SHORTER OLE PERFESSER: The boys sorta got outta hand with these here "minorities," but that's what happens when the government is always bending over backwards for niggers.

REYNOLDS' UNIVERSAL ROBOTS. A few posts back, when I quoted Motörhead ("That's the way I like it, baby, I don't want to live forever"), I was aware that not everyone sees things that way. Perfesser Glenn Reynolds, for one, looks forward to a near-future in which exist "individuals with powers that would have been until recently regarded as godlike." The Perfesser has elaborated:

Yes, it's possible to draw parallels between the Christian idea of The Rapture -- and, even more generally, between religious ideas of transcendence generally -- and the notion that, once human technology passes a certain threshold, roughly that described by Vinge and other Singularity enthusiasts, human beings will potentially enjoy the kind of powers and pleasures traditionally assigned to gods or beings in heaven: Limitless lifespans, if not immortality, superhuman powers, virtually limitless wealth, fleshly pleasures on demand, etc.

Oddly enough, I was reading Çapek's R.U.R. around the same time, which put me into a fugue state, and resulted in this:

2079

(A midwestern American town. Citizens, like the ones we know today, but with hyperextended thumbs and gently sloping brows, gather in a town square surrounded by barbed-wire and kill-droid guardians, in a high state of excitement)

ACE II: (mounting a plinth) Citizens! We are juiced today by the hyperpresence of the greatest robot lawgiver in our nation-state! Throw your citizenguns in the air like you just don't care for Perfesser Glenn Harlan Reynolds!

(Applause, shrieks, citizengunfire. ACE II descends and the PERFESSER mounts the plinth. He moves somewhat stiffly, being a nanotechnologic replication of his former pre-Singularity self; but his plasticine body is covered in roomy, luminescent grey cloth, and his head -- actually a titanium CPU -- is encased in a bullet-proof glass globe, upon the front of which is projected a lifelike image of his face from his pre-transhumanist days, and on top of which, like Happy Hooligan's hat, rests a small solar generator. His voice issues from a small speaker near what used to be his throat.)

THE PERFESSER: (With a gentle, whirring sound, his arms raise) Citizens! Heh! (giddy general response: "Heh!") Indeed! ("Indeed!") Hear me! (With a gentle, whirring sound, his arms descend; the crowd grows still) I am come to tell you that World War XXVII goes well, and the Free Market still rules! (whistles, cries of "hehindeed") Only a few statists remain in six or seven unsuburban spider-holes. And the statist stronghold of Madison, Wisconsin, I hehindeed to tell you, is today a Patriot Zone! (Cheers, gunfire) We heard the good news this morning from Ann Althouse, who will share it with you today.

(ACE II hands the PERFESSER a medium-sized globe, within which flickers an electronic representation of the face of ANN ALTHOUSE, rendered in psychedelic colors)

ALTHOUSE GLOBE: What a hoot! Partisan peoples running around, then they splashed like Jackson Pollock all over the walls and floors. They were so depressive! Why would I care about them! My toes were all tingly! I saw a pretty butterfly.

(The ALTHOUSE GLOBE makes a sputtering noise. The PERFESSER's arm rises; the crowd applauds; The PERFESSER's arm wobbles, which the crowd takes as a sign to be still)

THE PERFESSER: This news is very hehindeed, but we still face challenges from the Islamocommifascistevilstatistsquareds. (boos, screams, beach balls tossed) I am told that last night Kimkushkiba rockets landed just outside the Freedom Zone. (His voice slowly rising as ACE II turns his volume knob) Citizens, you know what we must do: increase production of iBrains threefold! And of Cafesodasplurges even more! And blog! Blog! Forever blog! (The crowd cheers lustily) For it is blogging, and coffee drinks, and technology, and most of all the Free Market that will destroy our enemies, as it did in the days of Winston Dubya and Reagan Hayek! Thank you, Good Night, and HehIndeed!

(The PERFESSER is helped from the plinth to enjoy the favors of robowhores, as the citizens scream, do the Electric Slide, and shoot each other with their citizenguns.)

2197

(The same midwestern American town as before, but somewhat the worse for wear. Citizens wear crudely-stitched flannel shirts and shapeless leggings, and gather around the PERFESSER, whose body-stocking is now of a faded pink, and stands erect only because he has had an iron bar implanted in his back. His face-image flickers but dimly in his head-globe.)

CITIZEN 1: (holds a stick shaped like a microphone at the PERFESSER) Perfesser! You say we beat Islamofish! That no true me think! Bomb bomb bomb all the time! Me sick alla time and wife she dead!

(Other CITIZENS roar, and point at the sky, each other, and the PERFESSER blocks of wood shaped like handguns.)

CITIZEN 2: Me sick too! Me iBrain no make tune no more! (crying) Me only know one tune no more! (tunelessly wails) "Put body, put body in motion! Put body in lo-co-co-motion!" (snarls, eyes gleaming at the PERFESSER)Uck uck uck! Me hate 'im! It sugg! IT SUGG! IT SUGG! EAT MY SHORT YOU KILL KENNY! EAT MY SHORT YOU KILL KENNY!

(Crowd yells and waves its wooden guns)

THE PERFESSER: (his voice tinny and faint) Citizens, citizens. The Free Market is the answer to your problems. Hehindeed. What is your manufacture? Where is your technology?

CITIZEN 1: Technol'gy? Technol'gy? (Pulls his flannel shirt up by the chest) We smesh together ol' clothes! Cause me got sewing machine, we pedal with feet! Cause no electric! Cause all bomb! Me make wood gun to fight, an' me fight you! You no good! You no good!

(Citizens hurl their wooden guns at THE PERFESSER, who topples, but whose face maintains its rictus grin.)

THE PERFESSER: Where are my robowhores? Bring me my robowhores!

2230

(The same midwestern American town as before. The air is full of blue smoke. The PERFESSER is in the same spot and prone position as before. His plasticine body has flattened and is covered by filthy pink rags. The speaker that was near his throat has been ripped away. The glass globe that served for his head is cracked and unlighted, and to the front of it is taped an ancient photograph of Gordon Ramsey. The solar generator hat tilts almost to the ground, hanging by a few thin wires. Some wild boys, naked and filthy, run up to him. One holds the PERFESSER's former voice-box, and waves it at him tauntingly.)

BOY: Ea' myshort! Faggit funna funna! Fagga ea' myshort!

BOY 2: Skree!

BOY 3: Body in motion! Body in motion!

(The PERFESSER, with his last dying electrical charge, thinks: I have no mouth. And I must heh indeed.)

NEEDED: A BLOGGER COMMONPLACE BOOK. Tbogg provides the first precept:

No one is going to get a blogging Pulitzer for being the fastest to post what they just saw and heard on the TV.

I love that guy.

UPDATE. The nut whom Tbogg is advising does not appreciate the help; nor does he appreciate all those "Brave, Tough, Strong Warriors of the Left" who laugh at his bogus terror alerts. He says that "this country needs a divorce, or at least a trial separation period," from the Left.

Loyal commenters roger that: "Really, Ace, the left and right in this country severely need a divorce. That, or we're gonna kill the bitch." But there are a surprising number of dissenters, some with a good deal of moxie:

Funny how the bedwetters never seems to live in New York, LA, Chicago, whatever.

It's always some loser in Bumfuck, Nebraska who's afraid the swarthy brown man is gonna drop da bomb on him at the In & Out Burger on Main.

To steal a bit from Maher, New Rule: If you're going to wet the bed from every alleged terror plot, you must live within five hundred miles of civilization.

If only my trolls were that funny! But Mr. Spades should probably take heed: this weird, morose state can't be good for him or his co-religionists. Even Jim Lileks, a pants-pisser from way back, is sick of it: "Frankly, I’m weary of dismay. I’m tired of feeling like tremulous Belgium in the latter thirties. We need to buck up. To paraphrase: we need to barg the farg up."

That's the spirit, Jimbo! Barg the farg up, you farging schmarg! And you too, Mr. Spades -- stop apost-hating Andrew Sullivan, that's for Lamont moonbats, the GOP's a big tent! Have a nice big bowl of Patrioats, and turn your attention to the real enemy: common sense!

UPDATE II. He's taken my advice!

CHEAP JOKE FOR THE WEEKEND. Damnum Absque Injuria (new to me, but apparently a Perfesser fave -- and, like the Perfesser, the sort of "libertarian" who can pretty much take or leave Constitutional rights) has some yucks with conspiracy theorists:

Recently we’ve read that 38% of Americans polled believe the U.S. government is withholding information about UFOs proof of the existence of intelligent life from other planets, and 36% think 9/11 was an inside job... Is there any question so wacky that one-third of the population will not answer it in the affirmative?

Wait a second. What's Bush's approval rating again?

PERUBLICAN ALERT. Not to be too optimistic, but it appears that folks are warming to the Democratic Party, while they remain highly disapproving toward George W. Bush.

Naturally, Republicans cry for a do-over.

Wizbang announces that "we need two effective parties in America." For the Democrats to be effective,

Once the hysteria of discovering they are no longer in the majority, but actually in a condition which may fairly be described as a tailspin, the Democrats will have to decide if they are willing to do what it takes to survive.

And what would that be?

The Democrats need a center of focus, to understand what really matters.

I am new to Wizbang, and thought this might be the prelude to a yoga, Rosicrucianism, or colon-cleansing pitch. But there was no follow-up, new age or otherwise, so I assume the author just likes putting the words "Democrat" and "center" together, as if this magical confluence will summon up, Golem-like, an Army of Liebermans.

Oh, and Democrats have to stop their constant attacks on George W. Bush. And for the Republicans to be effective, they also have to stop their constant attacks on George W. Bush:

Republicans, for their part, were only too happy to take the gains which Dubya made happen, only to shun him the moment the MSM claimed he was not effective.

Let us pause to enjoy the mental image of Rick Santorum, his eyes glassy and arms outstretched, in zombie-like submission to the commands of Bill Keller.

The Republican Party also suffers, says Wizbang, from its "Extremists" -- and also from its "moderates," and from its "leaders" as well. Whew -- what's that even leave? Dubya, who "has done more for the United States of America and its citizens, than most Republicans and the Democrats put together."

To sum up, the Democrats -- who, here on planet Earth, may actually luck into some Congressional gains -- are portrayed as hapless losers in "freefall," while George W. Bush, polling at 36% approval, is the Republican Party's only hope, and must be prevailed upon to protect the GOP from the extremists, moderates, and leaders that would drag it down.

I still think the GOP can pull it off if they scream NINE ELEVEN! and FAGS GITTIN' HITCHED! loud enough, but it is nice to see their advocates and apologists so panicked for a change.

WHISKEY! DEMOCRACY! SEXY! BULLSHIT! NYT:

“Senior administration officials have acknowledged to me that they are considering alternatives other than democracy,” said one military affairs expert who received an Iraq briefing at the White House last month and agreed to speak only on condition of anonymity.

“Everybody in the administration is being quite circumspect,” the expert said, “but you can sense their own concern that this is drifting away from democracy.”

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, it is always good to see frauds exposed, and this unraveling might have a salutary shock effect on the American voter, and cause him to question his fearmasters. On the other hand, the state of our education and intellectual life being what it is, the American voter may not remember how we got into Iraq in the first place, and Bush might go on TV tomorrow and blame it on some recently-dead celebrity like, say, Bruno Kirby.

"Sadly," the President may tell them, "the lovable Ed Furillo of 'City Slickers' and Young Clemenza of 'The Godfather Part II' were not the only roles Bruno Kirby played. He was known to his terrorist minders by his secret Islamiciscisc... Islamsis... Islama-ci-sist name, Yabba Dabba Doo. As Bruno Kirby, he enjoyed a great reputation as both an actor and as an expert of Arab-American relations, and unprecendeted access at the highest levels of government. But as Yabba Dabba Doo, he was devoted to undermining and embarrassing the United States of America. When we invaded Iraq, our actions were based on his recommendations, and thousands have lost their lives, or their political viability, as a result of that tragic deception.

"The loved ones left behind in both America and Iraq may take some comfort that justice was done on August 8th, when Yabba Dabbo Doo was taken down by a team of Navy Seals posing as leukemia.

"We must make sure that America is never again caught unprepared for this kind of deception. I have issued an Executive Order establishing a new cabinet-level office, the Department of Sincerity Assessment, which will consist of teams of psychics like they have on TV. These psychics will be able to tell who is telling the truth, and who is lying, or has a terrible secret. Cold cases will be solved, and tragic errors avoided. And unique plot twists will keep audiences coming back week after week."

Or something like that. Maybe he'll just go on TV dressed like Obe Wan Kenobe and say, "We are not the droids you're looking for." Or hold up a swinging watch, or sprinkle pixie dust on us. What the hell: we voted for him twice, how smart can we be?

JESUS, FREAK! Crunchy Con Rod Dreher has started talking about what a mess that Iraq is. We were "rolled" by the Shiites, he says: "They played us for useful idiots...I hate that a single drop of American blood was shed for these people," adds Dreher, whose Christianity apparently stops at the water's edge, "But what happened, happened."

And part of how what happened, happened was crap like this, written by Dreher in the run-up to war:

We’re already moving toward Baghdad in our war against Iraq, one I believe with all my heart is just and necessary. We don’t know how long it will last, or what the fallout will be. When the smoke clears, I am afraid that one home-front casualty will be some friendships.

With America preparing to blow the shit out of a bunch of people on the other side of the world, for Dreher the clear and present danger was arguments with his anti-war buddies.

At least Dreher had an exit strategy: "There’s simply no point in talking to most antiwar people, left and right, because they’re lost in a fever swamp of emotionalism." Comity problem solved! Unfortunately for the Iraqis, they couldn't wish us so easily into the cornfield.

Now that the place is a hellhole, does Dreher regret his support for the Maximun Leader in 2004? Well...

...my heretical thought is not, "Maybe I should have voted for Kerry," though that might be true. My heretical thought is that no matter what my reservations were about Bush either time I voted for him, they were overcome by my single-minded focus on the Supreme Court.

And get this -- he's not sure he wouldn't do it again! Even knowing what was to come of it, and despite all the American (if no other) blood spilled.

Ladies and gentlemen, your Moral Majority Redux: willing to permit the needless deaths of as many non-American non-embryos as it takes to keep women from getting abortions and gay people from getting married.

And they say Allah attracts a rough crowd!

UPDATE. Like Clouseau's crime scene investigation in The Return of the Pink Panther? ("What wax? AAAAAH!"), Dreher keeps finding new and more amusing ways to display idiocy. In a new post, he lambastes the Republicans for playing a "confidence game" in which "all they have to do is keep banging away on the public's fear that the Democrats would be worse." As if to demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach, Dreher finishes:

[The Republicans] deserve to lose. They really do. But I don't think the country deserves the Democrats, at least not the Democrats we have now.

One reaches this level of self-unawareness only after years of patient non-study, or immediately following a strong blow to the head.

A PLEASANT SURPRISE. Hey, Professor Althouse has delivered a stern rebuke to parents who use homeschooling as religious indoctrination! "The beauty and freedom of this country does not include the right to deprive children of schooling," she says. And boy is she hard on parents who make their children memorize Bible texts to the exclusion of other subjects!

Actually when I said "Bible," I meant "Koran." But I'm sure the professor would agree that the principle is the same.

UPDATE. Her commenters seem to think it's all about Islam and some epochal struggle ("the battle is joined - the one that England's already lost"). What a hoot!

BUT SOME ARE MORE GODWIN THAN OTHERS. Iranian PM Ahmadinejad was on "60 Minutes" last week. Media scold Bernard Goldberg reports:

...And how unfortunate it was that 45 million Americans don't have health-care insurance. "That," [Ahmadinejad] said, "is very sad to hear." You just know that every liberal tuned in to "60 Minutes" was nodding in agreement...

In fact, instead of seeming like a modern Hitler (a not unreasonable comparison, given that one wanted to exterminate all the Jews while the other wants to wipe Israel off the map), Mr. Ahmadinejad came across as, well, a fairly typical, run-of-the-mill liberal.

Compare Bush to Hitler and you're a nut; tell the world that a Hitleresque dictator is a "run-of-the-mill liberal" approved by all American liberals within the sound of his voice, and we run that baby on page one.

It's been a long time since overestimating their degeneracy was even possible, but they still manage to surprise me sometimes. A tribute to my childish faith in human nature, perhaps.

TODAY'S PHILISTINE. Lindsay Beyerstein plans to read The Tin Drum. Tim Blair implies that, because the book's author used to be a Nazi, Beyerstein is therefore an anti-Semitic semite.

I've read a lot of Shakespeare. I must be a monarchist.

It is amazing that these people learned to type words into computers without ever having learned to read.

FANTASY, CAMP. Tbogg directs our attention to a Citizen Journalist who thinks baby-killing needs a public defense. He also thinks colloquy, being an antique device, should be written like a Gor novel:

The gentle soul -- how I respect her! -- will begin by pointing out how many innocents have died in the recent wars, and especially the children, who are the most obviously innocent. She will point out figures for Iraq, for Afghanistan, for Lebanon, and ask: "How can you justify this? These poor children, who might have been good men, good women, lain in the cold earth?"

We have all had the conversation that far, have we not?

Well, maybe all of us who have a hitch-hiker tied up in the basement.

Another Citizen Journalist posts this provocative statement at a fellow Journalist's website:

If this were WW2, we wouldn’t be worrying about the feelings of Muslims, or castigating ourselves as racists for attempting to defend ourselves. We’d be girding our loins to defeat the Ragheads just as we battled the Nips and the Krauts to an unconditional surrender.

Admit it — you winced at my last sentence, didn’t you? That illustrates the depth and breadth of the problem we now face.

When taken to task by one of our own commenters for this display of "testicular lunacy," he responds, "At least we’ve got the testiculars with which to be lunàtic" -- manhood, in the Citizen Journalist universe, being proved by ready use of racial slurs, on the internet and under a pseudonym.

Following the rule of three, I looked this morning for a capper, and went directly to Ace of Spades. I know he wouldn't let me down. Sure enough, I find him lecturing an imaginary Arab (no use of the term "Raghead" here -- where are your balls, man?) who, in Mr. Spades' roleplay exercise, has objected to British racial profiling that harasses him despite his innocence. Mr. Spades is unmoved except to hot rage:

What did you guys think was going to happen? Did you think we were just going to let your fellow Muslims kills us, with only the smallest amount of help from you in stopping them, forever?

Did you think we would never decide "It is you who are causing the problem. It is you who should bear most of the inconvenience/'humiliation' from the problem"?

What you've been taking as "weakness" and "stupidity" was just a naive, idealistic hope that if we treated you well enough you would stop. You didn't. The naivete and idealism are giving way to cold hard ugly realities forced upon us by your soft support of terorism...

The outrage you'll now be directing at us should have been directed at the terrorists and terrorist-inciters and terrorist-supporters among you five years ago.

But it wasn't.

So now here we are.

How ya like them apples?

This routine is best imagined with Jon Wayne of Texas Funeral fame ("Mr. Egyptian, yer a goddamn liar!") reading the text aloud to a dusky-faced scarecrow.

As previously noted here, the latest Arab-Israeli clusterfuck has got our Citizen Journalists moody and restive. Sold out by Bush's cease-fire, and denied the invigorating bloodbath they had come to expect, some turn on one another; others go out back to see how those robot brides are coming along; but the most entertaining ones wait upon that candy-colored clown they call the sandman, and report his visitations as if they were real.

VISION THING. Boy, that Liberal Media sure is tricky -- letting former Bush apparatchik Michael Gerson go on for thousands and thousands of words in Newsweek! If any of you fellers figure out how this advances the LM's Islamocommie agenda, please let me know, 'cause I'm stumped.

Gerson was once a Bush speechwriter, and like Peggy Noonan is trying to tell the new breed how it's done. His peroration is meant to convince the public to stay the course, terror-wise, despite their obvious desire to go another way.

Gerson acknowledges that the people are no long singing "Glory, Glory, Hallelujah" with W and the boys. But guess whose fault that is?

The President, says Gerson, is a visionary -- "Every element of the Bush doctrine was directed toward a vision: a reformed Middle East that joins the world instead of resenting and assaulting it." Condi Rice is the midwife stoically enduring the new Middle East's "birth pangs" (though if I were the Middle East right now, I'd be wondering where the fucking epidural was).

And you crappy little people are harshing their new paradigm:

First, the nation may be tired, but history doesn't care. It is not fair that the challenge of Iran is rising with Iraq, bloody and unresolved. But, as President Kennedy used to say, "Life is not fair"...

Some commentators say that America is too exhausted to confront this threat. But presidential decisions on national security are not primarily made by the divination of public sentiments...

Or, to put it in the visionary Bush's own words, who cares what you think? Gerson goes further, proposing a "new compact between citizens and their government":

Americans have every right to expect competence and honesty about risks and mistakes and failures. Yet Americans, in turn, must understand that in a war where deception is the weapon and goal of the enemy, every mistake is not a lie; every failure is not a conspiracy. And the worst failure would be a timid foreign policy that allows terrible threats to emerge.

In other words, you have a right to your expectations, and we have a right to do whatever we want without your goddamn belly-aching. This is a "new compact," indeed, as applied to the citizens of a Republic, though it is familiar enough to conscripts, battered children, and such like.

Having thus cuffed his audience, Gerson believes they will sit quietly while he fills the middle section of his address with W's Greatest Hits. Democracy in the Mideast is "messy" but "no one has a better idea." We must "draw a line." "Liberty improves life." Democrats practice "McGovernism." Etc.

And now for the wow finish:

The response of many Americans to all of this is ... up in the air. And, unfortunately, the demands of history may just be beginning, requiring more engagement, more sacrifice, more promotion of democracy, more foreign assistance to raise failed states where dangers gather. Setting out this case will fall to presidents of both parties, in calm and crisis—and making it will always be difficult in a weary hour. But necessity, in the end, makes a stronger argument than the finest rhetoric. And from London to Lebanon, history is proving that peace is not a natural state; it is achieved by a struggle of uncertain duration. In that struggle, the cynical, the world-weary, the risk-averse will not inherit the earth.

Wow! I'm juiced, aren't you? We're locked in a struggle that will never end! Let's crank some Twisted Sister and get down with some dismal necessity!

(I love the little knock against "the finest rhetoric." As long as he's lowering our expectations of the government, I suppose Gerson has a right to lower our expectations of himself, too. Though I must say he needn't have bothered.)

I imagine Gerson and all these guys, the moment the latest terror incident broke, running to the tank and finding there was nothing left but bitter dregs, too noxious to be made palatable even with the Coke syrup of patriotic sentiment.

So they're serving it up raw: weary struggle and blind obedience, and "cynicism" is the new treason.

This new model does not require formation-flying displays, the National Anthem, or invocation of the Founding Fathers. In fact, such things would tend to mess up the routine. We are no longer talking about our hopes, but about our apprehensions. We are no longer encouraged to celebrate our infinite possibilities, but ordered to accept our lack of choices. And democracy is not a gift with which America is blessed, but a sort of chemotherapy that America must wearily roam the earth administering to other nations.

I'm a New York City smart-aleck, yet I think more highly of this country than the Republicans do! I never thought I'd say this without irony, but I really think they've lost their patriotism.

UPDATE. See Kung Fu Monkey's related thoughts about FDR and Churchill versus piss-pantsed us.

SHORTER BRENDAN LOY: I didn't hang up on the Democratic Party -- the Democratic Party hung up on me!

(Presumably Loy will now double not vote for Ned Lamont. No doubt by November the voting machines will allow that.)

AN ECHO, NOT A CHOICE. The U.N. resolution on Israel-Hezbollah brokered by the Bush Administration (and France!) is answered at National Review's The Corner with disgust, anger, and despair. Editor K J. Lopez takes a moment to direct us elsewhere: "THE BLAME-BUSH INSTINCT: Anchoress has had enough...."

Momentarily forgetting what sort of people I was dealing with, I expected The Anchoress would address Bush complaints such as those at The Corner. But she is instead angry at liberals, whose complaints are "...adolescent spouting off, backed up by nothing more than 'feelings,' 'caring,' and hysterical, dramatic angst."

The Israel situation roils the belly-juices of the Internet's killingest voices. TigerHawk asks, "What will it take to militarize the United States? What will it take to militarize Western Europe?... We will almost certainly need conscription..." He asks his patrons for their input. Along with the traditional talk of "ragheads," Verdun, and ammo, readers fault Bush for "poor communication," a "compassionate nation building approach," and his reliance on Condi Rice. But the President is not without his defenders: "I swear I am going to vomit if I read one more Islamofascist apologist blame any current event on Bush or on Iraq."

Little Green Footballs is also skeptical of the cease-fire -- because the UN and them Frenchies are involved. Bush is barely mentioned, and only in comments, mostly approving ("This is a bush poker strategy at its' best!") -- the main page is mostly given over to investigations of liberal media treason.

"This is a great victory for the forces of evil," says Don Surber. At Surber's sidebar you can still open his posts entitled "Bush=Truman" and "Bush's plan works."

But let us be fair: many of these people are turning to a Democrat: Joe Lieberman. Conservatives, most of whom do not live in Connecticut, rush to support him against Ned Lamont and whatshisname, the Republican guy. Jeff Jarvis, Andrew Sullivan, and David Brooks want to see Lieberman on a national ticket. (The Perfesser is not averse.)

In other words: Things are going very badly, and the only solution is to step up our support of the people who made it so.

YOUR ASSIGNMENT. Some highly-placed crackpots have already started telling the world that Ned Lamont is bad for post-airliner-plot America because he is against the war in Iraq.

To them I issue a challenge: Pray this day, on one side of one sheet of paper, explain how our half-assed war in Iraq helped to foil the airliner plot.

The length stipulation (borrowed from Winston Churchill) is placed to restrict your output to names, dates, and events relevant to the topic, and to reduce your opportunity for patriotic gassing.

Warning: if you turn in anything as sloppy and poorly-reasoned as this...

If we just pick up like Ned Lamont wants us to do, get out by a date certain, it will be taken as a tremendous victory by the same people who wanted to blow up these planes in this plot hatched in England...It will strengthen them, and they will strike again.

...we will have to mark you down "Republican," and you will run serious risk of expulsion from the Senate.

(Or not. The nation is not a classroom, or if it is, it's more like one from the first half of Lean on Me.)

SEVEN COME ELEVEN, SNAKE EYES WATCHING YOU. I see the news outlets are flooded with accounts of the the dog that did not bark. It is particularly weird to watch long morning news reports on non-events. The newsreaders furrow their brows and project a sense of urgency, and keep repeating the same thing: basically a variation on their usual mantra, be afraid be afraid be very afraid, be afraid be afraid be very afraid...

I also notice that the various rightwing blogs "report" on these events by repeating the stories of the hated MSM, adding as a garnish their own signature lunacies. Ace of Spades, for example, dabbles in numerology:

9/11

3/11

7/11

...?

How about 8/11?

I know 7/7 doesn't work, but mustn't stand on ceremony when you have people to kill.

It's funny that, when confronted with even reports of a foiled terror incident, someone who calls himself "Ace of Spades," and leans heavily on his butchness, retreats into Kabbalistic gibberish.

Michelle Malkin is near-hysterical that more people don't share her ceaseless concern with terror in general and Muslims in particular. If we were all constantly at the same fever pitch of racial and danger awareness as she, though, how would that help? My understanding is that the current plot was defeated by police work and intelligence gathering, not gangs of "truth squads" examining wire photos for modifications.

I'm supposed to go to London in a few weeks with Editor Martin. I see no reason to postpone or re-route. Terror only works if you're terrorized.

You know I'm born to lose, and gambling's for fools; but that's the way I like it, baby, I don't want to live forever.

"THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY HAS LOST ITS WAY" CRY THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY'S MORTAL ENEMIES. The defenestration of every Republican's favorite Democrat has brought much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Ace of Spades in enraged that Lamont came out last night against lobbyists. Some months ago Mr. Spades professed outrage that Democrats were taking money from lobbyists. Now an insurgent has promised to clean house, and Mr. Spades is madder than ever. There's just no pleasing some people.

At RedState, Mark Kilmer, hoping Tacitus will give him an "A" in Rhetoric, intones, "The Democrat fringe has its scalp, and now it wants a stack of casualties... The nuts have a grip on that Party." His colleagues are presumably too busy celebrating the defeat of not-conservative-enough Republican Joe Schwartz to notice.

"Lapdog Lamont... pet poodle, Ned Lamont," says Dean Esmay in an apparent attempt to portray the "incoherent, spitting hatred" of the majority of Connecticut Democratic voters. (Esmay previously on this subject: "tool of crypto-fascist slimeballs," "despicable desire to abandon the people of Iraq to fascism," "friend to vicious hatemongers," "gzigshhs," "skopryts," and "potrzebie."

My very favoritest, though, is Brendan Loy, who after many years as a Democrat (well, "many" if you count from the days he "marched around the schoolyard in fifth grade chanting 'Jerry Brown! Jerry Brown!'" -- Loy is in his mid-twenties) has decided to abandon his Party because it failed to return a Democrat he liked -- or should I say, the only Democrat he liked.

Here is how Loy reacted to the last Presidential election result:

I gotta say, I’m not all that upset with the result. Yeah, I wanted Kerry to win. But I’m not convinced, like so many of my Democratic bretheren, that the country is now officially going to hell in a handbasket. I’m also not convinced a Kerry presidency would have been better. I though the odds were slightly in its favor, which is why I voted for Kerry. But I think Kerry had a decent chance of being a colossal failure, and Bush has a decent chance of being a surprising success. So I’m not exactly crying in my beer over the result...

Meanwhile, I look forward to watching the Loony Left implode in utter confusion over the result.

I'm sure the Party will miss Loy's youthful enthusiasm.

UPDATE. Jay Brida in comments: "There's also a longing for the good old days for FDR, JFK, Truman... Christ, compared to the guys running the Dems these days, those guys were fucking Marxists... Could you imagine what the Loys of the world [would do] if, say, Nancy Pelosi even thought that we should be giving federal money to writers?"

If the Netroots really do clean house, there'll still be a place for the Lieberman-or-death types in the Perublican Party.

SOMETHING'S HAPPENING HERE, BUT YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT IT IS, DO YOU, SCOTTY RESTON? The central narrative of Rick Perlstein's Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of American Consensus seems unimportant once you've finished the book. That's what makes it so damned interesting.

Not that the story of the 1964 Presidential race isn't richly told: in fact, it is so crammed with details -- the pursing of Eisenhower's lips as the Goldwater team commandeers his farm for a commercial; the "single, white-gloved hand" Lady Bird Johnson used to silence hecklers on her Southern tour; the campaign-staff haggling that almost scuttled Reagan's last-minute TV address; Johnson's belly excitedly thumping his 47-by-47-and-a-half-inch podium in the home stretch -- that it could comprise a separate book. You can almost smell the sweat of the cramped jet cabins, feel the sudden panic of blindsided aides, and hear the tidal shifts in the roars and mutters of the big crowds.

But that story doesn't really begin till about halfway through Before the Storm, and even when it's fully launched, the stuff on the margins overwhelms it. The real story is the epochal coalescence of the American Right that launched Goldwater's Presidential race (literally, in Perlstein's telling) and proved too fractious and polarizing to sustain it -- but not to sustain itself.

Perlstein carefully lays the groundwork, starting with Clarence Manion, who channeled his rage at the Commies in Washington into a direct-mail and independent broadcast machine that prefigured the juggernauts that rule our political landscape today, and touching on every conservative coeval from the respectable (Bill Buckley) to the crackpot (Robert Welch) as they were drawn into a common orbit. Goldwater was their lodestar for a while, but his pull turned out to be insufficient -- especially as, in Perlstein's telling, Goldwater was as likely to exert push as pull. It was their exile, their absolute dismissal by the custodians of American "consensus," their sense of being right when everything was wrong, that really brought them together -- and conservative moneymen, sensing a chance in hell to roll back the forces of organized labor and creeping socialism, exponentiated their force. They swept up, sometimes chaotically, hundreds of small, like-minded groups -- Young Republican chapters, Citizens' Committees, anti-Communist and anti-Civil Rights ad-hocs -- to create a force that was strong enough to turn the country. But first they had to learn the badly-needed lessons of national defeat. And what seemed to the political world an end became a beginning.

This broad summary neglects the internecine struggles among that force that Perlstein notes meticulously; they give authority to the book, and difficulty to the reader. (At one point Goldwater asks, "Who the hell is So-and-So?" and I didn't know either, though he had been introduced to me at length.) There are betrayals, noses put out of joint, and grudges -- all on the Goldwater side; Johnson bullied everyone on his side into his own form of consensus. But the path was forged and followed.

Perlstein is apparently a liberal himself -- indeed, he explained in the Boston Review, in a painstaking, discursive style similar to that of Before the Storm, how Democrats might take the lessons of his learning -- but plays sufficiently fairly with the conservative warriors that the Brothers Judd and Bill Buckley, among other rightists, have praised the book.

This is probably good historian's hygiene, but Perlstein clearly admires the early conservatives' nerve, cunning, and persistence, and scoffs openly at the know-it-all liberals who misread them (he even describes Steve Allen as a "particularly smug liberal"). Scotty Reston, Arthur Schlesinger, Richard Hofstadter -- they were as clueless as Steverino, believing that their universe was too settled to be shaken. Perlstein is more naturally sympathetic to committed outsiders who are told they can't, but do.

He's not the only one. The book was recommended to me by some Lamont backers, whose man has scored a victory in Connecticut tonight. Maybe they think they're onto something similar. Are their Netroots the equivalent of Manion's Robotype machine? More to the point, perhaps: are there liberal versions of the New Deal-hating business moguls that sluiced Barry's way, and can the Iraq fuckup (or any of the current Administration's other fuckups) enrage and animate crowds the way the Civil Rights movement enraged and animated the future custodians of our current consensus? It may be that the "storm" prefigured by the Goldwater campaign only blows one way, and Perlstein will have to settle for providing interest rather than instruction.

NO SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY. We must be getting close to pulling out of Iraq: the New York Post today stacked up two articles explaining that the situation is hopeless, and that this is all the Iraqis’ fault.

John Podhoretz has inherited his father’s annoying habit of numerating wars that do not exist. Podhoretz fils explains that “This is the Third Iraq War, and the most striking aspect of it is that it doesn’t involve us.” The American troops currently stationed there might think differently, but only because they’re not seeing the big picture: Podhoretz says this Third Iraq War, in which we are not involved, “may be the one we’re going to lose.” Gasp, a paradox! Clearly, these/this Iraqi war(s) exist(s) on such an exalted philosophical plane that your average dogface couldn’t be expected to understand.

Podhoretz fully acknowledges a coming civil war in Iraq, but judges that it has nothing to do with us invading the country, bombing the shit out of it, and substituting for its corrupt but functional leadership a plywood shack of pseudo-governance. No, it’s only happening because the Sunnis are “crazy.” The evidence is that “they seem determined to start a civil war they can only lose.” The idea that desperate men in desperate circumstances might resort to extreme measures appears not to have occurred to Podhoretz, who, despite his deep involvement in World Wars II-IV and Iraq Wars I-III, has nonetheless managed to keep his cool.

Ultimately the message is that, “If the Sunnis and the Shiites really go at it… if Iraq wants to commit suicide in this manner,” it’s not our fault or even our concern: “the answer ultimately lies with the Iraqi people.” So the country may descend into even more hellish violence and misery – but Mission Accomplished, because we won Iraq Wars I and II at least, and two out of three ain’t bad!

Below Podhoretz, Rich Lowry, a war fan from way back and author of National Review’s now-legendary WE’RE WINNING cover story, now chides his Commander-in-Chief for ever thinking he could democratize these bloody wogs in the first place: “The problem with Bush’s freedom rhetoric is that it appears to be not true.” Now you tell us!

According to Lowry, Middle Easterners aren’t ready for freedom or democracy – it has something to do with “the Fall” of Adam and Eve, whose sin affected Arabs much more than it did us white people. But though Bush is dead wrong, Lowry says, “this doesn’t mean that Bush should abandon the liberalizing thrust of his foreign policy.”

Why not? Why persist in such a course if you don’t believe it can work? Shh, don’t disturb the analysis! Properly constructed and given time, it will so confuse the electorate that they will not realize the ignominy of our failure and the foolhardiness of our plan. Maybe we’ll even have our troops march backwards out of Iraq, so it won’t look like withdrawal. By the time people figure out what’s happened, we’ll be at war with Syria and/or Iran.

That will be a true victory – and, for this lot, the only kind that counts.

EASY RIDERS. This Times article about guys who stop working is very funny in places. For example, there is the case of Alan Beggerow, who maintains his life of ease by convincing his wife to work so he won't be forced to do just any old thing. A former warehouseman, Beggerow allows as how he would accept employment as a professional author.

If I had Mr. Beggerow's skill with the ladies, my novel would be coming along a lot faster. Or maybe it would be indefinitely delayed.

The article's bloviations about trends which Mr. Beggerow and his fellow slackers allegedly represent adds greatly to the humor. Work evaders are described as "unmoored"; a sociologist surmises that in this our modern age "men don’t feel a need to be in a career," etc.

Was I kidnapped in the middle of the night and taken to a planet where everyone is a college professor? Because in the world I used to live in, most people work because they have to, not as a journey of personal fulfillment to be pursued or interrupted according to shimmerings of the zeitgeist. And when they don't have to work -- when they have enough money to get away with it, or find a sucker to support them -- they stop.

Funny as the article is, though, it has been topped by the analysis of Dr. Mrs. Perfesser, who thinks these easy riders are slacking as an expression of male resentment toward feminists ("Why should we be surprised that men are opting out of their masculine role as provider when 'experts' and feminists have been trashing this role for years?").

As is her custom, Dr. Mrs. P has some entertainingly crazy commenters:

It's high time MEN got the easier, more rewarding side of things.

Working is stressful, unrewarding, and takes years off of your life. When you come home to a partner who has done about 3 or 4 hours of work when you've done 8 or 9, plus commuting, and to kids who run and cry to your partner for every need whim and desire, it's apparant that the worker is undervalued...
(Not my PERSONAL experiences, but others I know. I intend to make my life my own.)

I love that final note. Next up:

What a rotten generation you must live in.

An interesting Psychological Phenomena has been occuring here in leafy suburbia; when the wife relaunches a carreer after on average 11 years off, because her "clock" has given her "Babies Rabies", and now Mr. "Provider" is "between jobs", All the SuperDad performance in the world doesn't make up for the feelings people are surprised they have when he does an excellent job as "Mr. Mom" and she as "Ms. Stud, the Provider"...

He reports (or should I say, "Reports") on five bitches of his acquaintance who tried to be "Ms. Stud" and got what was coming to them. Others are content to wait upon the verdict of history:

Look, Moslem cultures have real contempt for females: THAT is a major problem. Our western culture does not as of yet have that level of contempt for males, but bet everything you own and everything you will ever own that we are headed in that direction.

Before long the commenters are talking to people who aren't there:

So yes, Mrs Athanasius, the first move is open to the women and that movement should be in the direction of picking up what members of your gender have abandoned--your authentic vocation. If they do not, the consequences are clear. When the social experiment we are currently in collapses, by virtue of the experiment, the men will be coarser then they ever were, the women will be subjugated and constricted to a level never seen before...

And:

Mommy, you whore, I'm through.

I wonder if Dr. Mrs. Perfesser gets psychiatric clients this way. If so, at this rate the Perfesser will be able to take it easy soon enough.