SKILLZ.

LACK OF SKILLZ.

A few liberal readers have taken offense to my suggestion that the "left" doesn't object to anonymous cruising for gay sex in public places...

First, I deliberately used "left" instead of "liberal" in the relevant sentence. But then I did revert back to liberal for most of the rest of the column. I probably could have been more exacting in the distinction...

Maybe I'm a product of my times, having grown up in New York City in the 1980s, but gay cruising in random places, specifically bathrooms, most certainly was part of the gay rights agenda...

I haven't paid that much attention to the issue in recent years, but I still don't seem to recall a lot of liberals expressing their disgust with bathroom hook-ups when Jim McGreevey's tale was revealed...

It seems fitting to say goodbye to summer '07 with Jonah Goldberg feverishly wrestling a rubber doll to keep it from fucking him in the ass.

NANNY STATUS. Ann Althouse worries about John Edwards' mandatory health care plan:

So, the mental health check is mandatory too? Why does he not even realize how bad that sounds? He's so warmed up about the generous benefits he's promising that he doesn't even hear the repressiveness in his own statements. I'm sure he won't be able to deliver on these promises. I'm just wondering about a person with so little sensitivity toward personal freedom.

Mandatory enrollment in a cradle-to-grave government scheme -- why, that's the stuff of totalitarian dystopias.

I do share Althouse's concern, though. Under this plan it's a coin-toss as to which of us would be locked up first: My anti-social attitudes sound a clear warning bell, as do the Professor's passive aggressive episodes.

I think it's a sign of how crucial the health care debate has become that Edwards is even proposing this. There is little danger for a Democrat in upping the ante this way. (Althouse may see this, too, hence the "I'm sure he won't be able to deliver on these promises" hedge.) And, were Edwards to carry this theme through to the general election campaign, I don't see a Republican getting much traction from claims that the Democrats want to put you in a nuthouse -- especially if Giuliani is the candidate. (Ron Paul might be safe, though.)

The political order of the day is a sort of selective nannyism. In security matters, Americans have already swallowed the idea that the innocent have nothing to fear from preventive detention, enhanced surveillance, etc. As health care climbs the charts as an issue, it may be that citizens will also decide that the sane have nothing to fear from mandatory mental health exams. Your average American is as convinced of his own sanity as he is of his own innocence, and with as much justification.

For amusement purposes, I hope this sort of thing keeps up. I would suggest the Republicans warn the people that a poor mental health grade might deprive some of them of their right to bear arms. Then the Democrats can wheel out James Brady to declare that Republicans want guns in schools. Then the Republicans can tell us that the Democrats' prescription for the mentally ill will be what Janet Reno gave the Branch Davidians. Then Al Gore can come out and explain that freedom doesn't mean much when you're drowning under twenty feet of melted polar icecap...

A few laughs on the way to preventive detention is all I ask.

UPDATE. Concurring Opinions suggests that the totalitarian angle on Edwards' plan is bullshit. I would have checked it out myself if I weren't having so much fun.

DA, DA, WE ARE McLOVIN! Attention comrades! Choose wisely your Labor Day blockbuster! At National Review, comrade Lowry assures us that Superbad is affirming of conservative moral values, while comrade Foreman finds The Bourne Ultimatum "one of the most anti-American movies made since the early 1970s." So enjoy approved tits and swears and avoid double-plus-ungood shoot-'em-up! Enjoy also your popcorn ration.

Ultimatum director Paul Greengrass' previous film United 93 was highly praised by NatRev's culture war review board. (Peter Suderman said, "Asking why this film was made is like asking why we go to funerals... We do it because we must," a pull-quote for the ages.) Greengrass' descent from patriot to traitor has been swift, but he should not despair. In 1999, Brad Bird was excoriated in the New York Post for making The Iron Giant, which had a nice Soviet robot in it. When he made The Incredibles, though, Bird was declared rehabilitated.

Of course Greengrass may still have to worry about the cultural journalism skills of Don Surber:

Based on my experience, women raising boys without fathers and urbanization are ending the hunting tradition. Disney and Warner Brothers certainly did not help the cause by depicting hunters over the years as shoot-em-up yahoos.

Even Bambi and Bugs Bunny aren't safe! I suggest Greengrass take a look at the long-awaited screenplay by Roger L. Simon and Michael Ledeen if he values his citizenship.

ON TOUR WITH OLD BLOOD 'N' GUTS. Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters has been sending dispatches from Iraq to the New York Post, and they are a delight. Here are some of Peters' most recent "I'll-remember-this moments":

Scrawny Iraqi police recruits chattering like excited birds as they marveled at the tattoos on a Marine weightlifter's torso: A flesh-and-blood metaphor for muscular, over-the-top America and our relationship with malnourished, bewildered Iraq.

Here's what our stateside poets miss: the opportunity to make metaphors of scrawny occupied peoples. Kipling might have appreciated the chance, but I expect he would have made more of it.

Peters continues in this expansive vein:

We were standing in Iraq's Atlanta, discussing Sherman. For one of those lightning instants when you grasp something beyond words, we both felt the timelessness of war and soldiering.

The glory that was total war, the grandeur that was Reconstruction. Well, five years after it was taken, Atlanta didn't have reliable electric service either.

Sitting in a plywood-partition office in a combat outpost with an American captain and an Iraqi Provincial Security Forces general as the Iraqi "complied" with the captain's request for three bids from local firms to deliver gravel to a dirt motor pool before the rains began.

Eager to close a deal that wouldn't do his own retirement savings any harm, the general laid down three pieces of paper. They were identical, except that one specified $800 per truckload, a second $750 and a third $700.

It was obvious that the bids were all from the same source and that the drill was simply to do things in the peculiar way Americans expected.

Who says they don't know how democracy works? Wait'll they get internet access. They'll be selling our own weapons back to us.

An old sheik, who had done nicely under Saddam, reminiscing about the days of no-nonsense law and order when he could drive safely on the spur of the moment from Fallujah to Basra. As the polite old man continued telling stories, it became heartbreakingly obvious that much of the post-liberation fighting between Iraqis and Americans had been the result of confounded expectations on both sides.

Living so long under Saddam - and previous stern regimes - men such as the sheik simply couldn't comprehend our rules or assumptions or philosophy, nor did we grasp the accommodations Iraqis had made with the concept of "laws."

We began by shouting past each other, and ended by shooting at each other.

This piqued my interest, till I read on and found Peters was speaking of Americans and Iraqis in general, and not of himself and the polite old man.

Peters closes with a long, funny description of one of Saddam's old palaces, during which he remembers that he hasn't said anything bad about liberals yet. "But maybe we could organize a tour that would take them to a few of Saddam's palaces," he says, "then to see the squalor in which most Iraqis live." I suppose we all have some idea of both pictures, and look forward to the day when both the palaces and the squalor will be eradicated. But I see we are almost done building a new palace in Baghdad, while the Army Corps of Engineers projects that Iraq will get sufficient power services sometime in the next decade. Also, I doubt even Peters could vouch for the security of our tour bus. So I'll pass on the offer, and continue to rely on Peters' dispatches, which are very revealing in their way.

ART TRIALS. Well, I did my best with Clive James' Cultural Amnesia, but after 500 pages I had to set it aside, not out of fatigue but out of irritation. The writing's not the problem. In and among the dozens of essays, each dedicated to (but not necessarily about) a major figure of the 20th Century (and sometimes others), James reliably produces insights that have both force and delicacy, as with this bit on Pound:

Pound vaunted his ability to form explanatory relationships, but it was the very thing he could never truly do, even though, like any other paranoid psychotic, he tried to all the time. Nevertheless he had the talent to demonstrate that to go mad for detail might yield something, whereas to go mad for generalization leads nowhere... he thought that he could judge an empire by the metallic composition of its small change, just as he thought he could extract the meaning of a Chinese ideogram by the way it looked. In both cases he was too far from the mark for sanity. But if he didn't get the picture, he could at least see it...

When he likes his subjects James is even better: "Montesquieu can delay his judgement on Tiberius: a forebearance that not even Tacitus can show... Tacitus, as much fascinated as repelled, had his sense of irony exhausted by a satanically gifted individual. Montesquieu, less emotionally involved, saw a point about Tiberius that extended to all mankind." If you can't get with this sort of material, he also writes elegantly about Dick Cavett and Tony Curtis.

The book isn't all about art, though. James' 20th Century is a slaughterhouse, so by his lights Hitler, Goebbels, Stalin, Mao, Pinochet and other such like must be considered, as well as artists who either opposed or collabrated with them, or were their victims. On these subjects, too, James can be forceful and even subtle: Goebbels, for example, "was the preeminent Nazi advocate of Total War... but he was also a realist in a surreal world, the madhouse he had helped create." On Nadezhda Mandelstam, whose husband was executed by Stalin, James is even poetic:

Akhmatova encapsulated the anguish of millions of devastated women when she wrote: "Husband dead, son in jail: pray for me." But a romantic she remained, still believing in the imaginative validity of a love affair beyond time. In Hope Abandoned, Nadezhda was able to say firmly that her friend was mistaken. Love affairs beyond time were impossible to take seriously when violent separations are the stuff of reality. With real life so disturbed, the nature of romanticism had been changed. In the new reality, all love affairs were beyond time.

James is so good at finding such aesthetic kernels in the tragedies that came with totalitarianism that I was prepared and even eager to hear a lot more of them. Alas, I did, and the kernels lost their savor soon enough. Part of it perhaps could not be helped; the horrors of the century may have been unprecedented, but they certainly begin to resemble one another over long stretches of description, and after the thirtieth or fortieth outrage I wished an editor had gently told James that we get it already. When Dante went to Hell he took Virgil, and you need a guide at that level to keep the infernal circles from closing into a blind spiral on you.

James' solution is to place the artists -- or, when they won't serve, polemicists -- in the context of relevant totalitarianisms. Did they perform admirably? Ernst Junger, despite being "incomparably the most gifted writer to remain on the scene" -- that is, in the Reich, though never quite a collaborator -- "no amount of horrifying truth could induce him fully to admit that he made a mistake. His way out of such an admission was to blame the style of the times; i.e., to console himself that everyone was at it..." If you think that's harsh, see what European Reds like Saramago get:

When Democracy finally arrived in 1974, Saramago didn't trust it. Saramago had good reason to suspect that justice would never come by reasonable means. But when it showed signs of doing so, he did nothing in his discursive writings to justify his position the only way it could have been justified... but it was wholly untrue to go on claiming that the far left offered an alternative in itself. The price of sticking to such a proposition was to restrict his own frame of reference to the size of his study. There was a world elsewhere in which the common people, all over the planet, had been massacred by the millions...

You soon see there is no Third Way with James. Authors who don't get the message are failures on that basis, despite the merit of their prose. James does not quite descend to the sort of Konservetkult nonsense we regularly lampoon here because he is a true critic with a rigorous standard: as with Pound, the ability to see the object is some recompense, but to get the picture is what art should be doing, particularly when the picture is of an oncoming holocaust. This is an arguable point, and certainly not the same thing as the blind weighing and sorting of the propagandist, but weighing and sorting is done and sometimes to an absurd degree:

In the long view of history, Brecht's fame as a creep will prevail, as it ought to. An unblushing apologist for organized frightfulness against the common people whose welfare he claimed to prize above his own, he was really no better than Oswald Mosley and a lot more dangerous. Brecht's fame as a poet will depend upon a wide appreciation of what he could do with language, and there lies the drawback: because the more you appreciate what he could do with language, the more you realize how clearly he could see, and so the more you are faced with how he left things out. You are faced, that is, with what he did not do with language.

What Brecht did do with language James never addresses, but you can pick up his plays and poems and enjoy them, I would say, even if you are not an apologist for Stalin.

This sort of hectoring eventually wore me down, but I am still getting some pleasure out of riffling it, because now I can desultorily enjoy James' lovely anecdotes, textual analyses, appreciations, and even some history lessons, without having to fidget in anticipation of another session of his grim tribunal.

WE ARE NOT DRUNKS. WE'RE MULTIMILLIONAIRES. The official end of summer is weeks away, but Labor Day announces the bell lap. Students are schlepping in; the nights grow less sultry. Have we wrung all the possible good out of our blessed time near the sun? Maybe not. So let's make the most of the short space left before the dropping of the iron leaf, and face life with the proper attitude. Here is an inspirational message from Withnail & I:



Enjoy your weekend.

POSITIVELY THE LAST LARRY CRAIG POST. Conservatives continue to contend that there's no hypocrisy in Larry Craig's actions. First, Jonah Goldberg tells us that "one can simply believe as a matter of principle or faith that marriage is the union of a man and a woman and that’s that while at the same time having much love or sympathy in your heart for gay people." Then he calls Craig a "pervert." Rod Dreher adds to this his usual obsession with gay men and bathrooms.

And... but why bother? The tools of reason are useless against people who are in full flight from reason. Better to contemplate how this argument would go down with normal people who are not in the semantic hair-splitting business. Hell, try it at Free Republic. Those guys may be bigots but they're no intellectuals. I should like to see Dreher exhort these proud members of the Republican base to oppose gay rights only in a spirit of Christian love. Soon enough they'll come to the conclusion that there's somethin' funny about Brother Rod.

I'm sick of it already. Bring on the next gay Republican!

SHORTER JOHN DERBYSHIRE. I say, deuced liberals won't allow one to enjoy racial humor, wot? (puts on ridiculous nightshirt, brushes rotten teeth with Marmite, and buggers a lad)

THE HEALING POWER OF LAUGHTER. Remember when National Review’s David Frum argued in defense of Ted Haggard that there was no such thing as hypocrisy? That must have been a trial balloon, because some conservatives are now using the idea as a defense of Larry Craig.

Mona Charen claims that she can’t find evidence that Craig “ran on family values” so, despite Craig’s support of Idaho's version of the Defense of Marriage Act, he can’t officially be a hypocrite:

I have no trouble saying that Craig should resign in disgrace. But the rest of the folks out there, particularly the lefties, who disbelieve in sexual disgrace (except perhaps where children are involved) can exult in cases like Craig’s only because this supposedly makes him a hypocrite. But what if he’s not a hypocrite? Suppose, as my admittedly hasty search suggests, he’s been pretty quiet about family values?  Doesn’t that mean the Democrats should be defending him?

I imagine Charen asking these questions in the manner of “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” and getting, as was gotten in the original context, the Big Ig.

Meanwhile Dean Esmay 's Kevin D.* offers the argument that secularists are the real hypocrites, man:

When pushing out one idea the void must be filled with another. You can't, as [David] Limbaugh points out, complain one group is legislating morality when you yourself seek to do the same thing.

So if you think, say, we should legislate against the persecution of homosexuals, you must also respect my legislation persecuting homosexuals. Otherwise you’re a hypocrite. Q. E. Duh.

As usual in cases involving gay people, Roger L. Simon pleads for tolerance, causing (again as usual) his commenters to roar their displeasure. One circulates a talking point from James Taranto’s Wall Street Journal defense of escort enthusiast David Vitter:

Hypocrisy does not mean saying one thing and doing the opposite. It means saying something that one does not believe…

So don’t call him a hypocrite -- he’s just someone who “weakened” under the awful strain of pretended heterosexuality.

We’re used to winger sophistries, of course. But this one’s in a special category. These guys are eager to defend Craig against charges of hypocrisy even as they accede to, and even demand, his resignation. Clearly they don’t give a damn about Craig, but they care deeply about negating the idea that their champions are hypocrites. They do it, I think, because hypocrisy inspires derision, which makes one's high horse about other people's morals less of an electoral asset, and that's an asset without which the modern American conservative movement is seriously weakened.

Hell, they're even making jokes about Craig themselves. Probably to keep from crying.

UPDATE. New reality: Larry Craig was set up. Defenders still want him out of the Senate, though. Sympathy and condemnation at the same time! This must be what they mean by "compassionate conservatism."

The Wall Street Journal:

Defenders of "outing" politicians argue that the cruelty is not gratuitous--that politicians are in a position of power, which they are using to harm gay citizens, and therefore their private lives are fair game. But if the politician in question is a mere legislator, his power consists only of the ability to cast one vote among hundreds. The actual amount of harm that he is able to inflict is minimal.

Clearly liberals should stop bothering gay anti-gay members of Congress until their number reaches at least a plurality. Which, given the trend, should be any day now.

Anyway, most lawmakers who oppose gay-rights measures are not homosexual. To single out those who are for special vituperation is itself a form of antigay prejudice. Liberals pride themselves on their compassion, but often are unwilling to extend it to those with whose politics they disagree.

OK, I've got a new idea: Keep the pressure on till growing conservative dismay at liberal "antigay prejudice" leads to sweeping legislative protections for homosexuals.

UPDATE II.Shorter Jonah Goldberg: Conservatives aren't uptight about sex. We laff at fags! Oh, and harumph harumph the humanity. (Must put that first.)

*UPDATE III. Fixed attribution on Esmay quote; thanks, apostropher.

LARRY CRAIG COVERAGE, CITIZEN-JOURNALIST STYLE. Democrats were Larry Craig first. Larry Craig is about the liberal media, semiotistics show. Larry Craig improves Republican prospects of retaining this Senate seat. Larry Craig should have punched plainclothes cop to demonstrate masculinity. Larry Craig is wrong on immigration, making his sexuality a legitimate issue. Larry Craig proves that active homosexuals must be purged from the Republican Party. Larry Craig proves that homosexuals are overrepresented in Congress. Larry Craig shows that closeted gay Congressmen can still be valuable allies in the war against non-closeted gay non-Congressmen.

Also, Citizen Journalist shocked to hear that gay people are targets of law enforcement.

BABY BOOM. A correspondent at Gates of Vienna charts declining birth rates in the West and blames "the disincentives to childbearing so readily provided by the welfare systems of Western countries." Those of us brought up on stories about welfare mothers churning out brats in order to collect more welfare may find this strange. GoV commenter Geraldo suggests that "Most of the problem is in school. Many girls/young women (ex, my daughter) dont want to have children because she was taught at school about a catastrophic world that is coming." As Gates of Vienna's primary subject matter is the coming clash of civilizations, I should think Geraldo's daughter, and anyone related to Gates of Vienna readers, would be used to such teachings.

HORATIO ALGER AT 9 PERCENT INTEREST. At National Review's Phi Beta Cons blog, George Leef notices a Harvard Business Online article about the choice to either stay in college or leave to seek one's fortune. The HBO author is sympathetic to the latter choice:

There are several arguments to be made on that side of the coin. First: as competition for college-educated employees increases, companies will become more and more motivated to use those without college degrees effectively in the workforce, in jobs that today would routinely require a diploma-in-hand as the price of admission. They will come to screen candidates in different ways, searching, perhaps, for the Simon Cowells among them: those who are bright, motivated, and will make them money.

A second argument: in their desperate search for college talent, companies will join professional sports franchises in recruiting individuals earlier and earlier in the pipeline. It will become a sign of your exceptional talent to proclaim that you were hired in your junior or even sophomore year in college. Only those in the lower ranks of the class will make it through as seniors.

The Phi Beta Con perspective in general is that all our citadels of learning are run by Marxist lunatics, which may explain why Leef highlights the author's claim that "a perception that at least parts of today's college education are actually not particularly relevant may pervade more and more young people's (and older employers') consciousness."

But an increasing number of Americans are going after college degrees -- including graduate degrees. The most recent Digest of Educational Statistics from the U.S. Department of Education:

College enrollment hit a record level of 17.5 million in fall 2005. Another record of 17.6 million is anticipated for fall 2006 (table 3). Enrollment is expected to increase by an additional 13 percent between 2006 and 2015... The traditional college-age population (18 to 24 years old) rose 15 percent between 1995 and 2005, which was reflected by an increase in college enrollment...

And (pdf):

Undergraduate enrollment rose 21 percent between 1996 and 2005. Graduate enrollment had been steady at about 1.3 million in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but rose about 59 percent between 1985 and 2005 (table 191)...

Growing numbers of people are completing college degrees. Between 1994–95 and 2004–05, the number of associate’s, bachelor’s, master’s, first-professional, and doctor’s degrees rose (table 251). Associate’s degrees increased 29 percent, bachelor’s degrees increased 24 percent, master’s degrees increased 45 percent, and doctor’s degrees increased 18 percent during this period. The number of first-professional degrees was 15 percent higher in 2004–05 than it was in 1994–95.

I'll go out on a limb here and suggest that this upward trend in college enrollment and degrees has less to do with an increased thirst for the joy of learning than it does with students' (and parents') hopes that degrees will get them good jobs. The cost of degrees is steep and people are getting ridiculously deep in debt to obtain them. The shift toward private loans to pay for schooling has been a bonanza for a certain kind of lender:

Overall, student lending has been an extraordinarily profitable business. Sallie's return on equity, which was over 30 percent in 2006, is one of the highest among American companies, and its executives are compensated lavishly. From 1999 through 2004, former CEO and current chairman Albert Lord took home over $200 million. In 2006, current CEO Tim Fitzpatrick was paid $16.6 million in salary, bonuses and stock.

I have discussed here the popular notion among conservatives that our economy is doing so well that any negative perception by citizens of their own financial prospects is unjustified, and excited not by personal experiences but by liberal propaganda. From this point of view, I can see why they might also wish to believe that expensive degrees are unnecessary -- if your boy or girl has to drop out, he or she may still become a Simon Cowell. It's an optimistic view, in its way, of the sort that one might express casually when a friend finds that he just can't make the tuition payments. And in some happy cases it may even come true.

But people are digging deep to get those degrees if there's any way in hell they can be gotten. It's not easy for most of them, but they persist because they believe that opportunity comes with an ever-increasing price of admission, and they'd better pay it now before it goes up again. Because everything is going up, constantly. Maybe your grandpa went to the mill to earn the money to house and feed his family, but those days are gone: Your best bet is the diploma mill.

It doesn't look like a happy picture to me, but regular readers will know that I am not much of an optimist.

FACE OF THE ENEMY UPDATE. Jules Crittenden, on vacation, gives the floor to one Theo Spark:

The West’s biggest problem however is…..the cancer of liberalism that is infecting our society. These are the fools who, having failed to turn the planet into a socialist ‘wonderland’ are now concentrating their attentions on the myths of ‘global warming’, the continuing struggle against capitalism (which gave them the internet, their new weapon of choice), and their standard anti-US mantra. They relish in the death of every ‘allied’ serviceman, fighting to preserve the very freedoms which give them a voice...

...The liberals are weakening our society, allowing our enemies to gain strength for the final onslaught. The worlds despots are surviving due to this weakness and millions are suffering as a result.

The title of this piece is ‘Is the West heading for Civil War? Unless we face down and defeat liberals the world over, we are headed for a civil war between the good and the gormless and the only people who will benefit will be our enemies.

Not finding in this post Sparks' recipe for the defeat of liberalism -- much less examples of our alleged glee at the death of coalition forces -- I visited his own blog. While it is clear that he likes girls except when they talk, he is short on policy prescriptions, which is perhaps for the best.

WHY DON'T YOU GO TO THE STARDUST BALLROOM? IT'S LOADED WITH TOMATOES. Speaking of poor, misunderstood right wingers, a gay conservatarian says it's been hard for him to get a date because liberals are prejudiced against conservatives. At the end, though, he reveals he has found a boyfriend ("though more liberal than I"). I wonder if he observed the usual controls for such a study. Did he change his haircut, for example, or lose a few pounds during his dateless period? The data is unclear.

This stimulates discussion from the hetero perspective at Volokh Conspiracy, where Ilya Somin claims that "A great many people believe that it is wrong to date anyone whose political views differ significantly from their own." Again, the data is unclear, and Somin denies experiencing this alleged problem himself.

Plenty of discussion at both boards. My take is, getting laid is more fun than talking about how other people are to blame that you're not getting laid.

THE SOFTER SIDE OF RUSH. Our subject found himself at the tender age of 37 accused of being "racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe, mean-spirited, angry." But he overcame:

There are certain areas in the business that I am the most successful person in the world where I cannot work because of what I think. Now, I have not run around and bellyached and whined and moaned about it. I have accepted it as a badge of honor because I do not allow myself to believe that those people are better or more important than I am. Just the exact opposite. And I have found a way to work around it and found my niche here. I know what I'm good at. I'm doing what I was born to do...

Everybody has obstacles to overcome. Now, Eric said that he's heard me bellyache and whine and complain about things. Not within the context of being discriminated against! I've found ways to work around it. Everybody has to.

The speaker is Rush Limbaugh, and he's tired of people who can't see this is a land of opportunity, because if Rush Limbaugh can make it, despite his disadvantages, then anyone can. The tirade is set off by a mention of racism. And he accuses Democrats of exploiting the feelings of "a country half full of unsatisfied, malcontent, miserable, unhappy people" with bellyaching about racism and poverty, and rock concerts.

I am in general sympathetic to the notion that we should try to rise above our circumstances. Still, I would be shy about citing my own history as a white man with a college education (notwithstanding my humble beginnings) as a counterweight to historic racial discrimination.

Of course I don't know what it's like to be as rich and powerful as Rush Limbaugh. And it may be that when you've attained such heights, you might lose your awareness -- if you ever had it to begin with -- of what it's like to be without money and power. Then the people who do know what it's like, either by experience or observation, might look to you like miserable malcontents.

To give him some credit, I imagine he has noticed that there are more malcontents than there used to be. He may also understand that a healthy chunk of those malcontents in the half-a-country have been peeled away from the large Republican majority that was in effect when he was battling discrimination as a radio celebrity back in the Reagan era.

In politics as in market share, the game is to win such people back. If you're confident, you restate your case more boldly. If you're less confident, you complain -- that people don't understand you, that your enemies lie about you, that you, too, are a victim. It's actually your opponents who are the bigots, while you are "America's Real Civil Rights Leader." In advertising they call it repositioning, and Sears did have some success proclaiming its Softer Side. But it tends to work best when you can justify it with your product line. And it never helps to be so defensive.

STOOPID ACE IZ STOOPID. Lofty social thinking, of the White Guy Trying to Be Helpful variety, from Mr. Ace O. Spades:

I guess this might be a reason to discuss the aggressively anti-intellectual -- or more accurately, pro-ignorance -- "Cult of the Authentic" which is more responsible for black failure than all the racism in the world.

Thereafter comes discussion of "thug life" and "culture of authenticity" -- as well as helpless laughter, as we discover Mr. Spades is talking about a black guy's entries in a freaking Facebook quiz -- a matter of cultural concern, according to Mr. Spades, because such language from a college man means that, among our dusky brethren, "this idea that intelligence is a sell-out to The Man persists."

I hope Mr. Spades will next bring his analytic skills to LOLcats, which phenomenon features lots of misspellings, and therefore must have been created by African Americans trying to make themselves look dumb for Al Sharpton or something.

I mean what else could it be? Humor? Maybe Ace can't see it because no one made fun of faggots.

CENSORSHIT. Iraq bitter-ender Armed Liberal says that "we don't do purges, and that's a good thing," and has invented a derogatory "Moon Unit" award which he will give " to people who think that gagging someone -- with or without a spoon -- is an appropriate political response."

His first honoree is Atrios, who wrote:

Is Tom Friedman a Bad Person?

All signs point to "pretty hideous human being, one which all good people should shun."

Even Armed Liberal's commenters cannot achieve consensus as to whether Duncan Black's gag constitutes an attempt to silence Tom Friedman. Nonetheless, Armed Liberal predicts that "the progblogs are going to be racking up a huge number of these 'Moon Units.'"

I should think "gagging" would look more like this:

Life in an FBI muzzle is no fun. Two Connecticut librarians on Sunday described what it was like to be slapped with an FBI national security letter and accompanying gag order. It sounded like a spy movie or, gulp, something that happens under a repressive foreign government. Peter Chase and Barbara Bailey, librarians in Plainville, Connecticut, received an NSL to turn over computer records in their library on July 13, 2005. Unlike a suspected thousands of other people around the country, Chase, Bailey and two of their colleagues stood up to the Man and refused to comply, convinced that the feds had no right to intrude on anyone's privacy without a court order (NSLs don't require a judge's approval). That's when things turned ugly.

The four librarians under the gag order weren't allowed to talk to each other by phone. So they e-mailed. Later, they weren't allowed to e-mail.

After the ACLU took on the case and it went to court in Bridgeport, the librarians were not allowed to attend their own hearing. Instead, they had to watch it on closed circuit TV from a locked courtroom in Hartford, 60 miles away. "Our presence in the courtroom was declared a threat to national security," Chase said.

Or it might look more like this bullshit libel suit against PZ Myers.

Or it might look more like what the Army does to milbloggers. They're largely rightwing, of course, and censored by their own superiors, but I'm sure there's some angle by which liberals of the unArmed kind can be blamed.

But what do I know? I say mean things about conservatives all the time. Obviously I'm a one-man Legion of Indecency, trampling the free speech of wingnuts 'round with the world with the legally-non-binding force of my invective.

UPDATE. Gulagmaster Norbizness says of Christopher Walken's latest poor choice of vehicle, "I think it's official... nobody should remember anything good that Christopher Walken has ever done in his acting career." Not even Hollywood is safe from liberal terror! And I'm pretty sure I heard some hippie say, "Christ, what an asshole" about Bush. Developing...

AND NO, RED DAWN DOESN'T COUNT. Perfesser Glenn Reynolds on the War on Whatchamacallit:

In a decade or two we'll get a new revisionist history in which America was united against the threat, much like we're hearing today about the Cold War.

My memory's not what it used to be, but I think there were several Democratic Congresses during the Cold War, and even a few Democratic Presidents. How is it that the Sovet Union never invaded? America was obviously ripe for the plucking.

Yet not even the traitors' victory in Vietnam brought us even close to Soviet domination. A less convinced soul than the Perfesser might get the impression that the United States sometimes engages its forces in error.

ANNALS OF LIBERTARIANISM. Talking about the Giuliani health care plan, Megan McArdle argues that "As a class, the old and sick are already luckier than the young and healthy":

Moreover, as a class, the old and sick have some culpability in their ill health. They didn't eat right or excercise; they smoked; they didn't go to the doctor as often as they ought; they drank to much, or took drugs, or sped, or engaged in dangerous sports. Again, in individual cases this will not be true; but as a class, the old and sick bear some of the responsibility for their own ill health, while younger, healthier people have almost no causal role in the ill-health of others.

Perhaps they deserve it by virtue of suffering? But again, most of them are suffering because they have gotten old, often in high style...

Try to imagine this woman on a lifeboat.

WRITING LESSON. Two interesting views of what was so awesome about 9/11, from two very different writers. First Christopher Hitchens:

In order to get my own emotions out of the way, I should say briefly that on that day I shared the general register of feeling, from disgust to rage, but was also aware of something that would not quite disclose itself. It only became fully evident quite late that evening. And to my surprise (and pleasure), it was exhilaration. I am not particularly a war lover, and on the occasions when I have seen warfare as a traveling writer, I have tended to shudder. But here was a direct, unmistakable confrontation between everything I loved and everything I hated. On one side, the ethics of the multicultural, the secular, the skeptical, and the cosmopolitan. (Those are the ones I love, by the way.) On the other, the arid monochrome of dull and vicious theocratic fascism. I am prepared for this war to go on for a very long time. I will never become tired of waging it, because it is a fight over essentials. And because it is so interesting.

Second, the man who quotes him, Rod Dreher:

I didn't, and don't, ultimately value the same things as Hitchens, but in reading this passage, I recognize his sentiment. To walk around New York City on that day and on the days that followed -- and probably to walk around where you live too -- was to see things with crystal clarity. As I've written elsewhere, that clarity, or perception of clarity, was more of an illusion than we could have recognized, and it led many of us to make bad decisions. Nevertheless, whatever one's view of the Iraq War, the feeling all, or nearly all, of us had on 9/11 and in its immediate aftermath was one of ultimate meaning returned to the world. Irony was suspended, and it was possible to feel not only real love for your neighbor, but love for your country, and a recognition of what you really did love, but took for granted -- until it was threatened. It couldn't last, but it was -- I have to confess -- a great feeling. All the usual bitching and moaning we do as part of our everyday lives ceased. We saw pure, uncut evil, and we knew it wanted to kill us, and we didn't know what we were going to do in response, but we knew we'd do something. And we were clear that Everything Mattered. Whatever else life was, it was no longer boring. We lived in interesting times.

One of the things I still admire about Hitchens' writing is that I believe him: not his belligerent analyses, but his portrayal of his own thoughts and feelings. He identifies clearly the personal obsessions that informed his strange reaction to the horrible event -- the multicultural versus the monochrome. He puts responsibility for his feelings on himself, and dares the reader to find him insane, because he doesn't care what the reader thinks. Hitchens seeks not to beg his reader's attention and understanding, but to command it.

Dreher has none of this. To speak in the first place of "the feeling all, or nearly all, of us had on 9/11" is a glaring sign that even in confessional mode, Dreher thinks in groupthink, and his announcement that our group feeling was "one of ultimate meaning returned to the world" shows that he can't even get groupthink right. "It couldn't last, but it was -- I have to confess -- a great feeling... And we were clear that Everything Mattered." Even if you weren't there, you'd have to doubt this, it's so phony. The problem is that Dreher can't take ownership of his own strange thoughts -- he has to project them on all of us. I think in the back of his mind he knew he was saying something awful, and so sought to offload responsibility for them.

If you can't take responsibility for what you're saying, you might as well shut up.