And then her mom cut off her allowance . . .

(BUMPED; UPDATED) Bristol Palin:

"I think abstinence is, like -- like, the -- I don't know how to put it -- like, the main -- everyone should be abstinent or whatever, but it’s not realistic at all."

Like, totally duh. Couldn't keep her britches on, and any expectation that she would keep her britches on was "not realistic." Any expectation that we won't eventually see tabloid photos of Levi Johnston slamming jello shots with strippers in an Anchorage bar -- also "not realistic at all."

UPDATE: Some of the commenters are scolding me for being . . . too judgmental. Look, I have three teenagers myself, a 19-year-old daughter and twin 16-year-old sons. Being judgmental is a full-time occupation, OK? I just put one of my 16-year-old boys onto a plane to visit relatives in Ohio, where he's also got a blonde girlfriend. When I called his cell phone before he boarded the plane, what was the last thing I told him? "Keep it in your britches, son."

Understand that sexy is a hereditary condition, so it's not like the boy won't encounter temptation. But something else is hereditary, too: Extreme fecundity.

My wife is one of seven children in her family, and we've got six kids, so there's really no such thing as "safe sex" with this crew. I've had to have this little talk with my daughter and her boyfriend, much to their embarrassment. It's about 100% certain they're not having sex, because if they were, there's a 99% chance I'd be a grandpa by now.

As to the efficacy of "abstinence education" as practiced in public schools, I am not in a position to judge. But how hard is it to tell a teenager, "Keep your britches on"? And how hard is that to do? It's an instruction so simple that even a teenager can remember.

So excuse my judgmentalism if I think that maybe at some point Bristol and Levi should have noticed they weren't wearing any pants, and that they should have recognized this as a signal their gametes might soon combine to form a zygote. There's 6 billion people on this planet, which suggests the efficiency with which gametes combine when two young lovers forget to keep their britches on.

BRISTOL: "Levi., you're not wearing pants."
LEVI: "You noticed, huh?"
BRISTOL: "Well, yeah. I did. Like, totally."
LEVI: "Yeah. And guess what?"
BRISTOL: "What?"
LEVI: "You're not wearing pants, either!"
BRISTOL: "Oh. My. God."
LEVI: "Heh. Heh. Heh."
BRISTOL: "I can't believe I'm not wearing pants!"
LEVI: "Incredible."
BRISTOL: "I'm not wearing pants. You're not wearing pants. How did this happen?"
LEVI: "Uh . . . stuff happens."
BRISTOL: "Yeah, I guess so. What do we do now?"
LEVI: "Hmmmm. I've got an idea . . ."

And so it goes. Two teenagers, mysteriously pantsless, and then -- suddenly -- pregnant. A sequence of events so baffling, so bizarre that it could only happen in . . . THE TWILIGHT ZONE!

UPDATE II: Gabriel Malor at AOSHQ salutes Bristol as "one brave woman," and is echoed by Ed Morrissey hailing her "courage." Yes, the admirable courage of misplacing your pants and then going on national TV to tell the world that it's "more accepted" to misplace your pants and "not realistic" to keep your pants on. Also, Ed has video of Bristol talking tabloids:

Having taken plenty of abuse for being ardently pro-Palin, no amount of politics can compel me to call a spade an "entrenching implement." And as someone who has complained loudly and often about double standards in the media, I refuse to suspend my judgmentalism because this particular unwed mother is named "Bristol Palin" and not "LaShonda Watts" or "Maria Gonzales."

UPDATE III: Now frequent commenter Thirteen28 brings up the common problem with teenage boys: Testosterone-induced dementia, also known as Constant Tumescence Syndrome (CTS). Having suffered a severe case of this dread disorder -- the condition persisted well into my 20s, a rare phenomenon chronicled as a case study in various medical journals -- I am sympathetic.

However, as a father, sympathy must be put aside so that CTS does not lead to two related adolescent maladies, Hymen Disappearance Disorder and the pandemic knockedupicus virus.

As a conservative, I believe that human beings (a species that includes even that beastly subspecies, homo pimplicus adolesens) respond to incentives. Therefore the teenage Lothario, when calculating the cost-benefit analysis of nailing my daughter, must consider the negative incentive of being perforated by 12-gauge double-aught buckshot. (Five in the magazine, one in the chamber.)

Had I been married to the governor of Alaska . . . Wait. Let's pause to contemplate that hypothetical. . . . As I was saying, had I been married to the governor of Alaska, the "scandal" would have played out in headlines like this:

TEENAGE HOCKEY STAR SLAIN

. . . and this:

'FIRST DUDE' SUSPECTED
IN MUTILATION MURDER
OF TEEN HOCKEY STAR

. . . and, perhaps, ending with this:

GOVERNOR'S HUSBAND ACQUITTED
Prosecutors Denounce 'Jury Nullification';
Defendant: 'That Hoodlum Needed Killing'

Forget about "abstinence education." If you want to reduce teen pregnancy, you'll get more results from marksmanship training for fathers.

UPDATE IV: Donald Douglas approves of the extreme judgmentalism.

PREVIOUSLY:

• 2/11: Imported poverty
• 1/31: TEEN! SEX! SCANDAL!
• 1/11: 'Science' and teen sex
• 1/8: Teen pregnancy: Fact vs. spin
• 7/22: Famous teenage mothers
• 6/29: In praise of teenage mothers

Headline of the Day

Stocks slump despite stimulus
-- CNN Money

Don't you just love that "despite"? I mean, you'd think that CNN could afford to hire headline writers who knew something -- anything -- about economics, so that the headline might read:

Obamanomics causes stock slump

What almost nobody seems to realize is that we're passing 7,500 en route to 6,000. This is not temporary "profit-taking," but permanent loss-taking -- the de-capitalization of Wall Street, as the smart money pulls out of U.S. stocks before we go from very bad to much worse. And if you think the stock market is scary, just wait until the bond market comes down with the heeby-jeebies. Get ready for Weimar America, people.

If I had one word of advice, it would be: SELL. And if you asked me for two words of advice, I'd say: SELL NOW.

Socialist government is BAD for capitalism?

(BUMPED & UPDATED) At least the capitalists think so. But just wait until the terror-famines against the kulaks begin -- that'll teach those hoarders and exploiters and parasites!

UPDATE: More surprises?

In midday trading, the Dow dropped 260.37, or 3.32 percent, to 7,590.04. It fell as low as 7,553.48 in early trading -- just a point away from the blue-chip index's five-and-a-half month closing low of 7,552.29 reached Nov. 20.

I'm shocked, shocked, at this vicious display of institutional racism toward President Mugabe Obama.

UPDATE II: Oh, this is freaking rich:

Right-wing economic "theory" is destroying America. It’s doing a bigger job on us that al Qaeda could ever have dreamed.

Among the more astonishing assertions I've read in a while, that one, since it hangs on a New York Times story about the economic woes of California, which is being strangled by (among other things) its public-employee unions. At some point, one must learn to discern the key factors in complex causation, and to see California's debacle as a result of "right-wing economic theory" is so bass-ackward I don't even know where to begin fisking.

Canadian advice to ignore

(BUMPED; UPDATE BELOW) David Frum advises:

In every poll I’ve seen, hefty majorities approve of President Obama’s economic performance. Approval numbers for congressional Republicans remain dismal.
If we’re to make progress in 2010, we have to look serious. This week we looked not only irrelevant, but clueless and silly.

Again with the "we" -- as if he and John Boehner and Tom Coburn are sitting around plotting Republican strategy. But the real problem with Frum's argument is something I pointed out Sunday: Opinion-poll numbers in February 2009 don't mean zip if what you are "popular" for is passing a neo-Keynesian stimulus that won't work.

Ross Douthat echoes Frum, pining to see Republicans "articulating an actual alternative to Obamanomics." But why should they propose an "alternative" that can't possibly be voted into action given the current overwhelming majority? At this point, Boehner should just tell Ron Paul to keep denouncing central planning and Keynesianism, and let the main GOP message on economics be one of repeated warning: The Obama/Pelosi/Reid plan is leading the U.S. economy into a fiscal trap.

Trying to "win" news cycles in February 2009 is not what the Republican Party needs to be worried about. Let's see what the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the inflation rate and the unemployment rate are on Labor Day 2010 before deciding who looks "serious" and who looks "silly."

More blog reactions at Memeorandum.

UPDATE: Kathy Shaidle once again reminds us that not all Canadians are evil. And hey, a dead-cat bounce in congressional approval ratings! Wonder what that means?


UPDATE II: Linked at Conservative Grapevine.

Larison We Can Believe In!

Daniel Larison and I are often at odds, but his takedown of Nate Silver is splendid:

Naturally, [Silver] is going to set up his own position as the rational one and the one he is attacking as implicitly irrational. That . . . is typical of the technocratic, anti-populist side in any debate to frame disagreements with their critics as a battle between reason and passion. You can find this with David Brooks' description of anti-TARP Congressmen as "nihilists" (even though their skepticism and advocacy for alternatives were entirely warranted and correct) or any of the usual pro-war and pro-immigration advocates that seek to impute malicious intent or hatred to their opponents. This is a method used for dismissing, rather than engaging, and for treating opposing arguments as inherently unworthy of attention or serious consideration. Technocratic types prefer practicing this politics of contempt, because it automatically rules out serious objections to certain policies as automatically invalid and invests them or people like them with a certain unchallengeable authority. They tend to make respect for expertise into a debilitating inability to question experts’ assumptions and biases. [Emphasis added.]

You'll find the same type of how-dare-you-question-the-expert-consensus arguments made by global warming alarmists, among others. Big hat-tip to Donald Douglas who, while even more politically/ideologically at odds with Larison, nevertheless can't deny the nail-on-the-head accuracy of Larison's description of the "technocratic" style in debate.

BTW, I am perfectly willing to admit that my politics are not always rational. Individual self-interest and "little platoon" loyalty are not the sort of things that can be articulated as universal ideological principles. What steams my vegetables is when the elite try to pretend that their self-serving politics is rational and principled, and backed by expert consensus, while the politics of the truck driver in Tulsa is just know-nothing populism.

Suggestion for President Obama

Please appoint Lindsay Graham to be an ambassador. Chad, China, Chile -- we don't care, just so long as it's far enough away that he never shows up as a Republican spokesman on TV again.

Viva Californication!

A $41 billion state budget deficit -- way to go AFSCME! Way to go SEIU! Way to go CTA! You showed that mean ol' Republican governor who's boss, didn't ya? So now your state is teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, and they're planning to cut 20,000 state jobs.

If there were any justice in the world, the idiot bosses who run the government-employee unions would be fleeing to Nevada and seeking police escorts to help them make it to the state line ahead of the vengeful mobs of angry taxpayers. Somebody should make reference to Fred Siegel's The Future Once Happened Here -- liberal Democrats and labor unions have done to California what they did to New York City in the 1960s and '70s.

UPDATE: Linked by Ed Driscoll, who has lots more on the rapidly imploding state of California.

How to fix the GOP?

John Hawkins is the list-master of the conservative blogosphere, and he's now got a list of "Six Keys to Turning Around the Republican Party." I think he's right in saying that the first step to figuring out how to go forward is figuring out how things went wrong, to wit:

Bush and his Republican allies in Congress systematically alienated their conservative supporters by almost totally ignoring their concerns on issues like spending and immigration, even to the point of gratuitously insulting conservatives who disagreed with them. The Party then topped this all off by choosing the single least popular man in the entire Republican Party with conservative activists, John McCain, as the party’s presidential nominee.

Read the whole thing. The important thing is not to let the liberal media, the Democrats and Republican "moderates" get inside your head with their what-went-wrong narratives, which always end with the conclusion that that those right-wing anti-government nuts and the evangelical holy-rollers are the problem with the GOP.

I started trying to get the "what went wrong" story straight even before the election, with my "How John McCain Lost" article on Oct. 7. That had been preceded by articles on "Libertarian Populism" (Sept. 30) and "The Bible vs. the Bailout" (Oct. 2), and was followed with "You Did Not Lose" (Nov. 5), "Don't Overthink It" (Nov. 12) and "Future Ex-Democrats" (Nov. 24).

The most important thing, after a solid ass-kicking like Republicans took on Nov. 4, is not to panic or become demoralized. You could argue that Democrats might not have lost in 2004 if they hadn't panicked and become demoralized after their surprising defeats in 2002. I think we can see that Howard Dean in late 2003 was basically on the path that would lead to Democratic victories in 2006 and '08, and John Edwards was viable at that point. Instead the party's Establishment got skittish and went with that insufferable loser, John Kerry.

But the Democrats did something very smart after 2004. Instead of freaking out over those "values voters" and getting all down in the dumps, they got busy organizing and raising money so that when the GOP hit a long streak of bad moves and bad news in 2005-06, the Dems were ready to take advantage of it. A day of organizing is worth a week of blathering about "strategy," and an hour of fund-raising is worth far more than a month of navel-gazing op-ed columns pumped out by the punditocracy.

But the pundits always want to over-intellectualize everything, because that's what they get paid to do, and the consultants always want to talk "strategy," because they's what they get paid to do. Grassroots organizing, candidate recruitment and fundraising -- those are the three things the GOP needs to focus on in the near term. It's hard to focus on that kind of important stuff if you let yourself get bummed out by doomsaying pundits.

UPDATE: Moe Lane:

Whining does not count as "doing something about it." Neither does demanding that the Party drop everything to concentrate on your pet issue, stapling your hand to your forehead about how the awful Party never listened to you, and/or threatening to move out to the countryside with a full load of ammo and survival gear. All any of that does is depress people who are trying to actually fix things.

Hear! Hear!

Cultural illiteracy

Professor Paul Gottfried surveys the yawning chasm of ignorance between the ears of the young:

My Western Civ. Students, who claimed to be appalled by the Patriot Act, compared the evil George W. Bush to McCarthy and Hitler. But significantly they couldn't tell me anything about the Patriot Act, and they certainly couldn't provide many details about the former junior senator from Wisconsin or the German tyrant.
Cultural literacy forms a unified whole, in the same way that Georges Clemenceau once stated that "La Gauche, c'est un bloc." And no, I don't believe that 68% of the American population is sufficiently informed about Darwin to be able to answer the pollster's question with any degree of honesty. My skepticism results from the fact my college seniors, who are presumably no worse than most, had absolutely no idea about what languages the Bible was written in. Except for natural scientists, the two educational gaps are usually connected. Cultural illiteracy, like the French Left in 1919, constitutes a consistent whole.

Well, Professor, how many know enough French -- or enough European history -- to know who Clemenceau was, or what he meant? The Tiger might as well have never lived, so far as the average college student is concerned. Nor would you see any flicker of recognition from that average student if you mentioned Black Jack Pershing, or Leon Trotsky or Whitaker Chambers, or Danton or Marat, or Catiline or Cicero, or Austerlitz or Agincourt or Cannae. How many know even a smattering of French or German? How know anything of Latin? And Greek? Don't even ask.

What is striking is that, even while a greater proportion of America's young people are now college educated than ever before, the percentage who are actually educated -- that is to say, who possess such knowledge as once befitted a person who was considered "well-read" -- is probably smaller than it was 50 years ago. However, because the average level of learning has sunk so low, they are ignorant of their own ignorance. They actually believe themselves knowledgeable, because they know as much as any of their classmates, apparently without realizing what absolute ignoramuses their classmates are.

Why is this? For a good 30 or 40 years, at least, the educational trend has been toward the cultivation of self-esteem -- All Must Have Prizes -- and thus their teachers are afraid to teach them the most important lesson of youth, namely: You don't know anything, you young savages!

Am I the only one who remembers when teachers used to employ what might be called "Socratic sarcasm." As early as seventh or eighth grade, I remember teachers who would call on a student and, if the student gave the wrong answer, the teacher would rebuke his ignorance with some droll remark then say, "Who knows the correct answer?" The kid who raised his hand next had better know the answer, and if no hands were raised, the class would be scolded for having failed to study the lesson.

Brutal? Well, after all, the lesson had been assigned, and you had the textbook right there on your desk. If you didn't know your Doric from your Ionic, whose fault was that? Our teachers didn't give a damn about our "self-esteem." They were not hired to flatter us, or condescend to us, or to applaud us for merely showing up and being nice. They were expected to teach us, and we were expected to learn. (Again: Am I the only whose teachers used to remark on the distinction between a pupil and a student?)

I am convinced that the vastness of contemporary ignorance is rooted in this trend toward pedagogical softness, and this in turn reflects the influence of television. As Neil Postman wrote nearly a quarter-century agao in Amusing Ourselves to Death:

[T]elevison's principal contribution to educational philosophy is the idea that
teaching and entertainment are inseparable.

If I had a time machine, I'd go back to maybe 1966 or '67 and find the first teacher who thought she was being "innovative" when she said, "Let's make learning fun!" And after I'd slapped her face a few times to get her attention, I'd deliver a lecture on the disastrous consequences of her idiotic idea.

Learning is hard work, and it only becomes fun when students have mastered the basic skills and developed their knowledge to the level of fluency. The smart ones might get there by fifth or sixth grade, but you'll never get them there by the teaching-as-entertainment, let's-make-learning-fun approach. And if they get used to the let's-make-learning-fun style when they're in first and second grade, what will become of them when they encounter algebra and diagramming sentences? I'm sorry -- you can buy gold-star stickers by the boxcar load, and it ain't going to make algebra fun, except for that handful of nerds for whom math is fun anyway.

A hunger for knowledge cannot be aroused unless the student is first made to feel ashamed of his ignorance, and the self-esteem theory of education forbids the inculcation of that sense of shame (or any other). Some clever teacher of the so-called "gifted," ought to try this with an advanced class of high-school history students: Assign Richard Taylor's Destruction and Reconstruction as a text.

Taylor was an erudite and urbane man, whose memoir is filled with clever allusions to history and literature, so that for example on page 64 one finds a reference to the mauvais quart d’heure of Rabelais, on page 68 he writes of being fixed with a "Parthian glance of contempt," and on page 71 he uses "claw for claw" (a reference to the Fingal legend of Conan, perhaps by way of Waverly by Sir Walter Scott).

If a teacher were to put Taylor in the hands of a classroom of smart 10th-graders, after having studied for himself all these allusions, then take the time during the class to call attention to these -- asking them to research Conan and Parthians and Rabelais, etc. -- it might get through to them just what a universe of knowledge is out there beyond their own limited store of learning. These kids know they're smart, they just don't realize how ignorant they are, and this is the point to be driven home, if they're ever going to become truly educated.

UPDATE: My friend and fellow JSU alumni James Joyner decides he wants an argument:

[W]e're comparing an idealized view of the past with a very different educational system of today. There was never a time when most Americans were well educated in the sense that Stacy describes.

James, I'm not talking about "most Americans," I'm clearly talking about college graduates, and I'm saying that the average college graduate knows less -- in terms of history, geography, literature and languages -- than was true 40, 50 or 100 years ago. Granting that college education is more widespread, the real problem is the simulacrum of education, the belief of swinish Philistines that they're "educated" when they really aren't. James continues:

We live in a much more complicated world than existed fifty years ago, requiring us to train our young people in a variety of tasks. Most obviously, today's kids are vastly more technologically literate than those of previous generations.

"Technological literacy," and yet our best graduate schools in engineering, medicine and science are notoriously full of foreign students. I think if you talked to some engineering teachers, you'd be much less convinced that the decline in the humanities is a result of any succcess in teaching students to be "technologically literate." James continues:

We give short shrift to -- or eliminate entirely -- subjects that were once considered "essential" knowledge for educated people in order to teach things considered important today.
I have a PhD and am much more of a reader than most people. But I don't know Latin or Greek, beyond a handful of words that have crept into our language or scholarly jargon. . . Part of that is because my education has been quite specialized compared to my historical antecedents. There's a lot more to know than there was in 1950, after all.

And part of it -- the very biggest part of it -- is the lowering of standards in secondary schools and in collegiate admissions, which have in turn produced lower standards all the way to the top of the system so that, inter alia, Larry Summers was run out of Harvard by a bunch of women's studies harpies. That a college-bound student should be able to fulfill the foreign-language requirement with Spanish (which I take to be almost the only foreign language that most students learn nowadays) utterly misses the original purpose of the foreign-language requirement, which I won't even go into.

While I took only a year of high-school Latin (in my junior year, Douglas County High was divided to create Lithia Springs High, DCHS retaining the Latin teacher, and I being forced to switch to French at LSHS) and remember nearly nothing of those cojugations and declensions, still there was some value in learning a smattering of Caesar and Cicero in the original.

Does my friend Dr. Joyner really believe that political science is such a specialized field that, in his 19 years of formal schooling, he could not have squeezed in a few semesters of Greek or Latin? Ah, but since classical languages have been discarded in favor of uno cerveza por favor, we find that teachers of Greek and Latin are almost impossible to find, and the new Dark Ages descend unnoticed.

Am I a nostalgist, idealizing the past? No, I'm a realist, who refuses to euphemize the present. We have lost a culture in which allusions to history and literature were the common language of educated men and gained a culture in which allusions to TV shows and movies are the only such references anyone understands. ("Eric Stratton, rush chairman -- damned glad to me ya!") This is certainly a decline, if not indeed a fall, and I don't expect that a future Gibbon will miss the point.

Good questions

Noticing the denunciations of the Senate RINO trio, Bradley Johnson reels off a list of Senate seats held by Democrats in states that are -- or could be -- competitive for Republicans:

Why do Max Baucus, Byron Dorgan, Tim Johnson, Kent Conrad, and Mark Begich hold seats in what are generally reliable Republican states at every level? Is it not possible to defeat Harry Reid in Nevada, Mary Landrieu in Louisiana, Robert Byrd in West Virginia, or Sherrod Brown in Ohio? How is it that Democrats control both of Virginia's senate seats? Not that long ago, Republicans controlled seats in Washington, Oregon, Minnesota, Delaware, New Mexico and Michigan. Is it really impossible to elect a second Republican Senator to join Chuck Grassley from Iowa or Dick Lugar from Indiana? Is there no way to defeat appointed Senators Roland Burris of Illinois or Mike Bennett of Colorado in 2010?

Mr. Johnson: The most important causes of the GOP decline in the Senate were:

• The war in Iraq -- You knew this.
• Top-down politics -- Ken Mehlman and Karl Rove tried to run the entire national apparatus of the GOP from Washington, picking favorites in Republican primaries and otherwise meddling in state-level affairs they should have stayed out of. This is what killed grassroots enthusiasm among rank-and-file party activists.
• Immigration -- In consecutive years (2006-07), Republicans led by John McCain pushed amnesty bills in the Senate, measures which were stopped only by a fierce clamor from grassroots conservatives who understood that amnesty is absolute poison in terms of keeping "Reagan Democrats." Don't. Ever. Let. That. Happen. Again.

It's perfectly possible to rebuild a Republican majority in the Senate. But if the GOP doesn't learn the lesson of its mistakes during the Bush years, there's no hope at all.

Hey, Deuce, pay attention!

Man, you're never going to catch up if you don't get to work on Rule 5, buddy. Let's see some hotness. Consider us even under Rule 2, until you link me again. Which you should do often. All your links are belong to us.

Burying capitalism

From AttackCartoons.com by John Bergstrom:

Truth is always funny, even when it's depressing.

Geekery with the IT Dept.

Eric Reasons, VP of IT at TOM, has taken notice of my long-term plan to develop a 3-column format here, and has directed me to this handy how-to guide, and created a mockup to give me the idea of what I can achieve. Primitive Unfrozen Caveman Blogger is intrigued . . . and intimidated. All those code-thingies! And you know what's really infuriating? The how-to guide was written by someone named "Amanda." A geek girl, showing me up in my embarrassing state of techo-primitivity. The shame of it all!

Overnight music video

For some unfathomable reason, Smitty posted this video on my Facebook wall:

So we might as well have a video music fest. "My Sharona":

How 'bout some Beatles?

Since we seem to be in pure power-pop mode here, how about some Nick Lowe?

From power-pop to harmolodic funk. Here's a rare cut, Bell & James, "You Never Know What You've Got," 1978:

Did somebody say "funk"? Baby, let's bring the beats -- Heatwave, "Grooveline":

Aw, now you got me in that Old School groove, gotta hit the kickspin with some Brothers Johnson,"Stomp":

Yeah, the crowd screams, "One more! One more!" Better get ready to get up and jam, 'cause this one's the last groove of the night -- Gap Band, "Early in the Morning":

'What Ann Coulter really thinks of the CCC . . .'

". . . I couldn't tell you. I lost my magical ESP powers in a tragic lawnmower accident."

Ace: Hanging with Hitch in Beirut

Ah, the glamorous life of the world's most famous hobo-hating Ewok:

Yesterday was the high point of the trip. We took a harrowing action-movie race up the mountains of [Shouf] that left several green and sickened and Christopher Hitchens berating the driver. "Now stop this nonsense," he said after we barely missed a head on collision with a Mercedes. "Start driving like a sane person." . . .
There we met Walid Jumblatt, leader of the Druze faction and the most stridently anti-Syrian critic, in his villa slash fortress slash Bond Villain Lair.

(Via Little Miss Attila.)

Our Canadian future

OK, maybe our future is Argentina. But maybe it's also Canada, where the government attempts to control who gets booked on TV talk shows:

Warren Kinsella, a senior aide to Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff, attempted to interfere with an editorial decision made by a public broadcaster today.
TV Ontario invited Kathy Shaidle, who blogs at Five Feet of Fury, to debate the "atheist bus" campaign. Kinsella, who was hand-picked by Ignatieff to head up the
Liberal war-room, immediately went ballistic, contacting the show's host, Steve Paikin, and demanding that Shaidle be un-invited.
Then Kinsella continued his hysterics, e-mailing provincial MPPs and staff, screeching that Shaidle must be persona non grata. He tried to get an online "campaign" going to stop her.

Congratulations, Kathy, on making the "persona non grata" list. First Mark Steyn, now you. If only someone had thought to ban Neil Young back when they had the chance . . .

'Better than having sex'

So does a 73-year-old Peoria woman describe the experience of watching Obama's motorcade pass. (Via Michelle Malkin.)

Pelosi Presents: Republicans Are EVIL!

Alexandra Pelosi, daughter of the Speaker of the House, has an HBO film deal -- I mean, wow, what a coicidence, huh? Time/Warner has only given $7.1 million to Democrats since 2000, making 82% of their donations to Democrats in the 2008 election cycle.

So HBO pays Alexandra to make a documentary about the election called Right America: Feeling Wronged: Some Voices from the Campaign Trail and guess what?

What kind of documentary would you expect given the subject matter and the filmmaker? . . .
If you said the film would show conservatives as ignorant, racist, hateful folk who genuinely cling to God and guns, give yourself a prize. Bonus points go for those who predicted the film would characterize McCain/Palin rallies as hate events.

Just amazing how these coincidences happen.

UPDATE: Smitty tips me to a story at Newsbusters, where Washington Post TV critic Michael Leahy pans the Pelosi documentary.

An assignment nobody wanted

A reporter at the New York Times has to write a profile feature about the Mexican investor who just bailed out Pinch Sulzberger to the tune of $250 million. It's like being the sportswriter assigned to cover the publisher's alma mater. You don't want that kind of assignment, because you know the guy that signs the checks is going to be breathing down your neck if any little detail is wrong. (Via Instapundit.)

Post-stimulus blues

Quin Hillyer is bummed out:

There are times when it's just too depressing to write about politics. This is one of those times. The welfare-reform-killing, debt-exploding, generational-thieving, pork-laden, growth-inhibiting, utterly unnecessary and counterproductive monstrosity that the Obamites and Pelosians just shoved down the nation's throats has left me in a deep numbness akin to one of the stages of grief.

Anybody else feeling the post-stimulus blues?

'You don’t have enough backbone to be a liar'

Moe Lane called this to my attention:

The other end of the political spectrum disregards you, Dahr, and now I know why. I thought it was because you're a liar -- but you aren't. You don’t have enough backbone to be a liar. You're a craven obfuscationist, intent on promoting your agenda at the cost of a menagerie of much braver men and women.

Now, THAT is some top-notch invective, directed by one HuffPo war-blogger against another. You'll excuse me, but I've got to go pop some popcorn.

Don't cry for us, Argentina

Phillip Jenkins:

The United States is a superpower with a huge economy. Argentina is a political and economic joke, a global weakling legendary for endemic economic crises. Between them and us, surely, a great gulf is fixed. Yet Argentina did not always have its present meager status, nor did its poverty result from some inherent Latin American affinity for crisis and corruption. A century ago, Argentina was one of the world’s emerging powers, seemingly destined to outpace all but the greatest imperial states. Today it is … Argentina. A national decline on that scale did not just happen: it was the result of decades of struggle and systematic endeavor, led by the nation's elite. As the nation's greatest writer, Jorge Luis Borges, once remarked, only generations of statesmanship could have prevented Argentina from becoming a world power.

My daughter's boyfriend was born in Argentina and immigrated here with his parents. I jokingly call him "The Argentine Romeo" or "Lothario of the Pampas," and threaten to call ICE to have him deported. Really a nice kid -- both of his grandfathers are ministers of the gospel, and his parents are fine Christians.

But Argentina! Such a mess! They've got a bad case of "revolution envy," and every minor political dispute results in mass protests/riots. My daughter attended college in Argentina last year and when she told me about the idiotic agricultural policy of Cristina Fernandez -- "People in Buenos Aires are starving!" -- I could scarcely believe it: A tax on exports! The most absurd thing I'd ever heard of, but a classic expression of envy-as-policy, which seems to be the norm down there.

Jenkins writes:

Could it happen here? The U.S. certainly has very different political traditions from Argentina and more barriers to a populist-driven rape of the economy. On the other hand, events in some regions would make Juan Perón smile wistfully.
California runs on particularly high taxes, uncontrollable deficits, and overregulation with a vastly swollen bureaucracy while the hegemonic power of organized labor prevents any reform. Thankfully, the state has no power to devalue its currency, still less to freeze bank accounts or seize pension funds, and businesses can still relocate elsewhere. But in its social values and progressive assumptions, California is close to the Democratic mainstream, which now intends to impose its ideas on the nation as a whole. And at over 60 percent of GDP, U.S. public debt is already higher than Argentina's.

Equality in misery: We have seen the future, and it dances the tango.

Bitter? Angry? Moi?

No, that's some other guy named McCain:

Democrats are growing increasingly frustrated with the brash political attacks Sen. John McCain has launched against Barack Obama in the weeks since the new president took office. No one expected the Arizona Republican to be a legislative ally for this administration. But it was widely assumed that Obama's overtures to McCain in the weeks after the election would dull some of the hard feelings between the two. Now, they are realizing, it has not.
"He is bitter and really angry," Bob Shrum said of McCain in an interview on Friday. "He is angry at the press, which he thinks is unfair. He is angry at Obama and angry at the voters. He has gone from being an angry old candidate to being an angry old defeated candidate."

"Brash political attacks" -- man, why didn't he think of this during the actual campaign?

Sarah Palin: Laying pipe!

Energy development in Alaska = "Stimulus we can believe in!" says the hottest governor of the coldest state, in an interview with Michael Medved (via Conservatives4Palin):

Also: "First Dude" is 6th in the Iron Dog.

PJM radio

Steve Green with a nasty head cold, plus Ed Driscoll, Jennifer Rubin, James Lileks, Glenn Reynolds, Michelle Malkin and more!

GOP demands Burris resignation

The Blagojevich iceberg continues ripping holes in the S.S. Hope:

• Burris under an ethical cloud (Politico)
• Illinois GOP leader calls on Burris to resign (AP)
• Burris Defends His Evolving Description of Talks (NY Times)

You get the drift. Michelle Malkin has a long roundup of the Burris scandal. Next stop: Smoothville!

Ace is in Beirut?

(BUMPED; UPDATES BELOW.) Filming a PJTV special, "Babes of Beirut"? Or so says Little Miss Attila, who adds:

As they say: we've established that you're a cyber-whore; we're just haggling over price. Which of course makes me a street-walker in comparison to Stacy and the high-end escort service he provides . . .

Look, traffic is traffic, Attila, but you've got to know the magic formula: High tech gizmos and a sexy brunette. If the combination of a Palm Pre and Anne Hathaway doesn't get Glenn Reynolds' attention . . . well, you can call me "John."

(H/T: Frequent commenter Smitty for the slim pretext to blog about Anne Hathaway, as if I needed a pretext.)

UPDATE: Confirmation from an AOSHQ Moron:

Sorry...he swore us to secrecy. He said if we told anyone about his trip, he'd tell the police about the hobos in the crawlspace.

Which is, BTW, Rule 6 on How to Get a Million Hits On Your Blog: Hatin' on hobos.

UPDATE II: Crap. Ace blew his own cover, and I missed it. Foundation junket. Schwweeeet! Got the blog-fu working.

An Austrian in Tennessee

The Austrian school of economics is a fundamental basis of my worldview, going back to when a former editor (Tommy Toles, who once served as press secretary to Rep. Larry McDonald) introduced me to the Foundation for Economic Education's monthly journal, The Freeman, around 1994.

By happenstance, I just stumbled onto a blog post by Ron Jones of Nashville, Tennessee, who describes how he became an ex-Republican conservative via Austrian economics.

Mr. Jones seems to be something of an autodidactic Austrian, and his disillusionment with the current system of party politics is typical of the Ron Paul/Rothbardian mood among many disillusioned Ordinary Americans. As Patrick Cleburn says in commending Mr. Jones's work: "There is a an instinctive presumption that if all the MSM can find to offer is NeoCon versus Liberal Democrat, maybe no one else can talk."

Indeed, this is just the sort of perception I've tried to combat over the years: The elite belief that, just because Ordinary Americans don't publish op-eds in the Wall Street Journal, they have no opinions that matter. Our elite, in both parties, have a profoundly undemocratic disdain for the "men of untaught feelings" who make up so many of those generally designated "Reagan Democrats."

The man who spends nine years in the Marine Corps (as did Mr. Jones) cannot be said to be "uneducated"; Parris Island is a much tougher school than Harvard. Yet there is a disturbing tendency of the elite to mistake articulation for intelligence, and to mistake credentials for expertise, so that those who do not express themselves in clever soundbites or elegant essays, those who have no well-connected Princeton, Georgetown or Dartmouth classmates to recommend them for insider positions, are automatically dismissed as dimwitted troglydytes who are unfit even to judge their own interests:

An' it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' anything you please;
An' Tommy ain't a bloomin' fool -- you bet that Tommy sees!

Or to quote the Outlaw Josey Wales: "Don't piss down my back and tell me it's raining." Which is to say, the Ordinary American understands that the elite view him as immeasurably beneath them. The Ordinary American also knows that the elite exercise far greater influence than he does, so that when he gets screwed over by the government, he naturally suspects that this somehow benefits the elite, and that indeed they have arranged this screw-over. There is, then, a special rage that fills the heart of the Ordinary American when the elite tell him that he is being screwed over for his own good.

Mr. Jones's disdain for the Bush-era GOP is perfectly understandable -- when did anybody at the Bush White House ever listen to the likes of him? If the Republican coalition is falling apart, it's not his fault, it's theirs. Ken "Cakewalk" Adelman, Henry Paulson and Michael Chertoff never gave a damn about the Ron Joneses of the world, and never will. It is this extreme disconnect between the party elite and its (potential) grassroots constituency that has sapped the vitality from the GOP.

The disconnect expresses itself as ideological, but in reality it is a question of class interest. The influential elite benefit, as a class, by the centralization of authority, since centralization puts power where the elite are best positioned to influence it, and where the Ron Joneses of the world can't touch it. Their access to centralized power assures the elite that, however power is wielded or by whom it is wielded, it can never be wielded much to their detriment.

To speak this way about the elite -- to see them as they are, as self-interested creatures of unlimited ambition, and describe them as such --is to invite designation as a "populist," as if you were William Jennings Bryan snapping his gallouses and ranting about the "Cross of Gold." But when the centralizing elite are so evidently wrecking the country, "patriot" or "populist" are quite nearly interchangeable.

There once was a certain student of James Burnham who understood these things.

Thank you, Eric Reasons!

Noting my self-confessed status as a primitive Unfrozen Caveman Blogger, an unsolicited bit of tech advice came via e-mail from Eric Reasons, who told me how to add the "Add This" functionality to the blog. I'm so happy I want to re-post a Christina Hendricks cleavage video!

How to Get a Million Hits on Your Blog in Less Than a Year

Having promised an appropriate celebration of passing the 1-million-visitors Site Meter threshold Friday, I will do so by sharing the secret of my success. It's the Underpants Gnome Theory of Blogging:

• Phase 1: Get a Blogspot account.
• Phase 2: ?
• Phase 3: One million visitors!

Obviously, the key here is Phase 2, which has been exceptionally disorganized. Some guys work smart. Some guys work hard. Some guys are just incredibly lucky.

The perceptive blog consumer will notice that posts here don't have all those little thingies (Digg, etc.) the way some other blogs do. This is not because I disdain such methods of traffic enhancement, but because I'm such a primitive Unfrozen Caveman Blogger I can't figure that stuff out. It's the same reason I'm still on a Blogspot platform, rather than switching to a custom-designed Wordpress format. Blogspot is so simple that even I can figure it out, and if they'd just offer a few more templates -- hey, guys, how about a template with variable-width sidebars on both sides? -- I might be able to fake that custom-designed elegance, too. I understand basic HTML, but Javascript no can do, and I'm too cheap to shell out the bucks for geek services.

Lacking advanced, sophisticated technological gee-whizzery, I have been forced to employ astonishingly crude Web 0.1 methods of traffic-enhancement, namely:

• Write stuff people might want to read; and
• Compulsively e-mail my posts to bloggers who might possibly consider linking me.

Astonishingly crude, but also surprisingly effective. And so we come to Rule 1, the Prime Directive so to speak:

• 1. Shameless Blogwhoring.

I'm amazed that Instapundit, Michelle Malkin, Ace of Spades and the Hot Air crew haven't declared a fatwa against me for the way I relentlessly fill their inboxes with blogwhoring e-mails like Arnold Horshack trying to get Mr. Kotter's attention: "Ooh! Ooh! Ooh!"

However, the smart newcomer to the 'sphere doesn't just suck up to big-traffic bloggers who can throw him major traffic (although he does that with a single-minded fanaticism), he also sucks up sideways and downward, to bloggers who might not be able to throw 10,000 hits a day, but who are nonetheless valued contributors to the blogging community.

Little Miss Attila is my favorite example of the "valued contributors" category. Her best recent month was 24K visits in October, but she's been around the 'sphere a long time, is much beloved, and it is bad kharma not to link her. Every so often, while on the hunt for good stuff to blog about, I'll go over to LMA, find something good she's blogging about and link it. Why? Because, among various non-kharmic reasons, she has done the same for me, which brings me to Rule 2:

• 2. The Full Metal Jacket Reach-Around

Maybe you're not a fan of Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket, and I'm not saying you should be. But the psychotic drill sergeant gives a notorious rant in which he colorfully expresses an important life principle: When someone does you a favor, find an opportunity to return the kindness.

Reciprocal linkage is the essential lubricant that makes the blogosphere purr with contentment. If somebody's throwing you traffic, you should either (a) give them a link-back update, or at a minimum (b) keep them in mind for future linkage. Because you don't want to end up on the wrong end of a kharmic unbalance in the 'sphere, where you're always taking and never giving.

Every beginning blogger confronts the Zero Hour. You've been blogging steadily for a week or two, sending around e-mails, trackbacking where you can, trying to develop some kind of regular traffic. And then, late one night, you think you might have finally composed your first Instalanche-worthy post and you e-mail it to Glenn Reynolds. You go to bed like a 7-year-old kid on Christmas Eve, then wake up at 4 a.m. and check your Site Meter to discover that your latest hourly traffic is . . . ZERO.

At which point, you want to swallow a handful of sedatives, wash it down with a quart of bleach, slit your wrists and stick your head in the oven. You are a complete and utter failure.

I've never forgotten the Zero Hour, and if I've become slightly less conscientious about reciprocal linkage since then, God forgive me, but I do try. In the midst of a traffic upswing, not all linkage is noticeable on Site Meter, so I check Technorati, which shows linkage regardless of traffic level. And thank you Dad29, thank you Joe Kristan, thank you, Andrea Shea King, thank you Jimmie Bise, thank you William Teach. Damn my lazy thoughtlessness, but please don't doubt my gratitude.

Now that we've scratched the surface of technique, let's address the tricky little subject of content with Rule 3:

• 3. Memeorandum

Did somebody say "lazy thoughtlessness"? The easiest place to find blog fodder is Memeorandum, which has an algorithmic formula that automatically updates to tell you what the hot topics are in the 'sphere.

I especially like their "Featured Posts," sort of a random grab-bag of stuff that will occasionally feature some lefty shooting off his mouth in pure idiotic moonbat mode. Grab that sucker by the neck and give him the Mother Of All Fiskings, with enough vitriolic ad hominem to make sure he never forgets it. Because buddy, the lefties will turn right around and do it to you if you ever rate "Featured Post" status, and there's nothing like a vicious flame war to earn your spurs in the 'sphere. Which brings me to Rule 4:

• 4. Make Some Enemies

We'll have none of your "bipartian civility" around here, you sissy weaklings. This here is the Intertoobs, and we're As Nasty As We Wanna Be. The fact that The Moderate Voice has turned into a reliable vessel for DNC talking points should tell you all you need to know about the fate of bipartisanship in the blogosphere.

At the same time, however, don't confuse cyber-venom with real-world hate. Maybe Ace of Spades really would like to go upside Andrew Sullivan's head with a baseball bat, I don't know. But at some point you understand it's just blogging about politics, and you start wondering if maybe it shares a certain spectator-friendly quality with pro wrestling. For all we know, Ace is spending weekends at Sully's beach shack in Provincetown. (Next on Blogging Heads TV: Can "Bears" and Ewoks Be "Just Friends"?)

Some readers might remember when I first kicked Conor Friedersdorf in the knee for "insufficient cynicism." Conor is, in real life, a nice guy. But he's also (a) young, and (b) as earnest as John Boy Walton. So I got into a habit, when he was at Culture11, of kicking him in the knee with some regularity. It's the Fraternity Initiation Principle: Pledges must be abused by their elders, and learn to be properly respectful, or else one day the ambitious little monsters will strangle us in our sleep. (Cf., my suggestion that George Freaking Will should be air-dropped on Jalalabad from a C-130.)

A couple days ago, hunting around for a reason to link my friend Russ Smith's SpliceToday, I happened upon a column by Russ's young minion, Andrew Sargus Klein, offering a particularly insipid argument for federal arts funding. Now, having been born and raised a Democrat, and arguably having never outgrown my obnoxious youthful arrogance, I can actually relate to Klein's insipid argument. Stupid is as stupid does, and when I was 25, I might well have written something equally stupid. But the boy will never outgrow his stupidity unless he gets whomped on the head some.

Easy as it would have been to ignore Klein, I hit upon the delightfully fun idea of laying into him in Arkansas knife-fight mode: If you're going to cut a man, eviscerate him. So I quickly composed a hyperbolic ad hominem rant, with the thoughtfully civil title, "Andrew Sargus Klein is an arrogant elitist douchebag." I forward-dated the post for Friday morning, and sent Russ an e-mail to the effect of, "Hey, hope you don't mind me abusing your office help a little bit. Nothing like a flame-war to build traffic. Don't let on to Klein that I'm just funnin' around with him."

I'd hoped to bait Klein himself into a response. However, before that could happen -- as if intent on illustrating how to make a fool out of yourself by taking this stuff too seriously -- one of Klein's friends offered up a comment:

Andrew Klein may be arrogant and elitist but he could craft logical arguments around your bumbling hypocrisy all day and night.

Of course I never bother "craft[ing] logical arguments," sweetheart. It's a freaking blog. If you want logic, subscribe to a magazine or buy a book. Pardon my double-entendre, Lola Wakefield, but people come here for the cheesecake. Logical arguments are a dime a dozen on the Internet, but sexy hotness . . . well, that reminds me of Rule 5:

• 5. Christina Hendricks

Or Anne Hathaway or Natalie Portman or Sarah Palin bikini pics. Rule 5 actually combines four separate principles of blogospheric success:

• A. Everybody loves a pretty girl -- It's not just guys who enjoy staring at pictures of hotties. If you've ever picked up Cosmo or Glamour, you realize that chicks enjoy looking at pretty girls, too. (NTTAWWT.) Maybe it's the vicious catty she-thinks-she's-all-that factor, or the schadenfreude of watching a human trainwreck like Britney Spears, but no one can argue that celebrity babes generate traffic. Over at Conservative Grapevine, the most popular links are always the bikini pictures. And try as I might to make "logical arguments" for tax cuts, wouldn't you rather watch Michelle Lee Muccio make those arguments?
• B. Mind the MEGO factor -- All politics all the time gets boring after a while. Observant readers will notice that the headlines at Hot Air often feature silly celebrity tabloid stuff and News Of The Weird. Even a stone political junkie cannot subsist on a 24/7 diet of politics. The occasional joke, the occasional hot babe, the occasional joke about a hot babe -- it's a safety valve to make sure we don't become humorless right-wing clones of those Democratic Underground moonbats.
• C. Sex sells -- Back when I was blogging to promote Donkey Cons (BUY TWO!), I accidentally discovered something via SiteMeter: Because the subtitle of the book is "Sex, Crime, and Corruption in the Democratic Party," we were getting traffic from people Googling "donkey+sex." You'd be surprised at the keyword combinations that bring traffic to a political blogger who understands this. Human nature being what it is, the lowest common denominator is always there, even if it's sublimated or reverse-projected as puritanical indignation, which brings us to . . .
• D. Feminism sucks -- You can never go wrong in the blogosphere by having a laugh at the expense of feminists. All sane people hate feminism, and no one hates feminism more than smart, successful, independent women who've made it on their own without all that idiotic "Sisterhood Is Powerful" groupthink crap. And if you are one of those fanatical weirdos who takes that Women's Studies stuff so seriously that you're offended by Stephen Green's sexist objectification of Christina Hendricks and her mighty bosom -- well, sweetheart, to paraphrase Rhett Butler: "You should be offended, and often, and by someone who knows how."

So, there you have it: Five Rules For Getting a Million Hits On Your Blog. There are probably another two dozen rules, but I'm too lazy to think of what they are right now. And to be honest, if it weren't for that old picture of me in a Speedo, I'd probably still be 20,000 hits shy of the million mark. Some of us are just . . . blessed with exceptional modesty. And some guys get the steak knives.

UPDATE: Probably special mention should be made of Kathy "Five Feet of Fury" Shaidle, who never heard of a fair fight. She's one of those people you don't want angry at you. A ninja blackbelt in Rule 4, when she goes at an antagonist, it's a knee in your groin and an elbow in your eye. However, she also keeps the customers satisfied with some naughty pinup hotness. (Rule 5!) That rare creature: A Canadian we like.

UPDATE II: Linked at Conservative Grapevine.

Actually a little bit funny

Dan Ackroyd's John Boehner impression is good -- he's got the gravelly pack-and-a-half-a-day voice down cold -- and while the political content is obviously distorted, it's serviceable as parody:

Of course, the sketch is grossly unfair to Eric Cantor -- a very smart politician -- but unfairness in humor is part of the game at "SNL."

The fiscal trap of Hope

The Washington Post reports on the fiscal bind into which we have been led by the neo-Keynesian "stimulus" approach to the recession:

The nation can't sustain trillion-dollar deficits without driving up the debt owed to private investors to dangerous levels that could undermine the nation's global economic dominance. That debt now stands at nearly $6 trillion.

A tax hike to pay for all this "stimulus" would certainly make matters much worse, yet the bond market -- a subject I referenced this morning -- must calculate the likelihood of repayment, and it's not just "global economic dominance" that is at stake, but rather the fundamental integrity of the federal government's "good faith and credit."

The Post article goes on to cite the unfunded liabilities of Medicare and Social Security, and Jennifer Rubin comments:

The president and his spinners declared this all to be a "long term" problem that had to take a back seat to the short term "solution" for the recession. But little they have done in the short term will improve the economy, which by their own calculations would have begun to bounce back on its own by the end of 2009.
The "long term" problem is now. The first act comes with the next major auction of Treasury debt. Are we going to start printing dollars ourselves to buy up Treasury paper? Raise the interest rate on bonds to keep Chinese and other investors in the game?

Rubin hits the nail on the head. The fiscal fantasies of Hope are about to slam head-on into the economic realities of the bond market. Economic reality is an unmovable object, and liberals are about to discover that Hope is not an irresistible force.

Or, in fewer words: It Won't Work.

(Cross-posted at AmSpecBlog.)

SPLC vs. Ann Coulter

Note how Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center lays on the modifiers:

Rabid far-right commentator Ann Coulter is known across America for sliming everyone and everything she disagrees with. . . .
Coulter has generally avoided bolstering white supremacist hate groups. Until now, that is.
In her latest foaming-mouth tome -- Guilty: Liberal "Victims" and Their Assault on America, released on Jan. 6 -- Coulter spends the better part of three pages defending a group called the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), which The New York Times had described as a "thinly veiled white supremacist organization." Coulter begs to differ. The CCC, Coulter opines, is "a conservative group" that has unfairly been branded as racist "because some of the directors of the CCC had, decades earlier, been leaders of a segregationist group."

"Rabid far-right" -- in what sense can that term be applied to Ann Coulter but not to, say, Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham, Mark Steyn, Michelle Malkin or Mark Levin? And "her latest foaming-mouth tome" -- her sixth bestseller, which you can buy right now and see for yourself whether it merits that description.

Beyond Potok's frothy prose, what is worth examining here is the application of what a friend of mine who's been smeared by the SPLC (we are legion) has called their "ransom note method" of quotation: A phrase here, half a sentence there -- the words are cut and pasted together like a kidnapper assembling a ransom note from cut-up magazines, with the SPLC's own interpretative comments helpfully interlarded to tell their readers exactly what to think about the target.

The fundamental premise of Potok's piece -- that Coulter was "bolstering" or "defending" the CCC -- is false. For that matter, her putative "defense" of the CCC doesn't occupy "the better part of three pages," but actually less than two, beginning on the middle of page 24 and ending at the top of page 26.

What Coulter is actually doing in this passage -- is Mark Potok dishonest or merely dense? -- is contrasting the differing treatment that the media gave to (a) Barack Obama's 20-year membership in the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's Trinity United Church of Christ, and (b) the CCC associations of Republicans Trent Lott and Bob Barr.

It's quite an interesting argument and perhaps the reason Potok couldn't bring himself to quote so much as two consecutive complete sentences of what Coulter wrote is that he's worried about copyright infringement. Or maybe he's dishonest, an interpretation supported by the way he quotes Coulter here:

"There is no evidence on its Web page that the modern incarnation of the CCC supports segregation," she says. "Apart from some aggressive reporting on black-on-white crimes -- the very crimes that are aggressively hidden by the establishment media -- there is little on the CCC website suggesting" that the group is racist. [Emphasis added.]

Contrast that to what Coulter actually wrote:

There is no evidence on its Web page that the modern incarnation of the CCC supports segregation, though its "Statement of Principles" offers that the organization opposes "forced integration" and "efforts to mix the races of mankind." But mostly the principles refer to subjects such as a strong national defense, the right to keep and bear arms, the traditional family, and an "America First" trade policy.
Apart from some aggressive reporting on black-on-white crimes -- the very crimes that are aggressively hidden by the establishment media -- there is little on the CCC website suggesting that the group is a "thinly veiled white supremacist" organization, as the New York Times called it in one of its more charitable descriptions. At least the crimes reported on the CCC's Web site actually happened, as opposed to the Reverend Jeremiah Wright's claim that the U.S. government invented AIDS to kill black people. [Emphasis added]

Compare the two italicized passages. Notice that, when Potok quotes Coulter, the direct quote ends with "suggesting," and then follows with Potok's own characterization, "that the group is racist"; whereas Coulter's actual sentence ends with a specific description from the New York Times calling the CCC a "thinly veiled white supremacist" organization. One can be "racist" without being "white supremacist" (ask Reverend Wright!), and as to the matter of the thinness of veils -- well, as a liberal might say, "Who are we to judge?"

In a fair-and-balanced "we report, you decide" manner, Coulter quotes the CCC's statements about "forced integration" and race-mixing and leaves it to the reader to judge how "thinly veiled" these principles are, and whether they are "white supremacist" -- a judgment that the New York Times apparently doesn't trust its readers to make for themselves. It is neither here nor there what the reader's judgment is, since Coulter's purpose is not to "defend" or "bolster" the CCC, but rather to expose the media double standard involved.

Reverend Wright can stand in his pulpit denouncing Israel, shouting "God damn America!" and saying that the 9/11 attacks were "America's chickens coming home to roost," and the media dismisses as insignificant the fact that Obama spent 20 years in Wright's congregation. Yet Bob Barr gave exactly one speech at a CCC meeting and this speech (which had nothing to do with race) is treated as major political news by the New York Times. Perhaps if Barr had spoken to a meeting of Weather Underground terrorists . . .

Never mind. Coulter describes the consequences of the media attack on Barr:

After the initial flurry of articles, editorials, and news stories in the Times excitedly reporting that Barr had spoken to the CCC, Democratic representative Bob Wexler introduced a resolution in Congress for the sole purpose of denouncing the Council of Conservative Citizens. Other than the 9/11 terrorists, the CCC may be the only group ever singled out for denunciation in a congressional resolution. How about a resolution from Obama pom-pom girl Wexler on Obama's Trinity United Church of Christ?
When Barr later gave a speech on the House floor favorably citing President John F. Kennedy, Senator Ted Kennedy's son, Representative Patrick Kennedy, got in Barr's face, shouting, "How dare you! Anybody who has been in a racist group has no right invoking my uncle's memory!" Liberals are now reserving the right to tell us which former presidents we can mention by name.
Barr had given a speech to a group that, even assuming everything the Southern Poverty Law Center says about it is true, does not hold a candle to the racism of Obama's Trinity United Church of Christ. Obama was married by the Reverend Wright, his daughters were baptized by the Reverend Wright, Obama gave his second autobiography the title of one of the Reverend Wright's sermons. And yet after decades of majoring in Guilt By Association, liberals were indignant when an ad on cable television linked Obama and the Reverend Jeremiah Wright Jr. The Times produced a blistering editorial decrying the "hate mongering" and calling the ads "the product of a radical fringe that has little regard for rational debate."

"Compare and contrast" -- the kind of exercise every college freshman is asked to do on essay-question exams -- and yet, when Coulter does it, her choice of the CCC as an analog to Wright's church is cited by the SPLC as evidence that she is a sympathizer of a "thinly veiled white supremacist" organization.

What Potok and the SPLC count on is that their gullible liberal readership will not bother to examine what Coulter actually wrote, nor question whether the SPLC's bawdlerization of Coulter's work is fair or accurate. Potok understands that Coulter occupies a special place in the liberal demonology, and that liberals are prepared to believe the worst about her. So he distorts her argument -- which, I repeat, is about media double standards -- into an accusation that she is "defending" and "bolstering" the CCC, and expects no one to contradict him.

Why? Because Potok suspects conservatives of cowardice. If you defend Ann Coulter, you'll be accused of sharing her "thinly veiled" sympathies, and there goes your book deal, there goes your think-tank fellowship, there goes your chance at a staff job in the next Republican administration. Potok believes that your ambition, your cowardly craving to be considered "respectable," will prevent you from defending the "rabid far-right" Coulter, and you will remain silent while she's dishonestly smeared by the SPLC.

Fine. You have the right to remain silent. And who will defend you when the SPLC comes smearing you?

But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted
freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defense of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise is gone!
-- Edmund Burke

UPDATE: Linked by Kathy Shaidle, who's been trying for years to get Canada to deport her to the United States, where that pesky First Amendment keeps hobbling the annihilationist impulses of liberalism.

UPDATE II: Linked by Mark Steyn, likewise seeking deportation. Canadian refugee fever inspires some awesome political incorrectness.

UPDATE III: Linked by Ed Driscoll, who probably wants to be deported from California.

UPDATE IV: Somebody at LGF sides with the SPLC.

UPDATE V: Getting very interesting now. Raphael Alexander says that Charles (by whom I suppose he means Charles Johnson of LGF) says of what I've written: "That article is ludicrous and deceptive. He claims Coulter is being quoted out of context -- I have the book, and she is NOT being quoted out of context. The charge, by the way, is not that Coulter herself is a white supremacist. It's that she is defending a blatantly, openly white supremacist group -- and that charge is TRUE."

I couldn't find that quote at LGF, which is now at the 1,000+ mark in comments, but assuming that Alexander's quote is accurate, I'm kind of stumped. The extensive quotes from Coulter's book make clear that her argument was basically: If Trent Lott and Bob Barr are beyond the pale for their associations with the CCC, why isn't Obama beyond the pale for his association with Trinity? It's not about being "out of context," but rather that Potok misread (or misrepresented) the whole purpose of that two-page passage.

Is Coulter "defending" Jeremiah Wright? Is the analogy inexact? Surely she will clarify and is capable of defending her own arguments without any help from me, but I saw this passage as essentially a critique of the media double standard.

In every previous Coulter controversy (which, by now, is a long list), she has emerged undamaged. She has Sean Hannity on speed-dial, and if this SPLC thing gets her more TV time, she'll cry all the way to the bank.

What's weird is that Coulter appeared on "The View" a month ago and I don't recall that this CCC thing ever came up. Is Whoopi Goldberg OK with the CCC? Certainly Coulter would agree to return to "The View" to discuss the subject. She would also probably be willing to discuss the subject on "Today," "Larry King Live," "60 Minutes," Leno, Letterman, "Saturday Night Live," "American Idol" . . . if any other TV producers want to book Ann, I can give you her publicist's e-mail address.

UPDATE VI: Linked at Conservative Grapevine.

Popularity vs. reality

Ben Smith in the Politico:

Obama's approval rating remains well above 60 percent in tracking polls. A range of state pollsters said they'd seen no diminution in the president's sky-high approval ratings, and no improvement in congressional Republicans' dismal numbers. And that's before the stimulus creates billions of dollars in spending on popular programs, which could, at least temporarily, further boost Obama’s popularity.
"It's eerie -- I read the news from the Beltway, and there's this disconnect with the polls from the Midwest that I see all around me," said Ann Seltzer, the authoritative Iowa pollster who works throughout the Midwest.

Prompting Jonathan Singer to exult:

Perhaps more than ever, there is a real divide between what the chattering class inside the Beltway is saying and what the people of this country are saying. . . . [T]he establishment media focuses on the less meaningful back and forth while at the same time overlooking the larger picture being grasped by the public -- that is that President Obama is succeeding, in terms of both moving forward his policy agenda and bringing two-thirds of the country along with him in his effort.

Idiots. Economics is not public relations. Don't you people understand that it doesn't matter how "popular" you and your policies are, if what you are doing is the wrong thing to do? And that it doesn't matter how clever and persuasive your arguments are, if your policies bring disaster?

Think back to late 2002/early 2003, when Bush was soaring in popularity and even Democrats like Hillary Clinton were publicly insisting that military action against Iraq was an urgent national necessity. As even David Frum now admits, however popular Bush and his policy were, it was still a bad policy. And the result of bad policy . . . well, here we are, eh?

Idiots. And here's another one -- Daniel Gross playing armchair economic psychologist:

Psychology plays a big role in all sorts of economic decisions. And at times like these, when people are gripped with fear, it plays an even larger role.

Gross seems to assume that the public's economic mood is so divorced from economic reality that all we need is an injection of economic self-esteem and -- no matter what the underlying reality -- this "all must have prizes" approach will assure recovery.

Well, I'm sorry, sir: It Won't Work. Economics doesn't operate that way. People can't spend money they don't have -- unless they can borrow it, and they can't borrow it when they're already overleveraged and the financial industry is collapsing.

So, you say, "We'll rescue the financial industry with TARP." Fine. What's the price-tag and where will you get that money? Oh, you'll borrow that, too. Fine. Go talk to some people who know a bit about the bond market, and see how they think the global investor class -- U.S. debt is a commodity traded globally -- will react to the prospect of still more deficit spending piled on top of all the deficit spending for the $152 billion "stimulus" in May, $350 billion for TARP I, and now $789 billion for more "stimulus." Another $350 billion for TARP II? Oh, they're going to love that.

If the world's investor class believes that your Keynesian pump-priming will work, they'll be happy to buy up all those Treasury notes, just like they'll be happy to buy stock in U.S.-based corporations. Do you think those people are stupid, sir?

Hell, no. They'll be putting in more "sell" orders on Monday, and at least one analyst expects the Dow Jones Industrial Average to sink to 6,000 soon. As bad as the stock market is, God help us if the bond market goes wobbly. (And they're starting to sound a bit skittish to me.) And never mind that, at some point, the debt holders will expect repayment. Seriously, we could be on the brink of Weimar America.

What none of you "progressives" seem able to get through your thick skulls is that this recession -- the massive losses in the Dow, the massive losses of home values in the collapse of the "bubble" -- represents a loss of capital. The American economy doesn't need psychological confidence, or a few dribs and drabs of pork-barrel programs and tiny "tax credits" to favored constituencies. It needs fat chunks of cash -- investment capital. And the disastrous policies being enacted will only serve to drive capital out of the U.S. economy.

If you start walking in the wrong direction, every step you take leads you farther from where you're supposed to be. U.S. economic policy has been going in the wrong direction, and every additional step in this direction only compounds the damage. Poll numbers and public relations cannot trump the forces of the market. The law of supply and demand cannot be repealed.

You idiots can talk about poll numbers until you're blue in the face and try to blame Bush for everything bad that happens, but like it or not, you own this one, and it's going to be a millstone around your necks.

UPDATE: The fiscal trap of Hope.