Thursday Olio: Friendship Goes Only So Far Edition

• It has recently come to the attention of the alabaster town fathers of Carmel, Indiana, Indianapolis’ “Bicycle Friendly”, but snooty, neighbor to the north, that some people ride bicycles fast. In particular, they do so on the Monon Trail, the Rail-Trail project which, if memory serves, scads of angry Carmel property owners fought when it was first proposed, on the grounds that a) it would lead to undesirables crossing into Hamilton county without so much as a traffic stop, and b) the rather novel legal argument that government-granted railroad right-of-ways from the 19th century somehow reverted to people who bought nearby land eighty years later once the railroad wasn’t using them any more.

As these things tend to go, once the natural-born burghers realized that people using the trail sometimes dropped loose change, Carmel decided it loved the Monon. So much so that it chose to build its hulking, $45 million, Oh-no-taxpayers-won’t-pay-a-cent Elephant (appropriately White) of a Performing Arts Center right next to it.

Anyhow, they fell a little short of their goal of 100% private sponsorship to build and operate the thing, like by approximately all of it. And since, apparently, hosting a single Kansas show every July won’t cut it, they turn the parking lot into their Saturday Farmers’ Market.

Which means, if you’re a bicyclist who actually pedals energetically enough to make the bike move forward, the usual contingent of mazed pedestrians, stray dogs, and orphaned children is multiplied by about 50, and any remaining free space spackled over with elderly confusoids. I’ve ridden through it twice. I never will again.

But apparently someone with power was passed by a cyclist who didn’t doff his cap, or by chance appeared insolent, so there was introduced into the town council legislation which would create hefty fines for speeding, and which would ban cyclists from riding more than two abreast. It would also have shortened the permissible length of dog leashes to five/six feet, down from “100 feet of clothesline, give or take.” Scratch a libertarian, find an authoritarian. Hell, just growing your fingernails long is usually enough.

There was some objection to the size of the fine, and enough other concerns that the council handed the issue over to a judge, on the grounds that maybe someone who knew something about the law should look at it. And, as a result, Carmel now has two proposed ordinances on the floor.

And don’t get me wrong; there are plenty of asshole cyclists out there. But they are joined by people paying no attention to anything other than their cellphones, three-seater strollers strolling two or three abreast, and with the notion that a mother with children has the right of way in all cases, even that of absent-mindedly pushing the child directly into the path of a speeding vehicle. Half the people on that Trail at any one time seem to think they’re at a stupefyingly linear mall. (For that matter, in Hamilton county, half the people you meet look like they do not, or cannot, distinguish between “at the mall” and anywhere else.) Those people will suffer no legal consequence for their actions. They have not even had to suffer an 80-pound sign saying “Walk Attentively” to equal the one that says “Ride Slow” [sic] which has been placed two inches off the side of the trail now, in hopes some miscreant cyclist will slam into it.

As an illustration, here’s the illustration the Indianapolis Star used for the story:

though I suspect they posed it; in real life there’d be two Bouviers des Flandres. Twenty-five feet away. Being held by one of the girls.

• 

The good news is that we know ass-kissing doesn’t cause cancer, else there’d be fewer Americans now than in the 15th century.

•

By the way, whatever happened to Republican complaints that in 2007 Candidate Hillary Clinton was treasonously conducting her own foreign policy by traveling to the Middle East?

Dear Ann

March 4, 2013

Ann Lois Romney
Charities, Horseshows, and Charity Horseshows, LLC.
Utah, USA

Dear Ann:

I don't wish to be snarky with you. Really. There are plenty of professional comedians for whom you types are both Bread and Butter, and far be it for me to steal another's sustenance. (I am a poor man, and so can afford to be reasonably honest.) Rather, I have two pieces of advice for you (three if you count "Please, please, please run for the Senate"), and this brings up the first. Maybe you could try to gain a little self-awareness. Talking to an entire nation as if you were speaking to The Help is inexcusable. Hell, it's inexcusable with The Help, Ann. And you know it. What I think you do not realize--you're a cosseted woman, Ann--is that the President of the United States is the president of all its citizens. Including the unsightly, the unpleasant, and the less than profitable, many who, in return, don't give a shit about your tap-dancing horse. And here's the thing, Ann: it was incumbent, you should pardon the expression, upon you to understand them. At least a little. The only skin the Poor have in the game is their own, ma'am.

And it's not that hard; every wealthy person in America who isn't wholly wedded to Wealth (and there are a few, but not as many as would self-identify) can do it. Human empathy. Human empathy that takes the extra step to understand, precisely because it does so from the "superior", or comfortable, position. Let alone from that required of a First Lady. Were you intending to fake it, or is there some There inside you which was somehow buried during the campaign? Great convention speech, by the way. I'm sure the Bay State would enjoy two or three a day between now and the end of June. Y'know, and get to know the real You.

Could I just mention something I held back during the Recent Unpleasantness out of civility, first, and also because I think you're too shallow, too self-obsessed, and too inconsequential to bother much with? I was born during the first Eisenhower administration, and despite the slow start there've actually been a greater number of impressive First Ladies in my lifetime than Presidents. Michelle Obama's a good one. Maybe you two girls should get together some time and swap stories about what crap Life and The Media have thrown at you. Roselyn Carter and Betty Ford. Lady Bird. Jackie. That's five more than there have been really good Presidents. I'll leave out Hillary if you'll agree I can leave out the Bush women and Nancy Reagan to save myself typing. Except to note that two of those were horrible human beings, and the other killed a man.

You weren't going to improve the list, Ann. I'm sorry, it's a harsh judgement. But it's irrespective of politics (although yours aren't particularly helpful, Ann. What was your theme gonna be? Reading? The Awful Media? Improving the Quality of our Culinary Education?).

The second thing, Ann, is that your husband was treated with kid gloves in the campaign. Yeah, some of them were used to punch him--there's a whole internet out there beyond Pinterest, Ann--but the networks handled him pretty fairly overall.

Well to me, anyway; in your interview you noted that We All see bias against us when we look at Media coverage. You were laughing when you said "Happy to blame the Media". I wanted to give you the benefit of every doubt there, Ann. Your pull quotes started getting splashed around, not too flatteringly, and I made a point of listening to you, twice through. Some of what you said is getting overblown. That's the breaks. You want to chair Failed Candidates' Wives for Media Accuracy go right ahead.

But your attitude is clear, Ann. Standard Republican/Wealthy Person political chitchat and personal aggrandizement. You ha-ha are happy ha-ha to blame the Media, but the fact is that you blame the Media. At least in part. At the very least to the extent that a Republican insider thinks so. Human nature assisted by four decades of Media-bashing victimhood on the Right. Ha ha. Got it.

The campaign controlled access. The campaign took Mormonism off the table. The Media, on the other hand, gave you lotsa free airtime to spread your positive message about your Very Special Husband. Maybe you could'a done a little better job. Yes, I know. I'm fired.

And Your Very Special Husband chose the message. He chose to flip out of his flops in 2008, and since then he'd gone in for some Serious pandering. You aren't exempt from responsibility for those things, just because you're wealthy. Wealth just makes it seem that way to you.

Your V.S.H. was roughed up a lot more by his fellow "Presidential" Republicans than by those awful Chicago people. Not to mention him blowing several toes off each foot all by himself. He wasn't liked by the dominant wing, or "wing", of his own party. Did he ever run in first place in the polls,before his Last Challenger Standing (I don't remember, now. Gingrich? Santorum? Cheney?) gave up the ghost? He's lucky Huckabee didn't run. Do you all think Huckabee would'a kicked Mitt's ass? I do. Huckabee could'a come in like Perry did, all gangbusters from the Guns 'n' Jesus wing (or "wing"), only he wouldn't'a stepped on his dick. Not right away, anyhow. Huckabee commanded the seas to part and people to eat chicken sandwiches. Your guy tried to convince half the population to stay home. Your Man trailed, at points, Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, and Donald Fucking Trump. He'd have only beaten Mitch Fucking Daniels by a hair. Your Man is a dud. May or may not be a great guy, personally, and probably is a good neighbor, at least until your landscaping man mows the lawn in a pattern not approved by the Homeowners' Association. You lost. Please do not, ever again, go on the teevee to talk about how truly great this country would be if only voters had been 7% smarter.

Please do not let the word "Sequester" exit your lips in public. Ever again. Unless that's the name of some dressage move.

Show-off campaigns that manipulate the Media have been around a long time, Ann. Longer than your husband's political career. Farther back, even, than the days you ate dinner off that ironing board. Don't gripe about it now. Really. The woman whose husband was a painstakingly-constructed, and awful, candidate for the role of The Politician in some Utah-financed classroom film should be the last person to complain about how the Media portrays things.

I liked getting to know the two of you better, though. More personal, somehow. Hey, maybe you could prevail upon Willard to do this every year. The Imaginary State of the Union Under the Romneys?

Yours in civility,

J.B.S. Riley

Why Do Missouri And Indiana Get To Have All The Fun?

SOMETHING called Politico brings us the sad news that someone called Erick E. Erickson, apparently a noted "conservative" intellectual, will not be challenging Saxby Chambliss in, I think, 2017.

And then someone, apparently figuring that the mere existence of this story did not incinerate everything decent, if anything, left in our political life, asked Erickson for an explanation.

This is, evidently, a quote. A quote from someone who someone else actually wanted to run for the U.S. Senate. Please do not operate heavy machinery within a week of reading it.

“Were I to run for the Senate, it would be a terribly nasty campaign. It’d actually be really awesome, but it’d be really nasty. I have a seven year old, a soon to be four year old, and a wife who does not like being anywhere near a stage. I’m not putting my family through that when the best outcome would mean a sizable pay cut in pay and being away from my kids and wife all the time huddled in a pit vipers often surrounded by too many who viewed me as a useful instrument to their own advancement.”

So, a couple things, here. One, I do hope that now, now, at long last and decades late, the Republican party, or whatever's left of it with a functioning cerebral cortex and a vague recollection of the word "dignity", if anything, regrets, the way someone else would come to regret killing his wheelchair-bound grandma with a hatchet so he could pawn her Hummel collection to pay for a sex-change operation--which was botched--ever insisting that it was unfairly under-represented in the "liberal" media.

Two: the most powerful electron microscope on the planet could not discern my interest in anything about Erick E. Erickson. He is Ann Coulter without the wit, Jim Inhofe without the erudition, and Glenn Beck without the artistic discernment. Rolled into one. I wish only to take the opportunity to say this about Erick E. Erickson. There are but two reasons why the term "goat fucker" would occur to someone in the heat of the moment. The first is wordsmithery.

Erick E. Erickson is not a wordsmith.

Witless Protection Program

SHEESH. Weigel:

The grand master of the Bell Curve is used to liberals pointing and sputtering at his conclusions. He typically pre-empts this by burying them with research -- research they, the sort of people who believe that human evolution happened but that human biodiversity is a myth, sure have not done.

Is there some sort of prize for proving it's possible to be more than 100% wrong?

Okay, first: Murray? Murray? So he enjoyed a brief primary-season resurrection among already-desperate Republicans, including the sort of Republican who believes saying "White People are Civilization" is a mark of intellectual bravery. It didn't work. It didn't work to the extent that Charles Fucking Murray seems to've noticed, and now is trying to explain, to whom it's not clear, that Asians are actually honorary Whites, and ought to be smart enough (unlike the Coloreds) to realize which side they should be on.

Tell ya whut, Dave: when some rightist intellectual figures out how to tell Republicans why they've been so wrong about so much for so long, and show no signs of ceasing, I'll take notice. Just bringing up Murray more than a week after that last book of his is a sign of derangement. Or worse.

Second, "liberals" "pointing and sputtering"? Research?  For godssakes, The Bell Curve wasn't demolished by critical commentary. It was pre-demolished by basic research forty years prior to its publication. The only people who believed by 1994 that IQ tests measure anything quantifiable at all--let alone measure it well--were psychologists, and Murray wasn't even one of those.

Who sputtered? Really, name one. I can't think of anybody to the left of David Brooks who takes Murray seriously, and even Brooks was a little sheepish about that Decline of White People thing.

Research they "sure have not done"? I'm guessing few have studied Nostradamus, or combed the minutiae of UFOlogy, either. For precisely the same reasons.

We're already skating on the marbles of Hackitude Speedway. But "the sort of people who believe that human evolution happened "?  You mean "non-hallucinatory sentients born since the middle of the 19th century and taught a human language"? And whose "belief" that "human biodiversity is a myth" is somehow the greatest piece of pseudoscience on record? This blog certainly supports exaggeration for effect, especially comic effect, but it also believes that it should be easy, in 90% of the cases and with 90% of writers who employ it, to understand the exaggeration, and to understand what was meant. This, instead (I'm feeling charitable), is just another example of the modern fad for forcing the reader to fill in what you mean. We shouldn't believe that it takes a "sort" to accept evolution. We might grant the use of "human" there, but only on the grounds that it was needed to make a point which was wholly unneeded. Otherwise singling out a belief in "human" evolution sounds like the sort of special pleading a hopeless Evangelical makes if he gets a real high school education.

And no one says biodiversity is a "myth", nor are they required to do so in order to dispute Murray's voluminous evidence; one of his most prominent critics (and pre-critics) was the late great Stephen Jay Gould. (Gould, by the way, was the Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology at Hahvahd. Murray's a political scientist from AEI.)

It is, of course, the height of biological illiteracy to insist we have to accept Murray's racial "explanations". Especially seeing as how Murray couldn't be bothered to accept the scientific consensus about IQ testing before he spouted off. And we are left, at the end, with just another foolish qualifier designed to fit a preconceived conclusion, just for the satisfaction of claiming that "liberals think they're so smart, but their own beliefs prove them wrong." Cf "Liberals are the real racists/sexists/war mongers", "Welfare is the real slavery", et. al. It's the sort of thing that wows 'em from the pulpit; it's telling that your modern "conservative" either doesn't know the difference, or thinks everyone's in the choir.

Reassurance From An Unexpected Source

NAMELY, this blog. Look, if John Kerry, Mitch Daniels, and Peggy Noonan are on the guest list at that Bilgeburger Conference then it almost certainly is Evil, and guaranteed not to be possessed of Genius.

And Jeez Louise, Rich People are needier than a claque of junior-high slumber partyists, aren't they?

You Have My Most Middling Sympathies

Jonathan Weisman, "After Many Tough Choices, The Choice To Quit". February 29

Dana Millbank, "A moderate's lament". February 29

IF you have tears, prepare to almost shed them now. Or ask your Doctor if a half-empty bottle of Restasis® is right for you:

WASHINGTON — The looming Senate vote on a Republican plan to give employers the right to withdraw health care coverage based on religious and moral convictions put Senator Olympia J. Snowe in a tough but familiar position: weighing her own views as a Republican centrist against pressure from fellow Republicans to support the party position.

A longtime advocate of increasing access to health care and one of a dwindling number of Republican backers of abortion rights, Ms. Snowe believed that the language was too broad and could have unintended consequences. At the same time, an embattled Republican colleague, Senator Scott P. Brown of Massachusetts, had publicly backed it, and a “no” vote from Ms. Snowe, of Maine, could isolate him as he sought to fend off anger in his heavily Democratic state.

Dear Lord, what have we done? Forcing a United States Senator to choose between voting her nit-picky conscience and chucking it all to symbolically aid the reelection efforts of a fellow Republican from a nearby state? Are we monsters?

Boy, there goes my beautiful dream, that someday in my lifetime the US Senate would be composed of Red State religious lunatics and Blue State moderate Republicans, and we could finally get something done.

with each day on Capitol Hill comes more evidence that the place is broken beyond repair — and that the last remaining vestiges of sense and moderation are fleeing. The latest blow came on Tuesday, when Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine, one of the Republican Party’s last moderates, said she wouldn’t seek a fourth term because she sees no imminent change in “the partisanship of recent years.”

Also heading for the door is much of the remaining core of Senate moderates: Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas; independent Joe Lieberman of Connecticut; and Democrats Kent Conrad of North Dakota, Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Jim Webb of Virginia. After that kind of exodus, Bennet will be one of the last reasonable lawmakers still standing. “I think that it should be a real wake-up call to people here,” he said. “There are a number of folks who don’t want to come here and participate in the dysfunction.”

This lament, by the way, is brought to you by Dana Millbank, whose regular job is piloting a clown car for the Washington Post.

One: what is losing Joe Lieberman, Ben Nelson, Kent Conrad, Kay Bailey Hutchinson, and the late lamented Evan Bayh, compared to living in a society where those five are described as "moderate"? I'm really supposed to be excited because Hutchinson (R-Exxon Mobil) is pro-choice (and thus "principled")? I'm supposed to be aghast at the prospect of three more dilatory, war-flogging (and thus "principled") Democrats (I'm sorry, two Democrats and a guy who got lost on his way to the Knesset) who managed to block single payer, the solution to a major social and economic problem in this country, for the sake of their friends (and wives' employers) in the insurance and pharmaceutical businesses, being "forced" to join Evan Bayh on the sidelines, in the boardrooms, and at FOX? Somebody show me the major legislation any of these bozos crafted. Somebody show me the major legislation they proposed, only to be cruelly overpowered by rabid partisanship. All five ought to be thanking their lucky stars for our dysfunctional politics, which allowed mediocrities like themselves to set themselves up for life swapping tax breaks and special treatment for "campaign" contributions and a sinecure to be named later.

(Jim Webb, on the other hand, seems a decent and thoughtful fellow. But Webb really made it clear in 2008 that he wasn't going to be a career Senator. Snowe may be a step up from her fellow retirees, and an actual sponsor of real-world legislation, but is her real problem with the "tone" in Washington, or the constant buzzing her own party has been emitting since 1964?)

Which brings us to Two: th' fuck did these people imagine they were going? Were they informed ahead of time that the Senate is the "deliberative" body? Isn't that at least covered at Orientation? For fuck's sake, all but Nelson (and Bayh) sat in judgement of William Jefferson Clinton, and none got so disheartened at the tone of that he hung up his galoshes. None of them has spent an hour of adult life living in an America that wasn't politically divided. All are old enough to remember the Civil Rights movement firsthand. All the males (except Bayh) are old enough to have escaped service in Vietnam, which, of course, they atoned for by voting unlimited funds for Iraq. This country's divided, like it or no; that's reflected--as it's supposed to be--in our Senate.

You ask me, the problem is that we aren't divisive enough, that an entire current of political thought is largely unrepresented in the Congress, namely, that of people who don't game the system, and who think things ought to be fair. When we're pillorying them in the Senate out of excess partisanship it'll at least mean we have some.

And tell me, who gives a fuck if Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neil used to have a beer after hours? Only people who're warm and satisfied with the results of thirty years of Reaganism.

Which brings us, of course, to Three: the Republican party comprises the criminally insane, the merely criminal, and the religiously mazed. Untreated, ignored, faux-balanced--let alone rewarded--this has, to no one's surprise except people who earn their livings working in government, or watching and reporting on it, merely grown louder and uglier. The Democratic party won sweeping electoral victories in 2006 and 2008, based largely on the public's wish that this would put a stop to such excesses. (This is ample evidence, where none was needed, that the American public doesn't pay near enough attention.)

It didn't. The new Democratic majority quickly reassured nervous markets that it would never do anything so radical as to tax wealthy people again (the one aspect of the Gentlemanly, Peaceful, and Respectful 50s no one wants to return), or treat war crimes and high-level profiteering as moral enormities on par with blow-job reception; thus reassured, and unfettered for yet another decade, the markets responded by looting the world economy.

This is what the lamenters lament. The All-in-Good-Fun partisanship of Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay. The days when a man, and only a man, could clap Strom Thurmond or Jessie Helms on the back in bonhomie, without worrying about some internet riffraff bringing up their voting records. The days when the Congress could just laugh and shrug at Iran/Contra or the S&L disaster. It very well might be that it would take more Evan Bayhs to bring those days back. Or the last Ice Age, for that matter. I would like to point out to people who think that way that we in Indiana managed to find another lackluster Republican Lobbyist/Senator to take his place without too much fuss. Now please explain to me why, if you could snap your fingers and make the Senate more efficient, you wouldn't prefer to snap your fingers and make it ten times smarter instead?

Me, on the other hand, well, my one regret when people start gurgling this nonsense is that I have only two hands to clasp my wallet with.

Recent Discoveries

Matt Taibbi, "Tea and Crackers: How corporate interests and Republican insiders built the Tea Party monster". September 29

Steven Thrasher, "White America Has Lost Its Mind". September 29

IT'S difficult to remember, and hard to defend, but I started this blog with the idea (I started this blog believing a blog should have an idea!) of explaining that the Red States, of which I, though a combination of inertia and indolence, am an inhabitant, were not as Red as they were typically portrayed to be, often by people in Blue states whose level of genuine knowledge of Flyover Land approached, but did not surpass, David Brooks'. This is not to suggest they'd love us If Only They Got To Know Us. To the contrary. But I had the notion--still do, despite it all--that much of the default Republicanism in the middle of the country is a product of misconceptions, internal and external.

Now, it may be added, or objected, that this is an exercise in political argument incompletely disguised as psuedo-sociological (but I repeat myself!) observation, David Brooks with more "fucks". Perhaps this is so, and more than a little. Like all men, as Borges said, I have been given bad times in which to live. I was born the same year that Harry Truman announced the first successful test of the hydrogen bomb, the better to thwart the plans of Peter the Great, and just four months after the Reds returned the favor, sort of, if you looked at it just right. (Full disclosure: I was due four months later; in reality it was four months and two weeks, signaling a lifetime's enjoyment of the Womb.)

Born fully cooked. My government, and its Western henchmen, were going to listen to Edward Teller, not Robert Oppenheimer. Its newspapers would defoliate vast stretches to report the latest pearls of ignorance from Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon. Liberal Presidents would replace George Marshall with Dean Acheson and give Curtis LeMay the Button.

Did people know? Hard to say. I came of age during Vietnam, often recognized as the tipping point. Left-wing intellectuals in the 50s were certainly aware that McCarthy and Nixon were crackpots and worse, but the threat of global nuclear annihilation was real, as was the sense of having been betrayed by Stalin. I've never discovered a large-scale sense in those days that the US government was lying, baldly and as a matter of course, about matters vital and trivial, for the gratification and financial benefit of a permanent ruling class. After all, FDR had changed government for the good, Hitler had demonstrated what Evil looked like, and Korea had proven that the Commies were bent on global domination. It certainly seemed at the time that the accumulating evidence of our duplicity in Indochina was revelatory, unexpected, of a different order of magnitude from chortling at the anti-communist rhetoric being aimed at the American living room every night.

Whatever, that was then and this is now. Not so long ago educated people scoffed at plate tectonics, believed in a static universe, and used mobile phones the size of grandma's stove. If you wanna feel superior to them by virtue of your having purchased an iPhone you could neither design, repair, or explain to someone who just woke from a coma, then fucking act like you've learned something.

Let's be clear: I agree with Taibbi; the Teabaggers are full of shit. We part ways only in the idea that this is something new, requiring some contemporary elucidation, that it's some nefarious picking of Ron Paul's pocket. Reagan voters were smoking the same shit a generation ago. (The other day Krugman Himself insisted that, unlike Reagan, today's GOP had no pretense of principle, however empty-headed, and its tax-cutting rhetoric would require the complete dismantling of the Federal government, excepting Defense and Social Security/Medicare, to pull off. But the exact same thing was noted at the time about St. Ronnie himself. He just didn't put it in writing, and he faced an electorate which wasn't going to let him wreck things indefinitely for the sake of ideology [there's your change, if any], so he raised taxes, and caved on Social Security.) Nor has this ever been shown to be the Dumbass Philosopher's Stone of America politics: voters have, on a regular basis, shown that they'll support higher taxes, and the concept of higher taxes, when the case is made. But Walter Mondale opened his mouth, and got clobbered, and that was It, as far as our two political parties and our nation's supply of neatly-coiffed newsreaders is concerned. Yet large-scale tax cuts create massive deficits. There's not even enough wriggle room there to pretend there's an argument. And even absent entitlements, and given perfect political will in DC, you cannot begin to slash programs to deficit-reducing levels before voters start screaming like movie extras. Period. And that's without touching Defense, which is our biggest money drain, despite all the rhetoric to the contrary. Taibbi is no doubt correct that the apparent contradiction doesn't bother many Teabaggers because their dedication to balanced budgets is pure sham. But it's axiomatic that these people do not control elections, so if this is some electoral majority based on pure wishful thinking, then when do we start blaming news organizations and Democratic officials for the poor job they're doing educating America? Break up AFTRA!

But Thrasher, now, really.

For the first time in their lives, baby boomers are hard up against it economically, and white boy is becoming outnumbered and it's got his bowels chilled with fear.

Okay, again: I was born at the tail end of 1953, or almost precisely 33% of the way into the Baby Boom. The American economy hummed along mostly unimpeded for the next two decades, high on our economic hegemony after WWII. It sputtered in the late 60s, because we insisted on spending billions on moon rocks and killing Vietnamese nuns. I'm sure there's no need to explain to an expert in Boomer dynamics that many of us actually opposed those things, and went so far as to publicly oppose them at the time, rather than retroactively. Still, I'll accept the tab for Indochina soon as you pick up the tab for Iraq and Afghanistan. Oh, I forgot: that check's still open.

In 1973, when I was a sophomore in college, the Oil Embargo ushered in a decade of double-digit inflation and rapidly descending property values. (I believe that at the nadir, '76 or so, you could've bought the entire Hilton hotel chain for something like $2 million. Though I suppose we'll always have Paris.) After the slight recovery of '80-81, accomplished by the Fed throwing masses of Americans out of work in the name of inflation busting, we spiraled back down again, into what looked at one point to be another gaping maw, somewhat averted when Reagan raised those taxes again. Then the Crash of '87, and the worst recession in post-war history, followed by the boom of the Clinton years, which the youngest Boomers entered already approaching middle age. The the Bush Doldrums (or as we like to say in Indiana, the First Daniels Miracle) followed by the Bush Disaster, followed by the God How Fucking Big Can A Bush Disaster Be? Disaster. Which brings us to today, and the Dawn of that New Fucking Era your generation ushered in in 2008, despite the racist machinations of Everyone Else. So, yeah, right. First downturn I've ever dealt with. Life until now has been one bottomless glass of Chateau Latour '61, and two topless hookers with a merit badge in Breath Holding. And ice cream for dessert. Sorry we seemed to've used that all up. Sorry we're scared of brown people. Why don't you go out and win another election predicated on transcending partisan politics? Or go fuck yourself?

Who Are These People?

"No."

-Amy Carter, America's Greatest First Daughter,

asked (at age 9) if she had a message for the children of America

AND No, I wouldn't be happier if Chelsea Clinton had run off with the gardener, or the maid, or the gardener and the maid. I don't care. A second-generation Jewish tailor's kid who helps Goldman Sachs screw widows and orphans? It's a nice touch, so very DLC. Am I supposed to think it's more egalitarian than whichever one of the Jennas marrying Thurston Howell VII? I don't. I don't care. I just wanna know why I had no choice but listen to three weeks of coverage, and, especially, three weeks of that coverage.

One: Lots of people hate Bill Clinton for lots of reasons. I never cared for his politics, but I was still young enough in 1992 to believe a moderate Democratic president was better than twelve years of Reagan/Bush. Which, of course, it was, in the same way eczema beats a screwworm infestation. Anyway, this whole process has served to remind me of my own reason: that the man not only named his daughter after a Joni Mitchell song, but then admitted in public that he'd done so. I happen to carry around zero nostalgia and even less idealism, but all the creative energy of a decade that gave us Dylan and Lennon and Beefheart and Hendrix and the Velvets, and the Free World winds up being run by a couple of Donovan fans.

Two: It wouldn't change my opinion if the new Mrs. Mezvinsky were the actual daughter of the actual sitting President, or had been named HRH The Official People's Princess II by People itself, which is how the thing was covered. I don't fucking wanna watch thirty-six hours of whatever Bush Twin is left unmarried picking out china patterns and bridesmaid dresses, but now we're doomed to that. Didn't these people hate the Clintons as recently as Hillary's nomination for State, which Bill was going to totally ruin because he'd be acting like co-Secretary, and hogging the limelight, because he always does, because they're just a couple of power-mad power junkies, and racists, to boot, who were certain to get divorced as soon as his Presidency ended because their marriage was nothing but a political sham? How, in just eighteen months, do we go from that to the Storybook Wedding of their Storybook Daughter tout le monde is attending while the Unwashed gawk?

Kee-rist. My Poor Wife had that sorry-assed CBS morning program on Saturday, for some reason; this reminded me that the Tiffany Network was both the first to cave to Nixon's anti-press campaign and the corporate megalith which brought you Sally Quinn. They turned the whole--what is it?--six hours into a wedding trade show, complete with suggestions about where to stash Grandma and Papaw so they don't embarrass everyone with their geriatricitude or bladder-control issues but still feel a part of things (I'm not kidding), and intro/exit graphics featuring "American Royal Weddings" (I…okay, you know I'm not kidding about that) with, to use the one example I saw before I had to go scream, Maria Shriver and Ah-nuld. Plus the Bridal Diet. The groom, presumably, needn't diet since he'll be throwing up a third of his body weight the night before. How did we wind up back in the Fifties, again?

Ah, well, at least the old attitude was still able to poke through, particularly in reports of how fabulously wealthy the Clintons had grown since he left office, and what the damned thing was costing. But the spark is gone; being fabulously wealthy however obtained entitles the bearer to unlimited Press tongue baths, so long as he's not President and didn't earn $10 of it in a $40,000 Arkansas land deal. I guess it's reasonable for the Fourth Estate to expect some ice cream and a little neck massage at the end of the day. And the open bar, of course.

Who lives like this, or wants to, and who th' fuck cares? I don't mean Who'll give a minute or two to feature news once in a while, or Who is willing to pretend someone else's million-dollar bash brightens their own lives or performs the vital task of hoodwinking another generation about monogamy for an hour (though, if we're so enamored of Love Itself then let's start by letting everyone play th' game). Whose hatred for his neighbor is ameliorated by the shine of that neighbor's new car or the lush of his lawn? If you knew someone in meatspace who thought like that, who called you over to impart the latest cigar-based sexual gossip about the Hendersons, and ended up enthusing over their new carpet for ninety minutes, how wide a berth would you give him in the future? Where is the goddam audience for endless drooling covetousness, and why doesn't it have anything better to do?

I know, I know, it must've cost the Clintons a small fortune to let everyone know how jealously they were guarding their daughter's privacy. And I guess, in the modern era, that entitles you to as much coverage as can possibly be squeezed out. We can't expect anything else. We don't deserve anything else. But how would it be if, for once, that sort of thing convinced everyone to just lay th' fuck off? Like the Simpons episode where Marge gets Itchy and Scratchy to renounce violence, and children quit watching teevee as a result, and discover the joys of fresh air: we'd be back electrocuting small animals inside a month. Anything to escape the interior of our own skulls.

Friday On Doghouse Riley's Doggone Good Food Blog™

Despised Hoosier Pork Tenderloin Sandwich

3/4 lb. pork tenderloin, trimmed

1/2 t. salt

1 t. pepper

1 t. paprika

1/2 t. savory

1/4 t. coriander

[Those're my proportions for the spice mix. Doesn't mean you dump all of it on the meat. And use what you like. A little salt and pepper is plenty good enough.]

1 egg

2 c. bread crumbs

4 T. freshly grated Romano *

4 T. olive oil

Combine bread crumbs and Romano in a mixing bowl. In a separate bowl, beat the egg thoroughly. Slice tenderloin into eight pieces, about 2 inches thick. Pound flat enough to read through. Season both sides. Dip into egg, then crumb mixture and coat both sides well. Tenderloins may be refrigerated at this point, but I prefer to cook them right away. Heat olive oil (hot, not smoking) in two skillets and fry tenderloins about 2 minutes per side. Smack grandma if she reaches for one without asking.

Home-made buns, you say? Try these.

_____________

* secret ingredient

Amity Schlaes, The Mayflower Madam Of Economic History

Amity Schlaes, "Obama threatens to follow in FDR's economic missteps". July 9

An expert on luxury lifestyle, high-end retail and exclusive service delivery in restaurants and professional services environments, Barrows consults with owners and managers and trains staff to improve brand experiences.

-Wikipedia

That fellow seems to possess but one idea, and that a wrong one.

-Doc Johnson

OH, to be a staffer trained by Sidney Biddle Barrows-Hoffman Herself to improve brand experiences! Which, if I recall correctly, polls say is why 73% of staff get into the fast-paced world of brand experience in the first place.

Okay, first, I googled the woman simply because I can never remember if it's "Sidney Biddle Barrows" or "Sidney Barrows Biddle" or "Sidney Burrow Biggles", which is how I think she should be remembered: as the last person in America where you even bothered to wonder how the three names they used to signify their rank were arranged. And you did so just to make sure the indictment wasn't quashed for technical errors.

It's unfortunate, really, that America was already over by the time she got her fifteen minutes; she woulda stood as the perfect metaphor for the Reagan economy, except you were sick of bringing her up because the nets were yammering about her ten minutes a night, every night, in their early efforts to attract the all-important Tabloid Mentality demographic. And today it would be interesting to note that while prostitution itself remains an object of moral opprobrium, all pimpin' had to do to become respectable was attach itself to the luxury brand experience.

Anyway, I clicked over to her Wikipedia entry, and at least now I'm relieved that being an expert on luxury lifestyle, high-end retail and exclusive service delivery in restaurants and professional services environments doesn't take so much of your time that you can't keep your own wiki updated. And I was reminded, parenthetically, that I often forget to give the 70s notion of restaurant operation--which faced down our unseemly democratic tendencies by bringing us the Server Who Introduces Himself By Name and Function As Soon As He Appears, the beauty-contestant's frozen smile and incontinent stream of over-familiarities as a substitute for quiet efficiency, and the idea that Customer Service Representative was just another name for Used Car Salesman--its proper place in the pantheon of Things We Should Have Realized Were Leading Inevitably To Ronald Reagan and Ruin, alongside Happy Talk News, Star Trek, and Barbara Walters. It's bad enough that you can't eat anything without wading through a Thesaurus entry ("Marinated Half-Grilled Pork Medallions in an Orange-Sandalwood Glaze, with Comfit de Marrons, Extra-Virgin Spring Greens, and finished with a Raspberry Mole Reduction"), but this has led to an entire generation-and-a-half imagining that Making Your Quotient or Adding On that Extended Warranty is not reason enough to go home at the end of the shift, run a warm bath, and cut your throat.

So, then; Sidney Burgess Biddie goes from providing a service some people could use, to peddling her memoir based on her scabrous excuse for Fame, to teaching waitstaffs how to convince the easily impressed that that dirty martini would be twice as nice with Grey Goose™. And this is considered an improvement.

And Amity Schlaes is considered an economic historian.

With unemployment high and the Dow Jones industrial average bumping about, the big debate this summer is how to prevent a double-dip recession resembling that of the late 1930s. Some say Washington should spend more, arguing that government austerity triggered the collapse in 1937 that erased previous gains. Others say that cutting spending now will strengthen the economy generally and preclude dramatic downturns.

Our question here is this: assuming, arguendo, that there was some reason to bring this up in the first place, or hock up a sinecured novella on the topic, why do we need to hear it again? Let alone twenty more times? Woman took her ivied English degree and her connections, not necessarily in that order, and perused the labor statistics for 30s, and wound up re-writing the same right-wing claptrap about the New Deal the previous seventy years had given us in spades. She noticed--as they all had--that there was a recession in 1937 (Sharp-eyed Lit Major!), and concluded--as they all had--that FDR had prolonged the Great Depression. The real effort in all this "research" was to find a set of statistics which left out the people the New Deal put back to work temporarily. Q.E.Fucking D!

She's added nothing to the record; she has no qualifications; she's been taken to the woodshed so often that only an aficionado of the genre could be bothered anymore. We've seen your cherry-red bum enough, dear! And so, of course, she has her own little minaret at the Post group, alerting the faithful to the latest threat to unregulated banking with the same old song and dance.

And this, of course, to an audience which largely equates any reference to Vietnam or Civil Rights in a discussion of current events as akin to injecting a lecture on fifteenth century modalities. Shouldn't this woman be explaining how it is her economic masters nearly brought down the global economy? Or, y'know, booking trips to the Greek Isles for lonely CEOs?

[Shit, I forgot: the Gershwin's Nice Work if You Can Get It, published 1937 and utilizing a popular English phrase of the day, as a pro-business commentary on the recession. The mind fucking reels, or would if one actually applied the mind to anything Schlaes says.]

A Waste Of Good Plantation Land

FIRST, kudos to CBS for making sure its announcing team for the Masters perfectly mirrored the uniformly white, 100% evidently male membership of Augusta. Not that I suppose this required anything more strenuous than hitting Redial, but in an age where even our sacred remembrance of the men who killed 110,000 Americans because their betters wanted to confer the political benefits of the 3/5 Compromise upon their descendants in perpetuity is smeared by Political Correctness run amok, it's good to see that at least one corporate megagiant understands the value of buttering the right side of the bread, as well as good old-fashioned trowel work.

I was prepared to ignore that Nike ad, as fascinating a cultural artifact as it is, but not Augusta Chairman Billy Payne delivering a moral rebuke to a guy who had boffed a few cocktail waitresses from the pulpit of America's most hallowed shrine to racism and sexism in Sport.

Then I tuned in yesterday* just in time to hear Jim Nantz take Tiger to task for issuing a swear or two on Five the day before, despite his promise not to. Yes, this is the same Jim Nantz who admitted "dating" a 29-year-old during his weepy testimony at his divorce proceedings last November, and, yes, that would be on the same CBS network which had for the previous fourteen years studiously avoided showing any of Tiger's legendary bad on-course behavior, while doing endless slo-mo replays any time Long John Daily belched.

And, y'know, I'm well beyond asking if anyone has any shame left, or a modicum of self-respect, or enough historical perspective to produce a moment's pause here. And the only danger I see in golf disappearing from the face of the planet tomorrow is that it might give Huey Lewis an excuse to go back in the studio. I don't suppose it occurred to anyone to check if the hookers in Augusta were holding a bake sale this weekend, what with all the suddenly celibate tourists leavin' their Cialis at home an' all.

No, I just say again: whenever you hear all this pious Judeo-Christian claptrap, just note how willing these pious hypocrites are to risk Eternal Gehenna Fire provided there's a buck or two in it.

_______________
* Amazin', really, what the anonymity of the internets gets people to admit.

Speech Enjoyed By All

Adam Liptak, "From Justice Kennedy, a Lesson in Journalism". November 11

PAPERWORK. Groucho Engels, in comments:

How exactly is metaphysics to blame for anything? Metaphysics is simply the realm of inquiry related to the non(or not currently)-emperically verifiable aspects fo the universe like free will, physicalism versus dualism, etc. It's very similar and related to epistemology and ontology.

Unless you are taking some hard-line materialist or positivist stance that contends to reject the very existence of these issues then your use of the word metaphysics makes no sense.

Metaphysics is not a synonym for religion or spirituality or the supernaturalism. Metaphysics is not heir to murderousness any more than the scientific method is heir to it for it's role in being used by those who invented the atomic bomb.

Please either show me what accepted definition of metaphysics you are basing your use of the word on or tell me what you meant by using the term and we can look for a more accurate word.

Okay, first, I'm a guy. A dude. A schlub. And I happen to have a blog, the way some people have bulimia. It's not much of a gig, but it's at least as lucrative as the one it replaced: smoking a joint, going to the Mall, and telling passing women what I thought of their tits. I am not responsible for anything I say. I realize this flies in the face of that accepted, Voltaire-like dedication to public discourse an' all, but there you are. I don't defend the things I say, let alone your right to object to 'em.

However, I do promise not to trip you just because no one's looking. Which, I think you'll agree, at least distinguishes me from 98% of the people who want you to believe they're speaking to you seriously.

The serious answer to your inquiry is one I'd rather not give, but here it is: I was using "metaphysics" in the sense in which David Brooks used it first:

But unlike the other animals, people do have a drive to seek coherence and meaning. We have a need to tell ourselves stories that explain it all. We use these stories to supply the metaphysics, without which life seems pointless and empty.

which, I think, carries all the (mis)connotations you object to. Brooks' intent was to make religious belief a biological imperative. He wasn't including the search for Beauty, or Self, or Parking. He meant religion, and specifically organized religion. My intent was to be funny. I was mocking Brooks. I thought that was clear.

Also not funny, but also true: I took exactly two weeks of Philosophy in college. It was my first semester and, unless I'm conflating it with some other class I couldn't wait to drop, it was held that hot August in Ernie Pyle Hall, which was originally built as a storage shed. I'm not making that up. Tiny row of windows at the very top of the back wall, and the Professor was a droner. Worse yet, to my eighteen-year-old mind, he started the thing off with four sessions on Alfred Jules Ayer. I mention this because, like a lot of idiots, I would realize fifteen years or so later that I was sneering when I should have been listening. I was in fact some species of intuitive logical positivist, and as jumbled up as that phrase implies. So, yes, I do reject the idea that there's any meaning in that parenthetical "not currently", though I would not go so far as to deny the non-existence of non-things.

As though banging a drum in search of a fugitive!

-Chuang-tse

There's a lot of other stuff wrong with me, too. For instance, I read Gregg Easterbrook's football column, or football * column, as last year he absolved himself of the responsibility of watching all the games, and this year he's absolved himself from writing about football. But he does go on about minor civil servants and their majorly-expensive tax-supported bodyguards, which is one of the things that crossed my mind when I read this:

WASHINGTON — The school newspaper at Dalton, a private school in Manhattan, contained a cryptic note from its editors last Friday.

“We are not able to cover the recent visit by a Supreme Court justice due to numerous publication constraints,” the note said. It promised “an explanation of the regrettable delay” in the next issue.

It turns out that Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, widely regarded as one of the court’s most vigilant defenders of First Amendment values, had provided the newspaper, The Daltonian, with a lesson about journalistic independence. Justice Kennedy’s office had insisted on approving any article about a talk he gave to an assembly of Dalton high school students on Oct. 28.

Okay, so the bodyguard thing, or more accurately a tangent of the bodyguard thing, actually came in around third or fourth, since my first thought was, "I wonder if the FBI Light Opera Society** seamstress has already stitched up a closetful of Kennedy's self-designed Rehnquistian Mikado Impeachment Get-ups, or if he's still in the sketching phase?" Followed by the idea that if we could just combine America's Next Top Designer Whose Flakiness or Poor Impulse Control Titillates the Nation's Terminally Teevee Captive with next year's Docket we'd have ratings dynamite with little or no discernible effect on the Court's actions.

The bodyguard thing, really, is just that I believe we need to take advantage of modern technology, not just to get to know the quote real end quote people who govern with our consent (Kidding, kidding!), but to more closely approximate the will of the Founders, who intended our choices to be made more manageable, in their case by limiting the gender, color, and net worth of the electable. I have, on this very internet, suggested that we'd be better off if once a year every opinionator using the public airwaves and making more than the $250 K per Charlie Gibson thinks puts you squarely in the middle-class had to open his or her primary home to the cameras, with all the Help lined up, in their required livery, and, for the sake of time constraints, we truncated a complete tour of the place by just looking into every bathroom. With a handy numerical counter in the lower right corner. I think political commentary would be improved overnight.

So, too: this view of Justice Kennedy's Roman gravitas and Hahvahd Law grandeur should not be limited to a few staff members at some $33,000/yr. Ivy-pipeline academy and the two- or three-hundred of our fellow citizens who still read newspapers. No. (And th' fuck does Justice Kennedy even have to ask that sort of company for the osculum infamum of Rank?)

Ellen Stein, Dalton’s head of school, defended the practice in a telephone interview. “This allows student publications to be correct,” she said. “I think fact checking is a good thing.”

And that barking dog belonged in the cornfield. He's happier there.

Anyway, I'm just spit-ballin' here, but there's this: everybody hates the droning, interminable, not to mention unfair questioning the Other Side subjects his side's Court nominees to. How 'bout we leave it to a vote of the people who've waited on them at table, or shined their shoes in the clubhouse over the past year or two? How much worse could it get?

___________
* Graphic element, not a footnote.

** That's two. Did you spot the other one?

Cracker. The Other White Bread.

Ross Douthat, "Race in 2028". Sunday, Monday, whatever

REGULAR readers, if any, may have tumbled onto the idea that I think a species of wingnut, as well as marginal breeding partners at the edges of its range--collective noun Reagantot, for its having passed, peristaltically, through the educational system circa 1976 through 1988--seems to suffer disproportionately from the modern trend towards perpetual adolescence--and I'm the last one to throw that around as an insult--rarely remarked upon and almost never diagnosed. In fact the absence of clinical interest was itself a Reagan-vintage phenomenon (dating from the Nixon war on the Librul Media, and coming into flower in the Carter administration, to be precise) wherein practically the entire litany of anti-fluoridationist complaint, a suite of arguments whose frequent transparent phoniness had been readily apparent to everyone just a couple years earlier, was suddenly accorded a position of authority previously unrecognized: the Throne of Opposition, or something. It entitled public Republicans (the ones remaining after the Goldwater purges) to a seat at every forum, on the grounds that the Librul Media had unfairly restricted such events to persons holding defensible ideas they'd arrived at through reasoning. And this wasn't all; in a society upholding the principle of free exchange of ideas, the paranoid rantings of its religious maniacs and the denizens of its inbred, excessively solarized, and home-distilled corn whiskey besotted sub-populations are, after all, more grist for the brewer of malt liquor. What was new was the idea that Opponents had a right to expound their views, or those of their long-dead imaginary Semite avatars, under a little-known rhetorical rule of No Tag Backs. Throughout the Seventies, accelerating after the Unfortunate Permanent Outsider Party lost a President through No Fault of its Own, Right wing positions on any and all issues--the B-1, the ERA, energy independence, affirmative action--were presented as if a) they were the only known alternatives to Librul Democrat hegemony and, as they represented the view of everyone in America not then holding the reins of power, b) not themselves subject to the same sort of scrutiny. (This is best represented, today, by Abortion, a debate still defined, in many, if not most respects, by the opponents of the law: when does Life begin? not How come you exclude contraception? or What about charging women and doctors with murder? which are still side-stepped and double-Dutched.)

Two notes of historical interest, before we move along to some of the more unpleasant consequences: the Republican party was allowed to milk the Outsider gimmick straight through to the early months of the Cheney administration, and to climb back aboard the moment it lost again, and, as some of you may recall, having re-established effective Dixiecrat control of the Congress in the 80s, it proceeded to eliminate the Fairness Doctrine.

As I was saying, before I interrupted me, you've got entire cadres of sickly white guys who matriculated at the University of Republican Grievance, and for whom this rhetorical victory sans debate, this Revolution seems to have come as a sort of personal vindication of their resolute, third-chair trombone, A-V club nerd, anti-hippie lack of youthful charisma. And who, it seems, are Never Going To Get Over It. David Brooks. Professor Reynolds. Goldberg. The Power Trio. Name a position any one of them holds today which could not have been predicted, Kreskin-like, and sealed in an envelope in 1983. Every conceivable political problem--aside from the question of revitalizing his repudiated party, somehow--was answered by St. Ron. (Brooks, today, suggests that the downfall of his party came when its "conservative Southern leaders" showed no understanding of its Moderates, nor Swing-State representatives, as though this condition has not obtained since the days of his potty training. And this is the Baedeker of our socio-political landscape! Christ, I've spent a small fortune over the years on various preparations designed to relieve obnoxious realities for all too brief periods, and this man winks 'em away with nothing stronger than the radiation from his monitor and a permanent supply of hallucinatory political beliefs.)

Enter Ross Douthat, and enter perhaps the single functioning piston still driving this stuff: Affirmative Action! It's Unfair to White People! We've Solved the Problem, and besides, They're Gonna Outnumber Us Soon, Anyway! And the President is a colored man.

Someone, anyone, explain to me how, in 2009 C.E., an apparently functioning human being, fully capable of manipulating a keyboard and mastering enough of a word processing program to produce recognizable English sentences, yet imagines that The Great Injustice of Affirmative Action (Though, of course, Necessary at One Time To Correct the Horrors of Slavery, which We All Despise, but Enough Already) which, arguendo, may have inconvenienced a few qualified White people over the past four decades, somehow trumps what every black, red, or brown man, woman, or child suffered in these environs for four centuries? It is the result of an Ignorance, a Willful ignorance, so profound that not even appeals to cupidity can rescue it.

It really is breathtaking how any little impetus brings out the Race Fear in these people. We watch an endless parade, and the far-too-occasional frog march, of the White Male Ivies who looted the savings of millions, and the solemn pledges of other White Male Ivies assigned to get to the bottom of it, provided we prop the culprits back up first, and this is somehow overshadowed by the fact that some guy in Holland, OH, couldn't get into an apprentice plumbing program because they're beginning to address the fact that no person of color had any chance whatsoever of getting in until the late 20th century. Yes, yes, yes: an injustice to one is an injustice to all; it's just too bad white people didn't discover that principle before it landed on them. In the meantime, Ross, your own party (unless, like Brooks, you mastered the ability to phase in and out of it by watching Star Trek) is presently in the ninth month of its latest bender because the President is half-African. God knows what you'd be saying if it had been Hispanics emptying the gun store shelves post-election. Log in your own eye and all that, Ross. What were they teaching you guys in Prep school?

Plus Some Of The Full-Time Members Reported Hearing Sniggers

LIFE presses, interrupting our plans to libel Sarah Palin--more of an experiment to see if it's theoretically possible to do so than a sense that she needs any help--but we wanted to help disseminate the story of the minority children whose Day Camp had paid a Philadelphia area swim club for the privilege of swimming there one a week, only to find themselves tossed out when their fully-developed tans so early in the season shamed the regulars, who are merely red of neck.

Which is, of course, a terrible, terrible thing to inflict on children, but fortunately the president of The Valley Swim Club was there to make his dirty, uh, duty, clean, uh clear:

"There was concern that a lot of kids would change the complexion … and the atmosphere of the club," John Duesler, said in a statement.

Fortunately the children got a new place to swim out of the deal. God knows it's guaranteed to be a better one.

A Brief Note On The Inadvisability Of Sequestering Yourself With Like-Minded Thinkers For A Quarter-Century. With Mustard On Top.

PLENTY enough has been made of Dijongate already, but a Wonkette commenter (who said, roughly, Dijon mustard? That shit was only marginally exotic in the 80s.) reminds us that history is too often the Dead Relative Who Left Us Some Crappy Candy Dish or Something. Real Men Don't Eat Quiche came out in the early 80s, and was an instant mega-success of the Hoola Hoop/ Where's The Beef/ Ricky Martin sort. And the fact that it was a satire was, in certain quarters, well, totally missed.

And, granted, missing the point was actually a badge of pride in some percentage of those quarters, though you won't think that would include nebbishy guys who aspired to passing the Bar some day. Nevertheless, this, a misperception of a satirical poke at social trends thirty years ago, Billie Jean King vs. Bobby Riggs meets Fern Bars replacing Chop Houses, with Wine in place of Corn Beer, is, if not the origin, at least the engine which drives the continuing obsession with condiments, leafy vegetables, and their possible link to someone overhearing you imagining you're gay. A one-note joke, misunderstood, then incubated over and over in a hothouse, and brought out occasionally in order to demonstrate that the same idiots who missed the point a generation ago still find it uproariously funny. Dudes. If Jethro Bodine with a mouthful of caviar is funny it's because of his unlettered expectations, not because no one should bother knowing the difference between Sevruga and Shit-on-a-Stick.

It's Like David Brooks, But With Those Links All The Kids Are Tweaking About!

Ross Douthat, "Cheney for President". April 27

OKAY, that started out as a larf, but let's have this out right now: links are not footnotes you stick anywhere. They're not the Post-It Notes of scholarship, or commentary, or whatever it is Ross Douthat does as a substitute for those. If your job, inexplicably, is to write 800 words worth of punditast once a week for The Newspaper of Record, then at least try to maintain the form. Seven-hundred fifty-three words, Ross, and seven fucking links. Why didn't you throw in a couple of Netflix pop-ups?

N.B.: ever' last one of 'em is insubstantial. Write "Sean Hannity interview with Cheney", link to Sean Hannity interview with Cheney. Write "Cheney takes the fight to Obama", link to Arthur (A. G.) Sulzberger piece (nice touch, that) about Cheney taking the fight to Obama, (which, into the bargain, was roundly criticized for being a pure steno job). Conservatism on "talk radio dials" takes us to Rush Limbaugh's site, where he's expectorating, or farting, or something. Thanks for clearing that up, Ross!

Sure, sure; somebody at the Times--maybe you--thinks this the way to reach the hot young crowd that flocked to The Atlantic to read you and the other over-ripe juveniles. Just like somebody at the Times figured you were the best early-declaration juco linebacker who could be turned into a blocking tight end still available in the seventh round. You weren't, and it isn't. By the way, this is one of the pernicious effects of the ubiquitous screaming advertising aimed at the mid-80s IQ, or what you people took to describing as "Freedom" in the early Reagan era, even as it invaded your personal space for someone else's gain: everybody in the country is now convinced that 18-24 year-olds hold some special Key to the Mysteries they are, sadly, too inarticulate to relate to the rest of us, and if we just gear our entire culture to their every whim, as imagined by executives twice their age, it might accidentally pop out like a starlet's nipple flash. This despite the fact that everyone in the country who used to be 18-24 years old actually knows it's complete bullshit; they still want that sweet, sweet nectar. Yet there has to be someone at the Times who remembers when every Allstate insurance agent in the country grew his sideburns to the bottom of his ears to show the Happy Hour hippie chicks he was down with what their Generation was sayin'. It's much, much worse than doing nothing at all, and everybody's just gonna laugh at you, and nobody's gonna tell you you look like a flaming twit. For fuck's sake, I did not click on Ross Douthat's column hoping he'd point me to all the news I needed to Catch Up With Ross Douthat's Flying Intellect, or Get Where He Was Coming From, and if I had done so those links wouldn't have helped me one whit. There is nothing inherent in New Media that abrogates Plain Ol' Sense. You're writing for, or at, people who read the fucking New York Times Op-Ed page. Maybe we could start by assuming that the readership has heard of Dick Cheney? Is perhaps even familiar with his recent appearances on FAUX Sunday News Bunker, or at least his general demeanor and opinion of the current President of the United States? Maybe we could go even further, and figure anybody reading you online knows how to use a search engine (when I saw the link to the Ochs v. 4.0 story it took me exactly five seconds, and Google 0.25 seconds, to find the full transcript of Cheney's March 14 bunker pronouncements. And I'm, like, eighty).

Does this make any sense? Okay, I'll answer: no. It's a silly substitution of appearance for substance, and we did quite well without it before people who would lie about sunrise if they thought there was a nickel in it took over. How 'bout we try correcting that seven times per column? Ross, if you say "Dick Cheney did x last Sunday" in print, under your byline, then Dick Cheney should be assumed to have said or done what you said. If we need confirmation of that because we are perpetually suspicious, well then, we should know how to find it. If we need confirmation because you are either not to be trusted, or less of an authority on saying and doing than someone else, you shouldn't be there. Simple, really.

But then there's the other part, the use of links to Limbaugh or Hot Air to "prove" some contention about whack-job "conservatism" taking over what's left of the Republican party. Really? Because Limbaugh and assorted internet nutballs are badgering "moderate Republicans", which, while they are perhaps not entirely mythological, still counts as the crazy guy down the block, the one who always wears eight wristwatches, killing bacteria by swinging a bat, they're suddenly taking over? Okay, so at least you'll admit they're "ascendant"--unlike Brooks, who would have, and has, simply invented fourteen Republican sects to throw off the count--how 'bout admitting, for once, that they are the Republican party, have been your entire adult life, while Burkean intellectuals like you and Brooks turn out to have been mere paid mouthpieces for Obscene Profit, Inc.? You find them distasteful, but not distasteful enough to have called them out back when you were winning. Quel surprise! Were Limbaugh and the other Assclowns of the Airwaves all chummy-chummy with the likes of you during the heady days of The Power to Fuck Everything Up? No? Then what do they prove now? Okay, I'll answer that: that you're the Trick. That you're the reliable vote for Sarah Palin's party, while ever since Reagan you tried to pretend that They were the Trick. That if you're as smart as you imagine yourself to be now, then you've been a coward for twenty-five years, and you're a coward now. It isn't like these fucks suddenly decided that John McCain was a Bad Idea; they thought he was a fuckin' Commie from the minute he went all weepy after getting caught with Chuck Keating's pecker in his mouth. They're in disarray; you're the ones who've been wholly discredited: don't run the party, implemented your every economic whim and watched along with the rest of the country as it blew up, then complained about the Threat to executive compensation; and have no fucking message left except that your party needs to be more like you. Because you couldn't have been pig wrong and pug vicious all this time, right? Pooches keep allowing themselves to be screwed, is what. You somehow imagine that had Cheney been crushed in November, rather than his crazy Southwest dopplegänger, that all those Theys would have Learned Their Lesson and would be morphing into sensible disciples of Smart Guys like, oh, like yourself. What a novel fucking concept, Ross. Just tell me, how is it that people such as you, who shared a fucking party with those yahoos for thirty years, never figured out what was what until it was over? Huh? So, hope you enjoyed three decades of tax cuts, off-shore shell corporations, and continual attempts to re-win Vietnam. Hope you stocked something away for the winter. If this is the best you got it looks to be very long and very cold. But at least you'll be able to show that phony Al Gore, right?

We Don't Care How They Do It In New York

Racist Star photo Rob Goebel

THE irrepressible élan that is a major chunk of formerly productive farmland now reserved as a playground for the terminally Republican, courtesy the Racist Star (as always, if you gotta look, look quick):

Keystone drivers celebrate opening of 2 roundabouts in Carmel

Carmel throws parties as roundabouts open at 106th and 126th streets

By Bill McCleery
Posted: April 19, 2009

CARMEL, Ind. -- Traffic began flowing Saturday through roundabouts at two newly designed interchanges along Keystone Avenue -- though the city's motorists will have to contend with delays into next year as workers build four additional Keystone interchanges....


The officials gave away hot dogs and chips, brought in an antique firetruck and had a community band playing happy tunes such as "Yankee Doodle Dandy."

Although I understand the 10 PM show got a little emo.

Among the few hundred people at Saturday's ribbon-cuttings, most seemed inclined to cut Carmel officials some slack for earlier miscalculations.

"A major project like this, I figure there's bound to be some delay," said Bill Loeffler, 54, Carmel. "The thing is, something great has come from it. It will be a great benefit in the long run."

Okay, look, we've been pretty nice about this. Despite our political abhorrence and the condescending sniggering directed at their risible prairie social pretensions, we've made it clear that Carmel--unlike its henchtowns, Fishers and Westfield--has actually done a lot right. But the notion of waking up one morning, let alone a sunny Spring weekend morning, in order to chirp away like a happy sparrow at the Mayor's PR-enhanced Celebration of Pavement, let alone to mouth inanities about "project delays" when the project in question picked your pocket while lying outright about it to your face is just too much, even for a man of my naturally even temperament. Free hot dogs. I'm gonna go teabag something*.

_________
* sorry

Back Home Again

CARMEL, Indiana--home of Crooked Stick GC, where in 1991 Long John Daly leapt upon national stage, though "leapt" here is figurative--sits in the half-light of a late fall morning just eight miles from here, and even at this hour one can almost hear someone scheming to deprive someone else of a considerable chunk of his savings. It's what they do up there when it's too cold to golf.

Carmel--it's pronounced CAR-muhl, which used to be the way you could spot outsiders, but that's been the standard waggish pronunciation, like tar-zhay for Target™, for so long I catch myself doing it sometimes--is the Queen of Hamilton County, which keeps repeating that it's the Fastest Growing County in Indiana as though that meant Still Plenty o' Good Arable Bottom Land Left and not McMansions and strip malls everywhere there isn't already a golf course. They don't add And The Wealthiest nearly as often, unless they're sure you're one of their kind or are interested in leasing some prime retail space. But they're entitled to that one, too.

As I recall it, Indiana was the first state in the nation to complete its portion of the Interstate Highway system, including 465, the ring around what was then mostly suburban or still rural Marion county, which the city of Indianapolis would annex in short order. This facilitated White Flight right out of the county, and the sleepy little village of Carmel, and the nearby, even sleepier, whistle stops of Fishers and Westfield, were among the major beneficiaries, doubly so since Indianapolis' Old Money has always resided on the Northside.

It's a solid Republican area--in fact "solid" seems to weak a word there--and has been, probably, since Lincoln won the War, as John Prine once put it. This circumstance was not noticeably altered by the influx of thousands of middle-to-upper class white people.

You can add to the mix Central Indiana's own Chinatown; the sharpers who ran the Water Company from the 1920s picked Hamilton County as the spot for their new reservoir(s) (at one point the plan--Caution: Army Corps of Engineers At Work!--was to flood a full third of the county). In the end Congress refused to fund the plan, and the Water Company had to content itself with the profits from land around the reservoir they rather astutely turned into a housing development before the county could take it over for a nature preserve. Fishers and Westfield were a little slower getting into the game, but now it's a race to annex the most land before it's all gone, the better to collect water and sewage charges for the rest of perpetuity.

It's been a grand enough spectator sport for the occasional viewer with a sardonic outlook and no tax liabilities at stake, wondering when the whole damn thing would blow up and who'd catch the shrapnel. Long-time readers of this blog with nothing important on their minds might even remember our coverage of the tail end of the Connor Prairie Boondoggle, in which an outdoor laboratory-type living history museum wholly owned by Earlham College, a Quaker institution in Richmond, IN, was wrested from it with the help of Indiana's Republican Attorney General Steve Carter, who stepped in when a lot of Fishers muckety-mucks thought its full commercial potential wasn't being realized. Carter had absolutely no standing to get involved, but he did have an eye towards higher office and a nose for where the campaign contributions required to get there might be located, which is at least 9/10 of the law. As a result, Earlham parted with the museum, which is now in the hands of the sort of people who spend every moment, up to two hours daily, raising funds by selling the wealthy tax-deductible dinners, and--coincidentally, we're sure--a small section of land has been set aside for a much-needed condominium development. At the end of this season the Racist Star glowingly reported that fundraising efforts had set a new record, which is about as surprising as finding that porn sites had proven popular with frat boys. Our personal involvement is limited to the fact that the move to expel the insufficiently commercial Friends was spearheaded by Berkley Duck III, Esq., whom we wouldn't have had the courage to invent.

[Full disclosure:  we used to live near the county line, and a scant three decades ago I used to blissfully bicycle my way across rolling flat-ass fields and past the sleepy train-stop hamlet of 800 people.  Now you take your life in your hands driving through the place in anything smaller than a Lincoln Navigator.]

But if we imagined that the inevitable distant explosion we hoped to live long enough to hear someday would be caused by insufficient infrastructure, shoddy home construction, empty retail space, or, at the outside, water riots, we've had to content ourselves mostly with the six-to-eight legal battles over incontinent annexation that've been going on for a decade now. That is, we did, until late last week.

Because now word has arrived that Car-MEHL has a bit of spending difficulty, unrelated to the general economic malaise.  It's  more in the vein of Predictable Result of Guaranteed One-Party Republican Rule for Generations. A little over a year ago the soon-to-be-facing-the-necessity-of-buying-airtime-for-eight-solid-months-of-campaign-ads Daniels administration agreed to pay the city $90 mil to take over four miles of Keystone Avenue (Highway 431). Carmel Mayor Jim Brainard announced that this was sufficient funding to allow the city to build six more of its beloved traffic roundabouts, which are sort of a public transportation version of domed stadiums, except with speeding morons coming at you from three directions at once. Evidently what Carmel loves about traffic roundabouts is that they are so utterly unfamiliar to anyone who doesn't (or wouldn't be allowed to) live there that a large percentage of outsiders is likely to die horrible flaming late-model-domestic-vehicle deaths, or stay the hell away after a loved one has. It's a sort of PC replacement for their long-standing tradition of arresting anyone caught driving while Black. The damn things are bad enough when you're traveling Carmel's own surface streets; now they're putting them in on a major north-south thoroughfare which used to belong to the state, which, of course, had previously stymied anything that looked like change, progress, or just vaguely European.

Or that is they were, until Brainard (who'd been reelected--there's a shocker--a year ago while promising not a cent of Carmelite money was needed) turned up asking for $58 million worth of those cents, as the project was 1/3 completed and the money 1/2 gone. And it turned out that, oh--seat belts fastened?--he sorta might have known about this all along, and that $112 million had been the low-ball figure he'd actually been given.

Brainard, to his credit--his credit as a Republican politician, I mean--insists that he never tried to low-ball the plan to his constituents, but was merely misinformed. And overly optimistic that $112 mil could be made to look like $90 mil if one simply wished hard enough, and whistled while crossing any graveyards. And he says he withheld the shortfall until now because he wanted to make sure all the numbers were in before he said anything. The city council, for its part, begins feigning shock, shock! at this wholly unexpected turn of events it had been helping to keep quiet since February.

This comes on the heels of the public collapse six weeks ago of the private-funding cover story for the $80 million asterisk Carmel Performing Arts Center. $70 mil of that public money is already spent; the $40-60 million expected to pay for the limestone façade and skylight, and other classy upgrades, which was supposed to come from private fundraising, is so far roughly $38-$58 million short of its goal. The Redevelopment Commission has ponied up a needed $45,000,000.

Now, again, the only thing that's surprising, to me, is that this was learned not thirty years after the fact, when a dead call-girl's diary was opened or a papier-mâché bridge collapsed, but here and now, about a seated government. And the most entertaining feature, thanks to the Racist Star's new practice of putting reader comments right at the end of stories, instead of making you click a link for them, and thereby having time to steel yourself, has been the die-hard Republican excuse mongering, which has included "this shouldn't be news in an Indianapolis paper!" (the old Love It Or Leave It ploy with a special reverse twist), and the suggestion--which comes, mind you, from someone standing in the wreckage of Reagan-Friedmanomics and, possibly, with a view from his office window of the fifth publicly-finanaced sports palace we've built in the last thirty years, or maybe just the spot where we've torn down one or are tearing down another--that Brainard had somehow "turned into a Democrat."  

No-Compete Friday

Gavin M. meets Goldberg Admiration Society treasurer Katie at Kaubki Village:

"But I waited…waited until I knew I would be in Manhattan for the day…a day when I could purchase it at the book store at Grand Central (making sure to ask the clerk where it was even though it was on a table in the center of the store…just because I knew it would drive the guy nuts) and could then carry it throughout my day of meetings."

Let’s look at this woman’s big day on the town. She created a multi-stage pageant out of buying a copy of Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism — a book devised as though on the spot at a cocktail party, as an insouciant one-liner from a half-drunk Jonah to some cornball editor he was trying to impress (Adam Bellow, let’s imagine), which was then delivered only after years of flop sweat, excruciating mental gymnastics, and probably genuine debilitating mental depression, because as Jonah knew at the time (and as he probably knows still during certain late nights and lonely self-encounters), while its concept is guaran-freaking-teed to make liberals hop-hop-hoppingly mad, it cannot stand as a serious book because it is premised on an absurdity. So here she’s like, “Tee-hee, my plan begins by loudly asking for this book at Grand Central Station, just in case there’s a liberal nearby to whom I’d be sticking it.” It’s like those Mexican guys in Los Angeles with the bouncy cars: On the surface it just looks silly, but then you consider the industry and determination on display — step by step from concept to technical execution — in installing custom hydraulic systems in order to bounce up and down in their car all pocketa-pocketa while scowling at you at a random stoplight, and it’s genuinely sort of terrifying. What sort of people would do this, and by God, what else are they capable of?

WE would just like to add, as a Public Service, that You can observe a lot just by watching. Supposing you would avoid crapping your pants except under the most ungovernable of circumstances, you might also take this to suggest something about your driving habits or political pronouncements, absent any evidence to the contrary. I'm always struck that people (including the author, apparently) consider Being There an indictment of Television mindlessness (which is like indicting somebody who was hanged a half-century earlier, innit?) when it's the simple knowledge gained from gardening that propels Chance into prominence. Maybe that's because I'm a feeble-minded gardener myself, but anyway: the fact that "Reality" does not instantly punish every instance of complete and utter bullshit that comes down the pike owes everything to the quantity of bullshit out there, not its quality. Every time a traffic light saves us from being crushed to death by a speeding dump truck we see the utter refutation of modern Republican Libertoonianism. Certainly, we might make a lot of money producing something like Liberal Fascism, and we might even do so under a nom de plume, thus keeping our shame a secret. But even if we managed to do so, every one of us can see, just walking down the street, that dying in unspeakable poverty is preferable to living as Jonah Goldberg.

Most of us, even some Republicans whose favored form of religious observance does not involve water moccasins and flaming jerrycans of white gas, do our own shopping. We are therefore capable of observing the attitude of most service personnel to the asshole Americanus in a natural setting, since if you're third in line or lower there's bound to be at least one in front of you, and if you're standing patiently in some formless line, at the Deli, say, and they're all behind you, at least one is sure to step in front when it's your turn. We could simply extrapolate from here; the average cashier or counterman must encounter fifty complete assholes and double that in brain-damaged twits in the average shift, and that's assuming the place doesn't serve alcohol. This means it's about as likely they bother him as it is that stepping in cowshit irritates a dairy farmer.

But let's go ahead and continue our field observations. How do such folk, in the main, respond? They don't. They don't give a fuck about you; if they did we're hear about one or two going postal every single day.

And I don't know, but I would suspect that people working in a bookstore, which, by its very nature, suggests literacy on the part of both employee and patron, pretty much have you pegged if you find it necessary to march up first thing and ask them where such-and-such could be found, whether it's Liberal Fascism, A Thomas Kincade Chanukah, or To the Lighthouse. There are enormous fucking signs delineating each section, lady. You've just announced you're too lazy or stupid to look for them, or else you're too self-important not to have The Help do it for you. It's hardly surprising, under the circumstances, that you're looking for Goldberg's shit sandwich. Aisle Six, on the (snigger) Left. Can I help the next asshole in line?

Yes, we said something about Public Service, and it's not to suggest to these people that they curb the junior-high slumber party antics before they deal with anybody who handles their food. Frankly, we hope they don't. It's that it's well past time to put this tired crap to bed and find a new routine. We'd like to suggest entering liberal bastions like bookstores, libraries, and daycare centers and brandishing a weapon at the employees, just to show your Second amendment absolutism.

Another Mulligan

"This nation has such elasticity, flexibility...you know, people you talk to abroad can't believe that the country that elected George Bush eight years ago has...shifted and is now electing Barack Obama, and they ask wh...what..how can...wh...how can you do that? And it's because we have an amazing ability in this country to learn, to change, and to give opportunity...and...um, and I think that that's what's going on here. We've already changed a lot and I think this is realy gonna make change come a lot faster in this country now. It's gonna speed it up."

--Gloria Borger, part of CNN's "best political team on television", election night

I'M not a world traveler, but I suspect that this is perhaps the one thing which most distinguishes Americans, apart from daily caloric intake: that we're the only people on earth whose political pundits could take a comment which obviously, and quite sensibly, questions the mass sanity of a country which could elect an inexcusable dipshit like George W. Bush, twice, and turn it into--all at the same time: 1) a compliment on our political perspicacity and capacity for "growth"; 2) a suggestion that our belated recognition of a total fucking disaster which was clear enough to the rest of the world four years ago, when it could have been eradicated by direct action, is a sign of some sort of unique political self-awareness; and 3) that the rest of the world is somehow astonished by the breadth of political expression in the Western democracy which is, or was, the most politically homogenous, excepting for the way the right end of its spectrum keeps falling off the table.  Because, y'know, no one could possibly conceive of the French, or the Canadians, or the French-Canadians, electing a conservative or anything. 

You may have heard that Slate, recent recipient of a layout rhinoplasty and, quite possibly, a bit o' the old lipo to that unsightly double-reverse-inside-out-contrarian-non-contrarianism--there's some unsightly bruising which we'd call tell-tale except that there's always some unsightly bruising at Slate, just like that wire basket on the kitchen counter where my Poor Wife puts fruit she then forgets about--has hosted this week a sort of Wither 'Conservatism'? seminar featuring the sort of back-bench you might be surprised to learn a decimated party would have left. Included are two--Christie Todd Whitman and Ross Douthat--who're already seasoned veterans at the How My Party Can Become More Like Me and Earn Fabulous Constituencies game, and one--Pepperdine Law Professor Douglas Kmiec--who was an announced Obama man. Slate also managed to land--talk about your journalistic coup!--Tucker Carlson, who apparently managed to find some free time somewhere, perhaps by reading The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People Who Used To Have Careers or something. Tucker, the boilerplate at the bottom informs us, is now a commentator for Tina Brown's The Daily Beast, which all the kids are talking about. Talk about someone who's got to be brimming with advice on reanimating your flagging fortunes! And there's Jim Manzi, a member of that most favored of Republican clans, the Entrepreneurs, or, to put it another way, a guy who became CEO of a thriving company and managed to maneuver it into being taken over by a more successful company. Although in this case (Lotus) it also includes Previously Allowing Microsoft To Take Over The Market With A Tenth-Rate Copy of Your Product. I'm really not sure how Manzi has avoided being tapped to run Indiana's BMW at this point. He's identified as being a contributing editor of the National Review, meaning we still don't know just how many teats a sow can have.

Hopeful free-speech martyr Kathleen Parker is supposed to be joining the happy throng, but hasn't been spotted as of 7AM Friday.

Leave us remember, now, that these people represent, not just a party, and an ideology, which just this week was repudiated at the polls for a second consecutive election cycle, but one which has watched its entire stable of stalking horses (Defense, Economy, Competence, Morality, and Philosophical Purity) get chopped up, ground twice, canned and sold as dog food, and then learned it even makes dogs sick. Because you're not gonna be reminded of this by that panel as they swap recipes for horse chitterlings.

Maybe we should just run it down in order:

• Manzi: Create competition in education! Reconsider immigration!

• Kmiec: Vouchers! Tricky Rewording of Roe! Get Out of Iraq! Civil Rights!

[Yes, Get Out of Iraq! an idea so brilliant you have to wonder why no one thought of it before. By the way, for daring to suggest that the Party legislate that Life begins at conception but requires a "supermajority" to "defend" from "murder"--thereby graciously offering a face-saving compromise to the majority of Americans, who don't believe it, and have just return responsibility for creating legislation to people who don't, either--Kmiec is immediately taken out back and strung up with one of Todd Palin's returned neckties.]

• Douthat: Disentangle my own sensible desire to enact Federal Ovary Control legislation from the crackpot extremist stuff most Americans don't want.

• Whitman: We must find a way to promote principles of sound government which recognize that government can be a positive force for good in people's lives, while at the same time ensuring it never acts on any such ideas. Oh, and keep our winning coalition together!

• Carlson: There has to be something out there that can inspire irrational panic again. Think!

That's it. Really, that's it. After that they commence to fightin' over who's willing to compromise on abortion the least. Oh, an' how massive spending on defense contractors isn't a form of redistributing wealth, 'cause we get so much return there for other people's money. Like the ability to claim Ronald Reagan wiped out Communism.

[UPDATE: Parker appears, says that the high-minded ideals which put Reagan in office have been betrayed by promoting a high-profile, low-IQ, intellectually-incurious, telegenic ideological mouthpiece like Sarah Palin. And can't we find a way to keep that guy with the Obama Monkey Puppet out of camera range?]

Along the way, Whitman comforts the group--she's later seconded by Parker--with the notion that while Obama won big, a lot of his supporters don't really like him. "This is still a centrist country" sez Kathleen, before recommending a good healthy dose of the Olde Time Centrism of Reagan and Bill Fuhbuckley. It serves to remind us that at least one Obama voter--the one in their midst--appears to have been hallucinating some quid pro quo from the Democrats, abandoning base and principles to assuage the hurt feelings of educated 21st century elites trapped by 12th century theology who've seen their devotion to a single "moral" issue damn near crumble everything good about the country. And he's the sensible one.