Yawn--another day, another Alec Baldwin meltdown--although give him credit; at least this time it's merely in print, and he's not doing his Christian Bale impersonation (or is it the other way around?) while screaming at his daughter:

To John McCain. You need to keep quiet, John McCain. You lost and more importantly you are to blame for your loss. You ran a lousy campaign. In terms of message, logistics, ideas. Now you can't seem to shut up about the stimulus package. Another rich Republican market shill who can only deal with spending bills that stimulate the Dow. You gotta shut up, John McCain. We can never go back to the Stone Age ideas that the likes of you and Paulson and Cheney (re: fighting terrorism) have tried to force down our throats.

Of course, Alec has a few Stone Age ideas of his own that he'd be happy to force down the throat of anyone who he disagrees with.

Update: Welcome Big Hollywood readers! Please look around the whole blog, or at least scroll through the archive category named after an earlier Breitbartian Tinseltown expose: Hollywood, Interrupted.

As South Carolina's Governor Mark Sanford noted on CNN today, "A lot of people who've made some very stupid decisions are being bailed out by the population at large":

"A problem that was created by building up of too much debt will not be solved with yet more debt," Gov. Mark Sanford said Sunday, making a reference to the federal deficit spending that will likely finance the federal stimulus package.

"We're moving precipitously close to what I would call a savior-based economy," Sanford also said Sunday on CNN's State of the Union.

The South Carolina Republican said such an economy is "what you see in Russia or Venezuela or Zimbabwe or places like that where it matters not how good your product is to the consumer but what your political connection is to those in power."

The "savior-based economy"? What could go wrong?

Update: Welcome Insta-readers. Feel free to look around the site, and if you like what see...Read The Whole Thing™, to coin a phrase.

As an adjunct to Kathy Shaidle's recent Examiner piece titled, "The Vietnam War: everything you know is wrong", Indy Jane and The People's Cube graphically illustrate what the New York Times would have looked liked in 1943 if it was Pinch Sulzberger running the show in 1943, and not his grandfather.

(And for some thoughts on how legacy mass journalism's collective tone changed dramatically during the course of Vietnam, ultimately becoming bifurcated from a wide swatch of its readers and country, follow the links here.)

Mary Katharine Ham checks in on the Winter Soldier In Winter, and writes, "John Kerry: You Know What's the Problem With Stimulus Tax Cuts? All That Freedom."

(Andrew Sullivan could not be reached for comment.)

Robert Stacy McCain and Donald Douglas weigh in on Judith Warner's New York Times-approved Freudian fantasies of a shack-up with Barack, or as Douglas calls it, the "Sexual Subtext in Obamessianism."

Update: The Skepticrats are appropriately skeptical about those seeking a Last Tango In Washington, and note that "It's worth checking out Gawker's post about this just for the illustration they use", which brings new meaning to the phrase "Unicorn Rider."

Join host Steve Green of VodkaPundit.com and myself for a troika of interviews with best-selling authors:

• Roger L. Simon, the CEO of Pajamas Media.com and PJTV.com, on his new book, which looks at forty years inside Hollywood, Blacklisting Myself.


• Bernard Goldberg, formerly of CBS, now with HBO's Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel, and a frequent commentator on Fox News, for his look at A Slobbering Love Affair: The True (And Pathetic) Story of the Torrid Romance Between Barack Obama and the Mainstream Media.


• And veteran talk radio host Hugh Hewitt provides a sneak preview of GOP 5.0.

Tune in here to listen! Incidentally, the interview with Roger L. Simon is available online separately, here.

Glenn Reynolds links to a post on the Flying Debris blog on the apparently systematic harassment of a group of anonymous Chicago-based blogs:

The bloggers at the fantastic Chicago blog Uptown Update and the now defunct blog What the Helen have been subpoenaed by a developer of the notorious Wilson Yard project in the Uptown neighborhood. Additionally two Uptown community groups have recently been subpoenaed, the Uptown Neighborhood Council and the Buena Park Neighbors.

Glenn adds, "Expose Chicago politicians and their cronies, and they'll try to expose you, I guess."

See also: Plumber, Joe The.

Judith Warner, the author of a book titled Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety begins her op-ed in the New York Times, still, despite its anemic stock price, one of the most influential spokes in the legacy media, thusly:

The other night I dreamt of Barack Obama. He was taking a shower right when I needed to get into the bathroom to shave my legs, and then he was being yelled at by my husband, Max, for smoking in the house. It was not clear whether Max was feeling protective of the president's health or jealous because of the cigarette.

Who dreams of having the President of the United States in their shower while their spouse is yelling at him for smoking? Worse, who admits to this in public? Warner herself provides a clue, here:

"This is the first president I've known who looks, talks and acts like a peer," is how one Washington man explained it to me. "Notwithstanding his somewhat exotic life story, I feel like I understand what he's like and where he's coming from. And despite his incredible achievements, he still seems like a lot of people I know. If you stopped the clock in 2004, in fact, or maybe a couple of years earlier, he'd feel roughly like a peer in terms of accomplishments, too.

Which means that if he had an (R) after his name instead of a (D) that Washington man would be calling him grossly unqualified for the White House, instead of admiring his rapid rise to power and vapid, chameleonic style.

More from the "Washington man" Warner quotes:

"Of course I know nobody with his political gifts, speaking skills and confidence, and he's also a gifted writer and thinker. But I feel like one or two different turns for Obama or me and he could have been someone my friends and I wouldn't think it extraordinary to have in our circle."

Sometimes this sense of close identification turns a bit dark. There's a subcategory of people who feel that they really should have true intimacy with the Obamas.

Included in that category are people whose shame is so diminished, they begin op-eds in a newspaper read by millions with embarrassingly mawkish dreams of showering with the President of the United States while simultaneously reaming him out for having a Marlboro 100 in the house.

Update: "Mind-sexing Obama??? File under Things I Could Happily Lived The Rest of My Life Without Thinking About."

That reporters would be threatened, and even physically roughed up on occasion--if not by the president himself, then by members of his cabinet--and they were right!

Peter Robinson writes, "Every so often a president finds himself standing completely exposed--naked, so to speak--before the political class." Reasonable people (if such a group can be found to debate President Bush's record) can disagree, but Robinson believes that President Bush was first caught with brass exposed in October 2005, when he nominated Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court:

As she began making courtesy calls on members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, word began leaking from the offices of astonished senators that her purchase on even the most basic constitutional case law proved tenuous.

In contrast, Robinson believes that President Obama's fallibility is being exposed much sooner in his administration's tenure:

Permit House Democrats to draft his stimulus legislation? What could Obama have been thinking? Only one answer fits: Obama wasn't thinking.

After the Harriet Miers debacle, Bush quickly recovered the support of Washington Republicans. He nominated Samuel Alito in Miers' place and then returned to his other duties as chief executive. That was that. Nobody ever had Bush figured for a brilliant mind anyway.

In recovering from the stimulus debacle, Obama is unlikely to prove quite so lucky. A brilliant mind is exactly what Obama's supporters in Washington thought he had. Brilliance defined Obama. Brilliance is what Obama was all about. Now we know that he has already made some dumb mistakes.

The glee among Republicans right now is only to be expected. The long faces among Obama's startled supporters in Washington are a lot more telling.

In 2007 and 2008, Obama was given virtually no vetting by a media deep in the midst of a "slobbering love affair," to borrow from the title of Bernard Goldberg's latest book. (Incidentally, Bernie will be a guest on this week's PJM Political show tomorrow on Sirius-XM satellite radio.) He (Obama, not Goldberg) encouraged voters to view him a cipher that they could project onto any and all hopes they wanted. He frequently engaged in messianic rhetoric while campaigning, and seemed to encourage similar responses from his more rabid fans--certainly, he did nothing to tamp down such responses.

Even when he won the election, and the media's comparisons to Lincoln, FDR, JFK, and other presidents venerated over decades or more of history continued, Obama consciously played into them, jetting back to Chicago and taking the train, a la Lincoln, to his inauguration.

What could go wrong once it became time for the least experienced executive in the nation's history to actually govern?

The etymology of an all-too popular and surprisingly insidious pop-culture phrase, explored by the new blog (and like ours, a Sekimori design), Gotham Resistance.

That's the headline from the Financial Times, which notes:

The US economy is suffering its steepest downturn since at least the 1970s and could descend into a depression, Jeff Immelt, General Electric's chief executive, warned on Thursday.

Far from warning about a devastating economic slowdown, most of GE's other spokesmen are surprisingly copacetic with the idea.

"Bill Gates just released mosquitos into the audience at TED and said, 'Not only poor people should experience this.'"

As Orrin Judd notes:

Two thoughts occur: (1) hasn't he been responsible for releasing enough bugs already; and, (2) if malaria actually was a disease of wealthy whites DDT wouldn't be banned.

Long before there Al Gore flunked out of Divinity School, this is yet another reminder of the horrors caused by the original junk science poseur, Rachel Carson.

On the other hand, Gates could easily make amends for this asinine stunt by becoming the next spokesman for Raid or Orkin.

"NBC's Ann Curry Gushes: 'Who Are We Going to Be' Because of Obamas?"

CBS's Katie Couric scolds the New York Post for running, as she sees it and decrees it, "an unfair picture" on their cover of President Obama.

"If [ABC thinks] they are bleeding audience numbers now, what do they suppose will be their audience's reaction when it is established that their chief Washington correspondent continues to be a key strategist for the Democratic Party?"

"Reporter Escorted From White House After Seeking Obama Autograph."

President Obama: "I think it's fair to say that I don't always get my most favorable coverage on Fox, but I think that's part of how democracy is supposed to work. You know, we're not supposed to all be in lock step here..."

At least once a season on TV's WKRP In Cincinnati, semi-competent news journalist Les Nessman would win Ohio's Silver Sow Award for his morning farm reports. Robert Kennedy Jr. sounds like he's definitely in the running for the fictitious award's next presentation ceremony, with this quote:

Today during a House Judiciary Committee hearing, Congressman Steve King asked Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to confirm a quote he made to the Des Moines Register in 2002: "Large-scale hog producers are a greater threat to the United States and U.S. democracy than Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network, says Robert F. Kennedy Jr., president of the Waterkeeper Alliance, a New York environmental group."

Kennedy responded: "I don't know if that's accurate, but I believe it, and I support it."

He'd face stiff competition from fellow Democrat Joe Biden, who has his own equally unique priorities for what's more important than the War On Terror:



(Oh to be a fly on the wall, if those two ever decided to compare notes on the topic.)

In his best-selling Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg wrote:

Like the editors of the old Soviet encyclopedias who would send out updates to instruct which pages should be torn out, American liberalism has repeatedly censored and rewritten its own history so that the "bad guys" were always conservatives and the good guys always liberals.

In The American Spectator W. James Antle III writes that you can see this phenomenon at work in Sam Tanenhaus' latest article:

I've been prodded to read and comment on this Sam Tanenhaus essay pronouncing conservatism dead. Tanenhaus is a smart guy who knows quite a bit about the conservative movement, much more than most liberal writers. But I'm not terribly impressed by his eulogy for the right. Uncharacteristically, Tanenhaus makes little effort to understand conservatives on their own terms. Instead we get embarrassingly tendentious liberal cliches like this:

Today, the situation is much bleaker. After George W. Bush's two terms, conservatives must reckon with the consequences of a presidency that failed, in large part, because of its fervent commitment to movement ideology: the aggressively unilateralist foreign policy; the blind faith in a deregulated, Wall Street-centric market; the harshly punitive "culture war" waged against liberal "elites."

This completely airbrushes out the "responsible" center-left's initial support for the Iraq war, the fact that the biggest "deregulation" relevant to banking was signed into law by Bill Clinton, the left's own role in the "harshly punitive 'culture war'" (which side imposed their will on the electorate via the courts?), and of course any distinctions between Bush's crony capitalism meets Sarbanes-Oxley meets bailouts and the laisezz faire wild west of Tanenhaus' fevered imagination.

Read the rest here; related thoughts from Orrin Judd.

Liberal blogger describe liberal legacy media as racist--for asking the president a question when he visited the White House press room. ("You can't ask questions in here! This is the press room!" Ann Althouse quipped with Strangelovian satire immediately after the incident.)

Such blue-on-blue reactionary thinking was merely a matter of when, as it's far from the first time that left has formed its own circular firing squad on the issue of race.

Back in 2005, I linked to a typically great article titled "California Screaming" by the now sadly deceased Cathy Seipp:

Behind the New Age grin of beatific self-righteousness with which so many Hollywood celebrities greet the world often lurks a tantrum ready to erupt. When the full, roiling boil is over, the slow simmer can last for weeks, if not months. By comparison, old-style screamers can seem quaint, almost benign. The storm may have been intense, but it passed quickly. A classic of the type -- the agent Norman Brokaw, for instance -- could suggest lunch within minutes of a blowup. And the scream usually took the form of a statement: "Get outta here!"

But new-style screamers eschew declarative sentences for rhetorical, F. Lee Bailey-esque questions: "What were you thinking? Why did you even pick up the phone? Do you even have a brain?" This can be harder to bear. As an observer told me once, "If it's 'You're fired,' then at least you're out. If it's someone trying to teach you a lesson, you're there, and you're stuck."

Some screamers can hardly utter a sentence that doesn't contain the f-word. The syllable almost seems to function as their sound, signifying only that they are in the room. Others are more careful with their language, because being sworn at is the point where many screamees stop listening and may even quit. So bland, schoolmarmish words of displeasure are amplified to ear-splitting volume. A vein-popping "Un-ACC-EPT-able!" is a great favorite. Also, a drawn out "DIS...A...PPOINTED!!!"

When in full throttle, the classic Hollywood screamer cannot be neither stopped nor shamed. I once heard a story about a studio executive who screamed at someone's assistant for a good five minutes before realizing he was in the wrong office -- possibly even on the wrong floor. "Well, if you see her," he yelled before stomping out, "tell her what I said!"

Screaming actors, it seems, can be easier to deal with, perhaps because they are not always famous for their brains. Many years ago, I read a story about how Roger Moore (a nonscreamer) took a younger actor aside and suggested he stop attacking everyone on the set. "I'm not in this business to win a popularity contest," the screamer fumed. "I just want to be a good actor."

"Well, you've failed at being a good actor," Moore replied reasonably. "Why not try for the popularity contest?"

Christian Bale is certainly a good actor, but he makes Paul Anka's infamous meltdown sound positively genteel with this must-hear rant.

Charles Platt was a senior writer for Wired, whom much like Michael Lewis, George Plimpton, George Orwell, and other journalists, decides to go to work in an industry reviled by, or otherwise unknown to elites--in Platt's case, Wal-Mart:

The picture above is of me, finishing my shift at the world's largest retailer. How did I move from being a senior writer at Wired magazine to an entry-level position in a company that is reviled by almost all living journalists?

It started when I read Nickel and Dimed, in which Atlantic contributor Barbara Ehrenreich denounces the exploitation of minimum-wage workers in America. Somehow her book didn't ring true to me, and I wondered to what extent a preconceived agenda might have biased her reporting. Hence my application for a job at the nearest Wal-Mart.

Getting in was not easy, as more than 100 applicants were competing for fewer than 10 job openings. Still, I made it through a very clever screening quiz, then through a series of three interviews, followed by two days of training. I felt ambivalent about taking advantage of the company's resources in this way, but I was certainly willing to do my part by working hard at the store, at least for a limited period.

The job was as dull as I expected, but I was stunned to discover how benign the workplace turned out to be.

Platt writes, "As for all those Wal-Mart horror stories--when I went home and checked the web sites that attack the company, I found that many of them are subsidized with union money." Of course, anti-capitalist forces demonizing department stores is hardly a new trend, and certainly not limited to America.

Read the whole thing, which concludes with a reference to Adam Shepard, the author of Scratch Beginnings, whom Glenn Reynolds and Dr. Helen Smith interviewed for one of their podcasts last year.

(Via Walter Olsen and John Hawkins.)

In his review of Amity Shlaes' The Forgotten Man for the Claremont Institute, Jonah Goldberg summarized the New Dealers' attempt to deploy military methods and central planning to nationalize America's economy thusly:

When liberals speak of unity and hope, what they really mean is success. The 1930s and 1960s, unlike the '20s and '50s, were decades when liberals, broadly speaking, were "winning." When you hear liberals bemoaning divisiveness and insisting that we must "get beyond" "labels" and "ideological" differences, what they are really saying is that their opponents should shut up and get with the program. The New Deal's appeal lies in the fact that it was the first time when progressive social engineers had real power without the galvanizing dynamic of a war. The Brains Trusters had spent much of the 1920s complaining "we planned in war," i.e., during World War I; they insisted that they should be allowed to plan in peace as well. The Depression gave them their shot. And that in a nutshell is why supposedly empirically minded and "reality-based" liberals still genuflect to the myth of the New Deal. It is the ne plus ultra of liberal power. Defending the New Deal is the first requirement of liberal power-worship.

Rusty Weiss spots a newspaper cartoonist so close and yet so far from this point, as he equates the passing of the so-called stimulus bill with the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima:

In one of the more insulting comparisons seen in recent memory, Albany Times Union editorial cartoonist John de Rosier does a major disservice to the honorable men who served during the Battle of Iwo Jima, by depicting recent efforts of Democrats to pass a non-stimulating 'economic stimulus plan' as equally heroic.

The cartoon shows Democrats in the role of the Marines featured in the Iwo Jima Memorial, a sculpture based on the famous photo by Joe Rosenthal entitled Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima. The exception to this replication lies in the flag being raised - the Dem's are trying to hoist a 'bailout flag' as opposed to a flag of the United States.

If that weren't insulting enough, the cartoon also shows the Republican Party mascot, the elephant, trying desperately to pull the flag down.

In short, the Democrats are trying to save our nation by heroically raising up the Obama bailout flag, while the villainous Republicans are trying to destroy our nation by stopping their efforts.

Meanwhile, in a brief item on Jonah's own Liberal Fascism book, Frank Wilson, the book editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer writes:

I downloaded Goldberg's book on my Kindle because I was curious about a book that had made it on to the NYT best-seller list without ever being reviewing in the Times or most other papers and because I didn't want to pay the full price for what I suspected might be a screed. I was pleasantly surprised to find it was a well-written historical survey of a set of ideas and how they grew. I was also surprised by what I learned about Mussolini.

As I wrote in my own review of Jonah's book:

Mussolini similarly invented the word "totalitarianism" as a way to describe a cradle-to-grave socialism that would bind all aspects of his nation together. "Mussolini meant it to be appealing to people," Goldberg said. "It was a sales pitch for his kind of government. He meant it as we would use words like 'holistic' today, as sort of covering every aspect of life; everyone's going to be included, everyone's going to be part of the community. No child is going to be left behind. That was the meaning of totalitarianism in its original conception."

Concurrently, the Philadelphia Inquirer seeks to get itself even deeper into bed with government, requesting a bailout from the state's Democratic governor. Needless to say, Il Duce would approve.

Related: The Illustrated Stimulus.

Mmmmm....steak.

(Meanwhile, Greg Pollowitz explains how PETA played NBC.)

He's not bad; his thetans are merely drawn that way.

Reuters reports that "New York City fears return to 1970s."

With a few notable exceptions, needless to say.

Gay Patriot writes, "Joy Behar Says Obama Too Perfect for Mockery":

On Sunday night, while doing my cardio, I caught what appeared to be rebroadcast of an episode of Larry King LIve. King asked The View's Joy Behar why comedians didn't make fun of the new president. The comedienne replied that this prez was just too perfect.*

Can you imagine how the media would react if a conservative had chastised a comedian for making fun of former President George W. Bush because he was "too perfect"? A few google searches yielded no mainstream criticism of Miss Behar's panegyric to the president (not even on the right-maybe that's because no one else was watching?)

It is truly frightening that a comedian in a free society would think her president too perfect for mockery.

As a former employee of ABC said in 2007 on Joy's show:

I'm saying that in America we are fed propaganda and if you want to know what's happening in the world go outside of the U.S. media because it's owned by four corporations one of them is this one. And you know what, go outside of the country to find out what's going on in our country because it's frightening. It's frightening.

Come back Rosie--all is forgiven!

(H/T: IP)

PBS's John Ridley:

"Quite simply, quite plainly, just by virtue his being, Obama is America. The first true American to lead our nation."

I thought questioning someone's patriotism and loyalties was bad. Ridley has manged to simultaneously trash the values of 43 earlier presidents in one shot.

Update: Like so many of us are tempted to do at moments such at this, Steven Den Beste shouts, "Hazukashii serifu kinshi tteba!!" Really, what else need be said?

An ABC morning show host in 2007: American morale is at an all time low because 9/11 couldn't have happened without massive government help.

An ABC morning show host in 2009: "Consumer confidence has to rebound, which won't happen without massive government help."

Sherman Frederick, the publisher of the Las Vegas Review Journal writes, "As our president said, it is time to grow up":

There is a growing faction of the American left that seeks revenge more than righteousness.

Intolerant of dissenting views, this faction thinks as comedian Janeane Garofalo does that some members of the opposing political party should be "jailed." Terrorist acts (such as mailing envelopes of white power to Mormon temples because the gay marriage vote in California went the church's way) are seen by this faction as understandable and acts of legitimate political expression.

There is also an ugly racial component to it. We first saw it with Obama's pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who said, among other things, that white America had deliberately inflicted black Africa with AIDS.

When the Rev. Wright first hit the national stage, we hardly knew what to make of his irrational and separatist statements. Consequently, we pretty much ignored the substance of Wright's racially divisive rhetoric and focused on it as a day-to-day political story. It made us more comfortable, I think.

But in light of the things we saw at the inauguration, it may be time to revisit the dangers of intolerance and hate -- no matter the color of the person who makes them -- and nip this ugly mean streak in the bud.

He's absolutely right, but he lost me with that last sentence. Nip it in the bud? This isn't exactly a new development: Garofalo's shtick dates back to 2003. The origins of the black liberation theology that fuels Obama's former spiritual advisor date back to the 1960s, not coincidentally, the terrorist heyday of Bill Ayers and other paramilitary Obama supporters. Radical payback for opposing views isn't exactly new, either.

Back in mid-2004 with an election year in full swing, Charles Krauthammer coined "the Pressure Cooker Theory of Hydraulic Release":

The loathing goes far beyond the politicians. Liberals as a body have gone quite around the twist. I count one all-star rock tour, three movies, four current theatrical productions and five best sellers (a full one-third of the New York Times list) variously devoted to ridiculing, denigrating, attacking and devaluing this president, this presidency and all who might, God knows why, support it.

How to explain? With apologies to Dr. Freud, I propose the Pressure Cooker Theory of Hydraulic Release.

The hostility, resentment, envy and disdain, all superheated in Florida, were not permitted their natural discharge. Came 9/11 and a lid was forced down. How can you seek revenge for a stolen election by a nitwit usurper when all of a sudden we are at war and the people, bless them, are rallying around the flag and hailing the commander in chief? With Bush riding high in the polls, with flags flying from pickup trucks (many of the flags, according to Howard Dean, Confederate), the president was untouchable.

The Democrats fell unnaturally silent. For two long, agonizing years, they had to stifle and suppress. It was the most serious case of repression since Freud's Anna O. went limp. The forced deference nearly killed them. And then, providentially, they were saved. The clouds parted and bad news rained down like manna: WMDs, Abu Ghraib, Richard Clarke, Paul O'Neill, Joe Wilson and, most important, continued fighting in Iraq.

Stripped of his halo, the president's ratings went down. The spell was broken. He was finally once again human and vulnerable. With immense relief, the critics let loose.

The result has been volcanic. The subject of one prominent new novel is whether George W. Bush should be assassinated. This is all quite unhinged. Good God. What if Bush is re-elected? If they lose to him again, Democrats will need more than just consolation. They'll need therapy.

The media's pressure cooker would pop yet again the following year: as Mickey Kaus wrote at the time, Katrina allowed them to go nuclear on Bush without sounding unpatriotic, unlike their GWOT and Iraq-bashing coverage.

So this isn't exactly a new development in politics--this is merely SOP for the American left.

"Now that the Obama Administration has taken power, it is critical for us to pay attention for how our language is being transformed before our eyes", The Gadfly Blog urges.

For some related thoughts, check out the conclusion of Byron York's recent interview with the man that Obama has apparently chosen to play Emmanuel Goldstein.

As Glenn Reynolds wrote last week, "Remember, it's only McCarthyism if you disagree with the politics."

As Amy Alkon notes, when Robert Reich writes, titles such as this emerge from his blog:

How to Create Jobs Without Them All Going to Skilled Professionals and White Male Construction Workers

But then, Reich has always had a way with words, as Jonathan Rauch spotted in a 1997 Slate article when he compared what Reich wrote in Locked In the Cabinet, Reich's memoirs of his days as Bill Clinton's labor secretary, with videotapes and transcripts of the actual events. Reich describes himself, as Jonah Goldberg wrote in Liberal Fascism (where I first discovered Rauch's Slate article), as trapped in a Thomas Nast cartoon, "in constant battle with greedy fat cats, Social Darwinists, and Mr. Monopoly." The actual transcripts and tapes describe a reality that's far more pedestrian.

But then such fantasies of the Reich Stuff make him right at home with Bill Clinton's "meaning of is" postmodernism, Hillary Clinton's fantasy snipers in Tuzla, and also President Obama, who as a candidate similarly misremembered at least one meeting with big business.

"What if the National Portrait Gallery had the graffiti it showcases in the exhibit vandalized on the side of their building? It would be helpful to have even a small amount of education."

Victor Davis Hanson notes the dichotomy that is the newly crowned President Obama:

For nearly three months since the election, we have been warned by President Obama, his staff, and the media not to burden him with unreal expectations that no mere mortal could meet.

But why then consciously borrow from Abraham Lincoln's speeches? And why re-create Lincoln's historic train ride to his inauguration--especially by flying back from Washington to Illinois to then return to D.C. by slow-moving railcar? Lincoln took the train because it was the only feasible way to get to Washington in 1861, not to copy the grand arrival of some earlier American savior.

Candidate Obama once adopted a presidential-like seal. He held a mass rally at Berlin's Victory Column (after his request for the more dramatic Brandenburg Gate was refused).

He adopted Greek temple sets at the Democratic convention. And like Zeus on Mt. Olympus, he talked about making the planet cool and the oceans recede.

And now he's capped all that by warning us to lower our expectations!

But if Obama deliberately takes on the trappings of a messiah, why shouldn't we expect messianic solutions?

Would you settle for tales of brave Obamacles?

Update: On the other hand, "Could President Obama really be Bill McKay?"

Victor Davis Hanson has "An Uneasy Feeling"--and who can blame him?

I distilled from the press coverage and the crowds and the punditry yesterday that for all too many suddenly a vote for Obama redeems America. Now, to paraphrase Michelle Obama, for the first time in their lives they are apparently proud of the United States. (Had we not had the financial meltdown in mid-September, and had Obama stayed three points back in the polls, would millions have stayed soured on America and now in sullen silence licked their wounds?).

So I am surprised that suddenly the election of a single individual means that we are united, patriotic, proud of America? Suddenly Okinawa or Antietam, or all those who died at the Argonne, are ours to claim again? (This reminds of elementary school, when our third-grade split up into two sides, as the teacher quizzed us on geography-and the losers of the contest cried and said unfair and how they didn't like school or Mrs. Wilson, and then when they won the next day, how suddenly third grade became glorious, and Mrs. Wilson and her games were once again wonderful).

But America was always ours, the public, and the nation transcends the proposition of whether Obama gets elected or not--given that the United States, in its worst hour, was better than the alternatives at their best. So I think it would be wise to cool it on the "I am now proud of America" rhetoric. If getting your way means suddenly the dead at Iwo or those who were blown up in B-17s over Germany are at last your own and matter, then we are in deep trouble.

Don't miss VDH's "More Modest Proposals in the Age of Obama" aimed at The One's more beatific supporters. Such as Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher, whom you can hear at 3:54 in the latest Hollywood Obaworshiping video stating, "I pledge to be a servant to our president and all mankind."

All of which is summed by this observation by Dan Blatt of Gay Patriot (via one of his commenters) on the yin and yang of the last eight years:

Obama worship is the flip side of Bush hatred. They love the one without knowing what he stands for and loath the other while mispresenting his record.

Exactly.

(H/T: IP)

As Jim Geraghty writes, "Surprising very few of us, we see that once in office, Obama is more open about his gun control efforts at WhiteHouse.gov."

Jonah Goldberg posts his initial thoughts on President Obama's speech and notes, "I agree with most of the folks here that it wasn't as well-written as I expected. There were some awfully clunky cliches in there", after listing a few, he hits upon a great observation regarding freedom versus collectivism:

One last point, for now. There was also a great deal of nonsense in there. Ramesh already mentioned the bit about harnessing the sun and whatnot to power our factories (why not distill energy from our strategic unicorn manure stockpile). But the line that grated on me most came from the bit about service and sacrifice. He said:

For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life.

For us, they toiled in sweatshops and settled the West; endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth.

No, "they" didn't. Slaves certainly didn't endure the lash of the whip out of a sense of service and sacrifice for us. That is one of the reasons slavery is so evil; it isn't voluntary. Suffice it to say that if that line had come out of a different man's mouth it would not be nearly so well-received. Nor did those immigrants make their sacrifices for "us." They made them for themselves, for their own pursuit of happiness, for their families.

This is not to say we do not benefit from the sweat of their brows and the shedding of their blood, but Obama's rhetorical ambition seems broader than that insight. He wants to forge a new sense of collective identity. There are aspects of that effort that are admirable or defensible, to be sure. Don't we conservatives lament a lost sense of citizenship and the erosion of a common culture? But too often he comes across as wanting to take that collective vision and drape it over individualism and enterprise like a wet blanket. The pursuit of individual prosperity is not selfish and the effort to defend it is neither a tired dogma nor a childish thing. I often get the sense that President Obama doesn't see it that way, never more so than today.

Which may be one of the reasons why one of the most visible scorecards for that prosperity was so off today.

Kathy Shaidle writes that Ayn Rand is slowly being embraced in one of the nations that needs her the most: France.

Meanwhile, England, on permanent recessional since about the 30 seconds after Kiplings' poem/warning in 1897 (save for a timeout in WWII) is taking grudging steps to re-enter the late 19th century as well: "In Britain, the slowly dawning realization that burglary is a serious crime." The Great Relearning continues apace.

In early November, I wrote:

To borrow from the vernacular of The Boss's early '70s glory days (to coin a phrase), has any musician become more Establishment than Springsteen?

Allahpundit notes the ranks of the Establishment have suddenly swelled:

One of the amusements of the Obama years will be watching the counterculture transition from inveighing against The Man to trying to get The Man reelected.

Too bad though that there doesn't appear to be an opposition party whose leaders have enough brains to capitalize on this.

Some thoughts on "the primal tribal imperative that underlies the relentless scapegoating of our 43rd president by his political adversaries" from Sisu Willis.

Related: On the other hand, "Welcome back from the Wilderness of Despair and Oppression, kids."

In "A Manual for Left-Wing Living", his new article in the Wall Street Journal, Kyle Smith reads Nation magazine's Guide To The Nation so you don't have to. Here's a sample:

In Monty Python's "Life of Brian," the People's Front of Judea was always prepared to respond to any crisis with an immediate burst of discussion. In "The Nation Guide to the Nation," praise is showered on the Brecht Forum cultural center in New York, which the editors note was recommended in 2000 by the Village Voice as the "Best place to start thinking about the revolution." Keep cogitating, revolutionistas. Someday your putsch will come.

Read the rest--then stop by Kyle's fine blog. (Berets, turtlenecks, sunglasses and bongos optional, of course.)

Via the Liberal Fascism blog, some thoughts from Byron York and Jay Nordlinger on all-enveloping corporate Obama worship. And much more from Debbie Schlussel, who calls into yesterday's B-Cast on Breitbart.tv to discuss Obama taking central command of the internecine battles in the cola wars--and getting his own trading cards as a result:

Related thoughts from Hot Air's Allahpundit.

Update: "Everybody remembers those pro-Bush celebrity videos sponsored by major corporations, right? Right?"

Jonah Goldberg spots Bill Moyers channeling Jimmy the Greek.

Jonah writes, "It's long past time they put Moyers out to pasture." Of course, if his statement goes down the memory hole, it wouldn't be the first time an unsavory element of Moyers is excused by the liberal establishment.

The Blogfather writes:

Remember, it's only McCarthyism if you disagree with the politics.

Just ask Tom Hanks.

Via Jonah Goldberg, this is a well produced look at the political spectrum and its history. Jonah writes, "I have my quibbles, but overall I think this pretty useful." I'm very much in sync with the graph that outline the poltical spectrum, which appears at 30 seconds into the video:

Headline on Contact Music.com: "Benicio Del Toro--'Che Guevara Was A Warrior, Like Batman.'"

Which fits nicely alongside the riff Oliver Stone went off on immediately after 9/11 that terrorists are like Einstein. Both quotes speak volumes of the moral inversion that is modern (and by modern, I mean insanely regressive) Hollywood.

(Found via "Big Hollywood", appropriately enough.)

The New Jersey Star-Ledger asks, "Are we done with green?"

Now that money is tight, will environmentalism turn out to have been just a passing trend -- the political equivalent of the pet rock?

Probably not, say the experts. While some consumers may have to put their concern for the planet on the back burner for now, they will likely resume their new-found green habits once the economy improves.

"It was all about the environment last year. But it's all about the economy this year. It's like we can't think about more than one thing at a time. It's either one or the other -- almost as if we can't do both," said Ann Mack, who forecasts trends for the advertising firm JWT, formerly J. Walter Thompson.

Actually, the two are remarkably intertwined, as Mark Steyn noted at the end of last year, and Bill Clinton at its start. And presumably these fellows are getting quite a chuckle out the current economy.

If you've named your kid Hitler (and one of his siblings "JoyceLynn Aryan Nation Campbell"), you've already come out in favor of a leviathan all-encompassing state. So why act surprised when it works against you?

Patrick McGhoohan, the star of the awesome (at least at its best) 1960s cult TV series The Prisoner died at age 80. Maureen Ryan of the Chicago Tribune notes:

I thought I'd also mention that all 17 episodes of "The Prisoner" are now available for free at the AMC Web site. That cable network is remaking the series with Jim Cavaziel and Ian McKellan for a 2009 release. More information about that version of "The Prisoner" is here.

If you've never seen the series, picture a 1960s TV spy as conceived by a collaboration of Ian Fleming, George Orwell and Franz Kafka. Here are the opening titles, which feature (I believe) Vick Flick on electric 12-string guitar, the same man who played the machine gun bass guitar riff on Monty Norman and John Barry's 007 theme.




As for the show itself, James Lileks once wrote:

I'd stayed up late watching, of all things, the last episode of the Prisoner. VH-1 ran it as part of an Austin Powers 60s spy marathon. In my second year of college I was devoted to the Prisoner, and watched it with religious rapture on Sunday nights, convinced that McGoohan had crafted a perfect show - a paranoid spy drama with Large Looming Themes about the individual and society. But even then in my hemp-addled state I saw the last episode for what it was: an inedible stew of sophmoric allegory that ruined everything that had gone before. So last night I watched it again to see if it was truly as bad as I remembered, and yes, it was. Interesting concepts, but tritely executed. Even so, I'll give him credit for one thing: having spent 13 episodes defending the rights of the individual to be an individual, he turned the idea on its head at the end, and suggested that absolute individuality corrupts absolutely, that it corrupts society. I didn't understand that in 1977; I didn't see that point.

Interesting point, but when it's being made by 30 robed guys in black-and-white masks pounding a table, you have to roll your eyes and say wow, man, heavy.

That said, the Prisoner was still a good show. What was American TV doing at the time? I Dream of Jeanie.

And The Jackie Gleason Show, in whose timeslot The Prisoner ran on American TV as a 1968 summer replacement.

Update: Frank Martin quotes a remarkably prescient moment from the show.

Back in 2003, James Bennett of UPI wrote a superb essay on the state of Europe in the immediate post-9/11 years that in some ways foreshadowed Mark Steyn's epic "It's The Demography, Stupid" article in early 2006 and subsequent best-selling America Alone. (For my audio interview with Mark on the book, click here.)

Key passage from Bennett:

Continental Europeans, helped by the Marshall Plan and American investment, rebuilt their countries with vigor after 1945. Led by the last generations to mature in the environment of the hybrid Jewish-European civilization, Europe seemed to pick up where it left off in 1933.

Gradually, however, Europe seemed to run out of creativity, in everything from arts, to academia, to demographic vigor, to the will to political reform. Endless rehashing of elsewhere-discredited Marxism replaced creative political thought. Overt fascism and national chauvinism were banned, but a new Euro-chauvinism took its place, loudly proclaiming the superiority of European ways over crude American ones -- a new chauvinism on a wider scale, based like the old national chauvinism primarily on resentment.

It may be coincidence, but these new generations are the ones who grew up without the experience of studying, working and socializing with substantial numbers of Jews. Can this have no effect on politics?

Well now we know--in the Wall Street Journal, Daniel Schwammenthal writes, "Europe Reimports Jew Hatred: The mythical Arab Street now reaches deep into Paris, London, Berlin and Madrid."

As the Professor adds, "Well, it's not as if that represents a big break with the past or anything..."

Update: The Freepers appear to have the full text of Bennett's essay, which may no longer available on the original UPI site.

More: Heh, indeed.™

Ten years ago, the late Paul Weyrich wrote:

I believe that we probably have lost the culture war. That doesn't mean the war is not going to continue, and that it isn't going to be fought on other fronts. But in terms of society in general, we have lost. This is why, even when we win in politics, our victories fail to translate into the kind of policies we believe are important.

In his latest column, Jay Nordlinger looks at the state of the overculture and similarly concludes, "It seems to me that the Left has won: utterly and decisively":

What I mean is, the Saturday Night Live, Jon Stewart, Bill Maher mentality has prevailed. They decide what a person's image is, and those images stick. They are the ones who say that Cheney's a monster, W.'s stupid, and Palin's a bimbo. And the country, apparently, follows.

I have a friend who teaches at a prominent university, and she says that, when Palin's name is mentioned, the people laugh. In the course of the 2008 presidential campaign, an extraordinarily accomplished woman -- more accomplished than most of the rest of us will ever be -- was turned into a laughingstock.

What are the shaping institutions of American life? The news media. Entertainment television. The movies. Popular music. The schools, K through grad school. In whose hands are those institutions? In what areas do conservatives predominate? Country music, NASCAR, some churches? (Talk radio too, I suppose -- no wonder so many on the left want to shut it down.)

I will be talking more about this in the coming weeks, months, and possibly years. Sidney Blumenthal once wrote a book called "The Rise of the Counter-Establishment" (meaning conservative associations and institutions). The counter-establishment needs to be tended, and beefed up.

A country that believes that Cheney's a monster, W.'s stupid, and Palin's a bimbo is a country with its head up its . . .

Donkey?

For a longform video look at the above topic, tune into John Ziegler (he of the upcoming How Obama Got Elected documentary) talking with the hosts of Breitbart.TV's B-Cast program yesterday. (Which concluded with my recent look at our incoming gaffe-o-matic president and vice president, after a brief mime-is-money silent interlude from the hosts and their failed soundboard.)

Jennifer Rubin posits that "the president-elect may end up pleasing conservatives more than McCain would have". I think the jury's still very much out on that, but Obama's already starting to alienate the nuttier fringes of the far left--scroll down to the bottom of Zombietime's coverage of the recent Gaza War Protest in San Francisco for plenty of anti-Obama vitriol.

Last year, most PUMAs angry at Obama for derailing Hillary Clinton's election bid eventually got back in line, if not in love with The One, the bloom has come off of at least one media romance rather quickly.

Edward Bernard Glick writes, "One has to wonder whether we would have fought the Second World War if American Leftists then had the defeatist 'war-is-never-an-option' mindset that afflicts so many of them now."

They did--they were simply overruled by Stalin.

(H/T: FR.)

I had planned to post a link to this item by Mark Hemingway in the Corner...

Here's a handy map Prop 8 opponents have put together showing you where donors to prop 8 live. You have to love the "Jump to San Francisco, Salt Lake City , or Orange County" feature. If someone put together a map showing where all the gay people in the neighborhood live that would properly be called an implicit threat, but this is altogether different, right?

....But this article titled "The Revival Of The Blacklist" at The American Vision puts a number of related pieces together, along with a note of another fear of cold war tactics in a hot election battle far from Los Angeles:

The Franken-Coleman election in Minnesota is testimony to the fact that conservatives fear liberal blacklisting. A lot of liberal money came in to support of Franken by noted liberals like Tom Hanks, Robin Williams, George Clooney, Michael J. Fox, Ted Danson, David Letterman, Mike Myers, Dan Aykroyd, and Steve Martin. Because the FCC data base is open to the media, those who donate are available to the Hollywood left. A conservative who donated to Coleman would be "outed" in periodicals like Variety and Politico and might find it difficult getting steady work in the entertainment industry (see interview here).

A similar tactic is being used to punish those who supported Proposition 8. A Los Angeles Times article reports that many "in liberal Hollywood who fought to defeat the initiative banning same-sex marriage and are now reeling with recrimination and dismay. Meanwhile, activists continue to comb donor lists and employ the Internet to expose those who donated money to support the ban. Already out is Scott Eckern, director of the nonprofit California Musical Theatre in Sacramento, who resigned after a flurry of complaints from prominent theater artists, including 'Hairspray' composer Marc Shaiman, when word of his contribution to the Yes on [Prop] 8 campaign surfaced."

A letter writer to the San Francisco Chronicle who supported Prop 8 was intimidated when Internet search engines were used "to find the letter writer's small business, his Web site (which included the names of his children and dog), his phone number and his clients. And they posted that information in the 'Comments' section of SFGate.com--urging, in ugly language, retribution against the author's business and its identified clients."

Now, is this to say that conservatives can't work in Hollywood today? Not at all. Is there a fear factor that keeps conservatives from speaking out? I don't doubt it. Those who are touted as conservatives usually have no stated public opinion on abortion and homosexuality. Patricia Heaton and Angie Harmon are notable exceptions. Kurt Russell is listed as a conservative, actually, a libertarian, which might explain why he's living with Goldie Hawn and not married to her, although I must say that he's stayed with her longer than Brad Pitt did with Jennifer Aniston. Many (most?) are economic conservatives like Kelsey Grammar and Drew Carey. And there are more who are being encouraged to make their conservative beliefs public.

Like so much of liberalism, liberals are hypocritical. They decry the blacklisting of the 1940s and 1950s but don't seem to mind if the right people are being blacklisted today who defy their pet causes.

Thus rendering the well over 40 year old Annual Blacklist Movie (scroll to about 1:15 into this edition of Silicon Graffiti from July for a montage of clips from numerous examples of this Tinseltown perennial) as even more hypocritical than it already was:

Related thoughts here.

John Hinderaker writes, "The Illinois Supreme Court ruled today that Governor Rod Blagojevich's appointment of Roland Burris' to the Senate does not require the Secretary of State's signature to be valid":

he unanimous ruling came as no surprise, but it stripped Senate Democrats of their principal excuse for barring Burris from taking the seat to which he has been appointed. It now appears that Mr. Burris will soon be Senator Burris after all.

Meanwhile, "Dems Melt in the Heat of Burris Fiasco", Jonah Goldberg observes:

Now, I certainly understand why Reid & Co. caved. For starters, Reid's not exactly the brightest crayon in the box.

But why all the fuss in the first place? Isn't this how it always works? The Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates, an impressive African-American writer, is amazed that "Reid has been outmaneuvered by the sort of overt, hamfisted identity politics deployed in the '70s."

The '70s? So this sort of thing stopped more than three decades ago? I had no idea. What planet do my newscasts come from?

I thought this was simply what liberals and Democrats do. When Newt Gingrich introduced the Contract with America, black Democrats denounced it as racist. Charlie Rangel proclaimed, "Hitler wasn't even talking about doing these things." When impeachment threatened Bill Clinton, he draped himself in black ministers and staffers. The NAACP ran an ad narrated by the daughter of James Byrd, a black man brutally murdered in a hate crime, insinuating that then-presidential candidate George W. Bush's refusal to support hate-crime legislation in Texas was like murdering her father again. In the recent campaign, nearly the entire liberal punditocracy insisted that opposition to Barack Obama could only be explained by racism, a story line egged on by Obama himself when convenient.

And don't tell me Blago's corruption changes the equation. Has anyone read about the baleful history of minority set-aside programs in cities like Chicago? Cronies and grifters are routinely given sweetheart contracts under the guise of fighting discrimination when in reality it's all a riot of kickbacks, "pay-to-play" and cronyism. People don't call Jesse Jackson a shakedown artist for nothing.

There are two reasons why this spectacle shocks some liberals. The first is that Blago, Burris, and Rush used this tactic on fellow Democrats. And since Democrats can't be motivated by racism, any ploy like this must be cynical. When the same gambit is used on Republicans, it's called "speaking truth to power." Second, some honestly believed that Obama represented a real change of the racial landscape. So far, alas, these folks just look naive.

Finally, in the face of impeachment, Gov. Blagojevich stands tall: "A Blagojevich spokesman said the governor will not resign."

Allahpundit asks, why would he?

He just got done rolling Harry Reid, and Fitzgerald's indictment is still months away. I'm not even sure what the charges against him in the impeachment trial will be at this point. Supposedly he can no longer perform the duties of governor effectively. Really? He was effective enough to make the entire U.S. Senate choke on the Burris appointment.

And if all this sounds surreal so far, you ain't seen nothin' yet.

Update: "Following a decision by the Illinois Supreme Court, Jesse White, the Illinois secretary of state, has certified Roland Burris' appointment to the Senate, removing a major roadblock blocking Burris' ascension to the body." Does this make the headline above official? It seems likely that Harry Reid's not going to offer very much additional pushback. But hey, between DC and Illinois, anything's possible.

Yesterday, we mentioned "Pallywood", the perpetual Palestinian propaganda machine. In the Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg recently explored "The World's Pornographic Interest in Jewish Moral Failure", which included this excerpt:

Once, in Khan Younis, I actually saw gunmen unwrap a shrouded body, carry it a hundred yards and position it atop a pile of rubble -- and then wait a half-hour until photographers showed. It was one of the more horrible things I've seen in my life. And it's typical of Hamas. If reporters would probe deeper, they'd learn the awful truth of Hamas. But Palestinian moral failings are not of great interest to many people.

One of Charles Johnsons' readers believes he's spotted yet another Palestinian snuff film.

No sign of Jay Sherman or Bart Simpson (though I think we know where Homer stands), but Debbie Schlussel spots one of the world's biggest cartoon heroes in the tank for the world's biggest celebrity. No word yet on whether they'll be teaming up for a sequel to this Very Special Issue of Spider-Man.

Back in 2004, Power Line's John Hinderaker wrote that comic books were "a medium in which the liberals will have a hard time competing", but the left's Long March Through The Institutions beginning in the 1960s and '70s also included a stop there, alas.

Found via the Corner, the Heritage Institute has produced an eye-opening graphic on unemployment in the 1930s, which notes that FDR's New Deal programs never drove unemployment under 20 percent until the US geared up for WWII. The left have been calling for a New New Deal since at least the spring of 2008 before the economic turbulence of the fall, and Obama is more than happy to oblige and spend a lot more taxpayer funds. It's never worked, but why let history stop you?

Update: It's also worth noting that the economy was "pre-socialized" by President Bush in the last months of his administration. There's often much more continuity in presidents with seemingly disparate policies than first meets the eye.

As Charles Johnson writes, linking to this essay by Steve Emerson on the Gray Lady's love of all things radical chic:

It's bizarre and disgusting to see much of America's media making excuses for a bloodthirsty, openly genocidal death cult. Something is deeply wrong with journalism in this country.

Meanwhile, Bob Owens explores the ongoing love affair between Reuters and Hamas, with an assist from out epic "Picture Kill: How We Got Here" post from 2006 on the media culture that allowed Adnan Hajj and other fauxtographers to flourish.

In his Los Angeles Times column (making left coast leftwing heads explode since 2005!) Jonah Goldberg looks at the moral inversion of the Middle East:

A sick mixture of Holocaust envy and Holocaust denial is the defining spirit of Hamas. Indeed, Holocaust denial passes for a scholarly pursuit not just in Gaza but throughout much of the Arab and Muslim world.

The head of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, literally earned a doctorate in it. His doctoral thesis became the book, "The Other Side: the Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism," in which he denounces "the Zionist fantasy, the fantastic lie that 6 million Jews were killed." In Hamas' eyes, Abbas is an incorrigible moderate.

It's Palestinian Islamists who have ideological and political ties to Nazism stretching back to the days of "Hitler's Mufti," Haj Amin Husseini, a happy warrior for the Nazi cause.

So why the obsession with casting the Israelis as the new Hitlerites? One answer is surely that critics know such charges are painful to a country largely born of the Holocaust and marked by its scars. It also grabs attention, galvanizes radicals, vents legitimate frustrations and anger and helps demonize the enemy and, hence, justify the deliberate murder of "Zionists everywhere," as Hamas often declares in its communiques.

But I think, deep down, the desire to cast the Israelis as Nazis is fueled by the haters' need to see their own hatreds and ambitions mirrored in their enemy's actions. Hamas has an avowedly Hitlerite agenda. The only way to make such an agenda defensible is to convince yourself and others that the Israelis deserve it. Hence, Hamas and its allies insist that when they aim rockets at grade schools and playgrounds, they are resisting the "new Nazis." It brings to mind Huey Long's reported prophecy that if fascism ever came to America, it would be called anti-fascism. Well, with Hamas, Hitlerism comes to the Middle East wearing the mask of anti-Hitlerism.

Meanwhile, over at Pajamas HQ, Ron Rosenbaum explores "Some Differences Between Hamas and the Nazi Party."

In 2007, it was giant sun shades orbiting the earth to block imaginary global warming. Today, as Tim Blair notes, it's giant mirrors in outer space to block carbon dioxide, as environmentally correct engineers dust off an old chestnut from Arthur C. Clarke.

Meanwhile, here's a massive terraforming project that looks like much more fun.

Noemie Emery charts the strange twists and turns of Clan Kennedy:

From Joe Sr. on down to his sons and their children, the Kennedys have been many things to most men. Morally, they have been profiles in courage and cowardice: They fled Luftwaffe bombs in Blitz-ridden London, and in wartime sought out the most dangerous missions; they have saved shipmates from drowning in dangerous waters, and left a woman to drown in a scandalous accident; they have given the last full measure of devotion in war and its aftermath; and in peace and in new generations, they have sometimes asked for much more than their due. In politics, they have been far right, far left, and dead center; they have been male chauvinists and quivering slaves to the feminist movement; they have been isolationists, interventionists, and democratic crusaders; they have been Churchillian and Chamberlainesque. Joe was an isolationist and a right-winger; Ted an isolationist and a left-winger; Jack and Bobby were centrists and interventionists, though in contrasting ways. The rational Jack was a centrist on just about everything, while the visceral Bobby was a melange of both left and right instincts; a friend in his time to Cesar Chavez and Senator Joseph McCarthy; a man who attacked Lyndon B. Johnson and his Great Society from the left, right, and center, and in his last years sounded like Ronald Reagan and a student protester on alternating days.

The ironic fact is that while Joe bought Jack his seat in the House in his first election (with help from Jack's maternal grandfather, a one-time mayor of Boston), the Kennedy brand was built on the talents of Jack and of Bobby, whose centrist convictions the latter-day Kennedys have gone to some pains to repudiate. Jack, it is known now, governed slightly to the right of Richard M. Nixon, while his heirs have been to the left of McGovern, who (along with his running-mate, a Kennedy in-law) lost 49 states to Nixon in 1972.

This has created between the legacy and those who claim to uphold it a disconnect, which voters sense and act on even if the legatees seem to deny its existence. At the start of the Cold War, John Kennedy urged rearmament, and ran to the right of his Republican rivals, while Ted Kennedy strenuously fought against all the arms systems with which the Cold War was finally won. Bobby Kennedy was famous for his loathing of Fidel Castro, a left-wing Latin American dictator who used his country as a base for America's enemies, while Bobby's sons suck up to Hugo Chávez, the Castro-lite left-wing Venezuelan dictator, who makes common cause with America's enemies, including Iran.

A number of Bobby's children, in particular, have seemed to go in for left-wing fringe causes, backed by the kind of boutique liberals Bobby once thought of as "sick." This is the reason the attempts of the younger Kennedys to tap into the emotional charge of the legacy have fallen with such a dull thud: the reason that despite lavish send-offs, no Kennedy of the third generation has achieved lift-off beyond local office; the reason that Ted Kennedy, adored in his state and by the base of his party, has always been a hard sell outside them, and was humiliated by the despised Jimmy Carter--and by his own party members--in the 1980 campaign.

The Kennedys, however, seem oblivious to these contradictions, a fact shown in Caroline's choice of her cousin Kerry to serve as spokesman and surrogate, even though Kerry's public service credentials are even weaker than Caroline's, and her main claim to public attention was as a tabloid heroine in a spectacular divorce in 2003 from Andrew Cuomo, Caroline's rival in dynasticism. Caroline meanwhile is trying to run on the legacy of her father and Bobby, while embracing a post-60s Teddy-type platform strikingly out of step with that of her father and late uncle.

Would Jack, who threatened pre-emptive war over missiles in Cuba, have really opposed a war with Iraq after Saddam defied U.N. resolutions? Would Bobby, who made his chops busting corrupt labor unions, have supported the end of the secret ballot in union elections? What would Jack and Bobby have said to the feminist social agenda, up to and including late-term abortion? And what would Bobby have said of gay marriage?

If Caroline wants to run as a legatee, she should explain which Kennedy legacy she supports, and why she supports it (including the tax cuts put in by her father.) She could start by reading her father's inaugural and seeing if there are any parts she believes in. Would she "bear any burden and pay any price" to ensure the survival of liberty? If she wouldn't, she should tell us why.

You can hear my interview with James Piereson, the author of Camelot and the Cultural Revolution, on JFK's 1960 election in the year-end edition of PJM Political by clicking here; and for a look at Caroline helping to launch the latest in a quadrennial search for a would-be successor to the throne, click here.

As the denizens of Berkeley celebrate the incoming Obama administration by remembering the aura of the penumbra of a vaguely remembered emotion called patriotism (having long since confused it with nationalism and filed it away under the heading of Scoundrel, Last Refuge Of), Orrin Judd responds, "If you're only 'loyal' when your preference prevails, it is yourself you love, not your country."

See also this lengthy post from Linda Kimball titled "The New Left, Cultural Marxism, and Psychopolitics Disguised as Multiculturalism."

Headline via the Binkmeister, who has a thorough catalog of links in his latest post documenting many other examples of a world gone insane, details via Kathy Shaidle:

Two Israelis were wounded today in a shooting incident in the Rosengardscentret in Odense [Denmark] on the island of Funen just after 3 p.m., according to police. Police said the nationality of the perpetrator was uncertain, although he was said to be a foreigner.

One of the victims was hit in the arm, the other was wounded in the leg, according to reports. Both were taken to hospital, but police were unable to provide information on their condition.

Eyewitnesses told bt.dk that the perpetrator arrived in a hairdresser's salon owned by one of the Israelis. He was said by eyewitnesses to have shouted something 'in a Middle-Eastern language' after which he began shooting.

One of the Israelis was said to have tried to flee, while the other threw a stool at the man. Both, however, were hit.

The police spokesman said that six bullets had been fired.

The Mere Rhetoric blog adds:

This is usually where I'd write something like "on the plus side this was probably just over exuberant anti-Zionism and had nothing to do with anti-Semitism." But we're talking about a country where "Jews are Allah's enemies" is a popular protest chant, so there might actually have been a little bit of anti-Semitism involved.

Complete with video of said chant.

At the top of the first post we linked to is news piped in from 33 A.D., regarding a long abandoned form of capital punishment that's making a surprising comeback in its region of origin...

"Bad move Number 1: Wearing a Nazi outfit. Bad move Number 2: Pointing a rifle at police:

The University of Washington student shot to death by police in the first hours of 2009 after pointing a World War II-vintage rifle at officers had an abiding fascination with the past, but no love of Nazism.

The 22-year-old student of German and Scandinavian history was wearing a Nazi-era uniform when two Seattle police officers shot him early Thursday morning near the door of his University District apartment.

According to police, officers were called to the 5200 block of 17th Avenue Northeast to investigate a report of two or three men firing weapons into the air. Officers say they fired on the man after he brandished what was described by witnesses as a bolt-action rifle.

Stupid fool--if you're going to reenact World War II, follow the lead of the Batley Townswomen's Guild:





On-campus Liberal Fascism of a different sort observed here.

The idea of newspapers being bailed out began as a post-election joke by P.J. O'Rourke, but since satire can never compete with reality for pure absurdity, it's rapidly gaining steam in the real world, thanks to an insane request by some Connecticut newspapers to a would-be government benefactor:

Connecticut lawmaker Frank Nicastro sees saving the local newspaper as his duty. But others think he and his colleagues are setting a worrisome precedent for government involvement in the U.S. press.

Nicastro represents Connecticut's 79th assembly district, which includes Bristol, a city of about 61,000 people outside Hartford, the state capital. Its paper, The Bristol Press, may fold within days, along with The Herald in nearby New Britain.

That is because publisher Journal Register, in danger of being crushed under hundreds of millions of dollars of debt, says it cannot afford to keep them open anymore.

Nicastro and fellow legislators want the papers to survive, and petitioned the state government to do something about it. "The media is a vitally important part of America," he said, particularly local papers that cover news ignored by big papers and television and radio stations.

To some experts, that sounds like a bailout, a word that resurfaced this year after the U.S. government agreed to give hundreds of billions of dollars to the automobile and financial sectors.

Ed Morrissey responds:

The only reason -- the only reason -- that news media is vital to a democracy is its independence from government. Think about this. Is The National Enquirer vital to democracy? [Actually, increasingly so--Ed] Will the Republic fall if Entertainment Weekly suddenly closed its doors? Not at all, not even if the entire paparazzi industry suddenly collapsed.

The need for a truly independent media is to make sure that the citizenry is fully informed of government activity and policy, and not just relying on the self-serving communications from elected officials. Without independence, newspapers and other media have as much value as press releases from Congressional offices.

Now, what happens when government suddenly takes a stake in newspapers and other media? Can they remain independent -- or will they cater themselves to those politicians who support those subsidies and target politicians who don't? In fact, the very act of asking for those bailouts has destroyed their independence and credibility on political matters, the very core of what makes a free media necessary for a democracy.

At this point, the best possible outcome would be to let the newspapers crash and burn. They're worthless now as an independent voice in Connecticut. If the market demand remains for print-and-deliver newspapers, then we will see private capital form to meet the demand. If not, then all the taxpayer subsidies in the world would not have saved them anyway.

We already know of one Connecticut newspaper that's announced publicly that it's in the tank to its region's politicians, and in the new spirit of old media -- "Comforting the Comfortable" -- it appears it will soon be joined by others.

Related thoughts from Roger Kimball, here.

Several of the recent posts here have focused on the surprisingly brief life and quiet death of objectivity in the legacy mass media. Or as Victor Davis Hanson wrote in the last days of the 2008 presidential election, "Sometime in 2008, journalism as we knew it died, and advocacy media took its place."

The replacement is a curiously schizophrenic beast; blending punditry and journalism; turning every newspaper into the Washington Times without the conservative op-eds, every network news department into Fox News without the pro-American populism. Regarding the latter trend, last month Robert Stacy McCain wrote:

The rise of Fox News as the No. 1 cable news outlet has resulted in ideological counterprograming. [emphasis in original--Ed] The success of a conservative news network has had an effect that might be best understood by reference to Newton's third law of motion. At first, there was the "equal effect" -- chastened by Fox's success, most networks sought to rein in their traditional liberal bias. But then, after the 2004 election, the "opposite effect" kicked in. Network executives figured, "Hey, Fox already has a monopoly on conservative viewers. Let's let our freak flags fly and give liberals what they really want." I really noticed this phenomenon during the 2006 campaign, when the media (a) pretended that the contributions Jack Abramoff's clients made to Democrats were meaningless, and (b) presented Mark Foley as the GOP poster boy. The existence of Fox News provides a ready-made excuse for liberals in the media to think of their bias as "balancing" Fox.

But half of the time those on the inside either don't know what's changed, or if they do, won't admit it publicly. (Occasionally a voice in these institutions will come clean and then a successor will forget the earlier admission--or more painfully, his own.)

All of which helps to set the stage for this post by Glenn Reynolds: "Paul Mulshine Blows It."

Update: Don't miss the extended comment by Jay Rosen regarding Mulshine's column, on Fausta Wertz's blog. Jay writes (amongst other things):

We are quite well informed about why the newspaper business is collapsing. The immediate cause: readers are moving to the Net but for various reasons the advertising isn't. Newspapers are stuck with huge capital structures they cannot easily jettison and revenues are falling. No one who writes seriously about new media and citizen journalism is unaware of this. No one in new media, citizen journalism or regular journalism knows what to do about it.

That's not the only reason, though it's a big one; it's an extremely safe assumption that revenues bottoming out are what's driving some of the other reasons old media's hit an iceberg (see above, and Michael Malone's great election-end column at Pajamas HQ), and is a subject we explored in video form earlier this month.

Meanwhile, Jules Crittenden also spots the extreme blurring of the lines between punditry and reporting in old media.

The Telegraph of England has an article titled, "2008 was the year man-made global warming was disproved." (Hey does that mean that the earlier 1970s-version of eco-paranoia, man-made global cooling is now back in style?) If so, one reason why is that the Internet makes it possible to go back in time and compare the predictions of the past with the current reality.

It also allows us to find earlier stories where scientists and journalists suggested that their peers in each profession ditch objectivity and play on the understandable fears of laymen. Flopping Aces has a long blog post written by Dr. Tim Ball, former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg highlighting one example of the latter technique from 1989. This is merely an excerpt:

E. R. Beadle said, "Half the work done in the world is to make things appear what they are not." The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) does this with purpose and great effect. They built the difference between appearance and reality into their process. Unlike procedure used elsewhere, they produce and release a summary report independently and before the actual technical report is completed. This way the summary gets maximum media attention and becomes the public understanding of what the scientists said. Climate science is made to appear what it is not. Indeed, it is not even what is in their Scientific Report.

The pattern of falsifying appearances began early. Although he works at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), Stephen Schneider was heavily employed in the work of the IPCC as this biography notes.

Much of Schneider's time is taken up by what he calls his "pro bono day job" for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He was a Coordinating Lead Author in Working Group II of the IPCC from 1997 to 2001 and a lead author in Working Group I from 1994 to 1996. Currently, he is a Coordinating Lead Author for the controversial chapter on "Assessing Key Vulnerabilities and the Risks from Climate Change," in short, defining "dangerous" climate change." - Pubmedcentral.nih.gov

He continued this work by helping prepare the Summary for Policymakers (SPM) of the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) released in April 2007.

Schneider, among others, created the appearance that the Summary was representative of the Science Report. However, he provides an early insight into the thinking when speaking about global warming to Discovery magazine (October 1989) he said scientists need, "to get some broader based support, to capture the public's imagination...that, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up some scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements and make little mention of any doubts we may have...each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective, and being honest." The last sentence is deeply disturbing-there is no decision required.

And that trend very much continues nearly twenty years later--legacy media trade publication Editor & Publisher actually ran an article last year titled, "Climate Change: Get Over Objectivity, Newspapers." My post about it from August of 2007 is found here; for non-subscribers of E&P, the text of the actual article can be read here.

But then, newspapers have gotten over objectivity on virtually all stories, not just climate change--with disastrous consequences.

(Via Maggie's Farm.)

Jonah Goldberg writes:

Steve Clemons' proposed solution to the Caroline problem is to have Obama send her to London as the Ambassador to the Court of St. James. That'd be fine with me, I guess. Though I don't think it's as exciting an idea as he does. I do think it's odd though that Clemons spends so much of his post rehearsing the usual anti-Bush throat clearing while completely ignoring a point that's actually relevant: The media would be obliged to revisit her grandfather's stint in the same job. And that might be embarrassing to the Kennedy clan.

Nonsense--all things embarrassing to clan Kennedy are conveniently airbrushed from history.

Michael C. Moynihan charts the strange birth and quiet passing of the P.C. "holiday."

Update: Ann Coulter claims vindication.

More: So does Kathy Shaidle.

I'm very happy to see that the Salt Nazis ("No salt for you--ever!") haven't banned sodium chloride from South Jersey's roads yet, unlike Seattle.

In his 2001 book, The CEO of the Sofa, P.J. O'Rourke wrote:

The founding fathers, in their wisdom, devised a method by which our republic can take 100 of its most prominent numskulls and keep them out of the private sector where they might do actual harm.

But of course, with every new bailout, the Senate is becoming further and further intertwined with the public sector, and doing increasing harm. As Frank Martin noted in a recent post on his Varifrank blog, "This is how it ends. As of right now, the Senate IS the banking system":

You just try prying the banking system from the hands of the Senate now. You want a loan? Sure, lets just check your voting record, lets see what kind of car you want to buy, oh darn its not a certified government "greenmobile", well sorry Mr. Consumer, we can't give you a loan for that new Toyota Dual Axle truck for your ranch, but how about a new Chevy Cobalt Hybrid? Sure thing. Sign right here Mr. Consumer.

SNAP! That's just how easy it is for you to find that you no longer have any economic choices. No banks - then no bank loans. No bank loans - then no economy. In point of fact, your entire economy is now run by just 100 people. 100 people that if most of us were in an elevator and any one of them got on, we would then get off and walk up the rest of the building rather than risk our well being by exposed to their close proximity.

Hence the subject of my newest Silicon Graffiti, which begins with a parody of Charles Schwab's 2007 ad campaign (with a little help from the cartoon plug-in from After Effects CS4) before exploring the auto bailout, and the banking bailout. And the good old days (by comparison), when Congress would look at a giant corporation and decide the best way to break it up, not prop it up. When it was wasn't defaulting on its own debts, of course.

And along the way, a look back at some early warnings from the 1990s, and going even further back, a flashback from Vice President Elect Joe Biden to President Abraham Roosevelt Franklin Washington's early televised fireside chats from the 1860s. And a timely paraphrase of the Bard of Springfield.

This is our 23rd edition of Silicon Graffiti ,which began in January of this year--you can explore the back catalog by starting here and scrolling through. It's a mixed lot, but on the average, we hope our approval rating is on the north side of these numbers.

(Also posted at Right Wing News, where I'm one of several guest bloggers this week.)

Ezra Levant has been named "Person of the Year" by the Canadian Christian magazine The Interim; the PDFs of his profile, where the above headline derives (it was written by fellow Canadian Blogosphere favorite Kathy Shaidle) can be found at Ezra's Website, along with a quote from Mark Steyn:

Ezra has been the indisputable man in the battle against the "human rights" racket. I've been happy to coast along, but he's doing the heavy lifting. I'm Dean Martin to his Jerry Lewis: he's doing all the work and I feed him the occasional line.

Shortly after this thing started, I had lunch with a journalistic bigshot in Montreal who advised me to play it cool - don't respond to interview requests, don't take a stand, let these suits work their way through as if it's some legalistic technicality in which you have no particular investment. And at a fancy Quebecois restaurant, that seemed like good advice. Then Ezra posted his interrogation video and I understood that my friend's advice was all wrong and that Ezra's strategy was right. Go nuclear. "Denormalize" them. Expose them for what they are - hacks at best and, at worst, deeply corrupt thugs. Ezra is like one of those shower settings where the merest nudge of the dial whacks it straight from nothing to a scalding torrent - which in a moribund public discourse such as Canada's is what it takes.

One thing that was confirmed to me this last year is that the incessant media self-congratulation about journalistic "courage" is in inverse proportion to any mustering of the real thing. It took Ezra going nuclear, going bananas, going medieval on Jennifer Lynch's totalitarian ass to rouse the great dopey herd of conventional wisdom even to take notice of this issue sufficiently to move the debate one smidgeonette in the direction of sanity. I forget who it was who said that Canadians weren't going to put up with some blowhard going crazy over "their" beloved "human rights" commissions, but they got it exactly wrong. Let's take it as read that Ezra is everything his detractors say he is - a blowhard, loudmouth, self-promoter, a "controversy entrepreneur," etc. If he weren't a blowhard, loudmouth, whatever, he wouldn't have been so spectacularly successful in his "denormalization" of Canada's "human rights" commissions.

Read the whole thing--and congrats to Ezra for surviving the machinations of the Great White Nihilistic North.

I was astonished at the YouTube clips of Canada's Star Chamber system that he uploaded in early January, and made a couple of excepts of them the subject of the first segment of my Silicon Graffiti video blog, which seems quaint--I hope--compared with some of my recent video efforts, but you've got to start somewhere:

In his profile of Paul Weyrich for the DC Examiner, Lee Edwards writes:

He was born on October 7, 1942, in Racine, Wisconsin, the son of working-class German Catholics. His father tended the boilers of St. Mary's Catholic Hospital for 50 years. He was politically active from an early age: at 19, he and his friends took over the Racine Republican party.

He worked for a local daily newspaper and then as a radio-television journalist before coming to Washington in 1967 as press secretary to Senator Gordon Allott (R-CO).

He learned how to organize from the liberal opposition. During President Nixon's first term, he attended a meeting of key liberals planning the enactment of an open housing bill. Present were a White House official, a Washington newspaper columnist, an analyst from the Brookings Institution, representatives from several black lobbying groups, and aides to a dozen senators.

Weyrich noted that everyone took an assignment. The Senate aides promised that their bosses would make supporting statements and contact other senators. The White House official said he would keep everyone informed of the administration's strategy.

The newspaper columnist promised to write a favorable article about the legislation. The Brookings analyst promised to publish a timely study that would impact the debate. The black lobbyists agreed to produce public demonstrations at the right time.

"I saw how easily it could be done with planning and determination," Weyrich later recalled, "and decided to try it myself." With funding from conservative businessmen like Joseph Coors and direct mail assistance from fundraiser Richard Viguerie, he helped start major conservative institutions such as Heritage, the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress (later the Free Congress Foundation), the Senate Steering Committee, the Republican Study Committee, and the American Legislative Exchange Council.

Liberals as well as conservatives acknowledged his essential role. In January 1981, the AFL-CIO described the New Right and specifically the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress as smart, effective and responsible for "a whole passel of persons sitting in the U.S. House and Senate."

The manufactured dissent that Weyrich describes witnessing in the early '70s and emulating during its second half reminds of something Tom Wolfe told an interviewer about his New York Herald-Tribune salad days:

Well, one of the things is what I would call "media ricochet", which is the way real life and life as portrayed by television, by journalists like myself and others, begin ricocheting off of one another. That's why to me, in Bonfire of the Vanities, it was so important to show exactly how this occurs when television and newspaper coverage become a factor in something like racial politics. And a good bit of the book has to do with this curious phenomenon of how demonstrations, which are a great part of racial and ethnic politics, exist only for the media. In the last days when I was working on The New York Herald-Tribune, I'll never forget the number of demonstrations I went to and announced that to all the people with the placards, "I'm from The New York Herald-Tribune," and the attitude was really a yawn, and then, "Get lost". They were waiting for Channel 2 and Channel 4 and Channel 5, and suddenly the truck would appear and these people would become galvanized. On one occasion I even saw a group of demonstrators down in Union Square, marching across the Square, and Channel 2 arrived, a couple of vans, and the head of the demonstration walked up to what looked like the head man of the TV crew and said, "What do you want us to do?" He says, "Golly, I don't know. What were you going to do?" He says, "It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. You tell us."

As Edwards wrote, Weyrich simply took the methods of the left and moved them starboard. Something that Mary Katharine Ham notes that Rick Warren is doing in his recent interviews with the legacy media.

"For people who think there's no cultural divide in this country, consider the treatment of two women much in the news in 2008."

Just found in my stats counter was this Google search (the abrupt cutoff is also in the original):

hitler and national socialism are really nothing more than contemporary shibboleths in america. whether invoked by thoughtless neocons i.e. goldberg's obnoxious screed titled ''liberal fascism'' or

Lionel Chetwynd, call your office!

Found via Newsbusters, this Chicago Sun-Times article begins thusly:

Bye bye, black Senate seat! The political blackbirds are singing a swan song for the hopes of keeping a U.S. Senate seat in African-American hands. The Rod Blagojevich implosion may have dealt that cause a fatal blow.

Last week's stunning pay-to-play charges led to calls around the nation for a special election to choose President-elect Barack Obama's successor.

That possibility has provoked outrage among black community leaders and politicians. Not so fast, they are saying.

So much for post-racial America.

As Jonah Goldberg once quipped, "those who cannot learn from history are condemned to hear George Santayana quoted to them for the rest of their lives"--or this time around, Robert Tracinski from Real Clear Politics:

It looks as if we are going to have to relive all of the mistakes of the 20th century one more time--let's hope it is one last time--before we relearn the big lesson of that century: the moral and material superiority of capitalism and the disastrous consequences of socialism in all its forms.

I thought we had learned that lesson well enough already, but it turns out I was wrong. Given a few decades to recover from the collapse of the Soviet Union--and given an opportunity to take advantage of the ideological confusion and muddled pragmatism of the pro-free-market right--the left is making a serious attempt to reconstitute itself.

And it is not just any variant of the left. It is the Old Left, the mid-20th-century left of public-works giantism, ham-fisted labor union protests, and command-and-control central planning.

By the end of the 20th century, the failure of all of these policies had caused the Old Left to splinter into two groups. The New Left hippies rejected industrial socialism in favor of anti-industrial socialism, adopting environmentalism and holding up a neo-primitive lifestyle as the ideal, while the New Democrat centrists sought a "Third Way" compromise between capitalism and socialism.

But now the discredited Old Left seems to be making a roaring comeback. We can see the signs all around us.

Consider Barack Obama's plan for up to $700 billion in New-Deal-style "public works" boondoggles. It is a good old-fashioned Keynesian "stimulus" based on the premise that you can revive the economy by spreading paper money around at random.

Yet it is now widely acknowledged that the original New Deal did not actually revive the Depression-era economy. Even under Keynes's failed theory, the amount of FDR's spending was not enough to stimulate the economy--and neither is the amount proposed by Obama. But that hasn't fazed the revived Old Left.

Which is why, as early as May, long before the September financial meltdown that paved the way for Obama's victory in November, leftwing politicians were calling for a "New, New Deal": But, as Tracinski notes above, what if the conventional wisdom is wrong about the Old New Deal, and that Risky Tax Scheme, to borrow one of Algore's catch phrases, prolonged the Depression?

At NewsBusters Kyle Drennen spots CBS with their shoe in their mouth:

According to CBS correspondent Richard Roth, in a report on Monday's CBS Early about an Iraqi journalist throwing a shoe at President Bush during a Baghdad press conference, the incident was reminiscent of the toppling of a statue of Saddam Hussein five years earlier: "Mr. Bush's message of progress was eclipsed in Baghdad by a sign of his unpopularity...The symbolism wouldn't have been lost on Iraqis, for whom shoes can be used to show extreme contempt, as with the footwear beaten against the statue of Saddam Hussein toppled by Marines five years ago."

Of course, in 2002, when Saddam held his last "election", CBS hilariously reported:

(CBS) Iraq declared Saddam Hussein the winner Wednesday - by an 11 million-to-0 margin - in a war-shadowed referendum on his two-decade military rule, sending celebratory gunfire crackling from the streets and rooftops of Baghdad.

The 100 percent turnout, 100 percent 'yes' vote shows all Iraqis are poised to defend Saddam against American forces, the country's No. 2 man said.

"If they come, we will fight them in every village, and every house," said Izzat Ibrahim, vice chairman of Iraq's Revolutionary Command Council, announcing results on what Iraq billed as a people's referendum on keeping Saddam in power another seven years.

"Every home will be a front, and every farmer, every shepherd, every Iraqi, will play his role," Ibrahim said. "All Iraqis are armed now, and by God's will we will triumph."

* * *

CBS News Correspondent Tom Fenton, reports voters going to the polls in Baghdad faced a simple choice - to vote "yes" or "no" - and everyone seemed to be voting "yes."

Whether that's because they love their leader - as many people said they did - or for other reasons, was hard to tell.

A United Nations human rights report says 500 people were jailed in the last referendum after they voted "no."

Some voters went to extremes to make it clear where they stood.

"I love Saddam more than myself," one man told CBS News, as he wrote "yes" on his ballot in blood - his own blood.

Ibrahim, announcing the vote, said all 11,445,638 eligible voters had cast ballots, and all for Saddam.

"Someone who does not know the Iraqi people will not believe this percentage, but it is real," Ibrahim said. "Whether it looks that way to someone or not. We don't have opposition in Iraq."

Iraqi officials said popular outrage at the U.S. threats to Saddam's regime made the turnout and percentage even higher than in 1995, when Saddam received a 99.96 percent 'yes' vote.

Iraqi media compared it to Bush's 2000 election victory, eked out in the Electoral College despite losing to Al Gore in the popular vote.

"The truth of the matter is that he (Bush) won by a fraction of the votes, and this fraction was engineered by sly lawyers' games," said the state-run Iraqi Daily. "Maybe this is one of the main reasons for his hysterical threats on the Iraqi choice!"

Of course. More explorations of the Memory Hole, here.

Meanwhile, Power Line reviews HBO's whitewashed miniseries about Saddam and finds more than a little equivocation:

There is much more that could be said. But let us sum up: HBO and the BBC want us to see Saddam as a family man, a tyrant at home, a dictator at work, who became this way because his stepfather beat him. He was, in this version, an ordinary kind of dictator and this was an ordinary kind of Middle Eastern authoritarian regime run as a family business. The trouble is it was not. Saddam was uniquely brutal in his rise through the Ba'athist Party. His regime sought to eliminate entire groups from the nation. He launched two aggressive wars against neighbouring states. This was not a normal authoritarian regime, nor even a bad one. Saddam was a genocidal dictator who terrorized his own people. This attempt to normalize him is a disgrace.

Saddam became a dictator "because his stepfather beat him"? Moviemakers seem remarkably generous when it comes to forgiving a tyrant's excesses when they can blame them all on a dysfunctional childhood.

More Hollywood forgiveness offered here.

The Business & Media Institute rounds them up; a Tech Central Station column by Arnold Kling from 2006 explains their origins.

In a related vein, Ronnie Schreiber explores "Myths of Organized Labor", memes which also derive from a similar ancestry.

Richard Fernandez compares and contrasts conversations with nature, then and now.

(Has anyone talked with the wind lately? It could be jealous for the attention.)

If you gnashed your teeth at Nick Gillespie's video look at Hollywood's obsession with terrorist chic, you're really going to hate "'Che' It Ain't So", Kyle Smith's review of Steven Soderbergh's endless encomium to everyone's favorite murderous thug and T-shirt icon. For the rest of us, here's a sample:

Meet Che Guevara. Just think of him as Jesus plus Abraham Lincoln with a touch of Moses and Dr. Doug Ross. After 4 1/2 hours of watching Dr. Ernesto "Che" Guevara heal the sick, teach the illiterate, daze the women, execute the lawless, defeat the corrupt, uplift the peasantry and spew the sound bite, I was convinced there would be a scene in which he turned water to Bacardi.

You can't spell cliche without "Che." And as I endured this mad dream directed - or perhaps committed - by Steven Soderbergh, I wondered where I'd seen it all before. The booted stomping through the greensward, the jungly target shooting? It's a remake of Woody Allen's "Bananas," right? Minus punch lines - or perhaps with them. "We are in a difficult situation," Che observes, at a point when his army is surrounded and forced to eat its horses.

The story of the Argentine doctor Ernesto "Che" Guevara is played with much broody self-importance by Benicio Del Toro. It will be shown in two parts after its one-week opening run. That way, on consecutive evenings, it can bore everyone but activist grad students.

Read the whole thing.

Nick Gillespie debunks Che chic in awesome new video from Reason.TV:

I was glad to see this moment from 2005 mentioned--and described as "Wearing a swastika in a synagogue."

Update: If you gnashed your teeth at Nick Gillespie's video look at Hollywood's obsession with terrorist chic, you're really going to hate "'Che' It Ain't So", Kyle Smith's review of Steven Soderbergh's endless encomium to everyone's favorite murderous thug and T-shirt icon. For the rest of us, don't miss it.

Warner Todd Huston compares and contrasts 2008 and 2001:

Jonathan Alter was an early accuser of new President George W. Bush when he and VP Cheney began to try to warn the country that an economic downturn was well underway as he was taking office. As Bush tried to warn the nation, the media jumped all over him for "talking down the economy." Yet, as we watch the reporting of Obama's current down talking of the economy, the media has said nothing similar to the condemnation reigned upon Bush.

The myth that people like Alter was pushing in 2001 was that Clinton bequeathed a good economy to Bush, but the reality was that the spiral had already begun to fall into negative territory months before Bush took office. Despite that obvious downturn, the media formed a chorus of attacking Bush for being too negative in the face of the American people. On March 26, Alter unleashed his Newsweek piece headlined "Thanks Ever So Much, President Poor-Mouth." Alter called Bush's warnings "risky and unusual," and made the pronouncement that Bush was wrong to do so. "Even if Bush turns out to be right in his predictions of gloom," Alter wrote, "that doesn't mean he was right to make them."

On CNN, Lou Waters needled Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer on January 12, 2001 about the "politicalization " of the economy. "President Clinton, sort of, answered that as well today. He's talking up the economy. There are economists who say you guys are talking down the economy. What's happening here in this transition period, the whole, sort of, politicalization [of the economy]...," Waters said.

On March 19, The New York Times scolded Bush that presidents were supposed to be "cheerleaders for the nation's economy."

Yet, has anyone seen any similar scolding of the new "cheerleader" in chief, Obama? Has anyone seen an Alter sternly scolding Obama for "poor-mouthing" the economy? Has there been any hectoring from CNN over Obama's grave warnings? Where is The New York Times beating up that downcast Obama?

Why would the media complain about Obama, when they're doing a remarkable job of talking down the economy themselves, as Virginia Postrel notes:

If anyone should fear a Depression, it should be journalists, who are already the equivalent of 1980s steelworkers. But instead, they seem positively giddy with anticipation at the prospect of a return to '30s-style hardship--without, of course, the real hardship of the 1930s. (We're all yuppies now.)

Read the whole thing.

Hugh Hewitt notes that President Elect Obama's desire to emulate enormous 1930s-style FDR public works projects may be thwarted by very 1970s-style environmental regulations designed to ensure that nothing gets built anywhere--even if it's by the state.

And it looks like the perfect go-between who spans both worlds may not be joining Team Barack.

The Rosetta Stone of humor is here--and the punchlines are endless.

Update: Found via STACLU, here's a bottomless well of bad (and needless to say reverential) Obama art. What would the response be if the ideologies were reversed, and it was a Website full of worshipful Reagan or Dubya art?

Ron Radosh notes that much of the country have confused politics and religion:

If you consider Obama the closest man can get to God, you are probably among those who think that George W. Bush is the closest man can get to being the devil. As Canadian journalist Robert Fulford writes in The National Post, "liberal Americans who see the Republicans as the party of the devil have enjoyed eight years of intense self-righteousness." These are about to end, thankfully.

Actually, (and it's safe to say that Radosh would agree with this), if you literally think either man is the closest one can get to God or the devil, you're insane.

Radosh adds, "As Obama takes over our nation's helm, hopefully more reasoned opinion will prevail on the question of George W. Bush's legacy as President", adding some thoughts on how history will view Bush. That's a topic that's also being explored by David Frum and Victor Davis Hanson this weekend. It's safe to say that history in toto will likely be much kinder to Bush than the cartoon caricature that's been created by the media, academia, and the left (sorry for the redundancy), once the 2004 election year and the media's coverage of Katrina the following year allowed the festering emotions on the left to burst, to borrow Charles Krauthammer's metaphor.

Though as with President Nixon, numerous leftwing historians will have to continue to justify the staggering amount of hatred they've invested in the man for ideological reasons, especially since, as was the case with Nixon, Bush's policies weren't all that different from his immediate predecessor.

Ezra Levant has some thoughts on CSI: Nova Scotia:

Headline via the Derb; it perfectly fits this example of what hopefully is a one-off leftwinger's meltdown, and not a trend, transforming Thanksgiving into yet another holiday that Dare Not Speak Its Name.

Related: Heard through the Grapevine, Greg Gutfeld rounds up his Thanksiving Turkey list.

In the latest edition of Silicon Graffiti, I take a look at anger in American politics. The title derives from the nifty book on the topic by Peter Wood, whom I interviewed near the end of the 2008 election for PJM Political.

Look for:

• The exterminating Olbermann!
  
• Terry Tate, sacking Sarah!
  
• Dehumanizing bumper stickers!
  
• Code Pink has a plan to stick it to the man!
  
• Open Mic Night!
  
• Shocking signs!
  
• The don't taze me bro!
  
• Five Easy Pieces!
  
• America's favorite ex-Weatherman!
  
• And the world's favorite Teutonic terror tyke!
  

The Five Easy Pieces clip, which Wood deconstructs in the above video is a tremendous touchstone of early 1970s anger. I had planned to connect it to this passage from David Frum's 2000 book on the 1970s, How We Got Here, but it would have taken the video above the YouTube-friendly ten minute cut-off mark. Of course, there are so many examples of anger run amok from the 2008 campaign, that this video could have run infinitely longer than that. (There's a reason why Michelle Malkin's 2005 book on the topic ran for 256 pages.)

For previous Silicon Graffiti videos, click here.

Mark Hemingway links to Barry Ritzholtz, who has crunched the numbers, adjusted for inflation of the financial bailout:

Whenever I discussed the current bailout situation with people, I find they have a hard time comprehending the actual numbers involved. That became a problem while doing the research for the Bailout Nation book. I needed some way to put this into proper historical perspective.

If we add in the Citi bailout, the total cost now exceeds $4.6165 trillion dollars. People have a hard time conceptualizing very large numbers, so let's give this some context. The current Credit Crisis bailout is now the largest outlay In American history.

Mark adds, "The only expenditure that comes close is WWII, and even that cost less."

And speaking of WWII, Jonah Goldberg notes the success of Amity Shlaes and others in reminding the public that the long grind of the Great Depression was made longer by the New Deal. So what's the rhetorical solution? Jonah writes:

As the work of Amity Shlaes and others starts to make much of the "new New Deal" propagandizing ever more difficult, many liberals are now switching to the argument that what we really need is another World War Two, minus the war part of course. Paul Krugman said a few weeks ago that WWII was just a big jobs program. And here's Robert Kuttner on ABC's This Week:

Now, on the question of whether the New Deal worked, Doris Goodwin said to me the other day, don't look at the Roosevelt of 1933, look at the Roosevelt of 1941, 1942.

The New Deal got us halfway out of the Depression, and it was Roosevelt's effort to balance the budget in 1937 that caused the downturn. But in 1941-42, we converted to a wartime footing and unemployment disappeared. And the deficit went as high as 28 percent of GDP. Now, I'm not saying the deficit has to go that high.

But Doris' point was, look at the auto conversion in 1941, 1942, when they shut the lines, they retooled, they started making planes and tanks and produced aircraft and weaponry at a rate the world had never seen. We could do that with fuel-efficient cars as the price of the auto bailout.

This is at best misleading -- and it's also an enormous "never mind" for liberals who've been worshiping the New Deal for 70s years. As Tyler Cowen noted this weekend, much of the gains from the war economy occured before we actually went to war but after we started selling all sorts of materiel to Europe. And the big gains that came after World War II were the result of the fact that Europe had been flattened and needed to buy pretty much everything from America. Investments in green technology are secondary, historical analogies are rationalizations. Kuttner simply wants a massive new industrial policy.

In the Robert Stacy McCain post I linked to over the weekend, in addition to media criticism, he suggested that "conservative spokesmen and Republican leaders in Washington need to find a safe line of attack against the new regime." Comparing the bailout to WWII offers a big ready-made talking point, for whatever few conservatives (if any) left in DC who aren't prepared to sign off on WWII Mark II.

Hey, a trillion here, a trillion there, and sooner or later you're talking about real money.

As highlighted by the latest Time and Newsweek covers, the incoming Obama administration and its media cheerleaders are attempting to dial back expectations a tad. Obama's no longer God (of course, as Mort Sahl once said, if you're going to identify, identify), he's merely the second coming of Abe Lincoln and FDR. Jonah Goldberg writes, "It's a step down from divine redeemer, but you have to start somewhere":

Lincoln was Lincoln because he fought and won the Civil War and freed the slaves. News flash: That ain't what America is like today -- and thank God for it.

I think Lincoln was just about the greatest president in American history, but I sure don't want to need another Lincoln. Six hundred thousand Americans died at the hands of other Americans during Lincoln's presidency. Lincoln unified the country at gunpoint and curtailed civil liberties in a way that makes President Bush look like an ACLU zealot. The partisan success of the GOP in the aftermath of the war Obama thinks so highly of was forged in blood.

Likewise with FDR. Listening to liberals gush over a "new New Deal" and Obama's call for us to emulate the "Greatest Generation," you'd think they want another Great Depression and World War.

Indeed, liberals have long idolized the 1930s as a decade of great unity. It wasn't. The 1930s was a miserable decade of poverty, domestic unrest, labor strife, violations of civil liberties and widespread fear. If liberals really loved peace, prosperity and national cohesion, they'd remember the 1920s or 1950s more fondly. And yet they don't. Why? Because liberals didn't get to impose their schemes and dreams on the country in those decades. Behind all the talk of unity and bipartisanship and shared sacrifice lies an uglier ambition: power. The audacity of hope behind all this Lincoln-FDR-Obama blather is the dream of riding roughshod over the opposition, of having their way, of total victory.

The Chinese curse and cliche "may you live in interesting times" is on point. Liberals (and a few conservatives as well, alas) seem desperate to live in interesting times. Not me.

"You know what I hope? I hope Obama is another Coolidge or Eisenhower", Jonah concludes. "But I'm not holding my breath."

Gee, it's always fun to see a leading German magazine running a photo of a US president with a bullet hole in his forehead.

In more "Deutschland is happy and gay" news, "German Students Lay Waste to Holocaust Exhibit."

(H/T: Steve Green, who writes, "Just like Herr Hasselhoff, we're big in Germany!")

Jim Treacher has "A friendly chat with the liberal who lives in my head."

Meanwhile, in an everything old is new again moment, Dan Riehl spots a surprising (or maybe not!) source calling for a minority group to step to the back of the bus.

I actually meant to post something along similar lines earlier today, but Incoherant Ramblings beat me to it--and the quote is surrounded by lots of great looking photos of its hostess instead of our usual blue Trilby and minimalism:

I wouldn't really mind the outcome of all this under normal circumstances really. If gay marriage became a reality in all 50 states, I would have gone on with my life. But I hope the backlash felt from all of these inane boycotts hits these protesters bad. Somebody needs to point out that there is a better way, and this will eventually wear thin on the voting populace who looks at these people as sore losers.

What's next? "Hey, here's a brilliant idea. Let's Boycott Sundance! Because it's in the state of Utah, LDS headquarters are in Utah, so it will affect those EVIL Mormons!"

Meanwhile, a lot of Utah Mormons are thinking "they're boycotting Sundance? Sweet! Maybe Robert Redford will take it somewhere else from now on."

I'd like to think I'm not the only person who flashed back to the reaction of numerous airline customers when the "flying Imams" threatened not to patronize US Airways when reading this latest call for a boycott.

The Boston Herald notes, "Boston City Hall named world's ugliest building"--and note the usual "start from zero" aspects of the 1969 building:

"That's gotta go," said Ivette Arenas of San Francisco, when it was pointed out to her on her way to the Common. "You have some of the best (buildings), and right here you have the worst."

"It is a pretty ugly building," agreed Carol Sue Graves of Orange, Va., as she walked to Faneuil Hall.

An example of the "New Brutalism" school of design, City Hall was seen as a clean break from Boston's past, said Jeff Stein, dean of the Boston Architectural College.

"They were looking for something new and startling," Stein said. "And boy did it succeed."

In From Bauhaus To Our House, Tom Wolfe wrote about the similarly Corbusier-inspired Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis, built in 1955 and mercifully demolished less than two decades later:

Millions of dollars and scores of commission meetings and task-force projects were expended in a last-ditch attempt to make Pruitt-Igoe habitable. In 1971, the final task force called a general meeting of everyone still living in the project. They asked the residents for their suggestions. It was a historic moment for two reasons. One, for the first time in the fifty-year history of worker housing, someone had finally asked the client for his two cents' worth. Two, the chant. The chant began immediately: "Blow it....up! Blow it....up! Blow it....up! Blow it....up! Blow it....up!" The next day, the task force thought it over. The poor buggers were right. It was the only solution. In July of 1972, the city blew up the three central blocks of of Pruitt-Igoe with dynamite.

A similar sort of aesthetic euthanasia seems long overdue in Boston.

Time magazine portrays BHO as FDR.

John Nolte writes on the New Hollywood Blacklist:

At least once a year we get a new narrative or documentary about the infamous Hollywood blacklist that forced a number of screenwriters out of the business or underground with the use of a pseudonym.

I included clips from a whole bunch of those annual Hollywood perennials in a Silicon Graffiti video back in July, which makes for a great double-feature with John's post. Speaking of which, here's more from John:

Most of these movies hit me as wish fulfillment fantasies with the filmmakers and their stars (George Clooney, Frank Darabont, Irwin Winkler, and on and on and on...) puffing out their chests to stridently declare that if they had been alive then that! never would've happened. Oh, no, they would have put their careers and livelihoods on the line to fight the good fight for the right to hold unpopular political beliefs without fear of retribution.

Well - here - we - are.

And where are you?

As John writes, they're too busy yelling, "Him, over there, He's Spartacus!"

Found via LGF, clearly these are examples of a handful of overzealous fans of Family Guy having some harmless fun. Or maybe a bored academician blowing off steam.

Nothing to worry about here, citizens!

Read More »

Andrew Breitbart boldly goes where few residents of the Hollywood area dare to go:

I have a dark secret to tell before the election so that it's on the record. It's something that is difficult to say to certain friends, peers, family and, lately, many fellow conservatives.

I still like George W. Bush. A lot.

For starters, I am convinced he is a fundamentally decent man, even though I have read otherwise at the Huffington Post.

President Bush is far smarter, more articulate and less ideological than his plentiful detractors scream, and, ultimately, he will be judged by history - not by vengeful Democrats, hate-filled Hollywood, corrupt foreign governments, an imploding mainstream media or fleeting approval ratings.

George W. Bush is history's president, a man for whom the long-term success or failure of democracy in Iraq will determine his place in history. He may end up a victim of his own tough choices, but the cheerleading for his demise when Iraq's outcome is yet determined has hurt America and possibly set up the next president for the same appalling partisan response.

The fact that the United States has not been attacked since Sept. 11, 2001, far exceeds the most wishful expert predictions of the time. Perhaps facing another al Qaeda-led barrage would have reinforced our need for national unity, caused us to recognize the gravity of the Islamist threat and fortified Mr. Bush's standing at home and abroad.

Yet, thankfully, that never happened. And Mr. Bush has been punished for this obvious success.

More here:

While President Bush has been marshaling a multinational force to take on modernity's enemies in foreign lands, the American left has decided to go to war against not only Republicans but also moderate Democrats.

Bush hatred was a fait accompli.

Back in November 2000, when Al Gore contested Florida and the demonizing of George Bush began full-bore ("President Select," "Bush Chimp," "the illegitimate president"), I told Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund, "You watch, the Democratic Party will never grant Bush his humanity, and they will never let up."

And they never did.

The Democratic Party chose to send a clear message that the impeachment of President Clinton incurred by the newly minted Republican-led Congress and the upstart new media - talk radio and the Internet - would be countered by unprecedented partisan fury.

The media will shape "the truth" that Democrats were always behind the initial Afghanistan effort or were poised to grudgingly accept the president whom they previously mocked as "illegitimate."

But those brave liberals who stood by the president were mostly a small minority, and all of them have since been excommunicated for their apostasy.

The biggest failure of the Bush administration has been their inability to clearly communicate a message to rise above the media din, and to court the media in a good will that's clearly not reciprocated.

As Victor Davis Hanson wrote last week, "Sometime in 2008, journalism as we knew it died, and advocacy media took its place." He's right, of course, but the media's transformation didn't happen overnight, and according to some media critics in 2004, there was an effort by the Bush Administration in its first term to attempt to counteract it. If so, it was far, far too fleeting.

The next Republican president, whether he's sworn in this January or in the next decade, will have to understand that new media reality, or face exactly the same demonization that Andrew describes above that every Republican president since 1968 has faced, no matter how he actually governs.

(Via John Nolte.)

Whoops--sorry, that's, "I want m************ Joe the plumber dead", apparently caught on an open mic during a newsbreak at San Francisco's KGO-AM talk radio station. More Plumber Derangement Syndrome spotted here.

A Daily Kossite takes Obama's trip to Berlin very much the wrong way.

Reader Patrick Cox sent me a link to this Reuters piece, titled, "WITNESS: Berliners' love affair with America grows cold". Here's a sample:

During the 1990s pro-American sentiment was still high.

They appreciated George Bush's support for reunification in 1990 that overcame British and French reticence. And Bill Clinton got rock star treatment every time he came here.

Even in the wake of September 11 attacks, Berlin's support for the United States was special. More than 200,000 attended a pro-America rally in Berlin on September 14, 2001 to hear German President Johannes Rau say:

"No one knows better than the people here in Berlin what America has done for freedom and democracy in Germany. So, we say to all Americans from Berlin: America does not stand alone."

Germans even dropped their taboo on taking part in foreign military operations and sent forces to help the U.S.-led mission in Afghanistan.

So what went wrong?

It was, of course, the dispute over the invasion of Iraq.

Before that, U.S. presidents had always been welcomed in Berlin. However, in May 2002 George W. Bush needed 10,000 German police to shield him from 10,000 anti-war protesters.

In June, Bush spent only a few minutes at Berlin airport on his way in and out of Germany for meetings with Chancellor Angela Merkel in an isolated village 100 km to the north.

It was difficult to believe that a U.S. president seemed to be avoiding the city that owed its very survival to America. There was a brief ray of hope a month later when Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama gave a speech in Berlin -- and 200,000 people showed up.

In case things don't change after November 4, perhaps it's time to try finally to get rid of the American accent.

Which brings Germany full circle: having been liberated by the US after their feverish support of a genocidal mustachioed tyrant, Germany is apparently peeved at the US because we defeated another nation's genocidal mustachioed tyrant. Yet curiously, that nation seems pretty happy not to be under Saddam's yoke.

(Triangulation spotted here; potential for deja vu all over again, here.)

Update: The proprietor of the Bitter Sanity blog spots a little time traveling going on, and emails:

From the article you just commented on:

It was, of course, the dispute over the invasion of Iraq.

Before that, U.S. presidents had always been welcomed in Berlin.
However, in May 2002 George W. Bush needed 10,000 German police to shield him from 10,000 anti-war protesters.

Um... people protesting an invasion that didn't start until ten months later? Prescient, those Germans.

Iraq didn't become an area of major controversy in Europe until winter 2002/2003, if I'm remembering correctly. These people wouldn't have been protesting Iraq - they would have been protesting either the dethroning of the Taliban, or America in general. Probably America in general.

I'm surprised that made it through Reuters' layers and layers of fact checkers.

Amity Shlaes reminds us that yes indeed, FDR's policies prolonged the Depression--or as Mark Steyn wrote at the start of the month:

"Lots of other places -- from Britain to Australia -- took a hit in 1929 but, alas, they lacked an FDR to keep it going till the end of the Thirties. That's why in other countries they refer to it as "the Depression," but only in the U.S. is it 'Great.'"

For most of the 1970s, Archie and Edith sang, "Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again." It took a few decades, but at long last, their wish finally comes true.

Meanwhile, Charles Johnson spots one huge budget-busting proposal from Obama, which is troubling not just for its fiscal excess.

Babalu Blog notes, accurately, I think, that "It's a lose-lose proposition for Obama's supporters":

On November 4th, Barack Obama just might win the presidential election. But regardless of whether he wins or loses, the vast majority of his supporters will lose. If McCain wins the election, they will feel the sting of watching the candidate they placed all their hopes in be defeated. But it stands to be much worse for them if their candidate wins.

By placing their hopes and aspirations in the hands of Obama, they have in effect transferred the individual faith they have in themselves to another person. A person who has promised to make their dreams come true for them. No longer will they have to fight, or struggle, or even work to achieve their dreams; Obama promises to do it all for them. But sooner, rather than later, they will realize that Obama can never deliver on this impossible promise. It is then when they will experience a pain much greater than they can imagine; the pain of realizing that you gave up not only your most sacred dreams and hopes to someone else, but that you gave up hope on yourself so that someone else can do it for you.

Which is why, "If I were John McCain's campaign, I would have just bought enough time to run this video after Obama's infomercial..."

Related: "America the Miserable." (Speaking of mirrors and reflections.)

As Michael Wade notes, "On this day in 1938, Martians landed in New Jersey", courtesy of Orson Welles' radio program and H.G. Wells' novel. Sadly, I suspect the latter would probably be pretty cool with what the writer of the latest movie version of his book used them to metaphorically stand-in for.

Meanwhile, James Lileks squares the circle, and John Nolte has additional Halloween movie selections. Though for us veteran connoisseurs of Philadelphia TV of our boomer youth, it's just not the same without Dr. Shock or Stella, "that Maneater from Manayunk" introducing them.

Update: And speaking of Philadelphia, congrats to the Phillies!

The Weekly Standard's blog looks at "what might have been."

In the latest edition of Silicon Graffiti videoblog, we visit industrious Outer Party Member Winston Smith hard at work in the Ministry of Truth, and look at how history can be turned on a dime, including:

• The Pivot on the Iraq War.
• Hollywood and the Iraq War.
• All media, all malleable.
• Pivots by Dalton Trumbo and Pete Seeger during World War II.
• World War II revisionism today.
• One man's new found respect for private property and the Chicago P.D.!
• And a homage to the most Kafkaesque secret agent of 'em all. Be seeing you!

This is the 19th edition of our ongoing Silicon Graffiti videoblog series, which began in January of this year; click here for all of the previous editions.

Kevin D. Williamson asks readers to "Explain this reasoning to me":

According to the geniuses at the Times, the governor of Alaska is self-evidently and grossly unqualified to be vice president of the United States, but a pop singer is obviously qualified to be lecturing the world about African civil wars and developmental economics.

Here's a little insight into the world of the Times op-ed page from editor Andrew Rosenthal:

Though rockers and pop stars are welcome, another group faces an uphill battle on to the New York Times' editorial page - conservatives. "[US Secretary of State] Condoleezza Rice is a particularly bad op-ed writer," Rosenthal said. However, the problem doesn't end there. "The problem with conservative columnists," Rosenthal said, "is that many of them lie in print." And they can't sing.

Liars? That's a bit cheeky from the newspaper that brought us Walter Duranty and Jayson Blair.

Condoleezza Rice got her PhD when she was 26 and speaks fluent Russian. Bono wears snazzy glasses and can see Ireland from his house.

It's more than reasonable to extend Rosenthal's attack on conservative columnists to potential conservative readers of the Times, and to reasonably assume that the Timespeople would prefer those readers avoid their product, just as many of those in Bono's industry would prefer they stay home. Which is one of the reasons why Steve Green projects out the Times' finances and writes, "The NYT in default? It couldn't happen to a nicer paper."

And even as his profession rushes headlong towards a financial cliff, veteran journalist Michael Malone writes that its moral bankruptcy has never been more evident:

Read More »

Forget the Black Panthers, hobnobbing with High Society on Park Avenue, happily dining on "asparagus tips in mayonnaise dabs, and meatballs petites au Coq Hardi". Bill Ayers is the workingman's unrepentant former domestic terrorist, and as such has earned longest of long shot third party presidential candidate Dave Burge's coveted support.

(Sirhan Sirhan could not be reached for comment.)

Jonah Goldberg updates a Boomer/Gen-X Saturday morning video chestnut: "The new Schoolhouse Rock cartoon: 'Conjunction: a word that connects a racist attack and Barack Obama'":

This week, an editorial writer for the Kansas City Star denounced John McCain and Sarah Palin for suggesting that Obama is a socialist because he wants to "spread the wealth around." Don't they understand that "socialist" has always been a racist codeword used by bigots like J. Edgar Hoover to demonize black activists like W.E.B. Du Bois?

A couple problems: First, as best I can remember, Marx, Engels, Lenin, George Bernard Shaw, Eugene V. Debs, Norman Thomas, and Michael Harrington do not usually get a lot of attention during Black History Month. Second, as writer Michael Moynihan recently noted, Du Bois wasn't merely a socialist, he was a Stalinist! (Du Bois was not entirely unsympathetic to the Nazis, either.) [Paul Robeson was also pretty keen on Uncle Joe--Ed] Besides, when did "socialist" stop being an anti-Semitic codeword for Jew? Maybe when the left started going batty over "neocons."

I'm pretty sure I received the memo replacing the outdated terminology a while back from the liberal Bletchley Park.

Echoing the slogan of the 1930s National Recovery Administration, Mickey Kaus writes that even "Baskin-Robbins is doing its part" to get their man elected.

The NRA (no relation to this NRA) gave corporations that "did their part" a blue eagle logo to display--and woe betide those who didn't cooperate. Presumably, Baskin-Robbins is hoping to be rewarded with the official "Patriot Employer" symbol for their more recent efforts.

From the department of "Be Careful What You Wish For", in my recent "Bonnie & Nixon" video, I incorporated a little of the audio from Bobby Kennedy's March 1968 speech at the University of Kansas, in which he quoted early 20th century progressive William Allen White's call for violence and upheaval by way of higher education:

"I am also glad to come to the home state of another great Kansan, who wrote, 'If our colleges and universities do not breed men who riot, who rebel, who attack life with all their youthful vision and vigor then there is something wrong with our colleges. The more riots that come on college campuses, the better the world for tomorrow.'"

As to bring things full circle (and then some), note who's namechecked on the dedication page of a book authored by a noted '60s rioter and rebel turned academician much in the news recently.

In a surprise bombshell study that absolutely no one could foresee, the Politico recently announced--brace yourself!--"Study: McCain coverage mostly negative".

Which is why Boston-based talk radio host Michael Graham writes, "I have a dream for Sen. Barack Obama":

I have a dream that one day, for just 24 hours, he could be Sarah Palin.

OK, maybe that's less of a dream and more a plot point from a bad Lindsay Lohan movie (redundancy alert!).

But imagine the Democratic nominee's day as Barack Palin Obama:

He wake up and reaches for a secret cigarette and a copy of The New York Times [NYT]. Instead of the usual partisan puff pieces ("Obama Health Care Plan Pledges Miraculous Healings For All"), the Times is running exposes about his family.

Does his spouse have extremist political views? Who pays when his kids travel to Washington? And how do we know one of them isn't really his grandkid?

Opening the editorial page Palin-Obama finds column after column filled with personal attacks and insults. Comments about his looks, how much his clothes cost, his speaking style - even suggestions that the radical teachings of his church might be a legitimate topic for discussion.

He clicks on MSNBC and sees the spittle-flecked face of Chris Matthews.

"Obama says he's cutting taxes for 95 percent of taxpayers, but he's not. He's just sending them checks! No cut in their tax rate AT ALL! IT'S A LIE, A LIE! AAARRGGHHHH!

As the MSNBC medical staff fires yet another tranquilizer dart into Matthews' thrashing body, Palin-Obama gets ready to face the day.

At the airport, Palin-Obama is under siege from the traveling press. "Why are you hiding, Sen. Obama? You haven't taken questions from us since last month. Joe Biden hasn't held a press avail since Sept. 7! Afraid he'll make another 'guaranteed crisis' comment? How many more screw-ups before you dump the guy?"

A crowd of thousands gathers to hear him speak. When Palin-Obama mentions the "destructive foreign policy of George W. Bush," someone shouts "murderer!" Another cries, "off with this head!"

By lunchtime, the cable news headline is: "Obama Whips Up Angry Mob, Some Fear Campaign May Inspire Violence."

That afternoon, Palin-Obama sits down with a CNN reporter who spends the first half of the interview asking variations of the question, "How can a half-term senator with zero executive experience and no record of achievement be president? Shouldn't you be ashamed of yourself for even running?"

"Let's talk energy independence," Palin-Obama asks hopefully. The reporter instead demands to know why Obama won't release his medical records, his original birth certificate or the names of about half his contributors.

"You're the most secretive candidate since Nixon," the reporter insists. "And besides, the guy who plays you on 'Saturday Night Live' is way hotter."

The day grinds on. False stories repeatedly corrected by the campaign continue to air. One Palin-Obama supporter - a plumber who asked John McCain a tough question at a campaign stop - had his private medical files hacked into, and found Candy Crowley hiding in his dumpster.

One more campaign stop, more questions about his wife's politics, his children's travel schedule and his clothing budget - and Palin-Obama finally reaches his hotel for a night's rest.

His nightmare of misreporting, mean-spirited negative attacks and blatant media bias is over. For Gov. Sarah Palin, it's going to last at least 12 more days.

You can see ABC's attempt at flooding the zone with negative headlines on display, here. And Tunku Varadarajan of Forbes gives you the A to Z of all the negative coverage here.

I've always thought socialism was an oft-used legitimate phrase to describe a wealth-distribution scheme involving high taxes and a command and control economy that placed onerous burdens on entrepreneurs and businesses, but was considered, particularly in the first half of the 20th century, much less bloody than the alternatives further towards the left. But lately, it's apparently become a codeword--but is socialism code for being black or being Muslim?

Let me know the definitive answer and get back to me, fellas.

Update: "Biden advises GOP to focus on economy, not attacks"--and yet when they do, they're smeared by Obama's surrogates, which makes for quite a Mobius loop.

As it did in 2004, the last month of the presidential election increasingly resembles dispatches from the police blotter, rather than a nation of adults carefully weighing whom their commander in chief should be. Here's but a sample of what's going on out there:

• "Overnight, the Republican Party's office on the courthouse square in downtown Murfreesboro was attacked. A large brick with a symbol for anarchy written on it was thrown through a window, taking out the entire glass front."

• "Owner Believes Lexus Vandalized Due To McCain Sticker." (Time to update these T-shirts and bumper stickers.)

• "Video: Code Pink tries to arrest Rove."

• "Angry graffiti messages were spray-painted on the garage of Norm Coleman's St. Paul home overnight and discovered this morning.

  "'u r a criminal resign or else,' was scrawled in black on the side of the yellow garage in the Summit Hill neighborhood."

• Restaurant Offers Free Pizza for [Stolen] McCain Signs.

• "Does Reebok Condone Violence Against Women?"

• "Anti-McCain vandalism hits Maryland: Democrat Displaying GOP Candidate Sign Wakes Up To Find Home, RV, Truck Covered With 'Vote Obama' Graffiti."

• "NEW: Dashcam Video of Palin Protestors: 'With the opportunity of having a national figure in town, civil disobedience is one of the best ways you can get your message across,' she told 11 News." (More video here.)

• "The Hill notes that police departments across the country are preparing for post-election violence."
  

As Peter Wood, the author of last year's A Bee In The Mouth, on anger in America told an interviewer:

For example: "[New Anger involves] deriding an opponent for the sheer pleasure of expressing contempt for other people....New Anger is a spectacle to be witnessed by an appreciative audience, not an attempt to win over the uncommitted....If in your anger you reduce your opponent to the status of someone unworthy or unable to engage in legitimate exchange, real politics come to an end....Whoever embraces [New Anger] is bound to find that, at least in the political realm, he has traded the possibility of real influence for the momentary satisfactions of self-expression."

And clearly we're seeing a lot of those momentary satisfactions of "self-expression", even if the Victorian Gentleman would prefer not to discuss their origins and root causes.

Your bumper sticker of the day: "She is not a woman--She is a Republican."

As Mary Katharine Ham writes:

Palin addressed a North Carolina fund-raiser Thursday night saying, "We believe that the best of America is not all in Washington, D.C. We believe...that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard working very patriotic, very pro-America areas of this great nation."

The comment was quickly picked up by media outlets and the Obama campaign, whose spokesman Bill Burton asked in an e-mail to reporters, "What part of the country isn't pro-America?"

Well, there is a small company town in southern California whose chief industry routinely compares one American political party with an ideology that that ended 60 years ago, but not before killing tens of millions of people, while annually explaining away its own deeply entrenched support for an ideology that concurrently also killed tens of millions of people, and is still trudging along in one form or another.

Further answers here.

"Terry Tate, Office Linebacker" made his debut in a Super Bowl ad that aired in late January of 2003, pitching Reebok sneakers. And considering the average career length of a real NFL linebacker, I guess Terry should be glad he still has a job. He's a free agent these days, no longer, to the best of my knowledge, associated with Reebok, but considering his national launch, it seems safe to say that Terry and Reeboks will forever be intertwined.

So I wonder what the sneaker manufacturer thinks of their former pitchman's latest video. Here's Terry, with a little digital editing help, brutally shoving a woman onto an unforgiving concrete floor and yelling oddly Freudian epithets at her, while tacitly endorsing high gasoline prices and the liberal media:

Is this funny? As they say in the NFL--you make the call! On the plus side, at least Terry's shown only trying to permanently injure Palin, not kill her, as The Economist and Keith Olbermann metaphorically called for, when Hillary was running.

So in that sense, it's a definite step forward in an election year in which the surprisingly well entrenched sexism of the liberal overculture was none too thrilled at the idea of female politicians from either party running for national office.

Back in April, Obama discussed Reverend Wright with Chris Wallace:

WALLACE: Did you talk to reverend Wright recently about his decision to make a series of public appearances at this particular point?

OBAMA: You know, I didn't talk to him about that. I had talked to him after all this had happened, partly because I regretted -- I always regret people who are civilians, essentially, being dragged into these political fights.

And I expressed to him -- I said, "Look, we have very strong differences. I do not agree with the comments that you made. On the other hand, I regret that you have drawn so much attention."

Obama talking about his wife, back in July:

And I've said this before: I would never have my campaign engage in a concerted effort to make Cindy McCain an issue, and I would not expect the Democratic National Committee or people who were allied with me to do it. Because essentially, spouses are civilians. They didn't sign up for this. They're supporting their spouse.

I guess once you move beyond the inner circle, the definition of "civilian" becomes slightly hazier.

Peter Wood's 2007 book, A Bee In The Mouth, explored the growing anger in American politics.

It's on full display, here, and here. Though of course, don't expect the Victorian Gentleman to investigate.

In the Weekly Standard, Sam Schulman asks, "Why is Bill Ayers a respectable member of the upper middle class and Sarah Palin contemptible?"

Pour yourself a Johnnie Walker Black and remember. The presidential campaign was going to be about sex--the sex of the inevitable winning candidate. Then it was going to be about race. We dreamed we would atone for slavery and the Berlin Airlift, impress Europe and charm the Arab world. But the undecided voters who will determine the winner are no longer interested in race or sex. They are looking at social class. Which ticket best expresses the values and tastes of the upper-middle-class--and captivates the rest of us who follow the lead of the upper-middles?

The class argument is why the Bill Ayers strategy won't do. In the sex and race eras, it would have worked nicely. Obama's longtime working collaboration with the radical educational theorist and retired terrorist would dramatize his carefully but hastily discarded political radicalism. But no longer. The anti-Ayers publicists are quite right about Ayers's malignity and Obama's connivance. But when they try to explain what Ayers has done in the past and still wants to do--turn schools into nurseries of revolution, make leftist views a condition for becoming a teacher, promote dictatorship, and glorify violence--they injure not help their cause. Class will always trump politics. Being the first in one's family to adopt liberal political sentiments or move to New York City means a step into the middle class, for most Americans, and an increase in social status. More extreme political radicalism lifts one a step or two higher.

Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn became Sixties royalty not because of the status of the Ayers family in Chicago, but because of their relish for violence. They attempted to kill, and celebrated the killings of others (like Charles Manson's victims and the murder of any number of cops), to set an example for the less privileged. "We've known that our job is to lead white kids to armed revolution. . . . Tens of thousands have learned that protest and marches don't do it. Revolutionary violence is the only way," said the future Mrs. Ayers in 1970. On the other hand, there were the masses of students who merely marched and flashed the peace sign. Socially, they were nowhere. That was the shock of the Kent State massacre--the veteran martyrs of Harvard's University Hall and Columbia's Low Library wondered that such a terrible and authentic event could have taken place at a far-away state school to people of whom we knew nothing.

Now mainstream Chicago regards Ayers as rehabilitated--but why?

Schulman's piece appears to have written before a certain Ohio tradesman became a household name. But the blowback caused by Joe's walk-on part in the cold civil war reminds us that it is very much a class war--and specifically, the left's attempts to eviscerate the middle and working classes.

Related: Jennifer Rubin writes, "Suddenly, the race card doesn't look as important as the class warfare card."

Dave Burge of Iowahawk has a rare non-satiric post in which he writes:

We've all witnessed a lot of insanity in American politics over the last few years. Up until the last few days, none of it has seriously bothered me; hey, just more grist for the satire mill. But after witnessing the media's blitzkreig on Joe 'the Plumber' Wurzelbacher, I can only muster anger, and no small amount of fear.

Politicians -- Sarah Palin, Bill Clinton, et al. -- obviously have to put up with some rude, nasty shit, but it's right there in the jobs description. Joe the Plumber is different. He was a guy tossing a football with his kid in the front yard of his $125,000 house when a politician picked him out as a prop for a 30 second newsbite for the cable news cameras. Joe simply had the temerity to speak truth (or, if you prefer, an uninformed opinion) to power, for which the politico-media axis apparently determined that he must be humiliated, harassed, smashed, destroyed. The viciousness and glee with which they set about the task ought to concern anyone who still cares about citizen participation, and freedom of speech, and all that old crap they taught in Civics class before politics turned into Narrative Deathrace 3000, and Web 2.0 turned into Berlin 1932.0.

Godwin's Law! you say? if the jackboot fits, wear it.

Or as Jim Treacher notes:

The whole "He's not a licensed plumber!" non sequitur is really fantastic. So, if you happen to be standing in front of Obama when he publicly reveals his socialism, what does the media do? Demands to see your papers. That's just delicious, is what that is.

Of course, at Matt Drudge once said:

"Roger Ailes told me early on, you don't need a license to report. You need a license to do hair".

Or be a plumber. But which job gets your hands dirtier?

(Meanwhile, Jim Lindgren spots a tax issue that doesn't involve Joe the Plumber, but an actual presidential candidate. Which is why the issue will never be raised by the media.)

Linking to my April 2005 review of Frederick Taylor's Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945, which discussed what a geopolitical football the city of Dresden has been ever since the end of World War II, Canada's Damon Penny notes that a panel of German historians has revised the death toll of the allies' bombing of the city near the end of WWII sharply downward:

For more than 60 years Britain's Bomber Command led by Arthur 'Bomber' Harris has been vilified for causing up to 500,000 deaths in the carpet bombing of Dresden during World War II.

But now, after a four-year investigation, a panel of German historians has said that the true number of dead from the Allied air raids in January 1945 was between 18,000 and 25,000.

They reached the figure after combing through death certificates, hitherto sealed eyewitness reports, registration cards for people made homeless and hospital records.

It now emerges that the high number of deaths from 'Operation Thunderclap' was a myth invented by the Nazis, perpetuated by Communists and re-born in the past decade to serve the aims of ultra-nationalists.

[...]

It suited the Nazi propaganda machine to claim that half-a-million women and children had been incinerated in the firestorm. It helped persuade a struggling population that this was awaited them all unless they fought for Nazism with their last breath.

Then the Communist East Germans perpetuated the myth, mindful that it served their purposes by showing the destructiveness of capitalism and fascism combined.

In the last decade neo-Nazis have sought to keep the lie alive as they praise many of the policies of the Third Reich.

Incidentally, Dresden also makes an appearance near the end of this post on modern architecture and the near universal need amongst the left to start from zero.

Over the weekend, Glenn Reynolds wrote:

NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE? So we've had nearly 8 years of lefty assassination fantasies about George W. Bush, and Bill Ayers' bombing campaign is explained away as a consequence of him having just felt so strongly about social justice, but a few people yell things at McCain rallies and suddenly it's a sign that anger is out of control in American politics? It's nice of McCain to try to tamp that down, and James Taranto sounds a proper cautionary note -- but, please, can we also note the staggering level of hypocrisy here? (And that's before we get to the Obama campaign's thuggish tactics aimed at silencing critics.)

As always, it gets worse: as Gateway Pundit notes, now the left is re-editing YouTube clips to create snuff porn about plumbers. (Gateway's post is well worth your time, but caution strongly urged before clicking play on the ghastly YouTube clip he's embeded.)

I was a little worried about being hyperbolic in discussing the concept of "a cold civil war" on this week's PJM Political, recorded on Tuesday. Who knew how prescient the show would quickly seem?

"Let's get just a little smart folks."

I've already linked to Glenn Reynolds' post on Joe Wurzelbacher, but this quote from one his readers is worth highlighting:

The harassment of Joe the plumber is the singular biggest mistake of the Obama campaign. The MSM is making Joe a martyr. Heck, DKos just published Joe's home address. Obama is now not only a Marxist but a Marxist bully - just another Chicago thug. America roots for the underdog and they will not take this action kindly. If Joe were a hero yesterday, wait a few days.

Obi Wan's line in Star Wars when fighting Darth Vader comes to mind - "Strike me down and I will return more powerful than you can possibly imagine." Americans will realize what happened to Joe could easily happen to them. And they will remember this come November.

Well, some will, but whether or not the politics of plumber destruction will be a game changer remains to be seen, of course. But the dynamics of the story do seem vaguely similar to the memorial for Paul Wellstone in late October of 2002. It was initially planned as a bipartisan memorial to an earnest Minnesota politician tragically killed when his private campaign plane crashed. The "memorial" became in the end, a hugely partisan pep rally, demonstrating for millions the most rapacious aspects of the far left in an election year. The back-to-back attacks by the establishment liberal press and their candidates on two conservative-appearing middle Americans, first Sarah Palin, and now Joe Wurzelbacher similarly demonstrate how craven the left can act when they smell blood in the water.

At least American blood. Terrorist blood should never be shed, of course.

I spoke with Mark Steyn yesterday for PJM Political on XM Satellite Radio's POTUS '08 channel regarding his Canadian show trials. Ten minutes of the interview is at the top of this week's show; the unedited version (which runs about twice as long) is here.

Shooting in Paris, John Travolta's latest movie has a pyrotechnic run-in with the Angry Paris Street:

Local officials said, however, that they believed that four days of filming with the Hollywood actor, due to start yesterday, had been "abandoned" for good.

The movie's producer, Luc Besson, had chosen to shoot a few sequences of a spy movie, "From Paris with Love" in Les Bosquets as a gesture of solidarity with local people. Nearly 100 people had been given jobs as extras and security guards.

Ten specially equipped cars, assembled for stunt sequences in the movie, were burned by persons unknown late on Sunday night. Local people insisted yesterday that the attack must be the work of "jealous" members of youth gangs from another district. Police said that they were investigating reports of an attempt to demand "protection money" from the production company.

Most people in the Les Bosquets estate at Montfermeil, 10 miles north east of Paris, had welcomed the filming. Moussba Harb, 43, hired as an extra, said that a "childhood dream, a gift from the heavens, has gone up in smoke."

However, tempers have been running high in recent days. M. Besson's production company, Europacorps, had promised to pay 95 local people Euros 100 a day to work as extras, cooks or security guards.

Some local youths complained that, given the Euros 38m budget for the film, this was a paltry amount. The payments were increased to €200 a day.

As Orrin Judd writes, "Maclean's better not run this one", but Tim Blair has some advice for the harried (hey, what did they expect?) filmmakers:

Says a singed production spokesman:

"There's no now possibility of Mr Travolta or any of the other stars of the film operating in such a dangerous area.

"The scenes we were meant to do here will now be shot elsewhere."

Try Baghdad. It's safer.

Heh, indeed.^TM

2008 won't be like 1984--but 2009? Hey, that's a different story:

For my hipster Libertarian friends out there, you need to get this through your thick skulls. Republicans, given the kind of power the Democrats are about to accrue, would maybe take away your right to get a completely totally naked chick to grind on your lap in a publicly licensed bar. The Democrats will do their damnedest to take away your right to speak. There's the First Amendment, and then there's the First Amendment. Be careful what you wish for.

--Steve Green, "Fighting Words."

A few years ago, when Jonah Goldberg pointed out "the generalized ignorance or silence of mainstream liberals about their own intellectual history", he wasn't kidding!

Glenn Reynolds (and no, he's not the subject of the above headline, which I'll get to in just a moment) writes:

NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE? So we've had nearly 8 years of lefty assassination fantasies about George W. Bush, and Bill Ayers' bombing campaign is explained away as a consequence of him having just felt so strongly about social justice, but a few people yell things at McCain rallies and suddenly it's a sign that anger is out of control in American politics? It's nice of McCain to try to tamp that down, and James Taranto sounds a proper cautionary note -- but, please, can we also note the staggering level of hypocrisy here? (And that's before we get to the Obama campaign's thuggish tactics aimed at silencing critics.)

The Angry Left has gotten away with all sorts of beyond-the-pale behavior throughout the Bush Administration. The double standards involved -- particularly on the part of the press -- are what are feeding this anger. (Indeed, as Ann Althouse and John Leo have noted, the reporting on this very issue is dubious). So while asking for McCain supporters to chill a bit, can we also ask the press to start doing its job rather than openly shilling for a Democratic victory? Self-control is for everybody, if it's for anybody. . . .

As I've noted before, in The Right Stuff and in subsequent promotional interviews, Tom Wolfe described the press as "the proper Victorian Gentleman":

I'll never forget working on the [New York] Herald Tribune the afternoon of John Kennedy's death. I was sent out along with a lot of other people to do man-on-the-street reactions. I started talking to some men who were just hanging out, who turned out to be Italian, and they already had it figured out that Kennedy had been killed by the Tongs, and then I realized that they were feeling hostile to the Chinese because the Chinese had begun to bust out of Chinatown and move into Little Italy. And the Chinese thought the mafia had done it, and the Ukrainians thought the Puerto Ricans had done it. And the Puerto Ricans thought the Jews had done it. Everybody had picked out a scapegoat. I came back to the Herald Tribune and I typed up my stuff and turned it in to the rewrite desk. Late in the day they assigned me to do the rewrite of the man-on-the-street story. So I looked through this pile of material, and mine was missing. I figured there was some kind of mistake. I had my notes, so I typed it back into the story. The next day I picked up the Herald Tribune and it was gone, all my material was gone. In fact there's nothing in there except little old ladies collapsing in front of St. Patrick's. Then I realized that, without anybody establishing a policy, one and all had decided that this was the proper moral tone for the president's assassination. It was to be grief, horror, confusion, shock and sadness, but it was not supposed to be the occasion for any petty bickering. The press assumed the moral tone of a Victorian gentleman.

And a huge part of that Victorian Gent's daily job is take a rogue's gallery such as this, and make you believe that they're nothing but polite, Ralph Lauren-clad kids just back from playing touch football on the lawn at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port.

Just as it was in 1963, the legacy media's primary role in its twilight years as gatekeeper is to keep news out. Unlike back then, it's not because there isn't enough time or space to report it (bandwidth on the Internet being infinite), but to protect their friends, colleagues, political constituency and their ideology as a whole. And to make their opponents, which prior to the Blogosphere constituted a big chunk of their readership--back when the emphasis was on silent majority--look as badly as possible.

(Jim Treacher boils the schism down to just two words.)

Update: More from Treacher: "I'm going to start calling them the Deathbed Media."

LilacRose links to a post of mine, amongst others writing on the same topic, and wonders if the Cold Civil War that we discussed last year at this time might get a tad warmer come November:

As far as I'm concerned, the differences are irreconcilable. One part of the country wants a socialist, European-style country. The other part wants a country based on free-enterprise and the Constitution. One side has disdain for orthodox Judeo-Christian faiths, whereas the other side embraces or at least tolerates those beliefs. One part believes that if we just let down our defenses, everything would be peace and lovebeads. The other part knows we live in a dangerous world and that defense is essential.

However this election turns out, there will be turmoil. If Obama wins, a large part of the country will feel angry and powerless against the will of the left leaning blue states, the news media, Hollywood and academia. (In fact, they already feel that way, I assure you.) They will believe that ACORN created enough false voter registrations to put Obama over the top. If McCain wins, the left will riot and claim, "The Diebold machines were hacked!" The blue states, the news media, Hollywood and academia will resent that the will of the "dumb hicks" in flyover country overruled that of their "betters". And we will hear the cries of, "Racism! Racism!" ad nauseam.

I hate to sound all doom-and-gloom, but I see absolutely no solution to this. Or at least no solution in which America stays in the same form it is now. I hope I'm wrong about that. I guess we'll see.

As James Lileks wrote a year ago:

This is what annoys me to no end about the 60s, to cram it all into a tidy convenient decade; the overculture and the underculture ganged up on the great Middle, for different reasons but with equal gusto. The Middle was Crass, in the eyes of the overculture; Phony, in the eyes of the underculture.

Meanwhile, some thoughts on the state of the Cold Civil War near the 49th Parallel, here.

Update: Much more on this topic from Mark Steyn, and from April Gavaza, the "Hyacinth Girl", who, in a newly written post, revisits the topic she originally kicked off a year ago.

As I've written before here, the past two presidential elections have brought out numerous painful flashbacks from the dreadful late 1960s and early 1970s leftwing culture of radical chic anti-Americanism. But this post at The New Criterion by Michael Weiss is truly Six Degrees of Separation moment:

William Ibershof, the lead prosecutor of the Weathermen in 1972 (and so the Marcia Clark to Bill Ayers' O.J.), has written a letter to the editor of the New York Times in response to its article on Obama's association with the domestic terrorist. Ibershof does little beyond add another layer of sediment on top of a story that partisans of the Illinois senator, and evidently two-thirds of voters polled by Fox News, wish to see dead and buried. However, one point he makes merits attention for its historical irony:

I do take issue with the statement in your news article that the Weathermen indictment was dismissed because of "prosecutorial misconduct." It was dismissed because of illegal activities, including wiretaps, break-ins and mail interceptions, initiated by John N. Mitchell, attorney general at that time, and W. Mark Felt, an F.B.I. assistant director.

So Deep Throat's incompetence enabled Ayers escape jail, become a fixture in the radical groves of academia, and then head up an education program endowed by Richard Nixon's former ambassador to Great Britain.

As Yogi Berra said upon learning of the Jewish mayor of Dublin: Only in America.

Heh, indeed.^TM Weiss's post is titled "Nixonland", a topic we explored a bit in video form a couple of weeks ago.

On his homepage, Mark Steyn writes:

Their Marsupial Majesties at the British Columbia "Human Rights" Tribunal have dismissed El-Mo's complaint against Maclean's and voted unanimously to acquit the hatemongers:

The panel has concluded that the complaints are not justified because the complainants have not established that the Article is likely to expose them to hatred or contempt on the basis of their religion. Therefore, pursuant to s. 37(1) the complaints are dismissed.

For the full monster PDF ruling, click here. I'll be discussing the verdict later today after 6.30pm Mountain Time with Rob Breakenridge on 770 CHQR Calgary. Further comment from Kathy Shaidle & Pete Vere - and there's never been a better day to pick up a copy of The Tyranny Of Nice.

You can hear my extensive interview with Pete and Kathy from earlier this week, at Pajamas HQ.

Update: Mark Hemingway adds:

The bottom line is that while it's great Steyn is off the hook, free speech in Canada still does not exist in any meaningful way. It would be fair to say that Steyn and Maclean's magazine were spared by the bureaucratic star chamber because they were well-known enough to fight back and attract considerable publicity. The next person in Canada who dares to excercise his freedom of speech in a way that attracts the government censors probably won't be so lucky. And unfortunately, Canada is still rank with Human Rights tribunals actively looking for those that express politically incorrect opinions, reprint objectionable Bible verses etc. so they can go about their business of denying free expression.

"Since I had the misfortune to become ensnared in the Canadian 'human rights' racket, I've come to appreciate more and more the comment one fellow left on an Internet post somewhere or other, remarking that he was in favour of free speech, because the alternatives 'were just too weird.'"

That's a brief excerpt from Mark Steyn's article-length introduction to Pete Vere and Kathy Shaidle's new book, The Tyranny of Nice, on Canada's "Human Rights Commissions", and their patented show trials to purge all doubleplusungood thoughtcrime from Airstrip Canada.

How weird do those trials get? And could similar such weirdness be coming to the US? Tune in to my 40-minute long interview with Kathy and Pete over at Pajamas Media.

As Jonah Goldberg writes, "The specter of Herbert Hoover is conjured every time there's an economic calamity, large or small":

But you know what? Specters are ghosts. And ghosts aren't real.

The Herbert Hoover of popular imagination was a laissez-faire lickspittle of Adam Smith. But this idea began as Rooseveltian propaganda and endures as the creation myth of modern liberalism.

William Leuchtenburg, possibly the greatest authority on the FDR era, wrote some time ago, "Almost every historian now recognizes that the image of Hoover as a 'do-nothing' president is inaccurate."

After the stock market crash of 1929, Hoover browbeat business leaders to keep wages and prices high. He invested heavily in public works projects. He pushed for an international moratorium on debts. He created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which later became a home for many of FDR's Brain Trusters. Hoover increased farm subsidies enormously.

Some of Hoover's interventions were good but ineffectual. A few were very, very bad and very effective.

In 1932, Hoover in effect repealed Calvin Coolidge's tax cuts, increasing the rates for the poorest taxpayers by more than 100 percent and hiking the top rate from 25 percent to 63 percent. Worse, contrary to his own better instincts, Hoover signed the disastrous Smoot-Hawley trade bill that raised protectionist walls at precisely the moment the world needed trade the most.

Then there's this idea that FDR rode to the rescue, saving the day by untying the American people from the railroad tracks of runaway capitalism. Former Clinton Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, now a surrogate for Barack Obama, recently said on NPR: "It's very tempting to always think that the government should just stand back and let the private sector sort these problems out. That's the kind of thinking that made the Depression 'Great.'"

Summers should know better (in fact, I'm sure he does). The Great Depression was not made "Great" by government inaction. Indeed, FDR's New Deal may have been wonderful in some mytho-poetic sense, and maybe some of its reforms can be defended in some broader context, but as an effort to end the Great Depression, the New Deal was a failure. As my colleague Mark Steyn writes, "Lots of other places -- from Britain to Australia -- took a hit in 1929 but, alas, they lacked an FDR to keep it going till the end of the Thirties. That's why in other countries they refer to it as "the Depression," but only in the U.S. is it 'Great.'"

Which is why the great Amity Shlaes reminds us in her recent column that "The stock market crash of October 1929 and the Great Depression were not the same thing". The late Robert Bartley of the Wall Street Journal titled a nifty economic history of the 1980s The Seven Fat Years. FDR turned the Depression into seven very, very lean years:

Two UCLA economists say they have figured out why the Great Depression dragged on for almost 15 years, and they blame a suspect previously thought to be beyond reproach: President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

After scrutinizing Roosevelt's record for four years, Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian conclude in a new study that New Deal policies signed into law 71 years ago thwarted economic recovery for seven long years.

Read the rest, here.

Meanwhile, Hugh Hewitt brings it all up to date with the omnious-sounding, "President Barack Hoover."

It's compare and contrast time! First up, this passage from academia's Ayers apologia:

All citizens, but particularly teachers and scholars, are called upon to challenge orthodoxy, dogma, and mindless complacency, to be skeptical of authoritative claims, to interrogate and trouble the given and the taken-for-granted. Without critical dialogue and dissent we would likely be burning witches and enslaving our fellow human beings to this day. The growth of knowledge, insight, and understanding--- the possibility of change--- depends on that kind of effort, and the inevitable clash of ideas that follows should be celebrated and nourished rather than crushed. Teachers have a heavy responsibility, a moral obligation, to organize classrooms as sites of open discussion, free of coercion or intimidation.

As witnessed by this moment at Brandeis:

Professor Donald Hindley, on the faculty for 48 years, teaches a course on Latin American politics. Last fall, he described how Mexican migrants to the United States used to be discriminatorily called "wetbacks." An anonymous student complained to the administration accusing Mr. Hindley of using prejudicial language. It was the first complaint against him in 48 years.

After an investigation, during which Mr. Hindley was not told the nature of the complaint, Brandeis Provost Marty Krauss informed Mr. Hindley that "The University will not tolerate inappropriate, racial and discriminatory conduct by members of its faculty." A corollary accusation was that students suffered "significant emotional trauma" when exposed to such a term. An administration monitor was assigned to his class. Threatened with "termination," Mr. Hindley was ordered to take a sensitivity-training class.

Call it "The Tyranny of Nice", to coin a phrase.

Or call it Anarcho-Authoritarianism, to borrow from an Fred Siegel's look at H.L. Mencken from a few years ago in the Weekly Standard, which I flashed back to earlier today, mainly because I was looking for a euphemism for "radical chic" in my post linking to Roger L. Simon's "Running On Empty" reminiscences on Bernadine Dohrn and her apologists in Hollywood:

The Sage of Baltimore needs to be placed in a broader intellectual context. The man who is still selectively celebrated by people like Rodgers, as if he were nothing more or less than an American iconoclast, was one of a number of anti democratic thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic. Some of them, like D.H. Lawrence, were proto-fascists; others, like H.G. Wells, were apologists for Stalin [Wells was no slouch as a proto-fascist himself, either--Ed]. But they all denounced democracy in the name of vitalism, eugenics, and a caste system run by an elite of superior men.

Part of the reason it's so hard to make sense of Mencken is that he was, paradoxically, an anarcho-authoritarian. He agreed with the American Civil Liberties Union on the importance of free speech. But while that organization, under the influence of principled men such as Felix Frankfurter, argued for such freedoms on the grounds that "a marketplace of ideas" (to use Justice Holmes's term) was the best method of arriving at the truth, Mencken supported it in order to shield superior men like himself from being hobbled by the little people. For the same reason, Mencken was a near anarchist when it came to America, but an authoritarian when it came to the iron rule of the Kaiser and General Ludendorff. We are more familiar with anarcho-Stalinists such as William Kunstler, who had a parallel attitude toward the United States and the Soviet empire, but it was Mencken who blazed the trail down which Kunstler and his ilk would travel.

That Ayers and Dohrn were consciously or not exploring concepts that were well over 60 years old at the height of their terrorist activities actually isn't all that surprising. When you're starting from zero, to borrow Tom Wolfe's line, it's easy to forget that you're also running in place--or at least in circles.

The Principalities And Powers blog has some interesting thoughts on my "Bonnie & Nixon" video from earlier this week--and welcome Founding Bloggers' readers, who are clicking over to it.

My "Bonnie & Nixon" video this week was inspired by a quote from Rick Perlstein to Reason magazine while he was promoting his new book, Nixonland. Orrin Judd has a lengthy review of Perlstein's book, here.

Back in the summer of 2004, after a rash of leftwing attacks on cars displaying Bush/Cheney bumperstickers, an enterprising T-shirt manufacturer took to selling shirts that said, "A person of tolerance and diversity keyed my car."

One Minneapolis resident really got a full spray of tolerance and diversity on his cars today. Back in 2004, one could make the argument that the left knew that Kerry was tanking and since politics is their religion, they had to vent their frustration in some way, no matter how childish. But with Obama currently ahead in the polls, this sort of fascistic vandalism is more inexcusable than ever.

Fascism is always descending upon America--but it always seems to land in Europe.

This past summer, Rick Perlstein, the author of the new biography called Nixonland, looked back on the period leading up to Richard Nixon's 1968 election and told Reason magazine that in his opinion, "Bonnie and Clyde was the most important text of the New Left", adding:

"It made an argument about vitality and virtue vs. staidness and morality that was completely new, that resonated with young people in a way that made no sense to old people. Just the idea that the outlaws were the good guys and the bourgeois householders were the bad guys--you cannot underestimate how strange and fresh that was."

It certainly was strange, compared with the nation's politics at the start of the 1960s.

In the latest edition of our Silicon Graffiti videoblog, we take a look back at the film, its radical chic times, and its champion--Pauline Kael of the New Yorker, who would reject traditional culture for "trash cinema." And we'll also look at Bobby Kennedy's Fascist Moment--and even a Bonnie & Clyde-related excerpt the fourth edition of Austin Bay and Jim Dunnigan's A Quick And Dirty Guide To War. Which sounds like one meaty, beaty, big and bouncy little video to me.

Tommy guns and fedoras are optional, of course.

(Previous editions of Silicon Graffiti, going back to the start of the year, can be found here.)

Update: Welcome readers of InstaPundit, the Brothers Judd, Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism blog at NRO, and--appropriately enough--the New Nixon Blog. Please look around, there's lots here we think you'll enjoy.

"They told me if I voted for John Kerry we'd end up with socialism. They were right!"

David Levinson Wilk of Politico claims that "Crossword puzzles heavily favor Democrats"--and he should know:

I am partly to blame.

On Jan. 8, 2005, I purposefully and unapologetically became the first person to ever construct a crossword puzzle for The New York Times that featured this five-letter answer:

OBAMA.

Earlier this week, Steve Schmidt, John McCain's senior campaign adviser, lambasted the Times for being "totally, 150 percent in the tank for the Democratic candidate." The GOP, it seems, is finally catching on to a once-hidden truth:

Crossword puzzles heavily favor Democrats.

According to the puzzle database maintained by Cruciverb.com, ever since that game-changing day in 2005, OBAMA has appeared regularly as an answer in New York Times crossword puzzles. With its wonderfully convenient alternating series of commonly used vowels and consonants, OBAMA has been the answer to the clues "Senator who wrote 'Dreams From My Father,'" "Future senator who delivered the 2004 Democratic convention keynote address" and "Presidential candidate born in Hawaii."

But what about MCCAIN? Shockingly, not once has MCCAIN been an answer in a crossword in the New York Times, The Washington Post or the Los Angeles Times. No MCCAIN, no JOHNMCCAIN, no SENATORMCCAIN, not even his most recent sobriquet, the presidential-sounding JOHNSMCCAINIII.

Gee, now there's a shock.

With a bailout plan costing--cue the Dr. Evil voice--700 bee-llion dollars in the works (designed to prevent a meltdown that would in the neighborhood "north of $30 trillion"), The Gormogons write, "So maybe Bush is a fascist after all--Just not in the way the frothing lefties allege."

Meanwhile, (also found via Jonah's Liberal Fascism blog), Roderick Long reminds us:

There never was anything remotely like a period of laissez-faire in American history (at least not if "laissez-faire" means "let the market operate freely" as opposed to "let the rich and powerful help themselves to other people's property"). The regulatory state was deeply involved from the start, particularly in the banking and currency industries and in the assignment of property titles to land.

I think it's also worth comparing the bailout to the period in the first half of the 1970s when the Democrat-controlled Congress attempted to make the trains run on time--or at least keep them running at all--by creating Amtrak in 1971 and Conrail in 1976:

Amtrak was designed to take over passenger railroading, which was essentially rendered superfluous by commercial jet aviation almost everywhere in the US except the sprawling Northeast Corridor, where passenger trains are still viable. Conrail was designed to merge the failed Penn Central and a half dozen other smaller but also bankrupt railroads.

Amtrak is still in existence and still relying upon taxpayer dollars to survive. It may very likely never be financially independent. Conrail was designed from the start to be a profitable company, and eventually did turn a profit by the mid-1980s, when it also went went public, and was eventually merged into two different railroads in 1999. Fortunately, the federal government hasn't gone into the railroad bailout business since the 1970s, and in fact passed sweeping railroad deregulation bills in the late 1970s that helped make Conrail financially viable in the first place.

So hopefully, like the railroad bailouts of the 1970s, this is a once in a lifetime event involving the investment community.

Until the next sector of the Mentos economy fails, of course.

Update: Nick Schulz has "The Acronym We Need."

Obama really grinds the gears of the Super Gaffe-O-Matic '76 with this one:

"You know, you can put lipstick on a pig," Obama said, "but it's still a pig."

But hey, he still hasn't called her sweetie!

Meanwhile, Camile Paglia writes:

The witch-trial hysteria of the past two incendiary weeks unfortunately reveals a disturbing trend in the Democratic Party, which has worsened over the past decade. Democrats are quick to attack the religiosity of Republicans, but Democratic ideology itself seems to have become a secular substitute religion. Since when did Democrats become so judgmental and intolerant?

Gosh--I don't know. Let's ask Clarence Thomas and Robert Bork if they know how far this trend goes back...

In 1946, Whittaker Chamber managed to sum up the entire history of the 20th century in 16 perfectly chosen words:

The dominant problem of the 20th Century is the reconciliation of economic security with political liberty.

Absolutely spot on.