BIG-TIME NEGOTIATORS, FALSE HEALERS AND WOMAN-HATERS. A bride wants her wedding dress to reveal the tattoo on her back, and does not feel the need to appear virginal on her wedding day. So Rod Dreher calls her a slut.

It takes hours, and a visit from Ayaan Hirsi Ali, to make Dreher retract the slur, though he still accuses the bride of "cheap morals" and "bad manners," and calls her behavior "slutty." Big difference.

Dreher frequently reminds us that Christians don't riot, as some Muslims do, when they perceive their values to be mocked. But he never recalls that for many, many centuries, Christians backed by the power of states harassed, exiled, and burned men and women who didn't conform to their prejudices in comportment or anything else.

When we mock Dreher here, we are not always thinking solely of the little fellow in Dallas who shakes his impotent fist at our times and manners. Often we also have in mind the loathsome traditions he wants to bring back to the civilized world, even praising the "order," "unity," and "purpose" of barbarous Islamic societies as a means of attracting us to a Western version with Jesus on top. Imagine a country where men like Dreher have the power to order a stoning.

It took us nearly two millenia and oceans of blood to reduce these savages to a noisome rump. We can spare a little attention to remember why we did it.

SHORTER MEGAN McARDLE. If you're an entrepreneur, you should have a government program to save you from your failures. But if you're just some pauper, bootstraps will do just fine.

I'LL BET. "The prism through which I'd like to view Obama's appeal is Bill Cosby." -- Daniel Henninger, Wall Street Journal.

THE AUDACITY OF HOPELESSNESS. The playa-hatin' on Obama continues at a pace that will leave many of the brethren exhausted by summer. A sort of apotheosis, or maybe nadir, is reached by Cal Thomas at the Washington Times:

"Hope is a dangerous thing," says "Red" to "Andy" in the 1994 film "The Shawshank Redemption." Red, played by Morgan Freeman, means that Andy, played by Tim Robbins, risks despair if he hopes to get out of prison.

Wait a minute -- didn't Andy escape in the end? And didn't a couple of cons successfully use his breakout method just last December?

This is where mature and experienced adults can steady the enthusiasm of the young and inexperienced. The Washington Post Magazine recently carried a cover story by Jeffrey Birnbaum titled "How lobbyists always win: Dispatches from Washington's relentless growth industry." It is a reminder of how, no matter who is president and which party controls government, lobbyists are part of the permanent class and very little can change without their participation and approval. Numerous "reformers" have come to Washington in the past, promising change. As often happens, they don't change Washington; Washington changes them.

Funny, I don't remember Thomas, or any of his fellow doomsayers, warning us in 1994 that Newt Gingrich's Contract With America was a bunch of bullshit.

The "hope" being sold by Mr. Obama and his true believers is misplaced. Mr. Obama cannot deliver; he cannot save; he cannot improve individual circumstances by redistributing wealth and talking to America's dictatorial enemies. He is selling snake oil.

The problem with this argument is not that the American people don't share his cynicism -- it's that they do. This makes the relatively untried Obama interesting to them, as he seems not to have been a part of the clusterfuck that brought us to our present dolorous state. And Obama has stormed to an unexpected lead in the Democratic Presidential race, which makes claims that he "cannot deliver" seem less like homespun wisdom and more like sour grapes.

For years conservatives have been blasting the negative attitude of the press; now that they're the ones playing the killjoy, telling everybody that it's all a sham of a mockery of a sham, they may be astonished to find that citizens have internalized their previous message, and won't give them any more credit than they gave Dan Rather.

Being a little cynical myself, though, I expect that if Obama gets the nomination, Republican supporters will have recovered sufficiently to go with a more traditional message, and devote their energies to reminding America that Obama is black.

UPDATE. Gerard Vanderleun tells us that Obama is a sorcerer because chicks dig him. I can see why Vanderleun would feel that way.

WE CAN EVADE REALITY, BUT WE CANNOT EVADE THE CONSEQUENCES OF EVADING REALITY. Megan McArdle complains that the littlebrains don't understand libertarians:

Every libertarian gets it: "even Megan McArdle doesn't support the bankruptcy reform bill. . . " or some variant thereof. This is supposed to prove that the idea being attacked is so malignant that even libertarians, who are normally opposed to all that is right and good, can't stomach it. Annoyingly, I almost never get this for voicing an opinion that is actually outside the libertarian mainstream... And since I don't agree with them on national health care, naturally I must disagree about every single other thing they hold dear...

Elsewhere she explains to us that the difference between her and other supporters of Barack Obama is that she doesn't agree with anything he says. Maybe when she says people don't understand libertarians, she means they don't understand her.

Me, I support Obama because his candidacy offers the tantalizing prospect of riots.

SHORTER DAVID BROOKS. Hope is a sickness. Fortunately we have a pill for that.

ADIOS AMIGOS. Castro's quitting. Bush says in response, "The international community should work with the Cuban people to begin to build institutions that are necessary for democracy and eventually this transition ought to lead to free and fair elections... The United States will help the people of Cuba realize the blessings of liberty."

I guess that means we invade, right? The high price of pre-sweetened breakfast cereal pretty much demands it, and Vegas is overbuilt.

EXCELSIOR. Margaret points me to Jeremiah's Vanishing New York, a melancholy chronicle of hypergentrification in the old town. One of Jeremiah's finds is a New York Observer portrait of an East Village developer named Ben Shaoul who says things like "I think what we try to do is try to maintain the streetscape and do what we can to maintain the grittiness of it. Although we put in marble, we try to maintain exposed brick floors and wide-plank floors."

The commenters to the article include some locals who have witnessed Shaoul's strongarm tactics (including "bang[ing] on resident’s doors in the middle of the night demanding that they get out of 'his' building"), and Shaoul defenders ("Clearly 'Anonymous' is unemployed... who else would have the time to author such a rant? If you spent as much time contributing to society [i.e. paying taxes] perhaps we would live in a better place").

The discussion is barely worth having. The luxury market is resistant to the national housing downturn, and in desirable New York neighborhoods that's where the action is. Most of Manhattan is becoming a theme park for the rich. They're even building condos in my own cruddy Brooklyn neighborhood. None of this will change until the general economic collapse, which I will pray for before I go to bed tonight. If you don't live here, or if you do but make a lot of money, you probably won't understand.

I took this photo on Bedford Avenue in the heart of upscale Williamsburg, where I lived once upon a time. It shows the promotional facade of a new real estate interest, announcing its humanity to the natives. The little stickers, which have been up for weeks, bear inscriptions that my cell-phone camera couldn't pick up. They say things like "We pretend to care about you," "We own fashionable little dogs," and "We are a nightmare."

BLOGGER'S REMORSE. I voted for Obama but now I've read Ann Althouse...

I've already said that Obama made a good impression on me when I first encountered him (when he spoke at the 2004 Democratic convention), but that I condemned all the Democrats who voted against John Roberts (and that included Obama)...

In the beginning of August, I was annoyed by Andrew Sullivan's effusive support of Obama as the candidate who would rid the young of the older "traumatized" generation...

So I was leaning strongly toward Hillary last summer. But I wasn't agonizing over the Democratic race. I favored Rudy Giuliani...

Obama just seemed bland to me around this time, and I was needling him to attack.

Then came Oprah Winfrey...

I was reading Carl Bernstein's "A Woman in Charge," and I identified with something Camille Paglia wrote...

Shortly thereafter, that video provided emotional massage...

Now, I've read through the posts and caught up to the present. Have I traced a journey?

...and I'm thinking, can't we get Dennis Kucinich back in the race? I'm clearly in the wrong constituency.

HOW WE DO. The Ole Perfesser has been working the angle that the Northern Illinois massacre occurred in a "gun-free" zone. The idea seems to be that if NIU, and other gun-free zones where similar massacres took place, had been instead flush with firearms, the victims would be alive today.

He has done this before, but never mentions the counterexample of New York City. We have been short on mass murders -- and, given our population, short on murders of all kinds -- for quite some time now. And legally we are as close to a gun-free zone as it gets. "Finding somewhere to buy a gun legally in Manhattan is not much less challenging than looking for a liquor store in Saudi Arabia," reported Andrew Stuttaford of National Review in 2000. And it hasn't gotten any easier in the age of Bloomberg.

Give some credit -- or damnation, if you are of a glibertarian frame of mind -- to Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, whose crimefighting approach included many implements beloved of the Right, but who near the end of his tenure bragged at length on his confiscation of guns:

"The Police Department's dramatic success in reducing crime is due in large part to its corresponding success in removing guns from City streets," the Mayor said. "More than 90,000 guns have been seized since 1994, and shootings have plummeted more than 74 percent. The NYPD's gun seizure success is also reflected in the murder rate, which has plummeted 65 percent since 1994, and is down another 11 percent this year over last year. The NYPD has also ensured that thousands of guns can never be used to commit a crime by destroying them and putting the metal to good use. Now, another 3,000 guns have been taken out of circulation -- permanently."

It is one of the more delicious ironies of the 2008 campaign season that Giuliani lost credibility with the Republican base because he couldn't escape the anti-gun history that gave him a law-and-order record on which to run in the first place.

Unlike the Perfesser, we are less inclined to find delicious ironies in the death of innocents, so we offer instead -- anticipating the objection that New York is a very different place from, say, Virginia Tech -- practical suggestions to constituencies that wish to achieve our low levels of violence:

• Crowd lots of people together. It sharpens the social skills.
• Import large numbers of immigrants. Our mix is roughly one in three, but your mileage may vary. We find that it doesn't matter much whether they are legal or illegal.
• Have also plenty of out gay, lesbian, trans and questioning folks on hand. This seems to have a calming effect on the polity.
• Encourage safe sex, with the accent on the sex.
• Union! (It seems to work for Las Vegas, too.)
• Have plenty of street demonstrations, screaming matches, loud music, obscene and intemperate language, and rude gestures, with the tacit understanding that in most cases this will not result in gunplay.
• Treat any suggestion that the answer to your problem is greater dissemination of deadly weapons with the derision it deserves.

MAGIC AND LOSS. Claims that Obama is a false Messiah are coalescing into a full-fledged genre of rightwing journalism. At the Weekly Standard, Dean Barnett, not having Reverend Keller's rhetorical gifts, tries to impersonate the Voice of Reason, which sort of casting we in show business call a stretch.

He waters down an old Rush Limbaugh slur ("The Magical Democrat") and makes mock of the scenes Obama inspires: "The Fox News cameras that night made a point of focusing on one woman who was so overwhelmed by the candidate that her eyes repeatedly welled up." Even Fox News! The liberal media is more nefarious than we ever dreamed.

Barnett's money shot:

The challenge for Republicans, specifically John McCain, will be to conduct the general election in the real world of limited government and dangerous foreign malefactors rather than in the Obama fantasy world. The good news for McCain is that he has far more experience dealing with the ugliness of the real world than Obama has, and can speak to our looming challenges with far more authenticity.

Barnett previously mocked the "childish" stridency" of McCain's "constant urge to prove his straight talking bona fides," but the Republican season is full of touching conversion stories, though their climactic scenes are usually hidden from view.

As for Barnett's invocation of the "real world of limited government and dangerous foreign malefactors," even the most casual student of current affairs will recall the budget-busting government programs/wealth transfers of the Bush Administration, and the fairy tales told to get us into Iraq. If Obama is a fantasist, his success may owe to the superior selling power of his fantasy versus the shopworn kind Barnett has been peddling for years. Barnett would be better advised to join his comrades in reliving old victories from the days when the crowd was with him.

WILD SURMISE. The Anchoress complains at great length that Keith Olbermann called Bush a fascist. "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means," quoth she. Hey, there's a new one.

Last month, The Anchoress offered Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism, in which Hillary Clinton is called "First Lady of Liberal Fascism," for sale at her site. Though she hadn't read the book, she said, "The cover is brilliant," and "For thoughtful folks on both sides of the aisle, this book may be a useful opening to begin once again listening to each other instead of simply shouting down."

I don't have a punchline. When anything, even ignorance, achieves such perfection, one can only marvel.

MORE ADVICE FROM YOUR MORTAL ENEMIES. Oh, isn't that nice: Miss Peggy Noonan is offering to write a speech for Hillary Clinton at The Wall Street Journal. It starts:

Look, let's be frank. A lot of politics is spin, for reasons we can all write books about. I'm as guilty as anyone else. But right now I'm in the fight of my life, and right now I'm not winning. I'm up against an opponent who's classy and accomplished and who has captured the public imagination. I've had some trouble doing that...

The column is full of imagined statements and interior monlogues by the former First Lady. I wonder if Noonan keeps a Hillary doll at the table where she takes her morning "tea."

Whenever I feel out of sympathy with Clinton, a Peggy Noonan column can always get me back on her side. If Clinton gets the nomination, I hope the Journal takes Noonan's column daily. It may be the best chance the Democrats will have.

SPEAKING IN TONGUES. I don't know why I trifle with weak sisters like James Taranto when the real hardcore anti-Obama action is at Jesus Christology. Sayeth the preacher, Bill Keller:

NO WE CAN’T! The cult of B. Hussein Obama. Remember I told you there would be a revival in this nation this year. Well, before we see a true spiritual revival that will bring millions to faith in Christ and help lead this nation back to God and Biblical values, there is going to be a “faux revival” led by the latest preacher of false hope, B. Hussein Obama...

Very troubling to me has been watching the “revival-like” atmosphere surrounding B. Hussein Obama’s campaign for the Presidency. Like all false prophets, it is a false gospel with lots of smoke and mirrors...

Want another interesting fact about B. Hussein Obama. As someone who has done live TV every night for 5 yrs, if you watch Obama, he only gives those stirring hope and change speeches when he has a teleprompter so he can READ HIS LINES! This man is a complete fraud!...

He is no more the next savior of this nation than I am the next great heart surgeon, and I hate blood! I am not even going to talk about his inexperience and the great peril all Americans will be in with this “child” at the helm in today’s complex and dangerous world of terror and global economics...

Once you tear away the hype, the smoke and mirrors, all you are left with is empty rhetoric that inspires people and makes them feel good, but leads them nowhere.

Come to think of it, this pretty much is the Taranto column, and many others like it, with a little added punch for the snake-handler market. You have to admire the Republican message machine: from the Beltway Boobs to the Jesus Freaks, they've got all their markets covered.

HISTORY'S GREATEST MONSTER! James Taranto attacks Barack Obama because a woman in one of his audiences fainted. Even worse, Obama tried to help her when she fainted.

What exactly are we to make of this? A cynic might wonder if the whole thing isn't staged, given how often it happens and how well-honed and self-serving Obama's standard response seems to be.

But if it's spontaneous, that's in a way even more unsettling. At the New Hampshire rally, Larry David of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" fame quipped, "Sinatra had the same effect on people." Sinatra made girls swoon by singing romantic songs. But America isn't electing a crooner in chief.

Obama has a talent for eliciting intense emotion--an ability that can be dangerous in a politician. What more does he have to offer? That's a hard question to answer, and it makes the prospect of an Obama presidency quite worrisome.

Just think -- women collapsing in the audience without being tased! That's the sort of thing Sinatra did -- and Sinatra was friends with the liberal fascist Kennedy.

I hope Obama gets the nomination so we may hear more of this kind of thing. I see Citizen Journalists examining auditorium seats after an Obama rally, looking for telltale dampness, their dispatches referring ominously the number of white women in attendance.

DREAM, COMFORT, MEMORY TO SPARE. With its snowy social-democratic setting, and Gordon Pinsent and Julie Christie giving off strong Erland Josephson-Liv Ullman vibes, Away From Her put me in mind of late Bergman. The story -- wife of retired professor gets Alzheimer's, professor copes with separation -- puts humanism into a bleak landscape, and rookie filmmaker Sarah Polley hits the symbolic angles: as disease estranges the longtime lovers, the white wastes of Canada take on added significance, and when the abandoned old man stops shoveling his walk the metaphor's hard to miss.

But Away From Her is much stronger in its psychological than its cosmic dimension. The simple human qualities with which the couple approach their coming separation -- she summons courage, he succumbs to guilt and grief -- are heartbreakingly detailed from the first misfiled frying-pan to the inevitable trip to the nursing home. When the wife forms an attachment with a fellow resident there, the professor's jealousy, bewilderment, and sorrow are familiar to anyone who has ever helplessly watched love slip away.

The professor's steps toward adjustment and acceptance follow a classic pattern, but with enough brilliantly surprising turns to keep them lifelike. [Mild spoilers ahead.] For example, one day the professor catches a caretaker, who has heretofore been cheerfully supportive, at a bad moment. It's a fine scene, but what makes it is that we see him anticipating and even inviting her quiet outburst before she has it. And when the professor becomes involved with a woman, and seems to think he has successfully compartmentalized his feelings for his wife, it is only slightly more of a surprise to him than for us when the girlfriend tells him, "it would help me if you could pretend."

By this manner the story won my devotion even as it devolved into the sort of lessons in life and love that I normally find annoying. The acting couldn't be better. Christie, intelligent and self-aware, is determined to go into the unknown with dignity for her own sake as well as her husband's. Her later confusion is specific and unsentimental; dementia ravages her perception but leaves her personality intact, which gives the performance its great poignancy. Michael Murphy wordlessly suggests a strong spirit encased in illness; Olympia Dukakis wears a thick skin that, happily, turns out to be quite permeable. Pinsent lumbers with ursine doggedness through his gauntlet, nursing his pain until he develops the new kind of strength that can override it. If it has some resemblance to a Lifetime movie, it is one that is about real lifetimes, and that makes all the difference.

UPDATE. Fixed a convoluted passage; thanks, Milo. I also want to add that Away From Her shows something you don't see a lot in the movies: an awareness that even learning to cope with loss doesn't make things all better. We see a young deaf woman talking in sign language with her infirm mother. We learn that the mother was the only one member of the family who bothered to learn to sign. Inevitably, the old woman forgets how to sign and even that the deaf woman is her daughter, and runs away from her. Backlit by pale winter light from the windows -- "plenty of natural light," the place's director keeps telling the professor -- the young woman suddenly appears engulfed in radiant solitude.

Such primal, painful events can be "moved on" from, after a fashion, but not forgotten; nor can we escape being changed by them. Survival is only a conditional victory. This mature perspective frustrates mushbrains who squirm when Cinderella endings are not on offer, but grown-ups may appreciate the truth in it.

BEING AND NOTHINGNESS. Daniel Larison criticizes Obama on diplomacy:

Nonetheless, his sane willingness to ease travel restrictions to Cuba and his willingness to meet with leaders of Syria and Iran have been evidence that some small good might come from an Obama foreign policy, deeply flawed as it otherwise is. However, this symbolic blunder at his Houston campaign office feeds into a narrative that Obama is not just taking different, defensible views on how the United States should conduct its foreign policy, but that he is, or at least members of his campaign are, somehow sympathetic to some of these regimes.

The "blunder" is some Texas Obama staffer having a Che flag in her office. Srsly. Larison frequently assails Obama for his lack of substance, but here he holds out hope that a minor screw-up will "feed into a narrative," all policy considerations notwithstanding, and help take the big blowhard down.

Well, like the man says, there has never been anything false about hope. But you have to wonder why Larison doesn't think someone can beat Obama with better policies.

And Larison's one of the brighter bulbs. I notice that most of the Obama's-all-talk accusations going around are themselves pathetically slight. Here's a typical one from Megan McArdle at The Atlantic: "I don't believe that Obama is going to change Washington, eliminate lobbying, etc. I wish he wouldn't tell me things that I can't possibly believe--and moreover that I can't really understand anyone believing."

(Humorously, this moves McArdle's colleague Matthew Yglesias to applaud her deep thinking: "She's not snorting with derision. She's listening. She thinks it's inspiring. Meanwhile, like anyone who writes about political and economic issues for a living, her opinions on these things are much more fixed and coherent than are the average American's." Cut-and-paste is a wonderful thing: I couldn't have typed out that last bit without thinking I had somehow hallucinated it.)

The Obama site has a section on issues. Voters may easily compare it to John McCain's or anyone else's. It's just not true that in Obama's case there's nothing to discuss.

The question is: how much attention will voters give to these issues, and how much will they give to what Larison calls narrative?

There's a tendency among poli-sci wiseguys to assume that if a candidate is rhetorically effective, he must be putting one over on the rubes. Of course Americans are susceptible to stirring words, which under the right circumstances may lead them to attend the big picture more keenly than the fine print. I recall that the soaring speeches of Reagan helped convince people that government power should be ceded to private interests. Three Republican Presidents (and one quasi-Republican President) and innumerable scandals and botches later, the zeitgeist may be flowing the other way.

The folks who find Obama's rhetoric insubstantial haven't yet come up with a convincing explanation for its power. If it's nothing, shouldn't you be able to beat it with something? Like a thousand more years in Iraq, or permanent tax cuts?

You might have a hard time seeing it amidst all the jabber, but maybe there's something going on here besides talk.

UPDATE. Commenter Righteous Bubba points out that Larison doesn't mind when citizens hoist the flag of a more overt enemy of the Republic.

OOGA BOOGA. Now that Obama's surging, the folks at National Review Online, heretofore acting a little gunshy of the racial politicking for which their magazine was once known, are starting to inch closer to the tar baby.

Jonah Goldberg, using the wishful-thinking reading of Robert Putnam's research common among conservatives, announces that liberals only like Obama because they don't know how awful black people really are:

It’s easy for upscale liberals to talk about the glories of diversity because they live at Olympian heights, above the reality of multicultural America. For Obama’s wealthy, white, liberal supporters, diversity is knowing a rich black lawyer, a wealthy Latino accountant, and lots of well-to-do gay folks.

Whereas for Goldberg, diversity is running into Deroy Murdock at Starbucks. If the Pantload ever turned up on foot in my ethnically diverse (and very Democratic) Brooklyn neighborhood, it would be to cop black market trans-fats, I'm sure.

Meanwhile John Derbyshire, normally more inclined to plead for his right to homophobia, wraps his silk dressing gown tightly about his withered frame and totters onto the balcony to address the Negro Question. He allows he might have voted for Colin Powell, for even though Powell "could 'talk black' when he thought it was required of him... You could tell the guy's heart wasn't in it." He didn't like Powell's politics, mind, but at least Powell was a Republican, and if we're to have blackamoors in high office they should at least be of the right party.

Derbyshire's gotten kind of obsessive on the subject. He insists that others object on PC grounds to his flippant treatment of Obama -- though there is no evidence that anyone at National Review objects, nor that anyone outside those premises (besides me) even notices.

National Review seems to have degenerated since the days when it fought against Brown v. Board of Education; where once race-baiting was its own reward, now its practitioners have to be assured that they are speaking truth to power each time they call the Senator from Illinois "O'Bama." Now doubt they would cite their own reticence as proof of the all-oppressing power of political correctness if they weren't such equivocating pussies. But if Obama gets the nomination, maybe the volcanic pressure of long-suppressed emotions will push them into franker language. Well, that's just one more reason to hope.

IT PAYS TO INCREASE YOUR WORD POWER. The Ole Perfesser:

IN THE MAIL: To Set The Record Straight: How Swift Boat Veterans, POWs and the New Media Defeated John Kerry. With "swift-boating" now being used by the ignorant as a synonym for false charges, it's worth remembering that it was John Kerry who had to retract his statement about his secret Christmas mission to Cambodia, despite it having allegedly been "seared, seared" into his memory.

Similarly, for many ignorant people "Watergate" is a legacy of the Nixon Administration, but it's worth remembering that Dan Rather had to leave CBS News.

Those of you who are not smug suburban douchebags may profit from this backgrounder. If the term swiftboating has lasting resonance, that's not because of ignorance: it's because the term captures the historical provenance of an ugly phenomenon which lingers in the public memory and, alas, shows no sign of going away.

JONAH GOLDBERG UPDATE. After doing battle with The Economist and Newsweek, he suggests that he's been plagiarized by... Cal Thomas.

This isn't something you expect from best-selling authors, though neither is the giant "NUMBER 1 AUTHOR" badge he's been sporting. The fellow is a constant source of wonder.

UPDATE. Now the Great One sez Obama is a fascist, or fascism, or something:

As I discuss at length in the book, totalitarianism was for Mussolini a way of uniting businesses, classes, regions, religions, institutions and people from "all walks of life" -- in Obama’s words -- in a common cause for the common good.

Liberal Fascism shouldn't have been a book -- it should have been a special edition of Mad Libs.