THE QUARRELSOME QUADRENNIAL. Since I have but two topics, myself and politics, and I am sick of both (hey, guess the ref!), y'all have fun with HarpWeek's Presidential Elections 1860-1912.

I have some feelings about these spellbinding horror stories of pride, ignorance, slander, and power madness, but I'll leave that alone for now. I just figured you guys would like it.

HE LIKED YOU BETTER WHEN YOU WERE A PUSSY. After being called traitors again and again and again, liberals got sick of it and started fighting back, which has prompted one "Doverspa" of RedState.org to ask, "Where Are The Reasonable Liberals?"

the center-left and center-right have been able to respect each other despite their differences in the past... I continue to hear the conservative critique of liberal programs... but the liberal critique has changed. The President (and by association all Republicans) are greedy, racist, and terrorism is a political ruse to scare the nation. President Bush probably knew about 9/11 ahead of time, he wants to repeal the Civil Rights Act, and he wants to enrich all of his rich buddies while screwing anyone who works for a living.

Yeah, when Kerry hollered "No blood for oil! Bush lied, people died!" at the Fleet Center, I knew the jig was up.

So conservatives are all sweet reason, are they? Let's see what kind of friendly, collegial criticism they're dishing out at one typical, mainstream right-site -- RedState.org:

Why should any believing Catholic vote for a Democrat, given that the Donkey Party's one sacrament is abortion on demand; and why should any Catholic who takes her faith at all seriously vote for John Kerry?

...it is nonetheless dismaying to watch the Donkeys descend into ahistorical madness... Clearly, the Democrats are either slowly self-destructing or acting out one heck of an ideological spasm. More power to them, I say.

...Osama bin Laden fan [Washington Senator] Patty Murray...

Congratulations, Democrats. You've just nominated for yourself an epistemological zero.

...one wonders if the modern Democrat party might have read too many comic books in its time... John "Kiss Me If You've Seen the Photo of Me Kissing Ortega" Kerry...

That's just in the past week or so, and not to speak of the Comments section.

Let me be clear. As a practitioner, I have nothing again hardcore invective, and I get a kick out of the RedStaters', which employs advanced vocabulary words and, on occasion, wit. But to sigh, at the same time you are using these flammable chemicals, that you are so very disappointed that your once "reasonable" opponents now use such techniques is rather like complaining that the kid you used to bully in third grade came back for the first day of fourth grade with some martial arts lessons under his belt. Nobody likes a bully, much less one that complains about the quarrelsomeness of his former victims.

THE RIGHT HAND DOESN'T KNOW WHAT THE OTHER RIGHT HAND IS DOING. From the Washington Times we get a story about two talk radio hosts who wish to unseat a congresscritter whom "they deem soft on issues such as border security and benefits for undocumented aliens."

We don't know this official's name. Neither do the show's hosts, John Kobylt and Ken Chiampou of KFI-AM in Los Angeles. The unlucky legislator will be chosen by their audience over a long and arduous campaign.

The "winner," as chosen by the listeners, will be announced the day after Labor Day. The hosts then will use the airwaves to pursue the representative's political downfall in November's election -- and have a little fun.

"We've made it like a reality show -- we've got drums beating in the background, stuff like that," Mr. Kobylt said.

Five nominees are named, all, BTW, Republicans who are not hardline enough to suit Kobylt's and Chiampou's taste.

Elsewhere in the same edition of the WashTimes, one Barry Casselman denounces the "self-styled (sic) 'cultural' elite" that seeks to defeat political candidates.

I am not saying that comedians and entertainers are not citizens like everyone else, with the right to express their political opinions. But in our American society, celebrities enjoy many special privileges of fame and wealth. And when these privileges are misused, we are all the poorer for it...

The comedians and entertainers who have hijacked the political debate to publicize themselves are doing no service to their country.

Seasoned readers will not need to be told that Casselman is talking about entertainers who "are conducting a class war against President Bush."

Casselman is described as having "reported on and analyzed national politics since 1972." You'd think that by now someone would have told him about talk radio.

A ONE-WAY TICKET TO OATMEAL, NEBRASKA. NRO's Mark Goldblatt, having recently dismissed black people as "the most hypocritical, most paranoid, most pretentious group of people on the planet" (next to the French, of course), now dumps on my fellow citizens and I, declaring that "New Yorkers, who pride themselves on their sophistication, seem honestly to believe that calling the president names constitutes a compelling argument against his policies."

Goldblatt's defense of his slanderous proposition isn't worth addressing -- he doesn't understand the difference between a reason and an excuse, let alone the difference between righteous indignation and blind rage -- but I note with curiosity that Goldblatt lives in New York, himself, and this gets me to wondering about all these blue-state Republicans who bitch about the evil residents of the blue states. Can you imagine living in Bumfuck, Mississippi -- by choice, not because you had to -- and writing screeds for the Bumfuck Herald-Dispatch about what a bunch of villainous cretins the citizens of Bumfuck were? Forget about the ass-kicking that would surely ensue (Bumfuck has not the culture of toleration our own metroplis enjoys); what would motivate an individual to voluntarily remain in such a self-created hell?

Goldblatt, Brooks, Sullivan, (and on a bad day, Richard Brookhiser) et alia: there are many fine hamlets, villages, gulches, junctions, and corners in this great land of ours to which you may repair to write smack about the City. Why not go to them? Better still, why not go to Hell?

CRAZY JESUS LADY GOES FREELANCE:

I do not think a lot of modern conservatives have taken on their philosophy because they were brought up in it, schooled in it, and swallowed it whole. And I don't think a lot of them became conservatives because they read a book by Hayek or Adam Smith and thought, "Ah ha, this seems sound!" I think a lot of people in our time who have become conservatives did it because they had a certain and particular kind of mind...

...the kind that goes Hey, this is E-Z! I just gots to remember 9-11 and the sancticity of marriage! Such folk will rejoice to know that Peggy Noonan is comin' to inspire them!

...a week ago, while watching the Democratic convention, I made a decision.

I am going to take three months' unpaid leave from The Wall Street Journal and attempt to support the Republican Party in the coming and crucial election... This will take a bite out of my finances but I can do it. Actually most of us, when we die, wind up with a few thousand dollars in the bank. We should have spent it! I am going to spend mine now.

Noonan has been a speechwriter for Reagan and Bush I, a CBS producer, an NYU professor, a Wall Street Journal columnist, an MSNBC and NBC commentator, and author of several books. She also got upwards of 50 grand for services to Enron before they went down in flames. If she only has a "few thousand dollars" in the bank, maybe she had a bad night rolling bones with Bill Bennett.

What the Crazy Jesus Lady will do for the GOP is at present a mystery. All she will reveal is, "I decided it's good to be on TV in whatever venue seems right when you feel you have something important you want to say." Maybe she will stand outside the Today Show studios early in the morning, waving a cardboard placard saying JESUS HATES DEMOCRATS. Maybe she'll replace Dennis Miller's chimp. Or maybe she will get a local public access TV show that features miraculous appearances by the Virgin Mary and denunciations of homosexuals.

I for one will miss her.

REASON WHY WE HATE THE REPUBLICANS #4,751. From NY1:

During the GOP National Convention, which runs from August 30 to September 2, no cars or buses will be allowed on streets from Sixth to Ninth Avenue, between 31st and 33rd streets. In addition, people on foot will have to show identification to get anywhere from 33rd to 31st Street between Seventh and Ninth avenues, and police will escort them to their destination.

“That’s not going to be good,” said one woman who works in the restricted area.

Know what burns my ass most about this? While the neighborhood is in lockdown, Giuliani will be inside the Garden telling the Republicans how much real New Yorkers (i.e., rich, white, vicious, constipated ones) love them.

I GUESS IT'S TRUE -- LIBERTARIANS REALLY ARE JUST CONSERVATIVES WHO SMOKE LOTS OF WEED! Virginia Postrel:

Gay Marriage Is Not the "New Abortion"... The comparison doesn't hold in one, very important respect: Abortions are sad. Weddings are happy. Having an abortion -- or having a friend or relative who has one -- may make you more supportive of abortion rights, but it won't make you celebrate the idea. Abortion won't make you smile.

People support abortion rights out of fear. They support gay marriage out of love. There are, of course, non-emotional arguments on both sides of both issues, but the fundamental feelings are different. That changes the politics, particularly with time and experience.

The same holds true with estate taxes, otherwise known as death taxes. Because death is so sad. So, you see, Republicans are against it. Because they're all dynamistic and shit.

You know what else is a downer: Hospitals. I was in a hospital once and it freaked me right the fuck out. So when I think about health care, I don't go to my happy place.

Dudette! That's some righteous dynamism!

A HERO FOR THE 21st CENTURY. Cathy Sieff goes to an anti-Bush book launch party, to see how the bluer half lives, and to write snide things about them for NRO. This "My Cuh-razy Liberal 'Friends'" scenario is ancient by now, but Sieff distinguishes her script with a fascinating new character, a Spicolli manque called Peter Stuart. Sieff describes Peter as if he were real, but he is really much too good to be true.

Peter used to make punk docs, and retains, his creator tells us, "a taste for the transgressive":

Peter, in fact, has long collected Feral House books, and often used to horrify his wife by hauling out the serial-killer volumes to share with dinner party guests.

Let us hope the soon-to-be-former Mrs. Stuart is not litigious.

But seeing the rise of Islamofascism up close in Europe moved [Peter] hard to the right, and now he always seems to be getting into it with someone.

I'll bet!

When a woman in the audience began reflexively laughing at the mention of "Christian fundamentalists," though, Peter turned to her and snapped, "What's funny about Christian fundamentalists? Are Islamic fundamentalists funny too?"

Pete's a caution. My favorite part is when the evening's author "suggested that military troops are underfunded 'so all the profits can go to Halliburton,' Peter raised his hand and pointed out mildly that 'actually, the $87 billion you're referring to was for rebuilding Iraq. So that's a little different, isn't it?'" I've been going over that sentence with an archaeologist's brush, and I still can't see what the hell Peter is talking about. But I suppose that's the joke, huh? Sort of a "Dude, Where's My Car?" thing.

I look forward to seeing a rough cut.

GIVE UP HOPE -- VOTE BUSH! The New York Post's Nicole Gelinas acknowledged on Monday that selling the voters on his rancid economy was "W's challenge." Whereas Kerry offered a "fuzzy-headed promise to create 'millions of good-paying jobs,'" wrote Gelinas, Dubya can only offer them blood, sweat, and tears, and Gelinas is forced to admit that "after four years of tough times, voters can't be blamed for seeking out a shining economic vision" -- of eventual emergence from crippling debt, one supposes, or of someday sending a child to college.

Despite a weak effort to "blame the fact that Bush has never had a charismatic Treasury or Labor Secretary" -- yes, we all remember how Robert Reich and Lloyd Bentsen set our hearts aflame! -- the article ended on a note of despair.

That was Monday. Did Gelinas get a call from Karl Rove in the middle of the night? Because the next day, she had an answer to W's dilemma. Yes, you guessed it -- 9/11:

...whenever I hear the Democrats' exultant invocations to those years, I feel a retroactive, physical dread. Much of late-1990s growth — that not already purged by early September 2001 by the reality induced by the burst tech bubble — was built on a false bottom: World Peace...

But we can't go back — and the financial markets can't go back, either. After 9/11, institutional and individual investors were forced to re-price for a costly and permanent new peril: al Qaeda's physical and ideological threat to the miracle that is the Western economy.

Gelinas goes on to explain that, because corporations have had to invest in more insurance than before, and "have spent billions renting and outfitting permanent backup sites far from Manhattan to house employees and data in the event of another attack," it's unreasonable to expect the jobs picture to improve, despite what fuzzy-headed Kerry promised and even despite what the President himself says on the stump ("This economy is strong and it's getting stronger").

The old 9/11 "everything has changed" now seems to also mean, no more getting ahead by working hard. It's kind of a grim analysis -- if you take it seriously. But who's that stupid? Certainly not my readers!

The fact is, while you and I are suffering economically, the market -- even with all those poor, brave investors so overtaxed by terrorism-related outlays -- is not doing so bad. Despite today's oil-related jitters, the Dow remains well over 10,000. On September 10, 2001, it closed at 9,605.50 -- having dropped about 2000 points since Bush's inauguration.

If you can't get a job, or can't get one that pays what your last one did, it's not because Morgan Stanley had to build a safe house in Jersey.

It's because the economy responds to things other than terrorism -- like a decline in consumer spending. Greenspan blames this on high oil prices, but the simplest explanation is that people are running short of disposable income, and of faith that they can safely run up their debt till more money materializes.

Also, the rise in productivity that Republicans like to trumpet is not necessarily a good thing for you and me. In the short term at least, it means that businesses large enough to work it right can make more with less -- including less payroll and less personnel.

Greater heads than mine could submit this to further discussion, so let's just cut it short and say that pulling 9/11 out of one's ass to excuse this Administration's lousy economic performance is probably not going to fly. But that may just be my natural optimism and faith in my fellow man talking.

CITI UNDER SIEGE. I dropped quickly by the Citicorp Center at lunchtime. The Atrium is closed, so only the shops facing the streets seem to be in business; Barnes & Noble and Houston's had what appeared to be a normal amount of traffic.

There were a few cops on each corner and at each entrance -- not as large a force as you might expect, but even one New York City cop carries a lot of weight on the street, and who knows what less-observable presence NYPD has going on.

The surest sign of the change in status was the presence of media trucks parked along Lexington. Most of their crews seemed to be in downtime, lounging on canvas folding chairs when I came by, though one cameraman was patiently recording a cop who held the leash of a panting, happy-looking German Shepherd.

A lot of passers-by seemed, like me, to be gawking a little as they shuffled past, interested in how the City was playing this one. "I can't believe this has become a tourist thing," one guy said.

On the subway steps was a paper seller with a pile of the Daily News, each front page featuring a picture of the Citicorp Center and the word TARGETS.

Just another day.

MOSES SUPPOSES. "We have an Orange Alert in NYC," intones James Lileks. What you mean "we," farmer Jim? Republicans love us when we're terrorized; it's the smell of votes what does it. (By the way, hayseed, New York City has been on Orange Alert since Tom "Rock" Ridge first trotted out his little Playskool thermometer, as Mayor Richie Rich reminded us in his press conference.)

During Ridge and Bloomberg's addresses I must have heard the word "specificity" three hundred times. I imagine a roomful of Republicans running it through with a vocal coach: "Speh-si-FIH-si-ty, speh-si-FIH-si-ty... Mr. President, how about you just let Tom Ridge give this speech?"

I'll roll by the Citicorp Center during my lunch break and let you know how it's looking.

UPDATE. "Kind of like meeting Hunter S. Thompson, except really fucking boring." The comments on this post prove that my primary usefulness here is as a muse to brighter bloggers.

YET ANOTHER REASON TO VOTE FOR KERRY. Via The Nation, spotted by eagle-eye Margaret:

The Democratic party platform that will be adopted this week includes one particularly significant change from the platforms adopted by the party conventions of 1992, 1996 and 2000. During the platform-writing process, the drafting committee quietly removed the section of the document that endorsed capital punishment. Thus, for the first time since the 1980s, Democrats will not be campaigning on a pro-death penalty program.

It appears Kerry, who doesn't "wear his faith on his sleeve," has more in common with Jesus than the famously born-again Bush. Don't worry, George, you can always trumpet your strong personal relationship with Hammurabi!

SHORTER DIANA WEST: My kinfolk don't hate fags proudly, as I do. Damned liberal media!

THE BIG STIFF IN PRIME TIME. I don’t mean to be rude, but much as I want it to work (and it could very well work), I cannot suspend a morbid consciousness of the political purpose of John Kerry’s DNC honor guard tonight.

Max Cleland is a very old-fashioned sort of politician, never mind the wheelchair. He looks proud and wounded all at the same time, and his face glistens in the hard light, as every Southern politician’s has since the days of Henry Clay, and like the most successful of them Cleland seems to enjoy rather than tolerate it. "My body was broken and my faith was shattered…. Although I had lost a lot, I still had a lot left. I resolved to make something of my life." This guy makes me ashamed, as he is supposed to. And you can get a lot of uplift out of that kind of shame in a situation like this.

"No Surrender." That’s a good choice – like all the songs on Born in the U.S.A., tinged with enough despair and regret to make it easier to really take to heart than Bon Jovi.

OK, this’ll be long. Better settle in. But I expect he’ll rush; they all have.

"I’m John Kerry and I’m reporting for duty." Holy shit.

"…because we love our country… united in one purpose: to make America stronger at home and respected in the world. A great American novelist wrote, ‘You can’t go home again.’" Quick, conservatives – find Thomas Wolfe’s commie credentials!

"I was born in the West Wing." Good thing there’s a TV show. "Mother was the rock of our family…" Oh, here’s the personal touch Teresa didn’t put in. "Den mother when I was a Cub Scout… gave me her passion for the environment… march for full equality for all women…" Boy, she sounds like a handful.

"Father… first baseball mitt… Greatest Generation… in the State Department… " Another handful. "I rode my bike into Soviet East Berlin… he promptly grounded me." Ha ha. "Fear in the eyes of people who were not free." I see where this will get to. "I learned what it meant to be America at her best… determined to restore that pride to all that look to America." Do we see that in the Iraqi citizens’ eyes, or fear of the Abu Ghraib torturer? That’s a nut-cutter there, and explains all the toy drives at Instapundit.

"The great gift of service… a Junior, John Kennedy…" Got it. "We believed we could change to world, and you know what? We did… but tonight… we’re going to write the next great chapter… change the world, but only if we are true to our ideals and that starts by telling the truth to the American people… that is my first pledge to you… I will restore trust and credibility to the White House…" Craggy-face Kerry as the voice of youthful America.

"As a young prosecutor… balanced budget… 100,000 police on the streets of America… finally made peace in Vietnam." Nice, tight resume. "Commander-in-Chief who will never mislead us into war… a Secretary of Defense who will listen to the military, and an Attorney General who will uphold the Constitution of the United States." Yeah, not like those weirdos we have now.

"Here is our answer: there is nothing more pessimistic than saying that America can’t do better. We’re the optimists, we’re the can-do people… look at the 90s… we just need to believe in ourselves and we can do it again…" Oh, yeah, Clinton, don’t you miss him?

"I am proud that at my side…John Edwards… his life is the American dream…" Every little boy can grow up to be a rich lawyer. Well, it’s true! "Succeed Dick Cheney…" Oh, sorry I was mean to JE. "What can I say about Teresa?" You’ll be asked to, of course. I loved her dipping her head to JE’s shoulder. Maybe by her very weirdness she’s an asset. I don’t mind watching her do her loopy thing for four years.

"Our band of brothers… what we learned as soldiers… every day is extra." That’s ‘Nam talk, son. "We may be a little older… still know how to fight…" You gotta love it -- Uncommon Valor.

"September 11… strength that our firefighters… rescuers… Flight 93… flags were hanging from front porches… it was the worst day that we have ever seen, but it brought out the best in all of us… we were only Americans, and how we wish it had stayed that way…"

It’s all one, you see, the Zen of liberalism. Every facet of public life – fighting terrorism and health care and tax policy -- feeds into the other.

"There are those that criticize me for seeing complexities…" Okay, I’m complex, you got my vote! "Proclaiming ‘Mission Accompished’ certainly doesn’t make it so." Snap. "I will bring back that time-honored tradition: the United States of America never goes to war because it wants to, it only goes to war because it has to… I will wage this war with the lessons I learned in battle… On my first day of office… never be asked to fight a war without a plan to win the peace. I know what we have to do in Iraq… I defended this country as a young man and I will defend it as President." Who is this guy, George McClellan?

"I will never hesitate to respond… no veto over national security… add 40,000 military troops, not in Iraq…" At last, forward thinking. "And we will end the back door draft of the National Guard and Reservists." Hello, this really is news. What about the Coast Guard?

"Strength is more than tough words… I know the reach of our power… we need to make America a beacon… looked up to, not just feared… tell the terrorists… the future doesn’t belong to fear, it belongs to freedom." See citizen, Iraq.

"Right here on our shores… 9/11 commission… I will not evade or equivocate… 98% of our container ships… nuclear and chemical plants… not opening firehouses in Baghdad and shutting them down in the United States of America." His case on competence grounds.

"To those who would question the patriotism… wrapping themselves in the flag… what America is really about… when Americans stand up… that is not a challenge to patriotism, it is the heart and soul of patriotism. You see that flag up there? We call her Old Glory… I fought under that flag…" We know! "From the gun-turret…" We know! "Draped the casket…" We know!! "It belongs to all the American people!"

What are they going to remember? That John Kerry fought in Vietnam and no one better even hint he’s a traitor.

The crowd chants USA! USA! Kerry still wants to hurry through this. "My fellow citizens… Those who talk about family values should start valuing families… taking cops off the street so Enron can get another tax break… big drug companies… windfall profits… I will not privatize Social Security, I will not cut benefits… family, faith, hard work… that is the American Dream…" Kerry as Boston Irish politician, beating the same pulpit (not literally, of course) as a 19th-century Mick alderman pledging the workingman a better deal.

"Dave McKuen, a steelworker…" This is a good story – oh, it’s not a story? "Marianne Knowles, a woman with breast cancer…" Hey, this is a good – oh. "Deborah Kromins…" That’s – "25% of our children in Harlem… people sleeping in Lafayette Park… three million…" Well, that was a fast transition from the specific to the general. But narrative is a vanishing art.

"Middle class not being squeezed but doing better… new incentives… manufacturing… good-paying jobs… close the tax loopholes… reward companies that keep jobs in the good old U.S.A… never have to subsidize the loss of his own job… give the American worker a fair playing field, there’s no one in the world that he can’t compete against." Seamus O’Kerry will save your full dinner pail!

"We won’t raise taxes on the middle class, you’ve heard a lot of false charges… roll back the tax cuts on wealthier Americans… making over $200,000 a year…" Some gnome is now rushing to find a $200,000 a year family who can’t make ends meet under ee-vil Kerry.

"Stop being a nation content to spend $10,000 to send a young man to prison… Head Start, Smart Start… a real start…" The old playbook.

"Health care… 4 million people have lost their health care… your payments, your premiums… save families $1000 a year… under our health care plan… Medicare will negotiate lower drug prices… less expensive… a right for all Americans…" That’s the playbook again, and it sounds as good as ever. We will of course have to wait for the bill of particulars, emphasis on "bill."

"Independent of Mideast oil…" Another good page from the playbook. "…not the Saudi Royal family." Yeah, you know, those guys Bush is mobbed up with. Victor Davis Hanson will deliver another rant distancing The Movement from the Saudis, but no one on the hustings reads Victor Davis Fucking Hanson.

"Benjamin Franklin could never have said in his acceptance speech: go to johnkerry.com." You mean we don’t have to listen to much more of this?

"Let me address these words directly to George W. Bush… let’s respect one another… never misuse for political purposes the most precious document in human history, the Constitution of the United States…" What can I say? When he’s right, he’s right.

"Big ideas, not small-minded attacks… divide group from group… maybe some just see us divided into those red states and blue states, but I see us united in one America, Red, White, and Blue… America is not ‘us’ and ‘them’… I don’t wear my religion on my sleeve, but faith has given me hope… Abraham Lincoln… I want to pray humbly that we are on God’s side." Good, he stopped talking for a few seconds, at just the right time and in just the right way.

"They’re American values… if we believe in them, we can build… so much promise stretches before us… " Kitty Hawk. NASA. Microsoft. "WE did that… and now it’s our time to ask, ‘What if?’" Alzheimers, AIDS, stem cells. "A President who believes in science…" A choice, not a idjit. "Do what adults should do…" Oh yeah.

"Patrolling the Mekong…" We kn-- – oh, forget it. "Literally all in the same boat… that is the kind of America… all in the same boat…. Look to the next horizon.. our best days are still to come… Good night, God Bless You and God Bless The United States of America."

Cue "Beautiful Day." I hear a lot smack about the music here, but this is just perfect.

As oratory it was rushed, monochromatic, and lackluster. But. This guy is alright, and he’s running against Bush. Well, you know what I think. What do you think?

UPDATE. From The Corner: "Um, Mr. Kerry, 'that flag,' that 'Old Glory,' that 'Stars and Stripes Forever,' flew upside down on the cover of your book 'The New Soldier.' So why don't you explain that?"

Translation: they're scared shitless.

UPDATE II. Some of my comrades seem to think I've been too hard on the Big Stiff. Let me be clear. I think Kerry should do well based on tonight's performance, but I insist in judging it by Olympian standards. Why? Because, as the man said, there is nothing more pessimistic than saying that America can’t do better.

Don't worry that there is a chorus of idiots spinning the speech down. (I see Lileks, at the lunar end of one of his frequent mood swings, believes a Kerry Presidency will lead to "a smoking crater in New York." Count on it, Prairie Putz; New Yorkers will vote big for that smoking crater!) They're all in the blogosphere, which, as far as Mr. and Mrs. America know, is one long, contiguous series of mothers' basements where stained-shirted Comic Book Guys lurk and play at politics. Which means that they may have well have the wisdom to elect the right guy.

SHORTER JOHN PODHORETZ. John Edwards's expression of concern for ordinary Americans is an obvious rip-off of George W. Bush.

(There's also a lot in there about how the candidate made a lot of promises in hopes of being elected. I don't know why they didn't run this baby on page one.)

INCLUDING "AND" AND "THE." So far the Dems have kept their Convention pretty clean and un-mean. Fortunately for the rightwing "reporters" on the case, very few people are actually watching, so they can just plain make shit up.

The New York Post, for example, decries "the Democrats' timeless tactic of trying to split Americans by wealth and income, urging everyone to hate 'the rich.'" And I decry -- oh, who am I kidding? I am tickled by -- the Post's timeless tactic of using a quasi-quotation to imply linkage between a slur and its target. "The rich," which I heard in none of the speeches last night, could in a pinch be nailed to anyone on the Convention floor (perhaps a Michigan alternate saying "I love the rich taste of Folger's crystals" within earshot of a Post hack); having established that, the Post just adds "hate" and gets itself a perfect picture of a Socialist Worker rally brimming with bushy-bearded bohos and spherical black bombs.

Of course, why stop at tarring the Convention? Club for Growth President Stephen Moore paints a nightmarish portrait of Boston itself:

The panoramic shots of the convention give the impression that there's no one here in Beantown but middle-class, flag-waving, child-hugging bus drivers and construction workers and soccer moms and grandmothers...

Don't be fooled by the spinmeisters. These people are not middle America. When you go into the bakeries, you can actually purchase wedding cakes with two brides on the top. A baker tells me even straight couples are purchasing these ultra-chic wedding cakes, as a sign of solidarity. The best-selling t-shirt shows George Washington standing aside George W. Bush. Under Washington the caption reads: "Could not tell a lie." Under Bush the caption: "Could not tell the truth." Every third car has a bumper sticker screaming: "RE-DEFEAT BUSH IN 2004."

Boston -- Sodom on the Charles! Later, Moore adds, "two antiwar protesters with 'Make Love, Not War' shirts (I'm not making this up) strutted in front of my taxi and shouted expletives, daring us to run them over." I love the "I'm not making this up." He should have repeated it after every sentence. Maybe a few people would have believed him.

OH, BTW: The other speakers tonight were fine. Gephardt: nice fella, no President, but bless him for running with the 90s-Congressional-Democrat football, even if only to his own 40-yard-line. Daschle: A little yapping dog, but our yapping dog. Obama: Superb. A comer. Mrs. Heinz-Kerry: Reminds me of a late Ingrid Bergman character, faint and unmodulated of speech but strong, nay, steely of conviction. Not very personable, which I consider a plus in the First Lady department. Most others probably don't, but who cares what they would think if they were listening (and they aren't)? (David Brooks thinks she was "a little bit offensive" and wanted a more "personal" angle. God, why does this drip exist, let alone appear on television?)

If you prefer to read lies about all this, go here. At alicublog, we speak truth to -- well, to a couple of smart people. From our point of view, that's enough.

ORATORIO. In last night's Convention roundup, I neglected to mention Rev. Alston, the black preacher who delivered a tribute to his old swift boat skipper, John Kerry. Alston began his address in the punchy cadences of an old-fashioned Baptist preacher ("where we FOUGHT. and BLED toGETHER. Serving our COUNtry"). But like everyone else that night, he was rushing over the logical pauses in his speech, and soon the regularity of it became numbing.

Then the crowd started cheering the preacher's Kerry references, and Alston swelled up like a bullfrog and turned from shouting to roaring his address. His cadence didn't alter, but his fire was lit, and it changed the whole effect for the better. It was as if they were the bellows and he were a pipe-organ with all the stops pulled and the bass pedals pushed to the floor.

It is hard to feel the interplay of speaker and audience through the tube, because background sounds are so convoluted by the audio feed (which is why it is so easy to scramble obscene crowd chants in TV broadcasts of ballgames). It's not until the thing starts to pick up and the speaker himself catches fire that you realize he's going over.

Something like that happened to Ted Kennedy tonight. At first, short of breath, he was just Mayor Quimby grinding out the rhetorical sausage for a buncha librul Demmycrats in the Commiewealth of Taxachusetts. I almost stopped watching. I figured I'd get my kicks reading about it the next day in the New York Post ("TRAITOR TED SLAMS HERO OF 9/11").

But the temperature did rise, and so did the quality of the speech -- maybe because of the quality of the speech. The old ham actually had a few ideas (or someone did -- the Kennedys always had a good rolodex for speechwriters). The best of them were about American history, which he conflated, naturally, with Democratic history (New Deal, New Frontier, etc.) -- never more boldly or effectively than when he reached back to before the Democratic Party, or the United States, even existed, to remind us of the Declaration's "decent respect for the opinion of mankind," and to say this:

Now it is our turn to take up the cause. Our struggle is not with some monarch named George who inherited the crown -- although it often seems that way.

Our struggle is with the politics of fear and favoritism in our own time, in our own country. Our struggle, like so many others before, is with those who put their own narrow interest ahead of the public interest.

We hear echoes of past battles in the quiet whisper of the sweetheart deal, in the hushed promise of a better break for the better connected. We hear them in the cries of the false patriots who bully dissenters into silence and submission. These are familiar fights. We've fought and won them before. And with John Kerry and John Edwards leading us, we will win them again and make America stronger at home and respected once more in the world.

That's pretty good. Tactically, it challenges the Republicans to show how their ideas fit in with American history. Sure, tell us about Lincoln -- and get some black people within camera range so it looks less risible. Tell us about Teddy Roosevelt, if you dare risk the old warrior's coming out of his grave to mount a Bull Moose challenge to your feeble "compassionate conservatism," or to agree too fulsomely and embarrassingly with your notion of Manifest Destiny. Then tell us about Reagan, whose cartoon version of the Spirit of '76 replaced the flagbearer, the drummer, and the fife player with the entrepreneur, the evangelist, and the easy-terms loanshark.

Tactics don't matter in this instance, of course. I understand very few people are watching this thing on TV. Probably even fewer have any real feeling about the American Revolution and the remarkable ideas that ignited it. Still, as a connoisseur of the game, I appreciated seeing the round played so well.

CONVENTION, ROUND ONE. I can’t devote myself to viewing all of this large, clumsy entertainment, and so missed Jimmy Carter, which I suppose is no great loss (I’ve seen him speak before).

In general, Night One seemed a little rushed. I guess the managers figured those few viewers who stumbled upon the show on their way to the Playboy Channel should sense vigor, or at least velocity, coming from the Fleet Center Though that deprived me of the great, rolling oratorical swells of yore, I understand that the modern ear is not attuned to them.

Thus Al Gore zipped through his speech, but that seemed generous of him under the circumstances – he was there to help, not to grab attention, so only his occasional shift to a low, rumbling tone indicated his old-fashioned speechifying gifts. He seemed relaxed and comfortable, especially by his usual standards. He was always better with the jokes when he wasn’t running for President. I didn’t see the embittered lunatic they talk about in the blogosphere, but that funhouse mirror is rarely reliable.

The 9/11 tribute was simple and even a little elegant, though I was strongly aware of its purpose as a touchstone for what would come later (as it did, with the Clintons using Kerry’s military record as resume lines for a Terror-era President). Cynicism or stagecraft? Depends on where you stand as you look at it.

Hillary was Hillary, and this was a good opportunity to think about what that is. I can see why some people hate her. There is always something a little hectoring in her tone, reminiscent of a grade-school teacher announcing the conditions under which next week’s field trip will be allowed. Of course this is more offensive when she is tired and grim, as she often seems to be when doing the people’s business. In this political context, though, cheerful and energized and surrounded by people who love her, she just seemed strong-willed and charismatic.

You could tell Bill Clinton’s speech was good because David Brooks on PBS did his best to piss on it ("No poetry," said Brooks; try to imagine David Brooks reading poetry for anything but quotes.) Clinton was never very good on the saxophone, but he plays audiences like no one else around, and he had a great theme: the campaign was not going to be about "who’s a good man and who’s a bad man," but about "choices." He kept stressing that the Republicans sincerely believe what they profess to believe, and that citizens who felt the same way (after Clinton had shown them how disastrously wrong they were) should go ahead and do so. So though his energy was high and his pace brisk, he seemed like sweet reason itself.

Whether any of this will work is for greater minds than mine to puzzle out.

CALL ME CRAZY. If we don't like Bush, suggests Virginia Postrel, it's just because we're mentally unbalanced:

When I was in New York a few weeks ago, a friend in the magazine business told me he thinks the ferocious Bush hating that he sees in New York is a way of calming the haters' fears of terrorism. It's not rational, but it's psychologically plausible -- blame the cause you can control, at least indirectly through elections, rather than the threats you have no control over.

Actually, Madame Dynamist, we expect to address, electorally, the cause we can control of a whole host of national ills. Thankfully -- and as a libertarian I'm sure you can appreciate this -- the franchise extends even to those of us who irrationally choose to live in New York, rather than (shudder) Dallas.

AN ORNAMENT TO OUR NATIONAL DEBATE:

NO WONDER THEY'RE ALL LIBERALS [Kate O'Beirne]
The delegates, politicians, consultants and hangers-on all know that there's such a thing as a free lunch--and breakfast and cocktails and dinners and late-night parties. They all stop milling around hotel lobbies every few hours to partake of all the free eats. While other hotel guests are in the restaurants talking with friends, I am the only one ordering food. Sure, GOP delegates will also enjoy lots of freebies, but at least they'll go back to working in the private sector when the convention ends. When the Democrats aren't feeding their delegates, the taxpayers are.
Posted at 02:26 PM

Nice to see the "truth squad" out there digging! Coming up: high volume of toilet flushes in Boston prove Democrats shit on America!

REDSTATE: NEW, KID-FRIENDLY FORMULA. When Redstate started out it was pretty wonkish, mostly featuring brain-busters such as this one by Paul J. Cella:

Modern Liberalism is our orthodoxy... the terrible conundrum for many on the Right is that the new orthodoxy is repugnant to them -- opposed, in fact, to the nature of man, which it is their orthodoxy to hold up to men as true, irrevocable. So Conservatives, under this new orthodoxy, cannot be conservative; indeed, the day may dawn when they will be revolutionaries. Yet some will remain mere conservatives, and turn with loathing on what they see in their former comrades as a new threat to the established order which it is their business to defend...

And if Hawkman teamed up with The Atom, they could totally take The Spectre and The Green Arrow.

But now it seems Tacitus and the guys have been through the focus groups and the blue-sky sessions, and are dumbing it down. Today at Redstate we find a Free Republic-style "W is My Kinda Heterosexual" photo essay, the text of which ("Yes, George Bush likes women. He's surrounded himself with one of the finest, Condoleezza Rice... she is one of the President's MVPs -- and the media and the left can't forgive her for that. But not me. I like Condi -- I like Condi a lot") suggests Peggy Noonan without the hallucinogens.

There is also what appears to be the transcript of a closing argument by an underfunded high-school debate team:

In this fight, no man or woman can be neutral.

I want a leader who, when he hears the words, Nine Eleven, feels them in his gut.

Oh, brother. What was that old line about putting the grown-ups back in charge?

FIRST TIME AT THE BALLPARK, MR. CARNEY? Timothy P. Carney compares the Democrats to Red Sox fans and the Republicans to the Yankees team -- a crappy analogy which Carney says he doesn't want to "take too far" before pounding three feet into hard ground. He compares the Dems thus not because they, like the Bostonians, have learned wisdom from long endurance of unjust defeats, but because they are (new Republican buzzword!) haters. As the Bostonians "find it more natural to hate the Yankees than to love the Sox," he says, so the Democrats are more about hating Bush than about loving Kerry.

First of all, John Kerry is not the Boston Red Sox. At best, Kerry is Terry Francona. (The Yankees/Republican analogy is slightly more apt -- both entities are awash in money; both are run by boorish, half-mad Nixonian tyrants; and in both cases, they get their strongest support from people who know the least about the game.)

The Bostonians' hatred of the loathsome Yankees is well-known, and seconded by all right-thinking people. But how does seething at one's enemies mean that you don't love your team? Carney offers as evidence the chant of "YANKEES SUCK" with which they responded to Bill Mueller's game-winning homer on Saturday. Perhaps he thinks the hardscrabble sons of a hardscrabble city should have thrown confetti and yelled, "GEE WHIZ, WE SURE DO LOVE OUR GREAT GUYS THE RED SOX, AND WE MEAN THAT IN A NON-SEXUAL WAY!" or whatever they do in the Montana Farm League.

Things are a little quieter now but time was, whenever the Phillies played at Shea, security had to be stepped up to quell the inevitable, Amtrak-enabled fistfights in the stands. The "YANKEES SUCK" chant has been heard at Shea, too. I suppose Carney might say that Mets fans have been "driven to insanity" by the Yankees, though I would not suggest that he say that anywhere near Flushing Meadow.

Come to think of it, I have heard (and been party to, and with good reason) booing of the Mets at Shea. Maybe we hate ourselves!

And maybe Carney should leave the baseball analogies to Ron Shelton.

ARTS ROUNDUP. A fellow named Daniel Fuchs wrote a book called Summer in Williamsburg back in the 30s. The novel, and its sequelae, didn't sell. Fuchs went on to write screenplays (including Love Me or Leave Me) and got rich.

Summer in Williamsburg isn't great, and suffers a good deal by comparison to that other New York Jewish proletarian novel of the time, Call It Sleep, but it's a fun read, especially (at least at first) if you live in Williamsburg. It touches on all the fashionable themes of its era -- the roiling misery and foolishness of the slums, race hatred, the weary arguments of capitalism and socialism, and some very specific intellectual pretensions of the day, to illumine which Fuchs uses a bohemian but untalented and neurotic young man named Cohen, and a girlfriend of the mensch protagonist who goes to ethnicified "modern dance" recitals and such like.

Fuchs apparently finds all this the bunk, which explains why he went on to write screenplays, and why the novel gets wearisome after a while. He even writes things like "High up, a million miles into the sky, God sits on a big cloud. He looks absent-mindedly about... now he peers down for a moment, His gaze rests on Williamsburg..." (This reminds me of a story Bennett Cerf used to tell about a cub reporter who found himself in Johnstown during the great Flood. He wired his lede to his editor -- "God sits looking down on a desolate Johnstown tonight..." -- and the editor wired back, "OK forget flood, interview God, rush pictures.")

But still it's nice to see old South 2nd Street and Merserole and the Bridge Plaza rendered, however romantically, in the days when penny candy really was a penny and people were called names like Natie the Buller.

Saw Night of the Iguana on TV. It's not first-rate Williams, but it sings in its own morbidly poetic way (his stories have a way of sucking you in once you stop gagging on the froth). And who can imagine a self-consciously lyrical text like this being made into a Hollywood A-picture, with stars the like of Richard Burton and Deborah Kerr, today? Camera tricks aside, it makes David Lynch look like Jerry Bruckheimer.

TELLING DETAIL. It's a small thing, I know, but often the devil is in the details, in this case literally so:

MORE CRUSHING OF DISSENT! "Dems bar Nader from Convention."

"More crushing of dissent" is of course the Ole Perfesser's way of making a funny (often with the appendage "in Ashcroft's America") when someone identified with the Left cracks down on someone's speech.

Those not nuts will realize that Ralph Nader is running against John Kerry and has no Constitutional right to attend his opponent's private function.

The responsible thing would be to trawl through the Perfesser's old posts and see which other ones are total crap. But in the immortal words of Hemingway (speaking, I believe, of the work of James Jones, to which he had been accused of paying insufficient attention), I do not need to eat a bucket of shit to know that it is shit.

SHORTER WILLIAM BENNETT. How dare you Democrats campaign vigorously against a sitting Republican President! That's not the Democratic Party I abandoned.

(Also, Preacher Bennett seems not to realize that Germany and Japan were allies in the Second World War, which is how Pearl Harbor got us at war with Hitler; it was not, as the Preacher suggests, an early version of Bush's "As long as we're all pissed off, why not invade another country?" strategy.)

PROFESSIONAL COURTESY. Tbogg reproduces some long, long paragraphs of godawful crap by this frother. I tunneled through it, wondering if anything T could stick at the end would make it worth the struggle. And there it was:

Kind of makes you wish you couldn't read English, doesn't it?

And with one light, deft smack the lumbering prose of Mr. van der Leun goes into a ditch. That, ladies and gentlemen, is style.

GOP OMG. Throw ya guns in the air like you just don't care! The 2004 "Stand Up and Holla!" competition for GOP youfs is in full effect.

Finalist Reza say:
What’s your favorite NYC scene featured in a movie? King Kong: I’ve always wanted to hang off of the Empire State Building with a beautiful woman in my arms. Swing her upside-down, bro -- no abortion discussion necessary if you bust a nut in her mouth!

Finalist Adam say:
What is the best show ever to hit Broadway? The best show to ever hit Broadway is “A Raisin in the Sun.” It captures all that is good and bad about America and the power of the American dream. Step off, Adam! Don't you know all commie Langston-Hughes related joints is straight-up wack?

Finalist Prabel say:
“I voted for Prell to go back to the old glass bottle. Then I became deeply cynical” ... Homer Simpson encapsulates why presidents ranging from Kennedy to George W. Bush have called for more community service. Well, maybe Homer doesn't quite mirror the president's sentiments, but it's for Americans like Homer that community service is important... Mr. Goldberg votes for you to write his columns. They don't make sense, either!

Finalist Hans say:
What is the best show ever to hit Broadway? West Side Story. We don't be hatin', but you can't get married, yo.

Finalist Clarence say:
What's your favorite NYC scene featured in a movie?
The 1990s musical Newsies features a scene where a group of boys, angry at the way they were being treated, stand up to a newspaper giant in the streets of NYC. This scene shows that NYC represents the heart and soul of America -- a land where everyone has the opportunity to succeed because of the free society we have been blessed with. See Hans.

Finalist Nathan say:
What’s your favorite NYC scene featured in a movie? What comes to mind first is a childhood favorite, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. I was about 8 years old when this movie came out and I remember thinking how cool it would be to live as Macaulay Culkin did in a suite at The Plaza Hotel, with an unlimited budget for room service. Damn, Nate -- you's a GOP-dawg fashizzle!

STOP THE PRESSES! OpinionJournal's Daniel Henninger doesn't like Fahrenheit 911. Among his complaints:

Even the Iraqi victims in Baghdad are props. A baby's corpse is lifted from a dumpster, bloodied limbs are shown, people wail--but in a succession of quick frames. Moore never spends any time with these people. They just, so to speak, blow by.

Not like the "liberal media" coverage of the war itself, where we got lots of up-close-and-personal interviews with bombed Iraqis. And:

Moore's on-camera characters are invariably lower middle class and inarticulate.

Henninger obviously wants a fiction film with sparkling urbanites discussing the art of love. Can someone give him the number for Moviefone?

Coming next week: how Citizen Kane unfairly maligns wealthy press magnates!

REAL TERRORISTS. The Syrian 'hijackers' who freaked out Annie Jacobsen so badly turn out to have been, as they claimed, just a band flying not to Jihadi Paradise but to a gig:

On Monday, a Federal Air Marshal Service spokesman, Dave Adams, said that the suspicious characters on Flight 327 were musicians. The man in the yellow shirt was a drummer, he said. "We interviewed all 14 of these individuals," Adams said. "They were members of a Syrian band" traveling to a gig at a casino near Los Angeles, he said, adding that their names were run through "every possible" data bank and terrorist watch list. "They were scrubbed. Nothing came back."

Annie Jacobsen isn't convinced. I asked her about the inevitable charge that ethnic stereotyping was driving her narrative. "I am simply not a racist," she said. "I travel everywhere. This situation was entirely different. I have never been so terrified."

That's interesting: "Jacobsen isn't convinced." I understand her mistrustfulness; I feel the same way about her.

I CRY THEE MERCY THEN, FOR I HAD THOUGHT/THAT THOU HADST CALLED ME ALL THESE BITTER NAMES. Some time back, Meryl Streep told the press that to prepare for the evil political mom in The Manchurian Candidate, she watched tapes of Karen Hughes and our own Crazy Jesus Lady, Peggy Noonan.

Catching wind of this, rightwing operatives from the backwoods of Tennessee to the closets of Los Angeles to the lowliest Internet tide-pools came out to insist that Streep was playing Hillary Clinton. Some normally astute people got fooled as badly by this disinformation as did the usual retards.

When operatives were reminded in public forums of Streep's comments, they said Streep was actually wrong about herself, or just pretended not to hear.

The masterpiece of the mobilization is in today's column by Streep's study subject herself, Peggy Noonan, in which she claims "People think the evil woman Meryl Streep plays in 'The Manchurian Candidate' is Hillary because, well, they've seen Hillary make a speech."

This is pure evil genius, friends, right up there with Richard III's turnaround on Margaret ("'Tis done by me, and ends in 'Margaret'"). If I didn't hate the bastards so much, I'd give 'em a golf clap.

AND THEN MY MIND SPLIT OPEN. Usually, not much can shake Jonah Goldberg's "point out my threadbare logic and mommy will breathe fire on you" insouciance, but he's set a-frothin' by Barbara Ehrenreich's perfectly self-evident observation re abortion that "there may be an appalling number of women who are willing to deny others the right that they once freely exercised themselves." Says Goldberg:

This is monumentally dishonest and more than a bit daft. Where else does Ehrenreich enforce this standard? Should racists stay racist? White people used to have the right to shout the n-word in the faces of black people. Does Ehrenreich -- who I assume supports hate crimes laws -- denounce former racists who would "deny others the right that they once freely exercised themselves"? Does a sexual harasser need to oppose sexual harassment laws lest he be counted as appalling in Ehrenreich's eyes? Since OJ Simpson got away with two free murders, should he believe that everyone should?

There you have it, folks: women who have had abortions are like O.J. Simpson.

Well, these are the people who think Rick Santorum will be an ornament to the Republican Convention.

HARD SELL.Tony Fabrizio writes about a gap between "perception" and "reality." Those terms take me back -- as I suppose they're meant to -- to the old Rolling Stone ad campaign, targetting media buyers and meant to demonstrate that the boomers whom buyers might have written off as shiftless hippies were actually quite loaded with disposable income. (Perception was a crappy Volkswagen, Reality was a Mercedes, etc.) Fabrizio, though, has a difference dichotomy in mind:

At the national level unemployment is down to 5.6 percent from 6.3 percent one year ago. The economy is creating jobs at a steady rate and economists predict solid job creation through the end of this year...

But, despite the hard data on jobs creation, the voters aren't yet buying it. Therein lays the "gap" and the political challenge.

The signal difference between Fallon McElligott Rice's campaign and Fabrizio's is not that the former was trying to sell ad space and the latter is trying to sell Bush. It is that the Stone ads told their audience about a useful service they may have misperceived, whereas Fabrizio suggests that the voters have misperceived their own situation -- with the help of duplicitous Democrats:

The Kerry team, in contrast, is hoping it can keep as many voters as possible on board the Pessimism Express to the November elections. They can't attack the current job-growth numbers, but they clearly will try to muddy the waters by talking down the economy and talking up jobs lost since January 2001. And this makes the rhetoric over the economy a contest between job losses of the past and job growth of the future...

Put this way, it sounds as if Kerry et alia were engaged in negative advertising to wrench the buyer's loyalty from its current product of choice toward a new competitor. But negative advertising doesn't work if the consumer has no reason to be dissatisfied with the performance of his current choice. (Fabrizio should know: he worked for Bob Dole's attempt to unseat Clinton in '96.)

I think it's fair to assume that advertising would be different in general if you had to choose a deodorant every four years and stick with it. And it's just plain true that worries over employment and employability in any given community are a hell of a lot more crucial to voters than whether they'll be liking Speed Stick as much in '07 as they do in '04.

So hammering the dissonance between the national job numbers and what someone in, say, Columbus, Ohio thinks is happening to his local economy -- and himself, and his family -- doesn't necessarily mean that the Ohio native is wrong and should just trust the numbers or the experts patiently explaining them. The Economist may tell you that though job outsourcing means "individuals will be hurt in the process," still "jobs will be created that demand skills to handle the deeper incorporation of information technology, and the pay for these jobs will be high." But if you're a telemarketer with no hope of becoming a programmer or data analyst any time soon, and people are being fired all around you, you probably won't count yourself an unlettered dunce for worrying about it. And if the Wall Street Journal tells you that the Kerry campaign's claims of a decline in wages is "just the gap between wages and 'what they would have been given historical wage growth,'" your reaction to this news will be strongly affected by whether or not you see stores closing all around you, sick days cut, and prices and interest rates moving beyond your reach -- certainly more strongly than by WSJ's assurances that "the return of 'McJobs' rhetoric means that an [economic] expansion is in full swing."

Maybe we'll be rolling in dough by November, but telling people that prosperity is just around the corner isn't a winning strategy no matter how confidently you shake your slide rule as you say it.

THE KIDS AIN'T TOO BRIGHT. "'What is emerging,' writes [Kay] Hymowitz, 'is a vital, optimistic, family-centered, entrepreneurial, and, yes, morally thoughtful, citizenry.' That's trouble, I believe, for the Democratic party..." -- James Glassman. (Coming up next: improved Crest Whitening Strips spell doom for Kerry.)

This beautiful piece of reasoning is part an article talking about how right-wing wonderful the kids are getting to be. Philosophe de biscuit-baril Reynolds offers a qualified endorsement, calling the new teen craze a "pro-gay-marriage, libertarian kind of conservatism" -- which is to say, the sort of "Eagle" conservatism Andrew Sullivan thinks is going to sweep the country right after our current batch of living, breathing conservatives gets through herding gay people into concentration camps.

Their fodder is something called the Mood of American Youth Survey -- an annual report, the San Jose Mercury News tells us, put out by the Horatio Alger Association, at whose site you can read the thing.

75% of the high-school students polled "feel hopeful and optimistic about the future." 52% say they spend between one to five hours a week on homework. (I notice, though, there is no category for "less than one hour.") 90% of them feel that "feeling personally satisfied" is "very important to success."

The one explicitly political issue, the War, finds 58% in favor. Only 21% plan on joining the military, though. (Hey -- maybe they are Republicans.)

They all love Mom and Dad lots and lots, and 49% of them -- surprise! -- are looking at "technology" as a career.

100% of them own a television.

Why don't we just lower the voting age to 13? They're obviously qualified to lead.

Now, I can understand the conservatives' desire to claim the love of the Young. I too feel that desire, particularly when I see pictures like this. But I don't go around telling people that Scarlett Johannson is going to marry me.

There are other dissonances in the rightwing youthquake thing. Glassman and Reynolds are reacting to polling data on how the young people feel. I thought the primacy of feelings was a liberal racket -- you know, the cult of self-esteem and all that.

If the American conservative movement is supposed to be something greater than a bunch of drunk fratboys punching each other in the chest and surreptitiously trying to brush up against their female R.A. -- actually that's probably as high as they're aiming, but let's keep the debate elevated for a few more minutes anyway -- why are they so interested in the hormone-driven emotions of teens? Supposing the pollsters had also asked, "Which would be more tight -- an iPod that you could plug into your eyes and it would show movies, or one that shoots webs like Spider Man?" How might the skew on that affect the 2012 Iowa Caucuses?

A more useful foreshadow of the kids' beliefs might be what they think about things like the economy, foreign policy, white-collar crime, social-security reform, environmental policy -- you already see where this is going, don't you?

I hate to play the bitter old crank here (oh, who am I kidding, it's the role that made me famous) -- but really, who cares what young people think? According to a National Geographic Society poll, among even older kids (18-24) only 13% could locate Iraq on a map. To be fair, a whopping 30% could locate New Jersey. If the 2002 Zogby survey is right, and today's college seniors are about as well-educated as high-school seniors were 50 years ago, I shudder to think where this puts today's high-schoolers.

There's a reason for that. They're children. Do you remember high school? How smart were you? No, I don't mean "How many teachers said you were smart," or "How many of your classmate found you intellectually stimulating," I mean how genuinely intelligent were you at 16? Would the current you even want to talk to the 16-year-old you?

I think the cons are betting that the kids won't get any brighter and will make all their future voting decisions based on inchoate (and easily orchestrated) feelings of rage and nationalism. They may be right. 75% of the kids are hopeful and optimistic, and they all have their own TVs.

COMRADES! IS MAKING UNFUNNY THIS SIMPSONS FOR TREASON! PLEASE NOT TO LAUGH! "I was wondering, Jonah, what you would nominate as the worst episode ever. The question came to mind last night as I watched, for the second time, the one where the family is sent to a re-education camp for being unpatriotic. I've seen several episodes with politics I disliked, but never before one that was so unrelentingly unfunny. Any others come to mind?" -- NRO's Ramesh Ponnuru. Was it less funny the first or the second time, Comrade Ponnuru? Also, please tell us which Family Guy jokes are politically incorr-- I mean, counter-reaganrevolutionary.

It gets harder for normal people to be conservative. For years the cons have been under bizarre sexual prohibitions, and now they are obliged to find The Onion unfunny and witless propaganda like this amusing.

Maybe NRO's first spin-off should be an American version of Krokidil, so true believers needn't expose themselves to socially retrograde humor.

WILD IN THE STREETS. Boy. I just thought of it as good material for some weak gags, but some people really seem to believe that evil hippies will go apeshit during the Republican Convention. Writes Michele Catalano, in a piece that really needs to be read aloud over swelling choruses of The Battle Hymn of the Republic, "I've got better things to worry about then getting hit on the head with a brick meant for Starbucks... I'll be damned if I'm going to go out at the hands of some wannabe hippie who smashes my head instead of smashing the state. But if a chain of events should occur that has that scenario playing out, my last words will be, 1968. I told you so."

The ones she should really be watching out for are the Protest Warriors, right-wing kids who relentlessly seek confrontation and coverage by major media, who promise to send hundreds of their troops to counter-demonstrate during the Convention.

These kids seem nice, but wrapped a little tight. Here we see one of their number, documenting lovingly his own fight to keep a bunch of political flyers he put up in his school from being taken down. One admires his, and his colleagues', youthful brio and romantic isolation ("keep fighting the good fight, even if it isn't the popular thing to do. You might feel alone in your struggle, but you are not..."), if not their equally youthful obnoxiousness, sophistry ("'Rednecks?' A sign can't have the word 'Arab,' which isn't a racial slur, but she can say 'rednecks'?"), and homosexual panic. But I can't imagine they'll be very happy Warriors in Manhattan; stranded for days on an island teeming with wrong-thinking blue-state citizens who will not be so eager to play verbal patty-cake with them as the saps back at their high schools, they may get testy and paranoid. It will be very hot out in the streets, and if there's ever been a situation in which a would-be Debate Club President might lose his cool, this would be it.

None of which means I don't welcome them here. It'll be lively outside MSG, but as a longtime New Yorker I've seen my share of lively, and the cops know their jobs. So come on down, kids. Just remember to hydrate.

UPDATE. Reader Myca offers this account of a Protest Warrior counterdemo. Apparently part of their schtick is videotaping the people they're protesting, which makes me wonder if they're not getting adult supervision from PW Fanboy David Horowitz, who has been known to do surveillance of his enemies in the past.

DEFINING JOURNALISM DOWN. I really do wish I were conservative sometimes, not only because the resulting reduction in brain activity might ease these horrible, horrible headaches, but also because it would increase my chances of publishing stuff that I had written while drunk or half-asleep or both, as demonstrated by this National Review Online article: A right-wing professor goes to Taxachusetts, where he finds feminist professors deconstructing Nathaniel Hawthorne. They do not share his distaste for Hester Prynne's adultery, so he makes fun of them. ("Fun" is used here in the familiar colloquial sense, not to imply that there is any actual fun to be had from the professor's account.) He runs into some Japanese people who don't say anything feminist, so he doesn't make fun of them -- actually he doesn't do much of anything with them. Then he runs into a tour guide who tells him more about the architecture of the House of the Seven Gables than he wants to know, so he calls the guide "jejune," an academic term that translates roughly as "Target store clerk insufficiently bent to my will" in Lileksese.

Imagine going on little adventures like this, making only such observations as flatter the prejudices of one's publisher, cutting and pasting them into more-or-less chronological order, submitting them to an editor with a strong stomach, and collecting for this modest effort a paycheck! No wonder they're always so cheerful over there.

FUCK YOU, EH. There is more imbecilism in this OpinionJournal thing about an American and a Canadian town than I want to spend much time addressing. I will just point out that, in comparing the "faceless bureaucracy" town of Stewart unfavorably to the "politically incorrect" town of Hyder ("politically incorrect" being, in rightwing world, a term of approbation, unless you're talking about sex or something evil like that), the authors find it necessary (in anticipation of adversarial journalistic answer, no doubt) to say that both municipalities accept beaucoup government largesse, that "in an earlier year's self-staged July 4 fireworks display, [Hyder] had accidentally burned down their fire hall with the fire engine inside," and that "The people of Hyder and Stewart are not nearly so different as they make themselves [sic] seem. They're friends, they go back and forth frequently, and they do a lot of the same kinds of work. It's not so much that they are different as individuals as that they choose to be different as communities."

In other words, they live peaceably together, though some of the people like to hang loose and some of the people like to hang tight.

Nonetheless, the OJ article seeks to show that the wild 'n' crazy free-marketeers of Hyder (and, by association, the tough-talking authors of this piece of shit) are morally superior to low-key residents of Stewart, and (by means of quotes from cowboy movies) to fan up some heat between the two apparently harmonious communities.
 
Having some Canadian ancestry and experience myself, I would imagine the good citizens of Stewart will find some quiet, polite way to express disapproval of this un-asked for incendiarism -- perhaps a gastask full of sugar -- in the unlikely event these social scientists happen back that way.

MY UNRINGING ENDORSEMENT. I have read the Democratic Party Platform, and found it full of the bland generalities and meaningless catch-phrases that have made America great. Nonetheless I am impressed with some of the concrete proposals, such as:

More than a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Russia still has nearly 20,000 nuclear weapons and enough nuclear material to produce 50,000 more. For most of these weapons and materials, cooperative security upgrades have not been completed. The world is relying on whatever measures Russia has taken on its own. At the current pace, it will take 13 years to secure potential bomb material in the former Soviet Union. We cannot wait that long. We will do it in four years.

Best of luck, President Kerry, especially after the Congress rushes for the exits when President Putin, in whose soulless, murderer’s eyes President Bush II found such deep reservoirs of fellow-feeling, turns out his pockets to dramatically indicate his complete inability to assist in this badly needed project.

But let us absent ourselves from pessimism awhile and consider some platform boilerplate that does indeed gladden the heart:

Today's tax law provides big breaks for companies that send American jobs overseas. Current "deferral" policies allow American companies to avoid paying American taxes on the income earned by their foreign subsidiaries. John Kerry and John Edwards will end deferral that encourages companies to ship jobs overseas, and they will close other loopholes to make the tax code work for the American worker…

President Bush and the Republicans in Congress have ignored the middle class since day one of this Administration. They have catered to the wealth of the richest instead of honoring the work of the rest of us. They have promised almost everything and paid for almost nothing. And the middle class is shouldering more taxes, earning less money, and bearing higher costs. The bottom line for the middle class under President Bush and the Republican Party is this: Instead of working hard to get ahead, the middle class is working hard just to get by…

First, we must restore our values to our tax code. We want a tax code that rewards work and creates wealth for more people, not a tax code that hoards wealth for those who already have it. With the middle class under assault like never before, we simply cannot afford the massive Bush tax cuts for the very wealthiest. We should set taxes for families making more than $200,000 a year at the same level as in the late 1990s, a period of great prosperity when the wealthiest Americans thrived without special treatment…

While this falls far short of the alicublog plan, which involves the entrails of priests and the necks of tyrants -- and what is this "middle class" to which the authors refer, and how may I, a humble salaryman with no hope of owning a home or car anytime soon, join it? -- it is still refreshing to hear of mainstream politicians with some hope of attaining Executive power address, however feebly, the savage inequity in relations between the haves and the have-increasingly-lesses. Saint Ralph may be more pure, but the Big Stiff and his charismatic teen sidekick have at least some shot at adjusting the machinery of power a little more in favor of us hapless unbillionaires, and in these parlous times that will have to do.

ALSO, THOMAS HARRIS IS NOT A SERIAL KILLER, AND CARL SANDBURG WAS NOT ABRAHAM LINCOLN.National Review Online advances its willful misunderstanding of simple reality a great deal with this incoherent Mark W. Davis piece:

Alfred A. Knopf... has decided that it is now acceptable to sell, as edgy entertainment, Checkpoint, a novella by Nicholson Baker that explores explicit fantasies about killing President George W. Bush...

Davis appears to have heard about a character in the book who has these fantasies. But unlike you arty-farty literary types, he considers the words "character" and "author" to be synonyms:

The author and publisher, no doubt, will argue that they are expressing an emotion, not an intention (which would be illegal). The problem is, intentions emerge out of emotions.... Checkpoint, whatever its literary conceits, will be an act of linguistic terrorism...

Sometimes you wonder whether they're dumb or malign, but here it's easy. If Davis were really as stupid as he's pretending to be, he wouldn't be able to write complete sentences.