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."

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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 presi