THE BARREL HAS NO BOTTOM. Oh Jesus: the Ole Perfesser thinks he's found video evidence against the evil MSM -- in a clip from Fox fucking News. Text is dismissive of the First Amendment and quotes a reader: "Maybe the media is just trying to make normal people understand how the Haditha Marines feel?"

This goes way beyond the normal COINTELPRO. It's like they used a Klan rally to discredit the SNCC. It's like they used Michelle Malkin to show that the liberal media is against SCHIP. It's...

Shit, I got nothing. Normally when they assault common sense, I can shake off the sting quickly enough to describe it, but I have to admit it will take me a while to adjust to this latest and most spectacular unreason. They have created a perfectly closed system, in which their operatives create outrages under their own aegis and then blame them on their opponents. 2 + 2 = 5 is easy to dispute, but 2 + 2 = 5 and How Dare You Say So outdoes Orwell. I once observed that they treat 1984 as an instruction manual, but I have to admit this latest improvement strains my rhetorical abilities. I'd like to think it's a fluke, but their recent desperation suggests otherwise. Maybe it's time to take up semiotics -- but that way madness lies. So I'll stick with garden-variety logic until something better comes along. I welcome your suggestions.

SHORTER JONAH GOLDBERG. Because why? Because.

Really, that's it. Goldberg's anti-abortion essay is, as usual with him, the stupidest thing ever written, and will remain so until Goldberg writes something else.

The "reasonable doubt" bit is my favorite. Leave it to Goldberg to compare the uterus to a gas chamber. But of course the women who would be forced to carry Goldberg's exonerated fetuses to term have only a mechanical function in his imagination. If pro-life panderers "just don't seem as bad" to him as pro-choice ones, it's because he's convinced that with the former no one gets hurt. Those apertures who enable his fantasies just don't count.

Bonus fun in the Goldberg's self-congratulation in The Corner:

The conventional wisdom is that being pro-life requires dogmatism and certainty. I don't think that's the case. At least not any more than being pro-choice requires dogmatism and certainty. Rather than analyze and dissect this point — i.e. tell — I thought it would be more honest to simply explain where I'm coming from, i.e. show.

There is something almost touching about this. First, he implies that he could offer a "very serious, thoughtful, argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care" if he wanted to. He seems to think his dreary article is some sort of tone-poem expressive of his deep, personal reaction to the subject. Maybe he put on Coldplay and drank half a Zima whilst he composed it. "This is it," we may imagine him whispering to himself, "This is the one I'll be remembered for..."

I'd feel sorry for them if they weren't fucking up our country so badly.

SURROUNDED BY ENEMIES. The Ole Perfesser:

READER PAUL STINCHFIELD WRITES that he's unhappy PC Magazine's list of their 100 favorite blogs includes only political blogs that lean left. Well, he's right unless you count Drudge as a blog (Drudge doesn't) but the PC Mag folks say the list is subjective, and a list of favorites can't be wrong, so long as those blogs really are their favorites. I guess it just tells us where they stand politically.

But hey, it's "PC" Magazine, right?

What a strange, passive-aggressive sentiment. First, the only straight-up liberal politics blogs on the list are Huffington Post, Daily Kos, and (I suppose) Wonkette. Drudge is accompanied on the list by Perfesser fave Buzz Machine, which, like many of the named sites, treats new tech, but also lards in plenty of conservative political ramblings. Not much of an edge there.

There are a few environmental blogs listed, and one of them has at this writing a picture of Al Gore without devil horns photoshopped on his head. Also one of them is about black people. Secret-agenda wise, maybe you could read those in. Overwhelmingly, though, the list is all geekery and screen-sports for young urbanites with disposable income: meta-comics, gizmos, restaurant reviews, fashion and entertainment snark.

Maybe the thinking here is that any blog not overtly conservative is liberal. Rightwing blogs of the sort the Perfesser favors increasingly take the default position that liberals are "Americaphobes," the New York Times is a treason mill, and America is not fighting enough wars. If you subscribe to this dire worldview, you may well believe that bloggers who prefer to engage in fun and games instead of continually sounding the tocsin against leftist perfidy are, in the time-honored phrase, not with you but against you.

As I have observed before, for these people the personal is indeed the political. I wonder why they didn't choose to flip it around, though? Why not claim the tech blogs are conservative, since progress is good and all good things are conservative? Comics blogs could be conservative too, since comics are fun and conservatives are all about fun. Come on, fellas. It's not like this sort of thing hasn't been done

Maybe they aren't feeling as confident as they once did, for some reason.

NO JOB TOO LOW FOR THE KULTURE KOPS. S.T. Karnick, culture scold frequently employed by National Review and occasionally treated here, has his own blog. Despite stiff competition, it may be the most pathetic culture-war specimen in Christendom. While Libertas, for example, occasionally leavens its ravings against godless Hollyweird with useful information about the filmmaking business, Karnick's blog merely judges crappy pop art by the standards of your crabby grandmother: that is, he finds most current TV shows too "gloomy," which he seems to consider a moral failing.

Sometimes he is more ambitious and hilarious. Another of his tropes is "the feminization of the American male," which he finds everywhere, including -- get this -- the Disney boob-baiter The Game Plan starring Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. Quoth Karnick:

The earnest aspect of this film is actually quite interesting and perhaps rather surprising, as it is actually part of the trend of feminization of the American male noted on this site last week. Unlike the similar 2005 film The Pacifier, a delightful comedy in which Vin Diesel plays a superspy action hero who changes a family of spoiled suburban kids (for the better) much more than they change him, in The Game Plan the hypermuscular former wrestler known as The Rock is subjected to a cultural reeducation into the superiority of femininity.

Johnson's character, Joe Kingman, is initially narcissistic, arrogant, egotistical, and selfish both on the field and off. Only after dancing in a ballet and being reeducated by his eight-year-old daughter, his sister-in-law, and the daughter’s dance teacher does he finally win a Super Bowl ring.

In today’s culture, women even make the best football coaches.

The filmmakers make it all as convincing as possible, and as noted earlier the movie is fun to watch, but it is definitely weird to see The Rock crumble in this way. Still, I suspect audiences will enjoy it and it will continue to do well at the box office.

And they will surely assimilate the message without realizing it.

[cue sinister homosexual music, and Roy's annoying redneck caricature] Citizens! Does y'all smell what The Rock is cookin'? Faggification, thass what! Whoever heard of a football player takin' ballet, 'ceptin in real life which don't count! Shoot! Gittin' so's yuh cain't even count on rasslin' stars! I reckoned The Rock were the new Haystacks Calhoun, but he more like a Gorgeous George! Hoo-ey! I'ma get my entertainment from reg'lar fellas like that Tom Cruise fum now on!

Please, folks, don't ever tell Karnick about Sitting Pretty, the 1948 comedy in which Clifton Webb's Mr. Belvedere sissified an entire red-blooded American family ("And chew each mouthful 27 times!"). He'll work a brand-new theory of boomer decadence out of it.

MORE DEEP THOUGHTS. Jonah Goldberg loves the World War III fantasy game too much to quit:

One common — and absolutely correct — response to the suggestion that we should have taken care of the Soviets in 1946 is that we couldn't because the American people were too exhausted from the war. That's true, but it leaves out an important point. The American people were also exhausted by the New Deal, which had kept the American public in a de facto state of war for nearly an entire decade before the real war even started. The relentless exhortations, the scarcity, the propaganda: these things began long, long, before Pearl Harbor and even before Roosevelt was promising voters he would keep America out of another European war.

That bastard FDR! Too bad we can't send Fred Thompson back in Goldberg's time machine to show Americans what real leadership looks like.

Goldberg is clearly trending John Birch. It's only a matter of time before he starts alerting us to the pernicious effects of fluoridated water.

MORE WARGAMES. On the bad decision not to follow World War II immediately with World War III (the hot kind, not the Norman Podhoretz kind): Jonah Goldberg can't let it alone --

Imagine if we could go back in a time machine and explain to Ike & Co. the consequences of containment: The mountains of corpses, the trillions of dollars, the gulags, killing fields, the military industrial complex, the balance of terror. Does it seem unreasonable to think that maybe Ike & Co. might have concluded that a bit more rollback or, conversely, a bit more diplomacy in 1953 (as Churchill recommended) might be the wiser course?

Why stop with a time machine? Why doesn't Goldberg imagine himself, not only transported back to the dawn of the Iron Curtain, but also equipped with superpowers? Then he could beat up Stalin, and wear a fancy costume.

Alas, Goldberg wavers toward the end:

Here's where I am coming from. I think the best possible policy toward Red China is regime change. Ditto North Korea. Ditto Iran. But, right now, the costs are just way too high to even consider forcibly removing those regimes.

I would speculate that, somewhere on the time-space continuum, conservative pundit 3Xreagan665a is bitterly denouncing Goldberg's shortsightedness. But this would assume that we have a future.

UPDATE. Commenter John Emerson breaks the code: Eisenhower was a commie! There is nothing so powerful as truth, and often nothing so strange.

IT'S NOT PERSONAL, IT'S JUST BUSINESS. Tigerhawk thinks the quote from Monty Burns on the Lawyers, Guns & Money masthead is a blasphemy against the sacred tribe known as businessmen:

In the entertainment industry's conception of business success you often see this sort of idiocy -- bad guy businessmen are a staple of prime time television -- but then the entertainment industry is famously left wing.

Yeah. No one ever heard of a greedy businessman before Jane Fonda and the Viet Cong took over Hollywood.

Avarice has been a staple of comedy from the days of Plautus, and when a business class began to emerge in the West, writers such as Ben Jonson and Moliere saw no reason to exempt them from portrayals of greed and prevarication -- after all, they were after money, weren't they? By the time Mark Twain got around to lampooning shysters and Gilded Age grifters, the criminal possibilities of "legitimate" business were already well-established subjects of mockery.

This may be news to Tigerhawk, who in the comments can only trace the lineage of this trope back to "The evil business man, from the nefarious banker in 'It's a Wonderful Life' to J.R. Ewing to some virtually every other episode of 'Boston Legal'..." (That hippie bastard Frank Capra!)

The state of arts education in this country is truly pathetic. And some of our fellow-citizens understand human nature still less than that. Tigerhawk says that "the vast majority of people I know [in business] think deeply about the rights and wrongs of the tough decisions they have to make literally every day." Yeah. Maybe after a massive layoff or offshore move, a CEO will think about its impact on his (former) employees -- preferably while he's helping his Communications Director draft a statement about it, so that his feelings of sorrow might seep evocatively into the prose, and convince the business press and company officers that he has "agonized" -- a cleansing ritual that gestures respect for the old moral codes. Then it's porterhouse at Ruth's Chris, baby! Because old what's-his-name's loss, and that of all the other what's-his-nameses, is the company's gain, which is why the deed was done. Because businesses don't thrive on random acts of kindness nor on Christian love -- they thrive on profits and growth. If it can be done the easy way, well and good. If not -- (traditional guttural sound accompanying the slow drawing of one's finger across one's neck)

If "thinking deeply" were all you needed to be a decent human being, this world would be a fucking paradise.

These facts are so stunningly obvious to those of us who have been alive more than a couple of seasons, you'd think even a rightwing blogger would know them.

LIBERTARIANISM EXPLAINED. "I've always wondered why someone doesn't buy cheap wood furniture and glassware by the cargo container, rent out safety outfits, and let people whack the hell out of stuff with big hammers."

Have you been reading Megan McArdle lately? There's a lot of stuff like this. It may be time to subject her blog to the Old Grey Perfesser Test, starting from the bottom of the current page:

09 October 2007 9:10 am: Reporters shouldn't go on junkets. They might see something that will change their minds.

09 Oct 2007 09:40 am: Bryan Kaplan calls out critics of multiculturalism, and I agree: liberals who do not approve of the status of blacks, women, and gays in that period before the 1960s known as the Victorian era are very silly.

09 Oct 2007 01:32 pm: Here's a cool oddity!

09 Oct 2007 03:58 pm: I don't like to pick fruit! What's wrong with people!

09 Oct 2007 05:12 pm: I understand conservatives are harassing a little boy. Well. I guess it's okay if Graeme Frost gets some health care, but he certainly shouldn't be able to leave a Park Avenue mansion to his children.

09 Oct 2007 06:41 pm: Here's another weird thing!

09 Oct 2007 09:04: Angry Bear points out that American homeowners' share of the equity in their homes is decreasing, and does so reliably under Republican Administrations. I agree that government housing subsidies are the problem.

09 Oct 2007 10:45 pm: City dwellers don't want to be crowded by ugly buildings. Tragically, they use regulations to achieve this, when they should be using the magic of the market to allow themselves to be crowded by ugly buildings.

10 Oct 2007 12:27 am: Democrats exploited Graeme Frost by using him to promote the cause of health care for people like Graeme Frost.

10 Oct 2007 07:54 am: I like Radiohead.

10 Oct 2007 08:52 am: Drivers and pedestrians do not understand me and my bicycle.

10 Oct 2007 09:05 am. Glenn Reynolds has shamed me: when it comes to Graeme Frost, I guess I'm just a big softy.

10 Oct 2007 09:40 am: How do you eat your Reese's Peanut Butter Cup?

10 Oct 2007 10:01 am: Cool science post!

10 Oct 2007 11:56 am: "Take Your Husband to Work Day." Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

10 Oct 2007 12:16 pm: I'm not done fighting with that home equity guy, which gives me a chance to show off my econ chops.

10 Oct 2007 06:43 pm: This medical term is weird.

11 Oct 2007 07:59 am: So long as the magic of the market is not involved, I can make jokes about sacred institutions.

11 Oct 2007 10:59 am: Government subsidies are bad except for when they are good to my Mommy.

11 Oct 2007 12:11 pm: Democrats are so superficial, supporting Hillary Clinton like they all do. It must be because she's a woman or something, because her positions are certainly not popular 'round my way.

11 Oct 2007 12:41 pm: I mean I don't support Hillary Clinton and I'm a woman.

11 Oct 2007 02:26 pm: How could people possibly misunderstand my previous posts on Graeme Frost?

11 Oct 2007 02:57 pm: I am one of the 162 people in D.C. who wish even more of my neighbors had guns.

12 Oct 2007 09:50 am: Every conservatarian does at least one column about how conservatives are under-represented on college faculties, and how it's the liberals' fault; I guess it's my turn. But mine has an anecdote!

12 Oct 2007 11:33 am: I'm busy.

12 Oct 2007 11:46 am: Though I was wrong without really being wrong about Iraq, I hold out hope that I will be proved right without really being right.

12 Oct 2007 12:52 pm: Hey, they changed the rules for TiVo! Great, because I have TiVo!

Conclusion: McArdle is Ann Althouse for the youth market.

ALL DELIBERATE SPEED. A novel approach to the claim that Giuliani was responsible for a decline in abortions in New York City, from John Podhoretz:

And there is one way in which it is probably very slightly acceptable — very, very slightly, though — for Rudy Giuliani to make such a claim. And that has to do with the atmospheric change in New York City under his tenure. The alteration of the city from the crime drop and from welfare reform was so profound that it is difficult quite to capture the effect. It was felt everywhere over time, and it wouldn't be too sentimental to describe it as a restoration of normal patterns of life that had been disrupted over decades. To the extent that the disruption helped engender a spirit of hopelessness in many quarters — and a corresponding inability to imagine that there was a future that would be any better or different from the present — it certainly contributed to behaviors of hopelessness and an inability to imagine a future. That is, I think we'd all agree, one of the spiritual causes of abortion...

For 30 years, they've been telling the anti-abortion movement that Republican rule would lead to the end of abortion. No doubt the evangelicals were envisioning something more spectacular than this trickle-down approach. But maybe they'll go for it. If the Giuliani bandwagon gets full traction, their alternative will be to bolt the party and reveal the minority status of their Moral Majority. Let us pause to consider the dilemma of megachurch millionaires forced to choose between God and earthly power. It's Monday and we could all use a laugh.

ALTERNATIVE HISTORY. They do indeed Think Big on the right: From Orrin Judd to Mark Steyn to Peter Robinson, an argument is transmitted as to whether we should have attacked the Soviet Union right after the Second World War. The National Review correspondents seem to lean, albeit grudgingly, toward the conclusion that it would have been a bad idea.

Most of us are grateful that we got through the Cold War without a nuclear cataclysm; these people see it as a missed opportunity. And they are determined not to miss another. Much as they admire George W. Bush's moxie, they think we aren't going fast enough now. A good standard for supporting political candidates would be to pick the ones who will keep these guys as far from power as possible.

UPDATE. As usual, Jonah Goldberg makes everything worse. "The benefit of a hot war is you tend to know when it's over," he says, "and it ends a lot quicker." Yes, he actually thinks global conflagration is preferable to tiresome old diplomacy. He also makes the same connection I made earlier between the right's speculative war with the Soviet Union and their desire to expand the current conflict into World War Whatever -- only he thinks it's a great idea. Can't K-Lo give them an afternoon off to play paintball or something?

BIG AL'S NOBEL. I expect conservatives will grouse and reminisce on the days when Peace Prizes were given to men who had actually put people to the sword. That just makes it more fun. I wish the current laureate were a better writer, but as long as they're giving these things for good intentions, why not Gore? It'll give him and Kissinger something to laugh about at cocktail parties.

A few people have asked me about Doris Lessing. I am embarrassingly unacquainted with her work. What do you think? Of her, I mean, not my ignorance.

LITTLE MISS CAN'T BE WRONG. John Derbyshire starts a weak National Review thread about how modern art is bullshit, and how brave he is to say so. As usual, Richard Brookhiser feebly offers resistance.

This tedious reminder of their Philistine leanings yields one blessing: acquaintance with a new culture warrior, one E.M. Zanotti, who contributes:

There seems to be a degradation of the concept of art that starts around the Enlightenment. Naturalism was a rejection of the spiritual art that came before it, then Impressionism and post-Impressionism are the beginnings of the interpretive approach to art. Modernism and post-modernism are the results of decades of hanging on to the idea that the standard of beauty is subjective and based on one's own vision of the world combined with a message about the rejection of anything eternal. Somewhere along the way, it became less about making a visionary artistic statement, and more about making a statement that was "counter-cultural" (the Dada movement, for example) and meant to shock the collective consciousness and open the minds of those who viewed it to new and wondrous avenues of thought (like contemporary art)...and what fit this qualification often garnered an artist fame in his own community and an increase in his paycheck. I suppose some might argue that that, in itself, goes toward proving that art is consciously fraudulent. Rothko and Warhol and others that recognized that art has a patently commercial aspect to it might just agree...

To condense: first came forced perspective, which was wicked, then pictures of people who were not saints, which was very wicked, then pictures of people who were not saints that didn't look like photographs, which was double-plus wicked, and then, fifty years before Theodore Roszak, a "counter-culture" of jokers and bicycle wheels, which ruined everything by increasing the artist's paycheck.

That's some tasty culture warring! You can find more at Ms. Zanotti's website. Among the choicer bits: rage at rock t-shirts with Arabic logos ("Sid Vicious might return as a zombie just to protest this"); rage at Bruce Springsteen ("What does seem funny, though, is that Springsteen has actively campaigned for people who support more government, not less"); rage at a female passenger who showed modest cleavage on an airplaine ("Nobody said we have to tolerate stupidity"), which morphs into rage at Britney Spears ("Nobody on Monday was complaining that the mother of two children was writhing around on a stage"), then into rage at the "porn culture" ("As we grew steadily more individualistic after the social revolutions of the sixites..."); and rage at some Hollywood movie ("Ironically, Italy is far closer to the Middle East than America has ever been").

Actually, having panned through three months' worth of her tripe, I can tell you unequivocally Ms. Zanotti is an idiot, which explains her inclusion on the National Review culture-cop roster. Look for her negative review of some movie with boobs or bad soldiers soon!

MIXED MESSAGES. Gateway Pundit notices Iranian dissidents declaring "Wish we were Columbia students." Haw haw, but a noble sentiment, even if the Ole Perfesser hehindeeds. But then GP asks, "Are you sure you want that, kids? It may be quite a culture shock." His link points to Free Republic, which we can assume means that whatever the Freepers want is even more freedom-loving than the Iranian protesters could get behind (at least, that is the most charitable interpretation). Let's see what the Freepers think:

Why should I care what a foreign country does to homosexuals?...

Guess that explains the low sales of Barbra Streisand CDs over there...

Why should I care what a foreign country does to homosexuals?
Nobody can be all bad, not even Amanutjob...

Didn’t say kill them but we don’t have to follow the Ancient Roman and Greek belief in accepting such sexual deviance as normal. The practices of gerbiling, fisting, rimming, and felching are not acceptable and the outcome is a lifestyle with a lifespan on par with IV drug users, which is another behavior that should not be tolerated. Sexual deviance, whether homosexual of pedophilic is not behavior to be condoned or accepted any more than theft, rape, or whatever form that is not in the interest of a stable society. The vast majority of male homosexuals seek sex with little boys. The “gay” parades used to always have Nambla representation — only recently has this part of the “gay” lifestyle become less acceptable....

yeah actually you have a point with the greeks. i had a landlord for 1 month who was this big obese married man who all of a sudden turned gay for me. worst month of my life, i almost did jailtime because of the final outcome of this pig. it also cemented (very biased) why the turks and greeks don’t get along. anyways it’s a month i don’t want to remember but he’s lucky he’s alive...

So, what I guess Gateway Pundit is saying is: Iranian dissidents should refrain from supporting American academic freedom until it is brought into line with the Gateway Pundit/Free Republic attitude toward homosexuals, i.e., disgust and homicidal hatred.

Refresh my memory: what makes us better than our enemies?

PS: For clarification as to what GP's pals at Free Republic think of gay people, try this search.

SURGE WORKING! THROW MORE INSULTS! As many of us know, and anyone with an internet connection may learn, the Empire State Building lights up in different colors for special events, ranging from religious holidays such as Christmas to celebrations of organizations such as the Poly Prep Country Day School.

Guess what? Jack Meoff of the Ace of Spades Beer Hall and Anime Collectors' Society is outraged that ESB will go green for the end of Ramadan.

This is a disgrace. Have you capitulated to the Caliphate already, New York?

Is the Big Apple now to be known as the Big Fig?

Pussies.

It's at moments like these that I wish the bloated self-regard of these mouth-breathers had some basis in reality. As previously covered here, hatred of New York is spreading like diaper rash among these blog booboisie, and if they had the sort of influence they think they have, they might reanimate this hatred, mostly dormant since nineeleven, among the entire flyover community. Then, perhaps, the yokels would stop sending their sons and daughters to us, and thus reverse the long upward trend in our population, our rents, our lameness, and our average body fat.

Alas, the Spades show is a niche entertainment at best. But we will make do. The units they have managed to activate -- e.g.:

I think Jack M. made a good comment in that it is pro-islam propaganda in a city that was targeted by islam at least twice already. This is why often I want to tell NY and New Yorkers to piss off. You want to allow this -- then don't come crying to the rest of the country when they blow you up again. Also, this is a judeo-christian country.

-- are sufficiently full of the poison that, should they so much as touch another outlander (unlikely for Spades readers, I know, but someday someone may, in an unguarded moment, offer them a high five), the effect should spread to the victim's entire extended famiy.

Spread the word, soldiers! New York is full of Muslims and we ain't even torturin' em! Hell, we make purty lights fur 'em! Don't it make yuh wanna rethink that Williamsburg condo you was a-hankerin' fer? Spend yer nest eggs on a fallout shelter instead! 10-4!

PINS & DICKS. At the Wall Street Journal Eugene Volokh tries to get some more mileage out of Obama's non-wearing of the flag pin, saying it means that Obama doesn't love America any more:

Wearing a flag pin is not supposed to be an explanation or an argument, just as "I love you" is not supposed to be an explanation or an argument. It's supposed to be a traditional statement of affection, powerful because it's cliché...

Yet if you used to say this and then you stopped, the symbolic message is pretty powerful. And that's true even though many people say "I love you" without meaning it (just as there are some who wear the flag pin but are just opportunists, not patriots). Even if this abuse of the phrase weakens its symbolism, an outright renunciation of the phrase retains its symbolism just fine.

The metaphor is rather weak, as one of the commenters observes:

If I were to constantly tell my wife that I love her, and meanwhile were to seek the favors of other women and hang out in taverns rather than with her and my daughter, my wife would not believe my words.

Wearing a flag pin isn't like telling your spouse that you love him or her. Unless you are a U.S. servicemember, or Captain America, or attending a naturalization ceremony, wearing a flag pin means you are a dick.

From the guy who fired Brad from All-American Burger in Fast Times at Ridgemont High to Fox anchors to the creeps who run for office to American Dad!, the flag pin has proved a reliable symbol of dickitude. Seldom have I seen an otherwise normally-dressed guy wearing a flag pin and thought, oh, isn't that sweet, he's telling America that he loves her! No, long experience has taught me that the pin-wearer wants something from me: either my vote, or an unearned advantage for whatever song-and-dance or sales pitch he's about to spool out. Or he wants the other Republicans in the room to spot him, so they can huddle privately and exchange stories about how they dicked someone over. Or he wants to pass for a dick so the other dicks won't gang up on him. Which makes him a dick.

Like most generalizations, this one is not foolproof, but coupled with common sense it is close enough to get you through most days. What Obama was trying to tell us with his gesture was simply that he is not a dick. It's not probative, but it's a step in the right direction. If he should go to work at Captain Hook's and take out a robber, he's got my vote for sure.

THE SURGE IS WORKING! Yesterday I was encouraged to learn that a street-corner slashing incident was turning people off to New York City. Today I found myself on lower Broadway, where the average age of pedestrians at 1 pm was roughly 20 -- a further sign that soon all downtown Manhattan will become part of the NYU campus, dotted here and there with communal living facilities for junior editorial assistants -- and prayed the meme was catching fire. And it may be! Walls of the City takes very badly the news that our citizens by and large do not pack heat: "New York City has made it legally impossible for your 'average', law-abiding citizen to carry [a gun] on his or her person. Welcome to 'modern' society, everyone... ain't it grand?" Somewhere a Second Amendment supporter is deciding that his young'un will attend Kansas Agricultural Land Grant College instead of Columbia. One less! One less!

Even more encouraging is the revelation that the slasher is a former model. When it gets around that even our sultry mannequins are going berserk, we won't be able to reel in the most abject suckers with a signing bonus and Friends: The Next Generation.

I envision the new Eli Roth movie: Fashion Week. Dewy innocents lured to tents in Bryant Park, there to be eviscerated or drowned in bronzer. One day a Chelsea bottle service club will close, and that will be the thin end of the wedge. Spread the word, and dream of a day when we may beat our condos into crackhouses.

WE GIVE THEM MONEY, BUT ARE THEY GRATEFUL?/NO, THEY'RE SPITEFUL AND THEY'RE HATEFUL. Since they're supposed to like Germany and France now that Merkel and Sarkozy are in, conservatives have of late been short of allies to yell at. Luckily Scott Kirwin's wife ran into a New Zealand girl who clued her to the astonishing news that a lot of foreigners don't like the United States. This gives Mr. Kirwin, a contributor to the Dean Esmay site, a new spot on the map at which to throw his verbal darts.

First he calls the girl a "trollop" and threatens, "Perhaps a little American Isolationism - our default state - is called for." He may have reflected that his threat would bear more weight if he cited his diplomatic credentials, because he updates to brag on his mad inferior-people skillz:

I am currently exposed to people from all over the world at my job. I work with two people from Beijing China. Even though I am fuming about what's happening in Burma and Darfur, and haven't forgotten the fear that Chinese students at my university felt after the Tiananmen Square massacre, I don't bring up these topics with them - nor do I mention the continuing oppression of Falun Gong. This is partly because of working together, but I also don't hold them responsible for any particular action of their government.

Maybe it's just that he's had more practice suppressing his rage at the Chinese, because shortly thereafter Kirwin denounces New Zealand, saying that its people hate the United States because they are a tiny and jealous country that "has spent most of its time since independence under European-style socialist governments." In one poetic flight, he muses on the vulnerability of the kiwi to predators:

For millions of years the kiwi thrived in its isolation. However today it is endangered by introduced predators including stoats, dogs, cats, weasels - and just about anything else that is fast enough to catch it. Only human intervention has saved the flightless bird from extinction.

He compares this to New Zealand's vulnerability to Muslim terrorists, announcing in bold type that "The weasel is a greater threat to the kiwi than to the eagle."

I'm guessing the dog would be government-run health care, the cat gangsta rap, and the stoat a player to be named later.

As for the weasel, it has, at least in its metaphoric form. been very little seen in New Zealand. No matter: the threat of terrorist attack against a disagreeable ally is not meant to sway the ally, but to provide a comforting revenge fantasy to enraged wingnuts. At least Randy Newman was honest enough to cut out the middleman.

WELL, I'VE DONE MY PART. Rachel Lucas, reacting to a local crime story:

So, yeah. I’m gonna go ahead and continue to be pissed off and judgmental for a while.

And will remember never to go to NYC without packing heat, even if it’s illegal (because New Yorkers are so fucking enlightened and evolved that they realized long ago that handguns are nothing but compensatory substitute penises for poorly-endowed redneck morons, and not necessary for civilized people in a civilized city like New York).

I hope she is as good as her word; we have too many idiots as it is. Whether she just stays away or gets locked up for playing Charles Bronson with a panhandler, it's all the same to me.

And if she can encourage other idiots to stay out of New York (her comments suggest she has), so much the better. For too long I have worried that our relatively modest crime rate was drawing too many such like into our overcrowded, expensive polity, but perhaps -- the right-wing blogosphere being, as we are constantly reminded, the true voice of the people -- this marks a turning point. Maybe all the teeth-gnashing, fist-shaking white people will stay away -- indeed, maybe such as have moved here will be spurred to flee, and the rest of us can finally get back to crack, heroin, squatting, cold lampin', turnstile-hoppin', and other pre-Giuliani pleasures we enjoyed before their invasion.

More encouraging signs -- Thrown for a Loop writes about my earlier Mets post:

But to claim the Mets have a claim to suffering in some special way (this year aside) displays the sort of self-centeredness and entitlement that makes people hate New York.

I hear ya, buddy -- please spread the word! New York's a terrible place! Abandon your condos and deflate our rents! Eschew Radio City Music Hall and depress our credit rating! Stay in the suburbs and let Gotham be Gotham! God take Miss Lucas to His mercy, and leave New York for us to hustle in!

UPDATE. Ace of Spades takes up the cause! From the comments: "Why I left NYC last week for good. The city is filled with psychos and moral cowards. This behavior isn't suprising in a city where everything is someone else's problem. Disgusting." It's a juggernaut! Time to dust off my squeegee.

THIS TIME FOR SURE. Victor Davis Hanson:

One thought in this context. It is of course true that the surge is working and our soldiers are far more sophisticated than in 2003. But in all the places one visits, there are reminders everywhere — pockmarked walls, rubble, memorial photos in bases — of all those killed during the worst ordeal between 2003-6. When one walks through these former battlefields, there is an eerie melancholy, a ghostly archaeology, a sense that now unnamed and largely anonymous Americans paid the ultimate price in those years to allow the opportunities we witness today. And that’s why we must continue and finish the job they started.

Charlie Brown no longer needs Lucy to pull away the football. He will drop back to punt and fall on his ass unassisted.

DUH DUH. DUH DUH, DUH DUH. DUH DUH, DUH DUH, DUH DUH, DUH DUH... Y'all know me, how I earn a livin'. Well, not a living, chump change really, but my fingernails on the blackboard should have convinced you of my seriousness anyway. I be a roving hunter of media buffoons. Mine's a small craft, but I am hella mediagenic in this grizzled guise of a crusty fisherman. Once I performed the works of the immortal Bard and couldn't buy a bag of farts, but we'll not speak of that.

Some bigtime operators are incensed that the White Whale Limbaugh is under attack by David Brock and a flotilla of Congressmen. Let me scratch my fake beard and speak plain: I don't like to see no creature ganged up on, and like it still less when the power of the state is invoked. I don't truck with no Fairness Doctrine. I am a simple man, as shown by the jaunty angle of my cap and my guttural dialect.

But when such powerful media voices rise to defend the mighty Leviathan even as their own junior death squads continue their merciless siege of one lowly soldier who spoke ill of their beloved Iraq occupation -- well, I have to spit evocatively over the side of my boat. They have no call to be cryin' foul. Their Mighty Wurlitzer has already made the seas run red with blood. I'll not put on a lifejacket again.

Farewell and ado to ya, fair Spanish ladies. Farewell and ado to ya, ladies of Spain. [writhes, spits blood] Yeeeargh! Yeeeargh!