To Suckle Fools And Chronicle Small Beer

Adam Nagourney, "Energized G.O.P. Looking to Avoid an Intraparty Feud". November 4

Philip Rucker and Perry Bacon, Jr., "As GOP celebrates victories, ideological battles between moderates and conservatives remain". November 5

TO a nation already reeling from the threat that the H1N1 virus might run its course before it gets a chance to be videotaped getting a shot, or a nasal spritz, or simply standing in line waiting to get a shot or a spritz, yesterday's post-election suggestion that that an epidemic of faux-nuance might break out among the nation's Press must have seemed like God's Own Leafblower had been aimed its direction. Or would have, if it bothered with reading any of that stuff.

Groundless fears, which it likewise would have known if it bothered with reading any of that stuff; the hard-scribbling men and women of the Press aren't about to let a challenge like that pass, especially when "This Doesn't Actually Mean Anything Outside the Actual Event, Does It?" can be subjected to the previously dialed-in crossfire of Provisional Agreement and simply yammering on like nobody's said anything. You want nuance? Sheesh, that's why there are fake news programs.

And look, don't get me wrong. These people can fill up unloved column inches any way they please, even with Ed Gillespie's "Tips for Teens and Republican Campaign Managers", which reads like a slightly longer, more ideological version of your grocer's Freshness Guarantee. I'm not much taken with the Glenn Beck Takes It Up The Pooper storyline, either; it's just that, in terms of the National Press, one has to bend frighteningly low enough as to read E.J. Dionne to get that one in high relief, rather than as a "harbinger" of Potential Intraparty Squabbling in the GOP, which, incidentally, they've been doing openly since 2005, after being allowed to pave over the cracks in 1988, 1996, and 2000 without much notice. It's difficult to imagine a less attractive candidate than Hoffman, or a more ham-fisted insertion onto the ballot, and I live in Indiana. Do you not really wind up "concluding" that Beck is a half-wit political entertainer and a ratings grabber--provided you're grading on a curve, there--with a FOX News sinecure, who'd last about as long as Rush did on ESPN if thrown out in the real world? Did it take an election to point that out?

The debate has been fueled by a somewhat inchoate populist anger that has taken hold among grass-roots conservatives, encouraged in part by political leaders like Sarah Palin, the party’s vice-presidential nominee last year, and commentators like Glenn Beck of Fox News. In that sense, the divisions within the party extend beyond the traditional strains between the shrinking ranks of Republican moderates and the social and economic conservatives who have dominated the party in recent years.

"Mr. Nagourney? The Last Sixty Fucking Years of American Political History for you, on Line 2."

Look, if I happen to see a Moderate Republican somewhere I'll pass along the warning. In the meantime I'll let Mitch Daniels know, if you'll agree to quit describing everyone in the GOP who's not 100% on board with burning suspected Satanists in the public square--at least until that looks like a good way to get elected--as "Moderate".

As the party turns toward the 2010 midterm elections, pitched battles between moderates and conservatives -- and between the Washington establishment and the conservative grass roots -- are underway from Florida to Illinois to California. Conservative activists, emboldened after forcing out the moderate Republican nominee in a New York congressional race, said they will fan out nationwide and challenge Republican candidates whom they deem too moderate or insufficiently principled.

Here's an idea: maybe political reporters could fan out nationwide and get a sense of what they're talking about.

This is the point where this analysis, were it in a Warner Bros. cartoon, would stop, gingerly feel around its feet without looking, then look down and realize it had run right off the cliff and was suspended in air with just enough time for the obligatory uh-oh take.

Take Indiana. Please. A "conservative" state in both the worst modern appropriation of the term and, occasionally, the fine old sense now skinned and scorned. We've had professional tax revolters since the 70s, professional Bronze Age political scammers of the same vintage, organized (and successful) Lunatic primary challenges in solid Republican districts, and every carnival geek show of attendant issues--banning porn, banning abortions, rewriting biology texts to bring them in line with 1st century thought, public prayer and leftover Cecil B. DeMille prop tablets on the courthouse square--hell, we had Teabaggers in 2005--and…what? Well, and nothing. We've fucked up the tax base, as California did; we'll see if things get that bad here. There's a flag in all our public classrooms. That, and a continually abysmal economy have done a lot for our military recruiting. The only way you can distinguish our Democratic Senator from our Republican is to look at what their wives earn from Big Pharma, and even then it's the precise opposite of what you're supposed to expect when you suppose, as you're supposed to, that Democrat=Liberal and Republican="Conservative". That's a reversal of the days when I was proud to call his Daddy my Senator. So what? In a state where the usual choice at the polls is between a Republican and a Republican-Democrat, the same set of government-assisted problems get dumped on Teabaggers as the ones they gripe about elsewhere. There's a slightly greater chance than the national average that the fuck-up will involve intentional de-funding of vital services rather than spirited mismanagement of same, and there's a near-assurance that the tax rates will in fact remain constant through willful obfuscation accompanied by showy "Cuts". And they're never going to get it. Can these assholes fuck up a Republican primary? On occasion, but check with Fred Thompson. Maybe before we start blathering about a "Renaissance" we could ask what these people plan to do. Replay the Bush administration on the grounds that it can't go that far South twice in a row? There may be a few Republican incumbents who fear a Palin invasion--assuming they won't be facing her in a timed essay contest--but any politician fears a primary challenge. When they've shown themselves to be an actual threat in an established Republican state such as my own, where the Grande Dame of "Moderate" Republicans is guaranteed a Senate seat until he actually begins to putrefy, and the "Moderate" Presidential "Hopeful" Governor would fuck a woodpile on the off-chance there was a snake in it, if I may quote Louisa May Alcott (and good luck to both sides on that one), then we can begin to talk about how formidable the Looniest of the Loonies are.

Maybe, instead of faux-year-end reviews of the President, this would be a grand time to ask what Democrats got for their votes in 2006 and 2008, and why Republicans should imagine they'll be different next time (Please, baby. Please.) Maybe we could hold off until these people actually win an election before we admire their influence, and maybe, instead of asking how readily the "moderates" of the GOP will adapt to Ned Beatty's role in Deliverance, we could start wondering how far they imagine they can swim while wearing lead fins.

Of All The Reasons To Be Apolitical, I Think Politics Is The Best

Hot!!! Do NOT Touch!!!!

MAYBE you're old enough, or--ten thousand times worse--Kraftwerk fan enough to remember "Popcorn", the global instrumental sensation that forever tainted its distant cousin, Music. I had--this is no lie--a college roommate who not only owned the 45--this would be a year after the goddam thing had assaulted millions of innocent bystanders--but played it. Repeatedly. Right up to the day he disappeared. He was a bellwether, that boy.

Anyway, enough nostalgia. If you recall "Popcorn", try this: halve the tempo, modernize the instrumentation by ~ 8 years, or roughly the point where Disco was making even Disco fanatics uncomfortable, push the result through a dime-sized speaker with the frequency response of a pay phone, and crank the volume to 11. You have now experienced my Vet's hold music.

And this is not the way to start off a day which you know is going to involve looking at endless recapitulations of the same four off-off year elections as told by people who could no more resist the urge to consider What This Means for the next episode of actual elections than they could pass a free buffet.

And sure, I know, there's also the now-obligatory This Doesn't Mean Shit Counter Gambit, and the Reverse Yes, But, Corzine Actually Lost For Blah Blah Blah Routine--everywhere but Slate, of course, which naturally plays the Contortionist routine straight--"Obama's Awful Night!"--but they're just drops in the drool bucket. It's like being an actual fan of a sport--let's call it, oh, Professional Football--and being forced, just for that reason, to view endless loving sideline camera caresses of Brett Far-vuh-ruh.

The presumption--maybe I'm just naive--is that the people covering professional football are there, at least in part, because they love the game, not because they thought it was more exciting to shill than deodorant. Presumably most people covering politics would have some interest in issues. People with a genuine interest in something might spend an inordinate amount of time masticating its trivia, its effluvia, and the cotton-candy of its rumor mill, but they are likely to do so in their free time. That this is not true of our political punditocracy tells you all you need to know. They are not talking about what they give the impression of talking about, and they're not talking to the people who'd have an interest in that if, indeed, they were. In real life this is called "lying", and it's generally frowned upon outside of commerce. And religion, where that's a distinction.

Four fucking elections, none of which means anything to as much as 1% of the populace, and a desperate attempt to make any and all of them into something which does. Bloomberg hurt by spending, overturning term limits! (Ouch!) House Democrats May Be Reluctant to Back Health Care With 2010 Elections Looming! (Yeah, it's no time to start doing anything popular. By the way, what's the Senate's excuse?) Republicans have the more energized constituency heading into next year's midterm elections! (You say "energized", I say "certifiable".) Maine Rejects Same-Sex Marriage, Extends Medical Marihuana! (Jacob Weisberg goes 0-2: Strikeout, reaches base on an error). Is any of this supposed to mean something tomorrow? (Okay, aside from the Maine business, which sucks, especially if you'd always dreamed of a June wedding with everyone in white except the black flies. It's a fucking slog, Weisberg! Sign up or piss off!)

And: Wishard Hospital wins bond issue in landslide, while school districts go 1-1 with one tie (Libertarians Lose! Then Win! Then Lose again. Or Something!) The Racist Beacon, in a rare moment of wisdom, had just taken the whole thing off the front page by noon.

Tuesday Cheap Hydrogenated Butter Substitute Edition

• We're voting in Central Indiana today, in a special session, on a bond issue for Wishard Hospital, the St. Elsewhere of Indianapolis. Which, of course, we wouldn't be doing absent the Property Tax Teabagging of three years ago, meaning the issue would have been decided by incompetent council members instead of incompetent voters.

The campaign has been notable for Wishard's large-scale Get Out the Vote efforts (my Poor Wife got three mailers on the same day) and What Appears to This Observer to have been a rather sheepish bit of cheerleading from that same local "news" media which spent half of 2006 pretending that all those Teabaggers were simple spontaneously-disgruntled citizens. (It's just fucking blatant anymore; this is why you can't let people get away with shit, even if it seems as innocuous or trivial as teleprompter reading. The hairdos are all upset again about Rising Gas Prices, as their Personal Highway Panzers start costing more and more to fill-up. By contrast, their reports of in-state job losses, sandwiched between H1N1 vaccine updates and video of children getting H1N1 inoculations, have all the passion of a $5 street blowjob. Maybe we should tie the licensing of the public airwaves to the unemployment rate, or COLA, or, especially in Hoosierland, funding for public education. Ooops, there goes the weekend Weather Bunny! I'm afraid we'll be going back to Doppler 2000 technology! We're downsizing the Noon cooking segment! Then you'd see the makeup running.)

At least that's the way it's seem to me, as the people who run such things have come face-to-face with the first big example of what incontinent tax-cutting has wrought, or the first example, anyway, that has real-world repercussions tied to no one's political fortunes. The people who decide how this sort of thing will be reported have plenty of reasons to root for lower tax rates, but when the consequences of that are a punch to the solar plexus of their civic boosterism they suddenly start worrying about consequences.

• Speaking of the locals, State Representative Ed Delaney was severely beaten Saturday morning in crime-ridden Hamilton county, Indiana. Delaney, who is also an attorney, was meeting--in his neighborhood--with a man who'd made an appointment to discuss some land acquisition. Delaney had managed to signal some passing neighbors, who called police, who arrived to find the man pistol-whipping Delaney on the ground. He suffered facial fractures and five broken ribs, among other injuries. The assailant fled and was captured after being Tasered. Delaney is 66. His attacker, Augustus J. Mendenhall, who is also an attorney, is 38.

At some point word of a possible motive--that Delaney had been involved in the 1983 closing of an adult bookstore in a building Mendenhall's father owned--leaked out, and was immediately misreported. (Sorry, should have warned you to sit down first.)

Channel 6 said the dispute had involved a "porn shop" in Lafayette Square Mall. I'm not sure when "porn shop" entered their stylebook, but it's what piqued my interest, and it is always simply fucking remarkable how long it takes anyone in the "news" biz to get a simple story straight. (Note: my Poor Wife heard "at Lafayette Square"; either is incorrect, though certainly there's never been anything more pornographic inside the Mall than the Orange Julius). The property in question was a building at the edge of Mall property; six stories later I'm still unclear as to who actually owned the land. It was closed as part of then-Prosecutor Steven "Goldsmythe" Goldsmith's efforts to "clean up" Indianapolis regardless of--perhaps that's "especially considering"--what rights he had to trample to do so. Goldsmythe* seized the building as part of the proceedings, and Mendenhall pere was (reportedly) bankrupted when he was chased all the way to the US Supreme Court before getting it back. Delaney represented the Simons, owners of the Mall, who evidently wanted the place shut down so they could bilk citizens in a wholesome, family atmosphere.

At any rate, the locals got hold of Gunsel Mendenhall Sunday or Monday for a little jailhouse video discussion, which apparently involves their agreeing to put a microphone in front of the guy and allow him to say anything:

"I explained to him that I was a representative of a Russian company and I implied that it was a front for Russian mafia," said Mendenhall as he met reporters in shackles. "I explained to him that they wanted to launder money through real estate here in Indiana."

Thus the local FOX affiliate. For fuck's sake. There's a senior citizen hospitalized, and damn fortunate this bunghole didn't manage to kill him, and you allow the guy to claim he "implied" he was looking to launder money for the Russian mob? Shades of Hannah Giles, Intrepid Girl Reporter! (Better yet, shades of that nutcase Hamilton county financial scammer who tried to fake his own death with one of his private planes. He got plenty of free face time, too.) The man has every right to raise this before the Bar, at which time it will become News, and you can morph into reporters. In the meantime, I look forward to you offering the same opportunity to the next child molester who makes the "news".

• WaPo runs a "reality" program entitled "Who Wants To Be The Next Wapo Opinion Columnist?", which, first, sorta illustrates the contention that newspapers aren't dying, they're committing suicide: they obviously haven't learned anything from the descent into Tabloidism, and are now cribbing from Teevee, which is like Penguin Classics announcing plans to release the Collected Works of David Broder; they seem to imagine that WaPo opinin' isn't something anyone with a keyboard could do as well as that bunch they've got now; and they also seem to believe that public popularity has something to do with it. I mean they seem to believe that you'll believe it. (Two words. First word. Sounds like "Pez-Ra".)

Anyway, it's Week Two (I think; I haven't really paid attention to it), and contestant Lydia Khalil ("a specialist on the Middle East and international security at the Council on Foreign Relations." God knows it's time we heard from them) pens the results of her discussions with five (5) cabbies! In one column! Game over! But lady, really, don't leave it all on the practice field.

• And here's the distinction between sports reporting and news reporting: once in a while sports figures tell the truth. Sunday on Dave Despain's show on SPEED he's got two of the American F-1 announcers on, and they're talking about next season, this season having ended earlier that day. And next year there'll be no refueling in F-1. And Steve Matchett says, "In 1994 (?; not sure, because SPEED doesn't post the video of lowly European racing) they re-introduced re-fueling, because, they said, it will make racing safer and more competitive. Now they ban re-fueling, because, they say, it will make racing safer and more competitive."

Imagine if you heard that sort of honesty in health care or education debates, or the run-up to our next War Resolution, and from someone whose income depends on the people operating the scam, yet.

• Indianapolis' City-County council (motto: Remember, You Could Be Living In Hamilton County) votes down a proposed smoking ordinance which would have included all workplaces, and--are you listening, Target?--prohibited smoking within 50 feet of the entrance to any building, after Accidental Mayor Gomer F. Ballard, USMC, who was silent on the deal before the last minute, tells the Republican majority in a closed-door session he wants the thing to fail. Sunday Indianapolis Racist Beacon above the fold headline says, "Streak of Individualism, Lack of a Health Culture Block Smoking Ban". I am not making that up.


__________

*It's the name the fittingly Number Two Man at Bush's Office of Faith-Based Initiatives and Permanent Three-Card Monte Outlet feloniously registered to vote under, right alongside the fake address he attested to, on the grounds that all the Bad Motorscooters he'd sent up the river were just itching to rub him out. Compare, fer chrissakes, Rudy Fucking Giuliani, who lived at Gracie Manor and kept his mistresses secret. While Goldsmythe was Mayor there was a police vehicle permanently stationed on his street, and they stopped you for driving on it. I know. I tried.

Olio

• I HEART Charles Pierce, vol. CCXXXII:

We are on the precipice of something very dangerous right now. Thirty percent [unemployment] is not the stuff of a sustainable, credible political democracy, which I suppose is OK, since we don't have one any more, and show no signs of being particularly upset about that self-evident fact. We 
saw that this week. The United States of America, which once fed its people and armed the world in order that it could save itself, is unequal in its self-government to the simple task of keeping its citizens healthy and alive. In the task of self-government, the unemployment rate is nearing 100 percent.

• Forget It, Jake, It's Slate: Chris Wilson, "Why couldn't we tell the balloon boy's parents were faking their distress?"

"Because people so differ from each other, evaluating whether an emotion is valid or not is very complicated for an observer," says Jack Mayer, a University of New Hampshire psychologist who pioneered the field of emotional intelligence.

Look, a big problem with the tabloidization of news is that the genuine issues that might be illustrated by something which a wide swath of the populace gets to see--whether it particularly wants to or not--get turned over to the same idiots who tabloidized the story in the first place. There's nothing even remotely interesting about this Heene idiot, not even in the sociological sense, or in noting that his fame-besotted quest sought nothing more than fame and/or riches, and merit be damned; those stories are a dime a networkload. What's interesting--that this country once imagined it had a responsibility toward the Greatness it bestowed upon itself, and now no longer cares--isn't going to get tackled, except peripherally, maybe, in the tsk tsking of the tiny minds whose viewership drives the ugly "celebrity" mania in the first place.

The public debate is now as shallow as our newscasts; we can actually ruminate on the excesses of the Falcon Heene Episode without risking anything, without it meaning a goddam thing. No one with a functioning cortex can imagine doing so will make a damn bit of difference. And even so august a journal as Slate can question the gullibility of, it says, Us while wholly missing the point. (Speak for yourself, by the way; the minute I realized the thing was Flying Saucer Shaped I was ready to vote for conviction.) "It's tough to know when people are lying," says Professor Mayer, adding the customary nothingwhatsoever from his field. The cops had an obligation to take the story seriously so long as it was even remotely possible there was a budding psychopath 5000 feet above Colorado. There aren't any prizes for solving crimes psychically and then rolling up the investigation without bothering with pesky physical evidence. Okay, so there may be a cable series in it for you.

Meanwhile, why did the Sheriff announce, in public, that they'd concluded the parents were telling the truth? Not because he'd come down on one side of the Truth question without the profound insights of a pioneer in the field of emotional intelligence. It was--as he stated later--because the two (or multiple) psychological experts who'd been observing the family found the parents believable.

Get it? It wasn't the human inability to separate Compassionate Conservatism from, well, even more bogus Compassionate Conservatism, which cops deal with every day, with the same mixed results and actuarial odds we all enjoy. It was the pretension of expertise where there is none. From psychologists. Asking another psychologist to explain the "mistake" after the fact is like asking a NASCAR driver if he was the one who caused the wreck.

• Forget It, Jake, It's Jacob Weisberg, "Why gay marriage, getting high, and going to Cuba will soon be legal". :

The chief reason these prohibitions are falling away is the evolving definition of the pursuit of happiness. What's driving the legalization of gay marriage is not so much the moral argument but the pressures from couples who want to sanctify their relationships, obtain legal benefits, and raise children in a stable environment. What's advancing the decriminalization of marijuana is not just the demand for pot as medicine but the number of adults—more than 23 million in the past year, according to the most recent government survey—who use it and don't believe they should face legal jeopardy. What's bringing the change on Cuba is not just the epic failure of the 48-year-old U.S. embargo, but the demand on the part of Americans who want to go there—whether to visit their relatives, prospect for post-Castro business opportunities, or sip rum drinks at the beach.

These are things devoutly to be wished, but I'll believe them when I see them at this point. How many Americans smoked pot in 1968? How many would have gone to Cuba? Gay marriage is a convenient issue, because it has traction, and it should be remembered that miscegenation in marriage remained illegal in some places until the 1970s; there are long hard slogs ahead of us, not facile libertarian advancement through the moral superiority of one's own agreements with the herd. And let's let this stand as a proxy for that Freakernomics dude and the comedy news hosts who love him, though not in That Way. Removing the moral argument from an issue doesn't, well, remove the moral argument from an issue. No moral argument will ever be entirely persuasive, and one can always be found to contradict our own superior positions on every issue. The same goddam thing is true of economic arguments. It's just as foolish to suggest that the law should reflect what large number of people want to do, without qualification. The laws you're trying to replace are there because large numbers of people wanted 'em, too.

It's called gaining historical perspective, and how long, O Lord, is it going to be before it comes back into fashion?

Our forms of prohibition are more sins of omission than commission. Rather than trying to take away longstanding rights, they're instances of conservative laws failing to keep pace with a liberalizing society. But like Prohibition in the '20s, these restrictions have become indefensible as well as impractical, and as a result are fading fast.

Marihuana was legal until 1937; you can look this sorta thing up. Travel to Cuba? Purely a response to the Evil Fidel, who was briefly our buddy until he started nationalizing American-owned property by buying it for exactly the amount the companies had claimed it was worth for tax purposes. Gay marriage probably has fifty different answers (in Indiana, by the way, marriage is defined in the state constitution as a union of a man and a woman; try changing that one in one brief decade, Kreskin); where it represents an extension of guaranteed rights to persons previously denied them it is nothing but a moral/legal argument, whether it's two brave souls or two million who challenge it.

Republicans face a risk in resisting these new realities. Freedom is part of their brand;

Ooops, pardon my snort.

if the GOP remains the party of prohibition, it will increasingly alienate libertarian-leaners

Sorry, sorry. Really. I swear it's involuntary.

and the young. But the party as presently constituted has very little capacity to accept social change. Democrats face a danger in embracing cultural transformations too eagerly.

Again, sorry to keep interrupting, but even ignoring the profound lunacy of that suggestion, what would it have to do with what you've been saying up to this point?

Nearly four decades after George McGovern became known as the candidate of amnesty, abortion, and acid, cultural issues are still treacherous territory for them. Why get in front of change when you can follow from a safe distance and end up with the same result?

And look, if I can have a moment for the vertigo to pass--happens every single time I'm lectured about an historical occurrence from my adult lifetime by someone who was eight at the time, and gives no indication of having any knowledge of the subject beyond some passing remark he caught twenty years later--assuming the Democrats of the past forty years have been secretly itching to legalize opium, gay marry priests, and give Castro the Presidential Medal of Freedom--which, by the way, they fucking haven't--how does this sort of malarky advance the cause of the Socially Evolved Libertarian-Leaner, Mr. Weisberg? The idea that Scoop Fucking Jackson--saddled, mutatis mutandis with a running mate who'd blatantly lied to his vetters, at the same, enormous political cost--would have done better in 1972 than the "liberal" McGovern is at best debatable and at worst pure horseshit. CREEP could have, and certainly would have, hung that Amnesty, Abortion, and Acid tag on any Democratic candidate, and it would have stuck with the red-meat base Nixon had helped Johnson turn into Republicans. Just as the same sort of shit works with the current generation. Democrats ran from McGovern because they're a pack of craven opportunists, not because of astute political calculation. What passes for the American Left may have its natural home in their party, from a choice of two, but the idea that this makes party officials a bunch of Bolshies is a Republican fantasy. Right up there with "Liberal Media". One does wish for a time when someone posing as a sociologically-superior impartial observer would stop perpetratin' it, fer chrissakes.

Don't Leave Me Alone

HOPE you're somewhere cozy, with an enjoyable weekend ahead, somewhere Autumn's fiery spectacle is still on the trees, rather than in the yard, and where 5 PM means local teevee shows screwball comedies instead of showing screwballs being unintentionally comic.

The other day my Poor Wife had one of those dog-and-pony parents meeting nights, which left me alone with local news. This is, in itself, at least as interesting a portal into human behavior as anything David Brooks conjures up, because even now I have no fucking explanation for why I turned the damn thing on. She's the one who wants to see six weather reports every night. I'm the one who wants to shoot six teevee meteorologists. But once you've been married long enough you start to look alike, to finish each other's sentences, and to develop resistance to the same poisons. I turned the damn thing on just as if she were there.

The difference--you may already know this--is that I choose a channel and stick with it, rather than using the remote as a primitive device for recreating the Golden Age of Music Video Jump Cutting right in your own home theatre. And that channel is Channel 8, the choice of which has nothing whatsoever to do with the quality of the "news" (foolish notion!) or the people who mime it; 8 just seems to shout a little softer than the other two which're on at the same time. (The standard delivery at 13, by comparison, is Adenoidal Teenaged Evangelical Christian Reading Bible Passages to an Ampitheater of Nursing Home Residents, all of whom are seated at the back).

So, one reason I hope you aren't similarly afflicted is the H1N1 business, which has pretty much become the Missing Blonde Teenager of public health stories, except there are actual ramifications for actual people who actually watch the broadcasts. Fluff the threat, fluff the public health reaction, fluff the threat, fluff the vaccine, fluff the shortage of vaccine, fluff the blind panic that has resulted; repeat. And this has gone on since June at the latest, despite the fact that the trajectory of H1N1, if not its magnitude, has been known all that time. Influenza is understood; that's why there's the vaccine, and that's why there's a organized and targeted release. Influenza is also mutable, which is why last year's vaccine didn't always work. And younger populations can be seriously challenged by some combinations. This is not a mystery. There is no theory of information in which scaring the fucking bejebus out of people gets them to act more rationally, and none where re-running the same routine the fifty-seventh time gets the same reaction as the first. It's done simply because they believe the tone itself encourages people to tune in.

Which is nothing new if, as a helpless bystander, you see their weather reports six times daily.

What I'd like to know, though, is: where are the fucking teabaggers? If this isn't socialized medicine, what is? The gubment controls who gets vaccine which, if we really love freedom, ought to be going to the highest bidder.

(This was also the night they gave their Chief Meterologist/Consumer Electronics Guru and Guy Who Had His Chair Yanked Out From Under Him When They Located A Hot Weather Bunny space to do the most naked plugola I've ever seen, five minutes on the Droid, or Druid, or whatever the latest piece of plastic crap I can't live without is called. "Tomorrow we'll be showing how it stacks up head-to-head against the iPhone". You'll be what? I guess that despite the previous two-week's fertilizer storm I've endured about the thing, I wasn't supposed to rise to the faux-viral adverts, and I'm supposed to have missed, despite giving it all the inattention it deserved, that whoever's responsible for the thing is precisely promoting "how it stacks up head-to-head against the iPhone". Or that they've been buying ad time on your channel, and they gave you what you touted as an Exclusive. Or that today's report, the prelude to tomorrow's heavyweight bout, basically consisted of you narrating what was obviously a series of graphics produced by the people who make the Drone, or the Drear, or the Doofus. If the Market is so fucking perfect, how is it that an alternative news for people with two healthy, functioning hemispheres to their brains hasn't turned up in thirty fucking years?)

That Parents Night deal also set us back on our already-one-day-delayed Daily Show/Colbert viewing, so it was just last night when I caught the Embarrassment of That Steven Levitt guy, who'd already made a fool of Jon with his previous book. Drop the fucking interviews, already, or cut 'em to one or two a week, and ban anyone peddling a book with a political agenda masquerading as Not a Political Agenda. And all teevee newsreaders. Stewart's always going on about how his is a comedy show, and he's right. The worst moments are when he wanders off into something he knows nothing about, with no one on the staff able to stop him; I'd rather watch eight Olbermann Special Comments in a row. If you know enough to say "People are upset about it," you know enough to have found out why. Not to mention the underutilization of another group of performers. C'mon. Those guys can fill an extra 16 minutes a week, certainly without falling any flatter than another Susie Essman schmoozefest. Though, on the other hand, those interviews do make Colbert look that much better.

Well, You Can't Argue With Success

Bill "Too Young For Vietnam" Kristol, "A good time to be a 'conservative' ". October 27

IN case anyone got here late--not that I'm suggesting you are the sort of person who'd've got here early and stuck around--I put the quotes around "conservative" above. Kristol couldn't find enough honesty in his entire career to've done so. I do, in perpetuity, inspired by Nabokov's claim that "reality" was the only word in English which should always be surrounded by quotes. "Conservatism", obviously, lacks the cosmic implications; I'd be more than willing to drop the quotes if it would drop the pose. That offer's forty years old at this point, and has been met by the Doppler-shifted sound of goose-stepping in the opposite direction.

And let's be clear about this: it's Italian goose-stepping, by and large, all bluster and pretend big balls and so stupid you'd send your army into the world's largest desert with trainloads of pasta for rations (True, by the way). It's not my intention to toss around "Nazi" or even "Fascist" the way an arsonist tosses around an accelerant, not like a Goldberg, or even someone who knows what he's talking about. The Right is soft. It's been soft since Reagan (at least), since it retreated into its Whiteness and its sense of entitlement and its perpetual faux-disgruntlement. The Right's had eight years now to go marchin' off to war, having been handed a Pearl Harbor moment it couldn't have scripted any better. Noticed a shortage of "conservatives" in that time? I'm not saying there aren't nuts out there, of course, of every stripe, most of them too apolitical to bother with being apolitical; I'm saying that average public gun polisher , while perhaps not the best advert for a well-balanced weapon and a well-balanced mind, is probably only a major concern if your sister's married to one.

Take, for example, Bravo Company Billy:

The implications of this [a Gallup poll showing 40% of Americans self-identifying as "conservative"] for the Republican Party over the remaining three years of the Obama presidency are clear: The GOP is going to be pretty unapologetically conservative. There aren't going to be a lot of moderate Republican victories in intra-party skirmishes. And -- with the caveat that the political world can, of course, change quickly -- there will be a conservative Republican presidential nominee in 2012.

Y'know, first of all, we are well beyond the time when anyone should be asking what Bill Kristol imagines he has to sneer about, beyond a tidy income for doing nothing whatsoever, and inevitably getting that wrong, and ask why reasonable Republicans--and there must be some, even now--haven't wiped it off his face for him. Second, if you still had "Hubris" on your list of possible explanations for Republican behavior that do not, per se, avail themselves of perpetual juvenility and debilitating sexual psychosis, scratch it off; one is supposed to learn something when Hubris leads to complete disaster. Finally, it takes a Gallup poll for you to conclude that the next Republican presidential nominee will be "conservative"? As opposed to fucking what, exactly?

Supposing you imagine Perpetual Aggrievedness is the "conservative" meal ticket. Then what? Between 2012 and 2016 you're going to roll back whatever excuse we've made in place of health care reform, tax-cut our way out of the Bush Deficit that's rebounded back to you, and invade Iran? On the strength of a 2009 Gallup poll ?

And, sure: in my lifetime the American voter has reelected Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush, and the gerrymandered Republican sinecure district whose rump bumps my own keeps reelecting Dan Fucking Burton. There's no idiocy left that could surprise me. But anyone who puts words on paper for a living--even if every last one of 'em is false--has got to understand at minimum that "consequences" is in the dictionary for a reason.

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

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

Still expecting to sell the natives shit for Shinola.

-with apologies to T.S.E.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do something! Douthat, yesterday:

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

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

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

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

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

Endlessly Repeated Idiocy. And Such Small Portions!

FIRST: one thousand apologies to Jaye Ramsey Sutter for any deleterious immune-system effects from the Pickle Men pic, and Best Wishes for a speedy recovery. I know in my own (still throbbing) lymph glands that it's cold comfort, but the one I was going to use was worse.

This reminded me of the local teevee news Homespun Hoosier Humorist and Whacky and/or Heartwarming Feature Story Narration Sinecure who used to
do restaurant reviews--this is the retired Homespun Hoosier Humorist, from the 70s, not the current guy who used to take his dog along with him as substitute for being even remotely interesting, and who was just seen yesterday encouraging some sixty-something perpetual adolescent to drive up and down his driveway at 8:30 AM of a quiet suburban Sunday in a homemade car which was apparently powered by some combination of late-50s NOVI racing engine and one or more decommissioned naval guns--where was I? Oh, who used to do restaurant reviews, which he sorta landed on after a decade of filling dead air as a sort of local Art Buchwald minus the wit, the political savvy, and the delivery. And every last fucking restaurant got ten stars, or whatever it was. Never varied. I think they might have dispensed with the star system after a while, but not out of any sense of embarrassment, just in the way the Town Slut eventually moves away and gets married. And sometime later he gave an interview in which he explained that very early on in his reviewing career he'd given some beanery or other a mediocre review, and they reported that it hurt their business, so he felt bad and always gave glowing reviews after that.

And he said this as though it were the most understandable thing in the world, and as though the moral of the story was he'd just not quite understood the power of television in his previous decade sopping up the perks of local celebrity. So, a thousand more apologies, Jaye, and lots more in advance, but on the other hand, we consider making people sicker a badge of authenticity.

Sometime yesterday--Halftime, probably--I went poking around the teevee schedule, and while crossing the News divide thought I spotted Jonah Goldberg in the little box o' feed in the corner. Sure enough. One C-SPAN or another was bringing dozens of Americans whose remotes were broken the ruminations of America's Overactive Swim Bladder. I lasted all of fifteen seconds, during which time he was explaining to his inexplicable audience--okay, maybe they were all armed with pies; I didn't stick around--how some liberals were drawn into Journalism, which Might Be a Good Thing in a Way for some reason I wasn't going to wait around to hear, since it would immediately be followed by the observation that however well intentioned this unfortunately led to ever' last bit of information US citizens could come by being filtered through the Filtering Filter of Liberalism. Which he probably then qualified some more.

I didn't check whether the Info button gave the recording date, so it might have been the release party for Liberal Fascism, or the trade paperback of Liberal Fascism, or any of several postponement parties for Liberal Fascism, or the blegging party for Liberal Fascism, or 1998, 1992, or him reciting from Mummy and Pater's flashcards anytime after he reached two-hundred pounds. Doesn't matter.

So either someone, somewhere, thought it was financially worthwhile to have Jonah Goldberg blather, in public, about the psychological makeup, a subject on which he appears no more knowledgeable than on any of the numberless other areas he's never studied, and 99-44/100% of those he has, of a group of people which he gives no indication of knowing a single example of, in an apparent effort to further the sales of a "book" he "wrote" which actually managed to set a new standard of lack of scholarship for Modern English with its title, or else he did so on his own. No wonder these people love capitalism.

And bear in mind that even if this had been an actual opinion, and not the psittacine squawking of some huge, flightless poultry experiment in producing the World's Most Massive Foie Gras gone horribly wrong, he still couldn't defend it; and just pause a moment to reflect where his evidence comes from: some mid-70s Gallup deal as reported in Newsweek, or US News, or somesuch which was based on self-reporting. And how it's continued for Goldberg's life span despite the fact that the last "liberal" act of the Mass Market US Press was reporting the results of the Washington Post's Watergate coverage. "Journalists" reported themselves to be libruhl, therefore they are. The required level of gullibility would also have you believe that all physicians went into medicine for the opportunity to serve Mankind, and all clowns love children.

And that, in turn, pretty much describes my political mood when I fired up the internet generator this AM and found Fareed Zakaria urging a more temperate approach to our sure-to-be successful Afghanistan Surge-a-Thon, if by "more temperate" you mean "anywhere to the Left of Dick Cheney". I mean, sorry, I must have missed the explanation of What th' Fuck Fareed Zakaria is doing there in the first place. His entire public career seems to consist not just of being absolutely wrong about everything while remaining likable, but also in leaving town after the disaster is widely acknowledged in order to follow the Mushy Middle to the Guaranteed Path to the Next Clusterfuck while mentioning "Democracy" a lot.

Sure, sure, there were plenty of So-Called Liberals and/or Moderates who got on board with the Iraq War, and few who've missed many meals for having done so. But most of 'em, to judge from the endless recapitulations after, want us to believe they bought into the Saddam=Rape Rooms Plus Everybody Though He Had Nukes routine, and would just as soon we not mention that they figured backing a sure winner couldn't hurt future employment opportunities in America's lucrative and growing Pre-emptive Invasion Excuse Mongering industry. Zakaria's the only one who immediately comes to mind when "Seems to have actually believed in that Islamic Democracy Domino Effect bullshit" comes up in conversation. And he's the guy who knows Islamic societies.

The crucial judgments that have to be made involve what the troops will do and how much of Afghanistan to cover. One option is the idea Ricks recently suggested to me: "Why not do the Petraeus plan [counterinsurgency] for the major population centers and the Biden plan [counterterrorism] for the rest of the country?" Following that middle course might be the most practical solution; more forces could still be needed, as McChrystal suggests, or perhaps we can make do with the almost 100,000 coalition forces already there. Obama should carefully consider all the options before racing to demonstrate how tough he is.

Squish, squish, squish. Y'know, sometime when you have more than 725 words in a major newspaper, and some time to spare from the vital business of showing that Dick Cheney is as full of shit now as he was when you agreed with him wholeheartedly, you might try telling us Why. Or else where we can get good deep-fried catfish in Pittsboro, IN.

Fall Break

The Continuing Cultural Fallout From That Frank Gorshin "Half Black/Half White" Star Trek Episode

Charles Lane, WaPo: "Medical marihuana is an insult to our intelligence". October 20

LIKE all men, I have been given bad times in which to live; live most weeks, it's a good week for avoiding the News altogether (with apologies to that blind Argentinian librarian).

Memo to the Times: God knows I don't ask for much--the public plucking of every last hennaed hair from MoDo's head, in Times Square, right after The Ball falls next January 1 isn't a personal request, but our due as Americans--but look: could we please stop the fucking charades over US interventionism already, sixty years after Korea? Public Divided! Obama at a Crossroads! McChrystal at a Crossroads! Dueling Vietnam books, one of them, favored by the Pentagon and blessed by an appearance on your Op-Ed pages last Sunday, written by a certifiable Lt. Colonel who apparently thinks our real problem in Nam was that we didn't lie enough. Like fuck we're trying to reason this out. Reason is clear. It's the goddam mission that's a complete mystery.

Here's the list, again, of where we've been, officially, since the Korean War ended paused, with the domestic interventions (Detroit, multiple locations following the King assassination, Wounded Knee, the US Virgin Islands, Los Angeles following the King beating verdicts, and the whole damn country after 9/11) redacted for the sake of praeteritio: Vietnam, Guatemala, Lebanon, Panama, Vietnam, Laos, Cuba, Panama, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Cambodia, Laos, Cambodia, Iran, Libya, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Lebanon, Grenada, Honduras, Iran, Libya, Bolivia, Iran, Libya, Philippines, Panama, Iraq, Somalia, Yugoslavia, Bosnia, Haiti, Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yugoslavia, Macedonia, Afghanistan, Philippines, Colombia, Iraq, Haiti, Pakistan, and Somalia.

That's forty-four in fifty-five years, meaning the real question is who Obama's going to invade by next March. And in all that time there's one, (1), uno, occasion where we decided "Y'know, on second thought, maybe not," and that was Lebanon, post-disaster Lebanon, and the Gipper, and the Gipper's free pass. If Zombie Ronald Reagan [redundancy intended] announced on FOX that it was time to come home it might create 48 hours of confusion, but that's it. Maybe it's escaped your notice (like you thought, maybe, the Yankees were finally giving box-seat holders some much-deserved elbow room?) but we can't even stop building stadiums at taxpayer expense so rich guys can sniff jocks. Are we really supposed to wonder whether Barack Obama will remove American troops from Afghanistan just because there's no good reason for them to be there beyond the bad headlines that'll haunt the final three years of his Presidency? Because Rahm Emanuel read a book about Vietnam? (And thanks, for that, really. You were born in 1959. Maybe while it was the major news story for the entire period of your entire secondary education would have been a better time to learn about it. Than, apparently, one weekend last month.)

(And, hey, how much fucking shit was aimed at George Herbert Walker Tiberius Prescott Bush I for leaving Iraq when the mission was finished, instead of fucking around for another generation?)

And that's assuming a level playing field in the President's mind, despite the tilted one in public. But this is the guy who made Afghanistan his Badge of Commander-in-Chiefyness. Hot Pursuit! Which has, to date, achieved his being backhanded by his hand-picked, recently-bestarred theatre commander (assuming you actually believe that; at any rate, it sure hasn't won him a whole lot of post-partisan pals on the Right). Just shut up. Short of outright disaster we will continue to send enough troops to prop up Karzai, who we just had to threaten to get to agree to a run-off election, and who will promise to follow the sterling example of Nguyen Van Thieu, at least through 2012. Enjoy the box seats, and the $15 nachos.

Y'know, I'm not sure there's any way out of the problem without a fundamental acknowledgement of more than the mere existence of the problem, straight through, that is, the trite recognition that not only are we a nation of facile liars, we've become a nation which values dishonesty, the more facile the better, above all else, to the point where we will shortly have to decide between becoming a purely cashless society or having one-third to one-half of our change-making retail transactions end in gunplay. Straight through, I say, to admitting that we are, in fact, and just twelve months after a half-dozen "Free" Marketeers nearly collapsed the global financial markets to cover a Call, still speeding in the opposite direction with bankrupt brakes and more interest in the cell phone conversation we're having than watching the road.

And, fuck, is there anything more fitting than a nation's attention caught last week by an actual bright shiny object? Okay, maybe it's a tie with the fact that the local cops at first believed the parents because their two body-language experts confirmed the couple was telling the truth. And okay, maybe it's that a professional writer of what used to be called "think pieces" carves off a chunk of Washington Post real estate to warn us of the dangers of…Medical Marihuana! Yes, it's 2009. I double-checked.

I don't think the federal government should be spending a whole lot of time on small-time druggies, and I'm undecided about legalizing pot, which enjoys 44 percent support among the general public, according to a recent poll. Recreational use is not the wisest thing -- and if my 12-year-old son is reading this, that means you! -- but it's no more harmful than other drugs (e.g., alcohol) and impossible to eradicate. On the other hand, I worry it's a gateway to harder stuff. So I think we probably should have an open debate about decriminalization.

Sure. Let's pencil that in after "open debate on Afghanistan" and "factual discussion of health care."

Gateway drug! No more harmful than, e.g., alcohol! Listen, Rube, the only way The Marihuana is anywhere near as dangerous as your third Dirty Martini is if you nod off briefly and accidentally set the couch on fire. And then try to put it out with alcohol.

So look: No. We can't have an open debate, because we're surrounded by a bunch of goddam fucking liars who've been conditioned to genuflect at the first mention of someone else enjoying himself. The opportunity for honest debate passed thirty years ago. I believe the final opportunity can be clocked to the minute, in fact, when John Chancellor, at the NBC anchor desk, solemnly intoned that a recent study had proven pot smoking caused gynecomastia in males, which, given the amount of pot being smoked in this country, would have turned every trip to the beach into one of those nudist volleyball film loops. Not that anyone by that point was much interested, let alone hopeful, about the "openness" and "honesty" any public debate would have involved. Thanks, in no small part, to that Gateway Drug mentality.

Usually, drugs have to pass exacting testing by the Food and Drug Administration before they go on the market. There's a good reason for this: we don't want people spending money on products that might be ineffective or actually harmful. In California and elsewhere, however, snake oil -- sorry, "medical marijuana" -- got on the market via a different route: popular referendum. The pot for sale in dispensaries is subject to none of the purity controls that actual pharmaceutical drugs must meet. Indeed, the new DOJ policy essentially recognizes a gray market for pot, leaving these supposedly seriously ill people at the mercy of their dealers -- I mean caregivers -- with respect to quality and efficacy.

Okay, first, abusus non tollit usum. What some people say, or do, or claim about a thing has nothing to do with its legitimate use. The idea's at least as old as Pliny, and that's Pliny the Elder.

Second, what do people get dispensary cards for? As an anodyne for the effect of AIDS or cancer treatments, bone pain, eating disorders. Not to cure any of them, no matter what Captain Haze said on the internets. You mutter some obligatory "oh, I'm not opposed to sick people using if it helps" to start off with, the old Establish Your Reasonableness Before Being Totally Unreasonable routine--another reason we can't have an open discussion--so why should pot be treated more harshly than the couple hundred "nutritional supplements" on sale at your local grocers? Because we owe it to Harry Anslinger? Pfffft. In a just world there wouldn't be any impediment to such people getting pot to relieve the pain. Or even just for fun. A few states have recognized the first half of the equation, and now the Feds recognize they've got better things to do, though not always so lucrative. But ooooh, let's wait for Congress to move The Marihuana off the same schedule as heroin. That'd be the Congress we elected in 2006 to end the Iraq war.

Finally, while the air quotes around "caregivers" speak for themselves, let's take a brief moment to howl at that "efficacy and quality" bit. Good Lord, there's more "efficacy and quality" in a dime bag today than there was in a quarter pound in my day. It's the government that adulterates the stuff, you Human Paraquat. And if it came to it, and I had to leave my baby, or my wallet, with a dope dealer, I mean "caregiver", a Congresscritter, or a Washington Post writer, well…I already listed 'em in order.

By the way, Steve Alford called. He's sending over a van to pick up his hairdo. *

__________

* Obligatory semi-annual joke only Hoosiers will get. Just ignore it.

There's Never Anything On Teevee

Victor Davis Hanson, "Confessions of a Cultural Drop-out". October 17

ROY points us at Hanson; wise commenters nail down what little he doesn't; commenter Riley, still battling respiratory crap and attendant five-thousand things left undone just as the leaves start to fall, decides mid-novella to just hijack the thing. Y'all can have your money back if not satisfied.

Now the first problem we ran into, about six paragraphs into our rough draft, was that there was no seamless way to work in the ad hominem attack on Hanson we'd been harboring since we saw him on the Military History channel a week ago, commenting on Cannae. You may recall (hope so; I'm too lazy to look it up) that one insomniac night a couple months back we innocently let run the final fifteen minutes of a replay of some History Channel Thermopylae thing which had been designed for a homoerotic piggyback ride on the PR campaign for 300, because we were interested in what came on next. It didn't occur to us, in the cognitive twilight, that 1) Victor Davis Hanson would turn up as a commenter, or 2) that, having done so, he'd blather something about urination and defecation, which, while perhaps the legitimate focus of the odd academic thought or two, yet required some measure of self-control to avoid guffawing loudly enough to wake my Poor Wife, especially when set against the Tom of Finland animation.

That one was my own fault. But the other day I clicked on the Cannae story and ran headlong into him. Which was objectionable on the grounds that 1) I can't believe my karma is that bad; and 2) Hanson's Great Battles Retold As Simple Moral Lessons For Kids From Eight to Ninety-Eight is particularly exposed by Hannibal's textbook double envelopment (see Robert Bateman). The only thing I had to add was this: Thank you, Professor Fucking Sominex. I'm guessing that either the tables at the War College are padded, or they recommended everyone attending Hanson's lectures keep his helmet on.

There are two salient beauties to this approach: one really needn't worry all that much about substantive criticism of an approach to historical scholarship that was outmoded before one's birth when potential critics have to decide, early on, whether to continue reading/listening to you or whether to continue breathing; and it's almost perfectly transferable to any other endeavor where facts may be discounted or dismissed as irrelevant. For instance, right-wing political commentary.

Anyhooo, I've always been fascinated by how this Degenerate (now also Liberal Anti-Capitalist) Pop Culture routine has managed to surf along behind the crest of the zeitgeist all these years and still remain in one spot.

Why not DVDs?

If I watch DVDs, they surely are not of recent vintage. I couldn’t tell you a single release in the current most rented 100. I rewatch instead Westerns—Peckinpaugh, John Ford, the classics like Shane and High Noon, the greats like Henry Fonda, James Stewart, Lee Marvin, George C. Scott, Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, Paul Newman, John Wayne, etc., and, as I wrote a few months ago, almost anything with a brilliant, but now forgotten character actor such as a Jack Palance, Richard Boone (cf. Cicero Grimes in Hombre), Ben Johnson, or Warren Oates—if only for their accents, ad-libbed lines, and carriage. Only the greats like DeNiro or Pacino, or a Robert Duvall, Tommy Lee Jones, and a few others (a Hackman, Eastwood, or Hopkins) approximate the old breed. (A Mickey Rourke, Gary Oldman, or John Malkovich are at least originals and, like real people, look the worse for it). So I find myself replaying something like a Das Boot or Breaker Morant, or supposedly corny 1930s and 1940s classics like How Green Was My Valley or The Best Years of Our Lives. If I want to watch a film that failed at the box-office, I’ll take One-Eyed Jacks or Major Dundee or Pat Garret and Billy the Kid; their failures are better than today’s “successes”.

Now, as several of Roy's commenters pointed out, this condition, in the less inclined to attribute every minor irritation in life to the cryptic machinations of Big Liberal, is known as "getting old." But as Hanson and I are the same age, I note it's also something more: it's fake. Not that one can't adopt a nostalgia for an era one never knew, although this has it in spades, but for the sense that today's Hollywood has suddenly departed from a norm when in fact Hanson and I have grown up and grown old with his very complaints in our ears.

Not that the Right hasn't been chomping on roast leg of Hollywood since the Silents, but, y'know, how does a 55-year-old limn Peckinpah without recalling the uproar his work created at the time? Movies were too sexy, too violent, anti-American, morally relativist, and insufficiently uplifting forty fucking years ago. If you don't care to watch anything made after Todd-AO, fine by me. Just quit trying to pretend it's a recent development. Movies started blowin' shit up--I mean, started being about shit blowing up--with Jaws and Star Wars, not Transformers. You're sure going to miss 85% of what's worthwhile in the 30s if "anti-corporate" pushes your gorge to your throat. How can you watch even a standard Sheepherders vs. Cattlemen oater without flying off the handle? If "some gay or feminist heroes fending off club-bearing white homophobic Mississippians in pick-ups" ruin the cinematic experience for you, what of a few thousand hours of crock o'shit representations of The American Indian? If moral relativism gives you the fantods, skip noir, dude. For that matter you might want to concentrate on Grace Kelly's corset, and not the story line, in future screenings of High Noon.

In fact, let's just make this a general maxim: If you want to walk through Life guided by the idea that the American Railroad Baron is the victim of calumniously bad PR, finding suitable entertainment is not your biggest problem.

While You're At It, Unscramble Me Two Eggs

Lt. Col (USA, ret.) Lewis Sorley, "The Vietnam War We Ignore". October 18

GOOD to see the Times springing for a real retired Looey Bird--they really should save Brooks for the post-victory opening of Kabul's first Olive Garden--and it's always interesting to catch up with the No, Here's The Real Story About Vietnam, (And This Time We Mean It!) brigades.

The first lesson of Vietnam, apparently, is that the people who use it as a cautionary tale of US military hubris and unexpected defeat are uninformed, hippie peacenik Fifth Columnists, but those who use it as a example of the incontrovertible advantages to be conferred on whatever quagmire we've managed to step in this time by one more troop escalation--as demonstrated by the fact that, after 1967, we really won in Vietnam--are military realists.

(A man after my own heart, Sorley's piece was bullet-pointed, at least in print--online this comes off as a series of Bauhaus printer's ornaments, for some reason--so if you detect an unexpected tenderheartedness to our vivisection, that's the reason.)

Vietnam is particularly tricky. While avoiding the missteps made there is of course a priority...

Not so much, though, as announcing that avoiding the "missteps" is a priority.

Y'know, Colonel, my memory ain't that great, but I really can't recall much support for the idea circa October, 2001. In fact the way I remember it, anybody so much as mentioned "the V word" or "the Q word" was an uninformed, hippie peacenik Fifth Columnist.

few seem aware of the many successful changes in strategy undertaken in the later years of the conflict.

Yes, in order to fully appreciate the lessons of the Vietnam war, we have to go all the way back to before Nixon was running it. Before we found the winning strategy, in other words.

The credit for those accomplishments goes in large part to three men: Ellsworth Bunker, who became the American ambassador to South Vietnam in 1967; William Colby, the C.I.A. officer in charge of rural “pacification” efforts; and Gen. Creighton Abrams, who became the top American commander there in 1968.

Each of whom, in his own way, had been responsible for implementing and/or prolonging the previous disasters. Colby had been spooking around the place since 1959. Abrams was Westmoreland's deputy, and far from implementing "clear and hold", continued Westy's war of attrition but without the incontinent troop escalation and unquestioned body counts. Hamburger Hill is one of Abrams' credits--that's late spring 1969, Colonel--and it's the political fallout from continued meat grinding, not Abrams' military insight, which accelerated the process of troop withdrawal and necessitated a change in tactics.

Ellsworth Bunker was an interesting man, but by the time he came to Vietnam, in his early 70s, was far too willing to see it as another Caribbean Problem--just spread the graft around among thuggish dictators friendly to "our" side, while keeping them there at the business end of overwhelming US military force--and much more supportive of Westmoreland than was Henry Cabot Lodge, the previous Yankee Brahmin in the post.

• Fight one war: Abrams, Bunker and Colby agreed that the war would be fought — and won or lost — in the villages….

In Afghanistan, it is vital that American and NATO troops get out of their protected bases to work alongside Afghan forces and build trust with civilians. In some ways this may be trickier than in Vietnam, as our troops will have to navigate the tribal and ethnic rivalries that have long divided Afghan society.

A problem hardly worth mentioning, since the pacific navigation of tricky questions of ethnic diversity is practically America's middle name. Hell, we even taught the guy who got us into all this the difference between Sunni and Shi'a. Eventually.

• Rethink combat operations…

In Afghanistan, combat does little good unless allied or Afghan forces remain behind to keep the Taliban from simply moving back in.

Would now be a good time to ask what, exactly, this got us in Vietnam? And whether the drawbacks to waiting eight years, until our attempts to force our will via superior bomb load have failed disastrously and ten times over, are not part of the lesson as well?

• Restrain the use of force…

Allied forces in Afghanistan may have to accept increased risks to themselves as the price of protecting the population. There have been some grumblings that they are hampered by the rules of engagement, and perhaps in platoon-level operations that it true. But Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top American commander in Afghanistan, is right that Western forces have to cut down on civilian deaths caused by air power and reckless use of force.

Sure. It's remarkable how forgiving native populations can be when you make a good faith effort to reduce the percentage you're killing indiscriminately.

• Create an effective central government: As Nguyen Van Thieu, who became South Vietnam’s president in 1967, gained experience and influence, senior Americans came to regard him as the “No. 1 pacification officer.”

And not just "A political grifter who'd've made an unholy three-headed combination of Jack Abramoff, Rod Blagojevitch, and Randy Cunningham blush."

He traveled extensively, promoting and evaluating local programs. And by 1972 his “Land to the Tiller” initiative had achieved genuine land reform, distributing two and a half million acres of land to nearly 400,000 farmers.

Giving many of them, in other words, what their parents might have gotten in 1956 if the United States hadn't blocked free elections in order to preserve the prerogatives of the colonial mandarins who ruled them.

President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan has no signature triumph like Land to the Tiller, nor has he made many efforts to reach out to average Afghans. Perhaps Washington should make some of its support to his government contingent on anticorruption efforts and delivering real services to his people.

Okay, but I thought we were learning the lessons of Vietnam here. The only thing that ended corruption in the South Vietnamese government was its dissolution.

• Support local governments…

Given the diversified population of Afghanistan there has been too much emphasis on central government — if the Karzai government lags in giving money and supplies to local and tribal leaders, the United States should consider doling out more aid directly to them.

Okay, look: before we flip over the next few cards and get to the reeking meat pile that's really at the center of the argument, let's stop and ask ourselves how we managed, yet fucking again, to wind up as all three props under yet another corrupt tin-horn dictator pretending to be a democrat. It's not from stupidity. It's not from refusing to learn the lessons of Vietnam, although we've certainly done our best to deny them. It's because we don't give a flying fuck for anyone who won't treat our tiniest whim as royal decree, unless they're too big for us to fuck with within the necessary tolerances for selling the project as "painless", and keeping most American's focus on prime-time television offerings.

Had we simply respected international law at the outset--sure, sure, Afghanistan was governed by a gang of sexually-degenerate religious thugs, but that doesn't stop us doing business with Texas--we might have gotten what we supposedly wanted, the non-Afghans who were responsible for 9/11. Maybe not, but we didn't get 'em in the event, anyway, and we were more than satisfied to torture whomever did got caught in our nets. Striking while the blood was up wasn't just the political calculation of the moment, it was also the result of thirty years of obfuscating the lessons of Vietnam, of maintaining the fiction that we didn't really lose, that we were too powerful to ever really lose, provided we stuck with the program come hell, high water, or public sentiment. There are the added subtexts: the Right's convenient World Government fantasies, which precluded reasoned diplomacy; Bush's Daddy Issues in Iraq, which had to be addressed on the timetable already established for maximum effect on 2004; and the whole reshaping the Middle East as the Kingdom of Israel II business. If you wanna explain why we should be studying the lessons of Vietnam now (even if they are your hand-picked lessons, and, well, somewhat divorced from the actual results), you might start by explaining why it should have taken eight years, just like it did in Nam.

• Control the borders: In South Vietnam, allied forces were never able to seal off borders with Cambodia, Laos or North Vietnam. The self-imposed prohibitions against going outside South Vietnam with ground forces allowed the enemy to use border areas for training, supply routes and sanctuary.

Jeez, what a surprise. The itch no crypto-colonialist can avoid scratching. Those self-imposed "prohibitions" also kept the Chinese as more-or-less disinterested observers, rather than nuclear-armed giant with a half-million Americans on its doorstep. Call it a lesson learned in Korea, if you'd like. And it's not like it stopped Nixon from extending the war into Cambodia or Laos now, is it?

Similarly, the Taliban uses the Pakistan border as its own barrier, and American drone attacks can do only so much. Either Washington must find a way to get the Pakistanis to step up the fight against the terrorists, or consider operations across the border.

Okay, sure, there's no possible downside whatsoever anyone could see from this. But what, exactly, are we doing this for, Colonel?

Maintain political support at home: All that was accomplished on the battlefield in the latter years of Vietnam was lost when Congress, having tired of the whole endeavor, drastically cut support for South Vietnam. Neither Lyndon Johnson nor Richard Nixon was able to rally public and press support for the war.

President Obama has said that Afghanistan is a war of necessity. If so, he must put his political capital behind it. As he and his advisers plan the new course for the war, he must also come up with a new approach for selling it to Congress and the American people.

Hey, feel free to think up an example or two, Colonel, in case the New York Times grants you a national stage or somethin'.

And look: how come nobody ever asks about the lessons of "maintaining political support"? It was maintained then with lies, deception, and political divisiveness. It's maintained now with lies, deception, political divisiveness, and a refusal to call on the public to sacrifice so much as a toenail clipping in its furtherance, at least overtly. What are the lessons of that, Colonel? What are the lessons of teaching that to another generation? While handing them the bill? And that's on top of fracturing our manpower and materiel for a generation, just like we did in Southeast Asia, while we were learning on the job.