TRIBUTE. Heath Ledger was a very good actor and I'm sorry he's gone. Looking back, I see that in my review of Brokeback Mountain I didn't speak on his performance. His vocal characterization reminded me, strangely, of Brian Keith in another movie with a gay theme, Reflections in a Golden Eye, when his Langdon was drunkenly muttering about the departed Anacleto. Langdon was openly contemptuous of the houseboy's feminine manner, but in his cups -- and in the presence of his good buddy and screamingly obvious closet case Penderton -- he rumbled and mumbled and moped over Anacleto's "dancin' on his toes."

Keith's Langdon was wrestling with man-attraction, though at a remove; Ledger's Ennis had no remove. He was simple, and love took him like a plague. The way Ledger played him, I got the feeling that if Ennis had loved a woman instead life would still have been hard for him, but loving Jack made it impossible. Still, he had love and kept it, and though his eyes receded they never became angry, watchful slits that dared the world away; they were warm and full of hurt and confusion, and even attracted affection, disastrously. A large part of the sorrow of watching the movie is expecting Ennis to adapt and realizing that he can't.

The words and directing carry a lot but it's the acting that makes the sale. Actors don't just portray, they also imagine, and under any great performance is always a humane conception that makes the display of skill worth attending. Whatever pain was particular to Heath Ledger, on screen the pain was all Ennis'. We should be grateful to have this fine example of the player's art by which to remember him.

WATCHING THE PROS WORK. Andrew Sullivan:

It really is time to acknowledge that Clinton is running for a third term - in flagrant violation of the 22d Amendment.

Gasp! Can we pre-impeach him? Meanwhile a humorous Onion article spurs one of the Protein Wisdom crew to deep thought:

However, in the past, comedians targeted Bill’s inability to keep his pants on in the workplace. This time the subjects are the implied co-presidency the Clintons offer and Bill’s honesty with respect to the political, rather than the personal. Those doing the mocking are not conservative talk show hosts, but left-leaning humorists. As previously noted, a psychological line may get crossed that permanently erodes — to some degree — the style of politics the Clintons made dominant in the 1990s.

You rarely see this sort of bipartisan spirit, let alone respect for "left-leaning humorists," at Protein Wisdom. In fact you rarely see it anywhere. Well, there was that period in '98 when every newsman was tracking Monica Lewinsky and every late-night comic was making cigar jokes. Great days, those. But it was Clinton who had the last laugh.

I hope someone other than Clinton gets the nomination, but in these early innings it is nostalgically pleasing to observe the continued potency of the Derangement Syndrome she and her husband engendered so many years ago.

HOW CAN THEY TELL? Fred Thompson has tottered off the national stage. His supporters are taking it hard. Kim du Toit, who once called Thompson "the man who’s going to get my vote in the primaries," now delivers this envoi: "Thanks for nothing. Good-bye, go back to Hollywood, and fuck you."

But most of the Fredheads alternate between mourning and belligerence. At RedState, where Ole Fred kinda sorta blogged, they are vacillating between the denial and bargaining stages. The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler says, "Now we get to decide which of the remaining horses we’re going to have to ride, if any." At Cold Fury Joe will still vote for Fred; Mike laments "Twilight in America," endorses a new American Conservative Party. Stephen Bainbridge wonders "whether there’s any one of the 4 [remaining GOP candidates] for whom it will be worth holding one’s nose and taking the plunge."

I expect they'll all come around when it's time to vote against Hitlery or that black guy. For now, let us remember the good times. Back when he was only a potential contender for the Presidency, Thompson sent conservative hearts aflutter by making videos like this one, in which he chewed a cigar and threatened Michael Moore with incarceration in a mental institution. How they loved the dazzling fantasy of that tough-talking D.A. from Law & Order stepping out of the idiot box to dispense rough justice to liberals. How Reaganesque it was!

Then he actually entered the race, and soon we were hearing about his "different kind of campaign" -- one in which he did little actual campaigning, or even filing to get on ballots. He was so somnolent on the stump that whenever he showed a flash of vitality, supporters lauded the event as if he were coming around from a long, debilitating illness.

Maybe he never really expected to get very far. Maybe the Thompson demi-campaign was only meant to raise his profile sufficiently to get him better TV gigs. Or maybe he thought all he had to do was show up, and the prize would be handed to him. For a certain kind of conservative, I guess that made him the ideal candidate.

THE PETER PRINCIPLE DIDN'T GO FAR ENOUGH. Early last year, in her much-covered "20/20 Bias" post, Megan McArdle began by announcing that she had been wrong about the war in Iraq, and then proceeded to explain why people who had been saying the war was a mistake all along were right for the wrong reasons, and were also in some way persecuting her:

This has not convinced me of the brilliance of the doves, because precisely none of the ones that I argued with predicted that things would go wrong in the way they did. If you get the right result, with the wrong mechanism, do you get credit for being right, or being lucky?...

What the doves would like to see the hawk's do--"I was wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong about everything, I am a stupid idiot, you are a brilliant figure with god-like omniscience"--is no better a guide to future decisionmaking than ignoring the fact that you were seriously wrong about the Iraq invasion.

This sort of work got McArdle a job with The Atlantic, where she has been writing a great deal lately about her diet, in which, her readers have learned, she will "only eat humanely raised meat" and has "virtually stopped eating bread." In this post she starts out talking about "a very real phenomenon: meat-eaters who are angry at you for not eating meat." She describes these unpleasant encounters, and says "Those who, like me, have made ethical choices about our diets that we haven't asked anyone else to emulate, find the aggressiveness of these encounters puzzling..."

By the end, you may have guessed, McArdle is lecturing vegetarians who are "hectoring" and "humorless jerks" and blaming them for making the meat-eaters mad at her. "You're not only annoying them," he says, "you're annoying me by proxy. Please stop."

If you think old-fashioned magazines are dying now, wait till the bloggers they've hired get through with them.

SHORTER JAMES LILEKS. I can't enjoy Hollywood films anymore because of their steady drumbeat of anti-Bush politics. I am speaking of course of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End.

NOT BEANBAG. I won't even bother to link many of bazillion posts going now about how Bill Clinton shouldn't campaign so ruthlessly for Hillary Clinton. Two are indicative enough. On the left, Ezra Klein:

The impulses behind his actions are easy to understand. And, on some level. it's his reputation, his capital, his right to expend it as he sees fit.

But even as he's got that right, he's also got a responsibility to the millions of Democrats -- and Americans -- who worked on his campaigns and fought in his battles, who sacrificed and toiled so he could have this place in our polity, and who expected he would use it to push for progressivism, not just for his family.

I hate to break it to Ezra, but Clinton was barely a progressive president. The distinguishing features of his reign were welfare cuts, pro-growth business policies, and NAFTA. The "progressive" social programs he managed to get through (like the Family and Medical Leave Act) were sufficiently modest that the moneyed interests were able to accommodate them without breaking a sweat. FDR he wasn't. He wasn't even Hubert Humphrey.

Despite this, he had to fight off the most highly developed political attack machine in history. He knows that even moderates have mortal enemies and have to fight like radicals to win. Why should he give a fuck about his reputation among the goo-goos or anyone else? He governed from the middle and got treated like an American Lenin. Presumably he thinks his and his wife's brand of competent, centrist government will be judged kindly by history, but it has to get voted in first.

And from the right, sort of, Andrew Sullivan. I don't even need to quote him; you know what to expect from him and have known it for years. If Sullivan has nothing else in common with his old rightwing colleagues anymore, he is reunited with and even outstrips them in his reflexive hatred of all things Clinton. I'm not so keen on them myself, but I don't need a fucking drool-cup whenever they come into view. And I must say that Sullivan's current concern for gentlemanly conduct in Presidential contests is a little rich when compared to his far more measured assessment of Karl Rove* as recently as 2004:

And the Mary Cheney thing is a brilliant maneuver by the Republicans. Rove knows that most people do find mentioning someone's daughter's lesbianism to be distasteful and gratuitous. So he can work it to great effect, exploiting homophobia while claiming to be defending gays. Again: masterful jujitsu. I tip my hat to the guy. Poisonous, but effective.

Compared to that loathsome episode, what the Clintons have been doing is strictly Marquis of Queensbury stuff, but they'll never get the kind of good-show Sullivan gave Rove because Sullivan is afflicted by what, in other contexts, is commonly called a Derangement Syndrome.

Again, Hillary Clinton is my least favorite Democratic candidate, but here reason forces me to defend her. The notion that saying mean things about Obama to beat him in a Presidential race is some kind of offense to decency is ridiculous even when you don't consider the source.

* Please forgive the tertiary sourcing; Sullivan's posts from his days of Bush enthusiasm are effectively memory-holed.

THE NEWS BUSINESS. Michael Yon gets a very friendly profile in the New York Times. Conservative bloggers for the most part treat it as a further opportunity to hammer the Times. (Tigerhawk is among the few noble exceptions.)

"I guess it’s that time of the year again, for the broken down clock at the NYTimes," sneers Flopping Aces. "The NY Slimes," says Ray Robison. Jammie Wearing Fool complains "they carefully avoid saying too much about his coverage other then giving his web site and the obligatory nod to the now famous picture he took of a soldier cradling a wounded little girl" as if that weren't something most journalists, citizen or otherwise, would kill for. "Pigs were recently seen flying over Central Park," hyuks the Ace of Spades correspondent. Neptunus Lex sees it as a "through the looking glass" event, and his commenters pile on the "chronically lying and serially leaking of defense secrets scumbags at the NY Times!"

RedState, trying hard to huff up some outrage of its own, gets oh-so-close to reality:

The article wasn't negative at all; however, to me it just seems like you could substitute any topic, and any individual, that you wanted to, and the story would read the same way, no tweaking necessary -- like it was a prefab piece.

Of course. The New York Times is a very large newspaper with plenty of room, resources, and motivation to maintain a consensus reality that will accommodate enough readers to keep it viable. When it feels it has to shore up its right flank, it hires a William Kristol or employs freelancers like Glenn Harlan Reynolds and Ann Althouse to write for them, or covers someone like Michael Yon, albeit in a "pre-fab" manner.

The paper is "liberal" only to the extent that it does not, in its institutional voice, full-throatedly endorse the views of its most rightwing constituents. If it did, it would gain nothing, least of all the respect of folks like the ones quoted above. But why should the Times strive for their respect, so long as it clearly retains their attention? Scan the conservative blogs and note all the references and links to the Times. In these days of newspaper attrition, such bloggers are among its most reliable readers.

As for Yon, as I have noted before, he has been far from unnoticed or even underemployed by the "mainstream media," and his insistence that he is being ignored has built his following and enhanced his profile, as the current article amply demonstrates. I applaud this old punk-rock trick of loudly announcing you're too hot for The Man until The Man comes calling with coverage lauding your independence; David Peel couldn't done it better.

As for the rest, I wonder if it ever crosses their minds that all this journalism stuff has something to do with money.

(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.