NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, considering reactions to the Sotomayor hearings. As usual, the upshot is a victory for the right -- either in that Sotomayor had to pretend (or really be) less lefty than our communist President really wanted, or that she will inevitably overstep when on the Court and finally awaken the sheeple. Ron Schenck says it's no big deal: "She will be a reliable pro-Roe vote, but she may disappointingly surprise some of her most ardent supporters when she gives a little bit to the other side," and "she is not the worse we could have gotten; and she replaces one of the worst on the Court, so the balance won’t change." He is referring, of course, to William O. Douglas. Nonetheless Schenck counsels his compatriots to call their senators and to "Pray! I do believe prayer changes things -- even Supreme Court justices!" This is an opposition strategy I can thoroughly endorse. It should be noted that Schenck is something of a moderate, and more radical factions may have other plans.

WALTER CRONKITE, R.I.P. First I have to credit those rightbloggers who have been gracious about Cronkite's passing, or have observed de mortuis nil nisi bonum.

Naturally there have been plenty of assholes. MacRanger announces, "Pinko Cronkite Bites the Dust. And good riddance. The original 'surrendercrat' is dead. Walter Cronkite along with congress caused us to lose in Vietnam." That the guy thinks Cronkite helped lose the war because of an anecdote about a President who, far from being influenced to bug out of Vietnam, slipped from office and left it to his Republican successors to bollocks up, would alone justify discounting his slur if his whole career hadn't already; to paraphrase Ray Collins in The Magnificent Ambersons, if he weren't so thoughtless we might think him rather offensive.

Not much less thoughtless but offensive nonetheless are John Podhoretz and Say Anything, who suggest that Cronkite could learn a thing or two from bloggers, of all people. "There are no Walter Cronkites any more, and while I bear personal animosity to Cronkite himself, good riddance to that era," says the latter (I assume no slip). "But to have a big, giant, sloppy mish-mash of information available for the public to pick through than a carefully managed stream of news being spoon-fed to us by talking heads on television who became so trusted nobody dared question them."

From that last sentence fragment I guess that he means the mish-mash is better. While I enjoy the big scrum as much as the next guy, as my coverage ceaselessly shows, it is also full of bullshit, and there are disadvantages as well as advantages to the caveat lector approach, particularly considering the dangerously elevated public relations and permanent campaign components of the blogosphere.

But let's not forget what these people are discounting: the career of a man who did local reporting when there was no internet, and barely phone service, to assist him; who went to North Africa and Europe to cover a hot war (and, in his middle age, Vietnam); who anchored a news organization which, whatever else you want to say about it, went everywhere for news; and whose work won the respect of real journalists. This blog thing we're doing, it's okay, but what Cronkite did was on an entirely different level. It's amazing that, in the face of all evidence, any of these pissants have the nerve to claim they've surpassed it.

Read this, basement boys. You have anything that compares? Kerning, perhaps?

UPDATE. Ain't no death-dis like a Christian death-dis -- The Anchoress:

After his retirement, I would read profiles and interviews with Cronkite, and I found myself thinking of him – even when I was still a “liberal Democrat” – as something of an elitist.

Yuh don't say.

So, RIP, Mr. Cronkite. I will not blame you for the media excesses we will have to endure for the next week to ten days.

Because what would be the point? She will blame instead Hitler/Obama.

NEXT WEEK: HOW FREE CONCERTS IN CENTRAL PARK SAP THE NATION'S WILL. At City Journal, Myron Magnet denounces not only that bastard FDR, as is the style these days, but also that bastard Fiorello LaGuardia. He attacks the "European-style New York" Roosevelt and LaGuardia engendered as anti-democratic and destructive of self-reliance.

When it comes to actual negative results from our "struggling under the accumulated burden of eight decades of 'progressive' government" in New York, though -- and eight decades should be enough time to produce a good dystopia, I think -- he mainly tells us that it's expensive, and that rich people pay too much for it.

He does claim that New York's "public services, even vital ones like the subway, work badly" -- compared to what? Public transit in Tucson? -- "because they operate less for the convenience of their users than for the sake of their unionized, overpaid employees," and because we have "no democratic levers of change, such as voters’ initiatives and referenda." But he fails to tell us where public services work significantly better, probably because New York doesn't compare well with other places. He might suggest low-tax New Hampshire, for example, but even the most conservative governance is not going to make us resemble that sparsely-populated, rural state in any case (though I like the idea of Town Meeting Day). And Magnet is presumably too smart to offer as an example that Valhalla of "voters’ initiatives and referenda," California.

You can just imagine his exasperation that New York no longer has the high levels of crime and grime of previous decades. Then this would be so much easier to put over! Oddly, the name "Giuliani" does not appear in his essay. Maybe Magnet denounced him, too, and the editors cut it out; or he started to praise the former Mayor, but realized that this would fit badly with his chronicle of decades of urban degeneracy.

So Magnet retreats to rhetoric ("As opposed to FDR’s immense governmental machine throbbing mightily at the end of history, how much grander is Edmund Burke’s vision of society," etc.) and warnings of future perils and further shores. Our allegedly socialistic regime will yet destroy our democratic spirit, he warns -- "Once you start talking about government’s equitable distribution of wealth... you have begun to leave democracy behind" -- just as it has in ruined Europe's, such as it was. He has plenty of horrible examples of genuinely anti-democratic behavior from there -- such as "France prosecuting Brigitte Bardot, and Switzerland and Italy prosecuting Oriana Fallaci, for anti-Muslim statements" -- but no convincing argument that they're coming to pass here. Couldn't he have mentioned our bicycle lanes? They've got to be will-sapping, somehow

The worst part is when he describes, at great length, the insufficient fighting spirit of Dutch and British soldiers. You can tell he wants to say that we're catching it, too. But to paraphrase Bogie, there are certain sections of New York, Magnet, where I wouldn't advise you to try and pontificate.

IT'S BIRTHERIFFIC! The tale of the soldier who refused to serve in Afghanistan on the grounds that Obama was born on foreign soil and is therefore not President -- an evasion of duty the soldier apparently had a right to pull as a reservist, which fact he initially concealed in order to drum up publicity for his cause -- has done us the favor of drawing out some heretofore unrevealed birther bloggers. I didn't know, for instance, that Tom Maguire of Just One Minute was one of them, but I may be forgiven for missing that as he's obviously trying to have it both ways:

AS TO THE BIRTHER CONSPIRACIES: I have no idea what the current state of play with the birther conspiracies might be (and I am not sure I want to find out), but the I will reiterate the one idea I might be able to pass off as original - Obama's mother and maternal grandparents would not have been cooking the paperwork on Obama's citizenship status in 1961 in order to preserve his Presidential viability in 2008; they would have been doing so in order to enhance their own chances in a custody scuffle with the Kenyan father...

Maguire's not like those nuts -- he's got an original conspiracy theory! And one with which he harasses poor, sane David Weigel at the Independent ("In his comments section Dave Weigel implicitly accedes to the notion that the Dunhams had a powerful motive to fudge Obama's citizenship... My follow-up comment is being blocked there, at least for now..."). This is a great way to show the world that you're not nuts, though maybe Maguire should march around outside Weigel's apartment with a sign that says "RELEASE THE MAGUIRE COMMENTS" to really cement the impression.

DirectorBlue has an even more wizardly fake-out: "Well, I'm certainly no conspiracy theorist when it comes to Barack Obama's birthplace, having done my best to help debunk the birth certificate controversy. But this article, from Ghana's leading newspaper, certainly won't help dull the outcry any."

Riddlemethis at The Astute Bloggers is more forthrightly in for the big win. Learning that the recalcitrant soldier had lost a Security Services gig with the DOD, Riddlemethis roars, "Is this what can expect from our DOD and the Obama administration: intimidation, termination, and bullying. Seems that Obama has a very large problem on his hands and has really got to show the birth certificate and everything sealed for that matter." Obama's really stepped in it this time! Riddlemethis will now watch developments with his nose that much closer to the screen, and a rag handy to wipe away the fog his breath leaves on this glass.

Not all of them are crazy in precisely this way. This Ain't Hell don't buy this birther crap nohow -- which is why he's mad that "the Obama Administration renews the paranoia from the birthers." Why would Obama sic the dogs of birtherism on himself? Maybe just to show off, like Houdini. When This Ain't Hell finds out that about the soldier's prevarications, he adds, "That still doesn’t let the Left off the hook, though." Jesus, everybody's in on this conspiracy to protect Obama by attacking him.

This story, today's insane jabber about Obama's pitch at the All-Star Game, and their other deranged obsessions further convince me that they're not even trying to argue against Obama to their fellow citizens anymore, but are just constructing an alternate reality in which to ride things out for a couple of terms.

NANNY STATE DIARIES. Rod Dreher, back at the porn trough:

[A high-school teacher] said he worked in a counselor's role there as well, and routinely dealt with students who were seriously messed up by their porn habits. For example, he said, he believed that many of the guys he worked with had no idea how to relate to women in a healthy way; the power of pornography, working consciously and subconsciously, caused the men to have badly distorted views of women, views that stunted and even paralyzed the men emotionally.

Taken in isolation, that statement is not objectionable -- in fact, it could be seen as admirable. Pornography has its uses, but it's a very poor video-game substitute for human relationships, which is why we try to restrict it to adults, teenagers being presumed insufficiently mature to take porn in stride.

But this is Rod Dreher we're talking about here, and this is his very next line:

My wife brought up the story of a handsome, popular Southern Baptist pastor in Dallas who, back in the 1980s, confessed to being the serial rapist who terrorized an apartment complex here.

And, brothers and sisters, it was the demon porn that set him off! Suddenly we've abandoned the protection of pre-adults and moved on to the hoary idea of porn as insidious demonic force.

Then, Lord love us, Dreher starts talking about Ted Bundy.

There are a few reasons why Dreher always spins off this way. One is his traditional rejection of feminism. "Feminism was supposed to raise the consciousness of men," he says elsewhere, "but it has made so many women just as raunchy and sex-obsessed as many males." This in an article about Bratz dolls, which he admits feminists probably wouldn't like, though he forebears to say why -- probably because it might have to do with their peculiar equanimous ideas about gender relations, which conflict with the ones Jesus taught him, rather than general sex-hatred. (At the same time he's creeped out by lesbian separatists. No pleasing this guy.) The idea that women might require respect outside of a restrictive religious context blows his mind.

The other has to do with Dreher's idea of life in general. He's alarmingly sympathetic to plural marriages between/among nymphets and middle-aged men in a religious context. But the notion of sexual fantasy nauseates him. With God, all things are possible indeed: if a grown man picks the right faith he can live like Humbert Humbert minus the guilt, but if he or anyone looks at Miss November not only is he doomed, but so is society.

Since the topic is naked ladies and gents, the normal reaction is to laugh it off. Still, it's worth remembering that these guys -- a major factor in our national governance till recently, and champing at the bit to get back into it -- actually think this way about everything. Because it's really the thought that a human mind might, with the merest provocation, be spurred to thoughts Dreher can't control that rattles him.

Nonetheless, as usual, his commenters are a joy. "Softcore 'porn' is indeed everywhere, including the pews in front of me at church all too often (especially during the summer)," says Zach Treed. " Few things are as mortifying to the eyes as approaching holy Communion while following behind an intermittent parade of hardbodies who can't, or won't, dress any differently for Mass than a stripper dresses for the start of her dance." Where has this church been all my life? h/t Nancy Nall.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP. Bored with Palin, I was delighted to find that Going Galt is still a thing. Regrettably, I missed that Tea Party Nation promises "on July 30th, Conservatives are 'Going Galt'":

On that date, we are asking Conservatives all across the nation to "Call in Conservative". On July 30th, Conservatives will not work, we will not buy. Instead, we will spend time with our families and friends. We will show President Obama and Congress who REALLY drives this economy.

To be fair, they've been frothing nonstop since the election, and could use a day off. I'd say it will be a relief to all of us, but have a sneaking suspicion they'll be blogging with more than usual fervor that day. So it really is a net loss. But we already know that even if we pay them off with votes or tax relief, they still won't shut up.

POSITIVE SPIN. Legal Insurrection has a post today called "If Palin Were President Now." I expected the next line to be, "She would quit." Alas, the professor who runs the site, launched unto internet fame by his obsession with President Obama's mustard, is not joking. But neither is he serious. Among his assertions:

If Palin were President, we would not have:

• A debt and deficit rising so far out of proportion to historical norms as to threaten the near-and-long term viability of the country's ability to service the debt without destroying the value of the dollar, and passing on to our children and grandchildren unsustainable burdens.
• A stimulus package filled with pork and giveaways to political constituencies, pushed through under false and fraudulent claims of job creation, and exaggerated claims of immediate economic disaster which themselves hurt the markets, in a process so disgusting that not a single Representative or Senator read the bill before voting.

There are within these and his other points numerous links, mostly to other Legal Insurrection posts, all of them about Obama's malfeasance and none of them about what Palin would do to correct it, though at the end he bothers to tell us that Palin does not have a "Master of the Universe complex" like Obama, and that "at least Palin understands how to put the brakes on government power," an assertion which could hardly be extrapolated from her record. So the general argument is that Palin would be better than Obama because Palin is Palin and not Obama.

The professor's lack of positive arguments is understandable. It is difficult to say how the governor of a state largely dependent on revenues from oil, corporations, and federal largesse would apply that experience to the economy of the United States. As for the foreign policy angle (Palin would not pursue "a foreign policy which strong-arms allies such as Israel and Honduras, while paying deference to enemies such as Hugo Chavez and Mahmood Ahmadinejad," the professor says), his proposition is so muddled with mischaracterizations of Obama Administration policy that he might as well say that Palin would not bomb Tel Aviv and claim that as an advantage.

It's also understandable that he would offer something with at least the form of a positive argument. Nearly all the arguments being made on Palin's behalf have to do with her spunkiness, the loyalty she engenders among rightwing Republicans, and above all her alleged victimization by mainstream media outlets (which she nonetheless floods with access), talk show hosts, and the guy who knocked up her daughter.

The professor may have perceived that some readers would not be satisfied with qualification by complaint, and come up with a title that promises a positive case for Palin. If the words that appear under it constitute nothing but further complaints, so what? Maybe someone will see the title and remember that the case has been made, by somebody and in some way, as they return to barricades to denounce Conan O'Brien or Charlie Rose or whoever the next target of outrage is.

THEY DON'T MAKE LIBERTARIANS LIKE THEY USED TO. Megan McArdle:

A Democrat of my acquaintance, who makes something, but not a huge something, over $200,000 a year while living in Manhattan, was recently grousing to me about the surtax. "My taxes on a marginal dollar are going to go up almost 1000 basis points!" said he.

(There is some dispute as to what 1000 basis points amounts to in this case; a commenter works it out to about $800, but it could be more.)

This is true, I agreed. And just what, I wondered, had he thought was going to happen if he elected Obama? Not clear. Our subject had listened to Obama talk about taxing people who made more than $250,000, which seemed entirely reasonable; he hadn't realized that being single, his tax hikes would start much lower than that--that he, too, was "the rich". Mentally speaking, the rich don't live in eight hundred moderately roach-infested square feet in an unfashionable neighborhood of New York.

By the way, here's what 800 square feet looks like. The "moderately roach-infested" is added, I would guess from precedent, to dog-whistle to the outlanders who seem to comprise most of McArdle's audience that New York real estate is grimy as well as expensive. (And of course it works.) I marvel that she didn't add something about muggers, panhandlers, or people who use their hands when they talk.

I do not come naturally to sympathy with the Democrat of McArdle's acquaintance, as I make a fraction of what he makes and live in a smaller apartment, though my neighborhood, swinging Greenpoint, is very fashionable, or so the magazines tell me. But if the loss of $800, or even a couple of grand, to fees for government services is of such pressing concern to someone who makes over $200,000, he must be an even worse money manager than I am, and my heart goes out to him. Maybe he should fire his accountant, or take a smaller room when he vacations in Cozumel.

McArdle's sympathy, expressed in comments, is much greater:

The problem is, in New York, it's really easy to be so tapped out on $200K that you do, indeed, notice the extra missing money -- his average tax burden is already in the 40-50% range, as mine was when I lived there. It's just not comparable to anywhere else. And it's no good saying that they chose to live in New York -- most people living in New York couldn't earn their "fabulous" income anywhere else.

That seems a strange attitude for a libertarian like McArdle to take about it. Isn't this guy supposed to vote with his feet, or Go Galt, or something? That would sure show the rest of us parasites.

Yet she talks about him as if he were a migrant farm worker about to be driven into the barren wastes. I've stopped minding all their jabber about how sorry we'll be all when they've left, but it's really annoying to hear from them how badly they'll suffer if we drive them out.

(By the way, didn't McArdle say she was voting for Obama? Or did she back off that? Like many of my class, I'm too shiftless to look it up.)

UPDATE. The invaluable Susan of Texas demonstrates to us in comments that McArdle didn't vote for Obama because she forgot to register to vote. This makes a great deal of sense. First, it's obvious from McArdle's blog that politics doesn't interest her very much. Second, why would such a Randian superperson as she trifle with voting? The fact that a bum like me gets as many votes as Alan Greenspan proves that voting is a levelers' ruse to promote the Reign of Witch Doctors. When you get as much franchise as your gold bars will buy on the open market, that's when she'll remember to fill out a registration form. And when Detroit makes supercars designed by Howard Roark, that's when she'll learn to register a car.

THE AIRING OF GRIEVANCES. If you're having trouble understanding the depth of conservative commitment to Sarah Palin's ridiculous assumption of martyrdom, John Derbyshire offers an instructive sidelight at The Corner. He starts with a typical "The Fuhrer was sweet, the Fuhrer was kind" defense of Pinochet, but gets to his bigger fish: a new film by "Chilean commie film director Pablo Larrain" called Tony Manero, which sounds like an American Psycho-style knock on the Pinochet years (I haven't seen it, and evidently neither has Derbyshire).

That's bad and silly enough. What lifts Larraín's feeble bit of ComSympery to the level of outrage is the particular cultural icon he picked on as the target for his venom. It is none other than Tony Manero, the character played by John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. Larraín's wretched, filthy movie is in fact titled Tony Manero.

Is there no decency any more? No restraint? No respect for our cultural heritage?

Chile had a narrow escape from Marxist-Leninist tyranny. We should never cease to remind the Left of that, if only because it annoys the hell out of them. Pinochet, with all his many faults, was a patriot who saved his country. We should keep saying that, too; and Pablo Larraín's absurd movie gives us the opportunity. It might all have gone unmentioned for another year or so if not for Larraín; but, as Tony Manero says to the customer in the paint store: "You brung it up."

I charitably assumed at first that Derbyshire was making a subtle joke, but as the screed wore on I realized that he was genuinely enraged that an art film few Americans will see trifles with the sacred images of Tony Manero and Augusto Pinochet. Even stranger, he found this cultural offense a suitable launching pad for new and louder defenses of the murderous dictator, to which most Americans are likely to respond, "Who are Pinoshay and Ayendi?"

It was unavoidable and understandable that, with conservatives largely out of power, they would spend more time complaining. But so much of their time these days is spent raging at irrelevancies. It's as if they believe their rage itself is incandescent and, if allowed to burn brightly enough, will attract voters like moths. The Palin eruption, in which her abandonment of the responsibilities of office is portrayed as victimhood, is only their biggest such bonfire of vanities at the moment.

This compares badly even with the conservative culture-warring of olden times, for which I find myself growing almost nostalgic. They make Pat Buchanan look like Isaiah Berlin.

CULTURE OF COMPLAINT, PART 83,992. At The Corner, Mark Hemingway is incensed that Obama joked in a speech to Moscow students, "I don’t know if anybody else will meet their future wife or husband in class like I did, but I’m sure you’ll all going to have wonderful careers." Michelle and Barack went to Harvard Law at different times, though Obama was at the time a student doing his summer internship at Sidley & Austin, where she mentored him. Newsweek calls the comment "a wee bit off," which is not good enough for Hemingway, who calls the publication Obamaweek.

"The statement is just wrong," Hemingway continues in a blind fury. "There is no 'technical' justification for it having any veracity that I can tell — 'in class' is quite specific. Next time you husbands embarass your wife publicly by not remembering a significant relationship detail. I bet you wish a major media organization would step in and spin it for you. Alas, you'll have no such luck." Because Obamaweek loves Obama and hates you ordinary people, whose casual statements Obamaweek will parse rigorously in order to embarrass your wives. And Obama clearly must hate his wife, too, to humiliate her thus.

Elsewhere at The Corner Jay Nordlinger flips out because a conductor at Lincoln Center said that he and his fellow Britons were "very pleased" at how things were going in America now, which Nordlinger took as a slur on George Bush. Despite a recent poll showing Obama much more popular with Brits than Bush, Nordlinger disputes the maestro's imputation: "There has been a new awkwardness in Anglo-American relations," he asserts. "Beginning with the return of the Churchill bust, continuing with DVD-gate, etc." Maybe the only Britons he knows are named Windsor. And, Nordlinger adds, "the administration has thrown cold water -- strange cold water -- on the idea of a 'special relationship.'" Strange cold water? Perhaps Obama imported it from Treasonstan.

Nordlinger finds this further evidence that there are no "safe zones" left where a decent, Obama-hating citizen can enjoy himself in peace. If you can't evade mildly liberal sentiments among artists at Lincoln Center, where can you evade them?

And they say liberals are touchy.

UPDATE. The Ole Perfesser catches Nordlinger's outrage. "I’m sorry," he says, "but the only way to fix this is to be an asshole, complain loudly, and make things even more unpleasant for the perpetrator than for you." This of course has been the Perfesser's modus operandi for years. He and the Missus must be a real ornament to the local arts scene. Maybe we should all pitch in and send them to a Decemberists concert.

THE RIGHT ARE VERY DIFFERENT FROM YOU AND ME. Legal Insurrection finds a Reuters photo captioned, "Supporters of ousted Honduras' President Manuel Zelaya, one of them with a shirt covered with blood,.." Turns out the guy wiped the blood on his shirt, which is no shock, since in the photo he is standing and gesticulating, something he would not be able to do if his chest had been blown open. Nonetheless, Legal Insurrection calls the accurately captioned photo "fauxtography," etc.

A commenter points out that the caption matches the reality of the scene, and one of LI's shills steps forward:

Caged, Reuters does not deal in truth but in innuendo and slant. The slant here is that someone was injured while protesting the ousting of Zelaya. That slant is false and Reuters deserves to be called out. Try Google sometime. Many compilations available of established Reuters fauxtography.

What kind of Useless Idiot defends Reuters or any MSM entity, anyway? The Astroturf kind?

It's like something out of a psych textbook. The patient, unable to completely deny obvious reality, tells you how his enemies are twisting everything to make it look bad, don't you see, and when his explanation fails to convince either his audience or himself he lashes out in rage.

I've spent six years explaining the strange folkways of American conservatives, but since their forced migration from power they've entered a phase that is new and a little spooky even to me. They've been risible before, even ridiculous, but in this new age of the Victorious Palin Resignation it's as if they've entered some kind of mass hallucination. The sad thing is, if they ever catch on to that, they'll think it's because Obama drugged them, and that I'm writing about it as a kind of double-blind to cover Obama's tracks, etc. Well, if they start screaming call the ambulance.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, following on the reaction of rightbloggers to Sarah Palin, particularly her threat to sue reporters and writers who "defame" her. Needless to say they think that's great. I remember a time when these guys were all about defending blog scribes from the attacks of the powerful. Of course, that was before Palin became their professional victim, someone who may be cast as the underdog in any encounter despite her position and privileges.

Ross Douthat's column today about Palin follows the general strategy of talking about her as a symbol rather than as a politician. He talks about what sort of person he imagines her to be, and what sort of person polls suggest she appeals to, which relieves him of the need to consider her disastrous national political career as something for which Palin might at least share some responsibility, and leaves him free to fantasize a Republican mythology in which a Palin figure who has no characteristics except a noble common touch, the love of hardcore supporters, and female genitalia is harried to destruction by the demons of the Left because of them. The actual story, of a local pol who fared badly in the national spotlight, is too painful for him to contemplate. Though she proved a turkey on the ticket, Douthat will no doubt treat her inevitable reemergence as the resurrection of a phoenix.

SHORTER ANDREW BREITBART: Bitches! If I say this often enough, maybe women will finally start voting Republican.

PUBLIC ENEMIES. Maybe I just have a bad chemical reaction to Michael Mann movies. I can barely remember The Insider or Heat, though I recall there were things in them that I liked; they just seemed lumpy and unfocused and their ponderousness overwhelmed even the very good acting (though Christopher Plummer's Mike Wallace, a professional trimmer with good excuses, sticks in my mind. Plummer was a fine actor in his younger days, but his late performances are sublime).

Public Enemies is no improvement, though since I saw it Friday I can recall it a little better. The first bank robbery was a nice how-to, but after that I lost interest in them, and I suspect Mann did, too. Actually most of the scenes, even when competently handled (and Public Enemies, like many recent action pictures, has bang-bang episodes where you can't tell who's doing what), just sort of lie there. As has elsewhere been noted, Johnny Depp and Marion Cotillard never get much of anything going, and after a short while seeing how Dillinger is going to get out of jail or get the money or get killed is no longer a matter of pressing concern.

The major problem is that Dillinger isn't interesting -- not in this telling, anyway. (I've heard good things about the Warren Oates version.) His signal qualities are professionalism, loyalty to friends, and a refusal to admit defeat; the movie would have to have more on its mind than showing this off to carry the day. As it is, he's just an admirable thug with a girlfriend. I think Johnny Depp's decision to play Dillinger quiet and heavily internalized is probably smart star-image-wise -- filmgoers want to see him play a soulful hero once in a while, in between weirdoes -- but disastrous for the movie. Being encouraged to admire a killer and bank-robber hasn't been a fresh trick for decades, and Depp's Dillinger doesn't reward our attention with anything else.

Context doesn't add much. A lot of effort is devoted to social portraiture around the edges; this is well-done but mostly futile. The J. Edgar Hoover and Melvin Purvis characters are meant to show the corruption of the law -- self-righteous in the former case, self-tortured in the latter. But that provides no reason to view Dillinger more kindly. In fact, this kind of comparison -- the crooks are bad, but the G-men are bad too -- is so lazy in the film as to become annoying. Worst of all is the segment where a lawman beats up the girlfriend and Purvis has to step in and rescue her -- mainly because we're supposed to feel for Purvis and it helps put him on the side of the good-bad guys, and maybe because someone figured the girl has to suffer some damage to raise the stakes.

All gangster-hero movies have to get out of these problems; the old black-and-whites usually did it will verbal pizazz and a morality that was just as bogus as Public Enemies' but lighter on the special pleading. Gable's exit in Manhattan Melodrama, of which we see a little in Public Enemies, is the flip side of Cagney's in Angels With Dirty Faces -- a moral conclusion that puts the weight of the downfall on the crook, not his environment. New-Hollywood movies like Bonnie and Clyde and Thieves Like Us were more interested in the hoodlum's environment, but also showed his relationship to it so we could at least get where he was coming from. Also, these heroes are ultimately losers. Dillinger is already a success when we meet him, and his relationship to Depression America is that of a star to his public, waving gamely from the back of a police car. Whatever happens, he's a winner. He has nothing to tell us but how he gets out of trouble, not how he got into it, or why.

There's some good acting in there -- Billy Crudup puts a nice crust of malice and authority on Hoover, and as Red Hamilton Jason Clarke has some scenes with Depp that suggest another, much more interesting movie about their relationship.

YOU STILL HAVE PALIN TO KICK AROUND ANYMORE. No way in hell she's dropping this valuable political equity. She'll lead her tribe of tea-partying neopatriots from a survivalist treehouse, either figuratively or literally. Even I enjoyed watching the video clips of her speech. I haven't seen this kind of addled positivity since Gracie Allen. Whatever she's on, I want some. And maybe America wants some!

Here's my Runnin' Scared roundup. I have since seen a consideration by neo-neocon that's especially impressive:

But if Palin is running for president, perhaps she sees the danger facing us in the Obama presidency as so powerful and so imminent that she wants to devote more time and more speeches to fighting it in a very public way. Or perhaps not.

Your guess is as good as mine.

In the immortal words of Olson Johnson: now who can argue with that?

AN APPLE THAT STAYED ON THE TREE AND ROTTED. I, and you, have Harry Hutton to thank for this Jonah Goldberg jackpot that had escaped my notice, in which a reader complains to the author of Liberal Fascism of "the creeping leftism of something as supposedly benign as a thesaurus." Yes, the correspondent looked up the entries for "liberal" and "progressive" in Roget's and found them too positive. Goldberg can't leave mad enough alone:

While annoying, none of this surprises me. I can't tell you how many people have told me that my book is idiotic on its face because the dictionary says so.

I must pause here to revisit a previous Goldberg entry:

The Washington Post's Dana Milbank quoted me as saying Harriet Miers fits the dictionary definition of "crony," as if it was a stinging rebuke of the White House. In reality, it was merely a factual statement. According to the dictionary, a crony is a longtime close friend or companion. Historically it didn't have a negative connotation. It derives from the Greek chronos (time)...

This happily spares me the effort of making up an instance of Goldberg doing something like it -- for example, "The dictionary defines 'ass' as 'any wild species of the genus Equus,' so you're really calling me a mustang which is a compliment actually."

He goes on:

By the way, my dad wrote about the deep-seated bias of dictionaries for the Wall Street Journal a few years ago.

Oh no, you think, it can't be -- but it is:

This is not the only instance of labeling-hesitation in Webster's New World--at least when the "leader" in question belongs to the "revolutionary" left. The dictionary can call Hitler the "Nazi dictator of Germany" but Stalin merely the "Soviet premier, general secretary of the Communist party of the U.S.S.R." Mussolini is an "Italian dictator," but Tito is "Yugoslav Communist Party leader, prime minister and president of Yugoslavia." Franco is "dictator of Spain" and Salazar "prime minister and dictator of Portugal," but Mao Tse-tung is "Chinese Communist leader, chairman of the People's Republic of China and of its Communist Party"...

Reference works carry with them, inherently, an air of authority, as if their contents are handed down from the heights of scholarship and learned precision. No one can feel right about error and tendentiousness slipping into the culture under such a guise.

So it's congenital! It also makes me think of: "Why, there are studies underway to fluoridate salt, flour, fruit juices, soup, sugar, milk... ice cream. Ice cream, Mandrake, children's ice cream." It's easy to forget, amid all the crazy sifting of signs and portents to which conservatives have resorted in the Obama era, that they don't have to be in defeat to think this way; Sidney Goldberg's article is from 2002. Something in them senses an unfair conspiracy in every nook and cranny of everyday life, even when they run the works,

Say what you will about liberals, at least when some of them get on about "heteronormativity," they're usually from the academic world, where such things are expected. Besides, conservatives will pick it up too when it suits them.

UPDATE. Commenter bleikker picks up something I'd missed: Goldberg pere complains about the preferential treatment given "when the 'leader' in question belongs to the 'revolutionary' left," as if other dictators e.g. Hitler and Mussolini were not leftists. It seems old Goldberg accepted the usual classification of fascists as rightists. I wonder: when the younger Goldberg started babbling to Dad his thesis that Hitler, along with everything else bad, was attributable to liberals, was Sidney proud that that his boy had amplified on his own "Infinity" with "Double Infinity"? Or did was the realization that Jonah represented his intellectual legacy the thing that finally killed him?

APOLOGIES. Sorry that posting has been so scarce. Basically I'm being worked to death, and whenever I devote time to anything outside my normal routine -- like cleaning the fridge -- everything falls apart. I am going to fix all this, probably by jumping off a roof, but in the meantime please accept as a token of my esteem this account of the latest New York tea party, this time in Times Square. I didn't stay for Stephen Baldwin because I was convinced early on that I had already gotten my money's worth.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the rightbloggers and Michael Jackson. I focused on their odd consensus that public interest in Jackson at his demise was some sort of plot to enslave Iran and give aid and comfort to President Obama. It may be unfortunate that Americans are so fascinated with celebrities, but that so many conservatives attribute this evident and well-documented national tendency to liberal media bias shows once again that paranoia is now their unifying principle.

ANOTHER COUNTY HEARD FROM. I am grateful to Jeremy Osner for pointing out that while all the squares are still into Obama birtherism, real gone cat Jack Cashill is into alterna-conspiracy, specifically the Bill-Ayers-Wrote-Obama's-Books thing. Actually up till recently Cashill has been the only active explorer of this literary crime and cover-up, though mainstream conservatives sometimes like to pick up on it to enhance their street cred.

But now he's got help.

About a week ago, however, I heard from a new contributor. I will refer to him as "Mr. West." Like most contributors, he prefers to remain anonymous. The media punishment that Joe the Plumber received has much to do with this nearly universal reticence.

A week before that, I heard from another excellent contributor, Mr. Midwest.

Build a better crackpot, and the world will beat a path to your door -- in discrete geographical segments, apparently.

Scoff as we will, Cashill, Mr. West, Mr. Midwest, and perhaps Mr. Pacific Northwest, Mr. Venice Beach, and Mr. Marvin Gardens have made real progress. For example, both Ayers and Obama misrender Sandburg's "Hog Butcher for The World" as "Hog Butcher to The World." If you would point out that many of us make the same mistake -- including, for example, Reason's Nick Gillespie -- that just shows that you're in on the deception. Maybe Gillespie proofread Obama's books -- he's a libertarian, and you just can't trust those people.

Also: like Ayers, Obama writes about the Mekong Delta -- and "Given Obama's age, 'Mekong Delta' was not likely a part of his vocabulary." (Wait -- didn't Obama go to Normandy Beach recently? How'd he know about that? It was way before his time. The plot thickens!)

And both Ayers and Obama use the word "baleful" -- Cashill says, "I had to look it up," which is to him further evidence of its singularity.

Cashill gloats over his accomplishments:

To this point, I have just skimmed the 759 items in the bill of particulars in my case against Obama's literary genius. Not familiar with the term "bill of particulars?" Uncertain myself, I looked that one up too.

You'll want to get on at the ground floor with this one, folks. Cashill and all his contributing jursidictions are going places,

FELCHIN' WITH CRUNCHY ROD DREHER. It was a treat to scroll through the latest Crunchy Rod Dreher stuff and find a post that begins, "In the most recent Eminem thread..." Boy, there's a phrase I haven't seen in a while!

This bit of internet retro came up because Dreher had earlier read somewhere that a mass murderer had chanted Eminem lyrics during his slay-fest, and despite admitting up front that "it's wrong, of course, to blame Eminem or his music for these murders," he proceeds to do just that ("That's on you, Marshall Mathers. Live with that, Mister"), and to also titillate the faithful with some of the allegedly psycho-enabling lyrics (a popular gambit with this lot).

Later it is pointed out to Dreher that the psycho in question did not spit Eminem lyrics at his terrified victims. This leads Dreher to announce that he is "backing off -- somewhat -- the force of yesterday's post," which of course means a longer, more fevered rant to follow. First he tries to bring aboard liberals, as he perceives them, by denouncing the horror that is "24" ("its valorization of torture was having enough of an effect on troops in real life..."). Then, black kids laugh at a severed head in a movie theater! Clearly a sign of End Times, like the Haunted House at a fairgrounds. And then, along with more Bill Bennett vintage horror stories, comes one of the great Dreher couplets of all time:

I wonder what higher faculties of the soul are nurtured by contemplating Eminem's couplet in which he discusses ejaculating into someone's anus, then eating the semen. (Sorry to shock you, but if we're going to talk about this, let's be clear what we're talking about).

Watch that slippery slope, Rod -- soon you'll be running a midway tent and promising suckers a glimpse of the Depredations of the Liberals for only one-tenth-of-a-dollah. Oh wait -- change the last bit to "click-through" and he already is.