CLASS WAR CONTINUES. Conservatives are still beating on Obama for his Pennsylvania voter remarks, and all this weekend work (plus the understandable need to distinguish oneself in a crowded filed) has made them reach a bit for angles. At Commentary Jennifer Rubin offers the last defense of Hillary Clinton you will ever hear from her:

Now conservatives might guffaw over her new-found appreciation for the Second Amendment, but there is something inarguably more down-to-earth ( and if not “normal” than at least “ordinary”) about Hillary Clinton than Obama. It has nothing to do with race or class (liberal bloggers want to remind us he was on scholarship to that tony Hawaii prep school) and everything to do with their life experiences. Clinton is a product of middle class, Midwestern parents and has spent a chunk of her adult life in Arkansas. She may not trust Americans to read a home loan document, but she knows them well enough to never let slip from her lips words of cultural condescension.

"Nothing to do with race or class" would seem to invalidate most of her argument, bringing it down to the notion that Clinton is better than Obama at putting it over on plain folks, surely not the Commentary writer's field of expertise.

Over at Classical Values, we find a clangorous attempt at race-card reversal:

At the University of Chicago students and staff are treated like Royalty and the neighborhood folks are treated like servants.

At my son's graduation there last summer almost all the wait staff were blacks from the neighborhood dressed like servants in the Jim Crow South (I lived there as a youth). It had an offensive feel to it. Just the way Jim Crow felt offensive to me.

That is the environment Obama was used to. His behavior fits in well with the people he associated with. And how do you behave towards servants? Well you certainly don't get into any kind of personal conversations with them.

Comparing white, rural gun enthusiasts to blacks under Jim Crow is hard to top, but the palm as usual goes to Crunchy Rod Dreher, who slags Obama for "condescension" to the common people immediately after one of his "Benedict Option" posts about going off the grid with a nice garden in preparation for Armageddon. Whatever difficulty Obama may have in explaining his remarks to the good people of Pennsylvania, I can guarantee he would have an easier time of it than Dreher would expounding on the need to "batten down the hatches and keep the family and the community's life and culture together during extraordinarily difficult, chaotic times," with "the dying of the bees" and "the strange weather patterns" as two of the Seven Signs. Unless, of course, Peter Kazlouski left some followers behind.

ARRESTED BY REALITY. Police hassled a bunch of people for dancing at the Jefferson Memorial! Only the dancers weren't dirty hippies, they were libertarians! To the barricades leaps conservatarian Peter Suderman, who, while explaining that "I hold both police officers as people and police as an institution in pretty high esteem," wonders

What does an arresting officer in any circumstance like this possibly think he or she is going to accomplish? Give his buddies something to do for the night? Maybe he’s got a paperwork fetish? Just can’t wait to take the paddy wagon for a spin?

The easy answer is, the officers think they are accomplishing their job, in accordance with the "Broken Windows" theory:

Popularized in New York City under the Giuliani administration, “Broken Windows” calls for the police to arrest people for petty violations and to investigate suspicious people in high-crime areas. Theoretically, arrests made for petty violations will provide apprehensions of people who are wanted for crimes that are more serious.

In this case "pretty violations" can be anything -- Public Nuisance is a good one. Failure to Disperse is another. There's no end to what a good officer can come up with, especially when you talk back to him.

I don't know what Suderman thinks of Broken Windows, but he's certainly a fan of Giuliani's "toughness," which reputation was based in no small measure on his willingness to arrest practically anybody. I daresay he finds it less appealing when his buddies are on the wrong end of the nightstick. With any luck he'll remember this when the cops sweep some miscreants who can't afford iPods.

Failing that, for his own sake I hope he has at least absorbed the ancient folk wisdom that you always try to swing with a policeman/And never ring-a-ding a policeman.

UPDATE. Peter Suderman tells me: "I don't find Giuliani all that appealing a candidate; my libertarian instincts are too strong." (We all talk to each other, you know; in fact we post all this crap from the same large, industrially-lit crap farm.) His post led me another way, but I believe him. Of course now it's days later and no one will notice, demonstrating once again the educational method of the blogosphere.

SHORTER ROD DREHER: I am troubled by the radical, anti-white, black power politics of Bill Cosby.

CLASS WILL TELL. A lot of people think Obama's comments on some Pennsylvania voters were gaffish. Mickey Kaus, for example, accuses him of "gruesomely off-key condscension toward downscale Rustbelt voters." "Downscale Rustbelt voters" is Kaus' own formulation, and one that would not play well in any bar full of Yuengling and gimme caps. But let's be fair: Kaus doesn't give a shit about those people, and probably imagines his point about Obama's elitism will be made to them on his behalf by talk radio hosts and local White Pride spokespeople.

After months of hearing that the Obama campaign has no substance, you might think these upscale Rushbelt commentators would welcome Obama's bold, public analysis of how Republicans bamboozle poorer voters. They themselves talk about this sort of thing endlessly in their media control towers; were they serious about what they say, they would be delighted to see the conversation go, so to speak, mainstream and into the streets.

Of course, they aren't taking the opportunity for discussion, but for politicking -- in the precise manner Obama described. This leaves it to more sympathetic voices to engage Obama's point -- and some do, but more tentatively, perhaps shaking a little in their tweeds at the imaginary thunder out of Lancaster and New Castle. But many others punt, conceding the ridiculous Republican point ("Obama was essentially claiming that the reason people are not voting for him is because they are bitter"), and presumably hoping we can all get back to discussing the important things, like which health care plan should be offered for sacrifice to the pharmaceutical lobby, or which excuse should be offered for staying in Iraq through the next decade.

There was a lot of enthusiasm for a "dialogue on race" some weeks ago -- not sincere, of course, but at least they felt they needed to pretend. A real dialogue on class, however, is something they will never countenance. Because no matter what happens in the former case, they know (most of them) that they'll always be white, but even the most firmly esconced at the top of the class structure nurtures some fearful awareness that the great wheel has been known to spin.

I AM A REACTIONARY. One reason I enjoy covering Rod Dreher is that he rekindles my love for America. We are surrounded by conservatives who insist that they love America, and describe it as a horrible place where the unfortunate deserve only the back of the hand of power, which must be maintained by endless wars. After a bellyful of their patriotism I sometimes begin to doubt my own. Maybe they're right, I begin to think: maybe the ugly America they celebrate is the real America, and I have only deluded myself that it was something better.

But when brother Rod denounces the West, as he is increasingly prone to do, my defensive reaction troubles me less. Because while I would agree with him, and his sources, that there are many things wrong with this country, his judgment of general rottenness on our way of life so offends me that I turn into a regular Yankee Doodle Dandy. When he says "[Patrick] Deneen raises the possibility that events -- economic, especially -- will do more to enhance traditionalist conservatism's prospects with the public than anything else," and I realize he is praying for catastrophe to befall us so that we will all come running to Jesus and the Old Ways for protection, I feel the sort of things that liberals of old must have felt when student radicals threatened to burn the motherfucker down: this is still my country, and if we are ridiculous about a number of things, I will certainly side with it against the likes of you.

Dreher does the trick for me better than a gibbering Islamic radical any day. The Islamist in most cases is only amplifying an ancient grudge exacerbated by bad treatment and a lack of video games and pornography that might divert and winnow his rage: Dreher enjoys the privileges and grass-fed beef of a great nation, and still judges it damned, the fucking hippie.

I get a similar, America-loving rush from some of The Anchoress' spasms. She begins a recent post with traditional laments about the liberal media, but soon escalates, with extensive self-quotation, to talk of a "painless coup" that has already made a hellhole of the Land of the Free: not only has it corrupted the noble rustics "Aunt Sally" and "Uncle Jim" into accepting abortion and tits 'n' swears on the TV -- it has actually made "our beautiful churches into bare concrete monstrosities (ready-made for quick-conversion into temples to secular reason)..."

She goes on thereafter about Liberty and Truth and the American President, but my mind yet dazzles that she doesn't just think we've picked the wrong leaders -- she believes some demonic force has possessed us, one that not only dirties popular entertainment and allows wrongful social policy but has actually twisted the minds of her co-religionists to build ugly, idolatrous temples. She doesn't just think the political tug-of-war has lately failed to go her way -- she thinks America is depraved. And when she comes to her prescription...

I don’t have a good feeling. I think we really have to get our free - and by free I mean unencumbered and disenthralled - press back. And soon.

...I get the queasy feeling that she isn't talking about electing McCain, or a slate of Republicans, or even pushing the kind of draconian legislation that usually emanates from the snake-handler wing of that party. She wants to drive out the demons. And who knows how far she would be willing to go to accomplish this sacred task?

Heaven knows I get mad about what's going on in this country, and often treat its leaders, opinion or otherwise, and even its citizens with raw contempt. So I'm thankful that Dreher and The Anchoress are around to set me straight. The American people are often ridiculous and sometimes do horrible things, and I have turned my wrath on a broad array of our native fixers, crackers, dupes, dopes, and scumbags. But they are still my people. I too want more than I could possibly deserve, chafe at well-meant and even reasonable restrictions, and prefer a good time to a Great Awakening. And in the last ditch I'll take my stand with our credit-, pleasure-, and freedom-addicted folk against our would-be saviors.

PRE-EMPTY STRIKES. At Hot Air, Allahpundit sees through Chairman Dean's claim that "Mitt Romney was the candidate I feared the most in the general":

He feared a guy who couldn’t beat McCain in New Hampshire despite the huge financial advantage, months of early campaigning, and proximity to the state he governed? He feared the social con whose faith and very belated conversion to the cause left him suspect in the eyes of much of the Christian base? Whose own most devout supporters felt compelled to beg him in the pages of the New York Times to stop running such a phony campaign?

I understand his rage. Dean is just doing a little pre-season politicking -- because that's what it's all about right now: laying down clouds of stink that operatives hope will linger enough that citizens can catch a whiff of them when they start paying attention. And, with the help of lazy reporters, perhaps they will.

Republicans, of course, have been doing the same kind of thing, claiming that the Democratic contenders are knocking each other out before the main event ("...we will look back on the Clinton-Obama contest, and its looming ugly endgame, as the low point of identity politics, and the beginning of a turning away..."). I doubt it has been much worse this year than it was in pre-seasons past. Those of us who, thanks to some horrible brain chemistry imbalance, are prone to notice this sort of thing are just noticing it more than usual.

Those mostly apolitical souls who are, perhaps optimistically, lately referred to as "voters" are probably not asking yet which candidate best represents their interests. They're probably asking "Four bucks for a gallon of milk?" etc.

I DO LOVE THEE SO THAT I WILL SHORTLY SEND THY SOUL TO HEAVEN. The even-when-you're-right-you're-wrong mode of conservative argument finds a new taker in National Review's Mark Krikorian, who thinks America should bow to our Chinese Olympic overlords and wants to know where Democrats get off spoiling the Party:

But does anyone think we'd be seeing all this commotion over Tibet in Paris and San Francisco if the ChiComs were still in their Maoist stage, sending educated people to work in the countryside and spouting all that revolutionary class struggle baloney? Of course not. It's only because China's in its Pinochet/Franco stage that lefty "world opinion" now has its knickers in a twist about their hip imaginary Tibetan friends, the monks of Shangri-la.

Contrast this unsupported "What If" to the well-documented change in conservative attitude toward China over the years: from rage at "Red China" to Nixonian accommodation to our present state, in which free-world corporations exploit China's ample cheap labor market, and rightwingers applaud because it feeds their ultimate fantasy: capitalism without freedom.

I seldom wonder if they have guilty consciences about it, but I think Krikorian might. What else explains this bit:

If you're a Tibetan trying to free your country from the clutches of the gangster regime in Peking, you'll take your allies wherever you can find them. But the trendiness and superficiality of this "free Tibet" business, from people who couldn't recognize Tibet if they tripped over it in the street, is striking.

Maybe he thinks the monks, despite all evidence, really prefer the slow road of laissez-faire liberation favored by conservatives, who really "get" them, to the noisome protests of hippies. Maybe he agrees with the Chinese that the Dalai Lama is a false leader to his people, something like Al Sharpton -- a peace pimp, or some such. Or maybe something inside Krikorian rebels against the accommodation he feels he must make with the grim demands of capital, and drives him to grotesque fantasies.

RED DAWN. Bad enough he hates white people; Barry Obama's a communist too. Ace O'Spades, fresh from his Time magazine coronation as "The conservative/ libertarian answer to the Daily Kos" (with, in evidence, an Ace quote about how black folk are prone to "virulent anti-Semitism"), tells us that Obama had a "mentor" who was a communist, and Michelle wants more pie. Connect the dots! But how does this pertain to actual policy in an Obama dictatorship?

Barack Obama is very vague about his actual politics and few have bothered asking.

Well, he does have a website -- but you have to know how to read it. For example:

The cost of our debt is one of the fastest growing expenses in the federal budget. This rising debt is a hidden domestic enemy, robbing our cities and states of critical investments in infrastructure like bridges, ports, and levees...

Critical investments! Sounds like a Five-Year Plan in the works to me. Let's dig deeper:

Let's set high standards for our schools and give them the resources they need to succeed. Let's recruit a new army of teachers...

An army of teachers! A barefoot army, no doubt -- and one already trained in the ways of the cadre by the AFT. That's a new Cultural Revolution in vitro, or my name isn't Jonah Goldberg.

Seen from this perspective, Obama's pledge to invade Pakistan looks less like the sort of saber-rattling Americans expect from their Presidential candidates, and more like a coded message to sleeper cells: comes the Revolution, Pakistan will be the first satellite in our Union of American Socialist Republics.

Please let this get around. I mean, he's black, he's pink, and (like all Democrats) he's yellow -- add cyan, and we have our winning electoral strategy -- registration black with 100% coverage!

TRY AND TELL THE YOUNG PEOPLE OF TODAY THAT, AND THEY WON'T BELIEVE YOU! At USA Today, David Frum concedes that the GOP has lost the "Youth Vote." It was once theirs, you know -- Reagan, Alex P. Keaton, cheap cocaine, all that. But then the GOP got lamer (it is poignant to see Frum list Iraq among its "embarrassments") and the kids got "more secular," "more permissive," and "browner and blacker." You see the problem! But Frum has a remedy, little girl guide:

Think Social Security taxes, not income taxes. Today's young voters are paying much more in Social Security taxes than in income taxes — and contributing much more into Social Security than they will ever see out of it...

...we can talk to young blacks and Hispanics as young people, who share economic interests with an entire generation of overtaxed young workers, regardless of race.

All the kids like that rap music. Maybe a new "Black Korea" can be engineered, this time with boomer crackers as the objet d'infame: "Everytime I wanna go make some fuckin bank/I gotta kick a tax to some Mick Jagger manque/bran-eating Gold Bond-dusted motherfuckers/that make a nigga mad enough to cause a little ruckus..." Bitch, I got a iPod!

Present a sunnier face on social issues. We need to make clear that we defend the family not to impose our values on others, but in order to give the next generation of America's children a fair chance in life.

Children who grow up without their fathers are more likely to go to jail...

Whoa, didn't take long for clouds to roll in front of that sunny sun. Finally Frum is reduced to plea-bargaining: "On abortion, too, it is important that Americans understand that the end of Roe v. Wade does not mean a national abortion ban... If California and New York vote to retain abortion rights after Roe, national Republicans won't interfere." There's a winning slogan: Abortion Is Murder! May Not Apply in New York and California!

Re-emphasize the environment. The voting data suggest that young voters might care less about the environment in reality than they think or say they do...

I'm beginning to wonder if Frum's heart is really in this. In fact, his Point Four ("Above all, results matter") rather indicates that it isn't, as he searches for hope in the presumptive ashes of 2008:

If the inexperienced Barack Obama wins — and then discovers that there is more to being president than giving speeches — we could discover that the next generation of young people reacts to the failures of an Obama presidency by rediscovering the enduring Republican principles of limited government, individual rights, strong national defense and pragmatic effective governance.

Maybe. Though, with conservatives -- including Frum -- increasingly prone to compare Obama to JFK in a bad way, maybe the result of disillusionment will be riots, dope, guns, and fucking in the streets. Say! This story has a sunny side after all!

A PROMINENT LIBERTARIAN JOURNALIST ON HER PROFESSION. Megan McArdle returns from wherever, and spectacularly relieves her Youth Brigade of thumb-up-the-ass detail with a three-part self-embarrassment:

It starts with Glenn Greenwald's observation that our media would rather report Barack Obama's bowling performance than the John Yoo memos which essentially declared President Bush above Constitutional law as regards torture and extraordinary renditions. McArdle says of course, silly -- Obama is more famous than John Yoo! "Readers buy more papers with headlines about Jamie Lynn Spears than they do with headlines about Alphonso Jackson or John Yoo," she explains, and as Obama is also a celebrity, there's no market reason (that is, no reason at all) why newspapers shouldn't cover him the way they cover a popstar's relatives, nor why they should cut into this frothy coverage with icky torture news.

Greenwald, making the fatal mistake of assuming McArdle to be educable, tries in a follow-up to explain that Yoo's memos "legalizing government torture, declaring presidential omnipotence, and suspending the Fourth Amendment inside the U.S." are important news, because they "became the official position of the entire Executive Branch of the U.S. Government." McArdle responds that "Mr Greenwald's anger at the establishment power structure seems to be rapidly transmuting into anger at the non-Glenn-Greenwald power structure." While readers are puzzling that one out, she describes her own difficulty in getting her stories printed:

Now, some of my readers are arguing that we journalists have a duty to give the public what they don't particularly want. Okay, well, you really should know how to calculate a bond duration...

So why should the suspension of the Fourth Amendment get more play than selections from McArdle's economic primer? "The public doesn't know because it doesn't care," says McArdle, "not because the journalists don't want to tell them." If this doesn't convince, McArdle also calls Greenwald's assertions "bizarre, even lunatic," compares him to the Ron Paul "rEVOLution," etc.

As word gets around about her dazzling logical display, McArdle returns for an encore:

Almost every journalist in Washington came here wanting to cover the kinds of things Glenn Greenwald wants written about; almost every editor here was one of those reporters, and assumed their current job hoping to break these kinds of stories. They are simply limited by the tastes of their readers.

Apparently Washington is the new Hollywood -- a place where fresh-faced writers go full of big dreams, only to be worn down by the demands of the marketplace, eventually (with some bitterness, perhaps, but also with some consoling paychecks) churning out stories about Bush's flight suit, happy new homeowners, unstoppable economic growth, and other feel-good stories. I would credit McArdle for a fresh insight here, but she seems to think that this is the way things are supposed to work in journalism -- no doubt because, as a libertarian, she must endorse whatever dollars endorse in any situation.

It's a good thing she hasn't got a job better suited to her talents, such as coal-mining: were the canary in her mine to drop dead, she'd probably just complain that she missed its singing and ask for a heartier one to be sent down.

SHORTER ROD DREHER: None of this Crunchy Conservative stuff is meant to supersede hatred of liberals, of course, nor uncomfortable chairs.

(I seldom pause to note, as the Sadlynauts always do, that the ‘Shorter’ concept was created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard, but it bears mentioning.)

DERANGEMENT SYNDROME. This electoral season, the Democratic Presidential candidates have been cleaning up. They're running hugely ahead of the Republicans in primary voter turnout, fund-raising, and registration.

To find dark linings to this silver cloud, you have to be creative and intellectually bankrupt at the same time. Fortunately the Politico has Ben Smith:

Anti-McCain groups lag in fundraising

Democratic talk of an early, hard-hitting campaign to "define" and tar Arizona Sen. John McCain appears to have fizzled for lack of money, leading to a quiet round of finger-pointing among Democratic operatives and donors as McCain assembles a campaign and a public image relatively unmolested.

Despite the millions of dollars pooling around Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton, anti-McCain funds have fallen far short of the hopes set in November...

With, of course, a link from the Perfesser, which is kind of a Good Housekeeping seal for rightwing bullshit.

For years conservatives told us that Democrats suffered from "Bush Derangement Syndrome," and were sabotaging their party's chances just to indulge their hatred for the President. Well, now the Democrats seem to have taken the lesson, devoting more resources to attracting voters, donors, and enthusiasm for their candidates, and less on attacking the GOP standard-bearer. Now, of course, conservatives portray this as a sign of weakness.

Expect in the near future articles telling us that even the Democrats' enthusiasm for their candidates is a harbringer of defeat. Oh wait -- they've been running those for months. Isn't a little early in the campaign for them to be running out of bullshit?

OBOY, LILEKS IS BACK! Let's see what the lovable scamp has been up to:

Went to the Paradise Valley Country Club (satellite view) for lunch and basting... I did not see Leslie Nielsen this time. I did, however, wander into the men’s locker room by mistake – I was looking for the loo, but mistook the clubhouse for the ordinary restroom – and I was in a different world.

Nothing can follow up on the promise of that passage, and neither does this.

I love Phoenix. It’s a 21st Century American City. You want the future? Here you go.

So, in the future there'll be no black people?

It’s new. It’s rich. It’s poor. It’s low and flat, it’s high and barren. It has broad new freeways rising high over barren canals, great empty stretches punctuated by high-tech office buildings holding dozens of incubating companies. It remakes itself with a speed that makes LA look like Paris. This is the future, but somehow when people want to capture the soul of America they go to Cleveland and film a shoelace factory that closed in 1982.

I don't see what the hippies want with those boring old buildings when they could be living in an office park in the middle of the desert.

Absolut Mexico ad stirs patriotism, or actually just hatred of Mexico for its lack of office buildings and freeways:

To order an Absolut in such a place, surrounded by things Mexico could have never be stirred itself to accomplish, would have seemed ungrateful. I went with the Reyka. From now on I will always go with the Reyka.

Lileks fights corporate insensitivity and lazy Mescans with vodka choice! And no wonder. He's looking at houses in Scottsdale; clearly he's already thinking like a native. There's no way the Mexofascists will make it into Arizona without the crucial support of the Swedish vodka cartel. And his new friends will let him know what other businesses to boycott.

UPDATE. In comments, Jay B rejoices: "L.A. is Paris, motherfuckers." Nancy Nall is puzzled by rightwing Absolut rage: "Why do they get all of Ann Coulter's quips, and nobody else's?" And R. Porrofatto links to a cautionary tale about Maricopa, Arizona, from whence Jimbo may soon find new, resentful underclass neighbors who aren't even Mexican.

THE FUTURE AND ITS ENEMIES. Even conservative operatives get tried, apparently, and so they have started handing off their anti-Obama scripts to libertarians. Virginia Postrel has Rev. Wright, Rezko, John F. Kennedy -- the works. The spiel rolls so smoothly off her tongue that (like that other famous libertarian, Penn Jillette) she pauses in the middle of the act to explain how her trick is done:

Where optimists fill in mystery with their hopes, however, pessimists project their fears. The flip side of glamour is horror: the vampire, the con man, the femme fatale, the double agent. These glamorous archetypes remind us of how easy it is to succumb to desire and manipulation. What, ask his opponents, is Obama hiding?

And now for the wow finish! Her wrapup on "the flip side of glamour" is an intriguing novelty:

Obama must have an inkling of these perils. He knows glamour better than most people, having grown up enchanted with the glamorized image of his distant father, an image shaped by his mother’s stories and his own yearnings. “The brilliant scholar, the generous friend, the upstanding leader—my father had been all those things. All those things and more, because except for that one brief visit in Hawaii, he had never been present to foil the image,” he writes in Dreams from My Father...

That image was false. Despite his early promise, Obama’s father died a bitter, lonely minor bureaucrat, leaving a fractured family to fight over his tiny estate. “All my life,” concluded the young Obama when he learned the truth, “I had been wrestling with nothing more than a ghost!” By then, however, the glamour had done its work, providing meaning and purpose to the son’s formative years. At the risk of bitter disillusionment, perhaps Obama hopes to do for the country what his father’s image did for him: provide a noble lie that tricks us into self-improvement.

I guess she thinks Obama's act is similar to her own, but even more diabolical: Obama has, like a Shakespearean villain, laid out in monologue the grudge that motivates his nefarious plot. Beware the ides of self-improvement! For it might not work, and then we'll all be mad at him.

It's a strangely defeatist POV for a self-proclaimed Dynamist, but improvisation will only get you so far when you're working with such crappy material.

UPDATE. I had forgotten about this bit from an interview Postrel did when she was publicizing her book The Substance of Style:

Take, for example, Kente cloth. Some people would say that it's inauthentic for white people to wear Kente cloth. But by that logic it's actually, in some sense, inauthentic for anyone in the United States to wear it, and even for anyone in Africa to wear it who's not from the aristocracy. Traditionally it had a very specific use. But it's evolved over time. It's beautiful; African-Americans see it as reflecting their ties to their ancestors in Africa, and to their sense of identity—even if no one in their family would ever in a million years have been allowed to wear this cloth. It's taken on another meaning, and that meaning, I would argue, is just as authentic. It's come out of a different experience, and it reflects the authentic pleasure and meaning of the people who wear it.

But now Postrel is concerned with the inauthenticity of Obama's childhood admiration for his father. Can't the experience have just "evolved over time" for him, and "taken on another meaning"? Also, for a preview of Postrel's inevitable Clinton hit piece, see the part where she doubts Hillary really liked doing her hair.

CHARLTON HESTON R.I.P. He was a bit stiff, but so were some other leading men of his time -- Glenn Ford, Rod Taylor, and Rock Hudson come to mind. Heston was usually a little more interesting. The other stiffs could be powerful and forthright, but they were seldom as galvanic as he, because his commitment onscreen was unrelenting.

Consider Heston as Moses in The Ten Commandments. The movie's kind of hilarious, but Heston isn't. And he should be, especially when he's describing Passover while extras make horror-movie noises offscreen. Even his superb voice, chiseled features, and Biblical makeup should not distract us from wondering how the Moses bit would play on a busy street-corner in Fresno. What puts him over? Probably the absence of anything like nuance. He's too busy executing the role, which he treats as a sacred trust, to trifle with humanizing touches. It's not because he's stupid, but because he has an abundance of that actor's gift of absolute concentration, which is deaf to absurdity and can resemble stupidity.

Of course you wouldn't call the performance intelligent, but this is clearly a circumstance in which an intelligent performance would spoil everything. Leading men often find themselves in such circumstances, which may explain Heston's success.

He didn't have a lot of gears, but he could surprise you. He's terrific in Ruby Gentry as a guy who knows better but can't keep his lustful eyes off Jennifer Jones. He's actually pretty sexy in the role, even sinuous. I can still hear him rasping his beloved's name ("rrrrROO-BEEeee!") through the door she has closed on him.

And for a ham-hunk of the old school, he took acting very seriously. He mounted a stage production of Long Day's Journey Into Night so he could play James Tyrone. He tried to get DeNiro to do Shakespeare. He always spoke highly of the talent of Vanessa Redgrave, who was politically his polar opposite. He took his own politics very seriously, but he knew to check his guns at the door of the temple of art.

UPDATE. Commenters come to the defense of Rod Taylor and Glenn Ford. My experience of Ford's and Taylor's oeuvres is limited, so I defer to their judgment.

But some commenters are mad at Michael Moore. In Bowling for Columbine Heston willingly and unnecessarily answered the bell as a credentialed representative of the People of the Gun. This wasn't a mugging, it was a press opportunity. If we profess to respect Heston for opening himself to Moore's blows, I should think our respect would prevent us from blaming Moore for landing them -- unless we're looking for a fake fight with pulled punches, to be applauded because it nurtures the old man's self-esteem. None of that P.C. crap for me, thanks, and I suspect for Heston.

Shall we also go easy on Bush because, as a dry drunk (or a real drunk -- reports vary), he is too emotionally fragile to defend himself from our criticism? And do watch out, because they'll be pulling this shit with McCain soon: "How dare you question his mental integrity! He's a very old man!"

NEW REALITIES. At American Digest, more stuff about the Inevitable Death of the New York Times. This is as much a rightwing blog evergreen as the Dirty Hippie, Our Fighting Men, and Hillary is a Bitch stories; On a slow day, hand-rubbing over the impending doom of the hated MSM's biggest cell will always fill the blog hole.

One thing I wonder, though, is what they'll do when the Times croaks. Technorati currently lists "1,620,071 blog reactions to nytimes.com." That's even more than Instapundit gets. In fact, Instapundit frequently links to the Times (recent example), as do just about all the other conservative blogs -- and not mainly to criticize it, but more often as a source.

Despite all the grand claims made for the groovy blog revolution, the phenomenon is still basically parasitic. Few bloggers do primary reporting. Why should they? The doomed dinosaurs do it for them, and all the bloggers have to do is link to them, occasionally adding some variant of "I call bullshit."

Were the Times to fold, and all the other big pubs to be drawn down into its maelstrom -- a consummation devoutly wished by wingnuts everywhere -- these bloggers would have nothing left to talk about except one another, and reports from large rightwing publications which would presumably, as honorary non-members of the MSM, survive.

You can get a glimpse of this gruesome future at Confederate Yankee, whose mania for media criticism sometimes leads him to attack to treasonous misreporting of... Fox News. Try to imagine him in a post-revolutionary environment. Deprived of liberal media outlets to scourge, he and his comrades would -- after a brief celebration of Rupert Murdoch's new unipolar status -- devote themselves to parsing conservative outlets, and each other, for signs of incorrectness. Every blogger would look upon his brother and see Andrew Sullivan, and denounce him as disloyal to the cause.

Mere opposition to government health care will be seen as accommodationist, and arguments will rage as to whether city hospitals should be merely privatized or closed down to discourage sickness. Each federal bailout of a troubled financial institution will lead to heated debate as to whether the firm's executives should be compensated in gold or Euros. Even the milbloggers, who would be the only source of war coverage in this bold new age, will turn on one another, each declaring the other's account of the latest glorious victory insufficiently enthusiastic, and photos of local youths handing flowers to servicemen will be scrutinized for dark clouds or unconvincing smiles, which will lead to accusations of Photoshop.

Of course, things are pretty ferocious as it is, and if you're of a really cynical turn of mind, you might suspect it's because our current consensus media reality is already exceedingly narrow. But if the evolution of the blogosphere has taught us anything, it's that things can always get worse.

UPDATE. The Ole Perfesser defines his position on the media:

...at the moment [the press is] playing their usual pre-election gloom-and-doom game in the hopes of helping the Democrats.

Which doesn't mean that the economy is necessarily doing better than they say, since their bias is exceeded only by their laziness and ignorance. As I noted some years ago about their Iraq reporting, the fact that they're transparently playing up bogus bad news doesn't mean that there isn't genuine bad news that they're not reporting, because reporting that would require knowledge and effort. So you can't just apply "Kentucky windage" and assume that things are better than the reports say. They may actually be worse, just in a different way than is reported . . .

Or, as Megan McArdle would say, the bad news is only true in "some trivial sense." If the Pope were this good at convincing followers of his infallibility, he wouldn't have to make personal appearance tours.

UPDATE II. Q. Ever-Fucking D.

SCENE REPORT. In case you were wondering why we haven't treated the Megan McArdle case recently, she apparently went away for a while and left her blog with a bunch of young wingers of the libertoid persuasion, with Daniel Drezner as a ringer. For the historical record:

Jim Henke establishes his libertarian cred at the outset, declaring that he is "not a fan of music... It just doesn't seem very interesting to me... why should it be unusual that some people just aren't touched by music?" Henke's liberty-love extends to an unjustly remanded government prisoner and to confederate flag-wavers -- though he seconds Matthew Yglesias that they should find "some less provocative emblem of Southern folkways" to celebrate (perhaps a jug with three x's on it, or Junior Samples), he feels that "opponents of the Confederate flag and Confederate History Month ought not reflexively cry 'racism' and demand penance... So long as each side chooses to be antagonistic, however, they will get the fight they expect." I wonder if it ever occurred to him that antagonism is the point?

Movie reviewer Peter Suderman repeats the old bloggerz-rool schtick, claiming Tocqueville in evidence. "After all, isn’t the internet the 21st century’s New World?... Indeed, it seems to me that much of the same frontier spirit that he saw as characterizing the birth of America now characterizes the birth and continual development of the internet." I smell sitcom! "So you see, grandsire, in many ways I am like you, traversing great distances in search of liberty." "Is you a gal? 'Cuz if you is, go fix me some vittles."

Such a show would have trouble finding its natural audience, though, in Suderman's perfect world: "I tend to think that there's no reason to subsidize access to broadcast TV in the first place." But for those who have the requisite latinum bars, there will be plenty of awesome entertainment, shown (in keeping with the customary libertarian aversion to traditional mass entertainment venues) in alpha movie palaces.

In their world, there are vacations, but no relief.

REDUCTIO AD DREHER. Rod Dreher wrote two days ago that he just wants to be nice to his fellow-creatures. Perhaps he was then temporarily mellowed out by some organic, artisanal weed. Since then he has been shaking his fist at everything that moves. I should have known he'd eventually turn his wrath on that pregnant guy:

In the consumerist utopia that we've built and are building, the individual's desires are God. Nothing is more important in this world than what Thomas Beatie wants. Thomas Beatie creates his own reality, heedless of the things that are. And we bless this tyrannization of nature as liberation.

In comments he clarifies:

I'm not saying that we don't have the right to change anything in the natural world. Were that the case, we'd all still be living in the jungle. But as the pope indicated, it has to be developed according to its intrinsic nature. It is not wrong (in my view) to eat animals for sustenance. It is wrong, though, to pervert their nature by raising them in conditions that do not allow them to live in some basic sense by their nature.

If you don't believe there is an intrinsic nature in the created order, then there's nothing wrong with what Beatie is doing. But nor is there anything wrong with what factory farmers are doing, or the scientists busily creating new forms of life by mixing animal and human DNA.

Godless humanists will see the problem with his thinking: factory farming affects other living creatures in a real way, physically and against their wills. Thomas Beattie only affects Dreher's idea of how everyone else should think and behave. Even if you are tempted to cut him some slack when he complains that swears on the TV are making our children into savages, you may have trouble understanding why a guy having a baby drives him nuts.

We might speculate: maybe Dreher is worried that someday society will make him squeeze out a young'un himself. Or that he might one day encounter a male mom at a PTA meeting and be socially obliged to treat him civilly, and isn't sure he has the stones to rebuff him as the Little Colonel did Silas Lynch.

But really, no one need be harmed, not even Dreher, for him to react this way. To that extent, this particular rant is revelatory. Usually, when he talks about "culture," he has at least the thin excuse that other people might be harmed -- by poor education, by poverty, by STDs -- because of whatever malfeasance he describes. Here it's all about the God Dreher worships and whose prescriptions he insists upon: "As goes the culture, so, in time, goes the civilization," says Dreher, "betrayed by pride and rebellion."

For Dreher it's really all about obedience. He'll try and reason with you sometimes that it's for your own good, but when he's on a jeremianic roll he will let you know it's because God said it, he believes it, and that settles it.

Of course, this leaves a lot of column inches to fill. Relieved of the necessity (or perhaps the advantage) of spending paragraphs explaining how this may affect you here on this temporal plane, he'll instead populate the space with jabber about "the things that are." If you don't get it, don't worry, he isn't talking to you. He's talking to the folks who will not be cast into everlasting darkness at the Final Trump, when he and they and their pal Jesus no longer have to make up reasons for you to believe them.

TRY, TRY AGAIN. Oh brother:

Obama Lying To Reporters About His Smoking Habits?

So...does this matter? Normally I’d say that something like a smoking habit doesn’t really matter as it doesn’t speak to the candidate’s policy stances, but smoking is risky behavior health-wise for someone Obama’s age and if the New York Times can make an issue out of McCain’s melanoma surgery from nearly a decade ago we can talk about Obama’s smoking.

At this stage in his life, I think if McCain gets out of a chair too fast it's cause for concern. As for Obama sneaking cigs, that just makes me want to go out and campaign for him.

At least The American Conservative has a sane approach. At Reason Jacob Sullum twits Obama for supporting the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, which is indeed a little nannyish but not hypocritical as it mainly seeks, from what I've read, to toughen labeling and additive standards, which may result in smoother, more flavorful smokes for Obama and the rest of us.

(Regrettably the bill currently requires user fees, but hopefully tobacco lobbyists can get them taken out.)

*UPDATE.Thanks to Commenter GeoX for correcting me: "flavorful" is the word I was looking for. I might also add: outstanding, and they are mild.

SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL. Another day, another Rod Dreher jeremiad:

The prohibitions ("remissions" in Rieff's terminology), both internal and external in our culture, that used to guide us and help us form the character of the next generation, are mostly gone. The culture, as Flanagan observes, is the enemy. The disorders of the age are spreading with the relentless efficiency of a killer virus. As a friend of mine put it to me wisely just now, you can't fully protect your kids, not in this culture. You can only inoculate them, and hope it takes. There is enough goodness in this country, and in its people, and enough liberty and imagination, to provide for those who resist. Somehow, we've got to keep working to find each other, and to help each other to redeem the time. We can't despair -- not as long as we still have freedom to act.

Etc. I guess this is what he thinks he's doing, writing a blog and editing the Dallas Morning News. It sounds as if he thinks only a handful of the elect will make it through the Dark Time, and he must lead them toward the light. He's using the machinery of evil mass culture to achieve his own ends. Clever of him; I wonder if Rupert Murdoch, owner of Beliefnet, is aware of it.

Of course he is. Murdoch knows that millenarianism is a market to be scooped up with the others. If he foresees a cataclysm, he probably expects it will be economic, not moral, which would explain why he is buying media to pick up dollars, rather than doing good works to obtain brownie points with the Almighty. Come Armageddon, a nice fortified compound would be a worthier investment than the respect of monkish moralizers.

I have some admiration for that, not because I prefer wickedness to righteousness, necessarily, but because it strikes me as a more human and ultimately more hopeful, and even more genuinely moral, way of looking at the world than what Brother Rod preaches.

Dreher professes affection for humanity, but he has given up on it, and expects a hard core of saved fellow zealots to reconstruct it after it perishes, this time the right way. Murdoch deals with what is, however cynically, feeding appetites that he must believe are lasting and intrinsic to man -- for who would invest so much in mere fads? Though his motives may be selfish, there is a certain humility in the way he gives the punters what they want. He does try to push them toward his favored political candidates, whom I generally dislike, but if they don't come around he still continues to feed them their sugar-candy and does not scold.

I'm not fond of Murdoch, and in my own millenarian fantasies he swings from a lamppost, but he certainly seems to have more on the ball than his employee. (If Dreher is really only bluffing about all this to keep himself employed, I offer him my apologies and a pat on the back.)