LAST GASPS. Obama leaves Trinity and the reaction is telling:

Obama can't stand the heat of a campaign without tossing aside his grandma, then his pastor, and now HIS WHOLE FREAKIN' CHURCH. One he'd been defending until NOW. One many leftists defended.

What a low life.

Unfit for the office.

Kerry had more class. At least he pretended to be honorable.

Later: "THE LEFT IS ALREADY SEEING OBAMA FOR WHAT HE IS. IT'S OVER. A NATIONAL NIGHTMARE AVERTED." In case you were wondering, this is not a disappointed former supporter, but one of the folks who were really counting on Reverend Wright to knock Obama out of the race and have just seen their last slim hope of it melt away.

Reliapundit is choleric under the best of circumstances, but the news is inciting strong language from even more temperate writers. "Thirty Pieces of Silver From the Pulpit," says RedState. "Why is he leaving all of a sudden? Is it because there is another untold story out there?" The author suspects shady in-church fundraising, based largely on his own experience as a perpetrator. (The post also contains yet another citation of Obama throwing someone, or being thrown, "under the bus," fattening that conservative meme for the winter, when its promulgators may need to live off it. )

Other make the best of the situation. "Now [Obama] is riding the whirlwind," writes Roger L. Simon. (Some whirlwind.) "Shocker... unbelievable!... UPDATE: Will Not Denounce Church!" says Gateway Pundit. Even the normally highbrow Victor Davis Hanson has to resort to all-caps: "So the question always arises-WHY?" he writes. "Is it because he didn't know the nature of his associates, OR is it because he finds their well-known messages suddenly as politically disadvantageous as he once found them essential in jump-starting his Chicago career?"

Most observers will guess the latter, and not be too exercised about it, as they are probably sick of hearing about Trinity Church and will welcome any development that puts an end to its coverage. It certainly will come up again, of course, but as a historical citation rather than as breaking news. By any rational analysis, the downside of this for Obama is very slight compared to the upside. But at the outrage factories where this sort of thing is stock in trade, it's as if one of their best-sellers were being recalled, so we can hardly blame them for making some noise about it.

UPDATE. Very interesting discussion in comments about how well or badly Obama plays these things in general. I'd say that he and his staff seem to do a lot of improvising, which is never a good sign from a political campaign. On the other hand, they improvise pretty adeptly; the "discussion on race" speech was good theatre and gave Obama a buffer against the Wright fallout. It wasn't a stopper, obviously, but it worked well enough to get him this far.

Tex, talking about the McClurkin episode, says "Well, it did cost him my respect. But he will still have my vote." Just so, and he's one of the few who remember McClurkin in the first place. We're well out of the time when naive enthusiasm was carrying the day for Obama, and into the difference-splitting part of the contest. This gives an advantage to McCain, who was never going to win an inspirational campaign; though his own improvisations haven't been so hot, the press hasn't belabored them nearly as much as Obama's.

It may be Obama will win or lose on his ability to play a game that has nothing to do with his advertised appeal as a healer. Right now, part of the opposition game plan is to reductively characterize Obama as a "Chicago politician" with old-fashioned backroom tricks up his sleeve. Well, he'd better be.

A COUPLE OF LIVE ONES. While we're on artistic subjects, I think we should acknowledge a couple of fallen heroes. Sydney Pollack was a director of, let us say, likeably modest talents; I have always prefered to think that what I saw on his face as he accepted the Oscar for Out of Africa from Billy Wilder, John Huston and Akira Kurosawa (!) included some embarrassment. But he had his moments, and real charm and skill as an actor. I can't compete with David Edelstein's magnificent summation at New York magazine, but I will add that the very thought of Pollack laying it all out for Tom Cruise in Eyes Wide Shut ("Okay. I think I should also tell you that I was there at the house." Tom Cruise: "Well, what an amazing coincidence." Pollack: "The words practically right out of my mouth") gives me the giggles, and I think he precisely caught the mordant Kubrick tone that baffled so many of the film's critics. It stunned me to learn that he'd been acting since the "Playhouse 90" days. Every time I saw him in a movie or on TV I thought, oh, here's Pollack slumming again. Maybe that's what they mean when they talk about making it look easy.

Also, word just came that Harvey Korman has passed. Korman was always willing to go too far, and on the Carol Burnett show you can often see how eager he was to crack up his fellow players. I still recall the impeccable timing of his reaction to Burnett's gushing Shirley Temple routine: he brought his fingertips to the bridge of his nose and, turning a beat into a drum solo, muttered, "Please, madam, I have diabetes." Blazing Saddles was his apotheosis. The movie pitched its tone on the border of hip and vaudeville, and while Cleavon Little and Gene Wilder worked the hipster angle, Korman came on with a fusillade of stutters, mad walks, lazzi and double-takes straight out of the Orpheum circuit. It played as well with stoned teenagers as it did with elderly variety-show fans. Hail and farewell to the last of the great schtickmen.

THE REICHSTAG ADVENTURE. While everyone else was enjoying Recount, I was attending a film about another great historical disaster, Downfall. It's certainly wonderful to see the great Bruno Ganz impersonate Hitler. We are introduced to him in 1942, where he is not flailing and screaming but visibly strange in a classically narcissistic way; he shows kindness, but at a palpable personal remove -- speaking to his prospective secretaries as if they were dumb creatures requiring soft speech to function properly -- that suggests his later ravings about the insufficiency of the German people didn't come from a last-minute psychological adjustment to disaster, but out of the core of his being.

Later, of course, when things are going less well for the Reich, we do see him flailing and screaming -- some of it has been memorably re-subtitled for YouTube parodies. And we get morose lethargy, truculence, delusory attachment to petty details, and so on. The most interesting section, Hitler-wise, comes in his final meeting with Albert Speer (the excellent Heino Ferch), who reveals that he has consciously failed to carry out the Fuhrer's "orders of destruction" and waits for a reaction. Hitler breaks a pencil -- quietly, with the palms of his hands -- adjusts his hair, stares away; pouts. Speer -- having survived his insufficient act of resistance -- gets up from his chair. "So you're leaving," says Hitler. "Good. Auf wiedersehen." He refuses to shake Speer's hand before he goes. He could have had him shot. That he doesn't is not an act of mercy, but of peevishness.

That's the kind of detail that sometimes makes Downfall more interesting than your run-of-the-mill historical drama. But it's from the Hitler part, and the solitude and mystery of the dictator seem to have spurred the imagination of the filmmakers more than the documentary events that make up most of the film. For these, Downfall is simply an efficient reenactment. It is something to see all these Nazis, infamous and obscure, facing their elaborately choreographed Gotterdammerung. And, to their credit, the filmmakers give enough clues to allow us to backwards-engineer the disaster in our minds: if these guys couldn't disobey orders as the Russians were encircling Berlin, you can imagine what they were like when things were going well.

But there doesn't seem to be much more to it than that: the Third Reich was an awful mistake, as you can see by the result. (It even invites fleeting sarcastic thoughts: Sure, hindsight's always 20-20.) The characters' varied reactions to the approach of disaster (from wild parties to fretful brooding) are believable and sometimes poignant but seldom illuminating. The few heroics and the abundant follies are alike swept up and engulfed in the horrible tide of events.

It seems terrible to say so, given the seriousness of the subject, but it can't be helped: Downfall is basically a disaster flick: multiple characters trapped in a Reich turned upside-down, each doing a star turn expressing some signal weakness or strength before his or her gruesome death or grateful rescue. In fact, for all its craft it's not up to the standards of Irwin Allen. Paul Newman's architect in The Towering Inferno was only first among glamorous equals; the architect of the Holocaust steals Downfall outright. I can't read Wim Wenders' complaint, available only in German, but I hear he was pissed about that. Maybe I flatter myself by assuming from translated snippets that he shares my view that this is primarily a dramatic problem. I certainly believe the makers meant well, but as Max Bialystock learned to his regret, you can't let Hitler have all the good lines.

EASY MONEY. At National Review, Jim Manzi is outraged that Obama would ask college graduates to heed a call to service. He also doesn't think much of Obama's decision to blow off a traditional career track and instead become a lowly community organizer, because he was just going to wind up a U.S. Senator and best-selling author anyway:

What's funny about his sacrifice is that when Obama took this job, $14,000 was about the average salary for somebody getting out of college. Of course, Obama wasn't just a run-of-the-mill college graduate; he was an Ivy-Leaguer, who graduated from Columbia with a BA in political science. A corporate career would almost certainly have been more lucrative — for a while. Last year, his family income was about $4,200,000. I don't have the data, but I bet that compares reasonably favorably with the average household income of 1983 Columbia political science and 1991 Harvard Law School graduates. Nonetheless, Obama did sacrifice some of his expected credential-based wage premium for a number of years.

Similarly, any well-educated person who decides to pursue a career as an actor can expect to become a Hollywood star, so it's really not that much different from joining Goldman Sachs.

I hope this gets around. A widespread delusion that community organization is a sure path to riches will do wonders for urban blight. Even our worst neighborhoods will be as full of eager volunteers as soup kitchens at Thanksgiving.

YOUR EXCEPTION IS NOTED. A lot of Bush people and their supporters are royally pissed at former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan and his new tell-all book. At NewsBusters, Rich Noyes complains that when Ari Fleischer issued a book that was far more complimentary to Bush than McClellan's, nobody wanted to cover it.

Noyes implies this is due to liberal media bias. Well, baby, you gotta gave a gimmick. Dee Dee Myers wisely chose to write a women's-empowerment book instead of a straight Clinton-era retrospective. Of course, if that former Press Secretary's tome had instead been all about how her boss was full of shit, I suppose that would have worked too. Dog bites man can be a story if the man is its master. Ask Louis Freeh.

But that just has to do with the stink McClellan's book has made and the copies it may sell. In political terms I don't expect much of a long-term impact from it. If Richard Clarke couldn't move the needle, what chance has Scott McClellan?

This got me thinking about David Stockman, first of the great celebrity White House apostates of the contemporary age -- that is, the age of Reagan, which we're still in. William Greider's Atlantic Monthly story in which Stockman spilled his guts about the Reagan Administration's economic malfeasance, and Stockman's own tell-all book, made him the most famous OMB Director in history (excepting, perhaps, Bert Lance).

Some people considered Stockman a hero, and praised his later experiments in enlightened capitalism. That's as may be, his recent criminal indictment on fraud and conspiracy charges notwithstanding (an auto-parts company he was running, and its employee pension fund, went bankrupt). But it's worth noting that Stockman's public disillusionment with the Reaganites gave him more stature than a quiet slinking-away would have accomplished. And other than a blip of bad publicity, it didn't do much harm to Reagan, either, nor to the policies he favored. Everybody won except the governed.

This isn't to suggest bad intent on Stockman's part, or McClellan's, but the way Washington works. No one is obliged to retain loyalty to a cause one has decided is corrupt. But no one can expect to make much of a difference by renouncing it, either. Not having read McClellan's book, I can't judge it as confessional literature or as dish. As a political artifact, it would seem, from the rumblings its digestion by the commentariat have caused (noisy but not clinically significant), to be pretty typical of its kind.

JUST A LITTLE JOKE BETWEEN YOU & ME. My latest jape. Jimbo was actually very nice about it, which of course ruins it for me.

UPDATE. His self-defense. Wilde and Whistler this ain't, but then a lot of things have gone downhill since the 19th Century.

THE CHICKENS COME HOME TO ROOST. Ron Rosenbaum's "In Praise of Liberal Guilt" at Slate has drawn some responses from conservatives who object, in varying degrees, to the notion that they should feel guilt about American racism.

The conversation is somewhat misguided. Whatever these worthies think about the effect of white guilt (or shame, or whatever they want to call it) on their own souls matters very little. Racism as a public issue is a different story.

Conservatives have built up a strong resistance to guilt trips of any kind over the years. They've learned to dismiss any gripe from anyone aggrieved (except their own constituent groups, of course) as politically correct nonsense. It's been useful for them in some ways, allowing them to project an air of certainty that is easily mistaken for strength, but in this instance it's getting to be a drawback. I never thought I'd say this, but Rod Dreher is actually onto something here:

That is, it's difficult to say, "Yes, conservatives were badly wrong on civil rights, but that doesn't mean that they're wrong today," because the left, in debate, tends to assume that the original sin of having been wrong in 1964 is ineradicable, and won't give any quarter. You can never win with liberals on racial questions, conservatives may figure, so it's better to adopt a defiant insouciance -- even if that attitude is not morally justified by the record.

I would add, though, that "you can never win with liberals" is unduly limited: when you take this sort of attitude, you can't win with a whole lot of people.

If you get around a little bit, you may have noticed that racism hasn't gotten any cooler over the years. Of course it persists -- strongly, in some pockets, and furtively in others under a variety of masks. But if you say outright crazy shit about black people, it doesn't play as widely as it might have in 1952.

We can argue about how much real progress this represents, but if you're the sort of conservative Dreher describes, it's pretty disastrous. If you regard the race card as a vampire regards garlic, it must be depressing to realize that Americans haven't lightened up about it. "Politically incorrect" phenomena such as "South Park" may sometimes buoy your spirits by convincing you that the heat's off, but then people get all bent out of shape about a radio joke, and your mood swing changes course.

You're left with bizarre fantasies in which Obama purposefully loses a state primary in order to slander its citizens as racists.

From this beaten-down perspective, with no hope of being recognized as the lovely race-neutral people they know themselves to be, conservatives looking at a Presidential contest with a black guy on the opposing ticket may worry that they'll have no choice but to energize whatever racist base is available to them. This the more tender-hearted among them must dread, because it may contribute to an unfortunate misperception of themselves. And it may explain why they think the tiresome topic of white guilt is worth discussing in the first place.

THE CHILDREN'S HOUR. Megan McArdle is away from her desk for reasons unknown -- from this photo it seems she may have at last found honest work as a telemarketer -- leaving a bunch of young guest-bloggers to romp and play in her stead. Peter Suderman -- at 17, the elder statesman of the group -- does big-boy blogging; they rest try to get away with the same shit that flew in their college newspapers.

Tim Lee lays out the case for Technology is Awesome. Here he explains that companies sometimes give away digital content because "giving away information goods (which have zero marginal cost) can expand the market for other goods that can then be sold at a profit," but cautions, "Figuring out what to give away and how to monetize the resulting attention is a difficult problem that everyone, from Facebook to the Atlantic is struggling to solve." Yuh don't say! Next he'll be telling us about the challenges facing our next President.

Lee follows up with that evergreen of the neverlaid, How Blogs Will Totally Replace Newspapers. Folks who reflexively assert that the New York Times does a better job of covering world events than a guy with a Wordpress account and several college buddies studying abroad are mired in oldthink:

There are fewer organizations that aspire to cover "all the news that's fit to print." But while that might worry people who are used to the predictability of 20th-century organizational methods, the new system is likely to be better. Specialization allows publications to develop deeper bench of talent in the topics they cover. A swarm of smaller organizations gives the system more flexibility. And the lower barriers to entry allow a proliferation of new voices that provide unique perspectives on the news.

And the great thing is, our Citizen Journalists get paid in buzzwords! I bet Lee prefers Taster's Choice to real coffee because it uses advanced freeze-drying technology.

My favorite is Conor Friedersdorf. First, there's the name: can't you picture him, peachfuzz painstakingly sculpted into a French Beard, smoking jacket carrying a crest of his own invention, snifter filled with Pibb Xtra? And Young Friedersdorf has a poetic streak:

Consider Las Vegas after 12 hours: already there is an urge to escape. The once quaint sounds of the casino floor clank against the nerves. You discern wrinkles beneath the caked-on makeup of haggard cocktail waitresses and paunch on black-jack dealers whose slouches gradually deepen.

Well, timor mortis conturbat me silly! Can't wait for the next installment, in which cackling crones of 28 are compared to witches and someone puts a cigarette out in a plate of eggs.

Friedersdorf also has posts about how New York is exciting, and conservatives aren't racist, look at Clarence Thomas, but really anything he writes is worth savoring. I hope McArdle is thinking legacy, and not only because that would mean she was leaving.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP here. It's about the many ways in which wingers use unverified rumors to spread mischief. See, rather than merely assert that the stories are true, they -- hey, hey, you drifted off there. Yeah, I know. Starting next week I'm going with this sort of thing. As my dear old mother used to say: "That's what people want to see, not your stupid bullshit."

UPDATE. Second link Not Safe For Work, you squares. No, I said the second -- oh, wait I meant the first! Yeah, the first!

"THIS IS YOUR FUTURE," PART TWO. The Ole Perfesser:

Well, I don't think that food prices aren't up. I do the grocery shopping for my household, and believe me, I've noticed; my average grocery run costs about 20 bucks more than last year. Rather, my point was the lameness of media efforts to report on that -- interviewing people at fancy gourmet markets? -- and the cheesiness of their "holiday" angle. As is often the case, even as they try hard to manufacture one bit of bad news, they're actually missing the real bad news, because reporting on that usefully would require actual work. As I've noted on this topic before, their bias is exceeded only by their laziness and ignorance. The data in the AP story don't prove its ostensible point -- that holiday barbecues (by which they mean cookouts, not actual barbecue) are vastly more expensive -- but to do an actual story on what food prices are up across the board, and why, would be actual work and wouldn't produce the "holiday angle" that editors want.

This has been a sneak preview of John McCain's response to economic questions in the forthcoming Presidential debates, minus reminders that the subject was a prisoner of war. Republican operatives will be dazzled by the anger at wire services, parsing of the words "cookout" and "barbecue," and reference to "fancy gourmet markets"; ordinary Americans, not so much.

SHORTER JIM LILEKS MEMORIAL DAY POST: Fucking Australian hippies, I'll show you! I've boycotted Mescan vodka and I'll boycott Green vodka! We shall fight on the benches, we shall fight on Jasperwood's various garden areas, we shall fight in the Lunds and Byerlys and Kowalskis, we shall fight about the bags; we shall never surrender.

UPDATE. According to the Greenhouse Calculator that so incensed Lileks, I should have died a long, long time ago. This fills me with joy, for I consider my entire life a gleeful evasion of what society expects of me, and the Calculator just confirms it. Poor Jimbo has internalized political correctness to such an extent that he must rage at the New Order that dares inform him he has transgressed. Young Republicans, past and present, take note: as the Captain told Babu in Benito Cereno, this is your future.

MEMORIAL DAY: ANNUAL LIGHTING OF THE LOGO. The folks at National Review Online haven't posted their usual complaints (yet) about Google's lack of a Memorial Day logo. The Ole Perfesser picks up the fallen standard (and pimps a link to a search engine that seems designed for lonely masturbators, though I didn't enjoy it at all).

CORRECTION: NRO's K-Lo did get to it, and early. I must have my filters on "high."

I thought we had this problem solved. But, hell, some prefer barbecue on Memorial Day, and some like to shop; everyone has his own tradition. Billy Kristol wants us to say thanks to soldiers on the street. Most Americans would like to show them more tangible appreciation.

Nothing wrong with that, but though the sentiments of Memorial Day accrue naturally to standing servicemembers, it was invented to honor the fallen. Whatever I think about this nation's military adventures, past and present, I know that millions died in them. That's worth a thought at least, and let contemplation take us where it may.

A SAD AND LONELY WORLD. Michelle Malkin, who has been boycotting Starbucks and supporting Dunkin' Donuts, not for sound gustatory reasons but for political reasons no ordinary person could understand, considers extending her jihad to Dunkin' Donuts because their spokesman Rachel Ray briefly appeared in something that looked like a scarf a Palestinian might wear.

When Sadly, No! first tauntingly proferred the keffiyah thing to Malkin, I thought: not even she is insane enough to actually take this bait. Now that she has, I'm beginning to get an unaccustomed feeling of Christian sympathy for her. What a small, strange world she lives in -- one in which even simple breakfast choices are fraught with peril. What are her lunch and dinner choices like? When she goes to a restaurant, does she peer into the waiters' station and wonder which servers are gays who wish to be married, peer into the kitchen and wonder which dishwashers are illegal aliens? When she makes her own meals, does she claw through the fridge and pantry like Harry Caul at the end of The Conversation, frantically searching the labels for signs of politically incorrect associations?

I rescued a kitten in Chinatown once. Her time on the streets had traumatized her, and while she was with me, she hissed at anything that moved, however slightly: toys, fingers, curtains caught in the wind, CD changer drawers, etc. I called her Spit. She finally found a nice home and, I'm told, calmed down and began to enjoy life. The idea of any living creature retaining such a horrible, all-embracing phobia into maturity chills me to the bone.

Of course, maybe she's just faking it for bucks, in which case I feel better and she should be thrown off a cliff.

JOKERS TO THE RIGHT. John McCain has repudiated Reverend Hagee's endorsement. This is probably a good piece of deck-clearing in advance of McCain's planned Grandpa Simpson offensive against Obama, and gets good notices from credentialed rightwing operatives. But at the fringes of the movement, he gets pushback. Michelle Malkin, tying it to the Parsley rejection:

The Straight Talk Express is starting to look like its 2000 model. Repudiationmania!... How much further can he go in playing chicken with Christian conservatives? “Outreach” ain’t going to carry him through...

She also asks McCain to repudiate Michael Bloomberg. At Free Republic, commenters are even more direct:

Soneone needs to get the word to McCain- QUIT PANDERING TO THE LEFT WING!!!!

..and what about LA RAZA ? Are they next..?

I guess the RINO relic can say with a straight face, I was again’ him, before I was with him, before I was again’ him again.

You f with Hagee you f’in with the REAL evangelicals. This could cost him dearly. I hope it does.

We usually leave the Freepers out of it, but these people are the baser part of the base, and they've had to be dragged kicking and screaming onto the Straight Talk Express. Now you see why.

It has been something of a talking point that Obama has known Reverend Wright forever while McCain's link to Hagee was very shallow. And so it was -- but endorsements, as opposed to friendships, are made for political purposes, and rejected for the same reason. No doubt some cost-benefit analysis was done before McCain finally pulled the pin. Hagee was part of what was supposed to shore up McCain's support among the red-meat conservatives -- not the National Review crowd, but the folks who want to save the fetuses by firing on the NEA with cannons stuffed with black people. Rejecting Wright was obviously painful for Obama, but the pain McCain will suffer from this is of a different kind. Obama doesn't have to worry about losing the Kill Whitey vote in consequence. The Hagee supporters, in contrast, may just reckon that God's kingdom is not of this earth, and stay home on Election Day to whittle and beat their children.

ISSUES ARE FOR PUSSIES. Obama briefly and rather gently rebukes McCain for his position on the GI Bill; McCain responds berserkly:

It is typical, but no less offensive that Senator Obama uses the Senate floor to take cheap shots at an opponent and easy advantage of an issue he has less than zero understanding of. Let me say first in response to Senator Obama, running for President is different than serving as President. The office comes with responsibilities so serious that the occupant can't always take the politically easy route without hurting the country he is sworn to defend. Unlike Senator Obama, my admiration, respect and deep gratitude for America's veterans is something more than a convenient campaign pledge. I think I have earned the right to make that claim.

When I was five years old, a car pulled up in front of our house in New London, Connecticut, and a Navy officer rolled down the window, and shouted at my father that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor...

"The Battle Hymn of the Republic" was playing in the background, and Rambo came out at the end to strafe reporters with machine-gun fire.

McCain was recently described by Karl Rove as "one of the most private individuals to run for president in history" and one of those "who are uncomfortable sharing their interior lives." Well, he got over that quick. His new plan is apparently to go Grandpa Simpson on Obama ("who did not feel it was his responsibility to serve our country in uniform") in hopes that America will prefer a belligerent war hero to a skinny civilian who pauses when he talks.

It's not a bad ploy. Democrats, having been inextricably tied in the public mind to draft-dodging hippies, don't have the luxury Republicans lately availed of talking down McCain's service, so Obama can only react to McCain's rage by (as he did in this instance) attempting to return attention to the actual subject. And when has that ever worked?

This country is fucked, but at least we're in for some lively Presidential debates on our way to the ash-heap of history. Expect cries of "Why, you young punk!" and "I'm a U.S. Serviceman, who the fuck are you?" and Charlie Gibson whistling for the MPs.

THE SELF AS SUBJECT. There's already some mocking reaction to the Emily Gould NYT Magazine article on her life and blog times, and seen one way her story is eminently mockable. She describes her ascent from just another me-blogger to internet "celebrity" via Gawker, and the personal details that she couldn't keep from broadcasting throughout, and background on those details that she hadn't previously shared. Of course it's appalling narcissistic, and the fact that it's a cover story in the Times magazine might give any sensitive soul in a bad mood the impression that the world has gone mad.

But I wound up feeling sympathy for Gould. First, because writing's a hard dollar, and writers must get it how they can: if the Times (or the Voice) comes knocking, why would you turn away? Her own story was what she had to sell. I doubt they would have let her cover the Balkans.

I also sympathize because narcissism is an occupational hazard of writers, or maybe a precondition. It takes tremendous gall to publish anything, even on the easy terms of blogging. Few writers start out as an authority on anything except themselves, and often have to be pulled like mules toward another subject. Journalism is very often the writer's introduction to the world outside himself, and ideally the demands of the craft take over, leaving style and sensibility as the pleasing distinctions that make Jane's coverage different from John's.

But Gould's Gawker beat encouraged her to more overt forms of self-revelation:

Injecting a personal aside into a post that wasn’t otherwise about me not only kept things interesting for me, it was also a surefire way of evoking a chorus of assenting or dissenting opinions, turning the solitary work of writing posts into something that felt more social, almost like a conversation.

Not being familiar with her work, I can't say whether this tendency was good or bad for it there (it obviously wasn't good for her personally, as her panic attacks indicate), but I can say that some of the most entertaining writers of the web are not above this sort of thing, and in fact their writing benefits from it. Terry Teachout's journalistic credentials are impeccable, but he writes about himself a fair amount, and makes it resonant, about something bigger than himself, and even illuminative of the points he makes in his arts criticism.

So that, in and of itself, isn't such a bad thing. There's always someone underneath all the words, and if he isn't too overeager to come out and steal the show, he may play a useful part on the surface of the writing, maybe even the main role. It takes a great deal of self-awareness to get that right, and that may be (along with the punishing hours, lousy pay, and enforced solitude) why so many writers drink, take drugs, behave badly in public, and have troubled relationships and, well, panic attacks.

The difference between Teachout's writing and Gould's is large but not categorical. Any subject can be worthwhile, even yourself, so long as you don't forget that it's a subject. Time and craft will take care of the rest if you heed them. This is not meant as advice to Gould -- who, being vastly more successful than I, doesn't need it -- but as a reminder to myself, which I share because that's what this gig is all about: the occasional residue of observation and thought that might be worth someone else's attention.

NO-BRAINER. George Packer's New Yorker article on the decline of the American conservative movement is okay, but it has two major themes and only sustains one of them.

The successful point, that conservative thinking is now moribund, is simple enough to show, and Stephen Bainbridge does a good job of underlining it by complaining on his blog that conservatives don't need new ideas, that they've been right all along, and that their mystical devotion to a Kirkean "people’s historic continuity of experience" is all that's needed. Next to this kind of fierce certainty, the tinkering of rightwing New Jacks Reihan Salam and Ross Douthat (the latter of whom describes his work to Packer, hilariously, as "a data-driven attempt at political imagination") seems absurdly twee, like trying to advance the Ratzinger Catholic agenda with a better kind of Folk Mass.

The problem is Packer's second point: that citizens are now unreceptive to the traditional conservative approaches. Pat Buchanan describes these to Packer as elemental: "... you can write columns and things like that, but they don't engage the heart. The heart was engaged by law and order. You reached into people -- there was feeling." Covering a rural John McCain campaign stop, Packer focuses on McCain's discomfort with the red-meat politicking the event required of him -- but nonetheless McCain did it, and it seemed to go over.

There's plenty of evidence that the voters are increasingly receptive to Democrats, but as you can see by the early anti-Obama campaigning apparent on the blogs and in the press, sometimes covered here, you can still get a lot of mileage out of calling Democrats elitist and out of touch, and even by tying them to ancient radical menaces like the Black Power movement. An intellectual might consider this approach shopworn, but political battles in this country are not exclusively intellectual events. You don't have to believe that the dead-enders are right to acknowledge that voters may yet be susceptible to their themes.

The main problem is that Packer treats the conservative movement as a serious intellectual force, and thinks its diminution as such will lead inevitably to defeat. Pitchfork Pat may have been trying to throw Packer a clue when he quoted Eric Hoffer to him: "Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." The conservative heavy thinkers to whom Packer gives much credence may feel as if the world has passed them by, but the racketeers really run the show. As formerly grumbling conservative operatives learn to love McCain and go all-in for the big win, philosophy is the least of their concerns, and their whither-conservatism thumb-suckers become mere padding for pages filled with stories about Obama's Muslim past, inability to bowl, and other such boob-bait. If you think they can't pull it off because their approach lacks intellectual vitality, you may be overthinking the whole thing.

YOU'RE RIGHT. THIS ACT HAS GOTTEN STALE. I'M GOING TO SEEK NEW HORIZONS. I forgot what I had against libertarians (Eloise at the Atlantic being a poor example of, well, anything) so I went to Reason's Hit and Run blog to refresh my enmity. There I found

• A lengthy example of the "I saw a silly liberal who said a silly thing" genre mastered by Alan Bromley and other conservative writers with active imaginations and absent editors -- very fine of its kind, but lacking a cab driver.
  
  
• A proposal that New Orleans replace Somalia as the official Libertarian Paradise since the citizens are "rebuilding on their own" thanks to a lack of competent Federal assistance. (Oddly, the author fails to make the obvious connection with the recent Chinese earthquake, the effects of which we may assume will teach self-reliance to millions.)
  
  
• Appreciative guffaws over Tim Cavanaugh's jovial response to the latest gay marriage controversy, basically saying that the concerns of silly gays are "boring" and their opponents are much more fun, and like who cares because someday we'll all look back on these days of second-class citizenship and laugh, especially if we're first-class citizens ourselves. (A timeline for the looking-back-with-laughter is not offered, but I'd advise those looking forward to it to find something to pass the waiting time, such as reading every book in their local library or knitting a cover for the barn.)

Actually most of it was inoffensive and some of it was even trenchant, at least to this statist's tired old government-worshipping eyes. But the fact remains: libertarians stand too close to you when they talk, sing along with Frank Zappa songs (even the obscure ones), and smell.

THE TREASON OF TECTONIC PLATES. Gazillion-Star General Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters says that not only is the press lying about our glorious war in Iraq, it's enlisting Communist help:

When Iraq seemed destined to become a huge American embarrassment, our media couldn't get enough of it. Now that Iraq looks like a success in the making, there's a virtual news blackout.

Of course, the front pages need copy. So you can read all you want about the heroic efforts of the Chinese People's Army in the wake of the earthquake.

Tells you all you really need to know about our media: American soldiers bad, Red Chinese troops good.

Is Jane Fonda on her way to the earthquake zone yet?

Today the top stories on the website of the New York Post, which carries Peters' column, concern Governor Patterson's migraine headache, a pay raise for the NYPD, and SPITZER AND THE HOOKER BY TV'S "LAW & ORDER" -- GOV. SCANDAL INSPIRES SHOW. Not a word about victory! Maybe Jane Fonda will bring Rupert Murdoch to the People's Republic. Oh wait -- he's already there.

FRAUD SQUAD. At National Review Online's The Corner, Andrew Stuttaford delivers a standard-issue plea for "skepticism" about climate change (or, as he puts it, "'climate change'"), but finishes:

That said, whatever their practical effects (some would be good, others not), McCain’s gestures to greenery are politically shrewd. Environmentalism is these days not only a widely-held civic religion, but, at least amongst some folk, a religion religion. Friendly nods in its direction are therefore a good electoral move, essentially harmless, and in the finest tradition of American political pandering: the equivalent, perhaps, of just another prayer breakfast.

As a wise man once (reportedly) said, “Paris is well worth a Mass.”

The Cornerites previously briefed Rudy Giuliani in the uses of dissimulation in getting over on gun nuts and abortion foes; Stuttaford's post suggests they may be preparing to give McCain lying lessons as well. Having previously been very, very cold toward the man they now embrace, they are certainly qualified to do so.

Obama is at a real disadvantage here. All his hope 'n' change stuff begs for conservatives to attempt to debunk it. Their ploys, from Rev. Wright to "Sweetiegate," have been mostly flimsy, sometimes even admittedly so, as with Jim Geraghty's item at NRO telling readers that though he is a "skeptic" of the rumor that Michelle Obama rails against "whitey" on a videotape, people may be inclined to believe it, which justifies his repeating it.

So they keep it up, throwing whatever they can get hold of, and declaring that their fusillades have penetrated Obama's facade, mask, disguise, fraud, etc. to reveal his socialist agenda, racism, devotion to Islam or the Devil or some damn thing -- because if he weren't guilty of some of it at least, why would people be paying attention? And when Obama pitches it back at them, he is accused of being thin-skinned, whiney, and, of course, guilty.

Obama is thus vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy because he has raised high expectations, and even an imputation of fault can reduce him. A similar counter-offensive against McCain can't be nearly as effective -- not because he is any less of a politician than Obama, but because no one sees in him anything to be hypocritical about.

Small wonder his supporters would so openly advise him to lay on the bullshit. It's their greatest strength.

UPDATE. Regarding the Michelle Obama tape rumor, commenter Julia asks, "Why is it, do you think, that all the angry black person dialogue these people invent for two ivy-educated lawyers with government jobs sound like Link from the Mod Squad?"