ARSENIC AND OLD LACE. Pretty much everything Peggy Noonan writes here was written better (naturally) by Gore Vidal in 1960:

MRS. GAMADGE. And your two fine sons. They're very attractive and that was a nice spread of them in Life, at the barbecue. Very, very nice. We'll want more of that. But most important, your wife should be at your side at all time. (Mrs. Gamadge rises and hands the empty glass to Jensen.) She must seem to be advising you. The women must feel that there is a woman behind you (Mrs. Gamadge has maneuvered herself into position behind Russell's chair.) as there has been a woman behind every great man since the world began! (Russell, aware of Mrs. Gamadge's presence, rises and crosses to Jensen at L.)

RUSSELL. Alice plans to campaign with me, if...

MRS. GAMADGE. She's a tremendous asset. I don't need to tell you. The women like the way she doesn't wear makeup and looks like a lady, and seems shy...

RUSSELL. She is shy.

MRS. GAMADGE. She doesn't make the women feel jealous. And that's good. Keep her with you, Mr. Secretary, at all times. It did Adlai Stevenson great harm, not having a wife, and trying to be funny all the time. Great harm...

...(Somewhat nervously, Alice enters and starts to cross to Mrs. Gamadage, who to Alice's alarm, starts backing away with a speculative look, taking in everything.)

ALICE. How very nice to see you...

MRS. GAMADGE. (slowly, deliberately) You... couldn't... look... better! I mean it! I like the whole thing... especially the naturally gray hair, that is such an important point with the women. Of course Mabel Cantwell dyes her hair, but she gets away with it because she does such a bad job the women feel sorry for her... (To Alice, cozily) When you're the First Lady just remember this: Don't do too much... like Mrs. Roosevelt. The women didn't like that. On the other hand, don't do too little... like Mrs. Eisenhower. The women didn't like that either. All in all, Grace Coolidge was really the best, bless her heart. My husband had such a crush on her...

Forgive my taking the Dramatists Play Service style, which includes stage directions from the original prompt book. I would so rather be seeing a good play now than paying attention to these idiots.

UP THE FLAGPOLE WITHOUT A SALUTE. Anyone here see the premiere episode of "Mad Men," about the bullshit kings of old Madison Avenue? I did, and though I have my objections (remarkably similar to those of James Wolcott), I'd like to see more, because the subject fascinates me. I puttered around some ad agencies in my freelance career, and took great pleasure in hearing the old bulls' recollections of the era depicted in the show. While doing newsletters for Ogilvy, I dug through some of their archives, which transmitted some of the impatient energy that "Mad Men" is going for. One finding concerned a board meeting at which a large batch of new vice-presidents had been proposed. That title is ubiquitous in advertising now (as David Ogilvy once observed, it is cheaper to give titles than raises), and one of the bulls at that particular meeting appears to have smelled an unhealthful change coming. "Seems to me," he sniffed, "that we're giving helmets to cheerleaders." If "Mad Men" can capture some of this tonal mix of patrician hauteur and homespun wisdom, I might have to get cable.

If you did see the premiere, you must recall the drama over the Lucky Strike acount, in which the client, a George Washington Hill type played by John Cullum, bitterly lamented all the foolishness about cigarettes being bad for you ("I've never been sick a day in my life"); the nervous ad guys tried to ease him into the new reality, till hero Don Draper tap-danced a new slogan based on one of the few points of difference left to discuss ad-wise: "It's Toasted." What do you think that scene was about? Draper's poise under fire? The situational ethics of mid-century advertising? The shift in the business between prose poetry and a crisper kind of nonsense? The difference between research and inspiration?

Whatever you saw, I can assure you the view of National Review's S.T. Karnick will surprise you:

In responding to 1950s revelations about the connection between cigarette smoking and lung cancer, the cigarette companies had been making claims that each one’s product was healthier than its competitors’. The federal government moved to put a stop to it.

That might seem a reasonable response at first glance, but it certainly runs afoul of the First Amendment, and it exemplifies the twentieth-century trend of government increasingly overriding people’s personal choices. This ham-fisted action by the feds resonates, of course, with the current crusade by all levels of government to eradicate cigarette smoking from the United States altogether.

Something else you have to give the old Madison Avenue guys: they were much smoother than the bullshit artists of today.

LINDSAY LOHAN'S "COME TO JESUS" MOMENT. The Wall Street Journal's Daniel Henninger expresses concern -- or is it contempt? It's hard to tell -- for the celebrities who take drugs, whether performance or pleasure-enhancing. At first he seems to think marketing is the culprit:

I now take it as an article of faith that marketing rules the world. Marketing is an ancient business tool, but unlike some other artifacts of the past, product marketing is a perfect fit for the age of electronic mass media. The Web has been marketing's Manhattan Project, and like Iran, everyone wants access to marketing's mysterious, sometimes dark powers...

The players became platforms outside the game for selling shoes, brands "and everything." Like Nascar drivers, the shirts of the Tour de France racers are festooned with product logos. But consumers aren't going to buy stuff promoted by any palooka. Professional athletes were tutored that part of the deal was they had to pump extra hang-time into their personalities. And if they couldn't do that, the guys making the Nike commercials would do it for them. In the early days, journalists derided this as "hype," but even the press eventually signed on, and suddenly lumpen athletes and entertainers had "attitude" and "edge." This was now admirable.

Henninger must have realized at some point that blaming the free market for Barry Bonds is a non-starter in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, so he comes to Jesus -- or, rather, swings Him at the heads of "the thousands of high-IQ people buying all those the God-Is-Dreadful books":

The simple idea that Mr. Bonds and Ms. [Lindsay] Lohan ought to go find something resembling a church to offset the compulsions of modern life drives the no-religion people nuts. If so, they should stop making funny jokes about sprinkling holy water and start proposing an alternative way to learn integrity, self-respect and character that will have a longer shelf-life than "Don't Be Evil."

Our great nation is covered with churches and filled with believers, and ruled by a fundamentalist Christian President, yet Henninger is worried about atheism's deleterious effect on Barry Bonds and Lindsay Lohan.

When I first approached his essay, I assumed that Henninger took movie stars and professional athletes as his subject because people are more inclined to read about them than Johnny Methhead or Jane Crackwhore. Now I think that if he expanded his purview to include ordinary citizens' drug habits among the horrors of atheism, it would too closely resemble a Chick Tract without the saving grace of lurid illustrations to suit the Journal's upscale clientele.

Of course, once Murdoch gets his hands on the Journal, Henninger may never need to be that cautious again.

UPDATE. Flash! Lindsay Lohan, at least, may be closer to redemption than we thought:

Christian pop culture critic Mark Dice insists he knows the cure for Lindsay Lohan’s problems. Jesus.

Dice credits himself for making Paris Hilton find ‘God’ in jail, and is now focusing his prayers on Lindsay Lohan.

“What Lindsay really needs is Jesus. She needs to read the Bible and find out who she is and why she is here. There is a vast black hole in her soul which nothing else can fill. No expensive rehab facility. No jail sentence. No family or friends. Only Jesus can fix what’s wrong” Dice explains.

Maybe Murdoch can just dump Henninger and hire Dice. He certainly has a livelier style.

ANOTHER "COME TO JESUS" MOMENT. I have a little cold and was not wont to post, but Kia Pienso has pointed out to me a new essay by Camille Paglia which has lifted my spirits somewhat.

The thing is hard to synopsize, but let me say that toward the beginning Paglia writes:

A primary arena for the conservative-liberal wars has been the arts.

Sometime later:

I would argue that the route to a renaissance of the American fine arts lies through religion.

Then:

Hymnody should be viewed as a genre of the fine arts and be added to the basic college curriculum.

The salutary effect of sacred song on the "the spiritual poverty of contemporary secular humanism" is hinted at in this description of what to unsympathetic readers may appear an outbreak of mass hysteria:

The most influential camp meeting occurred at Cane Ridge in Bourbon County, Kentucky, in 1804. For three days and well past midnight, a crowd estimated to be between twenty and thirty thousand sang and shouted with a great noise that was heard for miles around. Worshippers transported by extreme emotion jerked, writhed, fell to the ground in convulsions or went catatonic. This Kentucky Revival, called the Second Great Awakening, spread through the inland regions of the South and eventually reached western Pennsylvania.

(I pause here to add crucial emphasis, which Paglia's famously logorrheic style denies, to the punchline:)

But the movement never flourished in the North because of its harsher weather.

The 6,425-word essay covers a lot of ground, but we might say the key to it is Paglia's account of the attacks on Chris Olfili's The Holy Virgin Mary when it was shown at the Brooklyn Museum in 1999. Paglia blames this lunacy not on the people who made the attacks, but to the "the total failure of curatorial support" by the Brooklyn Museum, who presumably erred in failing to properly instruct a no doubt receptive Mayor Giuliani in African fertility symbology.

The whole thing pretty much goes like that. Examples of religious violence and absurdity are given, and the arts community gets the blame for being insufficiently acquainted with the Bible. While the little jihads are mostly described in coolly descriptive language, the irreligious artists and arts supporters are subjected to the kind of editorial attacks ("Supporters of the arts who gleefully cheer when a religious symbol is maltreated act as if that response authenticates their avant-garde credentials") that are sure make this essay, like many of Paglia's public explosions, a treasure trove for conservative quote trawlers, who will rejoice that somebody in the Academy is talking their language.

HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE. James Lileks reports from an Alaskan cruise about some damn kids who sang badly ("'Y.M.C.A' – a song about anonymous sex, incidentally") in a fucking karaoke bar. Later he goes to a tavern populated by waxwork dummies.

He leaves out the part where Rod Serling explains what happened to Lileks when he took the pig mask off.

GOOD OLD BOYS. The deaths of Antonioni and Bergman came to me as a double whammy from a great distance: I haven't watched their films in years, but both made a lasting impression on me. The astute Terry Teachout had a less than optimal experience revisiting Wild Strawberries in 2003, and it may be that either or both of these giants might look punier to me upon reconsideration than they did in my youth. But my memories of both director's films are clear and happy and I more or less trust them. It may be that I am less prone to disappointment than Terry, or more childish about old loves -- I enjoy Jason and the Argonauts on pretty much the same terms today as I did when I was a child; take that for what it's worth.

As for John Podhoretz' bizarre denunciation of Bergman in today's New York Post, I can only assume the 1970s were so traumatic for him that he feels it necessary to bear his grudges into the realm of excruciatingly bad taste. He certainly seems angrier at those of us who enjoyed Bergman's films than he is at the director himself, declaring that we think art "wasn't supposed to be easy to take or pleasurable to take in. It was supposed to punish you, assault you, scrub you clean of impurities." Well, The Virgin Spring ain't Star Wars, but there is more than one kind of pleasure, and Bergman's Medieval parable, rough as it may be, is well-built, stunningly photographed by Sven Nykvist, and deeply satisfying in its resolution. I don't think you have to be a snob to enjoy it, or to enjoy Max von Sydow's battle with the optical printer at the end of The Passion of Anna, or the recognizable conjugal truths of the contentious couple in Scenes from a Marriage.

For that matter, Antonioni's famous bleakness can be pretty funny, as in the first scene of The Eclipse, in which the most active member of the menage a trois is a rotating fan. I had many reservations about The Passenger when I saw it in re-release a few years ago, but I was never bored: even the misfired pairing of Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider was fascinating, and that last, long unbroken take at the end is exhilarating whether you think the film has earned it or not.

Rank them however high or low you like, but they applied themselves to their visions energetically and consistently and with undeniable craft. That's no small achievement.

HOW BULLSHIT WORKS, PART 5,858,351,117. Psst -- liberals are calling themselves progressives because they want to bring back eugenics via global warming and stem cell research. Pass it on! And if anyone asks, you didn't hear it from me!

(Oops -- almost forgot the glibertarian angle.)

MUST-FLEE TV. I finally watched one of those vlog things. Jesus Christ. Jonah Goldberg and Peter Beinart on comedy? If bongs had floated up into view, that would at least have provided an excuse.

For the record:

Goldberg acknowledged that Jon Stewart is "funny," but "what a lot of liberals are not appreciating is, come a Democratic President, Jon Stewart is going to be pretty funny about Democratic Presidents." Then who'll be laughing, traitors?

Goldberg: "On the whole humor is still much more helpful for conservatives than it is for liberals" because humorists are "equal opportunity guys and I have a couple of friends who are in the comedy business" who are of the fabled "conservative... actually libertarian" tribe, which Goldberg further qualifies as "Giuliani-type."

Goldberg: "People like Michael Moore or Al Franken don't help liberals all that much" because Franken is "dour and dark and kind of nasty," whereas Rush Limbaugh is a big ball of sunshine.

Not content to wait for Jon Stewart to make fun of future Democratic Presidents, Goldberg warns that "Jon Stewart can get into trouble... when he tries too hard to make the left-wing bloggers happy." So when I laugh at Stewart, America scowls? Thank God I don't have cable.

Goldberg says "I don't think it necessarily speaks particularly well for liberals they keep having to recruit comedians to do their arguing for them." I don't know, I thought Slappy White's keynote address at the 1992 Democratic Convention was pretty awesome.

"Humor right now still is in many respects in terms of the way we live our social lives more of an asset for conservatives," reiterates Goldberg, using as examples himself ("I win a lot of points with audiences"), Limbaugh, and noted right-wing funnyman Dave Chappelle.

On the whole Goldberg seems to think liberal humor is creaky and preachy ("going after televangelists and preachers is so old"), while attacks on "political correctness" are as fresh as springtime.

Beinart pretty much gawks at the camera and goes "muh muh muh muh" at intervals.

No wonder Republicans are crapping out of the YouTube debate.

SHUT UP AND SING. TBogg has a lot of fun with this Rockanomics site. I can't say I'm in complete agreement with his assessment. The proprietors are clearly mad, but so what? Music is for everybody, even and perhaps especially the disturbed. Neither the "house band" nor The Right Brothers (whom they closely resemble) are my style, but they don't sound any worse than a lot of other old-fashioned bands. I don't relate to "Open Season," but I don't relate to "Cop Killer," either, and they both rock pretty hard.

The bloggy parts of the site are expectedly tedious, but the parts that have music... have music. My standards are blessedly low, as are the standards of rock and roll itself. Goethe's dictum that there's nothing worse than active ignorance doesn't apply to rock. As a sprat I had my "California Uber Alles" and "Beat on the Brat." These are not works of measured analysis, but cool tunes.

The state of arts education being what it is, I have to applaud anything that motivates people to play. Long-term it may even have a civilizing influence on them. I've seen more than one anti-social type redeemed by immersion in a useful craft. Why might it not work on anti-socialist types?

But that is all to one side; the lively arts need no justification outside themselves. We shouldn't let the odd Horst Wessel Lied sour us on Euterpe. Her charms are for us all.

ATTENTION COMRADES! Previous meme "Scott Thomas does not exist" is no longer operative. Please to substitute "Scott Thomas Beauchamp is a bad man" or "Scott Thomas Beauchamp is Oliver Stone" or "Scott Thomas Beauchamp is a semiotic construct" or "We'll get Scott Thomas Beauchamp fired" or whatever damn thing you can think of.

UPDATE. Comrades show initiative! Conservative commentator tells Beauchamp to " get busy watching your back." I've heard of dolchstosslegende, but I thought it was supposed to go the other way round.

UPDATE II. "Scott Thomas Beauchamp is a bad writer" is apparently the libertarian angle. Armed Liberal quotes a soldier who says if we insist on acknowledging the existence of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, our soldiers will never become "a new Greatest Generation" (i.e., useful propaganda for Republicans). Hollywood is blamed. Filmed in der back!

UPDATE III. The libertarian response continues via Jane Galt, who offers a few puzzling restatements of the anti-anti-Beauchamp POV ("Well, everyone who's talking about this is evil"), hems and haws, then, perhaps sensing the quagmire rising about her (and that's another bad thing about us, we use words like "quagmire"), declares:

But as I say, my passing interest in the entire thing, which is animated almost entirely by the fact that I have spied some of the editors involved at cocktail parties, is not very great; somewhere below the neighbour's termite infestation, but above my urgent need for curtain rods and bookshelves. This will almost certainly be my last post on the subject.

Thence, of course, follows another post, in which she talks about famous frauds and the difficulty of fact-checking, which would be a relevant addition if the news were that Beauchamp had been shown not to exist, instead of, well, what actually happened.

This is a customary reframing of events: point out the ridiculous reactions of a number of well-regarding idiots, and you become a "TNR defender." Thereafter, if the New Republic drops a gum wrapper on the sidewalk, so to speak, you will take the fall, at least in the Second Life inhabited by such people.

AFTER THE FARTING: JONAH GOLDBERG CONSIDERED. At National Review, Jonah Goldberg says liberals are hypocrites. Oh, one asks wearily, pre-emptively shielding oneself from the spray of cracker crumbs that will accompany the reply, how so? Because

Liberals in the 1990s argued – sometimes with nuance, sometimes starkly – that the bright line for intervention was genocide... I am open to [John Derbyshire's] prediction that genocide may not be in the offing if we leave Iraq. Ultimately, none of us knows. But what I find fascinating is the growing acceptance among liberals – who are often quite strident about the need to intervene in Darfur, for example – that even if our departure results in genocide, that’s not reason enough to stay... For liberals to have supported Kosovo or who now agitate for intervention in Darfur on the grounds that America should put steel in the words “never again” to suddenly say that genocide largely caused by the US is irrelevant is astounding to me. And it won’t be forgotten. The next time liberals want to stop mass slaughter in country X where we have no interests, it will be pointed out to them that they abetted slaughter in Iraq when our vital national interests were involved.

In other words: liberals like to say they care about genocide, but they obviously don't, because they want to leave Iraq, which stands poised at the brink of genocide (or maybe doesn't, he isn't sure) thanks to the efforts of Jonah Goldberg et alia.

Goldberg is a little like a hostage-taker who, when seized after a ten-hour standoff, wants everyone to know that the hostage negotiator's arguments were really intellectually inferior to his own.

And I'm sorry, but whatever you think of the Kosovo intervention, Iraq makes Kosovo look like we gave everyone in Serbia ice cream and then flew them to heaven in a private jet.

I have a better way of preventing genocide in our client states, and stage one involves the removal of Jonah Goldberg and his colleagues from spheres of government influence via the election to government office of non-retards.

PLEASING THE AFFILIATES. "THINGS ARE JUST AS MUCH FUN AS EVER over at Protein Wisdom," blurbs Ole Perfesser Reynolds. I go over to the recommended site and see a long post by one of the second stringers (PW proprietor Jeff Goldstein being engaged, perhaps, in one of the long bouts of anomie that seem to naturally follow the logorheic fits for which he is known) making jokes about Amanda Marcotte's vagina. I sometimes wonder if the Perfesser and I are seeing the same internet.

I also see one of the Perfesser's pals hauled out to say stuff like "Like some modern opponents of globalization and free trade, the Nazis viewed economics as a zero-sum game between nations." I guess Godwin's Law is just for the little people, or had perhaps been overturned. Now I'm doubly eager for the Second Amendment revival to reach my town, so I can compare my opponents to Hitler while brandishing a gun. Who knows? The Perfesser's life may turn out to have been a net plus in the end.

BABY STEPS. "The Takoma Park city council has unanimously approved a resolution urging Congress to go forward with impeachment proceedings against President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney."

Lotta people working in or for the Federal gummint live in Takoma Park.

One such voter writes:

I’m telling you, it was straight out of Norman Rockwell’s 'Freedom of Speech' in that council meeting tonight. It was really, really good, I was very proud of us.

This looks kinda like an Instapundit post, doesn't it? Hehindeed.

MY YOUTUBE DEBATE. I have a better computer now, and will abuse the privilege by posting YouTube videos.

I've already told you fuckers The Penetrators of Syracuse, New York were gods, and here is the proof:



Whassamatta -- as the janitor told my friend Simon when he recoiled at the taste of angel dust in the joint the janitor had given him -- you don't like it? Okay, down the road I'll provide a Lester Bangs-style essay on the band that will at least confuse you. For now I'll just leave you with a few, harmless words... just a bunch of letters scrambled together, but their meaning is very important...

• The Bobby Fuller Four
• Willie Dixon
• Gunfight at Carnegie Hall
• Metallic K.O.
• Marcel Proust
• Reader's Block
• Andre Breton

But soft, the matin grows nigh! Adieu.

BELIEF SYSTEM. Don Surber reports on Rasmussen reporting that liberal bias rules the news -- sorta:

The current survey finds that 30% of American adults believe the Associated Press has a liberal bias and only 12% believe it leans the other way. Local television news is viewed as having a liberal bias by 30% and a conservative bias by 17%. MSNBC is seen as being a bit more to the left—33% say it has a liberal bias and 13% say the opposite. For CNBC, 29% say it has a liberal bias and 14% say a conservative bias.

Thirty-seven percent (37%) say local television stations deliver news without bias while 36% say the same for the Associated Press.

Hold on: Only 30/30/33/29 percent see AP/local/MSNBC/CNBC news as liberal-biased? After decades of conservative propaganda to that effect? I would have thought the notion would by now have as much support as the existence of angels (79 percent per FOX News), but the current numbers are closer to the 37 percent support FOX found for belief in astrology.

Someone's not getting his money's worth.

In case you're wondering what I mean by propaganda, you can find a good example in Surber's own post:

My pet theory is that as they rise in stature and income, the muckedy-mucks at AP start attending more upscale parties, where the Old Money Socialists and the Scholarly Professors push a political agenda that holds since American institutions are not perfect, they must be replaced.

Who wouldn't be moved by that? I can see it myself: the red velvet curtains, the crystal chandeliers, the mahogany furnishings; the Old Money Socialists in their wide-lapel suits and Pierre Trudeau haircuts sharing a glass of baby's blood with the gowned and mortarboarded Scholarly Professors; and the AP men of rising stature and income (the stature- and income-deprived AP men having been dispatched to comb John Edwards' hair) standing by with steno pads, asking how they might better effect the destruction of American institutions with their wire reports.

And I never get invited to those parties.

UNHINGED. Ann Althouse reacts badly to Greg Sargent's brush-off with a huge, intemperate post that accuses Sargent of quoting her accurately and includes genuinely spooky passages like this:

Now get up off your ass and write a real response to me. I'm sick of these cranked out non-responses that pretend you've suffered no real attack. You have!

Then she demands an apology. How long before Sargent finds a boiled rabbit in his kitchen?

UPDATE. Comments are rather hot. I have to say I cannot endorse cracks on Althouse's appearance. All women are beautiful, for one thing, and Professor Althouse is decidedly not an exception.

I was raised for the most part by a single mother, and am perhaps oversensitive on that account to this sort of thing.

HOT AIR. Roger Scruton makes a case for conservatives as stewards of the environment based largely upon hatred of liberals, represented here by Mao, György Lukács, and other such like. As is typical in such arguments, Scruton uses "little platoon" environmental successes -- like the disposition of a dump in his small Virginia town! -- as an example of how the whole problem can be solved.

It is almost embarrassing to have to point this out, but America's large-scale successes against its large-scale pollution problems have been overwhelmingly won through the use of state power, as with the late-20th-century regulation of air quality in Los Angeles. When people started blowing black snot, LA didn't ask polluters to please think of the children -- county supervisors enpowered pollution control officials to create regulations suggested by scientific research. State officials got in on the act, and eventually so did the Feds. Car and gas companies got the message and began retooling to meet both regulations and regulatory threats. (So much for Scruton's claim that "Environmental movements on the Left seldom pause to consider the question of human motivation.") Neither urban California nor America became as a result unproductive Sovietized wastelands, but healthier places to live.

Scruton wants to portray the effects of industry on the environment as if they were theoretical issues, leading to such humorous sentences as "First, the damage done to our environment is connected in many people’s thinking, and to a great extent in reality, with the activities of business," and to his association of environmentalism with "the cult of the victim." Mises, Burke, and Hayek are mentioned; the current Administration's notorious politicizing of science is not.

The article is merely a pernicious fantasy dressed up with grad-school citations. I wonder if even Scruton thinks it serves any purpose other than filling a need for a "conservative" position on an important issue. They have to have one, I guess, and apparently all it needs to do is criticize what liberals have been doing, not matter how successful they have been.

GET YOUR WAR ON. TBogg sees and raises on the "Generation 9/11 vs. Boomers" narrative that conservatives are starting to push.

I often wonder where such ideas originate, particularly when they relate to absolutely no verifiable facts. I wouldn't be surprised if this one were based upon a stray finding from a recent New York Times poll, which sees the young'uns "leaning left" in many areas, but adds:

But when it came to the war, young Americans were more optimistic about the outcome than was the population as whole. Fifty-one percent said the United States was very or somewhat likely to succeed in Iraq, compared with 45 percent among all adults.

Maybe some ambitious worker in the Ministry of Truth gleaned from this factoid an opening: if the kids are more inclined than their elders, if only by six percentage points, to believe that the Iraq adventure will prove successful, this point of difference might be marketable. Young people famously prefer to dress, rock, and recreate themselves differently than do the old folks: maybe they can be encouraged to see war boosterism, too, as a hallmark of youth.

By this theory, the Weekly Standard and little-read blogs are only a start, and the campaign will follow through in more popular arenas:

• AST Dew Tour Iraq -- the sands of the Mesopotamian desert come alive with the sounds of FMX racing.
• Jackass Baghdad -- Johnny Knoxville walks into an IED.
• And, of course, Qube TV.

If that doesn't work, there's always the draft.

THE NEW MAGISTERIUM. Thers had this first:

Newsbusters discovers that production of the show "24" (heretofore hailed in rightwing circles as double-plus good) is going "carbon neutral," and Kiefer Sutherland is doing a global warming promo.

Newsbusters commenters immediately start downgrading the show.

Thers' analysis is very astute -- their list of beliefs that render one unacceptably "liberal" expands in new and nuttier directions all the time. I would only add, as is my tedious wont, that this is exactly what you can expect when people start thinking about "culture" as something aligned with their political agenda: they recreate little Inquisitions in their minds, and the pleasure centers that should be receptive to such treats as "24" become subject to their review.

Little children are taught right and wrong, and it follows they will learn to disdain certain childish pleasures, such as screaming in public or late at night. But as adults we are expected to evaluate our training; sometimes this means making new rules, alas, but in the main adulthood is about finding sensible exceptions to the strictures of social life (e.g., screaming is acceptable when exhorted by a DJ or orgasm). We don't grow up by sealing off pleasures but by maximizing them intelligently. This development also affords grown-ups the ability to appreciate mixed blessings. Fat Russian novels can be hard to read but rewarding to finish. Disillusionment may deprive us of the joys of childish faith, but we may find new ones in a mature exploration of our beliefs and of the world around us. And we can enjoy the work and even the company of people with whom we happen to disagree.

These guys apparently missed a step.

A heathier approach to the news is found at fansite Blogs.4Bauer's "24 ways that Jack is carbon neutral":

1. Every day he eliminates at least one carbon emitting life form.
2. Cordite is safe for plant life.
3. The Jack Sack, among it’s other amazing properties, absorbs carbon dioxide...

If this be conservative, it's the sort of conservatism I can get behind.

HATE WILL BRING US TOGETHER. Rod Dreher:

In my Dallas Morning News column today, I defend Pope Benedict's recent official statement describing my church as "defective," and Protestant churches as not churches at all...

I end by saying I'd rather be on the side of those Christians and non-Christians who are willing to tell me respectfully that my beliefs about God are wrong, instead of those who would say, for the sake of diplomacy, that nobody can say what's true about God. At least the former know what's really at stake.

This changes my understanding of ecumenicalism: it's about churches united not by common beliefs, apparently, but by a common enemy, the dreaded agnostics -- some of whom aren't even being diplomatic about it -- into a sort of Coalition of the Willing. Though the partners consider each other defective, and even not churches at all, they will yet convene to smite the heathen.

Should these combined forces succeed in overcoming agnosticism, I look forward to their afterparty, which should be very rowdy. (I say "look forward" in a rhetorical sense, of course, since I will thankfully be dead by then.)