England's Telegraph: "Toddlers who dislike spicy food 'racist'".

And don't even mention those ne'er do well urchins--and bourgeois parents in the proletariat sector--who commit the doubleplus ungood crimethink of food waste!

(Can't the kids just claim that bland food and garbage are covered under their own personal interpretation of sharia law and be issued a hall pass?)

Whether on the small screen, or the big stage, Rosie O'Donnell is class all the way:

On Wednesday, the "comedienne" did a guest stint at a Cyndi Lauper concert in Vancouver, Canada, during which she called Ann Coulter a bitch, and rather indelicately compared her experience on "The View" to the scene in the movie "Born Innocent" when Linda Blair was raped in the shower at a girls' reformatory.

Imagine how the viewers felt. Here's what Rosie had to say; click over to Newsbusters for the video and Ann Coulter's response:

I hate Ann Coulter. That bitch is annoying, let me tell you right now...And speaking of annoying, remember "The View?" Do you get it here in Canada? It was a cute, little tea party show with the ladies turned into a women's prison film. We were tough girls elbowing each other shaving down spoons into shank (?), "Come here, you little bitch." Remember "Born Innocent," that Linda Blair movie? Remember the broomstick, Wooh, I know how she felt. It was like one, big, dysfunctional, Irish Catholic family. Do anything except tell the truth.

To borrow from an old Dennis Miller riff, that last sentence is the Rosetta Stone of Humor; the number of punchlines it inspires is bottomless. Start by flashing back to this, a classic Rosie moment from a year ago, and then write your own!

Recreate 1,000,068 B.C.! I had to laugh when a link to this advertisement started showing up this week in my Site Meter's banner ads:

Next month, you'll be able to meet more fossilized dinosaurs in Denver than Michael Crichton could have possibly ever imagined...

Complete with photos and video of their all-too-predictable meltdown, Gateway Pundit illustrates how "Code Pink disrupted President Bush at 46th Annual Independence Day Celebration and Naturalization Ceremony."

It certainly would have been fun to watch the aftermath if they had attempted to disrupt this Fourth of July ceremony...

As Roger Kimball notes:

Buried in a story about baby-boomer profs retiring:

In general, information on professors’ political and ideological leanings tends to be scarce.

Clearly, more research needs to be done: the Ford Foundation should fund a multi-year study to ascertain the “political and ideological leanings” of professors. That’s one of life’s great mysteries.

Indeed. Especially when the headline of the Times' article is, "The ’60s Begin to Fade as Liberal Professors Retire."

But the truly curious thing is why that era has lived on for so long--1968 was forty years ago; as far away from us as Clara Bow and Calvin Coolidge were to the sixties. So why has its juvenile ethos cast such as a long-lasting spell on the left? As I wrote a few months ago:

Tom Stoppard describes 1968 as "The year of the posturing rebel". Or as John Lennon confessed a decade later:

"I dabbled in politics in the late 1960s and 1970s, more out of guilt than anything. Guilt for being rich and guilt thinking that perhaps love and peace isn't enough and you have to go and get shot or something, or get punched in the face to prove I'm one of the people. I was doing it against my instincts."

Fascinating though, that the 1960s and '70s, a period that was rife with poseurs such as Lennon, is still influencing us to this day. You can see it in music, in the form of ersatz nostalgia acts such as Lenny Kravitz and Sheryl Crow, who dress in period costume (sort of the tie-dyed equivalent of greasers like Sha Na Na in leather jackets and D.A.s in 1975, or a big band that same year still playing in tan dinner jackets and bow ties). Or much more dangerously, in a politics that still takes it rhetoric from a period now four decades in the past, whether it's John Kerry in 2004, or Rev. Wright in 2008.

But then, when starting from zero, one is always tempted to stay trapped in Year One.

Sadly, perhaps until this countdown reaches zero.

Dave Barry rifles through the case files of CSI: Appleton, Wisconson:

A couple telephoned police in the middle of the night after finding a man in their basement covered head to toe in barbecue sauce.

Key Explanation That Clears Everything Right Up: "He told the officers that it was urban camouflage."

It's common sense, really: If they can't see you, they can't get to you!

Ivan Osorio quips:

My friend Tom Palmer says that whenever he sees somebody sporting a Che Guevara t-shirt, he likes to ask the wearer, “That’s a great t-shirt; do you have the entire collection?” The wearer usually responds either with a blank stare or by asking Tom what does he mean, to which Tom then responds: “You know, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot…”

Now I can happily say that the disgusting Che is in the right company in at least one type of merchandise. The photo below was taken recently by a friend in vacation in Italy.

Wnat's the photo? Well, as Ivan asks, "Would they also have Castro rum and Stalin vodka?"

(Via Tim Blair, who notes, "Che may finally have liberated someone, but he’s still mixing with the wrong crowd.")

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."

It's official--everything does indeed cause global warming. But before we ban flat panel TVs and monitors, we might want to ask this fan of conspicuous digital consumption what he thinks about the idea:

The central thesis of James Piereson's Camelot and the Cultural Revolution was that JFK's assassination was the key moment that caused a large portion of once sensible liberals to begin to tilt to the far, far left, and for lack of better word, become Unhinged.

Like this calm, rational fan of the New Frontier!

In the (admittedly totally tasteless) formulation of a friend of mine, the best thing that ever happened to civil rights in this country was the bullet through JFK's head.

Along the way, as I wrote three and half years ago on the after-effects of that sharp left turn:

You could make a pretty good argument (as I'm about to attempt) that "Radical Chic" was the most influential, or at least most significant, magazine article of the past forty years--and that it foreshadowed the next 34 years of American politics.

It helped that the timing of Wolfe's article and book was exquisite. 1970 was the apex between two key presidential election years: two years after far left anti-war protestors attempted to disrupt the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and two years before its 1972 equivalent, where, as Ben Wattenberg said back then, "there won't be any riots in Miami because the people who tried to riot in Chicago are on the Platform Committee."

And these days, serving on charitable funds with future presidential candidates, while new, experimental improvisations on that staid, old, National Anthem are being invented in yet another attempt to recreate the perigee of the year that refuses to die.

(And speaking of the afore mentioned Wattenberg, my PJM Political interview with him is online here.)

There's an unintentionally hilarious juxtaposition about a minute and half into this Evening Magazine segment on hippies descending upon Vancouver in 1967, when the curator of the city's museum looks back on their arrival and says, "The late 1960s and '70s...That's when I think modern Vancouver was born."

The editor then immediately cuts to a shot of the museum's exhibition in psychedelia devoted to a movement that's the very antithesis of modernity:

Charles Johnson has a video clip of, as he says, a typically bizarre piece of Iranian antisemitic propaganda, with the usual lunatic conspiracy theories run amok, and notes:

Good grief. The bizarre antisemitic propaganda being fed to the Iranian people would be funny in a dark way if it didn’t provoke such a sense of foreboding, of history repeating.

Capt. Jack Sparrow, Tom and Jerry, and the cast of Zionist poultry from Chicken Run could not be reached for comment.

Ann Althouse quotes an interview with Uma Thurman's father, whom Ann notes is "a professor of Buddhist studies and is ordained as a Tibetan monk (though he is American)":

"As a Buddhist, how do you reconcile your pacifism with the roles your daughter Uma has played in films like Quentin Tarantino’s bloody 'Kill Bill'?"

A question for Robert Thurman. Answer:

Quentin is kind of obsessed, he’s a wild guy. But he is very brilliant. We trust that his motive is to show people the foolishness of violence rather than to glorify it. I hope that’s true.

Think it is?

Oh, absolutely: Tarantino’s movies illustrate their director's belief in the foolishness of violence in exactly the same way that JFK demonstrates Oliver Stone's faith in Occam's Razor to discern the truth and his hatred of the utter futility of conspiracy theories...

Back in December, I mentioned Alycia Lane, a Philadelphia-area TV news anchorbabe who was fired after an altercation with a Manhattan police woman:

As Dan Riehl wrote in October when the story of Dallas-area TV journalist Rebecca Aguilar confronting an innocent elderly man on-camera broke, "Leave it to a real journalist to go over the top."

Here's yet another example of a professional TV journalist acting professionally in the most professional manner possible:

Alycia Lane, the evening news anchor on CBS affiliate KYW-TV in Philadelphia, was arrested on early Sunday morning in Manhattan after an altercation with a female police officer, according to the New York Times. Lane and her boyfriend Chris Booker, and another unidentified couple were reportedly traveling in a taxi through Manhattan and became upset over a slow vehicle blocking their way. Philly.com reports Lane confronted the passengers of the slow vehicle, which happened to be a group of police officers in plainclothes.

When one of the officers asked Lane, who was taking photos with her iPhone, to step back, the news anchor reportedly began verbally assaulting the officer. According to Philadelphia Weekly, Lane screamed at the officer, saying "I don't give a f*ck who you are, I am a reporter you f*cking dyke." Lane then punched the female officer in the face, according to the Associated Press, resulting in several lacerations and swelling. The officer was treated at a local hospital and released.

According to Wikipedia, KYW-TV's slogan is "We Are Moving Ahead"--by punching the daylights out of anyone that gets in our way!

While that story sounds trashy enough as it is, it only gets weirder from there:

CBS3 yesterday released anchorman Larry Mendte from his contract 31/2 weeks after FBI agents seized his home computer amid allegations that he illegally broke into former coanchor Alycia Lane's e-mail.

Sources said an internal investigation at CBS3 disclosed that software that secretly captures keystrokes - including passwords - had been installed on a station computer.

Mendte's firing came nearly six months after CBS3 fired Lane, following her arrest in New York for allegedly hitting a cop.

What began as a series of gossip-page scandals embarrassing Lane has morphed into a federal criminal investigation and a sexual-discrimination lawsuit.

The FBI is looking into whether Mendte illegally accessed Lane's e-mails and leaked information from them to the media, including an angry message from a wife upset that Lane sent bikini photos to her husband.

Six months ago, when Lane was fired, Mendte represented a strong public face for the station. But on Thursday, Lane filed a lawsuit in which she said Mendte worked to discredit her behind the scenes and that CBS3 defamed her as she was fired from her $800,000-a-year job.

Now, Mendte, who had about a year left on his contract, has been fired from his $700,000-a-year job.

Mendte's lawyer, Michael Schwartz, said Mendte was notified of the station's decision before it was made public. Schwartz declined to talk about the investigation or specifics about Mendte's career, except to say: "We continue to work with the federal authorities and expect a prompt resolution of this matter. I fully expect that Larry will resume his broadcasting career."

CBS3 said the claims in Lane's suit had no merit.

As of yesterday, Mendte, 51, had not been charged with any crime.

It is illegal under federal law to read another person's e-mails without permission. However, people charged with such a crime are rarely sentenced to prison, unless the crime includes significant economic or physical harm.

The Mendte case broke publicly late last month, when FBI agents armed with a search warrant arrived at the Chestnut Hill home he shares with his wife, Fox29 anchor Dawn Stensland. Mendte went to work the next day, but left abruptly.

Stensland is not suspected of any wrongdoing, sources said.

In a statement read during the 6 p.m. news yesterday, CBS3 anchor Susan Barnett said that Mendte was "released" effective immediately and that he was under investigation by the U.S. Attorney's Office.

Patty Hartman, spokeswoman for U.S. Attorney Patrick L. Meehan, said she could neither confirm nor deny the existence of a Mendte investigation.

Mendte's image and bio were removed yesterday from the station's Web site, which also carried a brief statement about his termination.

The station said the decision to let Mendte go was based on an independent investigation conducted by CBS.

You stay classy, big media!

(Hat tip: My mom, one of the great connoisseurs of Philadelphia television news, who told Nina and I that Mendte was fired "after he was caught going into someone else's Internet!" Hey, everyone's entitled to their own private series of tubes...)

Ezra Levant writes, "The Canadian Human Rights Commission, like any petty tyranny, has a strong instinct for survival":

As I predicted last week on the Michael Coren Show, that instinct would cause them to drop the complaint against Mark Steyn and Maclean's. And so they did.

With an RCMP investigation, a Privacy Commission investigation and a pending Parliamentary investigation, they're already fighting a multi-front P.R. war, and losing badly. Not a day goes by when the CHRC isn't pummelled in the media. Holding a show trial of Maclean's and Steyn, like the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal did earlier this month, would be writing their own political death sentence.

So they blinked. Against everything in their DNA, they let Maclean's go. That's the first smart thing they've done; because the sooner they can get the public scrutiny to go away, the sooner they can go about prosecuting their less well-heeled targets, people who can't afford Canada's best lawyers and command the attention and affection of the country's literati.

While this is a victory of a sorts, as David Warren wrote last December, the process itself is a form of punishment:

For more than twenty years, in this column and elsewhere, I have been writing against the human rights commissions, which have quasi-legal powers that should be offensive to the citizens of any free country. They are kangaroo courts, in which the defendant's right to due process is withdrawn. They reach judgements on the basis of no fixed law. Moreover, “the process is the punishment” in these star chambers -- for simply by agreeing to hear a case, they tie up the defendant in bureaucracy and paperwork, and bleed him for the cost of lawyers, while the person who brings the complaint, however frivolous, stands to lose nothing.

And if you haven't heard it yet, click here for my recent XM interview with Jonah Goldberg and Kathy Shaidle on the topic.

Update: "Isn't it funny how we're having more fun than the asshats trying to **** with us?"

I quoted James Lileks' take on AP's feverish doomsday piece yesterday, and James Pethokoukis describes AP's screed thusly:

"I know you're just a reporter, but you used to be a person, right?" is a quote from the film Deep Impact and immediately came to mind after I read this article from the Associated Press. (It actually took two people to write it.) The "article" made me weep for my chosen profession. The absolutely disgraceful lead:

Is everything spinning out of control? Midwestern levees are bursting. Polar bears are adrift. Gas prices are skyrocketing. Home values are abysmal. Air fares, college tuition and health care border on unaffordable. Wars without end rage in Iraq, Afghanistan and against terrorism. Horatio Alger, twist in your grave. The can-do, bootstrap approach embedded in the American psyche is under assault. Eroding it is a dour powerlessness that is chipping away at the country's sturdy conviction that destiny can be commanded with sheer courage and perseverance.

I dunno, maybe contributing to our low national morale are media that 1) compare a weak economy—although one that has yet to suffer even a single negative quarter—to the disastrous economies of the 1930s and 1970s; 2) forget to mention that the average person buying a home in, say, January 2000, is still sitting on a 66 percent gain; 3) ignore the economy's sky-high productivity, which helps make it the most competitive in the world; 4) ignore a global economic boom that is pushing up gas prices but also raising hundreds of millions of people out of poverty; and 5) for the heck of it, perpetuate the myth that college is unaffordable. (Oh, and since the authors of the article brought it up, it sure looks to this Soviet politics major that Iraq is turning into a situation for al Qaeda that is exactly the reverse of Afghanistan in the 1980s: Militants take on superpower. Get annihilated along with their global brand.)

America's "can-do" attitude? We are coming off a record year for initial public offerings. I mean, I could go on and on here. I don't know anyone who is giving up, other than the AP.

As Andy McCarthy writes:

Rush talked about that article this afternoon and made the excellent observation that the AP could have just said "Vote Obama" — it would have saved them several hundred words and spared the rest of us a lot of wasted time!

But at least it's giving the Blogosphere a chance to expose the can't-do spirit that seems to permeate AP.

At least until the bill arrives.

Meanwhile, as the AP tells the nation as a whole, "Yes We Can't!", the media as a whole have gone equally silent reporting on another nation's progress.

As Ed Morrissey notes:

Al Sharpton may get another chance to distract everyone from the massive IRS investigation into his personal and professional finances by seizing on another Don Imus eruption.

And this time around, if Imus is ousted, no one can blame this on anti-Hillary forces engaged in battlefield prep.

Or, maybe they just thought Faye Dunaway looked smokin' hot brandishing a .38 snubnose in her cashmere sweater and beret.

Making the rounds to promote his new book Nixonland, Rick Perlstein tells Reason:

reason: You like to mix cultural history with political history. Bonnie and Clyde is one of the central texts in the book.

Perlstein: My theory is that Bonnie and Clyde was the most important text of the New Left, much more important than anything written by Paul Goodman or C. Wright Mills or Regis Debray. It made an argument about vitality and virtue vs. staidness and morality that was completely new, that resonated with young people in a way that made no sense to old people. Just the idea that the outlaws were the good guys and the bourgeois householders were the bad guys—you cannot underestimate how strange and fresh that was.

The 1967 release of the movie certainly coincides with the period where traditional liberalism and the far left began to merge; not coincidentally, this was also the period where traditional morality began to break down. The next year would be 1968, a year the left is alternately trying to recreate, or is permanently trapped in, or both. Mick Jagger's lyrics to the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil" called the philosophy of the day "heads is tails", and whereas liberals once worshiped science and progress, they soon found themselves admiring the Black Panthers and William Ayers' Weatherman group, and tossing both modernism and hope for the future under the bus.

1968 was also the year that, only a few months before his death at the hands of a young radical, Bobby Kennedy told a college audience:

"I am also glad to come to the home state of another great Kansan, who wrote, 'If our colleges and universities do not breed men who riot, who rebel, who attack life with all their youthful vision and vigor then there is something wrong with our colleges. The more riots that come on college campuses, the better the world for tomorrow.'"

Orrin Judd reviews Perlstein's book here, and makes a great observation, which dovetails perfectly into Perlstein's Bonnie & Clyde reference and the breakdown of the mid-1960s in general:

I'm only in the early stages of reading Friend Perlstein's book but am struck by a potentially fatal flaw in his thesis that's implied in the review above. With his expected honesty, Mr. Perlstein initially identifies Nixonland as the sort of Red America that the Adlai Stevenson eggheads found themselves stuck in ad unable to comprehend in the 50s. That this part of the metaphor endures--is indeed a seemingly innate part of the culture--is reflected not just in his own essays about contemporary politics but in books by his friends and fellow Brights, like Thomas Frank's unintentionally hilarious, What's the Matter with Kansas.

On the other hand, the sort of violent divisiveness that he associates with Nixonland rather conspicuously developed at the exact time that Richard Nixon was not a central part of the national political scene. Inner-city riots, assassinations, student demonstrations, radical Left terrorism--all of these social plagues arose during the Johnson/Great Society years, the pinnacle of the Left's ascendancy. Even the initial violent reactions were led by Democrats--like LBJ sending federal troops into Detroit or Mayor Daley breaking up protests at the 1968 Democratic Convention. If anything, as Mr. Douthat suggests above, the return of Richard Nixon --a liberal Republican--in 1968 might be seen as an attempt by American voters to restore the social calm and consensus of earlier eras. Richard Nixon, at least in his final incarnation, should probably be considered an effect of the social breakdown of the Liberal 60s, rather than a cause of anything much.

As president, Nixon was no conservative, particularly in his domestic governance, which much more of an extension of LBJ than any sort of warm up act for the Gipper. (And Nixon's poor handling of the economy directly paved the way for the disastrous Carter years, which spawned the economic trainwreck that Reagan and Paul Volker would miraculously right.) But to the America of 1968 that didn't think that Bonnie & Clyde "were the good guys and the bourgeois householders were the bad guys", no wonder both Nixon's association with the relative calm of the Eisenhower years (at least in comparison with what was to come afterwards), and his promise of law and order sounded remarkably appealing. In that sense, perhaps Nixon's entirely unplanned timeout from the national scene during the mid-1960s wound up serving him remarkably well.

(Perlstein quote found appropriately enough here.)

George Carlin, dead at age of 71.

While England has many of the same problems that inflict the bluer alcoves of America, fortunately, that enlightened bastion of reason and common sense has its priorities firmly in order:

A council has banned the term "brainstorming" and replaced it with "thought showers".

Tunbridge Wells Borough Council in Kent was accused of taking political correctness to extremes after instructing staff to make the change.

The move came as council chiefs feared the word brainstorming might offend mentally ill people and those with epilepsy.

No, this story offends those of us who have a modicum of common sense remaining, which appears to be the world's scarcest resource these days. Meanwhile, as the editor of the 11th edition of the Newspeak dictionary once said, "You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We're destroying words -- scores of them, hundreds of them, every day."

(Story via Dirty Harry's other blog; headline via Claude Rains.)

As Mark Steyn wrote last year, "The ecochondriacs mean it: This'd be a pretty nice planet if we didn't live here."

Which is the theme of M. Night Shyamalan's new film, The Happening. The center-left New Republic and center-right Wall Street Journal don't always agree on the issues of the day, but neither publication is in doubt about how the repugnant that theme looks when it's played out on a 30-foot high screen at the local shopping mall's multiplex.

In TNR, James Kirchick, the author of headline quoted above writes, "the mere existence of the human race is a cause for great shame" in Shyamalan's film:

As with most of Shyamalan's films, The Happening has an intriguing plot: centuries of human pollution has prompted nature to retaliate against us by form of a noxious gas released from trees, plants, grass -- it's never really clear. The toxin is first emitted in Central Park, smack dab in the middle of one of the most densly populated places in the United States. First, victims lose their critical faculties. Then they freeze. Then they killl themselves. From New York City "The Happening" spreads all along the east coast, from Boston to Washington. Shyamalan leaves little to the imagination in depicting man's nature-inflicted suicide. We see a woman stab herself in the neck with a hair pin. A man runs himself over with a lawnmower. On can't help but leave the theater thinking that Shyamalan derives a sick, masochistic pleasure in showing the deaths of all his bit characters, hopeless rubes are these human beings. They drove their SUVs for too long and had a big carbon footprint and now they're going to pay.

After 90 minutes of this, the culling of humanity ends. We catch a brief television news segment in which a scientist warns us that what the Northeast just experienced was akin to a terrestrial occurrence of oceanic "red tides." The earth warned us, but thankfully we get another chance to amend the errors of our ways. Like the end of An Inconvenient Truth, we're left with some hope that environmental catastrophe is not a foregone conclusion. Buy a plug-in car. Use public transportation when available. Turn off the light when you leave a room. An unoffensive, and indeed positive message. The second to last scene depicts the female lead waiting nervously in her bathroom to read the results of a home pregnancy test. To her delight, she is with child. Her husband comes home, they embrace. Humanity soldiers on. What a warm feeling after so many scenes of horrific death.

But Shyamalan is obsessed with conceits at the expense of every other aspect -- the script, character development, and most importantly, good taste. He lives by the conceit, and, in this case, dies by it. After the pregnancy scene, the screen goes dark and we find ourselves in Paris, the Jardin des Tuileries to be exact. It's eerily reminiscent of the film's opening, with two men walking, engaged in pleasant conversation about their plans for the evening. A gust of wind! One of the men starts to stutter. People freeze. Screams. Mon Dieu!. Roll credits.

This isn't just radical environemntalist fare; it's perverse and anti-human. Shyamalan cuts immediately from the natural joy of pregnancy to its consequence: mass, nature-inflicted murder. It's not carbon output, styrofoam cups or the clearing of the rain forests that so angers Mother Earth and, thus, her self-appointed human spokesman. It's us.

Meanwhile, in the Wall Street Journal, (found via Dirty Harry's new film blog) Joseph Rago notes, "We have arrived at a strange moment in American pop culture when movie-goers spend two hours in the theater being informed that we all deserve to die":

In a recent interview, Mr. Shyamalan, best known for "The Sixth Sense" (1999), said that "The Happening" is intended to "wake everybody up" and "get back to the correct relationship with nature."

Obviously it isn't Hollywood's first environmental disaster flick. Think of 2004's "The Day After Tomorrow," where all it takes is the CO2-induced obliteration of the East Coast for Dennis Quaid to learn how to be a better dad. But catastrophic climate change in that movie was a simple plot device that could be replaced easily enough with, say, space aliens. "The Happening" is honest-to-Gaia green agitprop: Like the Lorax, Mr. Shyamalan is speaking for the trees.

Environmentalism's seam of misanthropy traces back to John Muir, who founded the Sierra Club in 1892, and probably to Thoreau. We're just another species, the thinking goes, or would be had our iniquities not made us unworthy of a place in the ecosystem. The existence of Homo sapiens is an affliction and cause for profound shame.

Today the position persists along the fringes of the "deep ecology" movement, where adherents can still be found chanting, "Four legs good! Two legs bad!" But the message also has some mainstream appeal: A best-selling book last summer was "The World Without Us," in which science journalist Alan Weisman gleefully imagined how nature would respond if man abruptly went extinct and how great it would be for the planet. "The Happening" merely takes this misanthropy to its logical extreme.

Of course, most mainstream greens limit themselves to nagging on behalf of Mommy Nature. Yet amid the much ado about global warming, the people problem is asserting itself with a neo-Malthusian vengeance. Almost every element of modern life is reducible to carbon. Like it or not, a higher population leads inexorably to more anthropogenic greenhouse gases.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ranks demographic proliferation as a "driver for emissions." British environmental minister Hilary Benn -- most recently spotted endorsing carbon rationing cards as a set of new sumptuary laws -- notes with approval that "family planning is the ultimate carbon offsetting scheme." Even though Paul Ehrlich's "population bomb" has been defused again and again, Jeffrey Sachs, Jared Diamond, Bill McKibben and others have come to similar conclusions.

Since population control led to such PR disasters of the late 20th century as mass forced sterilizations under Indira Gandhi and China's one-child policy, it makes people queasy. Instead, the greens, when not plumping for massive carbon tax-and-regulation schemes, focus on behavioral alterations -- like taking public transit or installing the correct light bulbs. The weight given to consumer-driven change, however, means that the people problem can't help but seep out into the culture at large. Having kids is the most carbon-intensive choice most people will ever make.

Not surprisingly, more than a few of the recent handbooks for "green living" recommend thinking seriously about children. The Sierra Club says that the ideal number is two. Messrs. Weisman and McKibben say it's one. Mr. Shyamalan seems to think it's zero. It can't be long before we're being offered another helpful "tip": Kill yourself.

But that's already occurred. In mid-2006, Tammy Bruce, amongst other pundits and bloggers, reported a speech given by Dr. Eric R. Pianka, a University of Texas evolutionary ecologist named the 2006 Distinguished Texas Scientist by the Texas Academy of Science. In mid-2006, the academy enthusiastically cheered upon the conclusion of this speech:

Professor Pianka said the Earth as we know it will not survive without drastic measures. Then, and without presenting any data to justify this number, he asserted that the only feasible solution to saving the Earth is to reduce the population to 10 percent of the present number.

He then showed solutions for reducing the world's population in the form of a slide depicting the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. War and famine would not do, he explained. Instead, disease offered the most efficient and fastest way to kill the billions that must soon die if the population crisis is to be solved.

Pianka then displayed a slide showing rows of human skulls, one of which had red lights flashing from its eye sockets.

AIDS is not an efficient killer, he explained, because it is too slow. His favorite candidate for eliminating 90 percent of the world's population is airborne Ebola ( Ebola Reston ), because it is both highly lethal and it kills in days, instead of years. However, Professor Pianka did not mention that Ebola victims die a slow and torturous death as the virus initiates a cascade of biological calamities inside the victim that eventually liquefy the internal organs.

After praising the Ebola virus for its efficiency at killing, Pianka paused, leaned over the lectern, looked at us and carefully said, “We've got airborne 90 percent mortality in humans. Killing humans. Think about that.”

With his slide of human skulls towering on the screen behind him, Professor Pianka was deadly serious. The audience that had been applauding some of his statements now sat silent.

After a dramatic pause, Pianka returned to politics and environmentalism. But he revisited his call for mass death when he reflected on the oil situation.

“And the fossil fuels are running out,” he said, “so I think we may have to cut back to two billion, which would be about one-third as many people.” So the oil crisis alone may require eliminating two-third's of the world's population.

How soon must the mass dying begin if Earth is to be saved? Apparently fairly soon, for Pianka suggested he might be around when the killer disease goes to work. He was born in 1939, and his lengthy obituary appears on his web site.

When Pianka finished his remarks, the audience applauded. It wasn't merely a smattering of polite clapping that audiences diplomatically reserve for poor or boring speakers. It was a loud, vigorous and enthusiastic applause.

Pianka's Wikipedia entry notes:

The host of the speech, the Texas Academy of Sciences, has released a statement stating that "many of Dr. Pianka's statements have been severely misconstrued and sensationalized."

Much like Reverend Wright would later be, it seems. This is a variation on the "botched joke" do-over the left claims for themselves whenever a Kinsley-esque gaffe of an unusually potent nature occurs. But as Tammy Bruce noted at the time, two years before Shyamalan's new movie, such eco-doomsday thinking isn't all that unusual:

I have been arguing for years now that the destruction of humanity, literally, is the actual agenda, conscious and unconscious, of Leftists worldwide. They have become progressively ugly and hateful politically and otherwise because they hate themselves and consequently project that hate, as Malignant Narcissists do, back onto humanity as a whole. Their frustration at the rejection of their agenda (history at least has taught us something) that they bother less and less with sugar-coating their nihilistic rage.

Now playing at a theater near you!

Related: "Phil Bowermaster On Fear Of The Future." And Rand Simberg adds:

Hey, how about if we save the earth by migrating into space?

Somehow, I don't think they'll like that, either.

Maybe that explains this.

Charles Johnson is livid over a recent Pat Buchanan op-ed titled "Was the Holocaust Inevitable?", and I can't say I blame him. Key passage from Buchanan here:

That Hitler was a rabid anti-Semite is undeniable. "Mein Kampf" is saturated in anti-Semitism. The Nuremberg Laws confirm it. But for the six years before Britain declared war, there was no Holocaust, and for two years after the war began, there was no Holocaust.

Not until midwinter 1942 was the Wannsee Conference held, where the Final Solution was on the table.

That conference was not convened until Hitler had been halted in Russia, was at war with America and sensed doom was inevitable. Then the trains began to roll.

And why did Hitler invade Russia? This writer quotes Hitler 10 times as saying that only by knocking out Russia could he convince Britain it could not win and must end the war.

Hitchens mocks this view, invoking the Hitler-madman theory.

"Could we have a better definition of derangement and megalomania than the case of a dictator who overrules his own generals and invades Russia in wintertime ... ?"

Christopher, Hitler invaded Russia on June 22.

The Holocaust was not a cause of the war, but a consequence of the war. No war, no Holocaust.

Did I read that passage correctly? It's the fault of England and America entering the war that the Holocaust occurred? And if they hadn't, Europe and its Jews would have lived happily ever after under Nazi rule? Even though Germany's euthanasia experiments predate the outbreak of WWII? And the systematic killing of Jews in Europe and Russia predates the Wannsee conference? And in Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote that he wished thousands of Jews had been gassed in WWI?

While Pat at least acknowledges (grudgingly?) that the Holocaust took place, he's rapidly going down the path already traveled by David Irving.

A few months ago, shortly after William F. Buckley's death, Jonathan Tobin wrote:

Long after he chased the Birchers out of NR, Buckley found himself forced to confront the issue again. When longtime colleagues Pat Buchanan and Joseph Sobran used their bully pulpits on the right to bash Israel and stigmatize Jews for their support for the state, it was again Buckley who took on the haters.

Buckley repudiated Sobran’s writing, which he labeled anti-Semitic, and pushed him off the magazine’s masthead.

As the issue continued to percolate in the aftermath of the Persian Gulf war in December 1991, he devoted an entire issue of the magazine to an essay titled “In Search of Anti-Semitism” (which was also the title of the book he later published on the same subject), in which he took on Buchanan, who was preparing an insurgent run for the White House against the first President Bush.

His conclusion was damning: “I find it impossible to defend Pat Buchanan against the charge that what he did and said during the period under examination amounted to anti-Semitism, whatever it was that drove him to say and do it,” Buckley wrote.

At the time, I doubt even WFB knew something like this was coming from Buchanan.

Dirty Harry reviews Pixar's Wall-E and is knocked out by the incredible CGI (as was I when I saw the trailer before the latest Indiana Jones movie), but he's rather offput by one of its themes:

For all its charms and wonders, one moment sticks in my head and, well, craw. It also confuses me. Why? Why go there? Other than the dark chuckles from the liberal critics around me, what’s to gain? And other than a lack of self-control or hubris on the filmmakers’ part, there’s no explaining it. But they did it. They actually had the President (Fred Willard) say about his failed mission, “Stay the course.”

Have we lost Pixar? Have we lost the wonderful studio who brought us The Incredibles and Ratatouille to Bush Derangement Syndrome? Here you have a winning streak going back ten-years, enormous amounts of public goodwill, equal amounts of credibility as serious storytellers, and they stop things cold, yanking you out of the story with the liberal nonsense. Quite a disappointment.

On the other hand, its not the first Pixar movie that some in the starboard side of the Blogosphere thought a bit squishy. But then there's this:

At first there’s not much of an environmental message. The piles of garbage covering our planet come off as nothing more than a good idea to set up a cool alt-version of our world and the lead character. Unfortunately, this doesn’t last. The humans are introduced as meaty, lazy, chair-bound consumers who live in a world run by a large corporation. The message about our consumerism, sloth, and addiction to visual stimulus is eventually beaten like a drum.

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

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

Meanwhile, one of Harry's commenters asks:

Have they started with the anti-consumerism merchandising and advertising tie-ins yet?

Heh, indeed.^TM

Update: Steven Den Beste emails, "If you look at the credits, the problem becomes clear: Brad Bird didn't direct this one. He wasn't involved in it at all." It will certainly be interesting to see how handles this upcoming film, given its all-too-recent subtext.

England's leftwing New Statesman somehow manages to stumble into an interesting take on a surprisingly old topic, in a post titled, “Deviance For Its Own Sake Is Reactionary, Not Rebellious”, complete with a horrific photo of the pierced and inked torso of a fella who looks like he escaped from a Theodore Dalrymple cover:

The ultimate critical virtue, agree many academics, is transgression - social, sexual and political. Theorists such as Judith Butler and Michel Foucault have contributed to a left-wing discourse in which the celebration of deviance has taken over from serious attempts to describe or improve the lot of the oppressed. Scholarly papers extolling the subversive energies cunningly hidden in literary texts or embodied in practices such as body modification, transvestism and every possible sexual perversion (as catalogued by the sainted Georges Bataille) are paying, albeit indirectly, for mortgages in the Home Counties and second homes in France. As often as not, the standard-issue tweed jacket conceals a vigorous champion of polymorphous perversity.

In many ways, this is one of the ambiguous legacies of 1968. Thinkers such as R D Laing and Herbert Marcuse supposed there was a close link between psychic, sexual and political liberation, and prescribed a heady combination of psychedelic drugs, free love and marching. Smashing fun, obviously, but that this recipe is still considered even vaguely plausible as a path to liberation must be because behind the hoopla there was a serious political message.

Yet the Sixties failed to deliver the political and sexual utopia they promised. Social inequality has got worse, and the Aids virus cruelly capped a sexual revolution based on promiscuity and the dissolution of the nuclear family. The current trend retains the form but not the content of the rebellion of 1968, as if rule-breaking were progressive in itself. But Jack the Ripper, Osama Bin Laden and the diehard wing of the fox-hunting lobby are all pretty transgressive, and hardly make comfortable bedfellows for us on the left.

The alternative to transgression need not be a return to the dreaded - and often unfairly caricatured - Victorian morality. Actually, nobody is more dependent on these kinds of rules than the person who lives by breaking them, as Bataille himself realised, opposing the sexual revolution for this reason. And there are cases in oppressive societies where contravening laws and conventions is not just worthwhile, but the duty of the responsible citizen. But this is transgression as a means, and not an end in itself.

Those who dissent from the critical orthodoxy are labelled "conservative", as if being uninterested in cyborgs, pornography and vampirism were tantamount to a betrayal of socialist principles. Yet writers such as Terry Eagleton - a Marxist who bemoaned the ubiquity of PhD theses on "the literature of latex or the political implications of navel piercing" - or Ashley Tau chert, a feminist whose important new book, Against Transgression (Blackwell), debunks many of the myths around the subject, can hardly be described as figures of the right.

As Eagleton and Tauchert both argue, there is something narcissistic and deeply conservative about revelling in transgression. In Tauchert's words, to do so is "reactionary, impertinent, cowardly, stifling".

Aleister Crowley & co. romped through the latter half of the 19th century and the pre-Second World War period of the 20th century with their "sex magick" rituals. Which is right around the time that all of the rules of the more transgressive examples of "modern" art were codified, and haven't been updated since.

Related thoughts here.

(H/T: OJ)

Back in 2005, Howard Dean told the late Tim Russert, "I will use whatever position I have in order to root out hypocrisy." As the above clip illustrates, Dean's got his work cut out for him, particularly in his own party and its media.

Over at NRO's Media Blog, Stephen Spruiell explores the New Yorker's recent profile of Keith Olbermann:

I find it amusing that magazines like the New Yorker are just now figuring out that Olbermann is a lunatic. Alternatively, maybe they just found it harder to ignore once Olby started attacking Hillary Clinton with the same frothing intensity he usually reserved for Republicans. Here's Phil Griffin, the senior vice-president in charge of MSNBC, telling Boyer what that was like from his perspective:

But, just as Obama must work to win Clinton supporters for the fall campaign, Phil Griffin has to repair a fractured audience base, a portion of which saw sexism in his network’s Clinton coverage and vowed to boycott MSNBC. Griffin knows that some of that anger is aimed at his star anchor. “It was, like, you meet a guy and you fall in love with him, and he’s funny and he’s clever and he’s witty, and he’s all these great things,” Griffin said of the relationship between Olbermann and the Clinton supporters among his viewers. “And then you commit yourself to him, and he turns out to be a jerk and difficult and brutal. And that is how the Hillary viewers see him. It’s true. But I do think they’re going to come back. There’s nowhere else to go.”

The New Yorker piece leaves you with the distinct impression that Griffin isn't just talking about Hillary supporters here. Olbermann's show is the only program on MSNBC that doesn't routinely get slaughtered by Fox News and CNN. Where else is Griffin going to go?

Meanwhile, as Larry Elder notes, "If 'The Media' Dislike Hillary, How Do They Feel About Those ----- Republicans?"

Iranian TV explores Hidden Zionist Themes in...

wait for it...

Chicken Run.

No really! (I wonder if anybody told Mel Gibson?) It's a bit like watching the Soviets in the mid-1960s complaining how decadent the West had become because they listened to the Beatles and Herman's Hermits. And incidentally, can you say projection, boys and girls?

(Via a post at Free Mark Steyn which looks at the insanity of conspiracy theories through the ages; as you may have already seen, we recently made a quick romp through their last fifty years in video form, here.)

England's Independent looks at the classic portrait photography of movie starlets of the 1930s by MGM staff photographer George Hurrell, a topic Virginia Postrel previously explored via a photo essay in Slate three years ago. The Independent's Hannah Duguid writes:

It's the stuff of fantasy: a photograph of Joan Crawford with liquid eyes and flawless skin, her strong bone structure casting sculptural shadows across her face. There is no context, no setting: it is simply a close-up of her perfectly beautiful face. Crawford's troubled character is not apparent in these photographs, nor is her battle with alcohol; the ravages of life are painted over with clever lighting and a thick concealer.

The photograph was taken by George Hurrell, head of portrait photography at MGM Studios in 1930. In those days, Hollywood studios employed full-time photographers who were responsible for creating a star's image. Those were the days of high glamour, when young women became sophisticated princesses, their allure heightened by their unattainability. Hurrell also moulded the images of Jean Harlow, Bette Davis and Rita Hayworth. He spent hours with his subjects, perfecting their look. Their public persona was a creation, a brand, an image on to which people could project their fantasies and desires. They were not meant to reflect reality, or reveal anything about the women's real character – it was all made up.

Yet, as time progressed, audiences and photographers tired of these images of idealised beauty. There was a place for pure glamour in fashion and society magazines, but now people wanted something more real, they wanted to know who their stars really were.

The modern-day implications of that last sentence bring to mind H.L. Mencken's classic line, "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard."

“[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?

In London's Telegraph, Janet Daley explores a few of England's myriad woes (the same sort of territory that Theodore Dalrymple has explored in depth), before concluding, "What we are living through is nothing other than the death throes of 20th-century ideology: the idea that the state is the only repository of civic virtue and moral authority":

The notion t