking things up. Maybe the very fact that it’s spotless and pristine makes people hesitate to ruin the perfection. Then again, you placed a small piece of paper on the ground and walked away a few yards, just to see what happened. It vanished in a puff of smoke.

Immediately, life at Orlando began to follow a set routine. Early in the morning breakfast was served in the gloomy dining-room, swept by a wet draught from the open windows looking upon a stony garden, while outside the sky was cloudy and cheerless, and a crowd of guides swarmed at the door of the vestibule.

We stopped at the Port Royale food court, and got something to keep us from falling over. My wife selected an Oriental salad; I chose a small, pre-packaged salad, and Gnat had a small bag of chips.

Next on the day's program was a slow automobile ride along crowded, narrow, and damp corridors of streets, between high, many-windowed buildings.

Monorails. Sigh. part of you thinks this is so cool and part thinks this is so lame. The rails themselves, with thier pylons and stained we concrete, have a deadening effect on the landscape, but the moment the cars slide past they look cool again. Then they leave, and the rails look like an abandoned aqueduct.

While the steamer was anchored at Space Mountain and Frontierland, the situation was more cheerful; but even here the ship rolled terribly, and the coast with all its precipices, gardens and pines, with its pink and white hotels and hazy mountains clad in curling verdure, flew up and down as if it were on swings. The rowboats hit against the sides of the steamer, the sailors and the deck passengers shouted at the top of their voices, and somewhere a baby screamed as if it were being crushed to pieces.

Gnat was a little unnerved by the preliminaries, and held my hand quite tightly. This from a kid who took Space Mountain without blinking. We shuffled down a dim corridor, lined with amusing symbols of Victoriana; apparently for all time, the late 19th century domestic style is fixed as the preferred model for haunted homes. As I’ve said before, it’s like waking up 70 years in the future and discovering that the post-war rambler is now the standard model for domiciles cursed by the dead.

A wet wind blew through the door, and from a wavering barge flying the flag of the Hotel Royal, an urchin kept on unwearyingly shouting "Welcome! Foolish Mortals! To the Haunted Mansion! . . ." inviting tourists. And the Gentleman from Jasperwood felt like the old man that he was...

We were crammed into a dim octagonal room with 70 other damned souls, and the doors were closed. It appeared that there weren’t any doors at all, and there had never been any door.

Then the lights went out.

I think this is as good a time as any to reveal that I am severely claustrophobic.

(Text from Ivan Bunin and James Lileks.)

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.