NEXT UP: WHY ENGLISH BULLDOGS ARE MORE LOYAL THAN FRENCH BULLDOGS. I'm just about sure now that I shouldn't be reading NRO's The Corner, let alone fishing clots of unreason out of it for public delectation. And I am sworn to rid myself of this enervating and anti-social habit (a few more prayers to my Dark Lord Satan should do it!). But not just yet.

Lately the Corner kids have been playing with a piece of intellectual debris extrapolated, to use a polite word, from Jonah Goldberg's exchange with Kevin Drum as to liberal vs. conservative traditionalism. Goldberg wondered why liberals "ignore their own intellectual tradition" while conservatives cry out the names of Burke, Hayek etc. every few minutes, like Tourette's sufferers. Drum suggested that liberalism's forward-looking nature disinclined its followers to idol worship ("The whole point of liberalism is change, so who cares what [Chares] Beard would have thought?"). A flip answer, I thought, and a little shakey (try telling the ACLU that they're insufficiently respectful of the work of the Founders!), but no more so than the question deserved.

This inspired a strange sub-theme that lasted for days: in his gloss, outrider Julian Sanchez posited a "divide between theoretical and engineering dispositions," and suddenly everyone was debating whether engineering was liberal or conservative:

Can you imagine if the Boeing engineers designed the next generation of jetliners the way liberals would design our next health-care system? (A Goldberg reader)

Back when socialism was considered "scientific" lots of engineers and other scientists were not merely liberals, but Marxists. (Goldberg)

Jimmy Carter is an engineer. 'Nuff said. (Steve Hayward)

I am pretty sure that Thorstein Veblen was a leader in the Technocracy movement. (Goldberg)

Catherine and I must have met a couple of hundred [engineers] during our research for the Apollo book... I met precisely one who was a liberal. Maybe others were too, but among everyone who even mentioned politics, being conservative was taken for granted. I think there is a distinction between the engineer mindset, which is definitely, "There's a way to fix that," and the impulse to extend that mindset to human problems, which seems to be a proclivity of intellectuals. (Charles "Negroes are Stupid" Murray)

I am pro-engineer in theory... engineers are, as I see it, a Good Thing. (John Derbyshire)

The Conservative Books thing was lame, but this is fucking quadraplegic.

(You might argue that it's all just a joke. Okay. So how then is it different from the rest of the site?)

TIME FOR ANOTHER VACATION. "I think of welfare reform and gay marriage as very similar ideas: reversing some of the leftism of the past, encouraging family and responsibility, unifying rather than balkanizing society." -- Andrew "One More Garbled Apothegm, Then Off to P-town Again!" Sullivan (emphasis added).

As Jack Warden said to John Cusack in Bullets Over Broadway, I don't think his spinal cord touches his brain.

L'ART VIVANT. OpinionJournal does not restrict its screwy ideas to politics. In today's edition Tyler Green says the Whitney Museum should send its Biennial artists and their works on a tour of towns like Boise, Jackson, and Salt Lake City, because these benighted hamlets "need the Biennial to have the opportunity to see strong contemporary art." Green even suggests that the artists themselves could "spend several weeks in a city, available to a cross-section of the community."

I dearly love the idea of Julie Mehretu meeting her public in Oatmeal, Nebraska:

"Last year we had this air show and this F-16 blew up in midair and it kinda looked like your picture. Can I get that in a henna tattoo?"

Even better perhaps would be Emily Jacir, replicating her "Where We Come From" project, in which "she asked exiled Palestinians, 'If I could do anything for you, anywhere in Palestine, what would it be?' Taking advantage of her American passport, she carried out their requests, which ranged from playing soccer with a boy in Haifa to visiting a mother's grave." It would take about seven minutes, I'll wager, for the Heartland boys to start sending her to McDonald's to get them lunch, or to the corner bar to ask for I. P. Freeley and Howard Djelaikakik.

It could all end happily enough, though. Assume Vivid Astro Focus may discover his talents are best suited to tricking out skateboards in Sandusky, Ohio. A win-win situation for art and America!

LET'S NOT GET CARRIED AWAY HERE.

RE: IRAQI FREE PRESS [KJL]
It should be noted that 250 newspapers have popped up in the last year in Iraq--and only one has been put in temporary shutdown mode.

Posted at 01:13 PM

Yeah, that was some consolation to John Peter Zenger, too.

THE NEXT TIME SOMEONE TELLS YOU HOW HUMORLESS LIBERALS ARE, please refer them to Lileks on Life of Brian, a movie which brings normal people joy but leaves the Prairie Pundit as unsettled as a 19th-century parson at Minsky's. Among his complaints: The movie includes an obvious parody of Meir Kahane and the JDL -- and (all together now, kulturkampfers) that's anti-Semitism! Even worse, the movie attacks every world-view except that dark stain on civilization, humanism! And that "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" number -- it's so negative. Why couldn't the ending have been more -- Lutheran?

Verily, as our Lord himself said, do not criticize the mote in your neighbor's eye without regard for the stick up your own ass.

FOUR MORE YEARS! (ON YOUR PRISON SENTENCE). Are conservatives growing soft on crime? In addition to the aforementioned conservative complaints about the way cops are persecuting Rush Limbaugh, we now have NRO's Andrew Stuttaford defending some poor corporate accountant who got an extraordinarily harsh sentence for what are apparently crimes against money (the prosecution recommended stiff sentencing because the guy's fraud "eventually resulted in more than $500 million in Dynegy stock losses").

Granted, the perps in question are not the worthy targets of justice seen on Law & Order and NYPD Blue -- scruffy, ill-behaved, and frequently ethnic. But anything that causes right-wing factota to veer slightly from Nixon's Prime Directive (Law and Order is a winning issue never to be abandoned by the GOP) is remarkable.

This clemency fad at first appears to have reached its peak as the famously doctrinaire and unthoughtful Kathryn Lopez points to a story about new and outrageously lax warrantless search standards in New Orleans. If a cyborg like Lopez begins to worry about overreaching prosecutions, might a watershed have been reached?

Alas, K-Lo's self-correcting mechanism pulls her back from the precipice of blasphemy: "Has John Ashcroft been blamed yet?" she jokes.

We're sure Ashcroft had not direct role in the New Orleans case, as he is presently too busy for that -- to some extent with the 9/11 Commission, but mostly with the centerpiece of his own brand of judicial activism, mandatory sentencing. Ashcroft, it is well known, closely monitors sentencing by judges across America, searching for and correcting any deviation in the draconianism his office has perscribed. When his hounds notice such shortfalls, correction is swift, as Buffalo Senior District Judge John Elfvin discovered when the Feds ordered him to more stringently resentence a tax evader and a drug dealer he had let off, in their view, too lightly. Elfvin told the Buffalo News, "I thought [Federal sentencing] guidelines were guidelines, not mandates. Now I'm told they're mandates, and I have to proceed on that basis."

While I doubt the Attorney General directly called the Louisiana Fifth Circuit judges with suggestions, I can see how his administration's emphasis on harsher sentences and more of 'em would embolden judges (the right kinda judges, if ya know what I mean) in such a course, as it emboldens prosecutors to reach ever further, ever deeper in the quest for more prison years with which to notch their belts. In that kind of "justice" system, why wouldn't they conduct more searches, however specious, and seek decades-long sentences out of accounting-fraud cases? So what if some of the brethren momentarily object that what they do is cruel and unnecessary? They aren't the ones holding the gun and the gavel.

NOT THAT AGAIN. Oh, brother, Michael "Cracker" Graham is doing that "Liberals act all uptight while we Republicans loosen our ties and crank the Hootie tunes" number.

As one of the dubbed Japanese in "What's Up Tiger Lily?" muttered with exasperation when one of his colleagues hollered Banzai!: Could somebody tell him? You can start here.

A FAVOR TO A FRIEND. At OpinionJournal today, a chilling tale of the Orwellian persecution of a citizen accused of taking drugs: His lawyer tells how the brownshirts "raided drugstores near [his] home; seized his medical records without going through the required process... leaked false information... that he was about to plead guilty to a felony; threatened to make his medical records public unless he pled guilty to a felony he didn't commit... he, and I, worry about the precedent that's being set in this case. So should you."

I guess most of you have already figured out that the citizen suffering this Kafka nightmare is Rush Limbaugh. I mean, try to imagine any other celebrity drug user -- or, for that matter, drug decriminalization advocate -- getting this kind of sympathetic treatment at the nation's #1 right-wing rantskeller.

Just last June, OJ's Benjamin Ivory seemed close to retching as he noted that the French Ministry of Culture has honored "rocker Lou Reed, who wrote a hymn to 'Heroin.'" OJ was also hard on Reason editor Nick Gillespie for his alleged crimes against the drug war, calling his magazine "the High Times of the policy world," and accusing its staff of smoking marijuana at editorial meetings.

But let a friend of La Causa get caught in the noose, and on goes the libertarian mask. Brothers and sisters! When they came for Rush, I did nothing because I was not a millionaire blowhard...

Maybe next week, Rolling Stone will give a page or two to Courtney Love's lawyer... nah, they have some standards.

JONAH GOLDBERG'S INTELLECTUAL METHOD ON DISPLAY:

1. "This reader (a professor) wants to know how it would be a slap in the face to Americans to get rid of the under God portion since it was only added half a century ago. Well, because it obviously would be."

2. "Like saying violence never solves anything, people understand what I mean even when in reality what I'm saying isn't true."

His Town Hall bio says he's "Generation X’s answer to P.J. O’Rourke," but I'm thinking more Professor Irwin Corey without the self-awareness (and, it goes without saying, the intentional laughs).
.

MRS. JESUS & THE GENERAL. Were we following the "Shorter" format (invented by D Squared and prefected by Busy Busy Busy, I keep forgetting to mention), today's Crazy Jesus Lady sidewalk homily would reduce to, "The 9/11 Committee witnesses were poilte and collegial, proving once again that everything is Clinton's fault." Accusing Clinton of being a Very Bad Man has become Noonan's "Carthago delenda est," though while Cato hoped for and got the Third Punic War out of his non sequitur, I assume that with her charges of "moral retardation" etc., Noonan is only bucking for a clear view from God's cloud of Clinton being hurled into everlasting darkness at the Last Judgment. In the words of Madonna, it's like a little prayer.

That's why she shows no gratitude to the Commission for offering her yet another excuse for Clintonophobic coprolalia, declaring it should not have been convened. (What our government should be doing for us, she suggests, is "making sure every citizen has a CBN suit, a regulation gas mask and data on how to recognize and respond to a chemical, biological or nuclear incident." Is that to prepare for attack, Crazy Jesus Lady, or to qualify for employment in one of the Bush economy's few job growth markets?)

And she's not alone: General Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters also had enough of this consent-of-the-governed bushwa: "Democracy is, by far, the greatest system of government yet created by human genius," concedes the General (perhaps silently adding, "the greatest, that is, until the coming rule of the RALPH PETERS ZOMBIE MOLE ARMY!") "The problem," the General says, "is the elections." While in peacetime these little electoral rituals do "little lasting harm," wartime requires we be more honest about our contempt for the ballot box. "While many domestic issues deserve debate," says Peters, "the War on Terror demands unity of purpose from both parties. It is essential that our enemies understand that we're united in fighting terrorism." So zip it, Mr. Kerry, till the war is over (by Peters' own reckoning, "decades" from now, if ever).

Those of us who remember President Nixon, the bills you have to pay, or even yesterday, might point out that even during the Civil War and World War II, elections were held in which candidates addressed, sometimes vigorously, the conduct of those wars. Insubordination! roars the General, and what's all this talk about history? "The hearings in Washington are history lessons," he says, "...But America is about the future -- about turning our backs on the past..."

Ignorance of the past would be helpful in advancing the General's agenda, no doubt. And in a conflict designed to last many, many years, time is certainly on his side. Repeat it with me now: America has always been at war with Terra... It will come more naturally soon enough.

SHORTER JOHN DERBYSHIRE. The white, straight man is the nigger of the world.

SHORTER TACITUS. I once dwelt among the Arabs of Cobble Hill, and saw they were the only people in New York who didn't drape themselves in the Stars and Stripes after 9/11 (why, even in Williamsburg everyone dressed like Uncle Sam for three months). Now that an Arab has been photographed mourning Yassin in some unidentified Brooklyn neighborhood, I see my blanket contempt for the lot of them was and is justified.

(Okay, it wasn't much shorter, but it always hurts a little more when you thought they knew better...)

I HAVE HERE IN MY HAND A LIST OF 57 ANONYMOUS LETTER-WRITERS! I see the sort of letters in which The Corner specializes -- dark stories about traitorous liberals, published without attribution-- have started turning up at Instapundit.

Here's the money shot:

I passed this news on to the editor, who was crestfallen: "Oh, no. I don't want anything good to happen for Bush before the election," was the reaction...

You believe that, don't you? Why. it's as verisimilitudinous as, oh, Dick Cheney crying aloud, "We've got to get into Iraq before the price of oil drops another penny!"

Give the Professor credit, though; he adds some new wrinkles. For one, his alleged correspondent prefaces his story by telling how he thinks IP is generally "dead wrong" about treason in the press corps. That's a good one! It adds a prodigal-son angle to the story, of the sort that has tickled the Right since the days of Whittaker Chambers. And it also means the author is not a neocon hothead, but one of those moderate fellers -- like Michael Totten, who bravely asserts his indepedence by saying something nice about gay rights every week or so -- and thereby especially believable when boosting the IP Agenda.

But the best, and I really tip my hat to him on this, is the feint at the end: IP says he only "assumed" the author wanted anonymity (meaning we were theoretically close to actually knowing his name; and, as any street scam artist knows, the idea of proximity -- "My bank is just ten minutes away!" -- enhances believability). But now he is glad he left the name off, because his correspondent has sent another missive, hinting that his Ninja masters would "blacklist" him if they find out he's been revealing their secret recipes. "Blacklisted by Big Media?" cries the Prof, throwing up his hands. "For wanting us to win the war? An appalling thought."

I get letters like that all the time -- "I was a major Bush booster, and even contributed to his campaign, before he crawled through my window and raped me; don't tell anyone, I can't afford to lose my job with the Texas Rangers" -- but they're all so sensational I don't think my cynical readers will believe them.

A GOOD MAN IN A BAD TRADE. Check Roger Ailes and his commenters' nominees for The Corner's "Best Conservative Fiction" list. Among the glittering jewels: “The Lady of the Lake,” by Susan Smith; “Intruder in the Dust,” by Paul Bremer; "The Confidence Man," by Ahmed Chalabi; and “The Executioner’s Song,” by George W. Bush. They're so funny I won't bother to compete.

So I will only reflect on the sad case of Richard (Rick) Brookhiser, self-appointed proctor of this gang of unruly undergrads who wage culture war by spitball without the faintest idea of what culture is. RB started his career as a teenager, writing for National Review about the D.C. Vietnam Moratorium. Expressing himself mostly these days in the New York Observer, he is more often wrong than right, but he has had time, opportunity, and inclination to reflect upon greater matters than partisan uplift, and it is truly painful to see his better nature batted aside by noncognoscenti who reduce what should be a serious sector of our national debate to propagandistic parlor games.

Some people think every liberal has to answer for ANSWER, but I thank God every day I don't have to take responsibility for this lot.

GO PEANUT, IT'S YOUR BIRTHDAY. Sadly, No! is always worth a look, but today's pre-9/11 timeline, comparing mounting alarm over terrorist movements by some parties while the Bush brigades were playing patty-cakes, is so good it made me rethink my cynicism about the Clarke charges.

Also making me rethink that is Clarke himself on Charlie Rose's show, and the godawful screaming from the neocon shills in the press. Jesus Christ -- Nixon's people showed more sangfroid when Woodward and Bernstein were coming up their ass. Something must be up.

THE BOY IN THE BUBBLE. Professor Reynolds downplays the egregious Jack Kelley scandal by quoting Oxblog: "Does anyone consider USA Today to be the United States' paper of record and its standard-bearer of journalistic integrity? ...for all you bloggers out there: How many times have you linked to a USA Today story in the past six months?"

The first point implied in this misbegotten argument -- that it's important to beat up the New York Times, at which a young black guy screwed up small stories, but unimportant to chastise USA Today, at which a veteran white Pulitzer-Prize nominee screwed up HUGE stories, because us conservatives (snif) love and respect the Times so durned much -- is so transparently fake, only Andrew Sullivan could believe it. But I believe the self-regard evident in the second part is wholly authentic.

USA Today has the largest circulation of any newspaper in America. Let me repeat that: the largest circulation of any newspaper in America. To think it's unimportant because bloggers don't link to it is insane. It's like saying the most important choreographer of the 1990s was the guy that came up with the Hampsterdance.

Elsewhere at the Professor's, we learn that he bought some grilling equipment with his tax cut money, and his wife is voting for Bush. "I wonder if this effect is widespread?" he asks. I hate to fuck with his heat-sealed reality, but here's a link that suggests it may not be. The Professor may want to run it through Technorati to see if it's worth reading. Alternately, he could try getting out of the house more.

POMOCONS? David Frum joins his colleagues on Clarke Patrol, telling us that the "former Clinton counter-terrorism official" is too old-fashioned in his thinking because he suggested getting the people who actually did the attacks instead of bombing Iraq.

The huge dividing line in the debate over terror remains just this: Is the United States engaged in a man-hunt -- for bin Laden, for Zawahiri, for the surviving alumni of the al Qaeda training camps? -- or is it engaged in a war with the ideas that animated those people and with the new generations of killers who will take up the terrorist mission even if the US were to succeed in extirpating every single terrorist now known to be alive and active? Clarke has aligned himself with one side of that debate -- and it's the wrong side.

It's been a while since this came up, but I still think it's amazing that these guys keep asking us to get behind a war that pits us against no specific tangible enemy, but against concepts: evil, terror, etc.

It's practically postmodern. The objective correlatives to the concepts with which we are at war are totally fluid, and we can only follow, without completely trusting, the authorial "I" (or, in this case, "W"). We dismiss the architect of 9/11 as an irrelevance, yet spend billions and blood to capture a dictator who had nothing really to do with it. And Saudi Arabia, a malefactor Frum specifically names in his article, we have not threatened with so much as a single missle!

No wonder so many of us stodgily cling to the old, discarded certainties.

Frum's idea of a "war with ideas" is more sinister still. A cursory look at the history of mankind shows that wars against ideas, as opposed to wars against physical adversaries, tend to go badly for their instigators. Ferdinand and Isabella successfully fought the Moors out of Spain, for example, but the Inquisition did a lousy job of the David Frum part of the operation, that is -- enforcing the worldview that the grand thinkers of the time felt was the really important part of the struggle.

Of course, being Americans, we tend to think the Inquisition ultimately failed because it was wrong and the proto-pluralists the Inquisitors tortured and burned at stakes were right. But think about it: the Reyes Catolicos subscribed to a perfectly lovely worldview called Christianity. We can today criticize the Inquisition without being presumed anti-Catholic, but in their time, this was not really an option. So the faultless ideas of Jesus Christ became associated with a reign of terror.

In other words, it is possible to have the right idea and still do things so wrong that good men will stand against you.

BLOGGER BURNOUT. Pray forgive the recent paucity of posting here. Alicublog recently celebrated its first anniversary in this format (after a year as an alicubi webmag featurette), and contemplation of this milestone induced in me an overwhelming sense of fatigue. Pissing into the wind as a long-term enterprise will do this to even the most muleheaded practictioner.

I find myself unable to get exercised over the scandals of the day: the Clarke charges, for example, strike me as a non-starter: after decades of botched Middle Eastern and terrorist policy, what's so outrageous or unexpected about Bush's malfeasance? In the context of our current poisoned discourse, it just seems like a means of protecting the Democrats against the inevitable election-year claims of weakness and irresolution. 9/11 has turned into a bloody shirt grabbed at each end by opposing parties, each furiously wrestling for control of the right to place blame, while small countries react to violence by engaging in less spectacular but possibly constructive measures to reduce chances of a recurrence. Someone's got their eye on the wrong ball.

Well, this too will pass. I could always go to The Corner and cherry-pick idiocies for a boost. Apparently they're still pushing the affirmative action bake sale strategy, thus convincing white teenage students that black people get all the breaks. Well, at least they get cookies out of it; the Two Minute Hate came, as I recall, without refreshments.

And there's always Lileks. Dear, reliable Jimbo continues to hunt traitors, this time at anti-Iraq-war demos. He snarls about non-support in the Village -- meaning, I suppose, that he'll boycott Cafe Reggio next time he's in town to flog a book. He says the idea that "the personal is the political" makes his blood run cold, a puzzling sentiment from someone whose daily recreation is tying world events to shopping trips with Gnat to Target.

And Instapundit is back from vacation. Plenty of laughs coming there, for sure.

But sometimes the asylum inmates just aren't that much fun to watch.

THE PARTY'S OVER. NRO Frat-Boy Emeritus Jonah Goldberg asks, why does Baba Booey hate America so much?

From the people who firmly believe in South Park Republicanism (You know who you are), in the wake of Howard Stern's new campaign to unseat George W. Bush. I used to be a fan of Stern's, but it seems that when he's forced to choose between winning the war on terror and having a more hospitable climate for dirty jokes, he'll choose the latter.

Harsh, dude! I thought conservatives were supposed to be the fun kids. Only a few years ago they were warming to drug law reform and playing at a Republican Party Reptilianism that was woefully (and, one imagines, willfully) self-contradictory but at least, you know, sounded kind of fun.

But now look: these days the Right Guard is down on gay people, rock and hip-hop music, even swearing ("Their language would have shocked my grandmother"). And they seem by common consent to have begun a mass retreat from any advocacy of freeing the weed; when a NRO masthead columnist claims that Rush Limbaugh's addiction to drugs means "his attacks on drug use and drug legalization resound more powerfully than ever," what sort of message does that send to our young hacks?

About the only outre activities they seem to endorse are showing snuff films to kids -- eh, not my thing -- and strong drink -- which enthusiasm I share and commend to them, knowing that, if this is the face of conservatism for the near future, they will need many barrels of it to get through.

DON'T BELIEVE THE SNIPE. From the Basque paper Berria on the incoming Spanish prime minister:

As Zapatero said, his first objective will be "to call on all the parties to fight against all kinds of terrorism." From the start of the campaign he stressed that there was "a need to restore unity and consensus in the antiterrorist sphere," and that it was also necessary to prevent that sphere from turning into a source of tension...

Zapatero yesterday confirmed his "commitment" to pull Spanish troops out of Iraq before July 1, but stressed that this plan had existed before the Madrid attacks. "The intervention and occupation of Iraq has been a huge disaster. Spanish troops will return [from Iraq]."

"Tony Blair and George Bush will need to engage in some reflection and self-criticism; you can't bomb a country just in case; you can't wage war with lies."

Zapatero may be prevaricating, greatly or slightly, but I thought you might want to hear some of his actual words, rather than subsisting on the simple characterizations of cowardice and pro-terrorism applied to him and the whole Spanish nation by the more simple-minded among us.

Definitely not one of the simple-minded is Ezra of Pandagon, who floats the idea that "a terrorist attack delays an election by two months automatically." Though I admire his seriousness, I must disagree.

Remember the first post-9/11 New York mayoral election? That almost didn't happen as scheduled. After the attacks, the thugs Murdoch and Giuliani tried to get the election postponed in the interests of "order," leaving Giuliani as some sort of extra-democratic ruler for a period of time ("three months, or six, or 12," proposed the Post) till who knows what authority considered the coast clear for democracy.

The Democratic primary had been delayed for purely functional reasons (it had been scheduled for September 11), so Giuliani summoned the chief combatants, Mark Green and Fernando Ferrer, and told them the deal. Green, the schmuck, was willing to go for it; but Ferrer, bless him, told Rudy to stuff it. He was the least powerful man in the room, but he said that the will of the people should prevail despite the near occasion of terror.

And you know what? He was right. He was so right that he got his way, despite the awesome power arrayed against him.

We got a shitty mayor out of that election, true, but what a blow our souls would have suffered had we decided (or allowed others to decide for us) that any times are too perilous for democracy.