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 i