He's Not Compensated By Wal-Mart. Say, That Has A Familiar Ring To It.

Sheesh, even their black people are white.

There's hope on the horizon, what with the Democrats regaining power an' all. Indy Star:

He just loves Wal-Mart

City-County Council member Ron Gibson has joined some state legislators in a group called Working Families for Wal-Mart Indiana.

Their mission: to get the word out on the positive side of the story about the behemoth retail company, which has been dogged by critics who say its wages and benefits are so low they compel workers to seek taxpayer-funded public aid.

Gibson said he loves Wal-Mart. In fact, he was shopping at the Wal-Mart at 38th Street and Franklin Road when The Indianapolis Star reached him on his cell phone last week.

He said Wal-Mart offers jobs to those who might not otherwise have them and sells retail goods at good prices in areas where people need more choices.

Gibson, a Democrat, said he was asked by the Baker & Daniels law firm to join the group to support Wal-Mart.

There is no compensation for his work, he said. State Rep. Vanessa Summers, D-Indianapolis, is among others in the group.

Now, I don't know if you share my opinion about Wal-Mart (humanitarians among you might feel the execution of the Walton family should be quick and painless, for example), but I'd like to know why this business, or any business, needs a government cheerleading squad. I say you get to choose one: either celebrate the glorious efficiency of amorality and the miraculous ability of free markets to turn shit into silver, or let's make everything a debate about morality and have at it on a level playing field. If the former, then certainly the virtual cottage industry of turning over rocks and watching Wal-Mart ooze out deserves to breathe free as well. Heaping praise on Wal-Mart because it actually pays its employees for most of the hours they work seems like setting the bar a little low, even for volunteer work.

Speaking of which, check out the website those volunteers maintain. It's sorta like Disney World without the exciting rides an' stuff. They wish you a Merry Christmas right at the top, use "holiday shop" as a verb, and explain with the sort of earnestness usually seen only in bepamphleted religious zealots on your doorstep that "Wal-Mart is also bringing "Christmas" back into its marketing." (Is that the greatest use of the floating random quotation marks ever, or what?) You can click the links to read real stories from actual working stiffs about how Wal-Mart has changed their lives despite the continued existence of trade unions, meet the Steering Committee (the first guy is a economics professor who's changed his last name to "Ph.D"; the second is Pat Boone) or check out the Mission Statement:

OUR MISSION

Working Families for Wal-Mart is committed to fostering open and honest dialogue with elected officials, opinion makers and community leaders that conveys the positive contributions of Wal-Mart to working families.

Interesting that they're not wasting any time explaining the positive contributions Wal-Mart makes to working families to the actual working families themselves, presumably since those families already know the value of Looking the Other Way when there's a buck involved.

PS Baker & Daniels? Yeah, it's that Daniels.

Happy Birthday

Willie "The Lion" Smith
November 25, 1897--April 18, 1973

False Modesty

Slate: "James Baker is the last guy we should listen to about Iraq"
by Christopher Hitchens

Not while you're alive, Hitch. Not while you're alive.

Conventional Wisdom Tuesday I: Phoning It In

Monday morning I was making the bed and gathering up all the pieces of laundry which had been flung around the bedroom over the weekend, and I had the radio on NPR, whence it had migrated during a recent electrical storm from the other PBS station, the one that plays classical music and the BBC. This meant--what's the opposite of serendipity?--that I got to listen to Cokie Roberts analyze of Our Current State of Affairs. Question: does Cokie Roberts actually do anything anymore? I don't mean to be cruel--she's a cancer survivor, godspeed an' all--but what exactly is her job description? Pundit without portfolio? Even if she hadn't figured prominently in the Press' lapdog response to George W. Bush I'd be hard-pressed to think of a reason to listen to anything she had to say, other than the fact of my arms being full and the radio being tuned to her.

So here's what I got from the Cokester: One--John McCain has called for increasing the number of troops in Iraq, which Cokie is sure he actually believes in, but which is "somewhat convenient" given that he's running for President and this allows him to say his idea wasn't tried (especially if he's interviewed about it by Cokie Roberts or the Cokiesque). And Senny Hoyer says besides, we don't have any troops, which was an interesting way of turning a factual question, with a straightforward and rather vital answer into a partisan toss-up.

Point two--of two; I hope Cokie is paid by the piece and not the minute--was about Charlie Rangel calling for a draft, which Cokie says won't happen, but Rangel is making a point about the conduct of the war. Fair enough, perhaps, but I'd like to suggest that since the last time he "made" the identical "point" it was widely disparaged as an anti-Bush stunt that he might be given some credit for bringing it back up when he has the power to get it a hearing and the authority to get blamed if it goes anywhere. But such a commendation was not forthcoming, not that I expected it; Cokie had gotten in her equal-opportunity skepticism. (No mention of McCain's new frame for his abortion views: the Sunday talk-fests probably air too late for Cokie to take note of by Monday. (By all means see Scott Lemieux' takedown of McCain at Tapped.)

And aside from her reading me 2/3 of last Friday's below-the-fold front page, I had to ask myself what I'd gotten for the time I'd invested other than a full hamper. Are those stories really equivalent? McCain, running for something, proposes to send troops we don't have* to a lost cause as a publicity stunt, in contradistinction to his Straight Shootin' image, while Rangel, about to be in charge of something after years in the wilderness makes the same unpopular proposal (which may be simply making a point) he did two years ago sans juice. The "cynical gesture" or "playing politics" rubric doesn't seem to fit them both. But maybe I just lack Cokie's studied impartiality.

* Mr. Riley does not suggest that 20,000 troops could not be rounded up under any circumstances and sent to Mesopotamia. The Bush administration has been more creative about numbers than a stretch Hummer full of Hollywood accountants. But we can no longer sustain more than about 60,000 troops for full tours without massive reorganization of our worldwide military commitments. This much has been known since 2002 at the least; the number comes from the CBO report from November of that year. And that doesn't count what's happened to our equipment in the interim.

Conventional Wisdom Tuesday II: That Sounds Oddly, and Tediously, Familiar

Matt Bai, "The Way We Live Now: The Last 20th Century Election?" New York Times Magazine, November 19, 2006:

Since Bush’s disputed victory in 2000, many liberals have been increasingly brazen about their disdain for the rural and religious voters; one popular e-mail message, which landed in thousands of Democratic in-boxes in the days after the 2004 election, separated North America into “The United States of Canada” and “Jesusland.” The populist author Thomas Frank won widespread praise for his thesis that unsophisticated rural types had been manipulated into voting “against their economic self-interest,” while the celebrated linguist George Lakoff posited that conservatives had rewired the brain synapses in these unsuspecting voters. Two eminent liberal political scientists, Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, wrote a more scholarly book, arguing that Bush could govern as an extremist without paying a price, because Republicans had gamed the electoral system and deceived voters.

Matt Bai, "The Excluded Middle" review of Off Center, by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, New York Times Book Review, December 11, 2005:

Over the last few years, in this time of Democratic despondency, there has emerged a new genre of comfort books for liberals - books that seek to expose the nefarious means by which conservatives have amassed power, while at the same time reassuring urban liberals that they bear none of the blame. Thomas Frank's best-selling "What's the Matter With Kansas?," for instance, advanced the premise that rural voters just aren't sophisticated enough to vote in their own interests. In "Don't Think of an Elephant!," the linguist George Lakoff took a slightly different angle, suggesting that these voters weren't dumb, exactly, but that their brain synapses had been rewired by the Republicans' skillful manipulation of language. Now come Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, political science professors at Yale and the University of California, Berkeley, with "Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy." Hacker and Pierson offer a variation on this same theme: voters can't make the right choices, they contend, because our system of government itself has dangerously malfunctioned.

Forget that Bai bills the Times twice for the same two-hundred words; they should be glad he didn't steal 'em. But notice how nothing changes despite the intervening sea-change of an election except the frame. Formerly, the Dems were seeking comfort food; now their very success condemns their earlier words:

But this election, in which conservative incumbents in states like Kentucky and Indiana went down to defeat, should discredit such alarmist (and elitist) theories. As it happened, despite all these neurological and structural impediments, ordinary voters proved perfectly capable of recognizing failed governance when they saw it, and seemed plenty capable of defending their own interests.

Both of these, by the way, were front page stories in their respective sections. Thus the liberal New York Times! And it should be noted that Hacker and Pierson fairly demolished Bai's critique the first time around, which accounts for the not-quite-identical description this time.

Bai's problem is obvious--he's too smart for either party, which requires a hard-edged sneering version of Cokie Robert's Both Sides Do It approach--but his editors' problem is a whole 'nother question. Hang on:

After the midterms, that tidal resentment has now washed away both of our old governing philosophies: the expansive and often misguided liberalism that dominated American politics up through the 1970s, as well as the impractical, mean-spirited brand of conservatism that rose up in reaction to it.

You know me--I can't get enough of people characterizing characterizations of things they know nothing about as if such an exercise explains something. Bai is no doubt completely unaware that he's mouthing a "conservative" argument in the guise of a history lesson.

But there's no excuse for lacking common sense, even if you won't pursue history beyond your own nose: is it reasonable to assume that liberalism "rose up" in reaction to anything? Is it too much to ask that twenty-somethings in this country show some familiarity with, say, McCarthyism? Say it again: I challenge any of you to go back and actually live under the social, cultural, and sexual repressions of the 1950s and come back and report which side you're on. The only thing that "rose up" in conservatism in response to the "domination" of our politics by liberalism--a bogus concept to begin with--is a few reactionary positions of the cultural right wing and an ever-increasing zest for tax cuts for the wealthy. Real conservatism, as opposed to the lumpy Jonah Goldberg variety which is all you seem to know, was just as impractical and mean-spirited sixty years ago, although I'd object that those are more euphemisms than descriptions.

It may be, then, that we have just witnessed the last big election of the 20th century; the question now is what kind of different, more relevant ideologies might rise from the ruins. Or, as Simon Rosenberg, the Democratic strategist, recently put it in making much the same argument, “Like two heavyweight boxers stumbling into the 15th round of a championship fight, the two great ideologies of the 20th century stumble, exhausted, tattered and weakened, into a very dynamic and challenging 21st century.” The era of baby-boomer politics — with its culture wars, its racial subtext, its archaic divisions between hawks and doves and between big government and no government at all — is coming to a merciful close. Our elections may become increasingly generational rather than ideological — and not a moment too soon.

First, to Mr. Rosenberg: when the DLC, in either its old-school or its spiffy new sci-fi version, wins elections, or when it figures out the base wins elections, or when it speaks for anyone outside one of its conference rooms, then maybe your insights will mean something. Second, if you believe that culture wars, racial politics, or the "archaic" divisions between hawks and doves is a mere blip on the electoral radar rather than real-world responses to real-world problems, then God help you and the Future, and God grant you a populace with an endless tolerance for rectal smoke receptivity, just as soon as I'm dead and buried. In the meantime:

Where are the fucking answers if you're so smart? How is it that all the DLC types--those forward-looking 21st Century Culturnauts who've managed to transcend the old dichotomies, marched in fucking lockstep with the Bush administration into Vietnam II?

[T]he new Democratic majority in Washington may fare no better in addressing the nation’s modern preoccupations than the Republican majority that preceded it. At week’s end, Democrats were preparing to name two 66-year-olds, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, as Senate majority leader and House speaker. In the House, Pelosi will be supported by new committee chairmen including longtime liberals like Barney Frank of Massachusetts and Charles Rangel of New York. They are, most of them, honorable public servants, warriors steeped in the battles of the last century. But the party remains reluctant to make room for its next generation, a pragmatic and talented group — led, perhaps, by Rahm Emanuel, the chief strategist behind the House elections

Yeah, and with damned good reason, sonny boy. Give us the answers, bright boy, or shut up and learn something. This, at least: those repugnant Boomers are just entering their sixties. They're gonna be voting for another twenty-five years. And old fucking people vote, homey.

Happy Birthday

Harry Tyson Moore
Novermber 18, 1905--December 25, 1951

Moore, a school teacher, founded the NAACP branch in Brevard County and later ran the state organization for Florida. (Both he and his wife Harriette were blacklisted from their teaching jobs for their efforts.) In 1949 Moore had protested the beating of the Groveland Four after they were jailed (that is, of the three who were jailed, as the fourth was shot while "resisting arrest"). In 1951 Moore called for the indictment and suspension of Sheriff Willis V. McCall, who shot two of the three while they were shackled and in his custody. Six weeks later, on Christmas Day, the Moores were blown up in their home. Harry died almost immediately; Harriette survived for nine days. Christmas day was also their 25th wedding anniversary.

It's almost superfluous to mention that no one was ever convicted of the crime, which was part of a wave of bombing terror directed at African-Americans across the South in 1951-52.

So tell us, Mr. Goldberg, and honestly, if that's possible: ever hear of the Moores before? Ever hear of the Groveland Four? Care to explain to us who's been blown to bits over affirmative action, or what act of reverse discrimination stands with this single example among thousands of the organized and legalized terror campaign that enforced genuine racism, you pathetic twit?

Spot the Fake Headline

#1 Publisher Calls Book a Confession by O. J. Simpson

#2 Riley Calls Judith Regan 'The O.J. of Literacy'

Republican Humor: Sometimes It's Five Years Between Set-Up And Punchline, Sometimes It's Only A Matter Of Weeks.

Five years:

Nuclear Deal With India Wins Senate Backing

By THOM SHANKER

WASHINGTON, Nov. 16 — The Senate gave overwhelming approval late Thursday to President Bush’s deal for nuclear cooperation with India , a vote expressing that a goal of nurturing India as an ally outweighed concerns over the risks of spreading nuclear skills and bomb-making materials.

By a vote of 85 to 12, senators agreed to a program that would allow the United States to send nuclear fuel and technology to India, which has refused to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

The agreement, negotiated by President Bush and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India in March, calls for the United States to end a long moratorium on sales of nuclear fuel and reactor components. For its part, India would divide its reactor facilities into civilian and military nuclear programs, with civilian facilities open to international inspections.

So, public notice of our payoff to India for sitting quietly while we played footsie with Musharraf, resulting in the capture of bin Laden and the eradication of the Taliban, finally arrives. And now the world's number one mutual nuclear threat is about to become seriously unbalanced courtesy of the US of A. I know, the other night on the Daily Show Ted Koppel was hammering George W. (Too Little--I believe you know Too Late?), but he was there promoting his new Discovery special, "Iran--The Most Dangerous Nation". Can't wait for the follow up, "Drew Bledsoe--The NFL's Most Respected Passer".

Aw, well, now that we've shattered our commitment to non-proliferation I suppose we can just even things up with Pakistan before long. No downside there.

Matter of Weeks:

Senator Richard G. Lugar , the Indiana Republican who is chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, hailed the measure’s passage as “one more important step toward a vibrant and exciting relationship between our two great democracies.”

His endorsement was significant, coming from a senator respected for efforts in nonproliferation and whose name is part of a sweeping program to secure nuclear bomb-making materials in the former Soviet Union. He also expressed “thanks for a truly bipartisan effort” to Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Delaware Democrat set to become Foreign Relations chairman in the new Congress.

Oh yeah, the significant participation of Dick "Foreign Affairs" Lugar. Just like when he wrote that letter before the Iraq war warning about being too hasty, then voted for the Resolution like he was told. That's an endorsement that should make all of us rest easier.

Lugar just won reelection for his forty-seventh term in the Senate; Democrats didn't even nominate anyone to run against him. His campaign ads--I'm not making this up--featured little vidclips of his involvement in securing the former Soviet Union's nuclear arsenal.

Erratum

Thanks to Olbermann, where they have Lexis/Nexis, we learned last evening that the hallucinatory portion of Rich Lowry's piece (see yesterday) was self-administered: the part about 55% of the public supporting troop increases in Iraq according to a Times poll, seems to have, uh, misstated the poll result. Sixteen percent supported increasing troop numbers in Iraq. That 55% was the number who said they'd support increasing troop numbers "if that could be shown to get the situation in Baghdad under control". Or something like that; I wasn't taking notes. Say this for the NRO gang: they never let you down. If you think about it, it's really too bad you'll never share a foxhole with any of them.

"Dems Use Embryonic Stem-Cells To Reanimate Neville Chamberlain; Will Serve as Hilary's Secretary of Defense"

I was already running late yesterday afternoon when I sat down at my keyboard, letting myself air dry for a few minutes--it was one of those events that required a second, midday shower, and no, "meeting a hooker" is not it--and I dialed up Roy, where I tried to leave a quick comment, and something was fucking it up, and while I waited I started clicking on links within links, and pretty soon I'm not only thoroughly dry but even more late, and my comment never did show up. But I did wind up reading this refreshing new take:

In 1968, the Tet Offensive led many in the media to believe that the war in Vietnam was failing. The most famous pronouncement was Walter Cronkite's declaration that the war was a stalemate. Lost in the media defeatism was the fact that American and South Vietnamese troops won the battle, and had delivered a crippling blow to the Viet Cong.

This is subjective, but it seems to me that the rewriting of the history of the Vietnam War has come in two stages, or maybe that's spasms, roughly corresponding to the Reagan and Bush II eras. In the former the jumpy, psycho, drug-addled Vietnam vet of the 60s and 70s became the poor, spat-upon, loner hero, the decent American guy with the bad memories of a bad war buried just below the surface, occasionally breaking through in a sweat-soaked dream sequence for Magnum, P.I. or Airwolf.

It's not as if one never heard the "Uncle Walter and his Lyin' Band of Librul Traitors" refrain in those days, but the debate was among people who'd lived through it. And while the results of Tet (the ultimate repulse and destruction of the so-called Viet Cong as a cohesive force) were freely acknowledged, it's really with this second wave, the arguments made by or for a group whose only experience of Vietnam lies in growing up with the historical revisionism going on and Chuck Norris rewinning the war that Tet has become a major operational victory traitorously sold to an unsuspecting public as a defeat. As so often these days we're forced to decide whether this represents a calculated lie or a prolonged, public case of mental illness; it is simply not possible that anyone even moderately versed in military history mistakes tactical success for automatic, capital-V Victory.

In 1968, the Tet Offensive led many in the media to believe that the war in Vietnam was failing. Well, no. By 1968 most honest observers had already concluded that. It's probably more accurate to say that after Tet we could establish that--as in Iraq forty years later--there was a significant segment of the population which would simply deny things ever could go poorly where the US military was involved. And so that segment would begin casting around for a scapegoat, and that they'd find one so much to their liking in "the media" they'd freeze-dry it and keep it on hand, apparently forever. The story of US involvement in Vietnam is the story of a war that was failing from day one. Johnson understood this pretty much all along. Sheesh, the Secretary of Freakin' Defense was publicly at odds with our strategy in Vietnam as early as 1966. No one who'd been paying attention needed Walter Cronkite to explain what a mess Vietnam was by 1968.

Anyone who'd been listening intently had been hearing we were about to turn the corner since 1962, at which time "the end is six months away" became a semi-annual announcement; I was pretty young, but I think you could buy greeting cards. By 1965 this was no longer tenable, and Westmoreland issued a three-year plan which was supposed to have Hanoi ready for surrender by '67, or face an all-out twelve-to-eighteen month final push if they didn't. This as US troop involvement rose from the 16,000 who were supposed to have won the war in 1964, to the half-million in theatre at the time of Tet--with Westmoreland's request for an additional 200,000 sitting on Johnson's desk. Congressional hawks like Mendel Rivers and Scoop Jackson were leaving the reservation. Small wonder that the public--and perhaps some in The Media as well--which had been fed a steady diet of body counts and an enemy on his last legs viewed a sudden series of mass offensives aimed at large cities as something less than a stirring victory for our side and something more like, well, like stalemate.

We'll leave alone the idea that crippling the "Viet Cong" meant much in the overall conduct of the war. Anybody watching Iraq, which had not been at war for fifteen years before we jumped in, knows it's fairly easy to generate an insurgency against a foreign occupier. The PAVN was still there, still pretty well equipped, still tenacious, as we'd continue to see.

The real story here is not that people lie or fantasize about Vietnam a generation later. It's that this leftover notion of WWII glory, that creating a killing machine and turning it loose in enemy territory leads to automatic victory, provided no teleprompter reader ever says anything negative about the effort, apparently will never die. Just as its proponents apparently will never learn.

Stranger Things Have Happened

Rich Lowry, "The myths of '06", Townhall, November 15

Elections produce two things -- new elected officials and bogus conventional wisdom. Once they gain widespread circulation, erroneous beliefs about elections are difficult to reverse and can be nearly as important as who won or lost.

Okay, so right away you may be thinking what I was thinking, and I think we're both blameless. It's Rich Lowry, whose official title (I think; I didn't bother to look it up) is Some Guy at What's Left of the National Review. So we're both thinking, "Twenty-five years, not one but two "Republican Revolutions" which have produced several landfillsworth of hype and no legislation whatever that means anything, does anything, or accomplishes anything, and we're about to hear how Democrats really didn't win." But Rich is full of surprises here, perhaps befitting his position as America's Oldest Political Wunderkind.

Here are seven myths rapidly gaining acceptance among conservatives, liberals or both:

--Republican losses were in keeping with typical setbacks for a party holding the White House in the sixth year of a presidency. Conservatives reassure themselves that the "six-year itch" has cost the party in power roughly 30 seats on average since World War II, so this year's losses aren't remarkable. But as liberal blogger Kevin Drum points out, most of the big "itches" came prior to the past 20 years when gerrymandering got more sophisticated. Reagan lost only five seats in his sixth year, and Clinton gained five (although he had already suffered a wipeout in 1994). For Democrats to win 29 seats despite all the advantages of incumbency enjoyed by the GOP is a big deal.

Okay.

--The conservative base, discouraged by the GOP's doctrinal impurity, didn't show up at the polls. This is the bedtime story conservatives are telling themselves to show that whatever ails the party will be cured simply by becoming more conservative. In 2004, however, conservatives were 34 percent of the electorate and liberals 21 percent. In 2006, the numbers were almost indistinguishable -- conservatives were 32 percent of the electorate and liberals 20 percent. The GOP didn't lose the election with its base, but with independents, who broke against them 57 percent to 39 percent.

Um, all right. I think we need to take that whole self-identification bit with a shaker of salt, since our elections have been close to 50/50 for some time, but, okay.

--Republicans lost because they weren't fiscally conservative enough. Another conservative illusion. A thought experiment: Which cuts in government would have, in and of themselves, increased the party's popularity?

Now, this is sorta the neck hair of your agenda peeking out over the Oxford collar of analysis, Rich. I heard plenty of complaints that Republicans weren't conservative enough, but I haven't really heard it limited to their fiscal conservatism, just their reckless spending. Which is really not a conservative issue at all, except for those of you who take "conservative" to mean "Double Super Plus Good With Chocolate Syrup", where I take it to mean "conservative", or at least it used to mean that. However, your response is acceptable, writ large: there wasn't much more fiscal conservatism to be had out there and still pay for all those wars we're winning.

--The GOP was too socially conservative for voters. This chestnut is trotted out every time Republicans lose an election. This time it is even less plausible than usual. Seven out of eight constitutional amendments banning gay marriage passed this year, often outperforming Republican candidates. That Democrats went out of their way not to antagonize social-conservative voters this year was one of the keys to their success.

South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, Wisconsin, Colorado, Idaho and South Dakota. Really, that's something less than a convincing cross-section of the country, and gay marriage bans have been notoriously easy to pass. You add the homophobe vote to the This Is My Side of the Culture War vote, and throw in the general hesitation to vote for sweeping changes in the legal landscape and you're home free. Equating that with "social conservatism" is an exaggeration. The Republican party is Jes' Right for the social "conservative" end of the political spectrum, but they're much to the right of most folks here in the Heartland. Come visit, sometime, Rich. Might learn something.

--The election was a great victory for conservative and moderate Democrats. If Democratic leaders gave their candidates leeway to take socially conservative positions, this year's new crop of Democrats still isn't a departure from the party's overwhelming liberalism. A few attention-grabbing, successful Democratic House candidates, Health Shuler of North Carolina and Brad Ellsworth of Indiana, are truly conservative. But only about five of the 29 Democratic winners in the House can be considered social conservatives. They will be lonely.

Correct as to the numbers. But I suggest that the social conservatives will feel all warm an' welcomed. You don't have to support draconian, hate-filled, intolerant legislation just because you're socially conservative. As opposed to being socially "conservative".

--The election was a decisive ideological rejection of conservatism. Liberal opinion writers love this one.

Bzzzzttt! I suppose we should have expected this, but could you possibly name one? Who said it was a decisive ideological rejection of conservatism? And so far as you know, did he eat all the mushrooms, or are there still some left?

--President Bush now must give up on the Iraq War. The rebuke to Bush was unquestionably an expression of voters' frustration with the progress of the war, but they are not ready to give up yet. According to pollster Whit Ayers, less than one-third of voters favor withdrawal. A late-October New York Times poll found that 55 percent of the public favors sending more troops to Iraq, a position now endorsed by the paper's liberal editorial board. Bush still has a window to take decisive action to reverse the downward slide in Iraq.

Ah, well, back to full-bore hallucination at last. I'm glad he saved that for the end. Still, at least partial credit on five of seven, which is pretty damned impressive.

I Too Have A Dream

Kathy inadvertently reminds me to share my mall story with the unsuspecting.

I had to go to the Don't Miss The Fact That We're The Upscale Mall two nights ago (I'm embarrassed to admit it's just five minutes away) because Williams-Sonoma is the only place that sells canel knives. A canel knife is a zester with a single slot about the size of the sharpened end of a pencil, and you can use it to make long strips of citrus or to turn lemons and oranges into festive, edible barber-pole-looking deals. Pretty cool, and I'm always losing mine, and I need one for the holidays. So off I go, and the friggin' place is crowded, which, among the Quality, does not mean you're in danger of actually rubbing elbows with anyone. It just means there's no parking.

So I had to park way the hell away from the place, which was no real problem, but because I had to enter through an unaccustomed door I got thoroughly lost and had to wander around for ten minutes. (I don't go there often, reader, and I generally head straight for one of three stores which are all in the same general vicinity.) The goddam place covers four city blocks and it's connected in the middle by a crosswalk, and I had to find my way over that before I could get my bearings.

Anyway, the place is pumping something like eight different varieties of cheap cologne through the ventilation system, either simultaneously or on a region by region basis which amounts to the same thing. I finally stopped off and asked the concierge--yes, they have a concierge!--if they had any complimentary oxygen available. While I was at it I was gonna ask her if she'd be good enough to ring the footman and have him bring the cabriolet around to the nearest exit, but I figured that would have been lost on her, plus I honestly didn't know how much breathable air I had left.

The other thing about Snootland Mall is that the way to two of those three stores I patronize on occasion is blocked by the massive viral infection of an Abercrombie & Fitch, and if you've ever owned property in a neighborhood where one house was owned by toothless inbreds, and watched your resale value plummet on a monthly basis as more automotive parts found their permanent resting place in the front yard you have some idea how I feel every time I try to pass the place with my good humor intact. At some point they decided to light the place solely with the power indicator lights of the cash registers, and they replaced the 100 decibel crap-rock soundtrack with 110 decibel Eurotrash disco. This time through I found the windows had all been covered by enormous flat-black louvres originally designed as props for Fritz Lang's Metropolis, and the single opening to the store buffered by a six-foot Wall Street Journal gravure print of a topless ambisexual young man lit by a couple of appliance bulbs, which made it stand out like a beacon by comparison. No merchandise whatsoever visible from the outside of the store. How hip. How inside. Just you, and I, and fifty million other Americans are in on the secret merchandise A&F has for us, back there in the Dark.

So now I'm not just nauseated by the fumes and deafened by some German woman with a two-note vocal range telling me she wants me, or vants me, I've got transient global cultural vertigo as well, and I'm gonna have to pass back by that way if I ever hope to find my way out again.

I think it must have come to me in the restive sleep that followed, but it took until this morning for the plan to crystalize. I'm gonna gain about 80 pounds, like DeNiro in Raging Bull, pull on some really tight clothing, unbuttoned to the navel, a bad toupee, and some earplugs, and yell, "Do you have this in XXXXL?" and "Wow, could you tell me who's singing this? I really like it!" at all the clerks until they quit en masse. Which, by my calculations, should take about ten minutes.