THE PERFESSER MAKES AN OFFER. Reynolds boldy triangulates off Andrew Sullivan! It's a Sister Soulless moment! "If I were in charge of making the decision, I might well put the tube back and turn Terri Schiavo over to her family..." Can we pursuade him, Jesus fans? Keep hitting that tipjar! I think he's only a coupla iPods away from comin' to Jesus!

THE PRIZE WON AND RETIRED. I sometimes read movie reviews at National Review just to see how painfully they can twist works of popular art to suit their own ends. They've come down a long way since the days when John Simon actually reviewed films for them, instead of expostulating on their social paradigms.

But NRO will have to huff and puff a good deal more before they disgorge anything like this, from Paul Cella at Redstate:

But the whole drift of the film, aside from some occasional flashes, fails to give criticism the foundation and balance of philosophy – precisely because it fails to self-criticize. It sees with poignancy and even power the wounds sin inflicted in a lost age of man; but it cannot see what wounds sin is inflicting even now, in our own age...

The guns of tradition — strangely assembled, an eclectic mix no one could have predicted — have already begun to congregate, as Mary Eberstadt demonstrated in a brilliant piece examining the thematic roots of the more grim members of popular music, which often lie in seething anger at divorce. The fortress of sexual liberation is already doomed, though none can say with any certainty what will follow it...

As the University of Pennsylvania historian A. C. Kors one wrote, if you want to discover the most powerful objections to Christianity, look not to the haughty doyen of the modern age, the Darwinists and Nihilists and Rationalists; look instead to the sed contra objections of the great mediaeval Schoolmen.

What most marks the Modern Age is that thing from which the creed of the Cross recoils most sedulously...

Would you have ever guessed that this is from a meditation on the Julia Roberts weeper Mona Lisa Smile?

I get the feeling this guy would come up with the same thing if you showed him The Rules of the Game or Lola Montes. Or Space Jam. Or a blank screen.

SHORTER MICHAEL TOTTEN. The country is being run by irresponsible lunatics -- eactly as I expected when I voted for them!

ADDENDUM. I have been seeing some prominent Bushites (e.g. Young Curmudgeon and Balloon Juice) who are disgusted and even shaken in their faith by the Schiavo schmegegge. My instinct and custom has been to take such provisional repentances with a large grain of salt -- because in the hour of doubt, these questioning souls are usually visited by a demon who whispers, "But the liberals are weak on defense," bringing the penitent back more bellicosely wrong than before.

But let me presume a little good faith, if only as an exercise. As the clinical psychologists among you may recognize, my cynicism is partly a defense against my own urges, bred by years in Catholic schools, to enable auto-da-fes of my own. I will not join in calling conservative apostates to renounce Satan and all his works and come to Jesus, D.-Heaven. While in my weaker moments I imagine the emotionalism of our current politics being turned to liberal benefit, and how poetically just that would be, the bitter angels of my nature remind me that 'twas ever thus, that my own kind would also abuse the privileges pertaining thereunto, and I might turn into some sort of a Michael Totten, which would be a fitting if unspeakably cruel punishment.

Because when you gain votes by dispensing fear and resentment, you are creating and enabling a horde of addicts; they are almost certain to come for your wares again, but they will want more each time, and will be more desperate; and, when you show weakness, or run out of the sacred shit, they will turn on you without mercy.

Q. E. D.

FREE TO BE YOU AND ME, AND TO GO SOMEWHERE ELSE FOR YOUR Ph.D. Before the release of an internal report on charges of student intimidation by wrongthinking Professors, Columbia President Lee C. Bollinger spoke the obvious, which, alas, apparently needed to be spoken. Per the NYT:

"We should not say that academic freedom means that there is no review within the university, no accountability, for the 'content' of our classes or our scholarship," he said. "There is a review, it does have consequences, and it does consider content"...

"The question is not whether a professor advocates a view," he said, "but whether the overall design of the class, and course, is to explore the full range of the complexity of the subject"...

While stressing that the university would not tolerate intimidation of students in the classroom, Mr. Bollinger stressed that "we will not punish professors -- or students -- for the speech or ideas they express as part of public debate and public issues"...

He also rejected the "academic bill of rights" proposed by David Horowitz, a conservative activist, that, he said, calls for a plurality of methodologies and perspectives in both hiring and curricula -- a proposal some state legislators are considering.

"We should not accept the idea that the remedy for lapses is to add more professors with different political points of view, as some would have us do," Mr. Bollinger said. "The notion of a balanced curriculum, in which students can, in effect, select and compensate for bias, sacrifices the essential norm of what we are supposed to be about in a university. It's like saying of doctors in a hospital that there should be more Republicans, or more Democrats. It also risks polarization of the university, where liberals take courses from liberal professionals and conservatives take conservatives classes."

The slap at Horowitz -- whose schemes for outside review of classroom content have, as I've said before, very unpleasant historical connotations -- is especially pleasing, but on the whole this should be unobjectionable to anyone who believes in academic freedom, not as a Constitutional matter, but as a vital component of Western Civilization.

Of course, that description may not be a good fit for the Ole Perfesser, who once suggested that the hate mail his readers wanted to send Nicholas De Genova might be more profitably sent to Bollinger, and even helpfully provided Bollinger's email address.

To repeat myself once again, students who do not like their Columbia education can always transfer to Liberty University. That's the free market in action, baby! I thought these guys believed in it.

POET VERY MAUDIT. Here's an amazing story: a Massachusetts murderer, apprehended after 20 years on the lam, had used his years of freedom to establish himself as a poet in Chicago.

What a cover! Norman Porter operated under the nom de plume J. J. Jameson -- which of course was the name of Spider-Man's boss, though I like to believe that it was meant, at least subconsciously, as an echo of Gulley Jimson. As described by friends and witnesses, Jameson seems to have found the transition from killer to poet rather natural:

...an elder statesman of Chicago's poetry scene -- a garrulous curmudgeon, the guy with the exaggerated Maine accent shouting from the audience for others to "Shut up and read the [expletive] poem!"...

He would wear a summer-weight suit and a bow tie in July, a second-hand fedora tilted atop his head. He was the Bug House Square re-enactor, the artist-provocateur, the hand-to-mouth handyman...

...said David Gecic, a longtime friend who published a book of poetry written by Porter using the Jameson alias... "He was a great, caring guy -- occasionally very generous. His faults were drinking and extreme anger when he saw injustice."

Heckler, drunkard, dandy, hothead -- sounds like a lot of writers I know. Actually he sounds a little like me. Dust for prints!

The Chicago Poetry News, which recently made Jameson Poet of ther Month, has updated their page on him: "He has been one of Chicago's most beloved anti-war poets. And now we find out he's really NORMAN PORTER!!! He recently did a huge feature at Coffee Chicago despite having shoulder surgery a few days before; even Marc Smith showed up for that one..." That's one of the things I like about Chicawgo -- they take life in stride.

Funny old world.

DEATH-LOVERS. The Crazy Jesus Lady is crazier and Jesuser than ever in her current Schiavo article. I could fill my morning with close analysis of its absurdities, but for now I will content myself with this:

The pull-the-tube people say, "She must hate being brain-damaged." Well, yes, she must. (This line of argument presumes she is to some degree or in some way thinking or experiencing emotions.)

I haven't heard anyone say "she must hate being brain-damaged," have you? Neither has Google.

Maybe CJL heard something else and -- oh, let's be charitable -- reinterpreted it. I do believe that CJL has heard people lamenting Schiavo's state of demi-life, and shuddering aloud to imagine themselves trapped in such a state. I've certainly heard such sentiments, even from unexpected quarters. Perhaps the angels in her head whispered to CJL that such people just don't know what they're saying, to which CJL replied brightly, Well, let's just tell them what they're saying, then!

Interest in living wills has sharply increased in the wake of this sad affair. Online marketers have seen traffic generated by the phrase "living will" increase tremendously. I doubt very much that these people are looking for ways to keep their life systems going through years of a vegetative state.

I guess they're all "pro-death," in the words of the Crazy Jesus Lady. I look forwards to the conversations she'll now invent for the members of the Supreme Court.

WE'RE NOT NUTS, YOU'RE NUTS. Howard Dean won't have any luck spreading Democratic gospel in red states, says Holman W. Jenkins Jr. in OpinionJournal's Political Diary (no link, sorry, it's a subscription service -- I found mine lining the bottom of a virtual birdcage), because of "blue Democrats whose angry-loser mentality keeps pulling the party back in the wrong direction." Here's Jenkins' anecdote:

Monday's special congressional hearing in Columbus on the presidential election in Ohio. Reps. Juanita Millender-McDonald of California and Stephanie Tubbs Jones of Ohio repeatedly badgered Ohio's Republican (and black) Secretary of State Ken Blackwell over rulings made during the election campaign, with Ms. Tubbs Jones at one point suggesting he "haul butt" out of her sight when she didn't find his answers
satisfactory.

A certain kind of blue Democrat is obsessed with the loss of Ohio by 118,000
votes, a source of psychic compensation for the fact that Democrats lost by three million votes nationally, lost ground with core constituencies like Hispanics and blacks, lost in the fastest-growing states and communities, lost in the suburbs and vast swaths of non-urban America.

This may be to Republicans a soothing analysis at this time, when their own party appears to be going bughouse. But the Ohio hearing, which would naturally be of interest to politicans who represent that jurisdiction, hardly seems representative of a national Democratic obsession; while the folks at truthout still smell a rat, one can comb the MSM -- which, let us remember, we are daily assured is a front for the Democratic Party -- and find remarkably few of its investigative resources devoted to the Ohio vote. In fact, the most high-profile quibble on the Ohio numbers has been that of Christopher Hitchens, and he was probably just trying to beef up his contrarian cred.

Each side has its grudges and resentments, but there is plenty going on right now to distract us from them. (Alas.)

I will add that, as Jenkins apparently considers it important enough to note that Blackwell is black, it seems odd that he failed to mention that Millender-McDonald and Tubbs Jones are, too. Oh, I forgot: we're supposed to be secret racists as well as nuts.

CRAPWATCH. The stream of gibberish loosed by the Schiavo case has grown so torrential that to identify the single most stupid statement issued on the subject by a prominent columnist would seem prohibitively difficult. Nonetheless, I think we have a winner! Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Brendan Miniter:

It is said that tough cases make bad law, and that's why it was wise for Congress to legislate only on this specific case rather than "making law" for everyone.

Such a perfect storm of bad faith, outrageous assertion, and absurdly inapposite employment of cliche, made from so high a perch as the Wall Street Journal, rarely occurs, and should be noted. Bonus points for the maudlin references in the rest of the copy to the subject as "Terri," as if she were a personal acquaintance, or a Lakers basketball star.

Or have I missed a better example?

UPDATE. Commenter Steve has a good candidate in Andrew McCarthy, who thinks "someone" should be in handcuffs for countenancing the removal of Schiavo's feeding tube (but hasn't the balls to call for any specific individual's arrest -- or, for that matter, to make a citizen's arrest of his own). Bonus points to McCarthy, too, for figuring an Abu Ghraib angle. I think Miniter still wins for the celerity of his stupidity -- congratulating Congress for their restraint in this extraordinary case because they aren't "'making law' for everyone" packs a lot of foolishness in a single sentence.

UPDATE II. Another good candidate proposed: Meghan Cox Gurdon, who uses Lewis' Screwtape Letters as a point of departure -- and departs indeed, and promptly, from Lewis' art to the arid plains of Propagandaland. Here's a bit of Lewis' original; the writing is thoughtful and stylish (if a bit damp); above all Lewis details a specific, recognizable perspective and manner, and even seems to take pleasure in the masquerade, which makes Screwtape vivid and interesting. Gurdon is doing a parody, true; but then we ought to have jokes at least, and what she provides in their place ("The walls are hung with scarlet velvet; the temperature an agreeable Fahrenheit 911") wouldn't tickle a Bible camper. Her Screwtape acts less like a devil than the villain in a bad Bruce Willis movie, and before long we're getting the material Hell House gave a pass ("The Right to Die... devilishly clever"). If there is a hell, the hottest rooms should be reserved for perverters of art.

UPDATE III. In comments Jeremy asks if the statements of Tom DeLay qualify for our competition. As he also intuits, politicians are in a whole other league from pundits, though, as this weblog has shown, the pundits are fast gaining on them, and the Schiavo affair may yet prove to be their Super Bowl III.

Also cited is John Derbyshire's lonely stand at The Corner. I am less interested, though, in the yowling of his challengers than in Derb's steadfastness. I have had a lot of fun with Derbyshire over the years, so risible has been his reactionary posturing and dedication to the proposition that he is refreshingly "politically incorrect" when he is merely an asshole. But the stark madness that has overtaken Derbyshire's colleagues seems to have shaken him into awareness that he is a grown-up, and as such he is most required to keep his head when all about are losing theirs. Ditto Brookhiser, but I always knew he had it in him. (Perhaps I should have seen it in Derbyshire too; no one who loves Hank Williams can be all bad.)

As for Hugh Hewitt, Jesus Fucking Christ. Glenn is right: that patch of Hewitt weaving between anger that Schiavo could die, and anger that the teenage Minnesota shooter will not die (in part because he's already fucking dead), captures a certain type of moral philosophy at its worst.

But we have been at this a while; the matin draws nigh. I sense the barometric pressure dropping, and a soothing mist descending. Might we have seen the worst of this?

BRAIN DEAD. I recently talked to a fellow whose aged, infirm mother passed on last year. At one point the woman was hovering between life and death, and the doctors had a talk with her son: we can probably revive her, they said, but she will certainly be brain dead and unable to breathe on her own. No heroic measures were taken, and the woman died peacefully.

This sort of thing -- for those of our readers unacquainted with life as it is lived by actual human beings -- goes on all the time.

Of course, but for an accident of timing, hordes of imbeciles might have forced Congress into an extraordinary session to get the mother on a respirator, or denounced the son as a murderer, or explained that the moral superiority of persistent vegetative states was proven by their childhood reaction to a "Star Trek" episode.

At the moment the American people seem to recognize what a lot of bullshit this whole Schiavo case is. But what they think hardly matters. The Republicans, flush with power, know that they can get away with a lot right now, and so are quickly handing out candy to their most powerful interest groups. The banks and financial companies got their turn with the Bankruptcy Bill, the oil companies got theirs with ANWR; now the Jesus Freaks are getting some play.

In the meantime, in case I can't scrape the money together for a living will soon enough, allow me to state here that I don't want to be kept alive in a persistent vegetative state, and hope my friends will act to end my misery should it come to that. I only hope the madness of our age doesn't make my wishes too hard to honor, and that no politically-motivated busybody gets the chance to exult over my drooling, mindless body.

CULTURE WARRIORS, WANKER DIVISION.<CountFloydvoice>Hey, boys and girls, you like scaaaaary movies? Ow-wooooo! Well, we got a special treat for you today -- a sneak peek at the sequel to the super scarey movie The Ring! You know, with the little girl she comes out of the well and you play the video and you die and -- hoo, boy that was some scary stuff! Ow-wooooo! Here to scare you now is Thomas Hibbs of the National Review Online.</CountFloydvoice>:

The Ring Two brings these two themes together in Sissy Spacek’s character, who advises the confused Rachel, “Send it back…Be a good mother.” It is perhaps too much to see Spacek as a horror-world stand-in for the detached, Enlightenment rationalism of the pro-euthanasia philosopher, Peter Singer, although the best piece on Singer, Peter Berkowitz’s essay in The New Republic, bears the striking title “The Utilitarian Horrors of Peter Singer.” As poorly made as it is, the film nonetheless gets at the horrifying reality of such proposals in ways utilitarian logic never could.

<CountFloydvoice>What the -- Ow-wooooo! Wasn't that scaaaary, kids? Huh? All that utilitarianism and radical veganism... think of the effect on contemporary mores! Ow-wooooo! Okay, so maybe it wasn't scarey -- in fact it's kinda pedantic and stupid! But these people do this kind of stuff all the time -- take silly movies and turn them into pamphlets for their stupid cause and suck the life out of everything. Think about it -- they're like -- like zombie nerds -- hiding in cubicles waiting to grab a scarey movie and suck the life out of it! Ow-wooooo! Still not scarey, huh? Well, wait until you get a little older and they put you in work-camps, boys and girls! That's scarey! Ow-wooooooo!</CountFloydvoice>

GOOD READING ON GREAT CITIES. I am reading a few books about New Orleans for research purposes. One, Robert Tallent's Mardi Gras... As It Was, dates from the 40s. It is wonderfully crowded with fact and incident, and its slightly stiff, reportorial tone provides a lovely medium for the many outrages it describes:

...In Gallatin Street, for instance, where police would not venture even in the broadest daylight, the murders showed a remarkable increase on Mardi Gras, although there was always bloodshed and excitement in that vicinity. In Gallatin Street the inhabitants' costumes were very simple. Both men and women would wear masks for their dances, but they wore nothing else, except perhaps a gun or a knife strapped to a thigh or an armpit.

But Gallatin Street was a country garden compared with an uptown section on and around Girad Street known as the Swamp. It was a boast of the Swamp that not for twenty years had an officer of the law dared to set foot in the section, and that the half-dozen murders that occurred every week were never investigated, never even reported. Bodies were as a matter of custom left where they fell in the mud streets or on a saloon floor until the odors drove the inhabitants to toss them into the river. A man could obtain a drink, a woman, and a bed for the night for six cents in this neighborhood, although it was certain that if he had any other money on him it would be gone when he awoke in the morning -- if he awoke at all...

The other book is New Orleans Unmasqued, from the mid-80s by S. Frederick Starr, described on the dust jacket as "president of Oberlin College, a distinguished Russian scholar and an advisor on Soviet affairs"; the end-notes add that he is clarinetist for the Louisiana Repertory Jazz Ensemble, and also its founder. This is a more general and desultory homage to the city, and many of its meditations are just pure pleasure, particularly this one on the historical character of New Orleans men:

...In their dealings with one another they avoided face-to-face conflict, prefering behind-the-scenes negotiations wherever possible. Rather than offer a firm "No" to a ridiculous business proposition from an old friend, the standard method was to nod gravely and equivocably, waffle for a few weeks and then do nothing. Everyone understands... This kept the ranks intact, heaven knows, but it institutionalized weakness and dependence. And it made the gents sitting ducks for opportunists from elsewhere...

But those same men possess other attributes that are unknown to the macho crowd of hyperactive doers. They have the time of day for friendships. They are reserved, but hospitable to a fault. Being acutely aware of their own failings, they are quick to forgive the weaknesses of others. Their sense of humor is genuine and honed by constant exercise...

The rarity of this attitude in the mainstream of male American Babbittry shows once more that not all desirable ends in this life are compatible.

I've never been but I'd sure like to go. Till then reading is adventure enough.

THE LAST OF THE REAGAN DEMOCRATS. I'm not sure what this Michele Catalano column is about. I have been able to identify two themes:

1.) The second Bush Administration disappoints her. "There are others out there like me... we feel used. We feel taken advantage of. We feel manipulated."

2.) But that doesn't mean she's a goddamn liberal. "...a flurry of clenched fists and righteous indignation, with calls for me to go out and start protesting (or something like that) to prove my regret... And this doesn’t mean that I’m going to suddenly sign up for the Democrat party and start carrying around No Blood For Oil placards."

The election was four months ago. At that time, her reaction was a long harangue at liberals ("You ran your own campaign, one filled to the brim with bile and acidic spittle and you wonder why you feel so black today?"). Later she wrote, "Just because a state is blue on a map, Ted [Rall], does not mean that we, the red zombies, are not here. We are. We exist. And for the next four years Horton the elephant is watching over us." Later she wrote, "How the Democrats, the left, the liberals, whatever they want to call themselves, have suddenly decided it's ok to pass around the jugs filled with smug hatred, to lick their lips as they drool the slobbering bigotry all over themselves, to become everything they always claimed they weren't." Later she wrote... well, you see how it goes.

I would like to be more sympathetic. I'm told we need to be reaching out. But I know that if the Democrats nominated Jesus Christ Almighty in 2008, and Jeb Bush's people told this woman that JCA is soft on terror and unfit for command, she'd fall for that, too. And blame us afterwards.

MINORITY REPORT. As the grey eminence of the blogosphere, I hate to be drawn into "fun" online events, but Majikthise, Norbizness, LG&M, and other worthies have listed their top films of the 1990s, and none of them has even mentioned the obvious crowning glory of that decade, and this bestirs me to join the young people, in their fancy discotheque with their bumptious music and flashing lights, and say my say.

I could talk about Happiness for hours, but I will only say here that though it travels disguised as an outrage, it is a morally serious film, indeed almost a moral pageant. Each of the characters is looking for some recognizable variant of happiness -- from cheap thrills to true love to the peace of the grave -- and each expects it from other people, who are of course unable to provide it. (They sometimes seem to provide it, but there's always a problem: one doesn't have the right looks, another is incapable of love, another has a corpse in her freezer, etc.) None of the characters thinks to find happiness within himself, but Timmy at least has a chance -- he learns to make himself cum! So, you see, it is really a life-affirming sex comedy, albeit one in which the hero's father rapes little boys.

I love Goodfellas, The Big Lebowski, The Sweet Hereafter, and many of the other contenders, but I insist this very odd film is at least as successful on its own terms as they are on theirs.

SHORTED CRAZY JESUS LADY. I only wrote 600 words, yet Jesus has blessed me with a 3,500-word story. Praise His Holy Name!

THE DEATH OF THE WEST. When critics say that radical professors have "a unique hostility toward Western traditional and commonsense attitudes," and that their "true raison d'etre is in practice nothing other than to destroy to destroy utterly whatever allegiance a young person might have to traditional conceptions in morality, religion, politics and culture," are they talking about this guy?

…I am especially pleased that the killing — and, yes, I am happy to call it a killing, a perfectly proper term for a perfectly proper act — was a slow throttling, and was preceded by a flogging…

…I like civilization, but some forms of savagery deserve to be met not just with cold, bloodless justice but with the deliberate infliction of pain, with cruel vengeance rather than with supposed humaneness or squeamishness.

These are the words of right-wing legal eagle Eugene Volokh, whose sadism is excited by the Iranian mullahs’ decidedly pre-Enlightenment idea of justice.

Though the guilty party – and I suppose his guilt is a settled matter, the Iranian courts being models of probity – was convicted of unspeakable crimes, you might expect a Professor of Law (Constitutional Law, at that!) to at least acknowledge that flogging, stabbing, and slow-throttling to death is definitely Cruel and Unusual Punishment. Professor Volokh does, but with a surprise twist!

I'm not an expert on the history of the clause, but my point is that the punishment is proper because it's cruel (i.e., because it involves the deliberate infliction of pain as part of the punishment), so it may well be unconstitutional. I would therefore endorse amending the Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause to expressly exclude punishment for some sorts of mass murders.

His fellow tenured radical agrees. Well, Volokh was always comfortable with torture – I just didn’t know he considered it a desirable part of the criminal justice system of free nations.

This is about as anti-Western as you can get, but somehow I don’t think Feser, Horowitz, and all the other Canon-keepers will give Volkh a hard time. Because while they’re not above using Western Civ as a cover for their inquisitions, they really couldn’t give a shit about it. What do they care about? Hard to tell. I think it has to do with power, and perhaps pain.

UPDATE. Fixed links.

OUR POST-LITERATE FUTURE. I've been having some fun with the whole stupid "protest babe" thing, but some people take it more seriously: Michael Totten shows a bunch of pictures of Lebanese protestors, pro- and anti-Syria, and says that the relative prettiness and happiness of the anti-Syrians' pictures "really do speak for themselves."

Of what do they speak for themselves? Totten's commenters explain:

What you see is the difference b between pure hearts and evil ones. The smile on an evil face can never be as refreshing ad one one a good face. Evil betrays itself for all to see.

...coercive people are almost always mean, angry, repressive, and they think it's all for the greater good...

Look at the faces in each group...A picture tells a thousand stories.
One group looks happy and free,
*******while the other,*********
with their faces covered, looks dark and violent, (why?)...

It almost looks like Men and Elves vs. Orcs from the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, doesn't it? Too bad that in many ways it is. Let's hope the outcome is the same, albeit with a lot less bloodshed.

...I'll go out on a limb and say the Syrian thugs look a heckuva lot like the anarchist punks who riot in the streets of San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland, all the way down to the flag-burning and masks.

In case you're thinking I'm tarring Totten with the imbecility of his guests, the last quote is from Totten himself.

The political issue is a non-issue. Can you show me an article by any prominent American writer, liberal or not, calling for Syria to crack down? Lebanon will get as much freedom as America finds it expedient to insist upon. Ask, if you have a Ouija board handy, Reagan, the hero of Beirut.

So why the photo-heavy posts? My guess is that the blog elite have decided that they have done all the recruiting they can from the literate classes, and that it is time to pitch a little lower. And so they run lots of posts showing cute Cedar Revolutionaries versus grim Assadists. We are in favor of happy people! the crude photo juxtapositions say. Join us! It is the "whiny liberals" theme that has served wingers well since the Age of Safire, but dumbed down for an audience increasingly disinclined to read anything, but trained by the electric shocks of mass media to respond affirmatively to pitchers of purty gurls.

In a few years -- maybe months -- I expect the sites of Totten, Reynolds et alia will be replaced by streaming media of the Parallax Corporation's training film.

THE FUN NEVER STOPS WITH THE FUN FACTORY. Fresh from his bout with a rubber doll, Jonah Goldberg encounters another, but after a brief flail he shows a capacity to learn and gets his buddies to help him wrestle the rubber doll. After they have subdued the doll, Jonah gets some milk, which seems to calm him down.

Sometimes I think they're providing all this entertainment just for me.

STRAINED CREDULITY ON A BED OF PABLUM. Leon Kass, the Chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, seems to be working up a winger consortium devoted to outlawing some forms of genetic research, including cloning and stem cell variants. One might think that the President's Council was already such an organization, consulted as it has been by such as Charles "I'm Not Nuts, You're Nuts" Krauthammer and Robert P. "Unite Organically With Me, Baby" George, but apparently they weren't hardcore enough for Kass.

This has Iain Murray at Tech Central Station in full libertarian regalia, calling for Kass' resignation. As Murray usually defends Administration science policy, this must have been difficult for him, and it shows in the shuffling of his rhetorical feet as he explains himself: he is not for "objectivity," which is after all a word used by Rep. Henry Waxman, but for "procedural justice," which sounds like the same thing, only with an air of mystery wafted over it, as with Arlen Specter's invocation of Scottish Law.

But the kicker is that Murray says Kass' sin has been to defy the will of President Bush:

The merits of Dr. Kass's preferred policies are irrelevant here. The problem is that by hitching his star to a particular set of policies he has breached the trust set in him by the President, whose executive order creating the council asked it to "explore specific ethical and policy questions related to these developments; [and] to provide a forum for a national discussion of bioethical issues."

Does anyone on God's green earth believe that Bush would countenance even a Procedurally Just Council if there were any chance that it might come back with a full-speed-ahead on cloning etc.?

This reminds me of the popular invocations among this sort of Saudi Arabia as a nexus of Middle Eastern tyranny. Of course it is, but the notion of a Bush crackdown on the corrupt House of Saud is hilarious. Still we have guys like Cal Thomas citing "straight-talking Donald Rumsfeld" and Victor Davis Hanson as indicators that the Sauds are in our sights, and comparing the Wahhabi menace to the American Communist Party. One would think the Sauds were being propped up by Ted Kennedy. Yet as long as the Sauds keep the oil pumping, we have every reason to expect that figleaf elections will do to keep Saudi Arabia exempt from our invasions-for-democracy program, and in line for gentle treatment.

A Council that was a set-up from day one is said to have strayed from its original, procedurally-just charter; a tyranny to whom we are friendly is portrayed as a potential target. It makes my head spin just to read it -- I can only imagine what the effect of writing it must be.

DIPLOMACY, SCHIPLOMACY. For our new Undersec'y State for Public Diplomacy, Bush has hired family friend and flack Karen Hughes. The job had previously been held in this Administration by advertising giant Charlotte Beers, which seemed like a bold move at the time, but produced confusion and boondoggles. Beers was replaced by longtime GOP/Big Business insider Margaret Tutwiler, whose 2004 pitch to Congress for funds contains lots of wounded references to budget shortfalls, and uninspiring proposals such as "micro-scholarships" for Middle Eastern kids.

With the elevation of Ms. Hughes, the position has been officially demoted from "sinecure" to "something for a relative or pal who needs a leg up and wants to get home early on Fridays." And "mandate," apparently, means "we don't give a fuck."

"RIGHT" AGAIN. An odd conservative tic I've noticed over the years is their tendency to describe rights as quote-unquote "rights" -- e.g., "There is no end to the so-called rights which can be demanded," and "So-called rights of homosexuals really amount to a campaign to legitimize homosexuality," and "I have no sympathy for the so called 'rights' of terrorists or killers or those that plan it at all," etc.

This schtick is taken a little further than usual today by Arnold Ahlert, whose credentials for his New York Post column are a mystery to me -- maybe someone at the paper thought it would be neat to hire someone who looked like Jerry Della Femina after two years in a survivalist camp. In an article regarding the Atlanta escaped-defendant incident, Ahlert writes, "If reports out of Atlanta are accurate, the so-called 'rights' of an accused person to a 'fair and impartial trial' have passed the point of absurdity."

Yeah, what kind of rights freak thinks you have a so-called right to a 'fair and impartial trial'? That's not even in the Bill of So-Called 'Rights'!

How to explain Western jurisprudence to Arnold Ahlert? Well, Francis Gaffney, speaking at an OSCE Meeting in 2003, said it pretty well (and on behalf of the U.S. Government): "...citizens should be able to expect that their grievances against the state or other individuals or against organizations will be addressed impartially in a professionally competent judicial system. This is a bedrock principle of democracy. In the absence of rule of law and an independent judiciary, democracy cannot take root or flourish. All the guarantees of a constitution are set aside when citizens cannot be assured of the right to a fair and impartial trial."

The relationship of Ahlert's outburst to the alleged topic of his article is tenuous at best. If you want to read something smart about a killing spree, try Julia.