PLAN B. Now that some Republicans are trying to draft Chicago Bears legend Mike Ditka as their latest "oh, why the hell not" celebrity nominee, I think it's time Democrats one-upped them by drafting well-known figures from history and literature. Using their New Age connections, and the old Catholic superstition that God speaks through priests, we can draft an all-star lineup of Jesus Christ, Abraham Lincoln, Spider-Man, Tom Joad et alia in key "swing" states across the country.

The Jesus candidacy would require special boldness, but it is long past time that the Democrats addressed their problems with religious voters the same way that Republicans do -- by making outrageous and insupportable assertions. All we need is one liberal cleric willing to say that Jesus has spoken to him and announced his candidacy for the Pennsylvania Senate race.

Democratic lawyers will argue that Christ meets the eligibility requirement because God is "hic et ubique." Similarly, once Joad is nominated, his representatives in the Modern Language Association will argue his qualification for whatever race they want him in on the grounds that he is "there in the way guys yell when they're mad... there in the way kids laugh when they're hungry and they know supper's ready," etc., though of course ideally they'd prefer to run him in Oklahoma.

As for the inevitable complaints that the candidates themselves are insubstantial, their supporters can always rejoin, "What else is new?"

BITS 'N' PIECES. The Ole Perfesser, tirelessly on Michael Moore firewatch, approving quotes a reader who describes flag-burners as Moore's "target audience." Fahrenheit 911 has so far grossed over $60 million dollars -- representing at minimum six million paid admissions. Must not then the streets of our Republic be ablaze with flaming stars and stripes? And yet no coverage by the media! Another conspiracy for the Perfesser to smack down!

Bigot Valkyrie Maggie Gallagher finds a child raised by a same-sex couple who opposes same-sex marriage. Fine. My mother and father got married because of societal pressures, and it was a terrible mistake, leading to untold misery for them and their two children. There. Consider Gallagher countered. If she comes up with another one, I'll knock on a few doors in my apartment building and see and raise her.

OpinionJournal complains that the City of Boston will require its cabbies to accept payment vouchers in lieu of cash from attendees of the Democratic National Convention. My heart bleeds. According to the commie rag New York Post, "Thousands of commuters who take NJ Transit trains directly to Manhattan will be forced to go to Hoboken and transfer to PATH trains during the GOP convention, officials said yesterday. The plan would be to divert NJ Transit's 11,000 daily commuters who usually take the Midtown Direct service into Penn Station and have them transfer at Hoboken." This is not to mention the insane nuisance the Convention will create for everyone trying to walk or do business in the area, including stores that will experience "street closures and security so tight it will choke off the foot traffic that most businesses rely on."

With all this bullshit on tap, is it any wonder I took solace in an opening-night showing of Anchorman? It was stupid as shit -- no, stupider -- and very funny.

SUNLIGHT IS THE BEST DISINFECTANT. Spurred by lawsuits by the ACLU, CNN, and others, the State of Florida has removed one of the novelty items from its electoral trick-bag:

Florida elections officials said Saturday that they would not use a disputed list that was intended to keep felons from voting, acknowledging a flaw that could have allowed Hispanic felons to cast ballots in November.

The problem could have been significant in Florida, which President Bush won by just 537 votes in 2000. The state has a sizable Cuban population, and Hispanics in Florida have tended to vote Republican more than Hispanics nationally. The [felons] list had about 28,000 Democrats and around 9,500 Republicans, with most of the rest unaffiliated.

The next time someone asks you why Democrats keep belly-aching about the 2000 election, feel free to mention this.

UNIFIED THEORY OF LILEKS. They call it the "Eureka Moment" -- the epiphanic insight that takes the intellectual odds 'n' sods one has been glumly trying to piece together and instantly pulls them into a nice, tight bow.

I had mine during today's Bleat, In Which Father Lileks Again Contemplates Children at Play

Then they watched "Barbie Swan Lake," a computer-animated movie that’s all the rage in the tot set. Kelsey Grammer is the bad guy, and his motivation is simple and utterly Blofeldian -- he wants to take over the world. Why? Like that's ever worked. And if you could take over the world, what the hell would you do with it? I know, I know: if you’ve secured control of one hemisphere through necromancy, you’re always going to wonder whether the other hemisphere will challenge your rule, so might as well go for the gold. But it would be easier to just rule a small part and guard your power so you could repel any attempts to puncture your domain.

See also, North Korea.

Even now, to contemplate this fragment stirs my laughter -- but it is Olympian laughter, the laughter of the Gods! Much like the laughter, at the end of Peckinpaugh's Convoy, of Dirty Lyle -- who laughed to see the Rubber Duck resurface at his own funeral, because he knew then that there is no death!

Today's Bleat by itself didn't bring me to clarity -- many Lileks playdates, many trips to Target, many italicized toddler drolleries, led to this Moment. But it was the straw that both stirred the drink and broke the camel's back.

Reading the passage for the first time, I was put in mind of friends who are parents and devote large blocks of their time to their children. As they are intelligent, sensitive people (yeah, I do know a few), they fully enter their children's worlds and follow the simple logic, uninformed by brutal adult experience, of their games. It can be charming to observe -- but only because you know they will come back from such adventures whole and sane.

Not everyone can, apparently. Think how many hours Lileks has spent engaged in this sort of conversation with Gnat:

If you have five Hello Kittys, you’re sad because you don’t have six. And that’s not right.

I have nine Kittys.

Okay, you have nine Kittys, and you’re sad because you don’t have ten. But some kids don’t have any.

Can I have ten Kittys for my birthday?

And so it goes...

Some adults can come out of these mind-warping sessions and, after a faceful of cold water or a snootful of rye, fully rejoin the grown-up world. But Lileks' boundless devotion has drawn him in too deep for that.

Now, whenever he tells his readers that Kim Il Jung has been explained by Barbie, I will be inclined to sympathies rather than rage. I always half-knew that it was some psychological malady of the less offensive type -- not the pure evil that works through such earthly forms as Jonah Goldberg -- that animated his ravings. Now I am sure of it.

As soon as I figure out what's wrong with the rest of these assholes, I can close down this weblog.

THE COMIC BOOK GUY'S DAY JOB: "In this and other ways, Spider-Man stands athwart a very influential liberal conception of the self: as being utterly autonomous, floating free from any antecedent obligations."

Are you the author of Hi and Lois? Because you are making me laugh.

CBG's secret identity, Thomas Hibbs, also thinks Spider Man 2 is "is about ordinary working-class life in contemporary America." That will be a shock to John Sayles.

FASTER, SLAVES! KEEP THOSE NUMBERS MOVING! Arnold Kling trumpets "The Good News About Productivity" and wonders aloud why we don't hear more about it before answering himself: because the media distorts the truth to elect Democrats ("the current Administration is unpopular with the media").

Maybe there's another reason. Some of us think of productivity as a completely positive, Jetsonian boon, whereby you just push a button and Rosie the Robot cleans your house, manages your database, monitors workflow etc., all to the greater glory of the national bottom line (a phenomenon also known as "The Economy as Corporate Identity Commercial").

But productivity is also something squeezed out of the hide of workers. From the International Labor Organization:

U.S. productivity grew in 2002, surpassing both Europe and Japan in annual output per worker for the first sustained period since World War II and further widening the productivity gap with the rest of the world.

But while productivity growth is up, job creation has not kept pace, the ILO finds in the third edition of Key Indicators of the Labor Market (KILM). The employment-to-population ratio in the U.S., which measures the proportion of people in the population who are working, declined 1.6 percent (from 64.3 to 62.7 percent) between 1999-2002. During the same period, the employment-to-population ratio increased slightly in the European Union (from 56.1 to 56.7 percent)...

Lawrence Jeff Johnson, chief of the employment trends team responsible for the comparative study released in September, told ILO Focus that "Americans are producing more with fewer workers in the labor market." At the same time, he explained, "labor market flexibility in the United States may be one of the factors allowing employers to adjust more quickly to changing economic conditions by shedding or adding jobs."

ILO also notes that "Americans worked more hours annually than many of their European counterparts, averaging 1,825 hours in 2002. In contrast, Germans worked 1,444 hours; the French 1,545 hours."

This may give you goose-pimples if you think of the U.S. economy as a machine, not as the product of workers who are now running up enormous personal debts to afford the homes, cars, and families that were, once upon a time, within easy reach for nearly anyone willing to work 40 hours a week.

Our Fed chief, by the way, is phlegmatic about this debt -- he recently "pointed out that U.S. households own more than $14 trillion in real estate assets — almost twice the amount they own in mutual funds and directly hold in stocks." Good news from someone's perspective, I guess -- creditors can credit the inflated values of these holdings (as debt, or as repossessed properties) on their balance sheets. In the long run, we are all dead, wot? (Or, as they play it Chicago-school, I got mine, don't worry about yours.)

HOW TO TELL YOU'RE WINNING. What bring tears to your eyes faster -- Lileks' Grandpa Simpson impersonation, or Tacitus' Farewell Address? My favorite piece of talking statuary is "feeling a profound disgust with humanity online." Assuming, perhaps unfairly, that he is not describing a new Sartrean Sims module, I take this to be another complaint about incivility online.

Yes, some of the conservative brethren have been talking about how rough the playground has become, particularly since liberals began to fight back. "Jane Galt" even says she's "ashamed" of liberals backing Fahrenheit 911 because the film has "no counterpart on the right" -- which is rather like the British complaining that those blasted American Revolutionaries keep breaking formation. (At the same time, she doesn't care that "Bush manipulated our fears of something bad happening to get us to support his policies" because "that's the definition of politics." No way you can lose with arguments like these!)

How well, though, do I remember those heady days when the greatest honor these patriots could bestow upon one another was the title "politically incorrect." No cows were sacred, no screed was too intemperate, and Fisking was the fashion!

Now we're all asked to be quiet and reasonable. Well, if you wrote the rules, I suppose it's only natural that you would imagine yourself able to rewrite them in the middle of the game. But if history teaches us anything, it's that no matter how sincere her protestations to the contrary, Lucy will always yank the ball away. Which is why it's time to stop trying to kick the ball and to start (or continue) kicking Lucy's ass.

KUDOS to Sasha, proprietress of a conservatarian group site, on this post:

The rest of the gang here can keep you up to speed on piddling matters like Iraqi sovereignty, the Canadian elections, Britain's almost-war with Iran, and Wimbledon. I shall be blogging important stuff, like the various recipes I've found on the web for ancho pork chops, ancho barbecue sauce, ancho beef stew, ancho potato chips, ancho cornbread, ancho pancakes, and even ancho brownies...

How I wish I had the self-discipline required to make such a pledge. We'd all be so much better off.

A LITTLE RAY OF SUNSHINE. I must admit I was a little worried when I read in the New York Post this morning that Gephardt was going to be Kerry's choice. Not that the the Post is in any way a reliable source of actual news, but they are pretty good at gossip, and this seemed like the kind of backstage-whisper type of revelation at which they could excel.

The one hopeful sign was that there was no Deborah Orin story on page two, telling us how the French-looking, waffling Kerry had once again destroyed any chance he might have had in hell of beating the heroic, popular Bush. The omission of this evergreen, rare with any Post Kerry story, was a strong sign that someone at the Post was hedging his bets.

It all turned out to be bullshit, of course. And though the mudpies will fly soon enough, I am battle-weary enough to take this as a good thing for the Democrats. Edwards is good-looking and well-spoken. And he has the right kind of sense of humor. In his Letterman appearance last spring, when he said he'd lay out his platform right then "if I wasn't rip-stinkin' drunk," he demonstrated a talent for absurdism -- the one kind of humor that most violently throws most politicians.

That will come if handy against the holy warriors of the right, as they inevitably become more unintentionally absurd themselves. Take as a case in point today's National Review Online on the New York Times: "Each day, more and more it seems, the Old Gray Lady transmogrifies into America's al-Jazeera." Kerry might wobble his wattles over such an egregious overstatement, but maybe Edwards is capable of giving it the kind of "who are you kidding with that shit" response to which voters might respond -- for which, in fact, they may actually be longing.

Not bad for a Monday (I mean Tuesday -- oh hey! Better and better!)

THE GLORIOUS FOURTH. You all know the primary text by Mr. Jefferson and his editors, so let me here offer a concordance by Mr. Young:

Got people here down on their knees and prayin'
Hawks and doves are circlin' in the rain
Got rock 'n' roll, got country music playin'
If you hate us, you just don't know what you're sayin'

Ready to go, willing to stay and pay (U.S.A.! U.S.A.!)
So my sweet love can dance another free day (U.S.A.! U.S.A.!)

The holiday will find me playing this album, and maybe walking out to take in our local celebration -- Hungry March Band's parade from Union and Metropolitan to the afterparty -- but mostly quietly enjoying the blessings of liberty, an inheritance bought by blood and courage that must never be surrendered.

BYE BYE BRANDO. Marlon Brando has died, and I am surprised to see the normally astute folks at About Last Night shrugging him off. They seem to think he was tricky and lazy. Well, what's an actor without tricks? I'm reading Anthony Holden's biography of Laurence Olivier. It underlines Lord Larry's gift for the telling stage gesture, which we might also characterize as trickery (or even by the baser term "schtick") were Olivier not so good at it.

But he was, and so in a different way was Brando. He could be straight-up hammy -- see Bedtime Story and The Missouri Breaks. But one of the most potent tools in his arsenal was a sort of outrageous understatement. I remember the first time I saw The Godfather. For the first several minutes I wondered, what the hell is he doing? Ernest Borgnine, one of the actors originally considered for the role, would have been picking pieces of the set out of his teeth by now -- why does Brando look so absent? Then the genius of it struck me: this guy doesn't need to come on heavy -- he's the Godfather. Let the other guys work.

Which may be why some people think was lazy. Brando fed the preception by publicly denigrating the craft of acting on several occasions. But if you listen carefully to his musings on the subject -- like the ones he gave in his wild Larry King interviews -- and compare it to his work, you might see that Brando didn't handle acting with contempt so much as delicacy. He treated his job lightly, not because it wasn't worth his doing, but because he didn't want the souffle to fall.

On the King show Brando insisted that everyone alive acted to a greater or lesser extent every day. Yet some people are more watchable than others. Technique only explains some of that; the rest is a mystery. I think Brando was respectful of that mystery, but tempermentally unsuited to the quasi-mystical gibble-gabble many actors use to describe it (see "Inside the Actor's Studio"). So he made light of it. He had a very lively sense of humor. On the set of The Score, he called the director, Franz Oz, who had worked on Muppet movies, "Miss Piggy," and once told him, "I bet you wish you could stick your hand up my ass and make me do what you want."

On the occasion of his demise I find myself thinking not of The Godfather or A Streetcar Named Desire or Last Tango in Paris, but of the TV miniseries "Roots: The Next Generation," in which Brando shares a brief scene with James Earl Jones -- no slouch himself.

Jones is Alex Haley, and Brando is George Lincoln Rockwell, the American Nazi Party boss. Haley has come to Nazi HQ to interview the leader for Playboy. Brando's Rockwell is exceedingly flip. Once he gets over his surprise at Haley's blackness -- which seems to affront him because he's been tricked, not because Haley is, by his logic, a subhuman -- he relaxes and explains, with no trace of self-consciousness, that some Negroes are quite intelligent. "Take you, for example," he says, looking dead at Jones. "I enjoy talking to you."

Logically consistent with this, Brando plays Rockwell's contempt for Haley as a black man -- albeit one of the acceptable variety -- by alternately ignoring him and giving outrageous answers as if their offensiveness could not possibly matter. At one point Haley reads from his notepad some damning Rockwell quotes, probing for a response. Brando reaches nonchalantly into a drawer of his desk, pulls out a can of air freshener, sprays it around, and starts giggling. Later, to demonstrate some point, he starts roaring an anti-Semitic parody tune -- "The Jews are through in '72, parlez-vous! /Around their necks we'll tie a bell/and send them all to kosher hell/Hinky dinky... dinky..." He trails off, smiling. "I forget the rest of it."

It all seems very tossed-off and natural. And it makes perfect sense that Haley is sweating profusely by the end.

"Scorches the earth, doesn't he?" Jack Nicholson once observed in a similar context.

COMRADES! IS NOT MAKING FUNNINESS POLITBURO CAN ENJOY! PLEASE TO MAKE LAUGHS AT KERRY! You knew this was coming: the conservatives have turned on The Onion.

In a cloud of hot gas appearing at Oxblog, David Adesnik says,

I love The Onion. I read it every week. But I laugh a lot less at The Onion's political humor than I do at its brilliant send-ups of America's social habits and popular culture.

The reason I laugh a lot less is that...

...because they make fun of Republicans living and dead, and that is by definition not funny! Oh, shoot, that's the short version -- here's a few cubic inches of what's really coming out of Adesnik's pressurized tank:

...is that The Onion's political humor employs the same caricatures and stereotypes over and over again. Moreover, these satirical devices collectively form a coherent ideology that is both extremely elitist and extremely liberal.

To be frank, I have a lot more trouble with The Onion's elitism than I do with its liberalism. Liberalism is a good thing. Liberal ideals, both classical and modern, have contributed immeasurably to American political discourse. Yet The Onion's brand of elitism, when cloaked in humor, has the potential to breed a disturbing sort of cynicism...

You catching this, kids? Humor is bad for you when it breeds a "disturbing sort" of cynicism -- meaning, perhaps, that a sort of cynicism that would make you despair of ever dislodging greedhead, hegemonic Republicans from office -- or, for that matter, being anything other than a drone for the super-rich all your miserable life, diverted from suicide only by occasional tax cuts and lotto fantasies -- would be less disturbing, in fact something to be encouraged.

Thereafter follows "evidence for the points I am trying to make," which consists of Adesnik analyzing Onion columns' humorous/political content, which is what Dante called "the tenth circle of Hell." Later, perhaps, Adesnik will condemn Citizen Kane as an unflattering portrayal of American businessmen.

One expects this from the fever swamps, but here's tie-loosening right-wing party boy Professor Glenn Reynolds trying to get his crew to do the wave over Adesnik's foul tip. "I just wish," mourns Reynolds over The Onion, "they were funnier."

My momma done told me: never take humor advice from a guy who goes "Heh" and writes it out.

Soon word will spread throughout the land. Maybe even Sullivan will stop linking to The Onion, on grounds of Disturbing Cynicism ("Hello? Don't they know there's a war on? Disgraceful. And my lifesize Orwell skeleton agrees"). Tacitus will tell us in choked voice how a comrade-in-arms innocently betrayed their position on Heartbreak Ridge because he laughed too loudly at Jean Teasdale, and many good men were lost that day, my friends (or, rather, you baby-killers), because of their Disturbing Cynicism.

Truth Squads will emerge. "There never was a Reagan Pyramid," theonionlies.com will declare. "Sure, Donald Rumsfeld proposed one, and Bush said they could build it -- but then he explicitly declined to do so. This whole spurious idea has been traced to a 20-something 'artist' from New York -- a blue state -- who walks around with his shirt untucked and reads Langston Hughes."

Let's see: by their reckoning, we have the movies, theatre, literature, popular music, the visual and plastic arts, and now humor. And they have blogs and Bible camp.

Looks like we did good on that trade.

JUST A HEADS-UP. L. Brent Bozell, national finger-wagging champion ten years running, says the message of Fahrenheit 911 is "The Bushes and the bin Ladens plotted September 11 together." Perhaps this thesis is presented in some director's-cut edition I haven't seen yet, but it is certainly not in the film I, and millions of my fellow Americans, saw last week.

This just shows to go you, folks, that just because the anti-Moore types talk about their concern for truth doesn't mean that they won't lie, in some cases (I think this is one) without knowing it, in pursuit of their goals.

Bozell also declares that "To be taken seriously, every liberal today should criticize 'Fahrenheit 9-11' as an affront to journalism and civil discourse." He could have reduced this perscription to three words: auto da fe.

YOUR LATEST SLICE OF NUTCAKE. Kerry likes the poet Langston Hughes -- his "Let America Be America" slogan comes from a Hughes poem, and he contributed prefatory comments to a Hughes collection. Since Hughes was a Communist for a while, this shows, by somebody's idea of close reading, that the Democratic candidate presumptive's campaign theme is "Anger, Bitterness, Cynicism, and Communism." Mike Poterma at The Corner decrees that "Just a couple more steps in this direction, and they will find themselves on the wrong side of a Goldwater/McGovern-level blowout." Patriots everywhere concur.

But before they go after Kerry, they'd better get on the hotline to one of their own. The Crazy Jesus Lady recently wrote an encomium to Lorraine Hansbury's "A Raisin in the Sun." "I love this play," Peggy Noonan gushed. "I've seen it several times..." Hansbury, of course, named her play after a line from a poem by Langston Hughes, so Hansbury, by the prevailing logic, is just as bad as John Kerry.

You all better be careful. A lot of your favorite writers might be just as bad. That goes for Euripides and Kit Marlowe, too.

WHY DOES THE CRAZY JESUS LADY HATE AMERICA?

Here is my fear: that the American people, liking and respecting President Bush, and knowing he's a straight shooter with guts, will still feel a great temptation to turn to the boring and disingenuous John Kerry.

(insert child's long, querulous "whyyyyyyy?")

He'll never do anything exciting. He doesn't have the guts to be exciting. And as he doesn't stand for anything, he won't have to take hard stands. He'll do things like go to France and talk French and they'll love it. He'll say he's the man who accompanied Teresa Heinz to Paris, only this time he'll say it in French and perfectly accented and they'll all go "ooh la la!"... "A return to normalcy," with Mr. Kerry as the normal guy.

Additional content: Peggy likes pretty flowers. She didn't like them when she was reading Kafka and Sartre, but that's all over now. Peggy likes pretty flowers.

She writes from London, where perhaps she was sent for her health.

C'MON. A Corner reader points out that Canadian PM Paul Martin says "Flashman and the Dragon" is his favorite book. "I have to think that anyone who can enjoy a Flashman novel has to have some reservations about our country's multiculti mindset," says the reader. John Derbyshire is unimpressed. "I always think the answers have been tailored by some handler after running a few focus groups, and have nothing whatever to do with the actual candidate's actual tastes," he sniffs.

A focus group told Martin to pick "Flashman and the Dragon"? Wonder who turned Bob and Doug McKenzie on to George MacDonald Fraser.

There is such a thing as too much cynicism.

A LITTLE PERSPECTIVE:

"Everyone says liberals love America, too. No they don't. Whenever the nation is under attack, from within or without, liberals side with the enemy." -- Ann Coulter.

"If [the Democrats] win this election thanks to a promise to undo the Reagan-Bush Doctrine, those cheering loudest will be the most evil-loving among us." -- Mark Levin, National Review.

"Make no mistake -- The anti-war voices long for us to lose any war they cannot prevent." -- Ralph Peters.

"Fresno residents and community leaders, outraged by an e-mail message in which City Council Member Jerry Duncan wished he had a 'dirty bomb' to kill every liberal in Fresno, called Thursday for his resignation, recall or reprimand." -- Fresno Bee, August 16, 2003.

"…liberals, whom I regard as traitors in this time of crisis…" -- New York Post columnist and belligerent drunk Steve Dunleavy.

"I don’t hate Michael Moore, I pity him - he’s going to die in 15 years of a massive coronary on a cold tiled bathroom floor, awash in the blasts of his emptied bowels…" -- Jim Lileks.

And these are the credentialed types. Moving down to the even shallower end of the pool, we find:

"THIS IS WHY ALL LIBERALS MUST FUCKING DIE!!!!!!!!!!" -- "I Kill Liberals" at the
Hillary Clinton Forum.

"A typical liberal cry baby faggot with no balls. I have been using you as the perfect example of a cowardly liberal cunt… What a pathetic little piece of shit you are. Remember my favorite advice for you liberal traitors: EAT SHIT AND DIE COWARDS!!!!" -- "NeoCon 21" at the MG Politics Board.

"Now there are some pussy-footing preachers who say that if God chose evolution as his way of creation, that's okay. Those people are pussy-footing right into hell. Some of these liberal pussies are right in my own Southern Baptist Convention. They may call themselves 'moderates'…" -- Ronald L. Ecker.

This and worse has been polluting the Internet since the days of Mosaic and USENET.

And I'm supposed to be concerned that someone put up a parody of Goya's Saturn Devouring Her Children starring Bush?

They can dish it out, but they sure do whine when made to take it.

UPDATE. Upon further review, Ecker is a prank. (I should have paid attention to the Roxanne Pulitzer references.) You may substitute any of 428,282 legitimate alternates. Here's a good one -- though I'm not entirely sure the entire site isn't a prank.

BYE BYE, BAGHDAD. It would be too much to say that nothing became our Iraq adventure so much as our leaving of it. Saddam's in the dock rather than the Palace, and that's good (as in "it’s an ill wind that blows no one some").

At the same time, a cautionary note is sounded by our prior liberatees in Istanbul:

President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan pleaded with hesitant NATO leaders today to rush troops to his country to protect officials trying to register voters for coming national elections.

Extra troops promised by NATO should be sent immediately, he said, because violence was disrupting preparations for the vote, set for September, and threatening the country's shaky progress toward democracy.
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"I would like you to please hurry," said Mr. Karzai, whose speech was met with polite applause but no commitment.

NATO presently has about 6500 troops in Afghanistan. There are many times this number of coalition forces in Iraq now, but it's an open question as to how long our allies will want to stick around. Even the Blair Administration is making oddly negative comments about the postwar governance of Iraq.

I'm not sure how much Bush wants to stick around, either. The examples of Kosovo, Haiti, and (most unfortunately) Somalia indicate that we like to go in and kick ass, but we’re less psyched about the mopping-up stage.

Meanwhile the scramble for Iraqi contracts goes on. Members of the Coalition get first dibs, since the U.S. decreed that only countries that supported the war would get reconstruction contracts ("Arabian Oil, Japan's biggest oil supplier, is in early discussions with Iraq's state-owned South Oil to repair and upgrade oil facilities in the south of the country in what would be the first Japanese involvement in the Iraqi oil sector since the 1991 Gulf war." -- Financial Times, June 3). But the handover has some in the Coalition of the Unwilling convinced they’re back in the running:

German firms -- excluded so far from U.S.-awarded contracts as punishment for Berlin's anti-war stance -- are hopeful that the handover of power to the Iraqi interim government will result in lucrative business deals…

In the past, German companies have tried to get involved in business in Iraq as sub-contractors for firms from Kuwait or the United Arab Emirates. Then at least they are not subject to the Americans' goodwill, [Hans-Jürgen] Müller [of the German foreign trade association BGA] pointed out. Since mid-June an office set up by the DIHK in Amman, Jordan aims to put German firms in touch with business partners in Iraq and other Persian Gulf countries. The DIHK also plans to establish a German-Iraqi chamber of commerce.

The new Government of Iraq is preparing for elections. I have little doubt they’ll come off in time. It will interesting to see what choices are then presented to the citizens, and how much say they will have in the disposition of their resources.

ALL AESTHETICS MUST BE PUNISHED! Tim Graham reads about a work of fiction but cannot recognize it as such. Hilarity ensues:

Knopf (publishers of the Clinton memoirs) plan to publish novelist Nicholson Baker's latest work: "Checkpoint," in which the main character really wants to assassinate President Bush. A Knopf flack says "It is not the first time a novelist has chosen fiction to express their point of view about American society or politics." Apparently, his point of view is Bush deserves to die.

In other literary news, Thomas Harris ate a man's liver with fava beans and a nice Chianti, Robert Louis Stevenson turned into Mr. Hyde at night, and Mark Goldblatt is black.

Maybe a deep-seated wish to believe Lynne Cheney's Sisters is autobiographical has globally affected Graham's understanding of dramatic characterization. Or maybe it's the old culture/revolver thing.

POORMOUTHED. Literally, the only interesting thing about Cheney cursing is the weird defenses offered for the Veep's brief bout of coprolalia. Here's a fellow who blames Cheney's outburst on liberal prevarication -- it starts out like this:

But however impolitic his outburst, it's hard to blame him. Lies, distortions, and other types of misrepresentation have become standard rhetorical devices for the disloyal opposition...

...and goes on, and on, like this:

The deeper cause of this cognitive dissonance is postmodern relativism, which makes it too easy to rationalize lies. Thanks to its over-representation in academia and the media, the Democratic Party contains a disproportionate number of people who believe that truth is an illusion, or an imposition of hierarchical power. On the other hand, the Republican Party contains a disproportion of believers in traditional virtues like civility. They have responded to ever-shriller deceits with a constraint that has often disadvantaged them politically. Woe to the Democrats, and the nation, if that constraint disappears. Without civility, we are lost.

If I'm reading this right (if there is a right way to read such a thing, besides quickly, or not at all), Cheney's f-bomb is a wonderful teaching opportunity to discuss the evils of liberalism. But then, what isn't?

And I am loving the idea of Republican civility. You'd think that, with so many countervailing examples widely available, the author would take a moment to try and explain why, those examples notwithstanding, things aren't as bad as they look. Instead, he just bulls on: we are civil, you are moral relativists.

State of the discourse, 2004. How long before it's all just animal noises and explosions?