What caused the meltdown of the banking system? Was it Texas-Hold'em Poker? According to those new puritans at New York magazine it was--gasp!--television! Worse, horror-of-horrors, it was cable television, and they want this sort of smut and financial pornography banished from the airways:

The real villains here, the truly bad seeds at the heart of this crisis, have gone unpunished thus far and are still in operation. They are Jeff Lewis and Ryan Brown of Bravo's Flipping Out, Armando and Veronica Montelongo of TLC's Flip This House, Kristen Kemp of TLC's The Property Ladder, Kendra Todd of HGTV's My House Is Worth WHAT?, and the TLC, Bravo, HGTV, and Fine Living networks in general. All of them encouraged people to take out massive loans in order to buy and renovate homes and sell them at a profit when, really, most people have terrible taste, and furthermore, are bad at laying tile. These shows are still on! WHY?

But then, there are all sorts of reasons for those on the left to avoid examining some of these root causes:



Back in late December, we noted that the Connecticut Post refused to print emails from readers if they delved too heavily into a particular hometown topic:

"All letters are welcome. But there are code words hidden in some that are signals to stop paying close attention -- "Chris Dodd" and "Barney Frank."

All of which points to a word that the New York Times simply can't bring itself to speak, Ed Morrissey writes:

The Times wants to sell Dodd as a victim of the "moneyed Washington subculture where powerful incumbents are invited to get something wholesale," but that's poppycock. The man who accepts a bribe is no more of a victim than the man who offers it. It takes both to create corruption, and it's hard to find a more bald example of it than this. Dodd oversaw Countrywide as part of his committee chairmanship and understood that when he accepted the two loans for below-market rates and no-points acceptance. Countrywide later went belly-up, costing the nation billions of dollars for its easy-terms lending practices, and Dodd has been among the voices blaming the collapse of the lending markets on poor oversight. Well, he ought to know that firsthand, oughtn't he?

There's more at stake in this refusal to acknowledge corruption, and we have seen it in Barack Obama's Cabinet appointments. He and Congress have excused wrongdoing for Tim Geithner that would likely have resulted in criminal prosecution for others because Geithner supposedly belongs to a rarified elite group of technocrats that the nation can't do without. That stands the rule of law on its head, and put Geithner, Dodd, and others like them beyond the same responsibilities as the rest of us plebes. Dodd, Geithner, and other DC insiders now get a pass from responsibility for their actions simply because of who they know.

Taking sweetheart deals from the industry Dodd oversaw is corruption, regardless of the circumstances. Refusing to pay taxes even after getting reimbursements from one's employer is tax evasion. When we start making up new names for old crimes based on the relative power of the person who committed them, we have ended the rule of law and created an aristocracy.

Exactly. As G.K. Chesterton noted a century ago, "It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem"--or where it began.

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.)

The etymology of an all-too popular and surprisingly insidious pop-culture phrase, explored by the new blog (and like ours, a Sekimori design), Gotham Resistance.

"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.

Brent Bozell files the latest dispatch from the defensive side of the Culture War:

McKay Hatch is a 15-year-old boy from South Pasadena, California who people clearly hate. He's received over 60,000 negative E-mails, most of them vicious, some including death threats that have spawned police and FBI investigations. What has this boy done that's caused such anger? Was he caught dealing drugs? Did he rage? Did he kill? No. He started a No Cussing Club.

And for that he is vilified. Hatch says some people are going out of their way to curse him at school, on the Internet and on the phone. They send him pornographic magazine subscriptions. Not long ago, someone ordered $2,000 worth of pizza delivered to Hatch's house. Then came the death threats.

Brent Hatch, the teenager's father, told reporters one death threat in particular crossed the line. "I was at the hospital with my wife, we were visiting family, and some guy had called on my cell phone said, 'I know you you're gone, you're not there, and I'm in front of your house and I'm going to kill your family.'"

If the purveyors of profanity think that cussing is so harmless, why are some of them so unbelievably hostile to anyone suggesting a voluntary ban on the bleeps?

Theodore Dalrymple has written tens of thousands of words attempting to answer variations on that last question. Here are but a few of them:

A problem arises, however, when all such rules, arbitrary as some of them might be, are eroded to the point of total informality. The culture of any society becomes graceless in the absence of all formality, a development that is peculiarly evident in my own country, Great Britain. Here, gracelessness has become, by a peculiar ideological inversion that has occurred in my lifetime, a manifestation of political virtue. My father's view of the whole matter of manners has triumphed all but completely.

The argument goes something like this: formality is etiquette, and etiquette is a manifestation of an unjust, class-ridden, patriarchal society. The rejection of etiquette and the formality it entails is therefore a sign that one is on the side of the angels, that is to say, of the egalitarians. Modern egalitarians, at least in Britain, do not content themselves with the kind of abstract or formal equality before the law that allows any amount of difference in wealth, status, taste, and sensibility; they demand some progress towards equalization of everything, including manners.

Of course, egalitarians are just as attached as everyone else to their own material possessions and wealth and have no real intention of forgoing them by radical redistribution, at any rate, of their own money and possessions. The struggle for equality--of the actual rather than the formal kind--has therefore to be transferred to fields in which it will cost the egalitarian nothing, or nothing material and financial.

What better way to prove your egalitarian credentials than by adopting the supposedly free and easy, utterly informal manners of those at the bottom of the social scale? The freer and easier the better, for such informality demonstrates another quality beloved of, and praised by, intellectuals: a superiority to the dictates of convention. Thus you can never be quite informal or unconventional enough.

But why the anger? Reminding the New Puritans of their flaws is guaranteed to make them quite cross--especially when anger is their primary emotion to begin with.

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.

Mmmmm....steak.

(Meanwhile, Greg Pollowitz explains how PETA played NBC.)

The newly airbrushed White House Website trashes President Bush over Katrina--and Drew M. at Ace of Spades HQ is not a happy man. Can't say I blame him.

Yes, Americans just love their presidents and immediate staff to be partisan and petty. Bad first step, fellas.

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."

"Leading climate expert Jim Hansen" (no relation, as far as we can tell, to a deceased but global warmingly remembered Muppet expert) believes "Barack Obama has only four years to save the world."

Of course he does. But we give Mr. Hanson bonus points for eschewing the leisurely and far overdone bourgeois pace of the ten year countdown--four isn't a number that's picked all that often from the proverbial hat for a doomsday countdown. But in any case, file this one way for election time in 2012 if--and we think the odds are somewhat reasonable here--Mr. Hanson is wrong.

In any case, no final countdown is complete without...

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.

Ed Morrissey links to Andrew Malcolm in the L.A. Times and his take on the Golden Globe Awards last night, which sounded more like outtakes from the The Sopranos than a black-tie event. Malcolm writes:

This year's Golden Globe Awards by the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. had acceptance speeches that were full of words like $%&*(=^ and f!$*&-+. Also, balls, suck and suck it. So if you were among a majority of Americans who didn't watch it, you might have missed something.

Apparently, some were surprised by the profanity production of the culture crowd.

But clearly the actors have been studying Illinois Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who was caught on FBI wiretaps and not quoted publicly by that bleeping federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. This was after Blago's December arrest for, among other things, allegedly auctioning off his "<<&*%$# golden" nomination to fill the vacant Senate seat of President-elect Barack Obama, who'll be inaugurated in just 8 days.

Ed Morrissey adds:

Mickey Rourke attained the evening's height of wit by discussing "balls" in detail, and having his friend, director Darren Arenofsky, flip him the bird while on camera. Tina Fey told three of her critics on the Internet to "suck it". And those were the printable quotes from Hollywood last night.

Ed concludes:

Here's a handy hint: If you have to wear your tuxedo or formal evening gown -- or if you have to spend more than $100 to get dressed for an event -- keep your balls in your pants and keep the suck in your vacuum cleaner.

Besides, cursing like a sailor on national TV has been done to death. If you really want to epater le bourgeois--particularly our puritanical legacy media--try this approach.

"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)

As the denizens of Berkeley celebrate the incoming Obama administration by remembering the aura of the penumbra of a vaguely remembered emotion called patriotism (having long since confused it with nationalism and filed it away under the heading of Scoundrel, Last Refuge Of), Orrin Judd responds, "If you're only 'loyal' when your preference prevails, it is yourself you love, not your country."

See also this lengthy post from Linda Kimball titled "The New Left, Cultural Marxism, and Psychopolitics Disguised as Multiculturalism."

"Auto sales likely dropped a breathtaking 3 million vehicles in 2008, the largest decline since 1974, said Ford Motor's head of sales analysis Friday", according to Knoxville's WBIR.com.

As Mark Steyn wrote last week, "Hey, that's great news, isn't it?"

What was it that then Senator Obama said on the subject? "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 boy, we took the great man's words to heart. SUV sales have nosedived, and 72 is no longer your home's thermostat setting but its current value expressed as a percentage of what you paid for it. If I understand then Senator Obama's logic, in a just world Americans would be 4 percent of the population and consume a fair and reasonable 4 percent of the world's resources. And in these last few months we've made an excellent start toward that blessed utopia: Americans are driving smaller cars, buying smaller homes, giving smaller Christmas presents.

And yet, strangely, President-Elect Obama doesn't seem terribly happy about the Obamafication of the American economy. He's proposing some 5.7 bazillion dollar "stimulus" package or whatever it is now to "stimulate" it back into its bad old ways.

And how does the rest of the world, of whose tender sensibilities then Senator Obama was so mindful, feel about the collapse of American consumer excess? They're aghast, they're terrified, they're on a one-way express elevator down to Sub-Basement Level 37 of the abyss with no hope of putting on the brakes unless the global economy can restore aggregate demand. What does all that mumbo-jumbo about "aggregate demand" mean? Well, that's a fancy term for you -- yes, you, Joe Lardbutt, the bloated disgusting embodiment of American excess, driving around in your Chevy Behemoth, getting two blocks to the gallon as you shear the roof off the drive-thru lane to pick up your $7.93 decaf gingersnap-mocha-pepperoni-zebra mussel frappuccino, which makes for a wonderful cool refreshing thirst-quencher after you've been working up a sweat watching the plasma TV in your rec room all morning with the thermostat set to 87. The message from the European political class couldn't be more straightforward: If you crass, vulgar Americans don't ramp up the demand, we're kaput. Unless you get back to previous levels of planet-devastating consumption, the planet is screwed.

Staggeringly, the Huffington Post actually has an essay that begins:

You are probably wondering whether President-elect Obama owes the world an apology for his actions regarding global warming. The answer is, not yet. There is one person, however, who does. You have probably guessed his name: Al Gore.

Al's gaseous rhetoric did much to fuel the calls from Obama and numerous others on the left for fewer cars, higher gas prices and reduced domestic energy production. Along with Democratic tampering with the mortgage laws of the 1990s which also set the current economic slowdown in motion, the environmentally correct left should receive a fair chunk of the blame for today's economic woes.

"After 6 months, drivers ignoring cellphone ban." Naturally, the solution proposed by government--pass more laws to strengthen the already ignored nanny state law.

As little-known 20th century author Alisa Rosenbaum once wrote:

There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.

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.

I'm very happy to see that the Salt Nazis ("No salt for you--ever!") haven't banned sodium chloride from South Jersey's roads yet, unlike Seattle.

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.

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.

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!"

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?

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!

Don Surber has some thoughts on the Palinophobic Liz Smith:

Liz Smith shows her ignorance.

In her column today, Smith of The New York Post shows her ignorance as well as her envy for the $7 million advance that Republican Gov. Sarah Palin can expect if she writes a book.

Wrote Smith: "What could Sarah Palin, age 44, write of a life still so young? Anything she damn well wants to write. The public, it seems, is just waiting to lap it all up like that finger-lickin' moose stew."

Barrack Obama was 34 when he finished, "Dreams from My Father."

By the way, Palin has been a beauty queen (OK, runner-up), a sportscaster, a business partner with her husband, the mother of 5, a reform mayor, a reform governor and a candidate for the vice presidency.

She's no community organizer though--and let's face it, age 44 is "a life still so young" as Smith writes; it's not until you hit the wizened age of 47 when the Lincoln, FDR, JFK, RFK, RWR comparisons start to flow in.

Elsewhere, the Moonbattery blog collects more examples of the Palinphobic left--and even, as astonishing as this will be to many, that always cool, unflappable, conservative's conservative himself, Andrew Sullivan.

(Don't miss Bill Maher's reaction to one of Andrew's rare moments of excitability.)

Related: The Winner of the Sullivan Award goes to...

Headline via the Derb; it perfectly fits this example of what hopefully is a one-off leftwinger's meltdown, and not a trend, transforming Thanksgiving into yet another holiday that Dare Not Speak Its Name.

Related: Heard through the Grapevine, Greg Gutfeld rounds up his Thanksiving Turkey list.

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.

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.

Jim Treacher has "A friendly chat with the liberal who lives in my head."

Meanwhile, in an everything old is new again moment, Dan Riehl spots a surprising (or maybe not!) source calling for a minority group to step to the back of the bus.

I actually meant to post something along similar lines earlier today, but Incoherant Ramblings beat me to it--and the quote is surrounded by lots of great looking photos of its hostess instead of our usual blue Trilby and minimalism:

I wouldn't really mind the outcome of all this under normal circumstances really. If gay marriage became a reality in all 50 states, I would have gone on with my life. But I hope the backlash felt from all of these inane boycotts hits these protesters bad. Somebody needs to point out that there is a better way, and this will eventually wear thin on the voting populace who looks at these people as sore losers.

What's next? "Hey, here's a brilliant idea. Let's Boycott Sundance! Because it's in the state of Utah, LDS headquarters are in Utah, so it will affect those EVIL Mormons!"

Meanwhile, a lot of Utah Mormons are thinking "they're boycotting Sundance? Sweet! Maybe Robert Redford will take it somewhere else from now on."

I'd like to think I'm not the only person who flashed back to the reaction of numerous airline customers when the "flying Imams" threatened not to patronize US Airways when reading this latest call for a boycott.

John Nolte writes on the New Hollywood Blacklist:

At least once a year we get a new narrative or documentary about the infamous Hollywood blacklist that forced a number of screenwriters out of the business or underground with the use of a pseudonym.

I included clips from a whole bunch of those annual Hollywood perennials in a Silicon Graffiti video back in July, which makes for a great double-feature with John's post. Speaking of which, here's more from John:

Most of these movies hit me as wish fulfillment fantasies with the filmmakers and their stars (George Clooney, Frank Darabont, Irwin Winkler, and on and on and on...) puffing out their chests to stridently declare that if they had been alive then that! never would've happened. Oh, no, they would have put their careers and livelihoods on the line to fight the good fight for the right to hold unpopular political beliefs without fear of retribution.

Well - here - we - are.

And where are you?

As John writes, they're too busy yelling, "Him, over there, He's Spartacus!"

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.)

What is it with the New York Times and Facebook? A couple of weeks ago, Jodi Kantor uses it to bait school kids into trashing Cindy McCain's parenting skills; over the weekend another Timesperson uses it to through a hissy fit involving the Daily Show:

NewsBusters.org Contributor, the estimable Matthew Vadum of the Capital Research Center, made an October 30th appearance on Comedy Central's The Daily Show, during which he discussed the many illegal activities of the community organizing group Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) and their long relationship with the media's all-time favorite candidate: Illinois Democratic Senator and Presidential candidate Barack Obama. Soon thereafter, Mr. Vadum changed his Facebook Profile photograph to one of him hamming it up with his Daily Show interlocutor John Oliver.

This was all too much for New York Times reporter Dan Mitchell. Mitchell sent Mr. Vadum a poison Halloween Facebook email, which is hostile from start to finish and in which he calls Mr. Vadum the aforementioned body part.

The Mitchell email in its entirety, with the one word redacted so as to maintain our G-rating:

Read the rest; more birds flipped here.

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.

"Joe Biden's RAVE Act of 2002 was a terrible blow against dance-generated alternative energy."

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."

"Terry Tate, Office Linebacker" made his debut in a Super Bowl ad that aired in late January of 2003, pitching Reebok sneakers. And considering the average career length of a real NFL linebacker, I guess Terry should be glad he still has a job. He's a free agent these days, no longer, to the best of my knowledge, associated with Reebok, but considering his national launch, it seems safe to say that Terry and Reeboks will forever be intertwined.

So I wonder what the sneaker manufacturer thinks of their former pitchman's latest video. Here's Terry, with a little digital editing help, brutally shoving a woman onto an unforgiving concrete floor and yelling oddly Freudian epithets at her, while tacitly endorsing high gasoline prices and the liberal media:

Is this funny? As they say in the NFL--you make the call! On the plus side, at least Terry's shown only trying to permanently injure Palin, not kill her, as The Economist and Keith Olbermann metaphorically called for, when Hillary was running.

So in that sense, it's a definite step forward in an election year in which the surprisingly well entrenched sexism of the liberal overculture was none too thrilled at the idea of female politicians from either party running for national office.

Peter Wood's 2007 book, A Bee In The Mouth, explored the growing anger in American politics.

It's on full display, here, and here. Though of course, don't expect the Victorian Gentleman to investigate.

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

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

Glenn Reynolds (and no, he's not the subject of the above headline, which I'll get to in just a moment) writes:

NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE? So we've had nearly 8 years of lefty assassination fantasies about George W. Bush, and Bill Ayers' bombing campaign is explained away as a consequence of him having just felt so strongly about social justice, but a few people yell things at McCain rallies and suddenly it's a sign that anger is out of control in American politics? It's nice of McCain to try to tamp that down, and James Taranto sounds a proper cautionary note -- but, please, can we also note the staggering level of hypocrisy here? (And that's before we get to the Obama campaign's thuggish tactics aimed at silencing critics.)

The Angry Left has gotten away with all sorts of beyond-the-pale behavior throughout the Bush Administration. The double standards involved -- particularly on the part of the press -- are what are feeding this anger. (Indeed, as Ann Althouse and John Leo have noted, the reporting on this very issue is dubious). So while asking for McCain supporters to chill a bit, can we also ask the press to start doing its job rather than openly shilling for a Democratic victory? Self-control is for everybody, if it's for anybody. . . .

As I've noted before, in The Right Stuff and in subsequent promotional interviews, Tom Wolfe described the press as "the proper Victorian Gentleman":

I'll never forget working on the [New York] Herald Tribune the afternoon of John Kennedy's death. I was sent out along with a lot of other people to do man-on-the-street reactions. I started talking to some men who were just hanging out, who turned out to be Italian, and they already had it figured out that Kennedy had been killed by the Tongs, and then I realized that they were feeling hostile to the Chinese because the Chinese had begun to bust out of Chinatown and move into Little Italy. And the Chinese thought the mafia had done it, and the Ukrainians thought the Puerto Ricans had done it. And the Puerto Ricans thought the Jews had done it. Everybody had picked out a scapegoat. I came back to the Herald Tribune and I typed up my stuff and turned it in to the rewrite desk. Late in the day they assigned me to do the rewrite of the man-on-the-street story. So I looked through this pile of material, and mine was missing. I figured there was some kind of mistake. I had my notes, so I typed it back into the story. The next day I picked up the Herald Tribune and it was gone, all my material was gone. In fact there's nothing in there except little old ladies collapsing in front of St. Patrick's. Then I realized that, without anybody establishing a policy, one and all had decided that this was the proper moral tone for the president's assassination. It was to be grief, horror, confusion, shock and sadness, but it was not supposed to be the occasion for any petty bickering. The press assumed the moral tone of a Victorian gentleman.

And a huge part of that Victorian Gent's daily job is take a rogue's gallery such as this, and make you believe that they're nothing but polite, Ralph Lauren-clad kids just back from playing touch football on the lawn at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port.

Just as it was in 1963, the legacy media's primary role in its twilight years as gatekeeper is to keep news out. Unlike back then, it's not because there isn't enough time or space to report it (bandwidth on the Internet being infinite), but to protect their friends, colleagues, political constituency and their ideology as a whole. And to make their opponents, which prior to the Blogosphere constituted a big chunk of their readership--back when the emphasis was on silent majority--look as badly as possible.

(Jim Treacher boils the schism down to just two words.)

Update: More from Treacher: "I'm going to start calling them the Deathbed Media."

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

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

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

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

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

Los Angeles' city seal may no longer have a cross on it, but those God-fearing Christianists at the L.A. Times seem to have developed a sudden new case of religious fever:

The Los Angeles Times seems to have taken a sudden new interest in biblical study. No, they haven't become religious or anything close to that. Instead, they are microanalyzing the Bible for passages that they think they can use to slam Sarah Palin for running for vice-president.

Wow, when Richard Miniter recently wrote, "In the 1950s, the most puritanical place in America was somewhere in Kansas. Today it is Los Angeles", he didn't know the half of it!

After the 2004 presidential election, the left started billing themselves as "The Reality-Based Community"--as opposed to those faith-based Christianist God worshipers on the other side of the aisle.

And yet, the left isn't above asking a higher power if He'd be willing to invoke a little smiting of his own from time to time...

(Earlier vlogulations found here.)

Having watched several clips of Charlie Gibson's interview with Sarah Palin, I have to say I agree with Jay Nordlinger's take on Gibson's body language:

In his loud sighings and overall body language, he reminded me quite a lot of Al Gore, in the first 2000 debate.

Remember that debate? Governor Bush did poorly, but Gore's behavior was so boorish, people tended to focus on that (and a Saturday Night Live parody absolutely slew Gore).

Palin did much better than that (and Bush rose to the occasion -- more than rose -- in the second and third debates). (Same thing happened in '04, oddly enough.) And she'll get nothing but better, I predict.

P.S. Gibson's behavior was so "out there" -- drawing attention to itself -- I think Palin should have remarked on it, in the course of her answers. What do I mean by "out there"? Well, I mean intrusive, in a way. Blatant.

Often, a good interviewer is seamless in his performance -- he almost absents himself from the proceedings, so that the questions and answers take over. But it was like Gibson was the co-star -- if not the lead star -- of the whole show.

He was as much adversary -- debate opponent -- as questioner. And that's not my idea of how these shebangs should go. (Whether the interviewee is an R or a D.)

As Jay wrote in an earlier post:

Remember this about Gibson, too: A lot of pressure was on him. Why? Because he had the first interview, with this much-hated figure. He was standing in for the whole MSM -- and they were depending on him. He just had to be somewhat hostile, he had to trip her up, if only a little. Otherwise, his colleagues would have said he had blown his opportunity -- their opportunity -- and gone all soft.

In the eyes of the arrogant MSM, he was "vetting" for all.

So -- walk a yard or two in his moccasins . . .

Moccasins? At the risk of venturing into the Manolo's territory, those looked like extra clunky double-soled Florsheim battleship-grade wingtips Gibson was tapping whenever he was bored with Palin, the perfect metaphor for a dinosaur media in general.

Beyond Gibson's effete condescension, the 65,327 jump cuts in the video were obvious and glaring. And in these days of unlimited bandwidth, there's no excuse for that. I can certainly understand cutting a lengthy interview down to fit in with the rest of the material on the half hour nightly news. (Itself a relic from the Jurassic era of Eisenhower and Arthur Godfrey.) But then put the whole thing online with a few or no edits.

And in addition to ABC's edits, Gibson relied on a truncated AP quote to attack the Alaskan governor on her prayers for America's troops. And then to compound the problem, ABC puts the word 'God' in unnecessary scare quotes on the video page highlighting the exchange. Stay classy, ABC!

Update: Neo-Neocon also has some thoughts on, as she calls Gibson, "the Not-So-Grand Inquisitor":

I was constantly distracted by two things: the shockingly choppy editing, and Gibson's profoundly inquisitorial demeanor.

It wasn't just his game face, and the peering over the eyeglasses (he gave new meaning to the expression "looked down his nose at her"). It was his remarkable condescension: "I got lost in a blizzard of words..." That crack sounded more like one side of a couple's quarrel overheard in a restaurant than the statement of a neutral interviewer.

It didn't help that it was preceded by yet another clunky jump cut, leaving the viewer not knowing where "the blizzard of words" was naturally concluded by Palin or--more likely it seems--truncated by an editor at ABC.

Read More »

Jonah Goldberg writes, "Whether or not Sarah Palin helps John McCain win the election, her greatest work may already be behind her. She's exposed the feminist con job":

On Tuesday, Salon ran one article calling Palin a dominatrix ("a whip-wielding mistress") and another labeling her a sexually repressed fundamentalist no different from the Muslim fanatics and terrorists of Hamas. Make up your minds, folks. Is she a seductress or a sex-a-phobe?

But this any-weapon-near-to-hand approach is an obvious sign of how scared the Palin-o-phobes are.

Gloria Steinem, the grand mufti of feminism, issued a fatwa anathematizing Palin. A National Organization for Women spokeswoman proclaimed Palin more of a man than a woman. Wendy Doniger, a feminist academic at the University of Chicago, writes of Palin in Newsweek: "Her greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman."

It's funny. The left has been whining about having their patriotism questioned for so long it feels like they started griping in the Mesozoic era. Feminists have argued for decades that womanhood is an existential and metaphysical state of enlightenment. But they have no problem questioning whether women they hate are really women at all.

Since we know from basic science that Palin is a woman -- she's had five kids, for starters -- it's clear that these ideological thugs aren't talking about actual, you know, facts. They're doing what people of totalitarian mind-sets always do: bully heretics, demonize enemies, whip the troops into line.

Hey, somebody should write a book about that!

Of course, Palin has unhinged (hey, somebody should write a book called that!) the rest of the left as well. Roger Ebert's meltdown earlier this week is a classic of the genre:

Palin is a shallow, chirpy person with those vaguely alarming eyeglasses. Now her fans all want a pair. Remember back when women wore glasses that departed their ears in plastic swoops and swirls? My theory is, anyone who wears glasses that look weird is telling me something I don't want to know.

Remember all that stuff from the left in the late 1990s about tolerance and diversity and multiculturalism and "think different?" Pretty amazing how it all goes out the window when "The Shadow" appears.

(Ebert has apparently since broken out the Liquid Paper to whitewash his gaffe, but thanks to the Blogosphere, that genie's out of the bubble.)

Update: Orrin Judd writes, "Because they are materialists, the Left thinks elitism is an excess of material things, so they don't even realize that it is how divorced from American culture they are that has always hindered them."

Meanwhile, Tiger Hawk writes, "If John McCain is as lucky as he is smart, the lefty pundits and bloggers -- for example -- and their allies in the press will keeping hammering Saracuda all the way to Halloween."

Jim Geraghty writes that this ABC headline "Really Belonged in The Onion":

The smears of Sarah Palin continue, as ABC News writes, "Obama Takes on Obama-like Phenomenon."

Compare her to a pig. Call her election "a step back for women." But calling her "an Obama-like phenomenon" is way out of line.

Unlike the transnational Obama, as long as Hurricane Sarah doesn't play well in anti-free speech Canada, Old Europe and amongst other overseas socialists, she's safe.

Obama really grinds the gears of the Super Gaffe-O-Matic '76 with this one:

"You know, you can put lipstick on a pig," Obama said, "but it's still a pig."

But hey, he still hasn't called her sweetie!

Meanwhile, Camile Paglia writes:

The witch-trial hysteria of the past two incendiary weeks unfortunately reveals a disturbing trend in the Democratic Party, which has worsened over the past decade. Democrats are quick to attack the religiosity of Republicans, but Democratic ideology itself seems to have become a secular substitute religion. Since when did Democrats become so judgmental and intolerant?

Gosh--I don't know. Let's ask Clarence Thomas and Robert Bork if they know how far this trend goes back...

Hey, remember a month ago when leftwing Hollywood puritans blew a gasket over a movie using the word "retard?"

Nahh, neither can I.

Update: And neither could Christian Toto, who also heard the Tinseltown crickets chirping in response response to the latest outbreak of the R-word.

Neo-Neocon writes that a big reason why the left hates Sarah Palin is that "she's a woman from the wrong side of the tracks. Or at least, that's the way she's been perceived":

Cries that the Democrats have engaged in sexism towards Palin are not misplaced. Palin is also hated for her social conservatism--even by feminists, who acknowledge she's a woman, but a woman from the wrong side of the issues.

But perhaps even more important to many liberals is that she's a woman from the wrong side of the tracks. Or at least, that's the way she's been perceived.

Forget that she's a college graduate, with a father who was a teacher. She went to the wrong college--or colleges. She's a redneck, even if she's from the far North where the sun hardly shines for half the year. She's a redneck at heart, don't you see, with the "mess" of a pregnant daughter and five children herself. How very gross.

She hunts. She fishes. Hubby's a Marlboro man, minus the cigarettes. She's a working woman but not an oppressed "worker." She probably even shops at Walmart and listens to country music.

I'm old enough to remember when a working class hero was something to be.

Albert Brooks: "Is this the new way for women to break the glass ceiling? To have their daughters throw their babies at it?"

As Richard Miniter recently wrote, "In the 1950s, the most puritanical place in America was somewhere in Kansas. Today it is Los Angeles", and that hectoring puritanism has seeped into its celebrity culture in a massive scale.

Fortunately, whenever such Hollywood hypocrisy occurs, the opportunity for satire is rife, and Cracked.com riotously pushes back with "The 7 Most Retarded Ways Celebrities Have Tried to Go Green." I can't argue at all with their number one choice; I would have found a way to work this item into the list somewhere as well though.

(Found via Dirty Harry, and definitely one for Orrin Judd's "All Comedy Is Conservative" files.)

Robert Stacy McCain flashes back to Hunter S. Thompson, McGovern-Eagleton, and the rest of the bad old days of 1972. Flashforward to 2008; Tommy Chong, who certainly knows a thing or two about both the '70s and bad flashbacks, is not a happy man:

"Check out the people you're voting for.... "For instance, Joseph Biden comes off as a liberal Democrat, but he's the one who authored the bill that put me in jail. He wrote the law against shipping drug paraphernalia through the mail - which could be anything from a pipe to a clip or cigarette papers."

Wow--"Liberal" Democrats turn out to be rigid puritans--that never happens these days!

And speaking of the neo-puritanical Biden, he's no great fan of the Second Amendment, needless to say.

Update: One of Charles Johnson's readers also has a pretty amazing '70s flashback.

Jeff Goldstein quotes a wide swatch of David Harsanyi's great article in the Denver Post on MADD and adds:

After the Orioles won the World Series in 1983, Storm Davis, a then-20-year-old starting pitcher for the Birds, who played an integral role in Baltimore's success, could not partake in the post series champagne and beer celebration.

Mother Against Drunk Driving would likely counter such a seemingly arbitrary and incongruous segregation among teammates by noting that the ritual of celebrating with alcohol "glorifies" drinking, and so should itself be eliminated.

- And at that point, it should become clear that MADD is no longer worried about drunk driving per se, but is rather become a neoprohibitionist organization trafficking in emotional arguments to convince cowardly politicians to force change upon the culture -- "change" that has the effect of taking away individual freedom and responsibility, along with the role of parents in teaching young adults how to handle certain freedoms, in exchange for a government run mandate, complete with police powers of the state or municipality, that presumes to usurp those responsibilities by a kind of 3/5 rule on adulthood.

Exchanging white hoods for big buttons and a lot of emotional appeals merely suggests a change in rhetorical strategy from those who seek to build society to match their own personal hobby horses.

Nothing classically liberal about that -- not to mention that turning water into wine these days would likely result in 100 hours of forced community service work, an orange vest covering your flowing frock, your staff replaced by one of those pointy sticks used to pick up coffee cups and Almond Joy wrappers...

Or as James Lileks described the rapidly growing neo-puritanism yesterday, "Smoking, drinking, bacon and sex: I remember when only one of those was a sin."

Life among the new puritans: "Smoking, drinking, bacon and sex: I remember when only one of those was a sin."

Ed Morrissey ponders, "How many times can the DNC mention that Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) is a Jew?" in a single article?

I guess Barack Obama was right after all. This election will see dirty smears based on identity politics. He just got the party wrong. This didn't come from a blogger or an e-mail kook -- this comes from the DNC itself. In 660 words, they manage to use a derivative of the word Jew five times in attacking Cantor. They never explain why this forms such a strong theme in their opposition of Cantor, but apparently they believe that Democrats won't need an explanation to oppose Jews.

When will Barack Obama attack this real racism from his own party with the same amount of vigor that he falsely accused Republicans of engaging in it?

Addendum: Defenders of the DNC could say, "Well, hey, all of these are just quotes from newspapers like The Hill and the Picayune" -- which would be true. The DNC, however, just managed to pick five quotes that contain five references to Cantor and/or Abramoff's religion? Let's imagine the response that would erupt on the Left if the RNC did the same thing to Obama. Even Bill Clinton's single reference to Jesse Jackson's win in South Carolina got him branded as a race-card player -- and that didn't involve tying Obama to a criminal on the basis of his skin color.

Heck, we don't have to imagine this at all. Remember all the cries of "racism" when the subject of Jeremiah Wright finally aired?

The silence from the MSM on this, will of course, be deafening. On the other hand, just wait 'til Vice President Lieberman takes office...

If "inexperienced" is code for racism, and if Ralph Lauren's Waspy-duds are racist, (which must make this a photo of the 21st century KKK in their bedsheets) then surely the headline of the article that RedState links to is as well.

The writers of Avenue Q didn't know the half of it: by the time November rolls around everything will be code for racism--if it isn't yet already.

Related: "Roasting Obama."

Rich Lowry writes:

In the first fifteen minutes, McCain had established a moral seriousness stemming from his conduct in Vietnam as a POW and his long-time as a national leader that Obama can't match. Throughout the rest of the night, he brought up Iraq, al Qaeda, and the Georgia crisis, when Obama was more inward-looking. McCain sounded like a potential commander-in-chief, Obama more like a potential friend.

It's Obama on your shoulder!

In England's Times Online, Alice Thomson writes:

Julie Burchill can't stand them. According to her new book, Not in my Name: A Compendium of Modern Hypocrisy, she thinks all environmentalists are po-faced, unsexy, public school alumni who drivel on about the end of the world because they don't want the working classes to have any fun, go on foreign holidays or buy cheap clothes.

Michael O'Leary, the chief executive of Ryanair, agrees. In an interview with Rachel Sylvester and me, he told us that the "nutbag ecologists" are the overindulged rich who have nothing better to do with their lives than talk about hot air and beans.

So the salad days are over; it's the end of the greens. Where only a year ago the smart new eco-warriors were revered, wormeries and unbleached cashmere jeans are now seen as a middle-class indulgence.

But the problem for the green lobby isn't that it has been overrun by "toffs": it's the chilly economic climate that has frozen the shoots of environmentalism. Espousing the green life, with its misshapen vegetables and non-disposable nappies, is increasingly being seen as a luxury by everyone.

In addition to the deliberate misery that green policies cause (seen most obviously every time you fill up your car), the seeds of its destruction are sewn by the same people who espouse its beliefs. Environmentalism is a substitute religion, but a religion nonetheless, and the left, historically, works to undermine religious faith, quickly pointing out any sign of hypocrisy. Al Gore will tell an audience...

"This is not a political issue," Gore told a crowd of approximately 2,500 paying attendees. "It is a moral issue. It is an ethical issue. It is a spiritual issue."

...Before floating away on the Goretanic. If that was Jerry Falwell using similar rhetoric but living such a lavish lifestyle, the hoots of derision from the chattering classes would be palpable.

Or, look at this way: everybody admires Mother Teresa's sacrifices, because nobody wants to actually live that way himself.

Update: Related thoughts from Robert Bidinotto.

Jason Maoz of Commentary asks, "Whatever Happened to Liberal Humor?"

Fire up the Tardis--with or without Barry behind the wheel: We answered that one two and a half years ago, three years ago--and five years ago!

(H/T: KS)

Related: "Best. Headline. Ever."

AMC's Mad Men series is filled with poke-the-viewer-in-the-ribs moments where characters in a TV series set in 1960 are smoking and drinking like, err, mad--even with their kids around, and on the way, in the case of one pregnant character who smokes like a chimney. And yet somehow, we all managed to survive such a stone knives and bearskins culture. So I have to laugh when a celebrity gossip site, full of photos of Hollywood actresses in various stages of undress and occasionally in various stages of acts that would have caused the boys in the Hayes Office to go into complete myocardial infarction in 1960, has a puritanical headline such as this: "Britney Spears in a Bikini is Smoking... In Front of Her Kids."

Gosh--I know I'm shocked.

Something else the characters in Mad Men wouldn't be the least surprised by, because they had a millennium of history and common sense to go by: "Social stigma drives some women to remove tattoos."

And as usual, the L.A. Times, where history and culture are always in the present-tense, is surprised by (a) a topic that Theodore Dalrymple was writing about nearly a decade and a half ago and (b) your grandmother understood 50 years ago.

(Via Conservative Grapevine.)

That's the advice to comedians from leftwing journalist Joel Stein, (who knows a thing or two about recovering from the proverbial botched joke himself), as he explains, "How To Make Fun Of Obama" in the L.A. Times. As Stein tells comics, you "have an arsenal of jokes to use against a 71-year-old ex-POW cancer survivor and Obama is too touchy a subject?

Maybe this is why American talk show hosts are loathe to mock the eminently mockable Obama--they fear if elected, he'll throw a Canadian-style snit and create an American equivalent to Canada's "Human Rights" Commissions. Over at Pajamas HQ, Kathy Shaidle writes that after watching Canada's HRC unleashed on stand-up Guy Earle after a bout with a pair of lesbian hecklers went awry, Mark Steyn told Hugh Hewitt:

You know, if you're Don Rickles, you don't want to be booking any stand-up appearances in the Dominion of Canada anytime soon, because the joke police are in full flight up there.

Read the whole thing.

Ronald Reagan's famous quip to Jimmy Carter during the presidential debates in 1980 was designed to puncture Carter's ever-growing hectoring punitive liberal tone. Carter's natural elitism was masked by his initial sunny campaign persona and omnipresent smile during his 1976 campaign, but worn down by four years in which Carter's fecklessness was no match for rising inflation, unemployment and interest rates, a flat-lined stock market, a newly radicalized and reprimitivized Middle East, and a Soviet Union which had reacquired its taste for land acquisition, all a direct result, as the Gipper would go on to prove once in office, of Carter's outdated playback coupled with Carter's own built-in sense of malaise.

Fortunately for the American public, Barack Obama has arrived at the same dissipated and humorless state merely from being out on the campaign trail, instead of after four painful bumbling years actually in the Oval Office!

Of course, those could well be on the way no matter what happens, but Obama's current malaise may be why, as James Bowman posits, the New Yorker tried to do Obama a favor this week, by giving him something to punch against, to restore the populist charm of his campaign back in the earlier, carefree days of the primaries:

The most disturbing thing about this media storm is the utter humorlessness not only of the hard left and the media, which we already pretty much knew about, but of the Obama campaign itself, which professed to be mightily offended by the cartoon. And suddenly I am struck by another possibility: that the posture of taking offense was the Obama campaign's repudiation of the support of the eggheaded, Kerry-loving, cheese-eating faction that so many Americans look on as elitist. At the risk of being seen to have jumped on the paranoiac band-wagon myself, I wonder if giving the offense in the first place was The New Yorker's way of offering him that opportunity to disclaim the elitist tendency he was so damaged by when Hillary Clinton successfully identified him with it during the primary campaign.

But of course, Obama is no mood to look at gift cover in the mouth, as Kathleen Parker writes:

Oh, for a good riposte.

Barack Obama's levity-free reaction to the now-famous New Yorker cartoon leaves one reluctantly wondering: Is he humor-challenged? Perchance, does he take himself too seriously for a nation of wits and wags?

So soaring has been Obama's rhetoric and so dazzling his smile that we've missed the possibility that the Illinois senator is less the lanky rock star and more the purse-lipped church lady, clucking his tongue in disapproval of the chuckling masses.

His campaign's angry reaction to the magazine cover shows a stunning lack of political dexterity. It wasn't always so.

In earlier days, Obama was self-deprecating and light of touch. But something happens as people get closer to Washington, as Obama himself has pointed out in other contexts. A popular story that Obama tells concerns a Las Vegas debate during which he was asked about his weaknesses.

Obama answered that he has trouble keeping up with paper, that his desk is a mess. O.K., it wasn't knee-slapping hilarious, but it was honest and, therefore, endearing. A real answer from a real person.

In contrast, two of Obama's contenders, both Washington veterans, responded to the same question with the kind of painful earnestness that makes dogs cynical. As Obama recounts it, one of them said his biggest weakness was that "I'm just so passionate about helping poor people." The other said, "I'm just so impatient to help the American people solve their problems."

Oof.

Obama continues the story: "So then I realize, well, I wish I'd gone last and then I would have known." (Laughter, applause.) "I'm stupid that way, I thought that when they asked what your biggest weakness was, they asked what your biggest weakness was. And now I know that my biggest weakness is I like to help old ladies across the street."

Now, that's funny. And there's a reason the other two candidates — John "passionate" Edwards and Hillary "impatient" Clinton — aren't leading the Democratic ticket.

But that was before the Cult Of Obama was cemented into place as the official narrative, right around the time of this messianic MTV moment. As a result, Charles Krauthammer writes, "Americans are beginning to notice Obama's elevated opinion of himself":

There's nothing new about narcissism in politics. Every senator looks in the mirror and sees a president. Nonetheless, has there ever been a presidential nominee with a wider gap between his estimation of himself and the sum total of his lifetime achievements?

Obama is a three-year senator without a single important legislative achievement to his name, a former Illinois state senator who voted "present" nearly 130 times. As president of the Harvard Law Review, as law professor and as legislator, has he ever produced a single notable piece of scholarship? Written a single memorable article? His most memorable work is a biography of his favorite subject: himself.

It is a subject upon which he can dilate effortlessly. In his victory speech upon winning the nomination, Obama declared it a great turning point in history -- "generations from now we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment" -- when, among other wonders, "the rise of the oceans began to slow." As Hudson Institute economist Irwin Stelzer noted in his London Daily Telegraph column, "Moses made the waters recede, but he had help." Obama apparently works alone.

Obama may think he's King Canute, but the good king ordered the tides to halt precisely to refute sycophantic aides who suggested that he had such power. Obama has no such modesty.

After all, in the words of his own slogan, "we are the ones we've been waiting for," which, translating the royal "we," means: " I am the one we've been waiting for." Amazingly, he had a quasi-presidential seal with its own Latin inscription affixed to his lectern, until general ridicule -- it was pointed out that he was not yet president -- induced him to take it down.

Much like Senator Kerry before him, Obama's newly discovered humorlessness is a gift to John McCain and his advisors if they're savvy enough to use it to their advantage, and in a sane world, it would be a gift to late night TV as well, if they only they were smart enough to get their own sympathies out of the way and have some fun for a change:

"Morning Joe" host Joe Scarborough slammed the "hacks" at "The Daily Show" on Wednesday for only making fun of Republicans and giving a free pass to Democrats. Discussing a July 15 New York Times piece that described how TV comics and talk show hosts are hesitant to make fun of Barack Obama, Scarborough mocked, "I never want to hear anybody from 'The Daily Show' or any of these other shows ever saying again, 'We speak truth to power.' 'Cause you know what they do? They speak truth to Republicans."

After admitting that Republicans have made many mistakes over the last seven years, the MSNBC host continued to eviscerate the crew at the "The Daily Show" and others: " But, please, don't be subversive, because you're not. Because you're a hack. You're a hack for the Democratic Party and you only tell jokes about one side."

Because Obama is rife for satire, as Kyle Smith notes:

Jimmy Kimmel says comedy writers refuse to make fun of Obama because he's black: "There's a weird reverse racism going on." Others vow that, gee, they'd be wiling to make fun of Obama but, damn, he just hasn't done anything worthy of making jokes about yet.

Naw, nothing funny about being the first admitted coke user to be nominated by a major party. Nothing funny about palling around with a member of the Weather Underground. Nothing funny about spending 20 years going to the church of a psychotic rage-a-holic preacher who makes Jimmy Falwell look like St. Augustine. Nothing funny about having a wife who said she had never felt proud of her country before. Nothing funny about flippity-flopping on your no. 1 issue–campaign finance–or voting for a surveillance bill you vowed to fillibuster. His problems with quitting smoking alone would be the subject of a million late-night riffs if he were a Republican.

Comics insist they're equal-opportunity offenders but they're really not. When they talk about making jokes about Obama, they shy away from anything whose punchline implies some failing and go off-roading into neutral comedy territory like his father's goat-herding or his habit of tying everything into his talking points. Kimmel suggests going for laughs by making fun of Obama's ears. Hard-hitting stuff, James. A writer for Letterman suggests that the audience won't go for any racist stuff. True, but so what? There's nothing racist about mocking cokeheads or wobbly principles.

As Kyle wrote, it's "Day Five since Barack Obama's camp revealed he has suffered an acute humorectomy"; if, as Joe Scarborough wrote above, a similarly humor-challenged conservative were discovered (cough--Quayle--cough), they'd circle around him like sharks getting their first taste of chum.

Well, have it fellas--the water's fine, if you're willing to dip a fin toe in. Even Jon Stewart says so.

To Nanny, or not to Nanny, that is the question.

(And sad to say, I think I know the answer, as does Hubert Humphrey.)

It's victim politics a-go-go! First up in an interview in GQ, Mark Penn (whom the magazine describes as "her beleaguered chief strategist") shares some thoughts on why Hillary lost:

...Look, there’s no question that the Obama campaign took comments that could not in any way, shape, or form in an objective reality be seen as racist, and they told surrogates to characterize them that way. And I think that was the… And not only that, but when you look at who was making the comments, people who devoted their lives, you know—President Clinton was there in Little Rock—who devoted their lives to kind of repairing the breach racially in this country, it was doubly, it was really doubly unfair and troubling.

All of which is awfully rich coming from someone associated so closely with the couple that brought you the politics of personal destruction. But Rich does have a point, and Obama's surrogates have found a new target--those white racist reactionaries...at the limousine liberal Manhattan magazine that dubbed Bill Clinton the first black president a decade ago:

Myrlie Evers-Williams, 75, the widow of slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers, told an NAACP luncheon group Tuesday that political spin masters and the news media are painting the Obamas as unpatriotic and dangerous radicals. She said the attacks are serious enough to use the term lynching, even though that usually refers to racially-motivated killings.

Evers-Williams, a chairwoman emeritus of the civil rights organization, said New Yorker magazine’s recent cover is an example. The magazine’s cartoon cover shows a turban-clad Barack Obama bumping knuckles with a gun-toting Michele Obama as an American flag burns in a fireplace…

“As I watch the political scene unfold, I realize there is more than one way to lynch someone,� said Evers-Williams. “I look at the picture of the New Yorker and to me that was subtle, political lynching. You can call it satire if you want.�

While his surrogates and supporters patrol the old media, Obama himself takes on those upstarts on the right:

GLAMOUR: An AP poll shows that while the positive ratings on Michelle are higher than those of Cindy McCain, her negative ratings are higher as well. I’m curious about how as a husband that makes you feel. Does it mystify you? And what do you want to say to those Americans who don’t know the woman that you know?

SENATOR OBAMA: It’s infuriating, but it’s not surprising, because let’s face it: What happened was that the conservative press—Fox News and the National Review and columnists of every ilk—went fairly deliberately at her in a pretty systematic way…and treated her as the candidate in a way that you just rarely see the Democrats try to do against Republicans. And I’ve said this before: I would never have my campaign engage in a concerted effort to make Cindy McCain an issue, and I would not expect the Democratic National Committee or people who were allied with me to do it. Because essentially, spouses are civilians. They didn’t sign up for this. They’re supporting their spouse. So it took a toll.

Which is of course, yet another page from the Clinton playbook: it's hard to think of any potential first ladies prior to Hillary in 1992 being used as campaign surrogates; as late as 2003, Howard Dean's wife basically stayed home while he campaigned.

No wonder television's comics are afraid to make sport of Obama, despite his myriad flaws, not the least of which is buying into his own messianic press clippings. Fortunately, there is one iconoclast willing to say that the emperor-to-be is bereft of his Burberry suit.

(Although, to be fair, it's tough to picture the Shawn-era New Yorker that Tom Wolfe satirized in his classic "Tiny Mummies" article doing anything that would actually get them this much negative press, particularly amongst the left.)

Michelle Malkin writes welcome to the big leagues, rook, where the establishment left routinely satirizes politicians of all stripes. What, you thought you'd get a pass?

Ezra Levant to America's Congress: put Canada on the watch list of human rights abusers.

But even if such an action occurred, it may be a case of too little too late. Stories such as this one indicate that America may be rapidly headed in the same direction as Canada, where any hurt feeling is grounds to claim victimization and/or call the lawyers.

Back in 2004, we quoted Radley Balko's take on today's left becoming just a might...conservative in their thinking:

You know, you sometimes get the feeling the day after the polio vaccine was invented, today's left would have run editorials lamenting the good ol' days, when we were a little more cautious about what swimming pools we jumped into, and expressing sadness that we'd now have no new stories about the afflicted overcoming their disability to inspire the rest of us.

I'm not kidding. They're that resistant to change. Every mill that shuts down is a "sign of our sad times." No matter that the new mill will do things better, faster and cheaper than the old one. New farming techniques grow more food on less land. But dammit, if there wasn't something romantic about the old-stye "family farm" that's deserving of government protection. Innovation isn't celebrated, it's excoriated for displacing some idealized vision of the way things once were. In matters of progress and dyanmism, the left is far more conservative than the conservatives are.

In his latest op-ed, "The Politics of Can't-Possibly-Do", Daniel Henninger writes that you can see the left's love of stasis most dramatically in the giant hole in the ground that remains at the corner of Church and Liberty Street:

This week the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey issued a stunning document to explain why Ground Zero has remained nothing but a hole for some seven years.

It is arguably the greatest political and bureaucratic fiasco in the history of the world. Remember the line about how if we don't rebuild the towers "the terrorists will win"? The terrorists will be dead of old age before this project is finished.

Port Authority Executive Director Chris Ward, who did the remarkably frank report at the request of a frustrated Gov. David Paterson of New York, wrote that original estimates of time and cost (now at $15 billion) "did not reflect the unprecedented challenges associated with a project . . . involving so many different public and private stakeholders." (Arguably the system began its decline when the vocabulary changed deadly "factions" into benevolent "stakeholders.")

Ground Zero is a perfect storm of contemporary American politics. The report cites "19 different governmental entities from every level of government each laying claim to some component of the overall project." And, "Each entity makes daily decisions about their individual projects, but no streamlined process or authority is in place to . . . ensure that each decision is in the best interest of the overall project." This sounds eerily like the 9/11 Commission's assessment of our dis-coordinated national security agencies.

Besides the public players, the report notes "dozens" of family groups representing the victims, plus various community groups. Bowing to another toxic value, the agency promises to still be "inclusive," then complains no one has the authority to decide anything.

That is because productive decision making has fallen as a public value below "being heard." Even being heard is no longer enough. The "stakeholders" have to prevail, somehow assuming that the process – or a complex project like this – will endure endless blows. Meanwhile, construction of the wholly private, 52-story 7 World Trade Center building was done in 2006.

New York City, a chipping temple to the public sector (the roadbeds would embarrass a third-world country), will sink or swim beneath this dead weight. But as a case study of system malfunction, the Port Authority report on unbuilt Ground Zero is a warning shot to our acrimonious national politics. A can-do tradition is losing ground to can't-possibly-do. Barack Obama's appeal rests heavily on the belief that he'll bring back can-do. He's one man. The answer lies deeper, with a people who have to choose between politics that moves its system forward or a politics that just wants to have fun.

And not even that: given their rampant puritanism, do the left's true believers really have all that much fun?

On Thursday, I wrote about the ongoing efforts--from a variety of sources--to reframe World War II, in an effort to cast the Allies' efforts in a much more cynical light than history currently remembers them.

But Matthew Yglesias sets the Wayback Machine way, way back, in an effort to reframe not 1945, but 1776.

Jenifer Rubin asks Hollywood to put its carbon credits where its mouth is:

There is no group more susceptible to Obama’s vision and rhetoric than the Hollywood elite. And given their exalted status in our society, their influence on others if they take up the challenge to improve our country might be profound.

So in that spirit we offer a pledge, the Pledge We Can Believe In, which Obama can present to all of his Hollywood admirers. Indeed, he might inscribe the Pledge We Can Believe In on all financial donor forms and on all requests for tickets to his campaign events. The time for idle chatter is over and the fierce urgency of now demands that those who support Obama and his vision for a new America take the Pledge We Can Believe In:

I'm sure they'll sign--the minute this prominent Oscar-winning Hollywood documentarian signs off on the first draft of the pledge.

At least until the tail end of the first decade of the 21st century, World War II always seemed like pretty settled history to me; but it's obvious that the Second World War--particularly the conduct of the Allies--is being reframed by a surprising number of groups. As Victor Davis Hanson wrote last month:

Questioning the past is a good thing, but rewriting it contrary to facts is quite another. In the latest round of revisionism about the Second World War, the awful British and naive Americans, not the poor Germans, have ended up as the real culprits.

Take the new book by conservative pundit Patrick Buchanan, Churchill, Hitler and “The Unnecessary War”: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World. Buchanan argues that, had the imperialist Winston Churchill not pushed poor Hitler into a corner, he would have never invaded Poland in 1939, which triggered an unnecessary Allied response.

Maybe then the subsequent world war, and its 50 million dead, could have been avoided. Taking that faulty argument to its logical end, I suppose today a united West might live in peace with a reformed (and victorious) Nazi Third Reich.

On the Left, novelist Nicholson Baker’s nonfiction title, Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization, builds the case that the Allied bombing of German cities was tantamount to a war crime.

Apparently there was no need to, in blanket fashion, attack German urban centers and the industry, transportation, and communications concentrated within them. From Baker’s comfortable vantage point, either the war was amoral or unnecessary — or there must have been more humane ways to stop the flow of fuel, crews, and equipment for the Waffen SS divisions that invaded Europe and Russia.

In the luxury of some 60 years of postwar peace and affluence — and perhaps in anger over the current Iraq war — Buchanan and Baker and other revisionists engage in a common sort of Western second-guessing. The result is that they always demand liberal democracies be not just better and smarter than their adversaries, but almost superhuman in their perfection.

That's the theme of a new mini-series written by moderate historian Niall Ferguson, but aired on the otherwise typically liberal PBS, as Adam Buckman notes in an article whose subtitle says it all: "PBS Show To Argue Allies As Bad As Nazis":

MEMBERS of the Greatest Generation - especially those with weak hearts - might want to steer clear of an upcoming PBS documentary that suggests the Allied victory in World War II was "tainted" and questions whether it can even be called a victory.

Moreover, the documentary, titled "The War of the World: A New History of the 20th Century," asserts that the war could only be won by forming an unholy alliance with a dictator - Joseph Stalin, who was as brutal as the one they were fighting, Adolf Hitler - and by adopting the same "pitiless" and "remorseless" tactics practiced by the enemy.

The three-part documentary is a companion to the best-selling book, "The War of the World: Twentieth Century Conflict and the Descent of the West" by Harvard and Oxford historian Niall Ferguson. The one-hour Part One of the documentary premieres Monday night at 10 on Ch. 13. The other two parts air the following two Mondays. World War II is the focus of Part Two.

His thesis: Instead of looking at the 20th century as having been disrupted by two world wars with periods of relative peace before, between and after them, it is more appropriate to view much of the history of the century as a continuous bloody conflict that was interrupted occasionally for a few short, exhausted catnaps of relative calm.

It is an illuminating viewpoint, and Ferguson does an effective job tying all of the century's mass deportations, enslavements, ethnic cleansings and genocides together so that you can't help being won over to his view that the violence of the 20th century was virtually never-ending.

I think Austin Bay once quipped to me (and possibly wrote about the theme in a column as well) that you could make a pretty good case that the First World War didn't actually conclude until 1991, (and arguably, not even then) so that's not an unreasonable point, though as Buckman notes:

But it is Ferguson's revisionist view of the tactics applied by the Allies in World War II that is likely to raise the hackles of those who have always believed in the "necessity" of bombing German and Japanese civilians, culminating in the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to end a war we did not start.

"I think it's very hard for those who have imbibed the idea of a 'great generation' that what the Allies did to defeat the Axis was in some measure to adopt totalitarian tactics," Ferguson says in a Q&A on PBS's Web site.

Sort of a Liberal Fascism, to coin a phrase originally spoken, favorably, three quarters of a century ago by the same author also who inspired the title of Ferguson's miniseries, which Dorothy Rabinowitz reviews, and in an essay titled "Forget the Good War", adds:

Russian troops had liberated Auschwitz, yes, but we're reminded that Stalin had imprisoned and murdered millions. Does this mean the liberation of Auschwitz was nothing? A good question with no answer. Mr. Ferguson is content to have delivered another in his long stream of accusatory ironies and contradictions, all in support of the claim that the morally tainted Allied armies should not be credited as liberators.

The Americans and British had adopted the totalitarian techniques of their foes, Mr. Ferguson contends in a series of arguments ranging from the strange to the simply inflated. Japanese combatants kept fighting to the very end, he explains, because they feared the cruelty of their American captors. Undoubtedly some American troops were guilty of killing Japanese prisoners. In this film's version of events, the slaughter was wholesale. By way of support Mr. Ferguson summons testimony from Charles Lindbergh -- pro-Nazi icon of American isolationists. He proceeds to reminds us that Lindbergh had complained, in the 1940s, that Americans thought nothing of killing Japanese prisoners. Noteworthy to be sure -- the first and last time, perhaps, that the world was privileged to hear Lindbergh express outrage over the commission of atrocities.

The catalog of Mr. Ferguson's stranger arguments is too long to go into, but here's a hint -- don't miss the part about Kursk, the greatest of all tank battles. Here the U.S. seems to stand accused of providing material help that made it possible for the Russians to prevail. Were the Germans supposed to win? Mr. Ferguson doesn't say, but the question hangs in the air -- for good reason.

Meanwhile, regarding Pat Buchanan's new book, at Pajamas HQ, Sheryl Longin writes:

The left is currently the home of some of the worst forms of cultural relativism, but let us not forget that the right houses its own equally dangerous revisionist historians who attempt to use their false history to influence current events. Now is not a time when America can afford to be fuzzy with the truth. Facts are facts. Ideology blinds people. We forget that at our own peril.

But in the afterward of Liberal Fascism, titled, "The Tempting Of Conservatism", which documented several examples of how the modern right is also susceptible to fascism, Jonah Goldberg wrote:

In the 1990s liberal anger about Buchanan’s “right-wing” fascism reached a fever pitch. As Molly Ivins wrote in response to Buchanan’s 1992 Republican National Convention speech: “It probably sounded better in the original German.” The irony here is that Buchanan was actually moving to the left. For years Buchanan’s opponents called him a crypto-Nazi for his defense of Ronald Reagan and the GOP. In reality, the only thing that kept his fascist instincts in check was his loyalty to the GOP and the conservative movement. After Reagan and the Cold War, Buchanan abandoned both in a leftward search for his true principles.

Buchanan calls himself a “paleoconservative,” but in truth he’s a neo-progressive. During the 2000 election he denounced free marketeers and flat taxers, saying that they spent too much time with “the boys down at the yacht basin.” He came out in favor of capping executive pay, in support of higher unemployment benefits, and against any kind of free-market Medicare reform and backed a “Third Way” approach to government activism. Buchanan’s neo-Progressivism has even caused the onetime Reagan aide to rail against the social Darwinism of the free market.

And Buchanan's magazine, despite its American Conservative sobriquet, is pretty darn cozy with the far fringes of the American left, and it appears that World War II is yet another issue where Pat and the far left, both then and now are remarkably simpatico.

Could Hollywood beckon next?

Update: Did Pat cook the books? "Busted!... Nazi Sympathizer Pat Buchanan Accused of Plagiarism, Hacked Quotes & Wrong Dates."

Pixar's new Wall-E certainly looked incredible in its trailer, but it left Kyle Smith with quite a sour aftertaste:

A more advanced flying probe-bot sent to Earth for reasons unknown has feminine curves and lovely blue eyes that leave WALL-E smitten, though except for her habit of laser-zapping any suspicious object she could be one of those white bullet-shaped trash canisters you’d see at a snack bar.

When she and WALL-E start to beep sweet nothings at each other, she has a higher-pitched tone than he does and says her name is Eva, so WALL-E is confirmed to be a heterobot. The two of them wind up at a space station that houses the remnants of the human race. At this point the film, previously dingy and dark, goes matte black.

The earthlings — or maybe Americans, as none of them have any other kind of accent — are brain-dead blobs perpetually stuffed to the gills with entertainment. They never leave their spotless flying barcaloungers — and never could, since their bones have shrunk to useless twigs inside their Shrek-like masses. They float through their troglodyte lives as unquestioning subjects of the master corporation (the same one that ruined the Earth) that houses them, distracts them and feeds them. All foods are made to be sucked down like milkshakes for maximum convenience.

It’s hard to see how a Disney-certified happy ending can result from this, and the answer is it really can’t. This is perhaps the most cynical and darkest big-budget Disney film ever, and an artistic gamble on the scale of Fantasia, which initially flopped despite critical acclaim. Pixar is now acting like Disney’s senior partner. Perhaps never before has any corporation spent so much money on insulting its customers — WALL-E is expected to be the year’s most heavily promoted film.

The meatball humans in WALL-E are like customers passively being served up a fake existence at the Magic Kingdom (which readily provides wheelchairs for not merely the afflicted but also the obese and the simply lazy), snorfling up the latest wows in an entirely artificial setting where every beverage and hotel room brings profits to the same corporation. And Disney paved over a few thousand acres of Florida wetlands to build Walt Disney World in the first place.

How paying customers will react to being told they’re porky slobs, or are headed in that direction (WALL-E is set 800 years in the future) will depend on how closely the people in the audience ignore the people on screen and concentrate on WALL-E and Eva.

Speaking of Disneyworld, Kyle's description of the schizophrenia of Disney's current cinematic product is of a piece their in-person entertainment. Here's James Lileks' description of his recent visit to Disney World's EPCOT Center:

Since we were here to do things we had not done before, we decided to take in “The Circle of Life,” a show about the interconnectedness of man, nature, and anthropomorphic cartoon characters. I hate to be a killjoy grump about these things, but oy, what a load of sanctimonious rubbish. The actual Circle of Life, as applied to animals, consists of birth, killing, consumption, excretion, copulation, and solitary death from small predators in the blood or nasty ones with big teeth. Sometimes there’s death by fire, for variety’s sake. It takes consciousness on the human level to extract the metaphorical weight in the whole Circle of Life thing, and while I think it’s wonderful to appreciate and marvel at the intricate ecosystems of the planet, and tread as lightly as necessary, wordless choirs voicing ecstatic vowels over footage of wildebeest herds does not really equal a High Mass for spiritual impact or depth. All of which I kept to myself, of course. But I felt like the village atheist.

The plot was hugely ironical: Timon and Roomba or whatever the warthog is named were building a resort in the jungle, and damning a stream to create a water feature. Simba showed up to demonstrate the error of their ways. The hilarity of any manifestation of the Disneyverse criticizing an artificial lake to build a resort goes without saying. And it did go without saying, of course. Simba said that Timon and Roomba or whatever were acting like another creature that did not behave in tune with nature, and that creature was . . . man.

BOO HISS, I guess. Jaysus, I tire of this. Big evil stupid man had done many stupid evil bad things, like pile abandoned cars in the river, dump chemicals into blue streams, and build factories that vomited great dark clouds into the sky. Like the People’s State Lead Paint and Licensed Mickey Merchandise Factory in Shanghai Province, perhaps? Simba gave us a lecture about materialism and how it hurt the earth – cue the shot of trees actually being chopped down, and I’m surprised the sap didn’t spurt like blood in a Peckinpah movie – and other horrors, like forests on fire because . . . well, because it was National Toss Glowing Coals Out the Car Window Month, I guess. I swear the footage all came from the mid-70s; it was grainy and cracked and the cars were all late-60s models. Because I’m pretty sure we’re not dumping cars into the rivers as a matter of course any more. You’re welcome to try to leave your car on the riverbank and see how that turns out for you.

As I mentioned to Tammy Bruce on Tuesday when discussing the envirohectoring subtext of The Happening, Hollywood likes to think of itself as a wild and crazy Sodom and Gomorrah on the Pacific--an endless orgy of hedonistic abandon. But like much of the left in general, lurking just behind its hipster artifice, modern Hollywood has a surprisingly puritanical, we know what's best for you streak. And just as last year's anti-war message was piledriven into the ground by Hollywood, there's lots more eco-lectures to come!

Nobody wanted to be lectured by their parents as a kid; so how long will grown-up audiences voluntarily shell out hard-earned money to replenish the coffers of an industry that's rapidly becoming one giant digital nag?

On Friday, I had some thoughts on the anti-consumerism subtext of Pixar's upcoming Wall-E movie, and wrote:

Anti-consumerism: now there's a message you'd expect from the entertainment industry. Parents--buy your kids less Star Wars toys! And stop paying $15.95 a pop to buy all those DVDs! But thanks for spending ten buckets a ticket and five dollars for a drum of popcorn to watch our movie!

I wonder if the summer popcorn crowd will get whiplash when they go from the conspicuous consumption of Sex In The City to the hectoring subtext of Wall-E?

And once you're done being lectured on the evils of consumerism by your betters in Hollywood, you can buy their merchandise!

For only $250, you can buy the remote-control Wall-E action figure – which will be available in time for Christmas. When kids aren’t busy making the world a better place, they can plop down in front of the plasma and exercise their thumbs on the Wall-E video game, available for Nintendo Wii, PlayStation 2 and 3, and Sony PSP. You can carry your Wall-E lunchbox to school and at night, sleep under a Wall-E poly-blend comforter.

And this isn’t even recounting the junk associated with the Toy Story trilogy (the third one comes out in 2010), Ratatouille, The Incredibles, Finding Nemo, and so forth.

Pixar is not in the business of going green. It’s not in their interest. So why tell little children that consumerism is bad while pushing a load of useless crap down their throats?

Hey, nobody said it was easy for Hollywood to be puritanical.

Update: Related thoughts on puritanical Hollywood here.

Glenn Reynolds quotes Gregg Easterbrook:

Democratic attacks on Mr. McCain and Republican attacks on Mr. Obama both seek to punish impermissibly positive thoughts. At a time when there exists a sense of crisis over the economy, fuel prices and many other issues, this reinforces the odd, two realities of life in the United States today: The way we are, and the way we think we are. The way we are could use some work, but overall, is pretty good. The way we think we are is terrible, horrible, awful. Possibly worse.

Well, yeah. Check out this recent doomsday riff from David Letterman, who, during the 1980s, despite the equally eeeeevil Reagan being in charge was far too cool and ironic to be this morose about life:

Guys talking about the President really can't do anything about the economy. I don't know if that's true or not, but let's give them that one, let's just say “okay, the President can't do anything about the economy.” Everything else has gone so lousy in the last eight years. I mean – and I'm a guy who doesn't pay attention to much, as long as I got wresting and a TV dinner I'm fine – but even I am perceiving now that things are horrible in ways they shouldn't be horrible. Now, we're not going to impeach the guy. Could we get our money back? Honest to God, what, I mean [audience applause], just at least something.

Dave's clinging bitterness is enough to make you change the channel...And if it's to ABC, you're confronted with more doomsday, as James Lileks notes:

"Are we living in the last century of our civilization? Is it possible that all of our technology, knowledge and wealth cannot save us from ourselves? Could our society actually be heading towards collapse?

"According to many of the world's top scientists, the answer is yes, unless we take action now."

They’re asking for readers to submit their own dystopian nightmares.

What is it with the pessimism of the overclass? If it wasn’t for doom and gloom, they wouldn’t have a reason to live. The latest example comes from ABC News, and suggests that this century may be the last one for civilization. Who says? Scientists! Ah, well, if it’s scientists, we’d best pay heed. Or perhaps you disagree; the century’s still fresh and young. It still has that new century smell. Warranty’s good for another few years, and besides, we haven’t dumped the trunk-junk accumulated in the previous century. We’ll figure something out. We always do.

But you don’t get publicity by suggesting this century might be better than its predecessor, or by asking people to envision how cool the future might be. There are dozens of websites and Flickr sets devoted to retrofuturism, to the art of describing what things might be like. If you grew up in the 60s, you’ll remember all the paintings of space – useful space full of gleaming silver ships. That all ended with “2001: A Space Odyssey” which suggested that the future of space was long, dull, and lonely, punctuated with homicidal computers, trippy FX and enormous wise space-fetuses. Great film, but from then on, something seemed different about the future. Did we really want to live there?

I'm not sure how much of a role Stanley Kubrick's opus played in causing liberalism's turn towards nihilism, but the timing is certainly right; as I noted a couple of years ago in a post titled, "1969: The Shattering of the Modernist Dream".

So is there reason to be optimistic today? Of course. But just don't expect much help in that department from the media, at least until November. They've got the double-whammy of their own industry in dire straits, and an economy to keep talking down, at least until--somehow, miraculously--it begins to turn on a dime the day after the election. (Provided the appropriate audacity and hope and change occurs, of course.)

“[Inside the windowless courtroom] there’s no link with the outside world except a clock, which is stuck at 8:00. And that’s government bureaucracy for you. You know, in British Columbia, it claims to be able to eradicate hate, but it can’t get someone in to restart the clock.”

--Mark Steyn on The Hugh Hewitt Show, as quoted by Kathy Shaidle, who goes through the looking glass of his Kafkaesque Show Trial at Pajamas Media.

Meanwhile, reader Joseph Somsel emails:

Seems to me that some of the defendants from the Canadian Human Rights Commission trials could legitimately seek asylum in the US as victims of persecution.

I wonder if Canada's chilling of free speech makes it a more or less desirable destination for leftwing Americans?

Somehow I don't think Oswald Spengler (the one who wasn't a Ghostbuster) quite expected western civilization to enter its death rattles quite like this:

Some of the comments expressed the familiar desire to leave America for Canada. O Canada. Land of sweet reason and freedom.

You mean the place where a Human Rights Commission can haul up anyone for a show trial and cast out the rule of law and fine them for saying things that made people sad, then force them to recant their beliefs in public?

This ruling is just astonishing – a pastor has been barred for life from ever speaking his mind on a particular issue in any form – newspapers, radio, TV, the internet, semaphore signals. I doubt any halfway serious gay person would applaud it (update: proof.) The pastor in the dock said LGBT people “perverse, self-centered and morally deprived,” which seems a rather broad net to cast, no? It’s a self-refuting statement for anyone who knows anyone who’s gay, and if it had been leveled against straights by someone from the ranty fringe of, oh, I don’t know, Leather Bear Kluxers for Zoroaster, I wouldn’t have felt particularly wounded. You could argue with the fellow if you like, but the idea of bringing him up on charges for talking doubleplus ungood harmthink is absurd.

I know some believe that dissent has been crushed and driven to the margins in this country, but try to imagine a government agency charging Rev. Jeremiah Wright with hate speech for a sermon, and forcing him to disavow key elements of his church’s theology. It’s impossible, isn’t it? It would be different if he said those things on the radio, in which case the government agency responsible for determining Fairness would be required to enforce the airing of alternate opinions. And now, for the response to today's sermon.

It’s a messy world full of messy minds and loose tongues. Words can hurt, and we can’t have that.

It's not the only case before the Canadian HRC system, as noted; Mark Steyn and the magazione that runs his work is facing judgment from this pinhead star-chamber as well. But by all means: pop in your copy of "V For Vendetta" and pretend the dark Christian fascists will surge to power any minute now and use the surveillance infrastructure to justify limits on acceptable headgear. Any minute now. Any minute.

As Natalie Solent writes, "Canada is no longer a free country." How long before we can say that about about the rest of the Anglosphere?

Update: Not long indeed: "Great Britain’s Free Speech Breakdown".

P.J. O'Rourke revisits the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago after touring it as a kid: "At least people are still dressed the way I was a half-century ago: In jeans or shorts, T-shirts, and gym shoes. Except these are people of 40 or 50."

Beyond the steep decline of its visitors' sartorial standards, there is much about the museum itself that O'Rourke is displeased with. Hilarity ensues thusly:

The European inflictions are grimly illustrated. The first one upon which we are expected to reflect is the only decent thing (not counting the wheel, iron, cigarette papers, etc.) that Europeans brought to America's Indigenous peoples, "Religious Conversion." Second is "Disease," which should stir our sympathy but hardly our guilt. The exhibit points out that disease was the chief cause of suffering after European contact. Therefore, the horrors that beset The Ancient Americas following 1492 would have happened if the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa María had been manned by Jimmy Carter, the Dalai Lama, and Bono.

You escape the pity parlor of When Worlds Collide and traverse a space of video screen talking heads and interactive displays with all their buttons being pounded by toddlers. This is "Living Descendants." The ancient Americans' modern relations are regular folks, as well as their ancestors were, and with clothes on, too, the same as you and me. Of course, if they're the same as you and me, why do they need a room in a museum any more than we do? Well, "despite centuries of injustice and oppression, today's "Indigenous peoples strive to sustain their cultural traditions."

You could say the same of the Irish. Being one, I looked for the exit to go find a drink. I wandered into a solemn, quiet, awe‑engendering place. Looking around the large, gloomy hall I saw the full-scale cutaway of winter quarters in MacKenzie Bay. Its labels are curled and yellowing but unchanged: respectful, factual, precise.

The ancient Americans weren't regular folks. They lived strange, spectacular lives on strange, spectacular continents untrod by man and more remote for them than Mars--or the world of museum curation--is for us. The ancient Americans were tough as hell. They did their share of nasty stuff. But even the Aztec don't deserve to be patronized, demeaned, and insulted by what is--or is supposed to be, or once was--one of the white man's great institutions of learning.

Give the "Ancient Americas" exhibit back to the ancient Americans, and the Field Museum along with it. If any of the heirs and assigns of the Aztec, Inca, or Maya feel inclined to practice a little human sacrifice on anthropologists, sociologists, moral relativists, neo-Marxists, and other conquistadors of modern academia, call it "maintaining the natural order of the world."

Yet another reminder that It'll be all right on the night.

Here's a winning whining message:

“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.

In addition to his off-the-rack Burberry suits and Neville Chamberlain's umbrella, it sounds like Obama's all set to don Jimmy Carter's cardigan as well.

Update: Roger Kimball also has a strong sense of Carter redux.

Slightly sanitized below, but pithy nonetheless:

For many, many years I wrote cover lines, ad copy, captions, pet copy, and many other assorted items for Penthouse Magazine. From this experience (which is seared, seared!, into my memory), I think I am more qualified than 99.99% of all the human beings that have ever lived to know pure, prime, steaming hot bulls*** when I see it, and this sign delivers. As a former bulls*** artist second to none, I know power bulls*** when I see it, and I have to say this placard contains enough high-velocity bulls*** to drop a charging rhino at fifty yards.

Read the whole thing.

So many on the left seemed perpetually trapped in the past, usually in the 1930s, '60s, or the 1970s, but recently, Jonah Goldberg spotted the slightly more recent epoch that has made Barack Obama so bitter:

There’s always been a certain cultural lag time to Barack and Michelle Obama, a kitschiness that’s hard to pinpoint. But I think I’ve got it: They’re self-hating yuppies straight out of the 1980s, which were to the Obamas what the 1960s were to the Clintons.

For those too young to remember, “yuppie” was shorthand for young urban professionals — think Michael J. Fox as Alex P. Keaton in the TV series “Family Ties” — who allegedly represented the collapse of ’60s values and the triumph of ’80s greed. Yuppies sold their souls for a BMW and a condo.

Ironically, the biggest complaints about yuppie materialism came from self-loathing liberal yuppies — like the Obamas.

The Obamas still seem stuck in that time warp, clinging to ’80s-style resentments and political assumptions. Michelle Obama is never so eloquent as when she’s complaining about the burden of student loans for her two Ivy League degrees and covering the high cost of summer camp and piano lessons for her kids on her family’s half-million-dollars-a-year income.

“Don’t go into corporate America,” she exhorted low-income working mothers in Ohio in February, even though she is a highly compensated hospital executive. She admits to being consumed with “a constant sense of guilt” over having to balance work, politics, and family. “It’s guilt, feeling guilty all the time.”

It’s telling that for the Clintons, JFK defined politics, but for Obama, Ronald Reagan is the role model. Last year, Obama admitted to admiring the Gipper’s “transformative” leadership (though not his policies). Indeed, not only did Reagan restore confidence in the nation while reducing confidence in government, he put a stake in the heart of the “Vietnam syndrome” and the blame-America-first ethos of the Democratic Party. The Reagan Revolution moved the country durably to the right — so much so that even Democrats saw the writing on the wall. Obama wants to erase that writing.

And as Abe Greenwald of Commentary writes, so does someone else with a Brilliant Disguise, whose artistic career peaked just before the decade the Gipper made:

It’s true that Obama speaks to the America Springsteen usually writes about. But I’m not sure what he’s referring to in this description. Springsteen’s America is a soot-covered wasteland of junked cars, violent townies, shotgun weddings, racist cops, closed factories, and endless unemployment lines. If you think Obama was tough on small town mentalities, consider the lyrics of Springsteen’s “Born to Run”:

Baby this town rips the bones from your back
It’s a death trap, it’s a suicide rap
We gotta get out while we’re young
‘Cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run

* * *

When, in 1980, Springsteen wrote...

I got a job working construction for the Johnstown company
But lately there ain’t been much work on account of the economy
Now all them things that seemed so important
Well mister they vanished right into the air
Now I just act like I don’t remember, Mary acts like she don’t care

...who could blame him? It was less than a year after Jimmy Carter had gone on television and made a speech diagnosing the country as clinically depressed and spiritually bankrupt:

In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.

The symptoms of this crisis of the American spirit are all around us.

Springsteen took the nation’s pulse and wrote about it. The problem is that his sense of America–forged during the Carter years–has not changed since. Sure, he came out with an inspirational post-9/11 album. But that came and went as fast as Yasir Arafat’s blood donation to the victims.

Springsteen said in his Obama letter: “After the terrible damage done over the past eight years, a great American reclamation project needs to be undertaken.” But it’s hard to imagine what exactly he wants to reclaim. The last time Springsteen’s lyrics reflected any consistent sense of romance and adventure in connection with America was during the Nixon years. Personally, I’d love to see him make music like that again. But somehow I don’t think that’s what he’s getting at.

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

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

From The Ominous Parallels by Leonard Peikoff (though also quoted here, not surprisingly):

The only person who is still a private individual in Germany," boasted Robert Ley, a member of the Nazi hierarchy, after several years of Nazi rule, "is somebody who is asleep."

Ghost of a Flea's take on academia up in the 49th parallel (to namecheck a superb movie about a much more humanitarian Canada long since gone), sounds remarkably ominous itself:

People wonder why I quit university teaching. Imagine an office - all your colleagues and all your supervisors and anyone with a say in your tenure prospects, your research funding and your publications - where everyone organizes their careers in such a way that a "human rights" commission would have no reason to object. Their teaching practices, their research, their political views; everything they think and do including and especially their "private" lives from the television they (do not) watch to the fast food they (do not) eat to the sex lives they (do not) allow themselves to have. Even the concept of a "private" life dismissed as reactionary and/or illusory and in any event subject to the scrutiny of any undergraduate with internet access and a grudge. That is the life I escaped.

Can't say I blame him--though I imagine life in America's elite universities probably isn't much different. Like the man said: "1984 -- A user manual for lefties; a warning for the rest of us."

(H/T: SDA)

Jacob Sullum writes that "There are two kinds of people in the world":

The kind who think it's perfectly reasonable to strip-search a 13-year-old girl suspected of bringing ibuprofen to school, and the kind who think those people should be kept as far away from children as possible. The first group includes officials at Safford Middle School in Safford, Arizona, who in 2003 forced eighth-grader Savana Redding to prove she was not concealing Advil in her crotch or cleavage.

Add the zero-intelligence tolerance insanity of the crotch inspector to school junk food patrols and the asthma Nazi, which the late Cathy Seipp reported on back in 2002.

In the Grauniad, Oliver Stone asks, "How did Bush go from being an alcoholic bum to the most powerful figure in the world?"

I don't know--how does anyone recover from a substance abuse problem and successfully rebuild his career in a brutally competitive industry?

STONE: I think drugs are very much a part of my generation's experience. We were not only the Cold War generation, we were the drug generation, And marijuana, with its origins in the Sixties, was good. It was a force for good. As was acid. It transformed consciousness. And in Vietnam, it certainly kept us sane.

PLAYBOY: What was your drug use like?

STONE: After the war, I took it to excess. I was using as much LSD as anybody. Even slipped it into my dad's drink once. What I did turned bad in the sense that it got heavier. My usage became heavier, but not for a purpose. It became an indulgence.

PLAYBOY: How much and what were you using?

STONE: Well, I started more acid, and grass, I suppose, in the beginning. And then I touched on some other things here and there.

PLAYBOY: Heroin? Cocaine?

STONE: Cocaine, certainly. But that was in the late Seventies. Cocaine is what took me to the edge. I finally realized that coke had beaten me and I hadn't beaten it. So in 1981, 1 went cold turkey on everything. Except an occasional drink here or there, or an occasional, you know, thing, but basically cold turkey. I moved to Paris that year and wrote Scarface, which was a farewell to cocaine.

PLAYBOY: Scarface became a cult hit. Had you quit using cocaine before or after you wrote it? .

STONE: I wrote it totally straight. But I researched it stoned, because I had to research it in South America, in various spots where I had to do it in order to talk with these people.

PLAYBOY: Before you quit, how deeply were you into it?

STONE: I would say it was an everyday thing. Hollywood in the late Seventies was-there was a kind of cocaine craze. And it lasted until later in the Eighties.

But assuming that Stone's movie hits theaters before November, it might serve as a key teachable moment for the left. It could reinforce the lesson they've been so gently trying to teach voters these past eight years, so that they won't elect another president this fall who both didn't serve in Vietnam, and who has admitted a youthful dalliance with not just alcohol, but other controlled substances as well, as ABC's Jake Tapper wrote last year:

In his 1996 memoir, "Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance," Obama wrote candidly about his high school-era drug use: "Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it. Not smack, though."

And note that Obama may still continue to ingest what most on the left consider the most dangerous, evil, vile drug on the planet, as Tapper noted yesterday.

(HT: LGF)

Update: Related thoughts from BeldarBlog:

Recklessness is a quality that Americans voters should and do try to weed out of their presidential candidates, if you'll excuse that pun.

Even in the nanny-state America that your party is trying to move us toward, Senator, in which cigarette smoking will eventually become a criminal offense — anywhere and everywhere, even by consenting and well-informed adults who are heavily taxed for the privilege — the Nixon Rule will still prevail: It's not the crime, it's the cover-up that brings down most politicians.

Found via Glenn Reynolds, who quips, "Call it coffin-nailgate."

Heh, indeed.^TM

Geez, haven't any of these people ever been in a Hooters before?

(Via Breitbart.com)

UPI reports, "More die because helmet laws repealed":

U.S. motorcyclist fatality rates have increased in states that repealed their universal helmet laws in the past decade, researchers said.

The nanny state doesn't understand that freedom is also the freedom to potentially stupid things. Or as P.J. O'Rourke once said, "There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences."

Indeed we could, but this latest round of "pushers" aren't exactly the best material to write the backstory for Superfly: The Next Generation. Up on the Drudge Report is this headline:

School candy ban spurs underground 'sugar pushers'...

Who, other than the nanny staters, didn't see this one coming from a mile away?

The great Victor Davis Hanson wonders why none of the candidates will get serious about discussing America's energy needs:

In terms of energy, we continue to delay coal plants despite our vast reserves, we dither on nuclear power, we won’t drill off the California coast or in tiny parcels in a vast Alaska, while we talk grandly of wind and solar and hydrogen and all the other solutions that are decades away from contributing in major ways to our energy needs—while our enemies in the Middle East are building trillion dollar reserves that will find their way into the hands of those who want to kill us. Do we think Nigeria or Russia is easier on the environment than we are when drilling oil, or that the Chinese have cleaner coal plants? If we really live on planet Earth, then isn’t it incumbent on us to exploit our own resources safely to ensure others less careful do less damage to our shared globe?

Can’t we find a single Presidential candidate who says: ‘Hang on. We are going to get serious. We our going to build coal, nuclear, more hydro-electric plants. We want as many Americans as possible to buy a second electric plug-in car for urban driving; we want more efficient gas and diesel engines; we are going to cut spending, radically so, to balance the budget, pay down the debt, pay off our foreign debt, and raise the value of our currency. Tighten your belts: federal spending is frozen for five years; we are going to raise the Social Security retirement age and reform the system. The borders are going to close, and citizenship is going to mean something again.’

Should McCain say that, it would trump ‘hope’ and ‘change’ and the 1960s tired old agenda, adopted by both parties, that got us in the mess we’re in.

What's really fascinating is that even a sclerotic leftwing organization such as this one is willing to engage in a more sensible conversation about America's energy needs than any of the remaining candidates on either side of the aisle.

As I noted three years ago:

Joanne Jacobs writes that all too frequently these days, pushers supplying contraband are roaming the halls of American schools--who have only themselves to blame.

The contraband in question back then? Candy, which is increasingly verboten on school property. And a bag of illicit Skittles has derailed (temporarily one hopes) an eighth-grade honors student in Connecticut.

Fascinating that boomers did all sorts of really illicit substances in the 1960s, and endlessly shouted "question authority." But now, as they approach their dotage and are the authority, they get the vapors from trivialities as silly as a bag of candy in school.

(Via Jules Crittenden.)

Update: "School clears kids in contraband candy caper", AP reports. And the student learns a valuable lesson regarding how juvenile the alleged leftwing grown-ups running his school are.

Johnny Carson was once quoted as saying, "New York is an exciting town where something is happening all the time, most of it unsolved."

Not the least of which is how this staggeringly idiotic anti-Big Apple screed came to be published by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

A couple of years ago, Julia Gorin wrote:

It's a peculiar thing that as the threat of global terrorism reaches a crescendo, so apparently does the threat of global warming - at least that's what some would have us believe.

Tough language is borrowed from the war on terror and applied to the war on weather. "I really consider this a national security issue," says celebrity activist and "An Inconvenient Truth" producer Laurie David. "Truth" star Al Gore calls global warming a "planetary emergency." Bill Clinton's first worry is climate change: "It's the only thing that I believe has the power to fundamentally end the march of civilization as we know it."

Freud called it displacement. People fixate on the environment when they can't deal with real threats. Combating the climate gives nonhawks a chance to look tough. They can flex their muscle for Mother Nature, take a preemptive strike at an SUV. Forget the Patriot Act, it's Kyoto that'll save you.

And no one conflates the two like the Ultimate Nanny Stater, Nurse Bloomberg.

"A U.S. study suggests marketing plays a role in how often parents buy fast food for their children."

I need a study to tell me this?

As David Frum, our guest this week on PJM Political wrote in How We Got Here, the 1970s was an era loaded with bad ideas (not to mention even worse aesthetics). One of the few bad ideas that America dodged was converting to the metric system--but that's not the case in EU-ifed England. Debbie Schlussel warns, "Beware the metric jihadis. Consider me a fellow member of Al Anti-Metricaeda."

As part of his series with Reason's TV division, Drew Carey notes that the Nanny State has no rhythm:

The anti-smoking brigade's work is now complete.

(Forewarned is forewaxed: Accompanying photo not for the faint of heart.)

"Obesity now a 'lifestyle' choice for Americans, expert says":

"Obesity is a natural extension of an advancing economy. As you become a First World economy and you get all these labor-saving devices and low-cost, easily accessible foods, people are going to eat more and exercise less," health economist Eric Finkelstein told AFP.

I need a "health economist" to tell me this? Fifty years ago, in those less enlightened times, less obssessed with counterknowledge, this was called "common sense."

Do not taunt happy fun trial lawyers; heed the important safety warnings that Laurie Kendrick has assembled.

"Please do not bring any alcoholic beverages into the newsroom. Let’s go out like the professionals we have been these last, difficult weeks."

Ben Hecht, Lou Grant and Ben Bradlee would simultaneously weep upon reading that, except they were real men (Well, OK, Grant was fictional, but you can't have everything, as they say in Cairo) who didn't do that kind of stuff.

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

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

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

Well, yeah.

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

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

Someone should write a book about this topic.

Megan McCardle looks back at America's wild and carefree recent history:

The wild, drunken office Christmas party used to be a staple of television, books, and movies. Now I feel as if it's dropped pretty thoroughly out of the popular imagination; the only example I can think of recently is a fleeting scene in Bridget Jones' Diary. Were office holiday parties really that much wilder in the past? Or have we just stopped noticing, literarily?

Something tells me that David Harsanyi can answer Megan McCardle's question.

(By the way, note the reference to AMC's Mad Men series in the comments.)

Return with us now to the era of Woodrow Wilson, Carrie Nation and Margaret Sanger, as "Progressive" New Puritans continue their sweep through government, devouring your freedoms.

David Harsanyi of the Denver Post and the author of Nanny State writes that it's the return of the most obvious form of puritanism--prohibition:

Drinking is under attack these days in ways we haven't seen since the failed experiment with national alcohol prohibition in the 1920s. Indeed, for many neoprohibitionists, that experiment wasn't a failure at all, since it did cut alcohol consumption, which is all that matters. We can see that mentality today in policies that go beyond preventing drunk driving or punishing drunk drivers and aim to discourage drinking per se.

But food is also under attack; in San Francisco, where the progressive dream can be seen in the US in its full glory: out-of-control vagrants harrass an otherwise shrinking but ever-so-environmentally correct population, fireplaces could soon be banned. (And they may already be banished in some Bay Area suburbs.)

And then of course, there's the story making the rounds on the starboard side of the Blogosphere and cable TV this week:

At the age of 27 this young woman at the height of her reproductive years was sterilised to “protect the planet”…

“Having children is selfish. It’s all about maintaining your genetic line at the expense of the planet,” says Toni, 35.

“Every person who is born uses more food, more water, more land, more fossil fuels, more trees and produces more rubbish, more pollution, more greenhouse gases, and adds to the problem of over-population.”

Where it all ends only knows Gaia, but here are three examples of taking environmental absurdity to its most absurd destinations.

This New York Times article on the upcoming DVD version of the first season of Sesame Street is on the one hand a hoot, and on the other rather depressing in terms of how badly the nanny state has made inroads into American society since 1969. Back then, it merely wanted to educate your kids about reading, writing and 'rithmetic (in the form of taxpayer-funded shows like Sesame Street). These days it wants to go much, much further than that:

According to an earnest warning on Volumes 1 and 2, “Sesame Street: Old School” is adults-only: “These early ‘Sesame Street’ episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child.”

Say what? At a recent all-ages home screening, a hush fell over the room. “What did they do to us?” asked one Gen-X mother of two, finally. The show rolled, and the sweet trauma came flooding back. What they did to us was hard-core. Man, was that scene rough. The masonry on the dingy brownstone at 123 Sesame Street, where the closeted Ernie and Bert shared a dismal basement apartment, was deteriorating. Cookie Monster was on a fast track to diabetes. Oscar’s depression was untreated. Prozacky Elmo didn’t exist.

Nothing in the children’s entertainment of today, candy-colored animation hopped up on computer tricks, can prepare young or old for this frightening glimpse of simpler times. Back then — as on the very first episode, which aired on PBS Nov. 10, 1969 — a pretty, lonely girl like Sally might find herself befriended by an older male stranger who held her hand and took her home. Granted, Gordon just wanted Sally to meet his wife and have some milk and cookies, but . . . well, he could have wanted anything. As it was, he fed her milk and cookies. The milk looks dangerously whole.

Live-action cows also charge the 1969 screen — cows eating common grass, not grain improved with hormones. Cows are milked by plain old farmers, who use their unsanitary hands and fill one bucket at a time. Elsewhere, two brothers risk concussion while whaling on each other with allergenic feather pillows. Overweight layabouts, lacking touch-screen iPods and headphones, jockey for airtime with their deafening transistor radios. And one of those radios plays a late-’60s news report — something about a “senior American official” and “two billion in credit over the next five years” — that conjures a bleak economic climate, with war debt and stagflation in the offing.

The old “Sesame Street” is not for the faint of heart, and certainly not for softies born since 1998, when the chipper “Elmo’s World” started. Anyone who considers bull markets normal, extracurricular activities sacrosanct and New York a tidy, governable place — well, the original “Sesame Street” might hurt your feelings.

I asked Carol-Lynn Parente, the executive producer of “Sesame Street,” how exactly the first episodes were unsuitable for toddlers in 2007. She told me about Alistair Cookie and the parody “Monsterpiece Theater.” Alistair Cookie, played by Cookie Monster, used to appear with a pipe, which he later gobbled. According to Parente, “That modeled the wrong behavior” — smoking, eating pipes — “so we reshot those scenes without the pipe, and then we dropped the parody altogether.”

Forty years from now, when the current season of Sesame Street is being assembled for release on whatever the successor format to the successor format of DVD is, how much of it will have to be reshot to comply with how much further the nanny state is sure to have expanded further?

Yet another great moment in surveys--not to mention headlines: "Bars, nightclubs linked to more drinking".

"You can have my Ho Hos when you pry them from my cold, dead hands!" is the rallying cry that seems to emerge from Andy Kessler's recent Tech Central Station piece. Which isn't the first time the Cali Cupcake Cops have reared their ugly new puritan heads--recall this post by Virginia Postrel from a few years ago on a very similar theme.

Related: Gee, that only took about 15 years! NBC has only just now figured out that maybe, just maybe, there's a nanny state.

More: Meanwhile, Iowans--particularly right around this time each year--fear the dreaded Pumpkin Police!

Frank Martin explains why Harry Reid's poll numbers in Nevada are so low, even the crack forensic scientists of CSI: Las Vegas couldn't find them.

Truth be told, I don't think that Reid actually believes any of this stuff, but when you're a spokesman for an ideology that's headed far, far to the left in recent years, you've got to toe the party line.

Why yes, this is a textbook case of "Not loving thy neighbor."

As Allah writes, "Look on the bright side: after Arafat, Carter, and Iranian marionette Mohammed ElBaradei, the award couldn’t possibly be more degraded."

Steve Hayward has some additional thoughts on Al Gore's Nobel prize, and a bold prediction: "In 20 years Gore or his climate alarmist successors will be lucky to appear on cable access TV, and Gore’s Peace Prize will take its place alongside Le Duc Tho’s 1973 award as a Nobel embarrassment". If that sounds harsh, simply compare Gore with Paul Ehrlich, the most prominent Malthusian of the 1970s, when modern eco-hysteria began:

It’s never a good sign when politicians declare a scientific matter settled; we all remember how well that worked out for the Vatican when they told Galileo 400 years ago that astronomy was settled. It is even more problematic to suggest that climate change is not a political issue, but a moral issue, but then to demand massive political interventions in the economy to fix the problem.

The adrenaline rush of the Nobel is likely to prove evanescent, however, and will probably turn out to be the high water mark of climate hysteria. Increasingly, climate catastrophe is coming more and more to resemble the hysteria over the “population bomb” of the late 1960s and early 1970s. In those days, Paul Ehrlich was a frequent guest on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, and there were government commissions launched here and abroad to ponder whether we needed an aggressive anti-natalist policy. The effort to develop a population policy in the U.S. collapsed quickly and quietly when someone pointed out that any anti-natalist policy would disproportionately affect racial and ethnic minorities. Oops.

Population pressures were and remain a genuine environmental concern, but it gradually became clear that Ehrlich and other alarmists had way overestimated the problem, and it looks very different today. (Indeed, the great social problem of the end of this century may be population that is falling too rapidly.) And while Ehrlich is still peddling the same Malthusian gloom, he never turns up on the Tonight Show any more; in fact, he doesn’t even make it on Hardball or Countdown with Krazy Keith.

Likewise, climate change is a real phenomenon, but the catastrophic scenario of Gore and his fellow climate campaigners is steadily fraying around the edges if you follow the scientific literature closely. Has anyone noticed, for example, that global temperature has been flat for the last decade, after two decades of slow and steady increase from 1980 to 1998?

Read the whole thing.

Glenn Reynolds writes that "in some quarters, patriotism is the highest form of dissent. Er, or it would be..."

(Somebody should put that on a bumper sticker!)

Back in 2004, Jonah Goldberg looked at the post-Michael Kelly Atlantic and wrote, "The Atlantic is still a great magazine, but it seems to be inching urther and further into official Liberal Magazine Land."

That destination is concluded, with an article that begins:

If the American idea was to subdue Native Americans and place them at the disposal of European settlers, to import several million Africans to the New World and subject them to a lifetime of slavery, to impose on Asian immigrants a lifetime of discrimination, then perhaps the American idea was not so admirable.

And thus, the post-JFK strain of punitive liberalism rears its ugly head again. Or as Ace of Spades quipped a while back, "Call it the Ike Turner school of patriotism."

Thus winning the eternal support of Katie Couric, her fellow newscasters, Hollywood, and other compassionate head-tilters, "Obama Stops Wearing Flag Pin", AP and Drudge breathlessly report.

In contrast though, John Stephenson isn't losing much sleep over this transnational tempest in a press release.

Update: More from Pajamas HQ, Hot Air, and Michelle Malkin.

Thank you for smoking, Matt Lewis writes:

I didn't watch the Dem debate last night. But, as Marc Ambinder reports, every candidate except Hillary and Obama said they would favor a national ban on smoking ...

But what about the growing Hookah Parlor Gap?

"Manolo says, Ayyyy! The Irony! One minute, you are looking like Hooters Girls, and the next you are escorting them off the plane for indecency."

Don Draper wouldn't recognize today's world.

Update: Now it makes more sense. But we'll do our best to follow-up with a response from Catherine Tramell ASAP.

The BBC--and who could harbor a negative thought concerning such a well researched, unbiased news agency?--reports: Guinness may indeed be good for you.

To understand how far to the puritanical left America has traveled since the Manhattan of 1960 depicted in AMC's Mad Man, it's worth revisiting this quote by David Frum:

They lit rockets in their backyards on the Fourth of July. They bought their steak marbled with fat. They smoked. They bought cars without seatbelts. They gave boys .22-caliber rifles for their eleventh birthdays. How they would gape and stare at a contemporary playground, with its rubber matting underneath the swings, safety belts on the teetertotters, and three-year-olds strapped into crash helmets before they can mount their tricycles. How they would snicker at grown men gird­ing themselves like test pilots to pedal through the park, at a Post Office that airbrushes the cigarette out of Humphrey Bogart’s hand lest some im­pressionable stamp-collector get the wrong idea about smoking, at the massive Range Rovers we buy so that we can commute to the office with­out fear. Back then, one did not show so much concern for one’s carcass.

Compare that quote with the videos that AMC has uploaded to promote Mad Men--there's something like a half-dozen different clips on the dangers of smoking, not counting the endless hectoring of the show's premiere episode itself. Did Basic Instinct have warnings on the health hazards of unprotected sex? Superfly or Scarface on the dangers of illegal narcotics? A Christmas Story on firearm safety? (OK, I guess the constant warnings of "You'll shoot your eye out, Ralphie!" count.)

And as Tim Blair notes, the bar has certainly been lowered in terms of scandal. Whereas Brian Jones and later Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones had to consume kilos of illicit drugs in the 1960s and '70s for the police to bother with them, all it takes now is for Keith to light up a Marlboro 100 onstage, and it's truly Exile On Main Street time.

Does it get any better than this for Michael Bloomberg? He just experienced the ultimate moment of nanny state auto-erotic nirvana, as he bans himself: "Nobody's going to elect me president of the United States."

Bloomberg gave his scoop to a struggling cub reporter named D. Rather, at an little-seen TV network called HDNet. Considering where he made his fortune, I think it's great to see that Bloomberg is still supporting new and alternative media!

Update: More good news! With Bloomberg out, "Accordingly, We Expect Much Less Discussion of Trans-Fats on the Campaign Trail". But it's not exactly like the Nanny State solely resides in him, of course.

Dean Barnett asks, "What other industry goes to such lengths to make the vast majority of its customers know they’re second class citizens?"

Meanwhile, Jules Crittenden notes that the paradoxically pacifistic Party of Rage can really get their freak on when they're treated like second class citizens:

Rep. Bob Filner is facing an assault and battery charge after an incident at Dulles Airport where he allegedly pushed an United Airlines bag claim employee as first reported by ABC7/Newschannel 8.

… Filner, a Democrat from California, allegedly attempted to enter an employees-only area on Sunday night.

Van Cleave spoke with several witnesses who said they heard Filner yell “You can’t stop me,” before pushing aside the employee and refusing to leave the office.

Filner disputed the account in a statement issued by his office.

“Congressman Bob Filner is on his way to Iraq, visiting our troops, and will have a full statement when he returns. Suffice it to say now, that the story that has appeared in the press is factually incorrect - and the charges are ridiculous,” the statement said.

Jules dubs it "pre-traumatic stress syndrome", or rage induced by encounters with someone not up speed with their DYKWIA--"Do You Know Who I Am". Or perhaps its guilt-induced paranoia caused by a fear of committing the left's newest, and yet most heretical sin.

In any case, thanks to the media, we may not know which party they are, when they emphasize their disapproval in such physical outbursts. Curiously, this rarely warrants the same response from these ordinarily ultra-sensitive souls.

Update: "It’s easy to see why he’s so anti-gun. He thinks we all have as little self-control as he does."

As Victor Davis Hanson wrote back in June:

When I was growing in rural California in the 1950s and 1960s, my FDR parents winced at the nut right-wing fringe. This was, remember, the era of bulk mailings on pink paper, crazy “Did you know?” unsolicited newsletters detailing the names of local and national communists, usually sent from strange addresses in the Sierra Nevada foothills. At seven and eight, we used to pick them up from the garbage and ask our parents, “Hey, Mom, are Lucy and Ricky really communists?”

My cattleman uncle Tango used to stop by with John Birch literature, warning us about the impending fluoride conspiracy to make us all impotent.

Needless to say, things have come full circle since: "It's a hugely beneficial liquid in a slim cylinder of plastic, but for US environmentalists, it is the new public enemy number one: bottled water."

NRO's Phi Beta Cons blog links to Frederick Hess's article on the limits of what is commonly described in today's shorthand as "tolerance":

Writing on NRO today, Frederick Hess examines the recent flap at the University of Maryland, where a student wearing a pro-Israel shirt was indignantly told by a cashier at the Maryland Food Collective that "Your shirt offends me. I won't ring you up."

The student was able to get another cashier to complete the transaction, but the episode led to a big flap over the rights of customers and cashiers. A spokesperson for the Food Collective says, "no one should have to have contact with people whose views they find hurtful."

If history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes, here's the San Francisco counterpoint to the above east coast incident, which Cinnamon Stillwell recently linked to:

Many Jewish customers have refused to enter Rainbow Grocery — the hippie-dippy worker-owned cooperative that preaches an "inclusive environment that is welcoming to everyone" — ever since two departments de-shelved Israeli products in an apparent anti-Israel boycott in 2002. (Store employee Naomi Jelks says it was done without store authorization, and the boycott was later shot down by an employee vote.)

Now the Human Rights Commission is investigating a complaint by ex-customer David Nahmod, who says he was called a "stupid Jew" more than a year ago by a cashier who employees say identifies as Palestinian. Nahmod, a 51-year-old freelance writer and dog-sitter, says he motioned to the woman's "Free Palestine" T-shirt and asked, "Wouldn't it be nice if they could all live in peace?" He alleges that she responded with the epithet and that suicide bombers should kill as many Jews as possible.

I worked in a retail store a couple of decades ago. Back then, the typical response to "Your shirt offends me. I won't ring you up", would have come from the store's manager and had the words "you're fired, schmuck" somewhere in the sentence.

Of course, the above incidents could have easily have escalated into something even more insane: at least no latex balloons were involved in either transaction!

(H/T: GR)

In the late 1960s, before his movie career launched, Woody Allen made several television specials, including one in which he interviewed Billy Graham. Late last year, when Ann Althouse linked to the YouTube clips of this somewhat surreal moment, "Dirty Harry" of the conservative Libertas film blog wrote:

With all the acrimony and right against left and poisonous debate going on during this election season, I thought I’d pass on this very charming clip of Woody Allen interviewing Billy Graham. They’re both very funny and obviously enjoying each other’s company though they agree on little. (Letterman could learn something from this.)

Such moments in which prominent members of the "Two America" publicly debate in a colligate spirit seem to occur much less often these days; Bob Tyrrell blames it all partially, and I believe somewhat tongue-in-cheek, on William F. Buckley:

What claims the attention of major media today is a phenomenon called Kultursmog. It is the popular culture of the United States, polluted utterly by a weird politics, a politics that is often called liberal but is actually simply leftish and adolescent. It has no fixed values or ideas other than to disturb the peace, which the legally attuned will recognize as a misdemeanor in most jurisdictions of the civilized world. Kultursmog is a culture that mixes rock stars in with fashion models and the ideas of Al Gore. Occasionally the smog actually includes the Hon. Gore, along with those other "rock star" personalities, the Clintons. The Kultursmog is always politically correct, ever sensitive to the whims of the Democratic National Committee, and increasingly anti-intellectual.

What makes it anti-intellectual is that the ideas behind public policy today are almost completely derived from Buckley, Milton Friedman, Irving Kristol, and other less well-known conservatives and neoconservatives. In fact I think I can argue successfully, if ironically, that Buckley is personally responsible for the anti-intellectualism that has spread throughout major media over the past 25 years. There once was a time when the late night television shows, the morning chat shows, and the personality sections of print journalism would occasionally feature the likes of Buckley and his most frequent liberal opponents, John Kenneth Galbraith and Gore Vidal. The time is long past. Buckley finished off his opponents years ago, and no young egghead was up to taking on his wit or erudition.

In any case, it's hard to argue that the gatekeepers of the overculture are infinitely more hostile to conservatives than they were a few decades ago.

Case in point: Mark Finkelstein notices that "Time Puts Horns on the Reverend Billy Graham:"

Just when you thought the MSM couldn't sink any lower . . .

Could there possibly be an American who doesn't admire the Reverend Billy Graham? Apparently, yes. Have a look at the cover of this week's 'Time.' Of all the ways the editors might have positioned the logo, they managed to do so in a manner in which the 'M' in 'TIME' is transformed into horns protruding from the good reverend's head.

Tucker Carlson and Willie Geist took up the matter on Tucker's MSNBC show this afternoon.

MSNBC'S WILLIE GEIST: A guy who has advised presidents, the Reverend Billy Graham on the cover of Time Magazine this week. I know the media is secular, but do they have to rub it in? A nice picture there of the reverend praying, but look at the horns above his head. A not-so-subtle message that maybe he's, well, Satan incarnate.

MSNBC HOST TUCKER CARLSON: That is actually . . .. Have people complained about that? Because that's unbelievable.

GEIST: Yeah, there's some chatter on the internet right now, and there's sure to be more.

Glad to oblige.

Is the juxtaposition purely a strange coincidence? Maybe, but then so was this, which received gallons of ink in 2000. And note how often these strange coincidences seem to occur in the MSM, and whom they frequently involve.

Related: If you can't use 'em, bruise 'em.

Mike Bloomberg may have finally gone a ban too far:

Amidst all the conflicting advice from friends as well as experts in child rearing, one solitary issue united everyone: Breastfeeding is better than bottle feeding. Doctors unanimously tout the benefits of breastmilk — it provides antibodies which protect from respiratory and intestinal diseases, increases immunity, protects newborn intestines, and — if you believe the hype — makes babies more likely to get into Harvard. World Breastfeeding Week, which started Wednesday, should have been a time for everyone on the planet to come together as one and celebrate the fact that even though we’ll go to the mat on issues like co-sleeping and childhood vaccinations, we all agree on one single parenting issue: Breast is best.

In the face of unity not seen since America came together as one to decry the farce that was Jar Jar Binks, it was apparently time for the government to step in. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg took the opportunity to announce that the city’s hospitals will no longer include free baby-formula samples in gift bags given to the frequently shell-shocked new mothers, as part of a $4.5 million “Take Good Care of Your Baby” campaign. The new gift bags will include breastfeeding tips, ice packs to keep expressed breastmilk cool, nursing pads, a baby T-shirt with the slogan “I Eat at Mom’s,” and a foam finger like they use at ballgames to point at any mother who has the gall to bottle feed in public.

Okay, that last one is an exaggeration — but it does seem Mayor Bloomberg is a bit of a scold.

Go figure--never noticed that, myself.

By the way, pssst--hey Mike: dihydrogen monoxide can also impact newborns. Best start working on banning that next....

Elton John bypasses merely a ban on dihydrogen monoxide (though who knows, he'd probably be for outlawing that as well) and goes straight to the ultimate ban of all.

He wouldn't be alone, of course--here's somebody who would sympathize. Elton's rant also dovetails nicely with a piece I wrote for Tech Central Station a few years ago.

Mickey Kaus dubs Rudy Giuliani "The Manny":

From Associated Press' Phillip Elliott:

MEREDITH, N.H. (AP) - Republican presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani on Monday accused Democrats of favoring a controlling "nanny government" as he continued his bashing of the rival party.

Hmm. What mayor was it again who installed those hectoring recordings in New York cabs that kept telling you to buckle your seat belt?

Indeed. To be fair though, Manhattan's hectoring nanny government really began to go into hyperdrive once Giuliani's purportedly "liberal" successor took office.

Rudy Giuliani uses R-rated word 15 years ago, puritanical left implodes.

This sounds like something that was left over from the Lucky Strike-themed debut of AMC's Mad Men yesterday: "Turns Out, Those Truth Ads Are Obnoxiously Self-Righteous Enough To Induce Smoking To Spite Them".

When my school banned smoking among students after it caused a major fire on school property, it made it seem infinitely cooler for kids to smoke, if only to stick it to The Man. (Including, as I recall, the Headmaster's daughter herself, who was caught lighting up a Marlboro or two.)

Larry David celebrates his divorce from the environmentally and toilet-paperly obsessive Laurie David:

Now that he’s separated, Larry David is having a laugh at his wife’s expense. The “Curb Your Enthusiasm” card said he celebrated the end of his 14-year marriage to eco-activist Laurie David in a way that was sure to upset her. “After the divorce, I went home and turned all the lights on,” David told TV critics in LA. A fiercely private guy, David denied that his wife’s public war on global warming caused the split. “No, no, no, she’s been that way throughout,” he said.

I think we should follow his example and all join in the celebration tonight.

Ann Althouse writes that the Bobos who used to be Gen-X who used to be Yuppies are morphing into the New Victorians.

(And no doubt, with more than a touch of the New Puritan about them, of course.)

Update: Much more from Jay Reding.

Meanwhile, this map is "guaranteed to bring fear to the heart of every thirty-something Manhattan single woman".

But chances are you will: David Harsanyi of the Denver Post launches Nanny State, a blog accompanying his new book. Both keep track of "an invasive band of do-gooders who are subtly and steadily stripping us of our liberties, robbing us of the inalienable right to make our own decisions, and turning America into a nation of children."

Stop on by--before the Fairness Doctrine returns...

"Al Gore Appears On Live Earth Tokyo Stage As A Hologram". Triumph could not be reached for comment.

Much more at Hot Air, whose name describes the concert--aka, “Private Jets For Climate Change” perfectly.

And speaking of which, Newsbusters has some thoughts on the private jet-setting Jann Wenner.

Update: "Mostly Mild Weather Greets Live Earth Global Warming Concert Goers. Backstage, the Red Hot Chili Peppers get puritanically scolded (what else did they expect?) for using their red hot private jet.

More: "Whither the Gores’ war on sex, drugs, and rock and roll?"

If, as Gore once claimed, a traffic accident involving Al III was the singular moment that transformed him into the scourge of the automobile industry, I wonder if we can blame today's proceedings at Live Earth entirely on Al being dissed by Courtney Love and desperately trying to recover his leftwing pop culture streed cred. But then, this isn't the first industry that Al's been forgainst.

Related: Is this all a sign that global warming has “jumped the shark”?

Update: Indeed it has.

Paco, a frequent contributor to Tim Blair's site, notes that America's leftwing artists need to believe that they live in an oppressive culture, no matter how free from government regulation their speech is:

Pretending that one lives in an oppressive and fearful society, and saying so publicly, creates a sensation of courage and nobility that, in reality, is totally missing from the lives of many of these artsy types. For some reason, it’s not enough for these people to be perceived as interesting, or witty, or brilliant: they have this great need to be perceived as heroic as well.

Meanwhile, Christa Wolf, a communist writer who made her career in East Germany, a society which of course actually did outlaw freedom of speech, is feeling nostalgic:

The trajectory of Wolf’s political evolution has many parallels with that of leftist Western intellectuals, whom historical events compel to abandon their support for communist regimes, but who prove unwilling or unable fully to renounce their earlier convictions. Wolf continued to nurture utopian longings and lingering reverence for Marxist ideals even after the East German regime’s collapse. She responded to the reunification of Germany with a reaffirmation of moral equivalence: if communist systems had turned out to be bad, so were the Western capitalist ones, and there was little to choose from between them. Wolf’s complaints about consumerism expressed these attitudes, as when she writes of a time “when we are supposed to be buried in material objects and become material things ourselves”—a complaint that gives comfort to intellectuals, whose sense of identity is rooted in the role of social critic.

Wolf did not seize the opportunity One Day a Year presented for a thorough, systematic probing of the evolution of her worldview, nor for an understanding of the errors and illusions to which she was susceptible. She seems annoyed by those who “demanded my confession of guilt as an entry into the Western media landscape”—even though she managed to enter it without making such confessions. The sources of her qualified disillusionment with the East German regime remain unclear, as does the extent of her dissatisfaction. What is clear is that for Wolf, not even living most of her life in a highly repressive communist society could extinguish her longing for an ideal, egalitarian, non-commercial society.

And speaking of teaching old dogma new tricks, Amity Shlaes reconsiders our reverence for FDR.

In City Journal, Nicole Gelinas reviews Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole, by Benjamin R. Barber:

Somewhere in Consumed, Benjamin Barber, a civil-society professor at the University of Maryland and the author of the 1995 book Jihad vs. McWorld, has a serious point to make: many Americans have opted out of a common civic culture based on shared values and have turned inward instead, to a relentless, infantile narcissism that free markets only encourage. But Barber can never quite grasp this point in his own book, or make practical suggestions on how to deal with the problem. Instead, he wildly overreaches and couches everything he writes in apocalyptic terms.

For the flipside of Barber's argument, one that has been made frequently by a surprisingly puritanical left probably even before Peter Seeger and Malvina Reynolds' ticky-tacky-screedy "Little Boxes" singalong, it's worth rereading Virginia Postrel's The Substance of Style.

Sorry to dust off Telly Savalas' old Players Club TV commercial pitch, but I wanted to remind you of the evil planet-crushing dangers of...."Big Recreation"!

“Big Oil” sounds a bit sinister.

“Big Tobacco”, likewise.

“Big Pharma”…uh, what?

And now I’m being told to fear “Big Recreation“.

Big Recreation?

Like “Evil Kitten”, it doesn’t matter what the adjective is, because the noun just defeats all attempts at scare tactics.

Oh, nooosss! I’m going to be relaxed and entertained to death!! Will they stop at nothing??

What's especially fun is watching members of "Big Recreation" tie themselves up in knots when they feel the need for self-persecution over the eeeeevils of so-called manmade Gerbil Worming or Glowball Warmening, as Tim Blair is wont to malaprop.

(Via Kathy Shaidle.)

Related: Just in time for Memorial Day, puritanical Newsweek conjures up its inner nanny in regards to outdoor cooking.

Drink at your high school prom, make the front page of your local newspaper.

(Which is yet another way to keep a growing youthful narcissism in check, I suppose. But fortunately, such youthful indiscretions were more accepted--not the least of which by my parents--in the more sophisticated and nuanced culture of the past.)

Roger Daltry's not buying into the hype of the puritanical "Live Earth" concerts to help raise Al Gore’s stature, and ideally amongst the left, help to dramatically slow the economy by attempting to force Kyoto-style anti-business regulations down the throats of the US government:

JUST when it looked like every rock star on the planet was jumping aboard AL GORE's green bandwagon, there’s a backlash already underway.

THE WHO's ROGER DALTRY has blasted the big Wembley gig Gore is organising to raise awareness of global warming.

The huge concert - which features performances from the likes of MADONNA and RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS - is taking place at Wembley on July 7 and in other countries around the world.

But Roger, who played with U2 at Live Aid and Live8, reckons the whole thing is a waste of time.

Speaking exclusively to Bizarre, Roger said: "Bo***cks to that! The last thing the planet needs is a rock concert.

"I can't believe it. Let's burn even more fuel.

"We have problems with global warming, but the questions and the answers are so huge I don't know what a rock concert's ever going to do to help.

"Everybody on this planet at the moment, unless they are living in the deepest rainforest in Brazil, knows about climate change.”

The rocker, who used to sing about my g-generation, added: "My answer is to burn all the f***ing oil as quick as possible and then the politicians will have to find a solution.”

(Via Instapundit.)

This will never happen of course, but I'd love to see an interviewer ask the participants at Gore Aid to take a pledge involving their touring and personal lifestyles, similar to the one that Gore himself recently rejected:

An interesting event took place during soon-to-be-Dr. Al Gore’s visit to Congress on Wednesday. Sen. James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma) asked the former Vice President to take a pledge that he would not use more energy in his personal residence than the average American, and Gore refused (video available here).

As reported at the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works website: "Senator Inhofe showed Gore a film frame from 'An Inconvenient Truth' where it asks viewers: 'Are you ready to change the way you live?'”

On the playground, one would call this “Put up or Shut up.” Do you think Gore put up? The press release deliciously continued:

“There are hundreds of thousands of people who adore you and would follow your example by reducing their energy usage if you did. Don’t give us the run-around on carbon offsets or the gimmicks the wealthy do,” Senator Inhofe told Gore.

“Are you willing to make a commitment here today by taking this pledge to consume no more energy for use in your residence than the average American household by one year from today?” Senator Inhofe asked.

Senator Inhofe then presented Vice President Gore with the following "Personal Energy Ethics Pledge:

As a believer:

that human-caused global warming is a moral, ethical, and spiritual issue affecting our survival;

that home energy use is a key component of overall energy use;

that reducing my fossil fuel-based home energy usage will lead to lower greenhouse gas emissions; and

that leaders on moral issues should lead by example;

I pledge to consume no more energy for use in my residence than the average American household by March 21, 2008.

I wouldn't have as much of a problem with Live Earth if it really were The Last Rock Concert by those who participated in it. It takes an enormous amount of cognitive dissonance to simultaneously believe that the planet's ecosphere is soon to be doomed, but the solution is a blowout concert in two different football stadiums.

As Daltry told the The Sun, "I can't believe it. Let's burn even more fuel". Each concert will require massive transportation efforts involving jet planes and tractor-trailers, hundreds of thousands of watts of electricity to power the lighting and sound gear, and the deforestation required to print at least couple of hundred thousand souvenir programs (and many more no doubt, for sale afterwards). And heck, just think of all of the methane emissions coming from the stadiums' rest rooms, where, no matter how much the audience promises, the Sheryl Crow Rule is incredibly difficult to enforce.

But in the minds of its participants, a cause like Live Earth is worth it. But a generic, everyday, run of the mill concert shouldn't be. So go out with a bang, rock stars--and then, don't be hypocritical puritans; take the sort of pledge that even the Goracle won't.

In The Weekly Standard, Andrew Ferguson explores the New Hollywood: R-rated smoking, X-rated trans-fats.

Wow--this is just bizarre: Austin, Texas 7th grader "suspended because his hair is too short".

This sort of thing makes me feel so old: Why, sonny, I can remember the good ol' days back when schools were concerned about boys with long hair--long like Paul McCartney's, dagnamit!--not crew cuts.

(Via the always well-coiffed InstaPundit.)

Fire and brimstone isn't my thing (on either side of the aisle), but the religious leader passed away today at age 73.

Here's one of his more amusing moments (and the backlash to it was made somewhat ironic in light of this new puritanism from Hollywood), and here's a flashback to his final exit from polite society and the resulting birth of the Blogosphere's anti-idiotarian movement.

In an Age Of Abundance, the aesthetics of the New Puritanism are drafted.

This just in from the conservative left:

Clintonian liberals at Slate suddenly discover family values.

Hollywood updates Hays Office-era puritanism for the 21st century.

University student censored for a radically transgressive thoughtcrime.

University student newspaper punished for a radically transgressive thoughtcrime.

Radical university professor segrated for his own thoughtcrimes

Suggestive artwork censored in John Ashcroft's, Alberto Gonzales' Barack Obama's America.

But I thought dissent was the highest form of patriotism?

The Gipper liked to refer to America as a Shining City on a Hill, but not everybody views it in such a favorable light, of course.

Over the weekend, I mentioned this item from Peggy Noonan:

This week saw a small and telling controversy involving a mural on the walls of Roosevelt High School in Los Angeles. The mural is big--400 feet long, 18 feet high at its peak--and eye-catching, as would be anything that "presents a colorful depiction of the rape, slaughter and enslavement of North America's indigenous people by genocidal Europeans." Those are the words of the Los Angeles Times's Bob Sipchen, who noted "the churning stream of skulls in the wake of Columbus's Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria."

What is telling is not that some are asking if the mural portrays the Conquistadors as bloodthirsty monsters, or if it is sufficiently respectful to the indigenous Indians of Mexico. What is telling is that those questions completely miss the point and ignore the obvious. Here is the obvious:

The mural is on the wall of a public school. It is on a public street. Children walk by.

Today, Jonah Goldberg writes of his recent visit to England:

Last week, I appeared at the Oxford Union to debate the proposition: “This House regrets the founding of The United States of America.” Such is the extent of anti-Americanism out there that this was considered to be a reasonable debate topic by Britain’s best and brightest.

And only a half an hour ago, this moment occurred at the first GOP presidential debate of the campaign season at the Reagan Library:

OK, my jaw has now officially dropped. The guy from Politico.com just asked Mitt Romney, “What do you dislike most about America?”

Too bad Mitt probably didn't reply to Mr. Politico, "You go first".

The first cut of a roll of Charmin, I guess.

James Lileks posts photos of one the great moments of fifties swank, the original automobile compact disc player. It probably skipped and popped a whole lot more than the real CD players of today, but the original gets bonus points for style and creative, if impractical thinking:

It’s the Highway Hi-Fi. It’s a record player for your car. I repeat: a record player for your car. More details can be found here. (Warning: BYO Paragraph Breaks.) Also here. Ah, but what music would you play on such a miraculous device? Well: this would be an excellent time to try out our new music-playing widget, and provide the following tune for your driving pleasure. It's a selection from a record provided to Kresge stores: this is what they played over the speakers in the ceiling.

It makes me feel six years old again. There's not a day I hear 60s and 70s pop in the grocery store, and wish they'd bring this stuff back. Heck, half the shoppers would think it was ironic, which would make it all okay.

Having spent my teen years toiling in the family retail store, where my father insisted on Easy-Listening Muzak over the frequent protestations of his rock & roll crazed son, I find it more than a little ironic that today’s Muzak is…rock & roll.

But for unintential irony, it's hard to beat the notion that singers like Madonna, and Sheryl Crow with her cover of Yusuf Islam’s “The First Cut (of the Palestinian suicide bomber) Is The Deepest” think of themselves as épatering les bourgeois when their music is now fit to be non-offensive background tunes. Here’s a tip: when your songs are being played on the Muzak speakers by the pool and cabanas of the Bellagio Hotel & Casino, you’re no longer avant-garde. You’re officially the garde.

Similarly, I’m old enough to remember when rock musicians actually were edgy and dangerous, and not entirely play acting at it. Now they’re puritanical nags, ordering their listeners to cut down on CO2 emissions, even as they organize tours around private jets, limousines, and tractor-trailers full of HiWatt amps, PA systems and more stage rigging than any Broadway play. (And buttering up to the husband of a woman they once, briefly, reviled.)

Maybe stores should return to the Muzak of the past. It can’t contain any more hidden irony than today’s rockers.

Just making sure I understand the scorecard: Ann Althouse has two sips of wine in a video, and is now the reincarnation of Dorothy Parker or Zelda Fitzgerald. Ronald Reagan, who as a former actor was once thought second only to Jack Webb as a rigid authority figure, is now a genial hedonist. President Bush, who gave up drinking nearly two decades ago, is a "dry drunk". Smoking=worst danger to mankind. Automobiles=New Holocaust.

When did the left become more uptight than my parents?

Update: Related thoughts here.

This is rich--in the Washington Post, leftwing journalist Timothy Noah is attacking President Reagan for his "genial hedonism":

Reagan, like just about every other actor who ever passed through Hollywood, had a very hard time viewing sex as something to repress. This genial hedonism would later express itself in Reagan's embrace of supply-side economics.

I've referred to the left as "the new puritans" on more than a few occasions here, but up until now, I've never thought that they actually believed they were acting upon this trait themselves.

So if Reagan, who by all accounts wasn't exactly the next Errol Flynn when it came to 1940s and '50s style Hollywood hard partying is being attacked for being too hedonistic, perhaps its time for the left to re-evaluate President Clinton's excesses?

(Commencing holding breath....turning blue...feeling faint...never mind.)

So says Ann Coulter about Al "Elmer Gantry" Gore. Glenn Reynolds writes:

Moralists are especially vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy -- ask any backsliding fundamentalist preacher. If Gore were less moralistic in his approach -- as he gains weight, he's even starting to look a bit like a younger Jerry Falwell -- the charges of hypocrisy would have less bite.

Roger L. Simon adds, "there's a deeper question beneath all this. Does hypocrisy count?"

Does it matter than Hollywood stars parade around in Priuses while keeping private planes and multiple homes that burn up who-knows-how much energy (in many cases enough to dwarf Al's)? Is it just that these people mouth off that raises our eyebrows or should they actually practice what they preach ?

Now I don't have a particularly Green Lifestyle, although I am thinking of buying a hybrid for my next car (primarily because I can't stand to stick another dollar in the Saudi gas pump) and the next time I build something I'll probably pay more attention to good window sealing (the code will probably make me do that anyway). But what's with Gore? How could he be so thoughtless and, yes, arrogant to go out there banging the drum for his film at the very time, according to public records, he increased his already sizable personal energy consumption. How embarrassing and how terrible for his cause. Maybe he doesn't really care about it at bottom - maybe it's all about him.

In the movie business you see a lot of that, a kind of narcissistic politics in which how you appear is so much more important than what you really are. It's as if there were two people - the private one bossing around the staffs while burning up more fuel than the Sultan of Brunei and the public one wagging a finger at the rest of us. Gore seems to have fit in well with these folks. In the long run, I suspect that doesn't augur well for the environment.

UPDATE: In Gore defense, the ex-veep apparently did purchase some "Green Power" chits for his manse. But I was just on the Steve Gill's Tennessee talk radio show where it was pointed out this is one of but three Gore homes - and no one seems to know how much time he even spends there. Plus... there's always the use of Gulfstreams, etc., to ferry Al to his next (well paid) global warming extravaganza. Who knows the total of his "carbon footprint" but it's probably bigger that 99.99% of humanity's. Still.. it's only hypocrisy. For the right cause, no problem. Right. Right?

Meanwhile, Tim Blair looks at a Hollywood celebrity who really does qualify for the latter half of Ann's equation. (Even if she did cause The Manolo to obtain the orgasm of the celebratory.)

Update: Welcome Tim Blair readers! Click here for even more Gore goring, as Al meets Gandhi, Jonah Goldberg, and even the Terminator.

Jonah Goldberg writes, "we’re all in favor of censorship; we just get clever about what we call censorship":

For example, unless you think profanity, violence and hard-core sex should be legal on broadcast television during the after-school time slot, you’re for censorship. We’re also all for criticizing bad behavior, bad language and the rest. But because we don’t want to think of ourselves as scolds or censors, we make ourselves feel better by calling our positions “common sense.”

The problem is that the definition of “common sense” is a moving target. What was once verboten is now commonplace and vice versa.

Marc Cherry, the creator of ABC’s Desperate Housewives, told an interesting story to a gathering of TV critics recently. Cherry had screened a scene for a network censor in which the character played by Eva Longoria beds her 17-year-old gardener. Afterward, she enjoys a post-coital cigarette. Cherry said the censor asked, “Does she have to smoke?” To which Cherry replied: “So you’re good with the statutory rape thing?”

And the answer is “yes.” Hollywood is good with the statutory-rape thing. But it’s not good with the smoking thing. And yet if I were to criticize Hollywood for the statutory-rape thing, the Hollywood crowd would whine about how I’m a prude and, ultimately, a censorious enemy of free expression. If I were to complain about the cigarette? They’d say, “Good for you.”

Read the whole thing.

On Jay Leno last night, Bill Maher fired off a rant against President Bush that would have been well at home in many Internet forums and chatrooms, including this passage:

"When people say to me, 'You hate America,' I don't hate America. I love America. I am just embarrassed that it has been taken over by people like evangelicals, by people who do not believe in science and rationality. It is the 21st century. And I will tell you, my friend. The future does not belong to the evangelicals. The future does not belong to religion."

Maher couldn't be more wrong: the future does belong to religion. But it will come in a few different flavors.

Update: Tammy Bruce appearing on The O'Reilly Factor, and the Anchoress, each respond to Maher’s hateful rhetoric.

Glenn Reynolds writes, "a waste is a terrible thing to mind":

Or, in other words: "Nowadays, every politician will be defeated by exactly one word. Kerry got 'stuck.' Biden had 'clean.' Obama gets 'wasted.'"

And John Edwards had "Godbags", though it was spoken by his would-be Blogitrix, not himself. To understand how so many on the right view the Democrats and religion, check out Rod Dreher's "The Godless Party" (with a title that says it all), and this 2004 essay by Peggy Noonan. As numerous bloggers on the right and the left have written, to hire someone whose writing embodies the very worst of those clichés was a horrible decision that reflects squarely on either Edwards' own anti-religious views, or at the most generous, his lack of attention to detail. And given the uphill campaign that Edwards finds himself in to merely earn the nomination, he's severely shot himself in the foot so early in the presidential race.

Update: "100 wpm typing speed. 500 wpm deleting speed."

More: Bryan Preston adds:

There may be one silver lining in all of this. If being a potty mouthed bigot limits one’s blogging career opportunities, maybe there will be fewer potty mouthed bigots among the blogs. That, I would consider a substantial win.

Indeed it would.

Between Vent, Blog Week In Review, and now Mary Katharine Ham's latest HamNation video, I guess it's multimedia day in the Blogosphere. MKH writes:

The distance between the communities "defended" by environmentalists against development and the communities themselves is often large, both philosophically and literally. Filmmakers and journalists, Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney have made a documentary that highlights these environmental battles and the exaggerations, fibs, and sometimes outright lies that keep some of the world's poorest cultures from developing. "Mine Your Own Business" is an entertaining, moving and sometimes humorous look at a side of the environmental movement we don't often see—the dark side.

McAleer traveled to Rosia Montana, Romania several years ago to cover a story for the Financial Times—the story of Toronto-based mining company Gabriel Resources forcing people from their homes, planning an environmentally destructive mine, and ruining the pristine countryside of that remote Romanian village, all against the wishes of its residents. Only, when he got to Rosia Montana, he found a different story.

"I pretty much found that everything the environmentalists were saying was either false, exaggerated, or just a plain lie," McAleer said in a telephone interview Monday.

Residents told him they had sold their land for good money. Mining company representatives told him they planned to clean pollution left by now-deserted state-run mines that were built before environmental standards were in place and modernize housing and plumbing for residents. Locals told him the pristine rivers were actually running with cadmium and zinc.

Environmentalists claim that 80 percent of the people of Rosia Montana are opposed to the building of the mine. When McAleer and his wife toured the streets and homes of Rosia Montana, they found many who spoke in favor of it, and who wondered why so many outsiders were interested in stopping it (a letter signed by the people of Rosia Montana is here).

As I wrote in 2006:

Last year, Matt Welch described a similar sentiment amongst equally leftwing and reactionary tourists to Cuba:

this common sentiment has always irritated the hell out of me. Oh, the crumbling, no-longer-beautiful houses! Ah, the lovely two-feet-deep potholes, and rickety Chinese bicycles (because the 50-year-old Chevys and 30-year-old Ladas don't work, and at any rate there's no gas). How people can derive pleasure from evidence of the suffering of innocents is beyond me, and few sights are more unseemly to my eyes than seeing a Lonely Planet-waving travel snob whine about how some current or formerly misgoverned hellhole has been "ruined" by all that yucky reconstruction, material success, and (worst of all!) tourism. Oh how pretty! The baseball players make $20 a month, and they live on a prison, but at least there's no annoying electronic scoreboard!

Val Prieto, who frequently blogs on Cuban issues at his own Babalu Blog dubs it "Omnipotent Tourist Syndrome".

Sort of like the propagation of SARS, it appears to be spreading beyond travelers to one nation, into a global meme. And it's worth noting that a variation of it was the dominant theme of the 2002 U.N. Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, where numerous Gulfstream Transnationalists such as California's own Jerry Brown urged--for the sake of the global environment, if not local civilizational ruins--that the Third World remain as backward and shackled as possible.

Recently, the Libertas film blog explored the one-meme-fits-all state of documentaries and wrote:

Brave would be a documenatry filmmaker who took the Jesus Camp approach to Islam; who took the Iraq in Fragments approach to what we’ve done right in Afghanistan and Iraq: who took the Inconvenient Truth approach to extremism in the environmental movement. That would be diverse. That would be provoking. That would be brave.

That would get you blacklisted.

By Hollywood, yes. Fortunately, there are increasing alternatives, a topic explored, coincidentally enough, in this week's Blog Week In Review.

Jim Geraghty writes:

Yesterday’s discussion of Barack Obama, and the Post story on his long-ago use of cocaine, brought some reader mail regarding Obama’s current habit of smoking cigarettes.

(By the way, the term “use” instead of “experimenting” is deliberate. Let’s avoid the term “experimenting” with drugs when it comes to politicians. If you’re not in a lab coat and using a Bunsen burner, you’re not experimenting. Otherwise, on New Year’s Eve I was “experimenting” with microbrews and whiskey.)

Ramesh Ponnuru adds:

I think Christopher Caldwell wrote something similar a decade ago in the New York Press when some Republican politician confessed to having "experimented" with marijuana. Yeah, he said—I paraphrase—I "experimented" too. But the first test wasn't under ideal conditions, so I had to repeat it a couple of hundred times.

And Geraghty also asks an interesting question: can a presidential candidate who "experiments" with cigarattes have a chance of winning these days? They're the most demonized vice of all, by the same "new puritan" left that would be Obama's biggest boosters.

Over 300,000 defy England's hunting ban; as Glenn Reynolds writes:

If that many British Muslims turned out to protest interference with their customs, the Blair government would be bending over backward to please them.

Heh, indeed.^TM Read the whole thing.

(Via Maggie's Farm.

Update: And speaking of Tony Blair....

...In Seattle and England.

They're a delicate lot, these new puritans.

Ann Althouse explores the crossroads between aesthetics and Puritanism:

I simply do not believe that the so-called health side is really composed of people who are solicitous about everyone else's health. I can't prove it, but my intuition is that all the strength on the "health" side of this war comes not from people who really care whether other people are healthy, but from people who don't like having to see fat people. They are concerned about their own aesthetic pleasures, and they think fat is ugly.

They wouldn't be the first to confuse aesthetics for religion.

Update: Puritanism spreads to Australia! "Eat Your Vegatables" screams the front page of the Sydney Sun-Herald, in a headline that would make the previous generation of hard drinking, raw meat devouring newsmen around the world weep.

Or break out in gales and gales of laughter.

Give me that old time religion! A few years ago, Jay Nordlinger wrote in National Review Online:

Jerry Taylor of the Cato Institute tells a story about Julian Simon, the late and great economist.

He was at some environmental forum, and he said, “How many people here believe that the earth is increasingly polluted and that our natural resources are being exhausted?” Naturally, every hand shot up. He said, “Is there any evidence that could dissuade you?” Nothing. Again: “Is there any evidence I could give you — anything at all — that would lead you to reconsider these assumptions?” Not a stir. Simon then said, “Well, excuse me, I’m not dressed for church.”

I love that story, for what it says about the fixity of these beliefs, immune to evidence, reason, or anything else.

Last year, Jonah Goldberg explored the concept of liberalism as religion in depth; the whole article is very much worth your time, but here's a representative sample:

It was the philosopher Eric Voegelin who, in a phrase made famous by William F. Buckley Jr., decried the liberal impulse as an attempt to "immanentize the eschaton," or to create a heaven on earth. The often spiritual nature of the environmental movement; the quasi-messianic treatment of Martin Luther King Jr.; Bill Clinton's invocation of "covenants" with the American people; Hillary Clinton's hibernating "politics of meaning," which claimed to redefine what it meant to be a human being in the post-modern world--all of these are examples of what Voegelin would describe as the neo-Gnostic effort to make the hereafter simply here.

* * *

From Woodrow Wilson on, central to the new liberals' project was to create, in [Thurman] Arnold's words, a "religion of government," where the old dogma of a limited state with defined powers would be rendered obsolete in favor of an "organic" state and an oracular "living constitution." Perhaps Howard Dean should purchase some "Don't Immanentize the Eschaton!" buttons with the "Don't" crossed out.

Flashforward to today's announcement, which should therefore come as little surprise: Byron York writes that "the founder of DailyKos plans to move into the megachurch business. But the Church of Kos will be a little, well, different":

At what's arguably the top of his game, Moulitsas says he's "going offline" next year, taking his obvious knack for building online communities and applying it to that other great American pastime: sports. And once he gets his network of sports blogs ramped up, he'll turn to building communities in the real world, a chain of giant meeting places "replicating megachurches for the left" – complete with cafés and child care. Moulitsas has shown he can harness people's enthusiasm, but he says he doesn't want a leadership role in these "democracy centers"...

While working on the mechanics of the sports blogs, he plans to embark next year on building real-world destinations for progressives and liberals throughout the Midwest, "cultural outposts" designed to attract thousands of like-minded liberals. "Each one of these would have a vast left-wing conspiracy component," he says, like leadership training or discussions on progressive issues.

Well, at the least it should make for a fun interfaith rival with an even more supersized and eschaton-obsessed house of worship that's opening soon in England.

Ralph Nader catches a horrendous case of BDS.

I don't smoke, but I've never been anti-smoking; and in era where our freedoms are being dramatically curtailed in the skies, this seems like an exceptional idea:

PARIS If Alexander Schoppmann is right, then where there's smoke, there's a flier.

As more countries ban smoking in public places, his idea might seem malapropos. But Schoppmann, a German entrepreneur, is hoping to turn smokers' umbrage at ever-expanding efforts to stub out their habit into a highflying business proposal: Smoker's International Airways.

As the name suggests, the airline, known as Smintair for short, will probably not be for the faint of lung. The carrier, expected to begin luxury service with only business and first-class seats early next year, plans daily flights between Schoppmann's hometown of Düsseldorf and Tokyo - a 12-hour journey that, for some inveterate smokers, is simply not worth the nicotine-withdrawal headache.

"Many people simply don't travel long distances anymore because they can't smoke," said Schoppmann, 55, who admits to a 30-a-day cigarette habit as well as the occasional cigar. "That has to be why they invented videoconferencing."

Ironically though, as the author of article suggests, Schoppmann's airline is far more likely to be permitted by regulators in Europe, the bluest blue state of them all, than in America.

"Mel Gibson Busted for DUI", according to TMZ.com.

As always, whenever someone generally associated (rightly or wrongly) with conservatism is arrested for substance abuse, watch for hypocritical attacks on Mel's sobriety to come from a generation that lionizes Keith Richards, Keith Moon, Charlie Parker, Dorothy Parker, Teddy Kennedy, Scott Fitzgerald, and numerous other famous non-teetotalers.

Update 7/31/06: This post was written before details of Mel's despicable anti-Semitic tirade came to light. See these newer posts for my current thoughts on Gibson.

James Lileks writes, "I am not susceptible to disaster scenarios":

I do not believe we have ten years to prevent the inevitable collapse of civilization. As long as I can remember I have been fed end-times scenarios – death by ice, death by fire, death by famine, death by smothering from heaps of clambering humans scrabbling for purchase on an overpopulated world, death by full-scale nuclear exchange, death by unstoppable global AIDS, death by a two-degree rise in temperatures, death by radon, death by alar, death by inadvertent Audi acceleration, death by juju. Doesn’t mean we won’t die of juju. But somehow we survive. The only thing I take away is a vague wistful wonder what it would be like to live in an era when things were generally so bad that the futurists spent their time assuring us it would be better. Say what you will about the past, but at least they had a future. All I’ve ever had, according to the experts, is a grim narrow window of heedless ignorance bliss followed by a dystopian irradiated world characterized by scarcity, mutation, and quite possibly intelligent chimps. You have no future. Oh, and don’t smoke!

Bah.

Oh sure--laugh it up for now. But what happens when the Doomsday Machine arrives?!

David Harsanyi of The Denver Post has some thoughts on global cooling/warming climate change hysteria:

So next time you're with some progressive friends, dissent. Tell 'em you're not sold on this global warming stuff.

Back away slowly. You'll probably be called a fascist.

Don't worry, you're not. A true fascist is anyone who wants to take away my air conditioning or force me to ride a bike.

Heh^TM.

Back in late April, the Wall Street Journal had an op-ed piece that noted that "The dirty little secret about oil politics is that today's high gas price is precisely the policy result that Mr. Schumer and other liberals have long desired":

High prices have been the prod that the left has favored to persuade Americans to abandon their SUVs and minivans, use mass transit, turn the thermostat down, produce less consumer goods and services, and stop emitting those satanic greenhouse gases. "Why isn't the left dancing in the streets over $3 a gallon gas?" asks Sam Kazman, an analyst at the Competitive Enterprise Institute who's followed the gasoline wars for years.

Scan the Web sites of the major environmental groups and you will find long tracts on the evils of fossil fuels and how wonderful it would be if only selfish Americans were more like the enlightened and eco-friendly Europeans. You will find plenty of articles with titles such as: "More Taxes Please: Why the Price of Gas Is too Low." Just last weekend Tia Nelson, the daughter of the founder of Earth Day, declared that even at $3 a gallon she wants gas prices to go higher.

The subtitle of the essay was "Don't liberals like sky-high fuel prices?". Well, here's one who does, as he screedily writes in his gloriously stuck-in-the-seventies op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle:

No wait, not 6. To hell with that. Make it 10. Ten bucks a gallon, no matter what the going rate for a barrel of light, sweet crude. That would so completely, violently, brilliantly do it. Revolutionize the country. Firebomb our pungent stasis. Change everything. Don't you agree?

Here's what we could do: Give gas discounts to cabdrivers (at least initially), metro transit systems and low-income folks, those who have to drive their busted-up '78 Honda Civics to their jobs scrubbing restaurant toilets and flipping burgers and vacuuming the residual cocaine from the seat cushions of numb SUV owners. Everyone else, 10 bucks a gallon, across the board. Eleven for premium.

It would take some finessing. Maybe also give a price break to some truckers and trucking companies (so vital to the economy), but not so much to global delivery companies (FedEx, DSL, et al), because that would force them to raise shipping rates and force you (and me) to reconsider buying everything online and hence encourage you to shop locally, thus reviving a stagnant local economy.

Voila -- gas crisis, oil crisis, warmongering agenda, pollution issues, road rage, traffic congestion, urban decay, oil profiteering -- all completely, almost totally, somewhat solved. Or at the very least, dramatically, gloriously shifted toward ... I don't know what. Something better. Something more humane, less greedy, more sustainable.

The Carter years.

An interview is just an interview. But a good cigarette is a smoke.

Tim Blair writes that Morgan Spurlock's idiotarian classic has supersized McDonald's business:

Since 2003, according to the NY Times, revenue for McDonald’s “has increased by 33 percent and its shares have rocketed 170 percent.”

Maybe the Times should hire Spurlock and pray for the same results...

Nick Schultz, my editor at TCS Daily, has some thoughts on today's global warming hysteria:

The alarm bells are ringing louder than ever in global warming circles. An impressive amount of ink has been spilled to scare you in to thinking that the planet is doomed if we don't do something about climate change, and soon.

As alarmists flood the media with scare stories, however, they are distracting the public from the economic and practical realities that will determine planetary health. And they are doing so just as some less heralded news reports demonstrate that the alarmists' prescription for our ailing planet is failing badly.

But first, the alarm bells. Consider:

This week Time magazine has a "special report" on global warming with the cover blaring "Be Worried. Be Very Worried."

Australian alarmist Tim Flannery has a new doomsday book out "The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What I t Means for Life on Earth."

The Washington Post recently featured a front page article about melting ice in Antarctica.

ABCNews recently attacked skeptic scientists such as the University of Virginia's Pat Michaels.

A cover story in the New Republic this month attacked the popular writer Michael Crichton for his skeptical views on catastrophic anthropogenic climate change.

The New Yorker's Elizabeth Kolbert recently published a book with the telling title "Field Notes From a Catastrophe."

And the Advertising Council and Environmental Defense have just launched the first "public awareness" campaign on global warming.

Phew. That's considerable output in just a few weeks. And later this year Al Gore has an alarmist documentary he has produced coming out called An Inconvenient Truth so expect the bells to keep tolling.

According to Time, "the global climate seems to be crashing around us," and that "this is precisely what [scientists] have been warning would happen if we continued pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, trapping the heat that flows from the sun and raising global temperatures." Time points to heat waves, floods, storms fires and glacial melts as evidence that we've reached a "tipping point" and says "scientists have been calling this shot for decades."

Time is right about scientists issuing warnings for decades. It just hasn't always been about global warming. Three decades ago, as Rich Karlgaard of Forbes reminds us this week, Newsweek magazine was warning not about global warming, but about global cooling. And the rhetoric was just as alarmist then. According to Newsweek at the time, "There are ominous signs that the Earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically...with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth."

The flip-flop on global cooling/global warming or "climate change" as it's now called, to straddle all contingencies, is something that George Will explores in his latest column:

While worrying about Montana's receding glaciers, [Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer], who is 50, should also worry about the fact that when he was 20 he was told to be worried, very worried, about global cooling. Science magazine (Dec. 10, 1976) warned of "extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation." Science Digest (February 1973) reported that "the world's climatologists are agreed" that we must "prepare for the next ice age." The Christian Science Monitor ("Warning: Earth's Climate is Changing Faster Than Even Experts Expect," Aug. 27, 1974) reported that glaciers "have begun to advance," "growing seasons in England and Scandinavia are getting shorter" and "the North Atlantic is cooling down about as fast as an ocean can cool." Newsweek agreed ("The Cooling World," April 28, 1975) that meteorologists "are almost unanimous" that catastrophic famines might result from the global cooling that the New York Times (Sept. 14, 1975) said "may mark the return to another ice age." The Times (May 21, 1975) also said "a major cooling of the climate is widely considered inevitable" now that it is "well established" that the Northern Hemisphere's climate "has been getting cooler since about 1950."

In fact, the Earth is always experiencing either warming or cooling. But suppose the scientists and their journalistic conduits, who today say they were so spectacularly wrong so recently, are now correct. Suppose the Earth is warming and suppose the warming is caused by human activity. Are we sure there will be proportionate benefits from whatever climate change can be purchased at the cost of slowing economic growth and spending trillions? Are we sure the consequences of climate change — remember, a thick sheet of ice once covered the Midwest — must be bad? Or has the science-journalism complex decided that debate about these questions, too, is "over"?

About the mystery that vexes ABC — Why have Americans been slow to get in lock step concerning global warming? — perhaps the "problem" is not big oil or big coal, both of which have discovered there is big money to be made from tax breaks and other subsidies justified in the name of combating carbon.

It's also worth noting that global cooling/warming/changing began in the early 1970s, as did virtually every issue that obsesses the modern left. No wonder it's the decade we can never escape from.

Last year, we noted the left's attacks on Christmas and even Halloween. (Can't offend those sensitive Wiccans!)

Yet another traditional holiday with origins in Christianity is falling under attack: appropriately for February 14th, Registan, Charles Johnson, and Tim Blair look at Islam's war against Valentine's Day.

Tim Blair links to a terrific article by John Birmingham in the Sydney Morning Herald titled, "It'll be all right on the night--Political correctness has crippled the left's sense of humour". It ties together themes we've been exploring since the early days of this blog: about a year after its launch, we wrote back in May of 2003:

Orrin Judd has a theory that all comedy is conservative. I agree with that to a certain extent, but it's definitely true that at some point on the leftward curve, humor seems to be anathema--there's just too many shibboleths that risk offending. With the PC movement allowing anyone and everyone to claim victimhood, it's got to be tougher to write a funny script in Hollywood. And increasingly, Hollywood's obsessions (anti-war, vegetarianism, Scientology, an obsession with race, rococo sexual politics and of course, bashing anyone whose politics are to the right of Jerry Brown) aren't playing well out in the heartland.

Perhaps that explains why Mel Brooks' Broadway version of The Producers was set in the past, and the Austin Powers movies makes fun of the '60s and '70s--humor was allowed back then. Or why My Big Fat Greek Wedding, about a traditional Greek family whose daughter is marrying a spineless WASP who believes in many of those same Hollywood trends I just mentioned) was such a hit.

In his SMH piece, Birmingham writes:

By establishing an exclusion zone around a whole category of topics that are ripe for exploitation by comics because of the very tensions they create, the left abandons the field to the enemy and often confuses itself over just who are its friends and who are its foes. Silverman, for instance, is often cited as an example of toxic conservatism, and yet her skewering of identity politics is as dangerous to reactionaries as to anyone. Likewise the creators of South Park, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, were excoriated by some critics for their pitiless treatment of Hollywood liberals in Team America: World Police, as well as racking up black marks for the unholy trinity of racism, sexism and homophobia. Yet Team America remains one the sharpest satires of the war on terrorism so far released, while South Park offends everyone eventually.

The stand-out feature of Parker and Stone's work, indeed of all successful comics, whatever their medium or subject matter, is confidence. Confidence that their joke is inherently funny, even if millions of people refuse to agree. And confidence of course is a defining characteristic of the right in its resurgent form. To read Mark Steyn on the Islamisation of France, for instance, is to encounter a man speaking the unspeakable and doing so with an unshakeable self-assurance. But it is also to witness a comic genius at work, sharpening an already finely honed wit to a razor's edge on the rock-hard noggins of his enemies.

The left, on the other hand, has indulged for so long now in the guilty pleasures of relativism, protected by a value system that says discussion of certain topics is off limits, that any sense of confidence they might have had at one time has now entirely disappeared. And with it their sense of humour.

It's like the old joke. How many angry feminists does it take to change a light bulb? Answer: that's not funny!

By all means, read the whole thing.

Remember that awesomely stupid piece in 2002 about an Olive Garden restaurant that Lileks took apart like a surgeon?

Well, now where know where the European journalist who wrote it wound up working...

Virginia Postrel links to this Los Angeles Times story about a 56 year old stuck in the 1970s former SDS radical, environmental attorney and classic New Puritan:

Mark Pollock is a Napa-based environmental lawyer, a former Bay Area student radical and lover of fine food. Gloria Alvarez is a resident of Culver City who, for the last 33 years, has owned and operated Gloria's Cake & Candy Supplies, a tiny Westside culinary landmark jammed into a former American Legion Hall near the intersection of Sawtelle and Venice. Pollock and the seventysomething Alvarez have more than a little in common.

To be precise, on April 23, 2003, Pollock and his lone associate, Evangeline James, sued Alvarez and a who's who of names from the bakery world: "Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Inc.; Dean & Deluca Inc.; Chefshop.com Inc.; Pfeil & Holing Inc.; Kitchen Etc.; Q.A. Products Inc.; Confectionary House; Beryl's Cake Decorating & Pastry Supplies; American Cake Supply; Albert Uster Imports Inc.; Do It With Icing; Cooking.com Inc.; Candyland Crafts Inc.; Favors by Lisa; Sugarbakers Cake, Candy and Wedding Supplies Inc.; Kitchen Conservatory Inc.; American Gourmet Foods Inc.; Annerose Hess d.b.a. Ohess; Pastry Wiz; Barry Farm Enterprises; GM Cake and Candy Supplies d.b.a. Cybercakes; Babykakes; and Does 1 through 100 inclusive."

Pollock's lawsuit swept through the close-knit world of American cake decorating like a hot knife through icing. Despite no law specifically outlawing dragées, private citizen Pollock took it upon himself to rid every last supermarket shelf, specialty food store and mail-order purveyor in California of those tiny silver-covered sugar balls you've been licking or flicking off the top of your cupcakes since you were a tyke.

Pollock's suit was an attempt to get a potentially dangerous substance out of the hands and stomachs of the California public. But to Alvarez and her colleagues, it was as if they were being blackmailed by a distant tree-hugger.

As if? That's exactly what they were, as the Times later notes:

The 56-year-old Pollock speaks with confident authority. Although he is an unreconstructed radical, he looks great in a lawyer's crisp striped dress shirt, dress pants and tie. A former SDS member, he entered law school at the University of La Verne to help cleanse the system from within.

As Postrel writes:

Pollock is a fanatic who's determined to stamp out other people's small pleasures in pursuit of his own version of righteous living (and collect lots of money along the way). He succeeds because it costs him almost nothing to sue. His victims settle rather than spend more, in time and money, to fight his claims. Any litigation system that encourages--indeed, rewards--this petty tyranny needs serious reform.

And how.

Prescient quote from the original P.J. media maven:

Something is happening to America, not something dangerous but something all too safe. I see it in my lifelong friends. I am a child of the "baby boom", a generation not known for its sane or cautious approach to things. Yet suddenly my peers are giving up drinking, giving up smoking, cutting down on coffee, sugar, and salt. They will not eat red meat and go now to restaurants whose menus have caused me to stand on a chair yelling, "Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, dinner is served!" This from the generation of LSD, Weather Underground, and Altamont Rock Festival! And all in the name of safety! Our nation has withstood many divisions - North and South, black and white, labor and management - but I do not know if the country can survive division into smoking and non-smoking sections.

--From Republican Party Reptile, 1987.

Dave Johnston writes that Detroit's Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick is proposing a "fat tax" on fast food. Dave writes that it's sure to be followed by additional proposals, as the New Purtanism continues to spread across the left.

Radly Balko writes, "In an effort to get 'get tough' on drunken driving, lawmakers are not only needlessly carving into our civil liberties, they're actually making our highways and roads more dangerous than they were before":

"Americans are more aware than ever before of the dangers of drinking and driving," [a press release issued last week by the National Transportation Safety Board] begins. "Few realize, however, that drunk driving fatalities continue to rise -- and that thousands of them are caused by extreme or repeat offenders known as "hard core drinking drivers."

The study goes on to point out that these "hard core" offenders account for 40% of traffic accidents but account for just 33% of drunk driving arrests.

It's actually worse than that. If we look at "fatalities" instead of "accidents," drivers with a BAC above .10 account for 77% of the alcohol-related body count. And the average BAC in fatal accidents involving alcohol is .17. Put another way, motorists with very high blood-alcohol levels account for an increasing percentage of highway fatalities, but a decreasing percentage of arrests.

Clearly, we're allocating limited law enforcement resources toward the wrong pool of offenders.

Yet the first bullet point in the NTSB's "Recommended Model Program" for dealing with hard core drunken drivers is "frequent and statewide sobriety checkpoints" -- the very policy that in all likelihood is responsible for the uptick in traffic fatalities to begin with.

And as these policies continue to erode highway safety and spike fatality statistics, lawmakers will inevitably use those very statistics as justification for not only continuing and extending the same bad policies, but for passing even more laws aimed at stripping drunk driving defendants of criminal protections, and at restricting the sale, marketing, and consumption of alcohol.

No wonder there's an increasing backlash at MADD.

Joanne Jacobs writes that all too frequently these days, pushers supplying contraband are roaming the halls of American schools--who have only themselves to blame.

A month ago, I noticed that McDonald's had buckled under to the criticism of the Michael Moore-like Super-Size Me propagandamentary and eliminated its Super-Size menu.

But anytime there's political correctness, there's an opening to exploit the wussiness and puritanism of those involved, which Hardee's chief executive Andrew Puzder is more than willing to do with his 2/3rds of a pound Monster Thickburger:

In an interview on CNBC, Hardee's chief executive Andrew Puzder was unapologetic, saying the company's latest sandwich is "not a burger for tree-huggers."

"This is a burger for young hungry guys who want a really big, delicious, juicy, decadent burger," he said. "I hope our competitors keep promoting those healthy products, and we will keep promoting our big, juicy delicious burgers."

As CBS writes:

But despite the bad press, or may be because of it, it's also produced an 8 percent growth in sales for Hardees. Blue-state critics, meet red-state consumers.

Daniel Drezner adds:

There's a complex observation to be made here about what "Red America" wants -- Many lefty commentators believe that Red Staters are getting hoodwinked into buying deceptive political propaganda about "moral values" hook, line, and sinker. The appeal of the Monster Thickburger suggests that Red State denizens know exactly what they want, and appreciate it when it's sold to them without any deception whatsoever.

Not too surprising, to be honest.

I wouldn't eat one (frankly, 2,500 calories in one shot from a hamburger, fries and a drink is too crazy for me, and this is closer to my idea of delicious food porn), but if I see a Hardees I'd definitely go out of my way to order something there to support a CEO who knows his audience--and is willing to have some fun with his humorless critics.

Jim Geraghty bluntly responds to Peggy Noonan's Wall Street Journal essay (see previous post): "It will never happen, Peggy".

Ever since the election, Democrats have been trying to find a way to bridge the gap between the left and the right, and the blue states and the red ones. And to try to and erase the stigma, as Rod Dreher of The Dallas Morning News dubbed them, of being The Godless Party.

Peggy Noonan has an excellent first step:

Read More »

James Lileks and Jay Nordlinger have some thoughts on the ever-diminishing use of the C-word.

Jim Geraghty, Orrin Judd, and John Derbyshire each look at the backlash against eliminating the word Christmas from public space. Geragthy writes:

Cam, Mike McCarville and others on NRANews are fired up about Oklahoma schools that are making sure no Christmas carols appear at the “Holiday Concert,” while songs about Hannukah or Winter Solstice are okay.

As one who is not threatened, and who in fact applauds the flourishing of faith in American life, I disagree with the school decision, but am more reassured than outraged. This reaction is based on my suspicion that the backlash to this hyper-political correctness will “move the ball” more in our direction than in theirs.

Is there any force in life that makes us more motivated than some screeching harpies demanding that we stop doing something because it offends them? Could anything spur folks to make publicly-visible expressions of religious faith on private property than some bullying hyper-sensitive litigious folk demanding a holiday-free zone?

Cautious corporations and advertisers may be quickly replacing their Christmas decorations with generic expressions of “Happy Holidays,” but I suspect ordinary citizens, having been challenged by someone with the audacity to issue fatwas on certain phrases, songs, and symbols, are going to defy this with ever-greater and holiday-specific expressions.

I agree--it's very strange (and frustrating) to watch each fall progress from Halloween to Thanksgiving, to "The Holiday That Dare Not Speak Its Name", as James Lileks ironically dubbed Christmas last year.

Radley Balko asks, "What is the new heroin? What isn't?"

Well, at least by a couple of bucks.

Yesterday, while my wife and I were out buying decorations for our Christmas tree, we drove through the local McDonald's drive-through for a couple of quick Diet Cokes.

I noticed my large drink wasn't as large as it used to be.

I thought they simply screwed up our order. The kids at the drive through are just that: kids, and they make mistakes.

Or maybe it wasn't. But just for fun, I thought I'd find out.

So today, while doing more Christmas shopping, I went back to the same drive-through and asked for "a Super-Sized Diet Coke".

The clerk on the other end of the microphone told me that "McDonald's doesn't do Super Size anymore".

There was nobody behind us, so I said "No thanks", and left. We're weren't "Lovin' it". So that's about $3.75 or so that McDonald's lost, thanks, I guess to Morgan Sporlock. And the evidence is overwhelming: new puritanism and political correctness kills business.

Three bucks worth, at least. But hey, maybe more: wonder if the local Burger King still serves large beverages?

Roger Kimball of The New Criterion explores how the left has become the new puritans, disdaining sybaritic pleasure at every turn--and smugly punishing those who don't toe their rigid and arbitrary line.

Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal offers an example of new puritanism in action in England.

Kimball's post builds on an essay from June in the Weekly Standard by James Piereson which he called "Punitive Liberalism":

Read More »

Tech Central Station looks at Renate Künast, Germany's obesity czar.

Their obesity czar?? (Looking at her photo, I'm having a flashback to the martinet female calisthenics leader on the telescreen at the beginning of 1984.) What's made the left so puritanical these days?

Leonard Nimoy Jonah Goldberg discovers something that I never saw when I was in high school or college: kids under 21 who said that they don't drink because it's against the law!

Of course, the drinking age in New Jersey was raised from 17 to 21 during my senior year in high school, so it was very new, and we were young bucks who wanted to protest. And it was much closer to the '60s and '70s ethos of getting drunk and having a good time on the weekends. As Jonah writes (and he's a few years younger than I am), "I associate college so much with social drinking; I have such an ingrained and generalized contempt for the 21 drinking age; and I’ve simply never met anybody who used this explanation before, let alone heard that this is a fairly widely held attitude among college students. It makes me rethink the power of the law to shape culture in America."

David Frum writes:

While Donald Rumsfeld takes his victory lap in Iraq and Americans celebrate the capture of yet another al Qaeda creep, the British media are consumed by a controversy over ... chocolate. It’s worth paying attention--because a similar story will in all likelihood be coming on this side of the Atlantic very soon.

* * *

During the battles over tobacco, skeptical conservatives used to wonder--what’s next? Attacks on cheese and chocolate and cola makers for causing obesity? (There’s a funny scene in Chris Buckley’s Thank You for Smoking in which a tobacco lobbyist indignantly insists that a single cheddar cheese cube is much more dangerous than a single cigarette.)

Well guess what? That is exactly what is coming next.

Frum has some interesting observations as to why. And speaking of the battles over tobacco, its recent ban in New York bars isn't doing much for the city's quality of life.

PETA is busy writing letters to Yassar Arafat, to stop the killing...of donkeys.

Kerry Doughtery of The Virginian Pilot writes that on January 26, a bomb exploded on the road between Jerusalem and the West Bank settlement of Gush Etzion:

As terror attacks go, this one was minor. Most of us didn't hear about it because, with the exception of one bus passenger treated for shock, no one was injured.

Thank God.

Palestinian terrorists delivered the bomb to its destination by donkey. They strapped explosives and a remote device to the animal and detonated the bomb by cell phone as an Israeli bus passed by.

The donkey, of course, was killed.

You know where this is going, don't you?

That's right. PETA, the group that never before expressed concern about the carnage in Israel, is suddenly outraged.

All because a donkey died.

Never mind that, according to the Israeli embassy, which keeps track of such grim statistics, 729 Israelis have perished in terrorist attacks since September 2000.

It gets worse from there. Leave it to PETA to address Yassar Arafat as "Your excellency."

UPDATE: Reader Chuck Simmins emailed to mention that a famous celebrity also has some thoughts on the limits of mule warfare.

The rap against Republicans--especially conservatives--is that they want to legislate morality. But compare the Left in the early 1970s to where it is now. In his excellent book on the 1970s, How We Got Here, David Frum wrote that prior to the Great Society, and certainly, prior to the mid-1970s, Americans were relatively carefree folks:

They lit rockets in their backyards on the Fourth of July. They bought their steak marbled with fat. They smoked. They bought cars without seatbelts. They gave boys .22-caliber rifles for their eleventh birthdays. How they would gape and stare at a contemporary playground, with its rubber matting underneath the swings, safety belts on the teetertotters, and three-year-olds strapped into crash helmets before they can mount their tricycles. How they would snicker at grown men gird­ing themselves like test pilots to pedal through the park, at a Post Office that airbrushes the cigarette out of Humphrey Bogart’s hand lest some im­pressionable stamp-collector get the wrong idea about smoking, at the massive Range Rovers we buy so that we can commute to the office with­out fear. Back then, one did not show so much concern for one’s carcass.

Beginning with the combination of OSHA, MADD, PETA, the anti-smoking movement, the anti-SUV movement, the anti-fast food movement, the left changed from being wild and carefree to being--if not Big Brother, then Big Nagging Grandparent, who always bugged you to button up your coat, look both ways before crossing the street, make sure your shoelaces are tied--and be a general nag. Even sex--the last bastion of fun for the Left was looked down upon, when (prior to Bill Clinton's impeachment), seemingly any compliment a man gave a woman was suddenly sexual harassment--or at least potential grounds for such.

You can't help but think that the Left, embarrassed by their own excesses during the 1960s felt that everyone needed the big nagging grandparent that they collectively lacked in the 1960s--and that they were each going to assume that role--thus the rise of MADD, PETA, Michael Moore, Gray Davis, Mike Bloomberg (the definitive RINO--"Republican In Name Only"), and all of the other Big Nagging Grandparents.

'Scuse me while I go run with scissors before I launch some rockets.

Gray Davis signs bill allowing Segways on California sidewalks. Two days later, San Francisco Supervisor Chris Daly introduced legislation that would ban the two-wheelers in the city.

You have to hand it to those carefree, experimental, progressive San Franciscoans. They always let people do their own thing.

The anti-smoking zealots (God how it's tempting to type Nazis) visit the offices of National Review, in this William F. Buckley Jr. essay.