(HATE) IN THE NAME OF PRIDE. MLK Day (observed) has drawn no observations at this writing from National Review Online -- which, given their past observances, is about the most respectful thing they could do.

Wingnuts in general are quiet, perhaps saving up their vitriol for Abraham Lincoln's birthday. Extreme Mortman manages only a short MLK tribute:

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in a 1968 appearance at Harvard: “When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You are talking anti-Semitism.”

I don't blame him; all I remember about Nixon is his rousing piano rendition of the Missouri Waltz.

At Reason Jesse Walker reproduces a very apt passage by the late Dr. King. I assume concern over the recent Ron Paul newsletter fiasco prevented Reason from printing their planned denunciation of the statist Civil Rights Act. Well, isn't Martin Luther King Day all about being grateful for the little we get?

UPDATE. They're still pretty quiet about it. One of the guys at Libertas does stand up for King against his mortal enemies -- that is, the "wretched NAACP today or liberals in general trying to effect change through divisively revelling and dwelling on our real or perceived mistakes and refusing ever to acknowledge our many virtues." Because King was nothing if not a booster. That's why he kept interrupting the "I Have a Dream" speech to lead the crowd in a chant of "U.S.A.! U.S.A.!"

Pierce has this sort of gibberish well-handled at Sadly, No!:

No, what MLK was all about was color-blindness! Yes, he was only interested in a unified world where everyone behaved exactly like white people. He was not interested in nonsense like affirmative action or restitution for slavery, despite his many public statements to the contrary; even the fact that he wrote an entire book about it shouldn’t sway us into thinking that Dr. King supported anything as crazy as racial quotas or economic compensation in addition to legal equality.

We live in a hell of a world, where liberals are fascists and MLK is Edward Brooke.

On a lighter note, there are some laughs in this Ron Paul video which compares the two doctors' philosophies and (disastrously for Paul) rhetorical styles. There's even a glimpse of young Paul talking cheerfully with black people -- I though Lew Rockwell burned all those!

And since he's all the rage (literally) these days, let me close with a little somethin'-somethin' on Jonah Goldberg's history with the schvartzes.

STILL MORE LIBERAL FASCISM. Jonah Goldberg leads his latest column about the liberal fascists with the grim news that "California is proposing revisions to its housing code that would require all new or remodeled homes to have a 'programmable communicating thermostat'... you would basically cede control of your home's heating and air conditioning to the state (when and if state officials wanted to exercise it)."

You cannot tell from Goldberg's column that the California Energy Commission withdrew this proposal on January 16, nor that the Commissioners, with one exception out of five, were appointed or re-appointed by Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Then Goldberg talks about all the bans proposed or put in place by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg without mentioning that Bloomberg was elected as a Republican.

I can't wait for the Ole Perfesser to put this one in his "name that party" file.

Goldberg pads out the remainder of his column with references to other countries, "public service announcements that use fear, terror and gruesome imagery to encourage workplace safety," and the Third Reich.

At The Corner, Goldberg links to an item on the invention of the cup-holder without mentioning that it was first proposed by Hitler to weaken the self-reliance of German motorists.

THE HOLLYWOOD VERSION. Via Memeorandum, I see Oliver Stone wants to do a George W. Bush biopic. Roger L. Simon and Libertas have already started snarling.

I am intrigued. Stone's Nixon is a muddle, but a pleasurable one, and certainly not a hit job -- in fact, it's Stone's quixotic attempt to humanize Nixon that makes it both confused and interesting. Stone could never concede that Nixon was just a monster of ordinary ambition; he scours his biography for insecurities that might explain him ("I kept thinking of my old man tonight -- he was a failure, too"), even inventing troubled relationships with his wife and mother to show the depth of his existential loneliness. These Freudian interludes clash badly with the massive historical events to which Stone absurdly gave equal weight: Nixon goes to China, Nixon goes to Russia, Nixon goes to Hell.

At times the ill-fitting gears mesh to lovely effect, as when young Nixon attends his mother's admonition to seek "strength in this life, happiness in the next," and the camera sweeps skyward and then down upon a thoughtful Nixon waiting to take the Republican Convention stage in 1968. But the real Nixon, or even a poetic equivalent, remains as elusive as Nixon's dialect in the mouth of Anthony Hopkins. The real hero of Nixon isn't Nixon but Stone, the adrenaline-addled Vietnam volunteer seeking to justify his psychedelic patriotism even amidst ample, excellent cases for abandoning it. His sentimental inability to see Tricky Dick plain provides its own fascinating spectacle of wishful thinking, which reverberates through the eulogies Bob Dole and the ex-Presidents yammer during the end credits.

How could I not be eager to see what Stone will make, ten years later, of Dubya and his exceedingly strange family (and please God let James Cromwell play Poppy)? We'll see then if even Stone's forgiveness has its limits.

IS NOTHING UNTAINTED BY LIBERAL FASCISM? Now the color blue is fascist, or something. Jonah Goldberg posts a reader's note:

I'm powering through the book and will try to send more interesting thoughts and criticism as I can, but I had to write in about that little trivia about the naming of the Philadelphia Eagles. That aside solved a huge mystery for me. This year, the Eagles celebrated their 75th year with throwback jerseys from their inaugural that were mysteriously hideous. They were blue and tannish/yellowish. What the heck did those colors have to do with eagles? Now I know. The blue, which was the main of the jersey, comes from the Blue Eagle of the NRA.

The Eagles were indeed named after the NRA's signature bird -- a neat bit of bandwagoning in a Depression-wracked city -- but the uniform colors are those of the Philadelphia city flag and had been worn by the jurisdiction's previous pro team, the Frankford Yellow Jackets.

But the city of Philadelphia is predominately Democratic, which means that it's fascist, so this only strengthens his point.

Presumably naming the franchise of ultraliberal New England the "Patriots" was just an attempt to fool people. Like Alger Hiss!

This isn't the first time a National Review writer has identified a football team's political affiliation by its colors: "I love it that [the Steelers'] opponents this year will be wearing the colors of — hard to comprehend this — Hamas! Couldn't be a better opponent, who will probably be favored..."

With pro football so riddled with treasonous influences -- and, per Rich Lowry, "a race-obsessed zone" -- it's no wonder another National Review author has argued for a change of allegiance -- expressed, naturally, in terms of occupation: "If American conservatives dedicate themselves to backing American soccer, the resultant energy and optimistic buzz might just push the U.S. men's national team to the final rounds of this summer's World Cup, or at least lower the percentage of the fans sitting next to me who voted for Mondale, Dukakis, and Gore."

Thank God pitchers and catchers is just a month away.

A CHANGE ELECTION. My first reaction to this ad was that it, and its sponsor, Americans for the Preservation of American Culture, couldn't be real; they had to be mischievous inventions of the Romney or maybe even the McCain campaign.



I'm still not sure, but I'm tending toward the view that I've been overthinking it. This is after all an American election, and a little Stars 'n' Bars controversy before a Southern primary is as much a tradition as lawn signs and walking-around money.

The innovations of our glorious new age have given 2008 a patina of novelty, but let's not get carried away. If Obama gets the nomination, we'll get Willie Horton II (and possibly III, IV, and infinity); if Clinton gets it, the position papers of the opposition will resemble the taunting letters-to-the-editor of serial killers of prostitutes, and if Edwards wins they will all be written by the Club for Growth and Mr. Burns from "The Simpsons." So maybe American Culture is being preserved after all. And maybe, despite all the talk of change, that's really what the American people want.

SOMEDAY NEVER COMES. As usual, Ed Driscoll is telling us that "legacy media" is over. But he also offers us the face of the future: Hotline TV! Turns out to be a lot like legacy media, except the jokes are even lamer, its viewership is in the low hundreds, and it has a scoop: the Michigan Primary was good news for Rudy Giuliani. (Male host: "We've been talking about how he's dead in the water, but he might end up being sort of crazy like a fox!" Female host: "Hmmm!")

I keep hearing Hollywood is over, too, but people are paying millions of dollars to go see The Bucket List instead of Bloggingheads, although the plots seem rather similar.

I have my own idea about what the future will look like. It involves omnipresent clouds of blue smoke, sporadic gunfire, and the revival of ring shouts. Naturally I don't talk about it much.

WHERE ARE THEY NOW? Ross Perot is right on top of things:

When I asked about Barack Obama, Perot said he admired his eloquence but thought it "a little odd that we would be less concerned about his background than being a Mormon." Perot was pleasantly surprised when I told him that Obama was a Christian, not a Muslim, and relieved when I informed him that the e-mail Perot (and untold others) received about Obama not respecting the Pledge of Allegiance was a fraud.

I hope we can resurrect some more former giants of American politics for their views on the Presidential race. Jesse Ventura, for example. This is from a review of his new book:

Jesse "reveals" that he met with CIA agents after he took office (it sounds about as sinister as a fan-club meeting between FBI agents and a NASCAR driver), says he told President Bill Clinton to bomb the Israel-Palestinian problem (Clinton considered the source) and imagines a weird scenario in which Jesse and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. make a run for the White House that ends with an assassination attempt that leaves Jesse in a coma.

How can they tell?

The final words of the book, while uncredited, are lyrics from "Hotel California," by one of Jesse's favorite rock bands, the Eagles:

"You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave!"

I want more! Please, somebody give Ventura and Perot a talk show, or a sitcom. It would beat the hell out of Mark Shields and David Brooks.

ASSHOLE BUDDY. Let me just say that I admire and approve the statement by Ezra Levant made to the Alberta Human Rights Commission. (You may also read his opening remarks to the Commission here.) If you don't have the right to print stupid, offensive things in your own publication, you have no meaningful freedom of speech at all.

I also reaffirm my defense of Mark Steyn's freedom of speech. Though I'm sure none of this changes the fact that I'm a fascist.

RAIN-DANCERS OF THE RIGHT. Peter Wehner, a former Fellow at the Bill Bennett School of Public Scolding and Bush White House strategist who has run for shelter from the upcoming conservative apocalypse to National Review's The Corner, nonetheless feels optimism: "Something good seems to be happening in our land." And that glad tiding is that Matthew McConaughey has referred to the thing growing in his girlfriend's womb as a baby.

"A baby, not a fetus," marvels Wehner. "I wonder how this locution will go down in the militantly pro-abortion world of Hollywood, where the 'right' to an abortion is sacrosanct." Trust me, if McConaughey's career ends in 2008, it won't be due to his use of the b-word -- it'll be due to Fool's Gold.

Things are rough for the right-wing when they jump on proud-parent usage as a sign of the Third Great Awakening. Not even The Corner's normally undemanding readers can stand for it, and they send Wehner complaints -- not, alas, that he has wasted their time with his gibberish, but that McConaughey has not married the mother of his proto-child and is therefore an unsuitable harbringer of moral revival.

Wehner, using some of the skills he no doubt honed at the White House, eats a certain amount of Christer shit before asserting, "I’ll take progress where we can find it. If we are seeing a movement toward respect for the unborn child in Hollywood, let’s accept that — and then, hopefully, we can move toward a greater commitment to marriage."

I suppose the next Hollywood wedding, however doomed, will have them convinced that Christ's Second Coming is right on schedule. (Maybe Jesus did help them with the timing -- they could have got stuck with Eddie Murphy.) Then they can move on to the next step -- getting McConaughey to denounce homosexuality.

Failing that, though, they could raise a small cheer if he tells some reporter that he's not into anal. Or if he gets a nice haircut or holds a door open for a lady or something. These people are like roadside rain-dancers; they can dance through weeks of drought, and still take credit for the shower that breaks it.

UPDATE. gypsy howell makes an excellent point in comments: "Huh. Judging by the number of celebrity out-of-wedlock babies, I was thinking that 'Hollywood' has never heard of having an abortion." What Would Tyler Durden Do concurs. They could add a "Cutest Baby" category to the Oscars and conservatives still wouldn't be satisfied. In fact, when Hollywood finally becomes a giant kindergarten they'll just complain that these "neo-Boomers" will all grow up to smoke pot and have riots.

GOLDBERG VARIATIONS. Jonah Goldberg is upset that Jon Stewart took him to the gas chamber:

Yeah, I knew I was in trouble when the interview just wouldn't end — and I got the sense it wasn't ending because Stewart didn't feel like he "won" so he had to keep going. I haven't watched it (though I pretty much never watch myself on TV), but I knew that editing wasn't going to help me. Still, I also went in knowing I wasn't going to get a supportive reaction from the guy.

I don't have cable, but let me guess -- did it go something like this:



Or was it like one of those old Smothers Brothers routines where Dick gets all up in Tommy's face and Tommy goes, "You... you.. you're a fascist"? Or was it like the old Bob & Ray routine in which an author of a book on American History (who is not an academic but a longshoreman, and so has written the book "mostly from memory") is called out for listing Lincoln's birthplace as "Bailey's Mistake, Maine," and responds, "Well, it's a big book, a few mistakes are bound to slip through"? (The author also, when confronted with a obvious 17th Century plate of American Indians parlaying with settlers that he had captioned "FDR signing the Social Security Act," counters, "Well, look, if you want to nit-pick a book...")

Well, such is the life of a legacy pledge when confronted with a world that, to his horror, is not bound by law or custom to be true to his school. I'm just surprised Ramesh Ponnuru didn't warn him off.

UPDATE. It must have been worse than I thought, as Goldberg has hauled out the "letters of support" routine. (I bet the interns hate this: "Get cracking, kids, Jonah needs some love!") As is common in the genre, one of the correspondents says he's a liberal -- though he adds "probably 'classical' by your definition" because even Goldberg fans might find the idea of a liberal saying "Thanks for calling me a fascist" hard to swallow.

CAN'T WE ALL USE A LITTLE GOOD NEWS? The local ABC Affiliate reports that should rich prick Michael Bloomberg run for President, he couldn't beat anyone or even carry his "hometown," New York City. For extra schadenfreude, WABC failed to add the usual "that's because New Yorkers want him to keep being their bestest mayor ever" that traditionally appears with these things.

Mmm. Even the air smells fresher.

I actually hope Bloomberg doesn't dwell on it too much -- and not just out of fellow-feeling for whatever servant he will abuse in his rage; I fear he may seek to punish us all with another ban. But what's left? Maybe sugar-free chewing gum. Which would suck, as that's part of my weight-loss program.

ROMNEYMENTUM! Another impressive showing by Old Fred Thompson. This guy's catching fire. Despite what the liberal media says, Thompson's manager says he got "about 15%*" in Michigan. No doubt the discrepancy is due to the fact that his supporters are still in their voting booths, trying to figure out how to work the levers.

(* Ooops -- misread, the manager was talking about Huckabee's 15%. My only excuse is all the excitement in the air -- call it Referred Huckafever -- and the peculiarity of a campaign release leading with the third-place finisher's number. So dazed was I that I also failed to mention the Thompson campaign's gracious congratulations to the winner. Oh, wait a minute...)

And say what you will about Uncommitted, he's still very much in this race!

Romney invokes "George Herbert Walker Bush," just to make sure no one thinks he's talking about that stupid drunk in the White House.

JONAH GOLDBERG'S I KNOW YOU ARE BUT WHAT AM I? I'll say this for him: Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism is full of fun historical facts, including these hilarious biographical details for Rabbi Michael Lerner: "When [Lerner and his bride] were married, they exchanged rings extracted from the fuselage of an American aircraft downed over Vietnam. The wedding cake was inscribed with the Weathermen motto 'Smash Monogamy.'"

But the book doesn't offer much in the way of analysis. As in his writing for National Review and elsewhere, Goldberg treats facts as dirt-clods to hurl at his opponents; the task of condensing them into a case that fascism comes out of liberalism (and that modern-day liberalism is still just a putsch short of fascist dictatorship) is well beyond him.

We get a hint at the problem early on, when Goldberg defines fascism. "Scholars have had so much difficulty explaining what fascism is because various fascisms have been so different from each other," he says. But he is unwilling to take as a guide such apparently definitive statements as Mussolini's ("the resolute negation of the doctrine underlying so-called scientific and Marxian socialism") -- even while calling Il Duce "The Father of Fascism" -- prefering instead to emphasize Mussolini's youthful enthusiasms for Marx and socialism, which Goldberg accepts as proof that Marxism, socialism, and fascism are all the same thing -- that is, liberalism.

As a perhaps semi-conscious defense of this selective reading, Goldberg notes that "as a pragmatist, [Mussolini] was constantly willing to throw off dogma, theory, and alliances whenever convenient" -- yet he doesn't seem to grasp that this statement cuts both ways; if Mussolini was just conning people when he denounced the Left, why couldn't he have been conning them when he embraced it?

So Goldberg offers his own definition:

Fascism is a religion of the state. It assumes the organic unity of the body politic and longs for a national leader attuned to the will of the people. It is totalitarian in that it views everything as political and holds that any action by the state is justified to achieve the common good. It takes responsibility for all aspects of life, including our health and well-being, and seeks to impose uniformity of thought and action, whether by force or through regulation and social pressure. Everything, including the economy and religion, must be aligned with its objectives. Any rival identity is part of the "problem" and therefore defined as the enemy. I will argue that contemporary American liberalism embodies all of these aspects of fascism.

If the charge at the end surprises you, you have missed a trick: by "all of these aspects," he doesn't mean all at the same time. Any little piece of the bill of particulars, regardless of context, will serve. Thus, the fact that Mussolini supported old-age pensions and a minimum wage becomes as important to understanding his fascism as hyper-nationalism and the one-party state, because "takes responsibility for all aspects of life, including our health and well-being..." appears in Goldberg's definition.

You can imagine how this figures in Goldberg's classification of the Great Society and national health care as fascist phenomena. Indeed, there isn't an American welfare program or idea in the book that Goldberg doesn't find fascist or proto-fascist (this includes George Bush's compassionate conservatism). One wonders why he failed to mention the fascist provenance of Home Relief or the Sermon on the Mount.

Once you start using history and logic so irresponsibly, anything goes. For example, when we come to Hillary Clinton, Goldberg's "First Lady of Liberal Fascism," we are offered her 1973 Yale graduate paper arguing for granting legal autonomy to children in court cases as evidence of her fascism. Many of us might question the scope of Clinton's youthful claim, but it takes a Goldberg to compare Clinton's arguments to those of Robespierre and Hitler on the grounds that they, too, advocated "'capturing' children for social engineering purposes." Goldberg follows with some characteristic broken-field running, saying that Clinton's project "is in no way a Nazi project" -- and then compares her to Stalin and Mao ("they share a sweeping vision of social justice and community and the need for the state to realize that vision").

Clinton took a side in legitimate competing interests, and the most evident legacy of her efforts may be seen in the relatively mild legal and policy efforts of the Children's Defense Fund. But Goldberg finds her fascist because "while there are light-years of difference between the programs of liberals and those of Nazis or Italian Fascists or even the nationalist progressives of yore, the underlying impulse, the totalitarian temptation is present in both." And didn't Goldberg explicitly use the word totalitarian -- in italics -- in his bill of particulars? Close counts in horseshoes and Liberal Fascism.

If you think this is rich, see what he gives Norman Lear. Yes, that's Norman Lear the TV guy. The sitcom maker's formation of People for the American Way, and his despair at "the spiritual emptiness of our culture" and "our obsession with numbers, the quantifiable, the immediate," draws this analysis from Goldberg:

Lear's cri de coeur is an almost pitch-perfect restatement of the neo-Romantic objections to modern society that inspired fascist movements across Europe and the search for 'a cause larger than ourselves' of the American Progressives. He might receive an appreciative hearing from the early Paul de Man, Ezra Pound, and countless other fascist theorists and ideologues who denounced the Western -- particularly Jewish -- obsession with numbers and technical abstraction.

From wan, warm-hearted boilerplate to fascism in two easy sentences! And it can be used on anyone who pleads for deep feeling -- even Mr. Spock! ("It is almost a biological rebellion, a profound revulsion against the planned communities, the programming, the sterilized, artfully balanced atmospheres...") Try it at home yourself!

There are many similar howlers in the book. The barbarities of Leftist radicals in the 60s -- despite Goldberg's admission that these people sought to "differentiate themselves from liberals, whom the hard left saw as too concerned with politeness, procedure, and conventional politics" -- are connected to official Democratic politics because Howard Dean once spoke nostalgically of the Civil Rights Act and Hollywood made Easy Rider. Goldberg glides over the blacklists of the 50s -- he has previously spoken sympathetically of them -- but takes care to remind us that "[Joe] McCarthy's political roots lay firmly in the Progressive Era." The Da Vinci Code is linked to "the Nazi attack on Christianity." And there are all those brain-farts ("The white male is the Jew of liberal fascism") that have been the joy and solace of Sadly, No! lo these many weeks.

Goldberg is on firmer ground documenting the often deplorable overreach of the Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt Administrations. Of course, you may have already learned about many of their atrocities from Howard Zinn, Gore Vidal, and other liberal writers. That liberals, socialists, and progressives mainly took it in the neck from Wilson doesn't bother Goldberg -- after all, the Nazis fought the Commies, and they were all fascists. And I doubt Goldberg would even acknowledge that the more coercive aspects of the Roosevelt Administration are now rejected by most liberals, and indeed mainly defended by conservatives.

And that's really what this book is about. Throughout Liberal Fascism Goldberg inserts complaints that liberals unfairly call conservatives fascists -- a slur that, in our age of blogospheric intemperance and extraordinary renditions, is even harder to escape than when hippies were yelling it. Well, he'll show them. Having heard the "Why do you think they called it National Socialism?" routine for decades, I have some idea of the depth of Goldberg's well of resentment. Though he has plowed up a lot of source material to stuff his magnum opus, that sense of ancient grievance permeates and dooms his book. Goldberg betrays a palpable need to get all his (and previous generations of American conservatives') grudges in, from Rousseau to John Kerry. And he's got to prove they're all fascists. Even a skilled polemicist would have collapsed under the weight of the task, but a skilled polemicist would have known enough to rein it in a little. Goldberg doesn't. Whenever he does manage to string a few points together, The Quest calls him unto a new absurdity.

That won't matter to the built-in market of Coulter fans and dittoheads who have already adopted Liberal Fascism, but unaffiliated readers will probably be flummoxed. As for those of us on the other side -- the real fascists, if you will -- it is, as tradition dictates, just the latest, if also the largest, of Goldberg's gifts of laughter.

QUESTION OF THE DAY: Whatever happened to thepoorman.net?

UPDATE. Look, proud brothers: the club is open!

A SOLITARY MAN. Rod Dreher is on one his natalist tears. "Will Boomers die alone and unloved?" he asks, and refers to Philip Longman's harrowing premonitions of Boomer-geezer disappointment in Social Security, of which my favorite part is this:

The younger generation to whom Boomers will turn for support in old age will also contain a higher proportion of African Americans and Hispanics than does the Baby Boom generation itself. So on top of the generational divide, and on top of the culture divide, will be a widening racial and ethnic divide.

As if anticipating that the prospect of senescence in hands of dark-skinned strangers may not be enough to sway us, Dreher doubles down with a childless couple's lament: "It's the other side of the Boomer childlessness story."

It's amazing how much of the Jesus people POV is based on the Ant and the Grasshopper. Just you wait, they say, one day you'll be old and alone and godless -- and, if we have our way, broke. Then who'll be laughing?

Speaking as a childless man of no great fortune, I fully expect to die one of these days, and I have respect enough for narrative, and the odds, to also expect that my end may not be heartwarming. But I fail to see how that should drive me to procreate. As Lear and a million other geezers knew, children are an unreliable source of comfort and security. However long a span I am granted, the end is just a little piece of it. If that isn't sweet, I know that my memories, if I am blessed to retain them, will be, and thereafter is oblivion. I have front-loaded my happiness, and have no regrets.

I understand that Dreher wants for religious reasons to encourage increased childbearing, and would threaten abrogation of the Social Security contract to achieve it. That he and others would use such a crude weapon to scare people into having babies is frankly disgusting. If my natural inclinations would in any case encourage my resistance, under such circumstances my self-respect demands it. Better, morally speaking, to fall back on my default retirement plan: a pistol and a rooming-house.

If you are not so inclined, you might still consider carefully before taking life lessons from a guy whose idea of Walter Cronkite is Ross Douthat.

THE BLOODY HORSE. I'm surprised at the restraint Tim Burton shows with Sweeney Todd. To be sure, there's plenty of swooping camera movement, acres of grime and gallons of blood, and many inventive openings-up of the stage play (the "By The Sea" number was my favorite of these, with the comically morose Sweeney planted like a black beach umbrella in Mrs. Lovett's resort fantasy). But Burton doesn't really own the property so much as do a creditable movie version of it.

In a way I'd have preferred to see Burton do Brigadoon or something else that might have resisted his scalpel and thus encouraged him to outrageous mischief. He seems to respect Sweeney Todd a great deal -- in fact, by excising the original, didactic prologue and epilogue, he shows that he got the point well enough not to belabor it. Much as I love the musical, though, I would have liked to see Burton take more liberties with it. I appreciate, for example, Alan Rickman's vulpine Judge Turpin, but wasn't Burton tempted to show him running his fingers along something more interesting than the leather bindings of antique pornography? I wonder what Ken Russell would have made of it. A botch, perhaps. Still, with Burton in the ring with Sondheim, I expected a bit more grappling.

All in all, we get a first-class musical handled by a director with a feel for it, and that's not bad. The acting's very fine. It doesn't bother me that Johnny Depp's no George Hearn -- the film wouldn't bear that kind of high-voltage dementia. Though comparatively wan, Depp is sufficiently alert to the demands of his vengeance to keep us watching. Maybe if Burton keeps working with him, they'll eventually get to the places Hitchcock took Jimmy Stewart. Helena Bonham-Carter's underplaying beautifully captures the more ordinary madness of Mrs. Lovett. All the others are good, but I especially liked Timothy Spall as the Beadle. I only know Spall from his Mike Leigh grotesques in Life is Sweet and Topsy-Turvy, but here he really out-gargoyles himself, swollen with self-regard and bad diet, and most repulsive when he's trying to charm. The very tilt of his topper is nauseating. All the craft aspects are what you'd expect: extremely clever about torturing tones out of the Victorian London muck.

The blood must be mentioned. It may be that, in its display, Burton gave himself the largest measure of freedom. Were the film less successful, that would be a sad commentary. As it is, the bloodletting constitutes a kind of signature. An unnaturally viscid stream unites the elements in the credits; when the killing starts, more fluid sprays and seepings add color to Sweeney's joyless, silver-and-black shop -- a nice objective correlative. The climactic slaughters are best of all. (Mild spoiler alert.) When Sweeney achieves his revenge, he and Burton revel in a nicely choreographed, effulgent display of gore. And at the tragic conclusion, the blood drools thick and slow to unite, absurdly and pathetically, the lost lovers. With apologies to Roy Campbell, while I respect his use of the snaffle and the curb, it was something to see Burton give us at last the bloody horse.

UPDATE. There are apparently a lot of YouTube videos of Sondheim teaching musical acting. Here he instructs a couple of kids who are working on "My Friends." Kudos to the boy for wearing white pants; I would have worried about soiling them. But Sondheim is very gentle and very, very educational. I like to think Depp saw and took this lesson.

VARIATIONS ON CONCERN TROLLING. Brendan Loy publishes a long letter to Barack Obama, warning him to disassociate himself from race-baiting supporters. He concludes:

By the way, I am a registered voter in Tennessee, which holds its primary on February 5, I will be closely following this issue, among others, as I finalize my decision of whom to vote for. I hope that, in the end, I will be able to cast my ballot for you.

In an update, he says of those who accuse him of concern trolling, "Sorry to disappoint, but I actually am a (tentative) Obama supporter, as my archives make clear; I'm not just pretending to support him to make a point. It's telling that folks would assume that, though. How dare I question the party line, eh?" (In an update he clarifies further: "I am leaning toward Obama for the Democratic nomination, not necessarily for the presidency.")

Let us indeed consult the archives. Loy claims to have voted for Kerry in 2004, but when Kerry lost he said, "I’m not all that upset with the result... I think Kerry had a decent chance of being a colossal failure, and Bush has a decent chance of being a surprising success... Meanwhile, I look forward to watching the Loony Left implode in utter confusion over the result."

In 2006 Loy said he quit the Democratic Party because Connecticut Democrats failed to nominate Joe Lieberman, a result he called "disturbing one to anyone who cares about the future of the Democratic Party. (Which, frankly, I no longer do, particularly. I do believe it’s important to have a viable opposition party, but personally I’d love to see McCain and Lieberman hook up, form a third party, a centrist/unity party — let’s call it the Liberty Party, since Libertarian is already taken — and watch the Democrats’ numbers shrink and shrink until they become the third party. That’d be sweet.)"

Last month Loy ranked his Presidential choices: Biden, McCain, Obama, Clinton, Giuliani, Romney.

So in Loy we have an embittered ex-Democrat and presumptive McCain supporter (particularly since he seems very excited by the prospect of a McCain-Lieberman ticket), earnestly advising Obama on campaign strategy. Because he might just vote for him if things don't work out.

Is that concern trolling? Let us be kind. Loy is an earnest young man who perhaps doesn't know his own mind as yet, and may not be capable of the kind of cynical gambits employed by the pros. I will note, though, that when I offer advice to, say, Rudolph Giuliani, I don't expect to be taken seriously.

OLD WAYS. Perfesser Reynolds complains of woolen knickers on a Brooks Brothers model, and compares them to foofy shorts. Tigerhawk seconds: "Old WASP culture, of which I know more than most bloggers (other than GreenmanTim, of course), is now well and truly dead."

These gentlemen may wish to revise their judgments. Who was a better avatar of Old WASP culture than explorer George "Because it is there" Mallory? He was lost on Everest in 1924, and his remains, along with those of his companion Andrew Irvine, were found in 1999. Attend the words of their discoverers:

"The idea of these two Oxford English gentlemen in tweed coats and woolen knickers attempting to climb the highest mountain in the world in 1924 just automatically makes people's eyes open wide."

It does indeed. Here is a comparison of Mallory's outfit with that of the leader of the 1994 team. The latter is better prepared, but the former, you must admit, is more stylin'.

Mallory and Irvine sent themselves into harm's way, rather than send others as the WASPs in our current Administration do. So there is some argument for degeneracy there. But let us not harsh on the woolen knickers. Though I would like to see them in cream flannel. For tennis, you know.

CAMPAIGN ROUNDUP. Apparently Giuliani was paying his staff something, but now they're going to have to be content with him not killing their families. Meanwhile Giuliani keeps appearing in commercials and debates, which may explain his precipitous slide in the polls, even among New York Republicans. Unlikability will only get you so far in politics.

The rise of McCain has prompted Mitt Romney to remind conservatives why they hated the war hero in the first place. McCain is "an individual who voted against the Bush tax cuts and continues to feel that his vote against the Bush tax cuts was right," says Romney. You know a campaign is in the trouble when it tries a little of that old Bush magic to win votes.

Fred Thompson's brief display of vital signs continues to impress bloggers. "Who put the vitamins in Fred Thompson's oatmeal?" observes Ed Morrissey. "UPDATE: Fred ate more Wheaties between the debate and his appearance on Hannity & Colmes." After he drops out, perhaps Thompson can endorse high-fiber breakfast products.

Mike Huckabee's current strategy is to be a good boy and wait for Jesus to make him President. But the other Republicans have begun picking on him in debates, so he has gone to columnist James Pinkerton for backup. Presumably Huckabee thinks Pinkerton will help him sell religion in politics without sounding entirely like a snake-handler. For his part, Pinkerton has proposed a "space ark" to preserve human specimens when we have destroyed the planet, so maybe he thinks Huckabee is the best hope for effecting both ends of that plan.

Ron Paul's racist newsletter articles have been well-covered, but they won't effect his support, as none of the people who love him care about such things. But the mere imputation of crypto-racism is a much bigger deal for Hillary Clinton, and sent her husband to Al Sharpton to mend fences. I can comfortably predict that this concern with liberal racism will remain popular unless Obama wins the nomination, at which point we will hear much more about black racism. That and madrassas.

THIS FRIDAY MUSIC THING... I'm gonna dive in:











If you're an old 80s punk psycho like me, you'll come out of this wanting more Human Switchboard. No problem. You can turn your heart in if you like; I'm not turnin' in my hope. (You may follow the further career of Myrna Marcarian here.)

UPDATE. Oh, yeah... Phil Ochs. Sob. A good reaction would be to demoralize some fascists. Yeah, I know: we're supposed to be the fascists. Confront the idiots who think so with humor -- it tends to turn them out.