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.

Obama's bizarre claim

Dan Riehl catches Barack Obama pandering to paranoia:

"If there is an Arab-American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney ..."

Say what? I'm having a hard time believing any such thing ever happened, but it surely doesn't happen routinely. Note that Obama uses the specific wording "Arab-American family" -- not an individual, not someone here on a work or student visa, but an Arab-American family, a phrase which to me signifies actual U.S. citizens, or at least long-term legal "green card" residents.

If any such persons indeed have been "rounded up without benefit of an attorney," Obama's campaign had better be prepared to provide their names and documentation of their case, because otherwise he's making a very harmful and irresponsible accusation.

It's almost as if he's trying to hand the nomination to Hillary.

UPDATE: Atlas Shrugs makes an obvious point: "CAIR would be screaming bloody murder."

My son, teen rock legend

Bob, one of my 15-year-old twin sons, demonstrates an original composition:

OK, so it's not to my taste -- I'm more into classic rock and R&B -- but I give the boy credit for having basically taught himself to play. Bob practices constantly, and while non-guitarists may not have noticed, he's learned "back-picking," which effectively doubles his speed. He reads tablature. Now, if I can just get him to learn the old classics by Chuck Berry, Little Richard, The Beatles, The Stones ... sigh.

Bob's twin brother Jim also plays (guitar, bass and a little bit of keyboard), but right now Jim's more into fixing up his old Dodge truck and talking to his girlfriend. You know how that goes.

This photo shows Bob (L) and Jim (R) together. They're both smart and funny and good-looking. Some things are just hereditary, I guest.

Adios, Tim Goeglein

"I've been plagiarizing all my life. It's called learning."

-- Hunter S. Thompson

The discovery (for which Nancy Nall deserves credit) that White House aide Tim Goeglein plagiarized material in columns he published in his hometown paper has led to his resignation:

A longtime aide to President Bush who wrote occasional guest columns for his hometown newspaper resigned on Friday evening after admitting that he had repeatedly plagiarized from other writers. ...
The aide, Tim Goeglein, had worked for Mr. Bush since 2001, as a liaison to social and religious conservatives, an important component of the president’s political base. ...
“This is not acceptable, and we are disappointed in Tim’s actions,” a White House spokeswoman, Emily Lawrimore, said Friday morning, hours before Mr. Goeglein resigned. “He is offering no excuses, and he agrees it was wrong.”
Mr. Goeglein, 44, is little known outside Washington. ...
With Mr. Bush traveling to his ranch in Crawford, Tex., for the weekend, the White House issued a statement late Friday saying that the president was disappointed and saddened for Mr. Goeglein and his family.
“He has long appreciated Tim’s service,” the statement said. “And he knows him to be a good person who is committed to his country.”
Mr. Goeglein had been publishing guest columns on the opinion page of The News-Sentinel in Fort Wayne [Indiana] for more than a decade, according to the paper’s editor, Kerry Hubartt.

Plagiarism is unacceptable in any context, but it's simply inexplicable that anyone would plagiarize for a column. Almost by definition, the columnist is expressing his idiosyncratic perspective, or else -- in the case of a news-oriented columnist like Robert Novak -- reporting exclusive information. To use the format of a personal column as a venue for plagiarism strikes me as utterly nonsensical.

Surely, Goeglein must have some explanation. Perhaps the column for the Indiana paper was just an attempt to maintain a print presence in his hometown, so that when his White House gig ended, he'd still be a known quantity (and valuable commodity) back home.

Whatever the reason, it was an unworthy abuse of the press, and a fraud perpetrated on readers.

More reaction at Outside the Beltway, Hot Air and Memeorandum.

Ron Robinson on Buckley and bias

Thursday evening, Young America's Foundation President Ron Robinson was at the Magic Gourd restaurant in Washington to teach an activism seminar for members of the George Washington University YAF chapter.

Robinson's presentation was about the nature of media bias, but his mind was clearly on the recent death of William F. Buckley Jr., the "conservative icon" to whom Robinson paid tribute on the YAF Web site:

"William F. Buckley Jr. was the founder of the modern YAF movement and a longtime friend of Young America's Foundation. The staff and board of Young America's Foundation send our thoughts and prayers to his family and friends."

While waiting for the event to begin, Robinson talked to me about what a tremendous loss Buckley's death is for the conservative movement. Later, during his remarks to the GWU students, he related anecdotes about Buckley, including the National Review founder's famous 1965 response when asked what was the first thing he would do if he won election as mayor of New York City: "Demand a recount."

Robinson told the GWU students that Buckley would be proud of the work their YAF chapter was doing on campus. And while even liberals praised Buckley at his death, it wasn't always so, the YAF president reminded the students. When he was in high school, Robinson said, one of his teachers told him Buckley was "more dangerous than Hitler."

The notion that conservatives are dangerous and menacing is propagated chiefly through the news media, and Robinson's presentation consisted of more than 100 slides showing covers of Time and Newsweek magazines, contrasting how liberal and conservative figures were portrayed. A November 1994 cover of Time featuring Newt Gingrich with the headline, "MAD AS HELL," was one example.

"How did you become a conservative?" Robinson asked the GWU students. "I bet it wasn't because of an overload of conservative teachers or professors. I bet it wasn't because of anything you saw on ABC, CBS, NBC 'Nightly News.' I know it wasn't because of anything you saw on the cover of Time or Newsweek."

With the assistance of Ron Robinson, YAF's national headquarters staff and local supporters, the George Washington University YAF chapter -- led by seniors Sergio Gor and Iris Somberg -- is becoming a model for conservative campus activism nationwide. Thursday's seminar was attended by more than 30 members, including freshman Joe Sangiorgio, whose notes on Robinson's presentation were essential to the preparation of this report.

A featured post at Memeorandum -- thanks!

Of Drudge and duty

Reaction to the Drudge Report's revelation that Prince Harry was serving in Afghanistan (the prince has now been withdrawn) includes some unusual discussion of "journalism ethics" -- with quotation marks that are quite necessary, I think.

Of course, Prince Harry's willingness to serve his country is entirely admirable, and the fact that the Drudge scoop led to Harry's withdrawal is to be lamented. Still, I can't go along with this suggestion from my friend Jeff Quinton of the Inside Charm City blog:

Since Drudge really isn’t that necessary anymore for news, and his scoops are few and far between anymore, why not drop Drudge? Remove his link from your website, de-link him from your blog and don’t link to him.

No. And not because I endorse what Drudge did. Rather, I think whatever blame there is in this matter must fall on Drudge's source. The sources were presumably parties to the agreement that kept details of the prince's deployment out of the news for three months.

It was the sources who broke the agreement. Drudge was never part of that agreement. Someone had a duty to keep this quiet, but that someone was not Matt Drudge.

Who leaked it to Drudge, and why? That's an interesting question, though I doubt we'll ever know the answer. I've never known Drudge to burn a source. But if you're looking for someone to blame in this affair, you need to ask yourself who that source might have been, and why they told Drudge.

Truth is a journalist's ultimate defense. When I was starting out in this business more than 20 years ago, my editors would tell me, "As long as you've got your facts straight, they can't touch you." For all the talk about how the New Media revolution has changed everything in the news business, that Old School rule still holds.

Of course, a smart journalist quickly figures out that he needs to earn his sources' trust, and that the ability to keep a secret -- making sure what's off the record stays off the record -- is essential to building a relationship of trust with those sources.

Drudge is no dummy. Reverse-engineering this Prince Harry story, I would bet that Drudge's source was someone in the British press corp who was eager to report on Prince Harry's Afghan adventure, but who was constrained by the agreement to keep his deployment secret. Therefore, the source tipped Drudge in order to blow away the agreement.

That's just a guess and, like I said, we'll probably never know the facts. But I still say that it is the source, and not Drudge, who bears the responsibility for this leak.

Linked at Newsbusters and Memeorandum -- thanks!

On cleavage

Writing in Smart Set, Jessa Crispin reviews The Meaning of Sunglasses by Hadley Freeman, quoting her thus:

“Show me a woman with a good three inches of cleavage on display, and I’ll show you a woman who, rightly or wrongly, has little faith in her powers of conversation.”

Well, I wouldn't presume to know what a low neckline says about a woman's self-image, but I have always found the display of cleavage problematic in the workplace. Whatever a woman may choose to wear to a party or to the beach is her own private choice; but what she wears to the office affects everyone there.

In Washington, the term "skinterns" was coined a few years ago to describe the bare-as-you-dare way styles favored by some female interns. It's mind-boggling what some of them consider appropriate or acceptable for office wear.

On the one hand, I am sympathetic to the interns' plight, recalling what it was like to try to put together a week's worth of business attire when I first graduated college. These interns are mostly college juniors and seniors who probably can't afford to go to Lord & Taylor or Macy's and buy a whole wardrobe of power suits and nice dresses (which will be out of fashion by the time they graduate, anyway).

On the other hand, the display of cleavage in the workplace is completely inappropriate and unprofessional. It's distracting and annoying. Even if you've got cleavage worthy of admiration, displaying it at the office will only incite envy among your female colleagues, while causing your male colleagues to fear that you're attempting to entrap them in a sexual-harassment suit. (Trust me, guys do worry about that kind of stuff.)

Please, ladies, reserve the display of decolletage for your disco dates, and save those strapless sundresses for Sundays in the park. Even if you want to draw the interest of some fellow at work, baring your bosom is not the best way to do it.

Remember: If you dress in the way that leaves nothing to the imagination, you'll only attract guys with no imagination.

Masonic conspiracy in Russia?

My friend Matt Keller called my attention to this story in the Moscow Times:

Perhaps nothing in Russia can whip up public hysteria like the notion of a Masonic conspiracy to take over the country. The word "democrat" has also become a widely pejorative term, and long hair on men is certainly a no-no for much of the Russian public.
Now meet Andrei Bogdanov, the presidential candidate with long, curly hair who heads up the country's largest Masonic lodge as well as the Democratic Party of Russia.
At 38, Bogdanov is Russia's youngest-ever presidential candidate, and he is running a long-shot campaign in the March 2 election that First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, President Vladimir Putin's preferred candidate, is all but guaranteed to win.
Bogdanov's party is also widely seen as a Kremlin-controlled project to draw votes away from actual opposition candidates and give voters a tame liberal option.
But Bogdanov says he is truly optimistic that he can eventually draw widespread support among young voters -- despite his Masonic background and cascading locks.
"We are working for the future," Bogdanov said in an interview this week at his party's headquarters in central Moscow. "A new generation of voters will emerge soon with a better knowledge of Freemasonry and with fewer prejudices about it -- and about the long hair."

Kind of funny, given all that the Russians have to worry about, that Bogdanov's long hair and Masonic membership would generate such concerns.

Bill Buckley, R.I.P.

Alas, he died working in his study. (Via Memeorandum.)

When I was growing up in Douglas County, Ga., I used to read Buckley's columns in the Atlanta Journal. For a boy 11 or 12 years old, reading Buckley was a splendid educational experience because I was so often forced to look up those fancy words he liked to use.

Years later, in the mid-1990s, when I was beginning to reconsider my loyalty to the Democratic Party, one of the first conservative books I read that helped change my mind was Buckley's classic Up From Liberalism -- first published in 1959, the year of my birth.

Buckley meant so much to the conservative movement. He was not only a magazine publisher, author and columnist, but for years in the 1950s and '60s, Buckley was the most public face of conservatism. He'd go on "The Tonight Show" or some other TV program and -- with his superbly honed skills of rhetoric and logic -- represent in fine fashion the movement he helped to build.

His jut-jawed aristocratic demeanor and his British-influenced locution conveyed an upscale sensibility that helped make conservatism appealing and respectable in an age when liberal spokesmen otherwise dominated the public discourse.

He will be missed.

UPDATE: Here's Buckley debating Noam Chomsky in 1969:



UPDATE II: Jimmie at Sundries Shack was also influenced by Buckley:

Between National Review magazine and his indispendable weekly Firing Line television shows, Buckley filled my teenaged mind with facts and arguments that required me to read a lot more than I already was just to keep pace.

Just so, Jimmie. Just so.

This is cool

When you Google this phrase from The Breakfast Club, the first return is to my blog post from February 2007. A banner year at the Bender household ...

Restoring hope for marriage

The Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute is having a contest for college students to win a hope chest:

The prize (you guessed it--a fabulous, authentic, cedar-lined hope chest filled to the brim with fun, fancy and frivoulous items that any newlywed would would envy) not only celebrates marriage, but makes the man-hating feminists crazy!

Deadline is March 14, and you can read the details here. The prize will go to the student who signs up the most of her fellow students to receive the 2008 "Luce Ladies" calendar, featuring such conservative stars as Michelle Malkin:



Blogging at Wendy Shalit's "Modestly Yours" site, Princeton student Cassandra DeBenedetto writes:

CBLPI is encouraging women to set their sights (and hearts) on marriage instead of sex.
Common misconceptions about medieval marriage law and customs associate hope chests and dowries with women being devalued as property. In reality, these traditions carried with them no such degradation. Hope chests were simply used to store the hand-made goods and other items that a woman wished to bring to her future marriage. Essentially, a hope chest was part of her preparation for those first couple years of marriage, and, as the name suggests, symbolized her hope in marriage.

Very true, although I hope Miss DeBenedetto will see the error in her phrase "marriage instead of sex." It's not an either/or proposition. Sex is quite nearly essential to marriage. Setting your sights on marriage certainly doesn't mean you're not interested in sex; it just means waiting 'til you say "I do" before you ... well, before you do.

Perhaps Miss DeBenedetto would have said "marriage instead of promiscuity" or "marriage instead of fornication," but she probably didn't want to sound judgmental.

Me, I've got no such compunction. I'm a married father of six, my eldest child is an 18-year-old college sophomore, and I know I wouldn't want her whoring around like some of these girls do.

Being judgmental is part of a parent's job. And part of the problem affecting young people nowadays is that parents are failing at that job, because it's politically incorrect to speak the blunt truth about certain things.

Debating about nothing

Last night's Democratic debate (via Memeorandum) was merely about tactics, beginning with a discussion of the mutual finger-pointing between Hillary and Obama over whose health-care plan would provide the most coverage for the most people.

Yawn.

I reject the idea that it is vitally significant who "won" that debate. Hillary and Obama are agreed on the only important question: Who is responsible for your health-care costs? They answer in unison: Not you.

Here is Hillary from last night's debate:

You know, health care reform and achieving universal health care is a passion of mine. It is something I believe in with all my heart. And every day that I'm campaigning, and certainly here throughout Ohio, I've met so many families -- happened again this morning in Lorain -- who are just devastated because they don't get the health care they deserve to have. (Emphasis added.)

"Deserve"? In what sense does anyone deserve health care? Health care doesn't just materialize out of thin air. Doctors and nurses require years of training, hospitals and offices must be built and maintained, drugs must be developed, manufactured and tested, etc. These are the things that, added together, we call "health care," and they cost a lot of money. So the question is, who's going to pay the bill?

Ultimately, it makes sense for the cost to be paid by the person receiving the care. He chooses what medical goods and services he wants, and because he's paying the bills, he has an incentive to choose wisely.

But if health care is an entitlement and a right -- if someone can be said to "deserve" a certain amount of medical goods and services -- then there is no longer any incentive to thrift, no reason for the individual to be careful in his health-care choices. This is the biggest reason why health-care costs have spiralled out of control in recent years: Third-party-payer systems that encourage people to go to the doctor's office (and take the prescribed medicines) without regard to the ultimate cost.

Some of the most important health-care choices, such as eating well and exercising regularly, are neglected because people know they can get "free" medical treatment if they ruin their health. Go to a buffet restaurant sometime and watch as hugely obese people fill their plates with red meat and other fatty foods -- that is what is driving the so-called "health-care crisis" in America. And both Obama and Hillary, by advocating universal health care (i.e., government-run, taxpayer-funded socialized medicine) are only promising to make things worse.

Pelosi's partisan priorities

Rep. Trent Franks, Arizona Republican, is steamed at the misplaced priorities of the Nancy Pelosi Democrats:

Almost 2 weeks ago, the House of Representatives adjourned for vacation after House leadership decided to allow the Protect America Act to expire rather than bring the Senate's version to a vote, which would have passed easily. Then today, in its first official act since adjourning for vacation, the Democrat leadership of the House Judiciary Committee decided to subpoena a former Secretary of State from Ohio whose only offense was to politely decline an invitation to appear at a hearing. I find it absolutely appalling that Democrats are choosing to sacrifice our first responsibility, which is providing for the protection and security of the American people and our troops abroad whose security desperately depends on foreign intelligence -- and instead are focusing on yet another political goose chase for the sake of partisan politics.

If Pelosi & Company are trying to ensure that their tenure as the House majority is a short one, they're doing a good job. Even the Associated Press can't help noticing how ridiculous they look:

With a week to go before a new round of critical presidential primaries, the hearing in Congress showed just how much lingering suspicion remains among Democrats over the last two presidential elections.
Democrats on the subcommittee won a vote authorizing a subpoena for Kenneth Blackwell, a Republican and Ohio's top election official in 2004, the year many Democrats charged that their supporters were being discouraged from voting. The state's 2008 presidential primary takes place next Tuesday.
Republicans on the panel derided the subpoena effort as a waste of time.

The alleged "voter suppression" is nothing of the kind. In fact, such complaints occur almost exclusively in Democrat-dominated urban precincts and are not the result of Republican malice, but of incompetent election officials in those precincts.

Oh, it's Tuesday, isn't it?

Having been out of the country for two weeks -- and nearly incommunicado for most of that time -- I lost track of U.S. politics, but it seems like y'all kept things interesting in my absence.

As I had predicted from the get-go, liberals would keep giving Crazy Cousin John the softball treatment right up until he had the GOP nomination locked, and then they'd unleash the dirt machine. Don't say you weren't warned.

On the Democratic side, it looks like Hillary's got it nailed, despite Obama's surging popularity. If she's managed to hang in this far, she's not going to blow it now.

But ask me if I care. I don't. I really don't.

Bryan, Michelle & HotAir.com

For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth. If ye endure chastening, God dealeth with you as with sons; for what son is he whom the father chasteneth not?

-- Hebrews 12:6-7 KJV

* * * * *

Last week, I called Bryan Preston to tell him about an upcoming news opportunity and was surprised to hear that he was leaving Hot Air to take a job with Laura Ingram, as Michelle Malkin announced Sunday. (Junkyard Blog reacts here.)

Bryan and I got to be pretty good buddies back in the summer of 2006, and he sometimes answered the phone at odd hours when I'd call to vent my spleen or pass along a tip. Bryan was kind of a night owl like me. I had a 70-mile commute from Hagerstown to Washington and would often use the time to talk news and politics on the cell phone. When you're commuting 15 hours a week, it's best to try to get some work done while you're driving, and Bryan was one of the guys I'd call most often.

"Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue," I'd often say when things got stressful at The Washington Times, quoting the famous line spoken by Lloyd Bridges in "Airplane."



Like Bridges' character, Steve McCroskey, sometimes we do or say crazy things when our jobs become stressful. To anyone who takes pride in his work, it always seems irrational and unjust when you're working as hard as you can and still not getting the kind of results you want. Sometimes (and I've experienced this myself several times) you get chewed out for taking the initiative and trying to do the best for your company.

When you find yourself in one of those career cul-de-sacs, when it seems like you're living some absurdist nightmare scripted by Ionesco or Sartre, it is small comfort to remember that God is sovereign, that there are no accidents, and that God's will for your life is being worked out for you, if only you'll be patient.

Perhaps godless people have an easier time in such situations, since without God there can be no duty, and without duty there can be no honor. Bryan is an honorable man and a sincere Christian, and when things weren't working out for him at HotAir.com, it was hard for him to talk to me about it. He could not betray the trust conveyed to him. For the longest time, Bryan bit his tongue and didn't let on that there was "a disturbance in The Force," a phrase from "Star Wars" I like to use to describe such situations.

I learned of the disturbance in The Force for Bryan accidentally -- because I learned from another source about a seemingly inexplicable decision where a non-answer was, in a sense, an answer. So since last fall, I've been very sympathetic to Bryan's predicament, which was so similar to what I faced at The Washington Times before I resigned in January.

Something I learned from my experience, and something I think Bryan also sees, is that we need to learn to face difficult circumstances with calm confidence. I am a poor excuse for a Christian, but I have faith in the power of prayer, and when things were bleak for me at The Washington Times, I always knew that this was a job my wife and I had prayed I'd get. If it wasn't going right, there had to be a reason.

After many hours of enforced meditation on this theme, I came to two important conclusions:

• Any apparent conflict between one's self-interest and one's honor is only apparent. It is never in one's interest to act dishonorably.
• If things aren't going right for you and you can't find anyone else to blame, try looking in the mirror and saying to yourself: "It is all my fault."

Well, it seems there has been a happy ending for Bryan -- a win-win where he goes out smiling, without burning any bridges, and HotAir.com can now find a new employee who better fits what they need for their company.

When Christians get chastised, we need to learn to be grateful for the lesson, and not complain.

Return of The Muzungu

OK, I'm back from Africa and trying to decompress from the intensity of the experience. Some of the stuff that happened seems like a wild fever dream at this point.

Africa was great. Kampala, the capital of Uganda, is lovely in February, and any tourist will be assured a splendid time if, after landing at Entebbe International Airport, he catches the shuttle bus to the luxurious Kampala Serena Hotel, a five-start resort to compare with any in the world. (If you're down at the poolside lounge, your waiter might be my friend Robert. Tell Robert to bring you a cheeseburger and a Bell Lager, the preferred beverage of famous international correspondents.)

I didn't go to Uganda as a tourist, but as a professional journalist. My services had been contracted and half the fee had already been received. Getting the other half is contingent on the publisher getting 70,000 words by May 1. That should be no sweat, honestly, though when worried friends would warn me about the dangers of my intinerary, including a planned visit to Sudan, I'd play it off with a joke: "I'm not worried about the Sudan. It's the deadline that I'm worried about."

People don't always get my jokes, which is why I nearly didn't get out of Heathrow International in London ("random search," my foot!) and why Her Majesty's government provided security all the way to Dulles International, where I eluded their cordon to reach American soil, thus regaining my rights as a U.S. citizen including, thank God, my Fifth Amendment right to remain silent.

As bizarre as that may sound, the reality was even weirder. Perhaps an old Cockney joke summarizes it best:

Q. What's the difference between crazy and eccentric?
A. 'Bout 'alf a million a year, I'd say.

I'll try to update later to explain. For now, I'm just trying to decompress and recover my emotional equilibrium.

Thursday night, Feb. 21, I was present as veterans of the Sudanese People's Liberation Army (SPLA) held a send-off party for Sam in Kampala, prior to his return to the States. It was a warriors-only tribal celebration, and the two Dinka tribesmen present for the party asked Sam (whose father was half-Cherokee) to share his own tribal customs.

So next thing you know, I'm the civilian eyewitness as Sam is war-whooping and doing a Cherokee dance, while the Dinka are doing their thing, the Acholi are doing theirs ... it was a stone-cold gonzo moment.

If you want to learn more about Sam's work -- among other things, his ministry runs the largest orphanage in Sudan -- check out his Shekinah Fellowship World Missions site. If you want to help with Sam's work, I promise you'll be blessed if you write a check (even if it's only $10 or $20) payable to "World Missions" and mail it to:

World Missions
P.O. Box 131
Central City, PA 15926

Today, if I understand correctly, Sam is out in Los Angeles. He's about to be hugely famous. Like I told Sam at breakfast one day last week, "Dude, you're going to be an action figure by Christmas." That may sound like a joke. It's not. I can easily picture the boys and girls telling Santa to bring them a Sam Childers action figure (complete with a classic '47 Harley) for Christmas.

Trust me. In college, I majored in drama (shout-out to my Alpha Psi Omega brothers and sisters at JSU!) and when it comes to method acting, Sam could give Lee Strasberg some lessons, because Sam never has to ask himself, "What's my motivation?" He's 100% about the job, he's always focused on completing the mission, and he has a low tolerance for distractions.

UPDATE TUESDAY 6:20 AM:

I see my good friend Jimmie at The Sundries Shack has linked -- thanks Jimmie.

I got 7 hours sleep yesterday, which is the longest stretch of sleep I've had in weeks. Looking back over the past several weeks, I realize I have been running at full-throttle overdrive since at least mid-January. The valves were starting to rattle a bit, frankly.

Anyway, after sleeping from 3 until 10 p.m. yesterday, I got up and checked e-mail and Facebook for a while. Then at 2:30 p.m., I hopped in my car (the black KIA Optima I call my "Korean Jag" because its lines look vaguely like a Jaguar) and ran to Wal-Mart with a shopping list of supplies I'll need to organize this book project.

With the copious notes and recordings I got during the Uganda trip -- plus the first drafts of four or five chapters, totalling about 20,000 words, and piles of printed notes by Sam -- we should easily hit this deadline on time and under budget.

Seven hours sleep and a bit of time to unwind have restored my confidence. I have an appointment today at 9:45 a.m. with Dr. Cantone, who said he wanted to see me when I got back to find out if I had any problems with the medications he prescribe me for the Africa trip.

Short answer: Hell, yes.

I was taking the anti-malaria medicine once a day as prescribed, as well as the antibiotic (since I had a respiratory infection) and the pain pill (because the cough was painful). When I got off the plane at Entebbe, I felt stressed-out from a nicotine fit, but as Sam later said, he thought I must be on some serious drugs

The situation became weird beyond words on the return flight to London's Heathrow Airport, where we missed our connecting flight and were laid over until the next day. To say that the Brits are security-conscious about their aviation is to engage in a classic English understatement. But I'll say no more about that, except to say that when I finally made it through customs at Dulles and headed for the exit, I felt like what Jethro Bodine would call a "double-naught spy," having made a narrow escape.

(MUSIC CUE: Johnny Rivers, "Secret Agent Man")

Shaken, not stirred

Not only was my wife waiting for me at the international arrivals gate at Dulles, but she had with her our pastor, Vladimir Corea. Hugs were exchanged, and we headed to the pastor's car.

My checked baggage hadn't made it to Dulles with me (just a coincidence, I'm sure), but Sam had warned me about that possibility, so everything essential was packed into the large nylon flight bag I'd purchased in the duty-free shop at Entebbe. (Yeah, I kept the receipt.)

We rolled out of the airport, with my wife in back and me riding shotgun. I mentioned what Sam had said about the potential hallucinogenic side effects of the anti-malaria medication. Pastor Corea said, "Oh, yeah, that happens all the time. We've had missionaries completely trip out on that stuff. It can be bad, man."

Right. It was as if I'd been through what Tom Wolfe once called "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test." And I'd passed the test.

So the storm was over and now I looked forward, like my buddy Scott said, to "Fair wind and God speed." But I'll keep praying.