It's easy to look at the headlines and chart a trendline straight to the abyss. But here are two positive developments that could bode well for the future:

"Gen X is least prone to adultery."

And survey says..."Generation Y biggest user of libraries."

Both sound like good news to me.

In Mark Steyn's "Happy Warrior" column in the latest edition of National Review On Dead Tree (subscription required to read online, but likely soon reprinted on Mark's Website, he compares Hollywood's recent string of anti-war duds with the plot of Mel Brooks' classic romp, The Producers:

Why have these films tanked? Roger L. Simon, a screenwriter himself, made the point that these films are “essentially inauthentic.” “The filmmakers think they are supposed to be antiwar, but they don’t feel it in their guts,” he writes. “This feels to me like a cinema of ‘received wisdom,’ not based on personal experience or ‘emotional knowledge’ of any kind.”

That sounds right. One reason the Oscar shows of the early Seventies are such a hoot compared with the butt-numbing snoozeroos of today is the tension and sniping between the John Wayne/Bob Hope/Frank Sinatra set and the hipster crowd reading out telegrams from the Viet Cong. Back then, being anti-war meant taking a side. In today’s Hollywood, being anti-war is the only side. I don’t believe Brian De Palma can tell you why he opposes the Iraq War. In fact, I doubt he thinks about it all that much. And when he does, he thinks about it through the prism of Vietnam. And you can’t make that template fit.

In a way, there’s something heartening about the inability of so many Hollywood A-listers to make a decent anti-war film. For a start, they’re all about the wickedness of the troops or Dick Cheney or some shadowy agency deep inside the administration. The actual “enemy” are largely absent. They fulfill the same role the natives do in old-school British Empire yarns: an exotic distant backdrop for conflicts played out between two different groups of white man. These days, there are “bad” Americans (the Pentagon, CIA, Halliburton) and a “good” American (usually a lawyer, journalist, or stonewalled spouse) who blows the whistle. But the glamorous guerrilla of yore is hard to transplant to the new conflict: To convey one of the chaps wreaking havoc in the Sunni Triangle or the Hindu Kush with any honesty, he’d have to be shown as theocratic, misogynist, and homophobic. You might as well make him a Republican congressman.

Which sounds like a very different reason than why filmmakers of 1970s and '80s rarely showed the North Vietnamese in full action. (With one noticeable and iconoclastic exception, whose director probably isn't too surprised by Hollywood's current string of anti-war bombs.

Geoffrey Norman suggests giving the Athlete of the Year award to one of Michael Vick's dogs: "Those dogs played for truly big stakes. If Peyton Manning had blown the Super Bowl, he would have been out a few commercials. The dogs got hanged. Or worse."

As the Vick and Barry Bonds stories indicate, along with Tom Brady fathering a child out of wedlock, and all of the lesser crimes and misdemeanors of the players who make up the NFL, NBA and MLB, professional athletics in general ended 2007 looking awfully tawdry:

And that, in fact, might be the big sports story of 2007: the end, not of illusions, but of disillusionment. After all, in order to be disillusioned, you need illusions. The kid who pleaded, “Say it ain’t so, Joe,” to Shoeless Joe Jackson after the White Sox had fixed a World Series for the benefit of gamblers was honestly dismayed. He believed, quaintly, in the integrity of the game.

The games are the back-story, now. The 2007 Super Bowl? Boring, but winning it did get Peyton some more endorsements. World Series? Red Sox and ho hum. NBA finals? Can’t even remember. But the Barry Bonds story? That baby had legs. And the Mike Vick saga? Hard to think of a case, since Icarus, where the fortunes of a single star have soared so high and then crashed so spectacularly. You could have said it was “tragic,” if it hadn’t been for the dogs. Those poor beasts made it merely tawdry; like just about everything else in sports in the unlamented year of two thousand and seven.

Meanwhile, Brent Bozell has some thoughts on the year in entertainment, where no further disillusionment is necessary.

Update: While I mentioned the Patriots' Tom Brady above, I forgot to mention his coach's win-at-all-costs predilection for illicit videotaping, yet another lowpoint for the NFL this year.

The People's Cube Website "Pwns Iranian Propaganda":

Dear Iranian Mullahs! While our satirical website and your Propaganda Directorate deal in the same trade of making up facts and exaggerating reality, we are different in that we can recognize a spoof - but you apparently can't. On Dec. 27, 2007 you used our spoof image on your propaganda website to illustrate a "true" statement that Jews are welcome in Iran and that Western reports about mass emigration of Iranian Jews are "lies spread by the Zionist hegemony."

Evil Bert could not be reached for comment.

Update: Nor could Achmed the Dead Terrorist.

Related: Rollover fun!

The Website of the great City Journal magazine, published by the Manhattan Institute, has been redesigned with a slick new look. And to kick off the rapidly approaching new year, a lead essay from one of the magazine's more prominent fans--a former mayor of Manhattan who's currently running for president. (And no, it's not Nurse Bloomberg.)

Responding to Benazir Bhutto's death, Bill Richardson immediately quipped:

“President Bush should press Musharraf to step aside, and a broad-based coalition government, consisting of all the democratic parties, should be formed immediately... It is in the interests of the U.S. that there be a democratic Pakistan that relentlessly hunts down terrorists.”

Uh-huh. Not surprisingly, Mark Steyn responds, "Wow. Who knew it was that easy?":

One way to look at what’s happened over the last five years is simply that Afghanistan and Pakistan have swapped roles. In the Eighties, Washington used Pakistan to subvert Afghanistan. Since the fall of Mullah Omar, the Taliban, a monster incubated by Pakistan, has swarmed back across the border and begun subverting Pakistan. Today, it’s the tribal lands that have a 200-yard corridor through the rest of the country, exporting Islamist values through the network of madrassahs to the fierce young men in the cities. Just as the Taliban eventually seized control of Afghanistan, so they believe they’ll one day control Pakistan. Stan-wise, the principal difference is that control of the latter will bring them a big bunch of nukes. Meanwhile, life goes on. Just as the tribal lands seem to be swallowing Pakistan, so Pakistan is swallowing much of the world. It exports its manpower and its customs around the globe, and Pakistani communities in the heart of west have provided the London School of Economics student who masterminded the beheading of Daniel Pearl, the Torontonians who plotted to do the same to the Canadian Prime Minister, and the Yorkshiremen who pulled off the London Tube bombing. Saudi men pay lip service to Wahhabist ideology but it rouses very few of them from their customary torpor. In Pakistan, Islamism spurs a lot more action.

No people are immutable. It’s worth noting that Muslims next door in India are antipathetic to jihad. Yet they are ethnically and religiously indistinguishable from the fellows in Islamabad wiring up one-year old babies as unwitting suicide bombers. The only reason one’s an Indian and the other’s a Pakistani is because of where some British cartographer decided to draw the line in 1947. Since then, Indian Muslims have been functioning members of a modern pluralist democracy, while Pakistani Muslims have been mired in incompetence, backwardness and dictatorship, and embraced jihadism as the most viable escape route. Reversing that pathology would have been beyond Benazir Bhutto’s pretty face. Or even the best-laid five-minute plans of Bill Richardson.

Similarly, how bad was fellow Democrat presidential hopeful Barack Obama's response? So bad that even noted Middle Eastern policy expert John Edwards labeled them "ridiculous."

"Obama told his supporters if he doesn't win in 2008, he won't be trying again later on."

Orrin Judd quips, "God forbid he should run when he might be mildly qualified." But it's not like any journalist will question Obama about his past statements in four, eight or 12 years. Nor will any of his potential supporters hold it against him if he changes his mind.

Rhetoric versus reality: Peggy Noonan writes, "Good luck, Iowa. The eyes of the nation are upon you."

But, as Jonah Goldberg reminds us, "In Iowa, where residents are told every day for a year that the fate of the world hangs on their vote, fewer than 1% of the population attends the caucuses. And Iowans are supposed to take 'the process' extremely seriously."

P.J. O'Rourke attempts to read the late Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.'s Journals, and ultimately abandons ship:

I made it all the way to page 12 before I was stopped cold by this sentence about Adlai Stevenson: "He is the one man in politics today who strikes an authentically new and fresh note." And that note would be? Ah, the note that was passed to Adlai in every classroom of grade school, high school, and Princeton--the small, crumpled piece of paper upon which was written, "LOSER!!!"

Read the whole thing, it's a scream; sort of an article-length version of Groucho's old line: "From the moment I picked up your book until the moment I put it down, I couldn't stop laughing. Some day I hope to read it."

The San Francisco Comical Chronicle's network of experts, editors, and fact checkers swing into action to report on the SF Zoo's killer tiger incident as only they and their vast resources can:

"Experts say that the depth of the moat and height of the walls could have a large impact on the animal's ability to escape the enclosure."

Who knew?!

Michelle Malkin writes on the real top story of 2007, and why it's gained so little traction in the MSM:

There’s a reason the magazine and newspaper editors are naming everything but the surge as their top story of the year. (Putin? The Virginia Tech massacre? Come on.) Good news in the war on terror is bad news for those rooting for failure. Far easier to play up casualties and sectarian strife, sensationalize accusations of atrocities, and demonize the men and women in uniform to indulge Bush Derangement Syndrome, as Washington Post staffer and NBC military analyst William Arkin did on Jan. 30 when he lambasted troops for enjoying “obscene amenities” and serving as a “mercenary” force.

Read the whole thing.

Which is the more craptacular Spider-Man PSA:

Spider-Man and Planned Parenthood from the 1970s?

Or Spider-Man and the United Nations, coming next year?

You make the call! (Preferably to Stan Lee, telling him to cut this stuff out.)

John Bolton will join Tammy Bruce at 3:00 PM pacific, along with Claudia Rossett, as Tammy sits in this week for Larry Elder on L.A.'s KABC.

And if you can't tune into that, don't miss PJM Political on XM's POTUS '08 channel at 6:00 PM eastern/3:00 PM pacific. (Podcast online--so tune into Tammy, then listen here.)

You know you're in the land of plenty when...

There's a podcast titled, "Diet in Decline: Can America's Overnutrition Crisis be Reversed?"

(Overnutrition?! God, I love that.)

And as Mickey Kaus writes, "This evening NBC Nightly News billboarded a 'housing CRISIS.' I thought a 'housing crisis' was when people couldn't find housing, not when it got cheaper. (NBC's expert: 'It's very, very difficult to find any silver lining.' No it's not.) ..."

To paraphrase Orrin Judd, every people should face such crises.

Jonah Goldberg makes a great point in his Real Clear Politics essay: "There's been a lot of hand-wringing over the spectacle of presidential candidates campaigning during Christmas thanks to the front-loaded primary schedule. But I like it. It provides a nice reminder of how unimportant politics really are":

Washington pundits and politicians have a habit of equating America's collective political mood with our feelings about our own lives. When Americans say the country is "on the wrong track" -- as three-quarters of us now say -- the pundits proclaim that Americans are in a "funk" or a "sour mood." When approval ratings for Congress or the president are in the toilet, news reports call Americans "angry" and the climate "poisonous." But walk along any American Main Street during Christmas week and you'll find the atmosphere is hardly poisonous, the mood far from sour.

Obviously, dissatisfaction with the government is hugely important in political terms, and politics are significant. But Washington needs to get over itself. Very few people define their lives politically -- a fact for which we should all be eternally grateful.

Or as Lily Tomlin once said, "Ninety-eight percent of the adults in this country are decent, hard-working, honest Americans. It’s the other lousy two percent that get all the publicity. But then—we elected them."

Theodore Dalrymple writes, "Researchers from Michigan found that people in divorced households spent 46 and 56 percent more on electricity and water, respectively, than did people in married households. This outcome is not all that surprising: marriage involves (among many other things, of course) economies of scale":

One of the interesting questions that this little piece of research poses is whether the environmentalist lobby will now throw itself behind the cause of family values. Will it, for example, push for the tightening of divorce laws, and for financial penalties—in the form, say, of higher taxes—to be imposed on those who insist upon divorcing, and therefore upon using 46 percent more electricity and 52 percent more water per person than married couples who stay together? Will environmentalists march down the streets with banners reading SAVE THE PLANET: STAY WITH THE HUSBAND YOU HATE?

For myself, I doubt it. Yet these figures, if true, are certainly suggestive. The fact that there will be no demonstrations against environmentally destructive divorcees, who probably emit as much extra carbon dioxide as the average SUV, suggests that the desire to save the planet is not nearly as powerful as the desire to destroy a way of life.

Well, yeah.

Glenn Reynolds and Helen Smith interview Jonah Goldberg on his new must-read book, Liberal Fascism in a wide-ranging 39 minute podcast. Watch for my review of Jonah's book in the March issue of the New Individualist.

Details as they come in at Hot Air.

Rudy Giuliani's statement on the assassination, here.

Update: Romney and McCain weigh in as well.

Mark Steyn adds, "She was everything we in the west would like a Muslim leader to be. We should be modest enough to acknowledge when reality conflicts with our illusions. Rest in peace, Benazir."

More: President Bush issue statement, vowing that the attackers must “be brought to justice.” Bryan Preston of Hot Air asks: define justice, please.

Evidently, whatever England learned from the aftermath of its first go-around with appeasement 70 years ago has long since been forgotten.

George Jonas writes "The newsweekly Maclean's and the brilliant Steyn are the best and biggest to find themselves in the jaws of [Canada's] Human Rights Dragon, not the first":

In the summer of 1977, shortly after it came into being, Manitoba's Human Rights Commission took it upon itself to caution Maclean's for Barbara Amiel having used the word "Hun" with reference to Germans in an article about the war-years. The Commission felt it had a mandate to express a government-sanctioned disapproval over a journalist's choice of words. The post-liberal state's action against Maclean's and Steyn comes on the 30th anniversary of the post-liberal state's warning against Maclean's and Amiel. This doesn't show a liberal agenda hijacked or kidnapped; it shows an illiberal agenda that was there right from the beginning.

Someone should write a book about this topic.

Rob Port writes that retail sales were up 3.6 percent, or 2.4 if you discount fuel sales:

(though it seems to me that those should be included; the economic health of our gas stations is every bit as important as the economic health of our retail stores).

* * *

The New York Times is calling these retail numbers “bleak,” but I’d be willing to wager that the folks at the Times would be dancing in the streets if their stock prices had seen 3.6% growth instead of the negative growth their stock has seen for most of the year.

Indeed.^TM And speaking of which, Glenn Reynolds notes that online sales were up over 22 percent. And don't miss this email from one of his readers:

The same schmuck, Michael Barbaro, wrote a similar story in 2005. He also wrote a story back in September of his year trying to say back to school sales only looked good, but really weren't:

Why do we care what the some schmuck at the New York Times writes anymore, anyway?

It's like reading something Andrew Sullivan writes and instead of saying, "Sullivan thinks....." we write, "The Blogosphere today announced that...."

Bologne. We need to get out of the habit of saying, "The New York Times....." and giving backing to these folks. Instead, we should say, "Michael Barbaro wrote....." and treat him just like we'd treat anyone in the blogosphere.

But the Times has layers of gatekeepers: Editors! Researchers! They wouldn't let an error or anything that smacks of an agenda creep into their paper, or its reporting on economic conditions, both here and abroad.

(And despite the best efforts of the MSM to throw cold water on it, we hope your Christmas was as enjoyable as ours. Watch for intermittent posting from us the rest of the week.)

Update: "Seven Year American Recession Watch Remains On High Alert", and it will for another 11 months--and maybe even another four years after that.

Posting will no doubt be a bit sparse on Christmas day (not that I was a posting machine yesterday, of course; I'm very happily on vacation this week). In the meantime, let me take this opportunity to wish everyone:

A Very Merry Christmas!

Related:

And via Hot Air:

Neo-Neocon: "Twas the bloggers’ night before Christmas."

Well, after aiding the North Vietnamese and then being forgainst the Iraq War, Senator Kerry has finally found a worthy advisory to fight: the NFL's cable network.

Mickey Kaus has a must-read post that dovetails remarkably well with the Don Surber article I linked to earlier today. Don wrote that the Lewinsky scandal "turned journalism inside out"--and one of the eventual results has been the birth of two very divergent voter classes:

Room Eight's Jerry Skurnick has suggested that the electoarate is splitting into two diverging parts--people who follow politics and people who don't--with the people who follow politics much better informed than the were before (thanks to cable, web, etc.) and the people who don't follow politics less well informed (they used to get at least some information from Walter Cronkite). That certainly rings true to me. And it may, as Skurnick claims, explain some of the new volatility in polling--e.g., when the uninformed majority suddenly discovers, say, that Rudy Giuliani has been married three times.

But there's a second way to divide the electorate that asks how the voters inform themselves. Do they rely on the traditional Mainstream Media (MSM), or do they get their political information from the Web, from cable news, from the tabloids, etc. This division may have once seemed unimportant, but it doesn't anymore--its seriousness is suggested by the MSM's impressive resistance to stories bubbling up from the blogs and the tabs that don't meet MSM standards (putting aside whether you regard those standards as high or merely idiosyncratic). "Rielle Hunter"--the woman whom the National Enquirer alleges was John Edwards' mistress--was the top-searched name on the MSN site at one point Thursday, I'm told. Meanwhile, in the traditional mainstream press, 'Rielle Hunter" was mentioned only ... well, zero times.

Of the two ways to divide the electorate, the second is arguably more important. After all, even those who don't follow politics, will eventually inform themselves before the election.** But if the MSM/Web barrier remains as robust as it's been, those who inform themselves from the MSM will find out something different, when they finally tune in, than those who go to the Web and learn both the news and what might be called the "undernews." *** If you're thinking of voting as a Democrat in Iowa or New Hampshire, you might watch NBC and never know about this messy Rielle Hunter business. Or you might read DailyKos know the whole allegation plus the arguments against it plus seven theories about how it came to light. That knowledge might cause voters to vote against Edwards or to vote for him--but either way first they have to find out.

Likewise, TNR's Noam Scheiber suggests that the egghead sector ( "urban, college-educated liberals") of the Democratic party--which used to be less partisan and combative than the blue-collar/labor sector--is now more partisan and combative, because its eggy heads are wrapped up in Kos and other anti-Bush sites, where they absorb the latest undernews about the machinations of Karl Rove and Tom DeLay. Scheiber argues this is a good development for Obama, who surprisingly doesn't have to become more partisan then he actually is in order to win over non-egghead (labor) Dems.

As Mickey writes (and it's well worth reading the rest of his post), "The 2008 campaign will be a test of the relative strength of these various differently-informed electorates."

Onboard the Ron Paul mothership: "it’s hard out here for a blimp."

Glenn Reynolds writes that for Mike Huckabee, it could be deja vu all over again:

Shades of Jim Wright? Well, possibly. Reader Bill Nelson sends a link to this report that Novo Nordisk -- the stem-cell company -- distributed 35,000 copies of Huckabee's book, translated into Spanish, for free. No word what Huckabee was paid; possibly nothing, possibly a lot. No doubt people will be asking the campaign about it.

Indeed^TM. Read the whole thing^TM.

Meanwhile, some very much related thoughts from Jim Geraghty.

Don Surber writes that a key milestone is fast approaching: the 10th anniversary of the Monica Lewinsky story. As Don writes, how newspaper journalists choose to describe how the Lewinsky scandal was broken will say volumes about what they think about their readers:

Now here is the test for readers as they read in the next month rehashes of the Lewinsky scandal: Does the newspaper or columnist view the emergence of Drudge and the Internet as a good thing or bad?

The whiners will complain that no one controls the Internet and that a lot of the information is inaccurate.

Yes. And people soon learn which sites to trust. As bloggers point out, Jayson Blair worked for the New York Times, not Lucianne.com.

Another complaint is there is too much celebrity news now, as if no one paid attention to the trials involving Fatty Arbuckle, Gloria Vanderbilt and Lana Turner's daughter.

The 20th century had at least a dozen trials of the century.

Then there is the complaint that Drudge is a conservative.

But he seldom writes. He links. And the things he links to appear in liberal publications as well as conservative ones as well as middle-of-the-road sites.

He did not become popular by suppressing the news. That seems to be the job of the editors at Newsweek.

Of course, how the legacy media viewed their successors is public record. In their youth, leftwing journalists might have happily sung along with John Lennon in the late 1960s and said they wanted a revolution. But thirty years later, they certainly acted like the entrenched reactionaries they had become when it dared impinge upon their own profession.

"Well, we’ve been able to accomplish quite a bit, but not very much."---Senator Harry Reid.

Blade Runner junkies may enjoy my review of the final final cut (we hope!) of the film, over at Pajamas Media.

As Mark Hemingway writes:

Let the cry be heard far and wide! I just discovered there's a blog called "Free Mark Steyn!" that is up and running with with information about his case. And the blog pointed me to the fact that there's a Facebook group called "Defend Free Speech in Canada — The Case of Mark Steyn." So far the group only has 16 members, but you now have your marching orders.

Another way to support Steyn is to shop early and often at his Website, of course.

In case you haven't seen them yet, two podcasts which I produced are online at the Pajamas motherblog:

This week's PJM Political, with Sen. John McCain, Evan Sayet, and Steve Green of VodkaPundit.

The debut of Austin Bay's new podcast, Deep Background, with Michael Knox Beran, author of Forge of Empires and "How Lincoln Saved The World."

And speaking of deep background, also at Pajamas are the "Director's Cut" editions of several of this week's PJM Political segments--Evan Sayet's terrific speech at the Heritage Foundation (in which he outs himself as a "9/13 Republican"), the full length version of The Glenn & Helen Show's interview with John McCain, and James Lileks' segment on this week's PJM Political.

"Make Global Warming A Priority": Indeed--this poor frozen soul looks like he needs all the help he can get!

Back in early 2006, Fred Siegel dubbed H.L. Mencken the seemingly contradictory descriptive of "Anarcho-Authoritarian":

Part of the reason it's so hard to make sense of Mencken is that he was, paradoxically, an anarcho-authoritarian. He agreed with the American Civil Liberties Union on the importance of free speech. But while that organization, under the influence of principled men such as Felix Frankfurter, argued for such freedoms on the grounds that "a marketplace of ideas" (to use Justice Holmes's term) was the best method of arriving at the truth, Mencken supported it in order to shield superior men like himself from being hobbled by the little people. For the same reason, Mencken was a near anarchist when it came to America, but an authoritarian when it came to the iron rule of the Kaiser and General Ludendorff. We are more familiar with anarcho-Stalinists such as William Kunstler, who had a parallel attitude toward the United States and the Soviet empire, but it was Mencken who blazed the trail down which Kunstler and his ilk would travel.

Reading Roger L. Simon's profile of Vanessa Redgrave, it seems safe to say that she'd qualify as an Anarcho-Authoritarian as well:

Vanessa has another side as a (sometimes Trotskyist) political activist. This week we learn she has been helping Guantanamo suspects, including one Jamil el-Banna accused of “producing extremist propaganda for Osama bin Laden,” putting up half of a 50,000 pound bail surety for el-Banna and a Libyan named Omar Deghayes who has links to the same al-Qaeda cell. The actress commented, “It is a profound honour and I am glad to be alive to be able to do this… Guantanamo Bay is a concentration camp. It is a disgrace that these men have been kept there all these years.”

Concentration camp? Well I imagine it’s not a very comfortable place. It’s a prison for enemy combatants. But “concentration camp” is an explosive term, evoking images of Auschwitz or the Gulag where tens of millions died, many gassed or starved to death, assuming they weren’t first lined up against the wall, shot and tossed into pits.

No one, to my knowledge, has been murdered in Guantanamo. Difficult jurisdictional questions have arisen with legitimate human rights questions asked. There have been a few reported suicides, though I am not sure how well documented. But starvation has not been a problem. According to many reports, the detainees have never eaten so well (four meals a day) and obesity might be more of an issue. Of course, there was that report in Newsweek a couple of years back that, to punish an unruly inmate, a US military guard had flushed a Koran down the toilet. Only it was then discovered that there weren’t flush toilets, only chemical toilets, at Guantanamo, so such an act was physically impossible.

Vanessa probably missed the retraction in Newsweek. It didn’t exactly appear on the front page. Nevertheless, I doubt the fine points mean that much to her. The actress is of the school that anything done by the West, particularly the capitalist West, is suspect. She is able to overlook the ideology of al-Qaeda in this regard, which is a particularly rigorous gymnastic considering the misogyny and homophobia of the al-Qaeda worldview. No doubt the Islamist group would ban many of the films in which Redgrave appeared, including Antonioni’s Blow-Up, in which she performed basically deshabille, and Wilde, in which she portrayed the homosexual playwright’s mother. In fact, it’s likely they would ban all her films, except perhaps a documentary she made with some Palestinian activists, and about that I’m not sure, given the internecine rivalries between various Fatah and Hamas factions. (It gets, excuse the phrase, Talmudic.)

But no matter. What’s important is how Vanessa appears – to herself and the public. It’s a kind of narcissism mixed with epater le bourgeoisie, masquerading as defense of the downtrodden, although these particular downtrodden are locked in an ideology that ensures their own continued misfortune. And the more the West is blamed for that misfortune, the longer it continues. Vanessa is in essence part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Yet again this does not bother her or even penetrate her radar screen. We should all be grateful, however, for her acting, just as we should all be grateful for the acting of the similarly unconscious Sean Penn (perhaps not entirely coincidentally also from an eminent theatrical family).

What intrigues me in all this is the relationship, if any, between talent and ideological blindness or rigidity. It’s not as simple as it seems. It could be the development of these false separate selves, these mini-me’s, that take the extreme positions, such as a Redgrave or Penn or Sarandon or, to a lesser extent, Streisand, have done, enhances the illusion of empathy that creates their art. It is generative artistically while being toxic politically. The Sean Penn who embraces Hugo Chavez is the same Sean Penn who gave us Jeff Spicoli. It would be great if we could have one without the other, but maybe, in some cases, we can’t.

Sadly no--but it's not all that new a development, for what it's worth.

"Chuck Norris sues, says his tears no cancer cure."

Well, it's good to see that there are limits to his otherwise omnipotent Chucktacular powers!

Yesterday, I mentioned the American Conservative magazine's trainwreck cover story/Godwin's law violating hit piece on Rudy Giuliani. As David Frum writes, the cover illustration "depicts him in fascist pose and costume: black shirt, bandolier, jutting Mussolini jaw":

In the past, garb like that shown on the mayor would have made the hearts of the editors of the American Conservative go pit-a-pit. "She is not a bad girl at all ..." co-founder Taki Thedoropoulos wrote of a society acquaintance in 2003, "but her problem is she loves publicity about as much as I love the Wehrmacht."

And yet oddly enough, this time the fascist posture is not offered by the American Conservative as an endorsement.

* * *

Have we really reached the point where a magazine that masquerades under the label of "conservative" thinks that the very worst possible allegation to throw against a president is that he has advisers who admire Israel and support democracy, that he knows his own mind, and that he is ready to defend the country against his enemies? If this is the American Conservative's idea of criticism, God save the Republican party from ever deserving its praise.

Hey, not all American Conservative-approved presidential candidates can be Ralph Nader.

(HT: LGF)

Back in October, in a post titled "Think and Grow Middle Class" (and belated apologies to Mr. N. Hill), I wrote:

In the 1930s, as Amity Shlaes discusses in The Forgotten Man, it was logical to assume that poverty was partially a result of geography. But these days, as Orrin Judd and Kathy Shaidle each note (and from across the pond, so does Theodore Dalrymple in vast tracts of his back catalog), it's very often much more a function of mindset than anything else.

Keep that in mind as read an article by Karen Selick in Canada's National Post, which posits that "Food banks simply conceal problems that are too taboo to discuss these days":

The illogic of food banks is so obvious that only one explanation makes sense. Charities can't simply collect cash and give grocery money to the needy because donors know it wouldn't all be spent on necessities. Some would be spent on cigarettes, booze or bingo. Years ago, when I prepared budget statements for clients on legal aid, I was astonished at how much some poor people spent on such things. [Having worked during college breaks in a liquor store as a teenager, I'm not.--Ed]

Middle-class or wealthy Canadians shouldn't accept guilt when anti-poverty activists hint that the existence of food banks proves some moral deficiency in the economic system. Far from it. Food banks simply conceal problems that are too taboo to discuss these days.

Via Kate at SDA, who boils the pertinent facts of the situation down to a pithy seven words.

Jonah Goldberg writes, "It’s a profound commentary on the state of our political culture that Huckabee’s ad is the controversial one. Huckabee promises nothing, Hillary everything":

The contrast between the Candidate of God and the Candidate of Goodies should remind everyone of P. J. O’Rourke’s timeless book Parliament of Whores.

“I have only one firm belief about the American political system, and that is this: God is a Republican and Santa Claus is a Democrat,” wrote the indispensable O’Rourke.

“God” he explained, is “a stern fellow, patriarchal rather than paternal and a great believer in rules and regulations. He holds men strictly accountable for their actions. He has little apparent concern for the material well being of the disadvantaged. ... God is unsentimental. It is very hard to get into God’s heavenly country club.”

P. J. continues: “Santa Claus is another matter. ... He’s nonthreatening. He’s always cheerful. And he loves animals. He may know who’s been naughty and who’s been nice, but he never does anything about it. He gives everyone everything they want without the thought of a quid pro quo.”

“Santa Claus is preferable to God in every way but one,” O’Rourke concluded. “There is no such thing as Santa Claus.”

P.J.’s right. But you won’t be hearing that from Hillary this holiday season.

Years ago, I remember hearing Doris Kearns Goodwin on PBS describe LBJ's Great Society as his way of giving "gifts" to the American people--and Johnson being quite surprised when the public at large (both the right and the then-burgeoning far left) turned on him. "You should like me, I'm giving you all these gifts" was (as best as I can remember) Goodwin's description of LBJ's mindset. I guess I shouldn't be surprised to see that politicians (and their hagiographic sycophants) still think of redistribution of taxpayer money as handing out gifts.

Allah suggests that this fellow move to L.A. and "get some sort of elaborate facial tattoo that integrates the blue into it...From freak to badass overnight." He's too burly to fit into their costumes, but perhaps he could become a roadie for the Blue Man Group.

Barring those suggestions, I predict nothing but blue skies ahead for him in the Libertarian Party, myself.

Michelle Malkin writes, "I believe this Rush-bashing incident may turn out to be Huckabee’s Howard Dean scream moment."

Glenn Reynolds adds, "I told you attacking him was a bad idea. That would be like Hillary going after Oprah."

Update: Audio of Rush here.

Hillary Clinton: "Bob Dole In A Pants Suit"?

Paging Mr. Godwin:

This is the cover of the new issue of Pat Buchanan’s American Conservative magazine, featuring an article by the far left’s most dishonest blogger, Glenn Greenwald. It’s a monumental convergence of idiocies.

Ahh, another election year, another Buchanan harmonic convergence with the far left. Has the magazine's big Michael Moore cover story and interview happened yet? It's only a matter of time.

Roger Kimball reprints a holiday greeting he recently received:

To My Democrat Friends:

Please accept with no obligation, implied or implicit, my best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low-stress, non-addictive, gender-neutral celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of your choice, with respect for the religious/secular persuasion and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all. I also wish you a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar year 2008, but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures whose contributions to society have helped make America great. Not to imply that America is necessarily greater than any other country nor the only America in the Western Hemisphere. Also, this wish is made without regard to the race, creed, color, age, physical ability, religious faith or sexual preference of the wish.

To My Republican Friends:

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Forgive me, then, for wishing everyone Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Video related to the former greeting, here.

Violate it while campaigning at your peril.

(Now a nice navy blue Trilby from Lock & Co.--that's a different story!)

This headline in the London Times is a scream:

Rupert Everett: acting in Hollywood is like living in Afghanistan

Uh-huh.

On the other hand, Everett claims:

“Hollywood is a place that pretends it’s very liberal but it’s not remotely,” he told The Times. “It’s like Al-Qaeda.”

Nahh. They may hate America as much, and crank-out movies that Osama bin Laden admires, but there's just a slight amount of difference between breast implants and amputation machines.

(This Hollywood procedure, on the other hand...)

At the beginning of this short clip, Bob Schieffer says to Fred Thompson that at one point, you called Mike Huckabee a "pro-life liberal"--and Thompson doesn't disagree:

I think I already know the answer to this, but I wonder if anybody has asked Thompson what would seem to me at least to be a natural follow-up question: "President Bush's free-spending big government Compassionate Conservatism is the successor to the 'Third Way' policies of President Clinton. Does that mean that President Bush qualifies as a 'pro-life liberal' in your book as well, Senator Thompson?"

Since, as a recent YouTube clip satirically exclaims,"Webster’s Dictionary defines ‘conservatism’ as ‘How closely one’s views resemble those of Fred Thompson’", such a question would certainly make for quite an interesting debate. Though it's probably one best left for an extended discussion on PJM Political, if Senator Thompson stops by again.

Is Bill Parcells going to rebuild the post-Vick, post-Petrino Falcons? Sounds very likely, according to the Dallas Morning News.

Update: The Dolphins are also fishing for Tuna.