CORRUPTION I CAN LIVE WITH. Apparently Pat Leahy and Arlen Specter (with an assist from John Kerry) leaned on the NFL to put tonight's Pats-Giants game on local TV.

National Review culture scold S.T. Karnick is outraged: "This is just the latest example of overweening, overpowering, stifling government regulation of the economy, the society and the culture."

So is Townhall: "Talk about a misuse of political power. Ahhh, wait, that's typical Democrats in action. They always misuse their power and make gains by making threats. Typical."

So is Wizbang, albeit with a bit more shirt-retucking and harrumphs:

Those stations had negotiated with the NFL in good faith, paid good money, and stood to reap the rewards of their foresight and good fortune by having exclusive rights to air what promised to be the most-watched game of the year -- possibly even dwarfing the Super Bowl.

Sometimes, though, there's such a thing as too much good luck. Envy reared its ugly head.

A lot of people hadn't signed up for the NFL network, and didn't live near enough to New York or Boston to pick up the game. They didn't like that one bit. And when they expressed their displeasure loudly enough, Congress heard -- and started making threatening noises...

So, what happens to WWOR and WCVB? The phrase "tough shit" comes to mind. They made deals in good faith, bet a hell of a lot on their agreement with the NFL to pay off in ad revenues and exclusivity, and are now being punished for making too good a deal...

Oh please oh please oh please let this get around.

Because as petty as the whole thing is, it does show Democratic politicians doing something that won them glory and power in days gone by: working the system to bring goodies to constituents.

Being something of a libertarian (i.e., kind of a dork) I understand the conservative good-government argument against the Congresscritters' finnagling. But being something of a human being as well, I think most normal people will not focus on the goo-goo free-market angle, and will instead notice that these Democrats muscled some large and powerful interests to get their peeps access to the Big Game. And I imagine their sympathies will be more on the side of the fans than on those of the media and sports empires that took the hit.

If as the political arm of the conservative movement the GOP is smarter and better organized than I think they are at present, they would flood the zone, claiming this malfeasance hurts all football fans, and producing videos with sinister music showing good Republicans forced to watch government-mandated, Soviet-style sporting events because the liberal fascist traitor Kerry loves Big Gummint. They might even claim that as a young sportscaster, Ronald Reagan once refused to go on the air because a similarly corrupt deal had been made. (He surely must have had a sick day that they can thus portray.) But at present they're too fragmented and busy attacking some crappy Presidential candidate on behalf of another crappy Presidential candidate.

This leaves it to bloggers and other operatives to tell America how awful it is that politicians violated the sacred rights of corporations so that people could watch a mere football game, and to their commenters to announce how they boycotted the game rather than enable statism. Which will earn them all the respect such a stand is likely to generate.

I don't give the Democrats much credit for brains, either, so it's a slim hope that this is a stalking horse for further government interference. They let us get away with changing the broadcast rights to a football game? Cool! Now let's pass a Net Neutrality Act!

But at the very least they've produced a political event that recalls the grand traditions of James Michael Curley and George Washington Plunkitt and the days when the Democratic Party was strongly associated with the common man.

WHAT DOES THE WANKING MAN WANT? MORE. That's the way it always is with these affirmative action programs. You give them the moon and they want the stars. Andrew Sullivan on Billy Kristol's new New York Times column:

He's obviously an extremely talented writer and editor, and I guess some naked partisanship on the right is necessary to balance out Krugman. But ideologically, having both David Brooks and Bill Kristol as the sole representatives of the right-of-center is to focus on a very small neocon niche in a conservative world that is currently exploding with intellectual diversity and new currents of thought. There are about five "national greatness" conservatives out there. Four of them now have columns in the WaPo or NYT: Kristol, Brooks, Krauthammer and Gerson. Thank God, I guess, for the blogosphere. We have no restrictions here, do we?

The Times adds another winger, but it's the wrong kind of winger. Eventually they'll need a fold-out section to accomodate all the different conservative gradations (closed-borders, anti-gay, bullshit libertarian, etc) the committee requires, and that isn't even taking into account all the free dispatches Michael Yon will demand the Times run when the eschaton is immanentized.

I don't understand how these guys sustain this level of cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, they're constantly announcing the irrelevance of the MSM. On the other, they lobby the Times to staff up with their buddies, as if the paper were some kind of government public works project that isn't keeping up with mandated rightwing hiring quotas.

In Sullivan's case, it may be a form of schizophrenia that comes from being a longtime credentialed magazine writer -- an establishment figure, in other words -- who is also a prominent member of the blogosphere, which is like indie cred for poli-sci nerds and, like all indie cred among the successful, must be maintained by occasional professions that one is Still Down for the Struggle ("There go my cable invites"). As for the rest of them, I reckon they're just full of shit.

Meantime, for added giggles, check out New York Times Op Ed columnist Glenn Reynolds professing surprise that the Times gave Jonah Goldberg a kind review.

UPDATE. Commenter psuedonymous in nc points out that the Times Book Review editor, Sam Tanenhaus, is a self-proclaimed "Man of the Right." Tanenhaus was recently appointed to edit the paper's Week in Review, too. Clearly such tokenism cuts little ice with conservatives. But I caution them: when the last Sulzberger is strangled with the entrails of Bob Herbert, they'll have to find some other publication at which to shake their fists. Maybe they can redirect their followers' Bookmark of Perpetual Outrage to the Huffington Post. But conservatives are famously lovers of tradition and may find the transition difficult. Well, they'll always have Walter Duranty.

PAKISTAN: THE LESS-SHORT VIEW. The Bhutto assassination has already led to unfortunate side-effects, including riots, U.S. Presidential candidate reactions, and what the Pakistani dictator Musharraf, in a piquant bit of Western political usage, calls "the blame game." Al Qaeda has expectedly taken credit; Bhutto herself left a note fingering Musharraf; reporters work their sources, and pundits their traditional decoder rings, for leads.

The flames in Karachi indicate that many Pakistanis will not have patience for this sort of inside-baseball analysis. I note this recent poll showing the unpopularity of Musharraf's regime, and also the poll's interesting provenance. I suspect similar results might have been obtained without the support of John McCain and neocon apparatchiks, but the International Republican Institute's efforts to publicize the discontent in Pakistan suggest that the current (and just about any possible future) Administration would have been much happier dealing with Bhutto.

What do you suppose they think about Nawaz Sharif, who is currently playing it extremely cagey? He's been linked to Al Qaeda, but even Bhutto played footsie with the Taliban once upon a time. And the New York Times reports that our government is now reaching out to Sharif. ("The very fact that officials are even talking to backers of Mr. Sharif, who they believe has too many ties to Islamists, suggests how hard it will be to find a partner the United States fully trusts.") This certainly wouldn't be the first time the U.S. has suddenly rehabilitated a suspect foreign leader, and it's not as if we don't know how to deal with him.

Armageddon may come tomorrow, in which case you may put me down as a fool. But one of the fortunate aspects of global political corruption -- contra Dr. Paul -- is that it presents opportunities for self-correction, at least until the next, inevitable crisis. It's not the best way of doing things, of course. In fact it's pretty sad. But who among our next generation of leaders will handle it any better?

UPDATE. I should have known ol' Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters wouldn't let me down! In October he wrote a full-throated paean to the Musharraf dictatorship and denounced the infusion of Bhutto's "charisma" into the race. Today he supplies us with the Good Riddance to Bhutto post we've been waiting for:

Her country's better off without her. She may serve Pakistan better after her death than she did in life.

What good can come from even a dead Bhutto? "Her murder may galvanize Pakistanis against the Islamist extremists who've never gained great support among voters, but who nonetheless threaten the state's ability to govern." That'll be some trick, even with the Pakistan government's hilarious accidental death verdict there to help.

But Peters is not all Blood 'n' Guts today; he spares a tear for the poor, misunderstood dictator Musharraf:

But [Bhutto] always knew how to work Westerners - unlike the hapless Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who sought the best for his tormented country but never knew how to package himself.

Better get the pointy-heads on that one, General! Maybe they can engineer a fun-loving, Idi Amin persona for Musharraf. Laugh and the world laughs with you!

YOUR CHRISTMAS PRESENT. Blogging will be infrequent to nonexistent here for several days in observance of Kwanzaa. Umoja, y'all!

THE REASON FOR THE SEASON. Ross Douthat and Rod Dreher celebrate the birth of their Lord by bitching about a black lady on welfare with a big TV. Douthat's item is headlined, "The 'Myth' of Welfare Queens"; Dreher's, "Of Welfare Queens and Wilbur."

Tuesday's birthday boy is alleged to have said, "Give to every man that asketh of thee." I'm not a Bible scholar, though, so maybe I don't know about some later passage where he took it back.

I'm not sure our tax dollars should be paying for the lady's big TV, but I'm not that worked up about it either. Maybe if I believed passionately in Jesus Christ I'd be mad at her too.

THE COME-TO-MOLOCH MOMENT. A few years back, Peggy Noonan was saying "God is Back," seeing "the face of the Evil One" in the falling World Trade Center, and calling for the Democratic Party to join her in festooning America with creches and the Ten Commandments ("Confound them, Terry [McAuliffe]! Come forward with a stand. It is the stand that is the salvation, not mysterious words or codes or magic messages").

Today she calls Mike Huckabee's cross-enhanced Christmas message "creepy," chides Republican evangelicals for over-sensitivity, and even manages to simultaneously compare Huckabee with evil Bill Clinton ("Like Mr. Clinton, he is a natural, charming, bright and friendly. Yet one senses something unsavory there, something not so nice") and denigrate Huckabee's religious certainties ("...it is not a philosophy that allows debate. Because it comes down to 'This is what God wants.' This is not an opener of discussion but a squelcher of it. It doesn't expand the process, it frustrates it").

A few weeks back, she discoursed on the Christers' "problem" with Romney's Mormonism, spoke up for atheists (!), and announced that "we've bowed too far to the idiots."

She's come a long way from the days when I called her the Crazy Jesus Lady. I never entirely trusted her religious effusions, but I have to admit I didn't think she'd go this far. But I never expected Huckabee to get this far. Neither did she, I guess, and that's why she has suddenly snapped to secular statism. Jesus Boy is off the reservation, apparently. Who knows what Republican funding streams would suffer from his possible nomination? Maybe Noonan's new boss had a talk with her.

I'm certainly not against any efforts enlisted against the dangerous buffoon Huckabee. And I take some pleasure in seeing the GOP's business interests openly at war with the Jesus folk. But I mourn this large loss of seemingly principled insanity among the chattering class. I worry that next The Anchoress will escape her metaphorical cell and become just plain old Daffy Suburban Rightwing Lady, and Rod Dreher will hang up the End-of-Days talk and become just another aging hippie who loves granola and hates homosexuals. The salt of blogging will then have lost much of its savor, and who shall savor it again?

THE PERSISTENCE OF MEMEORY. At Minding the Campus, U.S. News & World Reports columnist John Leo addresses a recent Princeton incident in which a rightwing student apparently beat himself up and blamed gay-rights activists. Leo talks a lot about hate crimes faked by leftwing students, and gives the impression that conservative correspondents acquitted themselves well in this case.

If he means that they backed off their earlier credulity when word got out about the hoax, he's right. And that's a good thing.

You have to wonder, though, whether that's because conservatives are more sensible about this sort of thing, or because more people are paying closer attention. In 2004 I looked at the Foster Barton case, in which a returned Iraq serviceman was beaten up in a parking lot and numerous citizen journalists rushed to blame the John Kerry campaign. It turned out Barton was beaten up by another former serviceman after the two had "exchanged insults about the other's military unit."

It looked fishy to me from the start, considering that the event outside which Barton had been jumped was a Toby Keith concert. But if you look at what persists on the internet about Barton, you'll find very little about the post-election upshot. No doubt there are plenty of conservatives out there who remain convinced that back in '04 a soldier was beat down by Kerry peace creeps, and recall the incident as another example of "Liberal Violence on the Rise."

That feverish election season is over, of course. But another is hard upon us. I wouldn't be surprised if some other poor souls then find themselves prepared to pay any price and bear any burden to put their opponents in an unflattering light. The question is, will the famously "self-correcting blogosphere" be on duty?

UPDATE. Maybe this answers my question: "I'm not saying it's true, Jill. I'm pointing out that the blogosphere is going wild over a rumor and noting that the Enquirer pulled down its story. These are events." Keep digging, citizen journalists!

UPDATE II. You do realize that, months from now, they'll be saying "Remember that guy in Oklahoma who totally banned Christmas?" as if it were really real. This really is a magical season!

LIE HARDER. Rudolph Giuliani's pals at the National Review are worrying about him. After a June GOP debate, Rich Lowry said, "If any pro-choicer can win the Republican presidential nomination, it's Rudy Giuliani. His abortion answer was bad, but what people will remember is his joking around about getting struck down by lightening during it." Apparently Lowry now thinks the lightning is getting closer:

Over the weekend, Giuliani went to Florida to try to relaunch his campaign with a speech focused on his forward-looking “12 commitments” as president. He didn’t mention the one about reducing abortions... Huckabee’s rise shows that social conservatives are still animated by their traditional issues, and Giuliani has little to say to them.

Meanwhile Giuliani spoke in Durham, New Hampshire, apparently hoping to pick up a little ground in an early-primary state he'd taken for granted (he's only now opening an office there). The result was predictable. "At Durham Event, Former Mayor's Swagger Is Gone," reported the New York Sun. Giuliani told local reporters, while pledging fealty to the Second Amendment, that he "used the gun laws aggressively in New York" because "I had to" and "it worked well." A gun-owners' group official sniffed, "If Giuliani's gun control agenda was really limited 'only' to big cities, that would be disturbing enough..."

Clearly his big-city rightwing friends had earlier advised him well to finesse these issues while on the hustings. In the lovely Live Free or Die town of Durham, pop. 12,664 -- the lead news item of its website currently states that "The chiller tube replacement" at Churchill Rink "is complete, there is a good foundation of ice, and the rink is now OPEN" -- Giuliani might have done better to explain that as Mayor he ruled over eight million snarling degenerates much like the ones his auditors saw on TV cop shows, and had he not disarmed them, they might have murdered him and his ex-family. Self-defense is an argument they would have understood.

Likewise, when Giuliani talked to the L.A. Daily News about his bizarre Pat Robertson endorsement, he shouldn't have just said Robertson believed "I would be the best in appointing judges" and left the abortion angle hanging. He should have brought and fingered a scapular, or perhaps a rosary, and denounced the slaughter of millions in the womb. Had the News reporter tried to pin him to policy specifics, he could have talked about his close personal relationship with Jesus Christ. That usually shuts them up.

Given that he competes against world-class fraud artists for the nomination, and isn't such a stickler for truth himself, I don't know why Giuliani hasn't dropped this "what you see is what you get" routine yet. Maybe he's waiting for Easter, or Super Tuesday week.

WAIT, RUN THAT PART BY ME AGAIN... Our old friend Michael Totten is doing the Iraq citizen-journalism thing for Commentary. His latest dispatch starts with rich promise of the sort of MSM smackdown wingers love, targeting in this instance one Ali al-Fadhily of the Inter Press Services. But I wonder how their smiles of anticipation fared through this section:

Some of what al-Fadhily writes is correct. The economy and infrastructure really are shattered. Unemployment is greater than 50 percent, as he says. It’s true that most Iraqis – in Fallujah as well as everywhere else – don’t have access to safe drinking water.

After this breathtaking admission that, even after four years of US peacekeeping, most citizens of Iraq -- including Fallujah, one of our great "successes" -- can't get fucking clean water, who cares what Totten's charges are against the IPS journo?

But for shits and giggles: al-Fadhily says Fallujah is under "siege," Totten says nonsense, there's actually just a "hard perimeter around the city manned by Iraqi Police who prevent non-residents from bringing their cars in." I agree that's not a siege: in fact, it's a pretty normal situation -- for walled cities of the Middle Ages.

The rest of it's pretty much like that. al-Fadhily says "seventy percent of the city was destroyed during Operation Phantom Fury." Totten counters: "I saw much more destruction in nearby Ramadi than I saw in Fallujah." If you're beginning to wonder if Totten is a liberal plant, he eventually does stick in the sort of good-news nuggets his audience goes for: the old standard Marines-distributing-food-and-schoolbooks, of course, as well as more fashionable, cutting-edge leading indicators, e.g. "Solar-powered street lights" and "Low-interest microloans."

We've reached the point with this war where what ordinary people would regard with horror and revulsion is perceived by its fans as great news. Of course, as ever, they're not nuts, we're nuts. "If peace arrives even in Baghdad," sighs Totten, "...somebody, somewhere, will complain that Iraq has been taken over by the imperial powers of Kentucky Fried Chicken and Starbucks." I say, send Starbucks now: their product tastes like foul water, too, but at least it's been boiled.

UPDATE. As is apparently dictated by our latest style guide, comments are brutal. I don't understand it, since I'm such a goddamned ray of sunshine myself.

For added humorous effect, Totten sends his readers to alicublog, urging them to "please be nice to those who live there even though they do not deserve it." A nod's as good as a wink: "What you're missing math_mage," writes one, "is that we should've just left Iraq in the hands of an atheistic murderer who kills simply because they pray to Allah. That's the kind of leader these leftists can get behind." Boy, Godwin didn't know the half of it.

UPDATE II. math_mage says he's thinking of starting his own blog, practices by posting more epic comments here. I keep threatening to ban people, but I haven't yet brought myself to do it. Well, Bill Buckley let Joan Didion write for him, after all. I wonder if she was this surly about it, though.

I welcome Michael Totten back to the fray. Apparently he has changed his mind about unmoderated comments, so long as they're mine. In the immortal words of Black Bart, I'm getting to be a big underground hit in this town.

ALL RIGHT! WE'LL GIVE SOME LAND TO THE NIGGERS AND THE CHINKS -- BUT WE DON'T WANT THE IRISH! Gates of Vienna correspondent from Scandinavia lectures America on losing its whiteness:

I see no indication that ethnicity is irrelevant in the USA. On the contrary, I see indications that the importance of ethnic rivalries is growing within the US along with mass immigration from non-Western countries. The reason why this haven’t had serious repercussions yet is because the white majority clings to the idea that ethnicity doesn’t matter. But as the white majority grows smaller and eventually disappears, these ethnic rivalries could potentially grow a lot worse as there would no longer be a stable majority group in the country.

The author cites as a proof point a survey that says "US minorities don’t trust each other." We've seen this sort of thing before. All I can say is, as a resident of culturally diverse Brooklyn, I have had much occasion to hear complaints from neighbors of varying ethnicities about "those people" -- Poles, Italians, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Arabs, etc. Yet my neighborhood is not engulfed in flames. It actually functions very well.

How can this be? We will, I'm sure, have many occasions to discuss it at length as other racial obsessives roll out other studies proving that we all can't get along despite the fact that we do. For now I have to get to work, as do a lot of my other neighbors, which may be an explanation in itself. I will say that I sort of miss the days when liberals were doing all the racism research. Then, at least, you got the sense that they were looking to reduce racism, rather than exacerbate it.

OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS. Joe Lieberman's expected endorsement of John McCain offers a great opportunity that the Republican Party may be too fractured to avail. McCain is the least absurd of the current pro-war GOP contenders. There are many things I don't like about him, but he was saying from the beginning that the war would require far more effort and cost than the Administration was letting on. And unlike most of his fellow GOP contenders, he doesn't consider torture a fun way to rouse the yahoos.

In a better world this would have made McCain a more formidable candidate long since, but the Jesus people and many hardcore rightwing operatives actively despise him. These folks are negligible in a general election, but hard to get past in the primaries. The Lieberman endorsement is a great way to signal to relatively sane pro-war voters that McCain might their best bet. But in the current environment, who knows how many of them exist?

YOUR MOMENT OF DR. HELEN. Dr. Mrs. Ole Perfesser throws more bait to the poor souls who have despaired of finding love in this cold, cruel, gynocracy. "Men are being told not to get married because of the bias in the courts there and are, with good reason, reluctant to get married," says the Doc. But as usual, the pre-comments content is barely relevant. At this point I don't know why she doesn't just use a dog whistle. The stuff we get in her comments is par for the course. Take the first one:

Some people are wildly unrealistic. I have a friend who got fleeced online thinking that a Siberian super model 15 years his junior had chosen him of all people in the Western Hemisphere to fall in love with. This guy is not stupid, far from it. But when a complete stranger asked him for money so that “she” could get a visa to visit him in the USA, he was blinded by a picture. Men are more easily governed by their vices than their virtues.

Yyyyeah, well... that's too bad, friend. Next!

Most men are simply priced out of the marriage and dating market. If you dropped a mere $100K in the yearly bank account of those lonely, "shy" men women would be all around and over them. Because the men would have higher RELATIVE status. Which would make them sexy instead of losers.

A "mere $100K"? Sounds like homeboy has a hard target. I dream, I plan, I can!

Let's face it, there's also blame & shame at play here! All of our media now specialize in blaming and shaming males. That effects how males behave in dating & marriage.

I hear you, pal. I was doing all right with this girl, and then I suddenly remembered that Subway commercial where the guy acts so foolish. Totally blew my cool; I started talking about my hunting knife collection and she went to the ladies' room and never returned.

Some commenters do break the mold a bit:

The modern woman harbors all manner of contradictory desires. She lives in a state of perpetual dissatisfaction. By satisfying one desire, she is logically bound to leave the other unsatisfied.

Common female contradictions:

“I want equality, so treat me special just because I’m a woman.”
“I want an assertive guy, who always does what I want"...

Let women figure out their own shit. Have lots of sex with them in the meantime.

If I was writing a relationship book for men here would be the thesis: don’t have them.

This laddybuck has suggested a bold new direction. It should work out fine for him, so long as he can find willing partners, which would be facilitated by keeping his mouth shut about what he really thinks of them, which, I'm guessing, he will find difficult to do.

The sex before marriage is not worth it with them and after marriage it will be non-existent. Why? Well sex makes you happy if reasonably well done and moderately frequent (2-3 times a week). What is the down side for a such a woman with that? It ruins her life story. It kills the narrative. It also ruins her status at pity parties. Way more important than being happy or keeping a husband.

I think I saw this one on Everybody Loves Raymond. But at least he's better off than the guy whose wife decrees that "the sex is over when she has an orgasm."

The reductio ad libertarian:

BTW men have the internet now.

It is not as good as sex with a competent woman but it is a heck of a lot cheaper and you get Instapundit, Dr. Helen, IEC Fusion Technology, and Power and Control at no extra charge.

I like your thinking, broham! May your message spread throughout the internets, and keep the pussy surplus at optimum levels for the rest of us. Oh, wait; it already has.

UPDATE. Accidentally took this post down last night -- was going to say something related to the troll infestation that it engendered, but I'll get to that later...

...actually there isn't much to say about it. We have a guy in comments doing the standard supervillain impersonation, including the old "Are you projecting a bit? Do YOU think that a woman also becomes a castrating bitch , etc." switcheroo that he probably learned from "Law & Order: Criminal Intent," and calling female posters with whom he doesn't agree ugly. He also identifies himself, in some of his aliases, as a liberal, which wrinkle I'm sure he prizes as his own personal Jedi Mind Trick.

I suppose it was good to deprive him of a forum for awhile, so that some other shiny surface might attract him away. But eventually we may have to avail the expedient of banning. Yeah, a misogynist teenager who thinks he's George Sanders is probably going to count that a perverse victory, but at this moment I judge the devotion of a gazillion posts in one comments box to the care and feeding of a single disturbed COINTELPRO volunteer to be too much charity work for this blog.

BLOWING THEIR COVER. Alan Keyes has been a prominent conservative for a long time. Ronald Reagan ("I've never known a more stout-hearted defender of a strong America than Alan Keyes") appointed him to the UN and to the State Department. The National Review used to be cool with Keyes, too: he has been interviewed and even written for the magazine.

In 1999 Jonah Goldberg called Keyes "the most intelligent, articulate, impressive guy to run for president in any party in years." It is interesting to see how he qualified this statement:

But I just can't shake the notion that he'd bring back the guillotine. As a friend of mine put it, if you drew a venn diagram of crackpots and great political minds, he would be one of the few people in that area where the circles overlap. Still, I find it befuddling that I can't articulate why he isn't getting more respect.

Back then, for this crowd, a Republican could be a "crackpot" and a great candidate at the same time. Why not? The GOP had Congress and Reagan Revivalism was in the air, and if some of its avatars were raw like Rush, that only added a fun frisson of political incorrectness to the proceedings. (Later Goldberg praised Keyes because "He doesn't believe that an idea or a fact is more or less true depending on whether it will make a feminist cry.")

But this year Keyes got on Wednesday's Iowa Republican Presidential debate, and spouted much the same gibberish as usual. This time the National Review crowd is incensed. "I Wish the Des Moines Register Had One More Republican Debate This Cycle," says Kathryn Jean Lopez, "so I could demand a place on the stage. It makes as much sense as Alan Keyes being there." Rich Lowry said Keyes "shouldn't have been on the stage." Mark Hemingway suggested Keyes be pushed off future debate stages with sticks.

Only Goldberg tried to maintain to old-school funtimes, saying "I kind of dug Alan Keyes' crazy guy on the bus routine." Elsewhere conservatives were uniformly angry at Keyes' presence, despite his commendations from the Gipper.

What changed? Well, for one thing, the Republicans aren't doing so hot, so the hijinks of olden times have to be kept on the down-low. The "mainstream" Republican candidates, knowing what a tough slog they have ahead of themselves, are making strenuous efforts to look and sound normal for the cameras. Conservative commentators play gamely along, talking about their debates as if they were business as usual, though were a soul innocent of the current GOP's bizarre standards of normalcy to happen upon one of these scenes, it would probably fill him with confusion and horror.

But most of us are not so well-protected, and are by now kind of inured to the Jesus-infused, torture-happy madness of Republicans. Their best chance is to keep a straight face over the course of the remaining 732 debates, and get us all acclimated to their insane ideas once more. Then Keyes comes along frothing at the mouth. Under ordinary circumstances, his competitors might see this as an opportunity to look more normal by comparison. But their supporters, at least, are wrapped too tight at the moment to see it that way. They see the rampaging id of Republicanism let loose upon their stage, and they are terrified that his mania might be catching. They had just learned to live with Ron Paul, and now this!

No wonder Keyes drives them bonkers. He's blowing their cover.

CLASS WAR. The Wall Street Journal editorializes against large, rich institutions that aren't giving back their fair share. Sounds strange? Relax. The institutions they're talking about are colleges.

Faculty members are paid more to teach fewer hours, and colleges have turned their campuses into "country clubs." Princeton's new $136 million dorm, according to BusinessWeek, has "triple-glazed mahogany casement windows made of leaded glass" and "the dining hall boasts a 35-foot ceiling gabled in oak and a 'state of the art servery,' " whatever a servery is.

The doorty rich swine! How will an appropriate wealth transfer to the Common Man be effected? The Journal proposes that colleges start spending out more of their endowments. Do they mean tuition rebates of the sort Harvard just put into place? Irrelevant, says the Journal; we must cut back "government handouts." Do they mean the sort of federal moneys regularly given to University researchers? The editorial doesn't mention that; it is instead concerned with the pernicious effect of indirect funding of Big Edu in the form of... financial aid to students:

Tuition has risen about three percentage points faster than inflation every year for the past quarter-century. At the same time, the feds have put more and more money behind student loans and other financial aid. The government is slowly becoming a third-party tuition payer, with all the price distortions one would expect. Every time tuition rises, the government makes up the difference; colleges thus cheerfully raise tuition (and budgets), knowing the government will step in.

In fact, the whole concept of needs-based financial aid smells fishy to the editorialists:

Mr. Vedder wonders why universities should get to ask the income of their students before telling them how much they'll be charged. That sounds like price discrimination: If a car dealer tried to make you fill out the form students have to fill out for financial aid, he notes, "you'd run to a consumer protection agency."

So dis-endowment must happen, but not in the form of tuition remission. The government should stop helping people get into colleges. Presumably then Big Edu will have to charge less.

A market-based solution! We should have seen that one coming. Of course the Journal never tries this kind of thing on companies like, say, Wal-Mart, which uses its own considerable resources to avail various tax breaks and government subsidies. In fact, when legislators push back against Wal-Mart, the Journal predictably comes to its defense -- and only denounces the corporation when it capitulates. Last year the paper's Brendan Miniter praised Maryland Governor Robert Ehrlich for vetoing a bill that, on the grounds that Wal-Mart's poor health care plans were stressing the state's Medicaid rolls, would have forced Wal-Mart to spend 8% of its payroll in the state on employee health insurance.

(Miniter said this veto, and "Erlich's defense of marriage and Christmas," meant the Governor was in "a strong position to win re-election this fall." Five months later, Ehrlich lost by seven points. This February, when the Wal-Mart CEO seemed, understandably, to warm toward a national health-care plan, the Journal likened it to "Stockholm Syndrome.")

This is to show, not that it needs showing, that the Journal is not normally given to proletarianism. But academia is a favored rightwing villain, and any means to decrease its power may be used, even class-war pictures of mahogany and serveries. The sad thing is that higher education is too expensive, as is made clear by the monstrous debts now incurred in its pursuit. Alas, this end of the equation the Journal treats lightly:

Though academic standards have certainly fallen, college graduates still, on average, make about twice as much over the course of their lifetimes as people with only a high school diploma. So if the government got out of the higher education business, a lot of families might decide to make the sacrifice anyway, even without the tuition aid. But they might also decide that they can live without the mahogany windows.

Mahogany windows are the least of their concerns; as I have said before, a degree is for most of our citizens just a way of getting over, and in the current environment many of them perceive the stakes high enough that it is worth even an astounding debt-load. The Journal seems to think its readers won't mind maintaining that onerous status quo, so long as the big boys -- the gowned sort, that is -- take a hit. They really ought to leave class war to the experts.

READING TOO MUCH INTO IT. Ann Althouse seems to think the Times' Zev Chafets (rendered "Zeve Chafets" by her) had it in for Mike Huckabee:

The reporter, Zeve Chafets, portrays Huckabee as rather sly...

Earlier in the article, Chafets also references the devil — who, I think, appalls most NYT readers not because they fear Hell but because they fear those who concern themselves with the famous old supernatural malefactor...

Is Chafets trying to get readers to think that Huckabee is more benighted than a Liberty University professor?...

Damn! Why won't Huck give Chafets the religious nuggets he so craves?

And so forth. She may be working from her traditional assumption that all Times writers (Brooks, Tierney et alia excepted) are liberal agents out to make evangelical Republicans look bad. Chafets is actually an erstwhile Jewish World Review and New York Post scribe who has said that he is "no longer convinced" that "Most American Muslims are peaceable, law-abiding, terror-hating folks," and recently lacerated "'Bananas' Jack" Murtha. He is also the author of one of the craziest things I have ever read: a New York Daily News column in which he urged readers fight terrorism by refusing to watch scenes of atrocities in Afghanistan on the TV. ("You have a weapon that can help win this war... It flows from a piece of high-tech weaponry: the TV remote control... your living room is the combat zone, and the dirty work belongs to everybody.") And he has a book out called A Match Made in Heaven: American Jews, Christian Zionists, and One Man's Exploration of the Weird and Wonderful Judeo-Evangelical Alliance.

These were probably the sort of bona fides that got him access to Huckabee, and his access got him in the Times, an aspiration of many journalists who are not motivated by a hatred of organized religion. Whatever inspired his take on the candidate, it probably wasn't any animosity toward his evangelism. Maybe Huckabee really is that much of an ass.

WAVE OF THE FUTURE.

LAS VEGAS - Assailants shot six young people Tuesday who had stepped off a bus coming from a high school in a midday attack just blocks from two elementary schools, authorities said.

Clark County Sheriff Doug Gillespie said the incident appeared to have been sparked by a fight at a high school earlier in the day. The fight, which is believed to involve a girlfriend, resulted in three arrests at Mohave High School, he said.

Following current conservative thinking, it's clearly time to allow schoolchildren to bring guns to school. Or, better yet, make it mandatory. Expect Giuliani to get out in front on this issue.

UPDATE. The Rising Jurist says in comments, "No, no; school children aren't old enough to lawfully own handguns. It is the teachers who should be allowed to carry."

School children not old enough to lawfully own handguns? In America?

When the Founders were the same age as these brats, they worked from sunup to sundown, drank a jug of hard cider every morning, had fathered at least three children, and kilt injuns. And how did they kilt those injuns? With guns, that's what.

It says something about our nation's moral decline that even a prominent rightwing buffoon cannot think this thing through to its logical end: arming the teachers merely increases the power of the Nanny State, leaving our teenagers soft, weak, and prey to hip-hop and baggy jeans. We need to start instilling a sense of personal responsibility in these young people, and fast.

Children who are not left on hillsides to die should start shooting squirrels by age seven at the latest. Those who haven't killed a man -- preferably in a duel or episode of vigilante justice -- by age twelve should be sent into the woods to live on their wits.

I say: old enough for purity balls, old enough to lock and load. If we're going to have this gun suffrage thing at last, let's have it full force and all at once. The ensuing carnage should depopulate enough southern states to ensure a long string of Democratic victories after the next Census.

GLORY BE TO GOD FOR DAPPLED THINGS. William H. Dutton quotes Ted Nelson:

To the best of my knowledge, the first rock musical was performed fifty years ago today. No, you probably haven’t heard of it; it ran as scheduled for two nights at Swarthmore College, near Philadelphia. I wrote and directed it in my Junior year, when I was twenty. There is even an LP.

There is indeed; I own a copy:


And I hate to dispute the esteemed Nelson -- an infotech pioneer -- but there aren't any rock songs in it. The score of Anything & Everything is a (to me) highly entertaining pastiche of many different styles including dixieland, Broadway, old school songs and college yells, contemporary radio pop, folk, and the sort of influences that I expect excited bright young things in that era (the Theatre de Lys revival of The Threepenny Opera and the songs of Flanders & Swann, for instance). The tone is modishly disaffected, with gentle swipes at the Organization Man, campus radicalism, sexual license and so forth. Sample lyric:

Everywhere between the sexes
The seat of cathexis is the solar plexus
I just feel like bein' in love, anything will do
'Cause I just need a gentle shove to fall in love with you

The closest thing to rock in it is the climactic "Do The Rock-a-Doodle-Do" ("The kit and kaboodle/They're doin' the Rock-A-Doodle/So why the heck can't you?"), though it's really closer to a narcotized shuffle (except for the Highland fling break), whether by design or interpretation I can't say.

It's weird, though, and fascinating to music pervs like me. I'm glad to have it. A few years back, moving from one tiny rattrap to a tinier one, I had to discard most of my vinyl, keeping only a few dozen specimens, including sentimental favorites (Tonight's the Night), records of my own material, and oddities that I surmised would never be issued digitally. Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music has made it to iTunes, and you can get a box set of the original recording of Leonard Bernstein's hallucinogenic Mass (though without the groovy picture-book), but in some cases I predicted accurately. My LP of the Stephen Foster Carillion Tower playing lumbering versions of "Old Black Joe" etc. will probably never see publication in any other form; neither will Woody Woodbury's First Annual Message From the President of the Booze Is The Only Answer Club. And I suspect Anything & Everything will remain safely restricted to the mouldering discs of a few Swarthmore alumni and myself.

There are probably far fewer analog audiophiles now than there were once upon a time. That battle has been lost by attrition. When I first heard Raw Power on CD I thought it was crap, and maybe if I still had the LP and a really good sound system I'd still think so. But I don't, and digital is what there is. To what extent was the ass-kicking power of "The Real Me" from Quadrophenia through my college roommate's maxed-out shelftop stereo a superior experience to whatever digitally remixed version we're on now? Was it the grooves, or the time and place? I can't tell you and I don't have thousands of dollars to try and recreate the experience. Maybe we were all better off with Edison cylinders.

But the recesses of our cultural memory are an archipelago where vinyl certainly rules. Things were caught on wax that, with rare exceptions, no one will bother to digitize because there's no money in it, or because no one cares, or because they just plain suck. These artifacts have the same value as any unobserved details of life: they are either worthless or a treasure trove, depending on how much faith one has in the obvious, or patience for that which is not obvious. Like bookstall remainders, garage-sale handicrafts, photos found in the trash, or conversations overheard on the bus, or anything you might happen to attend that did not call attention to itself, they are part of a secret world that is larger, and often more interesting, than the consensus reality we half-awakenly inhabit, and to which we can only abandon ourselves at great risk to our souls.

TRAITORS UNMASKED. Some days back Ace O'Spades called Huckabee a Democrat. The insult is being mainstreamed: Power Line, National Review, and the Ole Perfesser have taken it up. Each cites political similarities to Jimmy Carter, though the casual reader may be forgiven for thinking they refer to Huckabee's growing popularity with voters.

I dearly hope the tactic snowballs and makes it to the Republican Presidental debates. Romney has already been compared (albeit unfavorably) to JFK by Maureen Dowd -- maybe Giuliani can extend the slur. Romney could respond that Giuliani is the second coming of Al Smith (which would be a neat bit of jiu-jitsu, as Romney has already been compared to Smith himself). Ron Paul certainly has the standing to compare everyone else to Woodrow Wilson. Then someone can drop the FDR-bomb, and fists will start flying.

DIMINISHING RETURNS. Conservatives have been thumping the low approval ratings of the Democratic Congress as a way of offsetting the lousy standings of the Republican Administration. Now the destroyed CIA torture tapes has been quickly followed by leaks showing that some Congressional Democrats supported waterboarding in 2002. The usual suspects have made much of it:

Lots of people who were talking tough back then subsequently changed their tunes -- out of either a sudden flowering of scruples or an unprincipled desire to go after the Bush Administration with any weapon that came to hand. But, you know, if you're going to say "it was different back then," it really has to be more than just an all-purpose excuse for politicians. It's also a reason not to hang people out to dry for doing what politicians, and the public, wanted back then, when things were so "different." Your call, but Jules Crittenden notes: "Next thing you know, someone’s going to say the Clinton co-presidency thought Saddam had a nuclear program and backed regime change."

For a Party standing squarely against moral equivalence, they expend a lot of energy telling voters that the Democrats did it, too.

I wonder if it will work. We are closer to the 2008 elections than we are to the 2006 elections that put Pelosi and Reid into power. All deserve whipping, but given the choice, whom will the voters seek to punish next year -- the Party of the wheelman, or the Party of Mr. Big?

Some Democrats are forced to say they were wrong to support the Republicans, and some Republicans happily admit that those Democrats were wrong to support them. Sometimes, when you try to reframe the issue, you find that the issue is actually framing you.

HACKWORK FOR THE LORD. As I am not into hobbits or gremlins or witches or wardrobes or any of that CGI guff, I certainly won't see The Golden Compass. I am intrigued by the weird negative criticism of the film at National Review. I don't mean it's weird that the criticism is negative -- such a result was preordained, as Compass twits the Holy Mother Church, and the Review is pretty much an Opus Dei front organization. But I thought they'd at least use actual film critics to review it. Instead, they enlist Gina R. Dalfonzo, editor of Charles Colson's ultra-Jesusy online mag, and a Review "editorial associate" (intern?) named Emily Karrs. Neither of them seem to know or care much about movies, which is probably why they were picked for the job.

Dalfonzo's employers are clearly up in arms about the movie. Colson's "director of strategic processes in the Operational Advisory Services team for Campus Crusade for Christ" -- wonder what his uniform looks like; lots of gold braid, I expect -- warns the flock that children are being taught this filth in schools and "Christian parents ought to stand guard on behalf of the next generation." And Dalfonzo cites another colleague's "take" which is basically a rundown of Compass' Bad Thoughts.

That's mainly what's on Dalfonzo's mind, too. In her Review piece she complains that the plot gets confusing, but she likes some of the acting. And that's it, as far as aesthetics go -- just enough to convince somebody (if only Dalfonzo) that it's criticism, just like in the newspapers, and not a hit piece. But most of the text is about Philip Pullman's "appalling moral relativism" and general lack of Jesus.

As for Miss Karrs, her critical method relies too much on negative adjectives, and too little on explaining what exactly went wrong:

...Scenes in the books are shuffled or invented out of whole cloth and characters are rearranged and renamed. Many of the questions that are posed by the variety of moralities among species of conscious beings in the world are swept away in the script, so the film focuses on CGI rather than substance.

Ineptly cannibalizing its own themes in a hope to be all things to all people, the film ends up an exercise in vapidity rather than a great new epic. Such is the price of seeking to adapt a book that propagandizes for an unpopular philosophy into a major motion picture. The landscape is breathtakingly beautiful, the conversation of the computer-animated daemons sparkling, and Kidman nearly shatters the screen with her icy glamour as the deliciously wicked Mrs. Coulter. Yet despite so much technical richness, the film still feels empty.

I'm still waiting to hear what was wrong with the film as a film -- That it's different from the book? That it has too little blasphemous philosophical discussion to hold a teenager's attention? -- as opposed to what her priest would think was wrong with it if he saw it.

Why not use critics who could actually explain these things well? Because, for the most part, their reactions aren't predictable. They might perversely enjoy the film, or dislike it in a way that isn't sufficiently contemptuous. And they certainly wouldn't have the appropriate talking points memorized, nor would they be inclined to devote 80 percent of a review to them.

Again, for such people art is nothing but an opportunity for or threat against their power.