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.