WHAT, ME WEIMAR? In the most recent issue of The American Prospect (in articles not available at their website, unfortunately). the TAPpers talk about liberal language and image issues. This is meat and drink to me, but the articles made me a little queasy, particularly "Framing the Dems" by cognitive scientist George Lakoff, who compares the conservative and progressive (big word at TAP these days) worldviews to family models, the "strict father family" and the "nurturant parent family." To underline the point, the editors put in pictures of Robert Duvall as the Great Santini, and Bill Cosby as lovable Cliff Huxtable.

Lakoff makes some good points, but I'm not crazy about family analogies in politics because the analogy inevitably extends (though Lakoff makes little of it) to parents and children. I don't wish to be cast in either role, frankly, especially when social scientists are doing the casting.

Deborah Tannen is a little more on the mark in examining Frank Luntz' linguistic tactics for Republicans. She objects to Luntz' read on the appeal to female voters. Based largely on Bill Clinton's success with the ladies (electorally, I mean), Luntz calls for Republicans to "empathize" with distaff citizens. "Understanding may be all that a woman is looking for when telling her husband or boyfriend about something that frustrated her during the day," Tannen retorts. "But when they go to the polls to elect a leader, women as well as men are not electing a soul mate but a public official..."

Right on, sister. When we talk about politics, it's a good thing to examine the contents of the snake oil our adversaries peddle. But when we start working too seriously on our own formulae -- or counter-formulae -- we run the risk of further debasing our politics, which in the long run does everyone a disservice.

The real sad thing about the California recall is not that it may go badly for our side (by which I of course refer to the candidacy of Gary Coleman). It's that the recall is a circus, politics as entertainment. So too the whole Roy Moore/Ten Commandments fiasco, now being exported to Mississippi. Politainment may amuse bored reporters and disgusted voters, but it should make fans of representative government nervous. Because though a lot of politics is about putting on a good show, it's also about finding consensus and keeping the Republic healthy, and we seem to be veering quickly in the goofball direction.

It's the silly season for sure, but it looks sillier by the minute, and in case you haven't noticed, the country has a lot of real problems. We're not whistling a happy tune, we're whistling in the dark, and the marketability of the tune is beginning to matter less and less.

UNCLE ROY, WHAT'S A "STRAW MAN"? Fetch Uncle Roy down the jug and hit this to get Instapundit telling a tale out of school, or rather out of the Moonie Times. The alleged exchange is between 9/11 TV movie auteur Lionel Chetwynd and, it would seem, a brain-damaged person:

Still, the murmurs of pretty much blanket disapproval I'd been hearing from colleagues about Chetwynd's doing the movie did come to a head during one truly absurd exchange:

Question: "You did contribute to [Bush's] campaign?"

Chetwynd: "Yeah, the limit was $1,000...Would it make a better film if I'd given $1,000 to Gore?"

Question: "Yes."

"Chetwynd: "Why?"

"Question: "Because it would show less potential bias."

The questioner was absolutely serious...

"OH, THAT LIBERAL MEDIA" chortles the Perfesser.

Let's assume, nephew, that Chetwynd actually met and spoke with this Mallard Fillmore caricature. An amusing anecdote, but what the hell does it demonstrate or portend? It's sort of like my own anecdote:

The overweight Republican dusted off his top hat with the sleeve of his tuxedo jacket and, moving his fat cigar to one side, sneered to me, "Most days, I tell outrageous lies to the American people because it bamboozles them into keeping my pals and I rich and powerful. But on special days like today, I do it simply to further damage an already enfeebled democracy. Moow-wah-ha-ha!"

What! You doubt the veracity of my tale? Can you prove it isn't true? And, by the way, my anecdote shows that Republicans smoke cigars, wear fancy duds, and feast on the misery of the workers. Boo-yah! Advantage: flash fiction as journalism!

DOPE, GUNS, AND FREEPING IN THE STREETS. Atrios has flagged this Free Republic discussion of Arnold's old Oui interview (in which he cheerfully flaunts his casual sex and drug use). I have long harbored a morbid fascination with FR, and so try to stay away from it, lest I get sucked forever into their vortex of anti-logic and magical thinking. But this module's too good to resist.

Sample post:

All I'll say about this is that if Bill Clinton had done the things he did prior to 1977 and reformed his act, I'd never have given him the trouble I did.

Bill Clinton was, is and always will be a diseased brain infested likely traitor and felon.

The posting of this article is unfortunate. I can only shake my head that anyone would think it relevant today.

I made some terrible choices in my youth. I congratulate you if you didn't.

In the Nixon era, Ron Ziegler used the curious locution "mistakes were made" to minimize whatever Administration fuckup he was compelled to explain. Well, now we have a new usage for conservatives who want to excuse behavior that, had it been displayed by their enemies rather than their friends, would cause them to spew tidal waves of abuse: "Terrible choices" have been made.

All over this board, in and among the usual Hillary Clinton fan fiction, you'll observe VRWC factota, usually steadfast against moral relativism in all its forms, experiencing similar, sudden, and glorious conversions to this laissez-faire socially-liberal view -- with exceptions made, of course, for "diseased brain infested likely traitor and felon" Clinton. Love the sin, hate the sinner!

Of course, I'm joking, as in reality this is all Bullshit Libertarianism -- that popular stance adapted by those to who believe in freedom where, when, and for whom it suits themselves (see Carey, Drew). Too bad. If these guys were really listening to themselves, they might undergo a real conversion -- not in politics, perhaps, but in their attitude toward those Commie preverts who do things they wouldn't do except when they did which they wouldn't do now...

KELLY'S HEROES. Funny, when you read Instapundit these days on Britain, it would seem that all the Scepter'd Isle is livid with outrage at the BBC over the Kelly affair. Here's a ripe example of his coverage:

...The Beeb, which just can't seem to avoid sexing up weapons stories... ANOTHER UPDATE: Roger Simon is comparing the BBC to Nixon and to The New York Times...

He also observes that "The Guardian is all over this one." The Guardian, which actually originates in Blighty, is indeed all over the BBC story, and here's a fairly typical excerpt:

[Defense Minister Geoff] Hoon also acknowledged that the BBC report had led to a major political crisis for Prime Minister Tony Blair and that his government was under tremendous pressure to disprove the BBC's allegations that Blair had exaggerated the risks of Iraq's weapons before the war...

The BBC's allegations -- and the high-profile inquiry being led by Lord Hutton, a senior appeals judge -- pose the worst crisis for Blair in his six years in power, with the latest polls showing that many Britons question his credibility.

Regular IP readers who have heretofore assumed that Blair was as big a hero in Anglia as in Crawford, TX might want to wipe their exploded heads off their monitors now. The BBC may well be having credibility issues, but they're nothing compared to those of the Prime Minister. (Unless of course you believe that, as promulgators of the international liberal media conspiracy, the Beeb is actually more powerful than Blair...)

All goes to show, you can get a bogus idea of international events from even the more widely-puffed weblogs. Come to think of it, drop the "international."

WESLEY WILLIS R.I.P. Wesley Willis, paranoid schizophrenic songwriter, has passed on. A moment of silence, please, for the author of "I Whupped Batman's Ass." Hopefully Daniel Johnston can pick up the slack.

A SMALL THING BUT STILL WORTH NOTING. In a post about cellphone disruptions during the recent blackout, Professor Reynolds comments, "A reader emails that Verizon wireless was up throughout the blackout, unlike other companies. Bravo!"

Someone tell the Professor that Verizon badly botched the NYPD's emergency cell communications that day. The union with which Verizon has been tussling for months suggests that the telecom's personnel cutbacks might have had something to do with it.

Wouldn't surprise me -- Verizon is the worst public utility company with whom I've ever had the misfortune to do business: sloppy, expensive, and rude. But I'll say this for them: they're very good at guerilla marketing, as witnessed by the abovementioned, probably planted message.

IMMORTAL GREEKS. Jon Landis' reflections on Animal House in the New York Times are slightly surprising. I've long disliked Landis -- whenever I saw him on TV during his trial for supervising the stunt in the 1983 Twilight Zone movie that killed Vic Morrow and a couple of kids, he always had this shitty what's-the-big-deal grin on his face. But he did direct Animal House, and that buys considerable slack. And he said some good stuff in the Times:

• He went out of his way to credit Doug Kenney, Chris Miller, and Harold Ramis for writing the picture. The first two, particularly, don't get enough credit for their National Lampoon work, and the NYT namecheck is a nice gesture.
  
• He said he was trying to make in Animal House his own version of the old-fashioned college pictures with Rudy Vallee and Jack Oakie. That's a good reference, shows scholarship, and may direct some heretofore clueless Blutarsky fan toward silent comedy. (Landis included Buster Keaton here, too, and must have been thinking of the film College, one of my personal favorites.)
  
• Landis has an insight that hadn't even occured to me over many years of loving Animal House. He says:
  

  Why do people romanticize the military and romanticize college? You're 18, and you're out of the house. There's a great line in Animal House: 'We can do anything we want. We're college students!' In addition to everything else, the movie somehow captures that sense of youthful exuberance and excitement, of being out there in the world.

  
  This adds to my enjoyment of this film, and serves as a useful reminder that, to a large extent, the adventures of Bluto, Flounder, Pinto et alia are not only (or even primarily) antiestablishment nose-thumbing, but constitute an ingenious conflation of the bildungsroman and picaresque traditions. Which is to say, maybe the boys of Delta House remain popular (whereas the boys of Van Wilder and other, similar entertaiments never became so) because they resonate with the eternal. We may not all be frat boys, but we all know the attraction of getting out of the house, and of killing Niedermeyer's horse. Figuratively speaking, of course.

WINNING ISN'T EVERYTHING... I repeat myself, but isn't it a great indicator of conservatism's basic unseriousness that many of its leading lights are plumping for the apolitically ambitious Arnold Schwarzenegger?

"Schwarzenegger Comes Through!" gushes NRO third-stringer Peter Robinson over Ahnold's transparently Golden-Bear-baiting, non-Bartlett's-contending soundbites (e.g., "Before you promise anything to anyone right now, I think stop. Stop, stop, stop with the spending"). Based on such feeble evidence, Robinson compares Schwarzenegger flatteringly to Ronald Reagan. One is tempted to answer: No, Reagan's feeble-mindedness is caused by Alzheimer's, not steroid abuse, and the Gipper had an at least moderate range of interests (movies, politics, horses, Barnaby Jones), whereas Arnold Schwarzenegger has, judging from his behaviors, a genuine interest in Arnold Schwarzenegger and not much else.

Robinson, say this for him, plays it cagey and leaves his accounting of the Reagan/Schwarzenegger link murky: "The most important parallel between Schwarzenegger and Reagan? That's still developing," Robinson admits; but "when Reagan was elected president in 1980, there was no consensus on what should be done -- but there was a consensus that something had to be done." Well, Ahnold will do something, all right. Invite Rob Lowe and a few "friends" to the Governor's mansion for a sleepover, perhaps, or push through a bill mandating for himself a better seat at the Oscars. But other than that, what? Only his publicist knows for sure.

I am guessing that the real Reagan/Schwarzenegger "parallel" is simply that Ahnold is in movies and can win. Perhaps this is enough. That conservatives would like to lay siege to any Democratic redoubt is unsurprising -- but it's downright alarming to consider the price they're now willing to pay for victory. We knew (via the 2000 election and the 2001 campaigns) that they would employ any means to win, but that they would employ such a flawed vessel as Schwarzenegger shows a definite lowering of standards.

Mere weeks after the massive shitfit pitched by the Right over the Supreme Court's anti-sodomy decision (and amid its lingering cultural fallout -- see Robinson's fellow bench-warmer Tim Graham's bitching about TV gays), the new Great Right Hope is pro-gay, pro-choice, and otherwise not especially on board with the Roger Chillingworth wing of the movement. Poor Judge Roy Moore! As he risks his career for a statue of the Ten Commandments in Alabama, those who should be his natural defenders lavish their attention on a Tinseltown muscleman.

Elsewhere at NRO, Bruce Bartlett bites his nails over "Big-Government Conservatism." It seems to perplex BB that such a lovely, reactionary fellow as W would forsake true conservative principals just to win voter approval with handouts of public money. How I would love to see W reading (or having read to him) Bartlett's piece, and to hear his contemptuous laughter!

At home, as in Iraq, the illusion of victory seems to be enough for these guys. It is fitting that they now prostrate themselves before a showman.

WELL, THEY CALL ME THE CLEANSER, BABY. From the Washington Post:

GANGRE, Kenya -- The women of this village call Francise Akacha "the terrorist." His breath fumes with the local alcoholic brew. Greasy food droppings hang off his mustache and stain his oily pants and torn shirt....

But for all of his undesirable traits, Akacha has a surprisingly desirable job: He's paid to have sexual relations with the widows and unmarried women of this village. He's known as "the cleanser," one of hundreds of thousands of men in rural villages across Africa who sleep with women after their husbands die to dispel what villagers believe are evil spirits.

As tradition holds, they must sleep with the cleanser to be allowed to attend their husbands' funerals or be inherited by their husbands' brother or relative, another controversial custom that aid workers said is causing the spread of HIV-AIDS. Unmarried women who lose a parent or child must also sleep with the ritual cleanser.

(Thanks to Ken MacLeod for the link.)

The Post says at least some women in rural Kenya are now refusing to take part in this dangerous barbarity, and good for them. But, shallow fellow that I am, I still can't get over that such a line of employment even exists. Also, check out the Post's description of the job qualifications:

A cleanser is typically the village drunkard or someone considered not very bright.

That reminds me: I really need to update my resume.

Looking at the slothful chick-magnet musicians of my acquaintance, it seems there's a touch of the universal here. Perhaps when a well-brought-up young lady of our own time and place chooses to couple with a snaggletoothed wastrel, clubfly, or drummer, she is actually responding to a deep-seated cultural imperative, and will leave the encounter cleansed of something -- illusions, perhaps, or her wallet.

I also enjoyed the town's name, which seems to have been created by Evelyn Waugh.

STILL MORE PROOF THAT JONAH GOLDBERG IS AN ASSHOLE: He doesn't like Vermont. Apparently they have hippies there, and somebody yelled at him.

LET'S SEE, WHERE'D I PUT MY STRAW MEN? Today Instapundit spends hundreds of words trying to stick an embarrassing interpretation to a single phrase spoken by Ed Asner.

(So many standout self-parodic features appear in this single Insta-incident that I have gone italic mad!)

Among the techniques availed by the Perfesser is snippets of commentary from his stooges, mostly saying that Asner probably didn't mean what IP thought he might have meant, but is still a big jerk who smells bad anyway.

This really blows away IP's standard disclaimer that he's not a conservative. Only a died-in-the-wool winger would get this worked up about Ed Asner.

(My original question was going to be, "What is it with conservatives and Ed Asner?" But I'll just leave it at "What is it with conservatives?")

Well, fuck 'em. Ed Asner rocks. He was Lou Grant. Also did a great turn in Rich Man, Poor Man ("I am in hell, making Parker House Rolls"). And he was going to be in that banned Harlan Ellison New Twilight Zone episode as a racist Santa Claus before CBS intervened.

By the way, Alan Alda's a pretty good actor, too.

JUST IN CASE YOU WERE WONDERING: This is how I come out in Quizilla's What Leader Were You in a Past Life Test:



Funny, I don't remember being asked about the disposition of six million Jews. I most certainly would have answered, "Let them run the banking and entertainment industries!" I think my Spartan lifestyle threw the Quizmasters.

Thanks to Sasha Castel for the link. Achtung, baby!

THE GIULIANIFICATION OF BUSH. I see by the Chicago Tribune (via Alterman) that Bush's Pentagon wants to cut the pay of American soldiers in Iraq. This put me in mind of our late, accursed mayor Giuliani, who rode to glory on the backs of City cops and then fucked them over on pay raises.

Of course, Giuliani used the NYPD ill in many ways. Here's an interesting case revealed in New York Newsday last month:

Last week, City Comptroller William Thompson Jr. released his "Claims Report 2001-2002." Buried in parentheses amid the pie charts and bar graphs, was a line that said the city paid out $141.7 million in claims against the Police Department in fiscal 2001 - $63 million more than before or since.

The reason was a class action suit involving 7,000 citizens. Cost to the city: $50 million.

The case involved the strip-searching of 65,000 people for such minor first offenses as littering under former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's "quality of life" crime crackdown.

This massive payout is one major reason for the massive deficits that plague us still. (The others, including Hizzoner's largesse to large local businesses, would fill several columns.)

Yet the country worships "Rudy" as a savior, and doubtless Bush expects similar on-the-cheap veneration. To a large extent, it's a cultural thing. Cops and soliders identify with the Republican crackdown vision, and are, it seems, more easily flim-flammed than, say, hospital workers when it is quietly announced that they will not be compensated for their part in the new order. And the public is easily brought on board with the NYPD Blue, Third Watch, Law & Order narrative of tough leaders guiding tough civil servants through a world of skels.

These bastards have it worked good and proper. Come the Republican Convention in New York next year, the cops will, no doubt, efficiently pen protestors far from the media eye. They will be paid far less than they deserve or even require for doing so, but they will do it, and be part of the whole, carefully managed spectacle of muscular righteousness the Republicans have planned.

And some people call us useful idiots!

BLACKOUT NOTES. A little deprivation is good for the soul. I'm just not used to sharing it. Not on this scale, anyway.

My walk from Midtown West to Williamsburg was delayed for a variety of reasons until 7:30 pm yesterday. The atmosphere up around those parts was at first survivalesque, then carnivalesque. The street-choking mobs near Port Authority in the first hour were purposeful and dour (especially when we got a load of the closed doors and scant chance of escape), but once we started to radiate back into the neighborhoods, a cheerful determination took over. I talked to one friend through the window of a stalled bus, another on the street as he made his sweaty way to his girlfriend's place in the West 40's. (It never ceases to amaze me whom you run into, and how, in the City.)

Far West in the more Puerto Rican environs, bright acceptance was the rule. In a NYCHA building west of Tenth Avenue, they were hauling food down from the useless fridges for barbecue, and chatting amiably in the darkened stairwells as they conveyed themselves or their hobbled relations up and down. The kids were happy as shit, playing ball in the yards and screeching merrily to one another, like the gathering darkness was a pleasure to anticipate and the blackout a holiday. I can't imagine this town without Spanish people. I think the rest of us would have killed each other by now without them.

As I made my way dowtown in the last moments of sunlight, streets, sidewalks, and stoops had become social centers, sometimes with lawn chairs and frequently with coolers, or just piles, of drinks. Guys hauled bags of ice ("Cost me five bucks!" one guy yelled. "You wouldn't believe the line!"), at least half yapped on cell phones or stood diligently tapping the keys, trying to get through. At Rudy's on Ninth, where I stopped for a beer (knowing this would all be a little easier with one at least under my belt), the warm, stinky dimness reminded me of bars I'd frequented when A/C was not so ubiquitous: in the languor of the barflies, content on their stools, I felt again the old New York of pleasure amid squalor and lack.

I made my way through Times Square in the first hints of gloom, thinking only, I don't want to be here when it's really dark. But that was silly of me in retrospect. The big dead electronic billboards were something to see -- those vast panels of desire looking a little dull, frankly, without all the juice coursing through them, like constructions for a trade show before the crowds showed. But the people were -- well, cool would be the best world, were this not August -- they were damp and sizzled a little, not angrily, but complacently, like carriage horses waiting for custom around Central Park. I saw the now-storied sidewalk loungers, their nice shirts matted with sweat, their hair disarrayed, their name-brand shoes stretched uselessly before them, as they parked their haunches on backpacks, on newspapers, or just on concrete, and looked surprisingly resigned that their hotels or trains home were out of the question. They chatted and laughed as if their bus had been briefly stuck in traffic, or as if the ferry to their weekend house had been delayed by a storm and there was nothing to do but have another drink (of bottled water, in most cases) and make conversation with fellow-sufferers.

Further downtown, darker still. The clots of pedestrians were thick and took advantage of every available byway -- sidewalk, temporarily empty street, park, traffic island. Some sought assistance. A well-dressed man stood proudly at the edge of Sixth Avenue, holding five or six twenty-dollar bills fanned out in front of him. A cab miraculously stopped for two older women with shopping bags, who hobbled with delighted laughter toward it and toppled, still laughing, into the back seat.

Traffic was tentative. Cops in thin plastic reflective ponchos waved flashlights. One bicyclist, a chubby black guy in overalls and a tank top, skidded to stop for a sudden lurch of sidestreet traffic. "DUDE," yelled a cop, "THERE'S NO LIGHTS. TAKE IT EASY." The biker yet angled his front wheel for a break in the traffic. "IF YOU GET HIT," the cop loudly advised, "SANITATION'S GONNA BE A LONG TIME PICKING YOUR ASS OFF THE STREET."

As I got further down I thought of my cats and checked several of the open delis for comida del gato. Supplies were dwindling and lines were long. Sometimes Coleman Lanterns lit the stores; in one case at least, a parked car shone hi-beams through the glass front. Mister Softee trucks were everywhere, and had long lines. On Houston, in an amazingly stinky and hot bodega, I got the cat food, and some Gatorade and a Luna Bar to keep myself going. By then it was very dark. The Lower East Side was all it usually was, but with the revelry now mostly (though some boites were lit by candlelight, like sets from Gangs of New York) on the street: on Ludlow, blocked to traffic and nearly pitch black, residents straggled or sat in the streets with six-packs and howled and bayed and sang. You had to step lively to keep from toppling over them.

Crowds gathered on Delancey for access to the Williamsburg Bridge. A fat, black female cop, with a proper mesh vest emblazoned TRAFFIC, yelled into the night, "GOING OVER THE WILLIAMSBURG BRIDGE? WAIT RIGHT HERE." So we stood attentively like schoolchildren, waiting for the signal, and were conveyed through a sideways-waving gauntlet of cops to the walkway. The path across was dark and crowded. I passed several couples talking energetically, earnestly, and wondered if not a few of them had never before had this chance for uninterrupted and (it must be said) romantic talk before, and what might come of it. I kept peeping also over my shoulder (for the traffic moved quickly and almost in a mass) at Manhattan, in the moonlight and harborlight an awesome sight, the festival glow of its windows and streetlamps dead (but for one full-blazing building midtown and I'm still wondering which one it was). It looked gray and vast, like a rock formation exquisitely carved.

At the far end of the Bridge volunteers from the local Hasidic ambulance service deferentially handed out tiny cups of water. Some journeyers dunked their heads in a gush of water from an open hydrant. On my block I noted a crowd cheering around a lantern-lit bodega. A middle-aged woman in a short, frilly black dress was humping a gray folding chair to music from a boombox. At the corner, some youngsters burned scrap wood in a metal garbage can.

My own corner store sold me a beer, still cold, and I trooped up my dark, dark steps, gripping the railing and counting the flights, till I got to my own lightless piece of the City. I turned on my lantern, fed my cats, and sprawled on the bed. Through the open window came a light breeze, distant cries of roving groups of citizens, and firecracker explosions.

Around 3:30 the next afternoon we got power out my way. But of course, though they don't know it (though maybe they do, now, a little bit), the people had the power all along.

WE WILL FLEE THE NUCLEAR WINTER ON OUR SEGWAYS! Whatshisname (God, I hate linking to him) points us to Schwarzenegger's official site. "Where's the campaign blog?" is the only question Whatshisname advances. What I want to know is: where's the part of the site where the candidate tells us, oh, what he would do as Governor of a large, debt-ridden state?

(Of course a weblog would be more likely to appear at the site, as the ill-spoken Arnold could use PR specialists to invent for himself a voice that is free from gutteral friction, careless misuse of basic English, and meaning -- which last is, while do-able, a slightly harder trick in the "policy paper" format.)

I wrote this because the bile was overflowing and I couldn't help myself. I do realize that we Americans are now totally detached from our government, and that elections of Governors and elections of Star Search winners are more or less the same to us.

The funny thing is, Dick Morris seems to realize this, too, though, less unusually, his further analysis is less acute. "Why are voters so cynical, apathetic and downright surly?" the disgraced consultant writes. "Count the reasons. In 2000, the supposedly nonpartisan United States Supreme Court voted, almost along party lines, to deny the voters a chance for a recount in the presidential election..." Of the California debacle he adds, "Voters know that the political system is fundamentally corrupted by special interests and their campaign contributions. They realize that Gov. Gray Davis can no more cut the budget or close tax loopholes than could one of a Roman galley's slaves steer the boat."

Sounds about right. Despair will lead to desperate measures, and voters, like malcontented children, have good reason to believe that they will only be attended when they misbehave.

But that isn't what Morris means at all."Is there a salvation for our democracy?" he asks. "Yes. It will come through the Internet."

Omigod.

"...Dean campaign spread virally through the 'Net..." blah blah blah "...the free communication of the Internet will create an alternative to top-down manipulation..." blah blah blah "flow of information" blah blah "This is a revolutionary era we are entering." Blah.

Almost as reliable as Algren's classic formulation about places called Mom's and card players callded Doc is the (I should hope) by-now universal maxim that anything that has to be revolutioned by "the 'Net" is doomed already.

"The 'Net" was supposed to revolutionize music. Music now sucks. "The 'Net" was supposed to revolutionize publishing. Literature now sucks. (At least it hasn't been completely digitized, though. Remember hypernovels?) The only areas of human life web communications have improved are special-interest community building (which, while very nice, tends to militate against consensus politics, not for it) and access to porn (also very nice, but -- well, just very nice).

Sad, no? Reynolds and Morris, two reputable pundits, look at Conan the Barbarian's candidacy and ask, hm, what's the technology angle? I guess that's why they're both so chipper in these parlous times: in their view, as long at the iPods and Blackberries are running, Western Civ is advancing.

HIATUS, SORTA. Between these projects that I'll tell you about later, I haven't had much chance to get up in here and dish out karma. I shall return. Meantime check me out as guest columnist at Katie Lukas' Funny That, a daily review of the comics appearing in the New York Daily News. If that ain't meta, I'll kiss your ass.

ELECTION IN PROGRESS. I see the Administration has called out the good cop to announce a continuation of our moratorium on nuclear testing. This barely needed mentioning, as our avowed enemies of the moment crouch in caves fiddling with gelginite and whatnot, and hardly call the question as to whether America's WMD are sufficient -- we can kill anybody we need to, at any time.

This is a signal to no one but the American electorate, meant to convey that we are not totally nuts, at a time when more than a few citizens might be wondering about it.

Why would anyone else care? Russia is hardly at issue, especially given Putin's recent overtures toward an international moderate Islamic organization (yes, such things exist -- someone tell Den Beste!).

It might be argued that this move shows that the Bushites take the North Korean threat less than seriously. That would be a good argument. The Holy Ghost of the Axis of Evil is getting soothing words from Condi Rice, which will only surprise those who imagined that the tinpot despots of NK were as dangerous as was advertised in the President's long-forgotten war-fever speeches.

Meanwhile Homeland Security is generating income for some folks peddling ass-covering methods and devices by which security firms may demonstrate to clients that they are duly diligent in the matter of local terrorism. "On one side of the Jack Reardon Civic Center on Tuesday," reports the Kansas City Star of one such, "you could buy the HRI Hot Suit, perfect for braving a 600-degree fire after a terrorist strike. The cost: $80,000, which covers a package of three suits with supporting equipment."

One might wonder about the Saudis, but these days there hardly seems any point to that, does there? The folks at NRO's Corner have been as complaisant on that score of late as they have been on the pro-choice candidacy of the Terminator in California. (Even the reliable scold Lopez, having dropped a sour note on Ahnold at one point, later nollied it with some on-message boosterism.)

Election in progress! Turn off principles before merging with the one available lane.

CRAZY LIKE A FOX NEWSMAN. I used to make fun of Jim Lileks a lot, till my focus inevitably and happily drifted. My thought back then was that the guy was nuts, and his dire visions of nuclear death for New York and so forth still read like Bremeresque ravings found in motel drawers after killing sprees.

But Lileks has calmed. From the evidence of his most recent column, he would seem to have shifted his job description from the Jeremiah of Jasperwood to good-natured Republican hack.

He has developed, for example, a sunny side attitude toward the risible candidacy of Arnold Schwarzenegger, supporting the former Mr. Universe because he is "more likable and trustworthy than the alternatives... he’ll bring new voters to the polls." He sounds like an excitable Jaycee pimping his high school football teammate for County Executive. He adds, "We saw this in Minnesota with Jesse." I never noticed Lileks calling the surly Minnesota governor "Jesse" before -- either he and Ventura recently bonded over a secret stash of Battlestar Gallactica figurines, or the prairie pundit has begun adopting icons as journalistic pets. Talk of "Jack," "Bobby," "Rudy," or "Jesse" is a sure sign of incipient hackdom -- see any Pete Hamill column for details.

Then Lileks gets to that gay bishop, and suddenly he's channeling Maggie Gallagher. "It has nothing to do with Rev. Robinson’s sexual orientation," he assures. "The guy left his wife and kids to go do the hokey-pokey with someone else... 'I want to have sex with other people' is not a valid reason for depriving two little girls of a daddy who lives with them, gets up at night when they're sick, kisses them in the morning when they wake."

In just a few tear-stained cliches he's got the soccer moms on board with the Derbyshire wing, all the while maintaining plausible toleration! Is this the work of a madman? No, my friends, this is the work of a crafty wordsmith angling for the A. M. Rosenthal Chair, which is always well-padded, at some bigger daily than that he currently serves. All he has to do now is minimize the trips to Target and desperate declarations of fealty to his widdle girl, and tone down the keening pitch to which his longer pieces usually escalate, and he's a cinch the next time great Rupert has an opening.

SPRINGER OUT, SCHWARZENEGGER IN. Somehow I don't think this is what the Founders had in mind by check and balances. We have had some celebrity guest leaders, but at least Congressman Davy Crockett had some relevant work experience (most notably killing a b'ar when he was only three) before entering the legislature. And Max Frost could sing!

Schwarzenegger.com asks us to wait a bit for a statement, but there is much verbiage at the "Arnold4Gov" site, unsurprisingly short on policy details, though we do learn that the candidate loves America and that he "earned his first million not in movies but in business," by which I assume is meant the business of bodybuilding, unless he had a dry-goods store or something that I haven't heard about.

Arnold will have to start articulating soon. I expect mush, given what his consultant George Gorton has been telling the press ("When Arnold walks into a gym, these guys come up to him and tell their stories," Gorton told the Washington Post. "They'll say, 'I used to be a 90-pound weakling, but then I read your book and saw your video and whatever.' Arnold's like a god to these people.")

Mush may work. Whoever wins, I can't imagine anyone expects the victor to fix Cali's budget problems, so what the hell? Might as well have a good time on the way down the drain. One wonders how long these circuses may last without bread.

WAY TO GO, BISH. I normally don't trouble myself with the internal affairs of large, superstition-based organizations, but I am pleased at this new Episcopal bishop, if only because his appointment has set John Derbyshire to crying "For shame! For shame!" Next Derb will, one hopes, walk barefoot a la George Fox through the streets of Concord, crying "Woe unto the bloody state of New Hampshire."

EITHER WAY YOU LOOK AT IT, YOU LOSE. According to the Ole Perfesser, even when we're right, we're wrong. After approvingly quoting a few of the elect on the Administration's penchant for unconstitutional detentions, he claims that

Sadly, the Bush Administration's best friends in all this are those who have repeatedly cried wolf, and who now cast Bush as Hitler, thus discrediting the more serious civil libertarians who raise valid concerns like these.

"...and who now cast Bush as Hitler." Ted Rall is Bush's best friend?

Actually, who can tell who the Perfesser is talking about? Wesley Clark? Nat Hentoff? To what wolf-crying does he refer? At what point did it become prudent to complain about the Patriot Acts? After it was too late, apparently.

Funny, this guy is always writing about the Left's hatred of Bush. But he'd rather put his name to an outrageous and illogical statement like the one quoted here than side with a liberal on anything.

LESS THAN AUGUST. Columnists are often at their most revealing in silly-season thumbsuckers. Here's a passage from Dave Shiflett, "a member of the White House Writers Group," on Americans at the beach or some damned thing:

It is true that some fellow citizens have taken the Super Size craze a bit too seriously, growing to the size of fully adult manatees, to the point of having difficulty staying above ground in areas where the sand is not thoroughly packed. The larger point, however is that chunking up must now be considered an act of civil disobedience. In the current context, eating that extra éclair is a heroic act.

I'm cheating a bit, but not much, by not showing first Shiflett's run-up to this bizarre statement. He starts by castigating the anti-smoking law of the despised Bloomberg before hailing gluttony as a blow against the empire. See, first they banned smoking in bars -- clearly their next step is to padlock the freezer case at the Stop 'n' Shop.

The thing is, I sometimes have thoughts like Shiflett's, too: I hate Bloomberg's smoking ban (hell, I hate Bloomberg, with his depraved little "It's fun to play Mayor!" grin), and I can sympathize with anyone's annoyance at our therapeutic society. No one likes being told what to do, and some of us really don't like. (That's the secret of my success, certainly.) But within seconds of having them, I usually have this corollary thought: Congratulations, you're the one millionth writer to whine about "health nazis" and how they ruin everyone's good time. Here's your rattle.

Someone ought to render that service to Shiflett. It is genuinely weird to see a grown man (assuming Shiflett is grown) going out for a stroll on the boardwalk and observing of every expression of human pleasure he comes across that it is a "targetted activity" that some flying squad of blue-noses wants to ban. Well, yes, I suppose it is, but so what? When they come for the beer wagon, let me know.

You'd think the activities that are not targetted would please Shiflett, but no:

If we are going to go after rib eating, tobacco smoking, and beer drinking because they are drains on the health-care system, why not also clamp down on other behaviors that make people ill and cost lots of money, such as certain sexual practices?

Haw haw! That's tellin' them airy fairies what wants to take away our eclairs!

Here's why I can't be a conservative: I do not believe that the Surgeon General is the modern equivalent of the Grand Inquisitor. I would rather have sex than eat eclairs. And when a conservative columnist writes something that's supposed to be fun, like a beach blurb in August, I usually find it painful to read.

ATTENTION WHORES. "Web Hookups Blamed for Rise in AIDS" reads a headline out of the National HIV Prevention Conference and based on the new CDC numbers. You know, I do believe that a lot of the stuff people in this medium are saying about weblogs -- the kind of triumphalism I'm always dismissing -- is really based on the immense flood of traffic drawn by people's need to connect on more primal levels.

Even here I am happy to be linked, as 'twere, to like-minded blatherers -- I'm always pleased to be cited, answered, blogrolled. I believe the internet is really driven by a hunger for connection, and if you just look at the political weblog piece of it, you're missing the bigger picture. Behind most of the allegedly political, ideological, and journalistic impulses given for the weblog phenomenon are several millions of lonelinesses looking for surcease, a sign that someone feels as we feel. I strongly feel it when I scrawl (or post to) the comments sections of allegedly political weblogs -- that canker of isolation begging the balm of electronic contact.

This doesn't negate the good sense spoken by some of us, or even the nonsense spoken by others. But I think it should provide context for the exorbitant claims sometimes made for this little patch of public discourse. The desire to be heard (or to share on a grosser, in the Elizabethan sense, level) drives so strong that we should take it with a grain of salt, or sense.

It ill becomes me to say so, but if you haven't figured it out already (and you probably have), I'm a bit of an attention whore. I would suggest that most of the opinion vendors hereabouts tend that way, too.

"We are arrant knaves, all of us; believe none of us; to a nunnery, go!" Hamlet had that much right.

ORLANDO FURIOSO. Lord. Had to work this Convention in Orlando, and my preliminary response is, Orlando blows.

Well, that's grossly unfair, of course. I mainly saw the Convention Center and a Kinko's about 15 miles from it (and the infinite stretches of swamp grass, highway, and tourist trappings in between), and some other hotel bar where the art director and myself repaired for thrills (finding none) during our few free hours. As I am at present dead beat, I will just bullet-point you a bit of what I observed:

• Cabbies in Orlando could teach their NYC brethren something about thieving. Most routes were circuitous, most quotes outrageous. One driver offered to confirm his quote while driving to the destination! (We quickly pulled him over.) I can see this shit in New York or any other great, traditionally larcenous metropolis, but Orlando? Home of Mickey and Shamu? Small wonder the late Presidential election was so easily ganked here.
  
  
• In the Convention Center sodas cost $2.50. And the soda machines have credit card readers. I bought Mountain Dews with a credit card. I felt like Naomi Klein.
  
  
• But having experienced the vastness of the Orange County Convention Center, I begrudge Americans less their reliance on cars. The place comprises the equivalent of several football fields (10? 20? I cannot say), and having traversed these many times in the course of my various duties, and awakened after my few hours of allowed sleep with charley-horses, I began to hunger for the motorized carts availed by the more fat-assed among the attendees. America is big! Who knew?
  
  
• Everyone was very friendly, which I had expected, as I do make infrequent trips to America from the den of vice and intelligence I call home. But it was comforting to be reminded that the Bush-loving rabble are at bottom decent, well-meaning, sociable souls. It gave me hope that they may be right where they seem wrong, or if indeed wrong, then correctable.

More later, but I must reacclimate. God how I missed my City! My flight back took me over Manhattan. Ground Zero, which I had never observed from that height, looked like the space where one puts the battery panel on a laptop: flat, slightly irregular, asking to be filled.

TEE HEE. Gotta love this, via Google News:



Waiting for the usual suspects to blame the picture placement on the liberal media.

WHERE'S ROY? Sorry for the long absence. Weblog etiquette seems to require that we put up Out of Office messages when we're away. Most of the top bloggers do that, anyway, before they fuck off to some paradisical retreat paid for by the blood of the workers. I have always been a silently-slip-away sort, and I regret any resulting confusion or concern (fat chance).

I'm in Orlando on a job for my unnamed employers. I've spent most of the past three days running around the Orange County Convention Center. I can't stay long on the Mac right now (have to go get some tech support on a shitty Dell laptop) but I will get back to you soon about the fascinating, ugly place.

PRINCIPAL SKINNER AND MRS. CRABAPPLE MADE A BABY AND I SAW THE BABY AND THE BABY LOOKED AT ME. Moonie Times (aided and abetted by Sullivan) gives us the alleged Uday Hussein quote, "This time I think the Americans are serious. Bush is not like Clinton. I think this is the end." Interesting quote, especially from a dead man, especially from a dead man whose only real point of comparison in terms of unserious attacks on himself would be Bush Sr., not Clinton. You think maybe someone's gilding a lily here?

As for this "oily guns and steely knives" thing that SK Bubba mistrusts and Instapundit enjoys, I think that worth the benefit of the doubt. People can be astonishingly clever in all sorts of situations.

In general, though, my mother told me that when something seems too good to be true, it usually is, and I tend to discount blind (or dead) quotes that mysteriously support the prejudices of the media outlets that publish them.

In that spirit, I also find it suspicious that Reynolds goes "Yep" so much. Given his attitudes and prose style, I would be very surprised to learn that he was raised on the Pecos by Gabby Hayes, or in New England among a nest of Green Mountain Boys, which are the only conditions that naturally produce this linguistic peculiarity. I don't even think Ellen DeGeneres should be doing it, and I certainly wouldn't give a pass to the Ole Perfesser.

MOORE IS MORE. Michael Moore is one of the top hate-objects among wingers. So it is refreshing to see, in the midst of Kay S. Hymowitz's lengthy OpinionJournal attack on Moore, some passages in which the author addresses the question begged by most other, similar attacks: if Moore is such an evil spawn of Satan, how come he's so popular -- and not just with "trendy sophisticates in Cannes and Hollywood," as Hymowitz predictably notes, but millions of normal Americans in states Red as well as Blue?

Hymowitz allows how Moore is funny and folksy (or at least faux-folksy). And she also acknowledges -- and it's the only place I've seen this mentioned in the long, long canon of Moore antihagiography -- that Moore speaks to a nostalgia for that "populist's lost golden age" of the working class, before the age of endless layoffs; the days of the one-wage earner, two-car family, "where life was whole, people were genuine, and everything felt secure." She writes and quotes:

[Moore] evokes a vanished time, when laborers and corporate elites joined in a mutual spirit of loyalty and honest exertion. "My dad didn't live with this kind of fear," he has said of contemporary job instability. "The social contract then was, if you worked hard and the company did well, he did well."

This sounds reasonable. It's also one of the few stretches of Hymowitz's piece that is free of sarcastic dismissals of any implication that such a socially balanced work environment as Moore celebrates might be superior to the dog-eat-dog, Hobbesean nightmare into which America deeper descends every year.

Indeed, she implies that only a social misfit would want to live in the old, more-fully-employed America: "Though not without its appeal," she admits, "Mr. Moore's vision oozes with more 1950s nostalgia than a Loretta Young fan club." The cool kids embrace change! Hymowitz points out that people get bored with repetitive jobs -- "the mechanical repetition endured by the men and women who bolted thingamajigs to widgets on the assembly line" -- as if those who, in the Reagan era, were thrown off those lines and into chronic unemployment should have been grateful for the change of scenery.

As Hymowitz breaks it down, the death of manufacturing was not only unavoidable, but also class-neutral and even ultimately beneficent:

As cheap, well-made foreign cars flooded the market... companies had no choice but to cut costs and improve quality and productivity. They laid off workers, and organized those who were left into teams that had to take responsibility for the quality of their product. It wasn't just blue-collar heads that rolled. Restructuring, aided by waves of computerization, meant wiping out entire layers of management, a process that was bloody and sometimes deeply unjust....the fact is that many industries emerged from the carnage more competitive and better equipped to avoid layoffs in future recessions.

Well, speaking of nostalgia, the picture etched herein of American industry at the mercy of the Honda/Toyota menace does bring back the Lee Iacocca era, in which we were told that business "transformation" would save the American dream. Today, many of our former foreign competitors have conglomerated with American companies, but workers are still shit out of luck.

It seems to me this is the one hard nub Hymowitz and her crew can't break down. Yes, Moore is indulgent, and a prevaricator, and sometimes a hypocrite. But he knows that what he wants, and what a lot of us want, is attainable -- because it had been attained, in this country, only to be pissed away by a lot of greedy bosses, complaisant unions, and cynical politicians.

It's not nostalgia if you really think you can do it again. That's why Moore is, for all his kvetching, a positivist, and people love positivists -- ask Dale Carnegie! Which leaves his critics with the unenviable job of explaining to America why his happy vision should be resisted.

OOPS. Did an intemperate, incoherent post late last night, and have removed it. (What's your excuse for the leaving the rest of them up?--ed. Where were you when I needed you?--re) It was about Andrew Sullivan's response to Sam Tanenhaus on Ann Coulter and what ST seems to consider her erstwhile enablers (now critics) in the conservative movement. Sullivan thinks Tanenhaus unfairly "paint[s] diverse and serious writers like Dorothy Rabinowitz and David Horowitz as indistinguishable from Coulter." Well, Horowitz did write things like "Traitor in Chief," which more or less accused Clinton of selling us out to the Red Chinese. It's just a hop, skip, and a jump (maybe just a hop, actually) from that sort of thing to Coulterland. So it's piquant to see him, and a few others, now drawing a cordon sanitaire around her work.

But on sober reflection, it may be a good thing that they've distanced themselves from Coulter, even if only for ass-covering purposes. The high pitch of internet discourse hasn't been the best friend of reason -- I'm living proof of that -- and a dial-down here and there can't hurt.

[SIC]. A recent post from Andrew Sullivan:

DARK DAY FOR KRUGMAN: His hopes for recession seem to be receding.

If you don't know what's bughouse about this, explaining it to you would be a waste of my time.

CRAZIER THAN YOU THOUGHT. Leah at Eschaton has the proper attitude toward U.S. Institute of Peace board nominee Daniel Pipes. But I'm afraid she doesn't know the half of it (though the half she does know is pretty damning). In addition to his kill-'em-all-let-Michael-Ledeen-sort-'em-out approach to Middle Eastern affairs, Pipes has some interesting ideas about academic freedom here in the U.S. As I wrote back in November:

Columnist Daniel Pipes is unfailingly hard on Arabs, but he's murder on American professors of the antiwar persuasion. In this New York Post throwdown, he says our typical university is "a topsy-turvy world in which professors consider the United States (not Iraq) the problem and oil (not nukes) the issue." He also says the cloth-eared crowd "despise their own country," and describes them as "inept," "cranky and mistaken," and "the major American institution most alienated from the rest of the country."

After he's got that off his chest, Pipes gets down to prescriptions: "The time has come," he says, "for adult supervision of the faculty and administrators at many American campuses. Especially as we are at war, the goal must be for universities to resume their civic responsibilities."

One might wonder when unthinking compliance with Administration policy became an educational responsibility, but Pipes has no time to explain--he's got a plan: "This can be achieved if outsiders (alumni, state legislators, non-university specialists, parents of students and others) take steps to create a politically balanced atmosphere, critique failed scholarship, establish standards for media statements by faculty and broaden the range of campus discourse."

(Well, if I don't quote myself, who will? By the way, I'm the new new Orwell. Pass it on.)

Pipes' plan to send flying squads of thought police to college seems to me reason enough to keep him away from power, and perhaps sharp objects, for the duration.

SHORTER JONAH GOLDBERG: "I'm not nuts! You're nuts!"

(Best imagined as Albert Brooks screaming into the speakerphone in Real Life.)

FACES OF DEATH. I can't quite fathom why the deaths of Torturedee and Torturedum were supposed to be a boon to Wall Street. They must be hungry for good news. ("Uday's dead! This'll drive pork bellies through the roof!")

Not to rain on the bonfire, but what threat did those two pose anymore? Their father's regime is good and dead, and given what has been said about the lads, one can hardly imagine them mounting a fiercely loyal Saddamite resistance ("Follow me, boys, and tonight I will feast on the flesh of your tortured bride!").

Well, any port in a storm, I suppose. Iraq is a bloody shirt that anyone can wave; if you're of one mind, you can flog the risk to military lives, the feckless management, and the senseless waste and overreach of the whole affair, and if you're of another, you can flaunt "Democracy! Whiskey! Sec'y of Defense!" and such like. The posted pix of the brothers' shattered melons give the latter faction a chance to whoop. It'll be someone else's turn soon enough.

Meanwhile dollars and lives continue to sink into Iraqi sand. Someday they'll kill Saddam Senior, and the footage will be available on streaming video, but that won't turn the sand to concrete.

IT'S A FAIR COP, BUT SOCIETY'S TO BLAME. Ted Barlow says I'm "often unfair but always hilarious." He's too kind on both counts. Good luck at the new job, Ted, and I hope you don't really have to stop posting altogether.

HOPE FOR OUR YOUNG PEOPLE. "One of the most popular campaigns to curb alcohol use on campus hasn’t reduced student drinking and may actually have increased it, according to a new report from the Harvard School of Public Health’s College Alcohol Study." -- MSNBC.

I had previously worried that the kids were devolving into something docile and feeble. I'm still not sure they aren't -- their music sucks, and their taste in novelty liquor products suggests rampant pussification. But if an anti-alcohol propaganda campaign makes them want to get even more drunk, maybe their heads are screwed on straighter than I thought.

HAYSEED UNHEARD FROM. I see by Newsday that Celia Cruz's "funeral procession was led by white horses pulling a hearse, followed by limousines and a statue of the patron saint of Cuba, Our Lady of Charity."

When may we expect that asshole Rod Dreher to write a snotty column about it?

BOOBS. With the country safely in the hands of war profiteers and Jesus freaks, movement conservatives now have leisure to attend to cultural matters. At OpinionJournal, Collin Levey makes a conservative case for breast implants. "A boob job is certainly safer than eating arsenic or removing ribs, things earlier generations of women did for beauty," says Ms. Levey. Besides, breast implants piss off feminists. Boo yah!

I guess my preference for real tits is part of what makes me a liberal. I'll leave the silicon sacks to the Heritage Foundation boys.

IT HAPPENED JUST THAT WAY. At NRO's The Corner, they're telling stories about how cool people love them and lame people hate them. Brookhiser gets props from a biker. Jack Fowler (who he?) goes him one better, or worse:

As the train pulled into Grand Central Station, we got up and walked to the door, next to which was an aging hippie and Cruella Deville look-alike who gasped upon seeing my “NATIONAL REVIEW” shirt and hat. She conniptioned: “How could anyone have the nerve except Buckley to wear that,” etc. “Gee mam,” I respond, hoping to give her a greater reason to hate me, “I not only wear the clothes, I work there too.” “You’re intolerant” she hisses intolerantly. I smiled, tipped my cap, and said: “Have a wonderful weekend."

Kinda like a "Mallard Fillmore" strip come to life, ain't it? I have a story of my own, every bit as believable:

I was walking down Fifth Avenue, proudly wearing my DOPE, GUNS, AND FUCKING IN THE STREETS T-shirt, when a miserable, pinch-faced, squinty-eyed, fat, sweating, ugly, bad-smelling preacher, carrying a bible and drooling tobacco juice, let out a squeal and charged me, dragging by the hand former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Jeanne Kirkpatrick, looking every bit of her 107 years of age. "You is doin' th' Devil's work!" squealed the preacher, "Y'all ought to get right with God, head out to the Red States, lynch niggers, stomp faggots, an' drive a S.U.V.!" Jeanne Kirkpatrick nodded her three-foot-long head in agreement. "I, too, hate people of color and homosexuals," she rasped, "and my car is rather large." I sprayed them both with my squirting flower and they melted into dust.

I SHOUTED OUT, WHO KILLED DAVE KELLEY?/WHEN AFTER ALL, IT WAS THE BBC! Shit floats. The nutty idea raised by Andrew Sullivan yesterday has risen to the status of a new Right-wing meme: the BBC killed David Kelley by exposing the reluctant whistleblower to the wrath of the Blair Government. Here, the New York Post parrots:

BBC officials refused to disclose their source, but said the story was based on "one senior and credible source in the intelligence services."

An understandably outraged Blair ordered an investigation, which quickly focused on Kelly, a microbiologist involved in the search for WMD.

Ordered to testify before a House of Commons panel, he insisted he couldn't have been the source - because he hadn't said anything remotely like what Gilligan reported.

"From [our] conversation, I don't see how he could make the authoritative statement he was making," said Kelly.

But when Kelly - obviously distraught over having been thrust into the limelight - took his own life last week, the BBC confessed that he had, in fact, been the network's source.

Problem is, Kelly was never in the intelligence services. Nor was he "one of the senior officials in charge of drawing up the dossier."

And, as he himself insisted just days before his death, he'd never said what the BBC claimed he said.

Indeed, if anyone is guilty of having "sexed up" the information it gave the public, it's the BBC - not Tony Blair.

Two things jump out. First, there is some debate as to how the reporter actually characterized Kelley's role. This will probably be clarified soon enough in England, but by then the perpetrators of the current anti-BBC story, having milked it for all its stateside value, will have moved on to some other outrage, obviating any need for retraction that may arise among those few Americans who give a shit about British politics.

Secondly, this interpretation asks us to believe that when and if the Beeb misrepresented Kelley, he thereafter had no chance of a fair hearing by the Blairites, hence the suicidal despair. Given that Kelley, in this imagining, would be extremely useful to the Blair government in denying the BBC story, why would they not then clamp him lovingly to their breast? Isn't it more likely that Kelley, finding himself a major figure in what is turning out to be the biggest British Government scandal since Profumo, got cold feet?

The truth of this case may be unknowable, but we may know that certain explanations are not only unlikely, but perfidious.

CLOGS, FROGS, SPROUTS, ETC. Victor Davis Hanson on nationalized name-calling:

Remember various Germans' eerie evocations of Bush/Hitler, "another Caesar," Jews in Miami and New York, clicking one's heels, the German way, and other foul nonsense. Certain French apparatchiks and their consorts weighed in with slurs against Turkey and Eastern Europe ("end of Europe," "foreign culture," the need to stay "in their places," etc.) or Israel ("sh**ty little country"). Canada's officials chimed in with "moron," and other assorted outbursts. In contrast, very few in the Bush administration engaged in such childish smears.

Well, of course they don't -- Bushites have people to do that for them. Like Ralph Peters in the New York Post:

Forget the fact that the German contribution to the Renaissance was the realization that you could fit more beer in a bigger mug... a German Green is a Gestapo wannabe with a red paint-job... little German babies...

Peters ends this diatribe with a prose poem about how ugly and ill-mannered he found these two Germans he saw once.

I think we can agree that this sort of thing, while enjoyable in small doses, is unseemly in high places (and at the Post). And it says something awful about the current crop of democracies, including ours, that some people think they can drum up public support with that kind of behavior.

DAVID KELLEY STILL DEAD. ANDREW SULLIVAN STILL NUTS. A source for the BBC's WMD allegations, scientist David Kelley, talks of "dark actors playing games," then turns up dead. Official report is suicide.

If you are not inclined to take official reports seriously, you might suspect that the Blair Government had something to do with Kelley's death. They had something to gain by his silencing, certainly.

That might be paranoid. But if that's paranoid, what clinical psychiatric term would describe blaming Kelley's death on the BBC? Why, Andrew Sullivan, of course:

It is certainly not to the credit of the Blair government that, when Kelly told his superiors of his contact with the BBC, they pushed Kelly into the limelight in their defense. But they are still not ultimately responsible for this tragedy. Kelly deserved to have his views accurately represented by the BBC, rather than hyped in a way that made him the center of a grueling public storm. That very hype destroyed his privacy and led this very private man to despair. Someone at the BBC must be held accountable. And resign.

This paragraph -- from its vague acknowledgement of the real issue in this case, to the even more vague implication that Kelley's revelations were "hyped" and therefore not "accurately represented," to the final absurd misdirection of blame -- is a masterpiece of dementia.

Of course, it's possible Sullivan's not crazy -- merely eagerly deflecting attention away from his beloved Tony Blair, and trying to make a twofer of it by implicating one of his many voodoo dolls.

Geez, it says something about the guy that even the most charitable explanations for his behavior make him look bad.

SLIGHTLY SHORTER GLENN REYNOLDS. Did I mention I'm not a Republican? Though I'm no Socialist either. Heh. (coughing into fist) Reagan!

You Democrats ought to stop obsessing on Bush's lies. No one cares. The French are evil. There was that 9/11 Commission, you should look into that -- what? You have? Heh, heh, I can't hear you. Heh, heh.

The President has shown himself amenable to invasions anywhere except Saudi Arabia. Many prominent conservatives want to invade Saudi Arabia. There's a winning issue for the party of Clinton!

Homeland Security is a mess. I believe Democrats have failed to notice.

And why have none of you made an issue of the FCC? Swing voters are waiting to be swayed by your opinions thereunto.

You're always tearing down, never building up. I hate you. That's why I spend many column inches giving you advice. You should take it. Suckers. Indeed.

IN DEFENSE OF PRISONER TUCK 'N' ROLLS. I see a convicted killer wants a sex change at taxpayer expense. Like most of you, I had at first a bad first reaction to it -- the situation carries a heavy "ick" factor, as the icky Jonah Goldberg might put it. But let's take a contrarian view (actually contrarian, not the bullshit normally peddled under that name) and see how we feel.

If we accept Ruskin's idea that the state of any society can be measured
by the condition of its prisons, we suck. But I think we are generally tilting in the right direction on that score. Even some conservatives, normally insensible to the suffering of others, have warmed to the issue of prison rape. If National Review columnists give a shit whether Guests of the State are sexually tortured, you know we've reached a watershed.

And also in general, we have for years been pushing out the boundaries as to what, medically speaking, constitutes the acceptable minimal quality of life. With close to 20 million Americans taking antidepressants, it may be that condition of mind is getting to be as significant a standard of health as condition of body was back in the days when we first started deploring rickets in children.

I know that most people hate prisoners, for reasons ranging from personal injury done by them to a free-floating and very American contempt for all unfortunates. But even the most sour apple will admit that the lowliest convict must be given food to sustain himself and perhaps a little exercise. As our MDR for a tolerable state of being is inexhorably lifted, might we one day accept that gender confusion is a cruel and unusual condition even for the least of us?

I'm inclined to think, looking more than usual at the way our society has gone during the span of my life (tomorrow is my birthday), that despite the exacerbations of our natural cruelty leaders and newsreaders try to excite at every opportunity, we will soon enough grant privileges to prisoners that are unimaginable at this moment.

Will we, nill we, we're getting kinder. You may think that's bad, criminal, idiotarian, but there it is. (Hell, with the WMD evidence looking flimsier every day, even the hardest among us point to the kindness done to Iraqis as the justification for invasion -- if that's how Republicans are turning, can you imagine what's going on with the rest of us?) You may gnash your teeth at the injustice represented by one human being getting a little break, but I am looking at the horizon, and it seems a little brighter. I've never been among that pinch-necked crew that thinks we have too many rights. Your mileage may vary, but I believe time is on my side.

A LITTLE GOOD NEWS. "Masturbation protects against prostate cancer." Well, that's just the icing on the cake, so to speak.

So fellas, visit this newcomer to the blogosphere and blow a wad a votre sante!

"NEVER GET OUT OF THE BOAT." Freddie Forrest in "Apocalypse Now" knew it was a bad idea, but did it anyway and almost got eaten by a tiger. I knew reading Instapundit would piss me off. When will I learn? From the Perfesser's parsing today of a Times of London story about documents that suggest Italy was also duped about Nigerian uranium:

[A reader] adds: "Let's see. Italians fooled. Brits fooled. CIA left out of the loop until it was too late and the Govt presentation was compromised... Soooo... I guess that leaves France as the perp. Which is what everybody knows already, but pretends not to." Sounds plausible. Is it true? I don't know. But somebody does.

The really maddening thing is, you can't tell whether he's kidding or not. Now, I know he used to have that quote up on his site about having a dry sense of humor that many people are allegedly unable to get -- but sometimes when people are incomprehensible, it's not because they're geniuses, but because they're incoherent. IP floats so many ridiculous ideas that there's no telling whether he means this one. I guess a "heh" or an "indeed" might help.

Aaargh! (rubbing skull, Spock-like) Forget... forget...

LAST REPLACEMENTS LYRIC OF THE NIGHT: Who will be the next to dry your lashes?/Who knows?

HEY NOW, YOU'RE AN ALL-STAR. Great game tonight. The MLB directive that this shall determine home-field advantage in the October Classic (instituted after last year's debacle -- scroll, ye bastards, to July 9, 2002!), turns out to have been brilliant. Hank Blalock's homer was a great moment, but the whole chess match was worth watching. So much is ill done, what a pleasure to see something well done. Especially when it's a ballgame.

(On the stereo: The Replacements, "Another Girl, Another Planet.")

YO EL ROY. Here's another weblog by a guy named Roy! Looks like he's doing alright. I knew nearly everyone on the web was better off than me, but to find a guy with my rarified name -- a name that means King, after all -- in that distant, high-floating, wave-at-the-drowning-man boat is... piquant.

(On the stereo: The Replacements, "Portland.")

HOUSE POOR. From a FuckedCompany discussion of the West Coast housing bubble:

"Hell, Vegas is over $220k or so for a decent new place.....Phx can't be far behind. Reno is already $300k, even fucking Fresno is $300k for a new place. WHERE THE FUCK ARE THESE PEOPLE GETTING THE MONEY?"

"I have no idea how people who only make $45k per year are getting into $300k houses. Plus they have they obligatory GMC Yukon Denali or Hummer H2 as well..."

"For giggles, I did a search in the Washington Post's real estate section for any home in my area (Fairfax) for $125,000 or less. Six dilapidated condos were returned, tiny, in HUD areas."

"And when it all ends, those of us who still have money will be asked to bail out the banks who made loans at up to 125% of equity value, to people with shaky incomes or credit. Just like last time."

"Spoke to a guy recently who spent $650k (NYC) for a one bedroom condo. He's near panic state now thinking about real estate crashing."

Now, these seem like coastal concerns perhaps to the fat, happy Red Staters. They come mostly from angry, educated Blue Staters, whom they despise -- though this post perhaps hits a little closer to home:

"I am building in vegas. I see i every day. Its not the 300,000 houses that we wonder where the money is coming from. Its all the 2 million + houses that are being bought up. I wonder everyday where all these people are coming from and where the money is coming from."

It'll get worse and move toward the interior. Via Calpundit, we see that deficits are going through the roof, and there's not much wiggle room left in which Mr. Greenspan can do anything about it.

The housing market will crash. No one, not even Midwesterners, can afford the terms of home ownership by the standards of a generation ago, and with personal bankruptcies rising, it is questionable whether they can afford them by the standards of the present. The squeeze is on with no relief in sight. We live on a new bubble now, but without the cheerful feeling of the last one. God help us when it bursts.

CALM DOWN. Terry Teachout asks, "Am I the only person to have spotted the social significance of Roz Chast’s Cremaster-bashing back-page cartoon in the June 9 issue of the New Yorker?" I daresay he is. He goes on: "I do think there is something quite genuinely subversive about the fact that Roz Chast, of all people, felt free to make fun of Matthew Barney in the New Yorker, of all places."

If you type "art" into the search field at the New Yorker's Cartoon Bank, you will find plenty of panels lampooning artistic pretensions of all sorts. (Good example: one dog telling another, "What I do as an artist is take an ordinary object -- say, a lamppost -- and, by urinating on it, transform it into something that is uniquely my own.")

Teachout seems not have noticed. "Back in the days of Harold Ross, the New Yorker wasn’t above publishing cartoons that made fun of abstract expressionism," he reports, "but ever since Jackson Pollock became God, they’ve been careful not to make that kind of mistake again -- until now."

Well, I haven't seen any biting satires on Jackson Pollock, lately, but I imagine that's because he's been well beside the point for a long, long time.

There are a whole nest of critics who, like Teachout, seem to get a charge out of the idea that art scenes are all mobbed up to the advantage of certain deleterious movements and dogma. (Actually they are mobbed up, but to the advantage of certain individuals who are admired by the powerful -- and, of course, those thought to be bankable -- and 'twas ever thus.) I guess this makes such critics feel like rebels or something. If the magazine's management, acting as a sinister and monolithic force, roams the hallways muscling writers and artists (Mister Remnick wants you should say something nice about the Cremaster Cycle!), then to speak against Matthew Barney is something more than one man's opinion; it is an act of courageous political incorrectness.

Why Teachout, who writes and thinks well and whose present edition is otherwise a delight, needs to perpetuate this kind of juvenile fantasy is genuinely puzzling.

(Found via the Castel-Dodges)

FIELDER'S CHOICE. If you like fiction, as opposed to the chronicles of collective waking nightmare that comprise this weblog, there's a new story on my website.

I'LL WAIT TILL THE THIRD INNING. I see they yanked Zito for Clemens to start the All-Star Game. That's too bad. Yeah, I know it's Rocket's career year, but I hate the son of a bitch. He made some shitty cracks about Piazza's gender prefs on Letterman (I hate that son of a bitch, too, but that's for another time). And he throws at hitters without fear of retribution -- not because he is known for any self-defense skills, but because League rules prevent him for climbing into the batter's box to take some of what he dishes out.

In this respect he resembles his fellow Texan, George W.

UPDATE: Turns out Clemens isn't starting -- they just yanked Zito for him. An even dumber move in a game that's supposed to "count."

IF IT'LL BE LIKE THIS, PLEASE DON'T. "The North Korean problem is the most serious issue facing our country right now. Thank goodness President Bush dispatched Saddam Hussein before he became an 'imminent danger.' Korea is an imminent danger right now, and that’s exactly why it’s so hard to do anything about it. I hope to write more about Korea just as soon as I get a chance...." -- Stanley Kurtz at NRO.

THE NEW BUBBLE. We were told back then that everything had changed.

Lately when I think of the Old World I think of an insult that I mean as a tribute. It is the phrase the narcissism of small differences. In the world that has just passed, careless people--not carefree, careless--spent their time deconstructing the reality of the text, as opposed to reading the book. You could do that then. The world seemed so peaceful that you could actively look for new things to argue about just to keep things lively... You could have real arguments about stupid things... We were not serious. We were not morally serious.

In our newly-sobered media, there are hundreds of stories this week about a cute girl who, while pretending to be a sausage, was knocked over by a Pittsburgh Pirate. There are also a number of stories, less energetically pursued, about the latest attack on our troops in Iraq, a place where, you may recall, a great victory for American power and prestige was lately won.

There are also stories about the latest prospective military target in our new era of seriousness. American interests in Liberia are hard to explain, especially in light of the current Administration's previous disinterest in the region. But everything has changed, again, and keeps on a-changin', especially when there are electoral points to be scored ("Where do Janeane Garofalo, Mike Farrell, and Martin Sheen stand on intervention in Liberia?") by fresh use of the lately-sanctioned (and, given the slim chances of an economic turnaround at home, most readily available) vote-getting tool, foreign intervention.

Meanwhile patriotic writers in redoubts of high seriousness speak of the indignities suffered by privileged Americans.

It's a good thing the grown-ups are in charge.

YELLOW CAKE AND CIRCUSES. First the Bushies were telling the truth about Nigerian unanium and Iraq, then they were misled by the CIA, and now their claims are "accurate" and "supported by other British and U.S. information" (Associated Press). This is spin at its finest, folks: a zig-zag pattern that establishes the Administration as right even when it's wrong.

It doesn't just work for uranium, either: the WMD bullshit can also be treated similarly. The "even Hans Blix" argument that everybody thought the weapons were there (never mind that neither Blix nor most of the other cited sources thought their suppositions required an immediate U.S. invasion) maintains the Administration's plausible deniability (or affirmability, depending).

The mildly humorous spectacle of our leaders tossing dossiers amongst themselves, as in the old Time Bomb game -- no one wants the thing in their hands when the ticking stops -- distracts from the less humourous spectacle of the occupation, the cost and length of which looks worse everyday day. The task of the White House handlers is to make our foreign adventures look benign. Hence, Bush hugging Africans.

Meanwhile, everyone hates us and our economy is in the toilet.

ASK YO' MOMMA. At TownHall today, Jonah Goldberg says, "How come black people can say stuff about black people, but when we say it we get in trouble?"

Well, he didn't use those words. They were actually used by kids on my block when I was growing up, only they didn't use the phrase "black people." Goldberg uses several hundred other, different words, but they pretty much amount to the same thing.

What is it with this guy and peeps of color?

AVERAGE AMERICAN BLUES. Plagued by bigot and bullshit eruptions, the Right cries out that they still have the support of the Average American. Jonah Goldberg:

This crowd is always insinuating that Fox News is the tool of corporate and Republican interests. And yet, Fox is more popular among the "little guys" -- you know the people, not the powerful. If you keep in mind that Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, O'Reilly etc represent the victory of the Republican Party to be every much as populist (not always a good thing) as the Democrats you can decipher a great deal of the grumpiness and confusion of liberals who shriek about "right wing media."

The fact that grumpy liberals "shriek" is offered, one imagines, as further proof of their unpopulism and lack of Little Guy cred. No way the Average American would hang with them! Now, another working-class hero, John Podhoretz:

The problem is that American elites are weirdly immature. They should be sophisticated enough to know these things take time, but they have no patience... What's amazing is that the ordinary American shopping at Wal-Mart and going about her daily life, with no capacity to name the head of the Iraqi National Congress (or Tommy Franks, or Jerry Bremer), does have the patience that the experts, who really should know better, sadly lack.

Boy, these liberals sound like a pain in the ass, don't they? Always showing off how much they know! Whereas in JP's portrait of America, brave shoppers neither know nor care what the hell is going on, and are better, more patient people for it.

Of course, it may be that the Average American does notice some other stories in which he is also invoked, and which may cause him to wonder if his patience is still a virtue. Anchorage Daily News:

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the average American worker now spends 237.5 days a year on the job, about 25 days a year more than in 1973... Since 1970, the number of U.S. families that regularly eat dinner together has dropped by a third, de Graaf said. The number of families that take vacations together has also dropped by a third. "In fact, vacations for American families are starting to disappear"...

The average U.S. worker gets just 13 vacation days a year, according to a 2003 study by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The average Western European receives almost six weeks.

Meanwhile there's this interesting bit from the Southern Baptist Convention's Baptist Press:

It's hard to believe that a typical American family accepts a 30-year home mortgage as normal today or that it is now possible in some cases to borrow on a home for nearly 70 years... Today it requires from 40 to 70 percent of the average American family's total income to buy an average home, even with a 30-year mortgage.

The longest term of debt God's people took on in the Bible was about seven years. During the seventh year of remission, Jews were instructed to release their brothers from any indebtedness (see Deuteronomy 15:1-2).

Well, the Average American isn't going to see any such Jubilees anytime soon.

Perennial Average-American advocate NewsMax has a story up headlined, "Average American Lifestyle Called "Total Bull---t" by Environmentalist." NewsMax sneers at such analyses, but I wonder if a lot of Average Americans aren't beginning to feel the same way themselves.

AND SHALL I COUPLE HELL? I actually liked this Randy Barnett column at NRO. So that's what they're paying him for! In this Lawrence examination, he argues that Kennedy's decision (following on his Casey opinion back in 1992) has shifted the emphasis in SCOTUS anti-sex-law matters from the right to privacy (which Barnett finds shaky) to the right to liberty (which he wholeheartedly endorses).

Barnett comes at these things from a different angle than I do, but I am astounded at the fact that I've gone through the column once and haven't found anything that really pisses me off. And it's at National Review Online! Nothing they've emitted so far on this subject has been anything but an outrage. Indeed, its editors currently mutter darkly that the aforementioned decision "called into question [the Court's] willingness to tolerate any state laws based on traditional understandings of sexual morality."

Maybe there'll be something good on ABC tonight. This is a day for miracles!