WHILE YOU COMMIE-PAGAN BASTARDS ARE GOING TO COSTUME PARTIES, rightwing Christer sourball Mark Gavreau Judge commemorates Halloween by writing with an apparent lack of skepticism about a Catholic exorcism.

Wonder if he still thinks swing dancing will "contribute to the winning of the culture war"?

7.2 PERCENT GOP GROWTH? I've been hearing from certain corners that the economy is "in recovery" for so long -- almost as long, it seems, as many of my friends have been looking for jobs -- that this cheerful GDP report is not stimulating me a whole hell of a lot. Way the new jobs at? Never fear, sez the Murdoch Post:

The nation's payrolls grew by 57,000 last month. New unemployment-benefits claims dropped, which suggests that layoffs are slowing.

The payroll number is nice, if insufficient, but the drop in unemployment claims, as careful stat-watchers will know, could be attributed to the growth of freelance employment, whose practitioners are not eligible for unemployment when the work dries up. Also:

...the [tax] cuts "for the rich"... spurred an unexpected wave of across-the-board consumer spending -- particularly on durable goods, the expensive long-term items, which rose by 27 percent.

Moreover, overseas investment was up sharply. So was business investment in equipment and technology.

Well, someone's buying all those fridges and cars, but it hasn't been me or mine. And I find the upticks in "overseas investment" (offshore job centers?) and "equipment and technology" (robots that can shuffle papers?) more ominous than encouraging.

We can only hope that irrational exuberance will again take hold. But I wonder if GDP numbers -- which measure, after all, the base value of American goods and services -- will excite the average American as much as it does the decidely untypical souls now beating their pots and pans. It's hard to excite real people with numbers that don't appear on paychecks or bank account display screens. But then, maybe our bosses will be more easily excited (they certainly were in the '90s!), and throw money at us. So I guess there's some cause for optimism.

ALL HAIL THOSE PHLEGMATIC, PRODUCTIVE UTAHNS! A genuinely delightful angle taken in today's Salt Lake Tribune:

UTAHNS KEEP COOL AS TOY GUN PROMPTS LOCKDOWN IN CAPITOL

WASHINGTON -- When Capitol Police notified lawmakers Thursday that an armed intruder had entered their office building, Utah Rep. Jim Matheson accounted for his staff, locked the door and watched events unfold on television.

"I see some SWAT folks up on the roof looking out my window and we've heard police in the hallway shouting to people to get back into their offices, but for now we're just hunkered down here," Matheson said about an hour into the lockdown and shortly before the true nature of the threat was revealed. "I'm just trying to get some letters edited"...

For the next hour or so, Matheson said, his office watched television for updates and tried to get work done.

"I don't think there was any big panic," he said. "That's just not my office."

Like Tip O'Neill said, all Washington coverage is local. Happy Halloween!

WHICH BLOWHARD IS FICTIONAL? "Every American. Every American? Well, Howard, I don’t want the government to buy my health insurance. I pay for it. I’m glad to pay for it. I’m proud I can provide it. And I’m also proud that the money you might want to spend on me & mine will instead go to rebuild Iraq..."

"Who could they ask for help? If not God, then who? The Great Society? The Department of Welfare? Travelers Aid?... Look at these hands! The hands of a professional man? Not on your sweet life! The hands of a worker! I worked! These hands toiled from the time I was nine -- strike that, seven!"

One was created by Jules Feiffer. The other could have been imagined by Dickens had he the misfortune to be born into this wretched era of self-righteous suburbanism.

SLIGHTLY SHORTER JONAH GOLDBERG. The Democrats are now the party of Clinton (a synonym for evil), proven by the fact that their leaders ask a lot of questions when commanded to pony up billions to pay for the occupation of Iraq. They pretend to have reasons for this, but they're really just doing it to be contrary. I know a Democrat who agrees with me, but he thinks Republicans do the same thing, which is ridiculous. Oh, my imaginary mechanic friend called John Kerry an idiot; it was rilly funny.

BECAUSE I'M THE WINGNUT MOMMY, THAT'S WHY. "...my 4-year-old came across the recent 'Legacy' edn. of NRODT. She wanted to know who the naked man on the cover of the magazine was, why he looked sad, why he had no clothes, etc. When I tried to explain that he used to be President, and was a bad man, she wanted to know what he had done, what's a President, and how could a President be a bad man.... I got myself in over my head, on that one. Where do you start, and how do you explain it to a 4-year-old?" -- correspondent to Rich Lowry at The Corner (name withheld, presumably to thwart a Child Protective Services investigation).
P.S. In a later post, another fugitive from CPS suggests Mom buy the kid one of those Jesus-for-children tapes in which animated vegetables enact parables. My own childhood was no bed of roses, but Jeez...

EYE ON THE ARTS. I actually crawled out the bunker and attended a few performances recently. I liked Intolerable Cruelty, but it also reminded me of why I used to dislike the Coens. They have sort of an manic stoner aesthetic – they’ll grab a tangent and run with it ferociously until they get distracted by a bird or an ant or a body rush and then BAM! they start running, with equal ferocity, in an entirely different direction.

The Big Lebowski loosened me up on them, though: now I let their baroque set pieces, camera angles, and characterizations wash over me, and find meaning in the overall impression. These meanings are usually very simple, even stupid -- O Brother, Where Art Thou? really is about how it’s better to stick up for people than to, um, not stick up for them, to the extent that it’s not about how cool it would be to name a movie after a Preston Sturges gag and make it about the Odyssey etc. But, eh, stupid fun is better than no fun at all.

Cruelty, I’m told, is based on some wretched piece of Hollywood feel-good crap, and I imagined I could feel the Coens' breezy contempt for the material throughout the picture -- as when Clooney, as the dentition-obsessed legal shark, appears before an divorce lawyers’ convention, chastened and with shirt untucked, to declare that “Love is good!” This makes for a giddy mood, if not deathless art. And this particular movie’s stupid meaning – love conquers all – is not a bad one to believe in for an hour and a half, anyway. (Maybe if the Coens’ work has any point at all, it’s that you have to be a little light-headed to believe in movie messages like these in the first place.)

Also saw the Mingus Big Band. This is a large ensemble dedicated to the preservation of the great man’s works and spirit. Sue Mingus is sort of Chairman Emeritus/Keeper of the Flame. The rotating cast of musicians has definitely got it in their gloves: they not only have the scores down, they also improvise in a relevant and impassioned way, and that’s the best of both worlds. Also, we were seated right in front of the baritone saxophonist, a very attractive and skilled young woman, and when she stood up and hit the intro to “Moanin’,” I wanted to live with her on the coast of France. Jazz shows are a sometime thing, but this was sometime.

Last night I met friends at a local bar and saw a well-attended performance by a hot new band. Their schtick is that they only play Brian Eno covers. I forget their name, which is just as well; they sucked. The cuteness of having sub-talented youngsters play “Here Come the Warm Jets” lasted less than five minutes. I don’t understand all these bands staffed entirely by teenagers who play with low energy. Is there an Epstein-Barr epidemic in that demographic? Or is rocking hard just too much of an effort?

Hey, I’m getting surly again. Maybe I should go back to writing about politics.

THOSE PITHY GLASWEGANS! One has to love the way the Glasgow Daily Record announced that a chemical in red wine may work against lung disease: A DROP OF RED HELPS BEAT FAGS.

MAGNETIC FIELD POLITICS. I used to religiously read every damned word of the gibberish dissected here at alicublog, but I've been at this game for so long that I've become like an old country doctor who takes one look at the lumps on your ring finger and announces, "Pleursy!"

Small examples can be mightily instructive of larger maladies in logic, anyway. These two grafs from Harry's Place, excerpted by the Ole Perfesser, leapt at me like rabid hamsters, and I had to deal with them:

It is clear that the Iraq war has shown that a certain section of the left really has nowhere to go except self-hatred and that a reactionary antipathy to the US and the western democracies has moved from beyond the ultra-left fringes into the mainstream of left-liberal oppositionalism.

It is precisely the spreading of 'pure oppositionalism' that makes it worthwhile looking closely at the activities of the Socialist Workers Party and others. Because while the details of their quasi-Trotskyist ideology remain restricted to a tiny minority, their broader outlook has gained something close to hegemony on the radical left.

If I'm reading this right, and I fear that I am, Harry is allowing his subject to glide rather easily between "a certain section of the left" and the Socialist Workers Party, a highly suggestive and misleading tactic that suggests quick contagion from one tiny splinter group to a somewhat larger one, and thence to the whole "radical left" (which might mean everyone left of the DLC for all I can tell). One may as well speak of the demoralizing power of white supremacist cells over Focus on the Family.

Now, we have to understand for starters that Harry was inspired by Andrew Sullivan, and nothing healthy can grow from such a poisoned root. (Okay, I cheated, and looked at the actual post. This ole hoss cain't git out of his harness nohow!) The conflation of, say, Howard Dean supporters with the Stalinist hordes is an old rhetorical gambit ("If you're not with us, you're against us"), but it seems here to have been taken fatally to heart, to have gone from a trick to a tic -- the SWP, though small and impotent (allegedly reduced to mining radical Islamicists for "supporters for their marches, buyers for their newspaper and maybe even the odd recruit"), is magically infecting the whole of the Left with its "nihilism":

...the growth of nihilism, allied with the different but growing cynicism in our societies, weakens the ability of democrats to win their battles -- at home and abroad. Democracy, even the limited version that we live with, survives to a degree on a level of participation or at least voluntary acceptance. Nihilism, the rejection of politics, is corrosive.

Here's what's really crazy about this: some people, it is true, are rejectors. They stand outside the tent pissing in, in LBJ's colorful locution. But they are brought into the mainstream of whatever movement only insofar as they are worth the trouble to the majority. Otherwise they are left to non-join as they please, at a high risk of irrelevance. Is the Left, as such, really reaching out to the SWP? Is National Review begging Pat Buchanan for forgiveness?

Harry seems to think the "nihilism" of the fringe will automatically drag down everyone around it. What's missing from his analysis is any sense that leftists have discernment enough to make decisions about who does or doesn't get into their tent. He seems to view politics as a magnetic field which distributes forces according to immutable physical laws, not as the actions of human beings.

Well might he see it that way. In the Blogosphere, so many writers have been working so long from such reductive templates, dismissing their opponents as "objectively pro-Saddam" automatons and so forth, that when they examine any given situation, they see, in place of the literally millions of people who don't agree with them, a bunch of electric football game figurines reacting to the shaking of a motor.

Me too, of course. But I'm right!

NO CONTEST. Inspired by David Brooks' latest (thanks busybusybusy for the tip), I have a new way to view the world. It is divided into two groups: pain-in-the-ass pedants who bitch endlessly about other people's behaviors, and the people about whose behaviors they bitch, as here:

He spent much of the war having sex across the Pacific. He spent his last $5 on a Chinese prostitute because he was curious about what Chinese women looked like naked. He spent a year as a gigolo for an older woman in Singapore. And at each point he was looking for interesting sensations. "I hate responsibilities," he writes at one point in his book. Religion is a total bore, he notes at another. "Any job that will take longer than three days isn't worth doing," he observes. "That's the limit of my attention span."

In short, the world is divided between David Brookses and Helmut Newtons. Guess which crew I prefer to roll with?

MY HOMETOWN -- AND MAYBE YOURS. Some readers may know that I come from Bridgeport, a very corrupt city in Southern Connecticut. Once a proud industrial town, producer of metal and rubber products -- with, for several terms, a Socialist mayor -- it turned during my boyhood into a rust-belt worst-case-scenario nightmare. Jobs fled, crime soared. When I left it was locked in a tug-of-war between the Democratic ward-heelers (the Curran mob) and the Republican ward-heelers (the Panuzio mob).

It was hard to see what they were fighting over. The old town was down-at-heels, and its establishment incredibly racist. Put it this way: the first word I learned for a black person was definitely not African-American. I still remember a little demonstration I saw Downtown when I was a teenager, at which the cops grabbed a black woman and threw her in a squad car, leaving behind what looked to be her pre-teen son. "That's my momma!" the kid screamed at the cops. "She supposed to take me home!" The white, scumbag cop yelled at the kid, "Walk!"

In the many years of my exile I have desultorily followed Bridgeport's progress. In 1991, shortly after Republican Mayor Mary Moran tried, in typical Republican fashion, to file bankruptcy on the city's behalf (Hey, it's a business decision! There is no such thing as society!) and was slapped down in Federal Court, a Democrat named Joseph Ganim became mayor. He presided over a long period of economic rehabilitation -- and was this year taken down in a bribery scandal.

His successor is named John Fabrizi. As it happens, Fabirizi is an old pal of the former Mayor, and I have heard some hair-raising stories about both of these worthies from people who have cause to know.

You see, I still have my sources back in my old hometown, and they recently told me that a black high-school student recently turned up dead, allegedly the victim of a suicide, except that the suicide looked suspiciously well-laid-out, and is said to be the result of a beef involving a local white supremacist group called the White Wolves. Here is some of the (so far) scant media coverage of the situation:

The threat of the spread of hatred and bigotry by a group known as the White Wolves led a handful of concerned parents to meet with several [Trumbull, CT] officials Saturday morning.

The meeting at Town Hall had been planned before recent rumors about the white supremacist group, including that it was linked to the suicide of a Central High School student this past week, began spreading.

Trumbull school officials had even considered canceling a football game between Central and Trumbull high schools Friday night because of the rumors, but decided against it.

The game went on as planned without incident.

My sources tell me that the aforementioned game went "without incident" because it was attended by dozens of Bridgeport cops. Cops have also been hanging around Notre Dame High School in Fairfield, where, it is rumored, some local black kids have been seen lurking, in search of payback for the bogus suicide. This is because Notre Dame is the alma mater of one of the young chuckleheads involved with the White Wolves. This young man's father, I am told, is very highly placed in the Fabrizi administration, and I mean very highly placed.

More than usual tonight, I am in no mood to hear any bullshit about how this country is over its racial problems. This is probably the first you have heard of the White Wolves and their depradations in Southern Connecticut. You may hear more about them here. And I would not be at all shocked to hear hundreds of similar stories out of hundreds of other places in this country where money is tight, things aren't going well, and black people are convenient targets of white rage -- if I had connections in those places like the ones I have back home.

CONDOLENCES ON THE DEATH OF YOUR DYNASTY. As usual, I am far more sympathetic toward my nemeses once they have taken a fall. The Yankees fell hard last night in a masterfully-pitched shutout. The ghosts of Gehrig and Ruth did not waft any of the Bombers' weak fly balls over the fence. This series was a Yankee-spanking more portentious than the Diamondbacks' and even the Angels', because the team did not look at all like its old self. Pettite pitched beautifully, and for one spectacular play Jeter was as we will remember him when he goes to the Hall, the best shortstop New York ever had. But when the home-plate umpire isn't cutting Yankee batters slack on close pitches, you can smell dynastic death in the air.

It was a hell of a post-season, and I'm glad it's over. Now if I can just stopping writing this stupid weblog, maybe I can get something done.

HUBBA HUBBA. So nice to visit IP and feel something other than blind rage. One cavil, Professor: when you employ Oliver Willis as a guest-blogger, you should offer proper attribution.

AND ON THE SEVENTH DAY, DERB RAVED. John Derbyshire has found a fresh source of anguish: "The Boondocks." Fans of this neat little comic strip will appreciate that Derbyshire considers the following to be its first principles: "White people are scum. Black people are wise and good, except that... Any black person not an anti-war white-hating socialist is a self-loathing moral criminal with a tortured soul..."

In the immortal words of Iggy, "You can't understand 'cause you don't understand 'cause you can't understand."

Anyway Lileks got there first with a much more balanced take. (He did sour on the strip later, on the perfectly valid ideological grounds that it bored him anymore.)

The strip has also been discussed at Free Republic, and it's interesting to note that Derbyshire is angrier about it than those guys. When you're out-winging Free Republic, it's time for a vacation at the very least.

CAN'T WE ALL JUST GET ALONG -- ON MY TERMS? Daniel Henninger weeps that "our politics has never seemed more polarized." In his investigation of this sad phenomenon, he does not mention Rush Limbaugh, NewsMax, FreeRepublic, Ann Coulter, Pat Buchanan, or the yobs yelling "Shut it down" and "Get out of Cheney's house" in 2000. He does mention the ACLU, Roe v. Wade, and the bad people who made fun of religious maniac Jerry Boykin.

The "Mean Democrats" meme -- catch it!

WHAT THEY'RE SELLING. Of course it's a plant. The questions are -- or would be, if I cared -- which faction planted the Rumsfeld memo, which faction that faction was trying to screw, and to what end?

Well, maybe the last one does interest me a little.

My suspicion is, whoever did it has at least one wider goal in mind: softening the public up for a "long, hard slog" in the Mideast.

Recent polling shows that while most Americans favor the war effort, an even larger majority is quite anxious to offload at least some of the military responsibilities in Iraq to foreign troops. So they're still following the Leader, it seems, but are getting squeamish about the cost in time, blood, and treasure.

What would you do in this Administration's place? Everyone remembers Bush acting studly in his flight suit, announcing "mission accomplished," and everyone is also aware that the mission isn't accomplished, really; the Bush linguistics team could draw up charts explaning what the President really meant, but your average American isn't interested in that sort of hair-splitting, especially from a guy who positions himself as a straight-talkin' hombre.

POTUS could make speeches about our continuing commitment to the Iraqi people. That would not go over well. An economically becalmed (or, if you prefer, joblessly recovering) country like ours will not be eager to send billions to take care of foreigners.

The trick is to make everyone believe that it's what they wanted all along.

Look at the WMD issue. We'd been encouraged to believe that Saddam would blow us all to smithereens Tuesday if we didn't act fast. Now the smart guys are saying, WMD? Whoever cared about them?

So the idea that Iraq is our albatross has been more subtly introduced, via covert actions like these, so that by the time anyone thinks hard about it (preferably before the next election), it will seem as if we had been expecting a long, hard slog from the beginning.

Yes, I know the President never said "Out by Labor Day!" or "Piece o' cake!" But the coming conflict was described to us in terms of apocalyptic dread. "One crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known" -- 'member that one? Now that we've dispatched Saddam, quickly and at a relatively low cost, the horror-movie rhetoric seems nearly absurd, and a citizen might feel, watching his money flow down an Iraqi sinkhole, as if he might have been conned.

Unless, of course, his memory of the war fever Bush pumped up is less clear than the idea now coursing through the feeder-streams of the press: of course it's a quagmire. What the hell did you expect?

And he'd feel less cause to complain, bless him, because he'd been warned. Retroactively; but still.

JUST GO. Sometimes you just have to applaud. Michael Kinsley's latest, and one of his greatest, is at Slate now.

WHEN I USE A WORD IT MEANS JUST WHAT I CHOOSE IT TO MEAN. Remember the laffs right-wingers had over Clinton's "definition of the word 'is'" statement? (No need to remember, actually -- some of them are still laffing!)

That's understandable. Clinton was parsing a tiny word ridiculously fine, whereas his enemies, recent examples now show, seem to see no meaning in words at all. Or, if there is meaning, it shifts from circumstance to circumstance as needed.

First there was the fuss over the " sixteen little words" regarding yellowcake in the last SOTU. Shown that the claim therein was demonstrably untrue, conservatives tut-tutted their critics' shocking literalism. After all, they told us, yellowcake (and WMD, and whatever) were just rationales, which are not quite the same thing as reasons.

Then they told us that the President should be held blameless for any pre-war misapprehensions about the Iraqi threat, despite all the scary fairy stories about Saddam he had told us, because he never once used the word "imminent."

Now Minister of Information Reynolds is doing his bit for the New Word Order. Brad DeLong has pointed out that the Perfesser seems to change his interpretation of the word "stalker" based on the identity of its speaker. Nonsense, responds the Perfesser, DeLong is being too literal -- the Perfesser was engaging in one of his frequent flights of rhetorical fancy, whereas Paul Krugman is just crazy.

When they can't spin the facts, they spin the language. It seems to be working. Their frequent affronts to reason and common sense seem to be softening what few shreds of brain tissue remain in the skulls of the electorate. They've got guys like this saying with a straight (well, excepting the perpetual sneer) face that, not only was the WMD thing no big deal, the war was basically an exercise in machismo and, like, so what, dude?

How can you argue with that? You can't. Literally.

See how it works?

MORE ADVICE FROM YOUR MORTAL ENEMIES. The Ole Perfesser suggests that people think of Democrats as doormats, and counsels that they behave like doormats if they want to win elections.

Does anyone believe this shit? (Pretending to believe it doesn't count. P.S. to Derbyshire: if you schlubs are "the Daddy Party," I hope you have a fucking huge therapy trust fund laid up for the kids.)

INSTAPUNDIT'S ANALYTICAL METHOD REVEALED: " I don't know if this is a national trend, but I wouldn't be surprise to hear that."