I Could Swear The Banner Said Leading Candidates

WaPo: It's Fred Thompson Day!

IT'S apparently part of a series. So I'm guessing. The difference between reading The Washington Post, former newspaper, former employer of professional journalists, and visiting my dear gray-haired mother, former cognitively functioning member of society, is that I care about what my mother has to say, however addled. Otherwise, they make roughly an equal amount of sense anymore.

So I'm not quite sure how I stumbled upon this thing. There are six, yes, six, I'm serious, six separate pieces on the Unstoppable Downhill Log Roll that is Fred Dalton Thompson, not counting video and bullshit polls. The big question they raise is: just how badly do these people need jobs? And the answer is: enough to chew the Used Squeak Toy of Conventional Wisdom So Beslobbered The Dog Won't Even Touch It Anymore. Short survey:

The 2700-word bio (Joel Achenbach):

There are presidential candidates who are congenitally ambitious, having started campaigning for votes shortly after leaving the womb. There are other candidates for whom being presidential timber is a birthright, something inherited, along with a famous name and a jaw line and maybe a beachfront compound.

Then there's someone like Thompson -- a reluctant candidate, not terribly interested in stumping, slow to enter the race and so laid-back that he declines to take a wide-open shot at an opponent during a televised debate.

The Rib Tickler (the abominable Robin Givhan):

If one simply heard Fred Thompson speak and did not have the benefit of seeing him, it would be forgivable to assume that he, with his slow-as-molasses, just-us-regular-folks drawl, might be wearing overalls and a pair of muddied work boots after moseying in from the field.

The Real Tinsel Underneath (Dana Milbank):

Is it possible to be too folksy? Thompson seems determined to find out. The big man with all those Hollywood roles is trying to slow-drawl his way to the GOP nomination. To the extent that Thompson has a pitch, it's that he doesn't change his views like, say, Mitt Romney or Rudy Giuliani. "Where I stand does not depend on where I'm standing or what political office I happen to be running for," he asserts.

The Excuse Me Senator, But Where You're Standing Right Now Is "In A Pile Of Bullshit" Faux-Balancer (John Solomon):

2. Thompson loves to tell voters about his support of the right to bear arms, his lifetime membership in the National Rifle Association and his A grade from the gun lobby during his Senate career. Thompson, however, didn't join the NRA until 1994, the year he ran for political office -- the U.S. Senate -- for the first time. And recently he noted that he hadn't been hunting in a very long time.

The "Don't Blame The Media Because The Guy They Called 'The New Reagan' For Six Months Turned Out To Be The Old Earl Dodge" Explainer (Michael D. Shear):

Thompson's team waited because he wasn't ready. His late start meant he had to build a campaign organization in a fraction of the time others took. And Thompson, a policy wonk, wanted to contemplate the big issues before he jumped into the fray, former aides and advisers say.

Okay, hold it right there. I'm not sure if this attack of vertigo comes from reading all the above or just the sudden drop in air pressure from that "wanted to contemplate the big issues" bit. Name me one single stance of the Thompson campaign that couldn't have been predicted a year ago by anyone with any understanding of domestic politics. Or, for that matter, by a Thompson supporter.

You Be The President!™

I have to admit that the more I've thought about the Frank Rich-approved notion of Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee as the Two Sides of the one-sided Avoid Clinton-Bush Era Hyperpartisanship (But Not Always Successfully!) coin, the more I like the idea. And the more I like the idea, the more I think what a good fit for a game show it makes. Cut to:

Maddeningly dark and foggy set (sort of a cross between the CSI morgue and a Coldplay concert) with a raised, stainless-steel-and-lexan boxing ring in its center, surrounded by skeletal steel lighting towers. In the ring, on opposite stools, sit Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee, each reading a Bible; at its center stands a man in a striped referee shirt, possibly Judge Mills Lane. The surrounding studio seats, dimly perceived, are divided at the cardinal compass points by aisles lit by running lights. As a disembodied voice intones the show's tagline:

Let's meet the next ChallenJARRRRRRRR!

and the crowd screams, lights beneath each aisle flash a random pattern of Red, Blue, Green, or Purple, until they suddenly freeze on one, indicating the politics of the next questioner. Mr. Red comes jogging down the aisle to take his place at the small smoked glass lectern at the side of the ring. The giant holographic clock above the ring is set to 30 seconds. The Mills Lane guy holds his hands, palm up, in front of him, then makes a sweeping official-looking pointing gesture at Mr. Red while saying, "Mr. Red...GO!"

MR. RED: Uh, my name is Nathaniel Abraham, and I'm a Bible-believing Christian, and i was fired from my job at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution because I refuse to believe Darwin's Theory of Evolution.

Okay, I haven't really thought it out past this. Should it be a real competition or a rigged teevee-real competition? Should other contestants--or the disembodied voice--be allowed to chime in with, "But you lied about the job description," or "This is a matter for the courts"? Should the combatants each have a Bully Pulpit card, or get to play a Signing Statement Exemption to block? Should they fight as tag teams, with Obama-Oprah vs. Huckabee and the Masked Dominionist? Should there be a waterboarding segment? I'm just spitballin' here.

(I haven't yet seen anything on Abraham's cv; he either walked a post-grad tightrope worthy of Philippe Petit or his deceptiveness goes back a lot further than Woods Hole. As P.Z. has pointed out, the fact that someone with advanced degrees would even have applied for a job that so ill-suited him is, well, fishy. But it's that "Darwin's Theory of Evolution" bit that caps the deal. No matter how the man got through grad school--excepting a body double--he knows there's no such thing.)

And Yet, When Teenagers Display This Level Of Ignorance And Apathy We Call It An Education Crisis.

THE vibe in Missouri right now feels different than the usual “it’s too early to think about politics” malaise. Four years ago, we were up in arms from the get-go. I’d tramp over to my parents’ house like a Union picket and unload on my Republican father — a very quiet man — as I watched the war reports on CNN. The eight or so blocks that separated our houses sprouted a Hooverville of yard signs. Now I can jog an hour and not see one “Support the Troops” magnetic ribbon or a blue “War Is Not the Answer!” plea. Instead, our quiet neighborhoods remind me of de Chirico paintings: empty, well manicured, but with some unnamed anxiety hovering outside the frame.

SO Sunday the Times kicks off a series of campaign reports tapping into our nation's Strategic Novelist Reserve: writers in Ohio, Wisconsin, and Missouri--which makes your average Hoosier feel like he's ducked a round of birdshot--and San Francisco, sitting out on the Bay like some cultural counterweight. This, of course, raised a couple of questions immediately: 1) Does the Times Op-Ed section in fact have access to accurate maps of the interior? and 2) Why aren't these people on the Op-Ed pages every day, and Maureen Dowd and David Brooks out writing novels about, I dunno, a young trombonist's economic coming-of-age in the heady "Reagan Spring" of 1981, or a middle-aged woman who decides to get something down there pierced. Not necessarily respectively.

Whitney Terrell, quoted above, turns in a fine meditation on the war which, at 650 words, clocks in at roughly what MoDo spends on slumber-party invective three times a week (she once called Willard Mitt "puffy-coiffed", which certainly raises the question of whether she's ever actually bothered to look at him or if "puffy" is New York slang for "steel belted"; at any rate, she wrote an entire column about The Speech Sunday which never once referred to him as Governor Underpants or The Breederator, which suggests to this writer that Romney too closely resembles the CEO of a family-owned publishing empire for her to feel comfortable taking a swing. And I say that simply because I read that entire tree-killing column, and I'll be damned if I'm not gonna get anything out of it, however slight). Terrell closes with an anecdote from his teaching gig:

Meanwhile, my students at the University of Missouri-Kansas City — most of whom define themselves as “middle of the road” — nod vigorously when I ask if the war is an important issue. But when it comes to candidates, things get murky.

“Anyone for Hillary?” I asked the other night, before we started class.

Out of 21 students, I got one unenthusiastic half wave.

“Giuliani? Edwards? Anybody?” I went on, feeling like the teacher in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.”

Finally, as if to put me out of my misery, a young woman in the back row raised her hand. Like many people here, she had a relative — a brother — who had just returned from Iraq. “I want the war to be over,” she said, “but at the same time, I don’t want to feel like everything he did over there was just a waste.”

Had any of the candidates convinced her that they know what to do?

“Not yet,” she said.

Of course this is the week the respective primary races "tightened", either as the unlikely result of voters, who have had the good sense to ignore this shit up to this point, finally deciding to pay attention or, as seems reasonable, pundits and the pollsters who work for them deciding that horsemeat can sizzle as well as a steak. Obama Surges in Wake of Hillary Missteps! It's 7 points in New Hampshire. It was 10 points last time, a "surge" of, roughly, the fucking margin of error. (Bubububut it was 23 points last Arbor Day! Which shows how useless such polls are.) Iowa's always been close. South Carolina is interesting, but the real story there is that Homeboy Edwards fails to move as the wire approaches. The Democratic race has always been headed for a shootout of Hillary Clinton vs. Dislike for Hillary Clinton, and the Junior Senator from Illinois has been its designated Other almost as long. I don't doubt that Obama has closed; I don't doubt that he can win. I'll just believe it when it occurs, not when the Times and ABC and CBS and CNN tell me he's about to.

Huckabee may be a slightly different matter, but there's certainly reason to doubt the Christian Right Awakens! storyline. As an example, this tidbit from Rassmussen:

40% of Voters Don’t Know Which Republican Gave Speech on Faith and Religion
Monday, December 10, 2007

While pundits and analysts have pored over the details of Mitt Romney’s speech last week, nearly half the nation’s voters could not identify which Republican had given a major speech on faith and religion. A Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 60% were able to identify Romney as that candidate. That figure includes 66% of Republicans nationwide, but just 52% of Evangelical Christian voters....

It’s interesting to note that Evangelical Christians are somewhat less likely than the population at large to know of Romney’s faith. Among Evangelical Christians, 65% were able to identify Romney as the Mormon.

And I'd be happy to supply an alternative, if admittedly partial, explanation:

Their other candidates suck.

Of course this comes on the heels of wall-to-wall anticipation of Mitt's JFK Moment, followed by endless jibber-jabbering analysis of whether Romney had indeed measured up to the slain 35th President or more closely resembled Washington's Farewell to the Troops. Remember, these are the same people who spent months chronicling the seismic groundswell that resulted in Fred Thompson entering the race.

As all such matters will, eventually and usually too late, this leads to somebody on the Op-Ed pages of the nation's Newspaper of Record explaining that the pundits got it wrong. I believe they draw straws for the privilege. Frank Rich:

Having failed to anticipate so much else, including the Barack Obama polling surge of days earlier, the press pack has proved an unreliable guide to election 2008. What the Beltway calls unthinkable today keeps turning out to be front-page news tomorrow.

Frank, I'm pretty sure I saw you running with them...

What really may be going on here is a mirror image of the phenomenon that has upended Hillary Clinton’s “inevitability” among Democrats. Like Senator Obama, Mr. Huckabee is the youngest in his party’s field. (At 52, he’s also younger than every Democratic contender except Mr. Obama, who is 46.) Both men have a history of speaking across party and racial lines. Both men possess that rarest of commodities in American public life: wit. Most important, both men aspire (not always successfully) to avoid the hyper-partisanship of the Clinton-Bush era.

Though their views on issues are often antithetical, Mr. Huckabee and Mr. Obama may be united in catching the wave of an emerging zeitgeist that is larger than either party’s ideology. An exhausted and disillusioned public may be ready for a replay of the New Frontier pitch of 1960.

On the one hand, we'd be better served by hearing more honest if poorly-thought-out confusion from creative writing students, and less of the Zeitgeist as explained by people who a scant three paragraphs ago were explaining that they, as a class, had gotten everything wrong to this point. On the other, it might be nice if they saw their mission as requiring they take the Zeitgeist out back and break a couple of its ribs on occasion, when deserved (say, now, for example) instead of orally servicing it time and again in the hopes of getting a new car out of the deal. Not always successfully? Huckabee's a circuit-ridin' preacher. Some backwoods populism thrown in the mix doesn't make him The Promised Uniter. As for Obama, just give me one partisan issue he's proposed a solution to, and I'll tell you how many days he'll spend in the Oval Office before the first Limbaugh attack hits.

Meanwhile, 2/3 of the public has decided it would rather believe in Iranian nukes than waste all that perfectly good irrational fear and hatred. Meaning, I guess, that it's time to look for Fred Dumbo Thompson atop next Friday's Zeitgeist survey.

Father Forgive Them, Except For The "Mormon in America" Bit

Peggy Noonan, "Mormon in America: How Mitt Romney came to give The Speech--and how he did." December 7
David Brooks, "Faith vs. the Faithless." December 7

CANDYLAND! Bright, primary-colored game pieces move across a yummy ice-creamy landscape at the roll of the die, and there's no real competition--except with the outside world, which occasionally makes you come inside and eat vegetables. Noonan, of course, lives there; Brooks drops in to hide whenever the grab for his lunch money gets a little too real. Both kibitzed Mitt Romney's play Friday. Peggers went swoony:

Romney reintroduced himself to a distracted country--Who is that handsome man saying those nice things?--while defending principles we all, actually, hold close, and hold high.

Bobo reached for Junior Ad-Exec Teaches Community College Night School:

Yesterday, Mitt Romney delivered a speech that artfully blended the centrist Meacham and the conservative Neuhaus.

Now, one of the things one learns in trying to write every day--even if by "write" one means "type cranky Letters to the Editor with little thought and less editing"--is that it is impossible--even on Planet Peggy--to take shit like the artificial hoopla over Romney's speech seriously. One may certainly understand it's all bullshit without personally enduring a daily publishing schedule, let alone one as strenuous as Noonan's. But the effort of putting words on e-paper on a regular basis has got to inform you that this The Speech business was pure PR guff, the same way filleting farm-raised trout for a living would allow you to sense a spoiled one without bothering to sniff. Not that it's a surprise that either of these two would shill the thing; I'm just sayin'.

Nor is one surprised when Noonan takes a trumpet solo in the middle of her harp recital:

He had nothing to prove to me regarding his faith or his church, which apparently makes me your basic Catholic. Catholics are not his problem. His problem, a Romney aide told me, had more to do with a particular fundamentalist strain within evangelical Protestantism. Bill Buckley once said he'd rather be governed by the first thousand names in the Boston phone book than the Harvard faculty. I'd rather be governed by Donny and Marie than the Washington establishment.

Easily arranged. Take I-80 west til you get to the Bonneville Salt Flats. You'll get to travel the Indiana Toll Road in the process, so you can celebrate Privatization while you're at it, for a nominal fee.

But Peg, look, in the interests of doing what Willard Mitt didn't--namely, discuss religious differences--Roman Catholics are religious wholesalers. The most important thing to a Catholic is being seen as part of the inventory. They're not real concerned about the crazy guy panhandling down the block, unless he steals a truck. On the other hand, Protestants, generally, and certainly all evangelicals, buy retail. They don't like you readin' the magazines without buying. They're naturally schismatic. They don't tend to excuse doctrinal changes just because a new infallible leader got himself elected. Instead, they just start another One True Church. There are over thirty-five denominations of Baptist Church in this country, without counting the thousands of independent Baptists churches as separate denominations on their own, with they technically are. They'll form a splinter group over the question of whether you can baptize in fluoridated water. Minor questions of faith are major concerns for these people. They can lose half their congregations to some guy who drinks turpentine, overnight.

Which doesn't mean Roman Catholics should go around patting themselves on the back over their tolerance. It means they feel the penalty for early withdrawal, as drilled into young heads, is sufficient to hold off the Minions of Mongo. As I recall, some Catholics turned out to be pretty intolerant of one of their own around the last Presidential election, even though his beliefs were in line with the teaching. Romney doesn't have a "Catholic problem" not because Catholic Republicans are the soul of ecumenicalism; he doesn't have one because he changed his stance on abortion in an effort to get nominated. If "Abortions for some, tiny Ameican flags for others" was inscribed on one of those Holy Pie Plates from Mephzab that form the basis of his religion he'd have a Catholic Problem that'd make him forget his prostate.

(Nooners, by the way, gives us a remarkable Lives of the Saints view of The Speech--the resistance from "some" of the staff, the rough draft in March, the May Day of Decision, the Summer of Indecision, the desire to deliver it "on the ascendancy", the October "Thanksgiving" target date complicated, but not dictated, by the Surging Huckabettes. One thing is clear: with this much campaign mythology behind it--whether true or false or mixed--nobody's more intoxicated by The Speech than that campaign staff which is said to have been so lukewarm about the idea. I've met Tapeheads who weren't so obsessive.)

It's politics, not theology, behind the evangelical "uproar" over Mormonism--which seems strangely to have come instantaneously into play right alongside the Unstoppable Huckabee Iowa Express. This explains why Brooks actually dedicates half his column to being lukewarm about it, for real. After praising Mitt for competently navigating the raging rapids that separate Genuine Mushy Ecumenicalism and Politically-Motivated 'Conservative' Faux Mushy-Ecumenicalism, Brooks says:

And yet, I confess my own reaction is more muted.

And I'm sure there's something in Burke about it, too, but the real reason is that the But I'm Not A Social Conservative 'conservatives' like Brooks are the ones who were burned the worst by the whole Schiavo business, when their delusion about who they'd been sharing a party with since Reagan reached the flashpoint. If Brooks is now concerned about the banana pudding God Romney proposes to dollop onto every courthouse lawn in the Republic, what was he doin' the last thirty years? Is the bull-roaring homo-and-feminist Hater of Falwell and Robinson a better fit?

In fairness, Noonan gets around to this idea in her final graph, though one tries to be careful passing out credit to a woman whose very next sentence may concern the stopped watch the Queen of Sweden gave her in 1874.

I do not know why Romney did not include nonbelievers in his moving portrait of the great American family. We were founded by believing Christians, but soon enough Jeremiah Johnson, and the old proud agnostic mountain men, and the village atheist, and the Brahmin doubter, were there, and they too are part of us, part of this wonderful thing we have.

I dunno...is American really ready to clutch to her Xanax-deadened bosom the theological descendants of a mythologized Western cannibal? Or, for that matter, Jeremiah Johnson?

Happy Birthday

Dalton Trumbo
December 9, 1905--September 10, 1976

Wait, That's It?

"WE welcome a nation's symphony of faith"?

Th' fuck?

WIllard Mitt has had a year, minimum, to write that speech, his "Moment", and it winds up sounding like, take your pick: a) a Wednesday luncheon address to the Jaycees of Greater Ottumwa; b) the guest sermon at a Methodist/Church of Christ Interfaith Sunday; c) the back of a box of Kellogg's Frosted Religious Flakes & Nuts.

Okay, I take that back. For "sermon" read "perfunctory remarks before opening the serving line on the monthly Pot Luck Dinner".

Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God.

The "Elusive Butterfly of Democracy" Theory.

I don't know about you, but had I stopped for a moment before--and I assuredly did not--and tried to figure out just why Willard Mitt Romney was running for President I believe I'd have drawn a blank, apart from the natural villainy that's in all of us. So, again, always trust your first impressions.

Let me assure you that no authorities of my church, or of any other church for that matter, will ever exert influence on presidential decisions.

"As your President, I promise I will continue to pander only to that same set of rabid mainstream Christian extremists I've already sold out every ideal to. Unless circumstances dictate otherwise. Offer void in Utah."

I believe in my Mormon faith and I endeavor to live by it. My faith is the faith of my fathers. I will be true to them and to my beliefs.

I'm sorry...I'm having trouble concentrating on your speech and experiencing the sensation of whiplash simultaneously.

Is this what you people have against public education (theoretically, I mean, not the stuff about the coloreds)? That it's generally not permissible to give two diametrically opposed answers to the same question and still get an "A"?

You had a year! You have every consultant untold billions of consulting-firm fees can buy you. And now (ahead of schedule and "against their advice") you tell us not to worry that the Elders of your church will order you to sew preteen vaginas shut across this Great Land of Ours, but if you personally decide that Angels from the planet Mongo have ordered you to wipe Islam violent Islam off the face of the globe you're cool with it?

So lemme ask you: why should we trust a President who's already demonstrated he'll throw as much money as possible at any problem as a principled approach to problem-solving, even when it's his own or his investors' cash he's playing with? "Assume people are stupid, and say 'Jesus' a lot." I'd have given you that advice six months ago for $37.50, plus S&H.

In John Adams' words: ``We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. ... Our Constitution,'' he said, ``was made for a moral and religious people.''

Oh, shit, I left out "Quote the founders at their baronial, kindly-keep-the-peasants-downwind, finest. See Adams, John." Okay, 10% off.

Given our grand tradition of religious tolerance and liberty...

As illustrated by what's been practiced on, and by, my own little enclave...

some wonder whether there are any questions regarding an aspiring candidate's religion that are appropriate. I believe there are.

As illustrated by my tanking in Iowa...

And I'll answer them today.

Well, "answer" in the same sense that my sons are "serving in Iraq".

I believe that every faith I have encountered draws its adherents closer to God.

All four of 'em. Faiths, I mean. Four Gods would be an absurdity.

And in every faith I have come to know, there are features I wish were in my own: I love the profound ceremony of the Catholic Mass, the approachability of God in the prayers of the evangelicals, the tenderness of spirit among the Pentecostals, the confident independence of the Lutherans, the ancient traditions of the Jews, unchanged through the ages, and the commitment to frequent prayer of the Muslims.

Those comical one-liners of Confucius. Those tickle me. Reggae, except the political stuff. The delicious sausages of the Poles. The tasty fried potatoes of the French. As President, I'll wear a Pope hat and take peyote. Did I leave anybody out?

As I travel across the country and see our towns and cities, I am always moved by the many houses of worship with their steeples, all pointing to heaven, reminding us of the source of life's blessings

Right. Whenever I find myself in that small town America Mitt's servants hail from, I inevitably tear up at the sight of a brave Jewish steeple. I mean, Christ, these guys can't avoid saying "Some of my best friends are Negroes" even when they're the Negro.

But in recent years, the notion of the separation of church and state has been taken by some well beyond its original meaning.

Refresh my memory, willya Mitt?

They seek to remove from the public domain any acknowledgment of God. Religion is seen as merely a private affair with no place in public life. It's as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America - the religion of secularism. They are wrong.

No new religions! I've pandered enough, and if I have to eat another rubber knish I'm gonna hurl!

You just knew this was where he was headed, didn't you? "Let us come together as a freedom-loving people and really hate the atheists?" The only surprising thing--okay, not that surprising--is that we've reached a point where this sort of thing passes for public discourse. I don't expect Willard to address the real issues involved. I 'd just like it if someone would either answer the question without tapdancing clogging for an hour, or tell everyone else to go piss up a rope. Anything but Jell-O mold faux-theism. If Romney had pulled a random six items from The Big Book of Really, Really Crackpot Shit Mormons Are Supposed To Believe, Really, and said, "Yes, I believe those, because I'm a Mormon," I'd consider voting for him. That would have shown some character. Kucinich acknowledged seeing a UFO, and that's without believing he'd suffer Eternal Paper Cuts if he denied it. And y'know, just once I'd like to hear someone acknowledge that this sort of Bronze Age mush, rather than being constantly besieged, has been ascendant for thirty years without its having solved anything except the problem of making government seem more noisome and less efficient than it already was, and ought to go back to quietly informing people's lives instead of publicly screaming how desperate they are in the first place. What Mitt Romney will "do as President" is about as realistic a question as what he'll be doing when the Avenging Seraphim fly over Washington D.C. in their flaming Celestial Nash Ramblers*. Why we're all supposed to be listening is the real question.


* What his own father was doing while "The Greatest Generation" was "defeating fascism and vanquishing the Soviet Union."

My New Favorite Professor

IS Dr. James Stripes, and not just because I am totally stealing his comment that Fred Hampton advocated only the same thing Charlton Heston did, with the (as it turns out, fatal) misapprehension that it might apply equally to African-Americans. (This blog, by the way, is always quick to point out that Heston was one of the Hollywood names who marched with Dr. King back when that was not particularly a wise career move.) Rather, it's because his new blog, Patriots and Peoples discusses issues in American history raised by a comparison of Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States and Schweikart and Allen's A Patriot's History of the United States, a great idea in the first place, and the writing is lively, plus I seem a lot smarter by linking to it, except now I have to stop pretending I know anything about the subject. I would have mentioned it sooner, and gotten to Half-Price Books to find cheap copies, except my toe hurts, and if you think that's a joke, you try it.

To My Knowledge, No One's Yet Called It A 'Hail Mary'

SO Monday my Poor Wife was working away on her class project, the one for the class she's taking, not one she's teaching, and I found myself alone with the remote at the critical 5 PM slot. She was still within earshot, and I am nothing if not dutiful, so she got to listen to a half-hour of local jibber-jabber, except from one station only with no flipping back and forth to catch three-to-six different weather segments, depending on what's happening on the Threat Board. (Local "News" now begins with Weather unless there's a catastrophe of Biblical proportions occurring somewhere other than Iraq, which is firmly affixed to the 5:30 slot. Thus for three days last week we opened local "news" by watching weather radar over Central Texas, and prior to the first storm of the season dumping 3" of fluffy snow on us Wednesday morning we'd spent a weekend watching the pink nimbus of its radar reflection arcing across Minnesota and Wisconsin like we were Aussies in On the Beach.)

Anyway, I started flipping around and landed on Pardon the Interruption, the vaguely closeted ESPN Siskel & Ebert spinoff in which the guy with the second-worse case of the cutes in national broadcasting discusses the day's sports "issues" with the guy with the worst case. I believe you will know, assuming, for some reason, that you care, which one of those is Tony Kornheiser.

And I stuck around because the second story was Sunday's Colts-Jags game (they list the chronology on a sidebar), which had been pretty much ignored by the national press despite its having involved the much-injured but still possibly second-best team-in-the-league defending champs and their divisional rivals and top wildcard team who're one of the most feared clubs in the NFL, and despite the Colts win having all but clinched the AFC South in a season of adversity. And instead the discussion centered on Jacksonville's claim of having been cheated.

The Colts are 9-3 against the Jax since the two were moved to the AFC South in 2002. Remarkably, and against all odds, all nine of those losses have been the result of the Colts, the referees, the League office, NASA, and all the companies that use Peyton Manning as a celebrity endorser colluding. At least according to the Jags. They're one of the toughest outfits in football, but they're the biggest whiners in all of sports. So much so that it is a common bar sport in Indianapolis to name the most outrageous Jags' complaint after their next loss and see if you can approach the reality; I have a standing bet that "Pepper spray in the eye black" will turn up before 2012.

You might suppose that this information would manage to find its way over the Appalachians, even to a professed computerphobe like Kornheiser, but apparently not. They took this stuff seriously, although Kornheiser took off the tinfoil hat long enough to debunk--thanks, Tony!--Jacksonville DE Paul Spicer's mock insistence that Bill Polian had paid off the refs. They proceeded to show two plays from the first quarter where a Colts challenge was upheld (while neglecting to show the actual replays), and one of the Jags' four false starts, which they had blamed on Indy's defense "barking". The segment sorta concluded with Kornheiser pulling the old boxing bromide "You have to knock the champ out" from his sphincter, as though the game had ended in a split decision.

Okay, so, no big deal; aggressive stupidity is very big with Nielsen families, they tell me. But it's Monday night; time for the undefeated Pats to play the Ravens, and Tony Kornheiser to talk over Ron Jaworski for another entire broadcast, lest America actually learn something about the game. And the Ravens beat the Pats for 59: 37, only to lose in the end, and afterwards some of the Ravens go ballistic over some of the calls in the last :44, about which they have maybe one somewhat valid point and are full of some measure of shit on the rest. And so I set up to tape PTI the next afternoon in case my PW is back at the controls, and Lo! and Behold! after two minutes discussing the actual game, and whether Tom Brady's jock tastes like chocolate or is more redolent of peppermints, the third story is on the Controversy, and the sidebar title is "Conspiracy Theory".

The script is irresistible. They don't have to write to it. They view everything through it, all their waking lives.

Which brings us to one Willard Mitt Romney and the groundswell of excitement over "the Mormon speech" he's said to be delivering today. By casual count I have now heard this compared to JFK's "Catholic speech" 137 times, without ever searching it out once; I have heard 84 times that this wasn't his Kennedy speech, 73 of those noting that he'd not compare the circumstances/personalities/cultural import of the two; several dozen explanations of how the speech was planned for later, after he'd won some primaries, but is being moved up because of The Amazing Surging Huckabee, most of those allowing that his advisors were agin' it, but none of them questioning whether his advisors were actually behind the decision to tell the reporter that his advisors were agin' it. I have seen or heard it described as a Make-or-Break speech, the Most Important Event of His Campaign, his "Moment", and "Pivotal"; someone even bothered to wake up Jonah Goldberg, probably figuring that corporate media insanity would be incomplete otherwise.

Romney, by the way, is spending something like $800K per day on teevee *, has now spent more money than any candidate in history to this point **, and has already spent more than all the Presidential campaigns through 1988, adjusted for inflation, combined †. Which has achieved almost 80% name recognition and a make-or-break moment even before literally hundreds of our fellow citizens swarm the church basements of Iowa for their Quadrennial Vote-N-Snack, but a lot of goodwill from that subset of voters who sell television advertising time.

The only thing that justifies the hyperbole is that hyperbole is one of the few things besides eye-catching new packaging schemes and making idiots of ourselves on television that we're still good at. The only thing that justifies all actual discussions of the "issue" in question, rather than the significance of its contrivance, being buried in paragraph 18, is the sensitivity of the sort of Religious Freedom voter who thinks Mormons will burn in Hell for all eternity but would rather not say so publicly.

Still, as we swirl down the drain, if we remember to keep our eyes on a fixed spot we can a) avoid vertigo and b) enjoy some unintentional humor while we're at it. Bob "Pivotal" Novak:

Romney no longer is called the perfect candidate hampered solely by religious prejudice. After a half-hour immigrant-bashing duel with Rudy Giuliani, he looked like somebody who would say anything to be nominated.

Hey, Bob, you ever consider sportscasting?


* true
**also true
† faith based

Happy Birthday

John Davies Cale
born March 9, 1942
(h/t blackdogred)

Slate Quarterly Has A Nice Ring To It, Don'cha Think?

1) Hey, it's nice to see Stephen Metcalf's rebuttal--make that debunking--of that William Saletan series The Negro Cranium: Deficient or Just Subpar? But A) it's fairly damning when you have to call in the adults to clean up your mess; B) it's especially damning when your whole schtick is Up Is Orange, No, Wait, We're Kidding, It's Seafoam; and C) It should have been caught from Saletan's opening sentence. Plus he still has a job. I guess the conclusion is, uh, Ha Ha Ha! You Fell For It! We Never Said Inaccuracy Is The New Accuracy! We Just Don't Give A Shit!

One is tempted to suggest that this is the real face of Saletan's "Liberal Republicanism", except a chimera has no face.

2) Does Hitchcock Get Too Much Credit?

Ans: Yes.

I'd prefer to leave it at that, but should the reader fell compelled to click on the resulting slideshow he or she will learn--SPOILER ALERT!--that in fact Hitchcock did not draw his own storyboards, thereby leading us to the astonishing conclusion that cinema is a collaborative art.

I don't suppose there's any chance they're going to bring in an adult to correct this one, so let's ask the real question: Does Hitchcock get too much credit because people like Andrew Sarris used the Cahiers du Cinema as a blanket justification for their own juvenile tastes, thereby encouraging a generation or two of movie buffs to imagine they were getting some extra value for their Hitchcock movie buck despite the fact that it had nothing whatever to do with what they like about them?

Ans: Yes.

I'll grant you two or three of his late British pics, plus, arguendo, Psycho: you name me another Hitchcock flicker that's better than it should be.

3) If Zep reunites, will they play "Stairway to Headphones"?

It also doesn't help that the lyrics appear to be an index of a confused mind. If, for instance, the lady at the beginning of the song is a fool (she believes, after all, that she can buy a stairway to heaven), then why at the end of this long and winding lyrical road is she shining white light and showing us how everything still turns to gold? Some critics have turned themselves inside out trying to prove that this must be a different lady. Cultural-studies theorists will see this is an "open" text. Industry bean counters will notice that its ambiguity is the key to its popularity.

And the rest of us will have to content ourselves with the free soporifics.

Fer chrissakes, it's Led Fucking Zeppelin. Lyrics? Lyrics are to Led Zep what guar gum is to ice cream. Assuming, that is, that major commercial ice cream producers steal their supplies of guar gum. Lyrics? I thought the point of Led Zeppelin lyrics was that otherwise Robert Plant would have had very little to do onstage.

Okay, they're sonic innovators. They also blazed a path in babydoll shirts for men, and those guitars that are, like, double guitars. If you're embarrassed by people holding flaming Bic lighters aloft and singing along with "Stairway", well, maybe you should be.

Today In History: December 4, 1969

AP/World Wide Photo
It's always nice to see public servants who enjoy their work.

I'VE been trying to do this story justice--okay, justice has nothing to do with it--for long enough now that I'm just gonna give up and let the jolly coppers above speak for themselves. No one's ever gonna do it better.

Fred Hampton was 21 years old when he died. Mark Clark was 22.

There was a big fight last year when a Chicago alderman tried to designate that block of Monroe Street "Fred Hampton Way". The FOP, after all these years, still clings to the idea that Fred Hampton's rhetoric made him a cop killer, and made his killers lawful. I propose a solution: let's take the name and the stain off J. Edgar Hoover off his federal building, and call it auld lang syne.

Can't We All Just Come Together And Shoot Developers?

Bruce Barcott, "Kill The Cat That Kills The Bird?" December 2

I spaced out my mother's medications Sunday--my sister and I alternate weeks filling her pillbox (remind me to tell you about the assisted living/nursing home industry some time, in case you haven't already guessed)--and I flat forgot until five o'clock, about the time I was pulling a roast chicken out of the oven.

So we ate sorta hurriedly and left the wine bottle unopened on the counter, and drove off to the Westside in the dark and the horizontal rain. "Have you seen the Carnival at the (other) end of the street?" my Poor Wife--who'd volunteered to go along thinking I'd let her drive, because I'm blind as a bat at night, and wound up hanging on for forty-five minutes of Death Car VI--asked as I pulled off in the opposite direction. I knew which two viral Christmas lawns she meant. You do, too, probably, assuming you live anywhere in the US of A where they favor lawns. Growing collections of jumbo blow-up Santas and Snowglobes and Bears--a happy-visaged brown bear with his own chimney filling the last available cubic meter of one of the yards was the 2007 addition my wife was anxious for me to catch--are the new obligatory addition to public displays of Podunk taste.

"Yeah," I said. "I wonder how many copies of An Inconvenient Truth they passed around last Christmas?"

Then I added, "Like I should talk, with five florescent tubes burning fourteen hours a day to keep a bunch of tender perennials alive in the basement 'til next May." (Honesty compels me to admit that I didn't say this in order to be honest, but to reinforce the idea of my honesty to my wife, except she knows better, anyway.)

Last August she undertook the care and feeding of her baby brother's menagerie (two cats, one bunny) while his family was on vacation. About mid-afternoon the first day I asked her if she'd forgotten about it. "No, I have to go at night," she told me, and explained that the second cat in the household wasn't actually in the household, but was a neighborhood dumpee they'd taken to feeding and now called their own, but didn't allow in the house because they hadn't yet decided whether to subject it to a lifetime of pain from medieval claw-removal torture like they did the other one, on the grounds that they have small children. Humanitarians. (I happen to believe the real reason is they have furniture of which they're inordinately fond, but then I also believe that a good swat from a cat it has agitated beyond all tolerance is one of the best and swiftest lessons a young child can learn.) And it turned out that their neighbors, with whom they've had quite friendly relations for the decade they've shared a corner of Subdivision Nirvana, were birding enthusiasts, and had begun a war over the cat that had escalated to not-speaking and threats to harm the animal if he killed any birds. So the cat had to be fed in secret. "Tell him to ask if they shoot hawks, too," I said, though I've come to realize my bons mots never really carry the day unless I'm a lot bigger than the other guy. So she carried on the stealth feeding for a week, and last I heard the cat is still associated with them, though his winter quarters were yet to be decided. The bunny owns the garage.

This is not the only sense in which I have a personal stake in Barcott's story (which followed the hung-jury trial of the Galveston birder who gunned down a feral cat).

At the center of it stood Jim Stevenson, unrepentant and sure. “What I did was not only legal,” he told me. “It was right.”

Which, of course, is why he ran like a tweener spotted egging a house.

One Texas birder, a fourth-grade science teacher, suggested that Stevenson be given a medal for his actions.

There's a surprise.

My own suburban space counts more bird feeders (four, freshly filled), birdhouses (five), and drinking sources (three, one winterized) than cats (two, one strictly indoor). We've had as many as four cats, all allowed outdoors to some extent, at one time. We've lived here twelve years. In that time we've had six bird kills, four definitely by one cat and a fifth suspected. The sixth kill is merely attributed to cats; the leavings actually suggested a hawk. I've seen hawks take two birds in flight near the feeders. They've also grabbed a squirrel, a small possum, and a rabbit. The cats have all been more avid hunters of ground game: field mice, voles, and chipmunks. Lucky for us the number of people with a Lifetime Rodent List is relatively small.

So from my personal experience in a decade-long study of developed, mid-continent, new-growth scrublands with a considerable number of cat-hours available to hunt over seed, if desired, birds were only 1.5 times as likely to be killed by a domestic feline as by window glass. Shoot them out, why don'cha?

There's more, of course. That Wisconsin study, which causes Barcott to note

Cat advocates love to attack the Wisconsin study, but the more you delve into the scientific literature, the more the Wisconsin study looks like a red herring used by cat defenders to divert attention from more grounded research.

while ignoring the fact that that particular stinking fish led to a proposal of open season on cats in Wisconsin, hastily withdrawn, but not hastily enough to keep virtual animal-torturer and war hero Jonah Goldberg from sticking his head above his office sandbags long enough to applaud a proposed new avenue for exercising our Second Amendment rights.

In the past decade, at least a dozen studies published in top scientific journals like Biological Conservation, Journal of Zoology and Mammal Review have chronicled the problem of cat predation of small mammals and birds. The takeaway is clear: cats are a growing environmental concern because they are driving down some native bird populations — on islands, to be sure, but also in ecologically sensitive continental areas. At hot spots along the Pacific, Atlantic and Gulf Coast, cat predation is a growing threat to shorebirds and long-distance migrants. And as wild habitat becomes more fragmented by human development, even some inland species are under increasing pressure from both house cats and their feral cousins.

Here's the other side of my experience. My wife and I lived for a couple of years in a rented house owned by a guy who'd been seduced by those Make A Fortune In Real Estate Without Using Money infomercials, and he'd bought a couple of places in a speculatively gentrifying area downtown. And while he struggled to find renters he fed the feral cat population in an effort to keep down the rodents. There were six every morning back of the garage, waiting for food. And we had three of our own, who went outside sporadically, so it represented a problem, but we kept feeding them. Within a month we were down to four, then two, then one persistent big guy--the only one you'd let within a foot of your face--who'd obviously begun life as someone's pet. And he, like the others for the duration of our brief acquaintance, would turn up with the most horrific injuries on a regular basis, the result of mating fights, rat bites, accidents in vacant buildings, and who knows what else, until he, too, disappeared. Their lives are brutal. Feeding them prolongs the brutality. Feeding feral cats in coastal areas or on islands isn't tender-heartedness, it's wrong-headed cruelty to the cats, let alone their prey.

Like Stevenson's Texas, my brother-in-law and his nature-loving neighbors live in a rock-ribbed Republican enclave dedicated to squeezing profit out of every available plot of land; so far as I've heard the neighbors haven't threatened to shoot the mayor. Maybe they should study that in Wisconsin.