IF I CAN DREAM. Ross Douthat defends Amity Shlaes' new book That Commie Bastard FDR from John Updike. Douthat says:

But one of the implications of Shlaes' book, which Updike is supposed to be reviewing, is that FDR could have given us the fireside chats and the rhetoric of government action and yes, even the stronger safety net without the counterproductive attempts at centralized planning and the relentless scapegoating of business...

"Even this stronger safety net"? Surely, in the ideal Depression of rightwing alternative history, nothing stronger than a free cup of joe on the way to the workhouse would have been offered.

That leaves the fireside chats, which would probably have gone something like, "We have nothing to fear but Stalin himself. So don't ask your government for a handout -- we're saving our few tax revenues for an invasion of Russia. Now I'm off to Warm Springs for my fifteenth vacation of the year. Work or starve, parasites!"

I look forward to Shlaes' next book, said to expose Thomas Jefferson as a syphilis-crazed Jacobin who should have listened to his wise Federalist opposition and retained the Alien and Sedition Acts, the loss of which caused 9/11.

The more obvious their failure and collapse becomes, the greater, it seems, their need for fantasy.

WHAT DO THE DRUMS SAY, RODNEY? Ho hum, another God Versus Fornicators post at Crunchy Rod Dreher's Beliefnet Blog and Traveling Medicine Show. But answering a charge in the comments that Winger Jesus doesn't seem to care about greed as much as sex, Rod drops this:

I perceive sexual disorder in society to be a more proximate threat to my family, for a variety of reasons, not least because we live in a part of the city in which the violence of fatherless, lawless males and the sex-mad culture from which they come is a direct threat to the civil order...

Who knew that suburban Dallas was like Mad Max? (Or perhaps an college athletic fraternity.)

Elsewhere Brother Crunchy writes:

People -- black, white, brown, rich, middle-class, poor, Christian, secular, etc. -- naturally want to be around people like themselves. Why is that such a bad thing?

In five years I expect Dreher will be living in a gated community called Alabaster Acres or Ivory Towers or something, and writing about which semiautomatic weapons models are the most environmentally friendly.

UPDATE. Also, Brother Rod hates fags, which hatred he expresses in a typical passive-aggressive mode, fretting that the "lavender jackboots mob" threatens his Jesusosity.

I would advise you wash this garbage out of your brain with some hardcore pornography, but your work computer filters may not allow it, so use Faithmouse instead -- the guy is every bit as bigoted as Dreher, but clinically insane, which is much more entertaining.

BLOOD BROTHERS. Professional fist-shaker Stanley Kurtz usually hates him a bunch of Islamicism, but in a recent Corner post he shows great sympathy toward one Ali A. Mazrui, author of a piece (pdf) that condemns Salman Rushdie and essentially approves (despite mild demurrers) the fatwa against him:

When Britain’s first Muslim peer, Lord Ahmed, recently accused Rushdie of having "blood on his hands, sort of" it seemed a clumsy and ill-thought-out indictment. That it was. But if you want to see the Cadillac version of Ahmed’s accusation, consult the section of Mazrui’s article titled "On Literature and Chaos." There are huge problems with the argument of that section: false moral equivalences, and the notion that books kill people. But...

There's always a "but" with these guys.

...I do think Rushdie’s book feeds directly into the honor complex. In a sense, the Rushdie fatwa is the license for an "honor killing" (a point I made in a different way when I discussed the Rushdie Affair at the end of "Marriage and the Terror War, Part II"). I also found Mazrui’s opening comparisons between Western notions of treason and Rushdi’s "cultural treason" very much on target.

If you read the Mazrui, you will find his argument is, from beginning to end, that of a religious maniac and a thug, and unworthy of engagement by any civilized person. Which I guess lets out Kurtz.

Culture warriors such as Kurtz have clearly decided that, however obliged they feel by duty or loyalty to keep beating the drum for the War on Whatchamacallit, their greater battle is against evil blasphemo-pornographers. Well, hopefully I can get my Second Amendment rights restored before that battle begins in earnest.

HEY RUBE. Prairie content provider James Lileks says Woody Allen isn't so great with his snobby Manhattan:

Listen, give me Gordon Willis as my cinematographer and Susan Morse as my editor, and I’ll give you an opening montage of Fargo that will make people weep.

"Chapter one. He adored Fargo. He idolized it all out of proportion." No, make that: "He tolerated it all out of proportion. To him, no matter what the season was, this was still a town that existed in sepia-toned postcards that he bought by the carload at nerdfests, and pulsated to the great tunes of Lawrence Welk..."

I would love to see Lileks make the film, but I suspect it would look less like Manhattan and more like Stranger Than Paradise.

UPDATE. You want Manhattan? James Wolcott will give you Manhattan.

FURTHER ARTS REVIEWS. I have been Netflixing my way through the final episodes of Deadwood. I have only seen the show in bits and pieces, which is fine, as it is regrettably an unfinished epic, and because it has given me sufficient distance to sometimes find it silly. Would ye agree, bein' a sober fuckin' judge of the lively arts, that the complex sentences of Al Swearingen, him bein' a wordy cunt with all the verbal appurtenances of a fuckin' Cambridge professer yet slathered with the mud of authentic pioneer argot, sing most sweetly when some doxy is suckin' his prick? For fair, I do.

I wonder how well it would work if they all talked like John Ford characters. Ford trod this ground, too -- the tension between ripe, untrammeled individualism and the need for community -- and though I give him him the nod over Milch, I admit that Deadwood's modern advantages -- the richly meticulous physical reconstruction of the camp, the shocking cruelty, and the long, profane speeches -- are pleasing. Milch can get too pleased with himself after expending his vital energy breaching perceived limits; NYPD Blue got tiresome very soon after he succeeded in exploding the boundaries of the cop show. But though some secondary characters were left hanging -- it was sad to see Calamity Jane reduced to a mascot -- Deadwood still showed jam enough when the tap was shut off. I am content.

I blush to admit I'd missed John Huston's Fat City before this weekend. I love late Huston -- well, pretty much all Huston -- and this one is top shelf. It doesn't look like he had much money for it, but the old genius knew he didn't need it. I love Raging Bull but the fight scenes in Fat City make Scorsese's look precious and mannered. I know Scorsese's fights are supposed to be mannered, but Huston's makes you ask why someone would bother. He had maybe three camera set-ups, and the fighters, broken-down and hungry, get quickly lost in the violence; so do we, and their outcomes are always a shock that makes sense. Speaking of set-ups, see what Huston does when Tully (Stacy Keach) goes back to see Oma (Susan Tyrell) and finds her old old man (Curtis Cokes) has moved back in: the two men have their stand-off, and Oma only appears momentarily as a head -- drunk, dishevelled, mocking -- from Tully's point of view. I can't think of a better, more heartbreaking way to show it.

The Stockton locations have great, rotted flavor, and a Bukowski spirit of noble failure pervades throughout. Huston came from New York theatre royalty, but every facet of the human condition he was called upon to examine he looked square in the eye, and figured out how to make it play. They don't make too many like him. They never did.

ANOTHER APPROACH TO REASON. Al Gore's The Assault on Reason means well, and does well by several topics, most of them having to do with the Bush Administration's mismanagement of the country, on the one hand, and its ingenious management of ass-covering techniques on the other. Being a detail-oriented fellow, Gore lines up a good bill of particulars; many of these are familiar to people who get their news elsewhere than rightwing blogs, but they have a salutarily disturbing effect when seen in a bunch.

The problem is the prescription. Gore is very concerned with the "one-way" nature of political communications in our era which in his view causes citizens to "disconnect from the democratic process." He sees TV as the main culprit, so naturally he is convinced that we should attack the problem by using recent innovations to circumvent television's power -- he has, alas, a modish faith in blogs -- and by legislation on the order of the old Fairness Doctrine. He talks about Attachment Theory and the amygdala and the hippocampus as if explaining the psychological and physiological roots of our enthrallment by the idiot box will shake us from it.

This allows an opening for unsympathetic operatives like David Brooks to dismiss Gore as a "radical technological determinist," which, in addition to being a slander, is a shame. Because there is an earthier explanation of the problem.

First, rich people with a strong interest in distorting the truth use their financial advantages in every communications outlet -- not just on TV, but in newspapers, magazines, and even on the blessed internet. Gore is clearly aware of this, especially when it comes to environmental matters, but I think his faith in governmental solutions misleads him -- if, as he suggests at one point, we achieved "full transparency in the funding of nonprofit organizations" (including the ones sponsored by oil and gas companies), the villains would simply find a new way to disseminate lies. If Fairness Doctrine II came to be, they would use all their considerable powers to override it.

Second, while the multiplicity of lying opportunities cannot be pared down, we can yet equip our citizens to better apprehend the difference between their asses and a hole in the ground. Gore actually says that "education alone... is necessary but insufficient" without a way of "catalyzing the formation of a critical mass of opinion supporting their ideas." I say, let's take it one step at a time. If, as Gore admits, our people have had their heads stuffed full of nonsensical ideas, would it not be wise to teach them how to think? It is rather shocking that, in a book that includes "reason" in the title, Gore would say of the Enlightenment that

The Enlightenment, for all its liberating qualities... also had a dark side... abstract thought, when organized into clever, self-contained, logical formulations, can sometimes have its own quasi-hypnotic effect and so completely capture the human mind as to shut out the learning experiences of everyday life.

Q.E. fucking D., of course, but when the problem at hand is a proliferation of gibberish, can we afford to be so worried about the threat of sophomoric reasoning that we disdain reason altogether at the user end? With public education itself increasingly under siege, it would seem that any progressive attempt to fight the tsunami of propaganda would have to include, if not start with, a serious effort to teach young people how to reason.

No Child Left Behind is in place, but for obvious reasons a boondoggle; if we are to have Federal education standards -- and though in the main I am against them, let us for the moment argue on Gore's statist grounds -- why not use the structure to require meaningful education in critical thinking? Get middle school kids to use Google to formulate arguments for both sides of issues suggested by current events. Hell, throw in rhetoric while you're at it. In the ensuing years of political argument over the efficacy of this plan, millions of schoolchildren will have at least seen that the necessary information is available to them, and perhaps learn to do something useful with it.

I like Big Al well enough, and would happily vote for him again, but I really think he's got this thing by the wrong end. The Assault on Reason and David Brooks' disingenuous rebuttal are both out there to be read, but for most of our citizens, they're currently just free-floating bits of intellectual jibber-jabber: give 'em a chance to properly engage both, and they may get something out of them. Or they may revert to their original assessment, which would be a sign of real progress.

SO THAT'S HOW THE KIDS ARE DRESSING. Very well. I go to be young with the young! But first, some Old Spice!

UPDATE. My friends say I can't pull off the collar, among other things. I'm going to go with this look. It goes with my tone of voice.

STALK THE PLANK! I have been saying for years that blogging is absurdly overrated. One valuable measure of its triviliality is to see what happens to a famous blogger upon contact with real journalism -- contact beyond the usual link-mining and fist-shaking, that is.

In fact, to make it interesting, let's make it mainstream opinion journalism, which is sort of like tying one of journalism's hands behind its back. And let's make it The Plank, the in-house blog of the New Republic, which is to say mainstream journalism embarrassingly dressed in hipster threads and trying to get into a club.

The Plank's Christopher Orr took notice of the latest Althouse insanity previously mentioned at this site. Althouse doesn't respond well to criticism, but something about that little sailing vessel woodcut at the top of the page drove her to new depths of madness, and she began to stalk The Plank. In a series of comments she assailed Orr for incompetence ("Really, why are you writing for TNR when your diligence and comprehension are at such a low level"), then demanded an apology for something Orr didn't say.

Orr came back in a tone more of sorrow than of anger ("She's demanded multiple apologies... I'm rather sorry to have engaged her at all. Readers can judge for themselves my diligence, comprehension, prissiness, etc"), and Althouse returned to comments, announced "I am aware that my writing is popular," and then laced into poor Orr with the sort of blogger's boilerplate we all know too well from countless chest-beating posts:

Finally, you say "I fear the best I can do is to say that I'm rather sorry to have engaged her at all." Ha! You'd prefer to slam people and have them silently take it, right? Bloggers don't do that. The comfy old days of MSM are gone. Thanks for admitting that you can't handle the new situation where the people you attack have a way of fighting back.

Admittedly, not every blogger who goes mwah-ha-ha over what he or she imagines to be the corpse of the "MSM" is the online equivalent of the Simpsons' Cat Lady. But if we are tempted to believe that blogs represent some kind of massive paradigm shift that changes everything forever -- that is, if we forget how foolish that sort of triumphalist blather almost always turns out to be -- we should remind ourselves: Just because someone is using relatively new technology does not necessarily mean that he or she is the wave of the future. The screaming fellow with the Bluetooth earpiece may not in fact be connected; he may in fact be screaming to himself, only using technology to conceal his madness from the world.

THE RICH PRICK. Lots of talk now about a possible Bloomberg Presidential run. As I have said before, I hate the son of a bitch, but what are you gonna do? He doesn't care what I think, or what anyone else thinks, because a.) as the longtime operator of a popular news service, he knows exactly how much money it takes to implant a thought in the public consciousness, and b.) he has that much money.

When we imagine the archetypical Rich Prick, we generally think of vulgarian clowns like Donald Trump, but Bloomberg is a better example of that breed: he doesn't have to even stir himself to sneer. As we saw during the last Mayoral Debate, he effortlessly radiates contempt for anything that is not his will. When he gives press conferences, his manner is bland, because he knows there's nothing to get excited about: he is right, you are wrong, and he will prevail.

As Mayor he has blithely exercised his will, or his whim, on matters ranging from trans-fats to the razing of neighborhoods for private profit. And nearly everyone rolls over for him. All the major dailies endorsed him in his last Mayoral race. (He spent over $75 million on the campaign.)

No wonder he's interested in the Presidency. Experience has taught him that very little is beyond his grasp. So he will patiently go on accumulating power...

...until he is countered by another wealthy interest. Remember how Cablevision thwarted him on the West Side Stadium deal? Bloomberg folded then because Cablevision possessed the only authority he recognizes: money. (Silver and Bruno were merely cat's-paws in the event.)

That's why he probably won't get far in pursuit of the Presidency. It's too big a prize and there are too many other high rollers in that game. Eventually Bloomberg will decide it's not worth the effort, and go buy some other country he can run.

The papers find it interesting that we have the New Yorkers Giuliani, H. Clinton, and Bloomberg at the summit of our politics. I find it depressing. If they represented the New York of Billy Martin, Martin Scorsese, and Johnny Thunders, that'd be one thing. But they represent instead the New York of A-Rod, Judith Miller, and Larry Silverstein -- all power, that is, and no class. The poor and lower middle class once had a little somethin'-somethin' in this city, and they gave both steel and fire to its temperment, but now it's all about the most diseased exemplars of the filthy rich, yuppie dipshits and power-mad clowns -- which isn't a bad way to describe the city's current national candidates, come to think of it, and perhaps the reason why they are so popular with Americans these day.

LIBERALS HAVE FAILED TO DENOUNCE, AND HENCE SUPPORT, THE POTHOLE AT FIFTH AND MAIN. Norm Geras on the Rushdie Knighthood: basically, two British intellectuals gave unsupportive responses to the knighting, for which Geras shakes his fist at liberalism in toto. Perfesser Reynolds hehindeeds: "FEEBLE RESPONSE FROM THE LEFT to riots and threats over Salman Rushdie's knighthood."

Sometimes I think The Left should just hire a clerk to issue routine denunciations of the many, many injustices that occur worldwide every day, just to head off this kind of bullshit. It seems every time someone's cousin Clem gets his mailbox knocked over, we hear conservatives announcing that The Left Is Silent and thus supports petty vandalism. Well, I guess it's easier than defending their own policies.

I often mock conservatives via the writings of just one or two of their tools, but only when the connection is obvious and admitted. For example, when I mock Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters' mad ululations in support of the Iraqi occupation, it is fair to let some of the contempt slop over to conservatives in general, who support the same cause, though most of them lack Peters' distinctive savagery of expression.

It makes far less sense to link the statements of these two guys with the attitudes of liberals in general. For one thing, uber-liberals like Susan Sontag and Harold Pinter were supporting Rushdie in 1989. For another, come the fuck on: We liberals are historically and axiomatically all about freedom of speech: How else could we put on the blaspemous plays and Vagina Monologues that conservatives are always complaining about?

But if I must...

FOR THE RECORD, PEOPLE, LISTEN UP: I think it's great Rushdie got knighted, fuck a bunch of Islamic fundamentalism, etc.

Now right-click the time-stamp on this sucker and put the link in your stupid blogs, wingnuts. I dare you!

Not fast enough! Why does The Right embrace censorship?

TENURED RADICALS PART 45,332. Ann Althouse on a Hillary Clinton video:

Bill says "No onion rings?" and Hillary responds "I'm looking out for ya." Now, the script says onion rings, because that's what the Sopranos were eating in that final scene, but I doubt if any blogger will disagree with my assertion that, coming from Bill Clinton, the "O" of an onion ring is a vagina symbol. Hillary says no to that, driving the symbolism home. She's "looking out" all right, vigilant over her husband, denying him the sustenance he craves. What does she have for him? Carrot sticks! The one closest to the camera has a rather disgusting greasy sheen to it...

Which of course made me think of Matt Taibbi, a progressive who is famously embarrassed by the "silly" American Left. I say that for all the "guys on stilts wearing mime makeup and Cat-in-the-Hat striped top-hats" Taibbi notices on the left, I see an equal number, at least, of Althousean clowns on the right, as this blog documents.

The difference is, no one on Althouse's team has the brains to be embarrassed by her.

UPDATE. Oops. Instaputz way frist!

NEXT WEEK: HOW MAXINE FROM SHOEBOX CARDS ROBS OUR SENIORS OF THEIR DIGNITY. I hope Father's Day was a joy for you all. Do spare a thought, though, for those angry misfits we call culture warriors, for whom all public holidays are merely occasions for blind rage and nagging.

Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute didn't even wait for Father's Day -- she had her conniption at the freakin' card store:

For years now, as one stared with increasing despair at the studly stud, dirty old man, and bathroom “humor,” new categories of card were blossoming luxuriantly. “Celebrating your divorce” or “For my second stepmother” cards began popping up regularly among the “From the dog” or “Incompetent duffer” standards.

Don't start climbing the walls yet -- MacDonald's just warming up.

And this year’s display at a Manhattan stationer’s did not disappoint. In the small section devoted to Hallmark’s “African-American” line (of course there is one; it is called “Mahogany”), two card pockets advertised “For mother on Father’s Day” options...

With 70 percent of black children born out of wedlock, with marriage a moribund custom in inner cities, Father’s Day does pose a problem. Hallmark has solved it with aplomb.

She's being sacrastic, see! But not even her elfin wit can mask her seething anger at those bastards at Hallmark who abet black fatherlessness with their mindlessly thoughtful greeting cards:

A massive social services industry feeds off billions of taxpayer dollars directed at the consequences of that disintegration, to no effect beyond the employment of social workers. If Hallmark wants to make some money from it as well -- and, it would say, offer consolation and strength to those faced with the awkward irrelevance of Father’s Day -- that is its right. One can only hope that its product line for what it calls "'nontraditional’ family structures'" becomes a money-loser in the not-too-distant future.

When I was a kid, I used to give my Mom a card on Father's Day because my old man died when I was three. Did MacDonald ever think of situations like that? Oh, wait, I'm not black. Nevermind!

Thanks to Kia for the tip.

ROUTINE MAINTENANCE. Did some work on the blogroll. Me old pal Robert Schaffer, raconteur and sociopath, has started a food blog called The Gorilla Eats, and boy is he cranky! He doesn't even use paragraph breaks or spell check! But you may, or may not, enjoy his monocultural take on cuisine, as in the essay "Why Only Western Culture Understands Dessert":

I love Asian food, but what passes for sweets is mostly incomprehensible. Thick dry bean pastes, sweets with meat centers, huh? The Japanese are sneakier, they make desserts that look European until you bite into them, and reveal their non Western designs. One Japanese sweet looks like a ball of sweetened snot. Delightful. And Indian desserts, forget about it. My joke on Indian sweets is you take a Twinkie, put it in bowl of milk, let it sit on a windowsill for 3 days, then cover it in honey.

I will say that I don't agree with everything Bob says -- what sane man would? -- but he is absolutely correct that Katz' Deli isn't so hot and Frank Bruni erred grievously to rate it with the late, lamented Second Avenue Deli. Whatever became of standards?

Also added Glenn Kenny of Premiere who is sometimes cranky but mainly astute about the moving pictures, and has an eye for apposite frames, and is a fan of Loudon Wainwright III, which buys you a lot of cred round my way. And Northern Aggression, which recently posted a nice precis on the roots of our current geopolitical decline (i.e., money).

Finally, to make the whole thing even more shameful, I welcome the hamster dance of 2007, LOL President. Buttsecks!

WE SHALL OVERCUM. James Poulos calls himself a "Post Modern Conservative." What's that mean? A quick glance at his recent stuff offers a few clues. First, Poulos sees discontent among young liberals and young conservatives, and proposes a basis on which accomodation between the two tribes can be reached:

The only major gulf between these two groups is defined by the third vector among them of cultural libertarianism, which as I keep repeating is basically the question of sexual ethics. As young leftists recover a wounded common sense about the putative benefits of getting into an S&M relationship with the price-tagged, pleasure-pimped System in exchange for a golden ticket to being Sexually Active, they will grow more truly toward the Right...

If you're having problems navigating the metaphors, he means young liberals will stop wanting sex and then everything will be hunky-dory.

Oh yeah, and there's this:

Well, maybe semen suppressant is still a ways off, but now that we've conquered the period, delaying menopause is the 'natural' next step toward the complete and utter inversion of our sexual natures. Teenage slutpuppets that can't get pregnant and weepy cougars who want to be mommies after all, dammit -- I absolve you, I absolve you. Yes, this is Progress.

I think he's trying to be funny, though maybe in the postmodern world "funny" and "creepy" are synonyms.

This sort of thing actually makes me happy I didn't go for a postgraduate degree.

CHILDHOOD'S END. Every year near graduation time, the seniors at Hendrick Hudson High School in Montrose, New York do a prank. This year they set a bunch of alarm clocks to go off at the same time and snuck them into the school. Now many of the pranksters are up on felony charges because nineeeleven Virginia Tech we're a-scared etc.

You can read about this case in the White Plains Journal News, which also mentions what appears to be a little epidemic of this sort of bullshit:

Three students at Haldane High School in Cold Spring also found themselves in trouble this month after they created chalk outlines of bodies splattered with red liquid to resemble blood. The students were hit with criminal trespass charges, but will be able to participate in the school's graduation ceremony.

An Internet search shows that news organizations across the country are reporting about senior pranks that turned out to be serious busts. In one case last year, armed guards and swarming helicopters responded to a senior prank at an Orlando, Fla., school. The threat? An annual toilet paper attack.

You can also read a thumbsucker about Hudson High in today's New York Times. It's Select, but don't worry, here are the ponderosity highlights:

And it’s leaving everyone mulling over the questions of what’s stupid fun and what’s just stupid, and where you draw the line between reaction and overreaction in a world that’s half “Jackass” and half Age of Anxiety...

...one of those Rorschach tests for an edgy age: Is it a case of kids — and their overly protective parents — who need to face the consequences of their own bad behavior, or is it a reaction way out of proportion to the threat?...

(Pause for another thoughtful draw on the briar, and an oracular clouding of visage)

...You could get both responses, and a sense that maybe the vogue for dumb behavior celebrated on the Internet and in shows like MTV’s “High School Stories” needed some brakes...

No. No, no, no, and no. This isn't a cultural litmus test and it has nothing to do with those wacky shows the kids watch on the teevee. This is just nuts. If every American morning for past six years had begun with a terrorist attack, I might just consider it a forgivable overreaction to be reversed immediately; but with the relative paucity of terrorist attacks since 2001, it's nuts.

It's too seldom mentioned that one of the most obvious bad effects of the War of Whatever has been the pressure it puts on young people -- or, rather, the excuse it gives to the sort of petty tyrants who always like to make kids' lives hell to go absolutely bonkers, as the Montrose authorities have done.

Kids can get suspended these days for their MySpace pages or for holding up a goofy sign. They can get arrested for drawing cartoons. I suppose some of the Hudson High students can expect to be spirited away to one of our secret torture prisons in Syria.

There is an upside to this thing: that, after years of this crap, some kids persist in acting like kids. Maybe their draconian punishments will scare the guts out of them, or maybe they'll just understand more strongly the appropriate message: that the people in charge aren't fit to run a hot-dog stand, let alone other people's lives.

ROCK BOTTOM. The latest trend in rightwing commentary: absolute gibberish. Here's noted god-botherer The Anchoress on some widdle girl whom Simon Cowell failed to insult mercilessly on TV:

I think of this child’s singing as a sword of innocence thrust into the psyche a fierce world world that has forgotten how sharp and bright is it’s guileless tip.

I don't know what's worse: that she mistakes celebrity judges for Biblical villains, or that she mistakes her own prose for English.

Meanwhile at National Review Jonah Goldberg burps out a response to some bullshit about secular voters:

Now, we can certainly argue about how "mass based" Communism was and to what extent its mass appeal reflected or contradicted the religious attitudes of its supporters. But here's an idea. Maybe now that Communism and the various isms in its orbit have been discredited, the attributes which made it appealing may in fact flourish. A couple years ago I wrote a piece suggesting that cosmopolitanism explained much of the passion for Marxism. Perhaps the same case can be made for secularism. Perhaps Communism did us a great favor by partially discrediting, or at least tamping down, the appeal of secularism and cosmopolitanism. As Ross notes, turned toward secularism in the 1990s. Maybe that's because is association with "Godless Communism" crumbled with the Berlin Wall? That might be too much of a stretch. But while I think Communism is in the dustbin of history, that doesn't mean we should sweep it under the rug.

My first impulse was to send a team of grammarians in there, but what would be the sense? There's nothing here worth saving.

I don't see how they can get any worse. Maybe they'll just start uploading mp3 files of their farts.

FORM FOLLOWS FUCKWIT. The new Peggy Noonan column at the Wall Street Journal is too lame to deconstruct -- it's the usual bullshit about how Bush betrayed her and all America longs for a Leader who is exactly like whoever will next pay Peggy to write speeches.

But as I keep angrily declaiming from the brass rail, it is by their usages that ye shall know them. (In my old age I'm turning into a cracker-barrel deconstructionist -- the corruption of language interests me more than the corruption of Senators, probably because it is less obvious and the damage more serious.)

One of Noonan's fave rhetorical tropes is the invented quote -- you know: "I bet this horrible person says to himself I'm a big stupid liberal and I hate the American people and love Satan," that sort of thing. Of course, we all do it, but it can get old very quickly (one tends to lose the distinction between the genuine stupid ideas and the merely attributed ones) and Noonan reeeeeally overdoes it -- in fact she has devoted whole columns to it, as when she channeled the late Paul Wellstone, whose consciousness was clearly incomprehensible to her, but whose usefulness as an object of Republican propaganda she understood all too well.

But this bit from today's column contains that schtick's equivalent of a Triple Lutz:

The White House is exploiting American alarm at uncontrolled borders to get its way. This of course has added to the sense of national alarm. They believe the alarm works for them: If you don't pass our bill we'll never control your borders--yes, "your"--and you'll suffer!

That's right -- in the middle of an invented monologue, Noonan actually stops to comment indignantly at the words she has put in someone else's mouth!

Though Noonan has many distinguishing neuroses as a propagandist, I think this one reflects a common tendency among her whole tribe: the ever-increasing certainty that one's straw men are in fact real people. It's sort of like what happens to some artists and the characters they invent, except, you know, totally evil.

PURTY LADY NO TALK TO CAPTAIN? Captain Ed Morrissey has a complaint about Angelina Jolie and her involvement with the Daniel Pearl biopic. What, the informed reader will ask, is he still sore that they didn't cast Bo Derek? No, it has to do with her interview guidelines:

However, demanding that her answers never get used in any other context, and threatening reporters with restraining orders is not just unreasonable, but outright intimidation. It goes against the entire mission of Reporters Without Borders, and indeed against the notion of freedom of the press. I wonder if Jolie or her Hollywood friends would be as sanguine about these demands had they come from George Bush or Rudy Giuliani. Somehow, I think they'd be the first to demand a rush to the barricades...

Kudos to the reporters that told Jolie where to stick the agreement [!!! -- ed.], and raspberries to Jolie's self-important snit.

Sometimes I think that these guys aren't responding to ideas or arguments at all, but to endocrine storms and uncontrollable rushes of brain chemicals. I think the mere prospect of humiliating a purty gal and liberals in one blog post -- with a Muslim decapitation for added kink -- so excited the Captain that he was willing to spend nearly 500 words trying to achieve it. By the standards of journalism or even common sense, it is a dismal failure; but what of those? The heart wants what it wants.

YOUR MOMENT OF GOLDBERG. Jonah Goldberg notices a citation of sauerkraut being called "liberty cabbage" during World War I. The objective correlative that leaps most readily to his mind is:

a.) His fellow wingnuts' renaming french fries "freedom fries" because they were mad at France.

b.) Woodrow Wilson and the Progressives, because they "were keen on using food as a tool for political allegiance and organization." Also "today's environmentalists."

There's an explanation for this, but to find it you must join Porky in Wackyland.

I was thinking about doing at least one of these every day -- God knows there's always enough material -- but neither my readers nor I should risk that much exposure to Goldberg.

AS OF THIS MOMENT, THEY'RE ON DOUBLE SECRET PROBATION! Zillion-Star General Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters must have been a great hand-to-hand combatant back in the day. Just when you think you've got him down, he comes back at you with a surprise.

For instance, take the lede of his latest column:

WONDER what Iraq would look like if we left to morrow? Take a look at Gaza today.

One is inclined to laugh. Civil war and chaos if we leave Iraq? What have the past few years been, rehearsal?

Cornered, the General pulls out his Ka-Bar!

Then imagine a situation a thousand times worse.

Gasp! A thousand times worse? Now I'm scared! But I can't show it, or Peters will move in for the kill with Ten thousand times worse! Hundred thousand times worse! Infinity!

No worries, though -- eventually I'll pass out from the powerful fumes of the rest of his column. To encrapsulate: Arabs are sub-human and incapable of self-government, and our last hope of victory -- this month anyway -- is... (opens the envelope) "As fine an officer as we've got in uniform, Lt. Gen. Martin Dempsey." Start molding the statue!

Reading the General for sense is useless; persist if you must for his style, full of ripe analogies such as this:

Four years ago, the neocons fantasized about a post-Saddam Age of Aquarius. Now the Murthacrats insist that, once we bail out, Atlantis will rise from the Tigris and Euphrates.

I begin to suspect that Peters learned his trade -- the writin', not the killin' one -- from old police comics.