THE VIRTUES OF HYPOCRISY. Beliefnet's Rod Dreher starts out saying "there's something ...not quite there when conservatives who don't have families give advice and commentary on family-related issues." He tells us how a "conservative acquaintance... explained that the experience of raising kids, especially the one who suffers so much, has made him far less willing to pass judgment on other parents."

You know the drill. After several paragraphs Dreher executes a McArdle Maneuver and ends up talking about murderous teens who won't do their homework and "self-centered, couldn't-give-a-s**t parents." (He also says that having children "made me less quick to judge others harshly.")

Dreher's apparently in a mood to advise his fellow conservative commentators on lifestyle choices. Some days earlier, he told them to leave "Leave the NYC-DC Bubble":

I wonder if The American Spectator would be better off moving back to Bloomington, Indiana. I wonder how different National Review would be if it kept its DC bureau, but relocated its offices to Dallas or Atlanta. Similarly with the Weekly Standard. And so forth. For one thing, there would be much greater attention paid to culture, and less to policy and pure politics.

More attention to culture? Didn't he see Jonah Goldberg's review of Cloverfield? (Spoiler alert: it's about 9/11, "a message worth pondering.")

We've been over this before. Pleasing as is the prospect of Goldberg spending his lunch breaks at the Cracker Barrel in Fritters, Alabama, there's no reason for rightwing columnists to walk the walk. They're big idea men; they have read Hayek and Bloom and Coulter. It is for the lumpen to follow their social prescriptions, while the Smart Ones ponder welfare policy over phyllo-wrapped salmon at Persephone.

It would be easy to twit them for hypocrisy, but let us say this for them: they want others to think as they think, but draw the line at demanding that they live as they live. Dreher wants them not only to think as he thinks -- insofar as they can follow that snaking stream of half-baked ideas -- but also to live as he lives: religiously, away from major cities, with kids, organic food and compost heaps. He's the sort who will worry over "what American conservatism has become," and in the very next post worry over those who are "policing conservatism from within." And he thinks he's being non-judgmental. Some kinds of hypocrisy really are worse than others.

WITH GOD'S HELP, MY LAST CLINTON DERANGEMENT SYNDROME POST*. Back on January 4, when some people thought Hillary Clinton was cooked, National Review's Lisa Shiffren mourned:

Deep in my psyche, in the place that kind of misses the toothache I've been prodding at with my tongue, I am having a tiny little pang of missing Hillary. Not her, but hating her. Hating Hillary has been such a central political impulse for so long now — 15 years... I don't really know what I will do with that newly freed strand of energy.

She needn't have worried. Here she is today:

It is bad enough that the first serious female candidate for the world's most powerful office got where she is (as of now that is the U.S. Senate), by dint of her marriage, and not a career of ever more responsible political officeholding. It is bad enough that we all must work overtime not to dwell on the deal with the devil that constitutes her marriage to the former president: specifically, that she overlook a lifetime of unbridled public infidelity — in return for power.

Hate will find a way. Oh, and there's this:

And really, for all those feminists out there — and I know this is the wrong website for that audience, but I wouldn't be allowed to write at one that reached those women...

For similar reasons, I wouldn't be allowed to write for the National Review, but I will here advise Schiffren and her fellow sufferers: I don't support Hillary Clinton, but when you call her marriage a "deal with the devil" simple chivalry warms me toward her. In fact, crap like this constituted no small part of my rather sentimental decision to vote for her when she ran for the Senate. I suspect I'm not the only one -- and that's part of what she's counting on now. If you're really serious about shutting her down, you might try breaking the cycle of violence from your own end.

* 'til February or thereabouts.

OCCUPATION. Though I'm an old film nerd, there are a lot of esteemed directors whose works I've completely missed. I'm a little ashamed of it, but I must admit now that I was unfamiliar with Jean-Pierre Melville before tonight, because I've just seen Army of Shadows and can't contain myself.

As you might expect from a film about a French Resistance crew, it is one harrowing, nerve-tearing incident after another. There is no attempt to frame them with an overarching narrative; the men (and one woman) do their jobs, get caught or fail to get caught or escape. Between the exploits there is a patient attention to everyday activity that sustains the tension; when you are fucking with the Nazis, just eating a meal or walking down the street is a prelude to more terror. And the actors observable carry the weight of their occupation, in both senses, at every moment, and their seriousness doesn't get tiresome because it is palpably appropriate. What they're doing is heroic, but there is no lingering over that for effect, and when someone gets emotional it has to be tamped down for the good of the cause. (We get a clue that this will be the method at the beginning, when our hero coolly endures some chatter from a jolly Vichy gendarme. Later, the clasping of a hand is allowed to linger, under extraordinary circumstances, but that too must be put aside.)

Though the heroes are out of uniform, this is one of the best war movies I've ever seen. The two top Resisters' visit to London, where they meet DeGaulle and endure a blitz (and the central character, Gerbier, hitches a ride back to France with the RAF and makes his first parachute jump) gives a sense of the wider conflict within which they operate. This is war seen from deep inside, where the planning is endless and everything can go wrong and one can no longer be interested in what came before or hope too much for what may come afterward. "Struggle" and "conflict" are not conveyed by gritted teeth and flexed muscles but by silent attentiveness to opportunity and the occasional run for freedom or quick, bloody strike (and, in one hair-raising case, the dilemma of killing a man without disturbing the neighbors). The clarity is bracing. It makes Saving Private Ryan look like a soap opera.

I want to see more Melville soon, though my accursed taste for contemporaneity may postpone that so I can see a few more of this year's probably-shitty Oscar nominees.

GENERAL DERANGEMENT SYDROME. In Britain, "a story based on the Three Little Pigs fairy tale has been turned by a government agency's awards panel as the subject matter could offend Muslims." You can guess how I feel about it, and I can probably guess how you feel about it.

You may also guess how James Lileks feels about it too, but with him you can never guess far enough. He interrupts his rant to make this observation:

All the brave people waiting for things to get really bad so they can put on their V for Vendetta masks and upload YouTube videos of themselves writing graffiti on stop signs will roll their eyes and shrug their shoulders at this, because A) it’s just more wingnut hyperventilation, B) the people who get exercised have a deeper agenda, which probably involves deportation and gas chambers, and C) it’s just pigs, man...

Dig hard into your memory banks, lefty friends, and see how many people you can recall meeting who remotely match this description. They may safely be said to barely exist. I'm sure Lileks knows this, but he isn't really talking about these near-imaginary people. He's talking about you and me. Because we didn't wake up the morning and say, "I must protect America from this dhimmitude." You and I are not being criticized for our imagined support of the idiots on the children's book award committee, but for not caring so much about foreign idiocy as about the local variety. Which makes us graffitists who use beatnik slang.

We might call this the McArdle Maneuver, or attach it to a law of wingnut nature: any argument against any outrage will inevitably expand to encompass their ancient grudges, regardless of relevance.

Someone should clue Lileks et alia that the repetitive use of non sequiturs doesn't make them Cato, it makes them incoherent.

TRIBUTE. Heath Ledger was a very good actor and I'm sorry he's gone. Looking back, I see that in my review of Brokeback Mountain I didn't speak on his performance. His vocal characterization reminded me, strangely, of Brian Keith in another movie with a gay theme, Reflections in a Golden Eye, when his Langdon was drunkenly muttering about the departed Anacleto. Langdon was openly contemptuous of the houseboy's feminine manner, but in his cups -- and in the presence of his good buddy and screamingly obvious closet case Penderton -- he rumbled and mumbled and moped over Anacleto's "dancin' on his toes."

Keith's Langdon was wrestling with man-attraction, though at a remove; Ledger's Ennis had no remove. He was simple, and love took him like a plague. The way Ledger played him, I got the feeling that if Ennis had loved a woman instead life would still have been hard for him, but loving Jack made it impossible. Still, he had love and kept it, and though his eyes receded they never became angry, watchful slits that dared the world away; they were warm and full of hurt and confusion, and even attracted affection, disastrously. A large part of the sorrow of watching the movie is expecting Ennis to adapt and realizing that he can't.

The words and directing carry a lot but it's the acting that makes the sale. Actors don't just portray, they also imagine, and under any great performance is always a humane conception that makes the display of skill worth attending. Whatever pain was particular to Heath Ledger, on screen the pain was all Ennis'. We should be grateful to have this fine example of the player's art by which to remember him.

WATCHING THE PROS WORK. Andrew Sullivan:

It really is time to acknowledge that Clinton is running for a third term - in flagrant violation of the 22d Amendment.

Gasp! Can we pre-impeach him? Meanwhile a humorous Onion article spurs one of the Protein Wisdom crew to deep thought:

However, in the past, comedians targeted Bill’s inability to keep his pants on in the workplace. This time the subjects are the implied co-presidency the Clintons offer and Bill’s honesty with respect to the political, rather than the personal. Those doing the mocking are not conservative talk show hosts, but left-leaning humorists. As previously noted, a psychological line may get crossed that permanently erodes — to some degree — the style of politics the Clintons made dominant in the 1990s.

You rarely see this sort of bipartisan spirit, let alone respect for "left-leaning humorists," at Protein Wisdom. In fact you rarely see it anywhere. Well, there was that period in '98 when every newsman was tracking Monica Lewinsky and every late-night comic was making cigar jokes. Great days, those. But it was Clinton who had the last laugh.

I hope someone other than Clinton gets the nomination, but in these early innings it is nostalgically pleasing to observe the continued potency of the Derangement Syndrome she and her husband engendered so many years ago.

HOW CAN THEY TELL? Fred Thompson has tottered off the national stage. His supporters are taking it hard. Kim du Toit, who once called Thompson "the man who’s going to get my vote in the primaries," now delivers this envoi: "Thanks for nothing. Good-bye, go back to Hollywood, and fuck you."

But most of the Fredheads alternate between mourning and belligerence. At RedState, where Ole Fred kinda sorta blogged, they are vacillating between the denial and bargaining stages. The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler says, "Now we get to decide which of the remaining horses we’re going to have to ride, if any." At Cold Fury Joe will still vote for Fred; Mike laments "Twilight in America," endorses a new American Conservative Party. Stephen Bainbridge wonders "whether there’s any one of the 4 [remaining GOP candidates] for whom it will be worth holding one’s nose and taking the plunge."

I expect they'll all come around when it's time to vote against Hitlery or that black guy. For now, let us remember the good times. Back when he was only a potential contender for the Presidency, Thompson sent conservative hearts aflutter by making videos like this one, in which he chewed a cigar and threatened Michael Moore with incarceration in a mental institution. How they loved the dazzling fantasy of that tough-talking D.A. from Law & Order stepping out of the idiot box to dispense rough justice to liberals. How Reaganesque it was!

Then he actually entered the race, and soon we were hearing about his "different kind of campaign" -- one in which he did little actual campaigning, or even filing to get on ballots. He was so somnolent on the stump that whenever he showed a flash of vitality, supporters lauded the event as if he were coming around from a long, debilitating illness.

Maybe he never really expected to get very far. Maybe the Thompson demi-campaign was only meant to raise his profile sufficiently to get him better TV gigs. Or maybe he thought all he had to do was show up, and the prize would be handed to him. For a certain kind of conservative, I guess that made him the ideal candidate.

THE PETER PRINCIPLE DIDN'T GO FAR ENOUGH. Early last year, in her much-covered "20/20 Bias" post, Megan McArdle began by announcing that she had been wrong about the war in Iraq, and then proceeded to explain why people who had been saying the war was a mistake all along were right for the wrong reasons, and were also in some way persecuting her:

This has not convinced me of the brilliance of the doves, because precisely none of the ones that I argued with predicted that things would go wrong in the way they did. If you get the right result, with the wrong mechanism, do you get credit for being right, or being lucky?...

What the doves would like to see the hawk's do--"I was wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong about everything, I am a stupid idiot, you are a brilliant figure with god-like omniscience"--is no better a guide to future decisionmaking than ignoring the fact that you were seriously wrong about the Iraq invasion.

This sort of work got McArdle a job with The Atlantic, where she has been writing a great deal lately about her diet, in which, her readers have learned, she will "only eat humanely raised meat" and has "virtually stopped eating bread." In this post she starts out talking about "a very real phenomenon: meat-eaters who are angry at you for not eating meat." She describes these unpleasant encounters, and says "Those who, like me, have made ethical choices about our diets that we haven't asked anyone else to emulate, find the aggressiveness of these encounters puzzling..."

By the end, you may have guessed, McArdle is lecturing vegetarians who are "hectoring" and "humorless jerks" and blaming them for making the meat-eaters mad at her. "You're not only annoying them," he says, "you're annoying me by proxy. Please stop."

If you think old-fashioned magazines are dying now, wait till the bloggers they've hired get through with them.

SHORTER JAMES LILEKS. I can't enjoy Hollywood films anymore because of their steady drumbeat of anti-Bush politics. I am speaking of course of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End.

NOT BEANBAG. I won't even bother to link many of bazillion posts going now about how Bill Clinton shouldn't campaign so ruthlessly for Hillary Clinton. Two are indicative enough. On the left, Ezra Klein:

The impulses behind his actions are easy to understand. And, on some level. it's his reputation, his capital, his right to expend it as he sees fit.

But even as he's got that right, he's also got a responsibility to the millions of Democrats -- and Americans -- who worked on his campaigns and fought in his battles, who sacrificed and toiled so he could have this place in our polity, and who expected he would use it to push for progressivism, not just for his family.

I hate to break it to Ezra, but Clinton was barely a progressive president. The distinguishing features of his reign were welfare cuts, pro-growth business policies, and NAFTA. The "progressive" social programs he managed to get through (like the Family and Medical Leave Act) were sufficiently modest that the moneyed interests were able to accommodate them without breaking a sweat. FDR he wasn't. He wasn't even Hubert Humphrey.

Despite this, he had to fight off the most highly developed political attack machine in history. He knows that even moderates have mortal enemies and have to fight like radicals to win. Why should he give a fuck about his reputation among the goo-goos or anyone else? He governed from the middle and got treated like an American Lenin. Presumably he thinks his and his wife's brand of competent, centrist government will be judged kindly by history, but it has to get voted in first.

And from the right, sort of, Andrew Sullivan. I don't even need to quote him; you know what to expect from him and have known it for years. If Sullivan has nothing else in common with his old rightwing colleagues anymore, he is reunited with and even outstrips them in his reflexive hatred of all things Clinton. I'm not so keen on them myself, but I don't need a fucking drool-cup whenever they come into view. And I must say that Sullivan's current concern for gentlemanly conduct in Presidential contests is a little rich when compared to his far more measured assessment of Karl Rove* as recently as 2004:

And the Mary Cheney thing is a brilliant maneuver by the Republicans. Rove knows that most people do find mentioning someone's daughter's lesbianism to be distasteful and gratuitous. So he can work it to great effect, exploiting homophobia while claiming to be defending gays. Again: masterful jujitsu. I tip my hat to the guy. Poisonous, but effective.

Compared to that loathsome episode, what the Clintons have been doing is strictly Marquis of Queensbury stuff, but they'll never get the kind of good-show Sullivan gave Rove because Sullivan is afflicted by what, in other contexts, is commonly called a Derangement Syndrome.

Again, Hillary Clinton is my least favorite Democratic candidate, but here reason forces me to defend her. The notion that saying mean things about Obama to beat him in a Presidential race is some kind of offense to decency is ridiculous even when you don't consider the source.

* Please forgive the tertiary sourcing; Sullivan's posts from his days of Bush enthusiasm are effectively memory-holed.

THE NEWS BUSINESS. Michael Yon gets a very friendly profile in the New York Times. Conservative bloggers for the most part treat it as a further opportunity to hammer the Times. (Tigerhawk is among the few noble exceptions.)

"I guess it’s that time of the year again, for the broken down clock at the NYTimes," sneers Flopping Aces. "The NY Slimes," says Ray Robison. Jammie Wearing Fool complains "they carefully avoid saying too much about his coverage other then giving his web site and the obligatory nod to the now famous picture he took of a soldier cradling a wounded little girl" as if that weren't something most journalists, citizen or otherwise, would kill for. "Pigs were recently seen flying over Central Park," hyuks the Ace of Spades correspondent. Neptunus Lex sees it as a "through the looking glass" event, and his commenters pile on the "chronically lying and serially leaking of defense secrets scumbags at the NY Times!"

RedState, trying hard to huff up some outrage of its own, gets oh-so-close to reality:

The article wasn't negative at all; however, to me it just seems like you could substitute any topic, and any individual, that you wanted to, and the story would read the same way, no tweaking necessary -- like it was a prefab piece.

Of course. The New York Times is a very large newspaper with plenty of room, resources, and motivation to maintain a consensus reality that will accommodate enough readers to keep it viable. When it feels it has to shore up its right flank, it hires a William Kristol or employs freelancers like Glenn Harlan Reynolds and Ann Althouse to write for them, or covers someone like Michael Yon, albeit in a "pre-fab" manner.

The paper is "liberal" only to the extent that it does not, in its institutional voice, full-throatedly endorse the views of its most rightwing constituents. If it did, it would gain nothing, least of all the respect of folks like the ones quoted above. But why should the Times strive for their respect, so long as it clearly retains their attention? Scan the conservative blogs and note all the references and links to the Times. In these days of newspaper attrition, such bloggers are among its most reliable readers.

As for Yon, as I have noted before, he has been far from unnoticed or even underemployed by the "mainstream media," and his insistence that he is being ignored has built his following and enhanced his profile, as the current article amply demonstrates. I applaud this old punk-rock trick of loudly announcing you're too hot for The Man until The Man comes calling with coverage lauding your independence; David Peel couldn't done it better.

As for the rest, I wonder if it ever crosses their minds that all this journalism stuff has something to do with money.

(HATE) IN THE NAME OF PRIDE. MLK Day (observed) has drawn no observations at this writing from National Review Online -- which, given their past observances, is about the most respectful thing they could do.

Wingnuts in general are quiet, perhaps saving up their vitriol for Abraham Lincoln's birthday. Extreme Mortman manages only a short MLK tribute:

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in a 1968 appearance at Harvard: “When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You are talking anti-Semitism.”

I don't blame him; all I remember about Nixon is his rousing piano rendition of the Missouri Waltz.

At Reason Jesse Walker reproduces a very apt passage by the late Dr. King. I assume concern over the recent Ron Paul newsletter fiasco prevented Reason from printing their planned denunciation of the statist Civil Rights Act. Well, isn't Martin Luther King Day all about being grateful for the little we get?

UPDATE. They're still pretty quiet about it. One of the guys at Libertas does stand up for King against his mortal enemies -- that is, the "wretched NAACP today or liberals in general trying to effect change through divisively revelling and dwelling on our real or perceived mistakes and refusing ever to acknowledge our many virtues." Because King was nothing if not a booster. That's why he kept interrupting the "I Have a Dream" speech to lead the crowd in a chant of "U.S.A.! U.S.A.!"

Pierce has this sort of gibberish well-handled at Sadly, No!:

No, what MLK was all about was color-blindness! Yes, he was only interested in a unified world where everyone behaved exactly like white people. He was not interested in nonsense like affirmative action or restitution for slavery, despite his many public statements to the contrary; even the fact that he wrote an entire book about it shouldn’t sway us into thinking that Dr. King supported anything as crazy as racial quotas or economic compensation in addition to legal equality.

We live in a hell of a world, where liberals are fascists and MLK is Edward Brooke.

On a lighter note, there are some laughs in this Ron Paul video which compares the two doctors' philosophies and (disastrously for Paul) rhetorical styles. There's even a glimpse of young Paul talking cheerfully with black people -- I though Lew Rockwell burned all those!

And since he's all the rage (literally) these days, let me close with a little somethin'-somethin' on Jonah Goldberg's history with the schvartzes.

STILL MORE LIBERAL FASCISM. Jonah Goldberg leads his latest column about the liberal fascists with the grim news that "California is proposing revisions to its housing code that would require all new or remodeled homes to have a 'programmable communicating thermostat'... you would basically cede control of your home's heating and air conditioning to the state (when and if state officials wanted to exercise it)."

You cannot tell from Goldberg's column that the California Energy Commission withdrew this proposal on January 16, nor that the Commissioners, with one exception out of five, were appointed or re-appointed by Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Then Goldberg talks about all the bans proposed or put in place by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg without mentioning that Bloomberg was elected as a Republican.

I can't wait for the Ole Perfesser to put this one in his "name that party" file.

Goldberg pads out the remainder of his column with references to other countries, "public service announcements that use fear, terror and gruesome imagery to encourage workplace safety," and the Third Reich.

At The Corner, Goldberg links to an item on the invention of the cup-holder without mentioning that it was first proposed by Hitler to weaken the self-reliance of German motorists.

THE HOLLYWOOD VERSION. Via Memeorandum, I see Oliver Stone wants to do a George W. Bush biopic. Roger L. Simon and Libertas have already started snarling.

I am intrigued. Stone's Nixon is a muddle, but a pleasurable one, and certainly not a hit job -- in fact, it's Stone's quixotic attempt to humanize Nixon that makes it both confused and interesting. Stone could never concede that Nixon was just a monster of ordinary ambition; he scours his biography for insecurities that might explain him ("I kept thinking of my old man tonight -- he was a failure, too"), even inventing troubled relationships with his wife and mother to show the depth of his existential loneliness. These Freudian interludes clash badly with the massive historical events to which Stone absurdly gave equal weight: Nixon goes to China, Nixon goes to Russia, Nixon goes to Hell.

At times the ill-fitting gears mesh to lovely effect, as when young Nixon attends his mother's admonition to seek "strength in this life, happiness in the next," and the camera sweeps skyward and then down upon a thoughtful Nixon waiting to take the Republican Convention stage in 1968. But the real Nixon, or even a poetic equivalent, remains as elusive as Nixon's dialect in the mouth of Anthony Hopkins. The real hero of Nixon isn't Nixon but Stone, the adrenaline-addled Vietnam volunteer seeking to justify his psychedelic patriotism even amidst ample, excellent cases for abandoning it. His sentimental inability to see Tricky Dick plain provides its own fascinating spectacle of wishful thinking, which reverberates through the eulogies Bob Dole and the ex-Presidents yammer during the end credits.

How could I not be eager to see what Stone will make, ten years later, of Dubya and his exceedingly strange family (and please God let James Cromwell play Poppy)? We'll see then if even Stone's forgiveness has its limits.

IS NOTHING UNTAINTED BY LIBERAL FASCISM? Now the color blue is fascist, or something. Jonah Goldberg posts a reader's note:

I'm powering through the book and will try to send more interesting thoughts and criticism as I can, but I had to write in about that little trivia about the naming of the Philadelphia Eagles. That aside solved a huge mystery for me. This year, the Eagles celebrated their 75th year with throwback jerseys from their inaugural that were mysteriously hideous. They were blue and tannish/yellowish. What the heck did those colors have to do with eagles? Now I know. The blue, which was the main of the jersey, comes from the Blue Eagle of the NRA.

The Eagles were indeed named after the NRA's signature bird -- a neat bit of bandwagoning in a Depression-wracked city -- but the uniform colors are those of the Philadelphia city flag and had been worn by the jurisdiction's previous pro team, the Frankford Yellow Jackets.

But the city of Philadelphia is predominately Democratic, which means that it's fascist, so this only strengthens his point.

Presumably naming the franchise of ultraliberal New England the "Patriots" was just an attempt to fool people. Like Alger Hiss!

This isn't the first time a National Review writer has identified a football team's political affiliation by its colors: "I love it that [the Steelers'] opponents this year will be wearing the colors of — hard to comprehend this — Hamas! Couldn't be a better opponent, who will probably be favored..."

With pro football so riddled with treasonous influences -- and, per Rich Lowry, "a race-obsessed zone" -- it's no wonder another National Review author has argued for a change of allegiance -- expressed, naturally, in terms of occupation: "If American conservatives dedicate themselves to backing American soccer, the resultant energy and optimistic buzz might just push the U.S. men's national team to the final rounds of this summer's World Cup, or at least lower the percentage of the fans sitting next to me who voted for Mondale, Dukakis, and Gore."

Thank God pitchers and catchers is just a month away.

A CHANGE ELECTION. My first reaction to this ad was that it, and its sponsor, Americans for the Preservation of American Culture, couldn't be real; they had to be mischievous inventions of the Romney or maybe even the McCain campaign.



I'm still not sure, but I'm tending toward the view that I've been overthinking it. This is after all an American election, and a little Stars 'n' Bars controversy before a Southern primary is as much a tradition as lawn signs and walking-around money.

The innovations of our glorious new age have given 2008 a patina of novelty, but let's not get carried away. If Obama gets the nomination, we'll get Willie Horton II (and possibly III, IV, and infinity); if Clinton gets it, the position papers of the opposition will resemble the taunting letters-to-the-editor of serial killers of prostitutes, and if Edwards wins they will all be written by the Club for Growth and Mr. Burns from "The Simpsons." So maybe American Culture is being preserved after all. And maybe, despite all the talk of change, that's really what the American people want.

SOMEDAY NEVER COMES. As usual, Ed Driscoll is telling us that "legacy media" is over. But he also offers us the face of the future: Hotline TV! Turns out to be a lot like legacy media, except the jokes are even lamer, its viewership is in the low hundreds, and it has a scoop: the Michigan Primary was good news for Rudy Giuliani. (Male host: "We've been talking about how he's dead in the water, but he might end up being sort of crazy like a fox!" Female host: "Hmmm!")

I keep hearing Hollywood is over, too, but people are paying millions of dollars to go see The Bucket List instead of Bloggingheads, although the plots seem rather similar.

I have my own idea about what the future will look like. It involves omnipresent clouds of blue smoke, sporadic gunfire, and the revival of ring shouts. Naturally I don't talk about it much.

WHERE ARE THEY NOW? Ross Perot is right on top of things:

When I asked about Barack Obama, Perot said he admired his eloquence but thought it "a little odd that we would be less concerned about his background than being a Mormon." Perot was pleasantly surprised when I told him that Obama was a Christian, not a Muslim, and relieved when I informed him that the e-mail Perot (and untold others) received about Obama not respecting the Pledge of Allegiance was a fraud.

I hope we can resurrect some more former giants of American politics for their views on the Presidential race. Jesse Ventura, for example. This is from a review of his new book:

Jesse "reveals" that he met with CIA agents after he took office (it sounds about as sinister as a fan-club meeting between FBI agents and a NASCAR driver), says he told President Bill Clinton to bomb the Israel-Palestinian problem (Clinton considered the source) and imagines a weird scenario in which Jesse and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. make a run for the White House that ends with an assassination attempt that leaves Jesse in a coma.

How can they tell?

The final words of the book, while uncredited, are lyrics from "Hotel California," by one of Jesse's favorite rock bands, the Eagles:

"You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave!"

I want more! Please, somebody give Ventura and Perot a talk show, or a sitcom. It would beat the hell out of Mark Shields and David Brooks.

ASSHOLE BUDDY. Let me just say that I admire and approve the statement by Ezra Levant made to the Alberta Human Rights Commission. (You may also read his opening remarks to the Commission here.) If you don't have the right to print stupid, offensive things in your own publication, you have no meaningful freedom of speech at all.

I also reaffirm my defense of Mark Steyn's freedom of speech. Though I'm sure none of this changes the fact that I'm a fascist.

RAIN-DANCERS OF THE RIGHT. Peter Wehner, a former Fellow at the Bill Bennett School of Public Scolding and Bush White House strategist who has run for shelter from the upcoming conservative apocalypse to National Review's The Corner, nonetheless feels optimism: "Something good seems to be happening in our land." And that glad tiding is that Matthew McConaughey has referred to the thing growing in his girlfriend's womb as a baby.

"A baby, not a fetus," marvels Wehner. "I wonder how this locution will go down in the militantly pro-abortion world of Hollywood, where the 'right' to an abortion is sacrosanct." Trust me, if McConaughey's career ends in 2008, it won't be due to his use of the b-word -- it'll be due to Fool's Gold.

Things are rough for the right-wing when they jump on proud-parent usage as a sign of the Third Great Awakening. Not even The Corner's normally undemanding readers can stand for it, and they send Wehner complaints -- not, alas, that he has wasted their time with his gibberish, but that McConaughey has not married the mother of his proto-child and is therefore an unsuitable harbringer of moral revival.

Wehner, using some of the skills he no doubt honed at the White House, eats a certain amount of Christer shit before asserting, "I’ll take progress where we can find it. If we are seeing a movement toward respect for the unborn child in Hollywood, let’s accept that — and then, hopefully, we can move toward a greater commitment to marriage."

I suppose the next Hollywood wedding, however doomed, will have them convinced that Christ's Second Coming is right on schedule. (Maybe Jesus did help them with the timing -- they could have got stuck with Eddie Murphy.) Then they can move on to the next step -- getting McConaughey to denounce homosexuality.

Failing that, though, they could raise a small cheer if he tells some reporter that he's not into anal. Or if he gets a nice haircut or holds a door open for a lady or something. These people are like roadside rain-dancers; they can dance through weeks of drought, and still take credit for the shower that breaks it.

UPDATE. gypsy howell makes an excellent point in comments: "Huh. Judging by the number of celebrity out-of-wedlock babies, I was thinking that 'Hollywood' has never heard of having an abortion." What Would Tyler Durden Do concurs. They could add a "Cutest Baby" category to the Oscars and conservatives still wouldn't be satisfied. In fact, when Hollywood finally becomes a giant kindergarten they'll just complain that these "neo-Boomers" will all grow up to smoke pot and have riots.