LINDSAY LOHAN'S "COME TO JESUS" MOMENT. The Wall Street Journal's Daniel Henninger expresses concern -- or is it contempt? It's hard to tell -- for the celebrities who take drugs, whether performance or pleasure-enhancing. At first he seems to think marketing is the culprit:

I now take it as an article of faith that marketing rules the world. Marketing is an ancient business tool, but unlike some other artifacts of the past, product marketing is a perfect fit for the age of electronic mass media. The Web has been marketing's Manhattan Project, and like Iran, everyone wants access to marketing's mysterious, sometimes dark powers...

The players became platforms outside the game for selling shoes, brands "and everything." Like Nascar drivers, the shirts of the Tour de France racers are festooned with product logos. But consumers aren't going to buy stuff promoted by any palooka. Professional athletes were tutored that part of the deal was they had to pump extra hang-time into their personalities. And if they couldn't do that, the guys making the Nike commercials would do it for them. In the early days, journalists derided this as "hype," but even the press eventually signed on, and suddenly lumpen athletes and entertainers had "attitude" and "edge." This was now admirable.

Henninger must have realized at some point that blaming the free market for Barry Bonds is a non-starter in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, so he comes to Jesus -- or, rather, swings Him at the heads of "the thousands of high-IQ people buying all those the God-Is-Dreadful books":

The simple idea that Mr. Bonds and Ms. [Lindsay] Lohan ought to go find something resembling a church to offset the compulsions of modern life drives the no-religion people nuts. If so, they should stop making funny jokes about sprinkling holy water and start proposing an alternative way to learn integrity, self-respect and character that will have a longer shelf-life than "Don't Be Evil."

Our great nation is covered with churches and filled with believers, and ruled by a fundamentalist Christian President, yet Henninger is worried about atheism's deleterious effect on Barry Bonds and Lindsay Lohan.

When I first approached his essay, I assumed that Henninger took movie stars and professional athletes as his subject because people are more inclined to read about them than Johnny Methhead or Jane Crackwhore. Now I think that if he expanded his purview to include ordinary citizens' drug habits among the horrors of atheism, it would too closely resemble a Chick Tract without the saving grace of lurid illustrations to suit the Journal's upscale clientele.

Of course, once Murdoch gets his hands on the Journal, Henninger may never need to be that cautious again.

UPDATE. Flash! Lindsay Lohan, at least, may be closer to redemption than we thought:

Christian pop culture critic Mark Dice insists he knows the cure for Lindsay Lohan’s problems. Jesus.

Dice credits himself for making Paris Hilton find ‘God’ in jail, and is now focusing his prayers on Lindsay Lohan.

“What Lindsay really needs is Jesus. She needs to read the Bible and find out who she is and why she is here. There is a vast black hole in her soul which nothing else can fill. No expensive rehab facility. No jail sentence. No family or friends. Only Jesus can fix what’s wrong” Dice explains.

Maybe Murdoch can just dump Henninger and hire Dice. He certainly has a livelier style.

THE JESUS AND MARY CHAIN. My holiday has been so busy that I almost missed Daniel Henninger writing about the Atheist Menace.

Henninger's new stock in trade seems to be the announcement of some non-existent threat to society, followed by assurances that we'll all get through this dark time somehow. Just last week he was saying that a new wave of "clean" comedy was going to save us from filthy-mouthed Hollywood. (He also admitted to enjoying old Eddie Murphy routines, which suggests a wonderful picture: Henninger, whose manner on "The Journal Editorial Report" is that of a funeral director with constipation, relaxing in a Barcolounger and, when Ralph Kramden tells Ed Norton to fuck him in the ass, clanging open his mailslot mouth to emit the old Mr. Machine shriek of pleasure.) Now he suggests, on the strength of one provocative book, that atheist scientists are coming to burn down our churches. Exhibit A: The Treason of the Bookstore Clerks!

When I asked a young clerk at Borders on lower Broadway if they had Richard Dawkins's best-selling atheist manifesto, "The God Delusion," he replied, "Oh, we'd better: It's a fantastic book!" He swept the quarter-mile across the store to make sure I got it. "Enjoy!" he said sounding, well, triumphal.

"Swept," eh? Must be a fag, too. Yet through the godless science of IVF, he will unite with Lileks' bete noir, the small-breasted, unsubmissive hair stylist, and spawn a race of monsters!

The trope is risible, but what's a culture cop to do? The post-Foley era has taken some of the zest out of his racket. "Conservatism: The Anti-Sex" can only sustain so many columns, and even some right-wingers are tiring of the drug war. So it's down to the stems and seeds of psychodrama for Henninger till a new Pat Buchanan emerges to re-energize the scam.

I look forward to forthcoming columns in which he accuses "American Idol" of leading an assault on the Second Commandment.

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CRAZY JESUS LADY TAKES A DIVE! CJL's in rare form today, giving us all the proof we should need that liberals hate free speech:

• A couple dozen rowdies interrupted a showing at Columbia of Ku Klux Klan: Special Mexican Unit thereby depriving evil godless New Yorkers of their chance to learn the truth about those exotic Spanish people, even though Jesus was outside handing out flyers;
• A Columbine Dad told millions of CBS viewers that abortion made Jesus kill the Amish, but a couple of bloggers didn't agree, which is retroactive censorship of both Columbine Dad and Jesus;
• Barbra Streisand told a heckler to shut up. The heckler's name was Jesus Christ.
• Rosie O'Donnell is fat, whereas Jesus looks fetchingly slim on the cross.

"There's a pattern here, isn't there?" she asks. Yes, in the sense that my broken shoelace, the girl who laughed at me on the subway, the failure of my Lotto numbers to hit, and the overcooking of my lunchtime burger add up to I MUST KILL YOU ALL NOW WITH MY NINJA THROWING STARS!

By the same formula, Republicans are one-quarter boy-crazy middle-aged men, and the other three-quarters Denny Hastert's midsection.

Also, the Lady tells us, liberals and Democrats lack "grace," and "What also seems missing is the courage to ask a question. Conservatives these days are asking themselves very many questions..." Oh, I bet they are! Like "How much of this government money can I stuff into the trunk of my car before the voters turn me out?" and "Is now the time to start screaming about fags getting married, or should I wait until the week before the election?" and "If they caught Foley, does that mean they can catch me, or the guy that sold me this cocaine, or the prostitute that is currently sucking my dick?"

All that's left is to try and figure the Crazy Jesus Lady's real angle here -- for she is only mad north-northwest, and when the wind is southerly she can tell a hack from a handjob. While "Drunk/behind deadline" is a temptingly obvious choice, it is possible that she knew from the start how thin her argument was, and presented it in all its pathetic insufficiency to achieve not a political but a social effect.

The other OpinionJournal writers are every bit as bad as Noonan -- but not nearly as famous, Reagan-associated, or grandly declamatory in style. She may think that they think that they are not good enough for her. What else explains the nervous glances and evasive half-smiles that greet her when she wheels her shopping cart into their offices? Why else do they never accept her invitations to vespers?

And she has been so lonely since Reagan died and Dan Rather stopped sending her even the restraining orders. Well, she's not some bra-burning feminazi -- if a crappy tautology will do more than a lower neckline on her strait-jacket to make her seem more approachable, she can do that.

Oddly enough, in the very same OJ edition Daniel Henninger bitches out YouTube for making his favorite right-wing politicans look like feebs and assholes. (He also lets us know that he uses YouTube to look at jazz, not junk like you people watch.) I've seen Henninger on TV, and he looks and acts like a depressed undertaker after a shot of sodium pentathol.

The Crazy Jesus Lady and the Gloomy Culture Crank! A match made in heaven!

UPDATE. I have to add that while I believe the Minutemen certainly deserve all the contempt they get, I also think they should have been permitted to speak without the bum-rush.

I say this knowing that Noonan and every other conservative will continue to talk as if Democrats all advocate censorship, but what the hell. Maybe a few of them can read.

KULTURE KORPS KOMEDY FUNTIME! Tbogg notices that the Kultur Kops of Libertas are reviewing films they haven't seen. Hey, I've been all over Libertas like a dog on vomit -- or a pre-teen on edible body frosting -- for months!

I notice that the Libertasians still review movies by their trailers, too ("We spend a lot of time in the trailer with Erica Bana looking soulfully off-camera, wondering whether he’s losing his humanity -- and where are the terrorists in all this?"). Somebody tell them that, when Craig Kilborn used to review movie posters, that was supposed to be funny.

Not being in the business of reviewing films I haven't seen, I will trust the authority of OpinionJournal's Daniel Henninger, who actually took in Capote (what a shock -- I thought those OpinionJournal guys spent every weekend at hoedowns and hayrides with the Real People) and tells us this:

Up to this point, Truman Capote has been the perfect emissary from the land of the blue--a person who all at the same time can be ironic, morally fine-tuned, witty, empathetic, detached, and the brightest person in Holcomb wearing a scarf "from Bergdorf's." But inside Perry Smith's cell, Truman Capote suddenly passes to another place. He is staring into the face of evil, and after all these years, after all the articulate empathy, he knows it. Call it a Red state moment.

I always thought the states that went for Bush were defined by their psychopathic killers, and now a prominent conservative has confirmed it.

Bonus comedy: "Again, against the grain of current Hollywood practice, this movie takes no sides and, even more admirably, condescends to no one in Kansas." I can see the studio execs now, lounging in their hot tubs of fetal cord blood, watching the Capote rushes and yelling, "Wait a minute -- where are the Kansas jokes? Where's the rube from Topeka asking the urban-ethnic hero to help him get his thumb out of his own ass? That's what pushed My Best Friend's Wedding over the top!"

(PS to Henninger: Capote spent the highly formative first 10 years of his life in the deep South, and he retained some of that Southern flavor in both his speech and in his writing ever after. This actually makes him a very good exemplar of "the land of the blue," but probably not in the way that you think.)

EVEN MORE FUN in Henninger's comments section. Consensus: where we traitors see "diversity," patriots see "evil." And "New Jersey standards," by which I believe the fellow means something like this.

SHORTER DANIEL HENNINGER. New Orleans would be so much better if it were Phoenix, AZ.

UPDATE. Henninger's reaching his audience, alright. From the reader responses: "It is unfortunate that Pesident Bush has a guilty conscience and has succumb to pressure from the likes of Jesse Jackson and the black caucus. The fact of the matter is that New Orleans is a bad place... The children relocated to Utah, Vermont and Rhode Island have a chance at a descent education. In addition, it seems that many of the refugees have criminal backgrounds..." Wait -- Bush has a conscience?

FLASHBACK. Daniel Henninger re Medical Marijuana: "Liberalism to cancer patients: Drop dead."

Wait. I thought us liberals were high all the time, marching around Washington Square Park carrying FREE THE WEED signs... yeah, that was awesome... so, those were, in actuality, the conservatives? Like, wow.

Wait, wait. "The Supreme Court's liberal bloc -- Stevens, Ginsburg, Souter and Breyer..." But I thought Ginsburg was a big stoner! What? Oh, Douglas Ginsburg, right, yeah, wow.

"...with the support of Justices Kennedy and Scalia..." Hold on hold on hold ON. WHOA. SCALIA. So... wait a minute...

Never mind.

FUCK, I'M A LITTLE SHORT THIS WEEK...

SHORTER JAMES LILEKS: Fuck all you musicians who laughed at me in high school. You have failed to acquire bling, whereas I have a dog and a house, you rockstar wannabes with your frigging and fruging! Next, fuck all you arrogant poets who laughed at me in high school.

SHORTER OLE PERFESSER: Amnesty Whatever, fuck with me and some fat guy with a beard and George Bush and I will "fisk" you. There! That proves your irrelevance, Nobel Prize fucks.

SHORTER P.J. O'ROURKE: That Kerry fellow is quite the windbag! Remember me? You don't? Fuck you, I got paid.

SHORTER DANIEL HENNINGER: Michael Jackson, Kobe Bryant, Jimi Hendrix... Jesus Fucking Christ, people, do I have to spell it out for you?

SHORTER JOHN J. MILLER: I'm totally fucking nuts.

MORAL RELATIVISTS. You want to know how they do it? Here's a good example. A Wall Street Journal writer looks at some confusion over CDC figures concerning obesity and mortality. His conclusion: no one really knows if being fat is bad for you. In fact, no one really knows much of anything -- not when it comes to the dark arts of medicine and climatology:

This is confusing--and that's the point. Science, of its nature, is always confusing. Medicine is uncertain. But public-policy formation in the U.S., especially as concerns health policy or the environment, whether obesity or the melting of the polar ice caps, admits to very little confusion. We claim to know. But in fact we usually don't know.

Contrast the approach of this WSJ guy, Daniel Henninger, with a different sort of assessment of the same basic data: Thomas Maguire takes the few extra steps needed to reveal that the statistical blips do not prove that packing on the pounds is a risk-free activity. The rest of us may come to similar conclusions using what our ancestors called common sense, paired with our powers of observation.

But for conservative functionaries such as Henninger, doing his bit to further the antiEnlightenment, the grey areas of scientific enquiry are proof that science is, after all, just guesswork, no more valid than your guesses or mine if it comes to that, so that the science community's consensus on, say, global warming can be easily ignored if your spritual or political leaders require it of you.

This attitude has long been in effect further down the food chain, of course -- as in this Washington Times laugher, in which evolution is referred to by its old name of Darwinism -- not an institution, after all, but just the ditherings of one guy who was not Jesus! If some folk prefer to "use a little imagination" on behalf of Intelligent Design, who are the labcoats to squawk? But now that the prestigious Journal has taken it up, we may note a change in the weather, so to speak. You're either with them or against them, as always, whether they're right or wrong -- but now, even if you know what you're talking about and they don't have the slightest fucking clue, "against them" is still the wrong place to be -- maybe even more wrong than ever.

PLEASING THE AFFILIATES. I welcome our new advertisers, Dirty Flower, a fun daily read w/pictures, and whoever is selling Steve Hicks' book -- which I freely admit (in that orgiastic spirit of disclosure currently sweeping the opinion racket) I have not read and probably never will read.

For a simple soul such as myself, raised in a tract house and accustomed to dwelling in slums, all this yak about how the Left has been taken over by postmodernism -- "switched to themes of anti-reason, double standards, and cynicism," as the advertiser puts it -- has no relevance. In my frequent discussions with other liberals, I have never heard one defend or attack a POV by announcing that language is a mere construct. Neither have I heard one say, "Who are we to say what's right and wrong?" -- at least not since the last Alan Bromley article.

I take words very seriously, not only as a professional but also as a moralist. That's why propaganda is the main subject of this site. Stray offenses to reason annoy me, but coordinated, wholesale perversions of reason piss me right the fuck off.

And if it's monolithic anti-rationalism you're looking for, the Right is just where the action is these days. You can read my back numbers for evidence, or we can just pick us a fresh one off the poisoned information tree that we call the blogosphere. Ah, here's some ripe Daniel Henninger:

Mr. Bush's inaugural speech should put to rest the notion of a monolithic American "right." It set off a nice fight on the right among realists, internationalists, libertarians and neocons. (Liberals and the left are simply "against Bush" so it is hard to credit their arguments beyond brute obstruction.)

Still, I encourage you to click the Hicks link. It will gain me some little money, and it may gain you some pleasure, if you're of a certain turn of mind (the destination is an Amazon review page, and here is a sample of the commentary: "I only wish Michel Focualt would have saved us all the trouble by blinding himself with his pens rather then writing such garbage and serving as the flase profit of 'post-modernism' which I see as nothing more then the raw lust for power"). You may even become interested in the book, and read it and tell me about it, which may get me to read it. I have prejudices, but I can be persuaded. That's how we reality-based folks operate.

ARTLESS DODGER. From the Know-Nothings through the Birchers through our current, degenerate crop of neos and nutjobs, one of the many signs whereby ye shall know American Conservatives is their reflexive hatred of the arts and the people who make them. As we have seen, whereas in olden times wingnuts were content to merely blacklist artists, in our day they prefer to manage them, at least in their imaginary universe, presenting themselves as shadow moguls and imperiously demanding that more conservatively-correct entertainments be produced for their pleasure tout suite.

These are for the most part the harmless, Ozymandian fantasies of folks who have much but want everything -- who already run America, and yearn also to rule its dreams. Every once in a while, though, a winger's attempt at aesthetics turns out to be more instructive than usual.

At OpinionJournal, Daniel Henninger spends a whole column in astonishment that some prominent New York City artists recall the 1970s as a Golden Age. For conservatives, of course, the celebration of anything from the pre-Reagan age is blasphemy, but the New York of that time is the stuff of Fred Siegel nightmares. Tourists were killed! Rents were cheap! There were no Home Depots or K-Marts! How could anyone like it?

Of course, the speakers are artists talking about art, and it is easy for any sentient person to understand why they liked the 70s. Speaking as one was vas dere, Charlie, well, where to begin: CBGB, Harrah's, Rollerina, Scorsese, hiphop, Twyla Tharp, concerts in the Park, the Kitchen, Squat Theatre, the Performing Garage, the Times Square Show...

None of these exemplars of the excitement of that period of New York life is mentioned in Henninger's article -- nor does he attempt to make any comparison of them to equivalents from the current era, probably because that would be highly unflattering to his Giulianified Valhalla. Even Henninger must realize that the Ramones, Paul Auster, and Eric Bogosian make the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Candace Bushnell, and Fischerspooner look like utter shit.

Seeing no winning artistic argument for the no-grafitti team, Henninger turns the whole thing into class war, Republican-style -- that is, instead of rich vs. poor, it's elites versus "average Joes." After a discussion of how bad the subways were in the 70s -- comical reading for someone whose current morning L transit is reminsicent of 50s phone-booth-stuffing, though the cars are gleamingly free of spraypaint -- Henninger asks, "But could it be that New York's great weakness... is that its leadership elites are fatally enthralled by a reputation for creative fecundity that has been conjured and kept afloat by the city's artists and writers?" While we puzzle over this vision of a City Government dazzled by the lively arts, Henninger goes further:

Many of the city's most creative people in the 1970s (as now) were high IQ boys and girls from Smalltown who fled to the Apple and had the smarts to survive and thrive in a city beset with drugs, welfare dependency and housing stock distorted by World War II rent controls. Hell has always seized over-developed imaginations. But what attractions hath hell for average Joes who can't cop a "life" in SoHo or Williamsburg? Then as now, they just took hell's hits in the neck, or left. In economic terms, much of creative Manhattan simply "free-rides" on the backs of the workers whose tax payments constrain the bankruptcy sheriff.

One might mischievously ask: is he really saying that "average Joes" are less resourceful than us arty-farties? But I guess we have the unfair advantage of "free-rides." Tell me -- what are those? Where do artists get them? I and a whole list of friends would love to know.

Henninger's "then as now" formulation is also ridiculous. In the 70s space was cheap (yes, despite rent stabilization! How'd that happen?); rehearsal spaces and performance venues were affordable enough to support a lively scene. Today it takes a ton of money to keep a band, dance troupe, or theatre company rehearsed, let alone to open even a small "alternative" space; admission prices reflect this, and limit the audiences for new works.

That Henninger can't get why Fran Lebowitz and Caleb Carr would appreciate the New York of Annie Hall and Dictators Go Girl Crazy! is unsurprising, but I do give him additional gall points for hinting darkly that their appreciation is a bad sign for the future of the City: "Perhaps we should regard the famous Times' commentators yearning for the 1970s as canaries in the gold-plated mine shaft," he writes, and mutters about "endpoints" to great cities and the only hope for New York being for "the city's best and brightest" to "use some of their 'creative' brainpower to blow the whistle on the city's irredeemably corrupt and destructive Democratic politics." (Why the quotes around "creative"? Oh, I forgot -- only markets are creative!)

That art so utterly confuses such as Henninger is just one more reason to love it -- but let us remember that this is just one of its secondary benefits, lest we fall into the same aesthetic muddle as he.

THE POLITICS OF DISASTER. There was a rather remarkable column by Daniel Henninger in the Journal the other day. Its theme -- well, I'm not sure what its theme is. At first it seems like standard-issue conservative religious hooey attached, by reflex, to the recent disasters on the other side of the world. "Religious belief, for those whose belief includes an afterlife, is a kind of comfort that even unbelievers would be loath to deny the survivors of this tsunami," says Henninger. "Not long ago people would offer solace by saying of the dead that he or she 'is in a better place.' I haven't read or heard much religious sentiment expressed in public about what has happened to the peoples around the Indian Ocean or the Arabian Sea." But this idea is not followed upon, and so is probably just a spasm of the sort bred into such authors by prolonged obeisance to Republican Party talking points.

For a while the article looks to be about that old chestnut, information overload. "Two weeks ago, Scott Peterson; last week, the Mosul mess-hall bombing; this week, South Asia wiped out," writes Henninger. "Time was, we'd watch the scenes coming out of Asia 'in horror.' Now, I think, we mostly just watch." I am of the self-examining sort, and do not think I have conflated the Scott Peterson trial with the deaths of hundreds of thousands in an epic disaster; and, widening my purview perhaps unfairly, I can't imagine many others have done so, either.

But this is only a bridge. Eventually Henninger gets to brass tacks. The info overload is revealed to include (or be caused by -- again, the author is unclear) horrors in Iraq. "The world's leading expert on how emotional, data-passed news can obliterate important context is Abu Musab al-Zarqawi," says Henninger. "His homicidal bombings can't kill Iraq's 25 million people, but he knows that images and tales of sudden death will suppress calmer, constructive portrayals of Baghdad's five million people restoring their lives to normalcy."

So, if it means anything at all, Henninger's column is about the image war waged by our enemies -- those pictures of atrocities that we have been told again and again to factor out of our considerations of American policy. But what is the connection with the tsunami and its aftermath? Insofar as I understand him, Henninger wants us to spread democracy as a means toward reducing misery of all sorts in the world. ("Political work is the means the civilized world has for replacing men and ideas that are dumb or dangerous with something better.") A noble goal, say I, though we may differ as to means. But what has this to do with shifting tectonic plates, the resulting angry seas, and the lives thus obliterated? "In the aftermath of 2004's too-numerous unnatural deaths," concludes Henninger, "the only resolution possible is to re-enter the arena of politics and fight the good, slow fight. It's all we've got, and it is enough."

I keep reading that some parties are trying to politicize the disaster. Is this what they're talking about?

UPDATE. Related thoughts at Gadflyer.

SPEAKING OF FRAUDS. Daniel Henninger goes to Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley:

At the seniors center in Allentown, I met a fellow who said he'd lived all his life in New York City, when one day his wife said she wanted to move out west. They made it 30 miles into Pennsylvania, stopped and stayed. He's a Bush man, supports the war and the way Mr. Bush has handled it.

Standing next to him was a fellow named Francisco Figueroa. Mr. Figueroa was wearing a red U.S. Marine Corps cap pinned with a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star. A big-city journalist too familiar with stereotypes blurted: "Guess we know where you stand." Mr. Figueroa said, "What do you mean?"

Mr. Figueroa got his medals in Vietnam, where he did advance scouting on village conditions, one of which was My Lai. He's been shot at, a lot. He is voting for John Kerry. Why? Because John Kerry was over there, in the middle of it. The other guy never was....

Then Henninger sees some flags, a Marshmallow Peeps factory, and a car race. "Lasting impression," decides Henninger, "The Bush voters sounded solid. The Kerry votes came over as soft; everyone seems aware of the flip-flop label. Timid prediction: The Lehigh Valley goes Bush."

I understand Gallup uses similar methods.

WHATTAYA WANT ME TO DO, DRAW YOU A PICTURE? SPELL IT OUT FOR YOU? AS LONG AS YOU LIVE, DON'T EVER ASK ME MORE! Pretending to be mentally retarded, Daniel Henninger marvels at a Democratic fundraiser with rich Hollywood stars. "Isn't it becoming harder by the day to take the Democrats seriously as the party of the common man and the left-out?" cried the faux dumbass.

Sigh. Here's the top ten list of contributors, from OpenSecrets:

1. Goldman Sachs -- $3,910,296. 51% to Democrats; 49% to Republicans.
2. National Assn of Realtors -- $2,062,839. 51% to Democrats; 49% to Republicans.
3. Morgan Stanley -- $1,882,535. 33% to Democrats; 67% to Republicans.
4. Microsoft Corp -- $1,768,446. 64% to Democrats; 36% to Republicans.
5. Time Warner -- $1,730,995. 75% to Democrats; 25% to Republicans.
6. Citigroup Inc. -- $1,659,287. 50% to Democrats; 50% to Republicans.
7. SBC Communications -- $1,632,381. 32% to Democrats; 67% to Republicans.
8. Wal-Mart Stores -- $1,585,410. 19% to Democrats; 81% to Republicans.
9. UBS Americas -- $1,584,828. 37% to Democrats; 62% to Republicans.
10. Intl Brotherhood of Electrical Workers -- $1,556,630. 97% to Democrats; 4% to Republicans.

If the Dems are not "the party of the common man and the left-out," that sure doesn't mean the Republicans are. All us po' folk are fighting for an ever-shrinking slice of the American pie. If you trust Bush, Cheney, et alia to give you a bigger one, God go with you. But let's not make believe that the presence of Bruce Springsteen at a Donkey fundraiser means that the GOP, of all entities, has become the party of the little guy.

STOP THE PRESSES! OpinionJournal's Daniel Henninger doesn't like Fahrenheit 911. Among his complaints:

Even the Iraqi victims in Baghdad are props. A baby's corpse is lifted from a dumpster, bloodied limbs are shown, people wail--but in a succession of quick frames. Moore never spends any time with these people. They just, so to speak, blow by.

Not like the "liberal media" coverage of the war itself, where we got lots of up-close-and-personal interviews with bombed Iraqis. And:

Moore's on-camera characters are invariably lower middle class and inarticulate.

Henninger obviously wants a fiction film with sparkling urbanites discussing the art of love. Can someone give him the number for Moviefone?

Coming next week: how Citizen Kane unfairly maligns wealthy press magnates!

WORDS, WORDS, WORDS. Values scold Daniel Henninger thinks the recent rash of beheadings in Saudi Arabia "pose a political problem for John Kerry" because Bush calls the beheaders "evil" at every (media) opportunity, whereas the lily-livered Purple Heart awardee Kerry speaks only of ways to bring peace, and thereby fewer beheadings, to the area, which is apparently neither the manly nor the American way to do things:

Conservatives do believe in evil, and liberals either no longer do or they don't wish to allow the idea of evil to be explicit in our politics. I would guess that Mr. Hertzberg's view is shared by most of the people working on John Kerry's campaign. They would never ask Mr. Kerry to say in public that the beheadings are "evil." Or if he did, it would be merely as a tactical concession for the moment to the "moral vocabulary" of the world inhabited by the sort of people who support George Bush.

If only Jimmy Carter had thought of this in 1980! In the midst of the hostage crisis, he could have been trained to clench his fists and roar, in the manner of Donald Pleasance in the first "Halloween" movie, that the Ayatollah Khomeni was "toe-tally eee-vil!" Then the American people might have thought: well, he sure has made a mess of things, but at least he speaks our moral vocabulary!

"Moral vocabulary" seems in this usage to be the equivalent of "paternoster" or "mumbo-jumbo": words meant to chase away fear in the teeth of disaster. Might Henninger have written "marketing vocabulary," and been mistranscribed?

HEARTS AND MINDS, PART 56,957. Oh sweet Jesus. Daniel Henninger says we aren't doing enough propaganda in the Arab world -- and that's why the recent unpleasantness at Abu Ghraib is making us look bad. As ever, he traces the problem back to the perfidious Clintons.

Anybody remember Charlotte Beers? Early in the War on Whatchamacallit, the former Chairman of the Ogilvy & Mather worldwide advertising agency was made an Undersecretary of State by the Bush Administration, and tasked and budgeted with the dissemination of pro-our side messages in Arabia. Beers left the government last year "for health reasons." A few months back she talked to advertising columnist Bob Garfield about her experiences, and here's some of the little that she said:

Nothing would be more dangerous than silence. It's like asking Tylenol to be very quiet when people found out there was poison inadvertently put into their Tylenol packages. They went immediately to the air and every phase of communication to talk about what they were going to do, how it would be handled, and they won a huge round with the consumer groups. We do have some policies that are not popular, and that doesn't mean necessarily that we can make those popular, but we can certainly engage on many other fronts...

The skill it takes to have a brand cross borders is to create a universal understanding, you know, maybe the love of a Coke and the party that goes with it, and so on. And the second thing was to always honor and respect the local customs. And so the lessons that we all had to learn as marketers, to earn the right to sell our brands in those countries is one the United States has to practice. I mean the first thing I did in the first year was bring in people from the private sector to conduct courses in that kind of communication which is about context, and also about the basics of branding, really.

All respect to Ms. Beers, a former client of mine, but does this sound like the kind of thinking that would make a dime's worth of difference in a region that regards us as an occupying force? Branding? A Tylenol scenario? Coca-Cola?

That kind of thing did work once, in the former Soviet Union. The aura of our plenty, our brands, our Levi's and Fords and Coca-Colas, had a powerful effect on people who felt themselves oppressed by their own government, not ours. But we're the Big Daddys now -- scrambling to convince a violently hostile region that our berserkers do not reflect our true intentions. Yet we have precious little Coke or unpoisoned Tylenol to offer as tokens of good faith.

No wonder Beers bailed. It's impossible to sell the sizzle without the steak.

GRUMPY OLD MEN. At OpinionJournal Daniel Henninger devotes an entire, lengthy column to how there's so many swears on the TV these days and in his day they had Rod Serling and nobody used swears. Really, that's all it's about. A web outlet of the mighty Wall Street Journal is now running copy that sounds as if it originated with your cranky grandmother while she was off her meds, then was run through some kind of language software with the "pomposity" setting turned on High.

Meanwhile in Jasperwood Lileks complains of ennui, which is interesting considering what he wrote the day before. That session started promisingly enough, with a happy reverie about old-fashioned newspapering, "when movies regularly showed newspapers as things that spun like propellers before stopping at a jaunty angle," and the papers had great headlines like KILLER GETS DEATH, which Lileks repeated, again in all caps, adding the gloss, "Off to Old Sparky within the month." He seemed as happy as a teenage boy with a jar of Vaseline.

But then a housewife in a commercial behaved in a manner Lileks found insubordinate. This got him screaming BITCH, again in all caps, and reeling into a Kim Du Toit-style monologue:

it’s something I notice in ads: Guys Dumb, Girls Competent and Patiently Enduring Guys’ Thickheadedness. In the bad old days, in the era of spinning newspapers, it was the other way around -- the frails were dizzy flighty creatures who required an iron infusion of masculine common sense. Now the guys in ads all act like boys in a state of eternally attenuated adolescence, and they require partners who channel their inner Mom to whip them into shape.

He then announced he would amplify on this theme in his next installment. This morning I leapt out of bed and ran to my computer, only to learn that Lileks is too tired to write anything for us except one of those half-hearted Family Circus re-enactments. Little bitch.

Refresh my memory: aren't conservatives supposed to be the hip, fun kids?

WE'RE A LITTLE SHORT OF FUNDS... Daniel Henninger tells how you, Mr. Citizen, can assist the war effort in Iraq:

The First Marine Expeditionary Force and U.S. Army in Iraq want to equip and upgrade seven defunct Iraqi-owned TV stations in Al Anbar province -- west of Baghdad -- so that average Iraqis have better televised information than the propaganda they get from the notorious Al-Jazeera. If Jim Hake can raise $100,000, his Spirit of America will buy the equipment in the U.S., ship it to the Marines in Iraq and get Iraqi-run TV on the air before the June 30 handover.

Doesn't sound like such a bad idea, but why is this Marine (hopefully aided by what Henninger calls "the coalition of the can-do") compelled to take up a collection for it, rather than can-doing it with government money? Henninger says, to "bypass the slow U.S. procurement bureaucracy." That's nice, we all hate bureaucracy, but isn't the War on Terror a top government priority? If so, why isn't this funded by the cash-glutted Pentagon, rather than a serviceman's tin cup?

I mean, Jesus fucking Christ. The State Department hired a top advertising executive to promote our cause in the Middle East, but they can't jack up a hundred large for a studio and a couple of transmittors?

This sticks in my craw even more than it might have because of a conversation I had recently with a woman whose son was plaguing me to buy raffle tickets for a school fundraiser, the purpose of which was to buy books, paper, and other essentials. The kid goes to a public school. I asked, doesn't the budget cover that? And I was informed that this sort of begging was common; public schools never have enough government green to pay for all the necessities of education.

Even in this era of religious belief in limited government (which, like Christianity, is often invoked and seldom observed), that blows my mind. And now I'm asked to pry open my wallet, not for the widows and orphans whose diminishing share of government funding is a long-standing if bitter reality, but for basic military and educational operations?

What the fuck did I just pay taxes for? Or, maybe more to the point, what the fuck did the wealthiest Americans not just pay taxes for?

CONSERVATIVE POPULISM IN A NUTSHELL: Daniel Henninger tells us to go see The Passion, which he hasn't seen ("sounds a bit too much for me").