ICHTHYS IN A BARREL. The Mexican edition of Playboy has a cover depicting the Virgin Mary in a state of deshabille. The Anchoress says she is undistrubed:

Is it vulgar and insulting? Sure is. Is it worth my ire? No. And I’ll tell you why.

Thereupon follow 595 words of her ire, including attacks on Madonna and Christopher Hitchens and a link to a Vatican document.

I wonder how they got through childhood without realizing that, the more they protest, the more they're going to get teased.

UPDATE. Commenter Dave puts it best: "When a wingnut sticks their finger in your face and says: 'And I'll tell you why.' bring a lunch. You'll be a while."

A PRINCIPLED STAND. Reason's Nick Gillespie is glad that the auto bailout seems to have failed in the Senate (though now Treasury is stepping up, which his colleague Jacob Sullum says is wrong and maybe illegal).

I'm glad to to see the auto bailout go down for this round (though I wish the same had happened to the financial services bailout in the version that passed). However, I find it troubling that Republicans are also interested in dictating terms to any business (the story says they would have passed it if they figured the deal would break the unions more than the passage of time already has). That just isn't Congress' job and it's been part of the problem in the U.S. for at least 80 or so years.

Gillespie should be pleased that, over in the financial sector, no "dictating terms" worthy of the name is going on; no one appears to be crimping AIG's fat bonuses (or, as they are better known in the industry, retention payments). Conversely, workers at the car companies were asked to take a shave before their bailout would be given.

In our giant corporate welfare state, libertarians can only hope for, and be pleased with, incremental victories -- which suits the people we call conservatives, who take it as an opportunity to enact double standards that reward their friends and screw their enemies, and call it restraint. What for Gillespie is half a loaf is for the Republican Senators the whole megillah. "Small government" isn't winning anything here; the government is just making sure its big ladle is serving one bowl more than the other.

A HOLLYWOOD BOMB. Andrew Breitbart tells The Hill he's starting up a right-wing Hollywood site.

His strategy is to prod conservative Washington to start caring about Hollywood. Breitbart has already signed several big names, including House Minority Leader Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio), incoming Minority Whip Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and Reps. Thaddeus McCotter (R-Mich.), Mary Bono Mack (R-Calif.) and Connie Mack (R-Fla.), to post entries on the site. He has also landed former senator and GOP presidential candidate Fred Thompson, MSNBC correspondent Tucker Carlson and a slew of other conservative thinkers from the National Review, The Weekly Standard and Commentary magazine to contribute.

Breitbart is also eager to include commentary from Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh and other conservatives who have stirred up controversy in the past. “I don’t consider them controversial,” he says.

This Zhdanovite spectacle will offer endless amusement when it opens in January. We have been supplied with a press release, and here are some highlights of the first issue:

Amity Shlaes, author of The Forgotten Man, on how Frank Capra prolonged the Great Depression: "I was at first intrigued to learn Capra had made a film called You Can't Take It With You and hoped it would have conveyed a positive financial message that would get audiences spending to unleash the power of free markets. Alas, it turned out to be a celebration of non-conformists, clearly meant to make viewers comfortable with the alien philosophy of the New Deal. Capra also missed a valuable opportunity to have Mr. Smith, when he went to Washington. denounce Franklin Roosevelt from the floor of the Senate."

Rush Limbaugh on the treasonous legacy of Citizen Kane: "Folks, I am going to go out on a limb here. Every critic, marching in lockstep on orders from the cultural Kremlin, will tell you that Citizen Kane is a great movie. But how many of them have ever run a business? They just don't know what they're talking about. And Orson Welles, who was mincing around in spats and leotards since he was a baby, practically, didn't know either. So he libeled a great fictional businessman -- though everyone knows his model was one of my personal heroes, William Randolph Hearst -- by making him out to be corrupt and lecherous to stir up class envy. My friends, I've spent hours with business leaders like Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump, and I can tell you, no successful leader has a fireplace that big."

A podcast by Fred Thompson on Frost/Nixon: "Now, the Dick Nixon I knew was a mahty man, the sort of feller who'd brush off a David Frost lahk a houn' scratchin' off a flea. I tell you it galled Nixon to have to sit there oan thet TV set an' tolerate those questions from a lib'ral Englishman with big ol' sideburns. But he did it so people would know the truth an' to this day I hain't seen a lick o' evidence that he didn't donate that big ol' check to the St. Jude Hauspital. But that's the kinda man Richard Nixon was."

Jonah Goldberg on The X Files: I Want To Believe: "Now there's still the politically correct angle of the pedophile priest. I don't want to get into the weeds debating the role of the Catholic Church. I can understand why people are angry about priests diddling little boys, though I wonder why no one examines the role of gay rights groups in this abuse, which I hope to address in a future column. But I Want To Believe is really about faith, no matter how much the filmmakers try to get away from it, and I think it's ironic that Hollywood is so adamantly against religion and yet they keep making these movies about people who want to believe. There's a tradition of this in science fiction that I hope to get to in my new book. The head transplant thing also addresses conservative doubts about science and where it goes when it's left unregulated -- though liberals are all for regulation when it comes to banks, you never hear them speaking out against this sort of thing."

THE WILDERNESS YEARS. This response by Cato's Michael Tanner to Billy Kristol's otherwise useless column about the limits of small-government conservatism (which I have to assume presages a new starve-the-beast movement, since everyone knows Kristol is always spectacularly wrong) reminds us what those dear, dead days of Reaganism have come to:

Kristol is undoubtedly right that resisting big government has been harder in practice than in theory. But that hardly means that conservatives should abandon their principles. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor political, nor popular — but one must take it simply because it is right.” The evidence suggests that reducing the size and power of the federal government would be safe, popular, and good politics. But, regardless, Republicans should stand for limited government and individual liberty simply because it is the right thing to do.

On the one hand, Tanner portrays beast-starving as an MLK-style human rights struggle that must be pursued on moral imperative in the teeth of wild dogs and fire hoses; on the other, he believes that it would yet be "safe, popular, and good politics." Only the flustering caused by defeat could get these contrary assertions bunched up in a single paragraph like this.

For true believers of the Cato Institute, I imagine the cause is rather Biblical. But the political reality has always been earthier: decades of simply offering voters more for less, a winning proposition in most commercial transactions. The ploy worked so well that the treasury was looted and the national infrastructure and local governments were wrecked, and now that the market has stopped paying off silver dollars we are forced to notice it. If Tanner really likes his MLK analogy, he might consider that his civil rights movement has lost its authority because of the misbehavior of some "prosperity pimps." But I suppose he wouldn't want to take even that much credit for Dick Fuld and the boys right now.

In the same forum John O'Sullivan paraphrases holy Hayek to the effect that "the idea of small government was vital even if there was no prospect of its ever being achieved." The religious tincture (O'Sullivan even refers to a "barrier" that "might even gain a quasi religious status over time") suggests not only unattainability, but also a fallback when things go wrong: if our starvation diet causes more problems than benefits, then we have only been overzealous in pursuit of a noble ideal. We have fallen out of the Edenic state of Reaganism by sheer willfulness and pride, and will be restored to it after much suffering.

While these guys are thus considering the present-day conscience of conservatism, the rest of us are bailing like hell to keep the water from rising over our heads. I can imagine the reaction if they stepped out of their meditation room to tell ordinary folks that they ought to set aside the buckets and wait for the Invisible Hand to sweep the tide away. Looking inward is sometimes just a nice name for keeping one's head down.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, mainly on the War on Christmas and related battles. That's what the holidays are all about -- lazy journalism!

NOT ROCKET SCIENCE. Ann Althouse is angry about the "fluorescent bulbs that Obama and his cadre of environmentalists are about to foist on us all," and at his notion that we can save money by using them in government buildings: "Light bulbs first. They're supremely important! They will save us all! Light bulbs!"

The Ole Perfesser agrees. "Sorry, but this kind of wonky no-sacrifice fixit nostrum reminds me of Al Gore, or Jimmy Carter’s sweaters, and I don’t think it’ll play well, or deliver as promised."

Even Popular Mechanics -- whose authority the Perfesser usually accepts -- testifies that the average American home would save $180 per year by switching to CFLs. Since we're living under oppressive big government, which must employ hundreds of thousands of lightbulbs, going to fluorescents to save money seems like common sense. But that's been unpopular with Althouse and the Perfesser for a long time.

Meantime Dr. Mrs. Ole Perfesser, a global warming skeptic, has been convinced by a report that pollution may be increasing female vs. male births -- and her own observation "that it seems like there are more girl babies and just girls in general wherever I go" -- to call for "more research and attempts to address this problem."

Once Obama establishes his Chief Technology Office I'm sure they'll be demanding a NASA-scale program for eternal life.

WHERE'S THE OUTRAGE? As they're big on displacement, whenever some atrocity occurs wingers accuse liberals of showing insufficient outrage. It's not so much a policy prescription as an accusation of psychological unfitness because, though we agree that we would rather kill terrorists than let them kill us, we don't express it in blood-curdling howls. In the case of Mumbai, we've gotten things like "India Burns, Liberals Plan Tea Parties" from the wonderfully named Tygrrrr Express, which heeds us get into the proper spirit by watching a Batman movie ("I never thought that a movie about a comic book character would sum up something as complicated as terrorism so perfectly"). As to what government action we should take while thus emotionally stimulated, Tygrrrr asserts we should "kill terrorists, and turn over the ones we capture to India provided they promise to use brutality against them," which course of action he does not think to suggest to the present Administration, which is in a position to effect it and has in fact done it before, sometimes on carelessly chosen subjects. But I doubt he's really looking for Bush to do anything. He just wants us to know he's better than liberals because he can show anger more easily and voluptuously.

A kind of nadir is reached at Ace of Spades, where the proprietor tells us that, while it's admirable that Jon Stewart called terrorists "douchebags," he is unwilling to give the last full measure:

Would Stewart actually celebrate the death of a terrorist killed by US forces or a Predator drone, as we do here? Of course not-- that would be unenlightened, taking pleasure in the well-earned deaths of monsters.

Thinking back even to the golden days of Sid Caesar, I can't recall many TV comedy shows where the killing of even lawful combatants was inserted for laughs. Hell, I don't think anyone even got killed on "Hogan's Heroes" -- mainly they got humiliated, snarled, "Ooooooh, Colonel Hoooogaaaan!" and shook their jowls.

This sort of thing makes me think of John and John Quincy Adams (Gore Vidal has a beautiful essay about them and all the early Adamses), who presided over some of America's greatest foreign policy triumphs without pretending to be baboons. The elder Adams wished it put on his tombstone, "Here lies John Adams, who took upon himself the responsibility of the peace with France in the year 1800." John Quincy once responded to a toast of "My country, right or wrong," with "I disclaim all patriotism incompatible with the principles of eternal justice." No doubt Ace would think them, and Vidal (who served with the U.S. Army in the Second World War), sissies. We've come a long way since the Adamses, alas.

THE SOUL OF MAN UNDER JONAH GOLDBERG. Ross Douthat takes off from Jonah Goldberg's idiotic post about how "The Wire" is a "conservative" show, and does much better:

It's a testament to the genius of the show that its depiction of Baltimore (and by extension, America) offers fodder for liberal, conservative, leftist and libertarian readings - much like reality itself! In this sense, The Wire is the rarest and most precious of beasts: A work of art that's intensely political but rarely devolves into agitprop. But to the extent that any specific political vision undergirds its portrait of contemporary America, that vision is radical and revolutionary - though shot through with despair - rather than conservative.

Naturally Goldberg thinks this exonerates him.

But I don't think anything Ross has thrown up contradicts what I wrote . . . and neither does Ross! Lots of great artists and filmmakers and television producers have incorrect, debatable, wrongheaded, or just plain idiotic political views. George Bernard Shaw had real artistic talent and he held profoundly wrong and evil ideas about politics. D. H. Lawrence proclaimed, "three cheers for the inventors of poison gas" and insisted that: "If I had my way, I would build a lethal chamber as big as the Crystal Palace, with a military band playing softly. Then I'd go into the back streets and bring them all in, all the sick, the halt, and the maimed."

Compared to these guys David Simon's a hero-saint with the wisdom of Solomon in my book. The relationship between art and artists is a rich topic of discussion, though hardly my strength. Suffice it to say the fact that Simon draws incorrect conclusions about the proper public-policy solutions for the world he describes gives me little reason to respect that description any less.

At least his awareness that Douthat's reasoning is superior leads him, however clumsily, to pretend that it was his own all along -- the tribute idiocy pays to intelligence. It was also a good idea for him to avoid going any further on the subject of art and artists (any post in which he announces, loudly, in the title that "I Don't Care" presages a bolt for the exits), though in touching on it he leaves an unfortunate impression.

He's right that artists will often have ideas that are much harder to love than their works of art. But his examples suggest that the art-making is completely divorced from the ideas of its makers -- he tips it when he mixes Shaw's Fabian socialism with Lawrence's misanthropic outburst, as if they represent the same thing because he doesn't agree with either. He seems to believe "real artistic talent" insulates the playwright from his plays as if they were cabinets, which may in inspired cases show some of the soul of their creator, but not really as overtly as, say Heartbreak House does Shaw's.

The thoughts and instincts of great artists are distilled in their works. If these works are more universal and accessible than their makers' ideas, it's because making art is like solving an equation: speaking very generally, you start with a problem, and have to make the thing "come out" so that it explains itself after you've walked away from it. That burns away a lot of dross -- usually the stuff that you can better explain by merely talking.

Though Shaw preached political systems, the people and relationships in his plays (though some of them preach too) are necessarily more complicated than his ideas -- or, for that matter, any idea. He created heroic capitalists and dim-witted socialists not because he thought that way about capitalism and socialism, but because he was sensitive and attracted to the complexities of life and knew that paradox more effectively captured them than diatribe. Goldberg probably thinks Shaw was masking his "profoundly wrong and evil ideas" for his benefit, but artists can't be held responsible for the density of some of their patrons.

Some artists really are political. Shakespeare believed in monarchy. It doesn't much interfere with my enjoyment of his plays, for some reason.

EXIT INTERVIEW. A digest of President Bush's interview with ABC News has been posted. I can't bear to watch the interview itself, but I found the excerpts fascinating.

Bush has been practically invisible lately. His highest public profile since the last State of the Union address came during his senior-week antics at the Olympic Games. There have been reports of him drinking at a recent summit. Who could blame him? He's been in the deep freeze for months. His authority has plunged with his approval ratings. McCain's political kabuki of running against Bush's policies probably didn't upset him -- he knows how the game is played -- but it did remind him why it was necessary.

Think of his position at the APEC summit where he was alleged to be boozing. Another tedious managerial function at which his presence was required and unnecessary; while the attendees plumped for optimism and reform, bankers and regulators were making real decisions back in the States. Drunk or sober, it has to have worn on the guy. Back at Crawford he could just lift some weights or take a nap.

In fact it's a marvel he's stayed focused as long as he has. Most of his Presidency, and most of his executive career, has been like that summit -- a decision is made, a PR program (usually involving lecterns and backdrops with slogans written on them) is executed, then back to the bunker to collect the data. His famous incuriousness about detail ("Alright, you've covered your ass") probably made the job easy, even fun for him most of the time. But now that no one appreciates the spectacular, graceful ease with which he does barely anything at all, maybe his customary senior-management walk-throughs have become a dreary ritual, like taking victory laps when no one is applauding.

We have been encouraged to imagine what the man of action who has been made expendable might feel: Wilson after his stroke, Johnson when the war had spun out of control. What might go through the mind of a MBA/CEO President who had comfortably delegated so much, who stepped up only when political exigencies demanded his cowboy act, when he comes to the end of two terms and finds himself so singularly disowned by the people he had, by proxy, led?

You might say that Clinton had found himself in a similar place -- certainly as irrelevant, his last term a long vamp of compromise. But Clinton had impeachment to keep him sharp. Scandal just invigorated his glad-handing skills -- it was probably the highlight of his second term. Bush is as capable as Clinton of summoning his political gifts to meet a crisis, but after the September 11 attacks, nothing much seemed to excite him. I really believe he failed to effectively lead the charge to reform Social Security, despite his claims of "political capital," because the subject bored him. It was wonk stuff, it was difficult, and at the end what would he have accomplished? No one really knew, and even if it succeeded no one would remember this brave act of... accountancy. Which is what accountants do, not Presidents. September 11, on the other hand, that was already in history books. That was leadership.

That was the beginning of the end for Bush. The Republican Congress stepped up to fill the void, and found the attention unflattering and eventually fatal. Bush now existed only as a red flag with which ambitious Democrats could enrage voters. Bush, no dummy when it comes to his own best interests, stayed out of the public eye.

Now here he is on ABC, wanly wishing the intelligence on WMDs "had been different, I guess," and calling Iraq "a do-over that I can't do," regretting his inability to guide his own party on immigration, regretting also that "the tone in Washington got worse" -- something that, despite the bipartisan advertisement of his Texas tenure, he never, ever attempted in any way to fix -- and weakly defending his Administration's attempts to "safeguard" a financial system that is plummeting toward collapse.

Why does he bother? Because it's done, and he's used to doing the done thing. Here too is a ritual that he knows he can execute. I've never heard of a CEO who really thought he screwed things up -- there are always exigencies, market conditions, and such like that made a mess of a helluva good plan. But I've seldom seen a CEO make a stink at the end of his tenure, either, however ignoble. With his fatalistic l'envoi, Bush is showing what, in his world, is class. He could tell us all what a shit deal he got dealt, but two-term Presidents don't kick. So he just reads the toplines and brasses it out.

He knows we're disappointed, and it's not that he wouldn't have preferred us to be proud but hey, he's not running for anything anymore except the exit. He never needed us to understand, he just needed us to cooperate, and if he has any fondness for the people he led for eight years, it's because we did cooperate, right up until it didn't matter.

Bush also told ABC that he thinks Obama won because people preferred to see him in their living rooms "explaining policy." Bush was probably thinking about all those televised addresses and speeches he'd made himself, and how relieved he was when these were finished and the secondary could take over. I'm not sure he knows that, when Obama finishes a speech, he probably goes back to work; were he informed of the fact, he would probably shrug and say, "worth a try." Or if he were of a more philosophical frame of mind, he might turn to the immortal works of Clint Eastwood: "A man's gotta know his limitations."

RETURN OF THE CULTURE WARS. I had worried that it would come to this. They did it so often when they were in power that I had reason to hope that, once they went into the ditch, they would concentrate on Conservatism 2.0 and other such innocuous hobby-horses. But like a bat out of heck comes Jonah Goldberg talking about how TV showz he likez is really conservative:

But look at ["The Wire"] through the eyes of a conservative. This is a Democratic city, run almost uniformly by liberals... Race relations between the actual characters are remarkably healthy, and nearly every mention of race as a salient issue is in the context of the political nonsense inherent to Baltimore, or rather urban, Democratic politics. To the extent many liberals try to explain all of the problems of poor blacks on racism, the show was a powerful rebuttal.

I forget whether the political parties endorsed by Tom Doniphon, Stoddard, and Cassius Starbuckle are made clear in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, but I'm sure these are central to Goldberg's point.

He's actually on the brink of something when he says "most [liberals] no doubt liked it in no small part for the same reasons I did: it was brilliantly written, wonderfully acted and almost perfectly directed." (I'd like to hear what, in his view, prevents the directing from achieving perfection. On second thought, I'd rather not.) If only he could follow that train of thought far enough to consider why people of different political faiths would be moved by the same work of art.

But Goldberg's so addicted to explaining why everything good in life is right-wing that he is moved to make nonsense statements like, "Sure, the makers of the Wire are for ending the drug war, but their vision of drug use is hardly the cheery nonsense you hear from some champions of legalization."

If he were engaging the show rather than trying to protect it from his own preconceptions, he wouldn't wind up in such preposterous rat-holes. Too bad no one can explain to him that the traditional critical approach requires much less grinding effort -- he'd be on it in a second.

He threatens to give "Deadwood" the same treatment. Gack. Expect a lengthy disquisition on how Hearst was the real hero of the show.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the "Conservatism 2.0" plan for world domination, which seems a lot like the old plan. Also took a quick read of rightblogger reactions to the Clinton appointment, which indicate that Obama is actually George Bush. If only we'd known! It would have saved a lot of time.

OFF TO A BAD START. Victor Davis Hanson says Obama's centrist appointments show that "Obama's victory... more so even than perhaps a John McCain's, may do more for Bush's reputation that anyone ever imagined." Previously Hanson wrote that "at least on national and homeland security it is perhaps not the shadow of Bill Clinton, but of George W. Bush, that now begins to loom large" in the Obama Administration.

Two things need to be pointed out; one, just weeks ago Hanson was calling Obama a socialist, and two, Obama isn't even President yet. Apparently Hanson can't accept that so many people -- white people at that! -- voted for the socialist, so he gloats that Obama is going to be George Bush.

Rather than vamp so shamelessly, he should probably just take a vacation.

THE USUAL GANG OF IDIOTS. I feel I must apologize again for the paucity of posts, and this time admit that it's not all because I'm worked to death (though I am) or sick (better, thanks). I am also suffering from a lack of interest in my usual subjects. Maybe the emotional discharge of the post-election has affected them, or me.

I mean, what could anyone do with this? It's as mawkish and maudlin as any earlier Peggy Noonan joint, of the sort I used to enjoy, but now she provides no burr to catch the imagination. That she believes the economy can't be too bad because she can't see, from her dirigible high above Fifth Avenue, its effects ("Everyone is dressed the same... The mall is still there, and people are still walking into the stores...") is highly provocative; a few minutes' research might have revealed to her, for example, that crops are bad and crop insurers are defaulting, which in the current situation might discomfort any sensible person, and that things aren't so hot in the cities, either. Also, as I've said before, in our first stages of decline Americans naturally try to keep up appearances, not giving up the outward appearance of sociable, solvent life until it's absolutely unavoidable. What do you think was fueling that great credit surge before the bust?

But just as you're getting ready to pounce, Noonan decides she doesn't really mean it, but it doesn't really matter: things "will roughen," but "we've gotten through roughness before." Of course her model for getting through is the hands of Jesus guiding her jet liner to safety ("Lord, thank you for our previous safety, and get us through this turbulence"), and her coda a mention of a book with vodka in the title, which was probably to Noonan a sign from God that she should have another.

It's like that scene in Post Office where Bukowski's finally had enough of that co-worker who's always muttering insults, and wheels on him only to realize that the guy is lost in a private fog and has no awareness of him or anything else around him. It takes a lot of the fight out of you.

Likewise Lileks is moonier than usual and hard to grasp, as here, where he mourns (after some broken-field running to disguise the vapidness of his theme from readers, and possibly himself) the godlessness that has left our Modern Arts shallow and brittle, unlike the works of the Immortal Beethoven etc. All I can think to say is: so where's your cathedral, pal?

Maybe I'll start jabbing my leg with a penknife like Gide's Lafcadio until these guys start giving me more to work with.

IF YOU LIKE THEM SO MUCH WHY DON'T YOU GO SHOP WITH THEM? Crunchy Rod Dreher looks at the death of a mall of his acquaintance:

On the occasion that we would go to Bon Marche for something, you could tell that poor mall was on its way out. There would be surprisingly few shoppers milling about, and a growing number of poor black people. White people started to think of Bon Marche as the "black mall," notwithstanding that middle-class black people shopped at Cortana. Over time, the housing development next door, which, according to the Deadmalls.com history of Bon Marche's death, was built for yuppies, turned into a crime-infested ghetto.

You'll never guess where he's going with this.

If a mall gets known among white people as "the black mall" -- or, I suppose, in a regional variation, as "the Mexican mall" -- they just won't go to it. Stuff White People Hate? Right-minded white people will deplore the trend, but the kind of liberal, educated white people who deplore this kind of thing aren't the kind of white people who would be caught dead actually shopping in the black mall. They're embarrassed by other white people who won't shop there, and who don't feel bad about it.

It seems brother Rod doesn't want to come right out and say that black people ruin malls, so he hits an available secondary target, liberals. (Surely he doesn't count himself one of the "liberal, educated white people.") In his view they're worse than the rest of their race, because they're hypocritical. (It's an old gambit of his.)

I marvel that no one told him that we don't go to malls, but to boites and boutiques run by our friends the homosexuals.

He does ask if there has been "academic work on the role of class and ethnicity in driving the success and failure of malls," so there's a chance he may once again find a scholarly reason to keep away from black folks.

UPDATE. Maybe Dreher should solicit the opinions of some of the posters to this police bulletin board, discussing the Black Friday unpleasantness at the Green Acres Mall in Long Island. No guilty white liberals they!

BRINGING A DOG TO A CATFIGHT. Lindsay Lohan and Sam Ronson had a little punch-up the other day. What normal people see as another exciting episode in the public soap opera of celebrity nitwits, or perhaps proof that catfights aren't really as sexy as advertised, Glenn Sacks sees as evidence of the oppression of men:

The two lesbian lovers are abusing each other and “throwing punches” and the only man involved -- Calum Best -- is the one who breaks it up. Tell me, if Lohan was getting punched by her boyfriend as opposed to her girlfriend, would it be labeled a “fight”? Would it be seen as a cute lover’s “spat”?

Lohan and Ronson are reportedly in couples counseling. I eagerly await a Glenn Sacks column on how this exemplifies the rise of a therapeutic nanny-state designed to keep him from ever getting to know Lindsay Lohan.

TALES FROM THE BLOGOSPHERE. A fellow at Eject! Eject! Eject! doesn't like that he was recently made to take a sexual harrassment class, which many reasonable people could understand. Before he really get into it, he tells us how proud he is that he had "managed to get this far without working in a large corporate office," which is commendable, as is his professed respect for the "creative and terrific people" with whom he works in his new corporate job.

Then he describes the class: "I find it deeply offensive to my personal sense of honor and integrity to be punished or otherwise lectured on something I did not do," he says. The "two hours of second-grade style... lecturing infuriates me on many levels." He doesn't need this stuff: He learned good manners "not from the State of California or a battalion of corporate lawyers, but from my parents, who raised me to be polite, well-mannered," etc.

He pauses to mutter, "I know, I can see the smiles on many faces already. It’s like I’m speaking in Aramaic," yet despite our obvious lack of understanding he presses on. He was subjected to a video with the "same emotional pitch and condescension as the old ABC After-School Specials," "unimaginably cloying and infantile," featuring a "a clueless, insensitive white male... emotionally advanced, sensitive (yet strong!) women and his solemn, understanding (but firm!), black male superior." And he's "getting a little tired of this movie. I see this movie everyday." Doesn't say where, though -- perhaps at the government indoctrination center out where he lives, or on the backs of his eyelids.

Thereafter, for hundreds of words, he tells us more about the idiotic class, and about how he knows all this stuff already, and about how well he was raised. Which is why

I am willing to sit at this desk, as the only one of 24 happy, smart, creative people, and look like some reactionary nut case for being enraged about the fact that we willingly submit ourselves to insults to our personal honor and integrity that our forefathers would never, ever have countenanced. And I am ashamed on behalf of them. But just me. No one else thinks anything of it at all.

You can go there and read the rest of the aria, the pitch of which continues to rise till all glasses within earshot are shattered.

Sexual harrassment classes are a nuisance, like getting one's car registered, doing the laundry, and having one's teeth cleaned. Some authors belabor these situations to humorous effect, or to reveal some angle on these experiences that is unique and helps us see the universal significance of the mundane. Others only want you to know that they're bigger than all this, and bigger than the littlebrains -- however much they may tell you they respect them -- who don't see the same deathless import they see in their own suffering. In that vast madhouse echoing with anguished howling that is the blogosphere, it doesn't surprise me to find several of these every week, nor to find that they very often are made by privileged white guys who think their story needs no better claim on our attention than that they are telling it.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the slim pickings on which rightbloggers are obliged to feast these days, including Sarah Palin's slaughtered turkeys. It is one of their venerable schticks -- one day I really should assign them all numbers, as Slip Mahoney did for the Bowery Boys' "routines" -- to declare that their own embarrassments are actually victories that have been mendaciously misinterpreted by the media. This can work okay when the subject is some sober issue mostly handled in the print media, but when it's just a funny YouTube like the Palin event, practically any defense is doomed, especially in their ham-hands. There's a lot of bunk written about the effect of "new media" on politics, but I think this episode helps prove one defensible point about it -- that when viewers experience a piece of poli-tainment, the usual media filters can't do much to dispel its impact -- as well as the ancient wisdom that the cover-up is always worse than the crime.

The column touches also on their reactions to Obama's generally down-the-middle Administration picks which, whatever we fellow-travelers may think about them, have the effect of setting rightwing opinion against itself -- that is, forcing the widespread charge that Obama is a socialist dictator to coexist with congratulations that Obama has dispirited the "nutroots" by hiring centrists, which coexistence occurs sometimes side by side at places like RedState. This is of course an insufficient reason for a President to do anything, and I'll wait for actual governance to see how disappointed I'm supposed to be about it. I will say that, while I'm not the biggest Hillary Clinton fan around, I wouldn't be surprised if Obama were thinking that she'd be less damaging to him at State than in the Senate.

SORRY SO QUIET. I've been busy, natch, and also sick -- like my idol Jim Lileks I get colds, but instead of having dozens of them every year like he does, I just get one or two, but they're doozies and sap my essence.

Despite chills and bronchial tumult I have continued to earn my meager living at the Voice. You can always go look at that stuff; just because no one reads it doesn't mean it's not good. And I have a bit about Peggy Noonan today that might gladden your black little hearts.

STILL BITTER, STILL CLINGING, AND STILL BEATEN. Dr. Mrs. Ole Perfesser has apparently not yet gone John Galt, alas, with the Perfesser in an armed compound. So now she's taking advice from Ted Nugent -- specifically, become a public nuisance. She gives it a spin:

The other day, I was at a drugstore and the clerk was talking to what looked like a Baby Boomer who was discussing how he voted for Obama. They both scoffed that not many in Tennessee voted for him, "what do you expect?" said the older guy, "this is Tennessee we're talking about." They both chuckled in agreement. I looked at the clerk and said in a loud voice, "So what you're saying is those of us here in Tennessee who voted for McCain are rednecks, is that right?!!!!" There were several people milling around in line at this point and the clerk turned red and stammered, "No, ma'am," and went on to give some lame explanation about what he meant. But I knew I had him. He was visibly shaken and I hope the next time he decides to diss Tennesseans while at work, he'll think twice.

He'll certainly think twice about saying it around Dr. Helen (or, as she will swiftly become known around the stores of Knoxville, "The Screamer").

I see also that their new comfort object is a video that alleges everyone who voted for Obama is stupid. And bragging about how many new guns they're bought since, you know, things got a little dark in Washington.

To be fair to these lunatics, I don't think this program of contempt for most of their fellow citizens, expressed in public rages at service employees and gun fetishism, is meant to win the hearts and minds of their fellow countrymen, but to soothe their own. Hell, even liberals have been known to get a little snide with their countrymen right after a defeat. Of course, there are a few differences: for one, liberals don't generally respond to defeat by stockpiling weapons, and for another, conservatives act the same way when they win.

Of course, they're much easier to take when they've lost.

NARRATE THIS. At Pajamas Media, Jon Henke looks to rightwing history for guidance:

However, Reagan did not win this victory in the public consciousness ex nihilo. One of the dominant factors shaping public opinion is the availability heuristic...

I almost left right then, but it looked short, so I pressed on to the English interpretation of the keys to future wingnut victory:

As it turns out, a compelling story is enough to win elections by a large margin...

...the Left did not retake the executive and legislative branches by being more liberal or more moderate, or by clever political jujitsu. Democrats became the majority because they changed the story.

So true. And what a story it was: "The Republican have fucked this country up so badly that you'll even vote for a black guy to get it unfucked."

The Republicans are welcome to top it if they can. I suspect their offer will be some variation of "we hate fags."

UPDATE. Apologies for the trouble with the comments box here. Now sure what's wrong, but Haloscan and its new owners JS-KIT are clearly not rolling out the premium services for discount members.