FuturePundit explores "Mate Preference Trends" in the era of, as Tom Wolfe one called it, "Starting from Zero":

Strip away tradition. Strip away religious beliefs. What happens? Men and women are looking at each other in ways that seem even more influenced by their evolutionary heritage. The mating market looks like it is becoming more competitive.

Or as Kay Hymowitz described it last year in City Journal, "Love in the Time of Darwinism."

(HT: I/P)

Despite self-serving doomsday prognostications by President Obama, and a skewed unemployment chart produced by Nancy Pelosi and promoted by Andrew Sullivan, Alan Reynolds, a senior fellow with the Cato Institute, reminds us that "It's A Recession Not A 'Catastrophe'".

In the interim however, Brett Joshpe has a modest proposal for Big Hollywood:

Unlike the greedy Wall Street executives though, who have torpedoed our economy by allowing federal bureaucrats to bludgeon them into making bad loans, Hollywood would surely understand the merit of pay caps. After all, it would enable the entertainment world to fulfill its pledge "to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves but each other." (Cut for laughter and gagging and take two!)

But seriously, for the people who are leading the environmental movement and spearheading efforts to turn the Academy Awards green, cut back on the number of SUV's in their entourage, and demonstrate frugality to Al Gore, this is such a great opportunity to demonstrate restraint and help out the new President. What better way to show solidarity with Democrats who want to impose a command and control economy and to confiscate wealth from the rich. Especially since everyone needs to make sacrifices right now. Not to worry though, Steven Spielberg and crew, it will feel patriotic.

As such, we should cap the compensation that movie studios and Silver Screen stars make, particularly given the wealth disparities between the actors and actresses and the grips, stagehands, and extras. While there will be times for profits, this is not that time, especially when people are losing jobs and the Golden State's $40 billion budget deficit is bigger than most countries' total economic GDP.

It so refreshing to see Hollywood stars embracing this new America. They are just in time to put their dollars where their mouths are and to start fulfilling their pledge.

What say you, Ashton and Demi?

As an adjunct to Kathy Shaidle's recent Examiner piece titled, "The Vietnam War: everything you know is wrong", Indy Jane and The People's Cube graphically illustrate what the New York Times would have looked liked in 1943 if it was Pinch Sulzberger running the show in 1943, and not his grandfather.

(And for some thoughts on how legacy mass journalism's collective tone changed dramatically during the course of Vietnam, ultimately becoming bifurcated from a wide swatch of its readers and country, follow the links here.)

Mary Katharine Ham checks in on the Winter Soldier In Winter, and writes, "John Kerry: You Know What's the Problem With Stimulus Tax Cuts? All That Freedom."

(Andrew Sullivan could not be reached for comment.)

Robert Stacy McCain and Donald Douglas weigh in on Judith Warner's New York Times-approved Freudian fantasies of a shack-up with Barack, or as Douglas calls it, the "Sexual Subtext in Obamessianism."

Update: The Skepticrats are appropriately skeptical about those seeking a Last Tango In Washington, and note that "It's worth checking out Gawker's post about this just for the illustration they use", which brings new meaning to the phrase "Unicorn Rider."

Join host Steve Green of VodkaPundit.com and myself for a troika of interviews with best-selling authors:

• Roger L. Simon, the CEO of Pajamas Media.com and PJTV.com, on his new book, which looks at forty years inside Hollywood, Blacklisting Myself.


• Bernard Goldberg, formerly of CBS, now with HBO's Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel, and a frequent commentator on Fox News, for his look at A Slobbering Love Affair: The True (And Pathetic) Story of the Torrid Romance Between Barack Obama and the Mainstream Media.


• And veteran talk radio host Hugh Hewitt provides a sneak preview of GOP 5.0.

Tune in here to listen! Incidentally, the interview with Roger L. Simon is available online separately, here.

Judith Warner, the author of a book titled Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety begins her op-ed in the New York Times, still, despite its anemic stock price, one of the most influential spokes in the legacy media, thusly:

The other night I dreamt of Barack Obama. He was taking a shower right when I needed to get into the bathroom to shave my legs, and then he was being yelled at by my husband, Max, for smoking in the house. It was not clear whether Max was feeling protective of the president's health or jealous because of the cigarette.

Who dreams of having the President of the United States in their shower while their spouse is yelling at him for smoking? Worse, who admits to this in public? Warner herself provides a clue, here:

"This is the first president I've known who looks, talks and acts like a peer," is how one Washington man explained it to me. "Notwithstanding his somewhat exotic life story, I feel like I understand what he's like and where he's coming from. And despite his incredible achievements, he still seems like a lot of people I know. If you stopped the clock in 2004, in fact, or maybe a couple of years earlier, he'd feel roughly like a peer in terms of accomplishments, too.

Which means that if he had an (R) after his name instead of a (D) that Washington man would be calling him grossly unqualified for the White House, instead of admiring his rapid rise to power and vapid, chameleonic style.

More from the "Washington man" Warner quotes:

"Of course I know nobody with his political gifts, speaking skills and confidence, and he's also a gifted writer and thinker. But I feel like one or two different turns for Obama or me and he could have been someone my friends and I wouldn't think it extraordinary to have in our circle."

Sometimes this sense of close identification turns a bit dark. There's a subcategory of people who feel that they really should have true intimacy with the Obamas.

Included in that category are people whose shame is so diminished, they begin op-eds in a newspaper read by millions with embarrassingly mawkish dreams of showering with the President of the United States while simultaneously reaming him out for having a Marlboro 100 in the house.

Update: "Mind-sexing Obama??? File under Things I Could Happily Lived The Rest of My Life Without Thinking About."

That's the headline from the Financial Times, which notes:

The US economy is suffering its steepest downturn since at least the 1970s and could descend into a depression, Jeff Immelt, General Electric's chief executive, warned on Thursday.

Far from warning about a devastating economic slowdown, most of GE's other spokesmen are surprisingly copacetic with the idea.

"Bill Gates just released mosquitos into the audience at TED and said, 'Not only poor people should experience this.'"

As Orrin Judd notes:

Two thoughts occur: (1) hasn't he been responsible for releasing enough bugs already; and, (2) if malaria actually was a disease of wealthy whites DDT wouldn't be banned.

Long before there Al Gore flunked out of Divinity School, this is yet another reminder of the horrors caused by the original junk science poseur, Rachel Carson.

On the other hand, Gates could easily make amends for this asinine stunt by becoming the next spokesman for Raid or Orkin.

"Have we had a more incompetent vetting process in the White House over such a short period of time? When we criticized Barack Obama's lack of executive experience, even we didn't think it was going to be this bad."

Update: "It's easier to list the Obama-nees who aren't tax cheats than those who are."

More: "Two thoughts: (1) Don't any of these people pay their taxes? And (2) Is this, like, some kind of karmic payback for all the Joe-the-plumber tax business?"

Manolo for the Men sadly reports, "the economic downturn has led to a true casual-ty: 21, the famed Manhattan restaurant, is no longer requiring that male diners wear ties, as it had for the prior 79 years."

"It is the final victory of Los Angeles," Tim Zagat of the popular eponymously named restaurant wry noted.

There really are two Americas, Glenn Reynolds writes:

So in a way we have found a new kind of politics. We've gone from a "culture of corruption" in which people who figured in scandals (can you say "Duke Cunningham"?) faced actual consequences, to a culture of impunity, in which it's taken for granted that the rules for big shots are different.

Don't pay your taxes? If you run a dry cleaning shop in Cincinnati, the IRS will come down on you like a ton of bricks. But if you're a congressman or a former senator or a Treasury nominee, you can just sheepishly pay up, perhaps even , as in Daschle's case, without being assessed any penalties.

For that matter, an IRS field agent with these tax problems would have been cashiered, but Geithner, who will have the IRS under his supervision, gets the job anyway.

Ordinary Americans can be excused for thinking that there are two sets of rules: One for the bigshots, the connected, the Made Men of Washington D.C., and another for everyone else.

The Obama Administration may well ride out these particular scandals, and get its chosen nominees into office. Republicans may even let them, on the theory that an admitted tax-evader will probably find it harder to back tax increases on the rest of us.

And, besides, the Republicans in Congress who would be asking the questions are Made Men themselves. But the damage to the polity will remain.

Indeed. Read the whole thing^TM.

At least once a season on TV's WKRP In Cincinnati, semi-competent news journalist Les Nessman would win Ohio's Silver Sow Award for his morning farm reports. Robert Kennedy Jr. sounds like he's definitely in the running for the fictitious award's next presentation ceremony, with this quote:

Today during a House Judiciary Committee hearing, Congressman Steve King asked Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to confirm a quote he made to the Des Moines Register in 2002: "Large-scale hog producers are a greater threat to the United States and U.S. democracy than Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network, says Robert F. Kennedy Jr., president of the Waterkeeper Alliance, a New York environmental group."

Kennedy responded: "I don't know if that's accurate, but I believe it, and I support it."

He'd face stiff competition from fellow Democrat Joe Biden, who has his own equally unique priorities for what's more important than the War On Terror:



(Oh to be a fly on the wall, if those two ever decided to compare notes on the topic.)

What is it with the New York Times' ads lately? Last month, Galley Slaves linked to their incredibly lame Bobos In Paradise On Park Ave. themed Web video ads, noted (accurately, I think) "Whatever was spent on this 'Conversations' project might as well have been flushed down a drain. Just ridiculous", and asked, "Do Newspapers Deserve to Die?"

Today, Steve Green looks at the Times' latest online ad featuring a glowing photo of The One Who Pinch Has Been Waiting For and asks:

Is it just me, or has the NYT ad department just given the President a ringing endorsement? It's one thing when the editorial page makes an endorsement, but a banner ad? Really?

My favorite is the recent theme featuring the headline, "Subscribe To History," which has a remarkably ironic unintended subtext.

Charles Platt was a senior writer for Wired, whom much like Michael Lewis, George Plimpton, George Orwell, and other journalists, decides to go to work in an industry reviled by, or otherwise unknown to elites--in Platt's case, Wal-Mart:

The picture above is of me, finishing my shift at the world's largest retailer. How did I move from being a senior writer at Wired magazine to an entry-level position in a company that is reviled by almost all living journalists?

It started when I read Nickel and Dimed, in which Atlantic contributor Barbara Ehrenreich denounces the exploitation of minimum-wage workers in America. Somehow her book didn't ring true to me, and I wondered to what extent a preconceived agenda might have biased her reporting. Hence my application for a job at the nearest Wal-Mart.

Getting in was not easy, as more than 100 applicants were competing for fewer than 10 job openings. Still, I made it through a very clever screening quiz, then through a series of three interviews, followed by two days of training. I felt ambivalent about taking advantage of the company's resources in this way, but I was certainly willing to do my part by working hard at the store, at least for a limited period.

The job was as dull as I expected, but I was stunned to discover how benign the workplace turned out to be.

Platt writes, "As for all those Wal-Mart horror stories--when I went home and checked the web sites that attack the company, I found that many of them are subsidized with union money." Of course, anti-capitalist forces demonizing department stores is hardly a new trend, and certainly not limited to America.

Read the whole thing, which concludes with a reference to Adam Shepard, the author of Scratch Beginnings, whom Glenn Reynolds and Dr. Helen Smith interviewed for one of their podcasts last year.

(Via Walter Olsen and John Hawkins.)

As I wrote in November about Bruce Springsteen:

To borrow from the vernacular of The Boss's early '70s glory days (to coin a phrase), has any musician become more Establishment than Springsteen?

Over at Andrew Breitbart's "Big Hollywood" salon, Nick Gillespie of Reason magazine (who, like myself, grew up in New Jersey in the middle of Springsteen mania) makes it official--and asks, "did Janet Jackson's nipple really condemn us to a lifetime of Super Sunday misery?"

To be fair it's the Super Bowl halftime show--whether it's Up With People or a corporate dinosaur rock star, it's supposed to be miserable. But at least Up With People was honest in its own relentless polyester cheer. Springsteen will be singing to 66,000 people who have paid thousands of dollars to be in attendance, and tens of millions watching the game in their warm suburban homes in Dolby Digital Surround Sound on 52-inch rear projection HDTVs about how Dickensian the nihilistic purgatorial Hell the American existence is. Gillespie adds:

I will say this much in anticipation of the composer of "Mary, Queen of Arkansas" performing this weekend: I grew up in Monmouth County, New Jersey, which contains both Springsteen's hometown (Freehold) and his early haunt (Asbury Park), so I can't stand him in the same way that only a New Yorker can really, really hate the Yankees. I think that even his biggest fans will admit that his output over the past 25 years or so would make even Beethoven nostalgic for the first few albums. Springsteen is in that elite group of rock stars who have objectively sucked two, three, or even four times longer than they were ever any good (are you listening Sting, David Bowie, R.E.M., Patti Smith?). That, and in the video for "Glory Days," he had the worst fake baseball throwing arm since Gary Cooper in Pride of the Yankees. Which is saying something.

Watching Springsteen perform at the Super Bowl--and before him, rock mummies like Tom Petty and Rolling Stones--let's just say I'd rather go straight to the Bodies exhibition, where at least no one is pretending that the corpses on display aren't actually dead.

But then, as Mark Steyn notes, (quoting from another "Big Hollywood" essay), "for half-a-century now rock has very successfully been 'both establishment and anti-establishment'":

In fact, "a rebellious underdog distributed by the status quo" is the very definition of rock: All those fellows calling for revolution while contracted to Capitol, Columbia, EMI., Warner Bros - the exact same companies running the music biz back in the days when Glenn Miller and Bing Crosby were where the big bucks were. A few years ago the Warner Megabehemoth Globocorp launched a rap label called "Maverick", and nobody laughed.

Rockers attending the Obama inauguration are like visiting royalty at a Bourbon or Habsburg wedding. By the way, over the years I've met kings, princesses, dukes and all the rest, and none of 'em were as hung up on precedence as the aristorockracy. A decade or so back, Sting had to issue a formal apology because at one of his big save-the-rainforest banquets at his country pile he committed the ghastly social faux pas of seating Jools Holland (of the band Squeeze) next to some no-name session musician. In Britain, these guys all live in stately homes, and any of their number who makes it to 50 without choking on his own vomit or being found face down in the swimming pool gets knighted - Sir Elton John, Sir Mick Jagger, Sir Paul McCartney, etc. Obama's pal Bono has a knighthood. You say you want a revolution? Sorry I'm having tea with the Prince of Wales that day.

Or apologizing to your fan base on the left for--gasp!--selling records in Wal-Mart.

Not that there's anything wrong with that--though of course, as Billy Joel said to John Cougar Mellancamp when the latter man was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, "You're right, John, this is still our country and we'll always be victims of powerful people."

No matter how many tens of millions they stuff into your bank account.

Last week, Andrea Harris wrote:

For those who were born too late and therefore are under the impression that the Seventies was a gloriously innocent time of day-glo colored discoball party fun fun fun, that decade was actually when the American character was sunk in neurotic depression. We ran from Vietnam like a bunch of scared big girls. The economy sucked. Cynicism and selfish, destructive behavior was rampant. Cars were hideous junk painted ugly "earth tones" like crap brown, condensed-milk yellow, ketchup-stain red, and garbage can green. (My father's giant boat of a '73 Ford LTD was that color. Driving it was like trying to pilot the Hindenburg on the ground.) Fashions made men and women look like clowns. (Two words: plaid pantsuits.) The divorce rate, the drug-crime rate, the venereal disease rate -- everything bad went up.

And plenty of it landed in your living room along the way--James Lileks reposts the entire original "Interior Desecrations" site from the late 1990s, the inspiration for his best selling book a few years later. For the full visual horror of the 1970s at its plastic craptastic worst, click here and keep scrolling until your eyes bleed. For my Electronic House magazine review of his 2004 book, click here.

That was then...

"We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times ... and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK," Obama said.

"That's not leadership. That's not going to happen," he added.

This is now:

The capital flew into a bit of a tizzy when, on his first full day in the White House, President Obama was photographed in the Oval Office without his suit jacket. There was, however, a logical explanation: Mr. Obama, who hates the cold, had cranked up the thermostat.

"He's from Hawaii, O.K.?" said Mr. Obama's senior adviser, David Axelrod, who occupies the small but strategically located office next door to his boss. "He likes it warm. You could grow orchids in there."

Huh. You know, when it comes to the weather, folks in Washington don't seem to be able to handle things.

Reuters reports that "New York City fears return to 1970s."

With a few notable exceptions, needless to say.

Victor Davis Hanson writes, "If anyone wished to know what the baby-boomer generation would do when, in its full maturity, it hit its first self-created, big-time recession, I think we are seeing the hysterical results":

After two decades of unprecedented economic growth, rampant consumer spending, and unimaginable borrowing to satisfy our insatiable appetites, we are suddenly going into even larger debt and printing trillions of dollars in paper money to ensure that someone else after we are gone pays the debt. As if the permanent solution to a financial panic and years of spending wealth we didn't create were a government take-over of the economy in the manner we currently witness in Spain, Italy, and Greece--or the high-tax, high-spend ethos of a bankrupt California.

The reaction to the economic panic was sort of analogous to the call to 'charge it!' after 9/11 (cf. Ike's fights about the surtax to pay for Korea), or to the Iraq 2006 upsurge in violence, when suddenly our leaders declared the war lost, blamed the nebulous "they" for tricking them into voting for the war, and calling for immediate withdrawals and retreats. Ditto the Stalag-Gulag Guantanamo that, by January 19, had ruined the Constitution, shredded the Bill of Rights, and forever tarnished our reputation. Yet, on the 20th, it was suddenly complex and problematic, and required a "task force" to do a year-long inquiry into the bad and worse choices confronting us. At some point in all this serial hysteria, we are beginning to see the problem is not in the stars of the economy or of the war, but in ourselves--a weird generation that, when it finally came of age, proved to be just about what we could expect of it from what we saw in its youth.

California's already reached the tipping point, and the rest of the nation isn't that far behind it--which is why James Pethokoukis proffers "10 Reasons to Whack Obama's Stimulus Plan."

Just over the wire from AP:

John Updike, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, prolific man of letters and erudite chronicler of sex, divorce and other adventures in the postwar prime of the American empire, died Tuesday at age 76.

Updike, a resident of Beverly Farms, Mass., died of lung cancer, according to a statement from his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf.

A literary writer who frequently appeared on best seller lists, the tall, hawk-nosed Updike wrote novels, short stories, poems, criticism, the memoir "Self-Consciousness" and even a famous essay about baseball great Ted Williams.

An old-fashioned believer in hard work, he published more than 50 books in a career that started in the 1950s. Updike won virtually every literary prize, including two Pulitzers, for "Rabbit Is Rich" and "Rabbit at Rest," and two National Book Awards.

(H/T: Jose Guardia.)

Noel Sheppard writes:

The Obama economic adviser who doesn't want infrastructure "stimulus" spending to only benefit "white male construction workers" is angry at Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Michelle Malkin for having the nerve to report his racist remarks the mainstream media compliantly boycotted for several weeks.

In an open letter posted at his blog Saturday, former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich accused the trio of "manifestly distorting [his] words and pulling them out of context."

The best response to that would be to say, "I claim no higher truth than my own perceptions. This is how I lived it."

When we last saw Chris Matthews, he was busy explaining to Al Roker which direction the Oba-tingle flowed:

Are you sure Chris? Because the direction of Obaworshiping is beginning to follow a distinct southern migration pattern. The One has gone from being on your shoulder, to in your breast pocket. So is a race to the bottom next?

Yes they can!

(H/T for the Barack-pocket sized chrestobamathy: Charlie Martin.)

Sherman Frederick, the publisher of the Las Vegas Review Journal writes, "As our president said, it is time to grow up":

There is a growing faction of the American left that seeks revenge more than righteousness.

Intolerant of dissenting views, this faction thinks as comedian Janeane Garofalo does that some members of the opposing political party should be "jailed." Terrorist acts (such as mailing envelopes of white power to Mormon temples because the gay marriage vote in California went the church's way) are seen by this faction as understandable and acts of legitimate political expression.

There is also an ugly racial component to it. We first saw it with Obama's pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who said, among other things, that white America had deliberately inflicted black Africa with AIDS.

When the Rev. Wright first hit the national stage, we hardly knew what to make of his irrational and separatist statements. Consequently, we pretty much ignored the substance of Wright's racially divisive rhetoric and focused on it as a day-to-day political story. It made us more comfortable, I think.

But in light of the things we saw at the inauguration, it may be time to revisit the dangers of intolerance and hate -- no matter the color of the person who makes them -- and nip this ugly mean streak in the bud.

He's absolutely right, but he lost me with that last sentence. Nip it in the bud? This isn't exactly a new development: Garofalo's shtick dates back to 2003. The origins of the black liberation theology that fuels Obama's former spiritual advisor date back to the 1960s, not coincidentally, the terrorist heyday of Bill Ayers and other paramilitary Obama supporters. Radical payback for opposing views isn't exactly new, either.

Back in mid-2004 with an election year in full swing, Charles Krauthammer coined "the Pressure Cooker Theory of Hydraulic Release":

The loathing goes far beyond the politicians. Liberals as a body have gone quite around the twist. I count one all-star rock tour, three movies, four current theatrical productions and five best sellers (a full one-third of the New York Times list) variously devoted to ridiculing, denigrating, attacking and devaluing this president, this presidency and all who might, God knows why, support it.

How to explain? With apologies to Dr. Freud, I propose the Pressure Cooker Theory of Hydraulic Release.

The hostility, resentment, envy and disdain, all superheated in Florida, were not permitted their natural discharge. Came 9/11 and a lid was forced down. How can you seek revenge for a stolen election by a nitwit usurper when all of a sudden we are at war and the people, bless them, are rallying around the flag and hailing the commander in chief? With Bush riding high in the polls, with flags flying from pickup trucks (many of the flags, according to Howard Dean, Confederate), the president was untouchable.

The Democrats fell unnaturally silent. For two long, agonizing years, they had to stifle and suppress. It was the most serious case of repression since Freud's Anna O. went limp. The forced deference nearly killed them. And then, providentially, they were saved. The clouds parted and bad news rained down like manna: WMDs, Abu Ghraib, Richard Clarke, Paul O'Neill, Joe Wilson and, most important, continued fighting in Iraq.

Stripped of his halo, the president's ratings went down. The spell was broken. He was finally once again human and vulnerable. With immense relief, the critics let loose.

The result has been volcanic. The subject of one prominent new novel is whether George W. Bush should be assassinated. This is all quite unhinged. Good God. What if Bush is re-elected? If they lose to him again, Democrats will need more than just consolation. They'll need therapy.

The media's pressure cooker would pop yet again the following year: as Mickey Kaus wrote at the time, Katrina allowed them to go nuclear on Bush without sounding unpatriotic, unlike their GWOT and Iraq-bashing coverage.

So this isn't exactly a new development in politics--this is merely SOP for the American left.

"Now that the Obama Administration has taken power, it is critical for us to pay attention for how our language is being transformed before our eyes", The Gadfly Blog urges.

For some related thoughts, check out the conclusion of Byron York's recent interview with the man that Obama has apparently chosen to play Emmanuel Goldstein.

And as Andrea Harris writes, welcome back my friend, to the decade that never, ever, ever ends:

For those who were born too late and therefore are under the impression that the Seventies was a gloriously innocent time of day-glo colored discoball party fun fun fun, that decade was actually when the American character was sunk in neurotic depression. We ran from Vietnam like a bunch of scared big girls. The economy sucked. Cynicism and selfish, destructive behavior was rampant. Cars were hideous junk painted ugly "earth tones" like crap brown, condensed-milk yellow, ketchup-stain red, and garbage can green. (My father's giant boat of a '73 Ford LTD was that color. Driving it was like trying to pilot the Hindenburg on the ground.) Fashions made men and women look like clowns. (Two words: plaid pantsuits.) The divorce rate, the drug-crime rate, the venereal disease rate -- everything bad went up. The idea of the psycho vet helped trash the military in the eyes of the civilian public. And when Carter became president the fan that the shit had been hitting got turned up to high. We became known as a nation of weak, effeminate suck-ups. That's why the Iranians were able to take our embassy hostage for a year.

That's what Obama and his supporters want to bring us back to.

Let me ask anyone reading this: did you know anyone in your school who was known for trying to get everyone to like them? Did you think they were great people or did you laugh when you heard they were stuffed in their locker by one of the jocks? Get ready for America to be stuffed in a locker.

Any editors reading this passage, please provide the answer to Kathy Shaidle's question, here.

In the Chicago Tribune, Mary Schmich writes, "A few months ago, before Barack Obama became the linguist-in-chief, I made a note to myself to write a column about the need to exterminate a pest."

And that pest's name? Enormity:

The problem wasn't new, but it seemed to be multiplying like mice. Suddenly, all sorts of people, pundits especially, were tossing "enormity" around with abandon. The enormity of the economic crisis. The enormity of the housing crisis, the layoff crisis, the banking crisis, various foreign relations imbroglios and Donald Trump's ego.

Every time another pundit said the word, I winced, not out of fear for my 401(k) but because I saw a battalion of newspaper editors and college professors, led by my 6th-grade teacher, Miss Birch, rapping on the pundits' enormous brains and shouting, "Enormity does not mean it's big!"

Because I was browbeaten in my formative years by such language warriors, I felt called to crusade to restore "enormity" to its proper meaning: "monstrous wickedness."

But I didn't get around to the crusade before Obama was elected, and now the truth is too huge to avoid: The battle is lost.

"I do not underestimate the enormity of the task that lies ahead," Obama told the Grant Park crowd at his November acceptance speech.

Last Sunday, he violated Miss Birch's rule again, in a speech at the Lincoln Memorial. "Despite the enormity of the task that lies ahead," he said, "I stand here today as hopeful as ever that the United States of America will endure."

When the president of the United States--Harvard lawyer, deft writer, one of the most powerful people in the world--tells Miss Birch it's time to change, well, she might.

"But not without grumbling", Schmich writes. Read the rest--her concluding sentence encapsulates postmodern feelgood hopeychangeyness and the Bobos In Paradise market segment it directly appeals to perfectly.

Back in July you'll recall that John McCain's campaign ran a YouTube video that dubbed Barack Obama "the biggest celebrity in the world" and compared the candidate (still in the middle of his first term in the Senate) to Paris Hilton.

You know you're over the target when you start receiving Good Morning America, and they and the rest of the enraptured legacy media were collectively infuriated by this ad:

Co-host Diane Sawyer hyperbolically derided the spot as a "political nuclear attack" and asserted that the campaign is taking "a strange new turn."

GMA news anchor Chris Cuomo seemed equally flummoxed. He opened the show by asserting, "Some odd campaign news today. There's a round of new campaign commercials that really have us scratching our heads here." A bewildered Sawyer agreed: "What sort of committee meeting do you have where you say, 'Let's use Britney!' 'Let's use Paris!' Yes, that'll be a blow!"

And for a time it was. In mid-September, when McCain was still leading in some polls, Rich Lowry wrote:

The enduring scandal of the McCain campaign is that it wants to win. The press had hoped for a harmless, nostalgic loser like Bob Dole in 1996. In a column excoriating Republicans for historically launching successful attacks against Democratic presidential candidates in August, Time columnist Joe Klein excepted Bob Dole -- not mentioning that Dole had been eviscerated by Clinton negative ads before August ever arrived.

The press turned on McCain with a vengeance as soon as he mocked Barack Obama as a celebrity. Its mood grew still more foul when the McCain campaign took offense at Obama's "lipstick on a pig" jab. "The media are getting mad," according to Washington Post reporter Howard Kurtz. "Stop the madness," urged Time's Mark Halperin, exhorting his fellow journalists to fight back against the McCain campaign's manufactured outrage.

One of the reasons why the "Celebrity" ad so angered the MSM was that it spoke to the heart of Obama's appeal--it's not ideas and policy oriented, it's "largely aesthetic and personality-based", as Peter Wehner writes in an excellent article at Commentary. Read the whole thing, but the main thesis is here:

Obama's appeal, while widespread, is largely aesthetic and personality-based. This explains why a somewhat unsettling cult of personality has arisen around Obama. His appeal is not rooted in ideas or political philosophy or governing achievements; indeed, it is not grounded in any acts of governance. Yet some people already speak of him as a Lincolnian and Messiah-like figure.

But precisely because this appeal is largely aesthetic rather than substantive, because it is not grounded in things deep or permanent, its durability is limited. Reality will intrude. A million watt smile, fashionable sunglasses, and a nice jump shot are fine - I wish I possessed each of them - but one can confidently assume that Kim Jong Il, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Hassan Nasrallah, and Hugo Chavez are immune to their charms. Inflation, deflation, and unemployment will not be determined by the eloquence of Obama's rhetoric, the dinners he attends, or the columnists and reporters he seduces.

My point is really a rather simple one: Obama will be judged by the outcome of events. The other things are fine -- but in the end, they are far less important, and in some cases they are evanescent. People magazine and the Style section of the Washington Post are fun, but they are not serious.

Right now Barack Obama, having been President for all of three days, appears to be sitting on top of the world. He is a bright, talented, and able man. But the world is an untidy and unpredictable place. Pakistan may convulse. Iran may well go nuclear on Obama's watch; if so, Saudi Arabia and Egypt might soon follow, and the most unstable region in the world would be home to several nuclear powers.

Hard decisions need to be made, often based on incomplete information and rapidly changing events. Inter-agency clashes will occur. People and agencies thought to be competent will prove to be unreliable. Intelligence agencies will not be able to tell the President all that he wishes. A massive federal bureaucracy, an emboldened Congress, and other nations will begin to assert themselves. The law of economics will not be suspended. Entitlement programs remain unreformed and therefore unsustainable. Wasteful programs will refuse to die. The deficit is exploding. People's expectations are soaring, and soon enough they will insist on results.

Barack Obama may or may not succeed as president; but whether he does or not, the things people are taken up with now will not be determinative. And if things get worse rather than better, if Obama appears overmatched by events, then what are viewed as strengths now will be seen as weaknesses later. The day's vanity will become the night's remorse.

Barack Obama is President of the United States, not a crown prince on a white horse. Fairy tales are fine; but fairy tales are childish things.

Which is my Michael Novak is speculating on "The Coming Fall"--when it will occur, and what might cause it.

AP reports:

In a discouraging report for the American economy, General Electric Co. posted a 46 percent drop in fourth-quarter earnings on Friday and warned of a "tough environment" this year as it struggles with its ailing finance business.

To quote Mark Steyn's brilliant essay on previous reports of fresh disaster, "Hey, that's great news, isn't it?"

It is according to what GE's more public representatives have told us.

In November of 2007, one of the conglomerate's television networks urged us to turn off our lights (manufactured by GE) for the environment. Six months later, Barack Obama surely gave a tingle up the collective leg of one of their other television networks when he told told voters:

"We can't just keep driving our SUVs, eating whatever we want, keeping our homes at 72 degrees at all times regardless of whether we live in the tundra or the desert and keep consuming 25 percent of the world's resources with just 4 percent of the world's population, and expect the rest of the world to say you just go ahead, we'll be fine."

And at the start of 2008, the spouse of his leading opponent in the Democratic primaries was quoted as saying:

We just have to slow down our economy and cut back our greenhouse gas emissions 'cause we have to save the planet for our grandchildren.

Mission accomplished!

By getting Jim Geraghty to post "The right man won in 2008:"

Mac is back--back to his moral preening about how bipartisan he is, back to his reflexive demonization of his own party, back to his refusal to recognize any legitimate concerns raised by those who disagree with him. If we're going to have Democratic agenda enacted, better it be by a Democrat than a Republican obsessed with avoiding the "partisan" label in the White House.

Read the whole thing.

As its former Ombudsman Daniel Okrent wrote in 2004, "Is the New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?"

"Of course it is."

Related: Has Caroline Kennedy gotten Pinch-ed? Don Surber thinks so!

(H/T: Radio Pundit.)

Victor Davis Hanson has "An Uneasy Feeling"--and who can blame him?

I distilled from the press coverage and the crowds and the punditry yesterday that for all too many suddenly a vote for Obama redeems America. Now, to paraphrase Michelle Obama, for the first time in their lives they are apparently proud of the United States. (Had we not had the financial meltdown in mid-September, and had Obama stayed three points back in the polls, would millions have stayed soured on America and now in sullen silence licked their wounds?).

So I am surprised that suddenly the election of a single individual means that we are united, patriotic, proud of America? Suddenly Okinawa or Antietam, or all those who died at the Argonne, are ours to claim again? (This reminds of elementary school, when our third-grade split up into two sides, as the teacher quizzed us on geography-and the losers of the contest cried and said unfair and how they didn't like school or Mrs. Wilson, and then when they won the next day, how suddenly third grade became glorious, and Mrs. Wilson and her games were once again wonderful).

But America was always ours, the public, and the nation transcends the proposition of whether Obama gets elected or not--given that the United States, in its worst hour, was better than the alternatives at their best. So I think it would be wise to cool it on the "I am now proud of America" rhetoric. If getting your way means suddenly the dead at Iwo or those who were blown up in B-17s over Germany are at last your own and matter, then we are in deep trouble.

Don't miss VDH's "More Modest Proposals in the Age of Obama" aimed at The One's more beatific supporters. Such as Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher, whom you can hear at 3:54 in the latest Hollywood Obaworshiping video stating, "I pledge to be a servant to our president and all mankind."

All of which is summed by this observation by Dan Blatt of Gay Patriot (via one of his commenters) on the yin and yang of the last eight years:

Obama worship is the flip side of Bush hatred. They love the one without knowing what he stands for and loath the other while mispresenting his record.

Exactly.

(H/T: IP)

Ed Morrissey asks, "Wasn't this supposed the era of post-racialism?":

Robert Reich apparently didn't get that message. In his appearance before Congress on structuring the stimulus plan on January 7th, Reich suggested that the package discriminate against white male workers:

I am concerned, as I'm sure many of you are, that these jobs not simply go to high-skilled people who are already professionals or to white male construction workers. ... I have nothing against white male construction workers. I'm just saying that there are a lot of other people who have needs as well. ... Criteria can be set so that the money does go to others, the long term unemployed minorities, women, people who are not necessarily construction workers or high-skilled professionals.

Meanwhile, Ed notes that if nothing else, Caroline Kennedy at least fulfilled the most important aspect of being a senator from New York, quoting this passage in the New York Times:

Ms. Kennedy's departure would reset the political calculus among the remaining contenders, about half a dozen of whom were likely to be serious prospects if Ms. Kennedy were out of the picture. Publicly and privately, Mr. Paterson has talked about the importance of selecting a woman to replace Mrs. Clinton, which could boost such candidates as Ms. Gillibrand, Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, and Randi Weingarten, the president of the United Federation of Teachers.

Ed responds:

I get it. It's sort of the Robert Reich approach; we can't allow a man (of any color, this time) to replace Hillary. Instead of looking for intellectual or experiential qualifications as a primary concern, Paterson wants simply to bar another Y-chromosomed Senator. Call it the New York Gender Stimulus plan.

Funny, I don't recall Pat Moynihan making any waves about gender when his successor announced her candidacy.

Meanwhile, the Huffington Post didn't get the post-racial memo either, as they do a spot-on impersonation of Kanye West.

It's only Barack-Age Wasteland. As the Ace of Spades blog notes, "Let's not forget - this was touted as the "greenest inauguration in history"--of course, that's not exactly how things worked out:

It'll be a sad atmosphere in the Pool Room of the Four Seasons tonight, you know, as Caroline Kennedy ends her quixotic Senate seat bid.

Ed Morrissey bets New York State's obsession with dynastic politics won't end though: "I'd bet that Cuomo gets the call by tomorrow."

Update: Keep hope alive!

Update: Or not: "Spokesman confirms Caroline has withdrawn." And I'm sure we're feeling as withdrawn ourselves--if not much, much more so--at this news.

in his last week in power, in order to ensure that the nation's capital actually survive the transition process, President Bush had declared DC a disaster area. Between the inclement weather, the lack of indoor plumbing, the minimum of functional outdoor plumbing, and hundreds of thousands of pop music-loving anti-war protesters, last Thursday, I wrote that the inauguration sounded like "a repeat of Woodstock, except with Geritol the drug of choice instead of LSD, and many fewer cool bands."

CNN's John Roberts, the architect of CNN's infamous "Wright-Free Zone" last year, agrees. As Newsbusters puts it, "CNN's John Roberts Dubs Inaugural Crowds 'Barack-stock'":

CNN's CAROL COSTELLO: You know, usually, you have a little bit of a problem getting people to agree to be on television, but not yesterday. People were begging to be on TV. They wanted their thoughts recorded. They were very much aware that history was being made, and they wanted to be a part of it in whatever way they could.

JOHN ROBERTS: It really was 'Barack-stock' -- peace, love, and history.

COSTELLO: It really was.

Well far out, man! The lead act was pretty amazing, but did you catch Country Joe Biden And The Sea Kittens? Crosby, Stills And Rahm? Clinton Clearwater Revival? And how 'bout that oldies act, Thomas Jefferson Airplane!

Seriously though, it did seem like there was plenty of featherweight pop culture and more than a few bad trips yesterday as well. Hopefully the administration will recover from their dalliance with nostalgie de la boue and actually govern like grownups. The legacy media's long strange acid trip of the last election cycle may have been too much for them to overcome, though.

Update: While CNN's Roberts declared yesterday to be "peace, love, and history", Michael Medved notes that "President Obama explicitly and forcefully distanced himself from the far-left 'peace activists' who provided his drive for the presidency with much of its initial energy and urgency."

Tony Woodlief:

It was revealing that one of the speeches most worthy of note, from the incomparable Forest Whitaker, was essentially a selection from William Faulkner's Nobel acceptance speech, an uplifting affirmation of art and truth that is at the same time a denunciation of the worst of post-modernism and relativism. What we have forgotten, as unwittingly attested by the voices at this concert (excepting Mr. Obama, of course, who is a first-rate speaker), is that actors are not, in a classical Aristotelian sense, artists. They are skilled, to be sure, but they are empty vessels, to be fitted to parts as suits the real artists, the writers and photographers, the costumers and make-up specialists. This is not to deny the accidental beauty of Marisa Tomei or Jamie Foxx, or the emotive skill of Denzel Washington. But something is strangely out of whack when speeches are to be delivered at the foot of Lincoln, on ground hallowed by King, and the deliverers we choose are none of them thinkers or writers.

It was a concert, to be sure, and one can hardly expect, in today's entertainment-focused America, a crowd of onlookers to prefer Dana Goia to Jack Black's goofball-turned-briefly-serious speechifying. Who needs some stuffy poet, after all, when you have available the artistic genius behind Shallow Hal? Sure, John Irving wrote a couple of books good enough to become movies, but we've got the star of Snakes on a Plane, for crying out loud! Besides, reading is for elitists.

The reality, of course, is that most actors today are nothing without smoldering looks and other people's words, and so each in turn took the stage to read the words of their intellectual betters. Perhaps this is the way of art in a highly specialized economy--if even Christian rock stars these days have to be sexually appealing, then surely we can't cast stones at average Americans who prefer their speeches to be given by beautiful people.

As Woodlief writes, "It's a gentler kind of reflection we seek these days, not an inward look at what is good and evil within this country, within each of us, but instead a reflection that is all glitter and shine, delivered by beautiful people who have distinguished themselves by an ability to show us what we want to see."

Jay Nordlinger:

When I read that the crowd today booed President Bush -- and then saw a video of it -- I thought of a quip my friend Eddie made, not long ago: "When the Left asks for a classless society, now I know what they mean."

Meanwhile, Tom Brokaw has a classless moral inversion of his own, looking at the president who liberated Iraq from a would-be Stalin and quipping that his successor's inauguration "reminds me of the Velvet Revolution," which toppled the communist regime in Czechoslovakia.

One leading economic indicator wasn't impressed by today's festivities, as Reuters notes:

U.S. stock indexes extended losses and hit session lows on Tuesday after President Barack Obama's inauguration speech provided few new details about measures to tackle the growing economic crisis.

"I think people were looking for something, new plans, new hopes," said Joe Saluzzi, co-manager of trading at Themis Trading in Chatam, New Jersey.

"They didn't hear something new."

To be fair, an inauguration speech isn't exactly the place to lay out a new administration's fiscal agenda, but still, between this, Ted Kennedy passing out, the racially charged benediction from Rev. Joseph Lowery, whatever caused Rahm to flip the Emanuel, and the jeering of the incoming president's supporters at the outgoing commander-in-chief, there were lots of fumbles during the ecstasy.

Update: Perhaps this (via the Professor) helps to explain today's market swoon: "In the mind of the anti-free-marketeer, the government occupies the same kind of intellectual territory as the divine designer in the mind of an anti-Darwinian."

More" The temperature wasn't the only thing icy in DC today. Witness: "The awesomely awesome Carter/Clinton snub"--complete with video!

Feel the narcissism as "Generation We" makes their stand--then after a hard day's work of shooting a YouTube clip says screw it, and heads back to Starbucks for another decaf vente soy latte. As Melissa Clouthier writes, "Just in case you think the world will finally be saved once all the Boomers are pushing up daisies, I have bad news for you: they spawned."

Obviously, we need the next generation of this counter.

Rush transcription of same video featuring B-list celebs, here.

Related: Headline of the day award goes to The Gormogons: "Paging Vernon Reid".

At "Big Hollywood", James Hudnall has "10 Cinematic Cliches That Must Die!"

Allahpundit links to the video below, featuring, as he puts it, "Celebrities moved by new spiritual leader to become better people":

Via the Standard. If ever you doubted that Obamamania is fundamentally a religious movement, at least among nitwits like this, watch and note how few of their pledges are tied to Obama's policy agenda. It's mostly personal pap about smiling more and being a better parent, forms of self-improvement which, it seems, simply couldn't be undertaken until the GOP was out of the White House.

MySpace Celebrity and Katalyst present The Presidential Pledge


Andrew Breitbart asks, "Where Were You Celebrities After 9/11?":

God bless, President Obama. You have my best wishes and all of my best efforts. Even though I didn't vote for you, and disagree with much of your agenda.

But that doesn't mean I will forgive and forget an era of narcissism and petty complaining from the majority celebrity class that began well before Iraq. See "Hollywood, Interrupted" -- my book co-written with Mark Ebner -- which was written before and during the build-up to the Iraq war and before the WMDs weren't found. The public behavior from Hollywood was uniformly deplorable. It's a convenient lie they peddle that they were with us during Afghanistan. They weren't.

The decadence during this period was world class. The clubs raged. The boutique hotels flourished. The parties never stopped. And a precious few stepped up to support the American troops who have been valiantly fighting for your right to do lines off of each other's buttocks at your Hollywood Hills $10 million mansions.

This video is not a sign of desire to serve the country under Obama -- you will not honor this pledge like the rest of us will forget about our New Year's resolutions. This video is a relic of the era of celebrity decadence and boutique anti-Republican activism under President Bush.

It is a sickening sign that you want fast and easy absolution for having comported yourself like ill behaved children for the last eight years. Good luck, President Obama. The rest of you can go to hell.

OK, that's not entirely fair--I know of at least one celebrity who pledged her loyalty to President Bush in the immediate aftermath of 9/11--and her calm demeanor in the years since was an inspiration to us all.

AP's ubiquitous Nedra Pickler writes, "Biden shushes wife after secretary of state slip":

The wife of Vice President-elect Joe Biden let it slip to Oprah Winfrey Monday that her husband had a pick of two jobs in the Obama administration.

Jill Biden said President-elect Barack Obama gave Biden the choice of being secretary of state or vice president. The vice president-elect tried to hush his wife as soon as the words came out of her mouth, with a loud "shhh!" that sent the audience into laughter.

The Bidens made a surprise appearance on Winfrey's show, recorded at the Kennedy Center for broadcast later Monday on the eve of the inauguration.

The vice president-elect said he only accepted Obama's offer to be his running mate after talking it over with "Jilly," his pet name for his wife. Mrs. Biden said she told him vice president would be better for the family.

Fortunately for the sake of the entire planet's survival, Mrs. Biden wisely chose the job where her husband could the least amount of international harm:

In early November, I wrote:

To borrow from the vernacular of The Boss's early '70s glory days (to coin a phrase), has any musician become more Establishment than Springsteen?

Allahpundit notes the ranks of the Establishment have suddenly swelled:

One of the amusements of the Obama years will be watching the counterculture transition from inveighing against The Man to trying to get The Man reelected.

Too bad though that there doesn't appear to be an opposition party whose leaders have enough brains to capitalize on this.

Some thoughts on "the primal tribal imperative that underlies the relentless scapegoating of our 43rd president by his political adversaries" from Sisu Willis.

Related: On the other hand, "Welcome back from the Wilderness of Despair and Oppression, kids."

A fine selection of "Words To Rest In 2009."

As Jonah Goldberg writes in the L.A. Times, on the campaign trail, Barack Obama was every candidate you wanted him to be. But that's about to change once he actually takes office and begins to govern:

Presidential inaugurations are in many ways the high-water marks of any presidency because they're so full of hope. All things seem possible. The rivalries and backbiting haven't set in yet, at least not publicly. Even the inevitable disappointments over Cabinet picks and White House staffing are tempered by the wide-eyed dreams of an ambitious agenda. Everyone -- or at least everyone who backed the guy -- has that "we can make this the best yearbook ever!" feeling.

Then comes the letdown. No, I don't mean Barack Obama will be a failed president. But even the most successful presidents bitterly disappoint some people, usually some of their biggest supporters. Indeed, they can only disappoint supporters because disappointment first requires confidence and hope. Those who voted against Obama can either have their low expectations fulfilled or be pleasantly surprised.

Many conservatives, for example, had hoped that George W. Bush's "compassionate conservatism" was simply a marketing slogan. They were dismayed to discover he really meant it. In the 1980s, Republican factions were deeply divided in the "let Reagan be Reagan" debates. Everyone heard what they wanted to hear during the campaign and expected the man's presidency to jibe perfectly with their expectations.

Obama's ideological compass is far more difficult to discern than Reagan's or Bush's were. This is why his conservative detractors often called him a cipher. Obama's supporters rolled their eyes despite producing often-contradictory evidence to rebut the charge.

This raises perhaps the most interesting question of the Obama presidency: "What wasn't Barack Obama lying about?"

I don't mean this to be as harsh as it sounds. I'm not talking about what his conservative critics said he was lying about -- say, the true nature of his relationship with William Ayers. I'm talking about issues where his own supporters seem to have just assumed he had his fingers crossed.

Not the least of which is Obama's infamous statement on bankrupting the coal industry, uttered a year ago in the midst of an hour long conversation the editors of the San Francisco Chronicle and then unnearthed by a blogger in the last weekend of the election; the closest anyone remotely associated with the feckless McCain campaign came to delivering an October surprise. After The One's latest flip-flop on this issue, Ed Morrissey wonders if the freshness dating has expired on that statement--but concludes, don't be too sure.

Orrin Judd looks at a bitter clinging (but certainly not a sweetie) Nancy Pelosi at odds with the incoming president and quips, "At some point over the next two years, he's gonna find that labradoodle boiling away in a pot on the White House stove...."

Newsbusters spots "Celebs Giddy for Obama's 'Magic Moment' After 'Hell' of Bush Years". Here's but one of them:

Actress Gloria Reuben (IMDb page), now in TNT's Raising the Bar and formerly on NBC's ER, will be on hand Tuesday "to watch the magic moment happen" since she yearns for an end to the "hell" of the Bush years. (Screen capture is from Reuben on ABC's This Week in 2006 when she was promoting a play in which she played Condoleezza Rice):

It's a once-in-a-lifetime situation. The last eight years have been such hell. We're all so excited about the hope of things to come. I really think that's part of it. People are so ready to rejoice and celebrate what is hopefully the return of the foundation of the United States.

She looks fantastic. She's spent 13 years on a top-rated TV series making a high six figure if not seven figure annual salary. And "The last eight years have been such hell"? Why, lights on the set too bright? Wolfgang Puck didn't give you the first table at Spago? No, evidently, it's because the man in Washington who in the scope of things will be seen as governing in much the same fashion as his predecessor had an R after his name and not a D.

And yet, somehow, in the photo of Reuben from 2006, she's smiling--good stiff upper lip and all that whilst trapped in Bushitler Hell. That's more than other celebrities can say about their decade in purgatory--Maura Tierney, another traumatized victim of ER is quoted as saying, "I'm calm for the first time in eight years."

On the other hand, Tierney's IMDB profile notes this:

Wrote an article in the spring 2001 issue of Flaunt titled, "'Rudy Giuliani': A Fascist? You Be The Judge."

Ahh--now it all makes sense. Obviously a Buchananite crushed by his third party defeat in 2000 who's never recovered...

Related: Hollywood East.

Via the Liberal Fascism blog, some thoughts from Byron York and Jay Nordlinger on all-enveloping corporate Obama worship. And much more from Debbie Schlussel, who calls into yesterday's B-Cast on Breitbart.tv to discuss Obama taking central command of the internecine battles in the cola wars--and getting his own trading cards as a result:

Related thoughts from Hot Air's Allahpundit.

Update: "Everybody remembers those pro-Bush celebrity videos sponsored by major corporations, right? Right?"

Maureen Dowd visits a Florida spa; unintentional hilarity ensues.

Media Bistro's "AgencySpy" blog explains "why it's vitally important to watch what you say on Twitter":

A representative from Ketchum New York (a PR and Marketing firm) heads to Memphis to give a big presentation to their big client, FedEx, and totally offends everyone who works there before even stepping foot in the building.

Upon landing in Memphis and getting a lay of the land he tweets:

"True confession but I'm in one of those towns where I scratch my head and say, 'I would die if I had to live here.'"

Someone from inside FedEx was following Capt. Footinmouth, whose Twitter name is 'keyinfluencer' -- quite possibly the douchiest nickname of all history -- and that person sent the letter we posted below. You'll want to read it, because not only is it amazingly poignant, but because it was copied to "the FedEx Coporate Vice President, Vice President, Directors and all management of FedEx's communication department AND the chain of command at Ketchum." Thank you Peter Shankman for sharing this story.

"Mr. Andrews,

If I interpret your post correctly, these are your comments about Memphis a few hours after arriving in the global headquarters city of one of your key and lucrative clients, and the home of arguably one of the most important entrepreneurs in the history of business, FedEx founder Fred Smith.

Many of my peers and I feel this is inappropriate. We do not know the total millions of dollars FedEx Corporation pays Ketchum annually for the valuable and important work your company does for us around the globe. We are confident however, it is enough to expect a greater level of respect and awareness from someone in your position as a vice president at a major global player in your industry. A hazard of social networking is people will read what you write."

Now that you know what not to do, John Hawkins has assembled "The Super Awesome Right Wing News Twitter Guide For Newbies."

(Main story originally found, naturally enough, here.)

Related: Via Melissa Clouthier, helpful new media definitions--like, um "Twitter!"--are defined definitively, here.

Via Jonah Goldberg, this is a well produced look at the political spectrum and its history. Jonah writes, "I have my quibbles, but overall I think this pretty useful." I'm very much in sync with the graph that outline the poltical spectrum, which appears at 30 seconds into the video:

Jules Crittenden writes, "Anxious not to be stuck with the blame for another Katrina, Bush puts the federal disaster response into motion ahead of time, mobilizing FEMA bucks."

Jules has photographic evidence of the multiple survival mechanisms being put into place for those enduring the disaster region. He also links to an article which states that incoming volunteers are well aware of the grim conditions they'll be facing:

Beginning this weekend, millions of people are expected to swarm into the Nation's Capital - many with the highest expectations of seeing history unfold around them.Most seem aware of the challenges they face, transportation difficulties at best, millions of charged up people in the same place, enduring the elements for long hours, and all with no access to indoor plumbing.

Not to mention all of the anti-war protesters. In other words, a repeat of Woodstock, except with Geritol the drug of choice instead of LSD, and many fewer cool bands.

Related: Not that the Washington establishment isn't itself quite a hallucinatory experience.

As Mark Steyn wrote in 2005, "It's the Demography, Stupid"--or the lack thereof: "Shaky economy means 'bye-bye baby' for some."

Back in 2003, James Bennett of UPI wrote a superb essay on the state of Europe in the immediate post-9/11 years that in some ways foreshadowed Mark Steyn's epic "It's The Demography, Stupid" article in early 2006 and subsequent best-selling America Alone. (For my audio interview with Mark on the book, click here.)

Key passage from Bennett:

Continental Europeans, helped by the Marshall Plan and American investment, rebuilt their countries with vigor after 1945. Led by the last generations to mature in the environment of the hybrid Jewish-European civilization, Europe seemed to pick up where it left off in 1933.

Gradually, however, Europe seemed to run out of creativity, in everything from arts, to academia, to demographic vigor, to the will to political reform. Endless rehashing of elsewhere-discredited Marxism replaced creative political thought. Overt fascism and national chauvinism were banned, but a new Euro-chauvinism took its place, loudly proclaiming the superiority of European ways over crude American ones -- a new chauvinism on a wider scale, based like the old national chauvinism primarily on resentment.

It may be coincidence, but these new generations are the ones who grew up without the experience of studying, working and socializing with substantial numbers of Jews. Can this have no effect on politics?

Well now we know--in the Wall Street Journal, Daniel Schwammenthal writes, "Europe Reimports Jew Hatred: The mythical Arab Street now reaches deep into Paris, London, Berlin and Madrid."

As the Professor adds, "Well, it's not as if that represents a big break with the past or anything..."

Update: The Freepers appear to have the full text of Bennett's essay, which may no longer available on the original UPI site.

More: Heh, indeed.™

Just click for, as Hot Air calls it, your Freudian slip of the day:

Ten years ago, the late Paul Weyrich wrote:

I believe that we probably have lost the culture war. That doesn't mean the war is not going to continue, and that it isn't going to be fought on other fronts. But in terms of society in general, we have lost. This is why, even when we win in politics, our victories fail to translate into the kind of policies we believe are important.

In his latest column, Jay Nordlinger looks at the state of the overculture and similarly concludes, "It seems to me that the Left has won: utterly and decisively":

What I mean is, the Saturday Night Live, Jon Stewart, Bill Maher mentality has prevailed. They decide what a person's image is, and those images stick. They are the ones who say that Cheney's a monster, W.'s stupid, and Palin's a bimbo. And the country, apparently, follows.

I have a friend who teaches at a prominent university, and she says that, when Palin's name is mentioned, the people laugh. In the course of the 2008 presidential campaign, an extraordinarily accomplished woman -- more accomplished than most of the rest of us will ever be -- was turned into a laughingstock.

What are the shaping institutions of American life? The news media. Entertainment television. The movies. Popular music. The schools, K through grad school. In whose hands are those institutions? In what areas do conservatives predominate? Country music, NASCAR, some churches? (Talk radio too, I suppose -- no wonder so many on the left want to shut it down.)

I will be talking more about this in the coming weeks, months, and possibly years. Sidney Blumenthal once wrote a book called "The Rise of the Counter-Establishment" (meaning conservative associations and institutions). The counter-establishment needs to be tended, and beefed up.

A country that believes that Cheney's a monster, W.'s stupid, and Palin's a bimbo is a country with its head up its . . .

Donkey?

For a longform video look at the above topic, tune into John Ziegler (he of the upcoming How Obama Got Elected documentary) talking with the hosts of Breitbart.TV's B-Cast program yesterday. (Which concluded with my recent look at our incoming gaffe-o-matic president and vice president, after a brief mime-is-money silent interlude from the hosts and their failed soundboard.)

As this AP article notes, 2008 was "the fourth consecutive year that more residents decamped from California for other states than arrived here from within the U.S.":

The number of people leaving California for another state outstripped the number moving in from another state during the year ending on July 1, 2008. California lost a net total of 144,000 people during that period--more than any other state, according to census estimates. That is about equal to the population of Syracuse, N.Y.

The state with the next-highest net loss through migration between states was New York, which lost about 125,000 residents.

California's loss is extremely small in a state of 38 million. And, in fact, the state's population continues to increase overall because of births and immigration, legal and illegal. But it is the fourth consecutive year that more residents decamped from California for other states than arrived here from within the U.S.

A losing streak that long hasn't happened in California since the recession of the early 1990s, when departures outstripped arrivals from other states by 362,000 in 1994 alone.

In part because of the boom in population in other Western states, California could lose a congressional seat for the first time in its history.

Why are so many looking for an exit?

Among other things: California's unemployment rate hit 8.4 percent in November, the third-highest in the nation, and it is expected to get worse. A record 236,000 foreclosures are projected for 2008, more than the prior nine years combined, according to research firm MDA DataQuick. Personal income was about flat last year.

With state government facing a $41.6 billion budget hole over 18 months, residents are bracing for higher taxes, cuts in education and postponed tax rebates. A multibillion-dollar plan to remake downtown Los Angeles has stalled, and office vacancy rates there and in San Diego and San Jose surpass the 10.2 percent national average.

Median housing prices have nose-dived one-third from a 2006 peak, but many homes are still out of reach for middle-class families. Some small towns are on the brink of bankruptcy. Normally recession-proof Hollywood has been hit by layoffs.

"You see wages go down and the cost of living go up," Reilly says. His property taxes will be $1,300 in Colorado, down from $4,300 on his three-bedroom house in Nipomo, about 80 miles up the coast from Santa Barbara.

California's obituary has been written before--"California: The Endangered Dream" was the title of a 1991 Time magazine cover story. The Golden State and its huge economy--by itself, the eighth-largest in the world--have shown resilience, weathering the aerospace bust, the dot-com crash and an energy crunch in recent years.

But this time, the news just keeps getting worse.

As the AP article noted, "The state with the next-highest net loss through migration between states was New York, which lost about 125,000 residents."

New York's governor got a sense of his state's outward migration patterns when he took office last year:

Paterson cited a number of personal friends, all former New Yorkers, who have contacted him from out of state since his ascent to the governorship. "A friend from primary school, Randy San Antonio, told me he moved to Dallas 20 years ago," Paterson began. "Another friend, Randy Watts, had moved to Reno. A friend from Syracuse, Marvin Lee Simons, said he's working in Lower Manhattan. I said we should get together . . . and he said, 'Well, I don't live in New York. I live in western Pennsylvania.' Jeff and Stacey Stackhouse wanted to start a business on Long Island. They moved two years ago--they're trying to start their business in Charlotte, North Carolina. They couldn't pay the taxes here."

Shannon Love (H/T: IP) writes that California is following "the grim path of the Great Lakes states":

Those states where once the industrial dynamo for the entire Earth, yet they destroyed that enormous economic dominance by political policies hostile to economic creativity. Likewise, California had a golden era as an economic and cultural dynamo. Well up until the late 1980s California was the place to go to make it big. People moved from other states to California. Now, internal migration has reversed. California looks less like a dreamland and more like basket case waiting to happen.

It seems that in post-New Deal America, economic and civil success sow their own seeds of destruction. When things are going good, socialist experimentation seems harmless. A booming economy can pay for increased government spending and an ever-increasing scope of government power. Eventually, however, socialism strangles the economic engine and destroys civil society.

I think Texas may be the next boom state and I hope we escape this trap. One would think that socialism would not gain a foothold in independent minded Texas, but California was once a land of rugged individualists too.

Can't say I blame people for wanting to decamp to redder ground. Or as Glenn Reynolds wrote yesterday, "It's like the whole high-tax, high-regulation thing isn't working for them."

Theodore Dalrymple is currently enraging his fellow MDs by writing that "addicts do not need any medical assistance to stop taking heroin."But to challenge Sacramento and Albany's addictions, a cultural sea change is needed--one that I can't imagine arriving to either of what Tom Wolfe once dubbed "the Parentheses States" anytime soon.

In the mail today are the galleys for Roger L. Simon's new book, Blacklisting Myself. Here's an excerpt of an excerpt from (appropriately enough) "Big Hollywood":

In some ways, this new, less overt list is worse, because there is nothing concrete to rebel against, no hearings, no committees, no protest groups pro or con, no secret databases. There don't need to be. There is no there there, in Gertrude Stein's immortal words--only the grey haze of this mindless received liberalism, the world as last week's New York Times editorials, half-digested and regurgitated, never questioned, going forth forever with little perceived chance of reform, as if it were the permanent religious text of some strange new orthodoxy.

You see this new faith in practice at the average Hollywood story meeting. These are ritualized events and have been for the decades that I have participated in them. You wait an inordinately long time for your appointment, often longer than at a doctor's office, but with nowhere near the legitimate excuse on the part of the executive keeping you waiting. They are definitely not in surgery. The intention is merely to confirm your lower place in the pecking order. (I have personal knowledge of an instance when John Huston and Jack Nicholson were kept cooling their heels in a tiny room by the now-forgotten head of ABC Motion Pictures for nearly two hours--I assume he didn't realize they'd come to pitch him Prizzi's Honor. Or maybe he did and this was a form of envy or vengeance.)

Once inside the executive's office, the pecking order of talent and management thus confirmed, it's instantly waved off in a burst of small talk and a call for the requisite mineral water--originally Perrier, now something more exotic like an obscure Welsh brand in a blue bottle whose unpronounceable name you can barely remember. But the small talk is what's important. It usually revolves around the freeway traffic (a perpetual subject), the Lakers (depending on the year), and, over the last half-decade or more, a ritualized Bush bash. (What will they do without him?) Fucking Bush did this or that ... Did you hear the stupid thing Chimpy the Idiot said? You didn't even have to hear Bush referred to specifically-- the word "idiot" sufficed. You knew. The subtext was that we were all together, part of the secret society, the world of those who know as opposed to those who don't.

If you didn't agree with this particular Weltanschauung, if you dissented from its orthodoxy just a tiny bit, you had but three choices: One, you could argue, in which case you would be almost certain to be dismissed as a fool, a warmonger, or a right-wing nut (all three, probably) and therefore have had little or no chance at the writing or directing job that brought you there. Two, you could shut up and ignore it (stay in the closet), in which case you felt like a coward and experienced (as I have) a dose of nausea straight out of Sartre. Three, you could stop going to the meetings altogether--you could, in effect, blacklist yourself.

While this is (to the best of my knowledge) Roger's first non-fiction book, he's long been an exceptional fiction and comedy writer, and as we've long been documenting here, reality is always far stranger than satire. And as Hollywood's politically correct purges (see post below) continue and the level of dissent even less acceptable in a town that prides itself as being full of "free thinkers", many more people may well be blacklisting themselves as well in the years to come.

I had planned to post a link to this item by Mark Hemingway in the Corner...

Here's a handy map Prop 8 opponents have put together showing you where donors to prop 8 live. You have to love the "Jump to San Francisco, Salt Lake City , or Orange County" feature. If someone put together a map showing where all the gay people in the neighborhood live that would properly be called an implicit threat, but this is altogether different, right?

....But this article titled "The Revival Of The Blacklist" at The American Vision puts a number of related pieces together, along with a note of another fear of cold war tactics in a hot election battle far from Los Angeles:

The Franken-Coleman election in Minnesota is testimony to the fact that conservatives fear liberal blacklisting. A lot of liberal money came in to support of Franken by noted liberals like Tom Hanks, Robin Williams, George Clooney, Michael J. Fox, Ted Danson, David Letterman, Mike Myers, Dan Aykroyd, and Steve Martin. Because the FCC data base is open to the media, those who donate are available to the Hollywood left. A conservative who donated to Coleman would be "outed" in periodicals like Variety and Politico and might find it difficult getting steady work in the entertainment industry (see interview here).

A similar tactic is being used to punish those who supported Proposition 8. A Los Angeles Times article reports that many "in liberal Hollywood who fought to defeat the initiative banning same-sex marriage and are now reeling with recrimination and dismay. Meanwhile, activists continue to comb donor lists and employ the Internet to expose those who donated money to support the ban. Already out is Scott Eckern, director of the nonprofit California Musical Theatre in Sacramento, who resigned after a flurry of complaints from prominent theater artists, including 'Hairspray' composer Marc Shaiman, when word of his contribution to the Yes on [Prop] 8 campaign surfaced."

A letter writer to the San Francisco Chronicle who supported Prop 8 was intimidated when Internet search engines were used "to find the letter writer's small business, his Web site (which included the names of his children and dog), his phone number and his clients. And they posted that information in the 'Comments' section of SFGate.com--urging, in ugly language, retribution against the author's business and its identified clients."

Now, is this to say that conservatives can't work in Hollywood today? Not at all. Is there a fear factor that keeps conservatives from speaking out? I don't doubt it. Those who are touted as conservatives usually have no stated public opinion on abortion and homosexuality. Patricia Heaton and Angie Harmon are notable exceptions. Kurt Russell is listed as a conservative, actually, a libertarian, which might explain why he's living with Goldie Hawn and not married to her, although I must say that he's stayed with her longer than Brad Pitt did with Jennifer Aniston. Many (most?) are economic conservatives like Kelsey Grammar and Drew Carey. And there are more who are being encouraged to make their conservative beliefs public.

Like so much of liberalism, liberals are hypocritical. They decry the blacklisting of the 1940s and 1950s but don't seem to mind if the right people are being blacklisted today who defy their pet causes.

Thus rendering the well over 40 year old Annual Blacklist Movie (scroll to about 1:15 into this edition of Silicon Graffiti from July for a montage of clips from numerous examples of this Tinseltown perennial) as even more hypocritical than it already was:

Related thoughts here.

"Physicist Alex Wissner-Gross says that performing two Google searches uses up as much energy as boiling the kettle for a cup of tea."

Of course, a handful of really greedy buggers triple that impact with each search--and don't even mention the even bigger carbon criminals who dare to perform Google searches on their private Boeing 767s.

On the other hand, enough Google searches and private planes could prevent the new ice age--so have at it, boys and girls!

(H/T: Lileks on Twitter)

Paul Mirengoff writes that "The leaders of Montgomery County, Maryland, where I live, have for years pledged not to enforce the nation's immigration laws. Any jurisdiction that elects such leaders deserves the consequences."

It's always curious what laws local districts arbitrarily choose to ignore. Funny, there don't seem to be any that pledge not enforce the federal tax code--otherwise, welcome to the boom town!

In "Bruce Springsteen: One-Hundred Percent Republican" over at "Big Hollywood", Evan Sayet believes that the Boss may be suffering from a case of false consciousness:

The "culture war" that we hear so much about is, to borrow Thomas Sowell's phrase, a "conflict of visions." Visions, Sowell explains, go deeper than mere policy - in fact they are the font of where we stand on the issues - and they are founded on some of the most basic and fundamental beliefs the individual holds about the nature of man and, in turn, the role and purpose of government, family, religion and all other influential forces that society has evolved. Sowell called the conflicting visions the "Constrained" and the "Unconstrained" and offered Jean Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith as primary examples of the visions in conflict. More contemporary examples are John Lennon and Bruce Springsteen, the former holding the "unconstrained" vision (which I call here the Neo-Liberal view), the latter the "constrained," or, in my term, Conservative take. Just to be clear, yes, I'm saying that, while Springsteen the multimillionaire, rock star with the mansion in Beverly Hills may be a Liberal, Bruce Springsteen the poet is one-hundred percent Republican.

I'm not sure if I agree with that--though I'd be willing to say that Bruce is a reactionary, but not a Republican.

One of the reasons why the working class heroes and heroines that populate Bruce's albums never seem to transcend their problems is that they can't transcend their environment. To do so, some would have to leave their jobs in the factories, assembly lines and garages where all of Springsteen's characters seems to work and--gasp--put on a tie. Maybe even trade-in the '69 Chevy for an SUV or minivan. And take some responsibility for their situation, rather than decrying dark, unseen forces just offscreen. And singing about that is nowhere near as dramatic as the sturm und drang of Springsteen's shtick.

Instead, the post Springsteen of the Born To Run album and beyond, the Springsteen who became a mouthpiece for the politics of Jon Landau, his manager, is just as nihilistic as the John Lennon of "Imagine", except his characters have really do have "no possessions"--unlike Lennon's eight-figure net worth. But on the plus side, the E Street Band sure sounds a lot better, lacking both Plastic and Ono.

It's easy to understand why Sarah Palin drove the drive-by media insane--since she stood in the way of The One, and she established a successful career while concurrently being an apostate to whatever mishmash of ideas is commonly defined as liberalism these days, she simply needed to be destroyed, just as Joe the Plumber would similarly also need to be taken out.

It's not personal, Sonny, it's strictly business.

But Robert Stacy McCain has quite an interesting theory about why Sarah Palin had a similar effect on several prominent conservative pundits:

Somewhere between Bush's historic triumph in November 2004 (when he became the first president since 1988 to be elected by a popular-vote majority) and November 2006, the wheels fell off the Permanent Republican Majority. Suddenly, as if awakened from fairy-tale slumbers, conservative intellectuals began to regret that George W. Bush was not one of them.

Think about it. Peggy Noonan, Christopher Buckley, David Frum -- what is the thread that connects them? All worked as speechwriters: Noonan for Reagan, Buckley for Bush 41, Frum for Bush 43. While these Republican wordsmiths had all praised Dubya's machismo magnificence when he was contrasted with such pompous rivals as Al Gore and John Kerry, the bloom fell off that rose after 2006.

That born-again, down-to-earth, drawling Texas thing -- somehow, it had once made Bush seem like Gary Cooper in High Noon. But as the disasters mounted and the poll numbers headed southward, that Gary Cooper glow faded and these conservative intellectuals turned on their TVs to behold, with unspeakable horror, President Jethro Bodine.

Thus their reaction to Sarah Palin. While the Republican Party grassroots looked at Palin and saw an American Margaret Thatcher (except much sexier), the conservative intellectuals looked at her and saw . . . Vice President Ellie Mae Clampett.

Shootin' her some vittles! Takin' care of young 'uns. Let's go a-swimmin' in the ce-ment pond!

You see? The fear and loathing of Sarah Palin among (some) conservative intellectuals is a subconscious reaction to their belated recognition of Bush's weaknesses. The liberals who bashed Bush as being "in a bubble" and "out of touch" had a point. Since 1999, Bush really has been encased in a hermetic capsule of expert advisers. And this capsule was purposely constructed with the eager assent of the conservative intellectuals because, deep down, they never really believed he had it.

By "it," I mean what Ronald Reagan had, that finely-honed political sense, that keen instinct for the right word, the right stance -- the "vision thing," as Bush 41 once said.

Reagan had that, had it in his very marrow, in every molecule of his being. As much as the Noonans, Frums, Buckleys and David Brookses of the GOP wanted to believe that Dubya had that Reaganesque quality, he never did. He was . . . just another Bush.

Having watched firsthand Palin absolutely knock the crowd out inside the Minneapolis convention hall in August, she's certainly charismatic and has that magic X-factor that allows a speaker to connect simultaneously with both an arena full of thousands of people and the individual viewer watching in his den on a 32-inch TV. (And the echoes of her performance made McCain seem all the more stiff the next night.)

She certainly could have been a fine vice president if McCain hadn't "suspended his campaign", permanently, in retrospect, in late September. But does that make Palin the next Gipper? (Or an American Thatcher?) Unless you've got the legacy media firmly in your pocket--and no Republican, certainly no conservative, ever will--the final step between being one of 50 governors and being handed keys to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. is a very, very tall one. I'd like to see something along these lines in preparation if Palin wants the job. But definitely read the rest of Robert's post, here.

Back in 2005, I wrote up my thoughts on the dreadful mid-'70s Robert Redford/Mia Farrow version of F. Scott's Fitzgerald's epochal novel thusly:

I think Tom Wolfe (piqued at the unauthorized usurpation of his trademark white suit by Redford's Gatsby) once dismissed the movie as "Fitzgerald as interpreted by the Garment District", and while the film did put Ralph Lauren on the map, most of the duds the actors are wearing, with their fat ties and wide lapels, seem much more 1970s than 1920s.

But that's the least of Gatsby's problems. I can't quite figure out if Mia Farrow works or not, but Redford, who's far too cinematically pretty to play the self-made Gatsby, and who sort of sleepwalks through his role, seems wildly miscast. As does Bruce Dern, who can't escape his Roger Corman-era psycho biker roles (his Freeman Lowell in Silent Running was merely an interstellar variation on that persona).

But what really sinks Gatsby is a self-conscious pacing that makes Stanley Kubrick's stately Barry Lyndon seem like an MTV video in comparison. That's also the same problem that plagues 1976's The Last Tycoon, Elia Kazan's last movie, with a young Robert DeNiro in a thinly disguised portrayal as doomed Hollywood wunderkind Irving Thalberg.

So will there ever be a decent cinematic Fitzgerald? This article on the various cinematic portrayals of Gatsby says don't bet on it.

And as the made for TV version of Gatsby a few years ago demonstrated, attempting to film Fitzgerald these days presents an additional problem.

But much like Obama reliving ancient failed history with the New New Deal, that's not going to prevent Hollywood from trying again, Tom Shillue writes over at Big Hollywood.

John Hawkins has a bipartisan round-up of "The 40 Most Obnoxious Quotes For 2008"; meanwhile, Iowahawk, over at his swank UK gig, starts his 2009 Christmas vacation early, and looks back at the year to come.

Of course, as always, the reality will be far stranger than the predictions.

Jennifer Rubin writes that "now, with the election safely behind us and Sarah Palin tucked away back in Alaska, the truth can be told. Identity politics is not, in itself, objectionable -- it just depends on the identity":

Not okay: small town, funny accent, overt religiosity, non-tony education. Okay: Manhattan address, Ivy League, discreet attire, impeccable lineage. (In other words, just like Dowd's inner circle.)

And how do we know Caroline is "serious"? After all, she couldn't muster any particularly unique policy views in her jaw-dropping media debut and her "scholarship" is either a compilation of others' works, family tributes or both (as in a compilation of Jackie's favorite poetry). Now Dowd concedes that "It isn't what your name is. It's what you do with it." So what precisely has Caroline done?

Of course [Maureen] Dowd can't resist invoking "profiles in courage" because that's Caroline's true claim to fame: her father. We have no reason to believe, however, that Caroline would be courageous. Her life is devoid of acts of political boldness, personal sacrifice or original thinking.

But brilliant poetry editing, as Mark Steyn recently observed:

"Friends Say Kennedy Has Long Wanted Public Role," Anne Kornblut assured readers in an in-depth Washington Post tongue-bath. She hasn't "long wanted" it to the extent of, you know, running for dog catcher in Lackawanna and getting - what's the word? - "elected," but, if you have a spare Senate seat, she's graciously indicated that she'd be prepared to consider accepting it. As lady-in-waiting Anne Kornblut pointed out, Caroline is highly qualified, being "the author of several books." It's true! She's an experienced poetry editor. She edited "The Best-Loved Poems Of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis." Jackie Kennedy wrote poems? Of course! She wrote so many poems that some are better loved than others.

Let's see Harry Reid try that.

Related: "Does Maureen Dowd moonlight at MSNBC as Andrea Mitchell's writer?"

More: "Insert Chappaquiddick Joke Here"; internecine dynastic struggle observed there.

One of the (many) reasons why Hollywood has largely slept through this decade is the fecklessness of its writing. Technically, the craft of Hollywood has never been more sophisticated: watch The Dark Knight or the Matrix movies or any one of a dozen summer popcorn flicks for all-enveloping production design, cinematography and sound. But for reasons of political correctness, commercialism, or seemingly just out of spite, the committees that produce most films today can take a story that begins as a solid piece of fiction and make utter hash of it.

There's a new post at Big Hollywood by John Ridley ("When I write for the Huffington Post I'm often considered the resident Righty. When I write for NPR I'm the flaming Liberal."), who wrote the story that became George Clooney's 1998 film Three Kings. (The movie where Clooney blamed President George H.W. Bush for not finishing the job in Iraq. Clooney and the rest of Hollywood would of course spend the next decade blaming President George W. Bush for finishing the job in Iraq.)

But Ridley originally wrote his story with a black solider as the lead protagonist:

When I wrote the story for Three Kings, it wasn't meant to be particularly conservative or liberal. It was a black empowerment piece. The lead character of the story was a disillusioned black man who figures if the government is going to go to war over oil, then he is entitled to grab something for himself if he can. Gold. But when he sees that America is going to once again basically turn a blind eye to the plight of the oppressed, that's when he decides he has to step in and help his "dark skinned" brothers and sisters. The ascendancy of a man of color who sees wrong, and does right despite his circumstances.

What ended up on the screen from all that was Ice Cube in the sidekick role.

And right around the same time, Hollywood was doing the reverse to Andrew Klavan's True Crime novel, when it became a vehicle for Clint Eastwood:

The PC concerns, internalized in scriptwriters' heads even before any advocate complains, can produce bizarre incoherence. Novelist and screenwriter Andrew Klavan's True Crime is about an innocent white man on death row, railroaded because officials needed to prove that the death penalty isn't racially biased. "The only one who figures this out is this politically incorrect journalist who can see through the B.S.," Klavan relates. The gripping 1999 movie version, directed by and starring Clint Eastwood as journalist Steve Everett, transforms the innocent death-row inmate into a black man (played by Isaiah Washington). The movie works, even if it takes the anti-PC edge off Klavan's novel.

Of course, to really witness political correctness, poor casting, and screenwriting by committee ruin a killer novel, compare the ridiculous movie version of The Bonfire of the Vanities to Tom Wolfe's epochal book. Or spare yourself two hours of hell and just read Julie Salamon's The Devil's Candy instead--it's a much more entertaining look at how Hollywood's million dollar chefs can ruin even the most foolproof of recipes.

Reuters is apparently shocked that teens on MySpace are the same as teens elsewhere on the Web--not to mention in real life, or 3D, or meatspace, or whatever the cool kids are calling life away from the computer these days:

More than half of teenagers mention risky behaviors such as sex and drugs on their MySpace accounts, U.S. researchers said on Monday.

Say it with me now: I need a study to tell me this?

Eric Trager of Commentary is pretty cool with CNN's chief medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta being tapped as Obama's surgeon general, if only because it will chap Michael Moore's considerable hide.

After a bruising election, which continues to expose their worst elements, a party rank with corruption and racism seeks its way out of the whichy thickets: some thoughts on "How the Dems Can Get Back on Track" from Jennifer Rubin and "Obama and the Democratic brand" from Jonah Goldberg, who notes:

Well, the Democrats now dominate American politics in a way they haven't since the 1960s, if not the 1930s. Suddenly, a Democratic "culture of corruption" seems like a pretty easy story to write, thanks only in part to the most enjoyable -- and therefore un-ignorable -- scandal of the 21st century so far: Blagopalooza. Wiretaps, grotesque corruption, the race card, R-rated dialogue and hair you can see from space: What's not to love?

Heh, indeed.™

In The American Spectator, Ryan L. Cole writes that mister, we could use a man like Silent Cal again:

Today Coolidge lies buried in a tiny Vermont village just a short distance from the house where he was born and raised. A humble headstone marks his final resting place; the word "president" is nowhere to be found on the simple marker. On the occasion of Coolidge's death, H.L. Mencken said, "Should the day ever dawn, when Jefferson's warnings are heeded at last, and we reduce government to its simplest terms, it may very well happen that Calvin's bones now resting inconspicuously in the Vermont granite will come to be revered as those of a man who really did the nation some service." Given the results of our recent election, the arrival of that day seems unlikely.

As Cole writes, Coolidge "had no interest in saving or rescuing the American people -- he possessed, what is today, an uncommon faith they could take care of that themselves."

Cole writes that when shortly before Coolidge died on this date in 1933, he was quoted as saying, "I feel I no longer fit in with these times." Imagine how he would have felt witnessing 2008: "The Year Americans Rejected Self-Reliance."

Jimmy Carter can't catch a break--his post-presidential freelance foreign policy meddling has long been a disgrace, and his attempts at nailing down a better image at home are crumbling--literally--as well:

Residents of a model housing estate bankrolled by Hollywood celebrities and hand-built by Jimmy Carter, the former US president, are complaining that it is falling apart.

Fairway Oaks was built on northern Florida wasteland by 10,000 volunteers, including Carter, in a record 17-day "blitz" organised by the charity Habitat for Humanity.

Eight years later it is better known for cockroaches, mildew and mysterious skin rashes.

A forthcoming legal battle over Fairway Oaks threatens the reputation of a charity envied for the calibre of its celebrity supporters, who range from Johnny Depp and Brad Pitt to Colin Firth, Christian Bale and Helena Bonham Carter.

The case could challenge the bedrock philosophy behind Habitat for Humanity, claiming that using volunteers, rather than professional builders, is causing as many problems as it solves.

The road to cockroaches, mildew and mysterious skin rashes is paved with good intentions.

Noemie Emery charts the strange twists and turns of Clan Kennedy:

From Joe Sr. on down to his sons and their children, the Kennedys have been many things to most men. Morally, they have been profiles in courage and cowardice: They fled Luftwaffe bombs in Blitz-ridden London, and in wartime sought out the most dangerous missions; they have saved shipmates from drowning in dangerous waters, and left a woman to drown in a scandalous accident; they have given the last full measure of devotion in war and its aftermath; and in peace and in new generations, they have sometimes asked for much more than their due. In politics, they have been far right, far left, and dead center; they have been male chauvinists and quivering slaves to the feminist movement; they have been isolationists, interventionists, and democratic crusaders; they have been Churchillian and Chamberlainesque. Joe was an isolationist and a right-winger; Ted an isolationist and a left-winger; Jack and Bobby were centrists and interventionists, though in contrasting ways. The rational Jack was a centrist on just about everything, while the visceral Bobby was a melange of both left and right instincts; a friend in his time to Cesar Chavez and Senator Joseph McCarthy; a man who attacked Lyndon B. Johnson and his Great Society from the left, right, and center, and in his last years sounded like Ronald Reagan and a student protester on alternating days.

The ironic fact is that while Joe bought Jack his seat in the House in his first election (with help from Jack's maternal grandfather, a one-time mayor of Boston), the Kennedy brand was built on the talents of Jack and of Bobby, whose centrist convictions the latter-day Kennedys have gone to some pains to repudiate. Jack, it is known now, governed slightly to the right of Richard M. Nixon, while his heirs have been to the left of McGovern, who (along with his running-mate, a Kennedy in-law) lost 49 states to Nixon in 1972.

This has created between the legacy and those who claim to uphold it a disconnect, which voters sense and act on even if the legatees seem to deny its existence. At the start of the Cold War, John Kennedy urged rearmament, and ran to the right of his Republican rivals, while Ted Kennedy strenuously fought against all the arms systems with which the Cold War was finally won. Bobby Kennedy was famous for his loathing of Fidel Castro, a left-wing Latin American dictator who used his country as a base for America's enemies, while Bobby's sons suck up to Hugo Chávez, the Castro-lite left-wing Venezuelan dictator, who makes common cause with America's enemies, including Iran.

A number of Bobby's children, in particular, have seemed to go in for left-wing fringe causes, backed by the kind of boutique liberals Bobby once thought of as "sick." This is the reason the attempts of the younger Kennedys to tap into the emotional charge of the legacy have fallen with such a dull thud: the reason that despite lavish send-offs, no Kennedy of the third generation has achieved lift-off beyond local office; the reason that Ted Kennedy, adored in his state and by the base of his party, has always been a hard sell outside them, and was humiliated by the despised Jimmy Carter--and by his own party members--in the 1980 campaign.

The Kennedys, however, seem oblivious to these contradictions, a fact shown in Caroline's choice of her cousin Kerry to serve as spokesman and surrogate, even though Kerry's public service credentials are even weaker than Caroline's, and her main claim to public attention was as a tabloid heroine in a spectacular divorce in 2003 from Andrew Cuomo, Caroline's rival in dynasticism. Caroline meanwhile is trying to run on the legacy of her father and Bobby, while embracing a post-60s Teddy-type platform strikingly out of step with that of her father and late uncle.

Would Jack, who threatened pre-emptive war over missiles in Cuba, have really opposed a war with Iraq after Saddam defied U.N. resolutions? Would Bobby, who made his chops busting corrupt labor unions, have supported the end of the secret ballot in union elections? What would Jack and Bobby have said to the feminist social agenda, up to and including late-term abortion? And what would Bobby have said of gay marriage?

If Caroline wants to run as a legatee, she should explain which Kennedy legacy she supports, and why she supports it (including the tax cuts put in by her father.) She could start by reading her father's inaugural and seeing if there are any parts she believes in. Would she "bear any burden and pay any price" to ensure the survival of liberty? If she wouldn't, she should tell us why.

You can hear my interview with James Piereson, the author of Camelot and the Cultural Revolution, on JFK's 1960 election in the year-end edition of PJM Political by clicking here; and for a look at Caroline helping to launch the latest in a quadrennial search for a would-be successor to the throne, click here.

Tim Graham of Newsbusters looks at the letter that was missing from most media reports of political scandal.

Perhaps the legacy media simply didn't want to risk hurting their chance to be collectivized into a sort of uber-PBS network.

Meanwhile, Tom Blumer explores the other story which quietly dropped off the legacy media's vacuum tube radar: "A Toast to Old Media's--and Old Medea's--Defeat in Iraq."

Related: "Judicial Watch Announces List of Washington's 'Ten Most Wanted Corrupt Politicians' for 2008"

Ed Morrissey has a lengthy post on Rod Blagojevich's appointment of Roland Burris to fill Barack Obama's open Senate seat. As Ed writes, "Rod Blagojevich has apparently decided to take the Illinois Democratic Party down in flames along with himself", concluding:

If Democrats thought they had a big enough political problem two weeks ago to put that seat at risk, they face an absolute catastrophe now. Blagojevich has exposed their petty political machinations, catching them caring more about party and power than about their constituents and clean government. Burris won't stand a chance in re-election, and Illinois voters disgusted with Blagojevich will now become equally disgusted with the fools in Springfield who allowed Blagojevich to fill Obama's remaining two years with a party insider. The Democrats may lose more than just the Senate seat in 2010.

That's essentially up to new media--you can bet that its Old Media predecessors won't remind voters of corruption on the left come election time.

More: Mark Finkelstein asks, "Ain't this post-racial period great?"

Here we have one of the more famous members of the Black Congressional Caucus accusing Senate Democrats of threatening to act like Orville Faubus, George Wallace and perhaps the most iconic of segregationists, Bull Connor.

Bobby Rush, the former Black Panther who is now a congressman from Chicago, levelled his accusation on the CBS Early Show this morning in reaction to the letter signed by all 50 Senate Democrats declaring that they would not seat Roland Burris, the African-American that Gov. Rod Blagojevich yesterday named to take Barack Obama's Senate seat.

Maybe Rush is simply paraphrasing Nora Ephron.

Found via Maggie's Farm, more on New Jersey's woes, from long-time resident TigerHawk.

Is it better to give or to receive? Tim Blair spots Bank of America investing tens of billions of dollars in the summer "to make their operation sustainable [and] reduce greenhouse gas emissions"--before receiving $115 billion only a few months later from the ultimate source of gaseous emissions--Congress.

Related: Definition of insanity defined, here.

"When Barack Obama makes his New Year's resolutions, at the top of his list ought to be the following: 'I will not allow America to become New Jersey.'"

Last year, when New York's incoming governor David Paterson replaced disgraced fellow Democrat Elliot Spitzer, I quoted this passage from Nicole Gelinas of City Journal:

To lay out his goals, Paterson gave a speech last week similar to the one that Codey delivered nearly three years ago. "We need to take a realistic view of New York State's budget," he said, which is "too big and too bloated." He gently warned the legislature against its usual budget-balancing tricks: overestimating revenues, issuing long-term debt or hiking taxes to cover one-year shortfalls, and trying to use "gimmicks to solve real problems." He added that the legislature's modest cuts to Spitzer's budget proposal would be eaten up by April as tax revenues continue to fall. "We have got to address these issues," he said, "and not by taxing anybody."

Paterson could have recited facts and figures from census reports on how New York ranked dead last, in both raw numbers and percentages, in net domestic population losses between 2000 and 2004, with nearly 183,000 residents leaving the state annually. While immigration from other countries more than made up for these losses, New York still lost some ground in its percentage of the nation's population. And immigration could slow precipitously with the economy's woes, as a protracted credit slowdown will lessen the state's need for Parisian investment bankers as well as Salvadoran construction workers. The governor could also have cited numbers from the Tax Foundation showing that New York's state and local tax burden is a full one-fourth higher than the national average, and significantly higher than the burden in some of the states competing most fiercely with it for jobs and residents: Pennsylvania, Florida, Texas, and most of the states in the new South.

Instead, Paterson cited a number of personal friends, all former New Yorkers, who have contacted him from out of state since his ascent to the governorship. "A friend from primary school, Randy San Antonio, told me he moved to Dallas 20 years ago," Paterson began. "Another friend, Randy Watts, had moved to Reno. A friend from Syracuse, Marvin Lee Simons, said he's working in Lower Manhattan. I said we should get together . . . and he said, 'Well, I don't live in New York. I live in western Pennsylvania.' Jeff and Stacey Stackhouse wanted to start a business on Long Island. They moved two years ago--they're trying to start their business in Charlotte, North Carolina. They couldn't pay the taxes here."

Which helps to explain one particularly bloated and malicious area of the state's government:

Without question, the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance has the most advanced residency audit program in the nation. We would hazard to guess that the department, whether out of necessity -- because so many taxpayers in the New York region have, at least allegedly, questionable residency issues -- or sheer force of will, does more auditing of taxpayers on residency issues than does any other state, and perhaps more than all states combined.

I would hazard a guess that California, the other big blue parenthesis state, is pretty effective in this department as well.

(H/T: IP, who notes sadly, "Adrienne Barbeau not included" from this particular Escape.)

John Hinderaker of Power Line asks:

If you seriously believe that the Earth is threatened with destruction by global warming, then the current global economic slowdown is providential. Reduced economic activity equals less energy consumption equals less carbon emitted into the atmosphere. Environmentalists have been telling us we need to reduce our energy consumption, and live more modestly, for years. Now we're doing it. So where's the celebration of the world's sharp turn Greenward?

For that, we turn to the renowned economist, Jamie Lee Curtis...

Michelle Malkin has a "Tale of two presidential workout fanatics"; meanwhile, Ed Morrissey has a tale of two politically-connected religious leaders. In both cases, one story has been met by praise (home run!) the other with derision. What ties these pairs of stories together? "Liberal double standards: It's just how they roll", Michelle writes.

Several of the recent posts here have focused on the surprisingly brief life and quiet death of objectivity in the legacy mass media. Or as Victor Davis Hanson wrote in the last days of the 2008 presidential election, "Sometime in 2008, journalism as we knew it died, and advocacy media took its place."

The replacement is a curiously schizophrenic beast; blending punditry and journalism; turning every newspaper into the Washington Times without the conservative op-eds, every network news department into Fox News without the pro-American populism. Regarding the latter trend, last month Robert Stacy McCain wrote:

The rise of Fox News as the No. 1 cable news outlet has resulted in ideological counterprograming. [emphasis in original--Ed] The success of a conservative news network has had an effect that might be best understood by reference to Newton's third law of motion. At first, there was the "equal effect" -- chastened by Fox's success, most networks sought to rein in their traditional liberal bias. But then, after the 2004 election, the "opposite effect" kicked in. Network executives figured, "Hey, Fox already has a monopoly on conservative viewers. Let's let our freak flags fly and give liberals what they really want." I really noticed this phenomenon during the 2006 campaign, when the media (a) pretended that the contributions Jack Abramoff's clients made to Democrats were meaningless, and (b) presented Mark Foley as the GOP poster boy. The existence of Fox News provides a ready-made excuse for liberals in the media to think of their bias as "balancing" Fox.

But half of the time those on the inside either don't know what's changed, or if they do, won't admit it publicly. (Occasionally a voice in these institutions will come clean and then a successor will forget the earlier admission--or more painfully, his own.)

All of which helps to set the stage for this post by Glenn Reynolds: "Paul Mulshine Blows It."

Update: Don't miss the extended comment by Jay Rosen regarding Mulshine's column, on Fausta Wertz's blog. Jay writes (amongst other things):

We are quite well informed about why the newspaper business is collapsing. The immediate cause: readers are moving to the Net but for various reasons the advertising isn't. Newspapers are stuck with huge capital structures they cannot easily jettison and revenues are falling. No one who writes seriously about new media and citizen journalism is unaware of this. No one in new media, citizen journalism or regular journalism knows what to do about it.

That's not the only reason, though it's a big one; it's an extremely safe assumption that revenues bottoming out are what's driving some of the other reasons old media's hit an iceberg (see above, and Michael Malone's great election-end column at Pajamas HQ), and is a subject we explored in video form earlier this month.

Meanwhile, Jules Crittenden also spots the extreme blurring of the lines between punditry and reporting in old media.

Jonah Goldberg writes:

Steve Clemons' proposed solution to the Caroline problem is to have Obama send her to London as the Ambassador to the Court of St. James. That'd be fine with me, I guess. Though I don't think it's as exciting an idea as he does. I do think it's odd though that Clemons spends so much of his post rehearsing the usual anti-Bush throat clearing while completely ignoring a point that's actually relevant: The media would be obliged to revisit her grandfather's stint in the same job. And that might be embarrassing to the Kennedy clan.

Nonsense--all things embarrassing to clan Kennedy are conveniently airbrushed from history.

Joel Stein in the L.A. Times, January 24th, 2006:

I don't support our troops. This is a particularly difficult opinion to have, especially if you are the kind of person who likes to put bumper stickers on his car.

Joel Stein in the L.A. Times, December 26, 2008:

I don't love America. That's what conservatives are always telling liberals like me. Their love, they insist, is truer, deeper and more complete. Then liberals, like all people who are accused of not loving something, stammer, get defensive and try to have sex with America even though America will then accuse us of wanting it for its body and not its soul. When America gets like that, there's no winning.

But I've come to believe conservatives are right. They do love America more. Sure, we liberals claim that our love is deeper because we seek to improve the United States by pointing out its flaws. But calling your wife fat isn't love. True love is the blind belief that your child is the smartest, cutest, most charming person in the world, one you would gladly die for. I'm more in "like" with my country.

Back in July, when he proffered advice to fellow liberals afraid to satirize then-candidate Obama (as his deifying leftwing adulation was at its zenith), Stein wrote, "We are the immature jerks we have been waiting for."

Who am I to argue?

(Via Cassy Fiano.)

Glenn Reynolds links to James Surowiecki in the New Yorker, who asks, "Are Newspapers Doomed?"

"There's no mystery as to the source of all the trouble: advertising revenue has dried up. In the third quarter alone, it dropped eighteen per cent, or almost two billion dollars, from last year."

He also suggests something that I've noted in the past -- we may have been getting more news than we (that is, the market) actually wanted (that is, was willing to pay for) due to cross-subsidies from things like classified advertising. With those gone, we may wind up with less news. I hope not, but it's a plausible scenario.

Another reason why is that errors such as this are becoming increasingly easier for readers to spot.

To invert The Who, the Gray Lady will get fooled again, as Roger L. Simon writes:

No doubt most of you remember the Jayson Blair affair at the New York Times, when the paper jettisoned the reporter for publishing several plagiarized and, at least partially, fabricated stories on its front page. The ensuing brouhaha caused an editorial shake-up at the onetime "newspaper of record."

Well, what's the old saying about the "second time as farce"? [I think it's from Marx.-ed. So it is.] This time the paper has outdone itself by publishing a putative letter from the mayor of Paris, attacking the potential elevation of Caroline Kennedy to the US Senate:

The tipoff that it's a phony should be obvious, Allahpundit adds:

In the Times's defense, the letter does have a decidedly Frenchy tone ("Can we speak of American decline?"), but I ask you: Would the mayor of Paris, of all people, be likely to object to a big break for Jackie Kennedy's daughter?

Heh, indeed.™

Couldn't the Times have run the email past the ghost of Walter Duranty? That man knows a thing or two about phonying up foreign stories--and he's even got a blog, to boot. (Although, to be fair, it's about as quiet at the moment as the real Duranty is.)

Finally, Dan Riehl spots a giant iceberg looming off the port bow of the S.S. Sulzberger:

From 24/7 Wall St - based upon background and financials, ten major companies predicted to go away in 2009. Number 6 on the list? The New York Times. h/t An email from Pundita.

24/7 Wall St. looked at some of the largest and most well-known companies, reviewed their SEC filings if they are public, analyst reports, and media observations about their businesses and picked ten that probably won't be around at the end of next year.

6) The New York Times (NYT) has to repay $400 million in debt in the first half of 2009. It does not have the money. It plans to mortgage its headquarters, but it is uncertain what that will bring in an uncertain real estate market. The firm's Boston Globe and regional newspaper operations lose money, so they will be hard to sell. NYT is controlled by the Sulzberger family which has super-majority voting shares. That won't matter much when the company runs out of money. Another big media operation, perhaps News Corp (NWS) which owns The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post, will come in and auction off what it can and keep the flagship New York Times newspaper and NYTimes.com website.

If so, that will be one helluva an exit lap for this ever-accelerating race to the bottom:

Heh.™

"For people who think there's no cultural divide in this country, consider the treatment of two women much in the news in 2008."

Found via Mark Hemingway, the New York Times notes that W. Mark Felt, the FBI agent who was revealed in 2005 to be Woodward and Bernstein's "Deep Throat" and played by Hal Holbrook in the film version of All The President's Men is dead at age 95.

Back in 2005 with a movie then in theaters about a powerful Machiavellian ruler corrupted by power that featured performances even more wooden than Robert Redford in mind, Mark Steyn wrote "Revenge of the Felt":

''Revenge of the Sith'' is a marvel of motivational integrity compared to ''Revenge of the Felt,'' the concluding chapter in that other '70s saga, Watergate. Before the final denouement last week, there were a gazillion guesses at the identity of ''Deep Throat,'' but all subscribed to the basic contours of the Woodward and Bernstein myth: that he was someone deep in the bowels of the administration who could no longer in good conscience stand by as a corrupt president did deep damage to the nation. So Darth Throat, a fully paid-up Dark Lord of the Milhous, saved the Republic from the imperial paranoia of Chancellor Nixotine by transforming himself into Anakin Slytalker and telling what he knew to the Bradli knights of the Washington Post.

Now we learn that Deep Throat was not, in fact, Alexander Haig, David Gergen, Pat Buchanan or Len Garment, but a disaffected sidekick of J. Edgar Hoover, an old-school G-man embittered at being passed over for the director's job when the big guy keeled over after half-a-century in harness.

Hmm. Like the ''Star Wars'' wrap-up, ''How Mark Felt Became Deep Throat'' feels small and mean after three decades of the awesome dramatic burden placed upon it. The nobility of the Watergate myth -- in which media boomers and generations of journalism school ethics bores have sunk so much -- seems cheapened and tarnished by this last plot twist.

The best thing I read on the subject in the last few days was a 1992 piece by James Mann from the Atlantic Monthly. He doesn't identify Deep Throat, though he mentions Mark Felt in an important context. But get a load of this remarkably shrewd paragraph from 13 years ago:

''By coincidence, the Watergate break-in occurred on June 17, less than seven weeks after Hoover's death and [FBI outsider] Gray's appointment [as acting director]. The FBI took charge of the federal investigation at the same time that the administration was trying to limit its scope.

''Therein lies the origin of Deep Throat.''

Bingo! Mann also adds: ''Rarely is it asked whether White House aides like Haig, Ziegler, and Garment were the sort of people willing to hold 2 a.m. meetings in a parking garage, or whether they were able to arrange the circling of the page number 20 of Bob Woodward's copy of the New York Times, which was delivered to his apartment by 7 a.m. -- the signal that Deep Throat wanted a meeting.''

With the benefit of hindsight, Mann's observation seems obvious. That's what the spy novelists call ''tradecraft.'' It's the sort of thing spooks and feds do, not White House aides. Why then was it not so obvious for the last three decades?

The answer is that, thanks to All The President's Men, the media took it for granted they were America's plucky heroic crusaders, and there's no point being plucky heroic crusaders unless you've got the dark sinister forces of an all-powerful government to pluckily crusade against. Think how many conspiracy movies there've been where White House aides are the sort of chaps who think nothing of meeting you at 2 a.m. in parking garages, usually as a prelude to having you whacked. In films like Clint Eastwood's ''Absolute Power'' or Kevin Costner's ''No Way Out,'' political appointees carry on like that routinely. That image of government derives principally from the Nixon era.

During that same period, Jay Rosen wrote of "Deep Throat, J-School and Newsroom Religion":

Watergate is the great redemptive story believers learn to tell about the press and what it can do for the American people. Whether the story can continue to claim enough believers--and connect the humble to the heroic in journalism--is a big question. Whether it should is another question.

Felt and many of the other supporting players of Watergate are slowly heading towards the exits. And with the lights about to go out on the legacy media, journalists finally have found a new religion to rally around--but will it be powerful enough to save the old order?

Update: Welcome readers of The Hill's Blog Briefing Room.

Elsewhere on the Web, Ed Morrissey's thoughts on Mark Felt are also worth reading.

As you've undoubtedly read by now, Heritage Foundation co-founder Paul Weyrich has passed away at age 66. At Pajamas HQ, Jennifer Rubin asks, "Who Will Be the Next Paul Weyrich?"

Meanwhile, Robert Stacy McCain has some thoughts on Weyrich and the state of American culture as a whole. Be sure to follow his links as well.

At Commentary, Peter Wehner writes:

As the Rod Blagojevich scandal continues to unfold, it's worth recalling that Democrats in 2006 -led by Representative Rahm Emanuel- ran on the theme that they would end "the culture of corruption." Indeed, Emanuel, in dismissing wrongdoings by Democrats at the time, explained them away as simply the actions of a few individuals. About Republicans, Emanuel said, "They have institutional corruption." The argument put forth was that Democrats would bring ethics and high standards to public office and that the Democratic Party would embody integrity and police its ranks.

It hasn't quite worked out that way.

"As the sportscaster Warner Wolf used to say, let's go to the videotape..."

Meanwhile, while the Ohio Democrat who rummaged through "Joe the Plumber's" records has resigned, Rod Blagojevish isn't going quietly.

Update: Related thoughts from Brent Bozell.

Even as newspapers are shedding staff and hemorrhaging money, Roger L. Simon spots "The Great Byline Strike Of '08" amongst journalists at the Associated Press:

I read with amusement that reporters and photographers for the Associated Press are staging (via the Newspaper Guild) a 'byline strike.' Say what? To stage a such a strike people have to have heard of you, but practically no one is more anonymous than a writer for a news service. It almost comes with the job description. You are the "Associated Press," not yourself. The AP is not exactly where you find the next Norman Mailer. News service reporters are not even as well known as bloggers. I mean whose names are more famous to the general public at his point -- Glenn Reynolds, Michelle Malkin and (yikes) Markos Moulitsas or [insert any Associated Press writer here]?

Not that I don't have some sympathy for my AP colleagues. These are trying times for all in the media. But they made a choice by joining a news service and that choice was for a form of literary facelessness. Also, they opted for a form of homogenization, since the AP and other news services are by mission supposed to be uniform in style and content.

And therein lies the rub. Of recent years the uniformity of the Associated Press in publishing a kind of bland, accepted liberalism of the most uninspired (and sometimes distorted) sort may be the root of their business woes - not the presence (or not) of bylines or even the current economic situation, although the latter certainly plays a part. I would suggest to the writers and owners of the AP that they consider opening up their company to people of different biases and opinions. They are supposed to be a news service, after all, not a ideological distribution center. People on the more extreme right love to compare them to Tass. That's not fair. The AP is nowhere near as bad as that. But they are pretty bad. And they are failing economically. And when you're failing economically, you're supposed to do something. [Maybe they're waiting for a TARP bailout.--ed. I'd rather drive a Buick.]

As that sage philosopher of Springfield, H. J. Simpson once told his daughter, "Lisa, if you don't like your job you don't strike. You just go in every day, and do it really half-assed. That's the American way."

And from that perspective, the staff at AP have been doing an exceptional job of alerting readers of poor working conditions there for years.

The Business & Media Institute rounds them up; a Tech Central Station column by Arnold Kling from 2006 explains their origins.

In a related vein, Ronnie Schreiber explores "Myths of Organized Labor", memes which also derive from a similar ancestry.

Dissent: It's the highest form of patriotism. But patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

As others have pointed out, two of the most popular cliches among the left form quite a paradox. The Hill reports that Jennifer Granholm, Michigan's Democratic governor called the Senate "un-American" for voting against the auto bailout. (AKA further socialization of the automobile industry.)

Back in late September, during that week's Federal bailout, Rich Lowry wrote:

Pelosi unloads on House Republicans. Why is it always OK for Democrats to call Republicans "unpatriotic"?

Ramesh Ponnuru had the perfect reply: "Because it has no sting."

The media are fixating on Rod Blagojevich's helmet hair as a sign that he's "nuts", as Vanity Fair dubbed the Illinois Democrat. It allows for plenty of cheap jokes--and we're as guilty of that as anybody. But as P.J. Gladnick writes, it also allows journalists to ignore the bigger question they'd much rather avoid:

Will other media outlets also promote the idea of Blagovich as insane due to perfectly groomed hair? Hmm... John Edwards also had an obsession over his hair so there just might be something to it. Of course, insanity as evidenced by great hair is a much more palatable excuse for Democrats and their media allies than the fact that Blagojevich was a typical member of the corrupt Chicago political machine.

And for background on that machine, Reason.TV looks at "Crook County":

Nick Gillespie debunks Che chic in awesome new video from Reason.TV:

I was glad to see this moment from 2005 mentioned--and described as "Wearing a swastika in a synagogue."

Update: If you gnashed your teeth at Nick Gillespie's video look at Hollywood's obsession with terrorist chic, you're really going to hate "'Che' It Ain't So", Kyle Smith's review of Steven Soderbergh's endless encomium to everyone's favorite murderous thug and T-shirt icon. For the rest of us, don't miss it.

The Wall Street Journal notes, "In Chicago, Political Celebration Gives Way to Political Shame:"

The pride that's been surging through this city since Barack Obama's presidential victory last month is showing signs of deflating now that political corruption has returned to center stage in Illinois.

To many residents, the arrest of Gov. Rod Blagojevich for, among other things, allegedly trying to sell the president-elect's vacated senate seat marked an end to the political glow the city has been basking in.

"It was as if Chicago politics had turned a corner and this was a new day," said Sean Kennedy, former president of a student Democrat organization at Loyola University here. "All of a sudden, we get pulled back into reality, and realize nothing in Chicago has changed that much."

Gosh, there's a shocker. Meanwhile, despite being a target-rich environment there's "Not Much Humor in the Blagosphere", according to Yeah Right:

I haven't done an exhaustive search, but I'm pretty disappointed in the lack of funny material online on the Rod Blagojevich scandal. I mean, brazen corruption + lotsa obscenity + awesome name. In my book, that ought to = comedy gold. Perhaps its just that the reality is funny enough that it is stunting the creativity of our nation's funnymen who seem to be struggling IMHO.

One of their links goes to Blagojevich's Gary Hart moment from earlier this week:




Finally, though reasonable people may disagree, looking at Blagojevich's freeze-dried hair, I'd say now we know who Christopher Reeve donated his toupees to.

Just to follow up on our link earlier today to Virginia Postrel's post on "Depression Porn", Culture11 explores "Recession Chic" in the fashion magazine industry--"Who knew an economic collapse could be so fabulous?"

Meanwhile over at Ace of Spades, "U.S. Economy In Recession; Women, Minorities, and [B.S.] Artists Hardest Hit."

"Engraved in beautiful Helvetica!" Really, doesn't everyone on your list deserve one of these?





(H/T: John McCormack)

Over at Commentary's Contentions blog, Jennifer Rubin asks if Gov. Blagojevich is "Crazy or Corrupt?"

Like others, I wondered after reading the criminal complaint whether Gov. Blagojevich isn't just plain crazy. He thinks he's going to spruce up his image and run for President in 2016. He thinks he's going to get the Chicago Tribune to fire a columnist who suggested he deserved impeachment. He thinks he's going to get the President-elect to give him a huge job "in exchange" for a Senate seat. This is wacky stuff -- as if he was caught in a 1950's time warp, or a bad "B" movie. No one, even in Chicago, goes quite this far.

And were the people around him -- his chief of staff and Advisors A and B, not to mention Andy Stern -- similarly addled or were they playing along and humoring a lunatic? It seems peculiar that no one apparently said, "Oh, c'mon Governor. Barack Obama isn't giving you anything." Perhaps there was such a voice of sanity, and we'll hear it at trial.

Although I'm appalled, I'm more intrigued by the mendacity, bordering on insanity. How does some one function in a high office with such a loose grip on reality? And yes, Barack Obama did have some relationship with him, so it would be interesting to know if he ever perceived the governor of his state as a bit delusional. He did support him for governor twice, but perhaps he was duped too and didn't pick up on Blago's personal and mental failings.

The story will come out soon enough. But the most fascinating part is yet to be told -- how someone this unhinged gets to be governor and gets re-elected without anyone blowing the whistle.

Meanwhile, even though I'm pretty sure he'd wouldn't disagree with the second half of Jennifer's equation, Scott Johnson focuses on the first part, here: "Is Blago Nuts?"

PBS's Sesame Street music used to break terrorist wills in Gitmo!

Isn't interdepartmental cooperation nice to see? Sure, government is ever-expanding, but it's great when two very different, and often highly competitive agencies are working together to keep us safe.

And tunes from other PBS shows are being used as well:

Bob Singleton, whose song "I Love You" is beloved by legions of preschool Barney fans, wrote in a newspaper opinion column that any music can become unbearable if played loudly for long stretches.

"It's absolutely ludicrous," he wrote in the Los Angeles Times. "A song that was designed to make little children feel safe and loved was somehow going to threaten the mental state of adults and drive them to the emotional breaking point?"

He said with a deep and abiding understanding of the irony of the situation, knowing full well that he's driven millions of parents to the emotional breaking point having to listen to his music over and over and over and over again.

(H/T: CG)

With a little help from his friendly local Pepsi-Cola bottler ad men, James Lileks charts the decline and fall of western civilization, from Don Draper grown-up swankiness in 1958 to earnest granola-munching, acoustic guitar-strumming pseudo-hippies in 1970.

Sure, blaming the fall of postwar American culture on one soft drink's ad campaign is asking a lot--but we are talking about a company that named an entire generation after its products, after all.

Before concluding with the perfect epitaph for the 42nd president, Don Surber writes that for Dee Dee Myers, Bill Clinton's first press secretary, "Groping a cardboard cutout is worse than cheating on your wife for 30+ years."

While Rod Blagojevich's pay to play scandal involving Obama's soon-to-be-vacant Senate seat in Illinois has just broken, Ross Douthat does a nifty demolition job on the Washington Post's Ruth Marcus' case for Caroline Kennedy to replace Hillary's New York Senate Seat:

I don't know about Jesse Ventura, but I find Schwarzenegger and Sonny Bono's pre-political careers as self-made showbiz entrepreneurs - to say nothing of Jon Corzine's career in finance - much more impressive than anything Caroline Kennedy has ever done. Her life has been dedicated to worthy pursuits, by and large, but most of her accomplishments (fundraising for New York public schools, editing essay collections in honor of her father, etc.) are classic "born on third base" endeavors - laudable enough without being terribly impressive. And all of the names on Marcus's list actually submitted themselves to the democratic process on their way to the Senate, the House, and the California's Governor's Mansion; for an appointment to fill a vacant seat (especially a safe vacant seat), the bar ought to be set a bit higher than "she's more qualified than Sonny Bono."

But Caroline's case is easily made with the just four simple words: She's not Fran Dresher.

As that hoary old newspaper cliche goes, the goal of journalism is "comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable", a statement that makes a hash of any mid-20th century claims to "objectivity." But in the past, most journalists, print or video, paid lip service to the idea of being a champion of the little guy, the working man, Joe Six Pack, or whatever that particular week's fabulously outdated and only mildly paternalistic reference to Middle America was.

But that was a long time ago. On Sunday, Tom Brokaw suggested that President Elect Obama tank the economy even more, by sticking it to commuters' wallets:

Let's talk for a moment about consumer responsibility when it comes to the auto industries. As soon as gas prices dropped, consumers moved back to the larger cars once again. The SUVs are the big gas consumers. Why not take this opportunity to put a tax on gasoline, bump it back up to $4 a gallon where people were prepared to pay for that, and use that revenue for alternative energy and as a signal to the consumers: "Those days are gone. We're not going to have gasoline that you could just fill up your tank for 20 bucks anymore."

And of course, the Washington Post is also pretty cool with that idea.

Meanwhile, rather than letting the marketplace decide who sells books and who doesn't, New York Times columnist Timothy Egan doesn't want anyone infringing on his turf:

The unlicensed pipe fitter known as Joe the Plumber is out with a book this month, just as the last seconds on his 15 minutes are slipping away. I have a question for Joe: Do you want me to fix your leaky toilet?

I didn't think so. And I don't want you writing books.

Gosh, there's a shocker; Tim Blair makes quick work of Egan's arrogance--but it's merely the latest reminder that newspapers in general really don't want any competition for their territory.

Of course, they're not alone in that department.

Update: Not surprisingly, Iowahawk has a few japes at Egan's expense: "Silly Plumber, Lit Is For Crits!"

Tom McMahon diagrams Illinois governors then and now.

Wow, I really wish I had seen this 2007 clip from McClatchy CEO Gary Pruitt, before I shot my "Red Queen's Race" video over the weekend.

As P.J. Gladnick of Newsbusters notes, Pruitt does a terrific Baghdad Bob impersonation--but only before invoking his heartfelt commitment to "philosophers and rock 'n' roll songs. Sometimes it's one and the same as with Lenny Kravitz's song from a few years ago, 'Dig In.'"

"Frontrunner for best star memoir cover art EVER."

(Via Terry Teachout, who notes--and he's right--"the title's not too shabby either.")

Jennifer Rubin compares Al Franken to Humphrey Bogart---um, sort of.

Victor Davis Hanson notes that the lights are going out in the state of California--and he paints a remarkably grim forecast going forward.

But how did the Golden State lose its luster? That's the subject of this recent article in The American.

Update: At the Corner, Victor dubs the state "the left-wing version of Lehman Brothers"--even though Lehman had far more effective salesmen than some of California's leading industries.

Last year, Bill Kristol described one of the knocks against what Tom Brokaw dubbed "The Greatest Generation"--they begat the morally soft Baby Boomer generation, who took for granted the comforts their parents fought so hard for:

There really was greatness in the "greatest generation." It fought and won World War II, then came home to achieve widespread prosperity and overcome segregation while seeing the Cold War through to a successful conclusion. But the greatest generation had one flaw, its greatest flaw, you might say: It begat the baby boomers.

The most prominent of the boomers spent their youth scorning those of their compatriots who fought communism, while moralizing and posturing at no cost to themselves. They went on to enjoy the benefits of their parents' labors, sacrificed little, and produced nothing particularly notable. But the boomers were unparalleled when it came to self-glorification, a talent they began developing as teenagers and have continued to improve up to this day.

But to be fair, the vast majority of the men who came back from WWII were (like my father) decent, morally upright guys who returned from their service with the love of their country strengthened. And it's tough to truly fault them for wanting to give their kids a softer life than they had witnessed in the 1930s and '40s.

On the hand, when your dad says something like this...

In a future war involving U.S. soldiers what would a TV reporter do if he learned the enemy troops with which he was traveling were about to launch a surprise attack on an American unit? That's just the question Harvard University professor Charles Ogletree Jr, as moderator of PBS' Ethics in America series, posed to ABC anchor Peter Jennings and 60 Minutes correspondent Mike Wallace. Both agreed getting ambush footage for the evening news would come before warning the U.S. troops.

For the March 7 installment on battlefield ethics Ogletree set up a theoretical war between the North Kosanese and the U.S.-supported South Kosanese. At first Jennings responded: "If I was with a North Kosanese unit that came upon Americans, I think I personally would do what I could to warn the Americans."

Wallace countered that other reporters, including himself, "would regard it simply as another story that they are there to cover." Jennings' position bewildered Wallace: "I'm a little bit of a loss to understand why, because you are an American, you would not have covered that story."

"Don't you have a higher duty as an American citizen to do all you can to save the lives of soldiers rather than this journalistic ethic of reporting fact?" Ogletree asked. Without hesitating Wallace responded: "No, you don't have higher duty... you're a reporter." This convinces Jennings, who concedes, "I think he's right too, I chickened out."

Ogletree turns to Brent Scrowcroft, now the National Security Adviser, who argues "you're Americans first, and you're journalists second." Wallace is mystified by the concept, wondering "what in the world is wrong with photographing this attack by North Kosanese on American soldiers?" Retired General William Westmoreland then points out that "it would be repugnant to the American listening public to see on film an ambush of an American platoon by our national enemy."

A few minutes later Ogletree notes the "venomous reaction" from George Connell, a Marine Corps Colonel. "I feel utter contempt. Two days later they're both walking off my hilltop, they're two hundred yards away and they get ambushed. And they're lying there wounded. And they're going to expect I'm going to send Marines up there to get them. They're just journalists, they're not Americans."

Wallace and Jennings agree, "it's a fair reaction."

...Perhaps it explains why Mike Wallace's son has a far more reasoned sense of ethics than his dad.

(More here.)

Update: I've mentioned the Wallace/Jennings moment from 1989 a few times here, simply because (a) I remember watching it when it first aired and (b) it encapsulates perfectly the mindset of Old Media, who see themselves as transnationalists very much aloof from their own country--or any country. I'm glad to see that someone has uploaded the exchange to YouTube, which you can watch, here.

One of Ace's co-bloggers writes that "The NHL Is No Longer Ace of Spades Lifestyle Compliant", because Dallas Stars player Sean Avery was suspended for--gasp!--using the phrase "sloppy seconds" to describe his former girlfriends?

(And you thought that the NFL was the No Fun League!)

But given that the NHL is the national sport of Canada, and that Canada is a nation where the "Human Rights" Commission will take up the case of an aging stripper suing her boss for being fired, is it all that surprising that the NHL would want to stick the boot that's on the cover of The Tyranny of Nice deeply into Avery's backside?

With a vocal assist from Vera Lynn, Obama and Hillary Meet Again:

In Mel Brook's History of the World Part I, there's a scene in which Mel, playing the King of France, has this memorable exchange:

Count de Monet: It is said that the people are revolting.
King Louis XVI: You said it! They stink on ice!

France lost its Ancien Regime in 1789, but Harry Reid (D-NV) sounds like he's been drinking in a little too much from the House of Bourbon for his own good:

Reid
by burghnews

As AllahPundit writes, "Comedy gold from the unerring political instinct that brought us a Congressional approval rating lower than Bush's. Behold, the ultimate Kinsleyan gaffe:"

"My staff tells me not to say this, but I'm going to say it anyway," said Reid in his remarks. "In the summer because of the heat and high humidity, you could literally smell the tourists coming into the Capitol. It may be descriptive but it's true."

But it's no longer going to be true, noted Reid, thanks to the air conditioned, indoor space.

Allah asks, "What did the Senate chamber smell like before A/C?" I have no idea, but it is a reminder that Big Government needs Big Air Conditioning to prosper, as Jonah Goldberg wrote a few years ago:

In the 18th and 19th centuries a congressman wouldn't be caught dead in Washington during July. Well, actually, they might be caught dead, because they wore all those clothes and were so fat that they might have died while trying to get out. The British Embassy, for example, moved the entire kit and caboodle to Maine every summer.

The idea is: Ban air conditioning in Washington and you would cut the "productivity" of the government by more than a third (say from late May to late September) and return the United States to the limited government the Founders intended. D.C. is still full of members of this school of thought.

For such a powerful guy, Harry's an awfully delicate soul. Before he was getting the vapors from having to smell the peasants, he was having other health issues:



Come 2010 when he's up for reelection, the voters of Nevada might want to consider replacing Reid with another senator--if only to give Harry's delicate sinuses a chance to heal up.

Update: Welcome Corner readers!

The celebratory party surrounding the annual anemically rated Oscar awards must go on, even in these trying economic times:

Vanity Fair will hold its annual Oscar Night party at the Sunset Tower Hotel on February 22, 2009, it was announced today by editor Graydon Carter.

"The party will be a much more intimate affair than in years past; we're going to scale back the guest list considerably," Carter says. "We'll celebrate Hollywood's big night the way we did when we first threw the party 15 years ago--it will be a cozier, more understated event. And one with familiar decor--given the current economy, and our dedication to the green movement, we will be recycling many of the elements of years past.

Wardrobe recycling certainly appears to be in vogue with these two ultra-glamorous Hollywood superstars; meanwhile, a veteran television actress is forced to wear what appears to be a Hefty recycling bin liner at her recent photo-op.

Update: I shouldn't be too hard on Judith Light--she attended the same prep school I did, though a few years before me--and the Swedish Chef.

Iowahawk, November 24th: "Obama Names Bill Clinton to Presidential Post":

Ending weeks of speculation and rumors, President-Elect Barack Obama today named Bill Clinton to join his incoming administration as President of the United States, where he will head the federal government's executive branch.

"I am pleased that Bill Clinton has agreed to come out of retirement to head up this crucial post in my administration," said Obama. "He brings a lifetime of previous executive experience as Governor of Arkansas and President of the United States, and has worked closely with most of the members of my Cabinet."

Clinton said he was "excited and honored" by the appointment, and would work "day and night" to defeat all the key policy objectives proposed by Mr. Obama during the campaign.

"I am gratified that the President-Elect has entrusted me with this important responsibility," said Clinton. "I'm looking forward to getting back behind, and under, the Oval Office desk again. As I have told the President-Elect, I pledge to do whatever I can to serve his historic administration by making sure that none of that bulls*** he talked about during the campaign will ever see the light of day. Americans can rest assured that he will be safely confined to the East Wing, as far away as possible from any potentially dangerous office equipment or nuclear buttons."

The long anticipated naming of Clinton to head Obama's Oval Office team comes after a week that saw Obama appoint dozens of Clinton associates to his transition team including John Podesta, Rahm Emanuel, Eric Holder, Larry Summers, and Hillary Rodham Clinton. Hundreds of other Clinton Administration holdovers are rumored to be in line for remaining appointments, including Bill Richardson, Janet Reno, Webb Hubbell, Chelsea Clinton, zombie Vince Foster, and zombie Socks the cat.

"Let's face it, it's obvious I'm in way over my head here," explained Obama. "Anyone paying attention knows I am a disaster waiting to happen, and who can blame them? I mean, just look at the stock market. That's why I think it's in the best interest of the country that I hand over the reins to people who, whatever their ethical shortcomings, at least have a faint clue about what they're doing. Come on, man. I've got a 401-k, too."

While the naming of Clinton appears to have momentarily calmed jittery financial markets, it sparked ripples of disapproval at liberal websites like Huffington Post and DailyKos. The progressive blogosphere was an early key source of support for Mr. Obama's candidacy, but a steady stream of Clinton-era appointees since the election has left some charging that he had betrayed his campaign promises to bring them to Washington as part of a sweeping culture of change -- a charge that Mr. Obama vehemently accepted.

The Washington Post today: "Send Bill Clinton to the Senate":

Amid the blizzard of resumes blanketing Washington as the Obama era dawns, there is a superbly qualified candidate for full employment whose name has been overlooked. We refer, of course, to William Jefferson Clinton, America's 42nd chief executive and commander in chief. Yet now, by a wonderful combination of circumstances, comes an opportunity to harness his unquestioned political talents to benefit his country, the Democratic Party, New York state and his spouse. If, as is expected, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton becomes secretary of state, New York Gov. David Paterson could send her husband to the U.S. Senate.

Doing so would spare the governor the agonizing dilemma of choosing from the 20 or so Democrats already named as contenders for the junior senator's seat. Those mentioned include six sitting members of the House of Representatives (three of each sex), Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, Caroline Kennedy and her cousin Robert Kennedy Jr., Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown (an African American), and Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion Jr. (who is Hispanic). In this no-win competition, Paterson has to balance claims of gender, race, ethnicity and geography. He could wind up gaining one grateful ally while alienating not only all the losers but also millions of members of the disparate constituencies that each represents.

Hence the appeal of Bill Clinton. Who in his party could question so historic and dazzling a choice? In a stroke, the appointment would provide Sen. Clinton's indefatigable husband with a fitting day job, serve the interests of a state beset by a meltdown in its most vital economic sector and offer a refreshing reverse twist on a tradition whereby deceased male senators, representatives or governors are succeeded by their widows.

Shortly before the election, Jack Murtha (D-PA) said, "A carpetbagger from Virginia is going to represent a heavily Democratic district? No way. No Goddamn way."

Sadly, the voters agreed with him; so I guess amongst the left, it's Virginia carpetbaggers in Pennsylvania No!, Arkansas carpetbaggers in NY, Si!

In the latest edition of Silicon Graffiti, I take a look at anger in American politics. The title derives from the nifty book on the topic by Peter Wood, whom I interviewed near the end of the 2008 election for PJM Political.

Look for:

• The exterminating Olbermann!
  
• Terry Tate, sacking Sarah!
  
• Dehumanizing bumper stickers!
  
• Code Pink has a plan to stick it to the man!
  
• Open Mic Night!
  
• Shocking signs!
  
• The don't taze me bro!
  
• Five Easy Pieces!
  
• America's favorite ex-Weatherman!
  
• And the world's favorite Teutonic terror tyke!
  

The Five Easy Pieces clip, which Wood deconstructs in the above video is a tremendous touchstone of early 1970s anger. I had planned to connect it to this passage from David Frum's 2000 book on the 1970s, How We Got Here, but it would have taken the video above the YouTube-friendly ten minute cut-off mark. Of course, there are so many examples of anger run amok from the 2008 campaign, that this video could have run infinitely longer than that. (There's a reason why Michelle Malkin's 2005 book on the topic ran for 256 pages.)

For previous Silicon Graffiti videos, click here.

The Dallas Morning News notes that, as with any historical event fading into the rearview mirror of history, eyewitnesses are becoming scarce. But beyond the immediate events in Dallas, once again, I'll recommend James Piereson's Camelot and the Cultural Revolution as a tremendous look at how Kennedy's death transformed American culture. You can read my review of the book at TCS Daily, and watch Peter Robinson's half-hour interview with Piereson here.

Victor Davis Hanson writes that California "is now a valuable touchstone to the country, a warning of what not to do":

Rarely has a single generation inherited so much natural wealth and bounty from the investment and hard work of those more noble now resting in our cemeteries--and squandered that gift within a generation. Compare the vast gulf from old Governor Pat Brown to Gray Davis or Arnold Schwarzenegger. We did not invest in many dams, canals, rails, and airports (though we use them all to excess); we sued each other rather than planned; wrote impact statements rather than left behind infrastructure; we redistributed, indulged, blamed, and so managed all at once to create a state with about the highest income and sales taxes and the worst schools, roads, hospitals, and airports. A walk through downtown San Francisco, a stroll up the Fresno downtown mall, a drive along highway 101 (yes, in many places it is still a four-lane, pot-holed highway), an afternoon at LAX, a glance at the catalogue of Cal State Monterey, a visit to the park in Parlier--all that would make our forefathers weep. We can't build a new nuclear plant; can't drill a new offshore oil well; can't build an all-weather road across the Sierra; can't build a few tracts of new affordable houses in the Bay Area; can't build a dam for a water-short state; and can't create even a mediocre passenger rail system. Everything else--well, we do that well.

California's unemployment has just risen to 8.2 percent, the third highest in the nation.

Meanwhile, Patterico asks, "Is Arnold Risking a Recall?"

Update: Silicon Valley journalist Michael Malone explores the positive benefits of corporate euthanasia as a way of jumpstarting the moribund economy.

Patterico's Pontifications applies Seinfeldian theory to the incoming Obama administration: "Revisiting George Costanza's 'Worlds Collide' Theory -- What Will Happen When The Obama Administration Doesn't Function Like the Obama Campaign?"

A Barack divided against itself cannot stand!

Jim Geraghty asks, "Just What Has Obama Gotten Hillary Into?":

Every Secretary of State enters office as "a breath of fresh air" and with great vigor and enthusiasm, and year by year, we see that energy and enthusiasm beaten back by geopolitical realities and a massive bureaucracy. Maybe Hillary will break the trend.

Good luck, Hillary...

This time, it's sure to work!

According to the New York Times, (needless to say, take the news with a Pinch of salt), Hillary has accepted the Secretary of State position.

In a way, it's the least she can do. Because let's face it: when you've got a lifetime of experience, and all the boss has a speech that he gave in 2002, he'll need all the help you can deliver!

(Suha Arafat could not be reached for comment.)

John Agresto writes, "In trying to resurrect conservatism and the Republican party, I fear there's a whole segment of our country we can never reach. These people, whether rich or poor, are not our natural constituents. These are the people to whom things are owed:"

We saw it after the Katrina debacle, at the other end of the socioeconomic scale: "Why are you so slow to help us? Where is our money and food? Why haven't you been here, government, rebuilding my house? I know my rights, and my rights include welfare, subsidies, support, and attention. We're not to be treated like those victims of tornadoes in the Midwest who pull themselves together, help their friends, patrol their communities, and rebuild their neighborhoods. No, life is supposed to be easy, big and easy; why aren't you here right now with the support I deserve?" And we hear it from the fat financial community who want the bailout check left at their door while they go on rich retreats to celebrate their good fortune.

This, by the way, is why Sarah Palin was so refreshing and, to be clear, so exotic to all the elites: a woman who could raise herself up by dint of hard work and self-sacrifice to be a wife, mother, mayor, and governor. She didn't do it by set-asides, by birth, by quotas, or by handouts. She did it as a woman and she did it by her efforts. She exemplified what we all once saw as America--a land of opportunity, where you could be anything you set your mind to be so long as you worked for it. She showed us something about both her character and ours, our old-fashioned American character. For all this, she had to be ridiculed--she represented a kind of American virtue that shames the privileged, whether they be rich or poor.

Meanwhile, Ramesh Ponnuru expects an "overlapping series of Republican civil wars, each with its own theme," on the painful road to 2012.

Found via Theodore Dalrymple, leftwing author Tobias Wolff writes in England's Grauniad:

When I see someone being rude to a waiter, or blocking the road in a Ford Expedition, or yakking loudly on a cell phone in a crowded elevator, I naturally assume they voted for George W Bush. And - this is really mean, I know, really unfair and unreasonable and inhumane, and I scold myself for this, believe me, but - when a tornado tears off a few roofs in Texas, I think, serves you right!

But of course:

Here's Arnold Schwarzenegger quoted in the L.A. Times, urging Republicans to abandon their core principles:

In the wake of crushing defeats for Republicans in last week's national elections, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said Sunday that his party should regroup by moving away from some of its core conservative principles and embracing spending on programs that Americans want.

"I think the important thing for the Republican Party is now to also look at other issues that are very important for this country and not to get stuck in ideology," the governor said in an interview broadcast on CNN. "Let's go and talk about healthcare reform. Let's go and . . . fund programs if they're necessary programs and not get stuck just on the fiscal responsibility."

Schwarzenegger, a social moderate, long ago earned the enmity of many California Republicans who believe he abandoned some of the fiscally conservative views he espoused when running for office five years ago. They cite, for instance, his failed plan to dramatically expand health insurance in the state.

Last week, Schwarzenegger further angered Republicans by proposing a statewide sales-tax increase to balance the budget.

But the governor has not previously been so openly critical of the approach of the conservative bloc that dominates his party on the national level. He said that Republicans had "a very good party" and that he had no plans to leave it because he agrees with the GOP's push to reduce restrictions on business and remain tough on crime.

Schwarzenegger said, however, that the GOP should support greater investment to build roads and fix schools and fund other "things that the American people want to have done."

Republicans should not "always just say, 'This is spending. We can't do that,' " the governor said. "No, don't get stuck with that. We have heard that dialogue. Let's move on."

In 2004 though, Arnold was speaking from a rather different script:

I finally arrived here in 1968. What a special day it was. I remember I arrived here with empty pockets but full of dreams, full of determination, full of desire.

The presidential campaign was in full swing. I remember watching the Nixon-Humphrey presidential race on TV. A friend of mine who spoke German and English translated for me. I heard Humphrey saying things that sounded like socialism, which I had just left.

SCHWARZENEGGER: But then I heard Nixon speak. Then I heard Nixon speak. He was talking about free enterprise, getting the government off your back, lowering the taxes and strengthening the military.

(APPLAUSE)

Listening to Nixon speak sounded more like a breath of fresh air.

I said to my friend, I said, "What party is he?"

My friend said, "He's a Republican."

I said, "Then I am a Republican."

Of course, Nixon would abandon most of his core principles as well and move leftward himself while governing. But on the plus side, he earned the deep respect and eternal support of early-1970s liberals in the process. Which is why the eight uninterrupted years of the Nixon Administration are remembered so fondly on both sides of the aisle as a joyful interregnum in the culture wars.

"If you went back to the end of the 19th century and suggested to, say, William McKinley that one day Americans would find themselves choosing between a candidate promising to guarantee your mortgage and a candidate promising to give 'tax cuts' to millions of people who pay no taxes he would scoff at you for concocting some patently absurd H.G. Wells dystopian fantasy. Yet it happened."

Of course, Wells himself would have preferred much stronger medicine for America.

Not exactly a shocker though: Harry Reid is planning to kneecap Joe Lieberman, AP notes:

Although he aligns himself with Senate Democrats, Lieberman angered many Democrats for when he used a prime-time speech at the Republican convention this summer to criticize Barack Obama as an untested candidate beholden to Democratic interest groups. Republican McCain had considered making Lieberman, a longtime friend, his running mate this year before settling on Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

Bouncing Lieberman from his committee post would require the approval of the Democratic caucus, which is expected to meet this month.

"I want to spend some time in the next few days thinking about what Sen. Reid and I discussed what my options are at this point," Lieberman said. "He promised me that he would do the same and we would continue these conversations."

Republicans have said they would welcome Lieberman to their caucus.

"As the old saying has it, the left looks for heretics and the right looks for converts, and both find what they're looking for."

Umberto Eco wrote a few years ago that "We are supposed to live in a sceptical age. In fact, we live in an age of outrageous credulity." And as the recently, sadly deceased Michael Crichton noted just this past May, "The truth is, we live in an age of astonishing conformity":

I grew up in the 1950s, supposedly the heyday of conformity, but there was much more freedom of opinion back then. And as a result, you knew that your neighbors might hold different views from you on politics or religion. Today, the notion that men of good will can disagree has disappeared. Can you imagine! Today, if I disagree with you, you conclude there is something wrong with me. This is a childish, parochial view. And of course stupefyingly intolerant. It's truly anti-American. Much of it can be laid at the feet of the environmental movement, which has unfortunately frequently been led by ill-educated and intolerant spokespersons--often with no more than a high-school education, sometimes not even that. Or they are lawyers trained to win at any cost and to say anything about their opponents to win. But you find the same intolerant tone around considerations of defense, taxation, free markets, universal medical care, and so on. There's plenty of zealotry to go around. And it's hardly new in human history.

The media might stand as a corrective, cool and a bit detached, showing by example how to approach information and controversy. Instead, the media has clearly caught the fever of our intolerant times. Formerly, news people would never openly state their allegiance; young reporters understood it was poor form, and a senior person would carry the caution born of the experience that at least some of what one believes in the course of one's life turns out to be wrong. But it's a new era. Now, media reporters are proud to pound the table and declare their advocacy. Since so few of them have any training in science, they don't really know what they are pounding about, when it comes to global warming. They couldn't tell you even in general terms how the global mean temperature is calculated, for example. But it doesn't matter anyway. They just want to declare they believe what "everyone" believes. Who values such a news source?

A rapidly dwindling number, hence the legacy media's well known financial woes. Meanwhile, Andrew Ian Dodge notes that the outcome of the presidential election may help to thin the ranks of another media group whose lockstep conformity is only barely disguised by its veneer of individuality--the liberal comedian.

(Fortunately though, It'll Be All Right on the Night. At least for now.)

In "A Date With Scarcity", his latest op-ed, David Brooks writes:

Nov. 4, 2008, is a historic day because it marks the end of an economic era, a political era and a generational era all at once.

Economically, it marks the end of the Long Boom, which began in 1983. Politically, it probably marks the end of conservative dominance, which began in 1980. Generationally, it marks the end of baby boomer supremacy, which began in 1968. For the past 16 years, baby boomers, who were formed by the tumult of the 1960s, occupied the White House. By Tuesday night, if the polls are to be believed, a member of a new generation will become president-elect.

So today is not only a pivot, but a confluence of pivots.

It certainly is--and I explored several of those pivots in video form, last week.

Update: Shannon Love asks, "If Obama's economic policies work so well, why isn't Detroit a paradise?" and notes, "We may soon be living in a repeat of '70s and looking back at the years 1984-2007 as a golden era."

Over at his newly minted "Screedblog", James Lileks writes, "Just got this in the mail: McCain, in his last desperate hours, is reaching out to the party's hard core. Just not his party..."

As James writes, "I know what they're going for, but it's the most remarkably odd piece of campaign literature I've seen this year. They look like a divorced couple reconciling at their daughter's wedding. "

Just to follow-up on the Springsteen post below, nowadays, the only time I read about Bruce touring is every four years during a presidential campaign, when he hits the road as a well-paid (at least from the gate receipts) adjunct of the DNC. To borrow from the vernacular of The Boss's early '70s glory days (to coin a phrase), has any musician become more Establishment than Springsteen?

Well, there are a few who come close--and what they say about themselves illustrates the duality of corporate rock perfectly. As Diana West wrote in The Death of the Grown-Up last year:

When U2's Bono promises Grammy night fans "to keep f----ing up the mainstream," as critic Mark Steyn has noted, Bono fails to see--or admit--that he is the mainstream, a bonanza to corporate stockholders and well fit to perform at the official, ribbon-cutting opening of a presidential library in Little Rock.

I recently came across a similar moment in Wikipedia's profile of Billy Joel. (No, I don't know how I ended up there, either, but pop culture ephemera is what Wikipedia does best):

On March 10, 2008, Joel inducted his friend John Mellencamp into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in a ceremony that took place at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City. During his induction speech for Mellencamp, Joel said:

"Don't let this club membership change you, John. Stay ornery, stay mean. We need you to be pissed off, and restless, because no matter what they tell us - we know, this country is going to hell in a handcart. This country's been hijacked. You know it and I know it. People are worried. People are scared, and people are angry. People need to hear a voice like yours that's out there to echo the discontent that's out there in the heartland. They need to hear stories about it. [Audience applauds] They need to hear stories about frustration, alienation and desperation. They need to know that somewhere out there somebody feels the way that they do, in the small towns and in the big cities. They need to hear it. And it doesn't matter if they hear it on a jukebox, in the local gin mill, or in a goddamn truck commercial, because they ain't gonna hear it on the radio anymore. They don't care how they hear it, as long as they hear it good and loud and clear the way you've always been saying it all along. You're right, John, this is still our country and we'll always be victims of powerful people."

But of course: no matter how many TV commercials, supermarket Muzak systems or football stadium loudspeakers play your music, no matter how many millions of albums you've sold or millions you've earned, "You're right, John, this is still our country and we'll always be victims of powerful people."

That's right! Stick it to the man--even if he's yourself!

Back in April, during the Pleistocene primary season, seemingly one million years ago, I wrote:

Sadly, as Slate of all publications once noted, Bruce's second manager, Jon Landau, who went from Rolling Stone critic to rock Svengali, took that Springsteen away from us, transforming Bruce in his formative years from an exciting quirky apolitical musician to just another leftwing product on the showbiz assembly line.

(And speaking of Slate, nice of them to create a fun anti-Obama ad, which will have a little traction even after this week's PA primary has passed.

With Jake Tapper breathlessly writing about The Boss supporting the World's Biggest Celebrity, even as his bicoastal Keystone State gaffes are in the news yet again, who knew how timely it would be at the very end of the campaign:




Related: More on Springsteen and friends in the following post.

Flashing back to Obama's other bicoastal gaffe from April, John McCormack of The Weekly Standard asks, "What is it about San Francisco that makes Barack Obama say things that offend Pennsylvania voters?"

He may be columnist to the world (as Hugh Hewitt describes him each week), but Mark Steyn writes, "I'm not a 'journalist' and have never described myself as one":

And, when I give speeches or appear on TV or radio and the organizers or producers send us the biographical intro in advance, my trusty assistants always insist on the removal of the word "journalist". This used to be purely for truth-in-advertising reasons - I wouldn't want audiences to get the false impression that I'd passed rigorous tests and acquired a diploma signed by Professor Miller. But lately it's been for a more basic reason. I had lunch with Ken Whyte, my publisher at Maclean's, the other day, and mentioned en passant that one consequence of a year's worth of thought-police investigations was that it was no longer possible to avoid the painful truth that, for a profession that congratulates itself incessantly on its courage, bravery, fearlessness, etc (far more than, say, firefighters do) and hands out awards all year long for "speaking truth to power", most journalists are total pussies happy to suck up to state power as long as it's in PC clothing. Professor Miller, a J-school ethics bore boldly campaigning for the right of government bureaucrats to censor writers, would seem to be an almost parodic example of the phenomenon.

As Michael Malone wrote last week--and I'm sympathetic on a host of levels--"A few days ago, when asked by a new acquaintance what I did for a living, I replied that I was 'a writer', because I couldn't bring myself to admit to a stranger that I'm a journalist":

I'm not one of those people who think the media has been too hard on, say, Gov. Palin, by rushing reportorial SWAT teams to Alaska to rifle through her garbage. This is the Big Leagues, and if she wants to suit up and take the field, then Gov. Palin better be ready to play. The few instances where I think the press has gone too far - such as the Times reporter talking to Cindy McCain's daughter's MySpace friends - can easily be solved with a few newsroom smackdowns and temporary repostings to the Omaha Bureau.

No, what I object to (and I think most other Americans do as well) is the lack of equivalent hardball coverage of the other side - or worse, actively serving as attack dogs for Senators Obama and Biden. If the current polls are correct, we are about to elect as President of the United States a man who is essentially a cipher, who has left almost no paper trail, seems to have few friends (that at least will talk) and has entire years missing out of his biography. That isn't Sen. Obama's fault: his job is to put his best face forward. No, it is the traditional media's fault, for it alone (unlike the alternative media) has had the resources to cover this story properly, and has systematically refused to do so.

Why, for example to quote McCain's lawyer, haven't we seen an interview with Sen. Obama's grad school drug dealer - when we know all about Mrs. McCain's addiction? Are Bill Ayers and Tony Rezko that hard to interview? All those phony voter registrations that hard to scrutinize? And why are Senator Biden's endless gaffes almost always covered up, or rationalized, by the traditional media?

The absolute nadir (though I hate to commit to that, as we still have two weeks before the election) came with Joe the Plumber. Middle America, even when they didn't agree with Joe, looked on in horror as the press took apart the private life of an average person who had the temerity to ask a tough question of a Presidential candidate. So much for the Standing Up for the Little Man, so much for Speaking Truth to Power, so much for Comforting the Afflicted and Afflicting the Comfortable, and all of those other catchphrases we journalists used to believe we lived by.

I learned a long time ago that when people or institutions begin to behave in a manner that seems to be entirely against their own interests, it's because we don't understand what their motives really are. It would seem that by so exposing their biases and betting everything on one candidate over another, the traditional media is trying to commit suicide - especially when, given our currently volatile world and economy, the chances of a successful Obama presidency, indeed any presidency, is probably less than 50:50.

Furthermore, I also happen to believe that most reporters, whatever their political bias, are human torpedoes . . .and, had they been unleashed, would have raced in and roughed up the Obama campaign as much as they did McCain's. That's what reporters do, I was proud to have been one, and I'm still drawn to a good story, any good story, like a shark to blood in the water.

So why weren't those legions of hungry reporters set loose on the Obama campaign? Who are the real villains in this story of mainstream media betrayal?

The editors. The men and women you don't see; the people who not only decide what goes in the paper, but what doesn't; the managers who give the reporters their assignments and lay-out the editorial pages. They are the real culprits.

Why? I think I know, because had my life taken a different path, I could have been one: Picture yourself in your 50s in a job where you've spent 30 years working your way to the top, to the cockpit of power . . . only to discover that you're presiding over a dying industry. The Internet and alternative media are stealing your readers, your advertisers and your top young talent. Many of your peers shrewdly took golden parachutes and disappeared. Your job doesn't have anywhere near the power and influence it did when your started your climb. The Newspaper Guild is too weak to protect you any more, and there is a very good chance you'll lose your job before you cross that finish line, ten years hence, of retirement and a pension.

In other words, you are facing career catastrophe -and desperate times call for desperate measures. Even if you have to risk everything on a single Hail Mary play. Even if you have to compromise the principles that got you here. After all, newspapers and network news are doomed anyway - all that counts is keeping them on life support until you can retire.

And then the opportunity presents itself: an attractive young candidate whose politics likely matches yours, but more important, he offers the prospect of a transformed Washington with the power to fix everything that has gone wrong in your career. With luck, this monolithic, single-party government will crush the alternative media via a revived Fairness Doctrine, re-invigorate unions by getting rid of secret votes, and just maybe, be beholden to people like you in the traditional media for getting it there.

And besides, you tell yourself, it's all for the good of the country . . .

Not to mention the environment. If the news industry wasn't a collective Victorian Gentleman, then Obama's quotes on coal would be screamed in 48-point Times Roman Type on every newspaper's front page--if only because it's an incredible story, no matter what your thoughts on the environment.

CBS's Scott Conroy writes:

Seizing on a newly released audio tape picked up by the Drudge Report, Sarah Palin took the opportunity here in coal country to accuse Barack Obama of "talking about bankrupting the coal industry."

But it wasn't "newly released." It's been buried in the middle of an hour-long video uploaded by the San Francisco Chronicle that's been hidden in plain sight on the Brightcove video distribution Website since January, until some enterprising blogger stumbled over it.

In the above quote, Michael Malone writes, "Who are the real villains in this story of mainstream media betrayal? The editors." And he's right. Check out what the editors at the San Francisco Chronicle signed off on: the Chronicle uploaded the video of their interview with Obama to their Website under the narcoleptic headline of "Obama's straight-ahead style"--meaning they couldn't stumble over anything the senator said that they want to highlight in their headline. Which means either the writers at the Chronicle don't know a killer story when they see one--or they're willing to bury such a story if it helps their man get into office. (See also: media and Edwards, John; note dramatic contrast with Plumber, J.T., and Palin, Sarah.)

When the MSM moans about the gallons of red ink it's spilled since 2001, it needs to ask itself if it's prepared to actually report the news, in a fashion that interests readers, or if it exists as a non-profit ideological support system.

Keep rockin'!

Update: It's all about "context", which CNN is all too happy to provide (business as usual, there), rather than promoting a blockbuster story.

In repairing our nation's rapidly aging infrastructure, count me as very much one of the "Pro-Pavement People" that Matthew Continetti mentions here, as opposed to "The desire named streetcar."

As a connoisseur of fine conservative satire, I must say, I do rather like the cut of this "Iowahawk" fellow's jib:

When my late father T. Coddington Van Voorhees VI founded the iconoclastic conservative journal National Topsider in 1948, he famously declared that "Now is the time for all good conservative helmsmen to hoist the mizzen, pour the cocktails, and steer this damned schooner hard starboard." In the 60 years since he first uttered it after one-too-many Cosmopolitans at one of Pamela Harriman's notorious foreign policy black tie balls, father's pithy bon mot has served as a rallying cry for conservatives from Greenwich to Chevy Chase. Today, I say it's time for we conservatives to once again grab the rigging and set sail with the flotilla of the true conservative in this race: Barack Obama.

Trust me, I haven't taken this tack lightly. No Van Voorhees has supported an avowed socialist since great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandpapa Cragmont Van Voorhees lent Peter Minuet $24 and a sack of wampum to swing a subprime mortgage on Manhattan Island. Old dad himself often recounted how, as a lad, he would command the family chauffeur Carleton to drive the Duesenberg down to the Times Square Trans-Lux so he could hiss Roosevelt. But I've taken a good measure of this Obama fellow, and I must say I like the cut of the man's jib.

How can I say this, you ask? One look at this Obama chap is all the answer you need. Suave, tanned, unflappable, Harvard connections; it's obvious that here is a man to the conservative manor born. One imagines him at the helm of the Ship of State, basked in the sunlight diffusing through the seaspray over the bow, like some beautiful rugged Othello from a rapturous Ralph Lauren catalog, calmly issuing instructions to the deck crew in that magnificent mellifluous baritone of his. It's that easy-going, almost effortless grace that has all the A-list conservatives like David Frum and Kathleen Parker whispering Reaganesque in hushed tones. Even Peggy Noonan -- the Grand Dame of Gipperism -- has succumbed to Obama's undeniable conservative charms. Just last month I listened to her wax poetic about the Adonis of Chicago between chukkers at the Newport Club polo tournament final. "Why Peggy, you old dowager," I quipped, "I believe you just had an orgasm."

Do I even need to add the "read the whole thing" encomium here?

Check out this howler in a piece in CQ Politics titled, "What McCain Defectors See in Obama":

The defectors are a mixed lot, but all represent some brand of recognizably conservative thought. Some like Doug Kmiec, Andrew Sullivan, and Ken Adelman are probably conservatives by anyone's definition, while others are cut partly from an older mold. They bear some resemblance to the moderate Republicanism of the Rockefeller era, but the issues of their time are not the same.

Sullivan is as conservative these days as much as John Kerry was "the right man -- and the conservative choice -- for a difficult and perilous time."

(H/T: Orrin Judd, whose link to Powers' essay is titled, "Inherit The Windbags.")

Back in 2005, Howard Dean told the late Tim Russert that "I will use whatever position I have in order to root out hypocrisy."

This seems like an exceptional place to start.

Steve Green writes:

Sixty-five million years ago, dinosaurs ruled the earth -- with the same unthinking ruthlessness which Rep John Murtha (D, PA-12) rules the House Defense Subcommittee. His own website brags that "[o]f the nearly 10,000 men and women who have served in the U.S. House of Representatives since 1789, only 90 have served longer than he has." But maybe, just maybe, like the dinosaurs, Murtha's time is up.

He's long overdue for a nice long vacation on the beach at Okinawa.

Mary Mapes, the woman who brought you RatherGate, wrote yesterday at the Huffington Post:

Americans aren't responding to the old plays -- the fake fears, the faux outrage, the conservatives who yell "Communist" at the news cameras, the pompous right-wing bloggers who once held such sway. I know all too well how scary and effective these old tactics were in 2004. Today, they are toothless. Ha, ha. Nothing makes me happier than seeing once swaggering players like Powerline, Free Republic and Little Green Footballs forced onto the sidelines, left to limply watch this campaign pass by like a parade in which they play no meaningful part. They just don't matter anymore.

Mapes' post is titled, "The Monster is Dying"--so "conservatives who yell 'Communist' at the news cameras" are declasse, but attacking conservatives as a monolithic "monster" on a Weblog is reasoned nuance journalism. Charles Krauthammer, call your office!

But behind each of those "monsters" was at least one person who in one form another said, "I don't know how many people will actually listen, but why shouldn't my voice be heard as well?" (Just as the founder of the Huffington Post presumably said as well at some point.) Much like a certain Ohio tradesman with entrepreneurial dreams who is now called "the now infamous Joe the plumber," on over 500 Webpages. Or as another journalist with the same initials as Mary Mapes wrote today:

So much for the Standing Up for the Little Man, so much for Speaking Truth to Power, so much for Comforting the Afflicting and Afflicting the Comfortable, and all of those other catchphrases we journalists used to believe we lived by.

And calling one half of the Blogosphere "toothless" because their presidential candidate isn't an effective purveyor of the same message as they are seems awfully disingenuous to the other side--I don't think the bloggers at, say, the Daily Kos would take kindly at being called, by extension, toothless in 2004 because John Kerry was such a feckless candidate. It also fails to take into consideration that pundits supporting the out-of-party are able to go on the rhetorical offense, something that the right-hand of the Blogosphere will likely have ample opportunity to do so over the next four years.

But if indeed "The Monster is Dying", what a run! In September of 2005, a year after RatherGate broke, Mapes admitted that she had never heard of any of the blogs that she quotes above, even as she was a working TV producer at a corporation which billed itself at the time as "America's Most Watched Network", and hence, presumably, had her pulse on the nation's political scene:

Within a few minutes, I was online visiting Web sites I had never heard of before: Free Republic, Little Green Footballs, Power Line. They were hard-core, politically angry, hyperconservative sites loaded with vitriol about Dan Rather and CBS. Our work was being compared to that of Jayson Blair, the discredited New York Times reporter who had fabricated and plagiarized stories.

And accurately so, of course.

But hey, from cat food eating pajama-wearing navel gazers to a journalistic "monster" in the space of seven years after 9/11 is a pretty amazing growth cycle--and something tells me that the starboard side of the Blogosphere isn't going away anytime soon, no matter how much Mary wishes it were so, and no matter what the outcome on November 4th.

Kevin D. Williamson asks readers to "Explain this reasoning to me":

According to the geniuses at the Times, the governor of Alaska is self-evidently and grossly unqualified to be vice president of the United States, but a pop singer is obviously qualified to be lecturing the world about African civil wars and developmental economics.

Here's a little insight into the world of the Times op-ed page from editor Andrew Rosenthal:

Though rockers and pop stars are welcome, another group faces an uphill battle on to the New York Times' editorial page - conservatives. "[US Secretary of State] Condoleezza Rice is a particularly bad op-ed writer," Rosenthal said. However, the problem doesn't end there. "The problem with conservative columnists," Rosenthal said, "is that many of them lie in print." And they can't sing.

Liars? That's a bit cheeky from the newspaper that brought us Walter Duranty and Jayson Blair.

Condoleezza Rice got her PhD when she was 26 and speaks fluent Russian. Bono wears snazzy glasses and can see Ireland from his house.

It's more than reasonable to extend Rosenthal's attack on conservative columnists to potential conservative readers of the Times, and to reasonably assume that the Timespeople would prefer those readers avoid their product, just as many of those in Bono's industry would prefer they stay home. Which is one of the reasons why Steve Green projects out the Times' finances and writes, "The NYT in default? It couldn't happen to a nicer paper."

And even as his profession rushes headlong towards a financial cliff, veteran journalist Michael Malone writes that its moral bankruptcy has never been more evident:

Read More »

Fred Siegel looks at Mike Bloomberg, now approved by his obsequious city council to run for a third term as New York's mayor-as-nanny:

For the past year, New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg has been on a perpetual campaign for higher office. He's toured the country and run an ad campaign touting his educational "achievements," as a stepping stone to national office.

His lavishly funded and enormously effective p.r. operation has garnered adoring articles in Esquire, Vanity Fair and GQ on how this post-partisan philosopher-king of sorts has had supposedly extraordinary fiscal and educational accomplishments. But as Bloomberg, whose billions make it possible to insert himself into any campaign at almost any time, lost out on his presidential and vice-presidential hopes, he was reduced to buying a third term as mayor of Gotham. And that's where his problems began.

Read the rest--and then check out William Warren, who adds, "According to the City Council, sometimes the people need a king."

Kathy Shaidle connects the dots and illustrates why the Gray Lady is in more than a Pinch of trouble.

Having been dubbed racists and rednecks by Rep. Jack Murtha (D-PA), (after previously being dubbed bitter and clinging by Barack Obama) at least one poll illustrates that his constituents are especially eager to prove the punitive liberal wrong.

As Nicole Gelinas noted back in April, when New York's Governor David Paterson was inaugurated, he heard from a number of his old friends, now living out of state:

Paterson cited a number of personal friends, all former New Yorkers, who have contacted him from out of state since his ascent to the governorship. "A friend from primary school, Randy San Antonio, told me he moved to Dallas 20 years ago," Paterson began. "Another friend, Randy Watts, had moved to Reno. A friend from Syracuse, Marvin Lee Simons, said he's working in Lower Manhattan. I said we should get together . . . and he said, 'Well, I don't live in New York. I live in western Pennsylvania.' Jeff and Stacey Stackhouse wanted to start a business on Long Island. They moved two years ago--they're trying to start their business in Charlotte, North Carolina. They couldn't pay the taxes here."

Gov. Paterson's chief of staff has his own idiosyncratic, remarkably psychosomatic solution to the issue--a severe case of "non-filer syndrome."

(John Derbyshire writes about it here, just before being overcome with a terrible case of "non-blogger syndrome.")

Kevin D. Williamson spots "An Unbelievable Headline from Slate":

"Believing in vote fraud may be dangerous to a democracy's health."

Still though, I'm glad to see Winston Smith is finally off IngSoc's vast government payroll and happily writing in the private sector.

Incidentally, back in 2002, Glenn Reynolds suggested one simple method of reducing voter fraud:

The fact is, if you could come up with a new technology as simple and resistant to fraud as the paper ballot, people would be pretty impressed. So why do we use machines?

Perhaps in part for the same reason that some people used to prefer canned vegetables to fresh ones: "it's more modern!"

But since then, as any trip to the supermarket will demonstrate, the left have moved headlong into organic vegetables and away from the more modern canned variety.

Couldn't paper ballots be sold to the left along similar lines? Vote the organic way--vote paper!

Read More »

Shortly before the election of 2004, Tim Cavanaugh of Reason looked at what he called, "Twilight Of The Liberal Hawks":

What unified the liberal hawks was that their support for the war was based unreservedly on what is popularly understood as the "neocon" vision, the prospect of exporting democracy to the Middle East through force of arms. According to the "forward strategy of freedom," a democratic Iraq with an emancipated citizenry would serve as an example and beacon to the Arab autocracies, empowering liberals in the region while undermining dictatorships; opening up avenues of freedom and self-expression for ordinary citizens in the Muslim world would in turn remove the impetus for terrorism. For liberals whose taste for progressive-minded interventionism had been whetted by the Clinton administration's operations in the Balkans and Haiti (and probably even more so by the counterexample of Clinton's failure to stop the massacre in Rwanda), the invasion of Iraq looked like a natural fit, even if it was advanced through a Defense Department with whom they had little stylistic or political affinity.

Thus, in late 2002 and early 2003, we found such luminaries as Christopher Hitchens, Paul Berman, Thomas Friedman, Fred Kaplan, Kenneth Pollack, Fareed Zakaria, Jeff Jarvis, Andrew Sullivan, Michael Ignatieff, and many others arguing for the expenditure of American lives and treasure in Operation Iraqi Freedom.

These days, none of those luminaries can summon a kind word for the president who acted in accord with their own arguments.

And with these two endorsements, his successor.

In the Weekly Standard, Sam Schulman asks, "Why is Bill Ayers a respectable member of the upper middle class and Sarah Palin contemptible?"

Pour yourself a Johnnie Walker Black and remember. The presidential campaign was going to be about sex--the sex of the inevitable winning candidate. Then it was going to be about race. We dreamed we would atone for slavery and the Berlin Airlift, impress Europe and charm the Arab world. But the undecided voters who will determine the winner are no longer interested in race or sex. They are looking at social class. Which ticket best expresses the values and tastes of the upper-middle-class--and captivates the rest of us who follow the lead of the upper-middles?

The class argument is why the Bill Ayers strategy won't do. In the sex and race eras, it would have worked nicely. Obama's longtime working collaboration with the radical educational theorist and retired terrorist would dramatize his carefully but hastily discarded political radicalism. But no longer. The anti-Ayers publicists are quite right about Ayers's malignity and Obama's connivance. But when they try to explain what Ayers has done in the past and still wants to do--turn schools into nurseries of revolution, make leftist views a condition for becoming a teacher, promote dictatorship, and glorify violence--they injure not help their cause. Class will always trump politics. Being the first in one's family to adopt liberal political sentiments or move to New York City means a step into the middle class, for most Americans, and an increase in social status. More extreme political radicalism lifts one a step or two higher.

Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn became Sixties royalty not because of the status of the Ayers family in Chicago, but because of their relish for violence. They attempted to kill, and celebrated the killings of others (like Charles Manson's victims and the murder of any number of cops), to set an example for the less privileged. "We've known that our job is to lead white kids to armed revolution. . . . Tens of thousands have learned that protest and marches don't do it. Revolutionary violence is the only way," said the future Mrs. Ayers in 1970. On the other hand, there were the masses of students who merely marched and flashed the peace sign. Socially, they were nowhere. That was the shock of the Kent State massacre--the veteran martyrs of Harvard's University Hall and Columbia's Low Library wondered that such a terrible and authentic event could have taken place at a far-away state school to people of whom we knew nothing.

Now mainstream Chicago regards Ayers as rehabilitated--but why?

Schulman's piece appears to have written before a certain Ohio tradesman became a household name. But the blowback caused by Joe's walk-on part in the cold civil war reminds us that it is very much a class war--and specifically, the left's attempts to eviscerate the middle and working classes.

Related: Jennifer Rubin writes, "Suddenly, the race card doesn't look as important as the class warfare card."

As we've discussed numerous times around here, when states go from red, or even purple, to hard core blue--residents and businesses vote with their feet. (Even in the big blue states overseas.)

Ed Morrissey's latest post explores similar ground--and it focuses on a state (New Jersey) whose fiscal and gubernatorial woes were the subject of one of our very first podcasts.

Update: This comment underneath Ed's post crystallizes the opinions I've heard from several of my friends and family still in New Jersey.

Over the weekend, Michelle Malkin pasted up quite a rogue's gallery of the violent left. John Hawkins provides an equal number of quotes to go along with them.

Just don't expect the Victorian Gentleman to pay much attention.

We haven't heard much about the left's 180 degree pivot on the Iraq War in recent months, as the Surge has allowed the situation in Iraq to stabilize to one degree or another, which helps John McCain. But quietly, in the background, old man pivot keeps on rolling along.

The tagline for George Clooney's 2005 movie, Good Night, And Good Luck is "We will not walk in fear of one another." Judging by the above video (originally found here), that's not a message that many from its core audience deep within the Zabar's Zeitgeist of Manhattan seem to have internalized.

Which is more than a little depressing--if not at all surprising--considering the outpouring of support that Red States demonstrated in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, as "a lot of you remember"--to borrow Sen. Obama's remarkably nonchalant phrasing.

Despite the progress the nation has made, portions of America still remain remarkably xenophobic and puritanical. When The Other appears, challenging an insular culture's accepted notions and long-held reactionary superstitions, the result is cognitive dissonance in the extreme, bringing out the very worst in our citizens, as this unfortunate sound bite demonstrates all-too-well.

Update: Charles Johnson spots yet another example of puritanical naivete.

Jonah Goldberg once described feckless Europe as the world's biggest college campus. Michael Barone and Mark Steyn wonder if that dubious distinction will quickly be supplanted by America under an Obama administration.

Christopher Buckley (yes, Bill's son) breathes deep the cult of Obama, endorsing him, and adding:

But having a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect, President Obama will (I pray, secularly) surely understand that traditional left-politics aren't going to get us out of this pit we've dug for ourselves.

Jennifer Rubin asks, "Oh, my--where to begin?"

A first-class temperament does not consort with terrorists or lie about his affiliation with the same. A first-class temperament does not invoke the race card when presented with legitimate criticism. A first-class temperament does not seek to shed his Leftist skin for political expediency. To conclude otherwise is confuse calm with deceit.

And as for the hope that his first-class intellect will lead him away from more extreme ideas, I am not sure what biography Mr. Buckley has been reading. But Obama's is replete with identification with Left-wing causes and their practitioners. What would possibly lead him now to rethink a lifetime of political thought and action? Certainly a smashing political victory and a compliant Democratic Congress will be confirmation, if any was needed, that he has been on the correct ideological track.

On the other hand, considering how closely McCain's fortunes have tracked the S&P 500, it may all be academic, sort of like a course taught by Bill Ayers.

"Since I had the misfortune to become ensnared in the Canadian 'human rights' racket, I've come to appreciate more and more the comment one fellow left on an Internet post somewhere or other, remarking that he was in favour of free speech, because the alternatives 'were just too weird.'"

That's a brief excerpt from Mark Steyn's article-length introduction to Pete Vere and Kathy Shaidle's new book, The Tyranny of Nice, on Canada's "Human Rights Commissions", and their patented show trials to purge all doubleplusungood thoughtcrime from Airstrip Canada.

How weird do those trials get? And could similar such weirdness be coming to the US? Tune in to my 40-minute long interview with Kathy and Pete over at Pajamas Media.

So far today, we've seen Bill Ayers, former Weatherman, Barbara Walters, former attendee at Leonard Bernstein's 1970 "Black Panther Fondue & Twister Party" (to borrow a pithy Iowa-riff) refusing to talk about Ayers, and bloggers making lame Marvin Gaye references--and that's just on this blog alone. And now George Farging McGovern will apparently be appearing, via video, in tonight's debate.

(And that's in addition to the 2004 election's brush with the 1970s, in the form of flashbacks to John Kerry's Winter Soldier days.)

Enough with the 1970s! When does the decade that never ends...end?

At Pajamas HQ, Dr. Helen debunks a lame reply from Salon's advice columnist to someone with a raging case of PDS and mentions University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt, whose studies found:

While conservatives could put themselves in the mindset of liberals, liberals did not return the favor. [Yet more proof of the accuracy of Krauthammer's Law--Ed] In other words, like Hater, some scream, rant, and rave when someone does not agree with them, with no understanding of why people are different. Perhaps a little empathy is in order here for Hater's friends and family.

It would certainly help to reduce the "Attack of the Hatemail", which San Francisco-based columnist Cinnamon Stillwell found herself in the midst of when she publicly praised Palin in print, alliteratively speaking.

A couple of weeks ago, Tom Blumer wrote at Pajamas, "Very Different Economic Times in Red vs. Blue States"; certainly the very blue "parentheses states", as Tom Wolfe described them, have been having a tough time making a go of it, as these two headlines on the Drudge Report indicate:

• SCHWARZENEGGER: CALIFORNIA MAY NEED EMERGENCY LOAN...
• New York Deficit Swells...

Or as a recent City Journal article put it, "Houston, New York Has a Problem."

Meanwhile, Jennifer Rubin asks, "What's The Matter With Harry?"

One of the more curious -- but not unprecedented -- incidents in the last couple of weeks involved Harry Reid. The Wall Street Journal explains:

Just as U.S. credit markets this week were close to the edge of the cliff, threatening capital-starved businesses large and small, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid stepped in front of reporters and offhandedly announced:

"One of the individuals in the caucus today talked about a major insurance company. A major insurance company -- one with a name that everyone knows that's on the verge of going bankrupt. That's what this is all about." The next day, share prices fell sharply across the insurance industry. Let us stipulate we do not think it necessary for even U.S. Senators to understand the internal mechanics of credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations. But if we have learned anything amid the panic over Bear, Lehman, Merrill and adventures in naked short-selling, it is that rumors can obliterate economic value, instantly.

But this wasn't the only such incident:

It calls to mind Senator Chuck Schumer's public suggestion in July that troubled IndyMac Bank "could face collapse." It did, after a deposit run. Senator Schumer said criticizing his action was akin to blaming "the fire on the guy who called 911." The nation's shareholders would sleep better at night if some Members of Congress enrolled in Arsonists Anonymous.

All of this raises the question: are they trying to make things worse in the hopes of furthering their party's election prospects? Similar suspicions were raised when Nancy Pelosi seemed to inflame her partisan opponents and resist any effort to whip her own caucus on the first failed bailout bill vote. Certainly as the financial crisis has intensified their electoral prospects have brightened.

But if we assume that they "meant no harm" we are left with an equally troubling conclusion: they are reckless and ignorant about the ways in which their words and actions may impact a fragile economy. Or to put it differently, their first consideration is invariably "How do we maximize the public's perception that things are rotten?" rather than "What can we do to contain the conflagration?"

While he may lead the self-described "world's greatest deliberative body", anybody who says this...

"Coal makes us sick. Oil makes us sick. It's global warming. It's ruining our country, it's ruining our world. We've got to stop using fossil fuel."

...isn't going to get high scores in the thoughtful rhetoric department.

Related Blue State Blues: Roger Kimball plots "Data points from the Windy City".

Steve Green spots a late entrant to a topic I explored in video form back in May:

Update: J.R. Taylor writes, "Thanks for the first Jon Astley reference I've seen in ages..."

Ed Driscoll.com: Internet-based community organizer in an increasingly demassified postmodern world through the collectively remembered flotsam and jetsam of a once unified pop culture!

Fascism is always descending upon America--but it always seems to land in Europe.

This past summer, Rick Perlstein, the author of the new biography called Nixonland, looked back on the period leading up to Richard Nixon's 1968 election and told Reason magazine that in his opinion, "Bonnie and Clyde was the most important text of the New Left", adding:

"It made an argument about vitality and virtue vs. staidness and morality that was completely new, that resonated with young people in a way that made no sense to old people. Just the idea that the outlaws were the good guys and the bourgeois householders were the bad guys--you cannot underestimate how strange and fresh that was."

It certainly was strange, compared with the nation's politics at the start of the 1960s.

In the latest edition of our Silicon Graffiti videoblog, we take a look back at the film, its radical chic times, and its champion--Pauline Kael of the New Yorker, who would reject traditional culture for "trash cinema." And we'll also look at Bobby Kennedy's Fascist Moment--and even a Bonnie & Clyde-related excerpt the fourth edition of Austin Bay and Jim Dunnigan's A Quick And Dirty Guide To War. Which sounds like one meaty, beaty, big and bouncy little video to me.

Tommy guns and fedoras are optional, of course.

(Previous editions of Silicon Graffiti, going back to the start of the year, can be found here.)

Update: Welcome readers of InstaPundit, the Brothers Judd, Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism blog at NRO, and--appropriately enough--the New Nixon Blog. Please look around, there's lots here we think you'll enjoy.

Individuality is fine--as long as we all do it together.

"Is Bill Clinton deliberately undermining Obama?"

Update: Almost a decade and a half ago, Clinton said, "I hope you're all aware we're all Eisenhower Republicans." Now more than ever, judging by the title of this post by Pejman Yousefzadeh.

David Levinson Wilk of Politico claims that "Crossword puzzles heavily favor Democrats"--and he should know:

I am partly to blame.

On Jan. 8, 2005, I purposefully and unapologetically became the first person to ever construct a crossword puzzle for The New York Times that featured this five-letter answer:

OBAMA.

Earlier this week, Steve Schmidt, John McCain's senior campaign adviser, lambasted the Times for being "totally, 150 percent in the tank for the Democratic candidate." The GOP, it seems, is finally catching on to a once-hidden truth:

Crossword puzzles heavily favor Democrats.

According to the puzzle database maintained by Cruciverb.com, ever since that game-changing day in 2005, OBAMA has appeared regularly as an answer in New York Times crossword puzzles. With its wonderfully convenient alternating series of commonly used vowels and consonants, OBAMA has been the answer to the clues "Senator who wrote 'Dreams From My Father,'" "Future senator who delivered the 2004 Democratic convention keynote address" and "Presidential candidate born in Hawaii."

But what about MCCAIN? Shockingly, not once has MCCAIN been an answer in a crossword in the New York Times, The Washington Post or the Los Angeles Times. No MCCAIN, no JOHNMCCAIN, no SENATORMCCAIN, not even his most recent sobriquet, the presidential-sounding JOHNSMCCAINIII.

Gee, now there's a shock.

For most on the left, it's always 1968, the summer of Mobius Loops, and the year of the hippie poseur. Not to mention their only marginally more grown-up appearing peers, such as RFK, who said, "The more riots that come on college campuses, the better the world for tomorrow." But Edward Blum writes that to voting rights activists, "It Will Always Be 1965."

Newsbusters' Brent Baker writes, "Couric Scolds McCain for Palin's 'Great Depression' Scare -- Which Couric Proposed to Palin."

And meanwhile, Joe Biden's Pangea of gaffes this week continues to pay dividends--as blogger "Right Wing Professor" noted, Katie never batted an eye during Joe Biden's wacky Depression-era-flashback on Monday.

Jonah Goldberg spots the media playing the race card on Obama:

I have no doubt that the Bradley effect is real. But the Bradley effect does not reflect racism; it captures voters' fear of appearing racist. There's no reason to assume those who lie to pollsters are racists. But for Obama supporters and the media, poll results are some kind of sacred, binding covenant. If voters don't keep their promise, the media have no problem seeing racism at work.

The media's obsession with race in this election is probably fueling the Bradley effect. Repeating over and over that voting against Obama is racist only makes non-racist people embarrassed to admit that they plan to vote for McCain.

Another rich irony is that the only racists who matter in this election are the ones in the Democratic Party. News flash: Republicans aren't voting for the Democratic nominee because they're Republicans. A new AP-Yahoo News poll claims that racial prejudice is a significant factor among the independents and Democrats Obama needs to win, specifically among Hillary Clinton's primary voters. According to the pollsters' statistical modeling, support for Obama may be as much as 6 percentage points lower than it would be if there were no white racism.

I'm skeptical about those findings, as well as the overemphasis on race generally. But to the extent that race is a factor, here's the richest irony of all: Obama's problem is with precisely those voters the Democratic Party claims to fight for, working- and middle-class white folks. Of course, Democrats can't openly complain that their own vital constituency is racist.

I don't know--Nora Ephron's complaint on that topic was pretty darn out in the open during the primaries.

Update: As is this article from Monday's edition of the typically uber-liberal (if I recall the tone of the paper correctly from when I was living in the Delaware Valley until a decade ago) Philadelphia Daily News.

Brent Bozell writes:

It's a shame the roles in this interview couldn't be switched. Palin could have turned around and asked Gibson about his qualifications to lecture our commanders, whether he thinks any war, anywhere, is ever worthwhile. In 2003, he told Larry King "We used to have a little framed sign hanging in our bedroom, my wife and I, that said, 'War is not good for children and other living things,' and I believe that."

Wow--who knew that underneath his size 12 Florsheim double-soled wingtips, Charlie Gibson was such an unrepentant hippie?

Roger L. Simon pens an "Open Letter to My Fellow Jews: The Democratic Party is not your religion (or anybody's)."

Joel Stein in the L.A. Times in January of 2006:

I DON'T SUPPORT our troops. . . . But when you volunteer for the U.S. military, you pretty much know you're not going to be fending off invasions from Mexico and Canada. So you're willingly signing up to be a fighting tool of American imperialism, for better or worse. Sometimes you get lucky and get to fight ethnic genocide in Kosovo, but other times it's Vietnam.

Today in the Boston Globe, Steve Almond writes, "I have an ugly confession to make: I don't support the troops - at least not unconditionally":

PERHAPS the most insidious byproduct of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has been a reflexive sanctification of the military. To put this in bumper stickerese: Support the Troops.

Well, I have an ugly confession to make: I don't support the troops - at least not unconditionally. When somebody tells me they serve in the military, my first impulse isn't to say, "Thank you for your service!" like those insufferable chickenhawks on talk radio.

My first impulse is to say, "I'm sorry to hear that." Because I am. I'm sorry to know that the person I'm talking to might someday be maimed or killed on the job, or might someday kill someone else. Or refuel a plane that drops bombs on buildings.

I can't see how anyone who calls himself or herself Christian - or human, for that matter - wouldn't be sorry.

The fact that we have an army, that we need an army, is inherently tragic. It's an admission that our species is still ruled by fear and aggression.

As Jeanne Kirkpatrick once said:

Reflecting at a 2002 conference on her early career as a socialist, she said it had been "relatively short." As she read the works of various socialists, she said, "I came to the conclusion that almost all of them, including my grandfather, were engaged in an effort to change human nature. The more I thought about it, the more I thought this was not likely to be a successful effort."

"Human nature has no history", but then neither does much of the left. I'd call it a draw, but that might be using language that's too militaristic for some.

Related: The above "Human nature has no history" quote comes from Professor Glenn Loury, whom you can see discussing Obama and feminism in this new Bloggingheads TV interview.

Jay Nordlinger explores "the sheer hatred that Palin has aroused":

"I am almost 60 and come from Massachusetts. In all my years, I have never seen anything like this, and don't want to see it ever again. I have a friend who is both feminist and left-leaning. I asked her why they hate Palin so much. She said, 'Because she's had it all: family, career. And she did it without a man like Bill Clinton helping her. She did it on her own.'"

I have said it before: Hillary Clinton's husband was president of the United States. Sarah Palin's works the night shift in an oil field. Who is the feminist hero? Bien sûr.

I myself have a tale to relate. An episode left me kind of shaken, honestly. Last week, I was talking to a friend of mine -- a very warm and humane woman. We've been friends for years. I had been away, and we hadn't talked politics -- but then, we never do. We never had. She's a liberal, of course -- virtually everyone here in NYC is. And I never, ever bring up politics (with pretty much anyone -- not worth the trouble) (and, of course, I do it professionally).

But she said to me, out of the blue, "What do you think of Sarah Palin?" And while I was drawing breath to answer, she said, "I hate her."

That kind of took my breath away -- because this friend of mine is no hater. But she said it with firm, horrible conviction. She said it with true emotion in her eyes. Frankly, I was too taken aback to reply, other than to say, "Well, my feeling is the exact opposite."

I can see how you might disagree with Governor Palin -- she's a conservative, after all. I can see how you might find her unprepared even for the vice-presidency. But hate? Hate a woman who rose from a modest background to be governor of her state? Who is obviously a warm, civic-minded, talented mother of five?

Hate?

It must be abortion, religion, and culture. If she were pro-choice, went to a mainline church (only on Christmas and Easter), and didn't hunt, she'd be okay. At least less attacked. But then, she wouldn't be herself, would she?

The advertising tagline for George Clooney's 2005 Good Night And Good Luck, one of those exceedingly rare Hollywood movies about McCarthyism, was "We will not walk in fear of one another"--but there are always exceptions.

Meanwhile, Michelle Malkin notes, "The Associated Press refuses to assist federal investigators trying to find the hacker who broke into Sarah Palin's private e-mail account"; which of course recalls this seminal moment in transnational journalistic ethics--or the lack thereof.

With one and a half seasons behind it, and its themes better understood than some of the crabbier initial reviews anticipated, Kyle Smith weighs in on AMC's Mad Men:

When Pete (Vincent Kartheiser), a ferrety young colleague of Don's, finds out Don's secret and informs the head of the firm, he is angrily brushed off. It's Pete who comes off looking bad, just as it seems unwise for Don's wife Betty (the fetching January Jones) to talk to a shrink. Mad Men's rule is omerta in a station wagon, La Cosa Waspa.

Perhaps Don's finest hour came in Season One when his friend and boss Roger, felled by a heart attack during an office tryst, was being carried to an ambulance. Half-conscious, Roger moaned his new inamorata's name. Don grabbed him by the hair, slapped him in the chops and said, "Mona. Your wife's name is Mona." Can men ever have been this manly?

When Don meets beatniks, he spends the evening getting high with his suit jacket on. Yet it's not the fraudulent philanderer but the beardy coffeehouse revolutionaries who are ridiculous. Ironic or no, the show makes the case for repression that has seldom been heard in popular culture since Gary Cooper hung up his spurs: straighten your tie, stash your problems in the bottom drawer, pour another gimlet and carry on.

Along with Robert Morse's classic "A man is whatever room he is in" motif, the scene with the beatniks that Kyle mentions above ends on one of my favorite Mad Men moments.

Draper starts to leave in a huff. (If he waited a minute and a huff he'd be Groucho Marx of course.) But the cops are investigating a domestic disturbance in the apartment next door, and the beatniks (and Draper, if I recall correctly) have consumed a fair amount of cannabis and other substances that only way-out bebop cats like Gil Evans and Dave Brubeck would ever touch. So one of the proto-hippies tells Don that he can't leave--the cops are still outside.

"You can't", Draper tersely replies, putting on his suit jacket, buttoning the collar of his Paul Stuart shirt, straightening his narrow New Frontier tie, and donning his Lock & Co. Trilby.

For those of us who put our emphasis on the bourgeois half of David Brooks' Bobos In Paradise equation, it was a tremendous little moment.

Jonah Goldberg writes, "Whether or not Sarah Palin helps John McCain win the election, her greatest work may already be behind her. She's exposed the feminist con job":

On Tuesday, Salon ran one article calling Palin a dominatrix ("a whip-wielding mistress") and another labeling her a sexually repressed fundamentalist no different from the Muslim fanatics and terrorists of Hamas. Make up your minds, folks. Is she a seductress or a sex-a-phobe?

But this any-weapon-near-to-hand approach is an obvious sign of how scared the Palin-o-phobes are.

Gloria Steinem, the grand mufti of feminism, issued a fatwa anathematizing Palin. A National Organization for Women spokeswoman proclaimed Palin more of a man than a woman. Wendy Doniger, a feminist academic at the University of Chicago, writes of Palin in Newsweek: "Her greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman."

It's funny. The left has been whining about having their patriotism questioned for so long it feels like they started griping in the Mesozoic era. Feminists have argued for decades that womanhood is an existential and metaphysical state of enlightenment. But they have no problem questioning whether women they hate are really women at all.

Since we know from basic science that Palin is a woman -- she's had five kids, for starters -- it's clear that these ideological thugs aren't talking about actual, you know, facts. They're doing what people of totalitarian mind-sets always do: bully heretics, demonize enemies, whip the troops into line.

Hey, somebody should write a book about that!

Of course, Palin has unhinged (hey, somebody should write a book called that!) the rest of the left as well. Roger Ebert's meltdown earlier this week is a classic of the genre:

Palin is a shallow, chirpy person with those vaguely alarming eyeglasses. Now her fans all want a pair. Remember back when women wore glasses that departed their ears in plastic swoops and swirls? My theory is, anyone who wears glasses that look weird is telling me something I don't want to know.

Remember all that stuff from the left in the late 1990s about tolerance and diversity and multiculturalism and "think different?" Pretty amazing how it all goes out the window when "The Shadow" appears.

(Ebert has apparently since broken out the Liquid Paper to whitewash his gaffe, but thanks to the Blogosphere, that genie's out of the bubble.)

Update: Orrin Judd writes, "Because they are materialists, the Left thinks elitism is an excess of material things, so they don't even realize that it is how divorced from American culture they are that has always hindered them."

Meanwhile, Tiger Hawk writes, "If John McCain is as lucky as he is smart, the lefty pundits and bloggers -- for example -- and their allies in the press will keeping hammering Saracuda all the way to Halloween."

After my appearance on PJTV this afternoon, I heard Glenn Reynolds discussing this New York Times story with PJTV host Allen Barton and Maximum Pajamahadeen Roger L. Simon:

Ever since he was tried and convicted with Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on espionage charges in 1951, Morton Sobell has maintained his innocence.

Until now. In an interview on Thursday, Mr. Sobell, who served nearly 19 years in Alcatraz and other federal prisons, admitted for the first time that he had been a Soviet spy. And he implicated his fellow defendant, Julius Rosenberg, in a conspiracy that delivered to the Soviets vital classified military information and what the American government claimed was the secret to the atomic bomb.

Glenn added, "Before my time, but I believe that all right-thinking people believed the Rosenbergs innocent back then. I wonder what other beliefs, widely shared among right-thinking people today, will turn out to be similarly wrong in 50 years?"

Back in late 2005, when there a news item that Upton Sinclair hid knowledge of Sacco and Vanzetti's guilt in order to do his antediluvian Free Mumia impersonation (as I wrote back then), Jonah Goldberg noted:

So which leftwing martyr/icon is left? Sacco & Vanzetti were guilty. The Rosenbergs: guilty. Hiss: guilty. Margaret Mead: liar. Rigoberta Menchu: liar. Duranty: liar. Kinsey: liar. Upton Sinclair: liar. I.F. Stone isn't looking too hot (lied about America often, loved totalitarians, might have taken KGB money).

Martin Luther King Jr. -- small flaws aside -- is still looking good. But Bobby Kennedy is only a useful leftwing hero if you don't look too closely. Ditto JFK. Jesse Jackson's going to look awful to historians.

Who's left?

Hey, there's always John Kerry and Bill Ayers.

I just recorded a brief segment for PJTV's September 11th show. I had tons of notes prepared, since I didn't know how long I'd be on, so I'm reprinting some of them here in the form of a blog post on 9/11's impact on the culture war:

9/11 changed the culture quite remarkably, but it did so in ways that may not have been expected. Back in 2004, the great Charles Krauthammer wrote a piece in which he referred to "the Pressure Cooker Theory of Hydraulic Release":

The loathing goes far beyond the politicians. Liberals as a body have gone quite around the twist. I count one all-star rock tour, three movies, four current theatrical productions and five best sellers (a full one-third of the New York Times list) variously devoted to ridiculing, denigrating, attacking and devaluing this president, this presidency and all who might, God knows why, support it.

How to explain? With apologies to Dr. Freud, I propose the Pressure Cooker Theory of Hydraulic Release.

The hostility, resentment, envy and disdain, all superheated in Florida, were not permitted their natural discharge. Came 9/11 and a lid was forced down. How can you seek revenge for a stolen election by a nitwit usurper when all of a sudden we are at war and the people, bless them, are rallying around the flag and hailing the commander in chief? With Bush riding high in the polls, with flags flying from pickup trucks (many of the flags, according to Howard Dean, Confederate), the president was untouchable.

The Democrats fell unnaturally silent. For two long, agonizing years, they had to stifle and suppress. It was the most serious case of repression since Freud's Anna O. went limp. The forced deference nearly killed them. And then, providentially, they were saved. The clouds parted and bad news rained down like manna: WMDs, Abu Ghraib, Richard Clarke, Paul O'Neill, Joe Wilson and, most important, continued fighting in Iraq.

Stripped of his halo, the president's ratings went down. The spell was broken. He was finally once again human and vulnerable. With immense relief, the critics let loose.

The result has been volcanic. The subject of one prominent new novel is whether George W. Bush should be assassinated. This is all quite unhinged. Good God. What if Bush is re-elected? If they lose to him again, Democrats will need more than just consolation. They'll need therapy.

The pressure was released during the 2004 election cycle, but when John Kerry lost, it mutated further into a virulent strain that was only fully released after Katrina. As Mickey Kaus very presciently noted, Hurricane Katrina gave the media a way to talk about Iraq without talking about Iraq:

I'm not saying Bush and the Feds don't clearly deserve major grief for not getting today's National Guard aid convoy into downtown New Orleans a couple of days earlier. Some people are probably dead as a result. But the commentators on Washington Week in Review seemed a little too happy when proclaiming this a "debacle" that will damage Bush politically for a long, long time. And I don't think they were happy just because Bush has suffered a blow. I think it's because the hurricane and its New Orleans aftermath at least seemed to solve a big problem for anti-Bush commentators and politicians. Previously, they couldn't grouse about the Iraq War without seeming defeatist (and anti-liberationist and maybe even selfishly isolationist). Even the Clintons never figured a way out of that trap. But nature has succeded where they failed; it has opened up a way out, at least temporarily. Now Bush opponents can argue, in some cases quite accurately, that without the Iraq deployment aid would have gotten to New Orleans faster. And 'if we can [tk] in Iraq, why can't we [tk] in our own South?' They aren't being selfish. They are just asserting priorities! In short, Katrina gives them a way to talk about Iraq without talking about Iraq. No wonder Gwen Ifill smiles the "inner smile."

In a very real sense, 9/11 also created the Blogosphere and the idea of partisan journalism--and I don't mean that in any sort of pejorative sense--which began with Matt Drudge and Fox News in the mid 1990s, and Rush Limbaugh's national radio show nearly a decade earlier, and began to become an increasingly accepted element outside of the conservative media.

In 2004, the New York Times admitted what was obvious to all concerned--that it was a liberal publication; and a year prior, Eason Jordan, then of CNN, admitted that his network had shilled for Saddam Hussein. The pressure cooker that Krauthammer refers to led directly to some incredibly sloppy thinking, such as Dan Rather's MemoGate at CBS, and the rise of MSNBC, an openly hyper-partisan division of an otherwise staid establishment liberal news operation like NBC. This morning, MSNBC nobly ran the videotapes of The Today Showfrom 9/11, when all was chaos and uncertainty except for the two towers and the Pentagon being hit. But yesterday, as Kathryn Jean Lopez noted, Keith Olbermann of MSNBC said:

The television networks were told that the Convention would pause, early in the evening, when children could still be watching, for a 9/11 Tribute, and they were encouraged to broadcast it.

What we got was not a tribute to the dead of 9/11, nor even a tribute to the responders, or the singularity of purpose we all felt. The Republicans gave us sociological pornography, a virtual snuff film.

In addition to hyper-partisanship, 9/11, also fueled (if you'll pardon the carboncentric pun) the rise of environmentalism in the media. Julia Gorin, whom I've interviewed for PJM Political on XM, had a piece in the Christian Science Monitor in 2006 in which she talked about environmentalism as a sort of Freudian displacement for the War On Terror:

Tough language is borrowed from the war on terror and applied to the war on weather. "I really consider this a national security issue," says celebrity activist and "An Inconvenient Truth" producer Laurie David. "Truth" star Al Gore calls global warming a "planetary emergency." Bill Clinton's first worry is climate change: "It's the only thing that I believe has the power to fundamentally end the march of civilization as we know it."

Freud called it displacement. People fixate on the environment when they can't deal with real threats. Combating the climate gives nonhawks a chance to look tough. They can flex their muscle for Mother Nature, take a preemptive strike at an SUV. Forget the Patriot Act, it's Kyoto that'll save you.

That's why in 2004 we got "The Day After Tomorrow" - so we could worry about junk science that may or may not kill us in 1,000 years instead of the people who really are trying to kill us the day after tomorrow.

While the hawks among us worry about preventing the Armageddon that's coming, our modern-day hippies just want to make sure the planet is pristine when it does. In fact, the more menacing terrorism becomes, the more some people seem to worry about the weather. Scared and unsure how to fight terrorists, they confront "climate change," which only requires spending trillions of other people's dollars on something that may not need fixing or may not be fixable. No wonder some of these people chain themselves to trees - they think money grows on them.
Why are these people so worried about the environment, anyway? It's not like they're living on this planet. Speaking of which, scientists have recently discovered global warming on Mars. See that? Martians need to stop driving those darn SUVs!

Notice that the undercurrent in all the doomsday rhetoric is America as chief culprit in the axis of enviro-evil (just as it is in all the world's turmoil). Having found a warm and fuzzy cause to snuggle up against in this big, bad, scary world, the enviros pick a fight with the one guy they're not scared of: America.

Such displacement also helps to explain the conspiracy theories and "trutherism." For a very long time, ABC had no problem running someone like Rosie O'Donnell as part of their daytime programming, who in the course of five years went from publicly claiming support for President Bush in the early stages of 9/11 to literally telling ABC viewers not to trust what they had just heard on Good Morning America and other news shows.

The events of the morning of September 11, 2001 have changed the culture in ways that few could anticipate that morning, and will continue to do so, no matter who wins in November.

...By doing nothing, Cassy Fiano notes, adding that once again, the Dogpile search engine has a simple, tasteful cartoon on its homepage which does remember 9/11, and even adding the symbol that's dread by all transnationalists on Gaia's green earth, the American flag.

But hey, let's be fair. Not every day is the emotional equivalent of Walter Gropius's birthday.

Shannen Coffin writes:

It would appear that Carol Fowler was jealous of the attention her husband Don received for his God-is-smiling-on-Democrats-because-of-Hurricane-Gustav comments and wanted to say something equally stupid that would make her famous. She succeeded. Congratulations, Carol. I'm sure your apology will follow shortly hereafter.

And here it comes, right on cue--complete with the to-be-expected "I apologize to anyone who finds my comment offensive" weasel language.

Hey, it's a botched joke!

Decades ago, Orson Welles once called Citizen Kane and its use of "Rosebud" as a framing mechanism an example of "Dollar Book Freud". Bracing for the onslaught of Hurricane Sarah, Deepak Chopra channels some Dollar Book Jung, and nests a seriously clunky PC parenthetical along the way.

But what would Freud and Jung have made of this incredible admission from Smokey Joe Biden?

Jim Geraghty writes that this ABC headline "Really Belonged in The Onion":

The smears of Sarah Palin continue, as ABC News writes, "Obama Takes on Obama-like Phenomenon."

Compare her to a pig. Call her election "a step back for women." But calling her "an Obama-like phenomenon" is way out of line.

Unlike the transnational Obama, as long as Hurricane Sarah doesn't play well in anti-free speech Canada, Old Europe and amongst other overseas socialists, she's safe.

While PDS may be running rampant in the US, it takes Saudi Arabia to really push it to its ironic zenith:

Here's an irony to start your Iftar meal tonight: Saudi Arabia, where a woman must have permission from a male relative or her husband before traveling, will nevertheless run a Gloria Steinem column in its main English-language daily about the sufferings of American women (and their impending doom if Sarah Palin makes it to the White House).

But then, feminism has stopped at the American border since 9/11/01--and sometimes not even there.

"Journalists are not going to change their coverage because of what John McCain says. They are going to change their coverage because of what Jon Stewart says."

Obama really grinds the gears of the Super Gaffe-O-Matic '76 with this one:

"You know, you can put lipstick on a pig," Obama said, "but it's still a pig."

But hey, he still hasn't called her sweetie!

Meanwhile, Camile Paglia writes:

The witch-trial hysteria of the past two incendiary weeks unfortunately reveals a disturbing trend in the Democratic Party, which has worsened over the past decade. Democrats are quick to attack the religiosity of Republicans, but Democratic ideology itself seems to have become a secular substitute religion. Since when did Democrats become so judgmental and intolerant?

Gosh--I don't know. Let's ask Clarence Thomas and Robert Bork if they know how far this trend goes back...

Neo-Neocon writes that a big reason why the left hates Sarah Palin is that "she's a woman from the wrong side of the tracks. Or at least, that's the way she's been perceived":

Cries that the Democrats have engaged in sexism towards Palin are not misplaced. Palin is also hated for her social conservatism--even by feminists, who acknowledge she's a woman, but a woman from the wrong side of the issues.

But perhaps even more important to many liberals is that she's a woman from the wrong side of the tracks. Or at least, that's the way she's been perceived.

Forget that she's a college graduate, with a father who was a teacher. She went to the wrong college--or colleges. She's a redneck, even if she's from the far North where the sun hardly shines for half the year. She's a redneck at heart, don't you see, with the "mess" of a pregnant daughter and five children herself. How very gross.

She hunts. She fishes. Hubby's a Marlboro man, minus the cigarettes. She's a working woman but not an oppressed "worker." She probably even shops at Walmart and listens to country music.

I'm old enough to remember when a working class hero was something to be.

That of course is Tammy Bruce's trademark slogan, but it also applies perfectly well to another woman in politics. So it's not entirely surprising to find Tammy making "a feminist's argument for McCain's VP":

On the day McCain announced her selection as his running mate, Palin thanked Clinton and Ferraro for blazing her trail. A day later, Ferraro noted her shock at Palin's comment. You see, none of her peers, no one, had ever publicly thanked her in the 24 years since her historic run for the White House. Ferraro has since refused to divulge for whom she's voting. Many more now are realizing that it does indeed take a woman - who happens to be a Republican named Sarah Palin.

Read the whole thing, which ran in the San Francisco Chronicle, a paper and a town not exactly known for celebrating a wide diversity of opinions. As Tammy noted when she emailed the link, "If the comments section for their online version is any indication my argument has upset a few on the left." But then, it doesn't take much to do that these days. (These days being the last forty years or so...)

Albert Brooks: "Is this the new way for women to break the glass ceiling? To have their daughters throw their babies at it?"

Last October, there was an interesting, if sadly brief, discussion in the Blogosphere which attempted to define the culture war, the Red/Blue, Right/Left, conservative/Bobos Divide as a "Cold Civil War." Over at PJ HQ, Phyllis Chesler ponders if the coming election will cause its temperature to increase in a rather dramatic fashion.

Late last month, the Whiskey's Place blog wrote:

Much has been made by any number of commenters, from Steve Sailer, to John Derbyshire, to Spengler, to Mark Steyn, to in particular, Ed Driscoll, about the pathetic state of popular culture. Blogger Ed Driscoll in particular is fond of reminding us that in popular culture it's always 1968.

Well, to be fair, old media certainly does a pretty good job itself in that department. This NPR article on the Academy Awards of forty years ago has the usual boomer spin on the era, highlighted in this excerpt from Mark Harris, the author of Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of a New Hollywood, talking about The Graduate:

The scenario: Upper-middle-class L.A.; disaffected college grad (played by Dustin Hoffman) is seduced by older woman (Anne Bancroft), falls in love with her daughter (Katharine Ross).

That's not so unusual, Harris says: The idea plays like a mid-'60s sex comedy. But what even the actors didn't realize until shooting began was that the perspective would come from Dustin Hoffman's character.

"Suddenly," says Harris, "the camera head shifted, and this was looking at the Generation Gap from the other side -- from the young side."

Young people -- an audience Hollywood undervalued at the time -- flooded theaters around the country.

"And that's who movies got made for after that," says Harris.

I'll second the emotion that The Graduate is a great picture. But if it indeed opened up the youth market, a lot of grownups decided concurrently right around that same time to check out of the theaters, as Michael Medved (whom I met at The Best Party Ever, just to shamelessly namedrop) wrote when Jack Valenti retired from his role as the long-time president of the Motion Picture Association of America:

Despite his unquestioned eloquence, elegance and charm, Mr. Valenti presided over history's most disastrous decline in the audience for feature films. In 1965, the year before he left the Johnson administration to assume his plush position as chief mouthpiece for the entertainment industry, 44 million Americans went out to the movies every week. A mere four years later, that number had collapsed to 17.5 million.

In other words, some potent, puzzling force drove more than half of the nation's film fans to break the habit of movie going. That same mystical power served to suppress attendance for the next 20 years, with figures on ticket sales remaining flat until they began to rise moderately in the 1990s, reflecting the construction of thousands of new movie screens at multiplex theaters. Most recent figures (from 2003) show weekly attendance today at just over 30 million. As a percentage of the nation's population, however, the numbers on movie attendance remain only slightly improved from the devastating trough of 1970 (10.3% vs. 8.6%) and still vastly lower than the robust box-office years of 1965 (44%) or 1960 (45%).

It's amazing how many movie professionals remain altogether unaware of this long-term decline in film going--or, when informed about the depressing but undeniable figures, wrongly attribute them to the advent of television. TV sets began appearing in living rooms in the late 1940s, of course, and by the time the audience for feature films started its sharpest slump in 1966, the tube had already arrived in nearly all American homes.

Hollywood originally panicked that television would destroy its business by offering for free the sort of entertainment that cost money at the local Bijou, but during the fateful 10 years of the primary TV invasion (1950-60) the audience actually declined 34%, compared with a 60% decline in those nightmarish four years of the late '60s. In later decades, the arrival of the VCR, cable TV and DVD actually corresponded to modest increases in the motion-picture audience, so no theory centered on technological alternatives can solve the mystery of the missing moviegoers.

So what happened 38 years ago to drive millions of Americans away from movie theaters? In 1966, Mr. Valenti's Motion Picture Association of America quietly dropped its enforcement of the restrictive old Production Code that Hollywood studios had imposed on themselves since 1930. Then, on Nov. 1, 1968, Mr. Valenti introduced the "voluntary rating system" that continues in force to this day. As he proudly declared in his farewell address to the industry on March 23 of this year: "The rating system freed the screen, allowing movie-makers to tell their stories as they choose to tell them." That new freedom allowed the profligate use of obscene language strictly banned under the Production Code, the inclusion of graphic sex scenes along with near total nudity and, more vivid, sadistic violence than previously permitted in Hollywood movies.

The resulting changes in the industry showed up with startling clarity at the Academy Awards. In 1965, with the Production Code still in force, "The Sound of Music" won Best Picture of the Year; in 1969, under the new rating system, an X-rated offering about a homeless male hustler, "Midnight Cowboy," earned the Oscar as the year's finest film. Most critics, then as now, welcomed the aesthetic shift and hailed the fresh latitude in cinematic expression, but the audience voted with its feet.

And wouldn't return until Hollywood returned to making apolitical family-safe blockbusters a decade later; as I wrote a couple of years ago:

I have to laugh at the tunnel-vision of the filmmakers of the 1970s (and to a certain extent, Biskind himself, as he chronicles their rise and cocaine-laden fall). Sandwiched between blockbuster crowd-favorites of the 1960s such as Dr. Zhivago, Lawrence of Arabia, The Sound of Music and The Dirty Dozen and then the Star Wars, Star Trek and Indiana Jones movies (not to mention the bulk of Steven Spielberg's first twenty years of filmmaking), they don't understand what an aberration their late '60s to early '70s films were. Much as I love some of the darker movies of the 1970s (such as M*A*S*H, Taxi Driver, Chinatown, and The Conversation), while all of these films were critics' darlings, its always been popcorn fare that's kept Hollywood afloat.

How a slate of leftwing political movies such as Good Night and Good Luck, Syriana, The Constant Gardener, The Interpreter, and Munich could be greenlighted for release last year is beyond me, unless Hollywood in mid-2004 assumed that a Kerry win was inevitable, or after he lost, decided to put the celluloid shiv into Red State audiences. Why anyone thought these films would make money is utterly astonishing. But, to build on Michael Barone's recent op-ed, the Hollywood left is currently as stuck in the 1970s as liberal politicians are.

Not to mention their favorite radio network.

(Back in CA after an incredible week--see above shameless namedropping--regular blogging to resume tomorrow.)

Mark Steyn writes:

Golly. These days, NOW seems to have as narrow and proscriptive a view of what women are permitted to be as any old 1950s sitcom dad.

Why not? They rolled over for Bill Clinton's antics, which were right out of a plot from Mad Men, minus the veneer of gentlemanly courtliness still expected from executives back then.

Amy Holmes writes:

So, let's get this straight. They didn't choose her and her 18 million voters to put on the ticket. They gave the VP spot to Joe Biden. But now that Sarah Palin has arrived on the political scene, they're promoting Hillary as the female answer to the Republican VP nominee. Awkward, to say the least.

And as one female democratic strategist tells me, don't think that Hillary hasn't noticed.

During last Friday's round table discussion with Austin Bay, Glenn Reynolds noted that while Bill Clinton has reluctantly agreed to flak for Barack, all it would take would be a slight turn of the phrase from Bill for his selling efforts to backfire. While Hillary can't sell the postmodern treacle as well as Bill can, she wouldn't be above a little sabotage herself.

Tim Cavanaugh of Reason magazine writes:

If even Bill Clinton, the gold standard of "third way" politicians, is trading in classic Democratic Party populism, it really is over for the what used to be called New Democrats.

Which is bad news for everyone, as the Democrats shifting further left in the post-Clinton years shifts the American political center of gravity with them. Read the whole thing.

Kathy Shaidle writes, "I'm not a big Sean Hannity fan but... ":

He is spanking stupid old Mike Dukakis right now.

Dukakis came on acting like a tough guy -- I must say, it's the first time I've ever seen somebody try to swagger while sitting in a chair -- and ended up fumbling and mumbling when Hannity asked him to name some of Barack Obama's specific accomplishments.

Dukakis got so agitated his ear piece fell out, and he was reduced to parroting (just as vague) answers that Alan Colmes was shamelessly feeding him.

It's obvious that Dukakis spent all day, maybe all week, practising a tough guy act for this appearance: "Ha, not only would I kick my wife's rapist's ass, I'd do it IN A TANK!"

After less than five minutes, Hannity had him squirming, smirking and choking.

Brutal.

Heh.

Watch the Massachusetts Miracle man right here:

Iowahawk files a satiric dispatch from Denver:

With new polls showing Barack Obama's once-commanding lead over John McCain all but evaporated, the Obama campaign announced today it has begun deploying its vast volunteer army of downtown hipster douchebags to help reconnect the presumptive Democratic candidate with middle-American voters.

"Unlike Iraq, this is one surge that is actually going to work," said Obama campaign manager David Axlerod.

Sources within the campaign say the new strategy was prompted by recent national poll trends indicating McCain pulling even with, and in some instances even overtaking, Obama. More troubling for the campaign were internal tracking polls that show the candidate losing significant ground in key Midwestern, Southern and Western battleground states. As the numbers dropped, some within the campaign were left in stunned disbelief.

"It really didn't make sense," said Carly Voorhees, an East Village experimental performance poet, Cooper Union graduate student and member of Obama's 600-expert foreign policy team. "We knew in theory there were a handful of stump-toothed biblebillies and neocon dead-enders out there, but by all rights we should have had at least a 60%-75% lead. Even after Barack threw that awesome victory rave in Germany, the numbers kept deteriorating."

"At first we were stumped," she added. "Then it dawned on us -- McSame's subliminal attack ads were stoking the deep-rooted, latent racism of white middle America. We needed to warn these uneducated simpletons that McSame was exploiting their superstitions and genetic bigotry. The big question was -- how?"

Read on gentle reader, read on...

Nancy Pelosi's natural gas is flowing freely:

For those who thought this was just another election, Nancy Pelosi says to wake up: the planet is at stake in the choice between Barack Obama and John McCain.

"We've got a planet to save. Nothing less is at stake other than civilization as we know it today," the California Democrat and speaker of the House told reporters Saturday afternoon in assessing the election and the nominating convention taking place here over the week.

She said Mr. Obama's new running mate, Sen Joseph R. Biden Jr., was a good choice because he melds Washington know-how with an outsider's view. She pointed to his daily commute by train from his home in Delaware to Washington as evidence he is still a man of the people. [Fair enough: the people are paying for it--Ed]

"Joe Biden is the all-American boy," she said in a luncheon for reporters sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor.

"The All-American boy?" That's a pretty slanderous attack on Joe coming from the current leader of the party of transnationalism.

Well, I thought he was Don Draper (minus the hitch in Korea); Karl Rove thought he was "the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by."

And now Clark S. Judge, managing director of the White House Writers Group and was former Reagan speechwriter dubs him "Barack Gatsby":

Fitzgerald writes of how James Gatz swims out to a Great Lakes yacht, casts off his past and turns himself into Jay Gatsby, a very different man from a very different place. Barack Obama is such a figure. He didn't swim out to a boat. He went to Chicago and there, it seems, he reinvented himself. Much has been written of how he has cast off parts of his past - the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the one-time Capitol and Pentagon bomber Bill Ayers. In and of itself, walking away from problematic associates is not unusual for politicians. But his handling of Wright and Ayers is part of a larger pattern. Across the entire presentation of his personal history, he has nipped here and tucked there until the man in the camera looks entirely different from the man inside.

If, despite his populist rhetoric, people have - as polls tell us they do - a discordant sense of the elite in Barack Obama, it is because, while he may not own a bunch of houses, that's how he grew up and that's what he is.

But even if we're not sure of Obama's identity, as Ed Morrissey writes, "Identity politics -- it's what's for dinner in Denver", complete with Barack Obama's political mentor being accused "by several witnesses of calling a black Hillary Clinton delegate an 'Uncle Tom'", according to Ed.

Ace of Spades earlier today:

If you've talked to Hillary supporters, you know that they're the world's most recent and most enthusiastic converts to the Anti-Media Bias Party. It's almost funny how life-long Democrats are now sputtering angrily about media bias, the way we've been fuming for most of our lives. They know damn well the media propped up Obama while working to take down their girl.

Which is why Ed Rendell sounds much more like Brent Bozell in this Politico article:

Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell was supposed to give "closing remarks" during this afternoon's Shorenstein Center-sponsored panel discussion with all three Sunday show moderators -- NBC's Tom Brokaw, ABC's George Stephanopoulous and CBS's Bob Schieffer -- but instead, he opened up a can of worms about bias in 2008 election coverage

"Ladies and gentleman, the coverage of Barack Obama was embarrassing," said Rendell, in the ballroom at Denver's Brown Palace Hotel. "It was embarrassing."

Rendell, an ardent Hillary Rodham Clinton supporter during the primaries, now backs Obama in the general election. Brokaw and Rendell began debating campaign coverage, including the on-air comments by Lee Cowan, and when MSNBC came up, Rendell went after the cable network.

"MSNBC was the official network of the Obama campaign," Rendell said, who called their coverage "absolutely embarrassing."

Chris Matthews, Rendell said, "loses his impartiality when he talks about the Clintons."

Ed must be the last guy on the planet who can use the words "impartiality" and "Chris Matthews" in the same sentence and still keep a straight face.

As I noted on Friday, I'm not sure if Jennifer Rubin's description of Joe Biden, whom she described as "old school as they come and as familiar as a worn-out shoe", was an intentional reference to Adlai Stevenson--a similarly follicle-challenged Democratic senator who 50 years ago would have thought his IQ even bigger than Joe's--even if he couldn't remember to have a campaign aide pick him up a new pair of Florsheims.

Likely it isn't, if only because it's an unfair comparison to Stevenson. Peter Seller's President Muffley, clearly a Stevensonian parody, was, after all, the nominal adult voice of reason in the midst of the chaos of Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. But this description from Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism of the late 1950s, complete with its own Stevenson cameo is a reminder that while Obama was originally packaged as some sort of new and novel politician, while conservatives are thought to be old-fashioned, very little actually changes amongst so-called "progressives" and their political goals:

Kennedy's political fortune also stemmed from the fact that he seemed to be riding the waves of history. Once again, the forces of progressivism had been returned to power after a period of peace and prosperity. And despite the unprecedented wealth and leisure of the postwar years--indeed largely because of them--there was a palpable desire among the ambitious, the upwardly mobile, the intellectuals, and, above all, the activists of the progressive-liberal establishment to get "America moving again." "More than anything else", the conservative publisher Henry Luce wrote in 1960, "the people of America are asking for a clear sense of National Purpose."

* * *

Perhaps the best expression of this bipartisan-elite clamor for "social change" came in a series of essays on "the national purpose" co-published by the New York Times and Life magazine. Adlai Stevenson wrote that Americans needed to transcend the "mystique of privacy" and turn away from the "supermarket temple." Charles F. Darlington, a leading corporate executive and former State Department official, explained that America needed to recapture the collective spirit of national purpose it had enjoyed "during parts of the Administrations of Woodrow Wilson and the two Roosevelts" (you can guess which parts). Above all, a reborn America needed to stop seeing itself as a nation of individuals. Once again, "collective action" was the cure. Darlington's call for a "decreased emphasis on private enterprise" amounted to a revival of the corporatism and war socialism of the Wilson and Roosevelt administrations.

"We left corporate America, which is a lot of what we're asking young people to do--don't go into corporate America."

Robert Stacy McCain flashes back to Hunter S. Thompson, McGovern-Eagleton, and the rest of the bad old days of 1972. Flashforward to 2008; Tommy Chong, who certainly knows a thing or two about both the '70s and bad flashbacks, is not a happy man:

"Check out the people you're voting for.... "For instance, Joseph Biden comes off as a liberal Democrat, but he's the one who authored the bill that put me in jail. He wrote the law against shipping drug paraphernalia through the mail - which could be anything from a pipe to a clip or cigarette papers."

Wow--"Liberal" Democrats turn out to be rigid puritans--that never happens these days!

And speaking of the neo-puritanical Biden, he's no great fan of the Second Amendment, needless to say.

Update: One of Charles Johnson's readers also has a pretty amazing '70s flashback.

It's official, according to AP, who's reporting, "Obama picks Biden for veep":

Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware is Barack Obama's pick as vice presidential running mate, The Associated Press has learned.

Biden, 65, is a veteran of more than three decades in the Senate, and one of his party's leading experts on foreign policy, an area in which polls indicate Obama needs help in his race against Republican rival John McCain.

The official who spoke did so on condition of anonymity, saying they did not want to pre-empt a text-message announcement the Obama campaign promised for Saturday morning.

A recollection from Clarence Thomas' autobiography sheds some light on the duplicity of Biden the political hack. Meanwhile, Patrick Rufini has YouTube clips of Biden the gaffe machine: "Joe Biden vs. Joe Biden's Mouth", and Biden's non-gaffes could also come back to haunt him, as Jim Geraghty reminds us of those "'Just Words' That Joe Biden Would Like To Forget."

More confirmation from CNN: "Sen. Barack Obama has picked Delaware Sen. Joe Biden to be his running mate, multiple Democratic sources tell CNN"; Hot Air adds, "so much for texting".

My immediate take? It's such an offbeat choice that I'm reminded of this classic Seinfeld episode.

Exurban League's immediate take? Brutal.

Update: I was going to Google around for one my favorite descriptions of Biden's rhetorical excess from Jonah Goldberg, but fortunately, Jonah linked to it himself:

Biden has a not unrare condition in which the gear box that normally regulates the speed of your mouth has been ground down to a nub and so his mouth can rev at great speeds heedless of where his brain intends to steer it. Those flashes from his enormous teeth are really the equivalent of flashing your brights; he's saying "GET OUT OF THE WAY, I CAN'T STOP THIS THING!"

Meanwhile, over at Pajamas, Jennifer Rubin adds:

What a difference a summer makes. Barack Obama began the summer as he began the campaign: the Agent of Change. With the summer drawing to an end, he has chosen a running mate who is as old school as they come and as familiar as a worn-out shoe.

Which instantly calls to mind this image of an earlier generation's liberal senator who heard his own higher calling, and cursed with his own penchant for rhetorical excess which also caused him a fair amount of trouble.

Robert Stacy "The Other" McCain also fires up the Tardis: "Is it still too late for Obama-Eagleton?"

The thing is, Joe is old news. Very old news. And he's got no executive experience. To jerk around the national press for a full week, only to deliver Joe Biden -- this is a disappointment. Imagine the reactions of those poor saps getting their text messages: "WTF? Dude. Joe Biden?"

Earlier today, I heard Hugh Hewitt playing the bellowing trumpet-powered chorus from Jesus Christ, Superstar whenever he mentioned Obama's name. The truest of the true believers, who believe that Obama is Him--and equally infallible--will somehow rationalize the choice. Mysterious ways, indeed.

Jeff Goldstein quotes a wide swatch of David Harsanyi's great article in the Denver Post on MADD and adds:

After the Orioles won the World Series in 1983, Storm Davis, a then-20-year-old starting pitcher for the Birds, who played an integral role in Baltimore's success, could not partake in the post series champagne and beer celebration.

Mother Against Drunk Driving would likely counter such a seemingly arbitrary and incongruous segregation among teammates by noting that the ritual of celebrating with alcohol "glorifies" drinking, and so should itself be eliminated.

- And at that point, it should become clear that MADD is no longer worried about drunk driving per se, but is rather become a neoprohibitionist organization trafficking in emotional arguments to convince cowardly politicians to force change upon the culture -- "change" that has the effect of taking away individual freedom and responsibility, along with the role of parents in teaching young adults how to handle certain freedoms, in exchange for a government run mandate, complete with police powers of the state or municipality, that presumes to usurp those responsibilities by a kind of 3/5 rule on adulthood.

Exchanging white hoods for big buttons and a lot of emotional appeals merely suggests a change in rhetorical strategy from those who seek to build society to match their own personal hobby horses.

Nothing classically liberal about that -- not to mention that turning water into wine these days would likely result in 100 hours of forced community service work, an orange vest covering your flowing frock, your staff replaced by one of those pointy sticks used to pick up coffee cups and Almond Joy wrappers...

Or as James Lileks described the rapidly growing neo-puritanism yesterday, "Smoking, drinking, bacon and sex: I remember when only one of those was a sin."

Life among the new puritans: "Smoking, drinking, bacon and sex: I remember when only one of those was a sin."

As a man of the Great Indoors, air conditioning has been my life-long friend, one whose reputation I will fight long and hard to protect. But it's curious the partisan rancor it brings out in others: back in 1999, Jonah Goldberg quipped that it's responsible for Big Government:

In the 18th and 19th centuries a congressman wouldn't be caught dead in Washington during July. Well, actually, they might be caught dead, because they wore all those clothes and were so fat that they might have died while trying to get out. The British Embassy, for example, moved the entire kit and caboodle to Maine every summer.

The idea is: Ban air conditioning in Washington and you would cut the "productivity" of the government by more than a third (say from late May to late September) and return the United States to the limited government the Founders intended. D.C. is still full of members of this school of thought.

In Salon, on the other side of the political spectrum, Edward (no relation) McClelland writes, "I blame A/C for the decline of the labor movement and for decimating the Midwest's population. Mostly, I blame it for the election of George W. Bush."

And speaking of propeller-driven machines, Mayor Bloomberg spins back from the ledge, slowly:

Mayor Michael Bloomberg is backing off his suggestion to put windmills on city bridges and rooftops after newspapers mocked the idea with photo illustrations of turbines on the Brooklyn Bridge and the Empire State Building.

"There are aesthetic considerations," Bloomberg said. "No. 2, I have absolutely no idea whether that makes any sense from a scientific, from a practical point of view."

Imagine the howls of derision from the media if a Republican--or at least one who wasn't temporarily one in name only solely for electoral expediency said that.

Ed Morrissey ponders, "How many times can the DNC mention that Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) is a Jew?" in a single article?

I guess Barack Obama was right after all. This election will see dirty smears based on identity politics. He just got the party wrong. This didn't come from a blogger or an e-mail kook -- this comes from the DNC itself. In 660 words, they manage to use a derivative of the word Jew five times in attacking Cantor. They never explain why this forms such a strong theme in their opposition of Cantor, but apparently they believe that Democrats won't need an explanation to oppose Jews.

When will Barack Obama attack this real racism from his own party with the same amount of vigor that he falsely accused Republicans of engaging in it?

Addendum: Defenders of the DNC could say, "Well, hey, all of these are just quotes from newspapers like The Hill and the Picayune" -- which would be true. The DNC, however, just managed to pick five quotes that contain five references to Cantor and/or Abramoff's religion? Let's imagine the response that would erupt on the Left if the RNC did the same thing to Obama. Even Bill Clinton's single reference to Jesse Jackson's win in South Carolina got him branded as a race-card player -- and that didn't involve tying Obama to a criminal on the basis of his skin color.

Heck, we don't have to imagine this at all. Remember all the cries of "racism" when the subject of Jeremiah Wright finally aired?

The silence from the MSM on this, will of course, be deafening. On the other hand, just wait 'til Vice President Lieberman takes office...

James Lileks, whom I interviewed about AMC's Mad Men series last month for Pajamas' XM show, has some thoughts about the show in yesterday's Bleat:

I thought "Mad Men" would end up more highly regarded than "The Sopranos," and it wasn't just the late night and the well, wow factor the last episode left me with. It's the same kind of show - episodic, layered, one big arc sheltering a dozen small plots - and it also deals with a Big Subject, but there are crucial differences. That means a long "Mad Men" essay follows, so if you don't care, well, farewell! See you at buzz.mn. (And Twitter.)

Nearly everyone in "Mad Men" is a likeable character in some ways despite their flaws, and nearly everyone in "Sopranos" was mostly unlikable but redeemed for the moment by plot and dialogue. I suppose that's why the latter was lauded; there's something perverse and vicariously appealing about caring for bad guys. Aren't we naughty. But even the not-so-bad people in the Sopranos were unappealing, really; the wives were all shrews content to float along on murder money, the kids were empty shells, and the mobsters - while always fun to watch and listen to - were cruel men without qualities, only tics. Did anyone care if Christopher fell off the wagon? Anyone care about anyone, except whether they would be the Whacker or the Whackee this season? When you think about it, the grand tale of modern mobsters yearning after a bygone time when they had the nabe in their hands is a little like post-Communist block captains lamenting the end of the Soviet Union. Cry yourself a river. Put on the Sinatra and deal with it.

The show gets smaller as we get away from it, and in a way you start to feel a bit abashed for having gotten sucked in. "Mad Men" inhabits a far more interesting world, has people making an honest living, dealing with art in a quintessentially American way - through commerce - and takes place at the same time as the Soprano's good old Good Old Days - except these guys aren't stealing or hurting or killing. They don't have any good old days; these are the good days.

Well, at least until the end of this season, which is set in 1963. This was the penultimate first season episode. So it stands to reason that the crew of the good ship Sterling-Cooper are slowly drifting into one heckuva Boomer-era iceberg somewhere near the conclusion of this season's story arc.

Having read this article on New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's loony return-of-the primitive proposal to put wind turbines on top of apparently everything in Manhattan, I was about to post the usual bloggerific snark, though Rush and GlobalWarming.org have you well served in that department.

But when I looked up Bloomberg's Wikipedia page, I came across this truly bizarre passage:

Bloomberg has on numerous occasions been accused of sexually harassing men under his employment, which he has denied.[24][25] T. Dan Winger sued Mr. Bloomberg for sexual harassment, alleging that he had made explicit comments about his body and encouraged him to spend time alone with him. The lawsuit was withdrawn in 1999.[26] In 1997, a former Bloomberg L.P. employee who became pregnant while employed filed a lawsuit accusing Bloomberg of saying "Kill it!" and "great, No. 16," a reference to the number of pregnant women in the company.[24] The lawsuit was settled the same year for an undisclosed amount of money.

Somebody clearly has gone in and hacked the genders of those in that passage. "T. Dan Winger" is in all likelihood "T. Diane Winger" with a quick, err snip. I took a screen cap to record the weirdness, which will probably be reversed in the not too distant future.

Just another day at the faith-based encyclopedia.

Neo-Neocon has some thoughts on mixed marriages. "It's not the type of mix you might think", she writes. "This is a case of a woman who's a diehard Obama supporter married to a McCain guy. This sort of split isn't unusual for them; they nearly always disagree on politics." Read the whole thing, including this addendum:

I'll add that I think the death knell for a politically mixed marriage is when one partner or the other--or perhaps both--begins to consider that those on the other side are not just mistaken but are in fact evil.

Which probably happens more often than one might initially imagine, given Krauthammer's Law.

John Podhoretz argues for a hot cup of Joementum in Commentary; meanwhile Yuval Levin notes how topsy-turvy, how out-of-kilter, how utterly Koyaanisqatsi politics has become in the last eight years:

As the Obama team trots out Lincoln Chafee, Rita Hauser, and other "stalwarts" to try to suggest that even Republicans are turning to Obama, it's worth giving another thought to a very prominent fact that's so obvious we don't really think about it much: The Democratic Party's vice presidential candidate from 2000 is just about McCain's most vocal and prominent backer. Strange times.

Indeed.^TM

Assuming, as many rumors strongly indicate, that Lieberman, at a minimum, plays the role of Zell Miller at the Republican Convention, he'll be dead to Harry Reid.

Veep or Senatorial Siberia, the next several years will be provide quite a contrast for Lieberman.

Thomas Frank feverishly lets it all hang out:

The most cherished dream of conservative Washington is that liberalism can somehow be defeated, finally and irreversibly, in the way that armies are beaten and pests are exterminated. Electoral victories by Republicans are just part of the story. The larger vision is of a future in which liberalism is physically barred from the control room--of an "end of history" in which taxes and onerous regulation will never be allowed to threaten the fortunes private individuals make for themselves. This is the longing behind the former White House aide Karl Rove's talk of "permanent majority" and, 20 years previously, disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff's declaration to the Republican convention that it's "the job of all revolutions to make permanent their gains".

When I first moved to contemplate this peculiar utopian vision, I was struck by its apparent futility. What I did not understand was that beating liberal ideas was not the goal. The Washington conservatives aim to make liberalism irrelevant not by debating, but by erasing it. Building a majority coalition has always been a part of the programme, and conservatives have enjoyed remarkable success at it for more than 30 years. But winning elections was not a bid for permanence by itself. It was only a means.

The end was capturing the state, and using it to destroy liberalism as a practical alternative. The pattern was set by Margaret Thatcher, who used state power of the heaviest-handed sort to implant permanently the anti-state ideology.

"Economics are the method; the object is to change the soul," she said, echoing Stalin. In the 34 years before she became prime minister, Britain rode a see-saw of nationalisation, privatisation and renationalisation; Thatcher set out to end the game for good. Her plan for privatising council housing was designed not only to enthrone the market, but to encourage an ownership mentality and "change the soul" of an entire class of voters. When she sold off nationally owned industries, she took steps to ensure that workers received shares at below-market rates, leading hopefully to the same soul transformation. Her brutal suppression of the miners' strike in 1984 showed what now awaited those who resisted the new order. As a Business Week reporter summarised it in 1987: "She sees her mission as nothing less than eradicating Labour Party socialism as a political alternative."

That's the stuff! Every time I think that the right is just bumbling around in the dark and rapidly losing ground to the left, something like this from the other side truly warms my heart. As one of Charles Johnson's rotating metatags says, "please more print and distribute and get blessing!"

The undernews finally floats over the top, as ABC News reports, "Edwards Admits to Sexual Affair; Lied as Presidential Candidate" Lionel Hutz a liar? Say it ain't so, Homer!

John Edwards repeatedly lied during his Presidential campaign about an extra-marital affair with a novice film-maker, the former Senator admitted to ABC News today.

In an interview for broadcast tonight on Nightline, Edwards told ABC News correspondent Bob Woodruff he did have an affair with 42-year old Rielle Hunter, but said that he did not love her.

Edwards also denied he was the father of Hunter's baby girl, Frances Quinn, although the one-time Democratic Presidential candidate said he has not taken a paternity test.

Edwards said he knew he was not the father based on timing of the baby's birth on February 27, 2008. He said his affair ended too soon for him to have been the father.

So is this enough to get his speaking slot at the Denver convention reinstated, or will he still be considered toxic in a couple of weeks?

Note this element in the ABC story:

A former campaign aide, Andrew Young, has said he was the father of the child.

According to friends of Hunter, Edwards met her at a New York city bar in 2006. His political action committee later paid her $114,000 to produce campaign website documentaries despite her lack of experience.

Edwards said the affair began during the campaign after she was hired. Hunter traveled with Edwards around the country and to Africa.

Edwards said his wife, Elizabeth, and others in his family became aware of the affair in 2006.

Edwards made a point of telling Woodruff that his wife's cancer was in remission when he began the affair with Hunter. Elizabeth Edwards has since been diagnosed with an incurable form of the disease.

When the National Enquirer first reported the alleged Edwards-Hunter affair last October 11, Edwards, his campaign staff and Hunter vociferously denounced the report.

"The story is false, it's completely untrue, it's ridiculous," Edwards told reporters then.

He repeated his denials just two weeks ago.

Edwards today admitted the National Enquirer was correct when it reported he had visited Hunter at the Beverly Hills Hilton last month.

At this point, the spin that currently puts the story in the best possible light for Edwards is that, as Allah writes, "Rielle Hunter is his lover--but the kid is not his son. Er, daughter." And as the ABC article notes, "A former campaign aide, Andrew Young, has said he was the father of the child."

This sounds more like behavior more at home with a rock group on tour passing a favored groupie from musician to musician than (presumed) adults trying to position their man to run for the most powerful office in the land.

Mickey Kaus will--very safe to say--have more on this story; for our interview last week with Mickey on XM Satellite Radio, click here.

In England's Times Online, Alice Thomson writes:

Julie Burchill can't stand them. According to her new book, Not in my Name: A Compendium of Modern Hypocrisy, she thinks all environmentalists are po-faced, unsexy, public school alumni who drivel on about the end of the world because they don't want the working classes to have any fun, go on foreign holidays or buy cheap clothes.

Michael O'Leary, the chief executive of Ryanair, agrees. In an interview with Rachel Sylvester and me, he told us that the "nutbag ecologists" are the overindulged rich who have nothing better to do with their lives than talk about hot air and beans.

So the salad days are over; it's the end of the greens. Where only a year ago the smart new eco-warriors were revered, wormeries and unbleached cashmere jeans are now seen as a middle-class indulgence.

But the problem for the green lobby isn't that it has been overrun by "toffs": it's the chilly economic climate that has frozen the shoots of environmentalism. Espousing the green life, with its misshapen vegetables and non-disposable nappies, is increasingly being seen as a luxury by everyone.

In addition to the deliberate misery that green policies cause (seen most obviously every time you fill up your car), the seeds of its destruction are sewn by the same people who espouse its beliefs. Environmentalism is a substitute religion, but a religion nonetheless, and the left, historically, works to undermine religious faith, quickly pointing out any sign of hypocrisy. Al Gore will tell an audience...

"This is not a political issue," Gore told a crowd of approximately 2,500 paying attendees. "It is a moral issue. It is an ethical issue. It is a spiritual issue."

...Before floating away on the Goretanic. If that was Jerry Falwell using similar rhetoric but living such a lavish lifestyle, the hoots of derision from the chattering classes would be palpable.

Or, look at this way: everybody admires Mother Teresa's sacrifices, because nobody wants to actually live that way himself.

Update: Related thoughts from Robert Bidinotto.

Your one stop shopping for "The Ultimate List of Barack Obama Flip-Flops."

As Groucho Marx once said, "Those are my principles, and if you don't like them...well, I have others." And that was decades before postmodernism turned reality into a Play-Doh Fun Factory, and made a fixed worldview anathema.

(See also: Clinton, Bill.)

Joel Kotkin and Mark Schill ask, "What's The Matter With New York City?":

Ever since the 1930s, most urban areas have leaned Democratic. But in presidential elections, many remained stubbornly competitive between the two parties. As late as 1988, for example, Republican nominees won Dallas County and made strong showings in the core urban counties of Cook (Chicago), Los Angeles and King (Seattle).

Today, America's urban areas have evolved into a political monoculture that increasingly resembles the "solid South" that provided a base for Democrats from the late 19th century to the 1960s. Since 1972, the year of the Nixon landslide, the Democratic share has grown 20% or more in most of the largest urban counties.

As a result, places where Republicans such as Ronald Reagan could once win a respectable share of the vote - including San Francisco, Philadelphia and New York City - by 2004 were delivering 80% or more to the Democrats. Even in the losing year of 2004, Democratic nominee John F. Kerry won almost every city of more than 500,000 people.

This fall, Barack Obama, a resident of Chicago, can comfortably expect to triumph in virtually every major urban county, often by ratios of 2-to-1 or more. He can count just as much on cities in decline as he can on those that have been gentrified; he will rack up big margins both in heavily white core counties such as those around Minneapolis and Portland, Ore., as well as overwhelmingly minority Baltimore, Philadelphia and The Bronx.

Race and income levels do not explain the emerging urban monoculture, because the cause lies elsewhere: in the evolution of cities over the past four decades. The shift began in the late 1960s, when urban regions, from financial centers such as New York and Chicago to old industrial cities such as Detroit and Cleveland, began to suffer a massive exodus of predominantly white, middle-class residents.

This left behind an increasingly impoverished, highly minority population with very little proclivity to support conservative or even moderate Republicans.

More recently, some cities - such as New York, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco - have attracted a population of well-educated, white professionals. Many new urbanites tend to be students or professionals enjoying city life during their first, highly experimental years of adulthood. At this point, they are most open to liberal ideas and causes; they have yet to worry much about taxes and crime, issues that drive people to the center.

Meanwhile, as for a shrinking but still large city on the left coast, Victor Davis Hanson has a spot-on look at San Francisco:

I spent some time speaking in San Francisco recently. In crude and exaggerated terms, it reminds me of H.G. Wells Eloi and Morlocks. There are smartly dressed yuppies, wealthy gays, and chic business people everywhere downtown, along with affluent tourists, all juxtaposed with hordes of street people and a legion of young service workers at Starbucks, restaurants, etc. What is missing are school children, middle class couples with strollers, and any sense the city has a vibrant foundation of working-class, successful families of all races and backgrounds. For all its veneer of liberalism, it seems a static city of winners and losers, victory defined perhaps by getting into a spruced up Victorian versus renting in a bad district, getting paid a lot to manage something, versus very little to serve something. All in all, I got a strange creepy feeling that whatever was going on, it was unsustainable--sort of like an encapsulated Europe within an American city. The city seems to exist on tourism, and people who daily come into the city to provide a service, get paid--and leave. One businessman tried to assure me my anxieties were misplaced: "We are a revolving-door city: young people want a year or two in the "city" to have fun, so flock here, take menial jobs, cram together in an apartment, enjoy our night-life, and then leave wiser and ready to start life somewhere else in the real world. In the meantime, they are willing to work hard for us for little pay." I think that about sums up the city.

I remember SF in the late 1950s and early 1960s as a kid visiting with his parents. A much different place altogether of affordable homes, vibrant docks, lots of construction--and children everywhere.

While San Francisco is perhaps the most extreme example in America, a landscape of very wealthy and very poor, with a hollowed-out middle class seems to be a natural occurrence wherever liberal social and taxation policies become too punitive. As Steven Malanga of City Journal mentioned to me in one of my first podcasts, such a trend is already starting to occur on the opposite coast, in New Jersey*. And speaking of New York and taxes, Nicole Gelinas, another City Journal author, gives us a warning--or maybe a sneak preview--of "New York's Next Fiscal Crisis."

Read More »

Martin Eisenstad writes, "I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it seems that the new McCain ad criticizing Obama for being a celebrity has ruffled some unintended feathers":

I, for one, quite liked the ad, but I hear whispers from the inner campaign staff that the phone was burning off the hook today with calls from Paris Hilton's grandfather, William Barron Hilton (co-chair of the Hilton Hotel empire), furious that the McCain ad drew an unflattering comparison between Obama and his own granddaughter.

It seems that the elder Hilton has donated $18,400 to the McCain campaign, and $35,000 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee in the last couple of years. (Paris's father, Rick Hilton, has given an additional $6,900 to the McCain campaign. Suffice it to say, he's none too pleased either.)

Apparently, the elder Hiltons had breathed a sigh of relief that Paris was starting to get her act together since hitting rock bottom with her stay in jail last year, when all of a sudden the McCain ad compares her unfavorably to Britney Spears and Barack Obama.

Somehow, I think all of the players will survive this moment--they can meet here for cocktails afterward!

So can you immanentize the eschaton through the Force?

"I am the father of our Star Wars movie world--the filmed entertainment, the features and now the animated film and television series," (George Lucas) says. "And I'm going to do a live-action television series. Those are all things I am very involved in: I set them up and I train the people and I go through them all. I'm the father; that's my work. Then we have the licensing group, which does the games, toys and books, and all that other stuff. I call that the son--and the son does pretty much what he wants." He laughs. "Once in a while, they ask a question like 'Can we kill off Yoda?', things like that, but it's very loose.

"Then we have the third group, the holy ghost, which is the bloggers and fans. They have created their own world. I worry about the father's world. The son and holy ghost can go their own way."

Pretty biblical stuff from a guy whose original idea was to portray communist North Vietnam in a favorable light...

Victor Davis Hanson: "Why Do Europeans Love Obama? Let us count the ways"...

Rich Lowry writes that "If elected, Barack Obama might make history in more ways than one. He will be the country's first black president, but also--perhaps as consequentially--could be its first transnational president":

Transnational progressivism is closely allied to multiculturalism. Both share a hostility to American exceptionalism and seek to rein it in, by imposing global rules on the U.S. and by transcending its traditional culture (as defined by history, symbols and language). Obama, who for so long painfully sought an identity and initially found it in a black-nationalist church, clearly has affinities running in this direction.

Consider his gaffes: The world won't stand for us driving and eating and air-conditioning our homes as we please. We should worry less about immigrants learning English and more about teaching our kids Spanish. Gun-owning, Bible-believing people in rural areas are bitter. The flag pin is an inadequate symbol of patriotism. When Obama briefly auditioned his own presidential seal, "e pluribus unum" got bumped.

These are all hints of Obama's instincts, but he knows he has to check them. He has restored a flag pin to his lapel, ditched the fake seal and in Berlin was careful to declare himself also "a proud citizen of the United States" and defend America's global leadership. He'd be wise to do more. In November, the world doesn't have a vote.

What--it's not a question on that global test I heard so much about four years ago?

Over at Ace of Spades HQ, they're looking at a "Peaceful Bicycle Advocacy Group Attempting to Persuade a Motorist to Abandon His Gas-Guzzling Ways...By beating the s*** out of him and trashing his car."

Paging Mr. O'Rourke...Mr. P.J. O'Rourke to the white courtesy phone please.

Jason Maoz of Commentary asks, "Whatever Happened to Liberal Humor?"

Fire up the Tardis--with or without Barry behind the wheel: We answered that one two and a half years ago, three years ago--and five years ago!

(H/T: KS)

Related: "Best. Headline. Ever."

Lewis Black, in the above clip, witnesses the eschaton immanentized--and now with extra decaf caramel macchiato flavoring!

But as with all of man's previous attempts to build heaven on earth, the eschaton cannot sustain itself indefinitely. Sadly, the Wall Street Journal has published a list of upcoming Starbucks closings (and none in my town. So there!), and James Lileks explores the plight of the suddenly Starbucks deprived coffee drinker:

We have been bracing for the list of closings, and it was finally revealed: 27 Starbucks outlets will be shuttered in Minnesota, leaving only 45,234. Hasta barista, baby.

The effect on the Twin Cities will be light -- the average citizen will still be within six minutes of a $4 cup of coffee at all times. Productivity will not suffer as people slump over at their desks from lack of jitter-juice. The people you have to pity -- aside from the employees, who probably can't fill a bathtub now without thinking "room for cream?" and won't soon find another job requiring that question -- are the folks in the small towns who will lose a piece of the outside world.

A Strib story last week by Emma Carew told the plight of Albert Lea teens mourning the loss of their coffee shop.

And you can understand why: Starbucks was like an embassy of a country where people sat around and read foreign newspapers, like the Wall Street Journal, and discussed things.

Geez, isn't that what they invented the Internet for?

According to this AP report from April, Katie Couric's evening news show "averaged 5.34 million viewers last week, breaking a record low for CBS News' flagship show that had been set the week before, according to Nielsen Media Research."

And the rest of you 295 million troglodytes who tuned her out? Sexist bastards, the lot of you:

"Unfortunately I have found out that many viewers are afraid of change. The glory days of TV news are over, and the media landscape has been dramatically changed. News is available now for everyone, everywhere, all the time, and everybody fights for the last pieces of the shrinking pie. The corporate pressure and the ratings terror are intensifying all the time, and the situation is not simple. I find myself in the last bastion of male dominance, and realizing what Hillary Clinton might have realized not long ago: that sexism in the American society is more common than racism, and certainly more acceptable or forgivable. In any case, I think my post and Hillary's race are important steps in the right direction."

All that pioneering bravery, and for only $15 million a year.

Scott Whitlock writes:

On Monday's "MSNBC News Live," journalist Andrea Mitchell and Washington Post editorial writer Jonathan Capehart discussed whether Americans are not "sophisticated" enough to understand the attempted satire in the cartoon featured on the cover of the current New Yorker magazine. According to Mitchell, "...The only question there is whether [the cover] is too sophisticated to actually be perceived the way it is intended."

Congrats, Andrea! You've just personified each and every element present in the second most famous New Yorker cover.

"Despite all the hype over Obama's religious outreach, a new Pew survey indicates Obama actually has slightly less support from evangelicals than John Kerry had at this point four years ago."

Audacity--how bitter is thy aftertaste!

Well actually, of course you can--but that was before science got Title Nined, as Rod Dreher and John Tierney note. The latter writes:

Until recently, the impact of Title IX, the law forbidding sexual discrimination in education, has been limited mostly to sports. But now, under pressure from Congress, some federal agencies have quietly picked a new target: science.

The National Science Foundation, NASA and the Department of Energy have set up programs to look for sexual discrimination at universities receiving federal grants. Investigators have been taking inventories of lab space and interviewing faculty members and students in physics and engineering departments at schools like Columbia, the University of Wisconsin, M.I.T. and the University of Maryland.

So far, these Title IX compliance reviews haven't had much visible impact on campuses beyond inspiring a few complaints from faculty members. (The journal Science quoted Amber Miller, a physicist at Columbia, as calling her interview "a complete waste of time.") But some critics fear that the process could lead to a quota system that could seriously hurt scientific research and do more harm than good for women.

The members of Congress and women's groups who have pushed for science to be "Title Nined" say there is evidence that women face discrimination in certain sciences, but the quality of that evidence is disputed. Critics say there is far better research showing that on average, women's interest in some fields isn't the same as men's.

In this debate, neither side doubts that women can excel in all fields of science. In fact, their growing presence in former male bastions of science is a chief argument against the need for federal intervention.

Read the rest.

That's the advice to comedians from leftwing journalist Joel Stein, (who knows a thing or two about recovering from the proverbial botched joke himself), as he explains, "How To Make Fun Of Obama" in the L.A. Times. As Stein tells comics, you "have an arsenal of jokes to use against a 71-year-old ex-POW cancer survivor and Obama is too touchy a subject?

Ronald Reagan's famous quip to Jimmy Carter during the presidential debates in 1980 was designed to puncture Carter's ever-growing hectoring punitive liberal tone. Carter's natural elitism was masked by his initial sunny campaign persona and omnipresent smile during his 1976 campaign, but worn down by four years in which Carter's fecklessness was no match for rising inflation, unemployment and interest rates, a flat-lined stock market, a newly radicalized and reprimitivized Middle East, and a Soviet Union which had reacquired its taste for land acquisition, all a direct result, as the Gipper would go on to prove once in office, of Carter's outdated playback coupled with Carter's own built-in sense of malaise.

Fortunately for the American public, Barack Obama has arrived at the same dissipated and humorless state merely from being out on the campaign trail, instead of after four painful bumbling years actually in the Oval Office!

Of course, those could well be on the way no matter what happens, but Obama's current malaise may be why, as James Bowman posits, the New Yorker tried to do Obama a favor this week, by giving him something to punch against, to restore the populist charm of his campaign back in the earlier, carefree days of the primaries:

The most disturbing thing about this media storm is the utter humorlessness not only of the hard left and the media, which we already pretty much knew about, but of the Obama campaign itself, which professed to be mightily offended by the cartoon. And suddenly I am struck by another possibility: that the posture of taking offense was the Obama campaign's repudiation of the support of the eggheaded, Kerry-loving, cheese-eating faction that so many Americans look on as elitist. At the risk of being seen to have jumped on the paranoiac band-wagon myself, I wonder if giving the offense in the first place was The New Yorker's way of offering him that opportunity to disclaim the elitist tendency he was so damaged by when Hillary Clinton successfully identified him with it during the primary campaign.

But of course, Obama is no mood to look at gift cover in the mouth, as Kathleen Parker writes:

Oh, for a good riposte.

Barack Obama's levity-free reaction to the now-famous New Yorker cartoon leaves one reluctantly wondering: Is he humor-challenged? Perchance, does he take himself too seriously for a nation of wits and wags?

So soaring has been Obama's rhetoric and so dazzling his smile that we've missed the possibility that the Illinois senator is less the lanky rock star and more the purse-lipped church lady, clucking his tongue in disapproval of the chuckling masses.

His campaign's angry reaction to the magazine cover shows a stunning lack of political dexterity. It wasn't always so.

In earlier days, Obama was self-deprecating and light of touch. But something happens as people get closer to Washington, as Obama himself has pointed out in other contexts. A popular story that Obama tells concerns a Las Vegas debate during which he was asked about his weaknesses.

Obama answered that he has trouble keeping up with paper, that his desk is a mess. O.K., it wasn't knee-slapping hilarious, but it was honest and, therefore, endearing. A real answer from a real person.

In contrast, two of Obama's contenders, both Washington veterans, responded to the same question with the kind of painful earnestness that makes dogs cynical. As Obama recounts it, one of them said his biggest weakness was that "I'm just so passionate about helping poor people." The other said, "I'm just so impatient to help the American people solve their problems."

Oof.

Obama continues the story: "So then I realize, well, I wish I'd gone last and then I would have known." (Laughter, applause.) "I'm stupid that way, I thought that when they asked what your biggest weakness was, they asked what your biggest weakness was. And now I know that my biggest weakness is I like to help old ladies across the street."

Now, that's funny. And there's a reason the other two candidates — John "passionate" Edwards and Hillary "impatient" Clinton — aren't leading the Democratic ticket.

But that was before the Cult Of Obama was cemented into place as the official narrative, right around the time of this messianic MTV moment. As a result, Charles Krauthammer writes, "Americans are beginning to notice Obama's elevated opinion of himself":

There's nothing new about narcissism in politics. Every senator looks in the mirror and sees a president. Nonetheless, has there ever been a presidential nominee with a wider gap between his estimation of himself and the sum total of his lifetime achievements?

Obama is a three-year senator without a single important legislative achievement to his name, a former Illinois state senator who voted "present" nearly 130 times. As president of the Harvard Law Review, as law professor and as legislator, has he ever produced a single notable piece of scholarship? Written a single memorable article? His most memorable work is a biography of his favorite subject: himself.

It is a subject upon which he can dilate effortlessly. In his victory speech upon winning the nomination, Obama declared it a great turning point in history -- "generations from now we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment" -- when, among other wonders, "the rise of the oceans began to slow." As Hudson Institute economist Irwin Stelzer noted in his London Daily Telegraph column, "Moses made the waters recede, but he had help." Obama apparently works alone.

Obama may think he's King Canute, but the good king ordered the tides to halt precisely to refute sycophantic aides who suggested that he had such power. Obama has no such modesty.

After all, in the words of his own slogan, "we are the ones we've been waiting for," which, translating the royal "we," means: " I am the one we've been waiting for." Amazingly, he had a quasi-presidential seal with its own Latin inscription affixed to his lectern, until general ridicule -- it was pointed out that he was not yet president -- induced him to take it down.

Much like Senator Kerry before him, Obama's newly discovered humorlessness is a gift to John McCain and his advisors if they're savvy enough to use it to their advantage, and in a sane world, it would be a gift to late night TV as well, if they only they were smart enough to get their own sympathies out of the way and have some fun for a change:

"Morning Joe" host Joe Scarborough slammed the "hacks" at "The Daily Show" on Wednesday for only making fun of Republicans and giving a free pass to Democrats. Discussing a July 15 New York Times piece that described how TV comics and talk show hosts are hesitant to make fun of Barack Obama, Scarborough mocked, "I never want to hear anybody from 'The Daily Show' or any of these other shows ever saying again, 'We speak truth to power.' 'Cause you know what they do? They speak truth to Republicans."

After admitting that Republicans have made many mistakes over the last seven years, the MSNBC host continued to eviscerate the crew at the "The Daily Show" and others: " But, please, don't be subversive, because you're not. Because you're a hack. You're a hack for the Democratic Party and you only tell jokes about one side."

Because Obama is rife for satire, as Kyle Smith notes:

Jimmy Kimmel says comedy writers refuse to make fun of Obama because he's black: "There's a weird reverse racism going on." Others vow that, gee, they'd be wiling to make fun of Obama but, damn, he just hasn't done anything worthy of making jokes about yet.

Naw, nothing funny about being the first admitted coke user to be nominated by a major party. Nothing funny about palling around with a member of the Weather Underground. Nothing funny about spending 20 years going to the church of a psychotic rage-a-holic preacher who makes Jimmy Falwell look like St. Augustine. Nothing funny about having a wife who said she had never felt proud of her country before. Nothing funny about flippity-flopping on your no. 1 issue–campaign finance–or voting for a surveillance bill you vowed to fillibuster. His problems with quitting smoking alone would be the subject of a million late-night riffs if he were a Republican.

Comics insist they're equal-opportunity offenders but they're really not. When they talk about making jokes about Obama, they shy away from anything whose punchline implies some failing and go off-roading into neutral comedy territory like his father's goat-herding or his habit of tying everything into his talking points. Kimmel suggests going for laughs by making fun of Obama's ears. Hard-hitting stuff, James. A writer for Letterman suggests that the audience won't go for any racist stuff. True, but so what? There's nothing racist about mocking cokeheads or wobbly principles.

As Kyle wrote, it's "Day Five since Barack Obama's camp revealed he has suffered an acute humorectomy"; if, as Joe Scarborough wrote above, a similarly humor-challenged conservative were discovered (cough--Quayle--cough), they'd circle around him like sharks getting their first taste of chum.

Well, have it fellas--the water's fine, if you're willing to dip a fin toe in. Even Jon Stewart says so.

I've pointed out a few times that Pat Buchanan has become increasingly cozy with the far left...but who could have seen this one coming?!

(With apologies to Paul Simon.)

Related: No word yet if Chutch is intending to get in on the action.

Leftwing historian Rick Perlstein recently told Reason that "Bonnie and Clyde was the most important text of the New Left." It certainly foreshadowed the radical chic that runs through the liberalism of the late 1960s, from the Black Panthers sipping Martinis in Leonard Bernstein's salon to recurring parodies such Michelle Obama in camo and combat boots clutching an AK-47 on the cover of this week's New Yorker.

Speaking of the New Yorker, how much did Pauline Kael's championing of the movie impact the rest of culture? In my interview with James Lileks on AMC's Mad Men for PJM Political, we discussed the middlebrow culture of the 1950s and early 1960s. That culture was eventually eviscerated, as anyone who turns on a TV or goes to the movies knows all too well. But how much is Pauline Kael to blame?

Her part in the process began four decades ago when she wrote an article for The New Yorker defending Bonnie and Clyde, the 1967 Warren Beatty film that treated two 1930s bank robbers with sympathy and raucous humour.

Most critics found Bonnie and Clyde empty and trashy. The crusty old New York Times guy, Bosley Crowther, then one of the most influential American critics, decided that Bonnie and Clyde failed to meet his narrow, simple-minded, painfully respectable standards. It was too violent, and he thought the love story of its doomed, hare-brained title characters was "sentimental claptrap."

Kael, whose critical reputation was in its early stages, used Bonnie and Clyde as the opening shot in what turned out to be a war against middlebrow, middle-class, middle-of-the-road taste. Her New Yorker piece began: "How do you make a good movie in this country without being jumped on? Bonnie and Clyde is the most excitingly American American movie since The Manchurian Candidate. The audience is alive to it."

She announced no less than a revolution in taste that she sensed in the air. Movie audiences, she said, were going beyond "good taste," moving into a period of greater freedom and openness. Was it a violent film?

Well, Bonnie and Clyde needed violence. "Violence is its meaning."

She hated earnest liberalism and critical snobbery. She liked the raw energy in the work of adventurous directors such as Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Martin Scorsese. She trusted her visceral reactions to movies.

When hired as a regular New Yorker movie critic, she took that doctrine to an audience that proved enthusiastic and loyal. She became the great star among New Yorker critics, then the most influential figure among critics in any field. Books of her reviews, bearing titles such as I Lost it at the Movies, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and When the Lights Go Down, sold in impressive numbers. Critics across the continent became her followers. Through the 1970s and '80s, no one in films, except the actual moviemakers, was more often discussed.

It was only in the late stages of her New Yorker career (from which she retired in 1991) that some of her admirers began saying she had sold her point of view too effectively. A year after her death (in 2001) one formerly enthusiastic reader, Paul Schrader, a screenwriter of films such as Raging Bull and Taxi Driver, wrote: "Cultural history has not been kind to Pauline."

Kael assumed she was safe to defend the choices of mass audiences because the old standards of taste would always be there. They were, after all, built into the culture. But those standards were swiftly eroding. Schrader argued that she and her admirers won the battle but lost the war. Acceptable taste became mass-audience taste, box-office receipts the ultimate measure of a film's worth, sometimes the only measure. Traditional, well-written movies without violence or special effects were pushed to the margins. "It was fun watching the applecart being upset," Schrader said, "but now where do we go for apples?"

As the above article concludes, "Not long before she died, Pauline Kael remarked to a friend, 'When we championed trash culture we had no idea it would become the only culture.' Who did?"

(Via Jonathan Last.)

Kyle Smith writes:

Though my brilliant colleague Billy Heller writes most of the headlines in the Post's Pulse section, including yesterday's "Grinner Takes All," I'm slightly embarrassed to admit I wrote the hed for tomorrow's review of the supergay new musical "Mamma Mia": ABBA-DABBA-DOO!

Seriously, this movie is a quantum leap forward in gay technology. It is to previous incarnations of gay what the Apollo space program was to the bicycle. Lou Lumenick predicts it will do $30 million this weekend, though there is a slightly more interesting movie opening against it. Is this a much gayer country than I previously suspected? Is "Mamma Mia" the gay Batman? The Flighty Knight?

Wouldn't that be a violation of the Wertham Act of 1954?

To Nanny, or not to Nanny, that is the question.

(And sad to say, I think I know the answer, as does Hubert Humphrey.)

That's the question that David Frum asks:

During the Enron collapse of 2002, the public and the media were persuaded that Enron was somehow a Republican scandal, based on little more than senior management's history of contributions to the Republican party.

The ties between the Fannie Mae debacle and the Democratic party are much more intimate than that. Senior Democrats chosen for their political connections - James Johnson, Franklin Raines, Jamie Gorelick - took tens of millions of dollars in compensation out of the company. The ties between the Obama campaign and Fannie Mae are especially intimate: not only did Johnson head Obama's veep-vetting operation, but we learn in this Washington Post article that the campaign that Raines is advising Obama on the mortgage crisis! Well, he should know. Let's just hope the Obama operation is able to keep Raines away from the accounting side of things. Even the amazing Obama fundraising operation could not afford that!

More seriously: Here is potentially the largest financial disaster in American history. The American taxpayer stands to lose billions; Democratic insiders have extracted tens of millions. If Enron was a party scandal ... what is this?

The offramp to Schumerville?

Good question.

From my point of view, I'd say that these days, it's primarily a gossip and style rag that gets in waaaay over its head whenever its Bush-obsessed journalists let their hatred drive its political coverage despite the inevitably diminishing returns.

Oh wait, that's why people hate Vanity Fair.

Seriously though, while I haven't blogged much about Jesse Helm's death, due to my discomfort with much of his career baggage, I can't help but think he got this moment right:

Sometime in the mid-1990s, the Times wrote a blistering editorial about Jesse Helms. The senator's new, eager press secretary quickly drafted a letter to the editor, and took it in to the senator. Helms, of course, had not seen the editorial. He glanced at the letter and said, "That's nice, son. Do whatever you want with it. But understand something: I don't care what the New York Times says about me, and no one I care about cares what the New York Times says about me." Therein lay some of the senator's power.

An interesting development, as the Vanity Fair article notes, is that Times hatred became bipartisan this decade, which I'm sure the Times loves, though (and especially after this essay) it provides less ideological cover than they think.

(Or, Complexity And Contradictions in Postmodern Democratic Architecture, to borrow from Robert Venturi.)

Betsy Newmark notes that in his recent Time column on rich liberals voting against their class interests, Michael Kinsley "contradicts the whole Thomas Frank thesis from What's the Matter with Kansas?"

Fortunately, he doesn't sound too bitter about it in the process.

In his latest op-ed, Hugh Hewitt writes:

The environmental lobby owns Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, and Barack Obama –the brave new leader—doesn’t dare take it or them on. That lobby is applauding the deindustrialization underway, and their attitude is that a depression wouldn’t be such a bad thing as a lesson in learning how to live within our environmental means. Their jobs aren’t on the line, after all, and their disdain for the impacted industries is complete.

What they and the Triple D Democrats hasn’t counted on, though, was America making the connection between the deteriorating economy and their anti-energy agenda.

Energy is freedom. Energy is prosperity. Every Democrat on the fall ballot is part of the anti-energy party which is wrecking havoc on the economy and every family’s budget. A vote for any Democrat is a vote for shortages, rising gas prices, rising unemployment, and falling production. A vote for any democrat is a vote for failing airlines and collapsing financial institutions and for the shuttering of car plants and large manufacturing.

A growing, vibrant economy needs energy. The Democrats are anti-energy.

It is that simple.

Read the whole thing, then sign the petition.

Update: Found via Instapundit, Jack Kelly writes, "it takes mighty, repeated blows" to knock through the general public's inattention and apathy towards politics. Kelly adds, "As Ronald Reagan put it, a successful candidate must paint 'with bold colors, not pale pastels'":

But Mr. McCain has been Hamlet when he needs to be Henry V. He is discarding a strong hand through mixed messages and equivocation. He supports drilling on the outer continental shelf, but opposes it in ANWR. He backs a "cap and trade" program to reduce carbon dioxide emissions that would devastate our economy. Nuance is important in policy-making, but can be disastrous in political campaigning. If the trumpet be uncertain …

Mr. McCain needs to decide, pronto, which is more important to him: Winning the election or receiving an occasional kind word from liberal pundits who will vote against him.

If he wants to win, Mr. McCain needs to demonstrate in a dramatic way he'll take every reasonable step to increase energy supplies - including drilling in ANWR.

And he needs to do it soon. The No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, Dick Durbin, who is from Barack Obama's home state of Illinois, said Wednesday: "I'm open to drilling and responsible production." Mr. Obama has altered his position on virtually every issue he campaigned on during the primaries. Could another flip-flop be in the offing?

"Durbin's comment may be a signal that Obama will pivot soon," said the Wall Street Journal's Jim Taranto.

As I wrote last month, the first man who stands up on a podium in the middle of America's Vast Pestilential Wasteland and says the equivalent of this post's headline wins the election.

I can't say for certain, but I'd wager a bet that Jonathan Last is mildly pumped about the upcoming new Batman movie. I'll keep hacking the Internet until I know for certain.

Another post at Galley Slaves begs the obvious question: has Starbucks announced any store closings in Gotham City yet?

Last year, Mark Steyn noted that "Celebrity behavior has been pretty consistent for the last century:"

In the Twenties, Hollywood stars shagged anything that moved, did drugs, divorced routinely - but they (or, at any rate, the studios) understood that it would not be good for this stuff to get out, and on the rare occasions it did get out it was a career ender. The gulf between the celeb life and the lives of the masses was a very well-kept secret.

Obviously, that's not the case these days, illustrating huge changes in cultural mores. I'm not sure whatever happened to The Summer of George, but Michele Catalano writes that this year is "the Summer of Tabloid Divorce":

Let’s face it. We are a culture obsessed with our stars. Somewhere around the time of OJ Simpson’s fall from grace, the gossip rags went from generally fawning over lifestyles of the rich and famous to excitedly pointing out their flaws. We have made a culture of watching the unraveling of our pop culture idols. From the Star to TMZ, it’s all about pointing out the inadequacies of the elite, be it mental or physical. If it not Britney Spears’s mental breakdown, it’s Kirstie Alley’s ballooning weight. Behind every story about Angelina Jolie’s expanding brood of children, there’s a story about Brad Pitt’s supposed infidelity. We’ve created an industry devoted to gloating over the downfall of the rich and famous.

It’s not hard to see why we do it. Here’s someone with more money than we could ever imagine. While we’re struggling to make this month’s mortgage, they are spending $7,000 on a handbag. While we contemplate a vacation in our own backyard, they are jetting off to France for a weekend wine tasting.

For some people, there’s a certain satisfaction in seeing their idols brought down to a more human level. Look, they cry just like us! They have feelings! Their lives can fall apart, too! It’s vindication for us that money can’t buy happiness. For others, there’s a smugness that goes with the stories. You may have millions, but at least my marriage is better than yours. At least my kids aren’t in jail.

I think there's an enormous amount of truth in that last paragraph. In the first half of the century, when society didn't know anything about Hollywood's stars, it looked up to them; these days it laughs at their ridiculous foibles. I'm not sure if Hollywood considers that a fair trade, but its not like the worst tabloid offenders do all that much to eschew such publicity in the first place.

Just arrived from Amazon is the DVD collection of the first season of AMC's Mad Men, a show about which I've written several times previously. But the package is fascinating: its four DVDs are encased in a nifty giant tin mock cigarette lighter, and inside is an ad for a pair of actual working Zippo lighters embossed with the Mad Men logo. The inserted ad recalls an earlier sponsorship of the show. They're reminders that the producers of Mad Men want to have it both ways--they want to look down upon their characters for smoking and excessive drinking (pretty rich coming from hedonistic Hollywood), but simultaneously, they're happy to use their series on the excesses of advertising to advertise the exact vices the show condemns. Now that's postmodern entertainment!

Does the hectoring subtext of the writing matter all that much? Maybe not, as I wrote last week:

While the show's first season had some good episodes as it gained its stride and got past the hectoring tone of its debut (which I discussed at length over at Pajamas HQ last year), it's the extremely well crafted look of the show that serves as the real time machine. It's a reminder that, while Mad Men's establishment liberal Bobos In Paradise writers believe that the past is a strange, alien world, the series' production and costume designers certainly makes that world look remarkably inviting, especially when compared with today.

On the Museum of the Moving Image's Website (found via the IMDB) is a nicely written, if slightly hyperbolic article on the strength of Mad Men's production design, though--Warning!--it does contain a pretty big spoiler for anyone coming into the show cold via the DVD package. And come to think of it, the scene in question creates a modern connection to the show that I'm absolutely sure its writers didn't intend at all:

The climax of the first season of Mad Men, set at the dawn of the 1960s at a Madison Avenue advertising agency, is actually a brilliant anticlimax—a revelation swiftly followed by a re-veiling. Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser), a clumsy striver at Sterling Cooper, attempts to topple the resident alpha dog, Don Draper (Jon Hamm), with what looks to be a career-ending disclosure: Draper, the firm's dazzling creative director, is living under an assumed name; he's a fraud, likely a Korean War deserter, and possibly worse. Campbell blurts it all out to the avuncular overlord, Bertram Cooper [Wonderfully played by Robert Morse, who's perhaps the show's most inspired casting choice--Ed], while Draper stands by silently, poker-faced, hands steady enough to light yet another cigarette. The elder statesman Cooper considers, waits an agonizing long beat, and makes a purely utilitarian reply.

"Mr. Campbell, who cares?" Cooper asks calmly, his voice burring with pity and disdain for the youngster's naive theatrics. "This country was built and run by men with worse stories than whatever you've imagined here."

"The Japanese have a saying," Cooper continues. "‘A man is whatever room he is in'—and right now, Donald Draper is in this room."

This marvelously tense scene—from the season's penultimate episode, titled "Nixon vs. Kennedy"—is Mad Men in a nutshell. (The AMC series has its second-season premiere on July 27; the complete first cycle of 13 episodes is now out on DVD and Blu-ray disc from Lionsgate.) The televised Nixon-Kennedy debates are generally acknowledged as the moment when image overtook content and began supplanting it; for the hard-drinking, impeccably tailored men and women who populate the randy, smoke-filled offices of Sterling Cooper, the self is a performance, adjusted according to the demands of The Room. Context is everything. Everyone leads at least a double life. (For the men, juggling a wife and mistress is practically a job requirement.) Denial is enormously useful. (One character was pregnant all season and didn't know it.) But it's the dashing über-WASP Don Draper—né Dick Whitman, son of a prostitute, orphan of the Depression—who most fully embodies the idea of the self as a brand that can be revamped on the whims of the market, without remorse or apology. He is what he does. (And why is Donald Draper in this room? Because he generates revenue.)

"A man is whatever room he is in"--that's a remarkably timely phrase right about now, isn't it?

Related: The characters in Mad Men would be horrified by this lack of consumer choice in Obama's hometown; something tells me the producers wouldn't, though.

"Just cut to the chase and name the kid Rehab."

What is it about octogenarian presidents of CBS that seem to assume that the power to run a television network confers immortality? In 1990, Christopher Buckley reviewed Sally Bedell Smith's biography of William S. Paley, and wrote:

"WHY do I have to die?" the aging William S. Paley repeatedly asks of a somewhat helpless friend toward the end of Sally Bedell Smith's fascinating and exhaustive biography of the man who built the Columbia Broadcasting System. At this point, having kept company with Mr. Paley's ego for more than 600 pages, no reader is likely to be surprised at the old solipsist for having posed such a bizarre question, and so unphilosophically at that. If CBS's corporate logo was its famous "eye," Mr. Paley's innermost being ("soul" seems not quite the right word) bore the indelible stamp of an "I." The friend "could give no answer except to reassure him that his mother had lived into her nineties." The reply was possibly ironic, as it was Mr. Paley's cold and unloving mother, Goldie, who by shunning her young son had forced him to turn to the larger world for constant, indeed unremitting, affirmation.

* * *

TO the end of his career, Mr. Paley remained a desperately insecure man: jealous of his wife's affection for her son from her first marriage; jealous of Frank Stanton, whom he disastrously hounded from CBS, thereby insuring the ensuing succession of catastrophes that have made the network now, as Mr. Stanton put it perfectly, "just another company with dirty carpets." Lear-like, Mr. Paley ultimately subverted and ruined CBS, the thing he loved above all else -- besides himself -- driving out Mr. Stanton's successors, undermining the company by leaking unfavorable reports about them to the press, meddling in programming even though his quondam powers had by now left him, fretting obsessively about his perks, his private jet, his helicopter, his office, unable to let go; gobbling down experimental, supposedly life-prolonging protein pills every half-hour, gorging on supposedly restorative cucumbers, unable to let go, even of life. For Bill Paley, "Why do I have to die?" was the perfectly logical question.

But as it must to all men, death came to William Samuel Paley on October 26, 1990, at age 89. But note the echos of Paley's famous existential question in this quote uttered by his latest successor, age 85:

"I DON'T want to die. I love what I'm doing. I love Viacom. I love CBS. And so I don't want to die. I have a will to live. The same will to win that I've always had. And, I'm gonna fight death as long as I can. I like it here. I don't want to go anywhere else" - Sumner Redstone on CNBC's "Business Nation."

Ask not for whom the station identification tolls for...

Donald Sutherland is yet another superstar actor to whom Bill Whittle's Lou Grant Effect remains inviolable. As an actor, Sutherland nearly always invests his characters with charisma and charm; from the original Hawkeye Pierce in Robert Altman's M*A*S*H to the small town cop investigating crimes in the big bad city in Klute, to his wealthy proto-bobo Manhattan art collector in Six Degrees of Separation. But without a script and a director, this is the result:

As far as conspiracy theories go, the one actor Donald Sutherland posited at the Huffington Post Monday certainly doesn't rank very high.

After all, there's a long line of political pundits predicting the Clintons are conspiring to steal the Democrat presidential nomination from Barack Obama.

But, coming from Kiefer's dad, and the original "Hawkeye" Pierce from "M*A*S*H," the entertainment value is, well, delicious.

Get out the popcorn, folks...you won't be disappointed (emphasis added, h/t NBer Gary Hall):

The DNC's 'Terry McAuliffe mind-set' ruined the campaigns of Gore, Kerry and Senator Clinton and now the legions of McAuliffites who have surrounded Barack Obama are doing their damndest to undermine the possibility of his Presidency...There's a well sourced rumor of Machiavellian proportions running around that what's going to happen is that his base support will be so demoralized they won't have the vital conviction they'll need this August to withstand a McAuliffite push to persuade disenchanted delegates on the floor of the convention to make a resurgent Hillary Clinton the Party's nominee!...His heart and soul is being gutted and ours with it... This morning's news in the Washington Post is that he's revised his positions on abortion and troop withdrawal! His supporters are being sent to hell in a handbasket and it has to be stopped!

Suddenly, Sutherland sounds more like Frank Burns than Hawkeye!

Meanwhile, the otherwise regal Lauren Bacall also has a painful case of Hollywood, Interrupted:

Q: You told Larry King, “I’m a total, total, total liberal and proud of it.” Are you excited about the election?

A: I am. I’m a big Barack person. What I find really hard to take is the way the media behave. … They seem to pick on Barack much more readily than they do on McCain. They suddenly say he’s this kind of politician, he’s not what we thought, dah-dah-dah-dah. … I don’t understand why these anchors say, “We’re not supposed to take a side, we’re supposed to just give the news,” but they don’t just give the news, and they don’t tell the truth, excuse me. I only listen to Keith Olbermann. To hell with the rest of them. I’m an MSNBC type now.

Yes, if there's one thing about the legacy media, it's that they really, really despise Obama. Particularly at CNN. And the Washington Post. And The New York Times. And...

On Thursday, I wrote about the ongoing efforts--from a variety of sources--to reframe World War II, in an effort to cast the Allies' efforts in a much more cynical light than history currently remembers them.

But Matthew Yglesias sets the Wayback Machine way, way back, in an effort to reframe not 1945, but 1776.

Well, lots and lots and lots of butter on her popcorn when at the movies: Robert Reich, offshore drilling (and the sad lack thereof), Antonioni's Blowup and a young Hillary Clinton's deep abiding love of hot buttered popcorn--all this--and more!--coalesces, thanks to Ann Althouse, in the Rosetta Stone of blog posts.

(H/T: IP)

Pull quote from Jules Crittenden's post on the demise of Larry Harmon, the man who gave the world Bozo the Clown? “Larry’s aim in life was to Bozo-ize the world.”

A man's got to have a goal in life; I think we can safely say that Harmon has accomplished his.

Bill Schneider of CNN writes:

Spend a few days in western Europe talking about American politics and you discover that you are in deepest Obamaland. Not much different from Berkeley, California, or the South Side of Chicago.

Orrin Judd replies, in a post titled, "This Reads Like A GOP Press Release":

So Obamaland is Europe, Berzerkly and the South Side and Democrats can't figure out why they lose elections?

Indeed.^TM The euro-feel of Obamaland and its putative leader's campaign proposals isn't exactly a big surprise for anyone who's been paying the slightest bit of attention to the growing distance that voters in the Bluer alcoves of the American political map have been putting between themselves and their compatriots in the Red States post 9/11.

Via TVCriticism.com, here's a sneak preview from the debut episode of the second season of AMC's Mad Men, which plays like a stone knives and bearskins version of the replicants and their obsession with collecting photographs in Blade Runner:

One of Kyle Smith's readers commenting on a recent fawning New York Times profile of the series and its producer makes a great observation of the importance of the show's production design:

Regarding the article itself, I read a few pages and I believe the show’s creator said something like the show isn’t about the look of it. He’s dead wrong: it’s entirely about the look of it. Take away the look and you don’t have much.

I think that's exactly right. Sort of similar to the observation that the Don Draper character makes in the above clip, while the show's first season had some good episodes as it gained its stride and got past the hectoring tone of its debut (which I discussed at length over at Pajamas HQ last year), it's the extremely well crafted look of the show that serves as the real time machine. It's a reminder that, while Mad Men's establishment liberal Bobos In Paradise writers believe that the past is a strange, alien world, the series' production and costume designers certainly makes that world look remarkably inviting, especially when compared with today.

As James Lileks would likely agree, take today's computer technology and the aesthetics of the 1950s (that staid, conservative, gray flannel reactionary era that gave the world the Les Paul and Stratocaster electric guitars, the Ford Thunderbird and Chevy Corvette, Marilyn Monroe, Miles Davis, and Chuck Berry), and you've got the best of all worlds. Or as Rondi Adamson wrote last year, contrasting the rigid formula of Mad Men's writing with the joy of its production design:

The ad-men themselves, when they aren't drinking martinis for breakfast and smoking, are groping the hapless and/or slutty secretaries and making sexist and racist comments. The homelives of the ad-men are portrayed with equal subtlety. Every housewife is miserable and repressed -- though still managing some joyful smoking even while doing the dishes -- and every husband is adulterous -- though still around enough to drunkenly put together a dollhouse for his children. Every marriage fifty years ago, we are led to believe, was nothing but a loveless travesty, maintained for public perception only, secretly crushing the will to live of both partners.

In short, it's all great fun, but what I am enjoying most of all about Mad Men is the fashion and the etiquette. Say what you will about the role of women fifty years ago, but at least they didn't go out in flippity-flops or stretch pants, flab showing, hair out of control, even the wealthiest among them looking like they were on their way to the convenience store nearest their trailer-park in order to stock up on Doritos. And say what you will about the men, but they wouldn't have dared show up at even a casual weekend barbecue in crocs and shorts, wearing an "I'd rather be sailing" t-shirt or a baseball cap adorned with some silly sports logo, fingers poised to scratch inappropriate areas publicly. They were groomed and matching, even as personal happiness eluded them.

The second season of Mad Men debuts on Sunday, July 27th; in the interim, the first season is available on DVD, along with a soundtrack collection.

As Roger Kimball notes:

Buried in a story about baby-boomer profs retiring:

In general, information on professors’ political and ideological leanings tends to be scarce.

Clearly, more research needs to be done: the Ford Foundation should fund a multi-year study to ascertain the “political and ideological leanings” of professors. That’s one of life’s great mysteries.

Indeed. Especially when the headline of the Times' article is, "The ’60s Begin to Fade as Liberal Professors Retire."

But the truly curious thing is why that era has lived on for so long--1968 was forty years ago; as far away from us as Clara Bow and Calvin Coolidge were to the sixties. So why has its juvenile ethos cast such as a long-lasting spell on the left? As I wrote a few months ago:

Tom Stoppard describes 1968 as "The year of the posturing rebel". Or as John Lennon confessed a decade later:

"I dabbled in politics in the late 1960s and 1970s, more out of guilt than anything. Guilt for being rich and guilt thinking that perhaps love and peace isn't enough and you have to go and get shot or something, or get punched in the face to prove I'm one of the people. I was doing it against my instincts."

Fascinating though, that the 1960s and '70s, a period that was rife with poseurs such as Lennon, is still influencing us to this day. You can see it in music, in the form of ersatz nostalgia acts such as Lenny Kravitz and Sheryl Crow, who dress in period costume (sort of the tie-dyed equivalent of greasers like Sha Na Na in leather jackets and D.A.s in 1975, or a big band that same year still playing in tan dinner jackets and bow ties). Or much more dangerously, in a politics that still takes it rhetoric from a period now four decades in the past, whether it's John Kerry in 2004, or Rev. Wright in 2008.

But then, when starting from zero, one is always tempted to stay trapped in Year One.

Sadly, perhaps until this countdown reaches zero.

Thank God for the American public that the journalists they rely upon to help them make informed decisions are a hard-bitten cynical lot, having seen it all a hundred times, never falling for the latest huckster trying to sell them a bill of goods, instead of those naive, easily fooled bloggers...

Update: Fortunately, not all in Big Media are as dewey-eyed as the Gray Lady's unseasoned young naifs.

There's an unintentionally hilarious juxtaposition about a minute and half into this Evening Magazine segment on hippies descending upon Vancouver in 1967, when the curator of the city's museum looks back on their arrival and says, "The late 1960s and '70s...That's when I think modern Vancouver was born."

The editor then immediately cuts to a shot of the museum's exhibition in psychedelia devoted to a movement that's the very antithesis of modernity:

"The obvious question: will they look at us in 70 years with the same mixture of amusement, indulgence, respect and outright hilarity? the obvious answer: that's how we regard webpages from 1997. Of course they will."

Back in 2003, in a post titled "Mao And The Godfather", we had some thoughts on, and a photo of, the Andy Warhol print of Mao Zedong that hung above the mantelpiece in Francis Ford Coppola's dining room at the height of his power as a film director in the mid-1970s.

A reader of Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism blog quotes from an article by Jed Perl that suggests that Warhol didn't choose Mao as a subject randomly:

Mao is Marilyn, only more so. The terms "icon" and "global icon" are nowadays tossed around with slapdash glee, so it is important to make a basic distinction. It was the moviegoing public that made Marilyn Monroe an icon, because they responded to her beauty, her charm, her wit. The people who hang posters of Marilyn on their walls do so because they like her. It's that simple. But the omnipresence of Mao's image has an altogether different origin. While Leftists in the United States in the late 1960s may have gladly chosen to hang Mao's portrait on their walls, among the billion Chinese who were sure to have his portrait in their homes and in their workplaces, it was understood that they would have endangered their own safety if they did not put his portrait where Mao wanted it to be. There is a world of difference between an icon freely chosen and an icon imposed from above, and the difference has more than a little to do with the difference between a liberal society and an authoritarian society. Warhol's way of blurring this distinction leads straight to the political pornography that characterizes so much of the new Chinese art.

The distinction was not lost on Warhol. According to one of the umpteen books on him that has appeared in recent years, Warhol "often stated that his goal was to obtain the patronage of a dictator, who would then mandate that Warhol's portrait be placed in every governmental office, school, and so on, ensuring the artist unlimited financial opportunities." Was Warhol kidding when he fantasized about being a dictator's court painter? To some degree, of course, he must have been. But then again the fascination of Warhol's work was based on a confusion or conflation of a number of different kinds of power, beginning with the power of celebrity and the power of advertising and the power of art. In the early 1970s he added to that incendiary but still somewhat benign mix another element: the power of communist propaganda. That was the point at which his work turned foul. Warhol's Maos—as well as the Hammer and Sickle still lifes from later in the 1970s and the Lenin portraits of the 1980s—bring his own mercenary spin to a Western love affair with the certitudes of absolutist politics that dates back to the 1920s and 1930s. That was when some members of the European and American intelligentsia decided that the bombastic images of healthy working men and women coming first out of Russia and then out of Nazi Germany offered a relief from the intricacies of modern art. After all, there is nothing less intricate than a painting by Andy Warhol.
The impact that totalitarian imagery can have on free people is an enduring problem. Susan Sontag's essay on the subject, "Fascinating Fascism," was published two years after Warhol began to paint Mao. She could just as well have been thinking of Warhol's Maos, and more generally of the leftist infatuation with the iconography of the Cultural Revolution, when she remarked that the sophisticated public was beginning "to look at Nazi art with knowing and sniggering detachment, as a form of Pop Art." Sontag, who never liked to get too far ahead of her audience, was aware that her readership had still not quite outlived its infatuation with the Maoist look. But she made an important point when she observed that there is a difference between appreciating the peculiar power of a certain kind of totalitarian imagery and going right ahead and succumbing to that power.

As Jonah's reader suggests, expect lots more totalitarian imagery during the coming Olympics in Beijing; in the meantime, we'll always have Che.

Or, maybe they just thought Faye Dunaway looked smokin' hot brandishing a .38 snubnose in her cashmere sweater and beret.

Making the rounds to promote his new book Nixonland, Rick Perlstein tells Reason:

reason: You like to mix cultural history with political history. Bonnie and Clyde is one of the central texts in the book.

Perlstein: My theory is that Bonnie and Clyde was the most important text of the New Left, much more important than anything written by Paul Goodman or C. Wright Mills or Regis Debray. It made an argument about vitality and virtue vs. staidness and morality that was completely new, that resonated with young people in a way that made no sense to old people. Just the idea that the outlaws were the good guys and the bourgeois householders were the bad guys—you cannot underestimate how strange and fresh that was.

The 1967 release of the movie certainly coincides with the period where traditional liberalism and the far left began to merge; not coincidentally, this was also the period where traditional morality began to break down. The next year would be 1968, a year the left is alternately trying to recreate, or is permanently trapped in, or both. Mick Jagger's lyrics to the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil" called the philosophy of the day "heads is tails", and whereas liberals once worshiped science and progress, they soon found themselves admiring the Black Panthers and William Ayers' Weatherman group, and tossing both modernism and hope for the future under the bus.

1968 was also the year that, only a few months before his death at the hands of a young radical, Bobby Kennedy told a college audience:

"I am also glad to come to the home state of another great Kansan, who wrote, 'If our colleges and universities do not breed men who riot, who rebel, who attack life with all their youthful vision and vigor then there is something wrong with our colleges. The more riots that come on college campuses, the better the world for tomorrow.'"

Orrin Judd reviews Perlstein's book here, and makes a great observation, which dovetails perfectly into Perlstein's Bonnie & Clyde reference and the breakdown of the mid-1960s in general:

I'm only in the early stages of reading Friend Perlstein's book but am struck by a potentially fatal flaw in his thesis that's implied in the review above. With his expected honesty, Mr. Perlstein initially identifies Nixonland as the sort of Red America that the Adlai Stevenson eggheads found themselves stuck in ad unable to comprehend in the 50s. That this part of the metaphor endures--is indeed a seemingly innate part of the culture--is reflected not just in his own essays about contemporary politics but in books by his friends and fellow Brights, like Thomas Frank's unintentionally hilarious, What's the Matter with Kansas.

On the other hand, the sort of violent divisiveness that he associates with Nixonland rather conspicuously developed at the exact time that Richard Nixon was not a central part of the national political scene. Inner-city riots, assassinations, student demonstrations, radical Left terrorism--all of these social plagues arose during the Johnson/Great Society years, the pinnacle of the Left's ascendancy. Even the initial violent reactions were led by Democrats--like LBJ sending federal troops into Detroit or Mayor Daley breaking up protests at the 1968 Democratic Convention. If anything, as Mr. Douthat suggests above, the return of Richard Nixon --a liberal Republican--in 1968 might be seen as an attempt by American voters to restore the social calm and consensus of earlier eras. Richard Nixon, at least in his final incarnation, should probably be considered an effect of the social breakdown of the Liberal 60s, rather than a cause of anything much.

As president, Nixon was no conservative, particularly in his domestic governance, which much more of an extension of LBJ than any sort of warm up act for the Gipper. (And Nixon's poor handling of the economy directly paved the way for the disastrous Carter years, which spawned the economic trainwreck that Reagan and Paul Volker would miraculously right.) But to the America of 1968 that didn't think that Bonnie & Clyde "were the good guys and the bourgeois householders were the bad guys", no wonder both Nixon's association with the relative calm of the Eisenhower years (at least in comparison with what was to come afterwards), and his promise of law and order sounded remarkably appealing. In that sense, perhaps Nixon's entirely unplanned timeout from the national scene during the mid-1960s wound up serving him remarkably well.

(Perlstein quote found appropriately enough here.)

"Obama Moves to Reintroduce Himself to Voters", the Washington Post, notes, but check out the language of the opening paragraph:

In the opening weeks of the general-election campaign, Sen. Barack Obama has moved aggressively to shape his campaign and offered a clear road map for the kind of candidate he is likely to become in the months ahead: an ambitious gamer of the electoral map, a ruthless fundraiser and a scrupulous manager of his own biography in the face of persistent concerns about how he is perceived.

"Aggressive", "ambitious", "ruthless"--this sounds far more like the press at large is beginning to describe Obama using the David Brooks Machiavellian badass political samurai model, rather than the positive Hope! and Change! Yes We Can! new politics message that Obama began nationally with.

If the press continues to describe Obama in such terms, this could create a nifty opening for McCain to attack Obama on his cynicism and rote Chicago politics, much as Reagan deflated Carter in 1980 (who masked his own punitive opinions of America underneath a similar veneer of sunny optimism four years earlier) with his "Well, there you go again" line.

And on a related note, Lexington Green of the Chicago Boyz notes, "It is weird how so many who claim to like Obama hope he is lying. Three examples come to mind immediately". Read the rest.

Update: Jennifer Rubin observes Obama as he loses "His Teflon Sheen".

Glenn Reynolds links to San Francisco Chronicle staff writer James Temple, who describes "urban flight flipped on its head":

The number of low- and middle-income residents in San Francisco is shrinking as the wealthy population swells, a trend most experts attribute to the city's exorbitant housing costs.

Many worry it's increasingly turning San Francisco into an enclave of the rich, where nurses, firefighters, cops, teachers and other professionals aspiring toward homeownership or in need of cheaper rent can no longer afford to stay.

"A kind of derogatory term for the city would be Disneyland for yuppies," said Hans Johnson, demographer with the Public Policy Institute of California. "There is a legitimate public policy concern when a city that many people have lived in for many years and regard as their homes becomes so expensive they can't afford to live there anymore."

Last year, USA Today noted, “San Francisco Hopes To Reverse Black Flight”, but it's part of a much larger trend, as I noted earlier in 2007:

As a city, San Francisco has had its share of problems in the 21st century, among them: declining population, declining economy, declining children, contempt of the US military, a large and often militant vagrant class, and declining tourism.

Fortunately, when it comes to making an effort to solve those problems, local government has its priorities firmly in order.

But it's not just San Francisco--when I interviewed Steven Malanga of City Journal a couple of years ago, he noted the same trend of the middle class being squeezed out, leaving only the wealthy and poor occurring in New Jersey as well. And I imagine anywhere there are punitive liberal policies simultaneously raising taxes and making a difficult environment for new housing and entrepreneurship, this trend will occur, but San Francisco's certainly had a multiple-decade head start. If it's entered the endgame, perhaps it will serve as a warning to other locales, and not as a prototype.

"Politically correct is never a term one would apply to [Maureen] Dowd’s commentary", the New York Times ombudsperson Clark Hoyt writes. If you say so, though standard-issue East Coast establishment liberal boilerplate are all terms that readily come to mind.

In any case, as Hoyt's predecessor ombudsman wrote, "Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper? Of course it is." And now it's time to pay the piper:

Over the course of the campaign, I received complaints that Times coverage of Clinton included too much emphasis on her appearance, too many stereotypical words that appeared to put her down and dismiss a woman’s potential for leadership and too many snide references to her as cold or unlikable. When I pressed for details, the subject often boiled down to Dowd.

Andrew Rosenthal, the editor of the editorial page, said it was unfair to hold a columnist accountable for perceptions of bias in news coverage. A columnist is supposed to present strong opinions, he said, and “a thorough reading of Maureen’s work shows that she does that without regard to gender, partisanship or ideology.”

Some complaints about Times news coverage seem justified. A “Political Memo” last fall analyzed “the Clinton Cackle” — a laugh, it was suggested, that she used to fend off political attacks or tough media attention. Cackle? That’s what witches do in fairy tales. Times editors express regret about using the word, though they defend the examination of the laugh. The Times never did a similar dissection of the way Rudolph Giuliani burst into odd gales of laughter under tough questioning.

But other complaints seemed to reflect a shoot-the-messenger anger at The Times. A reader from San Francisco railed against a litany of offending words that she said the paper had used, but most of the slights were imagined. (I can assure you that the word “skank” was never printed in an article about Clinton.)

I asked my assistant, Michael McElroy, to run a database search for some key words that might indicate sexism in The Times — “shrill,” “strident,” “pantsuit” and “giggle,” among them.

So please, all you sexist troglodytes, no giggling at the end of that last paragraph!

(Via Hot Air.)

Dirty Harry reviews Pixar's Wall-E and is knocked out by the incredible CGI (as was I when I saw the trailer before the latest Indiana Jones movie), but he's rather offput by one of its themes:

For all its charms and wonders, one moment sticks in my head and, well, craw. It also confuses me. Why? Why go there? Other than the dark chuckles from the liberal critics around me, what’s to gain? And other than a lack of self-control or hubris on the filmmakers’ part, there’s no explaining it. But they did it. They actually had the President (Fred Willard) say about his failed mission, “Stay the course.”

Have we lost Pixar? Have we lost the wonderful studio who brought us The Incredibles and Ratatouille to Bush Derangement Syndrome? Here you have a winning streak going back ten-years, enormous amounts of public goodwill, equal amounts of credibility as serious storytellers, and they stop things cold, yanking you out of the story with the liberal nonsense. Quite a disappointment.

On the other hand, its not the first Pixar movie that some in the starboard side of the Blogosphere thought a bit squishy. But then there's this:

At first there’s not much of an environmental message. The piles of garbage covering our planet come off as nothing more than a good idea to set up a cool alt-version of our world and the lead character. Unfortunately, this doesn’t last. The humans are introduced as meaty, lazy, chair-bound consumers who live in a world run by a large corporation. The message about our consumerism, sloth, and addiction to visual stimulus is eventually beaten like a drum.

Anti-consumerism: now there's a message you'd expect from the entertainment industry. Parents--buy your kids less Star Wars toys! And stop paying $15.95 a pop to buy all those DVDs! But thanks for spending ten buckets a ticket and five dollars for a drum of popcorn to watch our movie!

I wonder if the summer popcorn crowd will get whiplash when they go from the conspicuous consumption of Sex In The City to the hectoring subtext of Wall-E?

Meanwhile, one of Harry's commenters asks:

Have they started with the anti-consumerism merchandising and advertising tie-ins yet?

Heh, indeed.^TM

Update: Steven Den Beste emails, "If you look at the credits, the problem becomes clear: Brad Bird didn't direct this one. He wasn't involved in it at all." It will certainly be interesting to see how handles this upcoming film, given its all-too-recent subtext.

Back in October of 2003, Howard Dean boldly went where no presidential candidate had gone before:

Dean declared himself a "metrosexual," the buzz phrase for straight men in touch with their feminine sides, as he touted his accomplishments in "equal justice" for gay and lesbian couples.

But then he waffled.

"I'm a square," Dean declared, after professing his metrosexuality to a Boulder breakfast audience with an anecdote about being called handsome by a gay man. "I like (rapper) Wyclef Jean and everybody thinks I'm very hip, but I am really a square, as my kids will tell you. I don't even get to watch television. I've heard the term (metrosexual), but I don't know what it means."

Perhaps it means this:

"In many ways, he really will be the first woman president," Megan Beyer of Virginia, a charter member of Women for Obama, told reporters. An op-ed essay in The New York Post headlined "Bam: Our 1st Woman Prez?" came to a similar conclusion, if a tad more snidely: "Those shots of Barack and Michelle sitting with Oprah on stools had the feel of a smart, all-women talk panel."

No wonder Hillary's narrative never gained traction in the Democratic primaries!

(Incidentally, the author of the piece is feminist icon Susan Faludi. Was she a Hillary backer in the primaries? Because that's quite a poison pill she's dropped into Obama's lap if that "he really will be the first woman president" line she quotes goes viral in the general election.)

Glenn Reynolds quotes Gregg Easterbrook:

Democratic attacks on Mr. McCain and Republican attacks on Mr. Obama both seek to punish impermissibly positive thoughts. At a time when there exists a sense of crisis over the economy, fuel prices and many other issues, this reinforces the odd, two realities of life in the United States today: The way we are, and the way we think we are. The way we are could use some work, but overall, is pretty good. The way we think we are is terrible, horrible, awful. Possibly worse.

Well, yeah. Check out this recent doomsday riff from David Letterman, who, during the 1980s, despite the equally eeeeevil Reagan being in charge was far too cool and ironic to be this morose about life:

Guys talking about the President really can't do anything about the economy. I don't know if that's true or not, but let's give them that one, let's just say “okay, the President can't do anything about the economy.” Everything else has gone so lousy in the last eight years. I mean – and I'm a guy who doesn't pay attention to much, as long as I got wresting and a TV dinner I'm fine – but even I am perceiving now that things are horrible in ways they shouldn't be horrible. Now, we're not going to impeach the guy. Could we get our money back? Honest to God, what, I mean [audience applause], just at least something.

Dave's clinging bitterness is enough to make you change the channel...And if it's to ABC, you're confronted with more doomsday, as James Lileks notes:

"Are we living in the last century of our civilization? Is it possible that all of our technology, knowledge and wealth cannot save us from ourselves? Could our society actually be heading towards collapse?

"According to many of the world's top scientists, the answer is yes, unless we take action now."

They’re asking for readers to submit their own dystopian nightmares.

What is it with the pessimism of the overclass? If it wasn’t for doom and gloom, they wouldn’t have a reason to live. The latest example comes from ABC News, and suggests that this century may be the last one for civilization. Who says? Scientists! Ah, well, if it’s scientists, we’d best pay heed. Or perhaps you disagree; the century’s still fresh and young. It still has that new century smell. Warranty’s good for another few years, and besides, we haven’t dumped the trunk-junk accumulated in the previous century. We’ll figure something out. We always do.

But you don’t get publicity by suggesting this century might be better than its predecessor, or by asking people to envision how cool the future might be. There are dozens of websites and Flickr sets devoted to retrofuturism, to the art of describing what things might be like. If you grew up in the 60s, you’ll remember all the paintings of space – useful space full of gleaming silver ships. That all ended with “2001: A Space Odyssey” which suggested that the future of space was long, dull, and lonely, punctuated with homicidal computers, trippy FX and enormous wise space-fetuses. Great film, but from then on, something seemed different about the future. Did we really want to live there?

I'm not sure how much of a role Stanley Kubrick's opus played in causing liberalism's turn towards nihilism, but the timing is certainly right; as I noted a couple of years ago in a post titled, "1969: The Shattering of the Modernist Dream".

So is there reason to be optimistic today? Of course. But just don't expect much help in that department from the media, at least until November. They've got the double-whammy of their own industry in dire straits, and an economy to keep talking down, at least until--somehow, miraculously--it begins to turn on a dime the day after the election. (Provided the appropriate audacity and hope and change occurs, of course.)

As spotted by Jim Geraghty, David Mendell in Obama: From Promise to Power writes:

"[Obama] always talked about the New Rochelle train, the trains that took commuters to and from New York City, and he didn't want to be on one of those trains every day," said Jerry Kellman, the community organizer who enticed Obama to Chicago from his Manhattan office job. "The image of a life, not a dynamic life, of going through the motions... that was scary to him."

And as scared as he is about the daily Metro-North commuter train, we know he's not very happy about commuters driving into work.

But Obama's not too crazy about people further out in the exurbs, either, as he mentioned in April when he was talking to, as Jean Kirkpatrick would say, San Francisco Democrats:

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them…And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

And then there was this classic bit by Michelle Obama back in February:

“We left corporate America, which is a lot of what we’re asking young people to do,” she tells the women. “Don’t go into corporate America. You know, become teachers. Work for the community. Be social workers. Be a nurse. Those are the careers that we need, and we’re encouraging our young people to do that. But if you make that choice, as we did, to move out of the money-making industry into the helping industry, then your salaries respond.” Faced with that reality, she adds, “many of our bright stars are going into corporate law or hedge-fund management.”

Geez, remember when Democratic presidential candidates and their spouses actually bothered to go through the motions of appearing to support the working man?

Related: "Ludwig von Mises v. Obama??"

Washington is likely to be trapped in the 1970s in perpetuity; coming this January, it won't be Welcome Back Clinton, but it may very well be Welcome Back Carter.

Though, as I predicted yesterday (and it wasn't exactly a tough call) McCain reminding voters of the potential of that seventies show isn't sitting well with the chattering class.

Like I said: more, please.

Going through my archives, I found this post from March 5th of last year, which quoted Richard Baehr of the American Thinker:

If Hillary's campaign collapses, it will be one of the least pretty sights in American political history. This is a woman wound up very tight, and always controlled, but completely unprepared for failure in her Presidential quest.

Given that Obama has come close to pulling even with Hillary already, I think there is a very good chance that at some point this year he will pass her, since he has room to expand his base of support, and she is desperately trying to hold on to what she has. If Obama becomes the frontrunner, I think Hillary is finished. While a new face frontrunner would normally get tough critical reviews from the press, the major media is in full swoon mode over Obama.

Pretty spot-on, though Hillary herself more-or-less kept it together until her badly phrased RFK-reference a couple of weeks ago. (Which is probably why, as Tammy Bruce speculates, that Hillary pushed back her announcement that she's winding her campaign down until tomorrow, lest it occur on the 30th anniversary of RFK's assassination.)

But look what it's done to her supporters: a half a year after MSNBC came out of the closet and announced (in the New York Times, appropriately enough) that it is indeed a leftwing TV network, there are calls from those who would otherwise be its core viewers for a boycott over the cable network's handling of Hillary (which included a veiled death threat from Olbermann and David Shuster's infamous "pimped out" line regarding her daughter). And Michelle Goldberg, a writer in the moderate-liberal New Republic, says that it's "3 A.M. For Feminism":

Hillary Clinton has lost the nomination, but some of her most ardent female backers seem unwilling to accept it. A strange narrative has developed, abetted by Clinton and some of the mainstream feminist organizations. In it, the will of the voters was thwarted by chauvinistic party leaders in concert with a servile media, and Obama's victory represents a repeat of George W. Bush's in 2000. It's a story in which Obama becomes every arrogant young man who has ever edged out a more deserving middle-aged woman, and Clinton, hanging on until the bitter end, is not a spoiler but a feminist martyr.

This conviction, that sexism cost Clinton the nomination, is likely to be one of the more toxic legacies of this primary season. It is leaving her supporters feeling not just disappointed but victimized, many convinced that Obama's win is illegitimate. Taylor Marsh, a blogger and radio host whose website has become a hub for Clinton fans, says she gets hundreds of e-mails from angry Democrats pledging not to vote for Obama. She's started running posts from such readers under the headline DEMOCRATIC STORM WARNINGS. "I'm not saying that this is a huge voting bloc," she says. "I'm just saying that there is a huge amount of talk and I'm convinced it's a reality that needs to be addressed."

Surely some of this political nihilism will fade by November. Right now, it's hard to quantify; Internet forums and political protests exist, in part, to magnify the passions of a few into an illusory groundswell. In exit polls from Indiana and North Carolina, at least half of Clinton supporters said they wouldn't vote for Obama, but there's no way to calculate the role of gender in their disaffection.

In the months to come, feminist leaders and Clinton herself will urge women back into the Democratic fold. Still, the bitterness is intense. Kate Michelman, the Obama-supporting former head of NARAL, has heard enough of it to get worried. "It does feel to me, just recently, like we're on a death mission," she says. "[T]here is a danger where we set a course for failure in November."

Logically enough, Daniel Henninger posits that since their views on the issues are nearly identical, Obama's identity politics defeated Hillary's identity politics. But at what cost? Time will tell.

From the home office deep inside the Stonecutters' headquarters, a look at conspiracy theories from the era of JFK, up to 9/11 and the current election year, and from General Jack D. Ripper to Rosie O'Donnell and Reverends Jeremiah Wright and Michael Pfleger.

You can see longer clips of some of the more recent players here. The complete edition of Peter Robinson's recent interview with Camelot and the Cultural Revolution author James Piereson can be found at National Review Online.

The clip of NBC's Andrea Mitchell referring to Obama having to "figure out a way to get a fair vote if he's the nominee in those red states" with their "Katherine Harris-type election officials" is available at Eyeblast.tv. (I really wanted to include a snippet of this clip from last year of Mitchell's hard-hitting detective skills in action, but in order to bring things in under 10 minutes for inclusion on YouTube, it ended up on the virtual cutting room floor.) And the December 2001 Reason article on the new breed of General Jack Rippers and their fluidic obsessions is here.

This episode is a sequel of sorts to the segment earlier this month titled "Radical Chic: Frozen In Amber"; this is a slightly broader view of a related but larger topic, but you'll certainly recognize a couple of the same players.

And for the rest of the earlier Silicon Graffiti videos, tune in here.

Kyle Smith has a great piece at the New York Post on the obsessed nature of Sex And The City's most die-hard fans, which would would be instantly recognizable if the genders were reversed and the costumes changed:

Suppose there were thousands of men who, every Thursday night, dressed up as Chewbacca or Boba Fett and headed en masse to an inviting "Star Wars"-themed neighborhood where they could discuss their strange obsessions at bars like Cloud City or Jar Jar's Joint while guzzling specialty cocktails (the TatooTini, the Hothmopolitan).

That would be strange, but not quite as strange as what happens at the "Sex and the City" theme park in the Meatpacking District, which is about two years away from installing its first TGIFridays and already is to hip what Mark Hamill is to acting. Unlike the "Star Wars" nerds, who are under no illusions that they will ever actually take the Millennium Falcon out for a chance to complete the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs, the "Sex and the City" fangirls think that they can live the life they see on TV.

So they swarm the night, staggering packs of "Sex" geeks - the hungry streets beneath them cackling, "Say hello to my leetle cobblestones, Manolo mamas!" - heedless to the fact that the ratio of them to their male equivalents is already the inverse of ComicCon and getting worse. The cougars of the movie, reviving their Jurassic snark for one more pun-dump, have digital airbrushing on their side, but in reality, bitchy 43-year-old women are not the center of attention at the clubs. Sexist? Not I. God.

Even 33-year-old women are not living in reality in this town. The multiplexes and networks and bookstores can barely accommodate all the movies and TV series and books (almost all written by men; one, I recall vaguely, written by me) about comical manboys coming to terms with the need to grow up. There is no equivalent message getting through to women.

Smith sounds like he's describing a textbook example of what Tom Wolfe once called "Information Ricochet". As Wolfe noted, there were no Hell's Angels (or if there were, they were in a pretty nascent form) before The Wild One, but once young motorcycle aficionados saw Marlon Brando projected on a fifty-foot high screen on his bike, they instantly, maybe even subconsciously assumed, "This is how we act! This is what we wear!" (The "Mutt" character in the New Indiana Jones movie is a sort of cartoon illustration of that exact phenomenon in action.) And then, when Hollywood went back to make more biker movies in the 1960s, they could then crib from the real Angels, who in turn stole ideas from those movies as Information Ricochet feeds on itself.

Of course, there were millions of single professional women living in New York prior to Sex And The City, but seeing the rules codified on TV makes for a powerful subconscious incentive to more carefully hone one's own lifestyle to the examples played out weekly on TV, and now movie screen. Or as Newsweek's Julia Baird wrote, "It revealed what they were already doing – and emboldened them to do more."

On the plus side, at least the average Sex And The City-obsessed woman is light years more aesthetically pleasing than the sort of fellow who fancies himself living in Mos Eisley.

Related: This is a riot:

Come on, I’ve been to a sci-fi convention. And once you’ve stood in the dealer room and pondered dropping $45 on the Battlestar Galactica Boardgame you had when you were five years old, you can’t really fault a woman for getting excited about a $600 pair of purple fuzzy pumps that look like they should come with their own stripper pole. I mean, who the f*** am I to judge? But Ch***t in a bucket people, did we need so many montages of them doing it?

Hey, the series didn't earn the sobriquet of "Shoes And The City" for nothing.

Libertas' Dirty Harry, who bravely suffers through all sorts of Hollywood drek so you that don't have to, has surprisingly kind words for the new Sex And The City movie.

(As does Kyle Smith of the New York Post, who's also celebrating his first anniversary in the Blogosphere.)

At least in terms of energy policy, as Victor Davis Hanson notes:

I don't quite understand why one party or the other doesn't campaign on delivering more energy to the American people to lower costs, keep the world price down, and money out of the hands of terrorists, and to address U.S. debt and the falling dollar. There seems no contradiction between wanting nuclear power, clean coal, tar and shale, more drilling off our coasts and Alaska — and more conservation, more money for hydrogen, biofuels, more solar, wind, etc.

But unfortunately the former seems to be the more conservative position, the latter the more liberal, when in fact they hardly are incompatible, since the first is the short-term solution that ensures we don't go bankrupt and empower our enemies as we evolve toward the long-term answers. Nothing could be more populist than trying to deliver affordable energy; but it's a position that so far neither candidate is addressing — maybe because Obama's base is still anti-nuclear and against drilling; and McCain is almost indistinguishable from him on the coasts and ANWR. One otherwise would have thought that energy would be the critical issue of the campaign, and instead — relative silence from both on stump?

Related thoughts from James Pethokoukis.

Another presidential year, another plea from the left to avoid the L-Word, as Paul Beston writes at Tech Central Station:

"A lot of these old labels don't apply anymore," Obama told the New York Times recently, referring to political terms like "conservative" and "liberal." In his stump speeches during the campaign, he has frequently championed policy goals by claiming that they aren't in fact liberal: "There's nothing liberal about wanting to reduce money in politics," he has said. "That is common sense. There's nothing liberal about wanting to make sure [our soldiers] are treated properly when they come home . . . . There's nothing liberal about wanting to make sure that everybody has healthcare. We are spending more on healthcare in this country than any other advanced country, but we've got more uninsured. There's nothing liberal about saying that doesn't make sense, and we should do something smarter with our healthcare system."

In arguing that "labels don't apply anymore," Obama is making the same claim, nearly verbatim, that Michael Dukakis, John Kerry, and other Democrats have made over the years, stretching back over a generation. What these candidates found out the hard way was that labels mean plenty, especially when they refer to something that people understand--like liberalism.

Americans learned over several decades what liberalism, at least modern liberalism, was all about. Contrary to some claims that conservatives, in a sinister plot, defamed the word, liberalism did a pretty good job defaming itself: from the anything-goes ethos of the 1960s to radical war protestors, from tax-and-spend government and welfare policies to lax criminal justice, pacifism abroad, and a wide-ranging contempt for the institutions and values of American life, liberals took what had been the dominant political current in American politics and made it into a pejorative term. Today, while centrist American voters may blanch at some of the Republican Party's positions, they have no wish to go back to governmental progressivism.

If they did, Obama-never one to miss a rhetorical trick--would be resurrecting the word "liberal" as change we can believe in.

Obama's evasion of the implications of "liberal" are worth noting by contrast with conservatism, a "label" that most politicians of that persuasion accept gladly, if they aren't already wrapping themselves in the mantle. Whatever the despair of the Bush years, conservatism does not come saddled with the hardened negatives that centrists and independents tend to associate with liberalism. For many, it still represents sensibility and practicality, as well as success, dating back to the presidency of Ronald Reagan. The Bush years have in fact not discredited conservatism, a point made suggestively--if, one senses, accidentally--by, of all people, Michael Dukakis.

"'What's conservative about invading Iraq?" he asked in a Washington Post story. "What's conservative about a $400 billion deficit?" Though Dukakis went on to say, shades of 1988, that "The terms have lost their meaning," his rhetorical questions underscore that even liberals don't connect the Bush administration's failures to traditional conservative principles. They criticize Bush by holding his policies up to conservative standards--and finding him lacking. What Bush has discredited is not conservatism, but the Republican Party. The number of Americans answering to that party identification has slipped markedly since Bush entered the White House.

Placed in this light, John McCain's "maverick" status might be the best chance that Republicans have. The candidate can claim, plausibly or not (depending on the issue), to be a "Reagan conservative" - still a golden phrase - while freely criticizing the Republican Party, an avocation that comes naturally to him. In doing so, he can run on ideas instead of institutional, party identification.

Contrast that with Obama or Hillary Clinton, either of whom will run under the banner of the Democratic Party - an affiliation that has increased during the Bush years - but will avoid voicing the party's governing philosophy, which is, was, and remains liberalism.

Both Hillary and Obama have attempted to define themselves as "Progressives" rather than "Liberals"--but that word has its own set of repercussions, not quite airbrushed out of history.

Just read that Sydney Pollack died, at age 73. I wasn't a big fan of Pollack's fairly doctrinaire punitive liberal worldview that was often on display in the films he directed. But as an actor, frequently cast in rather dark, amoral supporting roles, he managed to project a surprising amount of likability, even as the adulterous friend of Woody Allen in Husbands and Wives, and as Victor Ziegler, the sinister business tycoon in Eyes Wide Shut. (Or as Dustin Hoffman's agent in Tootsie, in a memorable scene where the above headline derives.)

Film directors rarely make good actors, and in both professions, few have careers that thrived as long as Pollack's. In an industry that increasingly allows few grown-ups behind the cameras, and even fewer in front of them, his gravitas will be missed.

Hillary obama rfk
by dollarsandsense123

She manages to weave a strange flashback to Bobby Kennedy's assassination in '68 into a reason--I think--for her to stay in the race.

And speaking of Kennedy conspiracy theories, this is probably as good a place as any to link to Peter Robinson's terrific multi-part video interview this week with James Piereson, whose Camelot and the Cultural Revolution last year did a superb job of not only debunking the conspiracy theories regarding JFK's death, but also explaining why they developed in the first place.

Update: Bumped to top; video found via John Stephenson who writes, "So, is the final nail in her political coffin? I vote yes!"

More at Hot Air.

Related: I reserve the right at some future point to revise and extend my earlier remarks:

With apologies to Jack Benny for the above headline; while I'm not in the market for a new car at the moment, the timing of Honda's new sales pitch makes it an awfully appealing proposition...

Certainly better than this gaffe (at least I hope it's a gaffe--never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity) by Dunkin' Donuts' latest spokesperson. In any case, mister, they could use a pitchman like Michael Vale again!

James Taranto writes that "Last night found us at the annual dinner of the Commentary Fund, publisher of Commentary magazine...where Sen. Joe Lieberman delivered the Norman Podhoretz Lecture":

Lieberman cited at length a 1999 National Review article by Norman Podhoretz, in which Podhoretz credited President Clinton with saving Democrats from McGovernism. "I think the Democrats have been pretty thoroughly purged of the McGovernite spirit," Podhoretz wrote. "It pains to me [sic] to admit this, but I would estimate that there is now more isolationist sentiment in Republican than in Democratic ranks." Lieberman argued that in many ways, the 2000 ticket of which he was a part was more hawkish than its Republican counterpart.

Since then--really, since the end of 2002--the Democrats have turned hard to the left on foreign policy, with Lieberman a rare dissenting voice. The Connecticut senator praised President Bush for his Knesset speech last week, and said that Bush's criticism of those who advocate appeasement applies to Obama, whether the president meant it to or not.

In his most devastating criticism, Lieberman noted that Obama favors talks without preconditions with anti-American dictators in North Korea, Venezuela and Iran, while taking an antagonistic approach toward democratic allies in South Korea, Colombia and Iraq, opposing trade deals with the first two and threatening to withdraw U.S. military support from the last.

It's reminiscent of John Kerry*, the Democrats' 2004 nominee, who traipsed about the country denouncing America's allies as a "coalition of the bribed and the coerced" while promising to subject American foreign policy to a "global test." Hardly anyone remembers it now, but Lieberman actually endorsed Kerry. How could he?

We may never know. We thought about putting the question to Lieberman after the lecture, but instead we decided to ask him about the 2000 nominee. Two years after that election, we noted, Lieberman's erstwhile running mate was delivering angry anti-Iraq rants to MoveOn.org. What, we asked, happened to Al Gore?

Lieberman's answer: "Damned if I know."

Considering Al's many twists and turns over the last 20 years--and where he goes, so goes the center of gravity of his party, sad to say--that's really the question, isn't it?

Slightly sanitized below, but pithy nonetheless:

For many, many years I wrote cover lines, ad copy, captions, pet copy, and many other assorted items for Penthouse Magazine. From this experience (which is seared, seared!, into my memory), I think I am more qualified than 99.99% of all the human beings that have ever lived to know pure, prime, steaming hot bulls*** when I see it, and this sign delivers. As a former bulls*** artist second to none, I know power bulls*** when I see it, and I have to say this placard contains enough high-velocity bulls*** to drop a charging rhino at fifty yards.

Read the whole thing.

The battles of the post-JFK mid-1960s were largely fought between the far left and the not-as-far-left: Democrats controlled all three branches of government, but the new left hated LBJ, hated the older generation of New Deal-minted liberals, and hated South Vietnam. The result was a--literally--bloody election year in 1968, and when Richard Nixon returned to the national spotlight as the candidate of law and order, he narrowly won over Johnson surrogate Hubert Humphrey.

In a much quieter fashion than forty years ago, we're seeing some of the same internecine struggles play out in this extended primary season between the far left Obama supporters, and the supporters of Hillary Clinton, who is cast in the role of the populist centralist. (If she actually won the nomination, and won in Novemer, she'd effectively govern much as Obama plans to, of course, because it takes a nanny state to control the village, but that's a whole 'nother story.)

Jim Geraghty, who in a previous post spots Joe Conason of Salon comparing Hillary to fellow Democrat George Wallace (just add it to this list), writes:

A note to add to this post: Saturday Night Live this weekend featured a faux-Hillary bragging to the superdelegates that the party had to nominate her over Obama, because "my supporters are racist."

It's become strikingly acceptable to declare Hillary's voters racist lately, isn't it?

Indeed it has. And it's arguably a form of projection in a way, after Rev. Wright's dramatic 15 minutes back in the spotlight a couple of weeks ago. As the Anchoress writes though:

Are Clintons racist? Nah, I don’t believe so. But conscious of, and fixated on race? Yes, that I’ll buy.

Absolutely. But next time the race card gets played against a Republican (and it already has, by Newsweek, not entirely surprisingly), we should remember that like Michael Corleone ordering up another hit, it's just business, nothing personal. And if enough people understand that, that might actually be a surprisingly positive outcome of '68, err, 2008.

Update: Charles Johnson writes that "According to the Washington Post, Indiana is full of racists and bigots": all Hillary supporters according to the Post, but as Charles notes, one of the examples that the paper uses to support their claim is this:

The bigotry has gone beyond words. In Vincennes, the Obama campaign office was vandalized at 2 a.m. on the eve of the primary, according to police. A large plate-glass window was smashed, an American flag stolen. Other windows were spray-painted with references to Obama’s controversial former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and other political messages: “Hamas votes BHO” and “We don’t cling to guns or religion. Goddamn Wright.”

As Charles adds:

Vandalism stinks, and whoever did this is a complete moron and a criminal. But the incident shows someone who’s upset by the racism of Reverend Jeremiah Wright. There are no racist words or slurs used. Why would the Washington Post call this “bigotry,” when there’s no evidence of it?

Because attacking bigotry is bigoted--or something like that. When we wake up in 2015 after our national coma, it will all make sense, I guess.

Roger Kimball writes, "much that we associate with 'the Sixties' really had its origin in the 1950s", observations that societal critics as disparate as Alvin Toffler and Diana West each mentioned to me when I interviewed them. While some on the left will tacitly make that point when pinned down, it isn't internalized in how the left views history, because it undermines much of the "the most important decade of the 20th century" narrative of the 1960s, as someone who did one too many tabs of lysergic acid diethylamide in the waning years of that decade once claimed.

More from Roger:

What Allan Bloom said in comparing American universities in the 1950s to those of the 1960s can easily be generalized to apply to the culture as a whole: “The fifties,” Bloom wrote, “were one of the great periods of the American university,” which had recently benefitted from an enlivening infusion of European talent and “were steeped in the general vision of humane education inspired by Kant and Goethe.” The Sixties, by contrast, “were the period of dogmatic answers and trivial tracts. Not a single book of lasting importance was produced in or around the movement. It was all Norman O. Brown and Charles Reich. This was when the real conformism hit the universities, when opinions about everything from God to the movies became absolutely predictable.”

[Rachel Donadio, writing in the New York Times Book Review] is chiefly interested in reminding us of the febrile cultural animation of the late Fifties. What she doesn’t say is, but what we can no see clearly with the wisdom of hindsight, is that the ideas of the Beats contained in ovo nearly all the characteristics we think of as defining the cultural revolution of the Sixties and Seventies. The adolescent longing for liberation from conventional manners and intellectual standards; the polymorphous sexuality; the narcissism; the destructive absorption in drugs; the undercurrent of criminality; the irrationalism; the na‹ve political radicalism and reflexive anti-Americanism; the adulation of pop music as a kind of spiritual weapon; the Romantic elevation of art as an alternative to rather than as an illumination of normal reality; the pseudo-spirituality, especially the spurious infatuation with Eastern religions: in all this and more the Beats provided a vivid glimpse of what was to come.

Indeed, the chief difference between the Beat Generation and the Sixties was the ambient cultural climate: when the Beats first emerged, in the mid-Fifties, the culture still offered some resistance to the poisonous antinomianism the Beats advocated. But by the time the Sixties established themselves, virtually all resistance had been broken down. It was then that the message of the Beats gained mass appeal. Reaction to the Vietnam War probably did more than anything else to enfranchise their antinomianism, though the introduction of the birth-control pill certainly did a great deal to further the cause of the sexual revolution, a prime item on the agenda of the Beats. In short order, the unconventional became the established convention; the perverse was embraced as normal; the unspeakable was broadcast everywhere; the outrageous was met with enthusiastic applause.

And as a refresher on the disastrous outcome of where all that inexorably led, I can't recommend enough this essay by Myron Magnet from the new issue of City Journal.

Update: When Peter Hitchens claims "The real issue for the 1968 generation has always been their right to have fun, however much it costs other people", that's true to a certain extent, but it ignores that neo-puritanism that quickly followed, as Rich Lowry observes:

The freedoms fought for in the student revolt soon curdled into the opposite: free speech became speech codes; sexual liberation became the regime of sexual harassment; civil rights became quotas. Meanwhile, Mark Rudd and a fringe of the New Left spun off into the Weather Underground, which took the destructive spirit of the campus protests to its logical conclusion in a campaign of terrorist bombings. Jonah Goldberg reminds us in his book "Liberal Fascism" that the radical left committed roughly 250 attacks from September 1969 to May 1970.

If the academics gave in, another segment of the parents resisted. They were the Nixon voters, reacting against the disorder and cultural radicalism with which liberalism became identified. Republicans held the White House for 28 of the next 40 years, and the alternative history of the 1960s is the rise of the right. Even now, with Barack Obama dogged by his association with former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers, the Democratic Party's challenge is to free itself from the taint of 1968.

Good luck.

At Pajamas HQ, Kathy Shaidle, who blogs at Five Feet Fury, has an article-length review of Daniel Flynn’s A Conservative History of the American Left:

The Left boasts enthusiasm and energy to spare, but its inability to learn from the past is its fatal flaw. As Flynn explains in the book’s introduction, “because of the suspicions of tradition inherent within radicalism, [the Left] largely ignores that past.” After all, visionaries “preoccupied with the triumphal future cannot pause to learn from the mistakes of the past.”

This refusal to check the rear-view mirror is reflected in the Left’s compulsion for coining extravagant, inapt, and frequently offensive historical analogies: these days, every conservative leader is “Hitler”, every war is “Vietnam,” and every petulant protester is the new “Rosa Parks.”

As Flynn points out to devastating effect, the sheer stupidity of such comparisons should, by rights, be enough to cripple them as rhetorical devices; alas, widespread historical illiteracy and an aversion to criticizing “protected” identity groups render healthy mockery almost impossible.

Read the whole thing; as Kathy notes, Flynn’s book sounds like it would make an exceptional double-feature alongside Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism, which itself is a potent centennial history.

Update: I should add Benjamin Wiker's 10 Books That Screwed Up the World: And 5 Others That Didn't Help to make the above titles into a pretty nifty troika.

I think Jonathan Chait is actually pretty astonished himself, when he writes:

People who thought they knew Hillary Clinton have gazed in astonishment: What has she become? The answer is, a conservative populist.

Orrin Judd looks back on her husband's two successful elections won with endless conservative populist rhetoric and wonders: What took her so long?

Meanwhile, Jonah Goldberg notes that Hillary's rhetoric may sound populist in the (presumably) waning days of her campaign, it's certainly not conservative.

This could make for one of those cheesy guilty pleasure National Enquirer-type surveys:

Choice of Hillary Metaphor

Reveals Your Inner Personality!

Is Hillary:

• Norma Desmond?
• Your psycho ex-girlfriend?
• Richard Nixon?
• Don Corleone?
• Big Brother?
• Or is she simply everything you hate about yourself?

You make the call!

Update: This one arrived too late to make the initial cut: Is Hillary Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction?

More: This was inevitable, and in highly questionable taste, to be honest

Travis Kavulla notes that last night, "Apparently a laser light show – or, rather, a piece of 'illumination art' – was projected onto the National Cathedral" in Washington, DC:

Last night, [Gerry Hofstetter, a 45-year-old artist from Zurich] ran a series of glass plates through a 6,000-volt projector and said artisty things like "Light is hope, fire is energy. These colors mean hope and energy."

Light is hope? I only wish more in the artistic class still believed that.

In the Atlantic, Ross Douthat writes, "the GOP is now a working-class party":

There are two important points to be made about these numbers, and the deeper reality they reflect. The first, which you hear around these parts a lot, is that the GOP is now a working-class party (with class defined by education and culture more than income, just to be clear; there are plenty of skilled craftsmen who make more money than teachers and journalists and academics), and that it needs to start acting like one if it's going to rebuild its shattered majority.

If the first half of that equation sounds familiar, it should: it's a theme that we wrote about four years ago when the GOP, and its incumbent president were riding high. After the midterms--and with more trouble potentially on the way--Douthat adds:

The second is that the GOP can't only be a working-class party; just as the famous Judis-Texeira emerging Democratic majority is built around the mass upper class and the poor but depends on winning some working-class votes to put it over the top, so any future "Party of Sam's Club" Republican majority is going to need to win back at least some of the mass-upper-class votes that the party has hemorrhaged during the Bush years.

Hopefully it won't take another Carter-esque extended economic malaise this time.

Just as Jack Torrance was trapped in the Overlook Hotel for all eternity, Stephen King appears to doomed to relive "Jon Carry's" gaffe from 2006.

Dr. Helen checks out Julia Gorin's new book, Clintonisms:

I spent the morning reading a new book by conservative comedian Julie Gorin called, Clintonisms: The Amusing, Confusing, and Even Suspect Musing, of Billary. I generally don't go for these kinds of books that make fun of various presidents but this one was sort of catchy and funny--although if you like the Clintons, you may not see it that way.

In the introduction, Ms. Gorin states that we are faced with the real possibility of a second Clinton presidency and her book "attempts to preempt that reminder and at the same time examine the pressing issues and questions that may be revisited in the event of a second Clinton presidency..."

She notes that her book is not a scholarly work and is not meant to be fair or balanced. "It's a collection of anecdotes, reportage, jokes and first, second and third-party quotes from and about the Clintons." The anecdotes, jokes and quotes range from those "Defining the Clintons" to "With Peacekeepers like These..." which focuses on disturbing sayings from the Clinton's ideas of foreign policy. The hypocrisy of many of the musings is food for thought.

You can hear my interview with Julia in the latest edition of PJM Political--tune in here; she's about 15 minutes in, right after Bill Bradley's opening segment.

Last week, we mentioned the strange op-ed by Paul Auster that the New York Times published. The author of the Weekly Standard's Scrapbook column follows up with this:

Readers with long memories will recall the spectacle of Columbia undergraduates--children of privilege enrolled at a distinguished Ivy League institution founded when New York was still a British colony--invading classrooms and administrative offices, manhandling deans, professors, and fellow students, stealing and destroying books and documents, vandalizing chambers devoted to learning, roaming corridors in search of fodder to burn. The Columbia strike of 1968 made a temporary celebrity of a student named Mark Rudd, and publicized the episode's emblematic slogan: "Up against the wall, motherf--r!"

It also unleashed something instructive in Paul Auster:

Speech followed tempestuous speech, the enraged crowd roared with approval, and then someone suggested that we all go to the construction site and tear down the chain-link fence. .  .  . The crowd thought that was an excellent idea, and so off it went, a throng of crazy, shouting students charging off the Columbia campus toward Morningside Park. Much to my astonishment, I was with them. What had happened to the gentle boy who planned to spend the rest of his life sitting alone in a room writing books? He was helping to tear down the fence. He tugged and pulled and pushed along with several dozen -others and, truth be told, found much satisfaction in this crazy, destructive act.

One of the great parlor games of modern scholarship is pondering how the German people--citizens of the land of Bach, Kant, and Goethe--could find themselves marching in step behind Adolf Hitler. Well, Paul Auster and his Boomer companions at Columbia offer a clue. Here is as plain and startling a description of the mob mentality--together with the attendant hysteria and romanticized violence--as you are likely to find in the op-ed pages of the New York Times, nicely camouflaged in the language of nostalgia and social protest.

If, in this presidential election year, anyone wonders how the political left grew estranged from the American mainstream, yielding the politics of the past four decades, they need only read Paul Auster's tribute to the Columbia strike, written "alone in this room with a pen in my hand" as "I realize that I am still crazy, perhaps crazier than ever."

The writer of the Scrapbook adds that every now and then, he's "seized with the thought that the last, best hope of mankind--or at any rate, for our peace of mind--will be the death of the last surviving member of the Baby Boom generation."

Of course, he's far from alone in that department--and for those keeping score at home, just follow along with this easy-to-use toteboard!

"Wretchard" of the Bellmont Club looks at Paul Auster, whom the New York Times notes, presumably without the intended irony, "is the author of the forthcoming 'Man in the Dark'":

Paul Auster's "Vietnam me act crazy" article in the New York Times is that worst of confessions: that kind that is accidentally funny. Explaining his strange behavior on a certain day in the 1960s, Auster says,

Being crazy struck me as a perfectly sane response to the hand I had been dealt — the hand that all young men had been dealt in 1968. The instant I graduated from college, I would be drafted to fight in a war I despised to the depths of my being, and because I had already made up my mind to refuse to fight in that war, I knew that my future held only two options: prison or exile.

Maddened by these alternatives, Auster went off and raised comparative hell.

After the outburst in the park, campus buildings were stormed, occupied and held for a week. ... Along with more than 700 other people, I was arrested — pulled by my hair to the police van by one officer as another officer stomped on my hand with his boot. But no regrets. I was proud to have done my bit for the cause. Both crazy and proud.

I hesitate to draw any comparisons with the present — and therefore will not end this memory-piece with the word “Iraq.” I am 61 now, but my thinking has not changed much since that year of fire and blood, and as I sit alone in this room with a pen in my hand, I realize that I am still crazy, perhaps crazier than ever.

"I am 61 now, but my thinking has not changed much" since 1968--which is as good a definition of hardened-in-concrete modern "progressivism" as you'll find.

Victor Davis Hanson writes that you go into these small artisan garrets in California like Hollywood, and, like a lot of small towns on the West Coast, it's not surprising that when people get bitter, they cling to identity politics and religions such as Scientology:

It is more interested in political correctness than profits, as the Iraq War movie bombs attest. Talent is no longer gravitating to Hollywood, but staying put in Europe and Asia. Alternate media, from the Internet to video games to cable television, mean that fewer go to the movies anymore (I went once in the last 12 months). The old bread-and-butter genres—like the Western or the war movie—are either moribund or merely landscapes for political revisionism.

One difference is the steady decline in the quality of male actors. We simply do not have a James Stewart, Burt Lancaster, Henry Fonda, Gregory Peck, Bill Holden, or John Wayne any more, much less brilliant against-the grain actors like a Robert Duvall, Lee Marvin, Jack Palance, or a Yul Brenner, nor character actors like a Slim Pickens or a Ben Johnson.

Today’s he-man actors don’t even sound the same as the old breed. Compare the speech patterns and intonation of Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Spencer Tracey, Henry Fonda or Bill Holden to those of a Sean Penn, Tom Cruise, or Tom Hanks—and there seems to be a new, but separate species of male. The appeal of a Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, or Daniel Day-Lewis is that they sound like, well, the old breed rather than sensitive metrosexuals.

Some of you will sigh: Victor, Victor, actors only reflect the society that produces them. We don’t have a Henry Fonda or Jimmy Stewart because we aren’t Fondas and Stewarts any more.

Perhaps, but what I also don’t understand is that we know that excellent war films—Breaker Morant, Saving Private Ryan, and Das Boot—win over critics and audiences. Why then do we keep seeing snoozers like Redacted, Lions for Lambs, or Stop Loss? Is there that little talent left?

A few years ago, Frederica Mathewes-Green wrote a superb essay on the transformation of Hollywood actors from men to perpetual adolescents. And if you work in an industry when one of your leading screenwriters can draft an essay for general consumption that includes the phrase...

This is an election about whether the people of Pennsylvania hate blacks more than they hate women. And when I say people, I don't mean people, I mean white men.

...your product is likely to reflect those values. Even if, as VDH notes, it costs that industry literally hundreds of millions at the domestic box office.

Speaking of movies, Glenn Reynolds links to a Popular Mechanics article that wonders when will Hollywood make another intelligent sci-fi movie. That's a topic we also discussed in this post from late 2006. In an industry that adopts to change as slowly as Hollywood (that's not really a knock--it's a titanic enterprise creating multi-million dollar budgeted movies involving armies of craftsmen and actors), most of the reasons haven't changed in the interim.

So many on the left seemed perpetually trapped in the past, usually in the 1930s, '60s, or the 1970s, but recently, Jonah Goldberg spotted the slightly more recent epoch that has made Barack Obama so bitter:

There’s always been a certain cultural lag time to Barack and Michelle Obama, a kitschiness that’s hard to pinpoint. But I think I’ve got it: They’re self-hating yuppies straight out of the 1980s, which were to the Obamas what the 1960s were to the Clintons.

For those too young to remember, “yuppie” was shorthand for young urban professionals — think Michael J. Fox as Alex P. Keaton in the TV series “Family Ties” — who allegedly represented the collapse of ’60s values and the triumph of ’80s greed. Yuppies sold their souls for a BMW and a condo.

Ironically, the biggest complaints about yuppie materialism came from self-loathing liberal yuppies — like the Obamas.

The Obamas still seem stuck in that time warp, clinging to ’80s-style resentments and political assumptions. Michelle Obama is never so eloquent as when she’s complaining about the burden of student loans for her two Ivy League degrees and covering the high cost of summer camp and piano lessons for her kids on her family’s half-million-dollars-a-year income.

“Don’t go into corporate America,” she exhorted low-income working mothers in Ohio in February, even though she is a highly compensated hospital executive. She admits to being consumed with “a constant sense of guilt” over having to balance work, politics, and family. “It’s guilt, feeling guilty all the time.”

It’s telling that for the Clintons, JFK defined politics, but for Obama, Ronald Reagan is the role model. Last year, Obama admitted to admiring the Gipper’s “transformative” leadership (though not his policies). Indeed, not only did Reagan restore confidence in the nation while reducing confidence in government, he put a stake in the heart of the “Vietnam syndrome” and the blame-America-first ethos of the Democratic Party. The Reagan Revolution moved the country durably to the right — so much so that even Democrats saw the writing on the wall. Obama wants to erase that writing.

And as Abe Greenwald of Commentary writes, so does someone else with a Brilliant Disguise, whose artistic career peaked just before the decade the Gipper made:

It’s true that Obama speaks to the America Springsteen usually writes about. But I’m not sure what he’s referring to in this description. Springsteen’s America is a soot-covered wasteland of junked cars, violent townies, shotgun weddings, racist cops, closed factories, and endless unemployment lines. If you think Obama was tough on small town mentalities, consider the lyrics of Springsteen’s “Born to Run”:

Baby this town rips the bones from your back
It’s a death trap, it’s a suicide rap
We gotta get out while we’re young
‘Cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run

* * *

When, in 1980, Springsteen wrote...

I got a job working construction for the Johnstown company
But lately there ain’t been much work on account of the economy
Now all them things that seemed so important
Well mister they vanished right into the air
Now I just act like I don’t remember, Mary acts like she don’t care

...who could blame him? It was less than a year after Jimmy Carter had gone on television and made a speech diagnosing the country as clinically depressed and spiritually bankrupt:

In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.

The symptoms of this crisis of the American spirit are all around us.

Springsteen took the nation’s pulse and wrote about it. The problem is that his sense of America–forged during the Carter years–has not changed since. Sure, he came out with an inspirational post-9/11 album. But that came and went as fast as Yasir Arafat’s blood donation to the victims.

Springsteen said in his Obama letter: “After the terrible damage done over the past eight years, a great American reclamation project needs to be undertaken.” But it’s hard to imagine what exactly he wants to reclaim. The last time Springsteen’s lyrics reflected any consistent sense of romance and adventure in connection with America was during the Nixon years. Personally, I’d love to see him make music like that again. But somehow I don’t think that’s what he’s getting at.

Sadly, as Slate of all publications once noted, Bruce's second manager, Jon Landau, who went from Rolling Stone critic to rock Svengali, took that Springsteen away from us, transforming Bruce in his formative years from an exciting quirky apolitical musician to just another leftwing product on the showbiz assembly line.

(And speaking of Slate, nice of them to create a fun anti-Obama ad, which will have a little traction even after this week's PA primary has passed.)

...And the left has to be the aggressors in the culture war. Which is why I disagree with the take that Daniel Henninger makes in the above video, and here:

Remember the culture wars? This week the Democrats sued for peace.

On Friday evening, email queues lit up everywhere with people reacting to Barack Obama's thoughts on life being nasty, bitter and short in small-town America. Time was not long ago that a Democratic candidate could have said such folk cling to guns and religion and are hostile to "diversity" with nary a peep from his party. Not now. Obama was repudiated. Crushed. Media analysis suggested the damage could last til November.

Before midnight, Hillary was paddling down Whiskey River with the boys at Bronko's. Then on Sunday evening, the white flag really went up over the culture war's battlefield.

Hillary and Obama were both at an event in Grantham, Pa., in Cumberland County. That's south of Mechanicsburg and east of Boiling Springs. John Kerry took Pennsylvania by 2.5% in 2004, but Cumberland gave George Bush 64% of its vote. Hillary and Obama were appearing on a CNN event called the "Compassion Forum." They were at a place called Messiah College. Connect the dots.

Campbell Brown to Sen. Clinton: "And you have actually felt the presence of the Holy Spirit on many occasions. Share some of those occasions."

Hillary Clinton: "I have had the experiences on many, many occasions where I felt like the Holy Spirit was there with me as I made a journey . . . You know, it could be walking in the woods. It could be watching a sunset."

Hit rewind on the tape of history. It is 1992, the Republican Convention in Houston, at the Astrodome. This was the moment of arrival for the "Christian right." Dan Quayle, George H.W. Bush's VP nominee, spoke to a huge throng of evangelicals about "family values." Pat Buchanan delivered his "culture wars" speech. The press corps, for whom all this was alien ground, was openly hostile to the GOP.

Shelves bend beneath the weight of books analyzing the "war" between religiously oriented cultural conservatives and secular libs. "Piss Christ" and all that. Abortion. Robert Mapplethorpe's erotic photographs banned in Cincinnati. Abortion. Gun control. Michael Moore mocking Charlton Heston. Hollywood's endless Babylon. Home schoolers. Abortion.

Though vilified, these people wouldn't go away. The exit polls for George W. Bush's victory in 2004 revealed that the No. 1 issue for most voters was "moral values." Liberal analysts furiously attacked Karl Rove for "exploiting" these sentiments.

But even Karl Rove couldn't invent God, and God and faith were everywhere in Grantham Sunday evening.

I think it was Ann Coulter who said that during a presidential election, both parties campaign as Republicans, but only one side actually is the Republicans. Whoever said it, it's certainly accurate--the culture war may temporarily go to ground during an election year (although not even then: which side released Fahrenheit 9/11, the (grossly inferior) remake of The Manchurian Candidate and the enviro-apocalyptic The Day After Tomorrow in 2004?) but that doesn't mean that it ends, as Obama's "What's The Matter With Altoona" speech in San Francisco last week so aptly demonstrates.

Proof that your 1970s-era leather jacketed populist hero to the working man persona may be looking a bit threadbare these days--when you actually say with a straight face, “I’ve found enormous sustenance from Paul Krugman and Maureen Dowd”.

Update: Bruuuuuuce! is Reason #4 of the 20 Reasons Why Frank Martin Is Bitter. And I'm even more bitter than he is over Reason #17:

17. I now own 'Blade Runner' in 5 different DVD formats.

Heck, in addition to owning multiple DVD copies, and writing about the movie for Pajamas, I've owned it on VHS, and two different laser disc versions. And reading in Billboard around 1987 that there was this new company called Voyager with something called a "Criterion Collection" that had released Blade Runner as a letterboxed laser disc (back when letterboxing was new and controversial!) and was planning to release a letterboxed 2001: A Space Odyssey later that year is why I bought my first laser disc player.

I mean, you go into these small colonies near Clavius and the Tycho Magnetic Anomaly and, like a lot of small earth colonies in the Sol Sector, it's not surprising that when people get bitter, they cling to laser discs, DVDs, or (via Lileks) space age prunes...

Immediately after the election in 2004, Rush Limbaugh was fond of quoting this exchange between David Westin, the president of ABC News, and Tina Brown, from her now long-since-canceled CNBC show (subscription required, but this gives you the gist of things):

RUSH: So, anyway, she's got David Westin on the program, and she says, "David, would you have a reporter/producer live in any of these communities?" She's talking about the red states of America here, folks. "Would you have a reporter/producer live in any of these communities and saturate themselves in these cultures so that they get more stories from those communities?"

WESTIN: I think we don't do that enough, and I'm not just talking religious communities. I'm talking all sorts of communities across the country. I think that... You understand this, Tina, living in New York or in Los Angeles, we have busy jobs. We go into the office every day. We tend to socialize with the same people, or the same types of people, and I think it's terribly important for journalists to get out whether it's overseas or domestically and try to understand.

RUSH: We need more foreign correspondents in Alabama! We need more foreign correspondents north of Palm Beach County in Florida! We need embeds to go to church, find out what's going on with these holy rollers! Ah, folks, you can't know how much I love this.

While we're waiting for those foreign correspondents to don their Willis & Geiger safari jackets and grab their Shure SM-58s and minicams, Robert Ferrigno, found via Mark Steyn, has an excellent suggestion for an ambassador to lead them into the vast unknown that is the American Heartland.

Jonah Goldberg parses the difference between "elite", "snob", "arrogant", and other nouns and adjectives that are fun to put Dr. Evil’s patented air quotations around:

In his telling Pennsylvania was once Belgium on the Susquehanna — cheese parties, Sam Harris book clubs etc — and it can be again if only these people get good enough jobs to lay down their guns and bibles. As just about everyone has observed by now, this is a fundamentally Marxist way of looking at the world and Obama deserves to be called on it.

But it's not elitist, not really. It clearly snobbish. It's certainly myopic and arrogant. And it's absolutely wrong. But I don't think it's elitist. Maybe I'm biased because I don't have any pressing problem with elitism, rightly understood. Elite derives from the Latin for elect and in our elections we decide who will be our (political) elite. Jefferson believed in a democratic elite which rose up on merit. I do too. We're all elitists in one way or another (Show of hands: Who wants an elite surgeon to perform their heart-lung transplant and who wants a really average surgeon to do it? If you answer that you want the surgeon from the really meaty part of the bell curve, I will concede you are no elitist).

What's offensive about Obama's comment isn't its elitism per se, but the arrogance of assuming that those who see the world through a different prism or who are relatively immune to his charms are somehow embittered and confused and therefore less equipped to decide who should be our elected elite.

And yes, I understand that elitism has come to mean snobbish arrogance and all that, which is what most people mean when they say elitist. But I'm going to cling to my view of elitism regardless of which way the tide pulls me.

Or as Mickey Kaus writes:

I'm convinced that the great achievement of Republicanism over the past decades was getting average Americans to think that it was the Democrats who were the snobs. The person who convinced me of this (in a highly persuasive lecture) was Thomas Frank.

Kaus notes, that Frank's theories "are on the verge of convincing millions of average Americans that the Republicans were right, at least about the likely Dem nominee."

Dean Barnett writes, "Several commentators have suggested that Obama's moment of sloppy candor repeats the thesis of What's the Matter With Kansas, and thus the book has a new lease on relevance":

In truth, as execrable as it was, Frank's book offered a much more tightly argued position than the one offered by the supposedly brilliant senator who has deigned to lead the American people.

Frank, a native Kansan, insisted that many poor Kansans vote against their economic interests because they're unreasonably preoccupied with social issues. The key additional ingredient to his argument was that conservative
politicians only use social issues to cynically manipulate churchgoing rubes, and really have no interest in achieving any results on matters like abortion. Frank particularly stretched to make the latter point, at one point even stating (without any evidence of course) that Sam Brownback was once pro-choice.

Although hardly identical, Obama's and Frank's sentiments do share critical commonalities. Both evidence an unbecoming condescension to the American people. And both share modern liberalism's assumption that Americans are a bunch of dullards. Perhaps no other trait has so thoroughly harmed the left at theballot box.

Anyone who has ever walked by Harvard Yard has heard the kind of condescending comments that Obama offered in San Francisco. Heck, anyone who has listened to a Michelle Obama speech has heard the same kind of contempt for the American people expressed in unequivocal terms.

If you want to find this kind of smug superiority on the left, you don't have to look very hard. If you're of a mind to do some field research, I recommend you tune into Bill Maher's show on HBO next Friday night. I predict you won't have to wait more than ten minutes before Maher and his panel of Hollywood philosophes agree on what a stupid and ignorant place America is.

Read the whole thing; elsewhere, Bill Bradley explores "The secret story of how Obama's gaffe made its way to the Huffington Post, of all places, and how it might affect campaign coverage from now on."

Update: Mickey Kaus makes a great point, via a comment submitted by one of his readers:

Alert emailer M wonders why Obama is applying a Tom Frank analysis--of working class voters who vote Republican--to Pennsylvania, since unlike Kansas, Pennsylvania is a blue state that "hasn't voted for a Republican presidential nominee since 1988." And the most economically distressed parts of the state are the most Democratic, despite all the clinging to guns and God that's going on. In short, Obama's explaining something that doesn't happen. ... I suppose one answer is that Obama wasn't explaining why Pennsylvanians wouldn't vote for a Democrat but why they might not vote for him--a black, liberal Democrat. But Obama says he's explaining why small-town Rustbelt voters don't buy the idea that government can help them, which sounds an awful lot like not buying Democratic ideology generally.

It's a false consciousness!

Found via Liberty Peak Lodge, Thomas Sowell writes, "Like so many others on the left, Obama rejects ‘stereotypes’ when they are stereotypes he doesn't like but blithely throws around his own stereotypes about ‘a typical white person’ or ‘bitter’ gun-toting, religious and racist working class people":

However inconsistent Obama's words, his behavior has been remarkably consistent over the years. He has sought out and joined with the radical, anti-Western left, whether Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers of the terrorist Weatherman underground or pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli Rashid Khalidi.

Obama is also part of a long tradition on the left of being for the working class in the abstract, or as people potentially useful for the purposes of the left, but having disdain or contempt for them as human beings.

Karl Marx said, "The working class is revolutionary or it is nothing." In other words, they mattered only in so far as they were willing to carry out the Marxist agenda.

Fabian socialist George Bernard Shaw included the working class among the "detestable" people who "have no right to live." He added: "I should despair if I did not know that they will all die presently, and that there is no need on earth why they should be replaced by people like themselves."

Similar statements on the left go back as far as Rousseau in the 18th century and come forward into our own times.

It is understandable that young people are so strongly attracted to Obama. Youth is another name for inexperience -- and experience is what is most needed when dealing with skillful and charismatic demagogues.

Those of us old enough to have seen the type again and again over the years can no longer find them exciting. Instead, they are as tedious as they are dangerous.

George Will adds:

Obama does fulfill liberalism's transformation since Franklin Roosevelt. What had been under FDR a celebration of America and the values of its working people has become a doctrine of condescension toward those people and the supposedly coarse and vulgar country that pleases them.

And Noemie Emery traces leftwing elitism back to the days of Adlai Stevenson--brought up to date via Thomas Frank's What's The Matter With Kansas:

In Our Country, Michael Barone traces this strain back to 1956 and the second campaign of Adlai E. Stevenson, who, when told "thinking people" were for him, said, "Yes, but I need to win a majority," and when praised for having educated the voters, said that too many had not passed the course. "Stevenson," Barone says, "was the first leading Democratic politician to become a critic rather than a celebrator of middle-class American culture--the prototype of the liberal Democrat who would judge ordinary Americans by an abstract standard and find them wanting," and since Stevenson, there have been many such. Hart and Michael Dukakis were brought down by this failing, as was John Kerry, whose 2006 swipe at George W. Bush and those forced into the armed forces brought this response from some servicemen: "Halp us, Jon Carry--We R Stuck HEAR N Irak."

After their unexpected loss in 2004, Democrats were much too impressed by Thomas Frank's treatise What's the Matter With Kansas? which complained that they lost because middle-class voters were too stupid to vote their 'real' interests (which were presumably served by the Democrats), because conservatives wickedly played on their fears. ('Fear' is the Democrats' answer for every vote they don't get.) Whether middle-class interests are better served by liberalism is an open question--they did so much better, after all, under Carter than Reagan, and the Clintons did so much to help them get health care--but condescension remains an unpromising strategy. There is, it appears, not muchthe matter with Kansas. Obama's mother, he says, did come from Kansas. But the matter with Democrats, and with Obama, seems to be Thomas Frank.

Heh, Indeed.^TM

As P.J. O'Rourke once wrote, "The founding fathers, in their wisdom, devised a method by which our republic can take 100 of its most prominent numskulls and keep them out of the private sector where they might do actual harm".

And kudos to John Kerry for really living up to that premise!

Ann Althouse looks back to Time magazine's January 5th, 1970 issue, which declared "The Middle Americans" as Time's Men and Women of the Year:

Their car windows were plastered with American-flag decals, their ideological totems. In the bumper-sticker dialogue of the freeways, they answered Make Love Not War with Honor America or Spiro is My Hero. They sent Richard Nixon to the White House and two teams of astronauts to the moon. They were both exalted and afraid. The mysteries of space were nothing, after all, compared with the menacing confusions of their own society.

The American dream that they were living was no longer the dream as advertised. They feared that they were beginning to lose their grip on the country. Others seemed to be taking over — the liberals, the radicals, the defiant young, a communications industry that they often believed was lying to them. The Saturday Evening Post folded, but the older world of Norman Rockwell icons was long gone anyway. No one celebrated them: intellectuals dismissed their lore as banality. Pornography, dissent and drugs seemed to wash over them in waves, bearing some of their children away.

But in 1969 they began to assert themselves. They were 'discovered' first by politicians and the press, and then they started to discover themselves. In the Administration's voices — especially in the Vice President's and the Attorney General's — in the achievements and the character of the astronauts, in a murmurous and pervasive discontent, they sought to reclaim their culture. It was their interpretation of patriotism that brought Richard Nixon the time to pursue a gradual withdrawal from the war. By their silent but newly felt presence, they influenced the mood of government and the course of legislation, and this began to shape the course of the nation and the nation's course in the world. The Men and Women of the Year were the Middle Americans.

Ann writes, "Read the whole, awesome essay — and marvel that we've been talking about these things for the last 40 years":

Barack Obama's recent comment about the bitterness of left-behind small-towners may seem like the latest line of dialogue in a long, long conversation.

I'm not sure what's to marvel about--Obama's rhetoric in his less guarded moments is merely another byproduct of one of the more curious aspects of what Time, almost four decades ago, called "the liberals, the radicals, the defiant young" (who are not so defiant now, merely trapped in a leftover haze of conformity): their absolute inability to advance their mindset beyond the first days of Starting From Zero.

From its headline on, this entire post by Ace on the Obamavania train wreck is well worth your time, but here's an excerpt to whet your appetite:

Video of Hillary playing the elitist card against Obama -- and successfully.

Is there another person on the face of the earth Hillary could call an elitist without exploding in a fiery ball of spontaneous irony?

Incidentally, the press is focusing on "bitterness" because that's mostly what Hillary is focusing on.

They're ignoring the critique made by conservatives, Newt Gingrich, and John McCain.

So you tell me: Are they ignoring the real issue here because they simply are unwilling to credit a non-liberal as offering a legitimate take?

Or are they so isolated in the liberal cocoon they're not even aware that a critique exists apart from Hillary's?

What's more likely? And which is worse?

As Betsy Newmark notes, Kirsten Powers hit the nail on the head: In a liberal world (including most big city newspapers, the big three TV networks and CNN), Obama's folk Marxism sounds "totally normal, and outside of that world I don’t know that he appreciates how it sounds."

...Put his left Salvatore Ferragamo in his mouth and twist:

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them…And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Four years ago, when another Democratic Senator running for the White House demonstrated that he was, in his own way, equally far out of touch with middle class voters, he at least did so by not knowing what to order on a cheesesteak (also involving Pennsylvania, in a nice example of retroactive synchronicity), or in a Wendy's, which Mark Steyn so memorably described. Or by not understanding that the average guy doesn't fly off to another state for a weekend of windsurfing whenever the mood strikes.

Talk about a rookie mistake: Leave it to Obama to make John Kerry's Brahmin hauteur seem earnestly goofy in retrospect.

Update: The timing of Obama's latest gaffe, immediately on top of this YouTube collection of audio clips from Obama's own readings of his books, which has been making the rounds through the Blogosphere this week, doesn't help matters.

In the Weekly Standard, Sonny Bunch writes that Martin Scorsese's Shine A Light, his Rolling Stones concert movie, is no Last Waltz. Cold comfort for those of us who also thought the latter was more than a little overrated--or to be more charitable, hasn't been well served by the passage of time.

(Speaking of which, don't miss Bunch calling the modern sixty-something Stones "leather Muppets"! And for a great Rolling Stones concert movie, you can't go wrong with the classics.)

It’s been said before that we live in an age of irony, and irreverence is king", Brent Bozell writes, adding that Washington Post writer Linton Weeks recently coined "the irresistible term 'Snark Ages' to characterize it":

Even today, the counter-culturalists, now aging academics holed up in university English departments, see sentiment as an enemy. Weeks cited Temple’s Joan Mellen, who demeaned sentiment as “friend to the status quo, and to passivity. A formidable enemy, of moral no less than of artistic integrity, in art as in life, in these beleaguered times it is best quickly identified, and then scrupulously avoided.”

Hollywood’s most influential cultural commissars also live by this code. They would claim to be the champions of authenticity, but in their endless attempts to persuade us through their “art,” they often suggest that nothing is authentic on its face, that no one can be trusted and everyone deep down is a phony, living a lie. I’m not talking merely about the manufacturers of movies and television shows and music, but about the critics who constantly proclaim for the whole country what is the best in art, and the award-show managers that now slavishly follow what the critics pronounce.

Insincerity is also rampant in Manhattan, in national magazine publishing. There is no greater irony than Kurt Andersen, one of the founders of a Snark Ages trendsetter, Spy magazine, to proclaim to Weeks that “If someone were to look at 2008 culture from 1963, I suppose it would look strangely unsentimental.” How priceless. Watch as the polluter looks out on his black oil spill of mockery and decides it isn’t all good.

Weeks turned to experts who suggested that sentiment is strangled in our private lives as well. Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at the University of California, theorized that the culture "has lost the capacity to be nice, to appreciate, to be modest, and even to be reverential -- all relatives of the appreciation family of emotions." Keltner added the theory that we spend more and more time with strangers than family and old friends, people who spur us to occasions he called “deep niceness.”

But Weeks protested that people are still sentimental in their private lives, that they still say “I love you” to each other, they still send flowers and greeting cards, they still cry at funerals and at tear-jerker movies. Of course they do. We have not lost the ability to love and revere and be sincere. There are still songs and shows that reflect that feeling. They’re just dismissed as hopelessly cheesy and square.

Throughout our lives, we privately resist the Snark Ages peer pressure of popular culture. Even today’s young people can learn to reject it. Call it rebelling against the rebellion. Who’s the counter-culture now?

Or as Mona Charen wrote a few years ago:

But we can't change the channel, because this isn't just a television invention. This is our culture. This free-for-all, libertine, conscienceless Maypole dance is what we've created from once-strong roots of Puritan rectitude. A nation once lampooned for its innocence now wallows in smut of every kind.

Were it not for the new counterculture — the millions of families attempting to raise moral and idealistic kids despite the deluge of decadence — I would be in doubt about our future.

Exactly.

Writing at Pajamas HQ, Kathy Shaidle directs her Five Feet Of Fury towards the Canadian Human Rights Commission:

Next time someone threatens to “move to Canada” over real or imagined Patriot Act overreach, present him with this scenario:

Having settled into his new Ottawa digs, your expatriate pal is reading his morning paper when a familiar name leaps off the newsprint: his own.

Turns out Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC) investigators were trolling your friend’s neighborhood for unprotected wireless internet connections, and leeched onto his.

Why? So they could post racist comments under assumed names on “neo-Nazi hate sites,” then charge the site’s owners with … publishing hate speech.

That’s how your innocent friend’s name and address got read aloud — then hastily broadcast by Blackberrying bloggers and journalists — in open court, as evidence in one of the CHRC’s most widely publicized cases.

So now your left-wing expatriate friend is widely suspected of being either a neo-Nazi racist or part of a secret government entrapment scheme.

His phone starts ringing. It won’t stop for quite some time.

Kind of a buzzkill after all those (highly exaggerated) reports about “gay marriage” and “legalized pot” up here in the Great White North, eh?

Kathy adds, "Pat Buchanan’s comical nickname for my country, 'Soviet Canuckistan,' is proving more accurate than he ever imagined."

Like I said in my first Silicon Graffiti video this year, think of it as totalitarianism with a smiley face.

By the time of his death in 2005 at the venerable age of 98, Philip Johnson was arguably America's best known architect, having designed his famed "Glass House" in 1949, and worked with Mies van der Rohe on Mies's Seagram Building a few years later. The former was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1997; the latter dubbed "Building of the Millennium" by the New York Times.

But Johnson's puckish demeanor in his later years, which earned him decades of good cheer from fellow Manhattan elites, hid a dark journey through the liberal fascist politics of the 1930s, which culminated in his cheering on the Nazis as they marched through Poland in 1939. "We saw Warsaw burn and Modlin being bombed. It was a stirring spectacle", he would write to a friend at the time.

At the start of the 1930s, Johnson was an admirer of the socialist-leaning architects of Germany's Bauhaus, as he founded the newly born Museum of Modern Art's architectural department, and helped put modern architecture on the map in the US. Apparently after witnessing a Hitler rally in Potsdam in 1933, Johnson was immediately attracted to the Nazis. That moment sent Johnson on a seemingly strange journey: shortly thereafter, he would leave MoMA to seek employment with first Huey Long and then Father Coughlin, before ultimately winding up cheering the Nazis on at the start of WWII.

During that same period though, while Johnson openly admired the Nazis, he befriended the last director of the Bauhaus, Mies van der Rohe, even as the Nazis were shuttering the design school's doors. Returning to MoMA in the 1950s and establishing himself, via his famed Glass House, as a known architect in his own right, as Hilton Kramer noted in the mid-1990s, and Anne Applebaum shortly after Johnson's death, Johnson did a near-thorough job of tossing his radical past down the memory hole. At the least, most of his fellow Manhattan elites didn't lose too much sleep over it.

And yet, comparing Johnson's past with the lost history of the 1930s described in Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism, in retrospect Johnson comes across as a sort of dark version of Woody Allen's Zelig character, appearing alongside several of the fascist left's most important figures in both the US and Europe during the Depression.

(More video blogging found here, incidentally.)

Is David Mamet a canary in the coal mine for the 2008 election? That's what Daniel Henninger posits. As the above title implies, Henninger also notes that while Mamet's coming out party in the Village Voice has been widely noted in Europe, America's old media have been maintaining radio silence--at least as of when Henninger shot this segment.

(Incidentally, welcome to our 13,000th blog post as we enter into our sixth year in the land of pixels and snark, according to my blog software.)

Andy Bowers of Slate believes he has found "America's Stupidest Bike Lane"; my much more curmudgeonly immediate impression is that it's a multiple-choice question with thousand upon thousands of correct answers.

Cuffy Meigs writes that it's Panic In Detroit (sorry, makes for a better Bowie song) Denver this summer:

Yeah, we bloggers/blog readers have been hearing this for the past month, but this AP piece is hitting the wires and will be in every print newspaper this weekend (sad to say, even I still take the local Sunday paper). Lots of unplugged people are about to get up to speed.

"Nightmarish...Wreck...Wrenching...Infuriating...Excruciating..." Delicious:

For all their delight in soaring voter registration and strong poll numbers, some Democrats fear the contest between Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton might have a nightmarish end, which could wreck a promising election year.

The chief worry is that Clinton may carry her recent winning streak into Pennsylvania, Indiana, North Carolina and other states, leaving her with unquestioned momentum but fewer pledged delegates than Obama. Party leaders then would face a wrenching choice: Steer the nomination to a fading Obama, even as signs suggested Clinton could be the stronger candidate in November; or go with the surging Clinton and risk infuriating Obama's supporters, especially blacks, the Democratic Party's most loyal base.

Some anxious Democrats want party elders to step in now to generate more "superdelegate" support for Obama, effectively choking off Clinton's hopes before she can bolster them further. But many say that is unlikely, and they pray the final 10 contests will make the ultimate choice fairly obvious, not excruciating.

Even as the "Recreate '68" voices huddle in the corner (geez when did it ever go away?) a savior emerges from the shadows!

(On the other hand, a powerful voice from the Dark Side of the Force whispers, "You know you got a problem if the answer is Al Gore".)

As I wrote at the start of the month after noting Gloria Steinem's Olympic-quality backflip regarding the successive former Navy men to run for the White House in 2004 and 2008:

56 years ago, Lillian Hellman rather disingenuously told HCUAA, "I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions." But as we're seeing, those who played the "Chickenhawk" and Starship Trooper-esque "Absolute Moral Authority" cards earlier in the decade have absolutely no problem hitting the CNTRL-ALT-DEL buttons on their consciences when the need suits them.

Much more recently, Howard Dean claimed, "I will use whatever position I have in order to root out hypocrisy."

Physician, heal thyself:

"The real issue is this," Dean said in March 2004, when endorsing formal rival Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., "Who would you rather have in charge of the defense of the United States of America, a group of people who never served a day overseas in their life, or a guy who served his country honorably and has three Purple Hearts and a Silver Star on the battlefields of Vietnam?"

McCain, by the way, has been awarded the Silver Star, the Legion of Merit, two Bronze Star Medals, a Purple Heart and the Distinguished Flying Cross.

(Via Hot Air, who dubs hypocritical Howard the quote of the day, and with good reason.)

Linking to an item found by The Deacon's Bench blog, the Anchoress writes, "This actually sounds like a church Obama could love: WE ARE THE GOD-LINGS WE’VE BEEN WAITING FOR!":

That triumphal barnburner of an Easter hymn, "Jesus Christ Has Risen Today – Hallelujah," this morning will rock the walls of Toronto's West Hill United Church as it will in most Christian churches across the country.

But at West Hill on the faith's holiest day, it will be done with a huge difference. The words “Jesus Christ” will be excised from what the congregation sings and replaced with “Glorious hope.”

Thus, it will be hope that is declared to be resurrected – an expression of renewal of optimism and the human spirit – but not Jesus, contrary to Christianity's central tenet about the return to life on Easter morning of the crucified divine son of God.

Generally speaking, no divine anybody makes an appearance in West Hill's Sunday service liturgy.

There is no authoritative Big-Godism, as Rev. Gretta Vosper, West Hill's minister for the past 10 years, puts it. No petitionary prayers (“Dear God, step into the world and do good things about global warming and the poor”). No miracles-performing magic Jesus given birth by a virgin and coming back to life. No references to salvation, Christianity's teaching of the final victory over death through belief in Jesus's death as an atonement for sin and the omnipotent love of God. For that matter, no omnipotent God, or god.

Ms. Vosper has written a book, published this week – With or Without God: Why the Way We Live is More Important than What We Believe – in which she argues that the Christian church, in the form in which it exists today, has outlived its viability and either it sheds its no-longer credible myths, doctrines and dogmas, or it's toast.

Post-Christian religion? What could go wrong?

Ever four years, there's at least one article mentioning that the left hates to be called liberal; here's Rich Lowry's take from 2004 (which actually namechecks Obama, then a newly minted senator). And in the International Herald-Tribune (a Pinch of a spinoff from the NYT), here's this year's model: in addition to never mentioning his middle name, one must never use the L-word to describe Barry O in polite company:

Simon Rosenberg, who leads the New Democrat Network and is currently unaligned in the Democratic contest, argues, "My basic belief is the generation-long era of political domination, the ascendancy of conservative politics, is at an end, and Obama has captured more than anyone else the opportunity of this era." He added: "It's very hard to put labels on him. He's building his own sandbox." [Is he old enough to play in it unsupervised?--Ed]

Obama, in fact, had the support of 64 percent of independents in the last New York Times/CBS News Poll. But can that transpartisan appeal be sustained? He has only begun to take some hard political hits - from the Clinton campaign, from conservative commentators and radio hosts, and from Senator John McCain's campaign. The recent flare-up about his pastor's racial views was one example. And Republicans are just starting up their attacks.

"Nobody's yet taken him on as a liberal," said Andrew Kohut, who leads the Pew Research Center. "But McCain will."

So far, Republicans give every indication of planning to portray Obama as a big-government liberal out of touch with American values and unprepared to be commander in chief.

"When you're rated by National Journal as to the left of Ted Kennedy and Bernie Sanders, that's going to be difficult to explain," said Danny Diaz , a spokesman for the Republican National Committee.

Coupled with Michelle Obama's punitive liberalism, Rev. Wright's radical chic-era boilerplate conspiratorial racism, Tony Rezko's questionable financial dealings, and Obama's own minimalistic voting record, that's quite a load of baggage for someone with a featherweight history as a national politician to tote on the road to the White House.

Related: Well, related conceptually, at least: "Kinder, gentler euphemisms for failure."

"Obama adviser likens Bill Clinton's comments to McCarthy's", the Boston Globe reports.

Meanwhile, Jake Tapper notes that "Carville Equates Richardson With Judas":

In the New York Times today, Clintonista James Carville calls Bill Richardson's endorsement of Obama "an act of betrayal."

“Mr. Richardson’s endorsement came right around the anniversary of the day when Judas sold out for 30 pieces of silver, so I think the timing is appropriate, if ironic,” Carville said.

So in Mr. Carville's view on this Easter weeend, Richardson is Judas Iscariot, Obama is Caiaphas, and Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY, is .....?

Heh. Now that brings an entirely new meaning to the phrase, "The King James Bible".

Tom Stoppard describes 1968 as "The year of the posturing rebel". Or as John Lennon confessed a decade later:

"I dabbled in politics in the late 1960s and 1970s, more out of guilt than anything. Guilt for being rich and guilt thinking that perhaps love and peace isn't enough and you have to go and get shot or something, or get punched in the face to prove I'm one of the people. I was doing it against my instincts."

Fascinating though, that the 1960s and '70s, a period that was rife with poseurs such as Lennon, is still influencing us to this day. You can see it in music, in the form of ersatz nostalgia acts such as Lenny Kravitz and Sheryl Crow, who dress in period costume (sort of the tie-dyed equivalent of greasers like Sha Na Na in leather jackets and D.A.s in 1975, or a big band that same year still playing in tan dinner jackets and bow ties). Or much more dangerously, in a politics that still takes it rhetoric from a period now four decades in the past, whether it's John Kerry in 2004, or Rev. Wright in 2008.

But then, when starting from zero, one is always tempted to stay trapped in Year One.

"If a liberal falls in the liberal forest and no one says they heard it, can you say it didn't happen? Mr. Mamet must feel like the guy in a mob movie who knows the hit is coming but has to sweat through to the bullet."

As Glenn Reynolds once wrote, "he left looks for heretics and the right looks for converts, and both find what they're looking for". And woe betide the man who takes Apple's advice and actually does begin to "think different": the silence will be deafening.

While it lacks the staggering production values and stentorian dialogue readings of the finest Fred Spencer Productions, the latest edition of Silicon Graffiti, our in-house video blog, is online. It analyzes and breaks down the creepy 9/11-ish vibe of a couple of advertisements, the first a Starbucks ad that actually ran in Manhattan less than a year after September 11th (here's our concurrent blog post from our first year). And the second, a much more recent viral video for a (possibly fictitious?) Dutch travel agency with close to a million and half views on YouTube and at least one appearance on the cable news channels, which is where I first saw it at the start of this month.

(Past episodes of Silicon Graffiti can be found here.)

"Within weeks of being inaugurated, I will return to the U.N. and I will literally, formally rejoin the community of nations and turn over a proud new chapter in America's relationship with the world."

Barack Obama out on the hustings this week? No, that's what John Kerry was saying right around this time four years ago.

The great Victor Davis Hanson wonders why none of the candidates will get serious about discussing America's energy needs:

In terms of energy, we continue to delay coal plants despite our vast reserves, we dither on nuclear power, we won’t drill off the California coast or in tiny parcels in a vast Alaska, while we talk grandly of wind and solar and hydrogen and all the other solutions that are decades away from contributing in major ways to our energy needs—while our enemies in the Middle East are building trillion dollar reserves that will find their way into the hands of those who want to kill us. Do we think Nigeria or Russia is easier on the environment than we are when drilling oil, or that the Chinese have cleaner coal plants? If we really live on planet Earth, then isn’t it incumbent on us to exploit our own resources safely to ensure others less careful do less damage to our shared globe?

Can’t we find a single Presidential candidate who says: ‘Hang on. We are going to get serious. We our going to build coal, nuclear, more hydro-electric plants. We want as many Americans as possible to buy a second electric plug-in car for urban driving; we want more efficient gas and diesel engines; we are going to cut spending, radically so, to balance the budget, pay down the debt, pay off our foreign debt, and raise the value of our currency. Tighten your belts: federal spending is frozen for five years; we are going to raise the Social Security retirement age and reform the system. The borders are going to close, and citizenship is going to mean something again.’

Should McCain say that, it would trump ‘hope’ and ‘change’ and the 1960s tired old agenda, adopted by both parties, that got us in the mess we’re in.

What's really fascinating is that even a sclerotic leftwing organization such as this one is willing to engage in a more sensible conversation about America's energy needs than any of the remaining candidates on either side of the aisle.

Kevin D. Williamson spots a classic line in The Grauniad:

Writing about David Mamet's rejection of "brain-dead liberalism" in the Guardian (commented on yesterday in Media Blog), columnist Michael Billington offers this groaner on Glenngary Glen Ross:

Given his new-found conservatism, I doubt he could ever write a play riddled with such moral ambiguity.

Kevin's response on the moral certainty of almost everyone on the far left is well worth your time, but Billington's comments on Glenngary Glen Ross and its "moral ambiguity" read as hilarious to me. I've only seen the movie, not the play, but the movie was one of the least morally ambiguous--and most depressing--films I've ever watched. There's a reason why the cast referred to the movie as "Death of a F***in' Salesman": it has the absolute certainly that Arthur Miller had that capitalism is evil, and selling is the most evil profession of all. At least until it's time to sell that latest movie or play.

Contrast Glenngary with Oliver Stone's Wall Street, a film written by an equally hard-line leftist, (at least prior to Mamet's intellectual awakening) which nonetheless dresses its contempt for the investment world in a slick, seductive surface. There's a reason why everyone I've met when I worked in the financial industry could recite big swatches of the film's dialogue (as could I), and why Gordon Gekko's horizontal striped shirts (designed by Alan Flusser) relaunched for a time amongst Wall Street executives a style long-dead since the 1930s.

In contrast, because Glengarry was a much less ambiguous film, it appeals much more only to true believers, a trait which Oliver Stone's post-Wall Street movies increasingly suffered from. Assuming Mamet ever works again after coming out of the other celluloid closet, I'll be very curious to see if and how the tone of his work shifts.

David Mamet discovers the true power of the Dark Side of the Force. But will he have a career left?

William Wilson asks, "Network TV News: Evil or Incompetent?" I think we can put our money on the latter, to be honest:

It is the day before the Ohio and Texas primaries. A main issue in the debate between Hillary Clinton and Barrack Obama revolves around which of the two would be stronger in dealing with foreign affairs. And yet, NBC treated the meat of the issue as if it was of no consequence.

In all of 31 seconds, NBC gave stories about the threat by Venezuela – a major oil exporter – to launch a war against a neighboring country, the Russian election where stark authoritarianism is raising its head once again, the bombing of another nation by the United States, and near open warfare in Gaza. That’s right: 31 seconds to deal with four stories, any one of which could have devastating consequences for American citizens.

So how did NBC fill the rest of the time? They spent 4 minutes and 20 seconds on two stories that will warm my mother’s heart. The first came down to “eat a good breakfast.” The second had one theme: “get 8 hours of sleep a night.”

Huntley and Brinkley would be working for a suburban TV channel--or a blog--in today's Oprah-fied, Katie Couric-ish network environment.

Related: "Listen, we need to talk to every high-dollar hooker on the eastern seaboard, like yesterday. Get on it, people! Err, you know what I mean."

Not surprisingly, Pamela of Atlas Shrugs has lots of fun at her (soon to be-former?) governor's expense, complete with links to the Smoking Gun and numerous Photoshops of the Empire State's Man Who Would Be Emperor and his Club.

Meanwhile, "When New York Magazine gave him their Public Service Award, they wrote, '... if you’ve heard of it, Spitzer did it.'"

He's gotta have it!

E. Gary Gygax has left the dungeon.

Back in 2002, Starbucks received plenty of grief over their "Collapse Into Cool" ad campaign, which appeared to take the symbolism described in Wilson Bryan Key's perennial 1970s back-catalog bestseller Subliminal Seduction into the 21st century.

Starbucks quickly pulled the ad, but six years later, this viral video from a Dutch travel agency appears to also use 9/11 as its subtext, if much less obviously:

Jumbo jet unexpectedly roars low overhead? Check.

Shaky handheld cinéma-vérité footage? Check.

Airplane banks into large urban buildings? Check.

Of course, the payoff is an emergency landing with kids ready to hit the beach instead of a fireball or terrorists emerging, but the buildup to that point seems pretty obviously designed to trigger all sorts of 9/11-themed subconscious messages.

I forget if it was CNN or Fox, but I saw the ad being discussed on at least one of the cable news channels last week while I was on vacation, and I'm reluctantly posting the clip above, but certainly not favorably. Will it ever be appropriate for those in the advertising business to use 9/11 imagery to sell their clients' products? Let history be your guide: other than movies and documentaries, do images of Pearl Harbor or the Civil War move any merchandise?

Related thoughts here.

Update: Oy.

Late Update (5/29/08): This post became the grist for Silicon Graffiti video shot a couple of weeks later:

This is hysterically funny on all sorts of levels: The New York Times has an article titled--I think with a straight face--"Parent Shock: Children Are Not Décor". From the headline on, the theme is Bobos in Paradise Yuppie parents who discover, the hard way, a basic and incontrovertible fact of life that in less enlightened times was once considered common sense: Little kids and delicate modernist furniture and decorations are not compatible:

Nevertheless, some people try. Ms. Brown and Mr. Friedman — who of course were thrilled to have a child, like all the later-in-life parents interviewed for this article — were also determined not to let Harrison “take control of the house,” Ms. Brown said. They went ahead with putting in flat-front lacquered maple cabinets in the kitchen, even though they soon had to watch a professional babyproofer drill 300 holes in them for safety latches. (Ms. Brown still cringes.) They put up silk Shantung draperies in Harrison’s bedroom, knowing that they might well end up stained, as they soon did — with yogurt. And they held onto the molded-wood chairs, which were not an easy transition from the highchair. “They have a very sleek bottom,” Ms. Brown explained. “He slides off it.”

The slightly arch tone of the article is a scream--it reads like the writer herself had no idea that high design and rough-housing kids were incompatible concepts when she wrote the piece.

(H/T: IP. On the other hand, I have a lot more sympathy for these parents than this earlier Times story of "modern" domesticity.)

"It is now clear that the 'Noughties' [Ugh--Ed] have much in common with the 1970s."

Dude--that was clear five farging years ago.

(More curmudgeonly flashbacks to the decade that taste forgot, here, here, and here. Link to Times article found via David Frum who, in 1999 wrote one of the definitive histories of that sorry brown polyester decade.)

Dr. Helen writes, "For 'Feminists' Only Well Behaved Women Make History":

Bridget Johnson at Pajama's Media has an interesting column on Golda Meir and today's brand of female leadership:

As I watched the life of the former prime minister unfold onscreen, I chuckled at the thought of how our 2008 obsession with identity politics seems to forget the great leaders — who just happened to be women — who have long had the attention of the rest of the world. After all, Oprah is not the most powerful woman in the world; that woman is, as ranked by Forbes, German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

But Merkel is a conservative. Meir fought for Israel’s survival in the Yom Kippur War. Even Condoleezza Rice’s term as secretary of state has not been hailed as a great advance for women and/or African-Americans. So is a leader who happens to be a women only hailed as advancement if she pursues a feminist agenda outlined by NOW or the Code Pink sisters?

It would seem that the answer to that question is a resounding "yes."

In December of 2004, in the immediate aftermath of President Bush's victory over Senator Kerry, Michael Barone wrote, "History does not always move in one direction". But that's not a message the identity politics-obsessed left seems able to process.

Some of our younger readers might be astonished to learn that many years ago, these tips used to be called, in less enlightened, less obssessed with counterknowledge times, common sense.

(Via the H.R. department at Maggie's Farm.)

Race42008, whom we quoted on this week's PJM Political show on XM regarding their spotting of a key Romney flip-flop, suggests that "the Democrats are in quite a pickle with their NASCAR-like rules, but, unlike the racing circuit, the world’s oldest political party has a little totalitarian detour on the way to the nomination":

NASCAR settles all its points on the tracks.

Democrats, on the other hand, borrow from Figure Skating and the old Politburo, with elitist judges holding ultimate coronation power.

Many Obama supporters have given notice that they will not abide winning the “standard” delegate race only to lose due to “super” delegate votes.

It appears that it is near impossible for either candidate to amass the needed majority of delegates via only standard delegates.

But then, there is Florida squared.

In 2000, the Democratic Party considered itself aggrieved when it lost the presidency despite the fact that Gore got the most national popular votes.

No matter that the rules have been in place since 1789 that make such calculations irrelevant. Also, no matter that they they tried to change the rules in Florida.

So, now the Dems find themselves rhetorically committed to exalting mob-rule pure democracy.

Add to all this the Clintons extreme ambition and the religious fervor of the Obama-ites, and one sees the makings of a convention that could make 1968’s look pedestrian.

As T.O. would say, bring your popcorn.

Update: More from Glenn Reynolds.

Jonah Goldberg writes, "One thing we’re learning from this election: These really are different parties":

First, look at the Democrats. Listen to the discussion about their strategies. Hillary needs to win more blacks and men. Obama must capture more Hispanics and peel away more white women. Both need to fight for “the youth.”

Now look at the Republicans and how we talk about them. Can McCain win over conservatives? Should he apologize for his support of amnesty or his opposition to tax cuts? Can Romney convince pro-lifers? Will Huckabee ever make inroads with economic conservatives? Were Rudy’s positions on gays, guns, and abortion too liberal?

He concludes:

The Republican party is a mess, absolutely. Conservatives are sorting out what they believe, what heresies they can tolerate and on which principles they will not bend. At times this argument is loud, ugly and unfortunate. But you know what? At least it’s an argument about something. On the Democratic side, if you strip away the crass appeals to identity politics, the emotional pandering and the helium-infused rhetoric, you’re pretty much left with a campaign about nothing.

Yes, but in both Hollywood and on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, shows about nothing were extremely popular throughout virtually all of the 1990s. And could very well be due for a revival.

James Lileks writes:

Love of country must always be qualified these days, lest anyone think you are unaware of slavery, insufficiently regulated railroad stock offerings, Lester Maddox or the attempt by Philip Morris to conceal the addictive nature of cigarettes. Say “I love this country” at a dinner table with strangers, and it’s like shave and a haircut without the two bits. But? But?

Back on September 11th 2003, based on a James Taranto "Best of the Web" column that day, dubbed it the Copperhead Conjunction. Laura Ingraham has more potent, if slightly less elegant term, for that conjunctive word.

Andrea Harris writes that although she's never watched 24 (truth be told, neither have I), "I just think it’s a shame that yet another apparently hard-hitting and gritty show is going to be shoved into the Very Special Lesson cesspool — as well as months of having to endure television commercials on how we should teach our kids not to hate anyone — really, including, say, pedophiles who rape and kill children?"

But it’s always been like this. Dealing with what our so-called entertainment media sees fit to serve up to us here in the US of A has always been an exercise in torment for anyone who thinks that art should not take a back seat to teaching five-year-olds how to share their toys. Unfortunately to get into power in this country (and probably others, but I know my own country the best so I’ll just focus on America right now) you have to be the sort of person who really believes that the rest of the nation is comprised of toddlers clutching their dollies stubbornly to their chests. I don’t think I have to give any examples, do I? Just think of the upcoming election, or look at the night’s television schedule. The media, of course, is part of the powers that run this country. Back when I was young the problem was an entertainment industry hamstrung by the need to be “proper” according to the standards of no later than twenty years previous. In the Sixties and Seventies that meant the Forties and Fifties was the touchstone of progress, and Depression-era decorum was the norm, which meant only women on TV wore white gloves and hats when they went outdoors. Today, in the supposedly progressive first decade of the 21st century, our Baby Boomer-run media empire has stalled in those halcyon days when women considered themselves “emancipated” if they were living with bearded stoners, being called “my old lady,” and serving mushroom tea instead of coffee to all the bearded stoner’s bearded stoner pals. There have been a few attempts to crawl at least into the Reagan era, but for the most part we’re stuck in the commune, and the natives are no more tolerant of “different” viewpoints than the squares of Eld were.

Maybe a big reason why television executives feel the urge to make their programming as childlike and condescending as possible is that they base their assumptions regarding America as a whole from daily observations of a remarkably dysfunctional talent pool.

A.O. Scott of the New York Times explores territory long since mapped in depth here at Ed Driscoll.com:

With a few exceptions, though — “Juno” being the current and somewhat controversial example — the rituals of heterosexual courtship no longer provide as flexible or adaptable a framework as they once did. The sexual revolution, of course, had something to do with this, since it dented the symbolic prestige of marriage and thus challenged the realism of plots that ended with wedding bells. (The quintessential romantic comedy of the revolutionary era was probably “The Graduate,” a movie that ends with the disruption of a marriage ceremony and an ambiguous escape from the altar.) And movies, after the 1960s, were able to deal more candidly with matters that had previously been addressed through indirection and innuendo.

That’s one theory, at any rate. But the movies made under the old taboos of the Production Code are far more sophisticated, and far less timid, than what we see today.

Indeed--as I wrote almost a year ago:

The need to bury these themes to get them past the censors in the Hays Office made for brilliant writing and great moviemaking. As did the need to use innuendo rather than overt sexuality (see: Hitchcock, Alfred). That period ended when--talk about unintended consequences--the demise of the Hays office depressed Hollywood’s box office by removing restrictions upon its writers and directors.

More Scott:

And yet, while the romantic comedy has almost always trafficked in happy endings, that happiness is rarely accompanied by a sense of risk or exhilaration. When you think of, say, Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn — or even Doris Day and Rock Hudson — you recall the emotional combat of two strong-willed, independent individuals ending in mutual conquest. Love, in those old pictures, was a dangerous and noble sport that required skill and cunning as well as commitment. It required movie stars whose physical appeal was matched by verbal dexterity and a vital sense of idiosyncrasy. They were not real of course: Who ever met anyone like C. K. Dexter Haven and Tracy Lord, the central pair in “The Philadelphia Story?” They were better.

That's because unlike today's stars, they were grown-ups, a species that's virtually extinct in today's Hollywood, where Jack Nicholson is 70 going on 18, and Leonardo DiCaprio is 33 going on 12.

But then, that's a topic that Frederica Mathewes-Green explored brilliantly two and a half years ago.

The New York Times: Where the news is almost as old as our readers!

Transatlantic Politics looks at "German protectionism against Nokia":

German protectionism at its best: Nokia is a "subsidy locust" and promotes "caravan capitalism" for having decided to move its 2,300 emplyees-factory from the Germany to Romania, where workers cost 10 times less - claim German politicians and trade unions.

Even the European Commission promised some help from "anti-globalization" funds for the angry German workers, backed by influential trade unions and populist politicians, while the European Parliament launched an investigation into alleged abuse of EU funds in relocating to Romania. Everyone seems to forget that Nokia is the LAST mobile phone manufacturer to leave Germany, after Motorola and BenQ Siemens did the same last year and two years ago. And Nokia is not moving to China, like everyone else, but stays in the EU and gives a fair chance of development to Romania, the poorest member of the club after Bulgaria.

Yet principles such as "freedom of goods, labor and services" within the EU are easily forgotten when it comes to German protectionism.

Socialism: if you build it, they will leave. Which is why, back in 2002, Steven Den Beste wrote, "Europe is a high-tech disaster area"; policies such as this indicate that little has changed to alter that perception.

Up-close and personal with Hillary Clinton and Tom Cruise on the campaign trail

(Via Breitbart.TV)

Andrea Billups of the Washington Times writes about advertising and father figures:

Todd Wasserman knew he had touched a nerve when he saw the enormous number of responses from readers.

As editor of Brandweek, a New York-based magazine that covers the nation's marketing industry, Mr. Wasserman penned a column in November bemoaning the treatment of fathers in advertising.

The dad-as-buffoon and the anti-father imagery seemingly permeated advertising and marketing campaigns, which continually use stereotypes about men to get cheap laughs, he observed. And they are increasingly the norm.

The letters poured in.

"I don't think we ever got so much reaction," said Mr. Wasserman, the father of a 5-month-old. "That fathers are often the butt of ads and accepted as idiots, that was just commonly accepted. But for me, it just seems like a stale target, a safe target for someone trying to get an easy laugh in an ad. The more people I talked to, the more it seemed a lot of people felt that way."

He is not alone in his assessment.

No, far from it.

CBS' Harry Smith:

In the civic religion that is Democratic politics, the most treasured covenant was passed to the young Senator from Illinois.

Well, it's tough to argue with the former half of that equation.

As to "the most treasured covenant", and the reality that it was built upon, James Piereson has some thoughts.

Karl of Protein Wisdom writes:

The Clinton strategy of marginalizing Obama as “the black candidate” and claiming that Obama was a Reagan supporter strikes at the very heart of the mulicultural vision, at the very heart of the Left-liberal identity. It cannot be compartmentalized as a defense of progressive ideals or the progressive movement because there is no significant ideological difference between Sens. Clinton and Obama. Moreover, the Democrats’ success in 2006, combined with their belief that this will be a “change” election cycle, makes the environment much different from the 1990s, when the Clintons were seen as first arresting the advance of the Right, later as the only bulwark against a GOP-led Congress. Thus, the relentless, overweening ambition and narcissism of the Clintons and their resort to racial politics is so nakedly exposed that Left-liberals are unable to avert their eyes from it.

Of course, it remains possible — perhaps even probable — that Left-liberals would rally to the Clintons again, should she win the nomination and even the general election. But I would still suggest that at the margins, this campaign, in this political environment, has forced Left-liberals to see the Clintons in a way that erodes the intensity of support they enjoyed in the 1990s. The scales have fallen.

Read the whole thing.

Found via Fausta's Blog, Front Page magazine notes that "The David Horowitz Freedom Center has succeeded in putting the feminists and Islamists on the defensive":

As David Horowitz and Robert Spencer note in the article below, the DHFC's exposure of the feminist movement's lack of attention to women's rights in the Muslim world has caused many of the movement's most prominent activists to sign a letter protesting that they originated concern for Muslim women. The letter, drafted by feminist writer Katha Pollitt, has been signed by such notables as:

Susan Faludi, the author of Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women, which argues conservatives are trying to suppress American womyn, and The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America, which claims terrorism provided a handy excuse for the American Right to begin binding women's feet again;

Julianne Malveaux, who expressed her feelings about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas on PBS' To the Contrary, "I hope his wife feeds him lots of eggs and butter and he dies early like many black men do, of heart disease"

Jennifer Baumgardner, a Nation writer whose idea of fighting female oppression is staging productions of The Vagina Monologues;

Dana Goldstein, an employee of the Soros-funded Center for American Progress and a writing fellow at the Soros-funded The American Prospect; and

More than 700 more leftists.

The letter spread quickly, beginning on the website of the far-Left's flagship publication, The Nation. (The Nation's piece was also picked up by Yahoo News). Soon, it had been posted on Mother Jones, the Islamic Forum, the University of Maine, and many other sites -- including that of a woman named Heart who is running for president. Not all are pleased; at least one insists U.S. immigration laws and Israeli treatment of Palestinians are a more direct affront to women's rights than clitorectomies. (She asks, "Does Ms. Pollitt think that 'Muslim countries' are particularly hostile to women’s rights for some reason?") Nonetheless, the very fact that the Left, so long silent about the crimes countenanced by its Islamic partners in the antiwar movement, now feels that it must mount a rousing defense is a vindication of our efforts. -- The Editors.

Hey, everyone's entitled to an off-decade.