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Ross Douthat, "Can Liberal Christianity Be Saved?" July 14

GEE, I dunno, Ross. Can the Times be saved?

IN 1998, John Shelby Spong, then the reliably controversial Episcopal bishop of Newark, published a book entitled “Why Christianity Must Change or Die.” Spong was a uniquely radical figure — during his career, he dismissed almost every element of traditional Christian faith as so much superstition —

So did the 19th century German Protestant theologians, Ross. And they were right. Demonstrably right. 

You can't be a learned member of 21st century society and insist that half the Old Testament was written by Moses, nor that there's any evidence at all of Jesus Christ, historical carpenter, that the Gospels are contemporary eyewitness accounts, that every species on earth is fixed for eternity and is descended from two parents, that the world is 6000 years old, for that matter, nor that the whole structure one refers to as "Christianity" is anything other than a collection of tales and beliefs which have been shaped to suit their times and political expedience for a couple hundred centuries now. Sorry. You can't. You can get a job at the New York Times, but you can't justify a bit of it in reasonable or rational terms.

but most recent leaders of the Episcopal Church have shared his premise. Thus their church has spent the last several decades changing and then changing some more, from a sedate pillar of the WASP establishment into one of the most self-consciously progressive Christian bodies in the United States.

As a result, today the Episcopal Church looks roughly how Roman Catholicism would look if Pope Benedict XVI suddenly adopted every reform ever urged on the Vatican by liberal pundits and theologians.

Apart from the ones which are specific to Catholicism, like "no more using young acolytes' rectums as snooker tables."

It still has priests and bishops, altars and stained-glass windows. But it is flexible to the point of indifference on dogma, friendly to sexual liberation in almost every form, willing to blend Christianity with other faiths, and eager to downplay theology entirely in favor of secular political causes.

Ross, let's just remember who started this argument, shall we?

For starters, among people who are currently able to sit up and take nourishment, the only ones willing to speak of the whole of Christendom as a two-thousand-year-old monolith free of contretemps and spray-painted graffito until the Sixties ruined it for everyone are people like you: Americans of a religio-authoritarian bent who, just for starters, have to ignore 50% of their fellow religionists in order to make the claim.

Yet instead of attracting a younger, more open-minded demographic with these changes, the Episcopal Church’s dying has proceeded apace. Last week, while the church’s House of Bishops was approving a rite to bless same-sex unions, Episcopalian church attendance figures for 2000-10 circulated in the religion blogosphere. They showed something between a decline and a collapse: In the last decade, average Sunday attendance dropped 23 percent, and not a single Episcopal diocese in the country saw churchgoing increase.

I'm not an Episcopalian, but so far as I can recall their sex scandals have been of the "O, Lord, they've got homasexyuls in their midsts and they're not even stoning them!" type rather than the "forcible serial boy buggery by priests who are then shielded by the Church hierarchy" sort. So I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt, and believe that the pronouncements of their theologians and councils have been designed to answer questions of belief, not as a marketing campaign to hook the much desired 18-29 demo. 

Which, by the way, I have no idea where, or if, it's going to church, but I'm pretty sure it isn't buying gayness as a ticket to Hell and contraception as the moral equivalent of murder. Not in overwhelming numbers, anyway.

But where's the Catholic Church in America over this period? Well, for one thing, it rather notoriously counts every American with an Italian, Irish, or Hispanic surname as one of its own, in perpetuity. And still, the only reason it shows a net growth is the rise of the Hispanic population, which is, to be sure, giving it a lot more miracles involving tree sap and burned toast than it used to have. Which may count for something, but it's not moral authority. 

The number one growing "Christian" cult in America is Mormonism. Mormons, you'll forgive me cutting Gordo's Knot here, aren't Christian. The fastest growing religion in America is Wicca. What their marketing strategy is I don't know. 

This decline is the latest chapter in a story dating to the 1960s. The trends unleashed in that era — not only the sexual revolution, but also consumerism and materialism, multiculturalism and relativism — threw all of American Christianity into crisis, and ushered in decades of debate over how to keep the nation’s churches relevant and vital.

Let's just throw all the cards over. It's extremely unattractive in the Rapidly Aging Young to hear them still mouthing their parents' inanities. You wanna blame The Sixties for the evils of sex, respect for ethnic and cultural distinctions, and "relativism", which is religio-authoritarianspeak for "calling out people in High places for hypocrisy"? Go ahead. But "consumerism and materialism"? For fuck's sake, those people were anti-consumerist and anti-materialist. For one thing, they were too busy fuckin'. 

You can get away with this sort of shit preaching to the choir, but you're not supposed to get away with it on the Times Op-Ed pages. Mainline Protestant churches have seen their attendance tumble in the past twenty years. So have Southern Baptists. Religious people have gone Full Snake Handler, Turpentine Drinker, Faith Healer, and Jesus Did To Ride A Dinosaur. This may be important information if you're the local Serpents and Solvents distributor, but as to what it means theologically, let alone as a measure of whether Ross Douthat's sex-repugnance is the New Normal: nothing. 

Is your own Church supposed to be above this, because it can excommunicate the faithless, the doubtful, and the sass-mouthed? The current regime may be hard-line conservative, but its moral authority with its own people is dropping like the Collection plate take at your local Second Presbyterian, and its claim to the moral high ground is gone for everyone else. How much longer do you think you can ignore that?

Go Fuck Yourself, Then

William Saletan, "Incest is Cancer: The David Epstein incest case: If homosexuality is OK, why is incest wrong?" December 14

IF you're like me, you probably regret that the pace of modern life keeps you from staying absolutely current on our nation's sordid, tabloid-trash fascination with what other people do with their pee-pees and wee-wees, and so possibly even missed altogether the fact that some Columbia professor managed to get arrested for performing unspecified (and, reportedly, consensual) sexual acts with his adult daughter, acts we can only imagine, over and over and over again while the very fabric of the Republic is rent, tearing, perhaps, like a cheap chemise, with an audible gasp and the sudden exposure of an inviting fecund fullness, the slightly chill air arousing our ardor in these climactic times, energizing our efforts, plunging us repeatedly into the precious honeypot of Liberty, faster, now, and yet faster still, our singular purpose distilled now to a hot white point of light like a thousand suns before it bursts forth, and we roll over and go to sleep.

Thankfully, this is another problem the internets can, and are eager to, solve, as apparently now the slightest juvenile attraction for any issue which can suggest S-E-X, but from a clean, respectable, metaphysical distance, is like Batman's Kleig Light for Slate's Bill Saletan, the man who recently solved the abortion controversy. This thing was the Most Emailed and Second Most Read story on all of Slate, which should have been enough to warn me off if "By William Saletan" wasn't. I clicked anyway, and damned if Woody Allen wasn't there to help get the Potentially Emailing Slate Reader in the mood.

Now, I have no idea what you think of Allen. I'm old enough to remember him as a sort of Steven Wright punctuation mark to a generation of standups (Bob Newhart, Shelly Berman, Mort Sahl) who were surfing the considerable wake of Lenny Bruce, except that, as a ten-year-old Midwestern teevee aficionado, I didn't know Bruce from Rusty Warren or Redd Foxx; he'd written a dirty book, was all I knew. Like Wright's, Woody's standup seemed to make the ordinary hallucinatory, excepting the hallucinations were from Miltown, not, well, hallucinogens.

I was never that big a fan of his movies. I sat through Bananas twice in a row, but I think that had something to do 1) the mescaline, and 2) the virginal and raven-tressed seventeen-year-old who was rather joyously allowing me to paw her in the dark, although that may've had something to do with 3) the mescaline. All I know is I never got to do it again. I liked Annie Hall a lot, and later Zelig and Broadway Danny Rose. Like much of America I could have done without his Bergman impressions just fine, although, unlike most of that much of America, I enjoy Bergman's Bergman impressions.

So The Great Woody Allen Scandal removed no skin from my nose, but it is the first instance I remember where puncturing my own eardrums with a couple of pencils suggested itself as a reasonable response. Had I known this was to be the template for all news coverage in the succeeding years I might have considered it more fully.

What.The.Fuck. I mean, whatever you think, or thought, of Allen's morals, being convicted in the Press of incestuous child molestation when it is indisputably the case that 1) they were not related, even in the broadest, legal-not-genetic sense; 2) she was a "child" of twenty; and 3) the molestation was consensual and, apparently, mutually satisfactory--they're still together twenty years later, which unquestionably beats the hell out of the romantic track record of at least 60% of Allen's teevee denouncers--was the real abomination. As a scandal, fine, if that's your bowl of soup. As an opportunity to simply make the law, and common understanding, over in your own image for the sake of a few ratings points it had few peers since the heyday of Hearst.

Cue Mr. Saletan:

Incest is for hicks. That's the stereotype among educated liberals: Homosexuality is urbane, polygamy is for Mormons, and incest is for hayseeds. So when David Epstein, a Columbia University political scientist, was charged last week with third-degree incest for allegedly shagging his adult daughter, the blogosphere erupted. Conservatives called it another sign of moral chaos. Liberals said it was gross but shouldn't be prosecuted. One side defends the privacy of all consensual sex; the other side sees an inexorable descent from homosexuality to incest.

Now, first, we might consider whether the fact that your hard news link takes us to a New York Daily News story doesn't tell us all we need to know, even before we note the ham-fisted incitement to outrage that follows. We might then notice that the link to the official Liberal response takes us to the straight news story in Columbia's student daily; perhaps we are to scan its comments section until we find the Liberal position we know must be there. (Maybe the link is screwy; the same page is linked twice, but Christ, you're a professional journalist on a commercial website, and the link's two days old now.) Maybe this would be an excuse if the rest of the 1300 words contained something like, uh, a direct quote from anyone who could be described as a Liberal.

And this is the first paragraph, where "educated liberals" not only believe incest is the exclusive province of toothless provincials, they apparently originated the idea, little realizing that one day they'd be hoist on that particular petard, and forced to reply, hypocritically and by rote, that If It Feels Good Do It still applies to everyone else.

Is there such a thing as an editor at Slate? Is there any reason to care?

At this point, liberals tend to throw up their hands. If both parties are consenting adults and the genetic rationale is bogus, why should the law get involved? Incest may seem icky, but that's what people said about homosexuality, too. It's all private conduct. To which conservatives reply: We told you so. We warned you that if laws against homosexuality were struck down, laws against polygamy and incest would follow. And now you're proving us right.

Okay, look: so Mr. Saletan, for whatever reason, has something I'm sure someone imagines as a "career" here to protect, but is there some rule which says he can't do so without being intellectually dishonest? What distinction is there, really, between calling all "conservatives" social Troglodytes, and calling all hicks inbred? Isn't the new Republican party beyond the Culture Wars, and strictly a grassroots libertarian economic enterprise these days? Did the "liberal" party put NAMBLA on a stamp while I wasn't looking? Who's having this argument, and where?

Or is it possibly made up on the spot for the sake of Saletan's ability to Declare Himself A Tolerant Man who wouldn't dream of actually criminalizing behavior, but has just stopped by to point out that his sharp, objective analysis just happens to show that anti-sex religious opprobrium neatly coincides with the Truth about the matter. Just sayin'. Not that we should take note of any religious objections when we justify throwing people in jail anyway. Because that would be wrong. And it would make Mr. Saletan seem illiberal. Which he isn't. It's just objective analysis.

Which just happens to be identical to his abortion solution.

I'm Sick Of Repeating Myself. But I Repeat Myself.

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

Still expecting to sell the natives shit for Shinola.

-with apologies to T.S.E.

YOU are the New York Fucking Times, fer chrissakes. It's not working; it hasn't been working for some time. Clearly. And Maureen Dowd has been clinically insane for much, much longer. Do something. Failing that, apologize to Jimmy Carter for that Malaise business.

Faux Balance is the problem. Phony 18th century Toryism is the problem. Barely contained 19th century backwoods snake-handling religious mania is the problem. Do something. Cut 'em out. Call 'em out. Something.
Brooks, today:

Fortunately, for those who study the human comedy, the epicenter of overconfidence moves from year to year. Up until recently, people in the financial world bathed in the warm glow of their own self-approval. Hubris in that world always takes the same form: The geniuses there come to believe that they have mastered risk. The future is an algorithm and they’ve cracked the code.

Over the past year, the bonfire of overconfidence has shifted to Washington. Since the masters of finance have been exposed as idiots, the masters of government have concluded (somewhat illogically) that they must be really smart.

Okay, first, I could have stopped after "for those who study the human comedy". David Brooks sees the world as essentially comic? Bullshit. David Brooks sees his meal ticket as requiring a pinch of self-deprecation, not that he has much choice. He may, in fact, see this as "comic"; anyone who observes him in action will be convinced he also sees it as a sly bit of mummery designed to hornswoggle the rubes. Show me, please, the day when David Brooks found his own opinions laughable. Not this bullshit finger-wagging at Wall Street, or the Republican party, for doing precisely what Brooks urged--no, make that what Brooks endorsed as apodictic truth--right up to the point where it blew up in their faces. Show me, please, the time when the Cosmic Kaleidoscope of Hubris drew his attention when his party was on top.

And he's talking about Democrats, Congressional Democrats, who couldn't organize a one-man parade. Which party has operated in lockstep for the past thirty years? (Oh, yeah, sorry, I remember: you've got so many factions you couldn't name them all. Or more than two.) Which one continues to? How many Republican insiders are taking your calls these days, Dave?

(And by the way, love that "believed they'd mastered risk". I think the English translation is "equated freebooting and highway robbery with economic 'freedom' right up to the point where their own pockets were picked".

Do something! Douthat, yesterday:

This ecumenical era has borne real theological fruit, especially on issues that divided Catholics and Protestants during the Reformation. But what began as a daring experiment has decayed into bureaucratized complacency — a dull round of interdenominational statements on global warming and Third World debt, only tenuously connected to the Gospel.

At the same time, the more ecumenically minded denominations have lost believers to more assertive faiths — Pentecostalism, Evangelicalism, Mormonism and even Islam — or seen them drift into agnosticism and apathy.

Nobody is more aware of this erosion than Benedict. So the pope is going back to basics — touting the particular witness of Catholicism even when he’s addressing universal subjects, and seeking converts more than common ground.

Now, I'm sure this topics fascinates as many as two dozen Americans, several of whom might possibly read the Times, and all of whom could have constructed the argument for themselves from a two-inch news item. Have we not reached the point where mid-80s Pharisaic Christianity looks as dated as a Thompson Twins video? I mean, I can type "systematic shielding of altar-boy buggery" as easily as Douthat can turn a Papal Bull into a column, but I'd prefer to move on.

And, again, he's got an entire week to come up with something. and how long did it take him to prove he wasn't up to it? How long does it take to distinguish between diversity of opinion and giving 2400 words a week so two careerist lackeys can chew the cud? Do something about it.

Hello, Death? Riley. Listen, I Just Read Douthat's Column, And If Last Week's Offer's Still Open I'd Like To Reconsider.

Ross Douthat, "Heckuva Job, Barack". October 12

LEST we forget to state the obvious, let us begin by stating the obvious: this is Ross Douthat, current moistener of the John Tierney Chair of "Conservative" Sinecuristics at the Times; a man whose career mission--making religiofascism, Christian Division, sound dishwasher safe to people who were inclined to give it a pass anyway--was augmented, briefly, when he saw Wither "Conservatism", Inc. as a strong buy; a man whose present position of prominence leads us to conclude that Kathleen Parker was busy; Ross Fucking Douthat is lecturing Barack Obama about accepting something he didn't deserve.

(Memo to David Shipley: The boy needs a mentor even worse than he needs a personal stylist. Could you maybe give him some suggestions? Maybe assign a topic once in a while? This thing is So Last Friday that Dowd's already written about it, which means the zeitgeist has moved on and the only people still hollerin' are the Right, the crypto-Right, and Adult Idolaters of Geriatric Men in Dresses who're still pissed off that John Paul #2 never got one. If Mr. Bad Teenage Beard on the Cusp of Middle Age can't distinguish between last week's Bozo Kazoo Ensemble and actual ongoing issues, at least move him off Mondays, where he not only competes with Krugman, but regularly opens the week with preternaturally colorless takes on what the blogosphere would have talked to death a week ago, assuming the blogosphere consisted of himself, Rod Dreher, MoDo, and that professional Christian who was on Everybody Loves Raymond back in the Forties.)

This was Barack Obama’s chance.

Here was an opportunity to cut himself free, in a stroke, from the baggage that’s weighed his presidency down — the implausible expectations, the utopian dreams, the messianic hoo-ha.

Here was a place to draw a clean line between himself and all the overzealous Obamaphiles, at home and abroad, who poured their post-Christian, post-Marxist yearnings into the vessel of his 2008 campaign.

Here was a chance to establish himself, definitively, as an American president — too self-confident to accept an unearned accolade, and too instinctively democratic to go along with European humbug.

Now, a lot of things come to mind here, and not all of them involve homicide. First, and most obvious, the question of your alibi for the period when George W. Bush was being hailed as the New Churchill and a Carrier-landin' Fighter Jock. Are we really supposed to believe that, had the Nobel committee given Bush II the 2001 Peace Prize for his foolproof plan to end global terra and free the enslaved women of Islam your cohort would have objected? Second, where are these overzealous Obamaphiles, anyway? I'd like to know why they couldn't be bothered to show up and drone out all the Town Hall bleaters this past summer. Obama had adoring throngs during the campaign. So did Reagan. So did Bush II. Fer chrissakes, so did Nixon. A lot of his was based on how badly your party had fucked things up. For someone who was busy at the time cashing royalty checks for your plan to reform the party you sure seem to be having a lot of difficulty getting over it. Some of it is what campaigns do, and, again, if those'd been Dick Cheney or Mitt Romney or Rudy Giuliani crowds it would have been a validation of their policies, not evidence of a Messiah complex. And don't look at me; I complained loud and long about it, and urged 'em to fire whomever was responsible for those chanting bleachersful of Thorazined monastics. For that matter, I urged a boycott of the Blackeyed Peas, but that was really because Fergie sucks donkeys.

In other words, if you've got a problem with the interminable war over product placement that is the modern Presidential election--and, fuck it, every other election from Dog Catcher on up any more--then take it up with the people responsible. And while you're there, admit that your only real problem with it is that your side loses from time to time. Kee-rist, Ross, whose candidate was pilloried last time because he'd supported cosmetic reforms to the campaign finance laws?

And look, th' fuck is the problem with you guys learning practical lessons? One minute you're intent on sham-reforming the "Conservative" movement, like some Baby Brooks (Oh, if only the Party would toss out all those racists and rednecks and anyone else I'm uncomfortable snogging in public it'd be on the road to permanent majority!); as soon as you sense the tiniest political advantage you're back in the tenth row of the mob, next to the guy with the "Grow A Brian, Post-Marxists!" sandwich board. I mean, where exactly do you think this is going to get you? Do you really imagine that your party is in control of its loudest, most hate-filled elements? That they're going to sit politely while you nominate Romney, or Mitch Daniels, and schedule Sarah Palin's Convention speech for 6 AM Tuesday?

He didn’t take it. Instead, he took the Nobel Peace Prize.

Big mistake.

Yeah, because by turning it down he'd have earned your eternal admiration. Just like involving the Republican caucus in the Stimulus and Health Care reform negotiations, and hosting that pro-life symposium at the White House did.

People have argued that you can’t turn down a Nobel. Please. Of course you can. Obama is a gifted rhetorician with world-class speechwriters. All he would have needed was a simple, graceful statement emphasizing the impossibility of accepting such an honor during his first year in office, with America’s armed forces still deep in two unfinished wars.

Shit. Both were finished a long time ago. It's just inconvenient for some people to admit it.

Incidentally, we're 165 words into this week's prattling--you have a full week to come up with these, Ross--and you've already exhausted your Idea, which is a term I use just to show Christian charity isn't confined to Christians.

And I come this far, Ross (and no farther), just for a couple personal reflections. Back in December of 2000, I remember waiting for Supreme Court designee George W. Bush to acknowledge that he'd lost the popular vote, and in many people's minds stolen the hinkiest US Presidential election since the invention of the telephone. Just to acknowledge that many of his fellow citizens, including a majority of those who had bothered going to the polls, did not want him as President. It's a standard feature of victory speeches from landslide winners, but the best we got from Bush that night was a smirky Tough Shit. Which I will admit, while not was I was hoping for was at least an accurate preview of his Presidency.

And less than a year later I remember arguing that Bush should announce he would refuse to seek a second term, in order to run a truly non-partisan campaign against Trans-Global Chaos, or whatever it was. Of course I knew it would never happen; of course it wasn't long before we knew (and by "knew" I mean "had our apodictic certainty confirmed by independent observation") that the administration, its pals like Giuliani, and the rest of its party intended to wring every last ounce of partisan advantage out of The Day That Changed Everything.

I had no illusions; I'd have settled for a speech, however mangled, that acknowledged the complexity of the situation, and the overwhelming odds that what he was proposing was a generations-long occupation or four halfway around the world, but I didn't expect that, either. And the point is that this is what we got from your man during the two greatest Presidential crises of the quarter-century, and during a pair of incompetently-managed, PR-directed military actions which he, and you, tried to peddle as a Battle for Civilization Herself. So th' fuck gives you the right to demand anything, let alone adherence to your phony ethical demands, in such a small beer as this?

Honestly, That's The First Time I've Ever Heard Of Someone Unintentionally Insulting Rod McKuen.

David Brooks, "This Old House". December 9

He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.

--Ecclesiastes, Or, The Preacher

Well thank God for David Brooks, then.

--Jimbo Riley

AND Dear Lord, he's back at that exurbs thing like a dog returning to its sick. This is either the result of Late Onset Complete and Utter Failure Syndrome (taken, in some quarters, for Premature Obama Derangement, but I'm sticking with my diagnosis), or Desperate Thrashing In Search Of Continued Employment. Whichever the case, either get the man a good editor or into treatment, or both; surely, unlike MoDo, there's someone on the Times staff who still believes his schtick.

The 1980s and 1990s made up the era of the great dispersal. Forty-three million people moved every year, and basically they moved outward — from inner-ring suburbs to far-flung exurbs on the metro fringe. For example, the population of metropolitan Pittsburgh declined by 8 percent in those years, but the developed land area of the Pittsburgh area sprawled outward by 43 percent.

In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Pacific Railway Act, and soon Americans from coast-to-coast had steam coming out of the tops of their heads.

I know, I know, we've been over this before. Real sociology is bad enough, though it must be given credit for more-or-less avoiding the fascist impulses of its closest cousin. Pop sociology is tennis with the net down, eyeless linesmen, and no balls.

People in cities moved outward! It seems less like a polished gem of cultural observation and more like an imperative of simple geometry. I suppose they could have gone Up, or Down, or Stayed In One Place; each of which would then have Told Us Something Significant about Up or Down or Stasis. It's like Thurber's vain struggles with the microscope in Biology 101: Mr. Brooks, you do realize you've just drawn a picture of your own eyeball?

And again, we're fine with these pastoral frolics of his; we simply object to the venue. But then we actually live in that America which Brooks occasionally pretends to visit. And we can pretty much tell you that Exurb-Bound America in the 80s and 90s was tryin' to get far enough away from the Nigras that only a few of them would show up at its children's school in the next fifteen years, and those would have 4.2 speed in the 40 or good penetration off the dribble. The End.

Did anyone ever call Brooks on this? I don't mean on the internets, I mean during his decade and counting on PBS and NPR. The man has built an entire career based on studiously avoiding the obvious...

If you asked people in that age of go-go suburbia what they wanted in their new housing developments, they often said they wanted a golf course. But the culture has changed. If you ask people today what they want, they’re more likely to say coffee shops, hiking trails and community centers.

...while substituting this passive-aggressive, updated-for-the-Go-Go-Eighties And Not Since version of Hippies vs. Straights for an easily amused audience. Not to mention one which did not want to be reminded why it really fled the suburbs for the supersuburbs.

People overshot the mark. They moved to the exurbs because they wanted space and order. But once there, they found that they were missing community and social bonds. So in the past years there has been a new trend. Meeting places are popping up across the suburban landscape.

There are restaurant and entertainment zones, mixed-use streetscape malls, suburban theater districts, farmers’ markets and concert halls. In addition, downtown areas in places like Charlotte and Dallas are reviving as many people move back into the city in search of human contact. Joel Kotkin, the author of “The New Geography,” calls this clustering phenomenon the New Localism.

And James "Doghouse" Riley, who hasn't got anything to sell that wasn't available at this summer's yard sale, calls it "White upper-middle class trendoids doing something different with their money than white upper-middle-class trendoids did fifteen years ago, and some guy in the newspaper discovering it eight years later. Which is, like, really, really unprecedented."

This is, admittedly, anecdotal, but then it's at least an anecdote, not something I extrapolated from a magazine while I was waiting for them to call my reservation. As someone who lived in a series of downtown neighborhoods that ranged from "trendoid transitional" to "sketchy", I've seen a remarkable, perhaps remarkably crazy, resurgence of the northside of my benighted village in the ten years I've been a suburbanite. The area north of the old, old monied residential areas of downtown, which were largely gentrified in the late-70s through the 80s, saw a housing explosion which had a lot more to do with Old Speculation than New Localism. To a guy approximately my height and weight who used to walk through areas of somewhere between ramshackle and condemned fine old houses, the difference between the latest go-round and the earlier was that this time in the place of individual rehabbers you got tax-break contractors coming in and turning whole neighborhoods into Victorianesque McMansions. I don't know anybody who lives there, which is to say it's a young couples' game, but I suspect that if the housing bubble burst anywhere in this city of neighborhoods, it's there, and that people who imagined they were going to sell for big profit and move across the county line when those children they planned to have someday were old enough to go to school are now considering the cost of a vasectomy. White flight is right where it landed. It isn't going away, and it sure isn't crawling back to the city shamefaced, shit-faced, or otherwise faced. It is, it goes without saying, demanding that a light rail system be built for it, to relieve the congestion and shorten the commute it caused and accepted in the first place, as small price to pay for getting away from the coloreds.

Barack Obama has said that he would start an infrastructure project that will dwarf Dwight Eisenhower’s highway program. If, indeed, we are going to have a once-in-a-half-century infrastructure investment, it would be great if the program would build on today’s emerging patterns. It would be great if Obama’s spending, instead of just dissolving into the maw of construction, would actually encourage the clustering and leave a legacy that would be visible and beloved 50 years from now....

the Obama stimulus plan could help localities create suburban town squares. Many communities are trying to build focal points. The stimulus plan could build charter schools, pre-K centers, national service centers and other such programs around new civic hubs....

But alas, there’s no evidence so far that the Obama infrastructure plan is attached to any larger social vision. In fact, there is a real danger that the plan will retard innovation and entrench the past.

Okay, in response, let me just say, "Fuck you." If we need advice about where the next fifty years are headed, maybe we should look elsewhere, rather than to the guy who last prediction lasted twenty, and that by his own scorecard.

If the Middle Class now finds itself in a leaky lifeboat with a serious list on a moonless North Atlantic night while suffering the first signs of hypothermia, maybe it could begin by thinking about the underclass it willingly threw overboard for the sake of a little extra leg-room, back when the sun was shining and the wind was fair. You Broke It, You Bought It, and don't act like you didn't see the sign. I'm sorry for the Middle Class. I are one. And I've been screaming about Reaganism for thirty years, but still, fair's fair. We're enduring the moral repugnance of bailing out Wall Street thieves and pirates, not simply because there are Wall Street thieves and pirates, nor the corporate shill politicians who enable them, but because the Middle Class consciously, and repeatedly, voted in their favor. To say now that massive federal works program designed--at least partly--to repair the damage--in whatever portion--ought to concentrate on building bridges so SUV-commanding exurbanwhites can get to daycare more efficiently is the sliming on the cake. Charter schools? Fuck you. Repair the damage you've done over the past forty years by turning urban schools into political footballs and surrogates for segregation. No more top-down entitlements, no more tax subsidies for Lifestyle Shopping Experiences while schools go begging and honest people go broke. Either the economy continues to spin down the toilet, in which case the Middle Class will soon become the Underclass, and full recipients of the back of the hand they offered when times were good; or the economy will stabilize, and it will be time for the people who enabled this to start paying an overdue bill.

For a country which feels so strongly about religious conviction that it routinely lies to pollsters asking how often it goes to church, you might think the day would dawn when it decided to actually wash away, rather than wish away, its stain. That's no doubt too much to hope, but I don't see why a loathsome toad and former Bush page boy like David Brooks should still be offering us his vision of the future, and still sitting at the New York Times instead of on some trendy 21st century version of the dunking stool. At taxpayer expense, fine. 

Really? You Have Mush For Thanksgiving?

Roger Cohen, "A Command of the Law". November 26

WHAT kind of Indian would say a fool thing like that?

It’s Thanksgiving. I’m thankful for many things right now, despite the stock market, and first among them is the fact that the next U.S. commander in chief is a constitutional law expert and former law professor.

Who didn't just vote to renew the trampling of constitutional rights via FISA, but did a Jim Rockford 180º to get there in time.

Look, we have already suggested that Barack Obama--should he find himself the beneficiary of an actual honeymoon period, and not just the current exasperated longing of an electorate for George W. Bush to vanish, from the Presidency, from history, and/or the planet--is entitled to one which doesn't invoke national commentary written as though the author found the entire honeymoon concept either new or foreign or rare.

So then are we also justified, maybe required, to suggest the opposite: that while the public may certainly indulge in the standard hopeful celebration of a new President accorded even so obvious a dud as George W. Bush, perhaps especially at a time when nothing has gone right for two election cycles now, the Public is an Ass; the punditasters ought to try to keep the tweenie squealing under control, unless they want to be mistaken for Jonas Brothers fans or Keith Olbermann.

It would be one thing if these platitudes could be mouthed in a glass without embarrassment. They can't. This was, as we said earlier, the first election in memory where the people who did vote would be the ones who couldn't bitch. Even the most zomboid of Obama fans cannot insist their man was elected, or plans to govern, as anything other than a career politician. He was, in fact, celebrated for that. This is of itself neither good, bad, fish nor fowl--nor required, as twenty-year-old political geniuses kept informing us during the campaign--it's a description of how we arrived where we are. Obama reversed himself on FISA, then excused the reversal on the grounds it was the best deal possible. At that point he'd been campaigning for President for eighteen months as the guy who was going to put an end to the white-socks-and-sandals unfashionableness of partisan politics. He did not pledge to do so while remaining a First, Fourth, or Fifth Amendment absolutist, not as I recall, but he did vow to "finish the fight with al-Qaeda" and express a preference for hot pursuit over the constraints of international law. Supposing we are still maintaining troops in Iraq come 2009, or still practicing "extraordinary rendition" people will have a right to be angry, but no right to feign shock.

Before I get to why, allow me to add two other reasons for thankfulness. The first is that Barack Obama is a man of sufficient self-confidence to entrust the critical job of secretary of state to his former rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton. She has the strength and focus to produce results.

The second is that he’s a man of sufficient good sense to retain the remarkable Robert Gates as defense secretary.

Well, maybe so...I don't think, given the circumstances, that Gates was a bad choice, and given insider information he might even be a wise one, but neither of us has insider information, though one of us might imagine he does. If it's wise this sort of blather has nothing to do with it; the idea that Gates is retained, or not, as a signal about Obama's intentions in Iraq is prime Inside Baseball idiocy. It's a gurgled cry from anti-war leftists who imagined they were backing an anti-war leftist. Iraq is not your worry with Obama; whether there's enough recognition of our serious, generation-long military deficit is. And I don't mean whether or not he'll live up to that campaign pledge to rebuild the military (remember that one?), but whether we are going to see, at long last, a decision made to bring Cold War militarism to heel while there's still some pressure left in the brake lines, or whether it's going to have to proceed like Reaganomics has, until we're steered off a cliff, screaming all the way down about how we got there. America: You Only Have To Hit Us Over The Head With A Brick Twice Per Issue! It's amusing, in a sick sort of way, to see this from Jim Bianco:

• Marshall Plan: Cost: $12.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $115.3 billion


• Louisiana Purchase: Cost: $15 million, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $217 billion


• Race to the Moon: Cost: $36.4 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $237 billion


• S&L Crisis: Cost: $153 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $256 billion
• Korean War: Cost: $54 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $454 billion


• The New Deal: Cost: $32 billion (Est), Inflation Adjusted Cost: $500 billion (Est)


• Invasion of Iraq: Cost: $551b, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $597 billion


• Vietnam War: Cost: $111 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $698 billion


• NASA: Cost: $416.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $851.2 billion

TOTAL: $3.92 trillion

TOTAL bailout commitment so far: $4.6165 trillion

but the thing that's left out there is what a colossal pile of shit we've bought since 1946 in the effort to retain our post-war military/economic hegemony. Not to mention how that PR campaign eventually began feeding on itself, and we wound up spending just to maintain the spending, and had to talk ourselves into the hegemony part. We spent more on NASA since 1958 than we spent on the first round of bailouts, yes, but NASA's a trillion-dollar lab coat we put on the militarization of space, apparently to fool the rubes who, it turns out, were with the program from the moment they heard something was gonna blow up anyway. We've spent roughly $23.3 trillion in daylight on "Defense" (figures, taken from the Center for Defense Information, here) since the Second World War ended. That's using budget requests or projections for the last five years (through fiscal 2009), which doesn't change the total much, but it also exempts the Iraq and Afghanistan wars which,  you may recall, we're funding as a sort of side bet. Certainly not all of that $23 trillion, plus whatever's been spent off the books, plus NASA and whatever other extra-military spending's been going on qualifies as boondoggle, but we'd be remiss not to remind you that in there, somewhere, you, your parents, or your grandparents bought $1 billion (in 1950s dollars) worth of Atomic-Powered Aircraft development (after intelligence information suggested the Ruskies had already developed one); sixty-eight AWACS flying radar stations (at $200 million per in 1970s dollars), the realization of a post-WWII dream thirty years late, which had, by the time the first one was delivered, gone through three different justifications just to keep up with changing military and technical environments and which, today, serves basically as a sort of YouTube for the Air Force; the equally belated B-2, proudly fighting the Cold War since 1997 at a cost of $2.1 billion per in 1997 dollars, and whose vaunted stealthiness remains a rumor; God Knows How Much tossed down the Star Wars hole, dutifully dug with $1500 Pentagon-procured shovels for an octogenarian President with terminal brain bubbles; and the tenth carrier of the Nimitz class, the soon-to-be-deployed USS George H. W. Bush, (Motto: "Freedom at Work!"), which, at an estimated $4.5 billion, will thankfully be obsoleted six years later by the new Gerald R. Ford class carrier, at $8 billion per, not counting the $5 billion in development, and fittingly named for the only President of the United States ever to kill a man with an errant golf shot. By the time the third Ford class carrier is completed it is hoped that sophisticated navigational upgrades will keep many of our two-dozen carriers from colliding with each other despite there barely being enough room left on the world's oceans to swing a catfish. (Global warming should also help.)

Carriers, as you might know, represent another WWII solution in search of a problem, though this has largely been solved by our regular desire to push around tenth-rate nations with no navy, or air force, and frequently no coastline.

And these are just examples, folks, and conspicuously leave out the most egregious high-ticket embezzlements (say, the Safeguard Anti-Ballistic Missile Program, which, for $6 billion 1960s dollars, protected one US ICBM site for four months from a theoretical Soviet attack which was theoretically impossible. Safeguard was itself a re-tread of the Sentinel program, which was designed to protect US cities. That one was never deployed at all, if that tells you anything you didn't suspect already).

And, okay, easy to pick on things, even when they are major programs, but leave us also remember that all this money, and plenty more, has managed to fail to achieve political objectives in four intervening wars, "spent" the Soviet Union into a bankruptcy it was already headed for, and found itself a much-needed new justification shortly thereafter, on September 11, 2001, thirty-nine minutes before NORAD managed to get two fighters to the most populous city in the country, assuming you're using the 9/11 Commission's timetable.

So you'll forgive me if I'm less that fascinated by whether Robert Gates is the right man at Defense or not, or whether his retention signals something or other about the Obama administration's real Iraq timetable, as my ratiocination in that area remains focused on how long we're going to imagine we can keep spending our way to a military hegemony notable for its big-ticket expenditures and near-total inability to actually defeat tenth-rate powers armed with sharpened spikes and the F-14 Tomcats we sold 'em back when the Shah was in power. For cryin' out loud, the incoming President faces not just the Sargasso Sea of flotsam left by the Bush administration; it also faces the prospect of trying to turn things around while professing a bipartisanship designed to elicit cooperation from the two parties which have so thoroughly fucked things up to this point. And he, or else some successor, will face the obligation at some point to scrap the whole thing and rebuild one based on reality. Better to try to do that when it's a choice than wait until it becomes a necessity.

So, too, you'll forgive me for imagining that New York Times Op-Ed columnists could find something more important to consider than whether Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton will be able to work together (!), or to express belated admiration for the (projected) dismantlement of a Gitmo their own paper's tub-thumping helped fill in the first place.

Strap On Your Thinking Caps, America, As Old Gold Cigarettes And Your Local Sinclair Dealer Bring You Well, That's Remarkable!

David Brooks, "What the Palin Pick Says". September 1

John McCain is not a normal conservative.

Well...that's Remarkable! David Brooks, since, starting with the collapse of the Republican party at the beginning of the second Bush term, you've been telling us how awesomely diverse "conservatism" is. But then suddenly, when its political fortunes are tied to a guy who is intensely hated by the biggest lunatics in his own party--not exactly a scarce commodity--for reasons that in the real world could only be termed "microscopic", suddenly there are "normal" and "abnormal" conservatives. And what's especially odd about that is, the more "normal" a person appears in real life, the more likely he is to be an "abnormal" conservative. And--especially,and--vice versa.

He has instincts, but few abstract convictions about the proper size of government.

I'm sorry, David Brooks, but...that's not Remarkable! So this might be a good time to reacquaint you, and the folks playing along at home, with the Old Gold™ Rulebook. Old Gold: not a cough in a carload! Okay, you are an extraordinarily overpaid political pundit whose sole requirement is to squeeze out roughly 1500 words a week, plus your main side gig, teaming every Friday with Mark Shields to reprise your Carl Reiner/Mel Brooks routine as The Prototypes for Disney World's Rejected Hall of Animatronic™ Talking Secretaries of Transportation, which, frankly, is beginning to wear a little thin, if you'll forgive some well-meant criticism. Your job, so far as any of us can tell, involves circulating Republican talking points while giving the impression of an imminent asthma attack, thus making anyone responding to even the most heinous of these seem like a heartless bully, and possibly a legally culpable one as well. To complete the image, you are supposed to seem uncomfortable with the torchlit crusading of the party's Bronze Age "social" "conservatives" without, naturally, denouncing their excesses or turning away their votes.

So in this instance, for example, reciting your high school debate team talking points --oops, sorry, I forgot; you were a "liberal" back then, am I right? Eh?--about "the proper size of government" (now marked down from "shrinking the size of government") is simply too much at odds with "Reality" to be Remarkable. Ronald Reagan talked practically non-stop about his abstract intentions to reduce the size of government, and when he left the federal payroll was 10% larger and the budget was up 25%, and there was a new cabinet position. Bush II, of course, is worse yet, although the cabinet thing remains tied.

He’s a traditionalist, but is not energized by the social conservative agenda.

He seems to pander to it pretty energetically, though.

As Rush Limbaugh understands, but the Democrats apparently do not, a McCain administration would not be like a Bush administration.

Okay, we haven't made it out of the first paragraph yet, and you're already flailing.  Deep cleansing breath.  Let's just run through that list of McCain's supposed apostasies, shall we? First, and foremost, he co-sponsored campaign finance reform. Two, he sass-mouthed Jerry Falwell and Bob Jones U. back in 2000, though seven years later he'd join the choir and endow a pew. Three, he voted against The Bush Tax Cuts, because he insisted on program cuts to go with them. Four, he has, on occasion, behaved like a Senator, notably in that Gang of Fourteen business, which, one might note, got the so-called "Democrats" in the Senate to agree not only to dance at the successive bachelor parties for John Roberts and Sam Alito, but to do so strictly for tips, in exchange for the Republicans not doing something (the "nuclear option") which would not exactly have played well everywhere.  The fact that Limbaugh has chosen to release torrents of intestinal gas while McCain was in the elevator with him does not constitute a GOP policy dispute for most sane people.

And speaking of gas, whenever you fill up, remember to look for Dino the Dinosaur and the fine family of Sinclair gas and lubrication products.

The main axis in McCain’s worldview is not left-right. It’s public service versus narrow self-interest. Throughout his career, he has been drawn to those crusades that enabled him to launch frontal attacks on the concentrated powers of selfishness — whether it was the big money donors who exploited the loose campaign finance system, the earmark specialists in Congress like Alaska’s Don Young and Ted Stevens, the corrupt Pentagon contractors or Jack Abramoff.

Judges? Okay, we're giving that one a Not Truly Remarkable, since simply making shit up about McCain's supposed anti-corruption track record while ignoring his campaign's continuing reliance on lobbyists is not Remarkable at all, but neatly parodying your own parody of Democratic National Convention platitudes from last week--if that's what you were up to--is.

Like McCain, Palin does not seem to have an explicit governing philosophy.

Okay, points for turning the negative space of Palin's accomplishments into a sort of amorphous blob of philosophical incertitude while simultaneously not being George Will. Remember, the "not George Will" bonus is available only once per round.

Her background is socially conservative, but she has not pushed that as governor of Alaska.

Unremarkably, since the "conservative" social agenda is 99% jawbone and 0.001% legislative action.

[Speaking of which, her Eagle Forum questionnaire, with the famous "If 'Under God' was good enough for the Founders it's good enough for me" response, seems to have been taken down, but the social agenda she "hasn't pushed" is still cached here. ]

She seems to find it easier to work with liberal Democrats than the mandarins in her own party.

Judges? Okay, the ruling is Not Remarkable, with a minor dissent on the grounds that reusing leftover Bush 2000 clichés is supposed to be avoided, just like all other references to the formerly misunderestimated Winston Churchill Junior. They're ruling that one inadvertent.

Incidentally, I'm from Indiana, where you get credit (or blame) for "working with liberal Democrats" if you pass Evan Bayh in the hall and wish him a good morning. So I'm just curious as to where Sarah Palin finds liberal Democrats to work with in Alaska? And what do they do--play three-handed Euchre?

Instead, she seems to get up in the morning to root out corruption. McCain was meeting a woman who risked her career taking on the corrupt Republican establishment in her own state, who twice defeated the oil companies, who made mortal enemies of the two people McCain has always held up as the carriers of the pork-barrel disease: Young and Stevens.

Fake bio, David. As Republican as, well, claiming to be a former liberal. That's your second warning.

The Palin pick allows McCain to run the way he wants to — not as the old goat running against the fresh upstart, but as the crusader for virtue against the forces of selfishness. It allows him to make cleaning out the Augean stables of Washington the major issue of his campaign.

Okay, again, we'll pass it, even though Augeas is a registered Republican and the last thirty years worth of oxen shit is the overflow from Reagan's bedpan.

So my worries about Palin are not (primarily) about her lack of experience.

Okay, Remarkable! in that in the previous 350 words you had not a) mentioned her lack of experience; b) talked about your reaction to it; nor c) led anyone to believe you thought the highest office in the Land required anything much beyond a lack of governing philosophy and a PR department with no scruples.

She seems like a marvelous person.

So do most sharpers at cards, except they tend to avoid lying to your face before the pot gets big.

She is a dazzling political performer.

That's Conditionally Remarkable! David Brooks. How many times, exactly, had you seen her before Monday's deadline? Two?

And she has experienced more of typical American life than either McCain or his opponent.

I'm warning you, Brooks. Not only are you out of here if you pull that Bobo shit again, but I'm going to personally give you an asthma attack that'll last til Election Day.

On Monday, an ugly feeding frenzy surrounded her daughter’s pregnancy. But most Americans will understand that this is what happens in real life, that parents and congregations nurture young parents through this sort of thing every day.

Just as an aside, does it hurt when you type something like that? Is there some point where every artifact of self-respect has crumbled to dust?

My worry about Palin is that she shares McCain’s primary weakness — that she has a tendency to substitute a moral philosophy for a political philosophy.

Just like Old Golds™ have a tendency to taste rich, smooth, and mild. C'mon, Brooks. She's a fucking Jesus-addled nutball.

There are some issues where the most important job is to rally the armies of decency against the armies of corruption: Confronting Putin, tackling earmarks and reforming the process of government.

Now, that's truly Remarkable! seeing as how it was the combination of Christ-like certitude and neocon "morality"-based foreign policy that provoked the Sov Russia into jabbing a stick in our eye the minute it had the chance, while Republican-controlled Congresses kept bettering their own earmark records in a way Michael Phelps would have envied. As for "reforming the process of government", what? The biggest dump ever taken on the Constitution, absent rebel armies being camped 100 miles from DC, wasn't enough reform for you?

But most issues are not confrontations between virtue and vice. Most problems — the ones Barack Obama is sure to focus on like health care reform and economic anxiety — are the product of complex conditions. They require trade-offs and policy expertise. They are not solvable through the mere assertion of sterling character.

Wait, David, Vertigo! is on another network. There's a clear-cut moral imperative for us to act as though we can order Russia around--in the Caucases!--but protecting the health of our own citizens is a tricky moral quandary lined with metaphysical landmines? Do you shave yourself in the morning?

McCain is certainly capable of practicing the politics of compromise and coalition-building. He engineered a complex immigration bill with Ted Kennedy and global warming legislation with Joe Lieberman. But if you are going to lead a vast administration as president, it really helps to have a clearly defined governing philosophy, a conscious sense of what government should and shouldn’t do, a set of communicable priorities.

BZZZZZTT! I'm so sorry, but three inadvertent Bush clichés and you're Out! like one of those cigarettes that doesn't use Old Gold's™ luxury blend of carefully selected tobaccos from around the globe! Here's a carton for you, plus our home game, and a $25 gift certificate to Red Lobster.  Better luck next time, David Brooks, and when you see Mark Shields, talk retirement! G'nite, folks!

If You Need Me, I'll Be In The Storm Cellar.

David Brooks, "Obama Admires Bush." May 16

OKAY, first:  that's George Herbert Walker Bush, and if you'd like to take a moment to scream about deceptive headlines, I'll wait.

Second, George Herbert Walker Bush? What, the Reagan comment wasn't enough for this guy? What's next? Nixon went to China? Herbert Hoover really had us on the right track? Roger B. Taney was misunderstood?  

Thirdly, fourthly, and fifthly, as the Bush Obama doesn't admire would say...well, okay, I don't think I have three more points. I just wanted to say that, having endured Bush the Dumber saying "fourthly" the other day, on The Daily Show, where they thought the gag was that he'd opened with  something like "There are three things to keep in mind..." whereas I just really, really hate the construction, and I don't care who accepts it, OED, it still sounds idiotic. Does one say, "Seven comes fourthly in the list of Primes?" No, one does not.

All right, then, lastly, don't mind me. I've decided to increase my caffeine intake, just as an exercise in health contrarianism, and it's making me a little jumpy. I'm sure I'll get used to it. In the meantime, I don't really hold this particularly bit of stupidity against Senator Obama, because the overt stupidity is being manufactured to get him, and because, given the electorate they have to work with, it's possible to defend practically anything a politician says as just something he has to say to get elected, just as it's possible to defend almost anything that outrages the general sensibility of the American voter as most likely true. (This is not to say I do not welcome the inevitable explanation from Progressives, as I'm curious to know if He Didn't Really Mean It again, or if Iraq War I is now the touchstone of acceptable US foreign policy. )

No, I'd rather look at Brooks, who is in full passive-aggressive simper mode here, with the Special Republican Talking Points you're not supposed to be able to see without the Secret Decoder Ring, because Brooks is, you know, reasonable.

Who's supposed to be falling for this stuff? Once in a while I run into someone who says, "Oh, I used to like Brooks," or "his book was pretty funny," just as I occasionally see where someone confesses he liked Lieks' earlier, funnier carpet samples. But the question is, "how long could it have taken you to get over it?" and the corollary, "Why's he still there?" Or, as chuckling said the other day about the late Jane Galt: Yea, but what's her publisher's excuse?

Shouldn't the Times require something like a yearly road-worthiness test of its columnists? Shouldn't Brooks have to demonstrate the metaphorical ability to parallel park? Can't we check his emissions?

Hezbollah, Lebanon, Obama, negotiations, blah blah blah. Is it too much, really, to ask that Brooks act like he remembers who's President, let alone what sort of fluffing the man used to receive for his Codpiece Diplomacy, from the likes of, say, David Brooks? It's the final fucking months, Allah akbar, of Commander Negotiation Is Appeasement, not the first hopeful moments of sunshine after the smoking hulk of Jimmy Appeasement Carter's Disastrous Reign. So how's that No Negotiations thing workin' out?

Is Obama naïve enough to think that an extremist ideological organization like Hezbollah can be mollified with a less corrupt patronage system and some electoral reform? Does he really believe that Hezbollah is a normal social welfare agency seeking more government services for its followers? Does Obama believe that even the most intractable enemies can be pacified with diplomacy? What “Lebanese consensus” can Hezbollah possibly be a part of?
If Obama believes all this, he’s not just a Jimmy Carter-style liberal. He’s off in Noam Chomskyland.

Let us try to be reasonable and open-minded about this. In the seventy years since the end of WWII spurred the Second Great Awakening of innate American empire lust, and the Truman administration strong-armed the creation of the State of Israel, there are, arguendo, three American contributions to its continued existence: massive foreign and military aid, the possible transfer of nuclear technology (so far), and the Camp David Accords, which ended the state of war between Israel and her largest enemy and fractured pan-Arabism. See if you can name the American President who pulled that one off. [Bonus question: how many battalions did he use?]

Let us further state that the difference between Stark Raving Chomskyism and the alternatives is that SRC hasn't yet failed in practice.

We might, while we're at it, note the accomplishments of two of our most activist post-war Presidents in terms of using military force to accomplish US aims: both Eisenhower and Reagan invaded Lebanon. Ike's even went pretty well, assuming you're a fan of propping up Christian control of Muslims agitated by the final act of the old Anglo-French imperialism. Reagan, well, not so good. And we'll add we're back talking about Lebanon, again, for the second time in the Codpiece administration.

As for Senator Obama, we're in full agreement here. There was absolutely nothing else the Bush I administration could have done in response to Kuwaiti slant-drilling unprovoked aggression by Saddam Hussein, a man the Reagan/Bush administration had repeatedly tried to rein in. And no one can argue that, after the US and Coalition forces invaded, there was not a single occurrence of the horrific use of incubator babies for bayonet practice.

You Do The Math.

MoDo: "Duel of Historical Guilts." March 5

WELL, that's settled. Maureen Dowd does write her own headlines.

Correction: That should read Pulitzer Prize-winning author Maureen Dowd writes her own headlines.

Okay, look: we are so far beyond the point of saying Dowd is a worthless gibberer with the taste and consistency of wet cardboard that I've lost track of what exponent goes with "cliché" when describing the sentiment. I believe we may even be beyond the point of wondering whether the language of Shakespeare, Swift, and Raymond Chandler is sufficient to do her real justice, and we know the psychiatric literature avails us nothing. I believe all that's left us is to wonder how many dead hookers and live donkeys there are in her blackmail photo files. We already know it's not enough.

While we're at it someone might want to consider whether there's some set of numbers between the natural and the integers, since without occupying negative space Dowd manages to crawl under Zero on a regular basis, with room to spare, even as we reset Zero to accommodate her previous efforts.  Go take a look at her freaking archive. The last time she wrote a column about anything other than Hillary Clinton was thirty-eight days ago, that one being a Thanks for breaking the story! post-mortem of the Giuliani campaign--a campaign she'd covered in a single column to that point--that mentioned "Clinton" nearly as often as "Rudy". Is there another columnist anywhere with that sort of record? Is there anyone who's been so completely left in the dust by this internets thing? The worst Clinton-bashing bloggers I know occasionally write about something else--even if they seem to share the notion that Senator Clinton ought to avoid saying anything that supports her own candidacy--and they turn out copy every day, and no innocent trees die in the process. The woman is the Taco Bell of columnists, except some people actually swallow Taco Bell's stuff. Today's combination of beans, cheese, and roadkill skunk begins:

Some women in their 30s, 40s and early-50s who favor Barack Obama have a phrase to describe what they don’t like about Hillary Clinton: Shoulder-pad feminism.

Go ahead. Google it and find out how many of them aren't Maureen Dowd.

They feel that women have moved past that men-are-pigs, woe-is-me, sisters-must-stick-together, pantsuits-are-powerful era that Hillary’s campaign has lately revived with a vengeance.

Can't wait 'til "They" start callin' 'em "Mustache Petes".

Look, I'm sorry for quoting her once, let alone twice. But, one, MoDo and I are the same age. (Actually, she's two years older but looks much better, because I've spent forty-some years trying to do Math and she doesn't have to bother.) I have no idea what she was doing in the early Seventies, but I was trying to nail Feminists, which gives me a certain species of expertise in the matter. Surprisingly few of them thought I was a pig, though fewer still let me in their pantsuits. In fact, I don't remember any of them actually wearing pantsuits (which I suspect may just be anti-Hillary invective), or Zoot suits, or bustles. I think it was mostly jeans and dresses. You know, like normal people when they aren't dressing for something.  I don't recall any of them demeaning entire classes of people by connecting them with some twenty-years-out-of-date fashion trend, Junior-high style, either.

I don't recall any woe, either, beyond the natural if buoyant gloominess that comes from being in your early twenties and taking a hard look at your world and your culture. Au-fucking-contraire; what I recall was a spirited determination to Call This White European Male Shit out, and an optimistic sense that a rotten structure would crumble from common sense resistance, and that any shoring up it received on the Times' Op-Ed pages from hopeless misogynists would come from men. Ah, youth.

It's bad enough that valuable Times real estate is given over to Dowd so she can work out her personal problems. But it's beyond forgivable that those problems center on the six years following and two years before the first appearance of pubic hair.

Dowd knows better, but the loss of one's mind is an absolute excuse (as well as a good excuse to stop publishing). But if any of "today's Feminists" are tempted to judge their predecessors according to hairstyle let them hang their heads in shame. The Seventies are not exactly running neck-and-neck with the Icelandic Sagas in the Mists of Time race. The evidence of how (much more) bigoted society was against women a generation ago is all around you. It still has the power to astound me, and I lived through it the first time. And the idea that we've somehow transcended it for all time, along with whalebone stays and shag carpeting, is repudiated regularly. On the pages of the goddam New York Times.

And Who Emails This Shit?

Shorter David Brooks: I'm not a Hillary-hater, but here's an anecdote about the cold, calculating, absolutist bitch that might give you pause.

Why we're congenitally incapable of doing "shorters", or being succinct: Health Care! 1993! John "Blue Dog" Cooper, the last man to lose an election to Fred Dumbo Thompson! The Educated Class rooting against Hillary!

Money Shot: "Cooper is, of course, a man who has been burned in the past. But it is legitimate to wonder if adults can really change all that much. A defter politician would have reached out to Cooper and made an attempt to address the concerns he represents."

"If adults can change that much!"   "A defter politician reaching out!"  That's rich, really, coming from someone who voted for Bush twice. And the "concern" Cooper represented was the insurance industry, not thousands of Tennesseans worried that they might be forced to receive affordable healthcare.

Is Brooks so stupid as to believe this? No. He's got a terminal case of Reagantotism, made that much worse by the fact that he, like a certain Presidential candidate Cooper has endorsed, was actually in his twenties when this magical land of Ponies and Unity was unrolled. It was made that much worse when the soft bigotry of low journalistic standards bestowed the phony title of "The Conservative Pundit Liberals Love" on his passive-aggressive AV-nerd chatter.   Now he's left trying to pickup Blue Dog Democrats in a seedy dive by repeating the only line that ever got him laid, even if it was twenty years ago.  

Skinny: Healthcare, of course, is the sine qua non of the Hillary hater, the intersection of Republican Entitlement Boulevard and Sexism Street, and its astonishingly long life is all one needs to justify throwing Brooks to the ground, grabbing his wrist, and making him hit himself until he cries, "Okay, I'm a Hillary Hater!" three times. The fact that Mrs. Clinton was tabbed to head her husband's task force was--and is--offered as evidence of some insidious take-over plot, and Mrs. Clinton was--and is--portrayed as some sort of power-mad harpy who dared presume herself the equal of Our Elected Officials. The plan was defeated thanks to the efforts of Democratic insurance-industry mouthpieces like Cooper and Pat Moynihan, after a massive industry-financed scare campaign which has kept national healthcare off the agenda for nearly twenty years.   A more vindictive man than myself could possibly be hoping that a sizable percentage of the people who helped stem the tide of reasonable concern back them find themselves lacking heath insurance today. And needing it.

If the cupidity of the Reaganauts was ever more in evidence I, for one, can't think of where. If we need a finer example of the will of the people being thwarted by the unequal access of big money concerns to our whorish politicians you'll have to find it for me. And yet! As Brooks, no Hilary-hater! tells the tale fifteen years later, on Super Dooper Times Three Tuesday, coincidentally, the whole matter boiled down to Mrs. Clinton being rude to John Fucking Cooper. It was the Congress of the United States that botched healthcare. It was Bill Clinton's program, not his wife's, just as Iraq is George Bush's war, not, well, Bill Clinton's wife's. That it was mishandled in its public-relations effort, and insufficiently ardent of the rectums of puffed-up politicos like Cooper are items we may put forward for discussion. But the clear winners were the people who owned their votes, and a generation of Hitlery biographers, and the clear loser was democracy.

While We're At It, Gimme Your Lunch Money: Assuming he's within shouting distance of the truth, something we would not necessarily assume from John Cooper's public record, how many politicians have told opponents "We'll bury you," in private? Of how many males is it quoted back as evidence of rapine, or suggested as something simply beyond the pale of politics? I have refused to support Senator Clinton's campaign, but if she'd like to borrow a shovel I'll be happy to oblige.

Get Me Rewrite!

MoDo, for once inadvertently revealing details about the inner lives of "cabbies" "her co-workers", rather than herself:

When I walked into the office Monday, people were clustering around a computer to watch what they thought they would never see: Hillary Clinton with the unmistakable look of tears in her eyes.

A woman gazing at the screen was grimacing, saying it was bad. Three guys watched it over and over, drawn to the “humanized” Hillary. One reporter who covers security issues cringed. “We are at war,” he said. “Is this how she’ll talk to Kim Jong-il?”

Another reporter joked: “That crying really seemed genuine. I’ll bet she spent hours thinking about it beforehand.” He added dryly: “Crying doesn’t usually work in campaigns. Only in relationships.”

How would you know?

My dad, 87 and going strong, grew up in an era where he never saw or heard an airplane unless he traveled to do so. My first record player, given me by my grandmother, played her Jolson 78s; by the time I was old enough to shop for myself they had been relegated to the area behind the counter, where they stood in brown paper sleeves, being ignored. Now there's 600 vinyl albums in my basement I'm too lazy to transfer to mp3s, and my dad flies to Vegas whenever he feels the urge, without having to hand-crank the flivver to get to the airport. So why is Maureen Dowd still at the Times? There's plenty of room for incoherent crackpottery on the blogosphere, and there must be some equivalent of Behind the Counter and Out of the Way at the Times, at the very least.

And maybe they could devote her space to covering issues or imparting information or something. Just kidding. I'll bet K-Lo could handle the increased workload as well as Kristol does.