FLIP A COIN. Looks like someone hacked Andrew Sullivan's site and put up a thoroughly disoriented post in order to discredit him.

Or not. Who the hell can tell anymore?

Just remember: If you celebrate Guy Fawkes Day, it means you hate Britannia!

LIKE THE PUERTO RICANS SAID TO RADIO RAHEEM, You got it, bro. Billmon has de-necessitated my entry on the Reagan TV Movie mess.

HEARTS AND MINDS. Lock and load, maggots! General Ralph “Blood 'n' Guts” Peters admits in the New York Post that “while our occupation of Iraq is going vastly better than the media suggests, there is certainly room for improvement.” And for ol’ Blood ‘n’ Guts, improvement proceeds from the barrel of a gun.

Here’s how he proposes to deal with Iraq’s Sunni Muslims, some of whom are thought to be involved in the deadly events of last week:

If the populace continues to harbor our enemies and the enemies of a healthy Iraqi state, we need to impose strict martial law… we need to cut back on electricity, ration water, restrict access to the city and organize food distribution through a ration card system. And we need to occupy the city so thickly that the inhabitants can't step out of their front doors without bumping into an American soldier.

The General also proposes limiting Sunni access to the nation's vast oil profits, and Sunni representation in Iraqi security forces. Thus would every man, woman, and child among them feel the wrath of Peters!

Having laid out the short-term punishment detail, Blood 'n' Guts looks into the future, proposing "alternative plans for Iraq in case attempts to build an integrated democracy fail." Here one is tempted to ask, "Didn't you just say that the occupation is going vastly better than the media suggest?" but this would only lead to a knee in the gut and a court-martial for insubordination.

All Iraq, Peters prescribes, is to be divided into three parts, like Gaul. And the imperial resemblance will not end there. "We're overdue to take a lesson from the Romans and the British before us," barks the General, "and recognize the value of punitive expeditions… we need not feel obliged to rebuild every government we are forced to destroy… Where you cannot be loved, be feared…"

You might have gotten the impression, from all the statue-toppling and sob stories, that our bloody adventure in Iraq has been justified, absent the WMD, by the hope and democracy we are eventually going to bring to its citizens. Well, ol' Blood and Guts don't cotton to all that P.C. bullshit!

We at alicublog thank this belligerent clown for his candor. Now if only the draft-dodging mush-mouth in the White House had his guts. 'N' blood.

WOLF HUFFS, AND PUFFS, BUT APPARENTLY DOESN'T BLOW. Naomi Wolf has an offense against reason at New York. And OMG, it's about porn. Sample quote:

By the new millennium, a vagina—which, by the way, used to have a pretty high “exchange value,” as Marxist economists would say—wasn’t enough; it barely registered on the thrill scale. All mainstream porn—and certainly the Internet—made routine use of all available female orifices.

Naomi Wolf doesn't sound like a fun date.

Thank God Sisyphus Shrugged has this shit hilariously covered (Julia, please supply a link to "Joe's House O' Internet Cooz") or I'd have to go on one of my more offensive, spooge-soaked rampages here.

THAT WAS SO FUNNY I FORGOT TO LAUGH. David Frum reviews Al Franken for FrontPageMag. We all know what to expect, of course, though the Conscience of Canada does manage to surprise in one respect: rather than just slam the politics, he actually attempts to assess the humor quotient of the national best-seller. Less surprisingly, he finds it wanting, at least in comparison to the work of his favorite humorists.

And whom might they be? Mark Twain? George Ade? Dave Barry? "Not to be invidious," invidiates Frum, "but the best right-wing funny men -- P.J. O'Rourke, Rob Long, Mark Steyn -- truly are laugh-out-loud funny. I have been on airplanes on days when Steyn's column is running in the local paper and heard the laughs exploding from the seat in front of me like artillery shells out of a howitzer."

This last is an interesting metaphor; maybe Frum's fellow passengers were actually choking on airline peanuts. Or maybe they were reading the latest statement from the Fed. Or it could be that he was riding on Air Force One, and the President's men were trying, with as much lung power as they could muster, to plant a message on the credulous frostback.

Anyway, Frum deduces that, since purchasers of the book cannot possibly have bought it for its humor, they have shelled out chart-topping amounts for Lying Liars because they are looking for "villains and scapegoats." That's worth twenty bucks, isn't it, folks? He even compares these readers to supporters of Islamic terrorists ("How had the once-wealthy and all-conquering Muslim world been overtaken by the despised Christian West? Al Franken's Lies can be read as one Democrat's attempt to grapple with an analogous problem.")

Of course, I may have misread him -- maybe he thinks Franken's readers are Islamic terrorists:

...like the enraged Muslims... Franken repudiates both self-examination and self criticism. It is all somebody else's fault. The faithful have nothing to learn from anybody. The solution to their problems is not reform, and it is certainly not self-criticism. It is a return to the fundamentals of the faith -- and war against the unbelievers.

Whew. Heavy analysis for a joke book with cartoons.

I have to admit that I don't find most overtly political authors very funny. (Witty and eloquent in some cases, yes, but not hardly risible.) About the best of the right-wing lot is Florence King, but after that it's a dry gulch; even O'Rourke's post-Lampoon career baffles me. (The joke always seems to be about how drunk he can get and still file dispatches, and how bad hippies smell.) And, truth be told, Franken is only mildly amusing in his attack mode (though I liked the Jesus comic very much) -- he was much funnier with Tom Davis.

But that's the nexus of politics and humor for you. Hell, even Twain's political work is less funny than chilling. I modestly propose a theory: political humor is only really funny when your contempt for your adversaries so exceeds your desire to make a point that you leave the orbit of politics altogether, and achieve satire. See Waugh, Heller, and even Franken in the hilarious intro to Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot (in which Jeanne Kirkpatrick finds herself obliged to review the book).

(I do laugh at Roger Ailes, BusyBusyBusy, and a number of others. But that's only because I hate America or something.)

WHEN PEOPLE SAY NICE THINGS ABOUT ME IT JUST REMINDS ME WHAT A WORTHLESS PIECE OF SHIT I AM, AND I HAVE TO CUT MYSELF WITH THIS PENKNIFE WHILE LISTENING TO NINE INCH NAILS. But thank you anyway, Ted.

STYLE SHEET. Let me draw your attention to one of the commentators struggling over Jane Galt's now-thoroughly-discredited (by Wampum -- thanks, Atrios, for the tip) article, "Are the Democrats Effectively Discriminating Against Minorities?":

Let me add my impression (and this may just be the result of me sucumbing to lying GOP propoganda, but as a data point it *is* my impression), liberal activists do see to seem to be especially vehement and zealous in their denunciations of conservatives when they are also minorities. My impression is of a desperate desire to maintain a near monopoly of minority official among Democrats, and a visceral hatred of minority conservatives as being an affront to the universe. If this is not just Republican propoganda, then Democrats and liberals need to rethink how they present their arguments...

This follows a phenomenon I've observed before, Friendly Advice from Mortal Enemies: the Right suggesting to the Left ways in which the Left can more effectively get their message across to people.

Sometimes, as here, the idea is to displace responsibility for bad arguments onto one's opponent: I know I haven't proven it , now you disprove it! Nice try, buddy.

More often, though, the gambit is much simpler. The latest variation is to find, or pretend to be (hard to tell which in most cases), a disaffected Democrat, former or inexplicably current, who won't vote for Democrats, and who goes on to explain how the Democrats can become more Republican so he/she can vote for them.

Today Andrew Sullivan has another one of those gee-look-what-I-found letters in which he specializes, beginning thusly: "If any of the Democrats want to win, they will need to get my vote..." This person claims to have voted twice for Clinton and worked for Gore (!), yet now considers him/herself a "September 11 Republican" and believes her former party of "hates the South, the West, anything not New York (I'm from New York, so I can say that) or San Francisco, or anyone who feels proud flying the American flag."

That's quite a turnaround -- practically schizoid. Sullivan's got another one here -- from someone saying he/she is related to a Democrat who now cries (swear to God) "Thank God Gore lost!"

There are plenty of these floating around, but my favorite is this one from PhotoDude's comments. This correspondent seems more reliably genuine than Sullivan's, in the sense that he actually exists, I think, and has a name, Bruce Webster, and a web site (the ultimate proof of authenticity!). But his political gambit is similarly curious. He considers himself a "Scoop Jackson Democrat," and it sounds like old Henry is the last Democrat he actually voted for: "I voted for Bush in 2000," he proudly avers. "I’ll vote for him again in 2004." Indeed, he only remains a Democrat "out of stubbornness."

So he seems lost to the fold -- yet he insists on lecturing the Dems as if they were the wayward children: "Sadly, I think it will take a crushing loss to lead the Democratic Party to remake itself, to realize that it has become the party of intolerance and exclusion and special interests, and that the Republican Party is becoming the party of inclusion and tolerance and leadership (sort of)."

This is a little like saying, "I came to believe that the Catholic Church is a tool of Satan, and since 1972 have attended only fundamentalist services. I regularly denounce the Church as the Whore of Babylon. Yet I still belong to Our Lady of Good Counsel parish. I'm just stubborn that way."

Come to think of it, maybe Sullivan wrote this one too.

LYING LIARS, GULLIBLE GULLS. Here's an interesting line from a con job from the American Enterprise Institute (about more later):

...Kissinger's conversations with relevant figures in Washington and elsewhere. Some of these conversations took place by telephone. Records of Kissinger's telephone exchanges, covering the entire span of his government service, are now in the process of being released--they form, for instance, the primary basis of his new book, Crisis...

Kissinger learned well from President Nixon, apparently: if you're going to record your conversations, make sure they go your way. Then you can corroborate a version of history with the tapes instead of hanging yourself with them.

The Kissinger phone records are so favorable to their owner that he has graciously lent them to AEI's Mark Falcoff to help prove, sort of, that Nixon and Kissinger had nothing to do with the 1973 Chilean coup.

Falcoff's many defenses are pitiably weak: he argues that Nixon didn't care all that much about Chile, as if that would prevent mischief. (Why? Scruples? Or the possibility of getting caught? The fucker had bugged incriminating conversations involving himself for years!) He also argues that, while it's true that Kissinger's agents had ordered the sequence of events that led to the failed first putsch right after Allende's election, Kissinger later ordered them stopped (but for some reason they went on anyway, which certainly was not Harry K's fault...), etc.

But the funniest and saddest part is Falcoff's faith in the Kissinger tape. At one point Falcoff throws this on the table like the opposite-of-smoking gun:

As for President Nixon, he was evidently pleased -- how could he not have been? -- but exhibited no sense of complicity with the coup-makers themselves. As he said on the phone to Kissinger on September 16, "Well, we didn't -- as you know -- our hand doesn't show on this one though." To which Kissinger replied, "We didn't do it."

"As you know, our hand doesn't show on this one." "We didn't do it." Yep, that's how innocent men talk about someone else's crime. Nice digging, Falcoff.

I observed long ago about the movie Atomic Cafe that its archival footage is comical to us moderns because we know the people in it are lying outrageously and, as they are unaccustomed to the omnipresence of cameras, they look clumsy when they're trying to look believable. Lying was not then the fine art it has now become, but some of Cafe's stars, notably Nixon, did pick up a few tricks quickly. What's amazing is that they're still taking people in.

WINGNUTS VS. COPS. At NRO, Jack Dunphy says that the New York Patrolmen's Benevolent Association (PBA) "betrays" its membership by endorsing Senator Chuck Schumer -- because Schumer favors gun control.

Yes, fellow citizens, that's really what Dunphy (of Los Angeles) said: cops don't like gun control laws.

Reckoning that the general political views of "the average cop on the street... would fall more in line with those of Jesse Helms (ACU rating: 99) than with Schumer's," Dunphy extrapolates that the NYPD en masse favors unfettered access to killing machines for every skel, nutjob, and walking time bomb who has the money to buy one.

Perhaps Dunphy has never spoken to a New York City police officer -- he claims to have done so, and quotes two anonymously in this article, but they both sound like the same guy, specifically Jack Dunphy. (One of his alleged sources claims that PBA boss Pat Lynch is a "rube" because "he worked in [relatively placid] Williamsburg." The brackets are Dunphy's, and the modifier within them is preposterous; as someone who lived in Williamsburg in the 70s and 80s, I can assure you that Billyburg had enough crime to go around then.) So perhaps he does not realize that many of New York's Finest don't share his guns-for-everyone Second Amendment absolutism.

Why would they? A large part of New York's historic 11-year drop in crime is due to strict enforcement of equally strict gun laws. You think those quality-of-life/broken-windows police crackdowns conservatives usually love were all about squeegee men? No, a lot of them were about guns. Get a load of this from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Protection:

The NYPD gun strategy uses felony arrests and summonses to target gun trafficking and gun-related crime in the city. NYPD pursues all perpetrators and accomplices in gun crimes cases and interrogates them about how their guns were acquired. In a proactive effort to get guns off the streets, the NYPD's Street Crime Units aggressively enforce all gun laws. In 1996, the Street Crime Units made up one-half of 1 percent of the NYPD, but made 20 percent of all gun arrests. In 1997, their ability to enforce gun laws and make firearm arrests was enhanced by a quadrupling of the number of officers assigned to the program.

OJJDC adds that "New York City has some of the most restrictive local licensing requirements for Federal firearm dealers in the country."

The results have been obvious to longtime citizens such as myself, but conservatives like Dunphy continue to make a big stink about the bureaucracy, the injustice to hunters, etc. I am not insusceptible to Second Amendment claims, but only as a matter of constitutional right -- not on the patently absurd grounds that my little slice of heaven in Brooklyn would be safer if you could get guns for the asking at the local bar or bodega.

This is one of the crazier propaganda tactics going: ideological matchmaking. Cops are seen as conservative because, I guess, they wear uniforms and are required to act manly on the job; therefore, the argument goes, they will support every wingnut idea without blinking. It's very similar to the idea that African-Americans will vote Republican because they allegedly "support family values" (i.e., don't like homosexuals).

It doesn't work, of course, but these guys apparently have enough resources that they can devote some of them to nonsense.

DIVERSITY VS. DRUNKS?From the Washington Post and making the rounds:

A Harvard University study released yesterday found that "binge" drinking by college students was significantly lower on campuses with more female and more black, Asian and other minority underclassmen.

The study, to be published in the November issue of the American Journal of Public Health, said that "the student-body composition and demographic diversity should be examined by colleges wishing to reduce their binge drinking problems."

I doubt advocates of affirmative action will turn this into a talking point. Not that it's completely counterintuitive. The Post also notes that "Previous studies have shown that younger, white male students, particularly fraternity members, are at higher risk for binge drinking," and who, flashing on his or her own experience of the Delta Tappa Keg of their own college days, does not envision a bunch of white guys, some with a bloody cotton ball stuffed up one nostril, roaring along to the Beach Boys or the Beastie Boys or Coldplay, depending on the era, and occasionally falling off a roof?

But look at U.S. News and World Reports' listing of America's most diverse schools. They are mostly either small "international" schools like Alliant, or intensely serious institutions of higher learning like Brown, Harvard, Berkeley, Rice, Temple, and various Institutes of Technology. (Though I note with interest that the University of Bridgeport is also on the list.)

It may be that one expects fewer roaring drunks at such places anyway. It may also be that the most aggressive efforts to diversify the student population take place at larger institutions, with more intrusive and pressure-sensitive Boards, than at smaller schools. The recent Supreme Court affirmative action case hinged on the University of Michigan, after all, not on Gopher Junction A&M. And if you're trying to get out of MIT alive, there's less time for binge drinking.

I'm probably the opposite of a statistician, but this doesn't seem like political dynamite to me.

THANKS FOR RELIEVING ME. I write about The Corner way too much for my own peace of mind. But now that the Mighty Reason Man has done this, I can lay off for a couple of months.

LATEST TOPBLOG INTRAMURAL: Volleys amongst Calpundit, Armed Liberal, and InstaPundit as to whether we are engaged in a "war of civilizations."

This is ridiculous. We are engaged in a series of battles against a loose federation of absurdly overmatched nuts, whose ability to strike at us is totally dependent on funds from rich benefactors about whom we do next to nothing. It ain't the Crusades. We overran Iraq in a matter of weeks; wherever Wolfowitz' dart hits next, it won't be too much different -- though whether we gain a really useful geopolitical advantage from any of these adventures is a matter of real debate. This is not looking like an epochal struggle on any level. Expensive, risky, tragic, yes, but not a war of civilizations.

And I must say that the Roger Simon post that kicked this all off isn't worth the pixels expended in reply. It's basically a hit piece on the Democratic presidential candidates ("sleaziest collection of low-down opportunists that I have ever seen," "pathetic," "yutz," etc) of the sort seen every day at other dispensaries of partisan invective, all the way down to the absurd implication that Kerry, Clark et alia don't realize that Saddam is/was a Very Bad Man. The only revelation is that Simon considers himself "an old radical-liberal." Well, so was David Horowitz, I suppose.

It's politicking, pure and simple -- sloganeering toward the end of electing candidates. A serious discussion of what we should do next may be going on somewhere, but not 'round these parts.

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.