Lost Art Of Compromise, Miraculously Rediscovered

Kathleen Parker, "Behind the Cell Curve: Why Is the President Ignoring a Scientific Gift?" March 11

Michael Gerson, "Stem Cells, the Right Way". March 11

PACE nearly every fourteen-year-old Jewish-Christian political philosopher and legal scholar I know of, modern American "conservatism" is precisely a sexagenarian issues-whore on whose gone-to-flab anatomy the faint blue tattoos of categories of principle which once, apparently, meant something can still be dimly made out if the light is right and some bright and helpful child is standing by to interpret.

Nowhere is that so apparent as with reproductive rights, aka ABORTION, the Single-Issuers' Single Issue, the model of, and in many cases the stated justification for, the Party and its principled adherents spending the last four decades refusing to talk to anyone but themselves. The particular robustness of Bronze Age paternalism, the largely unforeseen profound psychological, if not pathological, grip exerted upon the developing infant taught that Sex is Icky and Must Be Punished, not to mention its frequent survival into senescence, natural or premature, coupled with the power of excommunication and the rise of tax-free Local Access Cable Begging, well, these things were simply unexpected in 1973. At the very least phenomenal growth based on shameless manipulation of superstition, misogyny, and profound sexual dysfunction was thought to be a loser's bet, as well as damaging to the SS Ship of State Herself, which it proved to be, except the lesson took about four decades longer than expected. This was not naïveté; we already knew these people were in favor of nuclear brinkmanship, the Third Degree, and the impromptu death penalty in cases of ogling White Women, and opposed to fluoride. Naïve people in 1973 were the ones fearing that 1984 and 1984 had some sort of mystic connection, and hoping that Simon and Garfunkel could still patch things up.

ABORTION is the template for modern American "conservatism": the metaphysical certainty of the correctness of one's position, both factually and, especially, morally, and the attendant Manichaeism; the holy distain for opposing positions; the demonization of those opponents; the solution to complex problems via the bumper sticker slogan and/or Reagan quip; the refusal to address the argument in its own terms, and the willingness to lie one's way out of any unavoidable corners. All this may, in fact, be symptomatic of the human condition, or endemic among political party animals, but for "conservatives" it was seriously compounded by talking to themselves for so long, a congenital inability to sense humor, a serious, and reality-based, mass intellectual inferiority complex, compounded by a preference for cinematic alien life forms and loud explosions safely distant. This was then brought to full boil by the Reagan and Gingrich "revolutions" and served at a public masque which presented them as Outsiders even as they controlled the debate for thirty years.

And they were the only ones who'd eat it, though they wouldn't stop talking long enough to notice. The result is sadly predictable, though the only real sadness is that the rest of us fell victim. It's the rare public "conservative" pundit who can even construct an argument these days, let alone one that acknowledges facts, Mr. Will, or holds itself accountable to a reasonable level of consistency, Mr. Brooks. The efficacy of Incontinent Tax Cutting, the Myth of Global Warming, the academic hearing denied Intelligent Creationist Design, the Threat to the Very Institution of Holy Matrimony, the Quaintness of the Geneva Conventions; how did these things become "conservative" benchmarks? Principle? Or two generations of inbreeding?

It may be difficult to top the outright denial of accepted scientific thought, let alone fact, but the transfer of ABORTION irrationality to what Norbizness, RIP, called the Blastocyst American comes close. Monday the President, as you no doubt already know, lifted the restrictions on federally-funded embryonic stem cell research. Out come Parker and Gerson to demand the same degree of fairness they've shown the other side when they were in power. Oh, wait, I mean the opposite. Ladies first:

As he lifted the ban on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research Monday, President Obama proclaimed that scientific decisions now will be made "on facts, not ideology."

This sounds good, but what if there were other non-ideological facts that Obama seems to be ignoring? One fact is that since Obama began running for president, researchers have made some rather amazing strides in alternative stem cell research. Science and ethics finally fell in love, in other words, and Obama seems to have fallen asleep during the kiss. Either that, or he decided that keeping an old political promise was more important than acknowledging new developments. In the process, he missed an opportunity to prove that he is pro-science but also sensitive to the concerns of taxpayers who don't want to pay for research that requires embryo destruction.

Yes, damn you faintly, Mr. President, for keeping campaign promises, and let's hope it's not the start of a trend or anything.

Here's the point about the long, long-term refusal to address the issue on the face of it: what does your reproductive fetish have to do with the law? Millions of Americans oppose the death penalty, or massive military spending and the wanton destruction it sometimes entails, based on that very same moral notion, and I don't recall you asking George W. Bush to take it easy on them. Millions more disagree with your premise, object to the conveniently inconsistent application of moralisms, or believe that your metaphysical dogma will become relevant once you demonstrate it's True, preferably as you're being Raptured. Still others would simply like to know where your concern for the millions of Frozen Blastocyst Americans was hiding for twenty years before a few lines of stem-cell research animated it.

Then there are those like me who just wish you'd shut th' fuck up about science altogether, at least until the day the State begins threatening to vacuum your ladyparts and lease the harvest for the same price per acre as prime Federal drillin' land.

That goes for you too, Mike:

The breakthrough is stunning: four genes introduced into normal skin cells, enticing them to act like embryonic stem cells, which can be transformed into the 220 cell types of the human body. Somehow a piece of skin, after a few weeks of lab work, can become the cell of a beating heart.

The technology must be perfected; the cells may not prove to be exactly like embryonic stem cells; and the possibility of repairing hearts or spinal cords is still a long way off.
But the reaction of researchers has been close to giddy, and for good reason. The technique, unlike cloning, is relatively easy and inexpensive. Because the skin tissue will come from the recipient's body, the transformed cells would not be rejected. And the source of these cells, as one researcher said, is "ethically uncomplicated." A representative of the Catholic bishops agreed that there is "no moral problem with it at all."

Remind me, again: where does the Archbishop of New York stand in line of Presidential succession?

This is wonderful news for humanity -- and vindication for President Bush. In 2001, he slowed the rush toward public funding of research involving the destruction of human embryos. Instead, he directed millions of dollars toward alternative methods of obtaining stem cells, hoping science would eventually find a way around the problem. And it has.

Yeah, I'm sure the Japanese research team was real grateful for the funding.

This is that pure, principled lying about shit because you're better than everyone else in early Spring bloom. Bush permitted some lines of research to continue while introducing Federal funding. This amounts to what? in your view: just a little murder? Isn't consistency the single fucking requirement when making a moral argument? Playing tennis with the net down is one thing; getting to announce, "For the next five minutes the ball is invisible, too," is quite another.

Look, God-boy, we don't know, and we're not likely to. We don't know what, if anything, was lost in eight years of embryonic stem cell research impeded by what The Decider thought was the politically required amount of pandering to people who talk to dead carpenters. We don't know what sort of energy was wasted looking for "moral" alternatives; we don't know if recent non-embryonic-cell discoveries will turn out to be what is hoped. We don't know. We can doubt it would have been enough that my demented mother would have the will these days to push herself up out of her chair instead of sitting there staring out her window. We don't know. But we do know that whatever potential was lost was lost to salve the theological wounds inflicted on you types by the 19th century. And that all your magical beliefs will never cure one person of anything, excepting maybe sanity.

Two Words, Cupcake: Ben Fucking Shapiro

Jan Hoffman, "The Little Mr. Conservative". March 8

LOOK, I like ya, kid. Really. It's no problem that you're a conservative, or "conservative". You're a kid. The fact that you manage, while "clearing up" the distinction between genuine, principled Conservatism and the horribly unfair, party-and-policy-based common definition you see bandied about illiterately, to define Conservative "principles" backward from those very policies, well, you're a kid. A bright one, but a kid, and the bright ones are the ones who imagine themselves as intrepid pioneers every time they discover a new intellectual continent. This is why we have people called "teachers", rather than simply turning you loose in the library (or, for the Love of Jewish Christ, with a fucking AM radio) once you've mastered the alphabet. And this is why the best of those teachers is rarely also your parent, and rarely someone who's teaching High Latin once a week to a bunch of home-schooled upper-middle class Judeo-Baptist tweeners. Personally, if you've gotta have some outside religious instruction--and since humility is off the Christian menu these days--I'd like to see a Zen master come in once a week to whack you with a stick.

Not for the violence, mind you, but the intended purpose: shaking you out of complacency. Maybe you'll manage to do it for yourself later, but it's something your parents, or a good teacher, should be doing for you now. You're posturing, young man, and you found one of the few venues where you can do that for a lifetime ("conservatism"--party, policy, or principle--is a lot like Golf that way, and no real surprise there). Didn't you get a close up look at Bill Bennett? At Rush? Do you really want to be them in thirty years' time? Because the Precocious routine you've got going has a shelf life of three years. Like we said, take a gander at Ben Shapiro. He knew it all at age sixteen, too. By twenty-one he was saying, "I'm Ben Shapiro, dammit! I was a wunderkind!" And now he's the Norma Desmond of wingnut welfare, trying to pretend that if he never updates his photo or his bio he'll never lose his job with Goodwin Procter.

Look, kid: there are a few jobs available to the preteen, and rightly so; being a kid is generally more important than any of 'em. You can be a miniature Country & Western singer, itinerant Bible-thumping preacher, an actor, or a violin prodigy. Or a "conservative" pundit. If the answer isn't "Violin Prodigy" you really need to think long and hard about whether it's actually worth it, or at least Google "Marjoe Gortner" before you go any further.

It's facile applause from an easily-satisfied audience, kid; we suspect you're already bright enough to have figured that out, especially since you paused on your applause lines up there like George W. Bush. The saddest thing about that article was learning that it was your PR efforts for that book that brought you to CPAC, and not vice-versa; instead of taking you there and letting you borrow the cell phone your parents should have grounded you for a week, and assigned you to write a book about Ecclesiastes. (But, hey, what do I know? My experience of Jewish Christianity predates Mammon's hostile takeover.)

And I suspect it's occurred to you that there are any number of pubescents out there who can eidetically mimic some author's public speaking style after a couple hours watching Book Notes, and any number of gifted young intellects who can defend Liberalism, Marxism, Buddhism, or German Nihilism with an élan to match your own. But those tend to be markets where the adults confine their admiration for a dog walking on two legs to a Saturday afternoon at the circus. I mean the real circus.

The good news though, kiddo, is that if you manage to keep your head on straight you've already learned enough to become a New York Times Op-Ed columnist.

Up To A Point, M'Lord

Frank Rich, "Some Things Don't Change in Grover's Corners". March 7

Stanley Fish, "Neoliberalism Is a Pejorative Aimed At Me By People Who Are Insufficiently Pro-Israel". March 8

IT'S good to see Frank Rich returning to theatre criticism; we'd like to see him make it permanent, and the Times replace him with Glenn Greenwald, though we suspect they'd make a pitch to Stanley Fish.

And I'm glad, I guess, that Thornton Wilder is back on Broadway, if for no other reason than it means there's one less theatre contemplating commissioning a musical about the lives of The Monkees. I'm just more than a little wary about Depression chic making the rounds of people who have no intention, and little fear at present, of becoming one of them, and who will likely get no closer to the Dust Bowl this summer a strong breeze on a private beach.

I don't mean to be flippant, or dismissive; I just wanna know why the profession of journalism is so flippant and dismissive of its own role.

The simplest explanation for why America’s reality got so distorted is the economic imbalance that Barack Obama now wants to remedy with policies that his critics deride as “socialist” (“fascist” can’t be far behind): the obscene widening of income inequality between the very rich and everyone else since the 1970s.

And which just happens to coincide with the rise of Happy Talk News, faux-balance and fake reports, with the end of legitimate commentary on the "liberal" teevee networks, and the insertion of not-quite-crypto commentary into actual news reports, with the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine, with the lapdog treatment of Ronald Reagan and the wishful thinking and willful blindness that protected his "legacy" like a dainty parasol. It's a period that includes the stalking of Bill Clinton, led by the New York Times, the only President who reversed those trends. It's the same period which has seen the degrading of the political process into a species of celebrity gossip, the delimiting of the public debate to "Democratic" and "Republican" positions, frequently pre-shaped and pre-chewed for easy, unthinking digestion, and the unspeakable abdication of all journalistic principles in exchange for a flak jacket and a ride through Iraq on an M1 Abrams. And, no surprise, the cowardly Who Me? retreat that followed that disaster, much like the fast walk-and-whistle George W. Bush got from a couple of Times Op-Ed columnists who'd help sink his opponent in 2000.

And it corresponds precisely to that period when huge media operations were permitted to become behemoth media-company conglomerates thanks to, let's say favorable, decisions by the aforementioned Mr. Reagan, and the creation of the Heroic Entrepreneur Bravely Creating Wealth Despite Government Regulation mythos, which led us directly to CNBC.

Ah, not to mention the Times' own pledge to become more relevant to, and sensitive about, all the Right-wing Yahoo religious nuts which blanket all the arable land in this country wherever there're no subways. What is it now, two years old? How's it goin'?

But what the average man tries to skirt, the superior man obfuscates th' fuck out of. Here's Fish's capsule description of the Grand Unified Solution So Powerful No Level of Repudiation Can Stop It, Apparently:

In a neoliberal world, for example, tort questions — questions of negligence law — are thought of not as ethical questions of blame and restitution (who did the injury and how can the injured party be made whole?), but as economic questions about the value to someone of an injury-producing action relative to the cost to someone else adversely affected by that same action. It may be the case that run-off from my factory kills the fish in your stream; but rather than asking the government to stop my polluting activity (which would involve the loss of jobs and the diminishing of the number of market transactions), why don’t you and I sit down and figure out if more wealth is created by my factory’s operations than is lost as a consequence of their effects?...

Notice that “value” in this example (which is an extremely simplified stand-in for infinitely more complex transactions) is an economic, not an ethical word, or, rather, that in the neoliberal universe, ethics reduces to calculations of wealth and productivity. Notice too that if you and I proceed (as market ethics dictate) to work things out between us — to come to a private agreement — there will be no need for action by either the government or the courts, each of which is likely to muddy the waters (in which the fish will still be dying) by introducing distracting moral or philosophical concerns, sometimes referred to as “market distortions.”

Notice, too--and this is also an extremely simplified stand-in--that if you'd simply behaved as though your property rights ended where mine began you wouldn't have killed my fish in the first place, and we wouldn't be having this conversation.

Fish, though, is willing to give the other side a hearing:

The objection (which I am reporting, not making) is that in the passage from a state in which actions are guided by an overarching notion of the public good to a state in which individual entrepreneurs “freely” pursue their private goods, values like morality, justice, fairness, empathy, nobility and love are either abandoned or redefined in market terms.

Short-term transactions-for-profit replace long-term planning designed to produce a more just and equitable society. Everyone is always running around doing and acquiring things, but the things done and acquired provide only momentary and empty pleasures (shopping, trophy houses, designer clothing and jewelry), which in the end amount to nothing. Neoliberalism, David Harvey explains, delivers a “world of pseudo-satisfactions that is superficially exciting but hollow at its core.” (”A Brief History of Neoliberalism.”)

Well, yes. Of course "morality, justice, fairness and empathy" are redefined or abandoned, generally as part of the construction of the cosy sleeping bag of consent. And, of course, it begs the question: how did we get from a system based on morality and justice to one based on coercion without violating the terms of morality and justice to begin with? How does that simple guy with his simple pond of dead fish "deal" in fairness with the man whose position allows him to define not just the terms, but the definitions of "deal" and "fairness" into the bargain? At what point does the little guy get to redefine morality to make poisoning a two-way street? When he's gathered enough simple townsfolk with torches and pitchforks together?

And, above all, does this mean it's a good time to invest in farm implement and tar and pitch stocks?

Tip: Periodically Have Someone Check Your Plastic Bubble's Air Intake Hose For Kinks

Kim Severson, "Turning to Cube Steak, and Back to Childhood":

Although pounding tough pieces of beef to make them more tender has a long history in the Southern and Western United States...

...less primitive Americans in tonier regions developed corning and stocks.

Y'KNOW canning food only began to be perfected about 150 years ago. The first city in America wired for electric light was Wabash, Indiana in 1880. The rural South was electrified thanks to The Socialist and Class Traitor FDR. Home refrigeration dates to the 1930s; the icebox, its predecessor, pretty much required that one live near enough to a source of ice (seasonal or altitudinal) for it to be transported to one's location while remaining frozen. Corning, salting, smoking, pickling, fermenting, drying--actions we now take largely for the flavor they impart--were once matters of life and death for some Americans still living today. They did actually know more about preserving food, and increasing its palatability, than is suggested by their pounding it with their crude eating-slash-digging sticks. And this generally involved more than knowing the location of the nearest grain-fed boutique butcher's.

Is it really, really, really too much to ask that a nominally well-educated person have some broad sense of his place on a timeline that doesn't fucking begin with the dawn of Readily Available Premium Cable Channels? It's certainly possible that Ms Severson just wrote a really horrible sentence there--which would be sin enough--but the evidence says it's a transcript from whatever her grain-fed butcher was feeding her, seeing as how it links the actual, official, popularity of cube steak to steel-plated professional meat pounding.

And all of this being at the service of the semi-dredful Comfort Food meme, which is apparently being kept alive just to demonstrate how lazy food culture can become, and remain, and why the rest of the world is wise not to entrust it to English speakers. Not to mention the trendy update to Depression-Era chic. Listen: I'm 55 years old. The last time I got a home-cooked meal, cooked by someone else, on a non-holiday, that involved meat loaf, mashed potatoes that began the day as, well, potatoes, macaroni and cheese that began the day in separate packages, or anything else from that checklist, or began the morning with a bowl of oatmeal that wasn't ready to serve the moment oats met boiling water, was in 1965. Without question there are some people in America fortunate enough to have had real food served to them in their youth despite having been born after the general acceptance of the home microwave, the instant potato flake, and the invention of the term "Fresh Frozen"; but for most the whole business is a manufactured sham memory, the "comfort" they received (directly) from that sort of menu having been largely the radiated warmth leftover from a controlled nuclear reaction, and the "food" being, at best, moot.

The numbers of people who grew up eating actual "comfort food" and are still young enough to be able to calculate a tip must be so tiny that the Comfort Food Industry would today be vying with the Used Betamax Cult if it weren't for the incessant cheerleading of those professional food shills who deserve to be called "Foodies" except the word turns my stomach. But not as much as this professional quaintification of foodstuffs so the easily satisfied can dig into a bowl of something that doesn't look like it was designed by a Japanese florist and still feel superior.

That Business About Me Representing The Vast Moderate Middle? I'd Like To Wobble Slightly While Remaining In Place. Assuming That's Okay.

David Brooks, "When Obamatons Respond". March 6

FUCK it, it's already 60º outside at 7 AM, but I couldn't resist a peek at Brooks' Friday rebranding efforts. (I can hardly wait for the Vast Moderate Army to march onto the News Hour set tonight. I'm hoping for a pitched battle with the Propellerheads.)

Let's go back a bit. On Wednesday Somerby took this Ed Kilgore reply to Brooks' last column to task for obscuring Brooks' point ("We're piling up deficits!").

Now, our response is pretty simple--obvious, even--we think that what David Brooks writes is not congruent with what he thinks, or what he means. The fact is that we find Brooks among the most disingenuous of public men. He's a Reagan fanboy. He carries just as much of the Right's water per pound as Rush Limbaugh, but we're supposed to recognize some large qualitative difference because Brooks espouses some liberal social ideas. Rather, because he's said to; where are those columns, exactly? He's taken his Party to task over gay marriage, say, once or twice, but generally in the sense that Bronze Age authoritarianism was bad for electoral opportunities and bad for Business. Has there been a staunch defense of reproductive rights from the man? The occasional elevation of Martin Luther King, Jr., to plaster sainthood does not make one compassionate, clear-eyed, or demonstrate an understanding of the various enormities inflicted on minorities in this Hemisphere since Columbus first waded ashore. Christ, Jonah Goldberg can play that one. The fact remains that Brooks promotes himself as the tolerant, non-raw-meat-feasting face of Republicanism, and then he votes with the Neanderthals every last fucking time. While, we may add, trying to "persuade" others to do so by convincing them that, in essence, they're really not, because David Brooks is so mild and reasonable and non-threatening he'd never be driven to thoughts of a shooting rampage at the thought of two men marrying. When will we figure out who the real criminals are? The petty personal dishonesties of Manor-born flackery from the likes of Bill Kristol is small change in comparison.

Maybe it's me; granting Brooks whatever level of personal tolerance he feels but rarely expresses, I don't think there's any question that I'm closer to the average, middling, Negroes-and-Hippies-are-welcome-to-vote-for-us moderate Democrat out there than Brooks is to the Stars n' Bars n' Wifebeater wing of his party (no doubt I'm closer to them, too). But forty years of ersatz liberalism has been enough to keep me from being a Democrat (actually, it took much, much less than that), while Brooks clings to a Republicanism that was disappearing about the time he experienced his first Recess. I'm seriously disturbed by the dishonesty, graft, and hypocrisy of the Democratic party, and they're like a footnote to the seven-volume Republican study. And Brooks supposedly sees this stuff up close, and is paid to ponder it. Tell me how many insider conversations with Karl Rove, or Phil Gramm, or John Boehner, or Mitch McConnell you could have before you began to question if you wanted to share a species with them (assuming we do), let alone a Party? Just tell me how much lower current, Bush administration spending would be as a percentage of GDP if we had eliminated all the spending David Brooks objected to back when it was riding high? How much smaller those trillion-dollar deficits? Where was he and his Army of Moderation bivouacking before Bush and the GOP were safely re-ensconced after the 2004 elections, and before the poll numbers took a nosedive? Huh? What canny new regulations, or actually enforced old ones, would Brooks have put in place and saved all our hides? For that matter, tell me what blank check for what war of adventure we'd have written for Rush Limbaugh, but not for David Brooks. Maybe at this point, per Brooks, gay couples could form civil unions (we're guessing actual marriage might disappear in committee). Fine. That represents a reduction of 350 words out of Brooks' annual 80,000.

That's the answer. Sorry, it may not be wholly satisfying, but it's how things are post-Bush, and it's how it is with everyone who assisted him. We're not required to play the Pooches Were Screwed game when we've got 'em copulating with Queenie on videotape. Yes, we are facing massive deficits from the Stimulus spending, as well as the massive bail-outs, and on top of the disastrous deficit the new administration inherited. The fact that Brooks brings this up (all but the last part) does not make it his "Idea". It makes it the fungo bat lying around loose in the common area that he picked up and started swinging around like that makes him a Big Leaguer. When the fact is he's already disqualified himself.

But if Somerby found Brooks subjected to unfair liberal ire, take a gander at what Brooks himself found:

On Tuesday, I wrote that the Obama budget is a liberal, big government document that should make moderates nervous. The column generated a large positive response from moderate Obama supporters who are anxious about where the administration is headed.

Guess you missed all that liberal ire.

It was not so popular inside the White House. Within a day, I had conversations with four senior members of the administration and in the interest of fairness, I thought I’d share their arguments with you today.

So, thank Goodness, the Reader will have heard from both sides of the center, it being such an underreported segment of the political spectrum.

they do not see themselves as a group of liberal crusaders....They’re not engaged in an ideological project to overturn the Reagan Revolution, a fight that was over long ago....

I'm sorry to keep interrupting, but I'd just like to note that P.J. O'Rourke, surveying the smoldering wreckage of the economy wrought by unfettered and unregulated capitalism a few months back said only that he'd thought we'd reached that heightened state of awareness where we recognized that government's only proper relationship to Business was that of permanent handmaiden; Brooks stands neck-deep in shit and says, "Thank goodness we're all agreed the stables won't ever need cleaning again."

Now, I'm not gonna search--it's getting warmer by the minute outside--but I will guarantee you that more than one David Brooks column contained a demand that if Liberals didn't like the ongoing disaster in Iraq it was their duty to propose The Solution. Funny how that principle, like so much else from the Right, isn't reversible. It's a colossal fucking problem. You created it. Sorry--not sorry--the solution is of necessity too large to meet with your approval. Fuck you.

the Obama administration will not usher in an era of big government. Federal spending over the last generation has been about 20 percent of G.D.P. This year, it has surged to about 27 percent. But they aim to bring spending down to 22 percent of G.D.P. in a few years....most of the increase, they insist, is caused by the aging of the population and the rise of mandatory entitlement spending. It’s not caused by big increases in the welfare state....The Medicare reform represents a big cut in entitlement spending. It amounts to means-testing the system. It introduces more competition and cuts corporate welfare. These are all Republican ideas....

Dave? Me again. Did you just say cutting corporate welfare is a Republican idea? Do you guys have your own definition of "corporate" too? Do I have to start watching FOX before linguistic drift renders us mutually unintelligible?

Fourth, the White House claims the budget will not produce a sea of red ink. Deficits are now at a gargantuan 12 percent of G.D.P., but the White House aims to bring this down to 3.5 percent in 2012. Besides, the long-range debt is what matters, and on this subject President Obama is hawkish.

He is extremely committed to entitlement reform and is plotting politically feasible ways to reduce Social Security as well as health spending. The White House folks didn’t say this, but I got the impression they’d be willing to raise taxes on the bottom 95 percent of earners as part of an overall package.

Fifth, the Obama folks feel they spend as much time resisting liberal ideas as enacting them. The president resisted union pressure and capped pay increases for government workers. He resisted efforts to create mandatory veterans’ health benefits. The administration plans to tackle the suspiciously large increase in the number of people claiming disability benefits.

I didn’t finish these conversations feeling chastened exactly.

No. And not surprisingly, since they sound like you could have written 'em, if they'd just removed all hope of the Obama administration receiving credit.

Which, mind you, I'm not accusing you of, no sir. Because I don't expect any more of a lot of senior Obama administration figures, particularly the sort who'd bother to "correct" that insipid mush of a column from last Tuesday.

Can't wait to see 'em cut Social Security, though...

Suck

OKAY, so Twitter's an abomination; that doesn't mean I want to be the last one to climb on board. So, with a tip of the hat to The Daily Show and the invention of Voweler, I've decided to begin posting random minutiae of my wholly uninteresting life as reduced to action words there in the center column. It's sort of the old-time radio version of tweeting, since the reader gets to fill in the details for himself. So, for example, if I shoot some hoops, you can imagine I'm shooting heroin, or the mailman; if I screw that new bookcase together, you can imagine I'm screwing my head on straight, or the mailman. In this way I might become interesting. Okay, too much. I'll probably be tired of it in 72 hours, unless I win some web award; don't get too attached.

Sustainable Limbaugh Farming

OKAY, first: what's it going to take to get people to realize who the real fucking criminals are? The woman in Florida who called 911 "because McDonalds ran on out McNuggets" was the victim of an attempted robbery which she should have reported to the police non-emergency line. We know nothing of her comportment, before or after the arrival of the police; we do not know whether Fort Pierce routinely cites people for making non-emergency 911 calls, or whether she was arrested for Talking After the Cop Told Her To Listen. What we do know, or can feel pretty safe in guessing, is that one cannot hang up a sign in Fort Pierce saying "Unidentified Fowl Parts, $3", take someone's money, and then say, "Oh, we're all out of Fowl, and it's against policy to give you a refund. I do have the Bucket O'Sludge, but since that's just $1.98 you'll have to take two. That'll be an additional 96¢ please. Plus tax. Thanks for waiting!"

Okay, it's Florida. Maybe I spoke too soon. But everywhere else that's known as "Theft by Conversion".

And, y'know, if you'd like to convince me that the way Ms Goodman was treated was not part of a concerted effort to steal people's money in the utterly predictable event of a fast-food restaurant running out of an item--or, for that matter, a customer changing his mind--which operated in part by assuring that no one in a supervisory position would be available to correct the problem without a long delay, you may start talking.

Here's another thing we know: we know the mass-market media flogged the incident in a knowingly misleading fashion because "Woman Calls 911 Over Missing McNuggets" is seen as a ratings grabber--and what that says about 'em is enough right there--while "Major National Advertiser Systematically Short-Changes Customers" somehow is not. The pampered pets reading this stuff off the teleprompter--who get the opportunity, while they're at it, to sneer at the $3.50 involved, or roughly what they're paid each morning to tweeze one eyebrow--would never have dreamed of calling 911 had they been victimized. They'd have called Corporate, and two minutes later the McDonald's Regional VP of Media Relations would have roller-skated in offering to perform vigorous and enthusiastic anilingus while they waited for the chopper to arrive with fresh hot McNuggets from California, where stringent consumer protection laws require them to know what the chickens actually died of.

Of course, if she'd just thought to bring along a finger she'd have been a media darling for 48 hours. Plan ahead.

The capper is that the exercise almost certainly winds up costing Kroc Full O'Crap money, since the over/under on Number of Lawyers on Ms Goodman's Doorstep One Hour Later is six.

Like many other Issues of the Day this brings me to local teevee "news", or as I like to call it, Competitive Teleprompter Phonetics. These would be the people who last Friday brought us the sad story of Ringo, the Jack Russell terrier found dead, having been killed, his owner said, by coyotes. The man had seen the marauding beasts just outside his property, he said, pointing to the land just beyond the fence he didn't have. (This was one of those treeless Burghervilles in Greenwood, the former-pastureland Indianapolis suburb just over the border in Dixie, so I'm not sure that they actually have a law requiring dogs to be fenced in. For that matter, I'm not sure it's illegal there for siblings to marry.) Anyway, two days later a tiny notice appeared inside the Metro section of the Sunday Racist Star, quoting a Department of Natural Resources investigator as saying it wasn't a coyote, that coyotes generally do not attack dogs, and that the culprit was most likely a wild dog. To my knowledge none of the locals rushed a film crew out so we could hear the man set the record straight; if anybody covered it at all I missed it. But then, you know, dogs=cute, full of tricks, faithful companions; coyotes=chaotic, scary, and publicly-fornicating Nature intruding on McHomes thrown up incontinently and zoning-free on Its habitat, which It obstinately refuses to recognize as Its former habitat. Sorta like 21st century Apaches.

The locals were cheered yesterday when Nestlé announced it'd be adding a few hundred jobs, long-term, in war-torn Anderson, IN, and they got to return to the cheerleading mode they were in during Mitch "Small Beer" Daniels' just concluded fourteen-month reelection campaign. I swear I'm not exaggerating. The Channel 8 anchors--both got a piece of the story; one imagines them fighting like kids in the back seat before the Solomonic decree that settled that one--were in an obvious state of excitement, and not just the professional excitement mode they break out for the routine puffery of church bazars and Billy Joel concerts. They use that so much I know it better than I do my wife's moles. The news was so big that Governor Mitch "How's the Weather Down There?" Daniels actually left his bunker and was sighted for the third time since November. Of course, the Nestlé folks gave him a big pair of scissors and a ribbon to cut, a combination guaranteed to lure Mitch like doughnuts lure his police escort.

A few minutes later came the latest advice on How You Can Save Money, as told to you by the same over-paid personalities who were, as recently as three months ago, telling you about all the fucking electronic gimcracks it'd be a sad Christmas if you didn't buy.

They have no fucking idea; once the price of gasoline fell and they adjusted to the necessity of staying in their present homes a little longer, these people lost fucking touch again. And these are goddam mid-market locals. If you told David Gregory he couldn't get a refund on his McNuggets, you'd be the one in jail.

This is why, though I've sorta gone back-and-forth about it, I think the Rush Limbaugh: Head of the GOP bit is absolutely brilliant. I honestly had no idea this administration had it in 'em. I was all but convinced to begin with that they'd never stick with it, and I'm still agnostic about that, but if they do it's pure gravy. Limbaugh can't do anything but double-down every time he's attacked (although he did try to back-peddle his way out of that "I want Obama to fail" routine by trying to morph it into Obama's plan, the fat coward). He's the goddam Jake LaMotta of Political Blubberweights. He can't go down; he can only throw more haymakers. Keep the spotlight on this guy and sooner or later his 911 McNuggets moment will come (I mean his next one) and this time they'll be showing it on the nightly news instead of pretending they've never heard of him.

Why Married People Live Longer, Vol. 27

BIG Shirtless Roy, the lawn-care fanatic (void when it comes to raking his leaves before they blow into his neighbors' yards), middle-aged fireworks enthusiast, and amateur semi-nude model who lives catty-cornered from us was hauled off by the paramedics last night--pain and shortness of breath, but no heart attack, is the preliminary word--so that was our big excitement for the week.

Scary obsessives may remember Roy as the neighbor who dashed across our lawn one Yard Sale Saturday to berate an elderly couple who had parked with two wheels on the edge of his lawn (we have no curbs or sidewalks here in Brentwood Manor). Or as the guy who owns his own parking cones, lest he suffer any such indignity in the future, or as the guy whose party guests avail themselves of everyone else's lawn for their car-parking necessities, or as the guy whose obligatory, starts-at-10 PM Independence Day celebration features a couple hundred bucks worth of Communist-prisoner-made incendiaries lined up at the edge of that same front lawn so the refuse, embers, and flaming death wads wind up as someone else's lawn care predicament, and all of us can enjoy the sound rather than sleep. He owns dachshunds, too. In fact, a series of them, since they have the habit of dying of neurological disorders after a few years romping through whatever Fort Dietrick recyclables Chem-Lawn sprays on his grass each week.

So, y'know, we're not real big on pitch-ins with them. His wife is nice, though, so I quit giving the trash truck driver a sawbuck to let the right-side tires slip off the road over there after heavy rains. Especially once he started asking for $20.

But the arrival of paramedics is sobering, and last night's visit was the second in a row, though the first with the crash truck following and a gurney being wheeled in. And we're following all this through the window, intermittently, as neighbors will when there's nothing good on teevee. And it goes on for fifteen, twenty minutes maybe, which prompts me to say:

"Well, it doesn't seem like it's a heart attack, if they're taking this long."

and my Poor Wife to reply:

"My guess is an erection lasting more than four hours."

Thirty-two years, honey, and I love you more each day.

Brooks: For The Twenty-Fourth Year In A Row, The Exact Geographic Center Of The American Political Landscape Is In My Brogans

David Brooks, "A Moderate Manifesto". March 2

You wouldn’t know it some days, but there are moderates in this country — moderate conservatives, moderate liberals, just plain moderates. We...

OKAY, that's it. We is it. For while there may indeed be such a thing as a "moderate 'conservative'" in the Wild, like Bigfoot, like the new open-minded evangelical Christian, like the radio station with a decent playlist, the burden of proof is on the claimant, and it is accepted as proven until clearly demonstrated otherwise that even if there is, none exists as an adherent, a paid mouthpiece, nor as a toady for the Republican party. So let's pause at We. Even if we don't get back to the rest of your piece. We won't be missing much.

If the "moderate 'conservative'"--let alone the "moderate 'conservative'" Republican--lurks out there like some finless albino coelacanth he is, assuredly, in a state of natural grace, not a man writing books on comparative lawn care modalities. You, Mr. Brooks, are a Friedmaniacal economic radical, a position you have never renounced nor repented, and only recently began to deny owning, as though it were a gallon of toxic sludge draining into a sanitary sewer, and you hopeful the passing cop who just asked you about it didn't actually see you do it.

Had you, say, evinced the tiniest "moderate" concern while the previous administration was spending us into incontinent stretches of these trillion-dollar annual deficits you now find so objectionable we'd be a bit more charitable. But only a bit. The fact remains that our present economic disaster is the direct, predictable, and probably inevitable result of that very same Friedmania which served you the way a blinding flash of light served Saul of Tarsus (which, again, we'd be more charitable about had you ever evinced the slightest evidence of that adolescent liberalism you overcame. It, like your modern moderation, seems to consist of the theoretical possibility that you'd agree to have sex with an African-American should the opportunity present itself. And indeed this qualifies, provided the judging is entirely in the hands of Utah Republicans). We understand the impulse, god knows, but this does not entitle you to marshall the vast forces of Political Insipidity and declare yourself an aide-de-camp. You have a lot of shit to answer for, sir, and none of it involves your having been too temperate.

The U.S. has never been a society riven by class resentment. Yet the Obama budget is predicated on a class divide. The president issued a read-my-lips pledge that no new burdens will fall on 95 percent of the American people. All the costs will be borne by the rich and all benefits redistributed downward.

Okay, again: enough's enough. Find me the single Republican voice--politician, kingmaker, pipsqueak columnist--who stood against the opposite as, over the last thirty years, the American public was instructed on the necessity of letting the rich redistribute riches downward, at a trickle, and as that public saw, as a result, real lower- and middle-class incomes stagnate and the obscenely wealthy become the Obscenely Wealthy, now with More Anal Rape! I don't mean someone who expressed a middling concern. You guys are past masters of middling concern, like the fabulously rich and their abiding concern that enterprising young go-getters from the shivering classes be permitted the comforting myth of Being Able To Join Them. Name the moderate conservative who objected to that shit, loudly and in public, and kept his sinecure.

Yes, we are largely, (not never) a society un-riven by class resentment in modern times, though, like the Zen Master said to the Benedictine, I suppose that depends on whom you talk to. So it's remarkable, then, that the only time I hear the concept mentioned, aside from the occasional theoretical Marxist, is from you guys. How come, if it doesn't exist, you talk about it so much? How come, if it doesn't exist, it always seems to be invoked whenever taxes on the Super-wealthy get mentioned? And it's never your obligation to keep the thing intact; it's always the obligation of anyone who thinks a dash of economic justice just might enliven the stew to blindly obey the Tradition. Curious.

One more thing: how long before even the Times gets tired of this shit and hires a real honest stenographer like Bill Kristol again? This moderation schtick was your exact same play when Bush's little Iraq adventure blew up beyond all hope of Pretending it Didn't, or Rallying 'Round The Flag. It was your line when Schiavo suddenly revealed the presence of a statistically significant number of religious cranks previously hidden in the corners of the Republican Tent. Oddly, it wasn't the response when y'all figured the Bush deficits were no longer ignorable, and no longer attributable to the Holy War on Terra--which, while we're in the neighborhood, all you moderate, government-spending allergy sufferers signed a series of blank checks for--then it was Bush wasn't a True Conservative!

The theoretical center always rules, provided you're able to make it large enough. What it does not do is accede to your tiniest whim or unfailingly vote your way. As, for example, last time, in case you've forgotten. You don't want Democrats reinforced in the belief--which you've been attributing to them ever since you took the Damascus turn-off back at the U. of Chicago anyway--that they're empowered to solve the country's problems? You and your legion of "moderate 'conservatives'" should have done something about it while your party was creating so many of 'em.

The Neverending Search For Reasons To Wake Up

I'VE been watching Simon Schama's 15-part History of Britain on videotape--well, first I was watching it; lately I've been scanning it to locate the missing Elizabethans, who may have got bolloxed up in a tape switch or something--and I shut that down last night to find the teevee was tuned to one of the VH-1 henchnetworks, which was playing a retrospective of The Who. This would have been my signal to change the channel immediately, but for two things: first, the remote is on the fritz, and chose that moment to add "channel selection" to the list of things it was refusing to do; and, second, the surviving members were busily engaged at that moment in trashing the corpse of John Entwistle for his "sordid" exit (Vegas, Hard Rock hotel, coke, stripper). That is, the inventors of Rock-Star Excess were sneering at his death as unbecoming. Let us rise to his defense, then, if for no other reason than--so far as we are aware--the man never wore a jumpsuit, or fringe, onstage.

The worst thing, though, about any sort of Who retrospective that features band co-operation is the certainty that Pete Townshend will talk.

Now let's note here that I was what is now called an "early adapter" of The Who, whose first appearance in America, so far as I know, was on tape from some British pop show or other that was picked up by Shindig. It was the Keith Moon Bullseye Sweatshirt era, and, of course, you couldn't take your eyes off Moonie. These guys were serious; they were The Kinks without the fopish Edwardian duds. I was, and am, a huge fan of their mid-60s Top 40 output--"Pictures of Lilly", "Substitute", "I Can See For Miles"--which didn't chart all that well in the US, and were more or less ignored by my Herman's Hermits-fan grade-school compatriots. I routinely ripped open fingers and bled all over various parents' garage floors trying to evoke Townshend's guitar gymnastics. Then they released Tommy.

Now, I'm fifty-five, and I'm still not exactly sure what "pretentious" means, but whatever my fifteen-year-old take was, Tommy was its four-sided avatar. Plus they'd been smashing their instruments at the end of every set for four solid years at this point, passing not just from sensation to beyond boredom, but perpetrating this carnage while I had to connive and grandstand just to get a guitar, and save the proceeds of three years of summer jobs to pay for a decent practice amp. Around then Townshend started talking, and never shut up. And most of it was at the service of the idea that he, Pete Townshend, was the world's leading rock star intellectual, just in case you'd missed it from the world's leading rock star intellectual lyrics he wrote, and High Concepts he highly concepted, and the rest of it was how the secret to World Harmony--which was very popular in those days--was the teachings of some guru who'd maintained a forty-year vow of silence, or something, which Townshend chose not to emulate.

Then, just to confound me, he made the greatest classic rock album evah, Who's Next.

Y'know, I like to think of myself as a man who tries to be open-minded; I understand why Pete Townshend would want to quit writing three-minute pop gems and start writing turgid rock "operas". I just happen to believe, personally, that it was a bad idea. This does not mean I believe he'd have kept on producing three-minute pop gems otherwise. I understand that there may be people out there who haven't heard enough from him, or who missed their first 14,728 opportunities. I even understand why VH-1 has henchnetworks. What I can't fathom is who th' fuck demanded 2500 words on the bewitching enigma that is Marissa Mayer, the woman who "controls the look, feel and functionality of " Da Google. As such she is "one of the company’s most ubiquitous and closely watched public faces". But that's not All:

• Employee No. 20, the company's first female employee.

• A popular guest on TV news programs and talk shows, a Google-booster often quoted in print, and a rapid-fire presence on San Francisco’s social scene.

• She has invited attention — and in some cases, derision — in the last year for such actions as creating spreadsheets to find the perfect cupcake recipe, attending lavish ballet, art and fashion galas, paying $60,000 at a charity auction to have lunch with Oscar de la Renta, and hosting breezy, dying-to-get-invited-to parties at her $5 million penthouse atop the Four Seasons hotel in San Francisco.

• Refuses to be stereotyped.

• Almost every new feature or design, from the wording on a Google page to the color of a Google toolbar, must pass muster with her or legions of Google users will never see it.

• She adore(s) bold blocks of color against a white background, much like the Marimekko prints that once hung in her childhood home in Wausau, Wis. Her San Francisco penthouse has a similar, but more expensive, aesthetic. It is painted in neutral shades and decorated with fanciful, multihued glass artwork by Dale Chihuly.

• In meetings with subordinates, Ms. Mayer comes across as a zealous copy editor or meticulous art teacher correcting first-semester students. With so many new recruits, she reasons, someone has to teach them how Google does things.

• Her Solomonic, split-the-difference decision between the design team's choice of blue and the corporate brain-probers' preference for green showed her reliance on her gut, but she prefers to "rel[y] on charts, graphs and quantitative analysis as a foundation for a decision, particularly when it comes to evaluating people."

• She ultimately ordered further animal testing on 41 gradations of blue-green to determine consumer preference.

• She responds to co-workers who use "pregame" as a verb.

• Still, students of Google’s culture wonder whether Ms. Mayer and her management style would flourish outside the insulated world where her tenacity and curiosity mirror the company itself. “She clearly has what it takes to be a great manager at Google, but I don’t know if that translates into being a great manager at Hasbro,” said John Battelle, author of “The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture.” With any luck, that's another 2500 words.

• She says she is vexed by how some perceive her. “I am not a girl about town,” she says. “It isn’t how I project myself. It is how other people choose to project me.”

• She doesn't like odd numbers. She does like shopping and fashion, and isn't going to stop just because people don't like that, according to a friend.

• Noted in a Web interview that her gay friends demanded invitations to her women-only “Sex and the City” movie screening and birthday party. She relented, meaning they too got to enjoy the hors d'oeuvres and the fabulous shoe cam.

I'm sorry, but...it's a fookin' search engine, right? And this woman is its Stanford-educated snooty mâitre-d', who single-handedly defends its white homepage against rampaging barbarian hordes? And the eleven-inch tall, three-column wide pic that accompanied all 2500 of those hang-on-every-word words graced the front page of The Paper of Record, The New York Times Sunday Business section, correct? So how th' hell can this country be in trouble?

Sunday Soup Blogging

THE third bag of onions I've bought this (last) month has confirmed, in its vermiform green intention to Get Growing!, what the previous two suggested: that Spring is just around the corner. Goodbye, hearty soups and stews! Farewell, twenty-two quart pot of chicken stock left on the deck overnight to cool with lid weighted down so the raccoons can't get in it! We repeat, with allowances for variations in your own milage, that we can't figure out why you'd wanna live where it's warm all the time.

Soup is a touch item, like dumplings, fried chicken, or home-baked goods. The best comes from people who make it every day, not from people who "know" "how" to "cook". It's not amenable to chef tricks. Good soup requires balance and finesse, not raw power; you can't dump a bunch of spices in a batch in an act of contrition. (Anybody know a fancy restaurant that'll fry you up a plate of chicken? I don't. They can't stand the competition from Popeyes.)

I'm a pretty decent cook, but I don't think there are as many as ten soups in my repertoire I'd risk on guests. Here's one, though: easy, fast, and three-seasonal:

Tortellini Soup

1 large onion, sliced
2T olive oil
2 cloves garlic, minced, roasted preferred by me
1 qt. good-quality chicken stock, or vegetable stock
1 c. water
8oz. fresh cheese tortellini
couple handfuls of spinach, depending on your hands

crutons; romano; pepper to taste

•saute onion in oil over medium-high heat; let it burn a little. c'mon. always let 'em burn a little

•add minced garlic and cook very briefly. never trust a cook who tells you to saute garlic all the while onions are sauteing

•add stock and water, bring to boil. add tortellini, return to boil, reduce to low boil and cook 6-7 minutes

•cut spinach in chiffonade stir into soup, turn off heat, and let sit for a minute while spinach wilts

•serve topped with crutons and grated romano. and yes, that means fresh grated romano.

4 servings

Ex-tee, Ex-tree!

SAFARI 4 in beta (Windows or Mac). A page with up to twenty-four thumbnails of your favorite sites, or, in this case, mine. That cover flow, flipping-through-your-album-collection thing for your browsing history. Support for CSS 3 customizable fonts and other stuff I'm too lazy to ever learn. And apparently bitchin' fast, though you shouldn't go by me; I'm just attracted to bright shiny objects. And allow me to say again: it's in beta. I didn't say "OMG download it".

Interesting juxtaposition at Roy's, where successive posts find Rod Dreher, bedeviled by Dirty Hippies, 60s Division; CPAC attendees and commentators, bedeviled by the Librul Media; and Professor Reynolds, bedeviled by free enterprise, as personified by the Rocky Mountain News, R.I.P.

As usual, the interest is not in hearing what these people have to say but in charting which direction their melted brains are flowing this week.

Let's say that should we have unexpectedly acquired the habit of brevity overnight we'd note here that Phil Gramm was right about the nation of whiners, and merely wrong in the direction he was pointing, and leave it at that. The slow and painful revelation that Every Goddam Thing the American Right imagined it controlled under license from God--the world's most powerful war machine, its mightiest economy, the political debate in this country--has crumbled under their exclusive control has got to be like a kind of ceaseless ticking in the skull one ignores until one morning's application of Rogaine reveals the sagittal suture is now a half-inch gap with the consistency of Jell-O.

Or a Christian Scientist finding a lump. Y'know, it's interesting that the same sorta thing appears to be happening with newspapers, which now want us to remember their reporting, and expect us to forget the twenty years we begged them to do some, in vain, as they explained to us, because Tabloid was the new business model. And half a generation later, as if by magic, people who want tabloid trash can pick it up easier, more attractively, and in a more timely fashion anywhere, almost everywhere, and people who remember what newspapers used to be for are now rapidly exciting the last demographic they'll occupy where advertisers give a shit for 'em. This, by the way, is called a Business Model, and it's telling that such things cannot be crafted without involving Golf.

Look: I'm a goddam radical anarcho-leftist moderate. Not only do I not expect to win elections; I don't ever expect to get a fair hearing on cable news. Hell, the day you see Noam Chomsky on the tube, without the thing being expressly designed to make him apologize for Ward Churchill, you'll know we're really fucked. It is, frankly, the one position which offers the proper viewing angle to become aware that winning elections are about the second worst thing that can happen to you. Now, it may very well be that, having lost the one election that ever mattered to me (in a positive, not the Oh Christ Not Him sense), in 1972, to what proved to be (not exactly a surprise!) the Most Disgraceful Occupant of the Office in Modern Times with the Exception of Those who had Ant Farms in Place of Brains, and having been, as a result, excommunicated from the Democratic party for my effrontery in voting for its candidate, that I am in effect committing the same error as the Triumphalist Reagantots in reverse. Except that, again, Real Life, so studiously avoided by the right-wing pundit class as untidy, unprofitable, odorous, and bristling with disturbing genres of sexual penetration, teaches us the same lessons, as when we drive a vehicle, defrost a refrigerator, or avoid alimony nurture a lifetime of True Love and Togetherness: being fucking convinced that your tiniest cerebral event is unerring, that any evidence to the contrary is the result of massive conspiracies, possibly Marxist, Mormon, or Masonic, and that despite this, and any number of contrary examples, believing Everyone actually agrees with you, leads, almost inevitably, to immediate loss of steering control, expensive perishable foodstuffs, or Congress.

So maybe it's just too easy for me, but then maybe it's time you fuckers tried shutting the fuck up for awhile. Maybe just consider, for once, what being the party that behaves like a drunken high school jock whose girl was just asked out by an AV nerd has gotten you. In the 80s, like newspapers and teevee news, you doubled down on what you thought was a sure thing. That was a mistake. Not believing the results when they slap you in the face? That's psychosis. There's gotta be enough money in the coffers to buy Not Joe the Non Plumber a case of Crown Royal and a condo in a singles complex in Boise in exchange for his never speaking in public again. Tell Boehner you'll run Not Joe against him in the primaries if he doesn't shut up for the next six months. If you can't meet Palin's new asking price--or if Piyush Herbert Walker Jindal just blew up in your faces--well, shit; I don't have all the answers. But, look, maybe you'll get a few votes in gratitude for the intervening silence. It couldn't hurt.