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

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

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

(HT: I/P)

A decade's worth of obsession over "global warming" by Sacramento can't prevent a headline such as this--filled with not just eco-doomsday fear mongering, but alliteration you can believe in! "Energy Chief Chu predicts California climate catastrophe."

Gee, now there's a headline that will stop the ongoing outward migration.

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.

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

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

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

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

As Orrin Judd notes:

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

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

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

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

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

Burning Man Festival gets sued--after man attending festival gets burned.

No, really!

(And at the other extreme of Mother Nature's thermostat, "Buffalo State College hosts the national teach-in on Global Warming Situations today -- a day the local temperature bottomed out at minus 6 degrees.")

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

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

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

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



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

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.

Back in 2005, I linked to a typically great article titled "California Screaming" by the now sadly deceased Cathy Seipp:

Behind the New Age grin of beatific self-righteousness with which so many Hollywood celebrities greet the world often lurks a tantrum ready to erupt. When the full, roiling boil is over, the slow simmer can last for weeks, if not months. By comparison, old-style screamers can seem quaint, almost benign. The storm may have been intense, but it passed quickly. A classic of the type -- the agent Norman Brokaw, for instance -- could suggest lunch within minutes of a blowup. And the scream usually took the form of a statement: "Get outta here!"

But new-style screamers eschew declarative sentences for rhetorical, F. Lee Bailey-esque questions: "What were you thinking? Why did you even pick up the phone? Do you even have a brain?" This can be harder to bear. As an observer told me once, "If it's 'You're fired,' then at least you're out. If it's someone trying to teach you a lesson, you're there, and you're stuck."

Some screamers can hardly utter a sentence that doesn't contain the f-word. The syllable almost seems to function as their sound, signifying only that they are in the room. Others are more careful with their language, because being sworn at is the point where many screamees stop listening and may even quit. So bland, schoolmarmish words of displeasure are amplified to ear-splitting volume. A vein-popping "Un-ACC-EPT-able!" is a great favorite. Also, a drawn out "DIS...A...PPOINTED!!!"

When in full throttle, the classic Hollywood screamer cannot be neither stopped nor shamed. I once heard a story about a studio executive who screamed at someone's assistant for a good five minutes before realizing he was in the wrong office -- possibly even on the wrong floor. "Well, if you see her," he yelled before stomping out, "tell her what I said!"

Screaming actors, it seems, can be easier to deal with, perhaps because they are not always famous for their brains. Many years ago, I read a story about how Roger Moore (a nonscreamer) took a younger actor aside and suggested he stop attacking everyone on the set. "I'm not in this business to win a popularity contest," the screamer fumed. "I just want to be a good actor."

"Well, you've failed at being a good actor," Moore replied reasonably. "Why not try for the popularity contest?"

Christian Bale is certainly a good actor, but he makes Paul Anka's infamous meltdown sound positively genteel with this must-hear rant.

Charles Johnson writes:

In an interview with the Washington Post, the leader of the UN's blind, toothless International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei (on whose watch Iran's nuclear weapons program has been able to advance almost unhindered), compares Iran to Japan and asks, "Why isn't the world worried about Japan?"

Gosh, I missed all the Nightline segments on Japan seizing the American Embassy in Tokyo. I'll see if they're up on YouTube or Hulu and get back to you when I find them. This could take a while...

Well that's one way to stimulate the economy: sell lots and lots of Israeli and U.S. flags to the Middle East, where they'll have a remarkably short operational lifespan before replacements are needed.

Mmmmm....steak.

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

Do you believe this?

Berkeley's public library will face a showdown with the city's Peace and Justice Commission tonight over whether a service contract for the book check-out system violates the city's nuclear-free ordinance.

It's Berkeley--of course you do!

He's not bad; his thetans are merely drawn that way.

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

With a few notable exceptions, needless to say.

"Company who sold 'Retarded Babies for Palin' t-shirts goes out of business--The owner claims he can't take the hate mail anymore."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As Amy Alkon notes, when Robert Reich writes, titles such as this emerge from his blog:

How to Create Jobs Without Them All Going to Skilled Professionals and White Male Construction Workers

But then, Reich has always had a way with words, as Jonathan Rauch spotted in a 1997 Slate article when he compared what Reich wrote in Locked In the Cabinet, Reich's memoirs of his days as Bill Clinton's labor secretary, with videotapes and transcripts of the actual events. Reich describes himself, as Jonah Goldberg wrote in Liberal Fascism (where I first discovered Rauch's Slate article), as trapped in a Thomas Nast cartoon, "in constant battle with greedy fat cats, Social Darwinists, and Mr. Monopoly." The actual transcripts and tapes describe a reality that's far more pedestrian.

But then such fantasies of the Reich Stuff make him right at home with Bill Clinton's "meaning of is" postmodernism, Hillary Clinton's fantasy snipers in Tuzla, and also President Obama, who as a candidate similarly misremembered at least one meeting with big business.

"What if the National Portrait Gallery had the graffiti it showcases in the exhibit vandalized on the side of their building? It would be helpful to have even a small amount of education."

A little Oogedy-Boogedy from the left: "Ceremony purges White House of evil spirits."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exactly.

(H/T: IP)

Same as the old Anti-Semitism, Claudia Rosett writes.

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

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

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

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

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

Ed responds:

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

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

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

Not quite the same as the Chewbacca Defense, but worth reading nonetheless, as Robert Stacy McCain lists the sordid details of, as he calls him, "Mayor NAMBLA"--whose party affiliation dare not speak its name in the MSM.

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

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

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

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

COSTELLO: It really was.

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

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

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

Jay Nordlinger:

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

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

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

Obviously, we need the next generation of this counter.

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

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

Whoever's ghostwriting Wonkette this week ponders, "Did John Roberts Screw Up The Oath On Purpose?"

(Via Justin Hart on Twitter, who sagely advises, "Reminder to conservatives. Don't fall into this trap. It's too easy.")

Update: "ABC's Gibson on Al Gore: 'Had He Gotten a Second Term...'"

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

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

MySpace Celebrity and Katalyst present The Presidential Pledge


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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."

In "A Manual for Left-Wing Living", his new article in the Wall Street Journal, Kyle Smith reads Nation magazine's Guide To The Nation so you don't have to. Here's a sample:

In Monty Python's "Life of Brian," the People's Front of Judea was always prepared to respond to any crisis with an immediate burst of discussion. In "The Nation Guide to the Nation," praise is showered on the Brecht Forum cultural center in New York, which the editors note was recommended in 2000 by the Village Voice as the "Best place to start thinking about the revolution." Keep cogitating, revolutionistas. Someday your putsch will come.

Read the rest--then stop by Kyle's fine blog. (Berets, turtlenecks, sunglasses and bongos optional, of course.)

Jonah Goldberg spots Bill Moyers channeling Jimmy the Greek.

Jonah writes, "It's long past time they put Moyers out to pasture." Of course, if his statement goes down the memory hole, it wouldn't be the first time an unsavory element of Moyers is excused by the liberal establishment.

Earlier this week, we mentioned:

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

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

Today, Infidels Are Cool notes, "Man wearing Jewish symbol stabbed near Paris."

Behold the delicately filigreed philosophical wisdom of "Courtney Love, Anti-Semitic Trainwreck."

(Via a mellow enharshened Kathy Shaidle: "I finally have to start hating Courtney Love.")

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

Headline on Contact Music.com: "Benicio Del Toro--'Che Guevara Was A Warrior, Like Batman.'"

Which fits nicely alongside the riff Oliver Stone went off on immediately after 9/11 that terrorists are like Einstein. Both quotes speak volumes of the moral inversion that is modern (and by modern, I mean insanely regressive) Hollywood.

(Found via "Big Hollywood", appropriately enough.)

If you've named your kid Hitler (and one of his siblings "JoyceLynn Aryan Nation Campbell"), you've already come out in favor of a leviathan all-encompassing state. So why act surprised when it works against you?

And it looks like his unicorn is ready to do the full Roman Polanski switchblade maneuver on the bear market's right nostril.

If this makes no sense to you, you're not on the same wavelength--and/or medication--as this artist.

Let he who is without sin cast the first anti-aircraft cannon.

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

Key passage from Bennett:

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

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

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

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

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

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

More: Heh, indeed.™

Jennifer Rubin posits that "the president-elect may end up pleasing conservatives more than McCain would have". I think the jury's still very much out on that, but Obama's already starting to alienate the nuttier fringes of the far left--scroll down to the bottom of Zombietime's coverage of the recent Gaza War Protest in San Francisco for plenty of anti-Obama vitriol.

Last year, most PUMAs angry at Obama for derailing Hillary Clinton's election bid eventually got back in line, if not in love with The One, the bloom has come off of at least one media romance rather quickly.

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)

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

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

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

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

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

When I flew out to New Jersey for Christmas, I greatly enjoyed reading John Derbyshire's piece on H. L. Mencken in the December 29th issue of National Review on the long flight. So I finally picked up a copy of Terry Teachout's 2002 Mencken biography, The Skeptic at the enormous Barnes & Noble in the Citibank building on 54th and 3rd in Manhattan--and read it on the flight back. It's tremendously enjoyable on one level, though the deep cynicism and Nietzsche-inspired nihilism of Teachout's subject does start to wear after a while.

But history has been remarkably kind to Mencken in one sense. Upon Hunter S. Thompson's suicide a few years ago, James Lileks wrote:

He can say what he wants. Drink what he wants. Drive where he wants. Do what he wants. He's done okay in America. And he hates this country. Hates it. This appeals to high school kids and collegiate-aged students getting that first hot eye-crossing hit from the Screw Dad pipe, but it's rather pathetic in aged moneyed authors. And it would be irrelevant if this same spirit didn't infect on whom Hunter S. had an immense influence. He's the guy who made nihilism hip. He's the guy who taught a generation that the only thing you should believe is this: don't trust anyone who believes anything. He's the patron saint of journalism, whether journalists know it or not.

If Thompson made nihilism hip in the 1970s by combining a loathing of his country and the bulk of its inhabitants with gallons of Chivas and a Rexall's drugstore worth of pharmaceuticals, Mencken put it on the map in America in the first half of the 20th century--literally so in one sense, by penning one of the first biographies of Nietzsche in the English language.

And certainly Mencken's tone, if not his actually stance, was the model for newspapermen since. And really is his tone that mattered, because they didn't pay much attention to his content, aside from his writings on the Scopes trial. Unlike vast majority of journalists in Old Media, the only big government that Mencken admired was the Kaiser's; he had little use for Wilson's restrictions in WWI, and he really hated FDR and the New Deal.

In the 1920s Mencken wrote:

It is the prime function of a really first-rate newspaper to serve as a sort of permanent opposition in politics.

Which is certainly a respectable position, though half the time it involves contrarianism for its own sake. And at one point, journalists drunk deep from that well--or at least claimed they did, which is why that ridiculous "comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable" cliche keeps popping up, even in the 21st century. But these days?

Andrea Mitchell:

I think they realize that America wants to see results, and they don't want gridlock. So I think this is an extraordinary moment. I guess my passion is for something to happen to fix these problems, and for dialing down of all of the sharp criticism that we have on cable talk, on talk radio, from, you know, the -

ROSE: From left to right.

MITCHELL: - the blogosphere. I just wish that we could find something in the center that would be bipartisan and would be productive and constructive.

Tavis Smiley:

Harry Reid, put down the crack pipe. You don't work for Barack Obama? We're all working for Barack Obama.


* * *

I believe that he can be a great president. But only if we help make him a great president. It is not left to his own devices, it's not going to happen. We have to help make him a great president.

And that's just from the past couple of days; this McCain video from the summer featured clips of numerous earlier examples from 2008:




As one of the my favorite recent quotes (from Umberto Eco) goes:

G K Chesterton is often credited with observing: "When a man ceases to believe in God, he doesn't believe in nothing. He believes in anything." Whoever said it - he was right. We are supposed to live in a sceptical age. In fact, we live in an age of outrageous credulity.

H. L. Mencken may have been a rare skeptic in a nation where religion flourished, but these days, journalists have a new savior to worship. And something tells me that Mencken would be loving every minute of it.

Update: The writings of Mencken's mid-century successor also seem remarkably prescient these days.

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

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

(With apologies to Monty Python for the above headline)

21st century England's eventual demise due to postmodern moral uncertainty summed up in a single word:

The archsceptic professor Richard Dawkins today launched Britain's first atheist campaign posting the message: "There's probably no God. So stop worrying and enjoy your life" on the side of 800 British buses.

What would Nietzsche and H.L. Mencken say about wimping out like this? Even the atheists are unsure of themselves in England.

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

In his Los Angeles Times column (making left coast leftwing heads explode since 2005!) Jonah Goldberg looks at the moral inversion of the Middle East:

A sick mixture of Holocaust envy and Holocaust denial is the defining spirit of Hamas. Indeed, Holocaust denial passes for a scholarly pursuit not just in Gaza but throughout much of the Arab and Muslim world.

The head of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, literally earned a doctorate in it. His doctoral thesis became the book, "The Other Side: the Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism," in which he denounces "the Zionist fantasy, the fantastic lie that 6 million Jews were killed." In Hamas' eyes, Abbas is an incorrigible moderate.

It's Palestinian Islamists who have ideological and political ties to Nazism stretching back to the days of "Hitler's Mufti," Haj Amin Husseini, a happy warrior for the Nazi cause.

So why the obsession with casting the Israelis as the new Hitlerites? One answer is surely that critics know such charges are painful to a country largely born of the Holocaust and marked by its scars. It also grabs attention, galvanizes radicals, vents legitimate frustrations and anger and helps demonize the enemy and, hence, justify the deliberate murder of "Zionists everywhere," as Hamas often declares in its communiques.

But I think, deep down, the desire to cast the Israelis as Nazis is fueled by the haters' need to see their own hatreds and ambitions mirrored in their enemy's actions. Hamas has an avowedly Hitlerite agenda. The only way to make such an agenda defensible is to convince yourself and others that the Israelis deserve it. Hence, Hamas and its allies insist that when they aim rockets at grade schools and playgrounds, they are resisting the "new Nazis." It brings to mind Huey Long's reported prophecy that if fascism ever came to America, it would be called anti-fascism. Well, with Hamas, Hitlerism comes to the Middle East wearing the mask of anti-Hitlerism.

Meanwhile, over at Pajamas HQ, Ron Rosenbaum explores "Some Differences Between Hamas and the Nazi Party."

As a follow-up to our earlier look at England's mental meltdown, check out John Hawkins' post on "Britain's Slide Into The Politically Correct Abyss Part #8728". As John writes, "Wow. You'll just have to see it to believe it":

Prison officers have been told not to refer to their charges as "inmates" because it might offend them.

Ministers claim the age-old term is not appropriate if criminals are to be treated with "respect and dignity".

...Earlier this year prison inspectors at Bullingdon jail in Oxfordshire, said prisoners should be addressed by their first names, given free condoms and be served evening meals later time to stop them feeling hungry in the night.

In 2006, the Chief Inspector of Prisons, Anne Owers, criticised jail staff for calling prisoners "cons".

Meanwhile, another English institution isn't crazy about its colloquial name: "The new £4.7m school that won't call itself a 'school'... because it has 'negative connotations.'"

For some thoughts on the cause of this societal self-lobotomization, here's another link to the Linda Kimball post we mentioned earlier today.

(With apologies to Wolcott Gibbs for the above headline.)

Over at Ace of Spades HQ, Gabriel Malor looks at the loony hippy Brits of Glastonbury, England, beginning with this Fox News item on their tinfoil hat fear of the town's Wi-Fi network:

"This place is not appropriate for a Wi-Fi trial," resident Linda Taylor tells the local Fosse Way magazine. "People are complaining of headaches, tingling skin among other symptoms. This makes me wonder what is it doing to the children."

"I don't want my son exposed to risk 24 hours a day, including at his primary school, which is within the Wi-Fi zone," yoga teacher Natalie Fee tells London's Telegraph. "I would be failing in my duty as a parent if I did."

"I have given a number of [orgone crystal hippie] generators to shops in the High Street and hidden others in bushes in the immediate vicinity of the antennae. That way you can bring back the balance," Matt Todd told the Telegraph. "The science hasn't really got into the mainstream because the government won't make decisions which will affect big business, even if it concerns everyone's health."

"The pulsed microwaves feed the pineal gland with false information," local Jacqui Roberts tells the Western Daily Press. "Melatonin fights the free radicals and cancer-producing cells.

As Malor writes, "In other words, some of the dumbest people ever to walk the face of the Earth":

They live in a country of near-universal literacy. They have been provided with more opportunity for education than the majority of people alive today and the vast majority of people who have ever lived. The internet gives them access to more information than has been or ever will be stored in libraries. And still: dumber than a box of rocks.

In the latest issue of City Journal, the great Theodore Dalrymple has a superb article on "The Quivering Upper Lip: The British character: from self-restraint to self-indulgence." His first book was titled Life At the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass--and yet one is always astonished at just how far down, out and backwards civilization can ultimately go.

Tangentially Related: Mary Katharine Ham adds, "If you're concerned about the dwindling vital signs of Western culture in Britain, pull out the defibrilator, stat."

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."

Headline via the Binkmeister, who has a thorough catalog of links in his latest post documenting many other examples of a world gone insane, details via Kathy Shaidle:

Two Israelis were wounded today in a shooting incident in the Rosengardscentret in Odense [Denmark] on the island of Funen just after 3 p.m., according to police. Police said the nationality of the perpetrator was uncertain, although he was said to be a foreigner.

One of the victims was hit in the arm, the other was wounded in the leg, according to reports. Both were taken to hospital, but police were unable to provide information on their condition.

Eyewitnesses told bt.dk that the perpetrator arrived in a hairdresser's salon owned by one of the Israelis. He was said by eyewitnesses to have shouted something 'in a Middle-Eastern language' after which he began shooting.

One of the Israelis was said to have tried to flee, while the other threw a stool at the man. Both, however, were hit.

The police spokesman said that six bullets had been fired.

The Mere Rhetoric blog adds:

This is usually where I'd write something like "on the plus side this was probably just over exuberant anti-Zionism and had nothing to do with anti-Semitism." But we're talking about a country where "Jews are Allah's enemies" is a popular protest chant, so there might actually have been a little bit of anti-Semitism involved.

Complete with video of said chant.

At the top of the first post we linked to is news piped in from 33 A.D., regarding a long abandoned form of capital punishment that's making a surprising comeback in its region of origin...

"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.

Mark Steyn notes that "Over in Gaza, whether or not they're putting the Christ back in Christmas, they're certainly putting the crucifixion back in Easter":

So how was your holiday season? Over in Gaza, whether or not they're putting the Christ back in Christmas, they're certainly putting the crucifixion back in Easter. According to the London-based Arabic newspaper al Hayat, on December 23rd Hamas legislators voted to introduce Sharia -- Islamic law -- to the Palestinian Territories, including crucifixion. So next time you're visiting what my childhood books still quaintly called "the Holy Land," the re-enactments might be especially lifelike.

Read the whole thing, and stop by Hot Air if you haven't already, where there are frequent updates on the ground war in Gaza.

I'm very happy to be back from the Philadelphia area, dubbed "the City of Death" in 2007 for its high murder rate. Similarly, Michael M. Bates notes that in 2008, "homicides in Barack Obama's hometown of Chicago substantially exceeded the number of deaths of U.S. soldiers in Iraq":

As the AP itself reported:

According to a tally by The Associated Press, at least 314 U.S. soldiers died in Iraq in 2008, down from 904 in the previous year.

And the Chicago Tribune reported today:

Chicago closed out the year with 509 homicides, an increase of about 15 percent over 2007. . .

Obama, of course, has characterized U.S. involvement in Iraq as a "complete failure" and advocates the withdrawal of our military. If Iraq's a total failure, how does Obama view what's taking place in his own hometown? Should America stop sending millions, possibly billions, of dollars in assistance to what is obviously a losing effort? It'd be a good question for the mainstream media to pose.

Don't hold your breath waiting for the legacy media to explore the topic, but Jonah Goldberg explores crime, terrorism and defining deviancy both up and down in his latest column.

"Bad move Number 1: Wearing a Nazi outfit. Bad move Number 2: Pointing a rifle at police:

The University of Washington student shot to death by police in the first hours of 2009 after pointing a World War II-vintage rifle at officers had an abiding fascination with the past, but no love of Nazism.

The 22-year-old student of German and Scandinavian history was wearing a Nazi-era uniform when two Seattle police officers shot him early Thursday morning near the door of his University District apartment.

According to police, officers were called to the 5200 block of 17th Avenue Northeast to investigate a report of two or three men firing weapons into the air. Officers say they fired on the man after he brandished what was described by witnesses as a bolt-action rifle.

Stupid fool--if you're going to reenact World War II, follow the lead of the Batley Townswomen's Guild:





On-campus Liberal Fascism of a different sort observed here.

The illiterate brute brandishing his cardboard "Death To All Juice" placard is unwittingly uniting previously divided factions, much to his chagrin:

In what cynics dismissed as a ploy to inject life into his flagging career, Kool-Aid man had announced his homosexuality in 1996. Getting him in the same room as the famously anti-gay Bryant would prove challenging. But Tropic-Ana was able to break the impasse.

"Anita and Kool-Aid Man understood it was time to put aside differences and fight a common enemy," she said. "And it didn't hurt that he left his partner Snagglepuss in New York."

Drink in the whole thing.

Maybe this spelling-challenged gentleman really, really hates roast beef...

I'm no O.J. fan myself, but this guy must be really disappointed by the terms of his recent prison sentence....

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who am I to argue?

(Via Cassy Fiano.)

Michael C. Moynihan charts the strange birth and quiet passing of the P.C. "holiday."

Update: Ann Coulter claims vindication.

More: So does Kathy Shaidle.

Fair is fair: Thanks to this "alternative Christmas message" and Channel's Four's choice of host to deliver it*, England, the birthplace of Muggeridge's Law, has now run smack dab into it like an out-of-control Prius on an unsalted Seattle street.

Read More »

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.

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

Michael Graham has "The Shoe 'Nuff Truth":

Now that you've heard the Partisan Press cackle and misreport the Shoe-Flingin' Iraqi "Journalist" story for 48 hours (did the press tell you, for example, he worked at a Pro-SADDAM newspaper in Egypt?), get the Natural Truth from military analyst and historian Ralph Peters:

If an Arab journalist had thrown his shoes at Saddam Hussein or one of his guests, the tosser would've been beaten, then tortured, then killed. Today's Iraqi government is considering whether the man should be charged under the state's democratically validated Constitution.

Bush won. Even if shoe-thrower Muntadar al-Zaidi (who works for an Egypt-based media outfit) walks out in his stocking feet and becomes a hero to dead-enders, he unwittingly showed what a great thing has been accomplished in Iraq.

Charles Krauthammer made a similar point on Fox News yesterday, noting that while the Arab and American media are gleefully reporting this one man's actions as reflective of Iraq, the elected Iraqi parliament--which has to go home and answer to citizens--overwhelmingly passed the Bush-backed security plan that the president went to Iraq to sign.

Let the bad guys throw shoes, and let the US military win wars and help create democracies. I'll take that deal any day.

Glenn Reynolds places the attack into context with another event that occurred near the start of President Bush's administration.

(Via Kathy Shaidle, exploring the Zapruder film and going back and to the left wingtip.)

Just found in my stats counter was this Google search (the abrupt cutoff is also in the original):

hitler and national socialism are really nothing more than contemporary shibboleths in america. whether invoked by thoughtless neocons i.e. goldberg's obnoxious screed titled ''liberal fascism'' or

Lionel Chetwynd, call your office!

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.

Shocking foot-age (their pun, not mine--sorry, though) of who is behind the Iraq shoe attack. And on a more serious footnote (OK, I'll cop to that one), Roger L. Simon spots what this tells us about how far the nation has come--the idiot who perpetuated it isn't going to end up feet-first in the woodchipper, unlike if he had tried something similar to the man who was captured by the US five years ago this weekend.

Richard Fernandez compares and contrasts conversations with nature, then and now.

(Has anyone talked with the wind lately? It could be jealous for the attention.)

Great moments in awareness raising through pneumonia inducement:

About 60 people took a frigid dip into Walden Pond on Dec. 6, 2008 as part of the Polar Bear Plunge. The event was planned to raise awareness on global warming.

As Tim Blair writes, "Let's hope someone pays attention. The handful of previous awareness-raising efforts have barely been noticed."

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

Meet Che Guevara. Just think of him as Jesus plus Abraham Lincoln with a touch of Moses and Dr. Doug Ross. After 4 1/2 hours of watching Dr. Ernesto "Che" Guevara heal the sick, teach the illiterate, daze the women, execute the lawless, defeat the corrupt, uplift the peasantry and spew the sound bite, I was convinced there would be a scene in which he turned water to Bacardi.

You can't spell cliche without "Che." And as I endured this mad dream directed - or perhaps committed - by Steven Soderbergh, I wondered where I'd seen it all before. The booted stomping through the greensward, the jungly target shooting? It's a remake of Woody Allen's "Bananas," right? Minus punch lines - or perhaps with them. "We are in a difficult situation," Che observes, at a point when his army is surrounded and forced to eat its horses.

The story of the Argentine doctor Ernesto "Che" Guevara is played with much broody self-importance by Benicio Del Toro. It will be shown in two parts after its one-week opening run. That way, on consecutive evenings, it can bore everyone but activist grad students.

Read the whole thing.

"Italian guitarist stabbed, allegedly for 'sounding evil'."

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

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

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

Bernard Chapin interviews the great Theodore Dalrymple on "The Decay and Fall of the West."

Related: And here's quite a mile marker on the road to perdition.

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

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

"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. We're cutting the language down to the bone. The Eleventh Edition won't contain a single word that will become obsolete before the year 2050.'"

Update: More from Roger Kimball.

The Rosetta Stone of humor is here--and the punchlines are endless.

Update: Found via STACLU, here's a bottomless well of bad (and needless to say reverential) Obama art. What would the response be if the ideologies were reversed, and it was a Website full of worshipful Reagan or Dubya art?

Earlier today, we covered the character decline in American public discourse. The great Theodore Dalrymple has a look at British character, "from self-restraint to self-indulgence" in his latest City Journal essay, now online.

(Via the fine wholesale blogmerchants at Paco Enterprises.)

Exploring the horrific death of Long Island Wal-Mart employee Jdimytai Damour, Kirsten Powers writes, "Incivility isn't just accepted these days--from celebrity news to TV shows--it's glorified:"

Last week, the Oxygen Network debuted the third season of "The Bad Girls Club" - like seemingly all reality shows, a toxic celebration of rude, mentally unbalanced people shrieking at each other.

Oxygen's Web site features a section hailing these "Destructive Divas": "From home break-ins to club toss-outs, these girls are bad. The girls get kicked out of three clubs - all in the premier episode!"

The show is the most-watched Oxygen original series ever.

One "bad girl" brags on the premiere: "I like to push people's buttons. I have jealousy issues, I'm very rude, conniving, and opinionated . . . I'm just a bad person to know. If someone was picking on me because I was, like, a cute blonde girl, my first instinct would be to tell them they are ugly."

I would plow over someone at a Wal-Mart to get my hands on discounted lip gloss.

P.M. Forni co-founded the Johns Hopkins Civility Project in 1997, and has rung the alarm bells on the collapse of civility. While Americans still have manners, he says, we've lost "the manners of past generations."

Big deal, some will say - those "manners" are just outdated customs. No, Forni argues in his book "Choosing Civility": They're the glue that holds society together.

Compare Long Island 2008 with Manhattan in 1939.

(Found via Kathy Shaidle, who has some thoughts on both Powers' essay and the misremembered legend of Kitty Genovese. For my own recent video look at anger in America, click here.)

"How Can We Make The Iraq War More Handicap Accessible?"

"Berkeley Grandma Sues Over Canceled Iraq Embed"

Which headline is real and which is satire? You make the call!

(H/T: NB)

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

Reuters reports that Iran is cracking down on "satanic" clothing--Satanic in this meaning, "tight trousers and high boots."

I guess from the Imams' point of view, Nancy Sinatra is the Anti-Christ. Or maybe Suzi Quatro.

More Reuters:

Some analysts say the authorities fear such open acts of defiance against the Islamic Republic's values could escalate if they go unchecked. This worries them when Iran is under pressure from the West over its disputed nuclear work, they say.

"Some individuals, not knowing what culture they are imitating, put on clothing that was designed by the enemies of this country," Rahmani said.

"The enemies of this country are trying to divert our youth and breed them the way they want and deprive them of a healthy life," he added.

Rahmani did not say how the offenders would be punished. Usual penalties are a warning or a fine.

Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has in the past suggested Iran's enemies may try to stage a "soft" or "velvet" revolution by infiltrating corrupt culture or ideas.

I'd love to see Iran have its own Velvet Revolution--it certainly worked well in another corrupt culture well that was well worth infiltrating.

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?

The self-lobotomizing effects of political correctness on the media continues, as Patterico explores "An Ongoing Mystery to Our Journalistic Betters:"

Over at The Jury Talks Back, aunursa says that CNN can't figure out why the terrorists attacked a Jewish center.

It's not terribly surprising that they're surprised. I'll never forget how, after a Muslim terrorist shot up a Jewish Center in Seattle, the L.A. Times ran a box on the front page saying that the gunman's motive was a "mystery":

[Click over for page scan--Ed]

The story contained clues, such as the fact that the gunman targeted the Jewish Center after conducting a "cursory Internet search for Jewish organizations." Or the witness who said the man had screamed "I am a Muslim American, angry at Israel!" before opening fire.

I swear I am not making up those facts, or the fact that the L.A. Times declared the gunman's motives a "mystery" in the face of that evidence.

I guess these media types just keep getting mystified.

Of course, it's not just the media who are slow on the uptake these days--with dark satire to spare, Iowahawk writes that Bombay is all just a case of Too Late The Terrorist: "Apologetic Mumbai Killers: 'We Didn't Get the Memo About Obama.'"

Building on Christopher Hitchens' new essay on the fate of Bombay, John Hinderaker asks what's in a name--in this case, a lot:

Hitchens clarifies something that I missed, for some reason: the origin of "Mumbai." I first realized that Bombay had been renamed within the last year or two when, on an airplane, I read an airline magazine article about "Mumbai," evidently one of the great cities of the world, but of which I was entirely ignorant. I figured it could only be Bombay. Hitchens writes:

When Salman Rushdie wrote, in The Moor's Last Sigh in 1995, that "those who hated India, those who sought to ruin it, would need to ruin Bombay," he was alluding to the Hindu chauvinists who had tried to exert their own monopoly in the city and who had forcibly renamed it--after a Hindu goddess--Mumbai. We all now collude with this, in the same way that most newspapers and TV stations do the Burmese junta's work for it by using the fake name Myanmar. (Bombay's hospital and stock exchange, both targets of terrorists, are still called by their right name by most people, just as Bollywood retains its "B.")

This may seem like a detail, but it isn't, because what's at stake is the whole concept of a cosmopolitan city open to its own citizens and to the world--a city on the model of Sarajevo or London or Beirut or Manhattan.

The topic of establishing new names (in some ways, a variation on the left's eternal need to "Start From Zero") for settled places was explored in depth an essay by Jay Nordlinger back in 2002. As Nordlinger wrote, "If you start to go native on the pronunciation of foreign capitals and other places, there's no end to it. None"--and judging by the numerous examples he's spotted in his column, there really isn't--and substituting Mumbai for Bombay is merely the most recent and at the moment, most visible example.

(For my interview with Jay from this weekend's edition of PJM Political on Sirius XM, click here.)

One of the better articles that Slate has run was Stephen Metcalf's 2005 profile of Bruce Springsteen, which (I think quite accurately) named manager Jon Landis as Bruce's downfall, transforming him from a funky regional act to a commercial superstar--and punitive establishment bore:

For all the po-faced mythic resonance that now accompanies Bruce's every move, we can thank Jon Landau, the ex-Rolling Stone critic who, after catching a typically seismic Springsteen set in 1974, famously wrote, "I saw rock and roll future, and its name is Bruce Springsteen."

Well, Bruce Springsteen was Jon Landau's future. Over the next couple of years, Landau insinuated himself into Bruce's artistic life and consciousness (while remaining on the Rolling Stone masthead) until he became Springsteen's producer, manager, and full-service Svengali. Unlike the down-on-their-luck Springsteens of Freehold, N.J., Landau hailed from the well-appointed suburbs of Boston and had earned an honors degree in history from Brandeis. He filled his new protege's head with an American Studies syllabus heavy on John Ford, Steinbeck, and Flannery O'Connor. At the same time that he intellectualized Bruce, he anti-intellectualized him. Rock music was transcendent, Landau believed, because it was primitive, not because it could be avant-garde. The White Album and Hendrix and the Velvet Underground had robbed rock of its power, which lay buried in the pre-Beatles era with Del Shannon and the Ronettes. Bruce's musical vocabulary accordingly shrank. By Darkness on the Edge of Town, gone were the West Side Story-esque jazz suites of The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle. In their place were tight, guitar-driven intro-verse-chorus-verse-bridge-chorus songs. Springsteen's image similarly transformed. On the cover of Darkness, he looks strangely like the sallower cousin of Pacino's Sonny Wortzik, the already quite sallow anti-hero of Dog Day Afternoon. The message was clear: Springsteen himself was one of the unbeautiful losers, flitting along the ghostly fringes of suburban respectability.

Thirty years later, and largely thanks to Landau, Springsteen is no longer a musician. He's a belief system. And, like any belief system worth its salt, he brooks no in-between. You're either in or you're out. This has solidified Bruce's standing with his base, for whom he remains a god of total rock authenticity. But it's killed him with everyone else. To a legion of devout nonbelievers--they're not saying Bruuuce, they're booing--Bruce is more a phenomenon akin to Dianetics or Tinkerbell than "the new Dylan," as the Columbia Records promotions machine once hyped him. And so we've reached a strange juncture. About America's last rock star, it's either Pentecostal enthusiasm or total disdain.

Springsteen used his power with his base to become something safe and respectable, the left's answer to Pat Boone. He's the definitive establishment rock star--it's no coincidence that Springsteen's most visible when it's an election year and there's a Democratic president to elect.

Bruce's fame, as Metcalf noted above, derives from repetition and predictability. Because, as Kyle Smith notes, no matter who's in office, when Bruce is at the local football stadium or hockey arena, it's always Darkness On The Edge Of Town:

There is a bracing consistency in Springsteenian gloom, from the Ford years ("The street's on fire, a real death waltz") to Carter's ("Lately there ain't been much work on account of the economy") to Reagan's ("This old world is rough, it's just getting rougher") to the first Bush's ("Ain't no mercy on the streets of this town, ain't no bread from heavenly skies") to Clinton's ("Oh brother are you gonna leave me wastin' away on the streets of Philadelphia?") to the second Bush's ("Woke up Election Day, skies gunpowder and shades of gray"). If the Boss has a motto, it has always been this: No hope, no change, no way.

But as Kyle asks, what happens when one of show business's most famously punitive liberals can't blame America first for a change?

(Incidentally, after a surprisingly long absence, note that the text of Kyle's blog is back online.)

Found via Conservative Grapevine, Ericka Anderson goes "inside the strange culture of America's wannabe hobos":

A class system exists among America's homeless, where hobos are considered royalty. While few people would want to live like street people, there many who emulate the life of the "hobo." These home-owning hobo-aficionados, known as "hobos at heart," are looking for more simplicity and sustainability in their lives -- something actual hobos take to the extreme.

And you thought riding NJ Transit was frightening...

In other looks at America's reprimitivization, Steven Malanga reports on "The Professional Panhandling Plague", and Matt Sanchez spots "Squeegee Guys Returning to New York Streets", as the Giuliani era further recedes into the sunset.

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...

For over a decade, the good Dr. Dalrymple has written about England's out-of-control binge drinking problem; Mark Steyn explores a pair of size 12D unintended consequences: "Britain has clearly decided it has a golden future as one vast theme-park for The Onion. From The Daily Mail, a woman's right to shoes":

Drunk women who stagger about in high heels are to be protected--at public expense--from twisting their ankles.

They will be handed flip-flops to wear by police outside nightclubs as they wend their way home.

The scheme is part of a £30,000 drive by police and councillors to prevent 'alcohol-related harm'.

It has been prompted by fears that women wearing stilettos or similar footwear could tumble over.

The rubber shoes, which carry printed messages about safe drinking, will also be available free from the council's 'Safe Bus' on the harbourside...

Inspector Adrian Leisk, from Safer Communities Torbay, said: 'Sometimes people get drunk and you see them carrying footwear which is inappropriate.

'The emphasis is on providing replacement footwear for people to get home in, should they find their footwear uncomfortable, inappropriate or soiled.'

Mark adds that it's "It's worth a click just for the picture of Police Superintendent Chris Singer posing with two pairs of 'safe footwear'".

But how safe are they, really?

Clearly, this is a story benchmade like a pair of John Lobb wingtips for one man to comment on.

Ezra Levant has some thoughts on CSI: Nova Scotia:

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.

That's the New York Times' take on Rosie O'Donnell's variety show yesterday--and if Rosie bombed with the Gray Lady, Rosie bombed.

Of course, Hollywood's enemies list seems to be an ever-growing phenomenon, rendering the annual Hollywood blacklist movie even more hypocritical than it already was.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

"Today We Learned Something Horrible About Liberals."

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.

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

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

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

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

Gee, it's always fun to see a leading German magazine running a photo of a US president with a bullet hole in his forehead.

In more "Deutschland is happy and gay" news, "German Students Lay Waste to Holocaust Exhibit."

(H/T: Steve Green, who writes, "Just like Herr Hasselhoff, we're big in Germany!")

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

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

But of course:

AP reports that "Al-Qaida No. 2 insults Obama with racial epithet", Rush reminds us that it's deja vu all over again.

As a one critic wrote in 2002:

When a black public person like Harry Belafonte calls another African-American a slave to white masters, you see what I mean. When defenders of feminism call someone who files a sexual harassment lawsuit "trailer-trash," you get the picture. When a gay man can write a column asserting that another man is a "nasty faggot," it's hard to think of how much lower the discourse can get. When liberals denigrate the president as a "boy" or as a "sissy," to quote Maureen Dowd, homophobia doesn't lurk far behind.

I remember a brief interaction I had with one Barbra Streisand long, long ago when the Paula Jones suit had just been filed. I asked Ms. Streisand what she thought of the suit. "Oh, she's just a little kurva," she replied, referring to Jones. That's a yiddish expression for "whore." Charming.

Again, the simple test here is the following: If a conservative had used these expressions, would it have been denounced by liberals? The answer, obviously, is yes. Imagine if George Will had called Colin Powell a "house slave." Imagine if Pat Buchanan had called Barney Frank a "nasty faggot." Imagine if Trent Lott had called Hillary Clinton a whore. Do you think they'd be invited on "Larry King Live" to further elaborate on their comments?

Of course, that was a few Andrew Sullivans ago.

Victor Davis Hanson writes:

Traditional journalism as we knew it --the big dailies, the weekly news magazines, the networks, public radio and TV--no longer exists. Death by suicide. RIP--around March, 2008.

As rigor mortis sets in, I doubt the media are concerning themselves much about how ill-informed the average voter is, but if so, they might want to take a look at their story selection this year. Here are two recent but stellar examples of the media living up to the legacy set for it by Edward R. Murrow, et al:

CNN analyzes Obama and Palin's doodles.

Meanwhile, in a story that I'm sure its myriad of readers were undoubtedly pining for, Salon analyzes the incoming first lady's posterior.

Arthur Frampton could not be reached for comment.

These days, apparently the White House phone only rings at 3:00 AM when there's a international geopolitical crisis brewing. Similarly, for those domestic struggles involving America's Culture War, the frontline has finally been triangulated: the local Wendy's.

Glenn Beck discovers firsthand that things sure are a lot less Chili and Frosty at the local branch of the nationwide hamburger chain than they were during the visit four years ago by John Kerry and John Edwards as brilliantly documented back then for England's Telegraph by Mark Steyn.

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.

The Boston Herald notes, "Boston City Hall named world's ugliest building"--and note the usual "start from zero" aspects of the 1969 building:

"That's gotta go," said Ivette Arenas of San Francisco, when it was pointed out to her on her way to the Common. "You have some of the best (buildings), and right here you have the worst."

"It is a pretty ugly building," agreed Carol Sue Graves of Orange, Va., as she walked to Faneuil Hall.

An example of the "New Brutalism" school of design, City Hall was seen as a clean break from Boston's past, said Jeff Stein, dean of the Boston Architectural College.

"They were looking for something new and startling," Stein said. "And boy did it succeed."

In From Bauhaus To Our House, Tom Wolfe wrote about the similarly Corbusier-inspired Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis, built in 1955 and mercifully demolished less than two decades later:

Millions of dollars and scores of commission meetings and task-force projects were expended in a last-ditch attempt to make Pruitt-Igoe habitable. In 1971, the final task force called a general meeting of everyone still living in the project. They asked the residents for their suggestions. It was a historic moment for two reasons. One, for the first time in the fifty-year history of worker housing, someone had finally asked the client for his two cents' worth. Two, the chant. The chant began immediately: "Blow it....up! Blow it....up! Blow it....up! Blow it....up! Blow it....up!" The next day, the task force thought it over. The poor buggers were right. It was the only solution. In July of 1972, the city blew up the three central blocks of of Pruitt-Igoe with dynamite.

A similar sort of aesthetic euthanasia seems long overdue in Boston.

Basil Exposition: The Cold War's over.
Austin Powers: Ah, finally those capitalist pigs will pay for their crimes, eh? Eh, comrades? Eh?
Basil Exposition: Austin, we won.

As the Ayatollah Khomeini once said:

"Allah did not create man so that he could have fun. The aim of creation was for mankind to be put to the test through hardship and prayer. An Islamic regime must be serious in every field. There are no jokes in Islam. There is no humor in Islam. There is no fun in Islam. There can be no fun and joy in whatever is serious."

And dancing? That's right out as well, as Reuters (who else?) notes: "Iran vice-president under fire over Koran dance."

Even as science and common sense continue to dictate that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, Kathy Shaidle spots conspiracy buffs becoming ever more gnostic in their "analysis", obsessions, and, probably not surprisingly, their nomenclature.

The state of Western Civilization at the dawn of a new millennium summed up in a single photograph and caption.

(Paging Dr. Dalrymple--your next "Oh To Be In England" column awaits.)

First Hillary, and now half a year later, Sarah Palin. What is it with Keith Olbermann and female politician assassination metaphors?

Found via LGF, clearly these are examples of a handful of overzealous fans of Family Guy having some harmless fun. Or maybe a bored academician blowing off steam.

Nothing to worry about here, citizens!

Read More »

Oh wait--that's a football cliche. In "Resist these election-time myths", Anne Applebaum pops a number of election day cliches held by those on both sides of the blue light, tectonic plate shift.

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.

Whoops--sorry, that's, "I want m************ Joe the plumber dead", apparently caught on an open mic during a newsbreak at San Francisco's KGO-AM talk radio station. More Plumber Derangement Syndrome spotted here.

A Daily Kossite takes Obama's trip to Berlin very much the wrong way.

"Disgruntled Congressman Hastings Threatens Life of Opponent Marion Thorpe"--everything old is new again!

Marvel Comics and Mark Steyn's America Alone thesis on demographic decline team up for all of the two-fisted, one-handed imaginary action you can handle!

A Japanese man has enlisted hundreds of people in a campaign to allow marriages between humans and cartoon characters, saying he feels more at ease in the "two-dimensional world".

Comic books are immensely popular in Japan, with some fictional characters becoming celebrities or even sex symbols.

Marriage is meanwhile on the decline as many young Japanese find it difficult to find life partners.

Taichi Takashita launched an online petition aiming for one million signatures to present to the government to establish a law on marriages with cartoon characters.

Within a week he has gathered more than 1000 signatures through.

"I am no longer interested in three dimensions. I would even like to become a resident of the two-dimensional world," he wrote.

"However, that seems impossible with present-day technology. Therefore, at the very least, would it be possible to legally authorise marriage with a two-dimensional character?"

Sounds like somebody's due for a nice long rest in Arkham Asylum.

Besides--there's a larger marital issue which clearly Mr. Takashita hasn't considered. Since it's reasonable to assume that the most popular female cartoon characters would have thousands--nay, millions of male suitors, why, that's bigamy!

Babalu Blog notes, accurately, I think, that "It's a lose-lose proposition for Obama's supporters":

On November 4th, Barack Obama just might win the presidential election. But regardless of whether he wins or loses, the vast majority of his supporters will lose. If McCain wins the election, they will feel the sting of watching the candidate they placed all their hopes in be defeated. But it stands to be much worse for them if their candidate wins.

By placing their hopes and aspirations in the hands of Obama, they have in effect transferred the individual faith they have in themselves to another person. A person who has promised to make their dreams come true for them. No longer will they have to fight, or struggle, or even work to achieve their dreams; Obama promises to do it all for them. But sooner, rather than later, they will realize that Obama can never deliver on this impossible promise. It is then when they will experience a pain much greater than they can imagine; the pain of realizing that you gave up not only your most sacred dreams and hopes to someone else, but that you gave up hope on yourself so that someone else can do it for you.

Which is why, "If I were John McCain's campaign, I would have just bought enough time to run this video after Obama's infomercial..."

Related: "America the Miserable." (Speaking of mirrors and reflections.)

Larry Kudlow talks presidential economics on this week's edition of PJM Political, also featuring James Lileks' warm remembrance of Dean Barnett, and a round-table pre-postmortem of next week's election featuring Steve Green, Lileks, Ed Morrissey of Hot Air and myself.

And you'll never look at Five Easy Pieces the same way again!

Jules Crittenden wonders if insane neo-Nazis have mutated into an even weirder hybrid of "AndrogeNazis":

Hey, is it just me or does that neo-Nazi assassination plotter look like maybe he goosesteps with the left jackboot as well as the right? You know, siegheils from both sides of the Nuremberg rally. Like maybe his death train rattles in both directions.

Maybe he's an Ernest Rohm fan.

As Power Line notes, over at the once-respect publication The Atlantic, Andrew Sullivan has posted (under the same headline) a YouTube video trashing Sarah Palin titled, "Red, White and MILF." John Hinderaker responds:

I don't think there is any precedent in our history for the shameful manner in which the Left has treated Sarah Palin. Left-winger Andrew Sullivan gleefully posted a particularly disgusting example of the phenomenon today; it's a YouTube video titled "Red, White and MILF." Watch it only if you have a strong stomach. If you don't know what "MILF" means--I'm sure most of our readers don't--Google it.

I can remember when Sullivan was a respected journalist, not a gutter smear merchant and borderline pornographer. His descent exemplifies the Left's decline in recent years to a baboon-like level of discourse. The vileness of much of what passes for political "argument" on the Left has to be seen to be believed. The worst impulses of human nature have been not just unleashed, but rewarded. If you haven't looked at web sites like Democratic Underground, Daily Kos, the Huffington Post and Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish, you have no idea what the phrase "gutter politics" really means.

Nowhere has the vileness of the Left been more sickening than in its treatment of Governor Palin. It is interesting to contemplate what a semi-pornographic video about Barack Obama, playing on the same sort of prejudices and stereotypes that are so disgustingly on display in Sullivan's video, would look like. Frankly, I can't imagine such a video being made, let alone featured on the web site of the once-proud Atlantic magazine. But on the Left, anything goes--the more slimy and disgusting, the better.

Sadly, that's been true for a number of years now. But from time to time, some have called the left on their actions. Here's a pioneering member of the Blogosphere in 2002 on the dangers of racism, invective and ad hominem attacks emanating from the left:

When a black public person like Harry Belafonte calls another African-American a slave to white masters, you see what I mean. When defenders of feminism call someone who files a sexual harassment lawsuit "trailer-trash," you get the picture. When a gay man can write a column asserting that another man is a "nasty faggot," it's hard to think of how much lower the discourse can get. When liberals denigrate the president as a "boy" or as a "sissy," to quote Maureen Dowd, homophobia doesn't lurk far behind.

I remember a brief interaction I had with one Barbra Streisand long, long ago when the Paula Jones suit had just been filed. I asked Ms. Streisand what she thought of the suit. "Oh, she's just a little kurva," she replied, referring to Jones. That's a yiddish expression for "whore." Charming.

That blogger's name? Andrew Sullivan, oddly enough.

Forget the Black Panthers, hobnobbing with High Society on Park Avenue, happily dining on "asparagus tips in mayonnaise dabs, and meatballs petites au Coq Hardi". Bill Ayers is the workingman's unrepentant former domestic terrorist, and as such has earned longest of long shot third party presidential candidate Dave Burge's coveted support.

(Sirhan Sirhan could not be reached for comment.)

For an update on the McCain campaign worker who claimed she was attacked at a Pittsburgh ATM, Hot Air has the details--or the lack thereof in this case. As one Pittsburgh TV station notes:

Police sources tell KDKA that a campaign worker has now confessed to making up a story that a mugger attacked her and cut the letter "B" in her face after seeing her McCain bumper sticker.

Like I said yesterday, who Twitters about going to the bank? And as a reader emailed this morning, "Looking at the photo that has to be the most conscientious knife attack ever made. Uniform cut depths, nothing that needs stitching. Put some antibiotic ointment on it and forget about it"--adding, "It's a hoax. And I surely wish she hadn't done it."

Indeed.^TM

Remarkably timely video from the Onion:

On the other hand, the fighting amidst the cold civil war in Australia is also escalating to a new intensity as well.

Update: 10/24/08: It's a hoax; Hot Air has the details--or the lack thereof in this case. As one Pittsburgh TV station notes:

Police sources tell KDKA that a campaign worker has now confessed to making up a story that a mugger attacked her and cut the letter "B" in her face after seeing her McCain bumper sticker.

Like I said below, who Twitters about going to the bank? And as a reader emailed this morning, "Looking at the photo that has to be the most conscientious knife attack ever made. Uniform cut depths, nothing that needs stitching. Put some antibiotic ointment on it and forget about it"--adding, "It's a hoax. And I surely wish she hadn't done it."

Indeed.^TM Story from yesterday follows:

Found via Matt Drudge, WTAE-TV in Pittsburgh reports:

A 20-year-old woman who was robbed at an ATM in Bloomfield was also maimed by her attacker, police said.

Pittsburgh police spokeswoman Diane Richard tells Channel 4 Action News that the victim was robbed at knifepoint on Wednesday night outside of a Citizens Bank near Liberty Avenue and Pearl Street just before 9 p.m.

Richard said the robber took $60 from the woman, then became angry when he saw a McCain bumper sticker on the victim's car. The attacker then punched and kicked the victim, before using the knife to scratch the letter "B" into her face, Richard said.

Richard said the woman refused medical treatment after the assault, which happened outside the view of the bank's surveillance cameras.

The robber is described as a dark-skinned black man, 6 feet 4 inches tall, 200 pounds with a medium build, short black hair and brown eyes. The man was wearing dark colored jeans, a black undershirt and black shoes.

In a horribly macabre bit of irony, I read about this story immediately after concluding an interview for next week's PJM Political with Peter Wood, the author of A Bee In The Mouth, a 2007 book focusing on anger in American life, and particularly politics.

(Add this story to the Police Blotter Politics post from yesterday morning, a topic which I discussed a bit further on yesterday's afternoon's edition of PJTV, which subscribers can watch, here.)

Update: Ace cautions that "This could be a hoax. It's has a too-perfectly-awful-to-be-true feel, a Tawana Brawley feel." On the other hand, Ed Morrissey has a photo of the victim--in addition to the letter B scratched into her face, she has a very real looking black eye, to boot.

More: Glenn Reynolds adds, "This is so serious that I predict it will get almost one-tenth as much national coverage as something some guy yelled at a Palin rally once."

Update: Michelle Malkin expresses doubts; explaining why "that McCain volunteer's 'mutilation' story smells awfully weird."'

One item that does seem odd to me is this post on the victim's Twitter page:

atodd: Stubbornly searching for a bank of america to avoid ATM fees.
Thu, 23 Oct 2008 00:23:21 +0000

Of course, I could be reading my own concerns into this; my parents were always very discreet when leaving their small business to go to the bank, for fear of getting mugged, so I had that ethos drummed into me through osmosis. On the other hand, just because I wouldn't want the world to know when I was going to the bank, doesn't mean that others aren't blogging up a storm about that aspect of their lives.

Update: This Pittsburgh Tribune Review article mentions in the second paragraph that "Police planned to administer a polygraph test to Ashley Todd, 20, because her statements about the attack conflict with evidence from the Citizens Bank ATM where she claims the incident occurred, police said."

The article concludes by quoting local police Chief Nate Harper, who says. "We are treating this as a credible report", but adds, "The ATM has a security camera, and investigators were trying to watch the video."

Whether or not Todd's story is conclusively proven to be a hoax, note the smug headline on this Smoking Gun report.

Related: Tough to argue with this assessment: "election season is crazy season."

As it did in 2004, the last month of the presidential election increasingly resembles dispatches from the police blotter, rather than a nation of adults carefully weighing whom their commander in chief should be. Here's but a sample of what's going on out there:

• "Overnight, the Republican Party's office on the courthouse square in downtown Murfreesboro was attacked. A large brick with a symbol for anarchy written on it was thrown through a window, taking out the entire glass front."

• "Owner Believes Lexus Vandalized Due To McCain Sticker." (Time to update these T-shirts and bumper stickers.)

• "Video: Code Pink tries to arrest Rove."

• "Angry graffiti messages were spray-painted on the garage of Norm Coleman's St. Paul home overnight and discovered this morning.

  "'u r a criminal resign or else,' was scrawled in black on the side of the yellow garage in the Summit Hill neighborhood."

• Restaurant Offers Free Pizza for [Stolen] McCain Signs.

• "Does Reebok Condone Violence Against Women?"

• "Anti-McCain vandalism hits Maryland: Democrat Displaying GOP Candidate Sign Wakes Up To Find Home, RV, Truck Covered With 'Vote Obama' Graffiti."

• "NEW: Dashcam Video of Palin Protestors: 'With the opportunity of having a national figure in town, civil disobedience is one of the best ways you can get your message across,' she told 11 News." (More video here.)

• "The Hill notes that police departments across the country are preparing for post-election violence."
  

As Peter Wood, the author of last year's A Bee In The Mouth, on anger in America told an interviewer:

For example: "[New Anger involves] deriding an opponent for the sheer pleasure of expressing contempt for other people....New Anger is a spectacle to be witnessed by an appreciative audience, not an attempt to win over the uncommitted....If in your anger you reduce your opponent to the status of someone unworthy or unable to engage in legitimate exchange, real politics come to an end....Whoever embraces [New Anger] is bound to find that, at least in the political realm, he has traded the possibility of real influence for the momentary satisfactions of self-expression."

And clearly we're seeing a lot of those momentary satisfactions of "self-expression", even if the Victorian Gentleman would prefer not to discuss their origins and root causes.

Somebody has been watching too much NBC.

Your bumper sticker of the day: "She is not a woman--She is a Republican."

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.

So is this what 'Til Tuesday were singing about back in the halcyon days of MTV?

Til Tuesday - Love In A Vacuum
by jpdc11

(Via Allah, who gives the news its appropriate sobriquet.)

Over the weekend, Glenn Reynolds wrote:

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.)

As always, it gets worse: as Gateway Pundit notes, now the left is re-editing YouTube clips to create snuff porn about plumbers. (Gateway's post is well worth your time, but caution strongly urged before clicking play on the ghastly YouTube clip he's embeded.)

I was a little worried about being hyperbolic in discussing the concept of "a cold civil war" on this week's PJM Political, recorded on Tuesday. Who knew how prescient the show would quickly seem?

"Let's get just a little smart folks."

So is John McCain a Nazi or a Confederate slave owner? I wish the Obama campaign would make up its mind, and simplify its talking points for the media down to one useful all-purpose epithet, rather than the scattershot nailbomb approach of their advisors.

"It's noteworthy that Jackson does not consider himself a Zionist, and believes that Obama is not a Zionist, either. I don't often agree with Jackson, but this time I think he's right."

"Almost a year after two teenage girls were found dead -- allegedly executed by their father -- in the back seat of a taxicab in Texas, the FBI is saying for the first time that the case may have been
an 'honor killing.'"

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.

Yesterday, Glenn Reynolds featured an intriguing quote from James Bennett of UPI:

Now, of course, Columbus Day is under attack as a holiday in the United States by the forces of political correctness. This is primarily an effect of the Calvinist Puritan roots of American progressivism. Just as Calvinists believed in the centrality of the depravity of man, with the exception of a miniscule contingent of the Elect of God, their secularized descendants believe in the depravity and cursedness of Western civilization, with their own enlightened selves in the role of the Elect.

Sorry to be a day late and a (almost) URL short on this, but I found the full essay was surprisingly challenging to track down. Happily though, the Freepers have a reprint, and it's well worth your time. Though I disagree with Bennett's conclusion that we're celebrating the wrong Italian, as Columbus Day is--sadly and idiotically--yet another traditional holiday under enough attack already.

But then, they all laughed at Christopher Columbus...

Update: Wretchard's Warning is well worth heeding.

"Many in the West will demonstrate their fierce originality and intellectual independence today by condemning Christopher Columbus using the same shopworn cliches they used last year."

So from that perspective, we should give Google bonus points today for the creative--and, gosh darn it, down right adorable--way they stuck the shiv into yet another traditional holiday.

Update: Steve Green adds:

Cursing the history that brought you here is like wishing you, yourself never existed.

But he's probably not alone in that sentiment.

Indeed. Friends don't let friends mix cocktails that blend equal portions of post-modernism and anti-modernism.

Oliver Stone, borrowing a few tabs of Jim Morrison's acid:

"I think in this present political state, the real George W. Bush might not approve of this movie," says Stone with a wry grin. "But this movie tries to understand George W. Bush -- the good, the bad and the ugly.

"I tried to be fair and balanced and compassionate," Stone adds. "I don't take sides. I don't take political sides. I'm a dramatist, and this is the movie I've made."

Yes--imagine the movies that Oliver Stone might have produced had he truly been a polemicist!

(As this email to Glenn Reynolds highlights, Hollywood rounding out the Bush years with yet another in an eight year series of attacks on the man--a few of which actively called for his, or a convenient surrogate's assassination--guarantees no honeymoon for Obama if he is elected in November.)

Related: "Democrats and Republicans have become two solitudes, and so, the result of the election will be ugly, no matter which side wins."

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.

Annie Jacobsen writes that if the Muslim world's vice squads consider Barbie to be "Jewish", wait 'til they find out the origins of their favorite cartoon and movie superheros:

When Iranian toy seller Masoumeh Rahimi thinks of Barbie and Ken dolls, she thinks of heavy artillery -- only worse. "I think every Barbie doll is more harmful than an American missile," Ms. Rahmi told the BBC back in 2002. In April 2008, Iran's top prosecutor and religious cleric, Ghorban Ali Dori Najafabadi, upped the anti-Barbie campaign by calling for a ban on the sale of all Barbie dolls from the country. "Barbie is an emissary of nudity and promotes moral corruption," wrote the hardliner newspaper Kahyan.

* * *

The anti-Semitic tirade came after the Mutaween learned that Barbie's creator, Ruth Handler, was Jewish -- and that the American businesswoman, entrepreneur, and U.S. Business Hall of Famer had named the dolls after her two Jewish children, Barbie and Ken Handler.

But it appears not all religious clerics are doing their homework about which Jew created what incredibly popular icon. Last summer, Hassan Nasrallah -- the leader of the terrorist organization Hezbollah -- appeared proudly depicted as Superman in the Palestinian daily newspaper Al Ayyam. In the cartoon, Nasrallah was pictured pulling back his religious robes, a la Clark Kent, to reveal a Superman suit underneath. Superman is Lebanon's most popular superhero. Many teenagers believe him to be Lebanese because of his dark, swarthy looks. But if Barbie is "Jewish," so is Superman; he was created by two Jews named Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster, in 1932.

The same goes for just about every other "Jewish" superhero, many of whom are growing increasingly popular throughout the same countries in the Middle East. This summer, audiences from Egypt to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) flocked to see movies about Batman, Iron Man, the Hulk, and the X-Men -- all as "Jewish" as Barbie and Superman are. Each of these superheroes was created by a Jewish-American comic book writer.

All I can add (at least while still in my secret identity as a mild-mannered reporter for a great metropolitan new media firm) is, "Up, Up, And Oy Vey!"

In a fair world, Harry Reid would be the Piranha Party's first snack (bring plenty of Maalox); but if Dingy Harry does indeed believe that linking Obama to Franklin Raines is racist, then he might want to start by cleaning up the real racists that exist within his party's half of the Senate.

Back in 2005, Howard Dean, another Democratic Senator, told the late Tim Russert that "I will use whatever position I have in order to root out hypocrisy." Dean and Reid certainly have their work cut out for them, eh?

Incidentally, could someone alert CNN that Robert Byrd is a Democrat? One of their Obama cheerleaders journalists seems to have forgotten that recently.

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

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

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

It's compare and contrast time! First up, this passage from academia's Ayers apologia:

All citizens, but particularly teachers and scholars, are called upon to challenge orthodoxy, dogma, and mindless complacency, to be skeptical of authoritative claims, to interrogate and trouble the given and the taken-for-granted. Without critical dialogue and dissent we would likely be burning witches and enslaving our fellow human beings to this day. The growth of knowledge, insight, and understanding--- the possibility of change--- depends on that kind of effort, and the inevitable clash of ideas that follows should be celebrated and nourished rather than crushed. Teachers have a heavy responsibility, a moral obligation, to organize classrooms as sites of open discussion, free of coercion or intimidation.

As witnessed by this moment at Brandeis:

Professor Donald Hindley, on the faculty for 48 years, teaches a course on Latin American politics. Last fall, he described how Mexican migrants to the United States used to be discriminatorily called "wetbacks." An anonymous student complained to the administration accusing Mr. Hindley of using prejudicial language. It was the first complaint against him in 48 years.

After an investigation, during which Mr. Hindley was not told the nature of the complaint, Brandeis Provost Marty Krauss informed Mr. Hindley that "The University will not tolerate inappropriate, racial and discriminatory conduct by members of its faculty." A corollary accusation was that students suffered "significant emotional trauma" when exposed to such a term. An administration monitor was assigned to his class. Threatened with "termination," Mr. Hindley was ordered to take a sensitivity-training class.

Call it "The Tyranny of Nice", to coin a phrase.

Or call it Anarcho-Authoritarianism, to borrow from an Fred Siegel's look at H.L. Mencken from a few years ago in the Weekly Standard, which I flashed back to earlier today, mainly because I was looking for a euphemism for "radical chic" in my post linking to Roger L. Simon's "Running On Empty" reminiscences on Bernadine Dohrn and her apologists in Hollywood:

The Sage of Baltimore needs to be placed in a broader intellectual context. The man who is still selectively celebrated by people like Rodgers, as if he were nothing more or less than an American iconoclast, was one of a number of anti democratic thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic. Some of them, like D.H. Lawrence, were proto-fascists; others, like H.G. Wells, were apologists for Stalin [Wells was no slouch as a proto-fascist himself, either--Ed]. But they all denounced democracy in the name of vitalism, eugenics, and a caste system run by an elite of superior men.

Part of the reason it's so hard to make sense of Mencken is that he was, paradoxically, an anarcho-authoritarian. He agreed with the American Civil Liberties Union on the importance of free speech. But while that organization, under the influence of principled men such as Felix Frankfurter, argued for such freedoms on the grounds that "a marketplace of ideas" (to use Justice Holmes's term) was the best method of arriving at the truth, Mencken supported it in order to shield superior men like himself from being hobbled by the little people. For the same reason, Mencken was a near anarchist when it came to America, but an authoritarian when it came to the iron rule of the Kaiser and General Ludendorff. We are more familiar with anarcho-Stalinists such as William Kunstler, who had a parallel attitude toward the United States and the Soviet empire, but it was Mencken who blazed the trail down which Kunstler and his ilk would travel.

That Ayers and Dohrn were consciously or not exploring concepts that were well over 60 years old at the height of their terrorist activities actually isn't all that surprising. When you're starting from zero, to borrow Tom Wolfe's line, it's easy to forget that you're also running in place--or at least in circles.

Victor Davis Hanson writes, "On the Ayers matter, there is only one question that matters":

After Ayers wrote his Fugitive Days (2001), and after he told the NY Times (on 9/11 of all dates!) that "I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough," and adding when asked if he would do it all again, "I don't want to discount the possibility,'' did or did not Barack Obama continue to communicate at all with him in person and via email?

If so, that belies all his protestations that he was young when Ayers was bombing, or a mere casual acquaintance on boards and community projects. In other words, when the world knew via the New York Times, and a much publicized book tour in 2001, that Ayers felt no remorse about his bombing spree and terrorism, did Obama continue with his association? If so, ipso facto that is proof both of Obama's poor judgement and his later lack of candor in recalling his association with his terrorist-associate.

Jim Geraghty asks a related question: "Could you shake hands with William Ayers?"

Roger L. Simon makes a great observation:

The film Running on Empty was nominated for two Academy Awards for 1988 - one for its young star River Phoenix and the other for its writer Naomi Foner (she won the Golden Globe). I served with Naomi on the Writers Guild Board a couple of years later and we got to know each other pretty well. In those days, we were comrades on the left - more or less - and both "nominated" screenwriters.

Naomi's movie (an original script of hers) concerned life underground for veterans of the Weather Underground-about a couple and their son (Phoenix). Basically, to most of us, it was a fictional version of the hidden marriage of Wiliam Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. But it was more about Bernardine, really, because she was a hugely famous figure on the left for many years, talked of by some as an American version of Spain's La Pasionaria. I did not much care for what she did or said, even then. But I certainly recognized her charisma. And I knew that she was close to crazy. (Read the statements at the Bernardine link about the Tate-LaBianca murders.)

1988 was the same year that Barack Obama entered Harvard Law School. It was highly unlikely he did not know about Running on Empty. It was one of the most talked about movies of the year for serious people, like Ivy League law students. The subject of the film was clearly the ramifications of a life of violence on friends and family. And yet he choose to start his career in politics via Ayers-Dohrn (note the emphasis). And now he denies knowing who Ayers was or what he did. Well... as the saying goes... I lost it at the movies.

Running On Empty came out at the height of my film junky period, when I was subscribing to magazines such as Premiere, England's Sight & Sound and the American Film Institute's glossy monthly house organ, as I recall, each had laudatory articles about the movie, its radical chic plot, and its extremely well-known director, Sidney Lumet. Given the anarcho-authoritarian circles which the young Obama clearly aspired to at the time (one doesn't wind up spending years with Ayers, Dohrn and Wright by accident) he would likely have been infinitely more familiar with the movie than I was.

(Incidentally, the plot of movie, and the timing of the events it portrayed in docu-drama form squares remarkably well with Rick Perlstein's observations on the original radical chic movie, no?)

The news division of NBC and its affiliates were once populated by stand-up men such as John Cameron Swayze, Chet Huntley, David Brinkley, and Tim Russert. What ever their biases, these were solid, professional broadcasters, a trend very much carried on to this day by NBC's elder statesman, Tom Brokaw.

What would would they think of this recent comment from a man who fancies himself as their successor?

Update: Olbermann's Palin Derangement Syndrome has--shocker!--spilled over to his Sunday Night Football gig--yet another example of NBC's overt politicization of its flagship sports show.

Kathy Shaidle suggests that the McCain campaign should make Bill Ayers "the hippie O.J.", adding:

It doesn't matter when Obama met up with Ayers, or how many meetings they ever had.

It's about the fact that Ayers went from domestic terrorist to "respected community leader", to the point where Ayers was throwing well attended fundraisers for Obama, and they sat on boards together.

Bill Ayers should never have achieved such respectable positions in the first place.

Bill Ayers should be sitting in jail, not on boards!

But that's how the 1960s Left's reputation-laundering works. Look at Angela Davis, and the convicted felon and torturer who invented (the Marxist inspired "holiday") Kwanzaa and, like Davis, is now a tenured prof.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Ayers was quoted in the New York Times as saying he and his wife only regretted that they hadn't blown up more buildings. People were reminded that Ayers wife praised the Manson family murders.

That story was widely remarked upon for incredibly obvious reasons.

That story alone would make any decent, intelligent person say afterward: "Wow, I better not be seen anywhere near this guy, let alone sit on a board with him or go to his frickin' house. Boy, would THAT ever look bad."

So that means Obama isn't a decent, intelligent person. Period.

He's just another craven, arrogant, Chicago style politician.

The McCain campaign needs to spin this as an anti-hippie, anti-lefty, culture wars story:

Ayers and his wife are dangerous criminals and traitors who got away with it, and are now well off and respected. At least the Rosenbergs got the chair...

Look at how average Americans view O.J. -- make Ayers the hippie O.J.

Ask folks how they'd feel if Charles Mason was a professor now too?

Look:

a guy who has been photographed, as late as 2001, stomping on the American flag is one of Obama's supporters. [Obama served with Ayers on a board during this period, Charles Johnson notes--Ed.]

It doesn't matter if Obama denounces Ayers tomorrow.

It doesn't matter if their connection is/was "tenuous".

Here's what matters:

What does it tell you about Obama and his policies and his worldview that people like Ayers and his ilk are obviously going to vote for the guy?

Do you really want to vote for the same guy that unrepentant, unpunished domestic terrorists vote for?

Yes or no?

Pretty simple, but the McCain camp is blowing it.

Of course--but that doesn't prevent the AP from slagging anyone attacking their candidate and friends.

Meanwhile, Ed Morrissey notes another former associate of Obama who openly* called for the US invading Israel:

Power's ultimate aim is to send a massive American or Western force into Israel to stop what Power apparently sees as an Israeli genocide against the Palestinians. She specifically states that the force has to be "massive", not like a Srebrenica- or Bosnia-sized force. Why would it need to be so large? In order to neutralize the Israeli Defense Force, and protect the forces of Fatah and Hamas.

Had Barack Obama kicked her off of his advisory panel (rumored to number 300) after making remarks like this, it could have assuaged fears about his intentions towards Israel. Instead, he invited Power to advise him after making these remarks. She resigned only after calling Hillary a monster and after insinuating that Obama may not retreat from Iraq in 16 months if the ground situation changed -- which Obama later adopted as his own position after the primaries.

The interview ran in 2002, the period when the left essentially went to ground during the culture war in the immediate wake of 9/11, only to explode in often violent protests and bitter rhetoric in 2003 and 2004, which Charles Krauthammer memorably described as "the Pressure Cooker Theory of Hydraulic Release."

Read More »

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But this wasn't the only such incident:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Principalities And Powers blog has some interesting thoughts on my "Bonnie & Nixon" video from earlier this week--and welcome Founding Bloggers' readers, who are clicking over to it.

My "Bonnie & Nixon" video this week was inspired by a quote from Rick Perlstein to Reason magazine while he was promoting his new book, Nixonland. Orrin Judd has a lengthy review of Perlstein's book, here.

Back in the summer of 2004, after a rash of leftwing attacks on cars displaying Bush/Cheney bumperstickers, an enterprising T-shirt manufacturer took to selling shirts that said, "A person of tolerance and diversity keyed my car."

One Minneapolis resident really got a full spray of tolerance and diversity on his cars today. Back in 2004, one could make the argument that the left knew that Kerry was tanking and since politics is their religion, they had to vent their frustration in some way, no matter how childish. But with Obama currently ahead in the polls, this sort of fascistic vandalism is more inexcusable than ever.

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!

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

Rich Lowry:

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

Ramesh Ponnuru:

Because it has no sting.

But I thought dissent itself was patriotic.

Update: "We're staring down the barrel of the worst disaster since Katrina or maybe even 9/11 and these people are playing douchebag psych-out games with each other."

Kyle Smith reviews the new leftwing agitpropumentary on Lee Atwater:

Atwater's painful demise seems to delight the largely left-leaning pundits assessing Atwater's legacy, which inspired Karl Rove among others. Howard Fineman of Newsweek, for instance, says, "Life gets even with you in the end," an ugly comment that sounds a lot like the liberal equivalent of calling AIDS God's punishment for gays.

Mewanwhile, Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria begins his latest article with the following opening sentence: "Will someone please put Sarah Palin out of her agony?"

At the start of 2005, shortly before Newsweek started tossing Korans into toilets and American flags into garbage cans, Fineman wrote:

A political party is dying before our eyes -- and I don't mean the Democrats. I'm talking about the "mainstream media," which is being destroyed by the opposition (or worse, the casual disdain) of George Bush's Republican Party; by competition from other news outlets (led by the internet and Fox's canny Roger Ailes); and by its own fraying journalistic standards.

Might want to look a bit closer in the mirror, fellas.

"Only in Berkeley: Tree Sitters Accused of Racism."

Elsewhere in the news from the town that reason forgot, "Code Pink declares victory and folds tent", according to the This Ain't Hell blog.

I think Code Pink's "victory" over the Marines (one which sees Code Pink backing down and the Marines staying put) is an example of that "Peace With Papier-Mache" that Nixon was always talking about...

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

Brent Bozell writes:

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

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

Doug Ross has your one-stop Palin Derangement Syndrome Database to keep up with who's said which smear.

Meanwhile, The Jawa Report has a lengthy and detailed post on "Hope, Change, & Lies: Orchestrated 'Grassroots' Smear Campaigns & the People that Run Them." Scott Johnson of Power Line describes The Jawa Report's report thusly:

Rusty Shackleford has posted the results of his and his Jawa team's investigation to determine the source of smears directed toward Sarah Palin. The smears include false allegations that she belonged to a secessionist political party and that she has radical anti-American views. Shackleford's research suggests that a subdivision of one of the largest public relations firms in the world most likely started and promulgated the rumors, that the rumors were spread in a surreptitious manner to avoid exposure and that the firm was paid by outside sources to run the smear campaign. While not conclusive, Shakleford's evidence suggests a link to the Barack Obama campaign.

More from Ace of Spades.

What if it works? Well, Jim Geraghty has one forecast of what the next two years could look like.

At Pajamas Media, Katherine Berry notes that "The media gives celebs a pass on ugly rants -- as long as they bash the right people":

The true irony behind the left's united decision to overlook [Sandra] Bernhard's racist ravings is that, by doing so, they've given up their strongest rallying point: something Slate's John Dickerson called "the politics of umbrage" back when Hillary was still in the race.

A reporter will never go wrong at a Clinton or Obama press conference by asking: "Senator, what about the latest outrage?" The question is always apt, because taking umbrage and responding to it has become the chief daily business of the Democratic campaign.

Now, however, Hollywood -- the darling of the left -- is the source of the umbrage, and the resulting silence among the liberals is deafening. The effect is much like Dorothy and crew's stunned silence in The Wizard of Oz when the curtain pulled back to reveal the "wizard" as a gnarly little old man.

Only this time what the curtain has revealed is a far more gruesome sight: the true face of Hollywood, no longer wearing Al Jolson's blackface paint, but just as racist as ever.

Read the whole thing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As Jeanne Kirkpatrick once said:

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

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

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

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.)

Brian Maloney, the "Radio Equalizer", catches former Air America hostess Randi Rhodes calling Sarah Palin a child molester:

She's the woman who shows up at the kid's birthday party and starts opining about everything from politics to lawn care. This is the woman that knows it all. Will shout you down, will get revenge on you. That's who she is.

She's friends with all the teenage boys. You have to say no when your kids say, 'can we sleep over at the Palin's? No! NO!'

(Click over to Brian's site for audio of Rhodes.)

At least she's back to demonizing Republicans. Back in early April, when we last mentioned Rhodes, she was caught on videotape calling Democrats Geraldine Ferraro "David Duke in drag", and Hillary Clinton, "A big f***ing whore, too." As Jim Geraghty wrote at the time:

In and of itself, it's shocking, but it's otherworldly when we think about what Hillary Clinton has meant to liberals for most of the past sixteen years.

Maybe Bill Richardson owes James Carville money, because that would help explain the bitter jihad the former Clinton strategist seems to be on, so relentlessly decrying the New Mexico Governor as "Judas" that Richardson stopped doing media appearances. It didn't take much for Obama-backing General McPeak to declare Bill Clinton the equivalent of Joe McCarthy. And if you've read any Hillary vs. Obama thread on a liberal blog lately, you know that there have been friendlier back-and-forth exchanges in snakepits.

There's something vaguely reassuring about all this, from the view of sitting on the right. It reveals to conservatives that the nastiness exhibited in our earlier disagreements with these folks was never personal; these people are clearly nasty to anyone who disagrees with them. Geraldine Ferraro's long service to the Democratic party means nothing to many Obama backers; she's a racist, "David Duke in drag," as Rhodes put it. I'm sure Senator Patrick Leahy thought his decades of work on the left side of the aisle had bought him some street cred from feminists, but no, he was called sexist when he called on Hillary to leave the race.

Hillary gets called a "monster" by Obama's surrogates; Hillary's surrogates wonder out loud if Obama ever sold drugs. Today Clinton surrogate Ed Rendell speculates that Americans know only half the story of Barack Obama. Day in, day out, in this race it continues.

And while the far left's media mavens continue to wallow in madness, their more moderate establishment liberal counterparts are victims of narcissism, as Roger L. Simon writes.

The legacy of the post-breakup Beatles comes full circle--the terrorists whom Yoko Ono publicly admires have told Paul McCartney, as Allahpundit puts it, "Play Israel and we'll kill you."

(Fellow 1960s Britpop vet Cat Stevens could not be reached for comment.)

While PDS may be running rampant in the US, it takes Saudi Arabia to really push it to its ironic zenith:

Here's an irony to start your Iftar meal tonight: Saudi Arabia, where a woman must have permission from a male relative or her husband before traveling, will nevertheless run a Gloria Steinem column in its main English-language daily about the sufferings of American women (and their impending doom if Sarah Palin makes it to the White House).

But then, feminism has stopped at the American border since 9/11/01--and sometimes not even there.

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...

Tim Blair's aphorism defines, as he puts it, "The ongoing process by which the world's multiple idiocies are becoming one giant, useless force."

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.

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

Watch this short video; your next episode will then write itself in about five minutes.

(Need I even mention how the above clip fits perfectly into these categories?)

Update: "I so wanted the clip to end with Sarahcuda firing on a moose that wandered into their drum circle."

Hey, she only shoots things that needed killin'...

Mark Steyn writes:

Golly. These days, NOW seems to have as narrow and proscriptive a view of what women are permitted to be as any old 1950s sitcom dad.

Why not? They rolled over for Bill Clinton's antics, which were right out of a plot from Mad Men, minus the veneer of gentlemanly courtliness still expected from executives back then.

"Not that anybody wanted there to be a hurricane, of course. Good heavens, no. But if there had to be one, the timing was fabulous."

--Clive Crook, the Financial Times.

I'd quote from this story by Dave Barry on the big, big story of the Democratic Convention--the fight against bird porn, and a cameo from Daryl Hannah, but I'd wind up excerpting the whole thing in an effort to lay out the conceptional groundwork of this fast breaking story. Which, like Watergate 35 years ago, required the efforts of another journalist to bring the story to its complete fruition. In this case, Blogosphere favorite James Lileks, who makes a key guest appearance in Barry's article, and also has video of the anti-Bird Porn puritans in action, here.

There is no escape even from the aura of the penumbra of the echo of the Decade From Hell:

"Mackenzie Phillips has been busted at LAX for allegedly possessing heroin and cocaine."

Disco Stu's mood ring sure turned black over that news.

And it's comin' right at you, complete with a phalanx of papier-mache puppets, courtesy of Zombie's all-seeing camera in Denver. This caption in particular is terrific:

And then there was the woman who showed her support for "Separation of Church and State" by wearing a kaffiyeh.

Howard Dean's got to crank up his anti-hypocrisy machine a couple of more notches, I suspect.

Wow, I was only kidding when I wrote that last headline, but Ed Morrissey writes, "Recreate 68? They're on their way."

He has a link to the live video feed of the Denver Post of the crowds in the street for those who want to see if the proverbial revolution really will be televised. On the other hand, as Ed notes, "So far, the protesters have managed to recreate '68 in at least one way ... reminding the nation to vote Republican."

Well that would ensure the most authentic recreation...

Update: The esteemed Zombie is in the midst of the scrum, fighting off the odd blast of pepper spray.

And look! It's a giant paper-mache puppet! Oh, sorry, that's Ward Churchill with his stylin' shades and Che beret--since paper-mache is literally French for "chewed-up paper", it's easy to get the two confused.

Sonny Bunch asks, "Am I the only one who read this story about the kid arrested for 'protesting capitalism' in Denver and thought of this South Park clip?"

No--great bloggers searching for quick and easy gen-X pop culture references metaphor alike!

Don't even think about eating a peach inside the Democratic convention:

Today the security check-in tent has expanded to Ringling dimensions. Same rules: remove everything metallic and electrical. You cannot even think of the concept of steel or even the lesser, more malleable metals, or you will set off the detectors; they're calibrated to beep if you've listened to Iron Maiden in the last 24 hours. All electronic devices must be turned on - but of course by the time you get to your place before the Inquisitors, everything has shut itself off. You hold up the line as you struggle with your STUPID CAMERA, which has a balky button; it will turn on only when pressed for a second, but if you press it too long it turns itself off immediately. Behind you, professional camerapersons fume: rube. I made it through without alarms - or so I thought."Got another Apple," said the screener. I actually wondered if they were talking about the make of computer, and were all Mac fans themselves, but no. The secondary screener team plowed through my bags and came up with . . . an apple. "Can't bring these in," said Officer Apple-taker. I asked why, instantly regretting it: Don't cause a scene, idiot, just move along and accept the loss of an apple as one of those things that happens, unless you really want to wear the plastic bracelets and she said "it could be thrown."Yes, it could be thrown; it could also be eaten. That was the plan, long ago."I had to take a peach and a pear too," she added. Somehow that made it better. A simple, soft, gentle peach was now considered a weapon? Arrr. No roughage, no peace! No roughage, no peace!

On the other hand, it's not like next week's GOP convention will be any less strict in what its organizers permit being taken in or out of the convention hall in Minneapolis. Of course, at least there, poo and other contraband won't be carried by the hosting party's allies.

Pajamas has a terrific round-up of photos of the protesters in Denver, including this amusing shot. It's a banner featuring a hagiographic image of Saddam Hussein and written underneath, the caption "'Good Vs. Evil': Gross Simplification".

Well, except when you're a Newsweek columnist on PBS discussing Bob Dole and Spiro Agnew, of course. Why equivocate?!

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.)

Well, I thought he was Don Draper (minus the hitch in Korea); Karl Rove thought he was "the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by."

And now Clark S. Judge, managing director of the White House Writers Group and was former Reagan speechwriter dubs him "Barack Gatsby":

Fitzgerald writes of how James Gatz swims out to a Great Lakes yacht, casts off his past and turns himself into Jay Gatsby, a very different man from a very different place. Barack Obama is such a figure. He didn't swim out to a boat. He went to Chicago and there, it seems, he reinvented himself. Much has been written of how he has cast off parts of his past - the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the one-time Capitol and Pentagon bomber Bill Ayers. In and of itself, walking away from problematic associates is not unusual for politicians. But his handling of Wright and Ayers is part of a larger pattern. Across the entire presentation of his personal history, he has nipped here and tucked there until the man in the camera looks entirely different from the man inside.

If, despite his populist rhetoric, people have - as polls tell us they do - a discordant sense of the elite in Barack Obama, it is because, while he may not own a bunch of houses, that's how he grew up and that's what he is.

But even if we're not sure of Obama's identity, as Ed Morrissey writes, "Identity politics -- it's what's for dinner in Denver", complete with Barack Obama's political mentor being accused "by several witnesses of calling a black Hillary Clinton delegate an 'Uncle Tom'", according to Ed.

This is going to be fun:

Little Green Footballs and Pajamas Media are joining forces to send the undead creature known only as Zombie to the Convention, for the kind of exclusive, slightly bent coverage only an undead creature can provide.

We have a full schedule of newsworthy stuff laid out, but you'll just have to keep checking LGF because the Recreate 68 moonbats may act up and change our plans. We'll be staying in touch with Agent Z minute by minute during the circus, through the magic of teh innernut.

Zombie's reports will begin tomorrow, the opening day of the Convention. The reports will appear simultaneously at LGF and PJ Media; here at LGF they'll show up as front page articles just like the ones I post.

We're looking forward to this week; stay tuned to LGF and PJ for the latest.

Of course, plenty of zombies are already in Denver...

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."

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."

Having read this article on New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's loony return-of-the primitive proposal to put wind turbines on top of apparently everything in Manhattan, I was about to post the usual bloggerific snark, though Rush and GlobalWarming.org have you well served in that department.

But when I looked up Bloomberg's Wikipedia page, I came across this truly bizarre passage:

Bloomberg has on numerous occasions been accused of sexually harassing men under his employment, which he has denied.[24][25] T. Dan Winger sued Mr. Bloomberg for sexual harassment, alleging that he had made explicit comments about his body and encouraged him to spend time alone with him. The lawsuit was withdrawn in 1999.[26] In 1997, a former Bloomberg L.P. employee who became pregnant while employed filed a lawsuit accusing Bloomberg of saying "Kill it!" and "great, No. 16," a reference to the number of pregnant women in the company.[24] The lawsuit was settled the same year for an undisclosed amount of money.

Somebody clearly has gone in and hacked the genders of those in that passage. "T. Dan Winger" is in all likelihood "T. Diane Winger" with a quick, err snip. I took a screen cap to record the weirdness, which will probably be reversed in the not too distant future.

Just another day at the faith-based encyclopedia.

I gave NBC a lot of grief last fall for their global warming stunt of turning a handful of overhead lights off in their studio as some sort of sophomoric global warming cheerleading when covering a Cowboys/Eagles NFL game, which itself burned megawatts of power from the stadium lights, the video electronics, and the satellite hookups. Not to mention the hundreds of thousands of gallons of fuel spent by those driving to the game, the network equipment trucks, the corporate charter flights, etc.

But NBC made up for it big time with this:

WTHR, the NBC affiliate for Indianapolis, reported from Beijing and described the NBC set used for the network's two highest rated news broadcasts, "NBC Nightly News" and "Today," as air conditioned - even though it is outdoors.

"The set is outside, but air conditioning vents make the weather bearable," Anne Marie Tiernon wrote for WTHR Eyewitness News on August 14.

Thanks, fellas. Everyone has that brief embarrassing fling with the teenage nostalgie de la boue Rousseauvian primitiveness of environmentalism, but it's good to have you back with the rest of us.

Yet another boomer-era childhood memory tainted by politics:

If you thought Blues Brothers 2000 soiled the memory of one of the best films ever made, then you may not want to watch the video below. Fox is reporting that Dick Durbin and Rahm Emanuel will be performing as the Blues Brothers at the convention.

No word yet if Durbin will be dusting off his jackboots for his appearance.

It's Answered Prayers for some budding young Sith Lord! Kyle Smith writes that George Lucas may have stepped into the latest scandal for those aficionados of the industry of the world's most puritanical company town who:

A. Whose blood pressure blows sky-high if anybody looks at them cross-eyed.

B. Have far too much time on their hands, and:

C. Are bummed because they missed the chance to flip out over Tropic Thunder's use of the newest worst most eviltastic word discovered to still be in the English language.

It's....Capote The Hutt!

(Think he's kidding? Two words: Muggeridge's Law.)

But then, this is all just preseason stuff. The Complainy-American (to borrow a Tim Blair-ism) will really be out in full dudgeon this fall over this.

Update: Kyle's take on the film itself? "A Big Pile of Dukoo." Reading his review, I can't help but think of Marcia Lucas' thoughts on her ex-husband's franchise in Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls:

"After Star Wars, he insisted, 'I'm never going to direct another establishment-type movie again.' I used to say, 'For someone who wants to be an experimental filmmaker, why are you spending this fortune on a facility to make Hollywood movies? We edited THX in our attic, we edited American Graffiti over Francis' garage, I just don't get it, George.' The Lucasfilm empire--the computer division, ILM, the licensing and lawyers--seemed to me to be this inverted triangle sitting on a pea, which was the Star Wars trilogy. But he wasn't going to make any more Star Wars, and the pea was going to dry up and crumble, and then he was going to be left with this huge facility with its enormous overhead. And why did he want to do that if he wasn't going to make movies? I still don't get it."

That pea has dried up, and no amount of water in all the vaporators on Tatooine is going to bring it back to life.

Hot Air has video of impeachment-crazed leftwing whackos attempting to shout down Nancy Pelosi.

Her response?

"I have complete comfort with the frustration. I'm from the streets," she said.

But these days, there's just no place for a Street Fightin' Nan.

Thirty years ago, Pete Townshend attempted to define rock and roll to an interviewer:

"If it screams for truth rather than help, if it commits itself with a courage it can't be sure it really has, if it stands up and admits something is wrong but doesn't insist on blood, then it's rock 'n' roll. We shed our own blood. We don't need to shed anyone else's."

Too bad rap never got the message.

One Al Gore clubhouse inside of another, as Ted Kaczynski's cabin is on display now at the News mausoleum in Washington, DC.

As Jaime Sneider of the Weekly Standard writes:

So I guess the question is does the "hands on" experience of the Newseum allow visitors to handle the contents of Kaczynski's cabin? Do recall among his only possessions was an underlined copy of Al Gore's Earth in the Balance.

For our Silicon Graffiti segment on the Newseum, click here.

(Headline explanation here.)

What's in your Water? Rainbows, man! But what's in your video? Apparently several unnecessary apostrophes, and spelling errors prodominatly on display in the titles at the beginning of the video--always a sure sign that crack research scientists are hard at work!

The undernews finally floats over the top, as ABC News reports, "Edwards Admits to Sexual Affair; Lied as Presidential Candidate" Lionel Hutz a liar? Say it ain't so, Homer!

John Edwards repeatedly lied during his Presidential campaign about an extra-marital affair with a novice film-maker, the former Senator admitted to ABC News today.

In an interview for broadcast tonight on Nightline, Edwards told ABC News correspondent Bob Woodruff he did have an affair with 42-year old Rielle Hunter, but said that he did not love her.

Edwards also denied he was the father of Hunter's baby girl, Frances Quinn, although the one-time Democratic Presidential candidate said he has not taken a paternity test.

Edwards said he knew he was not the father based on timing of the baby's birth on February 27, 2008. He said his affair ended too soon for him to have been the father.

So is this enough to get his speaking slot at the Denver convention reinstated, or will he still be considered toxic in a couple of weeks?

Note this element in the ABC story:

A former campaign aide, Andrew Young, has said he was the father of the child.

According to friends of Hunter, Edwards met her at a New York city bar in 2006. His political action committee later paid her $114,000 to produce campaign website documentaries despite her lack of experience.

Edwards said the affair began during the campaign after she was hired. Hunter traveled with Edwards around the country and to Africa.

Edwards said his wife, Elizabeth, and others in his family became aware of the affair in 2006.

Edwards made a point of telling Woodruff that his wife's cancer was in remission when he began the affair with Hunter. Elizabeth Edwards has since been diagnosed with an incurable form of the disease.

When the National Enquirer first reported the alleged Edwards-Hunter affair last October 11, Edwards, his campaign staff and Hunter vociferously denounced the report.

"The story is false, it's completely untrue, it's ridiculous," Edwards told reporters then.

He repeated his denials just two weeks ago.

Edwards today admitted the National Enquirer was correct when it reported he had visited Hunter at the Beverly Hills Hilton last month.

At this point, the spin that currently puts the story in the best possible light for Edwards is that, as Allah writes, "Rielle Hunter is his lover--but the kid is not his son. Er, daughter." And as the ABC article notes, "A former campaign aide, Andrew Young, has said he was the father of the child."

This sounds more like behavior more at home with a rock group on tour passing a favored groupie from musician to musician than (presumed) adults trying to position their man to run for the most powerful office in the land.

Mickey Kaus will--very safe to say--have more on this story; for our interview last week with Mickey on XM Satellite Radio, click here.

Its multifaceted meanings are a mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma--with a touch of Goatse...

And voila! A meme is born:

In a column for the Politico yesterday, Reason editor Michael Moynihan wrote the left had turned into a "a virtual Bletchley Park of racial cryptographers teasing out the sinister motives and subtexts of McCain's campaign advertising."

It was a funny line, but it to dismiss it as just hyperbole would be a big mistake. Responding to McCain's "The One" ad, a Democratic consulting group put out a frightfully lengthy memo deconstructing it. This excerpt will give you the general thrust of it:

This is the use of religion at its very worst in politics because it is an attempt to subtly and perhaps even subconsciously play on some of the deepest fears of millions of evangelical Americans. From the title of the ad (that immediately reminds anyone familiar with the Left Behind series of the name of the false church set up by the anti-Christ) to the quotes (with no respect to context) and images that the McCain camp chose to use, which basically allude to every symbol of the anti-Christ possibole [sic] short of flashing 666 on the screen, this ad is an attempt to stir up already circulating falsehoods about Obama and add more fuel to the fire.

That's right, after the racist charges didn't stick and then their ridiculous Nazi accusations were ignored, there was only one other place they could go. Obama's defenders are now accusing McCain of using his campaign ads to call Obama the anti-Christ. Marvel for a second at the absurdity of that. I have no idea what charge the liberal Bletchley Park could make to further discredit themselves, but where there's a will, there's a way.

Here's an all-too-rare sign of racial sanity on the left, fortunately.

Update: Here's a new project for the codebreakers to sink their mad deciphering skills into.

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.

CAIR targets Abercrombie & Fitch, the onetime clothing retailer turned porn shop.

This is absolutely horrific--and naturally, because everyone is unarmed, nobody fights back:

Breitbart.tv video: Man Decapitates Fellow Passenger Aboard Greyhound Bus.

(I'm not embedding this, as it only seems to auto-play.)

Update: More details here.

Back in 2004, Mark Steyn noted that the famously hard-partying John Kerry had his sensitive troubadour side as well:

The time: last month; the place: MTV. The interviewer asks: ''Well, we know that you were into rock 'n' roll when you were in high school, and we know that you play the guitar now. Are there any trends out there in music, or even in popular culture in general, that have piqued your interest?''

''Oh sure. I follow and I'm interested,'' says John Kerry. ''I'm fascinated by rap and by hip-hop. I think there's a lot of poetry in it. There's a lot of anger, a lot of social energy in it. And I think you'd better listen to it pretty carefully, 'cause it's important . . . I'm still listening because I know that it's a reflection of the street and it's a reflection of life.''

Steyn dubbed Kerry's "America's first flip-flopper hip-hopper"--sad to say, he's not the last.

John McCain? No--Osama bin Laden!

Osama bin Laden wanted to introduce himself to America with an ABC television interview months before al Qaeda bombed two U.S. embassies in Africa, the interviewer testified on Tuesday.

Former ABC correspondent John Miller, testifying at the first Guantanamo war crimes trial, also recalled comparing bin Laden with U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt as he made small talk during filming of the May 28, 1998, interview at an Afghanistan mountain hideout.

It was a rare opportunity for an American journalist, and Miller detailed a movie-thriller route to get to bin Laden, complete with multiple plane flights in Pakistan, a nighttime border crossing into Afghanistan, and muzzle flashes from automatic weapons at an al Qaeda checkpoint.

"You are like the Middle East version of Teddy Roosevelt," Miller, who is now the chief FBI spokesman, told bin Laden in a selection of the interview tape screened for the trial of bin Laden's driver, Salim Hamdan.

Michael Moore and Brian Williams could not be reached for comment.

Fans of Mike Myer's Dieter character and his techno-Brechtian goof Sprockets will get a chuckle out of this, but as Allahpundit notes, I'm not sure how well it will play back in the Sudetenland Peoria:

Over at Ace of Spades HQ, they're looking at a "Peaceful Bicycle Advocacy Group Attempting to Persuade a Motorist to Abandon His Gas-Guzzling Ways...By beating the s*** out of him and trashing his car."

Paging Mr. O'Rourke...Mr. P.J. O'Rourke to the white courtesy phone please.

As a kid, I was never very good at building model airplanes (particularly when it came time to paint and detail them), and thus, a key career path is no longer open to me: minister of Iranian propaganda:

Here's a photo of the pilot. But really, isn't Iran's copying photos from the latest Revell catalog more or less on a par with this?

AP checks in on the two-minute hate in DC:

"I am really astonished at the mood in this room," commented one witness, George Mason University School of Law professor Jeremy Rabkin.

"The tone of these deliberations is slightly demented," Rabkin said. "You should all remind yourselves that the rest of the country is not necessarily in this same bubble in which people think it is reasonable to describe the president as if he were Caligula."

Nahh, they'd be pretty cool with him.

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."

It's not just a presumptive victory lap...it's the Love Parade.

Sad, sad news out of Denver: "Sound waves, goo guns won't be used on DNC protesters."

An instructional video from an earlier Colorado riot suggests some effective crowd control methods. I can only hope the proper authorities watch and learn before it's too late.

Your blood-pressure raising moment of the day courtesy of Eyeblast.tv; remember when the left debated whether or not scenes such as this actually happened in the late 1960s?

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.)

Betsy Newmark writes that she's "rather disgusted at Bill O'Reilly's unctuous defense of himself for not revealing that Jackson had used the n-word in his little rant":

I haven't ever thought much of Bill O'Reilly, but this story exposed him for an even bigger buffoon than I'd thought he was before. Note how he had a different reaction about people who criticized Don Imus for his riff on the Rutgers basketball team. At that time, with guest host Michelle Malkin interviewing him, he pretended that he was going to be all fearless in exposing those who criticized Imus but then used racist language themselves.

MALKIN: Well, I guess the rehabilitation of Don Imus will begin. But, I mean, how optimistic are you that the rehabilitation of all of the other hate-mongers and hate-tolerators is going to take place?

O'REILLY: Another excellent question.

I don't care whether their rehabilitation takes place at all. What I'm going to do is, I'm going to spotlight them now. And I think other people will, too, that, when they get back into this groove of hate, we're going to lay it out there, that we're going to layout there the gangster rappers, who they work for, who is paying them.

I wouldn't want to be Snoopy Dogg right now.

(LAUGHTER)

O'REILLY: And I wouldn't want to be Ludacris or 50 Cent, because every move they make is going to be on "The Factor."

I guess that that was just some self-promoting spin because Jesse Jackson was one of the biggest mouths out there protesting against Don Imus. But when Bill O'Reilly had an exclusive video shot of the sanctimonious Reverend using the n-word, he tried to bury the tape.

Maybe Bill's trying to stay on Al Sharpton's good side, lest he wind up in the same star chamber that Imus did. In any case, as Betsy writes, "O'Reilly may bluster all he wants, but he's proven that his zone has quite a good deal of spin."

In less than a year, Ezra Levant not only gets his right of free speech challenged by a Canadian Imam who thuggishly sicked the Alberta "Human Rights" Commission on him, he's now facing anonymous death threats on his blog. Having already witnessed, up close and personal, the failure of Canada's dangerous and incompetent government, as Kathy Shaidle writes, Ezra is "opening sourcing" things--and offering a $1000 reward to anyone who can identify the person who threatened him.

See if you can spot the disparity between the photo and its caption in this NPR story. Here's the text:

Angelica Hernandez (left) and her mother, Gloria Nunez, struggle to make ends meet on a very limited budget.

Click over for the photo.

The headline of the article is "For Some Ohioans, Even Meat Is Out Of Reach", which of course, probably makes PETA quite happy, in much the same way that rising gasoline prices give a warm fuzzy feeling to Gore and Obama.

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.

Leftwing historian Rick Perlstein recently told Reason that "Bonnie and Clyde was the most important text of the New Left." It certainly foreshadowed the radical chic that runs through the liberalism of the late 1960s, from the Black Panthers sipping Martinis in Leonard Bernstein's salon to recurring parodies such Michelle Obama in camo and combat boots clutching an AK-47 on the cover of this week's New Yorker.

Speaking of the New Yorker, how much did Pauline Kael's championing of the movie impact the rest of culture? In my interview with James Lileks on AMC's Mad Men for PJM Political, we discussed the middlebrow culture of the 1950s and early 1960s. That culture was eventually eviscerated, as anyone who turns on a TV or goes to the movies knows all too well. But how much is Pauline Kael to blame?

Her part in the process began four decades ago when she wrote an article for The New Yorker defending Bonnie and Clyde, the 1967 Warren Beatty film that treated two 1930s bank robbers with sympathy and raucous humour.

Most critics found Bonnie and Clyde empty and trashy. The crusty old New York Times guy, Bosley Crowther, then one of the most influential American critics, decided that Bonnie and Clyde failed to meet his narrow, simple-minded, painfully respectable standards. It was too violent, and he thought the love story of its doomed, hare-brained title characters was "sentimental claptrap."

Kael, whose critical reputation was in its early stages, used Bonnie and Clyde as the opening shot in what turned out to be a war against middlebrow, middle-class, middle-of-the-road taste. Her New Yorker piece began: "How do you make a good movie in this country without being jumped on? Bonnie and Clyde is the most excitingly American American movie since The Manchurian Candidate. The audience is alive to it."

She announced no less than a revolution in taste that she sensed in the air. Movie audiences, she said, were going beyond "good taste," moving into a period of greater freedom and openness. Was it a violent film?

Well, Bonnie and Clyde needed violence. "Violence is its meaning."

She hated earnest liberalism and critical snobbery. She liked the raw energy in the work of adventurous directors such as Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Martin Scorsese. She trusted her visceral reactions to movies.

When hired as a regular New Yorker movie critic, she took that doctrine to an audience that proved enthusiastic and loyal. She became the great star among New Yorker critics, then the most influential figure among critics in any field. Books of her reviews, bearing titles such as I Lost it at the Movies, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and When the Lights Go Down, sold in impressive numbers. Critics across the continent became her followers. Through the 1970s and '80s, no one in films, except the actual moviemakers, was more often discussed.

It was only in the late stages of her New Yorker career (from which she retired in 1991) that some of her admirers began saying she had sold her point of view too effectively. A year after her death (in 2001) one formerly enthusiastic reader, Paul Schrader, a screenwriter of films such as Raging Bull and Taxi Driver, wrote: "Cultural history has not been kind to Pauline."

Kael assumed she was safe to defend the choices of mass audiences because the old standards of taste would always be there. They were, after all, built into the culture. But those standards were swiftly eroding. Schrader argued that she and her admirers won the battle but lost the war. Acceptable taste became mass-audience taste, box-office receipts the ultimate measure of a film's worth, sometimes the only measure. Traditional, well-written movies without violence or special effects were pushed to the margins. "It was fun watching the applecart being upset," Schrader said, "but now where do we go for apples?"

As the above article concludes, "Not long before she died, Pauline Kael remarked to a friend, 'When we championed trash culture we had no idea it would become the only culture.' Who did?"

(Via Jonathan Last.)

Remember the carefree 1980s, when a team like the New York Jets could call themselves "Gang Green" and you knew it was only metaphorical? Welcome to the brave new NFL:

Hand signals captured on videotape are once again being scrutinized around the NFL. Only this time, it's not the New England Patriots studying them for a competitive advantage, but league officials in search of a more sinister message.

The NFL, concerned that some players might celebrate by flashing the hand signals of street gangs, has hired experts to examine game tapes and identify the gestures.

"There have been some suspected things we've seen," said Milt Ahlerich, the league's vice president of security. "When we see it, we quietly jump on it immediately, directly with the team and the player or employee involved to cease and desist. Period."

As I've written before on an unrelated NFL topic, the see-no-evil attitude of college athletics should share some of the blame as well.

Isn't the fascist epistemology of bicycling obvious? I mean, think about it: Freddie Mercury and Queen were dubbed "may be the first truly fascist rock band" by Rolling Stone at precisely the time they were singing...this.

Coincidence?

Of course.

But Sonny Bunch has a great observation here:

The hypocrisy of the biking community is kind of breathtaking. On the one hand, they demand equal access to the roads and get incredibly angry when car drivers suggest that the dangerously slow speeds at which bikers travel might hinder the flow of traffic. On the other, they proclaim that the laws of the road do not apply to them, and car drivers are just jealous. You can’t have it both ways, dears. Make up your minds.

Howard Dean could not be reached for comment. Nor could P.J. O'Rourke, but his earlier views on the topic can be found here.

"Rep. and House Energy Chairman Ed Markey: Somalia, Black Hawk Down Incident Caused by Global Warming."

Time to update this ever-growing list; as Ace writes, "Remember those superstitious, irrational, anti-scientific yahoos during the Middle Ages who blamed every phenomenon on the Devil?"

Chris Matthews has an exceptional idea, as Newsbusters notes: Matthews Worries 'Right' Will Turn New Yorker Cover into T-Shirt."

Capital idea, Chris! In an age where brand synergy is all, I'm sure the fellas at Those Shirts and the legal bean counters inside the New Yorker's offices could work out a licensing agreement that would be mutually beneficial. Considering how much the Manhattan-based print media have been suffering financially, I'm glad to see that Matthews is always on the lookout for ways to increase their revenues through carefully selected cross-promotional opportunities.

Seriously though, it's amazing, isn't it? A decade spent comparing President Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Rush Limbaugh, and more recently wishing that fellow Democrat Hillary Clinton would snuff it is all perfectly fine, but the left is positively apoplectic when their own firing squad turns circular.

(Which actually happens with surprising regularity.)

In his latest op-ed, Hugh Hewitt writes:

The environmental lobby owns Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, and Barack Obama –the brave new leader—doesn’t dare take it or them on. That lobby is applauding the deindustrialization underway, and their attitude is that a depression wouldn’t be such a bad thing as a lesson in learning how to live within our environmental means. Their jobs aren’t on the line, after all, and their disdain for the impacted industries is complete.

What they and the Triple D Democrats hasn’t counted on, though, was America making the connection between the deteriorating economy and their anti-energy agenda.

Energy is freedom. Energy is prosperity. Every Democrat on the fall ballot is part of the anti-energy party which is wrecking havoc on the economy and every family’s budget. A vote for any Democrat is a vote for shortages, rising gas prices, rising unemployment, and falling production. A vote for any democrat is a vote for failing airlines and collapsing financial institutions and for the shuttering of car plants and large manufacturing.

A growing, vibrant economy needs energy. The Democrats are anti-energy.

It is that simple.

Read the whole thing, then sign the petition.

Update: Found via Instapundit, Jack Kelly writes, "it takes mighty, repeated blows" to knock through the general public's inattention and apathy towards politics. Kelly adds, "As Ronald Reagan put it, a successful candidate must paint 'with bold colors, not pale pastels'":

But Mr. McCain has been Hamlet when he needs to be Henry V. He is discarding a strong hand through mixed messages and equivocation. He supports drilling on the outer continental shelf, but opposes it in ANWR. He backs a "cap and trade" program to reduce carbon dioxide emissions that would devastate our economy. Nuance is important in policy-making, but can be disastrous in political campaigning. If the trumpet be uncertain …

Mr. McCain needs to decide, pronto, which is more important to him: Winning the election or receiving an occasional kind word from liberal pundits who will vote against him.

If he wants to win, Mr. McCain needs to demonstrate in a dramatic way he'll take every reasonable step to increase energy supplies - including drilling in ANWR.

And he needs to do it soon. The No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, Dick Durbin, who is from Barack Obama's home state of Illinois, said Wednesday: "I'm open to drilling and responsible production." Mr. Obama has altered his position on virtually every issue he campaigned on during the primaries. Could another flip-flop be in the offing?

"Durbin's comment may be a signal that Obama will pivot soon," said the Wall Street Journal's Jim Taranto.

As I wrote last month, the first man who stands up on a podium in the middle of America's Vast Pestilential Wasteland and says the equivalent of this post's headline wins the election.

It's safe to say that Jesse Jackson isn't Senator Barack Obama's biggest fan right at the moment. And I think it's equally safe to assume that Tom Blumer isn't enjoying Obama's preemptive strike on the economy:

Remember the grief Dick Cheney received in late 2000, and then President Bush in early 2001, when they were accused of “talking down the economy”?

In summer of 2008, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, presidential candidate Barack Obama, and Senate majority leader Harry Reid aren’t merely talking the economy down; they’re taking it down.

They have created what I am calling the POR (Pelosi-Obama-Reid) economy. Businesses and investors are responding to their total lack of seriousness by battening down the hatches and preparing for the worst.

Meanwhile, the more rarefied quadrants of the leftwing also seem to lack a universal appreciation for Obama's triangulation efforts, as he seeks to move from the far left to somewhere closer to nearby to within shouting distance of the center left:

Hope.

Change.

It was all you talked about.

Then the FISA bill you gave the telecom companies retroactive immunity - something you said you were against - and voted FOR it on the senate floor.

Third party candidates, here I come. You’re no different than McCain.

Man, can Obama's inclusiveness bring everyone together, or what?

Last year, Mark Steyn noted that "Celebrity behavior has been pretty consistent for the last century:"

In the Twenties, Hollywood stars shagged anything that moved, did drugs, divorced routinely - but they (or, at any rate, the studios) understood that it would not be good for this stuff to get out, and on the rare occasions it did get out it was a career ender. The gulf between the celeb life and the lives of the masses was a very well-kept secret.

Obviously, that's not the case these days, illustrating huge changes in cultural mores. I'm not sure whatever happened to The Summer of George, but Michele Catalano writes that this year is "the Summer of Tabloid Divorce":

Let’s face it. We are a culture obsessed with our stars. Somewhere around the time of OJ Simpson’s fall from grace, the gossip rags went from generally fawning over lifestyles of the rich and famous to excitedly pointing out their flaws. We have made a culture of watching the unraveling of our pop culture idols. From the Star to TMZ, it’s all about pointing out the inadequacies of the elite, be it mental or physical. If it not Britney Spears’s mental breakdown, it’s Kirstie Alley’s ballooning weight. Behind every story about Angelina Jolie’s expanding brood of children, there’s a story about Brad Pitt’s supposed infidelity. We’ve created an industry devoted to gloating over the downfall of the rich and famous.

It’s not hard to see why we do it. Here’s someone with more money than we could ever imagine. While we’re struggling to make this month’s mortgage, they are spending $7,000 on a handbag. While we contemplate a vacation in our own backyard, they are jetting off to France for a weekend wine tasting.

For some people, there’s a certain satisfaction in seeing their idols brought down to a more human level. Look, they cry just like us! They have feelings! Their lives can fall apart, too! It’s vindication for us that money can’t buy happiness. For others, there’s a smugness that goes with the stories. You may have millions, but at least my marriage is better than yours. At least my kids aren’t in jail.

I think there's an enormous amount of truth in that last paragraph. In the first half of the century, when society didn't know anything about Hollywood's stars, it looked up to them; these days it laughs at their ridiculous foibles. I'm not sure if Hollywood considers that a fair trade, but its not like the worst tabloid offenders do all that much to eschew such publicity in the first place.

"Just cut to the chase and name the kid Rehab."

"Memoir says Madonna's true love is herself."

Orrin Judd sums up exactly what I was thinking about the outcome of Jesse Jackson's Kinsleyesque gaffe in the perfect headline: "If Barry Won't Come To Sista Souljah..."

Incidentally--Jesse Jackson making a crude disparaging remark when he didn't think the mics were on? Whodathunkit?!

Update: "Shakedown's Meltdown"!

More: "It’s a win-win for both of them in the long term."

Around 1969 and '70, when The Who's Tommy was a pop culture phenomenon, Pete Townshend and his manager, Kit Lambert were culturally aware enough to know that when they booked their self-described rock "opera" into real opera houses, they were veering dangerously close to camp. It was only The Who's sledgehammer live stage show (and Townshend's often great songwriting) that saved them--at least until Ken Russell arrived on the scene to direct the movie version a few years later.

Flash-forward to nearly 40 years on, and we find two prominent cinematic auteurs also seeking to enter the rarefied world of opera. But are they self-aware enough to know that the joke will be on them if their choice of venues actually comes to pass?

I can't be entirely certain, but I'd say there's a reasonable chance of a penumbra of an emanation of a rumor that these people simply are not here to make friends:

(From the friendly neighborhood Manolo himself at his terrific gossip blog, Ayyyy!)

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 that Big Government (whether in the central or the local form) could solve all social problems, and through its interventions achieve absolute justice and harmony, is collapsing. And in its last moments, in its disbelief and agony at its own failure, it is lashing out in every direction: if the earlier measures haven't dealt with crime/public disorder/anti-social behaviour/under-performing hospitals/insufficient recycling, we must add yet more layers of official interference.

If government fails to achieve its objectives, it must be because it isn't doing enough, isn't being sufficiently pro-active - so let's pass another law, bring in a further layer of intrusion, take away another dimension of personal responsibility from community life.

But somehow, everything that government does makes things worse: leads to more perverse consequences and unforeseen complications. And the panic increases and the desperation grows and we get yet more laws and rules and targets and misapplied regulations.

Because they have taken so much power over our lives, we feel free to blame the governing classes for everything that goes wrong. And they feel they must address our every difficulty because everything is their fault. (Indeed, their interventions so frequently exacerbate our problems that we are actually quite right to blame them much of the time.)

When there is a real crisis - not just dog poo or over-loaded wheelie bins - the solution always follows the same formula: take more power away from the people.

For example, the price of home-heating is now a serious problem, so what does the Government suggest? A return to zero VAT for heating fuel, which would lower the price instantly and significantly for everyone? Nope. What they propose is a hugely intrusive programme (at present illegal under data protection laws) in which private financial information about the poor would be handed to power companies, in the hope that the disadvantaged might be given more leeway in paying their bills.

So somewhere in the corridors of Whitehall, someone could have the power to decide which of us is deserving enough to have the confidential details of our hardship handed over to some anonymous manager at British Gas or Npower for their compassionate consideration. (Why not medical records, too? Surely the chronic sick could be given heating privileges?)

This madness is not all Gordon Brown's fault. He just happens to be the man presiding over the final moments of a political philosophy that has reached a dead end.

As Robert Conquest recently wrote, in the Soviet Union's last decade of existence, "came the realization by some in Moscow that the whole regime had become nonviable economically, ecologically, intellectually— and even militarily—largely because of its rejection of reality." Will the Anglosphere's left reach a similar tipping point within the foreseeable future?

(Via Theo Spark's Last of the Few. What--doesn't everyone read it for the articles...?)

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".

"Obama's catch-phrase is 'Change you can believe in.' Maybe it's time to start asking who Obama has in mind when he says 'you.'"

Meanwhile, Noel Sheppard asks--and I think he already knows the answer as well as you and I do--if the MSM will report this story.

The Canadian Press notes, "The man whose controversial writing is at the centre of a B.C. Human Rights Tribunal complaint is daring the tribunal to rule against him":

Two members of the Canadian Islamic Congress filed the complaint with the tribunal over an excerpt of Mark Steyn's book published in Maclean's magazine in 2006, saying it was hateful and showed contempt for Muslims.

"We want to lose," Steyn said Friday.

"We want to lose so we can take it to a real court and if necessary up to the Supreme Court of Canada and we can get the ancient liberties of free-born Canadian citizens that have been taken away from them by tribunals like this.

"We want those ancient civil liberties restored."

Steyn, who did not address the tribunal but was in the hearing room for some of the submissions, said he's "terrified" that the issue will be dismissed by the tribunal because the lawyer for the congress "put on such a staggeringly inept case."

Though not present for the entire five-day hearing, Steyn was not shy about how he feels towards the tribunal. He's called its members "pretend judges" and the system a joke.

"I think this court shames the province of British Columbia and is simply incompatible with the traditions of a great free society with a long, legal inheritance," he said outside the hearing room.

* * *

The hearing has been closely followed by members of the Muslim community.

Tarek Ramadan of Vancouver said that while hurtful things are often written about Muslims in the media, he was most offended by how Maclean's magazine dealt with the controversy.

"They're being a little difficult about giving the Muslim community a chance to rebut the article," he said. "Ideology should be faced with ideology."

Fellas, your soapbox awaits--write as many words as you like on the topic, as often as you like, whenever you like, and totally free of charge.

(Via Steyn Online.)

Update: Video added above found via Feet Of Fury.

Hope and Change doesn't arrive soon enough for this bitter, disgruntled worker, who has the audacity to do the full Pete Townshend auto-destruct routine to his corner of the cubicle farm:

http://view.break.com/513310 - Watch more free videos

(Via Breitbart.tv)

Update: In sharp contrast, life is infinitely more laidback inside this particular office park.

Andrew Klavan, the author of True Crime, adopted by Clint Eastwood for the big screen, albeit in a slightly bowdlerized form, visits an inner city fourth grade class, and comes away noting:

Beating poverty in America nowadays is largely a matter of personal behavior. Get a high school diploma, don’t have kids until you’re married, don’t get married until you’re 21, and you probably won’t be poor. It also helps if you work hard, show up on time, act courteously, and avoid anything felonious.

But where are these kids going to learn such things? It’s the stuff you just sort of absorb in a healthy, traditional, two-parent home, and that’s exactly what they’re missing. If they learn what they’ve lived, they’re done for—the girls too likely to “come out pregnant” like their mothers, the boys to be underemployed and maybe even do time.

You can’t legislate responsibility, either. Personal behavior in a free society has to be a matter of choice—choice without which there is no virtue—virtue without which a society can’t be free.

It seems to me that leaves these kids only one recourse: the culture. Where the institution of family is broken, only the surrounding culture can teach people the inner structures required for a life of liberty.

Many conservatives often seem to have given up on culture or not to care. There’s a strong strain of philistinism on the right. When we talk about “culture wars,” we usually mean preventing the courts from redefining marriage or promoting abstinence instead of birth control: culture, in other words, as the behavioral branch of politics.

Culture, in the true sense, is more than that. It’s the whole engulfing narrative of our values. It’s the stories we tell. Leftists know this. These kids get an earful from the Left every day. Their schools serve up black history in a way guaranteed to alienate them from the American enterprise. Their sanctioned reading list denies boys the natural fantasies of battling villains and protecting women from harm. Any instinct the girls might have that their bodies and their self-respect are interrelated is negated by the ubiquitous parable of celebrity lives. And I hardly need mention the movies and TV shows that endlessly undermine notions of manly self-discipline, feminine modesty, patriotism, and all the rest.

Conservatives respond to this mostly with finger-wagging. But creativity has to be answered with creativity. We need stories, histories, movies of our own. That requires a structure of support—publishing houses, movie studios, review space, awards, almost all of which we’ve ceded to the Left.

There may be more profitable businesses in the short run. The long run, as always, depends on the young. If you want to win their hearts, you have to tell them stories. I have reason to believe they’ll listen.

It's all part of the Great Relearning, especially important when the rest of culture is essentially ashamed of any history that's prior to 1968.

No, that's not a Frank Zappa song title, though if he were alive, hopefully he'd be satirizing this:

Beware of the Brown Note.

That's the word among some political activists as the Democratic National Convention nears.

As legend has it, the Brown Note is an infrasonic frequency believed to resonate through human body parts and cause a loss of bowel control. Some protesters are convinced that Denver police will amplify such low frequencies to subdue them in August.

"They'll bring out all the technologies they can get their hands on," says activist Ben Yager. "I wouldn't put anything past police in terms of crowd control."

Sounds paranoid?

Uh, yeah. But like the mythical brown note itself, paranoia strikes deep...

(HT: MM)

Clearly, I've been going about this whole DIY video thing entirely the wrong way...

From the home office deep inside the Stonecutters' headquarters, a look at conspiracy theories from the era of JFK, up to 9/11 and the current election year, and from General Jack D. Ripper to Rosie O'Donnell and Reverends Jeremiah Wright and Michael Pfleger.

You can see longer clips of some of the more recent players here. The complete edition of Peter Robinson's recent interview with Camelot and the Cultural Revolution author James Piereson can be found at National Review Online.

The clip of NBC's Andrea Mitchell referring to Obama having to "figure out a way to get a fair vote if he's the nominee in those red states" with their "Katherine Harris-type election officials" is available at Eyeblast.tv. (I really wanted to include a snippet of this clip from last year of Mitchell's hard-hitting detective skills in action, but in order to bring things in under 10 minutes for inclusion on YouTube, it ended up on the virtual cutting room floor.) And the December 2001 Reason article on the new breed of General Jack Rippers and their fluidic obsessions is here.

This episode is a sequel of sorts to the segment earlier this month titled "Radical Chic: Frozen In Amber"; this is a slightly broader view of a related but larger topic, but you'll certainly recognize a couple of the same players.

And for the rest of the earlier Silicon Graffiti videos, tune in here.

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.

Chris Noth, "Mr. Big" in Sex And The City, "Thinks New York Is Too ‘Commercialized’":

The actor, who began residing in New York City in the 1970s, told Interview magazine that its appeal has greatly lowered over the years. “New York is pretty much commercialized to the point of no return,” he complained. Noth also misses the city’s creative scene, stating, “It’s very suburban. The art scene really left, except in patches. It’s all about sort of a corporate sensibility, and it’s squeezed out room for any other kind of sensibility.”

Ironically, for a guy who makes his living playing a cop on TV, it sounds like Chris longs for the nadir of Big Apple's law enforcement, proving once again the inviolability of Bill Whittle's Lou Grant Effect.

Listening to the clip of Father Pfleger on The Hugh Hewitt Show, before he goes off into the high dudgeon apex of his anti-Hillary shtick, I got a distinct Dick Shawn in The Producers flashback from the tone of his voice:

Come to think it, Pfleger sounds infinitely more appropriate for the role that Shawn's character was auditioning for.

As I wrote back in March, when the New Black Panthers dropped in on Barack Obama's Website:

Remember those carefree days so long ago when all we worried about with liberal presidential candidates were bimbo eruptions?

After squelching the Panthers, the Ayers, and Reverend Wright, comes yet another radical chic acquaintance to be thrown under the bus, and airbrushed out of the campaign:

As I have traveled this country, I've been impressed not by what divides us but by all that that unites us. That is why I am deeply disappointed in Father Pfleger's divisive, backward-looking rhetoric...

I'll bet he is.

Update: "Meanwhile, Back at Trinity United..."

More: "Houston, we have a problem."

Last Update For Now: "All of Barack Obama’s men of bad faith": Your one-stop shopping guide to all of Obama's men of the cloth (as Mort Sahl once quipped about Jesse Jackson, that cloth being cashmere), so far.

Well give 'em credit: at least they're threatening to recreate 2000 instead of '68. But like much of "progressivism's" rhetoric, this nostalgic cliche is starting to feel almost as old and clapped out as your local folkie playing "Imagine" and "Give Peace A Chance" on his out of tune acoustic guitar. Or, given her early role in the Rocky Horror Picture Show, another chorus of "Let's Do The Time Warp, Again!"

“I’ve got a lot of flak from feminists who feel that I should be supporting Hillary Clinton, but I thought the whole point of feminism is that you’re not supposed to be defined by gender,” she says…

Always busy, [Susan] Sarandon is about to start work on the romantic period drama The Colossus, but with the presidential election campaign being heatedly contested, she also has bigger things to consider.

“If McCain gets in, it’s going to be very, very dangerous,” she says.

“It’s a critical time, but I have faith in the American people. If they prove me wrong, I’ll be checking out a move to Italy. Maybe Canada, I don’t know. We’re at an abyss.”

Yes, it's always a choice of polar opposites, isn't it? The Heaven-on-Earth of the messiah-like rookie liberal Democrat senator, or the abyss of the war hero moderate Republican senator.

And speaking of which, Allah notes:

She’s been a trooper up ’til now — 36 years of her life lived under Republican presidents and still, somehow, she hasn’t left yet. How does she stand it?

Meanwhile, Brian Faughnan has the logical response that most will have after the third consecutive go-around of this rhetoric: prove it to me, sister:

It's a valiant try by Ms. Sarandon, but the voters are unlikely to be fooled. We'll never know how many cast votes for George Bush in 2004, anticipating that Alec Baldwin, Robert Redford, Janeane Garofalo, Michael Moore, and many others would pack up and move to Canada. Alas, they failed to hold up their end of the deal.

Tell me Ms. Sarandon: how do I know that if I vote for John McCain, you'll keep your promise?

Canada--it's just a jump to the left!

Thomas Bartlett asks, "Did a 'dream team' of biblical scholars mislead millions?":

Marvin Meyer was eating breakfast when his cellphone buzzed. Meyer, a professor of religious studies at Chapman University, has a mostly gray beard and an athletic build left over from his basketball days. His friends call him "the Velvet Hammer" for his mild demeanor. He's a nice guy.

The voice on the other end belonged to a representative of the National Geographic Society. They were working on a project and wanted his help.

"That's very interesting," he remembers saying. "What do you have in mind?"

"We can't tell you," was the reply.

That was not the answer he expected.

"Let me see if I understand this," Meyer said. "You'd like me to agree to do a project with you, but you won't tell me what that project is. Is that right?"

"Exactly."

He would have to sign a nondisclosure agreement first — which, in the end, he agreed to do. Not long afterward, Meyer found himself locked in an office in Washington, with a desk, a pile of dictionaries and lexicons, and one of the most sought-after religious texts in recent history, the Gospel of Judas. For a week he worked almost nonstop on the 26-page text, translating the Coptic, an ancient Egyptian language written with Greek letters, into English. As he translated, a startling portrait of Judas Iscariot emerged. This was not the reviled traitor who betrayed Jesus with a kiss. This was the trusted disciple, the close confidant, the friend. This was a revelation.

When the Gospel of Judas was unveiled at a news conference in April 2006, it made headlines around the world — with nearly all of those articles touting the new and improved Judas. "In Ancient Document, Judas, Minus the Betrayal," read the headline in The New York Times. The British paper The Guardian called it "a radical makeover for one of the worst reputations in history." A documentary that aired a few days later on National Geographic's cable channel also pushed the Judas-as-hero theme. The premiere attracted four million viewers, making it the second-highest-rated program in the channel's history, behind only a documentary on September 11.

* * *

One of the seven million people who watched the National Geographic documentary was April D. DeConick. Admittedly, DeConick, a professor of biblical studies at Rice University, was not your average viewer. As a Coptologist, she had long been aware of the existence of the Gospel of Judas and was friends with several of those who had worked on the so-called dream team. It's fair to say she watched the documentary with special interest.

As soon as the show ended, she went to her computer and downloaded the English translation from the National Geographic Web site. Almost immediately she began to have concerns. From her reading, even in translation, it seemed obvious that Judas was not turning in Jesus as a friendly gesture, but rather sacrificing him to a demon god named Saklas. This alone would suggest, strongly, that Judas was not acting with Jesus' best interests in mind — which would undercut the thesis of the National Geographic team. She turned to her husband, Wade, and said: "Oh no. Something is really wrong."

She started the next day on her own translation of the Coptic transcription, also posted on the National Geographic Web site. That's when she came across what she considered a major, almost unbelievable error. It had to do with the translation of the word "daimon," which Jesus uses to address Judas. The National Geographic team translates this as "spirit," an unusual choice and inconsistent with translations of other early Christian texts, where it is usually rendered as "demon." In this passage, however, Jesus' calling Judas a demon would completely alter the meaning. "O 13th spirit, why do you try so hard?" becomes "O 13th demon, why do you try so hard?" A gentle inquiry turns into a vicious rebuke.

Then there's the number 13. The Gospel of Judas is thought to have been written by a sect of Gnostics known as Sethians, for whom the number 13 would indicate a realm ruled by the demon Ialdabaoth. Calling someone a demon from the 13th realm would not be a compliment. In another passage, the National Geographic translation says that Judas "would ascend to the holy generation." But DeConick says it's clear from the transcription that a negative has been left out and that Judas will not ascend to the holy generation (this error has been corrected in the second edition). DeConick also objected to a phrase that says Judas has been "set apart for the holy generation." She argues it should be translated "set apart from the holy generation" — again, the opposite meaning.

As with The Da Vinci Code, It sounds like National Geographic attempted to not-so-boldly go into the same moral inversion that Kenneth Anger had already gone 30 years ago, only to have the rug pulled out from under them. As Orrin Judd writes, "When the marketing campaign comes first the translation is bound to be sketchy."

Brent Bozell writes:

At the dawn of the Democratic primary race between Barack and Hillary, news anchors like ABC’s Diane Sawyer were caught up in the question: Is America more poisoned by racism or sexism? If like ABC, you think the country is still dragging its knuckles in the primordial slime, then the expected primary victory of Obama provides the answer: the country is more sexist.

Hillary’s now playing this card, even including the national media as an accomplice, as the rest of the poker palace is emptying out. Remember how the first President Bush suddenly discovered the "Annoy the Media, Vote Bush" tactic in the last futile days of 1992? Hillary looks just as pathetic trotting out this "Annoy the Media, Vote Hillary" angle in obvious desperation. Yet some in the press are biting. Washington Post reporter Lois Romano interviewed Hillary and asked her if her media coverage didn’t suggest mistreatment of women. Romano suggested "I get the idea that it's really pissed off a lot of women."

The chauvinist-pig national media? It sounds odd to hear liberals entertaining the notion that their profession hates women. It is never a function of the "news" media being too liberal. It is the lament that the news media are not liberal enough.

Hillary is charging that sexism has been greeted as more respectable in this campaign, when it should rejected just as heartily as racism, and the news media are complicit in this ugly turn of events. "It does seem as though the press at least is not as bothered by the incredible vitriol that has been engendered by comments and reactions of people who are nothing but misogynists."

But in contrast to Mrs. Clinton's take, Peggy Noonan notes this:

Where to begin? One wants to be sympathetic to Mrs. Clinton at this point, if for no other reason than to show one's range. But her last weeks have been, and her next weeks will likely be, one long exercise in summoning further denunciations. It is something new in politics, the How Else Can I Offend You Tour. And I suppose it is aimed not at voters -- you don't persuade anyone by complaining in this way, you only reinforce what your supporters already think -- but at history, at the way history will tell the story of the reasons for her loss.

So, to address the charge that sexism did her in:

It is insulting, because it asserts that those who supported someone else this year were driven by low prejudice and mindless bias.

It is manipulative, because it asserts that if you want to be understood, both within the community and in the larger brotherhood of man, to be wholly without bias and prejudice, you must support Mrs. Clinton.

It is not true. Tough hill-country men voted for her, men so backward they'd give the lady a chair in the union hall. Tough Catholic men in the outer suburbs voted for her, men so backward they'd call a woman a lady. And all of them so naturally courteous that they'd realize, in offering the chair or addressing the lady, that they might have given offense, and awkwardly joke at themselves to take away the sting. These are great men. And Hillary got her share, more than her share, of their votes. She should be a guy and say thanks.

It is prissy. Mrs. Clinton's supporters are now complaining about the Hillary nutcrackers sold at every airport shop. Boo hoo. If Golda Meir, a woman of not only proclaimed but actual toughness, heard about Golda nutcrackers, she would have bought them by the case and given them away as party favors.

It is sissy. It is blame-gaming, whining, a way of not taking responsibility, of not seeing your flaws and addressing them. You want to say "Girl, butch up, you are playing in the leagues, they get bruised in the leagues, they break each other's bones, they like to hit you low and hear the crack, it's like that for the boys and for the girls."

And because the charge of sexism is all of the above, it is, ultimately, undermining of the position of women. Or rather it would be if its source were not someone broadly understood by friend and foe alike to be willing to say anything to gain advantage.

Of course. But one hopes that the unending alternate cries of racism and sexism by Democrats directed at their own constituents and media have some lasting repercussions. The next time the rhetorical racist or sexist card is played as a cheap debating tool against a Republican, he should consider replying with something along the lines of: Wait a second--all we heard for literally six months in 2008 from your party was how racist and sexist Democratic voters are. Perhaps you should get your own house in order before criticizing others.

Oh--it was just meaningless talking points back then to score points with your constituents? Some things never change, I guess.

Update: "‘Racial minorities cannot be racist in the U.S.A.’ and ‘all whites are racist in the U.S.A.’"

With apologies to Jack Benny for the above headline; while I'm not in the market for a new car at the moment, the timing of Honda's new sales pitch makes it an awfully appealing proposition...

Certainly better than this gaffe (at least I hope it's a gaffe--never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity) by Dunkin' Donuts' latest spokesperson. In any case, mister, they could use a pitchman like Michael Vale again!

Esquire's Stephen Garrett reviews Che, Steven Soderbergh's hagiographic (is there any other kind of Che movie from monolithic Hollywood?) new biopic:

Steven Soderbergh has a big fat crush on Ernesto “Che” Guevara. But don’t tell him he’s biased. “I’m an agnostic,” he told the press corps at the Cannes Film Festival, where his two-part, four-and-a-half-hour paean to the Third World’s favorite revolutionary made its world premiere on Wednesday night. “I’m not personally invested in building him up or tearing him down.”

And yet. With Che, the combined version of two Spanish-language films separately entitled The Argentine and Guerrilla (rushed to completion for Cannes, by the way, and shot and shown digitally without titles or end credits), the Oscar-winning director turns away from the box-office catnip Ocean’s Eleven franchise to pay penance at the altar of high cinema. The impulse is unimpeachably admirable; the result is heartbreakingly misguided. Why try to avoid passing judgment? Why pretend that you haven’t anyway?

Che already has a slew of biopics to his name, most recently by Brazilian underclass auteur Walter Salles, whose 2004’s The Motorcycle Diaries predictably romanticized the Argentine doctor during a young-adult road trip that enlightened him to the plight of the impoverished. Soderbergh himself said that he sees his films as companion pieces to Salles’ work, forming a trilogy of Che’s life -- albeit one without the butchering death squads, homophobia, and other unsavory aspects that liberals might find a tad too distastefully indefensible. (So much for agnosticism.)

Indeed. As the blurb above the review notes:

Steven Soderbergh's nonjudgmental, four-and-a-half-hour biopic about Che Guevara never elevates the Cuban revolutionary beyond iconic T-shirt status.

Yes, young men fall all over themselves to attend film school and make the brutal climb up the Hollywood food chain to become film directors, all in search of the raw power that comes with...nonjudgmentalism!

Update: "Fortunately, No One Will Watch It". True--except for all of the college kids whose professors will force them to watch, both in first run at the theater, and--especially--in perpetuity as a classroom propaganda "teaching aid" once it's out on DVD.

Compare and contrast. First up, found via Kathy Shaidle, Ghost of a Flea notes, "A fifteen year old British boy faces prosecution for calling Scientology a cult."

Meanwhile, Steven Pollard of England's Spectator writes:

I make a point, as my friends will attest, of wearing a pair of stars and srtripes cufflinks. It might be slightly pathetic, but I want to demonstrate my solidarity with the nation leading the fight against barbarism.

Understandably, when strangers see but don't hear me, some jump to the conclusion that I am American. And it's instructive to see how some people behave when they see the cuffs.

On countless occasions I have been sneered at, sworn at and, twice, spat at. I would say - my memory is impressionistic on this - that by far the most common insult is a muttered "F*c*ing American". And I cannot recall such behaviour from anyone who looked older than 40ish.

Not being American, for me this is simply useful in seeing how common such prejudice is. Of course, just because it is only the under 40s who are vocal, it does not follow that others do not share their views.

It's not that usual to hear people give voice to their anti-semitic or anti-black bigotry. But in my experience, there is one prejudice which is now entirely acceptable: anti-Americanism.

Yes, if only America would just go away, along with another inconvenient democracy, which France's ambassador to Britain dubbed, shortly after after 9/11, as that "sh*tty little country", no doubt, all of England's myriad structural problems would resolve themselves instantly.

Update: Oh to be in Massachusetts:

Hummer Village of Norwood is where you go if you want to buy a Hummer in Massachusetts. We sent Mike Underwood there for a story on gas prices and people who don’t give a damn. They offered him a Hummer for a day. No “hummer” jokes please. I already made them all, until Underwood begged me to stop.

Underwood is a Brit. Not the soccer hooligan variety. A very civil, thoughtful, well-meaning chap. I told him this would be an important part of his American experience, where he could learn what it was like to be an American. Big, gas-guzzling, obnoxious, all over the road, disliked … and loving it. I told him to surrender himself to the Hummer, open himself to his inner Hummer.

That's the stuff!

Howard Kurtz spots vile commenters on Michelle Malkin's blog responding to Ted Kennedy's recent brain tumor announcement--but fails to notice an even worse level of vitriol amongst the far left commenters on the blogs of his print employer, the Washington Post.

And it's not the first time Kurtz's partisan blindspot in this area has occurred.

More at Michelle's Hot Air Website.

In over your head with too large a mortgage? Just toss the keys to the mansion in the mail, and return it to the bank. From baseball great Jose Canseco to freshman California Democrat congresswoman Laura Richardson, Michelle Malkin looks at the growing trend of "jinglemail".

James Taranto writes that "Last night found us at the annual dinner of the Commentary Fund, publisher of Commentary magazine...where Sen. Joe Lieberman delivered the Norman Podhoretz Lecture":

Lieberman cited at length a 1999 National Review article by Norman Podhoretz, in which Podhoretz credited President Clinton with saving Democrats from McGovernism. "I think the Democrats have been pretty thoroughly purged of the McGovernite spirit," Podhoretz wrote. "It pains to me [sic] to admit this, but I would estimate that there is now more isolationist sentiment in Republican than in Democratic ranks." Lieberman argued that in many ways, the 2000 ticket of which he was a part was more hawkish than its Republican counterpart.

Since then--really, since the end of 2002--the Democrats have turned hard to the left on foreign policy, with Lieberman a rare dissenting voice. The Connecticut senator praised President Bush for his Knesset speech last week, and said that Bush's criticism of those who advocate appeasement applies to Obama, whether the president meant it to or not.

In his most devastating criticism, Lieberman noted that Obama favors talks without preconditions with anti-American dictators in North Korea, Venezuela and Iran, while taking an antagonistic approach toward democratic allies in South Korea, Colombia and Iraq, opposing trade deals with the first two and threatening to withdraw U.S. military support from the last.

It's reminiscent of John Kerry*, the Democrats' 2004 nominee, who traipsed about the country denouncing America's allies as a "coalition of the bribed and the coerced" while promising to subject American foreign policy to a "global test." Hardly anyone remembers it now, but Lieberman actually endorsed Kerry. How could he?

We may never know. We thought about putting the question to Lieberman after the lecture, but instead we decided to ask him about the 2000 nominee. Two years after that election, we noted, Lieberman's erstwhile running mate was delivering angry anti-Iraq rants to MoveOn.org. What, we asked, happened to Al Gore?

Lieberman's answer: "Damned if I know."

Considering Al's many twists and turns over the last 20 years--and where he goes, so goes the center of gravity of his party, sad to say--that's really the question, isn't it?

Tough to like, you know, argue with this:

(With appropriate apologies to John Lukacs for the above headline, needless to say.)

In addition to racism and sexism, we can add ageism to the Democratic side of the election year, so far. Great way to capture that all-important AARP vote, fellas.

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.

Actually, given the seemingly permanent near-century-old reactionary state of "modern art", I'm just surprised there's a capital-C in the above-quoted UPI headline.

It sounds like Dr. Melissa Clouthier has a very similar take to my recent posts regarding what's in store in America in the next ten years or so:

Europeans are supposed to be enlightened. Yeah, I know. Whatever. But still, on the one hand they're turning into frigging Eurabia with all the conservative Muslims running around in burqas and on the other you've got thumbs that look like penises in public advertising aimed at children [in a new Playstation 3 ad running in Europe--Ed]. One of those philosophies is going to win, right? And which winner leaves Western Civilization the winner? The correct answer boys and girls is neither.

That seems to be the choices. Either nothing goes or everything does. Both ways lead to depravity and sexual dysfunction, ironically enough. One way leads to the objectification of women as vessels for male dominance or child bearing--underneath the black cover there's a vagina. The other way leads to the objectification of women and men and children as sex objects--no black sheet needed.

Americans, take note. This dichotomy, these two paths to destruction, is coming to a city near you.

Read the whole thing.

There's a passage from a 2005 essay by Umberto Eco that I've frequently quoted, as it neatly defines several elements of the mindset of our age in just a few carefully thought out sentences:

G K Chesterton is often credited with observing: "When a man ceases to believe in God, he doesn't believe in nothing. He believes in anything." Whoever said it - he was right. We are supposed to live in a sceptical age. In fact, we live in an age of outrageous credulity.

Indeed. While it's a cliche that ours is a cynical era, it really is just the opposite, as Eco noted. While college kids are instructed by their professors to "fight the power" and "speak truth to power" and to generally not trust that power (because it corrupts absolutely), all of that hard-bitten cynicism goes flying out the lefthand window at warp speed come election time. Jim Geraghty has a round-up of worshipful photos and illustrations of Obama that make him out, in quite hysterically literal fashion--to be the second coming; and in a post about Gene Healy's new book, The Cult of the Presidency, Betsy Newmark explains one of the reasons why we--and particularly the left, which often views government as a substitute religion--put our presidential candidates on such a pedestal:

With the Progressive Era and New Deal, our vision of what we asked of the federal government changed forever. Add in World War II, the Cold War, Great Society, and the War on Terror and it's clear that we're never going to return to a limited federal government or presidency. Liberals and libertarians will complain about the executive authority that George W. Bush has used in fighting against terrorism, but think of all that the Obama campaign is promising for their candidate. Some people have less concern for a presidential usurpation of power in order to defend us against terrorists and some people prefer to look to the president to use that power to fix our broken souls as Michelle Obama has promised that her husband, if elected president, could do for all of us.

"We have lost the understanding that in a democracy, we have a mutual obligation to one another -- that we cannot measure the greatness of our society by the strongest and richest of us, but we have to measure our greatness by the least of these. That we have to compromise and sacrifice for one another in order to get things done. That is why I am here, because Barack Obama is the only person in this who understands that. That before we can work on the problems, we have to fix our souls. Our souls are broken in this nation."

Whether we're looking for a president to keep us safe or fix our souls, we're certainly conceiving of a very different president than James Madison or even Alexander Hamilton ever envisioned. And we look to the federal government to have power encompass all of this. We're never going to be able to turn back the clock to an 18th or 19th century understanding of the presidency or the federal government. And perhaps there are few who would want to. When disaster strikes, whether it's a terrorist attack or a powerful hurricane, Americans will expect a president who can act with power and dispatch. If you think that George W. Bush is unique in his expansion of presidential powers, then you just haven't studied enough of our country's history. And there is not going to be some great return to an earlier understanding of what a president can or should be able to do whether we elect McCain or Obama.

Today’s “presidentialists of all parties”—a phrase that describes the overwhelming majority of American voters—suffer from a similar delusion. Our system, with its unhealthy, unconstitutional concentration of power, feeds on the atavistic tendency to see the chief magistrate as our national father or mother, responsible for our economic well-being, our physical safety, and even our sense of belonging. Relimiting the presidency depends on freeing ourselves from a mind-set one century in the making.

I'm afraid there may be far too much carbonized bunkum built up in our brains from those 100 years for that to be possible.

Found via Pajamas, which has thorough and regularly updated coverage of the West Virginia Democratic primary, Marie Cocco of the Washington Post writes, "As the Democratic nomination contest slouches toward a close, it's time to take stock of what I will not miss":

I will not miss the deafening, depressing silence of Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean or other leading Democrats, who to my knowledge (with the exception of Sen. Barbara Mikulski of Maryland) haven't uttered a word of public outrage at the unrelenting, sex-based hate that has been hurled at a former first lady and two-term senator from New York. Among those holding their tongues are hundreds of Democrats for whom Clinton has campaigned and raised millions of dollars. Don Imus endured more public ire from the political class when he insulted the Rutgers University women's basketball team.

Would the silence prevail if Obama's likeness were put on a tap-dancing doll that was sold at airports? Would the media figures who dole out precious face time to these politicians be such pals if they'd compared Obama with a character in a blaxploitation film? And how would crude references to Obama's sex organs play?

There are many reasons why Clinton is losing the nomination contest, some having to do with her strategic mistakes, others with the groundswell for "change." But for all Clinton's political blemishes, the darker stain that has been exposed is the hatred of women that is accepted as a part of our culture.

No, the darker stain is the hatred of the other, the opposite in general that flows through the identity politics of the left, from otherwise surprisingly "diverse" quarters.

Cocco's mantra is that she won't miss the sexism of the left, but that implies that such wounds are being put in the past. Why? Sides of the left that their media normally keeps well under wraps were exposed for all to see this year. In an ideal world the cliche that "sunlight is the best disinfectant" would be true, but these rifts aren't going away anytime soon.

Update: This portion of the latest essay by Camile Paglia dovetails remarkably well with the above rococo Cocco WaPo piece:

Hillary has certainly given a blast of artificial resuscitation to male-bashing paleo-feminism, which is back with a vengeance. The blogosphere is awash with accusations of "traitor" against women who have the temerity to vote for Obama. Gloria Steinem's anointed heir, Susan Faludi, weighed in with a recent New York Times op-ed about Hillary bizarrely arguing that a sports referee or umpire is "coded feminine" (huh?) and parallels the vintage American feminist as "prissy hall monitor" and "purse-lipped killjoy" -- a stereotype that Hillary the pugilist has broken. (Oh, really? When has Faludi ever endorsed pugilistic feminism before?)

With nice synchronicity, that same week Rebecca Walker, Steinem's goddaughter, was complaining about entrenched feminist "ideology" in the Sunday Times in London. The brand of feminism promoted by her mother, feminist icon Alice Walker, is in Rebecca's words "close to a cult": "I feel I had to de-programme myself in order to have independent thought." My own protest against the ideology problem in feminism has been going on, through word and deed, since the late 1960s. My latest salvo, "Feminism Past and Present: Ideology, Action, and Reform" (the keynote address of a conference on feminism at Harvard University in April) will appear in the Spring/Summer issue of Arion, to be published in print and on the Web in June.

Another point: Most of the media fell hook, line and sinker for the "Iron my shirt!" stunt at a Hillary campaign event in January in New Hampshire, where two scruffy male hecklers were clearly in collusion with her staff. (The signs -- including one suspiciously permitted on the stage itself -- were carefully positioned and lit, and Hillary had a pat prepared line to draw camera attention to them.) Those dorky guys, at least one with a link to a radio station, are far too young to have the slightest knowledge of an era when women ironed men's shirts -- or when shirts needed ironing at all! Businessmen's shirts go to the cleaners nowadays, and everyone else's gear is just tossed into the dryer. That hoax was designed to reawaken the atavistic resentments of older women voters -- and it worked.

[Watch a clip of the "Iron my shirt!" stunt, below] (Embedded in Paglia's post--Ed)

A perfect symbol of the empty rhetoric and slick manipulations of the Clinton campaign is its chairman, Terry McAuliffe, a wheeler-dealer businessman and former chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Despite our shared Syracuse background, I despise McAuliffe with every fiber of my being. On primary day in Pennsylvania last month, I voted for Obama in the suburbs and then dashed to 30th Street Station in Philadelphia to catch a train to New York (where I was to tape a TV interview with Sandra Bernhard for the In the Life gay channel).

There big as life right at the top of my departure stairs in the airy main lobby was Terry McAuliffe, dressed in a dark suit like a well-appointed undertaker and chatting away conspiratorially with two similarly dressed clones. A wave of aggression swept over me. From 10 feet away, I locked on to McAuliffe like the deranged ED-209 crime-fighting robot that shoots up a corporate boardroom in Paul Verhoeven's "RoboCop." Nouns like "scum" and "rot" and adjectives like "vile" and "corrupt" flashed through my mind, ready for ignition and firing. I struggled but uncharacteristically held my tongue. My cardinal principle of free speech was restrained by my subordinate principle of respect for shared public space. McAuliffe had as much right as I do to be free from harassment in a train station. But passersby missed what could have been a tasty little scene of 1960s-style street theater.

Probably wise--there's been so little of that in this election.

The New TeeVee blog embeds a video uploaded to YouTube taken during the midst of the horrific Chinese earthquake yesterday and notes:

The devastating earthquake in China today is just the latest crisis to showcase YouTube’s role as a primary source of firsthand accounts of breaking news. Last year, the video-sharing site gave us glimpses of the wildfires burning in southern California and of pro-democracy demonstrations in Myanmar. Now a video shot by a student shows us what it was like during China’s earthquake.

Meanwhile, Virginia Postrel adds:

From initial reports, the Chinese earthquake sounds pretty terrible. With magnitude of 7.9, it was 10 times as strong as the 1989 San Francisco quake and, according to U.S. Geological Survey stats (but not the LAT), more powerful than the 1906 quake that leveled San Francisco. And San Francisco, in either case, was much less populous than Sichuan province, which has 100 million people.

As bad as it was, however, the Sichuan quake would have been much worse had it occurred a few decades ago, when China was less open and prosperous and, thus, less resilient. As this MSNBC video points out a weaker 1976 quake killed a quarter million people. Back then, the Chinese government tried to suppress news of the quake, a stark contrast to today. Reading between the lins of this LAT report about local concerns, however, it seems Chinese government officials still don't quite know how to channel the charitable giving that inevitably follows such a disaster. But the Red Cross seems like a good start.

Back in 2001, in the aftermath of an Indian earthquake that killed 20,000, Jonah Goldberg also discussed the comparison between earthquakes in developed democracies and elsewhere:

Modern buildings have a tendency to fall down less than squalid tenements or shantytowns. Especially when you're rich enough to make them quake proof.

So again you ask, why is this relevant?

Well, if you listen to what the anti-globalization protesters are saying at the World Forum in Davos, Switzerland, or at my local coffeehouse, you'd get the impression that they have the best interests of poor people at heart. Of course, it turns out they don' t.

Globalization is generally something rich people are against and poor people are for, which is funny since rich people are supposed to be greedy and poor people are supposed to be content. This is true about both certain conservatives and liberals but for different reasons. Conservative anti-globalists and trade unionists fear what globalization will do to people inside our borders. That creates problems to be sure, but it's not nearly so evil as a certain breed of liberal nostalgia which wants to make the world safe for righteous tours of impoverished lands where noble savages still live in huts and starve with surprising regularity.

Okay so maybe most of them don't live in huts, but they do live in a crushing poverty that so many liberals think is preferable to being forced to eat at McDonalds or drink Starbucks coffee.

Modern buildings are also often a good place to be during hurricanes, much to the chagrin of some on the left.

Update: Via Instapundit on its brand new Pajamas-centric URL, Business Week explores firsthand earthquake blogging. That's something I'll be happy never to do again, and mine was nowhere near as severe as what Chengdu just went through.

At Pajamas HQ, Kathy Shaidle, who blogs at Five Feet Fury, has an article-length review of Daniel Flynn’s A Conservative History of the American Left:

The Left boasts enthusiasm and energy to spare, but its inability to learn from the past is its fatal flaw. As Flynn explains in the book’s introduction, “because of the suspicions of tradition inherent within radicalism, [the Left] largely ignores that past.” After all, visionaries “preoccupied with the triumphal future cannot pause to learn from the mistakes of the past.”

This refusal to check the rear-view mirror is reflected in the Left’s compulsion for coining extravagant, inapt, and frequently offensive historical analogies: these days, every conservative leader is “Hitler”, every war is “Vietnam,” and every petulant protester is the new “Rosa Parks.”

As Flynn points out to devastating effect, the sheer stupidity of such comparisons should, by rights, be enough to cripple them as rhetorical devices; alas, widespread historical illiteracy and an aversion to criticizing “protected” identity groups render healthy mockery almost impossible.

Read the whole thing; as Kathy notes, Flynn’s book sounds like it would make an exceptional double-feature alongside Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism, which itself is a potent centennial history.

Update: I should add Benjamin Wiker's 10 Books That Screwed Up the World: And 5 Others That Didn't Help to make the above titles into a pretty nifty troika.

Father Coughlin could not be reached for comment:

"All we're doing is going into the basket and saying, 'Damn, what did they do in '32, what did they do in '34, what did they do in '36,' and we're pulling them out, dusting them off, giving them a paint job, correcting the fenders a bit, and we're using them," Congressman Paul Kanjorski (D-PA) said. "To get us through the horrendous problems we may have over the next several years, we've got to make these old programs work, and we've got to be as inventive as hell."

Nice to know that with the Dow Jones about 12,700 points higher than it was in 1932, the left still sees nothing but Hoovervilles into eternity.

Keeping wide swatches of nearby sources of oil off-limits to drilling only ensures that Americans will be paying the Pelosi Premium for some time to come.

As Jim Geraghty writes, this would be a slam-dunk issue for John McCain to exploit--so naturally, don't hold your breath waiting for him to take it on.

Paging Theodore Dalrymple: Grist for your next essay on the decline and fall of western civilization is waiting right here.

Good question. Let's ask Bill Ayers next time we see him, or any of these folks.

(H/T: IP)

They call it witchcraft...Or the reality party, depending upon who you talk to.

Elsewhere, Cindy Crawford discovers her inner General Jack D. Ripper:

According to Crawford and the “Thirsty for Change” Web site, Americans use 50 billion water bottles a year.

“Fifty billion in America and only 50 percent are recycled,” Crawford said. “So that’s like 38 billion that aren’t recycled.”

The Exurban League explores the new math:

Let's see... 50 Billion x 50% = 25 Billion, subtract the loss factor, add in the safety margin, carry the missing supermodel brain cells... yep, 38 billion!

Do we know if Cindy has any thoughts on fluoridation?

(And don't even ask her about toilet paper...)

Update: Liberty Peak Lodge crosses the streams: check out the caption on the photo above this post.

With his rapidly becoming infamous quote Tuesday night on CNN that Democrats couldn't win in November with a coalition of “eggheads and African-Americans,” Paul Begala inadvertently reveals his inner-Stevenson.

But what would President Merkin Muffley Say?

Need to raise your blood pressure in a hurry? Just check out the photo that Marathon Pundit found of Bill Ayers--in whose home Obama launched his first political campaign in 1995--dancing on top of a crumpled American flag.

(Via Hot Air.)

Last week, we mentioned the strange op-ed by Paul Auster that the New York Times published. The author of the Weekly Standard's Scrapbook column follows up with this:

Readers with long memories will recall the spectacle of Columbia undergraduates--children of privilege enrolled at a distinguished Ivy League institution founded when New York was still a British colony--invading classrooms and administrative offices, manhandling deans, professors, and fellow students, stealing and destroying books and documents, vandalizing chambers devoted to learning, roaming corridors in search of fodder to burn. The Columbia strike of 1968 made a temporary celebrity of a student named Mark Rudd, and publicized the episode's emblematic slogan: "Up against the wall, motherf--r!"

It also unleashed something instructive in Paul Auster:

Speech followed tempestuous speech, the enraged crowd roared with approval, and then someone suggested that we all go to the construction site and tear down the chain-link fence. .  .  . The crowd thought that was an excellent idea, and so off it went, a throng of crazy, shouting students charging off the Columbia campus toward Morningside Park. Much to my astonishment, I was with them. What had happened to the gentle boy who planned to spend the rest of his life sitting alone in a room writing books? He was helping to tear down the fence. He tugged and pulled and pushed along with several dozen -others and, truth be told, found much satisfaction in this crazy, destructive act.

One of the great parlor games of modern scholarship is pondering how the German people--citizens of the land of Bach, Kant, and Goethe--could find themselves marching in step behind Adolf Hitler. Well, Paul Auster and his Boomer companions at Columbia offer a clue. Here is as plain and startling a description of the mob mentality--together with the attendant hysteria and romanticized violence--as you are likely to find in the op-ed pages of the New York Times, nicely camouflaged in the language of nostalgia and social protest.

If, in this presidential election year, anyone wonders how the political left grew estranged from the American mainstream, yielding the politics of the past four decades, they need only read Paul Auster's tribute to the Columbia strike, written "alone in this room with a pen in my hand" as "I realize that I am still crazy, perhaps crazier than ever."

The writer of the Scrapbook adds that every now and then, he's "seized with the thought that the last, best hope of mankind--or at any rate, for our peace of mind--will be the death of the last surviving member of the Baby Boom generation."

Of course, he's far from alone in that department--and for those keeping score at home, just follow along with this easy-to-use toteboard!

Australia's Tim Blair has a theory that he calls, logically enough, Blair’s Law. He describes it “the ongoing process by which the world's multiple idiocies are becoming one giant, useless force.” And in City Journal, John Murtagh writes that the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground were no exception in 1970:

During the April 16 debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, moderator George Stephanopoulos brought up “a gentleman named William Ayers,” who “was part of the Weather Underground in the 1970s. They bombed the Pentagon, the Capitol, and other buildings. He’s never apologized for that.” Stephanopoulos then asked Obama to explain his relationship with Ayers. Obama’s answer: “The notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was eight years old, somehow reflects on me and my values, doesn’t make much sense, George.” Obama was indeed only eight in early 1970. I was only nine then, the year Ayers’s Weathermen tried to murder me.

In February 1970, my father, a New York State Supreme Court justice, was presiding over the trial of the so-called “Panther 21,” members of the Black Panther Party indicted in a plot to bomb New York landmarks and department stores. Early on the morning of February 21, as my family slept, three gasoline-filled firebombs exploded at our home on the northern tip of Manhattan, two at the front door and the third tucked neatly under the gas tank of the family car. (Today, of course, we’d call that a car bomb.) A neighbor heard the first two blasts and, with the remains of a snowman I had built a few days earlier, managed to douse the flames beneath the car. That was an act whose courage I fully appreciated only as an adult, an act that doubtless saved multiple lives that night.

February 21st, 1970 was exactly five weeks after Leonard and Felicia Bernstein invited the Black Panthers up to his Park Avenue duplex for their fundraiser, along with some of his closest friends, including Otto Preminger, Barbara Walters, Frank Stanton, musician Peter Duchin, and the wives of Harry Belafonte, Arthur Penn, Sidney Lumet and Richard Avedon, as Tom Wolfe memorably described firsthand in Radical Chic.

(Via Hot Air, which has video of Murtaugh's appearance yesterday on Greta van Susteren's Fox News show.)

Update: And just to really bring things full circle...

Via Hot Air, comes this devastating snippet from the 1992 documentary on the Clintons' victory in 1992, The War Room. As Ed Morrissey writes:

And suddenly, Crackerquiddick is on the other foot. This looks like it came from The War Room, a documentary about the first Clinton presidential campaign, although I don’t recall the scene. Regardless, there can be little dispute about the people in the video being Carville, Stephanopolous, and Kantor.

What makes this worse is that Kantor gives that creepy, sotto voce whisper while saying this, knowing how bad it sounds but obviously unable to stop himself from saying it. Neither Carville nor Stephanopolous challenge Kantor, at least not in this clip. All three appear to agree that Indiana voters are worthless for Democrats even when they supported Clinton.

This isn’t quite as bad as Obama’s comments in San Francisco in a couple of respects. Hillary isn’t saying this, and it was 16 years ago, not six weeks ago. However, the disgust for the white working class comes through much more clearly in this video, and the fact that it comes from a former Clinton Cabinet official and current adviser makes it all the more compelling.

Indiana voters go to the polls in less than a week. Will they figure out which campaign despises them less?

Kantor counterclaims:

Mickey Kantor, who served as campaign chairman during Clinton's 1992 run for the White House and says he has offered help and advice to Sen. Clinton, insisted that the tape was a fraud and that he was exploring legal steps against the individual who posted it online.

"I've never used that word [the n-word] in my entire life, ever, under any circumstance, ever," an angry Kantor told The Huffington Post, citing his and his parent's work fighting for civil rights. "I have listened to [the video] and so have you. You can't tell what it is I'm saying in that second sentence, you can't decipher that."

But as Byron York notes, "I will agree that the n-word part in the second sentence is hard to make out on the video. But the "those people are s—t" part in the first sentence seems pretty clear."

The Internet Immortality Thesis comes into play once again, as someone clipped out this scene, captioned it, and uploaded it to YouTube--but it's obvious that Kantor knew that D.A. Pennebaker's documentary crew was filming him at the time.

Update: Doctored clip? Scroll to the bottom of Capt. Ed's post for updates.

More: Watching the longer version of the War Room clip that the above scene comes from, the audio of Kantor’s muffled whisper doesn’t sound at all different, so I don’t think the sound was doctored (fast-forward to about 4:35, when Kantor enters). But the caption is very likely a complete fabrication.

So, as Ed asks, who wrote it and uploaded the clip?

Last Update For Now: As you can see, the clip has been pulled. As Glenn Reynolds wryly notes, "I was hoping for change"; these sorts of dirty tricks aren't going to change the sentiments from those on the left who don't support "Mr. Getalong"--no matter which side this actually came from.

In my inbox was spam for something called "Pangea Day", apparently happening on May 10th. Wikipedia describes it as:

On May 10, 2008 Cairo, Kigali, London, Los Angeles, Mumbai, and Rio de Janeiro will be linked to produce a 4-hour program of films, music and speakers. The program will be broadcast live at the same time across the world. According to the festival organizers, "Pangea Day plans to use the power of film to bring the world a little closer together."

Pangea Day was created in 2006 when documentary filmmaker Jehane Noujaim won the TED Prize. Jehane wished to use film to bring the world together. May 10, 2008 will be the first Pangea Day event.

Seting aside the eternal right of return to 1968, I knew that big chunks of the anti-industrial left were hellbent on returning the planet to a near unpopulated state, or some other sort of Rousseauvian primitivism, but Pangea? Set the Wayback Machine way, way back, Mr. Peabody!

Ezra Levant explores the strange case of Montreal's "Bar Le Stud":

Pete Vere sends me this interesting case study of the wild animal biting madly. A Montreal gay bar, Bar Le Stud, told a woman named Audrey Vachon that she wasn't allowed in -- it was a men-only establishment, and had been happily operating that way for eleven years. Then the human rights commissions got involved, and Bar Le Stud has copped a plea bargain. We don't know the details of how much money Vachon got paid or -- and you know this was part of the deal, it usually is -- the kind of "sensitivity training" that Bar Le Stud's staff have to undergo.

A gay bar -- like a straight bar, like a Christian church -- has age-old rights that long pre-date our fads of "human rights". Bar Le Stud has property rights, which include the right to exclude people. They have freedom of association. They have contractual rights. Strangers have no "right not to be offended" by them. They have no "right" to come onto their property, to change the purpose of Bar Le Stud, and to interfere with its peaceful practices. But now they do.

Misguided gay rights activists -- like Darren Lund, and even Richard Warman -- have used the bludgeon of human rights commissions to batter down the real rights of others. But they have laid down precedents that, in this case at least, are being used against gays.

It doesn't happen often, because conservatives, and straights, and Christians, aren't as active as their opponents in the grievance culture that Canada's HRCs foment. And, of course, even if they were, the grievance-activist bias of HRC staff would probably dismiss those complaints.

But that can only last so long. As Mark Steyn pointed out in his last Maclean's column, Adolf Hitler didn't invent Germany's censorship laws, nor did he write the emergency powers provisions that the Nazis abused. They were all written by the liberal Weimar Republic.

Leftist and ethnic-identity activists have loved the HRCs because they have usually picked on those groups' enemies. But the dangerous precedents have been set, and everyone's rights are at risk, as Bar Le Stud has found out.

What we accept as the current definition of the culture war may look like a blissfully calm warm-up phase a decade or so from now. Consider the implications of a news story such as this, particularly if, as seems likely, such stories become more and more commonplace.

Update: Ezra concurs with my take, and notes: "Even if they don't believe in free speech or property rights for their opponents, liberals should protect the concepts for themselves." Read the whole thing, as they say.

The Bard of Jasperwood looks back on the events of the past few days with Lileksian understatement:

Interesting how we thought that Romney’s candidacy would lead to a discussion of religion and politics, eh? Turns out that was just the warm-up act.

The performance of the main attraction this weekend also places an interesting perspective on this recent quote regarding the citizens of the more remote exurbs of the Keystone State, eh?

"And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

Nora Ephron could not be reached for comment.

Update: "What The Clintons Did For Feminism, Could Obama do for race relations?"

More from the Time Warp files, as NRO's Greg Pollowitz links to a Huffington Post blogger none-too-keen on Keith Olbermann's typically hyperbolic language (and gee, welcome to the club!):

Olbermann was discussing the election with Newsweek's Howard Fineman, a frequent guest. They topic was, how can a winner finally be determined in this never-ending Democratic race for the nomination? Of course, the assumption was that it was Clinton that should be shown the door (despite clearly still earning her spot in the race thanks to, um, voters). Fineman said that, all the delegate math aside, ultimately it was going to take "some adults somewhere in the Democratic party to step in and stop this thing, like a referee in a fight that could go on for thirty rounds. Those are the super, super, super delegates who are going to have to decide this."

Said Olbermann: "Right. Somebody who can take her into a room and only he comes out."

Which sounds sort of like a rewrite of the Economist's infamous line earlier this month, which I quoted in my recent video:

The Democrats are all too aware that their civil war could spell disaster. A cavalcade of senior Democrats, including senators Patrick Leahy and Chris Dodd, have advised Mrs Clinton to retire to her room with a glass of whisky and a loaded revolver.

Are these the examples of the nuance that the left is so known for?

David Freddoso writes, "Republicans are jumping on Nancy Pelosi for getting the price of gasoline wrong by nearly a dollar in an interview":

I argue today that this is less significant than the fact that her promise to bring down gas prices was already a lie the moment she first uttered it. Pelosi isn't failing to do something about gasoline for lack of leadership or a plan, but because lower gas prices undercut a hugely important plank in the Democratic platform.

Higher gas prices are an essential part of creating economic disincentives against carbon pollution — that's the entire point of cap-and-trade, carbon taxes, and other proposed Global Warming fixes. In fact, today's high prices are already leading to greater conservation. Democratic complaints about gas prices are for election years — that's all they ever were.

Unlike Mrs. Pelosi, the more honest San Francisco Democrats will actually admit to that.

"Strap in. You’re in for a predictable 90-minutes."

And that's the problem with virtually every Hollywood film these days, isn't it? (Except that most films are nearly twice as long. At least, to paraphrase Alvy Singer, with H&K's new flick the food here is terrible, and mercifully, such small portions, too.)

Update: Writing for Pajamas Media, Kyle Smith of the New York Post notes that "there's only one decent political joke in the entire movie"--the direction of which, unintended or not, won't surprise many on the starboard side of the Blogosphere.

Couldn't he have have simply let it keep growing naturally to demonstrate the importance of sustained old growth forestry?

I once dubbed Pink Floyd's Roger Waters the Pat Buchanan of British rock: both, in retrospect, would have been quite OK with appeasing Nazi Germany; both are anti-Israel. But Julia Gorin has an excellent suggestion (and yes I'm very late to this) for Waters' next destination on his bringing "The Wall To The Wall" tours.

Of course, I could see why Rogers wouldn't want to Meddle there, not when his prospective audience would likely shout "One Of These Days, I'm Going To Cut You Into Little Pieces!" The Final Cut would then be followed by the Great Gig In The Sky, unless Waters plans to Run Like Hell after the gig.

OK, I'll stop now, before Brain Damage occurs...

"After 30 years of railing for separation of church and state, Bill Moyers comes to the aid of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright."

Glad to see that there's one man of the cloth that Moyers is willing to support! Meanwhile, several names and Webpages mysteriously have begun to go missing on Obama's Website.

Perhaps the rapture has arrived there.

Related: "In adversity, bitter pundits cling to their Obamessiah."

"Wretchard" of the Bellmont Club looks at Paul Auster, whom the New York Times notes, presumably without the intended irony, "is the author of the forthcoming 'Man in the Dark'":

Paul Auster's "Vietnam me act crazy" article in the New York Times is that worst of confessions: that kind that is accidentally funny. Explaining his strange behavior on a certain day in the 1960s, Auster says,

Being crazy struck me as a perfectly sane response to the hand I had been dealt — the hand that all young men had been dealt in 1968. The instant I graduated from college, I would be drafted to fight in a war I despised to the depths of my being, and because I had already made up my mind to refuse to fight in that war, I knew that my future held only two options: prison or exile.

Maddened by these alternatives, Auster went off and raised comparative hell.

After the outburst in the park, campus buildings were stormed, occupied and held for a week. ... Along with more than 700 other people, I was arrested — pulled by my hair to the police van by one officer as another officer stomped on my hand with his boot. But no regrets. I was proud to have done my bit for the cause. Both crazy and proud.

I hesitate to draw any comparisons with the present — and therefore will not end this memory-piece with the word “Iraq.” I am 61 now, but my thinking has not changed much since that year of fire and blood, and as I sit alone in this room with a pen in my hand, I realize that I am still crazy, perhaps crazier than ever.

"I am 61 now, but my thinking has not changed much" since 1968--which is as good a definition of hardened-in-concrete modern "progressivism" as you'll find.

Victor Davis Hanson writes that you go into these small artisan garrets in California like Hollywood, and, like a lot of small towns on the West Coast, it's not surprising that when people get bitter, they cling to identity politics and religions such as Scientology:

It is more interested in political correctness than profits, as the Iraq War movie bombs attest. Talent is no longer gravitating to Hollywood, but staying put in Europe and Asia. Alternate media, from the Internet to video games to cable television, mean that fewer go to the movies anymore (I went once in the last 12 months). The old bread-and-butter genres—like the Western or the war movie—are either moribund or merely landscapes for political revisionism.

One difference is the steady decline in the quality of male actors. We simply do not have a James Stewart, Burt Lancaster, Henry Fonda, Gregory Peck, Bill Holden, or John Wayne any more, much less brilliant against-the grain actors like a Robert Duvall, Lee Marvin, Jack Palance, or a Yul Brenner, nor character actors like a Slim Pickens or a Ben Johnson.

Today’s he-man actors don’t even sound the same as the old breed. Compare the speech patterns and intonation of Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Spencer Tracey, Henry Fonda or Bill Holden to those of a Sean Penn, Tom Cruise, or Tom Hanks—and there seems to be a new, but separate species of male. The appeal of a Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, or Daniel Day-Lewis is that they sound like, well, the old breed rather than sensitive metrosexuals.

Some of you will sigh: Victor, Victor, actors only reflect the society that produces them. We don’t have a Henry Fonda or Jimmy Stewart because we aren’t Fondas and Stewarts any more.

Perhaps, but what I also don’t understand is that we know that excellent war films—Breaker Morant, Saving Private Ryan, and Das Boot—win over critics and audiences. Why then do we keep seeing snoozers like Redacted, Lions for Lambs, or Stop Loss? Is there that little talent left?

A few years ago, Frederica Mathewes-Green wrote a superb essay on the transformation of Hollywood actors from men to perpetual adolescents. And if you work in an industry when one of your leading screenwriters can draft an essay for general consumption that includes the phrase...

This is an election about whether the people of Pennsylvania hate blacks more than they hate women. And when I say people, I don't mean people, I mean white men.

...your product is likely to reflect those values. Even if, as VDH notes, it costs that industry literally hundreds of millions at the domestic box office.

Speaking of movies, Glenn Reynolds links to a Popular Mechanics article that wonders when will Hollywood make another intelligent sci-fi movie. That's a topic we also discussed in this post from late 2006. In an industry that adopts to change as slowly as Hollywood (that's not really a knock--it's a titanic enterprise creating multi-million dollar budgeted movies involving armies of craftsmen and actors), most of the reasons haven't changed in the interim.

This bad.

Jennifer Rubin reminds us not to taunt happy fun Democrats such as Nora Ephron:

The Left is losing it. Not the election. Just any semblance of sanity. From one Barack Obama fan we learn, “This is an election about whether the people of Pennsylvania hate blacks more than they hate women.” And these are Democrats, mind you.

This is the religion they cling to--and it does seem to exacerbate their bitterness, eh?

No wonder their media keeps this stuff away from the general public.

Update: "Nora Ephron's Rage and Hatred".

Cuffy Meigs does the job that old media used to claim to do.

Update: More here (and note the accompanying photo) on what is likely to be a bottomless well. But Glenn Reynolds' readers note that John McCain hides a radical affiliation of his own:

"Hasn't McCain had a long association with former Klansman and fellow Senator Robert Byrd?"

As Glenn writes, Heh.^TM

Back in 1992, the late Pat Moynihan wrote "Defining Deviancy Down":

Moynihan argued that deviancy - crime, mental illness, out-of-wedlock births, etc. -- had become so rampant, had so thoroughly soaked into the culture, that we simply had to redefine the abnormal as normal to cope. By setting the bar lower, we comforted ourselves with the notion that the percentage of abnormal behavior was still manageable.

Moynihan's most famous example was the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. That event was a major turning point in American history, credited with helping to convince Americans to abandon prohibition. It warranted two entries in the World Book Encyclopedia. The actual details? Four gangsters murdered seven gangsters.

The CBS affiliate in Chicago notes that this weekend saw 32 shot, two stabbed, and six dead.

Related: "If I want a job cleaning your company’s toilets, I’ll have to present proof of citizenship and swear under penalty of perjury I’m legal, but if I mug you, beat you, and leave you for dead, it’s no questions asked?"

Stefan Beck quotes a terrific Theodore Dalrymple anecdote in the middle of his post on the “abortion as art” scandal involving Yale senior Aliza Shvarts:

Anyone seeking a little comic relief in the wake of Yale University’s alternately sickening and embarrassing “abortion as art” scandal need look no further than Terry Zwigoff’s 2006 comedy Art School Confidential. It’s very loosely based on a comic by Daniel Clowes, which appears in this anthology and is in many ways superior to the film as a satire of the mind-bending pretentiousness and inanity one finds in even the finest fine arts academies.

As I recall, one panel in Clowes’s original depicts the “old tampon-in-a-teacup trick”: Pressed for time? Cobble together some loaded imagery and insist with a straight face that it “raises questions” about something or other. “Raising questions” has enjoyed a lucrative career as the art world’s biggest con. When the shock-schlock “Sensation” exhibition appeared at the British Royal Academy of Art, Theodore Dalrymple asked its chief of exhibitions, Norman Rosenthal, what value he saw in a giant portrait, made up entirely of tiny handprints, of the child-murderess Myra Hindley. Right on cue, Rosenthal said that “the picture raises interesting questions.”

Dalrymple asked what those might be, politely reminding Mr. Rosenthal that “it must be possible to formulate them in words.” A picture is worth a thousand of them, after all—but in this case the ratio turned out to be more like 1:1, if a sharp intake of breath may count for a word.

Of course, most great works of art do raise questions, but they do so in addition to (for instance) being beautiful, or telling a story, or demonstrating proficiency of some kind. Bad art can rarely claim to do anything but raise questions. Yale senior Aliza Shvarts’s menstruation videos supposedly address “the ambiguity surrounding form and function [sic] of a woman’s body.” If, God forbid, that sounds to you like it might mean something, take a moment to pick it apart. What ambiguity? Is there some fundamental disagreement about whether the female form should function as a tube of red paint?

The fact that ridiculing the project and its unintelligible justification seems redundant is entirely the point. At any point in this project—which at best is a black eye for Yale and a waste of our time and at worst may lead to some lunatic assaulting Ms. Shvarts—an adult could have and should have stepped in and said, “This proposal is nonsense. There is nothing artistic about it and the questions it ‘raises’ are a figment of your imagination. You’re embarrassing yourself and your school.” None did.

Probably for about the same reason that Roger Kimball describes here:

A juror in the obscenity trial over Robert Mapplethorpe’s notorious photographs the S&M homosexual underworld memorably summed up the paralyzed attitude Orwell described. Acknowledging that he did not like Mapplethorpe’s rebarbative photographs, he nonetheless concluded that “if people say it’s art, then I have to go along with it.”

“If people say it’s art, then I have to go along with it.” It is worth pausing to digest that terrifying comment. It is also worth confronting it with a question: Why do so many people feel that if something is regarded as art, they “have to go along with it,” no matter how offensive it might be? Perhaps—just possibly—Aliza Shvarts has reminded us how untrue that statement is. If so, we are in her debt.

Of course, for those who think that a genre of "art" on the cusp of its second century is still "modern", you too can apply to the Yale Art School!

Update: Related thoughts from Maggie's Farm; be sure to follow the links.

Eric Trager writes, "The spectacle of a former U.S. president denouncing his fellow countrymen abroad was a Dixie Chicks moment for the ages"

Yesterday, following meetings with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and another Hamas delegation, Jimmy Carter blasted American attitudes regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “My country, the political arena of my country, is almost 100 percent supportive of the Israeli position,” Carter said. “You never hear any debates on both sides much, and most of the information is predicated on that sort of original premise.”

The spectacle of a former U.S. president denouncing his fellow countrymen abroad was a Dixie Chicks moment for the ages. But his choice of venue for decrying the lack of debate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was no less ironic: the American University in Cairo–where students are so unwilling to consider the “other side” that they threatened strikes and sit-ins when rumors surfaced that Israeli professors had been invited to campus. Most recently at AUC, a play that featured an Israeli character was protested by its own student-actors, who walked on the stage draped in kaffiyehs and donned “Palestine will remain Arab” t-shirts following the performance. (The actors objected to Israelis being portrayed “as humans only,” one cast member said.)

Jimmy could relate to that.

The decline and fall of Western Civilization, high and low edition: First, found via the Corner, here's a slice of life amongst the down and out of Commerce City, Colorado, as "Parents Fight Over Which Gang Toddler Should Join":

A couple fighting about which gang their 4-year-old toddler should join caused a public disturbance that resulted in the father's arrest, Commerce City police said Thursday.

On Saturday, Joseph Manzanares stormed into the Hollywood Video store where his girlfriend worked, threatened to kill her and knocked over several video displays and even a computer, Commerce City police Sgt. Joe Sandoval said.

After he ran out of the store, police were called and the 19-year-old was arrested at his home.

His girlfriend told police that they had been arguing about the upbringing of their son and which gang he should belong to. The teen mother, who is black, is a member of the Crips. Manzanares is Hispanic and belongs to the Westside Ballers gang, the woman said.

"They have different ideas on how the baby should be raised. Basically, she said they cannot agree on which gang the baby would 'claim,'" Sandoval said.

Funny, when I was kid, my parents argued over whether I would join Kiwanis or the Rotary Club.

In the past, it was theorized that advanced education was a way out of the lower classes. But the Ivy League is rushing headlong to level the playing field, as this satiric IowaHawk post highlights: Learn art the Yale way, through their exclusive DYNAMIC TRANSGRESSION™ method! Got a body fluid? Then life's your canvas!

Which is certainly a reminder of one of James Lileks' key tenets: "If art contains s***, we should take it at its word."

IowaHawk's post is titled "Close Cover Before Striking", and it's based on the ads one used to find on packs of matches. I wonder what ad was on the pack Virginia Woolf used to fight the heteronormative patriarchy back in 1938?

(70 years ago--which is a reminder at how ancient and clapped out so many "modern" and "transgressive" poses truly are.)

In all genres of show business, there's an enormous amount of snobbery. For example, the theater world often looks down on movie performers, and the movie industry is awfully snobbish towards those who work in TV. So it's always nice to see one group of professional actors honoring a fellow actor who happens to work in a different medium.

Update: More from Scott Baker and Liz Stephans on Breitbart.tv's B-Cast Internet news show, including audio and video segments of the speech that Tim Robbins asked not to be published. Proving that once again that legacy journalists and the phrase "off the record" are almost always unrelated concepts.

Burt Prelutsky looks back to the period of his youth with a gimlet eye, which is much more than Dick Cavett could ever do:

I can’t look at Petraeus — his uniform ornamented like a Christmas tree with honors, medals and ribbons — without thinking of the great Mort Sahl at the peak of his brilliance. He talked about meeting General Westmoreland in the Vietnam days. Mort, in a virtuoso display of his uncanny detailed knowledge — and memory — of such things, recited the lengthy list (”Distinguished Service Medal, Croix de Guerre with Chevron, Bronze Star, Pacific Campaign” and on and on), naming each of the half-acre of decorations, medals, ornaments, campaign ribbons and other fripperies festooning the general’s sternum in gaudy display. Finishing the detailed list, Mort observed, “Very impressive!” Adding, “If you’re twelve.”

Cavett utters bromides from 40 years ago, from another war that the left abandoned midway through in an effort to score partisan points and gather insider power while genocide occurred thousands of miles away--and massively escalated, once the American left had their way and we abandoned our allies--and thinks it's witty?

Well, I guess it is--if you're twelve.

Update: The 1960s never end at Politico either, where two former Washington Post journalists declare the Swift Vets, who accurately reminded voters of John Kerry's 1970s radical chic past (part of which occurred very publicly on the Cavett show back then) as part of "the right-wing freak show". As John Hinderaker writes:

If there is a "freak show" on the fringes of American politics, it can be found on the Left, at fever swamps like the Daily Kos and Democratic Underground that specialize in conspiracy theories and hate. It's interesting, though, to find out how former mainstream reporters--Harris and VandeHei formerly wrote for the Washington Post--feel about those who have broken the liberal monopoly on the news.

To be fair, there was certainly a neatness to the liberal conformity of the 1960s and 1970s, when three television networks and a handful of newspapers controlled the news. Breaking up those information monopolies would seam like a freak show to a particularly nostalgic mind, just as many senior citizens pine for the simplicity of an era built around Bell Telephone, three TV networks and three primary car manufacturers.

Matthew Sheffield writes, "If you've always thought her music was hackneyed and dull now you may have another reason to dislike Alicia Keys: she's apparently a racist conspiracymonger", as this AP report highlights (ellipses in Matthew's post):

There's another side to Alicia Keys: conspiracy theorist. The Grammy-winning singer-songwriter tells Blender magazine: "'Gangsta rap' was a ploy to convince black people to kill each other."[...]

Keys, 27, said she's read several Black Panther autobiographies and wears a gold AK-47 pendant around her neck "to symbolize strength, power and killing 'em dead," according to an interview in the magazine's May issue, on newsstands Tuesday.

Another of her theories: That the bicoastal feud between slain rappers Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G. was fueled "by the government and the media, to stop another great black leader from existing." [...]

Though she's known for her romantic tunes, she told Blender that she wants to write more political songs. If black leaders such as the late Black Panther Huey Newton "had the outlets our musicians have today, it'd be global. I have to figure out a way to do it myself," she said.

Matthew adds, "All this nonsense really should come as a surprise to Keys's mother, Teresa Augello, who is white. Is this just a phase? In any case, it's hard to see how a white entertainer or a religious-oriented entertainer making statements like this and it not doing significant harm to their career."

She's not alone of course; Keys' remarks regarding her profession sound much like those expressed by Rev. Eric Lee of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, who featured prominently in several recent articles over on the main Pajamas site this past week, including this one:

“In a very small part of my presentation, I referenced a meeting I had with Rabbi’s and other community leaders. A Rabbi stated in that meeting that the close relationship between the African American and Jewish communities had been disconnected after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. I further referenced in my speech that my response to the Rabbi was that the Black Power Movement emerged after the assassination of Dr. King and it was a direct response to the negative characterizations of African Americans through the silver screen, TV and the music industry, industries that are influenced by many in the Jewish community. I then stated to the Rabbis that the Black Power Movement was our effort to define for ourselves our own identity rather than be defined by anyone else. I then indicated in my presentation that I told the Rabbis’ that before a genuine coalition could be rebuilt between our communities, there would have to be dialogue and efforts made to deal with the negative characterizations of African Americans.”

But Keys' and Lee's conspiratorial ravings ignore a crucial element of the success of "Gangsta" rap: nobody twisted the arms of performers to record those records, or to strike thugish poses in videos and magazine covers to promote them, or consumers to purchase them. As Mark Steyn wrote last month regarding another prominent conspiracy theorist:

The Reverend Wright believes that AIDs was created by the government of the United States — and not as a cure for the common cold that went tragically awry and had to be covered up by Karl Rove, but for the explicit purpose of killing millions of its own citizens. The government has never come clean about this, but the Reverend Wright knows the truth. “The government lied,” he told his flock, “about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color. The government lied.”

Does he really believe this? If so, he’s crazy, and no sane person would sit through his gibberish, certainly not for 20 years [as Obama had].

Or is he just saying it? In which case, he’s profoundly wicked. If you understand that AIDs is spread by sexual promiscuity and drug use, you’ll know that it’s within your power to protect yourself from the disease. If you’re told that it’s just whitey’s latest cunning plot to stick it to you, well, hey, it’s out of your hands, nothing to do with you or your behavior.

Rather than conspiracy theories about "the government and the media" as Keys believes, the latter "influenced by many in the Jewish community" as Lee believes, and the former fermenting "genocide against people of color" as Wright believes, where are the calls for personal responsibility, by three people who are all voices of influence in their respective circles?

(Onion video originally found here.)

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)

Mike S. Adams:

"There’s really nothing like a dose of condemnation from a moral relativist."

But are you sure she really fits the bill?

Yesterday I interviewed Jim Geraghty for this week's PJM Political show on XM Satellite Radio on the topic of the dramatically coarsening leftwing rhetoric. In the space of two months, we've gone from MSNBC's David Shuster referring to Chelsea's parents "pimping her out", to Randi Rhodes calling Hillary a F***ing Whore, to the Economist's modest proposal:

The Democrats are all too aware that their civil war could spell disaster. A cavalcade of senior Democrats, including senators Patrick Leahy and Chris Dodd, have advised Mrs Clinton to retire to her room with a glass of whisky and a loaded revolver.

And now this combustible moment happens (which fortunately, for once this year, isn't aimed at Hillary) but too late to ask Geraghty about it.

And this is still the preseason, when typically only us wonks care about politics. Like the NFL, the general public won't really be focused on the presidential election until September--but unlike the NFL, fans in the bleachers won't be exempt from taking hits, which look to be bruising.

Jim Geraghty wonders how the far left reached the point where Air America hostess Randi Rhodes could call a former first lady, sitting US senator and first viable female presidential candidate "a f***ing whore" (train wreck video here, for the curious):

In and of itself, it’s shocking, but it’s otherworldly when we think about what Hillary Clinton has meant to liberals for most of the past sixteen years.

Maybe Bill Richardson owes James Carville money, because that would help explain the bitter jihad the former Clinton strategist seems to be on, so relentlessly decrying the New Mexico Governor as “Judas” that Richardson stopped doing media appearances. It didn’t take much for Obama-backing General McPeak to declare Bill Clinton the equivalent of Joe McCarthy. And if you’ve read any Hillary vs. Obama thread on a liberal blog lately, you know that there have been friendlier back-and-forth exchanges in snakepits.

There’s something vaguely reassuring about all this, from the view of sitting on the right. It reveals to conservatives that the nastiness exhibited in our earlier disagreements with these folks was never personal; these people are clearly nasty to anyone who disagrees with them. Geraldine Ferraro’s long service to the Democratic party means nothing to many Obama backers; she’s a racist, “David Duke in drag,” as Rhodes put it. I’m sure Senator Patrick Leahy thought his decades of work on the left side of the aisle had bought him some street cred from feminists, but no, he was called sexist when he called on Hillary to leave the race.

Hillary gets called a "monster" by Obama's surrogates; Hillary's surrogates wonder out loud if Obama ever sold drugs. Today Clinton surrogate Ed Rendell speculates that Americans know only half the story of Barack Obama. Day in, day out, in this race it continues.

Is there nastiness on the right? Sure. But it’s hard to imagine somebody being the equivalent hero to the right the way Hillary was a hero to the left, so suddenly and severely pitched overboard – no, that’s not it, denounced and demonized — when somebody else came along.

Last night I said to Cam, "I like our base." The right had a vocal, mostly policy-oriented fight earlier this year, and tempers did flare. But bit by bit, week by week, those on the right are either making their peace with McCain. And in some cases, some righties aren't; but you rarely if ever hear them calling McCain a "[badword]ing whore" on the airwaves. By and large, a sense of decency and respect permeates conversations on this side of the aisle. There are exceptions, obviously, but the GOP race (thankfully) never turned into this bile-strewn mess.

As Jim writes, the GOP "may be the stupid party, but they're also the decent party." His comments remind me of the contrast in tone that Steven Den Beste highlighted immediately after the 2006 midterms:

2000, Democrats: "We wuz robbed!"
2002, Democrats: "We wuz robbed again!"
2004, Democrats: "We wuz robbed yet again!"
2006, Republicans: "Bummer. Oh, well, we'll do better next time."

Only a true satiric master can beat the nigh-impossible odds that Muggeridge's Law imposes, especially when one of the participants is the nutty grandparent in cable television's attic. (Alongside Dan Rather, Walter Cronkite, Helen Thomas, Phil Donahue, and...hmmm: Whom The Gods Destroy, they first build lionizing PBS specials around.)

Add nutty Ted's latest mutterings to this one from a quarter of century ago, and it's yet another example of the Not So Final Countdown.

(Which is still probably better than this Final Countdown!)

Or at least I don't think it is, given Muggeridge's Law and everything, and the fact that Time did a similar story almost concurrently: "Anti-Emo Riots Break Out Across Mexico."

I bet this news makes Emo Girl even extra super sad. But then, what doesn't?

More seriously, there's an interesting Death of the Grown-Ups slant on this story: compare how soberly Time magazine covers a story like this with how its fellow newsweekly kept a safe healthy distance when reporting on another youth phenomenon over 40 years ago. That's something I touched upon regarding their coverage of another faddish story, here.

Andy Bowers of Slate believes he has found "America's Stupidest Bike Lane"; my much more curmudgeonly immediate impression is that it's a multiple-choice question with thousand upon thousands of correct answers.

Readin', Writin' and 'splodin'--what are they teaching the kids these days at Yasser Arafat Junior High?

All you need to know about the state of Google these days is summed up by comparing two concurrent weekends of splash pages: the transnational search engine couldn't be bothered to create a customized page last week for the traditional Christian holiday of Easter, but could create one for the gnostic "Earth Hour" festival to pay homage to Gaia. (In a blackout design which ironically uses more power than their usual white page!) And speaking of "Earth Hour", Tim Blair writes:

The University of Sydney isn't taking any chances. "Campus Infrastructure Services will be switching off as many non-essential lights as possible, while ensuring that safety and security on our campuses is maintained," said an administration email sent last week. "There will be some street and path closures to allow as many lights as possible to be switched off."

So they're closing streets to protect students from dangerous unlit areas. Sounds like the university needs to work on its definition of "non-essential."

That's one thing about light; it makes dangerous places safe. Light is emblematic of civilisation. Nobody would visit Paris if it were known as the City of Dark. Likewise, we rarely invoke the Dark Ages to describe a pleasant situation. Bruce Springsteen possibly wasn't in the happiest frame of mind when he wrote "Darkness On The Edge of Town."

Supporters of Earth Hour like to talk about the important symbolism of the event in terms of climate change and suchlike. The deeper symbolism is of a rejection of progress - of the centuries of research and innovation that culminates in us being able to bring light by flicking a few grams of plastic.

That's an excellent point. During the 1996 election Bill Clinton promised that his administration would build a bridge to the 21st century. But followers of his vice president seem to want to build a bridge back into the 11th century, particularly when you add their rejection of mechanical and engineering progress with a rejection of centuries of hygienic advancements as well. The hippies of the 1960s wanted to Start From Zero; their successors are determined to return there, dragging the rest of us back to Year Zero with them whether we want to reprimitivize or not.

(Incidentally, I wonder how they'd react if a hospital told them a loved one suffering a heart attack couldn't have electrical defibrillation because the juice in the emergency room was off for Earth Hour?)

Update: Found via Mark Steyn, Darrell Epp suggests, "Forget ‘Global Warming’ and Start Worrying About ‘Demographic Winter’."

Byron York spots this amusing exchange on CNN:

On Laura Ingraham's program March 14, the day after the Rev. Jeremiah Wright story broke, I said that Obama supporters "are going to try to suggest to TV producers that playing [video of Wright's statements] over and over is a racially inflammatory act."

Cut to yesterday, when Hillary Clinton was asked about Wright and said "He would not have been my pastor." You would have thought she had used a racial epithet. Andrew Sullivan quickly labeled Clinton's statement "a new low." And later, on CNN, when Clinton defender Lanny Davis called Clinton's remarks "legitimate" and described the statements by Rev. Wright that are the basis of the whole controversy, he was quickly called to task by host Anderson Cooper and fellow guest Joe Klein:

DAVIS: I think it's a legitimate way that she said it, which is that she personally would not put up with somebody who says that 9/11 are chickens who come home to roost, that Israel is a state-sponsored organization — nation, and that there are generic comments made about America…

KLEIN: Lanny, you're doing it right now.

COOPER: Lanny, it is amazing. Lanny, it is amazing. I'm not taking sides here, but we all know what the comments were. It's funny that you feel the need to repeat them over and over again.

DAVIS: It's appropriate.

KLEIN: You know, Lanny, Lanny, you're spreading the — you're spreading the poison right now.

As far as I can tell, Davis had not described Wright's comments on the program, so I'm not sure why Cooper said "over and over again." But it appears that in some quarters it is not only inappropriate to play the video of Wright's "God damn America," "chickens coming home to roost" and "U.S. of KKK A" comments, it is inappropriate to describe them as well. I think we'll be seeing a lot more of that in the future.

Contrast this attempt at a media blockcade of Rev. Wright's poison (as Joe Klein tacitly put it) with the approximately 100 times that the Washington Post repeated then Sen. George Allen's one-off "Macaca" gaffe in the fall of mid-term election year 2006, and the New York Times' literally daily front page coverage of Abu Ghraib during the middle of the previous year.

Related: "Obama: It's All a Distraction"!

Update: Along with a link to this post (thanks!) Allahpundit has video of Klein's CNN appearance at Hot Air.

Linking to an item found by The Deacon's Bench blog, the Anchoress writes, "This actually sounds like a church Obama could love: WE ARE THE GOD-LINGS WE’VE BEEN WAITING FOR!":

That triumphal barnburner of an Easter hymn, "Jesus Christ Has Risen Today – Hallelujah," this morning will rock the walls of Toronto's West Hill United Church as it will in most Christian churches across the country.

But at West Hill on the faith's holiest day, it will be done with a huge difference. The words “Jesus Christ” will be excised from what the congregation sings and replaced with “Glorious hope.”

Thus, it will be hope that is declared to be resurrected – an expression of renewal of optimism and the human spirit – but not Jesus, contrary to Christianity's central tenet about the return to life on Easter morning of the crucified divine son of God.

Generally speaking, no divine anybody makes an appearance in West Hill's Sunday service liturgy.

There is no authoritative Big-Godism, as Rev. Gretta Vosper, West Hill's minister for the past 10 years, puts it. No petitionary prayers (“Dear God, step into the world and do good things about global warming and the poor”). No miracles-performing magic Jesus given birth by a virgin and coming back to life. No references to salvation, Christianity's teaching of the final victory over death through belief in Jesus's death as an atonement for sin and the omnipotent love of God. For that matter, no omnipotent God, or god.

Ms. Vosper has written a book, published this week – With or Without God: Why the Way We Live is More Important than What We Believe – in which she argues that the Christian church, in the form in which it exists today, has outlived its viability and either it sheds its no-longer credible myths, doctrines and dogmas, or it's toast.

Post-Christian religion? What could go wrong?

As Tim Blair writes, "The Mercedes-Benz of peace has been up on blocks for a while, but now it’s back on the road".

In other news from the intersection of "progressivism" and horsepower, Massachusetts' Coupe Deval is continuing to hit pothole after pothole badly enough to actually be noticed by his supporters at the New York Times.

Time for Law & Order to rip a story from the headlines pipe another one in from their skulls:

On Wednesday, Law & Order served up another of those famed episodes ripped from the headlines – except the violence-preaching madrassa is Christian, not Muslim, the evil cleric brainwashing children quotes the Bible, not the Koran, and American Christians haven’t executed anybody by stoning since the Salem witch trials.

The plot for this episode is so ludicrous it hardly merits retelling, but for clarity’s sake, here’s a quick summary. The police find the body of a woman art gallery owner killed by stoning, and immediately suspect the killer had “strong religious views.” Suspicion falls first on a Muslim artist.

Time for a cheap shot at the Bush administration: the National Security Agency is wiretapping the gallery owner by mistake, revealing that she was having an affair with the artist. Suspicion shifts to her irreligious husband, who apparently didn’t mind being cuckolded. For reasons not explained, the police decide to arrest their son, Jason, a college student.

Jason turns out to be a Christian mystic who hears from God several times a day. The son is under the influence of a Bible-spouting pastor who runs the Angelgrove Camp, where he is preparing Christian children to fight a religious war.

Don't they tell this story every year?

For a look back at the show's awesome first three seasons before the rot sat in, click here.

"The 8 Stages Of Liberal/Progressive Discussion When They Are Busted":

1. Ignore the story - pretend it is not happening, or deflect like crazy.

2. Find some sort of moral equivalence or a story from 30 years ago saying a Conservative did something sort of similar.

3. Come up with some conspiracy theories. This is usually the most amusing part, reading and hearing all the strange stuff they come up with in their reality based chat rooms.

For some thoughts on the Mother Of All Leftwing Conspiracies, click here.

Update: And speaking of leftwing conspiracy theories!

Tim Blair spots this amusing exchange:

Porter Berry, Fox News: Ms. Huffington, how are you? I’m Porter Berry from “The O’Reilly Factor.” I wanted to ask you a couple of questions about the Web site. Some of the stuff you have on the Web site, some hate speech. One person commented talking about Tony Snow. They said quote, “His cancer will return and he will die a very painful death ..."

Arianna Huffington, Huffington Post: You know what? I think you need to learn something about the Internet. The comments that appear there are taken down immediately.

Porter Berry: This was posted on the middle of February and was up yesterday.

Whoops.

"Obama adviser likens Bill Clinton's comments to McCarthy's", the Boston Globe reports.

Meanwhile, Jake Tapper notes that "Carville Equates Richardson With Judas":

In the New York Times today, Clintonista James Carville calls Bill Richardson's endorsement of Obama "an act of betrayal."

“Mr. Richardson’s endorsement came right around the anniversary of the day when Judas sold out for 30 pieces of silver, so I think the timing is appropriate, if ironic,” Carville said.

So in Mr. Carville's view on this Easter weeend, Richardson is Judas Iscariot, Obama is Caiaphas, and Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY, is .....?

Heh. Now that brings an entirely new meaning to the phrase, "The King James Bible".

Mark Steyn's column on the now-infamous Reverend Jeremiah Wright and the implications of his radical chic sermons for the Obama campaign is a must-read:

‘I’m sure,” said Barack Obama in that sonorous baritone that makes his drive-thru order for a Big Mac, fries, and strawberry shake sound profound, “many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.”

Well, yes. But not many of us have heard remarks from our pastors, priests, or rabbis that are stark, staring, out-of-his-tree flown-the-coop nuts. Unlike Bill Clinton, whose legions of “spiritual advisers” at the height of his Monica troubles outnumbered the U.S. diplomatic corps, Senator Obama has had just one spiritual adviser his entire adult life: the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, two-decade pastor to the president presumptive. The Reverend Wright believes that AIDs was created by the government of the United States — and not as a cure for the common cold that went tragically awry and had to be covered up by Karl Rove, but for the explicit purpose of killing millions of its own citizens. The government has never come clean about this, but the Reverend Wright knows the truth. “The government lied,” he told his flock, “about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color. The government lied.”

Does he really believe this? If so, he’s crazy, and no sane person would sit through his gibberish, certainly not for 20 years.

Or is he just saying it? In which case, he’s profoundly wicked. If you understand that AIDs is spread by sexual promiscuity and drug use, you’ll know that it’s within your power to protect yourself from the disease. If you’re told that it’s just whitey’s latest cunning plot to stick it to you, well, hey, it’s out of your hands, nothing to do with you or your behavior.

Before the speech, Slate’s Mickey Kaus advised Senator Obama to give us a Sister Souljah moment: “There are plenty of potential Souljahs still around: Race preferences. Out-of-wedlock births,” he wrote. “But most of all the victim mentality that tells African Americans (in the fashion of Rev. Wright’s most infamous sermons) that the important forces shaping their lives are the evil actions of others, of other races.” Indeed. It makes no difference to white folks when a black pastor inflicts kook genocide theories on his congregation: The victims are those in his audience who make the mistake of believing him. The Reverend Wright has a hugely popular church with over 8,000 members, and Senator Obama assures us that his pastor does good work by “reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDs.” But maybe he wouldn’t have to quite so much “reaching out” to do and maybe there wouldn’t be quite so many black Americans “suffering from HIV/AIDs” if the likes of Wright weren’t peddling lunatic conspiracy theories to his own community.

Found via the Brothers Judd; much more from the Anchoress, in a post titled, "Obama, Psychic duality & the churches":

It has been exceedingly difficult to discuss race in this nation for about 30 years, because anytime anyone - white or black - has tried to make a serious point, the word “racist!” is immediately flung out; lasting and damaging labels are instantly attached to people, and so everyone just shuts down. People guard their words and swallow provocative debating points - even if their aim is to generate a real, open and honest forum of ideas - because no one wants to be called a racist. This happened to Bill Clinton and to Bill Cosby; it happened to Rush Limbaugh and Geraldine Ferraro, and driving today I heard the word spat out at Sean Hannity. It happened to me, actually, last week, when I was called a “racist” on another blog for writing this; I was also deemed “hypersensitive” about being called a racist.

To which I replied, “I don’t think you’d like it.”

But see, I didn’t think anything I wrote was “racist.” I simply made the mistake of trying to discuss race at all.

“Black” America is forced to live a psychic duality, but in a way, “white” America is, too. We are supposed to - apparently - somehow split our brains, into never even noticing that there are racial differences between us, unless we’re working in praise of those differences. So, there are no differences between us…but we celebrate the differences…but their are none, and if you think there are, you’re a racist. Now celebrate!

Does that make sense? No wonder the national psyche is so battered. No wonder Obama is having difficulty straddling this chasm, despite his long legs. No wonder issues of race are distracting us from a much larger issue, which is whether he is competent to be our president and CIC.

No one likes being called a racist, and fear of being so labeled (or called “sexist”) is part of what is roiling both the nation and this particular election. You cannot talk “race” (or gender) without being denounced by people who don’t want to shatter their own illusions about their own “righteous” ways, or who don’t want to enter the discussion because they might be called “racist,” or a “sexist” too. Toxic, toxic.

Obama’s candidacy has, for better or worse, - I think probably for better - revealed the complicated and shaky state of race-relations in America. Middle class “white” America had not realized just how touchy things were, perhaps because we hadn’t “wanted” to see it, or perhaps because in our minds, with our kids rapping and adopting “street” clothes and lingo, and the popular culture seeming fairly ingrained with a “multi-culti” mindset, it simply seemed like race had become a secondary or tertiary matter. Or we hoped it had.

Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King waited for the day when his children would be judged not on the color of their skin but on the content of their character. That day seems very far away, right now, and “white” America - even “well-meaning” white America - shares blame in that. But perhaps “black” America does too. Dr. King was not, I don’t think, exempting blacks from the challenge of considering a man’s character before his skin color, but modern reverends like Wright and Meeks seem to be teaching otherwise.

I wonder what Rev. Wright's typical Easter message is like.

Happy Easter!

Since this newly-born "holiday" lacks the historic significance of, say, World Water Day, Google, starting from zero, sits this one out with no special logo on its splash page. Again.

(At least Dogpile's artists spent 15 minutes to dress up its mascot for the day. And as Mark Steyn notes, sadly, some aspects of the season are becoming a bit too much for traditional churches)

In Canada's National Post, Robert Fulford asks what to many is a fairly straightforward rhetorical question:

Why aren't the Vietnamese more grateful to Tom Hayden? Recently, he returned for the first time in 36 years to the country that he and his then-wife Jane Fonda tried to save from American domination in the Vietnam war. The trip disappointed him. As he writes in the March 10 issue of The Nation, Vietnam has turned capitalist. Was that what he fought for? Absolutely not. He remains capitalism's enemy, still the same lefty who helped found 1960s student radicalism.

In the San Jose suburb of Milpitas, the large Vietnamese population is so enamored with the current communist regime that they've gone back to flying the flag of the free former South Vietnam. And they're not alone.

Via Small Dead Animals, which notes:

Ah yes, those ungrateful Vietnamese. After Hollywood cleared their path for a worker's paradise they've decided they don't like it much after all and are abandoning it. Oh well, Hollywood still has Cuba and there's always Hugo Chavez in Venezuela to embrace.

And possibly, eventually, not even the former:

A growing underground network of young people armed with computer memory sticks, digital cameras and clandestine Internet hookups has been mounting some challenges to the Cuban government in recent months, spreading news the official state media try to suppress.

Last month, students at a prestigious computer science university videotaped an ugly confrontation they had with Ricardo Alarcón, the president of the National Assembly. Alarcón seemed flummoxed when students grilled him on why they could not travel abroad, stay at hotels, earn better wages or use search engines like Google. The video spread like wildfire through Havana, passed from person to person, and seriously damaged Alarcón's reputation in some circles.

Something similar happened in late January when officials tried to impose a tax on the tips and wages of employees of foreign companies.

Workers erupted in jeers and shouts when told about the new tax, a moment caught on a cellphone camera and passed along by memory sticks.

"It passes from flash drive to flash drive," said Ariel, 33, a computer programmer, who, like almost everyone else interviewed for this article, asked that his last name not be used for fear of political persecution. "This is going to get out of the government's hands because the technology is moving so rapidly."

This is exactly what happened in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, and Cuba has the benefit of much more modern techology, to boot.

As the Cato Institute, among many others has noted, in the 1980s:

Fax machines and photocopiers, video recorders and personal computers outside the government were no longer exotica but a sprawling, living nervous system that linked the Russian political opposition, the republican independence movements, and the burgeoning private sector. Tied informally together, this equipment constituted a network of considerable scale.

During that period, those same tools had a similar, if sadly less revolutionary impact in China. So the decision to allow possession of computers in Cuba by the new regime after Castro's six year PC blockade could have suprisingly remarkable long term consequences for that currently still-imprisoned Island.

Found via the above "Day By Day" cartoon, Plumb Bob Blog has bobbed and weaved unto quite a plumb meme:

The short version of the screeching inversion is that the most immature among us get to pretend that they’re moral paragons, while the most mature are treated as moral pariahs, simply because the immature screech louder and a lot more often. Thus, in a morally deteriorating society, evil gets tagged as good, and good, evil.

Read the whole thing. The applications of the screeching inversion (and PBB's suggestions as to one of its popularizers in the 1960s is a pretty good one, in my opinion) are endless, but this endlessly screeched inversion is as good a recent example as any.

Link: sevenload.com

The government lied about Pearl Harbor? Does John Cougar Mellencamp attend Trinity United?

More seriously, "‘If you want to understand where Barack gets his feeling and rhetoric from,’ says the Rev. Jim Wallis, a leader of the religious left, ‘just look at Jeremiah Wright.’"

Update: Related thoughts from one of Jim Geraghty's readers: "Obama is being Jesse-ized by the day. The Clintons began the job, and Wright is finishing it."

Gerard Vanderleun has the logical metaphor for the Democrats' 2008 campaign. Which makes perfect sense: having boiled all of their policies down to a Nancy Reagan-esque "Just Say No": No to traditional religion, no to patriotism, no to energy, no to new construction, no to SUVs, no to war (except Darfur!), no to reforming the Middle East, no to cutting taxes, (Update: no fireplaces, either!), all that's left is primitive fighting over ethnic and gender issues. (Gerard's metaphor is also a reminder of Thomas Hibbs' fascinating book about the nihilism lurking just under the hilarious surface of Seinfeld.)

I don't know if he will benefit from it in the ratings polls, but the contrast of John McCain's statesman-like tour of Europe and the Middle East sounds like absolutely perfect timing.

(Via Jules Crittenden.)

Update: Related thoughts from Charles Krauthammer and Betsy Newmark, who writes, "When there are no policy differences, vote identity politics."

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.

The Wall Street Journal's Evan Ramstad offers a rare video glimpse of Pyongyang:

Ted Turner, not to mention Camp 22, could not be reached for comment.