Whores and NY Democrats

UPDATE: Linked at Blogs for Victory, where my friend Matt Margolis (co-author of Caucus of Corruption) notes the reports from the New York Sun and WCBS that Spitzer is expected to resign Wednesday.

* * * * *

As co-author of Donkey Cons: Sex, Crime, and Corruption in the Democratic Party, I was asked Tuesday afternoon for my reaction to the Eliot Spitzer scandal.

First suggestion? Read Iowahawk and laugh yourself silly:

At a hastily scheduled morning press conference at the headquarters of New York's exclusive Emperors Club prostitution ring, high priced call girl "Kristen" announced that she would temporarily step aside in the wake of charges that she had engaged in sex with New York Governor Eliot Spitzer.
"I made a serious mistake and betrayed the trust of my co-workers, my many clients, and my pimps," she said in a quiet voice cracking with emotion. "I will be taking a leave of absence to earn their forgiveness, and redeem myself in the eyes of the entire expensive whore community." . . .

Read the whole thing, and when you're through wiping the tears of laughter from your eyes, pay attention to a few points worth making:

• Why hookers? Spitzer is successful and powerful, so it is reasonable to ask why a guy like that is patronizing prostitutes. One word: Discretion. A bigshot like that figures that if he engages in an ordinary affair, the woman might tell somebody -- and if the affair breaks up, there's the "woman scorned" factor to worry about. But because prostitution is a criminal enterprise, a guy like Spitzer figures the prostitutes will keep things hush-hush. And maybe if this had been just an occasional fling, Spitzer might have gotten away with it. But doing hookers for six years? The law of large numbers finally caught up with him.
• The Tammany factor. The revelation of Spitzer's hooker habit highlights the significant role that prostitution played in the history of the Democratic Party in New York, going back to the heyday of Tammany Hall. As explained in Chapter 3 of Donkey Cons, during the 1800s, Tammany Democrats formed close alliances with criminal gangs in New York City, alliances that endured for many decades. A famous Tammany boss and saloon keeper, "Big Tim" Sullivan, controlled New York's police on behalf of pimps and gamblers. Sullivan was so influential that when he died with advanced syphilis in 1913, his funeral was attended by 16 congressmen and four U.S. senators.
• The irony. Hailed by liberals as the scourge of greedy Wall Street capitalism, Spitzer was destroyed by his enthusiasm for sex of the most capitalistic sort. Spitzer supposedly cared so much about the poor underprivileged "little guy," but didn't mind paying $2,000 a night for the privilege of demanding unsafe sexual acts from prostitutes. (Hey, they're just stupid whores, right? Don't all Democrats expect whores "to do things you might not think were safe"? Or is Spitzer a lone wolf in this regard?)
• The bright side. Spitzer's downfall apparently triggered Wall Street's biggest day in five years.

For more blogger reaction to Spitzer's Hookergate debacle, check out Memeorandum.

UPDATE: I've just been informed that the title of this post may tend to suggest a disparaging (and potentially libelous) comparison. Therefore, I hasten to point out that, unlike New York Democrats, some whores are actually decent human beings.

UPDATE II: Unlike "Kristen," who was warned about Spitzer's appetite for unsafe acts, another call girl, this one 22 years old, tells ABC News that Spitzer's sexual interests were "clean." Lots of good stuff in the ABC story:

Federal investigators say there is no evidence Spitzer used state money or campaign funds to pay the prostitutes, but that the way he moved an estimated $40,000 through various accounts violated federal money laundering laws. . . .
A prison term is one of the issues holding up the governor's resignation as well as whether or not he pleads guilty to criminal charges.

Heh. An ex-prosecutor in prison. He would be very popular there, I bet. But there's more from ABC:

Other than that, lawyers close to the case say New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer is prepared to resign and has his letter written.
Spitzer spent his day at his 5th Avenue apartment in New York City. His wife and three daughters left without him mid-afternoon as he prepared to step down as governor and end what even his political enemies called a once brilliant career.

"His wife and three daughters" -- yeah, prostitution is a victimless crime.

UPDATE III: I love the the New York Post for its tawdry tabloid mentality, but this is just bad writing:

She was waiting for him near the king-sized bed in Room 871, a stunningly sexy, petite brunette who called herself "Kristen."

She knew Client-9 had paid good money -- $4,300 -- for what would be their few hours of steamy sex together at Washington, DC's historic Mayflower Hotel on the day before Valentine's Day, in a deal brokered several days earlier by her pimp back in New York. . . .

Spitzer was a regular with Emperor, according to the complaint that contains the extraordinary details of the governor's tryst with the curvy bombshell: haggling over the price - and a down payment on future services - as well as the kind of sex the governor wanted. (Emphasis added.)

Good writing doesn't waste time with useless adjectives, and good reporting sticks to the facts. According to the affidavit, "Kristen" is 5-foot-5 and 105 pounds. Even though Emperor VIP advertised her as "petite," 5-foot-5 is about average height. My wife is 5-foot-6, and would never describe herself as "petite," a description that generally should be reserved for women 5-foot-2 or less.

"Kristen" is not petite. She is slender, slim or thin. If the writers at the Post want an elegant word for a skinny woman, they might try willowy, or perhaps coltish.

"Kristen" was advertised as "very pretty," but on what basis do the Post writers turn that datum into "stunningly sexy"? Have they met this woman? Is she really that hot? Are they writing a news story or promotional copy for a new DVD re-release of Pretty Woman? And what the heck kind of adverb is "stunningly," anyways?

The Post writers then go on to declare that "Kristen" and Spitzer engaged in "steamy sex." Really? Have they seen a video, or what? I would have a tough time applying the word "steamy" to any sexual act involving Eliot Spitzer, who ain't exactly Brad Pitt. Aesthetic judgments aside, there is no factual basis for the Post writers to say whether the sex in Room 871 on Feb. 13 was "steamy" or not. It's just another wasted adjective.

The real clunker in the Post story comes when the writers decide that the 5-foot-5, 105-pound "Kristen" -- whom they've previously (and erroneously) described as petite -- is now worthy of designation as a curvy bombshell.

No. No. No. A thousand times no. Whatever else you say about a woman who's 5-foot-5 and 105 pounds, she is most definitely not a "curvy bombshell." To have any serious curves, much less "bombshell" curves, a woman who's 5-foot-5 would have to weigh at least 15 pounds more than "Kristen."

Excuse me for venting so much spleen on a few paragraphs of this one article, but it's bad writing, and bad writing annoys me.

UPDATE IV: Holy crap! $80,000 worth of hookers?

The Associated Press, quoting unnamed law enforcement officials, said Spitzer's running tab for the trysts could have been as high as $80,000.

Wow. Spitzer was the Charlie Sheen of governors. After he resigns tomorrow, Spitzer should hop a flight to L.A. and become a Hollywood movie producer. He'd fit right in.

UPDATE V: Just woke up, checked the Site Meter and discovered that somebody had reached my blog by Googling "Spitzer" and "unsafe acts." Obviously, someone's curiosity was aroused by reports that the governor of New York was considered a "difficult" client, known to request that prostitutes "do things you might not think were safe."

What kinky and unsanitary vice was involved? Perhaps it was some kind of group scene, a sort of fantasy-fulfillment fetish involving Greg Gutfeld and Kerry Howley (who've been known to talk about hookers):

UPDATE VI: What is it with Kerry Howley and hookers?

I’m fascinated by the Spitzer-inspired discussion of prostitution on blogs that identify as feminist, most of which seem to be conflicted but marginally pro-decriminalization.

Miss Howley then struggles to discover what might be called a "pro-sex" feminist lesson in the case of "Kristen" and Gov. Charlie Sheen, to wit:

Anti-prostitution laws add a layer of legal sanction to all of our worst intuitions about the treatment of sexually independent women; they strengthen and validate the idea that women who bed men with any frequency are sick, marginal, pariahs.

OK, Miss Howley: Is it the laws or the idea with which you are arguing here? Arguing about laws is fair game, and no one's feelings get hurt. It's just politics, right? However, when it comes to your argument against the idea (which you caricature rather unfairly) of chastity as a virtue, and promiscuity as a vice, you seem strangely ... intolerant.

Don't people have the right to their own opinions? If so, then they have the right to hold sluts in low esteem. You seem to be suggesting, Miss Howley, that people who have a negative opinion of sluts -- or, to employ your euphemism, "sexually independent women" -- are all reactionary lowbrows or moralistic prudes, unfit for polite society. But if "polite society" is to be limited to those who enthusiastically approve of rampant sluttishness, well, it's going to be a rather small society (and not very polite, since it will include lots of "Girls Gone Wild" and Britney Spears fans).

As Ayn Rand might say, you need to re-examine your premise.

The Killer Commie: Che chic

Allison Aldrich clues in college kids about the guy whose face adorns their trendy left-wing T-shirts:

In a passage from his famous "Motorcycle Diaries," he quotes himself as saying, "My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood." . . .
Fidel Castro recognized this ruthlessness about Guevara, and placed him in charge of La Cabana prison in Cuba, where he was judge, jury and executioner. . . .
Several men who survived La Cabana prison recall a night when a 14-year-old boy was shoved into their holding cell. When asked what he did, he gasped that he had tried to defend his father from the firing squad, but was unsuccessful.
Moments later, guards dragged the boy out of the cell, and Che Guevara himself ordered the boy to kneel down.
The jailed men screamed "assassins!" and watched out of their cell window as Guevara took out his pistol, put the barrel to the back of the boy's neck, and fired.

Maybe Hollywood will do an Oscar-winning films about that Che. But don't hold your breath. For some reason, liberals don't like to think about the millions of people killed by the Left's communist heroes.

Last year I wrote about the Young America's Foundation's "Victims of Che" poster:

"The Victims of Che Guevera" poster, produced by the Young America's Foundation . . . uses tiny photos of those killed by Cuba's communist regime to compose the face of the Marxist guerrilla, who has become a popular T-shirt icon.
"Che is one of the heroes that the left idolizes," said Patrick X. Coyle, vice president of YAF. "But a lot of kids don't know anything about him. We thought this would be a great way to highlight his atrocities."

YAF's "Victims of Che" poster is free. (Isn't capitalism great?)

'Republican tactics,' oh, my!

For various reasons, I can't just wade in and do continuous daily current-news blogging, so there's no sense in my adding further derision to the mocking scorn now being heaped on Elliott "Had To Pay For It" Spitzer (a/k/a "Client Nine").

However, I will take note of Barack Obama's accusation that the Clinton campaign is using "Republican tactics."

Perhaps Obama meant to use "Republican" as a synonym for "successful" (and let's face it, most successful people are Republican), in which case he was merely saying that Clinton has staged an amazing comeback by using successful tactics.

But I'm pretty sure that wasn't what Obama meant at all. What he really meant to do was to use a cheap partisan smear against a member of his own party.

Democrats who attribute GOP political success to "tactics" are engaged in intellectual dishonesty, an effort to avoid discussing the failures of Democratic ideas, Democratic policies and Democratic politicians. If Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton had been successful leaders, if Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid were innovative and effective legislators, then the Democratic Party would not be such a mess, and "liberal" would not have such negative connotations.

Democrats routinely use this "tactics" smear against Republicans -- e.g., accusations of "Swiftboating" and stealing elections -- as an aggressive means of explaining Democratic electoral failures. For Obama to use this "Republican tactics" smear against Hillary Clinton is a desperate low blow.

Linda Hirshman is boring

Feminist academic Linda Hirshman is whining because she "got the boot" from the TPM cafe at Talking Points Media -- which, in case you don't follow these things, is a big liberal group-blog site.

Hirshman blames her loss of TPM blogging privileges on an intra-liberal political dispute over something she wrote for the WaPo. It apparently doesn't occur to her that maybe TPM dumped her because she's dull as dirt.

I don't know about her blogging, but the op-ed she wrote for the WaPo was totally lame. A (mercifully brief) sample:

Female governors, lifelong feminists, union leaders, moms rising -- all rushing into the Obama camp. What's going on?
Maybe Obama is the best candidate, and these highly educated women, with their greater political savvy, have recognized his value. A less charitable explanation is that college-educated women don't need the social safety net as much as their less fortunate sisters do, so Clinton's early stand on family leave or her slightly more generous health-care plan aren't as important to them.

About as interesting as an AAUW pamphlet. Hirshman's thesis involves a gender-race-class theory of why so many upscale white women are supporting Obama rather than Hillary. It might be possible to do something interesting with such a thesis, but Hirshman didn't. Her op-ed has no legitimate merit as analysis; it's just special-pleading from a Hillary supporter.

What makes the Hirshman op-ed (and her subsequent whining about TPM) so annoying is her flimsy effort to suggest that there are important policy differences between Hillary and Obama, a difference that has some relevance to her whole gender-race-class theory. But this is absurd on its face. Policy-wise, Hillary and Obama are quite nearly clones. Both are doctrinaire liberals. They differ primarily in style, rhetoric and biography, not in policy.

For liberal Democrats, the real question should be, which of these two equally liberal candidates is most likely to win in November? I think that explains the Obama surge: He is a very telegenic candidate, with a strong voice and pleasant personal demeanor. He is likeable in a way that Hillary never could or will be. Obama looks and sounds like a winner, and thus more Democrats who want to win in November are supporting him.

Hirshman's dullness as a writer is exceeded only by her arrogance in thinking that the people who read her WaPo op-ed can't see that she's just a cheerleader for Hillary.

Uganda aids South Sudan

Important news from Uganda:

The government of South Sudan is discussing a deal in which the country’s students in Ugandan public universities will pay the same tuition as their counterparts.
Yesterday, the South Sudanese media reported that this was one of the issues President Salva Kiir discussed with President Yoweri Museveni during his two-day visit here last week.
“I have signed with the Uganda president to allow all our students to pay the same tuition fees as their natives,” Kiir told Sudanese students at the Imperial Resort Beach Hotel in Entebbe on Friday. . . .
It was, however, not clear whether the deal applied to private universities. Uganda has five public universities: Makerere, Kyambogo, Mbarara, Busitema and Gulu. The arrangement is part of the cooperation that includes pacts on transport and communication, health, culture and the media.

This cooperation between Uganda and South Sudan is a very positive step toward peace and prosperity in the region.

South Sudan (also known as "New Sudan") won autonomy from Khartoum after a 22-year civil war that ending in 2005. That war was caused by radical Islamicist elements in the Khartoum government, which sought forcibly to impose sharia law throughout Sudan. The Christians in southern Sudan -- under the leadership of Col. John Garang -- fought back and paid a heavy price for their freedom. Many from the South were carried away in slavery to the Islamic North, and atrocities were widespread. Khartoum sided with Saddam Hussein after he invaded Iraq in 1990; For five years (1991-96), Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda were based in Sudan.

One consequence of the long civil war was that it produced what has been called a "lost generation" of Sudanese who have had little or no formal education. Among the South Sudan war veterans I met during my February trip to Africa were some who joined the Sudanese People's Liberation Army (SPLA) as young as 11.

However, I'm not sure that "lost generation" phrase -- with its overtones of hopelessness -- is entirely fair to the Sudanese. These veterans (such as my Dinka friend Santino, shown in the photo) are Christian men with the kind of personal dignity that befits such military heroes. Their long years of army discipline will surely make them valuable citizens in peace.

Nonetheless, the opportunity for South Sudanese students to attend Uganda's universities at standard tuition will be a tremendous aid to South Sudan's efforts to rebuild its economy and civil society.

The Remarkable Museveni

The mention of Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni in this Monday news story gives me an opportunity to discuss this amazing historical figure. Museveni has been controversial and he definitely has his critics (a Kenyan man who attends our church is one of those critics), but what he has accomplished in Uganda is truly remarkable.

Given that Museveni came to power 22 years ago as the result of a successful "war of liberation," it would be easy for Westerners to think of him as just another of the "strong man" rulers who have been so common in post-colonial Africa. It would be easy to think that, but it would also be ignorant and wrong to do so.

While in downtown Kampala with Sam Childer's assistant, "Nineteen" (his African name sounds exactly like "Nineteen" in English), I visited a street market and asked a used-book vendor if he had a recent history of Uganda. The vendor sold me, for a modest sum, a 1990 paperback book called Mission to Freedom: Uganda Resistance News, 1981-85.

I didn't realize it at the time -- not until I got back to the States and tried to find it online -- but there in that street market, I had purchased quite a rare volume. Mission to Freedom is a collection of original dispatches from what might be called the "underground newspaper" of the National Resistance Movement, which was then an outlaw guerrilla resistance effort against the dictatorship that ruled Uganda.

A very brief history: When Uganda gained its independence in 1962, a guy named Obote became the prime minister. In 1966, Obote effectively made himself dictator and pursued a socialist economic policy, with predicably bad results. Obote's dictatorship was dependent on the support of the military. In 1971 (again, predictably) the military decided it didn't need Obote, so while he was out of the country, there was a coup that installed as the new dictator Obote's longtime military henchman, Idi Amin. Of course, Amin became one of the most heinous dictators in history. He was finally deposed in 1979, and in 1980, Obote returned to power in an election that was widely considered fraudulent.

Museveni had been one of the Ugandans who went into exile in Tanzania during Amin's dictatorship, and was a key figure in the alliance of Ugandan exiles and Tanzanian army troops that deposed Amin. After Obote's fraudulent election, Museveni went into the countryside and organized a resistance movement. In February 1981, Museveni led a daring raid on a Ugandan military installation, seizing weapons and equipment, thus starting the five-year "war in the bush" that eventually made Museveni president.

OK, standard Third World "war of liberation" stuff, right? So it seems, until you read Museveni's declarations of his principles, written during the war, as reprinted in Mission to Freedom.

Though he had been a campus Marxist leader in the late '60s, and had written his senior thesis on the nihilistic intellectual Franz Fanon, clearly Museveni's worldview had changed in the intervening decade -- probably from the experience of watching the dictatorship of Amin in action. Museveni's writings in Mission to Freedom deal chiefly with military and political affairs, but he also condemns tribalism and "backwardness," and emphasizes "the rule of law" and "economic revitalization."

If he were an American academic, the Museveni of Mission to Freedom would be right at home at a Cato, AEI or Heritage seminar. As I was reading this book, I had the distinct impression that at some point Museveni had spent part of his exile reading Hayek.

Museveni & Uganda today

Uganda's gross domestic product ranks 13th in Africa, although a good bit lower (24th among 59 African nations) when calculated on a per-capita basis. However, considering that it is a relatively small landlocked country, considering that it has only recently suppressed the terrorist depradations of Joseph Kony, and considering that its northern neighbor Sudan has been embroiled in civil war so long, Uganda's economic situation is very good.

Uganda's economic situation is especially good if you keep in mind the historic context: First, the socialist insanity of the Obote regime, then the barbaric despotism of Amin, and then the five-year guerrilla war that brought Museveni to power in 1986. Recovering from such a history takes a long time. Even if Uganda's per-capita GDP of $1,800 a year doesn't sound impressive (although it's double the per-capita GDP of neighboring Tanzania), the country has obviously made great strides, and the stability of Museveni's government is a big reason for that.

Politically, Museveni's government has held true to its declaration during its "resistance" years, seeking to eliminate "backwardness" and discourage tribalism.

Like many of my conservative friends in America, I understand tribalism as being in some sense intrinsic to the human experience, and I suspect some of my America friends will look askance at the phrase "discourage tribalism." Trust me, friends: What the Ugandan government is doing is perfectly Burkean. I'd need 5,000 words to explain it, but it's a good thing.

I could (and eventually plan to) write a lot more about Museveni's policies, but it's getting late, so let me just give you one brilliant example. This is a photo I took of a roadside sign near downtown Kampala put up by the Uganda election commission:

"For Democracy, Reject Ignorance: Listen, Analyze and Choose." I don't know about you, but I'd sure like to see some signs like that in America.

Finally, to any of my American friends who might wish to visit Uganda, let me offer some travel advice:

• Fly British Airways. They're the best, and you'll just love listening to the crew speak with those cool Brit accents.
• Don't get freaked out by all the recommended vaccinations. Get the shots, but don't get the idea that you're heading to a rendezvous with certain death. Also, beware of medication interactions. About four or five days into my trip, I stopped taking my anti-malaria medicine because of the weird side effects.
• Also, don't get freaked out by the "traveler's advisories" from the State Department. The U.S. State Department is evidently run by a bunch of neuraesthenic, agoraphobic, hypochondriac scaredy-cats who get paid to convey the official U.S. government position that a trip to Uganda is a rendezvous with certain death.
• After arrival at Entebbe Airport, take the shuttle bus to the Kampala Serena Hotel. It's a five-star resort, located adjacent to the central government offices in downtown Kampala, and thus within a security perimeter similar to what you'd find at the White House or the Capitol. It's $375 a night, but wait until you see the fabulous gardens, the beautiful swimming pool with its dramatic waterfall, the poolside cafe, the dinner buffet, et cetera. We visited the Serena mainly to use their business center and Wi-fi service, but I also got a bit of leisure relaxation time there. It's excellent.
• Of course, smart travelers know never to drink tap water or any beverage with ice in a foreign country. The bottled water in Uganda is fine (Perrier is available), but if you prefer stronger beverages, allow me to recommend Bell Lager, a fine Ugandan beer.
• For shopping, I recommend the Garden City Mall in downtown Kampala -- it's the only mall I've ever seen that also includes a casino. I didn't visit the casino, but I did visit an ice cream shop, clothing store, grocery store and Internet cafe at the mall. Internet service in Uganda is much slower than what I used to in the States, but the Internet cafe at the mall had a connection as fast as the one in the business center at the Serena Hotel, for a lower cost.
• Your first day in Uganda, study the currency and exchange rate, so (a) you've got some idea what things actually cost, and (b) you'll be able to properly tip waiters, bellhops, etc. You will find that if you make a point of learning the name of your waiter your first day at the place, and give him a healthy tip (i.e., 20%), your service on all subsequent nights will be excellent. (Of course, this is true wherever you travel; I'm just pointing out that this principle applies in Africa, too.)

Peace in South America?

After my post on the American Chavezistas, a friend sent me an e-mail suggesting a follow-up. And indeed, there is relevant news today:

The crisis over a Colombian military raid in Ecuador was resolved Friday in the Dominican Republic, at an annual meeting of Latin American leaders. The Colombian president, Álvaro Uribe, apologized to President Rafael Correa of Ecuador, who shook his hand and said, "With the commitment of never attacking a brother country again and by asking forgiveness, we can consider this very serious incident resolved."

The latest from Reuters:

Colombia must make sure neighboring countries are never again affected by its war against the leftist guerrilla group FARC, Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa said in a newspaper interview on Sunday.
Correa has said it will take time to restore diplomatic ties with Colombia even though the countries have resolved a week-long crisis over a Colombian military raid against guerrillas hiding in Ecuador.
In Latin America's worst diplomatic crisis in years, leftist-led allies Ecuador and Venezuela sent troops to their borders with Colombia, cut ties with Bogota and condemned the March 1 raid, which killed more than 20 guerrillas.

Ah, so we see that Ecuador lines up with Chavez in de facto support of the vicious FARC terrorists. The struggle caused by Chavez's expanding influence extends to Peru:

The new Latin American version of the Cold War is especially fierce here in Peru, where President Alan Garcia ... is now a staunch Washington ally and apostle of free trade. ...
Like pro-U.S. Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, Garcia detests Chavez, whom he derided as a "midget dictator with a big wallet" during the hotly contested Peruvian presidential campaign in 2006. Chavez in turn labeled Garcia a liar, thief and U.S. lackey. Garcia ultimately beat back a challenge from a Chavez supporter, generating a deep sigh of relief at the White House.

So, America has the leadership of Columbia and Peru on its side against Chavez's neo-Marxism. It has been suggested that the Chavez regime has ties to U.S. foes in the Middle East.

Colombia's raid on the narco-terrorists killed two senior FARC commanders. That raid may have been just one part in a coordinated plan to bring counter-pressure against Chavez's expansionist efforts.

Peace? Not likely, so long as Chavez remains in power. It's like the '80s and the Evil Empire all over again, except this time, the Kremlin's in Caracas.

Not worth killing for

I love karaoke, but some folks take it too far:

A gunman in Thailand shot-dead eight neighbours, including his brother-in-law, after tiring of their karaoke versions of popular songs, including John Denver’s Country Roads.
Weenus Chumkamnerd, 52, put his gun to the head of a respected female doctor and seven of her guests as they partied at her home in Songkhla Province, South Thailand. ...
He said he was so furious with their awful singing that he did not notice he had murdered his own brother-in-law.
"I warned these people about their noisy karaoke parties. I said if they carried on I would go down and shoot them. I had told them if I couldn’t talk sense into them I would come back and finish them off," he added.

As long as you give fair warning, I guess that makes it OK, huh? Don Surber suspects the gunman may have been seeking to avenge the honor of West Virginia, Mountain Mama.

Some may fear that liberals in the Thai government will use this as an excuse to ban karaoke. But I say, "Bad karaoke doesn't kill people. Insane guys named 'Weenus' kill people."

There should be a proverb

"Three liberals in a row, just say no"? Or something like that (via Fausta):

A council of world leaders launched by former President Nelson Mandela is sending a three-person team to try to help ease tensions in the Middle East, the organization known as The Elders said Friday. Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and former Irish President Mary Robinson will visit Israel, the Palestinian territories, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Saudi Arabia April 13-21

Since liberals almost always achieve the exact opposite of their proclaimed goals, I'm pretty sure we can expect an outbreak of all-out war in the Middle East on or about April 22. That is, unless the mere prospect of a visit by these three clowns causes a war to start before then.

Meanwhile, on a related note, Soccer Dad viciously mocks Hillary's infamous "politics of meaning" guru, Michael Lerner, who can scarcely be mocked too viciously for my taste.

An offer to mediate

Little Miss Attila is at war with Ace and Rusty (actually Rusty's guest-blogger Ragnar) because they were dissing middle-aged celebrity women who evidently have decided that anabolic steroids are the best treatment for aging.

Here's part of Miss Attilla's rant:

What is it with some male bloggers?—"Too fat, too thin. Too out-of-shape. Too fat. Too buff. Too old. Too young." (Oops! That last one never happens. Just trying to see if you're paying attention.)
I mean, I like Ace and his crew. I even like Rusty and (most of) his crew (at least, when they aren't waxing anti-gay). But, WTF? Maybe their fans should be required to post pictures next to their comments—these fine gourmands of female flesh. I'm sure they are all prime beef. Uh-huh.
Bonus question: Which set of commenters is more hostile to women?—Rusty's, or Ace's?

That's the gist of it. And although Miss Attila says she's being hated for saying it, I think here comments are not entirely unreasonable. Something about the online environment causes some guys to display harsh judgmentalism toward women, so harsh at times as to qualify as genuine misogyny. This judgmentalism is by no means limited to aging celebrity chicks who are injecting testosterone and HGH.

I cite the example of Becky Banks, program coordinator of Students For Life (SFL). In January, SFL held its annual national conference of pro-life college students at Catholic University, and Becky appeared in a video at Hot Air. Being that Becky is a 20-something blonde, there was a good bit of "hubba-hubba" from the commenters, until a certain commenter named "Funky Chicken" weighed in with this remark:

You guys think she is attractive? I was thinking trout pout and kinda fugly.

Whoa! Where did that bit of venom come from?

OK, grant that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and de gustibus non est disputandum. Still ... "trout pout and kinda fugly"? Even if the full-lipped look isn't that fellow's cup of tea, the putdown seems unduly harsh. What could inspire such a hateful expression?

Let's start with peer pressure. Anybody who's ever hung out with a pack of guys knows that, in the pack environment, guys always strive to appear tough, cool and superior. Vulnerability and sensitivity are not exactly high on the list of personal traits valued in a scrum of guys who are trying to impress each other as "real men."

So if you want to know where "Funky Chicken" got the idea that it was tough and cool to put down chicks in such viciously derogatory language, it's that guy-pack mentality that is to blame. Trust me, that's hardly the worst put-down guys use in such environments. (Oh, what guys say about fat chicks ...)

The macho peer-pressure thing is one obvious factor behind "Funky Chicken's" derogation of Miss Banks. But wait -- remember, before that idiot added his two cents, the other guys commenting at Hot Air were all doing the hubba-hubba routine. So, if all the peer pressure at that point was positive toward Miss Banks, why did "Funky Chicken" go negative?

Here's your second factor: Rejection. Women, for all their claims to superior sensitivity, have no conception of the harm inflicted on the male ego by female rejection. Learning to deal with rejection is, I think, the essential sexual challenge of male adolescence.

I suppose there are exceptions to this rule -- guys so cool and sexy at age 14 or 15 that they never have to cope with rejection from some chick they really like. But for the other 99% of us, dealing with female rejection is a constant struggle from puberty onwards. And chicks are completely brutal and heartless when it comes to rejecting advances by poor lovestruck (or, at least, hormone-driven) teenage boys.

Different guys find different ways of coping with rejection. By the time I was 16, I was so emotionally traumatized, I had to learn how to play guitar. Chicks can't resist a guy strumming a guitar and singing a love song, you see. So over the course of the next decade, I kind of avenged myself on womankind. It didn't matter that the chicks whose hearts I was breaking weren't the same chicks who'd rejected me. It was symbolic vengeance, psychic payback.

Twisted? Sadistic? Evil? Yeah. But at least I got it out of my system. Some guys never do. And I'm serious about this. I know a guy who met his first really serious girlfriend at 18, dated her for three or four years, and then she broke up with him. Drugs, depression, suicide -- he died at age 30. She came to his funeral, and she cried, but those tears were a bit too late.

Rejection is a serious thing for guys to deal with, and they deal with it in different ways. I reckon "Funky Chicken" has been rejected a few times, too, so when the guys at Hot Air started making a big deal over Miss Banks, our friend Funky's response was: "I'll reject her before she can reject me."

It's a sour-grapes rationalization, and you see it all the time, especially within groups of young guys. If you get a bunch of frat boys sitting in the stands at a college football game, and they start "rating" the cheerleaders (all of whom are reasonably attractive, from an objective viewpoint), there's always one guy who will pronounce that the very prettiest cheerleader is a "whore," or a "skank," usually offering extensive graphic details of what a terrible slut she is. "Oh, she did such-and-so with this guy and that guy, and got drunk at a party and took on the entire starting offensive backfield," etc.

It's a defense mechanism, a reaction, OK? And something very similar takes place when anonymous guys on a blog are confronted with photos of 40-something celebrities like Madonna and Sarah Jessica Parker.

A lot of those guys, you see, are 40-something themselves. And when they look at those aging celebrity chicks -- artificially pumped-up and striated like triathletes -- those guys have got to say to themselves, "Is this what's left to me now? Is this the best I can hope my future sexual conquests will look like? These spindly, leathery old hags?"

Consider the alternatives for these guys:

• Buy a red convertible, get a hair-weave, and start dating a 24-year-old cocktail waitress.
• Buy a home in the suburbs, get a minivan, and marry a 34-year-old English teacher.
• Buy a loft in a trendy intown neighborhood, go to gay bars, and try to forget about women altogether.

You see, Miss Attila, these guys who make such brutally misogynistic remarks aren't to be scorned and hated. They are to be pitied, and nutured . . . with that special kind of nuturing that only a mature lady like yourself knows how to give.

I hope my mediation has been helpful. I feel that my work here is done. And now, if you'll excuse me, I must return to duty, mentoring the careers of promising young conservative activists in Washington.

UPDATE: Ace obviates the need for mediation by delivering a lecture to the morons, featuring several lines that only Ace could get away with, including:

I also don't think plainly over-the-top sexual language is off limits. "She's so hot I'd like to duct-tape her and stick her in my trunk" isn't offensive, or shouldn't be, because, I mean, come on. What are the odds any of the guys here could actually afford duct-tape? It's plainly a sexual fantasy, and a very, very hot one, but just a fantasy.
Unless I get my hands on some f---ing duct-tape. But I think that's obvious.

He's CPAC Blogger of the Year, and who can argue with that? OK, his parole officer, maybe ...

Busting the Chavezistas

Over at NewsBusters, Matthew Vadum does a number on the Friends of Hugo:

QUESTION: What do you get when you help terrorists seek dirty bombs, give sanctuary to Hezbollah and Hamas, taunt America, and threaten war on U.S. ally Colombia?
ANSWER: Hugs and kisses from members of Congress like Senator Chris Dodd and Congressman Dennis Kucinich, academics like Cornel West, and Hollywood celebrities like Danny Glover – and a pass from the press.
And what’s there not to love about Venezuela’s Marxist strongman Hugo Chavez, who crushes dissenters, muzzles the media, and takes from “the rich” to give to “the poor”? With a Kennedy clan member as his spokesman, he even gives discounted home heating oil to the shivering masses of the U.S. oppressed by the capitalist system. ¡Viva la Revolucion!

Definitely read the whole thing. As disgusting as Chavez is, his American supporters are even more disgusting.

Notes on Gonzo

Having been a Hunter S. Thompson fan for nearly 30 years, I recently decided to spend some leisure hours reading (or re-reading) Thompson's early work, including his breakthrough book, Hell's Angels, first published in 1967, when Thompson was 29.

Thompson's widow, Anita Thompson, has explained that many young HST admirers draw the wrong lesson from his work:

"A lot of young people are under the assumption that if you do a lot of cocaine and drink a lot of Wild Turkey, you, too, can write like Hunter S. Thompson," she told the audience ...

Alas, too true. So anyway, today, I was re-reading The Proud Highway, a collection of Thompson's early letters edited by Douglas Brinkley, and came across HST's Dec. 5, 1957, letter to his friend Joe Bell.

During a stint in the Air Force, Thompson had discovered a knack for sports writing while working for the Command Courier at Eglin AFB in Fort Walton Beach, Fla. Given that his burning desire was to be a novelist, the 19-year-old Thompson's attitude toward sports writing was ambivalent: He felt it was beneath his precocious literary talents, and yet (as he later explained in Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72) it was the only thing he knew how to do that anybody was willing to pay him to do.

'Not a fit place to live'

Upon leaving the Air Force, Thompson had arranged a job as a sports editor at a small daily paper in Jersey Shore, Pa., a Susquehanna River town about 15 miles west of Williamsport, Pa. My wife and I drove through that area a few months ago and found it charming and scenic at points, though it's hardly a bustling urban scene. And considering that Thompson was a native Southerner (from Louisville, Ky.) who had spent the past two years in sunny Florida, it's not hard to understand his reaction when he arrived in Jersey Shore in December. From his 1957 letter to Joe Bell:

It upsets me to have to go into detail about this fiasco. It is enough to say that a place which combines all the climactical advantages of Iceland and all the entertainment and cultural advantages of Harlan, Kentucky, is certainly not a fit place to live. I very seriously doubt that I shall be able to stand it for more than a month -- if that long.

Here, you see, we get a glimpse into the root and essence of Gonzo: The plight of the writer in a world that is profoundly indifferent to the writer and his craft.

Critics often describe HST's Gonzo journalism as "subjective" or fictionalized, even though some of his writings -- most notably Fear and Loathing: On The Campaign Trail '72 -- have stood the test of time as factual accounts of historic events.

Gonzo as self-awareness

To the extent that there is something "subjective" about what Thompson did, however, it lies in the ever-present subtext, the self-conscious recognition of himself as a writer on assignment. It is this self-awareness that distinguishes Gonzo from anything else in the field of journalism.

That's why Thompson's reaction to Jersey Shore, Pa., struck me so forcefully. Most people never think about the sort of humiliations inevitably experienced by a young writer. Here is the 20-year-old Hunter S. Thompson, recognized as a literary prodigy since he was a teenager writing for the Athenaeum Literary Association Spectator. And here is the Susquehanna Valley coal-mining town where the newspaper editor -- after evidently giving HST some Chamber of Commerce boosterism about the local scene -- has secured Thompson's services for $75 a week.

Maybe if Thompson had arrived in Jersey Shore in late May, the story would have been different. But for a Southern boy to encounter a small Pennsylvania town in the gray gloom of December? Egad. His stint at the Jersey Shore Herald lasted less than the month he predicted, and soon Thompson was in New York City, where he eventually hired on as a copyboy at Time magazine for $50 a week.

'Slumming' in journalism

You have to see the Gonzo essence here. Thompson had incredible talent. His letters at age 19 or 20 are brimming with evidence of his genius. But for a young writer to gain recognition for his talent is extremely difficult -- even today, when any kid can put up a blog or a Web site and publish his writing for a worldwide readership. It was much more difficult back in the day, when writing had to be done on a typewriter, and when applications, resumes, queries and manuscripts had to be sent to editors by snail-mail.

In order to keep body and soul together, then, Thompson had to hire himself out as a journalist. This meant either putting up with the limitations of a staff gig, like the job in Jersey Shore, or else trying to hustle assignments as a freelancer, as he eventually did with such remarkable success -- Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas began as a freelance assignment for Sports Illustrated that HST turned into an assignment for Rolling Stone.

Through all of that, while Thompson was re-inventing journalism on his own terms, he never lost sight of the famous novelist he'd once dreamed of becoming. He felt as if he'd been ripped off, deprived of his proper place in the literary pantheon, and forced to "slum it" as a mere reporter.

'Fear and Loathing' -- and payback

This is what I think most people don't get about Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. At some level, that was a story of HST's brutal payback against the publishing establishment.

Remember, in 1958, would-be novelist Hunter S. Thompson had worked as a $50-a-week copyboy for Time magazine. Time was part of the same Time-Life publishing empire that published Sport Illustrated. At the time of his 1971 Vegas escapade, Thompson also had an unfulfilled book contract (originally to have been coverage of the 1968 election) with Random House, which had published Thompson's first book, Hell's Angels.

So in 1971, there was this desert race with dune buggies and motorcycles called The Mint 400, sponsored by a Las Vegas casino. Some genius at Sports Illustrated apparently got the clever idea, "Hey, motorcycles! Hell's Angels is about motorcycles! Let's get that guy to cover the race!" (This is a reverse-engineered surmise of how HST got the assignment; I defy anyone to come up with a more plausible explanation.)

All right, so this is an expense-paid trip, a first-class press junket including a free room at the Mint Hotel. So then Thompson goes to the L.A. offices of Time-Life and talks them into giving him a $300 cash advance for the expenses. (If you've read The Proud Highway, you know how often, as a young freelancer, HST fought with his editors over expenses.) Then he rents the Chevy convertible that Thompson dubs "The Red Shark," and he and his radical Chicano lawyer buddy then spend the next several hours accumulating an unimaginable stash of drugs.

'Weasels closing in'

For some reason, most readers don't get it, but HST explains exactly what he's doing:

Free Enterprise. The American Dream. Horatio Alger gone mad on drugs in Las Vegas. ...
Every now and then when your life gets complicated and the weasels start closing in, the only real cure is to load up on heinous chemicals and then drive like a bastard from Hollywood to Las Vegas. ... Just roll the roof back and screw it on, grease the face with white tanning butter and move out with the music at top volume, and at least a pint of ether.

The key phrase here is "life gets complicated and the weasels start closing in" -- Thompson had a contractual obligation to Random House, at least two years overdue, and he hadn't published a new book since 1967. But there was no way in the world the uptight corporate people at Random House were going to give him the green-light for a book on the stuff he wanted to write, about radical politics and the drug culture.

Here he was, an acclaimed author, with no real prospect of being published again anytime soon, and "the weasels" were indeed "closing in": He had to pay the bills, and even with a bestseller like Hell's' Angels, the book royalties tend to dwindle a good bit after three or four years.

I would argue that this, at least at a subconscious level, was how HST's scheme of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas began. Thompson conceived of this as an opportunity to defraud Sport Illustrated -- to "stick it to The Man" as represented by the Time-Life publishing empire -- by using this expense-paid assignment as an excuse for a daredevil drug adventure.

Triple payback

As he subsequently explained, Thompson's actual assignment for SI amounted to nothing more than providing a few hundred words of copy to accompany a photo spread, but he turned in 2,500 words that he later said were "aggressively rejected" by the editors. Which was just fine with HST -- the expense money was non-refundable. Payback, you see? ($300 was not a small sum in 1971, to say nothing of Thompson's stay at the Mint Hotel.)

The payback continued when the adventure begun at Sports Illustrated's expense was continued -- covering a drug-policy conference of district attorneys -- under the aegis of Rolling Stone.

It's kind of hard for young people today, who know Rolling Stone as a pop-culture magazine about as subversive as US Weekly, to understand how radically dangerous Rolling Stone was in 1971. At that time, merely to have a copy of Rolling Stone lying on your coffee table would have been considered "probable cause."

So HST takes a trip to Vegas at the expense of the Time-Life empire, and then sells the resulting story to Rolling Stone, where it is met with rave reviews. Such is the acclaim for HST's story that he is able to sell it to Random House as the book that fulfills his long-overdue contract, and the rest is Gonzo history.

A triple-burn, you see: HST essentially forced staid, respectable Random House to publish what amounted to a counter-cultural manifesto.

But of course, it wasn't really about the drugs. It was about one writer's revenge on the idiotic editors and clueless publishers who had failed to see his talent back in the days when his career choices amounted to either $75 a week at the Jersey Shore Herald or $50 a week as a copyboy at Time.

HST's appeal to youth

I think this factor goes a long way toward explaining HST's enduring appeal to young writers, or young would-be writers. Let's face it, a writer's life can be a desperate thing, especially for a young unknown. An honest career counselor would tell any student with a top-notch verbal SAT score, "Look, kid, trust me -- you don't really want to be a writer. Law school, that's the way to go."

I've never been one to indulge any romantic nonsense about "suffering for your art" -- c'mon, I'm talking about the newspaper business, not the Sistine Chapel -- but anybody who wants to get ahead as a writer ultimately will have to pay their dues somewhere along the way. Maybe there's some easy way to success that I've overlooked, but every time a young wunderkind comes along, I reflexively expect a crash-and-burn to follow.

Somehow, though, it seems the "American Idol syndrome" -- that Warholian world of reality TV where 22-year-olds explode into overnight celebrities on a weekly basis -- has affected everyone. Nowadays, Washington, DC, is full of kids fresh out of college who think they'll be condemned as failures if they don't have a book deal, a syndicated column and a regular cable-news spot by the time they're 25. And I suppose similar conditions prevail in New York and Los Angeles and every other place where lots of young, talented people gather. Instant fame and instant success are the expected rewards.

OK, kids: Screw you. You're not better than Hunter S. Thompson and, therefore, whatever career hell you have to go through -- whatever obscure, underpaid, beneath-your-dignity gigs you have to work to pay the bills -- is not an injustice.

You are not being oppressed or ripped off. You are not a victim. You're just suffering the fate of young talent in every age. And if you're thinking in terms of payback and revenge, don't worry: Hunter S. Thompson already took care of that.

Just read and enjoy, kids. You'll get your turn one day.

Natalie Portman on a slim pretext

Donald Douglas of American Power is a blogger after my own heart:

This post is mainly just a chance to write about Natalie Portman. I mean she personifies eye candy!

Totally, dude! And I've got to admire a man who will seize on the flimsiest excuse to blog about a Hollywood hottie. In this case, it seems Miss Portman was featured in a New York Times story about celebrity activists:

In 2004, Natalie Portman, then a 22-year-old fresh from college, went to Capitol Hill to talk to Congress on behalf of the Foundation for International Community Assistance, or Finca, a microfinance organization for which she served as “ambassador.” She found herself wondering what she was doing there, but her colleagues assured her: “We got the meetings because of you.” For lawmakers, Natalie Portman was not simply a young woman — she was the beautiful Padmé from “Star Wars.” “And I was like, ‘That seems totally nuts to me,’ ” Portman told me recently. It’s the way it works, I guess. I’m not particularly proud that in our country I can get a meeting with a representative more easily than the head of a nonprofit can.”

Microfinancing? Cool. Princess Amidala talking about microfinancing? Awesome.

What we need is a free-market think tank in Hollwyood that sponsors celebrity parties and introduces movie stars to the ideas of people like Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell. I mean, just imagine Scarlett Johansen testifying before Congress about the importance of de-regulation and eliminating the corporate tax.

Yeah, it's a fantasy. But isn't that what show business is all about?

UPDATE: If you're going to do babe-blogging, you might as well do it right, so I'm going to make some important points here:

• First, what is it with the pouty look? Don't get me wrong, Natalie Portman can do the smoldering pouty look with the best of them. But she's also got a beautiful smile. So why do the photographers and magazine editors always prefer to show her pouting.
• Second, the gossip site Egotastic does an invidious cleavage comparison between Natalie Portman and her Boleyn co-star Scarlett Johansen. What's up with that? Is Egotastic trying to suggest that every woman in Hollywood must be a silicon queen? Is a B-cup not enough, even for a world-class beauty like Natalie Portman? (C'mon, guys: What's to complain about?)
• Third, am I the only one offended by the ahistorical Women's Studies lecture that intrudes into this Boleyn trailer?

UPDATE II: Here I was, merely indulging in gratuitous babe-blogging when, by force of habit, I decided to do some actual research and discovered that Miss Portman’s status as the favorite Hollywood hottie of right-wing neocons (like Donald Douglas) is no accident.

Yeah, that’s right: She’s Israeli-American. She told Rolling Stone she considers Jerusalem her true home. And, although she tries to be politically correct about it, she’s definitely a Zionist:

Recent events in Israel have troubled Portman deeply. "Anytime anything happens to anyone there, it's like a limb's been ripped off," she says. She adds, perhaps concerned that her entire political position should be assumed from this: "I'm very protective of Israel, obviously, but I'm more protective of humanity than of any of my own personal desires."

Her Wikipedia entry states Miss Portman’s name in Hebrew. Even though my Hebrew’s a little rusty, I’m pretty sure her Hebrew name translates to Super-Hot Sabra.

Obviously, Miss Portman is part of a Mossad/Hollywood conspiracy to undermine worldwide anti-Semitism. Little kids in Egypt and Iran even now are watching “Star Wars” and saying to themselves, “Wow, that Princess Amidala is so beautiful.” They internalize her as an ideal, and then they get a little older and find out she’s Israeli -- completely sabotages that genocidal jihadist mentality, you see.

So, by the most providential accident, I’ve stumbled onto a new argument in my “Hotties For Peace” campaign. The first argument being the original “gee hottie,” Fawzia Mohamed, Miss Egypt 2006. How can you hate people, when their women are so incredibly hot?

Obama: No VP

This is big news:

While in Casper, Wyo., today Sen. Barack Obama ruled out the possibility being a vice presidential candidate during an interview with CBS' Montana affiliate KTVQ. . . .
Q: Could you ever see yourself on the same ticket as Senator Clinton?
A: Well, you know, I think it’s premature. You won’t see me as a vice presidential candidate -- you know, I’m running for president. We have won twice as many states as Senator Clinton, and have a higher popular vote, and I think we can maintain our delegate count -- but you know, what I’m really focused on right now, because all that stuff is premature, is winning this nomination and changing the country. . . .

OK, candidates often say things they don't really mean. So there's the possibility that, if Hillary manages to win the nomination, Obama will change his mind about the No. 2 spot on the ticket.

However, consider the possibilities if Obama is serious about refusing the running-mate role. This is a Democrat who got 87 percent of the black vote in Ohio. So if Hillary wangles enough super-delegates and wins do-overs in Michigan and Florida, won't Obama's supporters -- and especially his black supporters -- feel that he's been cheated out of the nomination? And then, for him to refuse to run on the same ticket with her . . .

If ever there was a time for the GOP to call on The Man of Steele, that would be it.

Off the bus, Bumiller!

How to fumble a "gotcha" question:



(Hat tip: Hot Air) What Elizabeth Bumiller of the New York Times was trying to do was to point out that, in May 2004, McCain had denied meeting with John Kerry to discuss the VP slot -- something that McCain has since admitted. That initial denial is the kind of inside-baseball thing that no one outside the press corps really cares about, and McCain -- who knows the cameras are rolling -- refuses to play along.

Good for him. And bad for Bumiller, who clearly becomes flustered and can't seem to remember the point of her question.

Fired Obama aide a 'rock star'?

The Los Angeles Times describes fired campaign aide Samantha Power:

If Obama has been dubbed the "rock star" candidate, Power might have been his rock star advisor. Born in Ireland and schooled at Yale and Harvard Law, she was founding executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard. The Times of London said she would have fit right in with the Kennedy clan. She once played basketball with actor George Clooney, a fellow Darfur activist.

Well, whoop-de-do! That just cinches it for me, folks. Yale, Harvard, blah, blah, blah. But when somebody's playing basketball with George Clooney -- ooh, superstar!

Frankly, what Power said -- calling Hillary a "monster" -- was a minor gaffe, and Obama should have stood behind her, rather than throwing her under the bus. But after losing Ohio and Texas, the Obama camp's a mite flinchy now.

It was interesting to read Power's bio. She believes "the United States should have done more to stop the devastating killing in Darfur and other places." Ah, so our foreign policy is not aggressive enough? You got to love the way liberals think.

Josh Marshall sees Power's exit as evidence that Hillary's got the decisive edge on Obama:

If boxing is our metaphor she's got him cornered on the ropes on one side of the ring and she's just landing punch after punch. And all he can manage are the defensive moves that her constant attacks dictate.

Hang on, Josh -- just a few days ago, Hillary was on the canvas and the ref was counting to 10. Now, she's the unbeatable world champ? Get grip, son.

New blog on the block

My friend John Vaught LaBeaume blogs with C.B. Murray at Election Dissection. It's pretty cool -- analyzing voter trends down to the district level.

The blog apparently dates back to 2006, but John just recently told me he was blogging, so it's new to me.

Burying the lede

Ralph Z. Hallow reports on Crazy Cousin John's appearance before the Council for National Policy, but readers have to wait for the 11th paragraph before reading this:

The depth of disaffection from Mr. McCain among prominent members of CNP is so strong that some are already questioning the group's bona fides.

"It will say more about the state of the conservative movement than it does McCain," a veteran CNP member said. "If he is accepted at CNP, this will mark the official end of the conservative movement as we knew it."

Perhaps a little overdramatic, but that's the dilemma the McCain campaign presents to conservatives. If they endorse him, it undermines their credibility as conservatives. If they don't endorse him, they'll be accused of being spoilsports, "not a team player."

This is all McCain's fault. He took those non-conservative positions -- supporting campaign-finance "reform," voting against tax cuts, sponsoring amnesty for illegals, etc. -- with the full knowledge that those moves would make him anathema to major segments of the GOP base. He then sought the GOP presidential nomination, counting on crossover votes to win Republican primaries in New Hampshire and elsewhere.

He is responsible for what he's done, and no conservative should allow themselves to be guilt-tripped about it.

'Idol' gay gossip

Lisa De Moraes, writing in The Other Paper, has fun today mocking the Asssociated Press's breathless coverage of the "scandalous" discovery that "American Idol" contestant David Hernandez once worked as a stripper in an Arizona nightclub with "mostly male" clientele.

The real story the AP is pushing, of course, is not what Hernandez did to pay the bills in Phoenix. What they're trying to do -- and their reporter Derrik Lang is not being even slightly subtle about it -- is to turn "American Idol" into yet another venue for gay identity politics.

I think I speak for the overwhelming majority of Americans when I say that I don't care what or who David Hernandez does in his private life. He is a singer, and all that really matters (or what should really matter, from the perspective of the listener) is how well he sings. And I suppose Hernandez feels the same way.

The Gay Gestapo, however, won't let Hernandez have his privacy, because in their totalitarian worldview, privacy is not allowed. The Gay Gestapo demands that every homosexual in public life must declare his sexual preference, in order to serve as a "role model" for others. Those who wish to be discreet (or noncommital) about their private lives are condemned as cowards "in the closet," and thus traitors to the Great Gay Cause.

This ethos of identity and "outing" is totalitarian, as I say, because it demands conformity, tolerates no dissent, and relentlessly propagandizes. Notice that it wasn't some Christian fundamentalist morality squad that "outed" Hernandez as an ex-stripper. No, it was a Hollywood bureau reporter for the AP, that famous bastion of liberal media enlightenment.

I'm very much reminded of the "Is Kevin Spacey gay?" rumors of a few years ago. Kevin Spacey is a great actor, and it never occurred to me even to wonder whether he was gay until the Hollywood rumor mill started cranking about it. But the Gay Gestapo and its "outing" ethos insists that we all must know these things.

If some celebrity voluntarily decides to go public with their sex life, they're free to do so. Melissa Etheridge, Elton John, Boy George, Ellen DeGeneres -- hey, it's a free country. But this business of trying to force people to "come out" is absurd, and if the AP and Derrik Lang think they're fooling anybody about what they're doing, they'd better think again.

As for my own personal preferences ... well, Egotastic has some nice pics today of Kim Kardashian. So I'll "out" myself as being in agreement with Sir Mix-a-Lot about the aesthetic virtues of the ladies who've "got back."

Eyewitness testimony

My friend Sean Higgins of Investors Business Daily, guest-blogging at JeremyLott.com, offers this testimonial to the vocal prowess of the DC Karaoke King:

If you ever have a chance to watch Robert Stacy McCain perform Karaoke, you must take it. I don’t care if you are rescuing drowning puppies; go, just go.

Sean was in the house last week at Rockit Grill in Old Town Alexandria for my "Return From Africa" performance, which I opened with an all-out rendition of my signature tune.

With all due modesty, it wasn't bad. Peter Redpath of the Federalist Society and Richard Miniter also praised my initial performance. Later in the evening, however, exhaustion set in and my voice became so hoarse I sounded like Joe Cocker when I tried to sing Van Morrison's "Brown-Eyed Girl." I should have taken a nap that afternoon.

Race, Rush, Hillary & Hugh

Jonathan Chait, Matthew Yglesias and Maureen Dowd all depict the Democratic primary battle between Hillary and Obama in terms of race and gender.

Yglesias takes the cake with his assertion that Hillary won because of "the crucial racist vote." This is based wholly on an MSNBC exit poll that showed 20 percent of Ohio Democratic primary voters Tuesday said the race of the candidate was important, and of those, Clinton topped Obama by a 14-point margin, 57-43.

Question: Has Matthew Yglesias ever studied statistics? Because if my math is correct, 14 percent of 20 percent is 2.8 percent, which is surely less than the margin of error in that exit poll.

Given the inherent sampling problems, exit polls are very hard to read, and you certainly can't put a lot of faith in a 14-point gap on the 35th question in a survey. If you get a 2-to-1 margin on a question like that, OK, then maybe it's fair to declare that a "crucial" factor. But 14 percent? No way.

Besides which, you can't say those are "racist" voters, because there's no demographic breakdown of the respondents on that question. It's well known that many black Democrats are supporting Hillary because they don't think America will elect a black candidate. So it may well have been black voters (and Hillary got 12% of the black vote in Ohio, according to that poll) who gave Hillary her edge on that question. Either way, it's still just an exit poll, and as such, it's too flimsy evidence to justify hurling the word "racist" around (even if it's amusing to see Democrats called "racist" for supporting the wife of Our First Black President).

Meanwhile, Hugh Hewitt appears shocked at the thought that Rush Limbaugh's radio campaign to encourage Republicans to vote for Hillary in the Democratic primaries may have actually saved her hopes for the nomination.

The difference between Hugh and Rush, I think, boils down to this: Hewitt is a linear thinker, whose natural tendency is to plot the most direct and efficient path from Point A to Point B. Limbaugh, on the other hand, is an improvisational thinker, always considering contingencies and alternatives, trying to keep his options open as he looks forward to a future of unanticipated outcomes.

If you're a football fan, you could compare Hewitt to a classic dropback quarterback (Johnny Unitas) who stays in the pocket, counts on his blockers to contain the pressure and looks for the assigned receiver, whereas Limbaugh is like Fran Tarkenton or Ken Stabler, calling audibles, scrambling out toward the sidelines, changing the play even after the ball is snapped.

If you're a real football fan, you know that most Super Bowls are won by classic-type quarterbacks, who also account for most quarterbacks in the Hall of Fame. But there are exceptions to the rule, and in 1977 Stabler -- the left-handed wild man from Foley, Alabama, they called the "Snake" -- led the Oakland Raiders to victory in Super Bowl XI over Fran Tarkenton's Minnesota Vikings. (Tarkenton's in the NFL Hall of Fame; why Stabler has been snubbed three times by Canton is puzzling.)

So while Limbaugh's (tactical) endorsement of Hillary may seem mysterious to some people -- including a Johnny U. kind of guy like Hugh Hewitt -- I remain confident in Rush. His latest move make look as crazy as Stabler or Tarkenton scrambling on a broken play, but Limbaugh knows exactly what he's doing.

President? No, he wants to blog

Peach Pundit is the go-to source for all things political in my native Georgia, and it's from Peach Pundit's Jason Pye that I just learned Bob Barr is now blogging for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. (Stephen Gordon of Third Party watch had this last week, but somehow I missed it.)

This is bad news for the "Draft Barr" movement in the Libertarian Party. I mean, what kind of libertarian would have anything to do with the Atlanta papers? It's like blogging for Pravda.

The AJC (known to locals as the "Atlanta Urinal-Constipation") used to be a great newspaper, before control of the operation fell into the hands of Anne Cox Chambers, a billionaire socialite who apparently hates everything about Georgia, right down to the kudzu and red clay.

That things had gone hopelessly wrong at 72 Marietta Street became obvious in 1994, following the death of Lewis Grizzard. (If you don't know who Lewis Grizzard was, I'll just explain that the most famous son of Moreland, Ga., was a hugely popular columnist and author, as funny as Dave Barry and as Southern as grits.)

At the time of Grizzard's death in March 1994, I was working at the Rome (Ga.) News-Tribune. The speculation was rampant: How will the AJC replace Grizzard? Who will get the call to try to fill the gigantic shoes of the most popular journalist in the South? I figured the odds were they'd at least try to hire Dave Barry away from the Miami Herald. Yeah, Barry's from New York, but he is definitely funny.

My darkhorse pick to fill the Grizzard slot at the AJC was Rick Bragg, who at that point was an Associated Press regional reporter. I'd been slightly acquainted with Rick when we both attended Jacksonville (Ala.) State University. Even then, he had been a working journalist for years, stringing high school sports for the local papers as a teenager before becoming a staffer for the Anniston Star.

Bragg eventually won a Pulitzer Prize (1996) and published a best-selling memoir, All Over But the Shoutin'. I don't know if Bragg had ever done humor, but he shared Grizzard's (generally underrated) genius for narrative writing. Also like Grizzard, Bragg was, and is, a newspaperman to his fingertips. The raw deal he got from the New York Times in 2003 -- over what's called a "toe-touch dateline" -- was a screaming injustice, and Bragg's decision to resign was fully justified.

Anyway, in 1994, after Grizzard's shocking death at age 47, I was kind of hoping maybe the AJC would offer that columnist gig to Rick Bragg. What happened next ... oh. Words can't express my mortification.

Rheta Grimsley Johnson. When that name was announced, my reaction was the same as thousands of other Georgians: "Who the ---- is Rheta Grimsley Johnson?"

Don't get me wrong. I'm sure Ms. Johnson is a nice woman. She's won awards for her writing, and occasionally she'll even write something funny. But no way could she ever be acceptable as a substitute for Grizzard. She's not even close. She's not even in the same journalistic universe.

Except for those rare times when he'd write a tear-jerker, Grizzard reliably supplied at least three laugh-out-loud lines per column. Sometimes, he'd get five good laugh lines into a 700-word column. Anybody who thinks that's easy has never tried to do it. I used to do occasional humor columns for the Rome paper, and getting three good laughs in 700 words is almost a miracle. Grizzard accomplished that feat column after column, three columns a week. He did this for more than 15 years, during which time he also published more than 20 books, did hundreds of speaking engagements, and appeared on numerous TV shows.

To replace someone like Grizzard with someone like Rheta Grimsley Johnson -- it was simply unthinkable, an insult, an expression of the AJC management's profound contempt for its readership.

It was that blunderheaded decision, in 1994, that made me realize that whatever future I had in journalism, it wouldn't be in Georgia. The state's largest and most prestigious paper had just pimp-slapped every literate person in Georgia, effectively announcing that the AJC had ceased to care about providing its readers with a newspaper that respected their interests and values. Yeah, there had been ill omens before then -- i.e., the absurd tenure of the pretentious Bill Kovach -- but the Rheta Grimsley Johnson hire was like a Vegas-style neon sign, 100 feet tall and bright enough to be seen from space.

The subsequent decline of the Atlanta papers was foreshadowed the day they announced that move in 1994. Perhaps other papers in the U.S. have lost more circulation or ad revenue, or laid off more of their staff. But all this has happened at the AJC during two decades when the Atlanta metropolitan area has experienced astronomical growth in population and wealth. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has declined for one reason and one reason only: It's a lousy newspaper that gets worse every day.

Why Bob Barr would associate himself with such a third-rate publication is hard to understand. Maybe he should try to pitch his blog to the Marietta Daily Journal. Yeah, Otis Brumby is a tight-fisted tyrant, but at least he never foisted Rheta Grimsley Johnson on his readers.

37.4%

What is 37.4%? That's the share of the popular vote that the first President Bush got in 1992 during his doomed re-election bid. The final results in 1992 were:

• Bill Clinton.........43.0%
• George Bush.....37.4%
• Ross Perot.........18.9%

That was the low ebb of the Republican Party in the modern era. While the 1964 Goldwater campaign was considered a disaster, good old AuH2O got 38.5% -- demonstrating, I would argue, that even an "extreme right-winger" (as Goldwater was depicted by the media in '64) is more popular than a clueless "centrist."

Back when Crazy Cousin John was still only one of five main candidates for the GOP nomination, this bit of history was in the back of my mind while I was trying to warn Republicans against the dangers of a McCain candidacy.

Another bit of political history -- Bob Dole's 40.7% in 1996 -- was even more in my mind, since there are so many similarities between the Dole and McCain candidacies. Both are war heroes, both were "Establishment" choices in overcrowded primary fields, neither was exactly a darling of the conservative grassroots, et cetera.

Some readers are now saying, "Wait a minute! The pitiful numbers posted by Bush 41 in 1992 and by Dole in 1996 both occurred in three-way races with Ross Perot getting more than 10% of the vote. Where's the third-party threat that could hurt McCain that way in 2008?"

Apparently you weren't paying attention when I posted this story Feb. 11:

Bob Barr, who helped lead the 1998 impeachment of President Clinton, is the object of an alliance of conservative and libertarians seeking to recruit the former Georgia Republican congressman as a third-party presidential candidate.
Now an Atlanta-based activist with the Libertarian Party, Barr has repeatedly disavowed any intention of seeking the LP's 2008 presidential nomination. . . .
However, efforts to push a Barr candidacy were given new impetus last week when Rep. Ron Paul sent a letter to his supporters announcing plans to scale back his Republican presidential campaign and concentrate on his congressional re-election fight in Texas.
Several organizers behind the draft-Barr movement were supporters of the Paul presidential campaign. Last week, Barr introduced Paul at the 35th annual Conservative Political Action Conference, calling the Texas congressman "the Constitution's best friend" and "the gold standard of conservatism" in the GOP presidential campaign. ... (READ MORE)

An activist with the draft-Barr movement said last week the question now boils down to how much money they can raise, and how fast they can raise it. Given that they're tapping into some of the same online fundraising machinery that helped make Ron Paul's GOP candidacy so newsworthy, I'd be willing to wager that they'll clear that hurdle easily.

So think about that 37.4% number for Bush 41. Ross Perot was a pseudo-populist eccentric running on a vanity-party slate, yet in 1992 he got more than 18% of the vote. Now imagine Bob Barr -- a former member of the House Judiciary Committee, former federal prosecutor and one-time CIA employee -- running on the ticket of the Libertarians, the largest and most enduring third party in America.

The Libertarian Party holds its convention May 22-26 in Denver. The draft-Barr people know that if they want Barr to make a serious effort for the LP nomination, they've got to work fast. If the McCainiacs and the big-money GOP Establishment are not sleeping easily, it's not just indigestion from all that barbecue they ate Sunday.

There is an online Barr For President petition here.

Previous coverage at Peach Pundit and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Here is video of Bob Barr introducing Ron Paul at CPAC:



UPDATE 8:15 a.m.: Headline of the day (via Memeorandum):

McCain campaign stumbles early

Of media and 'experts'

The headline on this Associated Press item (via Memeorandum) is "Media Expert Decries Campaign Coverage," but whatever you say about Walter Shorenstein, his expertise is in real-estate development, not media.

The AP describes him as "founder of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University." More importantly, and far more relevant to the story, Shorenstein is a bigtime Democratic donor (to Hillary Clinton, among others), ranked among the top 20 political donors by Mother Jones in 2001.

Don Surber mocks the AP story:

Democratic fund-raiser complains about media bias.
A complaint about the media’s bias came from one of the Hill-raisers — Walter Shorenstein, “a prominent San Francisco-based real estate developer,” as the AP described him. . . .
Until Shorenstein is willing to take on the media for its bias against conservatives, this is more whining from a Hillary camp that underestimated the power of Barack Obama.

This story well deserves mocking.