THE ELLIPSOIDAL SOTU. Jim Lehrer (or Robert MacNeil -- I never knew which one it was who quit) guides us in gently, Brooks and Shields muttering collegially along,

Here come the Republicans! Powell and Rumsfield, both grinning like sumsabitches. Ashcroft, conversely, looks at everything as if it were a near occasion of sin. Spencer Abraham seems like a jolly old soul; I bet he's the only one that drinks. (MacLehrer mentions that one Cabinet Secretary has to stay away, but they don't say who. Curses, my plan has been foiled!) If you look up "saturnine" in an Elizabethan dictionary, they have a picture of Dick Cheney. Apparently Breyer's the only one from the Supremes here -- must be laundry night. Then Bush.

I watch this on PBS because on the other networks this part sounds like sheets of hail on a tin roof.

How does Kennedy keep his face so red? I though he'd dried out. Well, if I were him, I'd drink too.

"...a nation called to great responsibilities and we are rising to meet them." Despite the confident demeanor, a measured beginning.

The troops get the first call: "...bringing hope to the oppressed and justice to the violent, they are making America more secure..." But not just them -- all the uniforms: "Law enforcement personnel and intelligence personnel ... passenger lists... coasts and borders.. their vigilance is protecting America."

"...the American economy is growing stronger the tax relief you passed is working." No pause for breath there!

"...Congress.. take pride... skeptics had thought impossible... raising standards... public schools... perscription drug coverage under Medicare." DId the applause just dip?

"...we can go forward with confidence... or backwards... dangerous illusion... outlaws regimes no threat... turn back to old policies and old divisions... not come all this way through tragedy and trial and war only to falter and leave our work unfinished."

The speechwriters thought that Howard Dean would win in Iowa.

"...the American people are showing that the State of our Union is confident and strong." Well, someone has to.

"...active defense of the American People... September 11, 2001... tempting to believe that the danger is behind us. That hope is understandable, comforting and false... Bali, Jakata, Casablance... Jerusalem, Istanbul and Baghdad... By our will and courage this danger will be defeated." Take that, Dean! Or whomever.

"...law enforcement officials... Every tool they need... Patriot Act... beter share information... disrupt their cells... for years we have used similar porvisions... good for hunting criminals, they are even more important for hunting terrorists." The Patriot Act is what's great about America.

"...key provisions are set to expire next year..." Democrat Ironical Applause; the Chief shoves it back: "The terrorist threat will not expire on that schedule." Applause! Hooray for the unkillable Terrorist Threat!

"...our law enforcement officials..." That phrase again! "...You need to renew the Patriot Act... a mastermind of Spetember 11... awoke to find himself in custody... key player in the attack... two-thirds of their known leaders... remaining killers who hide... justice." Shot of the generals, soberly applauding.

"...Taliban... new constitution... businesses are opening... boys and girls of Afghanistan are back in school... building a nation that is free and proud... America is honored to be their friend." See, it's not just about killing bad guys; we've made new friends as well.

"...since we last met... combat forces... enforced the demand of the United Nations... the people of Iraq are free." Boo-yah! Stuff that "no WMD" bullshit! We won a fucking war!

"...we face a remnant of violent Saddam supporters... attack from the shadows... serious continuing danger... progress... found in a hole, and now sits in a prison sell." Where's Dad? No shot of Dad? "...of the top 55... captured or killed 45." Update your playing cards! "...our forces... on the offensive... average of 180 raids a week... thugs... as surely as we dealt with Saddam Hussein's evil regime." They can run but etc.

"...America is always willing to do what it takes... the whim of one brutal man... Iraqi Governing Council... Bill of Rights... United Nations... full Iraqi sovereignty... enemies of freedom will do all in their power... tring to shake the will of our country... will never be intimidated by thugs and assassins." In case y'all were thinking of, y'know, ever getting out.

"...Iraqi people will live in freedom... honored to welcome... the current President... sir, America stands with you..." Pachachi, bless him, looks like a former bouncer now running for alderman in Springfield, MA.

"...the world is changing for the better... leader of Libya... disclose and dismantle... weapons of mass destruction... correctly judged that his country would be better off... without weapons of mass murder." Intimidation works.

"...accomplished what 12 years of diplomacy did not... for diplomacy to be effective... no one can now doubt the word of America... insisting that North Korea... Iran meet its commitments... committed to keeping the world's most dangerous weapons out of the hands of the world's most dangerous regimes." And it will work everywhere else.

"...September 20, 2001... shield of a fallen officer... my complete commitment to securing our country... this pledge has been kept by me... you... cast the difficult votes... diplomats... skilled and tireless... military... hardest duty... midnight raids... lonely hours.. joy when they returned... sorrow... loss... honor of meeting... mess hall in Baghdad... America is proud of you... resources you need to fight and win the war on terror." The armed forces are Bush's most reliable punctuation mark. Even more so than "law enforcement."

"...some people question if America is in a war at all... law enforcement and indictments... some... sent to prison... matter was not settled... after the chaos and carnage of September 11... not enough to serve our enemies with legal papers." Now I see why "law enforcement" keeps coming up. This is the old Nixon law-and-order strategy writ large: a rebuke to the legal-aid types.

"...some in this chamber... did not support the liberation... principled motives... let us be candid... consequences of leaving Saddman Hussein in power... the Kay report... significant amounts of equipment... ad we failed to act... porgrams would continue... resolutions... empty threats... torture chambers... victims... killing fields... all who love freedom and peace... the world without Saddam Hussein's regime is a better and safer place."

I remember the litany of I-didn't-say-imminent horrors described by Bush last time out (here, and scroll to January 29) -- "One vial, one cannister, one crate... a day of horror like none we have ever known" -- and this is but a pale reprise; can this talisman have already lost its charm? Shot of Hillary robotically clapping -- in much the same manner with which she supported the invasion, no doubt.

"...some critics say... should be internationalized... hard to explain to our partners in Britain, Australia, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Thailand, Italy, Spain, Poland, Denmark..." Aw, you get it, don't you? But he goes on: "As we debate at home.. vital contributions of our international partners... we have gained much support... America will never seek a permission slip." Boo-yah, again.

"...we also hear doubts... democracy... freedom is rare... mistaken and condescending... God has planted... freedom... crushed by tyranny for decades, it will rise again." Those Democrats, forever trying to keep Iraqis on the liberal plantation.

"...forward strategy of freedom... confront the allies of terror... Voice of America... expanding their programming in Arabic and Persian... new televsion service... double the budget for the National Endowment for Democracy..." Doubling a National Endowment? This shit is serious! "...free labor unions in the Middle East... light the way for others... transform a troubled part of the world." Yeah, just wait'll the first strike and Right to Work laws.

"...nation with a mission... no desire to dominate, no ambitions of empire... peace founded upon the dignity of every man and woman... friends and allies.. our special calling... lead the cause of freedom." This is, as they say, the vision thing, and it would be wonderful to believe him.

"...last three years... fundamental strength of the American economy... corporate scandals... stimulate the economy... economy is strong and growing stronger." Here I believe the Congressmen were clapping much more loudly than the citizens.

"...doubled the child tax cedit... phased out the death tax... capital gains.. small businesses... lowered taxes for every Ameriican... put those dollars to work... driving this economy forward... third quarter... new home constructions... home ownership rates... manufacturing... interest rates... exports... jobs are on the rise." This, you see, is why we use the elliptical format -- it better renders the incantatory, magical nature of invocations such as this.

"...these numbers comfirm the American people are using their money far better than government would have and you were right to return it." Haw haw! Makes ya think of Reagan, don't it? When was the last time Bush made you think of him?

"...changing economy ... technology... more productive... workers need new skills... health care and biotechnology... good jobs.. reading and math... suppoosed to be learned in the early grades... for too long... skills never mastered. No Child Left Behind... 36 percent increase... standards... fundamentals... better options... excellence for every child in America." The 36 percent increase, BTW, refers to funding, not to results.

"...the status quo always has defenders... undermine.. weakening... common sense... we expect 3rd graders to read and do math at the 3rd grade level... help... nation will not go back to the days of shuffling children along... Act is opening the door to opportunity..." Goddamned teachers -- have to do something about them.

"...find work now... strong math and science... beyond the high-school level... 'Jobs for the 21st Century'..." At last, a new program with Capital Letters! "...expand advanced placement programs in low-income schoools... private sector... larger Pell Grants... increasing support for community colleges..." Was that Dem-clap again? "...so they can train workers... more and more Ameircans to join the growing prosperity of our country... pro-growth economic agenda."

"...the tax reductions you passed are set to expire..." Now comes the big, snarky Democrat volley of applause and cheers. "Unless you act, unless you act, unless you act..." Fuck you guys. "...the unfair tax on marriage... $300 more in federal taxes... small businesses... death tax will come back... Americans face a tax increase..." Was that a "boo"? "...for the sake of job growth, the tax cuts you passed should be permanent."

Like the old Reagan era battles. But with the deficits this guy has racked up, can they ever have the same frisson?

"Small business owners... needless federal regulations... junk and frivolous lawsuits..." Well, they thought Edwards might be the Vice-Presidential nominee, anyway. "...consumers and businesses need reliable supplies of energy... modernize our electricity systems... less dependent on foreign sources of energy." A President always has to say that -- none more so than ones named Bush.

"...free and fair trade... entrepreneurs, manufacturers, and farmers..." Boy, there's a WPA frieze, huh? "...jobs... younger workers... saving part of their Social Security taxes in a personal retirement account." Why not louder cheers? Is this not the reddest of meat for red-meat Republicans? "Make the Social Security system a source of ownership for the Amercan people, and we should limit the burden... by acting of good stewards of taxpayer dollars." Sounds like a fight broke out in the Chamber. Where's the Sergeant-at-Arms?

"...budget.. funds the war... limits the growth of discretionary spending to less than 4 percent..." Huh? "...cuts wasteful spending... be wise with the people's money... cut the deficit in half over the next five years."

The clapping and not-clapping go on as before, but can any viewer take this seriously? No matter; here comes the bill of legislative particulars:

"...reform our immigration laws... benefit our economy... new temporary worker program..." The silence is deafening. "...willing employers.... good for our economy... honest and orderly... protect our homeland..." Oh, for Christ's sake! "...law enforcement... I oppose amnesty... unfairly reward those who break our laws... citizenship path... millions of hard working men and women out from the shadows of American life." No, they don't buy it either.

"...health care... a time of change... amazing medical technologies... challenge... rising cost of medical care and insurance... expand the beneifts... bipatisan effort... strengthening Medicare... prescription drug benefit... Seniors can choose... card... 10 to 25 percent off the retail price..." It's beginning to sound like a late-night infomercial. "...additional $600... Seniors will have new coverage... wellness exams... January 2006, perscriptions drug coverage... bills cut roughly in half... keep their Medicare just as it is, or choose a Medicare plan that suits them best, just as you, members of Congress, can choose an insurance plan that meets your needs." The line is time-tested, but gets only sporadic applause. And Red Ted sure ain't going for it.

"...any attempt to limit the choice of seniors... will meet my veto." Louder applause. They love it when he's tough!

"...private health coverage... rapidly rising health care costs... small businesses... lower insurance rates.. pass Association Health Plans." Association Health Plans? I'll have to consult my playbook of privitization ploys later.

"...lower-income Americans... buy their own basic... computerizing health records... protect the doctor-patient relationship... eliminate wasteful and frivolous medical lawsuits." They clearly like this anti-trial-lawyer thing. Is that why's Hillary's laughing so heartily?

"...catastrophic coverage... dedcut 100 percent from their taxes... government-run health care system is the wrong prescription... costs under control... private medicine makes America's health care the best in the world." Aw, shit, says the media-pool cameraman, I blew my Hillary shot in the last section!

"Great change... some things endure... courage.. reverence... respect... values... families and schools and religious congregations... unseen pillars of civilization... we will defend them..."

Here, of course, comes the nut-job nanny-state part of the program. (Yeah, I know health care is kinda nanny, but it's not nuts.)

"...drugs... confront this problem... law enforcement... drug use in high school has declined... new funding ... community-based strategies... additional $23 million for schools... We love you and we do not want to lose you." Soccer moms, this is for you, Republican-stylee.

"Good examples... athletics play such an important role in our society... use of performance-enhancing drugs like steroids... dangerous... wrong message... short-cuts... I call on team owners, union representatives, coaches and players to take the lead... get rid of steroids now." But not on the government's dime! The cheapest bit so far, in every sense. Hey, Tom Brady's in the house!

"...three million teenagers contracted sexually-transmitted diseases that can harm them or kill them or prevent them from ever becoming parents..." Did he say "contracted" or "attracted"? And wait, what STD prevents them from (shut up, he's on a roll!) "...inform parents... double federal funding for abstinence... the only certain way to avoid sexually-transmitted diseases..." No condoms for you! But tons of money.

"Children... parents, shcools,.. negative influence of the culture... value the insitituion of marriage... respect individuals... principles... passing the Defense of Marriage Act... signed by President Clinton..." Ouch, you had to get that in there, didn't you? "...protects marriage under federal law... judges, however, have begun redefining marriage..."

You know, one expects this from the guy, but it never ceases to make me especially sick.

"...people's voice must be heard... judges insist... arbitrary... only alternative... constitutional process... our nation must defend the sanctity of marriage." (Spin that, Sully!)

BTW: "Each individual has dignity and value in God's sight." Yeah, yeah.

"...also important... compassion of religious institutions... every creed... taking the hand of the lonely... contracts... just because they have a cross or a Star of David or a Crescent on the wall... milllions of dollars in grant money... codify this into law... people of faith will know that the law will never discrimiate against them again." He seems particularly passionate about this, or at least louder.

"...mentors to chidlren of prisoners... another group... 600,000 inmates will be released from prison... if they can't find work... 4-year, $300 million prisoner initiative... transitional housing... mentoring, including from faith-based groups." Chuck Colson, call your banker!

"...second chance... when the gates of prison open the path ahead should lead to a better life."

My cynicism abates a little here. That this ally of the powerful should take a moment (and $300 million) for the least powerful among us seems almost, well, Christian.

A good place to put this in a speech, if you're a truly cynical bastard.

"...tests we did not ask for... we have shown what kind of nation we are... courage... daring... victory... we sense that we live in a time set apart... character... calm in times of danger... toughness... partners in a great enterprise... a girl in Lincoln, Rhode Island..."

Oh, fuck, not a little schoolgirl with a letter! "A letter -- ' Dear George W. Bush... age 10... what I can do to save our country... to our troops, please put: Ashley Pearson believes in you.'" Awwwww ralf. "Ashley... your message has been conveyed. And yes, you have some duties... study hard in school, listen to your mom and dad... and when you see a man or woman in uniform.. say thank you... while you do your part, all of us in this great chamber will do our part..." Oh, Jeez. "We now move forward with confidence... strong and steadfast.. the cause of all mankind... momentum of fredom... not carried forward by our power alone... the unfolding of the years... His purposes are just and true..." And the God thing, etc.

You know, as loud as he got and as comfortably as he smirked, I don't think he really had a coherent speech here. There's too much going on, too much of it beyond the real power of his Administration and, without an imminent ('scuse the language!) invasion, nothing to pull it through the eye of the needle.

But what do I know? Shields and Yarnell or whatever their names are have already led the charge of spinners working madly to make hay or horseshit of it. Let 'em have it. I've done my bit.

SOME COMPLIMENT. Andrew Sullivan tells Paul Krugman: why can't you be like that nice David Brooks? Brooks, says Sullivan, "tries to look at the opposing party empathetically, attempting to understand what's going on, hoping for the best."

What is the nature of this "empathy" of which Sullivan speaks? A characterization of the "quintessential Democrat," imagined by the Brooks as "a 55-year-old teacher... a moderate, optimistic, progressive educator who wants to believe in politics again."

That's nice, but as Brooks develops the character of QD, we find she is rather a flawed vessel:

...she has been disappointed so many times... Bill Clinton offered to rekindle her hopes but squandered it all so needlessly...

Like one who has loved ardently but not well, she is now wary about committing to a politician. At first she liked Dean... but she's had second thoughts because Dean isn't the sort of kind and respectful student she wants in her classroom...

Most of all, she is cautious and flexible. She wants to be sure that This Is The Guy before she gives her heart away one more time....

QD sounds like a terrible simp, doesn't she? Played and betrayed, a doormat to all these awful men, now timorously venturing out in brogans, white shirt and stockings, and plaid flannel skirt for one last shot at love....

QD's a nice image for Democrats if you want to reenforce the "Mommy Party" caricature of weaklings who cannot be trusted with decision-making power.

QD's so pathetic I could even imagine a few bruises on her, caused by her husband, QR. He's a confident, energetic man, who likes to have a few drinks of a weekend and discuss foreign policy. But because he's such a passionate man, sometimes QR goes too far, and he loves QD just so goldurned much, it just drives him crazy and...

But there I go, being empathetic with the Republicans.

UPDATE. Badly-thought-out word gag deleted.

LIBERTARIAN PARADISE. Here's what happened at that online Sims game:

As it was, Alphaville quickly turned into a hellhole of scam-artists, crime syndicates, mafia extortion artists and teenage girls turning tricks to make ends meet. It became a breeding ground for the very worst in human nature -- a benign-sounding granny, for example, who specialised in taking new players into her confidence, then showered them in abuse. Then there was the scam-artist known as Evangeline, who started out equally friendly and then stole new players' money.

Ah, the genius of the marketplace.

GRAHAM, CRACKER. As noted below, conservative outlets downplayed MLK yesterday. But this morning I did finally pick up an overt reference in The Corner's Iowa coverage:

WHAT SHARPTON'S WATCHING INSTEAD? [Tim Graham]
PBS is celebrating MLK Day with what must be the 37th MLK documentary on PBS -- "Citizen King," hyped today by Cursor.org and other lefties as providing that missing late MLK, the one that opposed Vietnam with all the ferocity of a Howard Dean.

Posted at 10:07 PM

Yes, while the good Americans at NRO were making fun of Democratic Presidential candidates, evildoers were indulging their dark obsession with this King fellow.

"Citizen King" was very good, by the way, and I would especially recommend it to people who are confused about, or willfully ignorant of, the great man's accomplishments.

THE RACE IS ON. It was Dean, Dean, Dean, Dean, and... well, you see what happened.

It's my opinion that Dennis Kucinich with a brain aneurysm, and maybe even Joe Lieberman, would be a better President than Bush, so I have to say I'm happy with tonight's result because it makes the race interesting. I certainly wouldn't count Dean out on the basis of a few thousand votes in Iowa. But now, suddenly, an electorate that had been hearing about nothing but how "angry" Howard Dean is has been reminded that there are a bunch of other guys running, too.

And considering the mushiness of Bush's support, that's probably going to be a positive type of attention. I liked Kerry's line about having an economy that works for the people rather than a people that works for the economy -- and I like even more that millions of Americans are going to read it in their paper tomorrow.

Also, the GOP hit squads will have to change course for a while, and this will drain their meager intellectual resources; from what I've seen so far, their Kerry slurs really need work.

None of the Democrats running is a perfect contender, but by summer one of them will be contending. That's a little more real now, and (in this instance anyway) reality is more appealing than fantasy.

FADE FROM BLACK. National Review Online has posted no Martin Luther King observance today. This is a switch. In recent years, NRO writers have celebrated the great man's birth by explaining how he was really a conservative, or wishing aloud that they could still call people of King's race colored. Idiotic as these observances were, they still acknowledged the occasion.

But this year, nothing's doing, unless this thing by Jay Nordlinger is meant as a tribute:

DEPT. OF "I WISH I HAD SAID THAT": "George W. Bush has several black Americans in high-ranking positions, but often they're not considered black, because they are, of course, Republican. So here's my thought: Michael Jackson could have saved himself a fortune on cosmetic surgery just by becoming a Republican -- then, in the eyes of the world, he would have stopped being black."

But then, Nordlinger is capable of this kind of shit the rest of the year too. So it would seem that NRO is passing the holiday in silence.

One would like to think it is embarrassed silence, an acknowledgement that they have nothing worthwhile to say about the subject. I fear it is probably a different sort of resignation that has quieted them: with affirmative action dug in for a few more years at least, the President factoring no black votes into his electorial plans, and the most regular and readable black contributor to NRO a cursed pro-gay libertarian, the NROniks have probably just given up on black folk entirely.

OpinionJournal doesn't mention MLK Day either. Last year, a few days before King's birthday, they posted an article about Republicans and race -- basically praising Bush for speaking against Trent Lott, saying it gave him "racial capital that's much too precious to squander," and warning that "white Americans cannot continue to deliver nationwide elections to Republicans."

Maybe they've changed their minds, too.

UPDATE. Pandagon has some good Right-on-King notes, too.

UPDATE II. Here's something to contemplate on MLK Day. Did you know people made postcards of lynchings? I sure didn't, and I grew up in a culture of victimization that discouraged the pulling up of one's own bootstraps, gave Toni Morrison the Nobel Prize, and continues to stigmatize frat boys who think the term "colored people" is a real scream.

UPDATE III. At NRO's The Corner, Denmother Lopez finally drops some MLK love, sort of: a statement, posted without comment, from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Money quote: "Racial progress is a train that left the station decades ago..." Spin connoisseurs will note the cliche denoting finality ("left the station") used to describe "progress," which is by its nature ongoing. Think one can't have it both ways? One can with the right speechwriters.

THE WEDDING SINGER. You know, I really think they draw straws for gigs like this one: explaining the $1.5 billion for remedial marriage lessons our President has proposed. Rick Lowry got the short one this time, but he's a gamer and puts on a good show.

Welfare, as Lowry explains it, was "the greatest anti-child-poverty program in all of recorded history," but "During the past three decades, the consensus behind this wondrously effective social program has collapsed," leading to frogs, boils, locusts etc.

Previously, Lowry had spoken feelingly for the welfare reform enacted by Congress, calling it "the most spectacular public-policy success of the 1990s," and lobbying for its preservation because "a falling black-child poverty rate is worth preserving." But now he thinks that "without a renaissance in marriage there will be no true welfare reform."

One wonders why Republicans didn't call for marriage lessons back in 1996 instead of seemingly superfluous reform. Perhaps it was felt that single mothers had to be pushed off welfare rolls and into workplaces, and left for some years in that situation, before they would focus their minds on the advantages of marriage.

But they're still not going for it in numbers to suit Lowry. Can't see why not -- after all, says Lowry, "...fathers of children born out of wedlock make, on average, $17,000 a year," but "According to [the Heritage Foundation's Robert] Rector, if they were to marry the mothers of their children, 75 percent of the mothers would be lifted out of poverty. In roughly two-thirds of the cases, the mothers would be lifted out of poverty without even having to work themselves."

Despite this tremendous financial incentive, single mothers for some reason "consider [marriage] a near-utopian state," says Lowry, "to be achieved in some far-off future when they have made it into the middle class." And so they must be educated.

The President's plan appears to target couples, but as portrayed here it is really the ladies who need convincing. Perhaps a special class will be convened for single mothers. I would dearly love to see the reaction of women who daily juggle all the titanic responsibilities of working motherhood on subsistence wages to this sort of instruction. What would the instructor say when some of his subjects talk back, and tell him that they cannot afford sitters to mind their children while they use their few free hours to hunt down Mr. Right?

Lowry also works in a couple of slaps at " American social policy since the 1960s" and gay marriage. Maybe this is to show his colleagues that no matter how preposterous his assignment, he can still acquit himself with panache.

DAWN OF THE DEAD. For all their alleged contemporaneity and stoopid-freshness, right-wing bloggers still have an old-fashioned paleocon attitude toward the Liberal Media. All that distinguishes them from, say, William Safire in his Agnew speechwriting period, is style (or lack thereof), and perhaps class (ditto).

Take Professor Glenn Reynolds, for example and please. He continually hammers the point, with a series of "Oh, that liberal media" posts-'n'-quotes, that the NY Times, WashPost, and a host of other malefactors seek to manufacture consensus among those benighted folks who do not yet receive all their news and opinions from the internet. One common schtick: comparing the Times to Pravda, heh indeed.

But one should not infer from this that Reynolds cannot himself assemble a pack-not-a-herd when someone violates the standards of blogbrotherhood.

The other day one Dennis Perrin said something bad about James Lileks. Of course, some of us do that all the time, but Perrin registered his objections via a print publication.

This spurred from the Professor an extra-long post, summoning several of his independent-thinking friends to pile on Perrin.

Reynolds and his guests don't deal with Perrin's ideas much (unless you think calling his article "lame and confused" is a rigorous line of enquiry), preferring to insult Perrin himself. The consensus is that Perrin does not "get" the blogosphere.(One contributor even suggests, with apparent seriousness, that Perrin has been forced to work in print media because he can't make it as a blogger.)

The usually clear John Scalzi says that Perrin errs in attacking Lileks for expressing "his personal opinion on his personal Web site on his personal time." I just can't find anything like this idea in Perrin's article, and was mystified by Scalzi's assertion till I read this further down his column:

Perrin seems to want to shout that Emperor James has no clothes. Problem is, he's shouting this momentous discovery in the middle of a nudist colony. We're quite aware James has no clothes and is spouting off from the top of his head, thanks. As are we all. If you don't like it, you are of course perfectly free to go away and leave us nudists alone.

Once we get past the grisly image of Reynolds, Andrew Sullivan, et alia, as nudists, it becomes clear that Perrin's offense was to judge Lileks' work by the standards of bad old Big Media -- clarity, reason, logical consistency, etc., as opposed to the "spouting" that distinguishes top blogs from underblogs in the Brave New World. Which is to say that nothing distinguishes them at all, except for preferential treatment by well-situated buddies.

"Looks like the Northern Alliance has been activated!" cries the Professor. Well, their thinking may not be clear, but it is certainly unidirectional. And with an army of zombies one can accomplish much.

MONEY QUOTE FROM CRAZY JESUS LADY'S LATEST BLATHER: "I am a conservative and do not hope for a Democratic victory, but I do hope for a Democratic fight..."

The rest of the blood issuing from Noonan's stigmata pools into this:

• The Democratic candidates who are likely to win are awful.
  
• All the people who will not win the nomination are nice.
  
• The awful boomer press is nicer now than when they supported that awful Clinton, they don't like that awful Dean.
  
• The nice Gephardt supporters have mud on their nice boots.
  
• Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death, amen.

It's enough to make one miss Father Coughlin.

CONQUEST. The ineffable John Derbyshire has an article up, positing Arabs as "The Irish of the World." As the Irish are to Britain, says he, so are the Arabs to everyone else. The staying power of the IRA and the intransigence of the fanatics who plot and move against America and its allies are objective correlatives.

Of course, there are a few bugs in the analogy, Derbyshire admits:

The West never ruled the Arabs in the way, or for the length of time, that Britain ruled Ireland. I cannot think of any Western leader who dealt with the Arabs as Oliver Cromwell dealt with the Irish. Nor did Ireland ever suffer the extreme misogynist neurosis that Lawrence Wright describes in Saudi Arabia [in his recent New Yorker essay]. Nor were her rulers and people ever corrupted by great wealth that required no effort on their part to generate it ? Ireland's economic problem was not wealth, but poverty.

So aside from the near-inversion of their economic and power relations, Anglo-Irish and World-Arabs is the same thing.

Oh, one other thing -- Derbyshire can see the rectification of the Anglo-Irish impasse: "...it will be the prosperity and sophistication of the modern Irish republic, her ancient and peculiar sense of nationhood dissolved by globalized economics, her religious intensity vitiated by the easy hedonism of Euro-culture, her aching sense of dwelling in the shadow of a richer, stronger power dispelled by the equalization of wealth and the shrinking of distances."

Small wonder he can see it: All this is not only possible but already visibly happening. Eire is free and engages profitably with the world and even with England; the Northern Ireland of today is nowhere near the battleground it was in, say, 1973. 350 years after Cromwell, a course correction is taking place.

The remedies that would redress the imbalance between each of the two pairs of worlds Derbyshire sees have been available in the European version for some time, and despite the many remaining impediments to success even Derbyshire, no Hibernophile, sees it going the right way.

As to the Arabs, well, we all see how that's been going. "...it is hard to see much sign of such improvements at present," Derbyshire says. "This is going to be a long, wearying fight."

What this implies, though Derbyshire doesn't speak of it, is that the stage of relations between us and not-us taking place in the Middle East is a lot further behind than the one between the Irish and the English.

To see how far back we are, entertain this message (per Gerard of Wales) from Roderic of Connaught (Rory O'Connor) to Dermot McMurrough of Leinster, whose dispute with Roderic over the High Kingship of Ireland led Dermot to invite, perhaps superfluously, the Norman invasion of Ireland:

Contrary to the conditions of our treaty of peace, you have invited a host of foreigners into this island, and yet, as long as you kept within the bounds of Leinster, we bore it patiently. But now, forasmuch as, regardless of your solemn oaths, and having no concern for the fate of the hostage you gave, you have broken the bounds agreed on, and insolently crossed the frontiers of your own territory; either restrain in future the irruptions of your foreign bands, or I will certainly have your son's head cut off, and send it to you.

This took place in the 12th Century. Today we have a corrupt and failing Saudi government desperately working its relations with the West while its brother nations come under the Coalition's wrecking balls, and mullahs and terrorists across the region brood and plot. Our killing of the Hussein boys is just a small foray into the Borgian blood-feast, the war on sons and brothers, there regnant.

Derbyshire's mention of the "easy hedonism of Euro-culture" sticks with me. American Conservatives still turn up their noses at this easy hedonism; Derbyshire himself was thrown into a snit over the recent micromarriage of Britney Spears. "...if a customary social institution is trashed and trivialized by irresponsible buffoons, we ought to exert more control over it -- to tighten access, not loosen it," he cried. That his tut-tutting from the porch is merely a quaint appurtance of our go-go culture, rather than occasion for a warrant from the Witchfinder General, seems to show how far we've come.

Yet in some corner of our planet -- a planet seemingly vast right now, its nations unfathomably disparate, despite the impression given by our President's recent call to conquer the galaxy (as if the conquest of our own little piece of it were a settled issue) -- time has not moved so quickly.

We can only be said to deal with the Arabs as the English dealt with the Irish if the struggle of mankind out of ignorance and into the light is much more retarded than is generally supposed. This is the aspect of our current foreign relations that is most disturbing --- so disturbing that it upsets such a settled mind as Derbyshire's. It's as if the Rennaisance were only a favorably settled local by-election. Now we scour the East with blood and thunder, and our troops hand out democracy like a Chick tract, and we wait for the message to take hold.

I wouldn't advise we hold our breath.

SOMETIMES, BAD SEX REALLY IS WORSE THAN NO SEX:

Anna, a 22-year-old graduate student in Manhattan, said she remembers clearly how she was introduced to one of New York's sauciest underground social scenes. It was via an instant message from a stranger who had seen her personals ad online at Nerve.com... he wanted to know if Anna would be interested in going "with me and my hot tattooed girlfriend"...

To gain entry, Anna first had to send an erotic essay and a photo of herself... Anna made the cut, was given the party's location and a pass phrase -- "untie my corset" -- and on a chilly night last year donned fishnet stockings and high heels and headed out to her first sex party....

Porn fans might be drawn on, as the promise of hotness redeems even the worst prose. But since this story appears in the New York Times, the more judicious ones will be filled by a creeping dread that the promise will be hideously betrayed:

...a quarter of the women -- most in their 20's and early 30's -- were topless, save for dabs of body paint on their nipples, to comply with the city's public nudity laws. Downstairs in the midst of a crowd of around 200, half a dozen women were packed tightly together in a sort of group rub, undulating in time with the techno soundtrack. In a corner, a stunning young woman with blond hair preppily styled like Gwyneth Paltrow's...

Well, there goes my hard-on.

"It's not just, 'I'm going to go to this party with my boyfriend to have sex in front of other people,' " said Melinda Gallagher, 30, a former graduate student in human sexuality at New York University... "The philosophy is that women need their own space to explore sexuality. The women in the room direct whatever happens."

Well, there go my next three hard-ons.

Still, given some of the pathetic stories I've been hearing about sex-averse attitudes among our young folk, it is encouraging to hear that some kids, at least, are within hailing distance of getting laid.

The orgy does sound depressingly like a launch party for some energy drink, but that's probably the fault of the writer, who approaches his urban satyrs from the Marian-the-Librarian perspective used by Times lifestyle reporters since before "boo" became "grass." He even sinks so low as to solicit a dissent to the debauchery from "a clinical psychologist and sex therapist at Beth Israel Medical Center." The swingers, says the shrink, are "so overstimulated in this environment that they may not understand sexual intimacy in a more monogamous relationship." Well, who does?

So let us be optimistic. Maybe when the kids finally get fucking right, they can work on that shitty music they've been listening to.

MY BUDDY. "Republicans giving advice to Democrats these days are usually poorly-received."

Gee, why do you think that is?

"The persecution complex and bunker mentality of so many Dem activists is so acute that we're now witnessing instances in which Republican defenses of Howard Dean are being rejected as disingenuous."

We sent a thank-you card; didn't you get it?

"Which is fine, in a sense, in that it only marginalizes the other side and makes my 288-250 prediction look better all the time."

You want to beat us? I thought you were our friends.

"But it's not fine, in a larger sense, because it's bad for the country and civic discourse."

So we're not just hurting ourselves, we're hurting America. Boy, if I had a nickel for every time I heard that one!

Tacitus, your concern is touching, but let's just keep this relationship acrimonious, shall we?

DEAR MR. PREZNIT:

my boys scholteacher red me that you was goin to give muny to peple who is havin bad marreges. espeshly if they has low incum & are not faggits. me & lucinda who is a gurl is haven bad marrage problems du to her bein a bitch LOL. but seriusly folks. my mind is not rite sincd i got layed off from the walmart on accont of it closd & move to beaufort county. sumtimes i go off on her & the kids & 2 or 3 times they call the cops & lucinda say take the baby away sumplacd safe. i think me & lucinda need yr help bad & could you put us up for the interpernsinnal relashunship clas and maybe sum samwiches & a cuple beer if you cn do it LOL. it dont have to be $1.5 bilion i will take anything LOL. Good Luck to You Sir the peple are with you & gratful you doin so much to help marrege cause we hav not had much help with marrege since the preahcer went to prisin.

yurs truly
roy edroso
brooklyn, ny
ps if you hav turkee left over i wud like sum too

FINISH THE JOB. PBS has just run a long documentary on Reconstruction. In my little Catholic parochial school many years ago, we were taught that Reconstruction was at best well-meant but overzealous, and at worst a criminal reign of terror over Southern whites. In some quarters this version of history is still taught, so it is bracing to see the means of Reconstruction's reversal, including the murder of blacks and of elected officials of both races, described in a public forum.

An especially interesting segment treats the slaughter of much of the Twitchell family in Louisiana's Red River Parish by allies of the Marston family. The Twitchell patriarch, Marshall, had headed the Freedman's Bureau in Red River, and the Marstons would not countenance his carpetbagger authority.

Interviewed on the program is a descendent of these Marstons, a lean, well-spoken fellow who speaks of his forebears' actions with obvious pride.

It is useful to note that a number of people continue to take up the Lost Cause. You can read some of these regarding the PBS doc here. Sample quote: "PBS is totally under the control of the liberal, leftist elite. They consider anything to be 'social progress' as long as it's something that destroys the fabric of traditional society, especialy that of the Confederacy."

Not Reconstructed enough, if you ask me.

HEY MOMMA EARTH, BETTER BRING ME BACK DOWN, I'VE TAKEN JUST AS MUCH AS I CAN. "Military victories in Iraq and Afghanistan have made America safer, and tax cuts have made us all richer," says Brendan Miniter, "so Mr. Bush didn't have to promise the moon to win in November. But now that he has, it's up to the Democrats to prove they're not lost in space."

This is the sort of thing a right-wing hack might get away with were jobs were plentiful and peace at hand, but when the economy is stuck like an SUV in quicksand and the terror alerts keep a-comin' despite the allegedly epochal Saddam capture ("Terror alert level lowered but nation must stay vigilant, Ridge says"), it seems rather strange.

Small wonder: OpinionJournal's resident Western-Civ scold seeks to portray Bush's space jam as a "shrewd political move."

How so? Because this plan "has allowed the president to seize the mantle of John F. Kennedy by embracing a visionary project." (Amazingly, Miniter is not the only one to make this comparison: "Both [Kennedy and Bush] were elected in a year ending in '0,'" notes Rand Simberg with interest, and adds, "(while this one hasn't yet been borne out for Mr. Bush, it's looking increasing likely) both led a realignment that made their party the national majority for years to come," suggesting, among other things, that Simberg believes he can see into the future as long as he appeases the gods by briefly switching, within magic parentheses, into a whole new tense.)

Such a bold, not to mention (if polls are any indication) groundless, assertion needs proof points, even in so forgiving a venue as OpinionJournal, so Miniter offers a f'rinstance -- the Bush plan has "potentially tremendous benefits for senior citizens":

Humans can lose more than a quarter of their bone mass just by spending a few months in space. And they often do not fully recover once they're back on Earth. It's similar to, although much faster than, the bone loss old people experience. Solving this problem could advance the quality of life for millions of Americans.

We start with bold dreams and Camelot, and end up with a medical study of the sort that recruits participants on the back page of the Village Voice, only with cool rockets and gizmos and a multi-billion-dollar price tag.

They ain't making vision like they used to.

SHIT IN A CORNER, EPISODE #1,397. One of the fun things about internecine conservative struggles -- like the current one over immigration reform -- is the resulting pissing contest at The Corner over who represents the truest conservatism (or who is most nuts, depending on your perspective).

A strong entrant is Jonathan H. Adler:

WHERE ARE THE CONSERVATIVES? [Jonathan H. Adler]
There certainly are reasonable conservative arguments both for and against more a more restrictive immigration policy, but I'm simply shocked to read certain arguments in The Corner. Coming to America to take a job is tantamount to stealing? As if anyone is somehow entitled to a given job? I'd expect to read such an argument in The Nation, but not here.

Posted at 05:59 PM

Yes, Americans, if you manage to find a job, consider yourself privileged! This guy's so far out John Fucking Derbyshire has to straighten him out.

Another strong claim is made by Jonah Goldberg, who speaks approvingly of a plan by "My old boss Ben Wattenberg" to "help maintain the demographic balance of the United States -- i.e. prop-up the share of white folks in this country," an idea which, Goldberg helpfully notes, "wasn't racist in the slightest."

Catch this breath-taking, logic-defying show while you can. They'll probably all give it up by Friday and go back to talking about Wesley Clark's sweater.

AND THIRD, WHEN DID CRYSTAL METH COME BACK, AND WHERE CAN I GET SOME? John Derbyshire says that, contrary to the assertions of "homosexualist lobbies" that AIDS "just falls from the sky" (I must have missed that paper), the disease is actually spread by gay men fucked up on crank.

Heterosexuals fucked up on crank, of course, never hurt anyone.

That Derbyshire would vomit up such a thing is not, after all this time, surprising. But I have two questions:

First, why does Derb feign ignorance of crank ("something called 'crystal meth'") when he was clearly speeding his balls off when he wrote this?

Second, when is Tacitus going to do something about it?

BLANKET DAMNESTY. Tacitus catches Hesiod referring to Colin Powell's "Stepin Fetchit routine" and calls for leftists to "do something about it," adding generically, "I'm not hopeful, but in this case, being wrong would be great."

Okay. I disapprove of the remark. (Not much else I can do about it, since I am not Hesiod's mommy.)

And since we liberals are nothing but a herd, marching blindly in lockstep behind ANSWER banners, Tacitus may assume we have all disapproved.

He may also assume that we disapprove of any regrettable remarks by people with whom we generally agree which he, Professor Reynolds, and the rest of the "truth squads" may uncover.

Henceforth I will devote myself, as previously, to the lunatic sentiments with which a good number of conservatives around these parts tend to agree.

BIG MEDIA. Soon we mom and pop weblogs will be swept away by a wave of megablogs, which will offer first-rate opinions and commentary in bulk from centralized locations. Intelligent consumers will flock to them. No zoning board can defend us; our days are numbered.

Protoype models have done well, and now the not-so-thin end of the wedge is represented by The American Street: David Niewert, Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, Kevin Hayden, Jeralyn Merritt, Luis Toro, with who knows whom else waiting in the wings. How can alicublog compete? Maybe we'll go for retro chic, offering handmade, personalized satire, and thus find our niche. I'll discuss it with the Board as soon as they start returning my phone calls again.

Meantime we remain open here on our dusty byway. Your patronage is appreciated.

ON TO BOB JONES! Roger Simon is mad because there was a lot of anti-war talk at an MLA conference:

The University Class is one of the most rigid in America in its thinking... At a conference like the MLA, whose primary raison d'etre is job search, the pressure to conform is compounded. Attendees with pro-war views would naturally be reluctant to express themselves for fear of losing out in the marketplace. I know I'd keep my mouth shut in such an atmosphere. I already know not to broadcast my pro-war views when going to a meeting in Hollywood.

One of Simon's commenters is surprised to hear that Simon censors himself. Oh, says Simon, "I had my tongue pretty far in my cheek to make a point. I'm not the kind of personality who could hide his views even if I wanted to."

Not like the rest of you, he might have added. You're a-scared.

Sigh. You see this kind of thing all the time now. Seen from this POV, liberals are nervous nellies for objecting to the Patriot Act, but such conservative members of the Modern Language Association as may exist are justified in fearing for their very tenures.

"I certainly don't want to be whiny and self-pitying" says one such whiny, self-pitying fellow, but in his freshman year at the University of Michigan (1982!), "there was a whiff of violence in the air, on that campus of mine. There really was. Of course, you have to be careful whom you talk to this way, because you could be marked off as an exaggerator or paranoid or worse." No shit.

His remarks were delivered at the 20th Anniversary celebration of the conservative Harvard Salient. No doubt there were a number in attendance waving prostheses and crutches, legacies of campus battles endured in the second year of the first Reagan Adminstration. Or perhaps no one was there at all, their forces long since decimated by the implacable jackboots of the Left.

Despite the miraculous survival of the Salient and its friends, some folks like David Horowitz want a form of affirmative action to get right-wingers into college professorships. As soon as that one goes through, I want a job at Fox News.

One thing has always puzzled me about this. If liberals have a hammerlock on most faculties, and this is a terrible detriment to our nation (as conservatives from Revilo P. Oliver to Megan McArdle have long known), why not let the marketplace solve the problem?

Instead of sending fat checks or resumes to hotbeds of liberalism like Harvard and Berkeley, why not build new citadels of learning upon foundations already laid by sympathetic educators? Jerry Falwell's Liberty University comes to mind. Or Hillsdale, or Wheaton, or any of a number of Catholic colleges and universities that would happily turn the best and brightest conservative minds to a higher, nobler purpose.

What a great advance for the cause it would be if some parents would find the gumption to say, "I know you've been accepted to Yale, honey, but the American Renaissance demands that we send you to Bob Jones U." Or if Harvey Mansfield were to rise up and shout, "Farewell, Harvard commies, glory calls at Magdalen College!"

The gains, admittedly, would not be immediate. But isn't conservatism about taking the long view?

THE MISANTHROPOGYNIST. I have been reading with pleasure Mencken's "Defense of Women," which seems to have been written as a deliberate outrage and would, with greater contemporary circulation, probably still do the job today.

Like most things written about women by men, the book is mainly about men, but unlike most other authors so disposed, Mencken seems to be aware of it. His playful premise is that women are in every meaningful way superior to our gender, but have been obliged by our mulish resistance to the fact, and by social customs designed to enforce our groundless ascendancy (the word "levantine" occurs frequently), to exercise authority by subterfuge, primarily via marriage.

Already there's plenty to howl over, but Mencken goes on his merry way. The things at which most men excel, he asserts, are mere bagatelles:

A man thinks he is more intelligent than his wife because he can add up a column of figures more accurately...and because he is privy to the minutiae of some sordid and degrading business or profession, say soap-selling or the law. But these empty talents, of course, are not really signs of a profound intelligence... it takes no more sagacity to carry on the everyday hawking and haggling of the world, or to ladle out its normal doses of bad medicine and worse law, than it takes to operate a taxicab or fry a pan of fish.

Imagine Kim du Toit or Glenn Reynolds getting a load of this! But no self-respecting feminist could go for it quite, either. For one thing, Mencken was implacably at odds with the suffragette (the book was first published in 1918), whom he described as "a woman who has stupidly carried her envy of certain of the superficial privileges of men to such a point that it takes on the character of an obsession, and makes her blind to their valueless and often chiefly imaginary nature." While he admits that women would soon enough "shake off their ancient disabilities" and emerge "as free competitors in a harsh world," yet "some of the fair ones, I suspect, will begin to wonder why they didn't let well enough alone."

Well, I don't know about that. But what I like about this, besides the great writing, is Mencken's detachment from the ordinary terms of debate. A good deal of reason and unreason was then (as now) being employed on the topic, and Mencken just staked out his own territory and had at it. He speaks approvingly of Havelock Ellis, but in general seems not to mind what anyone else has to say on the subject, prefering to make his own judgments based on what history and observation showed him. His instinct seems to be that his own reason was authority enough, and though most of us would disagree with a large part of it, in his case the analysis is at least coherent and compelling.

Mencken is shamelessly rhetorical and his style bears him along more reliably than his reason; he's frequently disingenuous and even self-contradictory, but in a way that would leave anyone trying to pin him looking pedantic. I think that's why so many intelligent people get a kick out of him, but also why anyone who identifies too closely with him inevitably looks foolish. Columns by the awful R. Emmett Tyrell, for example, used to run with a byline picture that aped a famous Mencken photo, and Tyrell's contraction-averse style still imitates the cadences of the Baltimore master, albeit stiffly. Even the initialized first name seems a forlorn sort of tribute, as it does, doubly, for P.J. O'Rourke, another professional contrarian whose obvious striving for the mantle of misanthropist-in-chief renders the homage somewhat pathetic.

All good writers make good examples, but as we were cautioned by the old Hai Karate ads, you have to be careful how you use them. It's never a good idea to try and be the "new" anything. (Look at Jet, a band that seems to want to be the new Black Crowes, an ambition that mystifies me.) From Mencken it might be best to take the lesson that it never hurts to take the lofty perspective once in a while, especially at a time when the political weblog scene more and more resembles a giant scrum trying, with grunts and curses, to push consensus one way or the other.

SHOT BY BOTH SIDES. Michael Totten is a pro-war type who till recently identified himself as a liberal. Some people think about him the way I think about "Democrat" Orson Scott Card -- as a living straw man who serves mainly as an "even the liberal" decoy to make real liberals look bad.

Who knows. David Horowitz and Roger L. Simon love the guy, and they're fairly satanic. He wrote in the Wall Street Journal that, essentially, liberals don't know anything about foreign policy. To the extent that he has a public profile, it seems based on his criticism of liberals.

But I forebear to judge. Totten, however, didn't, and recently declared himself an Independent, pushed, he said, by the "heretic-banishers" who are "purging non-conformists." Unsurprisingly, he mentions Orwell.

No sooner has Totten thrown off the yoke of orthodoxy when he notices the famous Club-for-Growth ad castigating "tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading... Hollywood-loving, left-wing" fellow citizens. It offends him. "Over-the-top Bush-hatred is matched by over-the-top Dean-hatred," he declares. "...the right's new bigoted ad disgusts me."

But a lot of Totten's commentators -- legacy pledges, one imagines, from his even-the-liberal days -- don't understand why he's so upset. "Whoa!" writes one, "A lotta you girls need to take a deep breath. This is political theatre, not the Nuremberg laws." "To those on the left," declares another, "saying anything that is politically incorrect but is too close to the truth is over the top."

Now, I haven't dug too deep into Totten's oeuvre, and at first glance he seems like a smart enough guy. But I find it interesting and, to use a badly overworked modifier, ironic, that the minute he declares his independence, and steps out his front door to breathe the sweet air of freedom, he runs smack into the new neighbors, who think everyone who reads, eats, and drinks like him is a menace to their way of life.

Whether that's ironic-sigh or ironic-hardeharhar-serves-ya-right I'll leave to one side for right now, but I do think it's a good picture of the state of our discourse at present.

WE TRULY LIVE IN AN AGE OF WONDERS. Well, at least now I can stop worrying about the dangers of smoking.

UPDATE. Some people think farmed salmon is still safe. I'm ignoring them. I don't want it to be true! I want my friends to come find in me in some low seafood dive, and grab my arm, crying, "You're killin' yourself with that stuff!"

ROSE'S TURN. What a lot of bullshit has been written about Pete Rose lately. The relevant part of the Hall of Fame's mission statement says that it seeks to honor "those individuals who had exceptional careers." If Rose had used babies for batting practice, he would still meet this requirement.

George Will, naturally, talks the most outright nonsense about Rose, offering this deathless example of a hack who thinks he's found a "contrarian" angle:

His dwindling band of defenders responds that it is unfair to judge Rose not by what he does but by the way he does it. Yet regarding repentance, the way you do it is what you do.

The putative point of this streak of rhetorical puke is that Rose should behave more penitently -- perhaps, in Will's imaginings, by travelling barefoot to the grave of Bart Giamatti -- to preserve the fiction that baseball cares deeply about the conduct of its players.

This and other such moral posturings share the childish premise that current residents of the Hall, and the brotherhood of baseballers generally, would be sullied by Rose's company. What a laugh this would get from Ty Cobb and other immortals who were in life a good deal more rapacious and destructive than Rose. What a laugh it would draw from the many steroid abusers in MLB, if they had a sense of humor, or less pharmacetical damage to their facial muscles.

Well, baseball's fan base is aging, and filled at this stage with a bunch of maudlin, would-be Billy Crystals blubbering over The Mick and The Babe and The Catch as superstitious Irish grandmothers once blubbered over saints and sacred relics. Such like may value tent-meeting hysteria and bathos over clear-eyed justice, but that doesn't mean I have to.

I love baseball, and I insist it needs no romanticizing -- its traditions, its place in American history, and the achievements of its players are what they are, large in actual fact, not because publicists pumped them up; no Field of Dreams mists are needed to make them interesting and worthy of respect. The current ginned-up show of moral outrage is an embarrassment, and the Rose ban absurd.

UPDATE. A commentator to this post has kindly informed me of Rule 21, which mandates ineligibility for a player caught betting on his own club. Them's the rules, and since this is baseball we're talking about, not something trivial like politics, I have to agree Rose should stay out.

Also, while in the past I have simply taken down my posts when in the sober light of morning (or afternoon) they seemed less than convincing or coherent, I'm just leaving this one be, as a monument to my own incompetence.

I still don't like Will's more mystical assault on Rose, and in another context I might argue that the rule is bad and should be changed. But Rose accepted the terms by playing in the League and didn't abide by them, so that's that.

YEAH -- ANYONE CAN DO IT, AND MOST OF IT IS CRAP. "And it inspired me to the realization that blogging is a lot like producing techno..." -- InstaPundit.

PUSSY. An article by Jed Babbin is introduced on National Review Online's front page with the tag "Air marshals are making us safer." The graphic says "Safer with AFMs." The article is entitled "Thank Your FAMs." There is, of course, nothing in the article demonstrating that air mashals have done anything at all except draw salary, but we are told why we should believe that they have: "But fortunately for us, and our economy, the skies are safe -- despite what terrorists may think." You don't think like one of those terrorists, now, do you?

More interesting than the alogical approach (which is rather common at NRO) are the purposefully butch insertions Babbin uses to bolster his non-argument. The thing is parfaited with Cheneyspeak, which attempts to convey masculinity by emulating the simple babbles of childhood. Thus Babbin refers to terrorists as "bad guys," and to American forces as "our guys"; grouped by speciality, American intelligence agents are "our intel guys," while troops trained in special operations are "spec-op guys."

The FAMs "get it," meaning "our guys know you can shoot a whole bunch of holes though the skin of an airliner without anything really bad happening," and at one point Babbin asks his subject "what message he'd pass along to the bad guys, baiting him for a growly, macho message." To be fair, Babbin does not use the phrase "big time," or go "HOO-ahh" at any point.

If want more of this kind of thing, you can go here and read Babbin on how his terrorist-attack survival methods are better than those of his effete liberal neighbors, because his "pal," a "a retired SEAL senior officer," forwarded him some advice from Red Thomas, who has "seen it all, and trained the young ’uns to fight..." The article is from last February; I wonder if Babbin still has his "go bag" of water-purification and other post-apocalyptic necessities stashed in his car.

Babbin's article, by the way, includes a picture of himself. He looks like a total pussy.

SHORTER MAGGIE GALLAGHER. This college kid I met hasn't given much thought to fatherhood, demonstrating that homosexuals are selfish destroyers of everything we hold dear.

STATES' (LAST) RITES. As is well known, our formerly solvent nation is running a record $374.2 billion deficit -- in contrast to the $230 billion surplus Clinton left us with in 2000.

But the states aren't doing much better. Not that they're getting less money from the Feds: While in 1998 the Census Bureau reported $25.3 billion in "federal government grants and other payments" to U.S. state governments ($29.8 billion went to California), in 2002 that rose to $36.2 billion for the states (and $41.6 billion to California.)

Yet state budgets are still a mess. Conservatives like to leave California as the only visible object-lesson of state spending run amok, as it had been piloted by a hapless Democrat before the telegenic Wolfcastle putsch. But Republican governors like Mike Huckabee of Arkansas and John Rowland of Connecticut are asking for tax increases to bail their asses out, reports the Christian Science Monitor, which also says we're currently seeing the "Deepest State Deficits in 50 Years."

The problem, says CSM, "is that tax revenues are way down and costs are exploding, particularly in healthcare, which represents 30 percent of state budgets." This has led to some heartwarming scenes, such as this one reported by AP:

Linda Garner of Columbus wrote [Georgia Governor Sonny] Perdue recently after the state terminated her quadriplegic daughter's benefits when she turned 21. The daughter, Melissa, was struck by a drunk driver when she was 6, and relies on a ventilator.

Perdue's reply to her was sympathetic but, after carefully explaining the state's budget difficulties, it offered her no help.

Costs are going up and revenues are going down, but no one wants to look like a tax-and-spend liberal so people get screwed. And until things gets to the Huckabee-Rowland stage, games are played to try and hide the damage for one more season. From a hilarious story in the Applebee (WI) Post-Crescent, optimistically titled "State Tax Burden Down in 2003":

The study found Wisconsin’s total tax burden was 33 percent of personal income in the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2003. That’s down from 33.7 percent in 2002, 34.4 percent in 2001 and 37.4 percent in 2000.
The total tax burden is a combination of all federal, state and local taxes Wisconsin residents and businesses pay.
“That’s encouraging,” Wood County Supv. Donna Rozar said. Her county decreased its property tax levy 12.3 percent this past year, but offset about 50 percent of that loss with a half-percent county sales tax, she said. [italics mine]
“I think we’re an overtaxed people,” she said.

Total taxes down 0.7 percent! Happy days are here again! And you have to love the property tax-sales tax shuffle.

Clearly this country is, at every level, financially fucked. Yet no one from the President down to the lowliest Town Supervisor wants to face up to our impending bankruptcy. For one thing, they have jerks like this saying that the states are only suffering now because they "went on a spending binge in the 1990s," presumably on such frills as ventilators for crippled teenagers. For another, they have voters howling for reform on the cheap.

So the various government agents, excepting those who have yet to run out of bullshit, juggle and fumble like bankrupt housekeepers, hiding the credit card bills and turn-off notices from the spouse and kids, hoping to get through one more day.

Meanwhile, half a world away, we teach democracy.

PLAYING TO THE CHEAP SEATS. "My hankering for Dean is therefore a little like Bill Kristol's." -- Andrew Sullivan.

(Sound effect.)

(Rimshot!)

Yes, I'm goin' for the easy laffs, friends, because alicublog has just been nominated for the "Best Humorous Blog" Koufax Award. Nominees were restricted to leftish sites, which is as it should be, as we are all about speech codes and political correctness.

A blue ribbon panel will soon winnow the 3,429 nominees in this category down to a select few, so I will celebrate now and hopefully sober up before it comes time to drown my sorrows.

Thanks to all who supported me, and remember, if I am not among the finalists, take it out on your loved ones, not the voters.

DEAD HORSE. A guy at Tacitus talks up Seabiscuit, a movie he liked so well that he's sorry he saw it on his "decent home theater set-up" instead of in a theatre.

I can see why he liked it -- which is not to say that it's good. I saw the thing last year. A bad feeling came over me at the opening credits, when the voice of that guy who narrates PBS history specials came on over some sepia-toned stills. Did I just pay 10 bucks to watch Ken Burns' American Stories on a big screen? I wondered.

Thereafter came a story about misfits banding together and keeping their dreams alive -- kind of a cross between Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Flashdance, only not as subtle as either. Here are some quotes from Seabiscuit, and yes, these paltry examples are representative of its eloquence.

As for its visual storytelling, I will remember forever a scene in which Chris Cooper, charged with matching a jockey to his horse, regards Tobey McGuire fighting off a bunch of guys, then turns to regard Seabiscuit fighting off a bunch of guys, then faces forward and broods on the metaphor a-forming in his mind. To be fair, he did not then snap his fingers, widen his eyes, tear off his cap and light out to tell Mr. Howard, but he might as well have.

All the acting and craft elements were dandy, but the story was so hectoring on its points as to be insulting. The sad thing is, I am very susceptible to the idea of America as a land of hope and opportunity that offers even to the damaged a path to glory and redemption. But a witless repetition of cliches on the subject just makes me want to snort.

Which, come to think of it, kind of explains this weblog.

MORE OLD BUSINESS. It has been 54 days since I wondered aloud at Andrew Sullivan's description of Howard Dean as "from Vermont, one of the home bases of what's being called 'the Starbucks Metrosexual elite.'" So I went to Google to see if anyone on the Web has actually used that term in relation to anything except Sullivan's use of it.

Chirp. Chirp.

Odd, I thought the guy knew a lot of bloggers.

A GIMME -- WITH AN EXPLANATION. Tan, wretched and ready Andrew Sullivan is celebrating his return to workaday life with a long post about the NYT's alleged distortion of Bush's gay marriage statement.

The post has absolutely no significant new information and mainly repeats a previous Sullivan charge, made to shore up the insane idea that Bush is somehow sympathetic to gay marriage.

Two can play at that game, Sullivan: why waste our readers' time and our own, when we can just waste our readers'? I herewith repost what I said about Sullivan's bullshit last month.

[Sullivan reports:] "One small problem: the president did not say that ['I will support a constitutional amendment which would honor marriage between a man and a woman...].' He said: 'If necessary, I will support a constitutional amendment...' In the context of religious right demands for immediate support for the FMA, that's a big difference."

In other words, though Bush has told the world that he's dead against gay marriage -- not even Sullivan denies this -- since he'll only use the FMA to stop it if he really needs to, the Times account is "what amounts to a lie about Bush's position"...

I wonder: were I to send Sullivan a letter, stating, "I want you dead, Sullivan. If necessary, I will kill you myself with my bare hands," he would fail to report it as a death threat, on semantic grounds.

Sullivan's so full of shit, I'm beginning to wonder is he's really gay.

Beats workin'.

OL' BLOOD 'N' GUTS' FINAL SOLUTION. I am a dedicated follower of General Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters (last sighting here), and look forward to each new column as eagerly as if it were a new Lockhorns installment.

His most recent column, though, has me worried. Not that it is stylistically off the mark -- it is in some ways the apotheosis of his style. But I fear he may have shot his wad.

The column opens with a graf of breathtaking logical inversion:

It's fashionable in left-wing circles to describe anyone who admires America as a fascist. But the real totalitarian threats of our time come from the left. And no public figure embodies the left's contempt for basic freedoms more perfectly than Howard Dean.

First a grotesque mischaracterization of a mischaracterization (us dirty hippies call tough-talking law-and-order types fascists, General -- people who "admire America" we call saps!), then a sweeping and undemonstrable historical generalization, closing with an outrageous slur against Dean and all Democrats that actually mirrors the liberal name-calling Peter first complained about! It's so wrong it's beautiful, like Beavis & Butthead with battle decorations.

Peters claims that Dean supporters are against free speech because they "try to intimidate other presidential aspirants by surrounding the cars delivering them to their rallies and chanting to drown out their speech... These are the techniques employed by Hitler's Brownshirts." I'm not sure what real-world events, if any, he's referring to -- the
Washington Post did report that Dean supporters chanted outside a Gephardt speech; Gephardt's people were obliged to close the windows, and his spokesperson called the act "a little bit disrespectful," which hardly summons up visions of Kristallnacht. (I can't find any reference in actual news to the car thing, which may exist only in one of Peters' brain-bubbles.)

Then Peters compares Howard Dean to Hitler, Goebbels, Big Brother, Lenin, Brezhnev, and Gorbachev.

All good fun, but you see the problem, don't you? The election is ten months away, and Peters has already gone to the money shot. After you've repeatedly compared a candidate and his followers to Nazis, what else is left? Maybe you could compare them to evil space aliens who are a hundred times worse than Hitler -- or Saddam Hussein. But nothing else quite has that Hitler zing.

Now Peters is stuck with the Hitler parallel. He may try to find another metaphor -- comparing Dean to a dung-beetle, say, or an artichoke, or a stagecoach -- but Peters' gift is not so much for creative writing as for monomania, and he will revert. And after a few months of screaming Hitler at the Democrats, Peters will sound like your typical Free Republic poster talking about Lincoln.

The General has given good froth for a few seasons, but it may be that -- like that other great General, Coriolanus -- he has o'erreached.

DON'T FEED THE TROLLS, DOC. Rachel Marsden is harshing on Howard Dean. (Thanks, Kevin, for the link.) It's mostly the sort of ad hominem bilge (Democrats are "sex-starved, party-deprived" "new age hippies" who have "run out of beer money") that all right-wing pin-ups from Coulter on down use establish their media profiles.

But even ambitious up-and-comers must do their grunt work at the Mighty Wurlitzer, and Marsden takes time to assist in the now widespread misrepresentation regarding Dean's "comments... about not wanting to pin the blame for 9/11 on poor Osama bin Laden."

What Dean actually said, even as excerpted by the vile Washington Times, is very sensible: "I've resisted pronouncing a sentence before guilt is found... I still have this old-fashioned notion that even with people like Osama, who is very likely guilty, we should do our best not to, in positions of executive power, not to prejudge jury trials."

If you think about it for more than two seconds (as I know a few of us have), it shows a healthy respect for, and confidence in, our system of justice. Of course, thinking is frowned upon in the current media environment, and our outrage merchants have found Dean's comments an easy layup in the game of Gotcha, and have egregiously manipulated them.

This quickly pushed Dean into an unfortunate attempt at clarification: "As a president, I would have to defend the process of the rule of law. But as an American, I want to make sure he gets the death penalty he deserves."

AP helpfully adds that "The former Vermont governor said he was simply trying to state in The Concord Monitor interview [the original source of the first quote] that the process of trying bin Laden needs to be fair and credible." But it still sounds like backtracking: if you don't want your comments to prejudice Osama bin Laden's trial, why say you want him dead?

In the short term, Dean got the politically convenient headlines he probably wanted ("Dean: Death to Osama" -- CBS News). But you know that, once the usual suspects are convinced that the original tsimmis has been played out, this second quote will be labelled another Dean flip-flop, further proving his volatility, unreliability, insanity, or whatever. (In fact, one or two fever-swamp opinion leaders have already done so.)

This may turn out to be a worthwhile trade-off for the Doc. Dean probably remembers how bad Mike Dukakis looked when CNN's Bernard Shaw asked him, during the 1988 Presidential debates, if he would not be tempted to favor the death penalty if someone raped and murdered his wife. Dukakis, clearly blind-sided, hemmed and hawed like a second-string high-school debater with a bad flu. Maybe Dean figured a small expression of righteous indignation, however flawed, might disabuse voters who had been manipulated into thinking that he was soft on bin Laden.

The problem, as I see it, is that Dean's kill-Osama gambit doesn't address his original statement -- it addresses the misinterpretation of that statement. He's playing on his opponents' terms. He might seem more aggressive than Dukakis here because he's using aggressive language. But in the long term, the other guys could turn it all around and say that mad, red-faced Howard has been only been aggressive in defending himself.

He should have just said, "Yeah, I believe in jury trials and the American people -- you got a problem with that?" Then let the trolls tear themselves to shreds. (I'm sure that within days you'd have a nest of commentators explaining to the American people that they are not fit to serve on a bin Laden jury. That would be worth any number of "Death to Osama" headlines.)

I like Dean and applaud his success. So I'd hate to see him pecked to death on stuff like this. Dean's obviously confident enough in his views -- else why run for President? I hope he can communicate that confidence more strongly in the future.

BOOK CHAT. Aren't you tired of politics already? I sure as fuck am.

Been reading a bunch of John O'Hara stories. This guy sold a lot mid-century, and it's easy to see why. Alice in Wonderland said, "What's the use of a book without pictures and conversations?" and if O'Hara didn't provide pictures (though his descriptions of settings are often rendered in clinical detail), boy oh boy did he provide conversations. No matter how dim or introverted, his characters fill their quote marks like senators on a filibuster. During one story particularly, "Andrea," about a long-term affair between two chronic unmarriageables, I kept thinking Shut up! Shut up and get to the punch line already! The punch line, alas, is usually dreary and unsatisfying.

Every once in a while, though, he rings a bell. Gore Vidal, who summed him up in 1964, thought O'Hara rang it in "The Trip," which I haven't read. I heard the bell in "Flight," which starts with an old playwright taking a spectacular fall on an icy sidewalk and, before he (unexpectedly) dies from his injury, having a long, pertinent conversation with his ex-actress wife, and an equally pertinent monologue, addresed to his dead son in a dream:

If you lead a completely useless life, but do it with style and die young enough, you're quite likely to be remembered with more affection than the man who has a record of accomplishment. But the secret is to die young enough. If you think you're going to live to a ripe old age, it's better to pile up a record of accomplishment of some sort. It may be bridge-building, or money-making, or butterfly-collecting, but it has to be something. People don't like to see longevity wasted on a do-nothing. And as a rule, it isn't...

Vidal thought O'Hara's writing overly improvisational, without a strong sense of direction. But the most skilled and dogged improvisers do develop a knack for bringing it all back home, as they say.

Also read most of George Gissing's "The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft," a made-up collection of journal writings by a Grub Street hack who has found leisure to pen some arty occasional pieces in his old age. (Gissing wrote "New Grub Street," the novel that gave him a brief vogue in his own time and also in the late 1990s, based equally, one imagines, on his experiences as, well, a Grub Street hack.) It's mostly pretty dreadful -- the wheezes of a petty bourgeois playing at Thoreau -- but I find it instructive sometimes to read bad writing from a previous era. This one's sort of like "Tuesdays with Morrie" from the turn of the last Century, with treacly amateur naturalism, imbecile social analysis, and breast-clasping swoons over ancient literature ("But I am thinking of the Anabasis. Were this the sole book existing in Greek, it would be abundantly worth while to to learn the language in order to read it") that remind me of the insufferable David Denby after he took a course in the Great Books.

Speaking of vintage crap, I've also been leafing through "The Spike," the 1980 novel by Arnaud de Borchgrave and Robert Moss about a Woodwardesque reporter who learns that the CIA was right about everything and that the American government is worm-eaten by Soviet moles (reaching as high as the Vice-Presidency) who yearn for a CCCP takeover. This piece of shit follows the Ludlam-Drury playbook, with villainous collectivists ("'All we need to do,' Barisov continued, 'is to help a few people -- journalists, junior officials -- to follow their own instincts'") that would make Ayn Rand blush, and softcore porn that would make anyone blush ("His hands were already moving over her slim, exquisitely molded body... Before he was sure she was ready, her deft, slender fingers pulled him deep inside her"). But the political impetus is stark and obvious: hippies and liberals are pawns of the Reds and those with some integrity left must be turned toward the light so that America can finally do something about Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia! Well, it worked, of course, and we see its bitter fruit falling around us now. Never underestimate the power of bad fiction.

There's more, but aren't you tired of art already?

2004's NEW CONVENTIONAL IDIOCIES -- FIRST TWO IDENTIFIED.
#1: Voting for Democrats is treason.

In the waning days of 2003, General Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters looked forward to the year ahead with these comments:

2004 is going to be a year of decision in the War on Terror. As our presidential election approaches, the terrorists remaining at large will sacrifice their last reserves in an effort to dislodge President Bush, freedom's great crusader, from the White House.

The terrorists will seek to convince American voters that the War on Terror is failing, paving the way for the electoral victory of a weakling and allowing them to surge back into vacuums created by an American retreat.

Their last, desperate hope will be to hit us so hard that we elect a coward in place of a hero.

We are so used to hysteria from the General that it is easy to miss the meme bobbing in the ocean of froth: that the Democrats are the Party of Terror, their field workers suicide-bombers and hijackers, and their election the fondest hope of those who wish us all dead or enslaved.

Close enough to a charge of treason, and I expect they'll aim closer still next time. Meanwhile the New York Post is working #2: Running against Bush is treason, thusly:

The [Democratic] party's nominee -- and this includes those who aspire to the nomination -- must understand that the whole world is looking at this campaign.

Looking for signs of confusion, of weakness -- of a lack of American will.

Or for signs of strength and seriousness of purpose.

And so the Democrats must conduct themselves accordingly.

They must be adults, in other words.

Now, standing against Bush, in the old, polite custom of British elections, would seem to be okay, but to disagree publicly with his war policies is... well, see #1.

Boy, that was quick. One would think there's be nowhere to go from there, at least in a southerly direction. But don't bet on it.

ANOTHER TEST of a feature which may be jejune and ultimately futile, but which is also constantly improving, and that, my boy, is the secret of success:

"CONSERVATIVE MOVIES" CONT. In comments to the previous post, a careful reader points out that Brookhiser said "most conservative" rather than "best conservative" movies, a small but not irrelevant distinction.

Giving Brookhiser and those guys some slack (probably undeserved, but New Year's resolutions are still fresh in my mind), it may be that they realize a work by a gay Marxist like Visconti could evince a world view that conservatives might embrace. (I wonder what Brookhiser thinks of "The Damned," though.) A work of art presents a world view, not a bill of political particulars (unless the artist is particularly tendentious and cloying, or a satirist). I like Evelyn Waugh, for example, not because I buy his personal Tory bullshit, but because books like Decline and Fall and Scoop take a mordant view of the follies of men to which I strongly relate. They're also funny and well-crafted. What's not to like?

Also, when NR types talk about conservatism in the abstract, they define it so broadly that nearly anything fits. That's especially true of Goldberg when he starts talking about Burke, as in this passage from a dissection of (believe it or not) "Animal House":

But for the purposes of this discussion -- and for modern conservatism generally -- the most important aspect of Burkean thought is his view of tradition and change. Burke recognized the need for reform (the lack of it, he believed, forced the American colonists to revolt) and he did not fear change... But he thought haste in the realm of reform led to even greater injustice than deliberate inaction... Burke simply didn't trust the problem-solvers. No single individual is smart enough to impose changes on society willy-nilly.

Well, if that's conservatism, sign me up! This is cool-kid conservatism's version of "big-tent" Republicanism. One might call it Jeff Foxworthy Conservatism: if you're in favor of prudence and against heedless reform, y'all might a conservative!

It's a way of making the movement attractive to people who balk at its strictures on, to take one glaring example, gay marriage, which is why we find gaycon Andrew Sullivan throwing props to Neil Boortz -- the guy wants a ban on gay adoptions, but he hasn't specifically called for homosexual heads on pikes, so they're Burkean brothers, y'see.

This kind of woolly thinking has led to the ridiculous, forced phenomena of "South Park Republicanism" and "Crunchy Conservatism." And it's probably why they see validation of their world-view in movies that they like.

It's all good fun, as my mother used to say, until someone loses a legislative agenda. And it may be why many conservatives, historically tight with a buck, are relatively phlegmatic about the big-spending Bush adminisitration. Never mind the hypocracy and the ruination of our economy -- we said fuck you to France, how cool is that? Pass the popcorn.

comments please