Slog

Okay, so I check in with this week's Nooners column, "Out of Touch: What the president's immigration speech and "The DaVinci Code" have in common," which--you're not going to believe this--never actually makes the case that either is Out of Touch. She does manage to use "detached elites" as a segue, but it's tacked on, unsatisfying, almost as if she'd merely slapped out her contractual 850 words by glancing at a couple of headlines, though of course we know better.

There's not much more to be said for the rest of the thing, either, except a) What the hell happened to religion over the past twenty years that its most vocal adherents can't handle a figurative accidental jostle on the bus without breaking into hysterics? b) would you please quit quoting that "85% to 90% of Americans identify themselves as Christian"? They don't. (It might have been 85% twenty years ago, but it's been dropping ever since and was below 80% a couple years back.) c) if you've got to make (up) those raw number arguments, kindly bear in mind that nearly that many Americans say they believe in ghosts or ESP, which should at least give you pause, plus a solid minority admit to believing in the predictive power of astrology, and many others attend Bi-Monthly Science Fiction Conventions in costumes they made themselves.

As for the Bush/Immigration part of the equation, it's turned out to be a celebrity marriage reality program between Bush and the Right, hasn't it? The aging drama queen and the no-longer-young stud who fills out a flightsuit but isn't too much in the imagination department? Can somebody explain this to me? Four years ago he was a Colossus, the Solitary Warrior, the man who'd single-handedly saved Civilization Herself from the dastardly Moor. Now he's a bum.

Of course no one puts it quite like that, but how are we to understand it? Nobody asked Noonan or Hinderocket back then to slather on the praise in a way that would make a Scientologist PR flack blush. But having done so, wouldn't you expect they'd stand by him now, instead of griping that he didn't update MacArthur's plan to salt the 38th Parallel with cobalt?

Oh, and one more thing, Peggy. If you're occupationally unable at this point to write about politics without telling us what "the people" want, move to Omaha and shut up for five years.

Speaking of Hiney, he's the second person I'd seen praise this from Wretchard at The Belmont Club:

However that may be, Jaynes' theory intriguingly suggests that hunches, guesses and intuition may hold some validity. They are the end result of a logical process inaccessible to the waking mind. My own hunch is that in the last two or three months there's been a change in the tone of the blogosphere. Nothing definite, simply a change in atmosphere in proportion to the degree of abstract tendencies of the blogger....

My own theory is that all the old divisions so sharply erected between September 11, 2001 and April, 2003 have been slowly eroded by the uncertainties of the world. The Left and the Right have seen their champions turn out to be all too human, and are confounded. Issues which are a wedge on both sides of the spectrum -- like immigration or Darfur -- have scattered interest groups around like balls after a billiard break. New issues like the resurgence of a hostile Russia, the spread of Marxism in Latin America -- even the malicious buffoonery of the Iranian President -- are crowding at the fringes of the now comforting world of the War on Terror. The old play is ending and yet the new one has not yet begun. And this bothers abstract intellectuals far more than it does the men in the field. A soldier can write with perfect conviction that "the world was a slightly better place every time I pulled the trigger" because he lives in a world of specificity, but the agonized thinker can find no such comfort in cold abstractions; abstractions now in need of repair under the weight of experience.

I can't count the number of links I've chased because somebody said, "X is a really good writer," or "Here's a thought-provoking piece for both sides," and he or it turn out merely to reinforce the blurbist's own prejudices. It's not a right-wing-only phenomenon, but the above is--that popping pressure-value of political angst, the wisp of comradeliness, the assertion that Right and Left have been equally misguided--you can only find that sort of thing on the Right, and then only because they've spent four years blaming the Left and the Media for everything and now find themselves out of ammunition and cover.

So in the spirit of our shared sacrifice, with the now comforting world of the War on Terror receding into the background, let me just say this: What the fuck you talkin' about?

I'm obliged, too, to mention that as it goes with the rest of the world, so it goes with Julian Jaynes and The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind: please do not try to operate it without reading the manual first. Jaynes' discussion of what consciousness is is a delight. The stuff about myth suffers from Academic Out of his Element Syndrome. Jaynes' theory is not reversible, the "bicameral mind" is not something quaintly assigned to "primitive" peoples, and it's not a defense of "intuitive thinking," nor an excuse to toss around "unconscious mind" like it's a scientific term. I think you were probably reaching for Jung, but at times like these, like most times, it's best to keep your hands in your lap.

Happy Birthday

James Thomas "Cool Papa" Bell
May 17, 1903--March 7, 1991

Adding My .00035 to the Sum Total of Left Blogosphere Nastiness

In my defense, I had to go to the mall today...

A) Waterworks

So, a television reporter just happened to notice Tony Snow's yellow bracelet and asked him about it. Uh-huh. Sure. Right.

I'm not even gonna bother with the "Oh, I'm not bashing Tony Snow and his brave fight against cancer" bizness. I don't really care if this gets misconstrued somewhere, and anyway, so what else is new? Lots of people fight the brave fight with cancer, and a lot of 'em don't have the health care benefits Tony Snow and the White House Press Corps types have. Snow, regardless of whether he once was brave enough, or firmly in grasp of the obvious enough, or desperate enough for attention to call his new boss "a double-digit IQ'd frat boy" is a card-carrying member of the party which has shot down public health care and cheap Canadian prescription drugs. When he weeps openly for everybody who's left out, lemme know.

But mostly it's the fact of this phony fucking set-up on Day One. Oh, looky, the new WH Press Secretary is human! Screw that noise. You people want to have a little party have it on your own time. Tony Snow is the replacement mouthpiece. Ari Fleischer was not the problem. Scott McClellan was not the problem. The people they work for are the problem, and it makes no difference who's doing their lying for them. I'm sure Tony Snow once had a beloved puppy, and may have saved a small Mexican child from drowning once. Give him a cake. Don't give him five minutes of the people's time for his Emmy highlight reel.

B) The Popular Bush

Nora Ephron at HuffPo gives Laura Bush points for saying "Yes" when asked if she's a feminist, even if that's full of shit. It's a point well taken. But someone tell me how the Washable Synthetic First Lady rates a 73% personal approval rating when all she's done is trot out onto the public stage when required and deliver a bunch of mealy-mouthed crap about The Wonderful Man She Married? Okay, and one time, one time, she told a joke about masturbating livestock. So she's got a highlight reel, too.

Oh, and she's in favor of reading. Great. She also took two days longer than her husband to wake up to the fact of Katrina, and once they finally got her up for a couple of walking-three-paces-behind-him photo ops it was so she could inform people who'd actually been paying attention to the thing for a full week that television was misleading them. You know, by showing pictures of people who'd been through the worst natural disaster in American history an' stuff, instead of focusing on the number of schools we'd be repainting.

The worst natural disaster in US history, and she stayed in Crawford to oversee the packing. She couldn't say, "Get me a fucking camera crew down here now so I can film a Red Cross appeal"?

I know, poll numbers are poll numbers, and she's the recipient of a sort of telephonic mercy hump, people saying they like her in a sort of act of contrition for hating her husband now when they know if they'd admitted he was an idiot six years ago and hated him then they wouldn't find themselves dealing with the fact that he's a criminally-inclined idiot now. Still, three-quarters of the population? For an act that bad? Maybe it's time for an Istar remake.

Michael Barone: Low Bush Approval Ratings "Merely Indicate Unpopularity"

Barone cheers up the Hindrocket who really needed it after this cab ride:

I rode home from the airport in a taxi a few minutes ago. My driver, as is almost always the case in Minnesota, was an African immigrant. No sooner had I gotten into the cab than he began talking about the speech and railing against Bush on the theory that the President is anti-immigrant. I patiently tried to explain that President Bush is in trouble because he is not just pro-immigrant, but pro-illegal immigrant. I explained that he has argued for a guest worker program and a path to citizenship, and has said repeatedly that it would be impossible to deport all the illegals.

My cab driver was completely disoriented by this. I could tell he didn't believe it. Like nearly all African cab drivers, he listens to public radio all day long. Twenty minutes with me wasn't enough to overcome years of liberal indoctrination. He simply wasn't able to absorb the idea that President Bush might not be a racist who hates immigrants. I'm sure he'd forgotten everything I said by the time he left my driveway.

Informal, Unscientific Poll. Is this:

A) Complete horseshit?

B) Utter bullshit?

C) Evidence that this was the driver's first day on the job, as no one working for tips would ever pick up John Hinderocket and imagine a good anti-Bush rant would snag 20%?

D) Evidence that the driver was extremely savvy, recognized immediately that nothing whatsoever would pry a decent tip loose from Mr. Powerline, and proceeded to make his trip as uncomfortable as possible?

So Hiney was damn near inconsolable after Bush's speech, until he read the "most grown-up of American political commentators":

When you look back at all these leaders' job ratings in office, you find an interesting thing. The transformational Thatcher and Reagan had negative to neutral job ratings during most of their longer years in power. Thatcher's peaked upward after the Falklands victory; Reagan peaked from his re-election until the Iran-Contra scandal broke two years later. Their divisiveness, the stark alternative they presented with the policies and conventional wisdom of the past -- all these held down their job ratings.

In contrast, Blair and Clinton for most of their years in office had quite high job ratings. Blair's ratings for his first eight years were probably the highest in British history. Clinton, after he got over his lurch to the left in 1993-94, also enjoyed high job ratings, especially when he was threatened with impeachment. The center-left alternative, by accepting most of the Thatcher and Reagan programs, was relatively uncontroversial, determinedly consensus-minded, widely acceptable to the left, center-left and much of the center-right segments of the electorate.

Thus, the crunchy, confrontational right was in its years in power not so widely popular as the soggy, consensus-minded center-left. Yet surely history will regard Thatcher and Reagan as more consequential leaders than Blair and Clinton.

Warmer than the bartender's smile at the airport Hilton when a grown man orders a Daquiri, Banana, frozen, (and then explains that he ordered it that way because that's how the cash register is set up) isn't it? So is this:

A) Total horseshit?

B) Near-total horseshit?

C) Remarkably horseshit-esque?

Did anyone else notice that the second paragraph seemed to declare war on itself about halfway through?

I'd like to be able to share the whole story with you, perhaps including some impressive four-color graph work, but that would require paying real currency to George Gallup when my religious convictions tell me I should be able to glean his field for free. So let's just point this out: Clinton and Reagan had roughly equal approval numbers over all. Clinton's tanked a year quicker than Reagan's (with Clinton's "lurch left"); they both remained fairly neutral until their second terms. Reagan dropped 20 points with Iran/Contra; Clinton zoomed when the Lewinsky scandal broke. So, sorry, no, America's most grown-up political commentator is doing what grown-ups frequently do: he's lying through his teeth. Just the sort of bedtime tale they prefer on the Line of Power:

Barone applies these lessons to today's political landscape:
It is in this context that we should consider George W. Bush's current poor job ratings. For all the high ratings for center-left leaders, it remains true in America and Britain that the policies of the right are more acceptable than the policies of the left -- and are capable of beating the center-left, too.

It is in the nature of things that the right, while sharply defining the issues and winning most serious arguments, should also stir more bitter opposition than the soothing, consensus-minded center-left. All the more so because Old Media in this country, more than in Britain, is dominated by a left that incessantly peppers the right with ridicule and criticism, while it lavishes the center-left with celebration and praise.

Even so, we continue to live in the world of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, as we once lived in the world of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

As I say, a needed dose of far-sighted optimism on a dark day.

And that, my friends, is how you win most serious arguments. Hold 'em with yourself.

In parting, here's today's retro-Barone poll reading moment. My wife tells me all her kids are crazy for these:

It looks like Bush is headed toward the bright sunlit upland of public approval that Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan enjoyed in the first two years of their second terms.

(Townhall, December 6, 2004)

"While Hurtling Over an Embankment to Certain Death" Is the Wrong Time To Decide You're in Favor of Guardrails

David Brooks, "From Freedom to Authority," NY Times, May 14

Psychologists joke that two sorts of people need therapy: those who need to be loosened up and those who need to be tightened up. Now, in the political world, we're moving from what you might call loose conservatism to tight conservatism. We're seeing a conservatism that emphasizes freedom give way to a conservatism that emphasizes authority. Many of George Bush's problems come from the fact that he's awkwardly straddling the transition point between the two.

So begins another in the weekly series "David Brooks Redefines 'Conservatism' According To This Week's Requirements", brought to you with rapidly decreasing justification by the Liberal New York Times.

It hasn't been pretty watching The Conservative Liberals Love yank desperately at a set of imaginary controls as he watches Commander Codpiece's irreversible death spiral, just as, pace the supposed Credo of Bush Hatred, it isn't pretty watching the Franco-like demise of Reaganaut "conservatism" from its admixture of hubris and self-serving delusion. This is not comeuppance; it's disaster. Yet still there's the hopeful spin each week, though it's become less and less anchored in talking points and more and more in the search for some enlightening, self-confidence restoring piece of psych-or-sociological wisdom that'll float in high seas.

So shut up and die like an aviator, already.

There are some forms of idiocy which, if they don't require a Ph.D to promulgate, are at least unavailable to the man who can't, or needn't, hide his copy of Maxim behind Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France. You wouldn't keep going back to the transmission repairman who told you your car was fixed, then that might take years longer to fix and cost several hundred times the original estimate, then that things were looking much better, and finally that the car was supposed to run exclusively in reverse.

In the 1970's and 80's, conservatives felt the primary threat was the overweening nanny state. Ronald Reagan tried to loosen the structures that restricted individual initiative and led to national sclerosis.

Brooks is writing this on the cusp of the anniversary of Bloody Thursday. Reagan made his "conservative" bones as the anti-hippie, anti-student demonstrator, anti-civil-rights authoritarian. It's understandable that for there even to be Reagan hero worship a lot of unpleasant realities have to be ignored, but does Brooks even know this stuff?

Times change. Now the chief problem is not sclerosis but disorder. The biggest threats come not from nanny states but from failed states and rogue states. There is less popular fear of bureaucrats possessing too much control than of ungoverned forces surging out of control: immigration, the federal debt, Iraqi sectarianism, Islamic radicalism, Chinese mercantilism, domestic rage and polarization.

Times change. And how conveniently they change!

The chief challenge these days is to restore legitimate centers of authority.

Restore them from the hash the Bush administration has made of them? Or from the hash the Right tried to make of them because Clinton was president?

Middle-class suburbanites understood this shift far more quickly than the professional conservatives in Washington. What people wanted post-9/11 was Giuliani-ism on a global scale -- someone who was assertive and decisive enough to assume authority and take situations that seemed ungovernable and make them governable.

Enough, already. You'd think the unmitigated disaster that's followed in the wake of this authoritarian yearning would at least slow down the Post-Nine-Eleven stuff, but no. If Middle America pined for more Giuliani-ism it was because it didn't know him. If it found the Runaway President's bullhorn moment "inspiring" it was because it desperately needed to. It was obvious at the time that America would respond with wrath untempered by the facts, and that we had the misfortune to have in power a particular set of politicians who would milk that for every advantage. Giuliani knew for weeks that the death toll he was using was twice the actual, but "twice as many deaths as Pearl Harbor" was a sexier rallying cry than "roughly the same." But rallying to do what? Bush's "retired fireman" was a Republican ward-heeler, and the police badge the dead man's mother wanted him to have was seized by the Secret Service. That Middle America you keep claiming to know, Mr. Brooks, was already united and already fear-stricken. What it needed was someone to calm, to explain, to establish national priorities and reestablish the democratic impulse. It's the authoritarians who strongly desired an Authority, apparently imagining they were getting a cross between Octavian, Peter the Great, and George Patton; what they, and we, got was Nero, Jr. And don't try to sell us on that Reluctant Caesar business. George Bush may have realized in his marrow that he'd faked his way to this point and was now way out of his depth, but is there any question about what side God was gonna come down on when He spoke up?

In many ways, President Bush was sensitive to the changing nature of the times. Bush had never believed that his job as president was to cut government to enhance freedom. He never promised to reduce the size of government. His education reforms didn't enhance personal choice; they turned the federal government into an accountability cop.

Yeah, yeah. Bush is not a conservative. Why were you guys so enthusiastic about him, then?

As Fred Barnes wrote in his book "Rebel-in-Chief," Bush and his team operate in Washington like an occupying army of insurgents, an "alien in the realm of the governing class." Ever the visionary, Bush told Barnes that his interest "is not the means, it is the results."

Y'know, reading those two sentences is a lot like watching one of those Hollywood Arabian Nights fantasies of the 40s or 50s, where everybody wore contemporary hairdos and Technicolor harem pants.

But statesmanship consists precisely of understanding the relationship between the means at your disposal and the ends you seek to pursue. Bush has had trouble exerting authority because he and some of his advisers have been aloof from or hostile to the inescapable and legitimate institutions of authority in this country.

How fortunate for all of us y'all could figure this out in less than six years.

Furthermore, Bush and his team have generally not shared information with the people with whom they share power. They've been slow to open reciprocal communication with people on Capitol Hill and elsewhere in Washington who could do them some good.

Now, here's the thing: this is the party Brooks claims superiority for on the grounds of its weekend Burke retreats and intellectual bullpen, yet every last time-honored conundrum known to Western Civilization sneaks up behind these guys and kicks 'em in the ass. Those people on Capitol Hill and elsewhere were makin' with the Hosannas as recently as last year, right up to the point that the poll numbers fell off the table and started rolling toward the basement stairs. Nobody went public, David. Nobody said Bush wasn't "conservative" enough until Bush was a dirty word. 'Course, you're the guy who recently told us how troubled all the insiders were about Iraq, the same ones that you had assured us earlier were uniformly optimistic.

Finally, members of the Bush administration did not respect government enough to understand that a strong one had to be established in postwar Iraq. They had too much faith in spontaneous social order, a libertarian myth from the 1980's that has been sadly refuted by events.

Only because, sadly, its refutation by easily understood rational argument was ignored.

For a hundred years we debated the economic reach of the state, but that debate's basically done. The next one will be over where the state should erect guardrails in a mobile and fragmented world.

How is it that the party of Burke seems to imagine that history began twenty years ago?

Happy Birthday

Diane Nash
born May 15, 1938

Happy Birthday

Ian Dury
May 12, 1942--March 27, 2000

Friday Frivolous Interruptus, Part One

To those of you out there who may be tempted to entertain the idea that we now have sufficient suspicions of high crimes and misdemeanors to initiate an impeachment investigation even in this House, or that, say, the GOP has one final chance, deserved or no, to show that it actually puts freedom, the law, and love of country above electoral success and criminal means of personal enrichment, or to those who might be wondering whether the Democratic party is intending to show up, like, ever again, I'd just like to ask you to think for one moment: the NSA has been logging the phone calls of practically everyone in the country for the past three years. I know, it sounds unconstitutional, and downright unAmerican, but just think for one minute how many terrorists we've caught in the interim.

Friday Frivolous Interruptus, Part Two

Or, that Roy is really too nice for his own good. Or maybe he just tuned in to The Corner a bit early:

SPEAKING OF RU 486 [Ramesh Ponnuru]

Judicial Watch's report on the topic has a lot of eye-opening information, but the letter from Ron Weddington, the co-counsel on Roe v. Wade , to President-elect Bill Clinton is especially worth checking out. It's on pages 61-64.

A sampling:

[Y]ou can start immediately to eliminate the barely educated, unhealthy and poor segment of our country. No, I'm not advocating some sort of mass extinction (sic) of these unfortunate people. Crime, drugs and disease are already doing that. The problem is that their numbers are not only replaced but increased by the birth of millions of babies to people who can't afford to have babies. There, I've said it. It's what we all know is true. . . .

I am not proposing that you send federal agents armed with Depo-Provera dart guns to the ghetto. You should use persuasion rather than coercion. . . . You made a good start when you appointed Dr. Elders, but she will need a lot of help. . . .

[G]overnment is also going to have to provide vasectomies, tubal ligations and abortions. . . . There have been about 30 million abortions in this country since Roe v. Wade. Think of all the poverty, crime and misery. . . and then add 30 million unwanted babies to the scenario. We lost a lot of ground during the Reagan-Bush religious orgy. We don't have a lot of time left.

We don't need more cannon fodder. We don't need more parishioners. We don't need more cheap labor. We don't need more poor babies

Now of course these sorts of sentiments aren't shared by all or even most supporters of legal abortion, but I suspect they are more widely thought than voiced.
Posted at 9:02 PM

Not shared by all or even most supporters of legal abortion. I guess that's the sort of keen insight and knowledge of your subject that gets you a book deal, huh?

Twit.

Y'know, you could walk outside the NRO offices and interview the first 100 people you see, and I betcha the most sophisticated psychological trap wouldn't catch too many people even thinking about eugenics, crackpot or otherwise, and it it did I'd put it at even money those thoughts were thunk by an abortion opponent, as their political commitment to life begins at conception and ends at birth.

Really, Ramesh, go pleasure yourself repeatedly with a thatch rake in a hot airless room. And that's an idea I voice more than think, and I suggest others join me.

But first...

Maybe the party of Obscure Kerning Samples could learn not to jump quite so far so fast. (In case you're interested, you can download the .pdf file here.) The letter from Mr. Weddington, which Judicial Watch apparently considers a "relevant document" fills the last four pages.

I wrote Mr. Weddington at his law office last evening asking whether he claims authorship. So perhaps we'll learn, and in the meantime, well, you read the "sampling". Only a low-grade commerical liar would try to pass that thing off as representative of anything other than some insane ramblings someone sent to the President. Maybe that's what they are. But at the risk of sounding like the Powerline boys on a corndog and Super Squishee bender, there's at least a few reasons to think for a moment:

1) It's a photocopy.

2) It's undated and without an inside address.

3) It addresses the President-elect as "Dear President-To-Be Clinton" (comma).

4) There are no typist initials.

5) The attitude ("hey, just between us liberals, we know we need to use RU-486 to decrease the number of poor people") looks suspiciously like it came from the same book of templates as the Anthrax Letters and the Jon Benet Ramsey kidnapping note.

6) Both Judicial Watch and Ramesh Ponnuru are trying to make hay out of it.

Is it a fake? I have no way of knowing one way or another, and that's just to debate which sort of meaninglessness it belongs under. I'm only suggesting that it gave me pause, and I wouldn't be staking a whole lot on its authenticity--unless I had no reputation to lose anyway.

Friday Frivolity

This Just in [Jonah Goldberg ]

The Stone Age sucked:

A survey of British skulls from the early part of the New Stone Age, or Neolithic, shows societies then were more violent than was supposed.

Early Neolithic Britons had a one in 20 chance of suffering a skull fracture at the hands of someone else and a one in 50 chance of dying from their injuries.

Details were presented at a meeting of the Society for American Archaeology and reported in New Scientist magazine.

Blunt instruments such as clubs were responsible for most of the trauma.

This is not the first time human-induced injuries have been identified in Neolithic people. But the authors say it is the first study to give some idea of the overall frequency of such trauma.

Rick Schulting of Queen's University Belfast and Michael Wysocki from the University of Central Lancashire looked at 350 skulls spanning the period from 4000 BC to 3200 BC.

"We generally think of Neolithic people as living peaceful lives - they were busy looking after cereal crops and rearing livestock," Mr Wysocki told the BBC News website.

"But it was a much more violent society."


Posted at 3:27 PM

Uh, just to point out that if you're a Space Age American you stand a 1 in 10,000 chance of dying from firearms misadventure this year, and a considerably greater chance if you happen to be young, male, African-American, and especially all three. If you're a woman you stand a 1 in 3 chance of being raped or physically assaulted by a spouse, partner, or date at some point in your life. And, dude, it really sucked to be in Falluja.

We already know Neolithic peoples were violent; I'm not quite sure what British archaeologists imagined their little rock was so different. In historic times the Iroquois tried to eradicate every last Huron, and when the Erie hid them, every last one of them as well. And they damned near succeeded. Which still made them pikers compared to the Europeans (see Columbus, Christopher, e.g.). And that's just your own history, Jonah. If you'll take the time to learn a bit about it you won't walk around with your jaw hanging open all the time.

Hour of the Wolf News

Sooner or later I'll be guest-blogging at Blanton's and Ashton's, assuming something comes to me. I'm going through one of those periods where there's fifteen unfinished pieces floating on my desktop, most of which have been rewritten twice and rejected three times. I rewrote that Cohen piece yesterday as a sort of housewarming gift for B's & A's and never finished it. I knocked around the internets for three hours last night without anything irritating me sufficiently for comment, although the twin idiocies of K-Lo and Jonah at The Corner, grousing about an American Idol vote and posting "Trek humor. Deal with it," respectively came close.

It's spring and I've been lightly kissed by allergies, I'm bone-weary from gardening and stonescaping, and I gave up smoking five days ago. Pipe smoking, that is; I've never tasted a cigarette. I smoked maybe two dozen cigars between my teenaged plastic-tipped blueberry monstrosity days and the drugstore A & C's of my late twenties, when I developed a taste for the real item. Cigar smoking gave way to pipe usage when cigars got trendy and prices got ridiculous, though the latter wouldn't have been a deal breaker by itself. A month ago I just took a notion to quit once the last pouch was finished. No physical addiction involved, only slight cravings and the occasional need to find something to do with my hands, but tobacco does tend to focus the mind wonderfully, its one redeeming feature beyond the old-fashioned joys of cigar connoisseurship now rendered hollow and magazine-slick.

It's like there's a seasonal hole in my personal ozone layer, one that used to be plugged by a haze of African tobaccos from that shop in the Village, and I'm walking around like I know I've forgotten something important but I've not idea if it's Sorry I forgot your birthday important or Oh shit, I burned down the house important.

Or maybe it's just that the Blogosphere is talking about...the Blogosphere, not its most attractive quality, to be sure, but it is difficult to keep coming up with new ways to say George W. Bush is the incompetent inheritor of a global criminal enterprise and that his supporters, both current and erstwhile, have juvenile sexual psychoses obvious to everyone but themselves. Whattya gonna do?

What I did was go to sleep for a few hours, just shortly after I found this from Jane Hamsher:

There is a very good article on Richard Cohen by journalist Gene Lyons , whose work I respect a great deal. In it he notes:

The larger point is that Beltway courtiers like Cohen, Time’s Joe Klein and others currently succumbing to the vapors over critical e-mails from fans thrilled by Colbert’s gutsy performance are on their way out. The brief reign of the celebrity pundit began with cable TV and appears to be ending with the Internet. Washington socialites are quickly being replaced in public esteem by politically oriented bloggers like Josh Marshall, Kevin Drum, the inimitable Digby, Glenn Greenwald, Billmon, Atrios and many others. As Greg Sargent recently pointed out in The American Prospect, “Readers are choosing between the words on a screen offered by Klein and other commentators and the words on a screen offered by bloggers on the basis of one thing alone: The quality of the work.”

I mention this because I’ve seen this same list floated recently as reflecting some ideal future punditocracy. And if the people Lyons mentions were all to step into the roles of the principal political pundits in our culture, I’d be standing under a banner saying "Mission Accomplished" with my own codpiece. But much like my predecessor-in-photo-op it would not be time to declare victory. I agree with Lyons that every single one of the people named is fantastic and worthy of a public stage for their commentary, but to the best that their race and genders are publicly known (and I admit I do not know them all) these are all white men....


Now I don’t think there is any big conspiracy to keep women out of the discourse; just the opposite in fact, I’ve found that liberal male bloggers actually bend over backwards to help us. I can assure you that nobody would probably be reading this blog today if TBogg hadn’t put us on the map by linking to us prominently 4 or 5 times a week until we got our sea legs. And I am just as guilty as everyone else of not linking to women bloggers enough; it’s just laziness. In a rush to feed a hungry blog every day I just don’t take the time to cruise around the blogosphere and listen to new voices the way I used to. That’s a problem.

So here are a list of my favorite women bloggers, it’s off the top of my head and by no means exhaustive so if I left someone out it was accidental:

Pam Spaulding at Pam’s House Blend
Taylor Marsh
Arianna Huffington
Watertiger at Dependable Renegade
Belle Waring at Crooked Timber
Laura Rozen at War and Piece
Barbara O’Brien at Mahablog
Avedon Carol at the Sideshow
Susie Mandrak at Suburban Guerilla
Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon
Sheri Zollinger at World ‘o Crap
Xan, Leah and Chicago Dyke at Corrente
Georgia10 and McJoan at Kos
Emptywheel at The Next Hurrah
Jeralyn at TalkLeft
Ellen Nagler at The Broad View
SusanG at Booman
MaryScott O’Connor at My Left Wing
Lindsey Beyerstein at Majikthise
Athenae at First Draft
Echide of the Snakes
Roxanne at Rox Populi
Elayne Riggs
Julia at Sisypus Shrugged
Shakespeare’s Sister

Okay, she left herself off, and Christy, and the top of her head missed eRobin, who belongs near the top of the list, none of which is to the point. Firedoglake is a terrific site, one which belonged on Gene Lyons' list (not a criticism; I'm sure he has other things to do besides read blogs). And, indeed, it's one that benefited from TBogg's links, which ran to "Why don't you two get a room?" levels, but it's a great blog which would have climbed into the upper reaches without it. So my question is, Where are your goddam links to these women? I've seen an awful lot of links to Atrios, Digby, or TBogg.

Yeah, I understand it's a lot of work putting together a blog, and I just do it in my spare time. And maybe I'm being a bit unfair, because I don't read any of the multi-megablogs on a daily basis. But it seems sorta pandemic with them. Is it any less work for Julia or Roxanne, who are always linking to someplace interesting, and rarely to Kevin Drum?

Really, though, my point--and I'll make it before I run to the car to see if there's any year-old tobacco in the glove box--is What's wrong with the blogosphere being the blogosphere? Why do we want any of these people to "replace" the celebrity punditocracy? Off with their friggin' heads. I already lived through "My Sharona" as a substitute for the Ramones. Replacing Laura Ingraham's headshot with Ana Marie Cox's is not my idea of a rallying cry.

11:38 AM fixed Robin link.

Happy Birthday

Maybelle Addington Carter
May 10, 1909--October 23, 1978