From the Ashes

"If a conservative order is indeed to return, we ought to know the tradition which is attached to it, so we may rebuild society; if it is not to be restored, still we ought to understand conservative ideas so that we may rake from the ashes what scorched fragments of civilization escape the conflagration of unchecked will and appetite." --Russell Kirk

Virginia is for Dullards?

Are Southerners, and more specifically Virginians, stupid? That's what Mark Finkelstein believes that Chris Matthews is saying:

All that was missing was the theme music from Deliverance. Not content to condemn George Allen for raising the issue of Jim Webb's racy writing, Chris Matthews decided on this evening's Hardball to slur the entire Commonwealth of Virginia south of the DC suburbs.

Interviewing senior Webb campaign advisor Steve Jarding [Chris did indicate that he had unsuccessfully tried to get an Allen representative on the show], Matthews had this to say:

"Not to take sides but they've had this material since the day Jim Webb announced, and they've chosen to use it now with the risk that it implies, because everybody in Northern Virginia, in this area of the country, reads books, they think."

Although I wouldn' characterize it as a "slur," Matthews is clearly implying that the transplanted members of the overclass who live in the vicinity of Washington, D.C. read more than the average Virginian. For what its worth, I assume he is wrong. Doubtless, these kind of people read books in college and buy more books today -- doorstop biographies of FDR, Lincoln and Churchill -- but actually read them? Yeah, right.

But it is Allen supporters who are clearly hoping that Virginians are so dumb as to be unable to tell fantasy from reality or fiction from nonfiction or Southeast Asia from the United States. I don't know if this slimy little episode will make a difference, but George Allen is clearly the loser. He has repeatedly made an an ass of himself and has now stooped to digging up dirty passages from his opponents writing. He may win another term in the Senate that he doesn't really want; but he will never, ever be president -- which he really, really wants.

Man of Macaca

James Webb should be feeling pretty good right now. A hamhanded attempt by the Allen campaign to destroy him by publicizing weird and dirty passages from his "fiction novels" seems to have had a positive effect on sales of Lost Soldiers and Fields of Fire.

Webb will either be a U.S. senator next year, or he will be positioned to write a bestselling Roman a clef about a creepy senator who sends his staff to the library to find the dirty passages in novels so he doesn't have to read a whole book all by himself.

Lurking . . .

I'm not sure who Mark Rose is referring to here. I don't hear many calls for "negotiate with terrorists." I do know of a president with lots of rightwing supporters who believes that we can plant democracy in the arid soil that produces this kind of rhetoric:

An 8-year-old girl said on Abu Dhabit television, "I hope Bush dies in flames, and I want to go to (then-Israeli Prime Minister) Ariel Sharon and kill him with a gun and stab him with a sword."
. . .
A lyric from an Iranian music video carries this line, "America is lurking for you, and will not give up until it destroys you completely. Rise up soon because the world is not safe from the hunter."

Shazam!

I see by Doug Bandow that Rick Santorum -- mild mannered senator by day, superhero by night -- is the only thing standing between America and a new race of Super Nazis:

Likening the times to the late 1930s as Nazi Germany was rising to power, Sen. Rick Santorum said last night that if he loses his re-election bid, it could set the stage for terrorism to become more of a threat than the Nazis ever were.

The Art of Knowing

Rod Dreher has a post up about Michael Polanyi: The Art of Knowing by Mark T. Mitchell. I have read a little of it and noticed that Isaiah Berlin with Polanyi: "These Hungarians are strange . . . here is a great scientist giving up the Nobel to write mediocre works of philosophy."

Mark Mitchell also notes that Polanyi allowed his subscription to National Review lapse in 1964. Presumably he anticipated the Goldberg-Lopez-Lowry Axis of Cretins in charge there now.

WikiNerds

I read about such types in recent articles from The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly, and then I was deleted by a Wikishutin. This guy, a Canadian math nerd has removed me from the list of contributing editors for Liberty magazine, although I clearly am. He also removed me as a "selected contributor" from the page for The American Conservative, which I also clearly am. He seems to have a lot of time on his hands.

Got War?

The Bush administration has shown an admirable commitment to developing new slogans to replace "stay the course." A wise move since the current "course" appears to be directly to an iceberg. To help out the cause I came up with a few replacements for the president and his media/blogosphere/talk radio followers to use:

99 & 44/100 per cent pure liberation.

"Shut up!" I explain.

Cut and win!

Show me the victory!

No war left behind.

Vietnam was worse.

Hewitt is still on board.

UPDATE: To answer a question from the comments, 99 & 44/100 refers to the purity of Ivory Soap. It also can refer to a Ronnie Milsap song.

Restraint

When we last heard from The American Spectator's Jed Babbin he was revealing the Putin, Hu, Pelosi conspiracy. This week his formula for victory in Iraq is to make war on Iraq and Syria and threaten the rest of the world with the same if they "sponsor Islamic fascist terrorism."

I guess for Babbin this qualifies as admirable restraint. I half expected him to advocate bombing Latvia with tubs of margarine and make war against Moon Men as a plan of victory in Iraq.

Near-Great

Day four of a week with Bill Kauffman at 2Blowhards:

Y'know what always got me? Those rankings of the presidents by historians. The Greats, Washington and Jefferson excepted, tend to be the warmakers: Lincoln. Wilson. FDR. Those responsible for the most unnatural deaths. The "near-greats" were those who gave warfare the old college try: Teddy Roosevelt. Even the wretched Truman. Those who sat in the White House while peace raged outside the door were average at best, though often below average or the dreaded "failure."

Stand By Your Man

Jay Nordlinger stands by his man in the face Jonathan Chait's(reg. required) ridicule. Nord still has more faith in Don Rumsfeld than in The New Republic and thinks that saying that war is a "dirty job" shows how direct and "uneuphemistic" the secdef is.

I prefer my take on Nordlinger's worshipful Rummy article in the Dec. 31, 2001 issue of National Review that The American Conservative published three years ago:

The cover was a low point for a once serious magazine, featuring a caricature of a smiling Rumsfeld mimicking a Betty Grable, come-hither pose. The article reported on Rumsfeld in a manner more appropriate to People magazine than to a respected intellectual journal. Nordlinger breathlessly revealed that Rumsfeld was a sex symbol (!) and a pop-culture icon (!!): "Reports have it that people gather round to watch Rumsfeld press conferences the way they do Oprah . . .Women confide that they have . . . well, un-defense-policy-like thoughts about the secretary of defense. . ."

"Bookshops"

Bryan Appleyard writes about the coming of print on demand technology and the demise of the "bookshop." I share his excitement at the prospect of POD but not his disdain for we in America call bookstores. Amazon, AbeBooks or a POD station in a Starbucks are great when you know what you are looking for; they aren't so good for finding what you aren't looking for, or for discovering what you didn't even know existed. In fact, AbeBooks is a network of stores like Knoxville's Book Eddy.

Along the way he beats a dead horse that should have been buried long ago -- the impending demise of the midlist:

Publishers have been forced to take fewer risks. Their cheap-to-run backlists can survive on small sales, and the mass market will look after itself. But the middle element in the equation -- consisting of the new, the risky, the strange, the difficult, the ambitious, the non-generic, everything, in fact, one values -- has been squeezed out. As publishers repeatedly say, the number of copies of a book that now have to be sold to justify the upfront costs is getting higher and higher. New books that aren't The Wag Diet by Jordan Beckham don't stand a chance.

I have heard this many times and while it may be true in England, I doubt it is in the U.S. Benjamin Schwarz took a swing at this myth a few years back in the Atlantic when Ann Godoff was fired from Random House. "It is simply untrue that the number of worthwhile titles published has diminished with the consolidation of publishing houses, the popularity of the Oprah and Today Show Book Clubs, and the proliferation of such chain bookstores as Borders, Barnes & Noble, and Books-A-Million." Along the way, Schwarz notes that a lot of prestige titles are crap and still get heaps of undeserved praise and publicity.

I can't judge how the industry compares to thirty or fifty years ago, but I see plenty of excellent non-blockbuster titles such as Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette from Bill Kauffman and The Life You Save May Be Your Own by Paul Elie (admittedly helped by being an editor at FSG).

Neutral

Alexander McClure at Whizbang Politics has advice for the president and the Republicans. "The President has to take the initiative on Iraq. Making it seem that we are not stuck in netural and bound to a stay-the-course strategy is necessary." Good idea. The only problem is that we are stuck in neutral and are bound to a stay-the-course strategy.

More deep thoughts in the comments from Nehemiah:

Also, the "teach the Republicans a lesson" crowd need to have their own history lesson.

Did getting a Stalin teach the Russians a lesson? They didn't afterward elect a conservative -- they kept getting more communists.

Stalin, . . . Nancy Pelosi, . . . whatever.

You Said It, K-Lo!

Regular readers of NRO's the Corner know that Katheryn Lopez is right in saying that "the name of Rick Santorum brings out some of the most idiotic reactions in people." And how.

Tony the Disgusting Tiger

Tony Blankley completes a rapid descent from a competent Rightwing hack to a nauseating wierdo:

Apparently, these anticipated conservative non-voters are annoyed with Republican imperfection. They are disheartened, disappointed, disillusioned, distempered, and dismal -- and thus plan to dis the party that better advances conservative principles in government.

They appear to have fallen victim to the false syllogism: 1) Something must be done; 2) not voting is something; therefore, 3) I will not vote. Of course the fallacy of the syllogism is that the second category could be anything. For example, No. 2 could as well read "eating dog excrement is something."

Not only is Blankley unnecessasarily disgusting, his reasoning is faulty. His syllogism should begin with the proposition that undivided Republican rule has been a disaster. From there it is hard to come to any conclusions involving eating dog poop, another Republican congress or any other sickening prospects.

Daniel Larison read Blankley (hopefully not while eating) and responds to his whining at the thought of congressional oversight of the Bush administration:

Egads, the President might be investigated! He might even be held accountable for his violations of the Constitution! Not that! Not the Glorious Leader! Minions, protect your Leader! I command you! Of course, it is hard to “scandalise” an already scandalously bad and abusive administration. It is impossible to overestimate just how disgusted some people on the right are with Mr. Bush, which makes framing the appeal to vote in terms of protecting Mr. Bush all the more hilarious. This is supposed to persuade the disaffected and the angry? Call them stupid and remind them of one of the reasons why they are angry? If this is the best argument the GOP has (and it has been their main argument for the entire year), they not only deserve to lose but deserve to get their heads handed to them for the arrogance and self-importance the argument reveals.

Go Devils!

It's Kauffman week at 2Blowhards, with an interview here and here. Here's a brief sample:

My English forbears came to God's country on neither the Mayflower nor a Mayflower moving van. They were farmers who settled around Churchville in the dim mists of time. (Speaking of Churchville -- I digress the way other men blink -- my wife, the lovely and long-suffering Lucine, was roped into coaching the Batavia High basketball cheerleaders a few years ago. BHS is the Blue Devils, a colorless French-derived militaristic nickname that we and 1,200 other schools ought to drop tootsweet. When BHS played the Churchville-Chili Saints, Lucine's girls chanted "Go Devils! Beat the Saints!" A chill ran down my superstitious Catholic back.)

Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Cuckoo!

Jed Babbin looks to be about ready for the lollipop factory. Today's column is a series of random sentences leading up to the final paragraph:

It's a very good thing that Osama bin Laden isn't as smart as he thinks he is. If he were, he'd send one of those European-looking al-Q members to Havana to kill Castro. With Fidel dead and the assassin suitably shot to pieces, the world would be in an instant uproar, and we'd see a media feeding frenzy in Turtle Bay that would make the UN look like the courthouse in the Michael Jackson trial. America would be blamed and Chavez (Fidel's most ardent admirer and greatest supporter since Brezhnev) would go to Havana personally to supervise the restoration of the Castro regime. The Cuban-American community would be up in arms -- literally -- and President Bush would be caught in the middle. And what a fine mess that would be. Like I said, it's a good thing OBL isn't that smart. But both Bad Vlad Putin and his funny-named sidekick, Hu Jintao, are.

So there you have it -- the leaders of Russia and China are going to assassinate Castro in order to tip the House to the Democrats.

Babbin is ready for the nice men in white lab coats.

Barbaric Yawps

Michael, of 2Blowhards on the Sage of Batavia:

None of Kauffman's books are straightforward affairs. You'd be frustrated if you turned to them for clearly-laid-out arguments or encyclopedia-style information. Instead, they're fullblown reading experiences: part history, part personal essay. They're also big, heraldic, all-over-the-place prose poems -- patchwork, Whitmanesque, "barbaric yawps" set to driving rock, country, and blues beats. They're florid and funky, perverse yet open, bristling with deeply-felt exhortations and digressions, and full of comic but heart-busting praise-songs. To the extent that I'd want to categorize his work at all, I'd put it on the same rhapsodic / eccentric, full-of-contradictions-but-that's-the-point-dammit shelf as Edward Abbey, Henry David Thoreau, and H.L. Mencken.

Issues

Glenn Reynolds compiles a list of reasons for what appears to be a coming Republican debacle but he neglected to include the quagmire in Iraq until the updates from readers, thus revealing his belief that the Harriet Miers nomination did more damage to the Republicans than to the failed war that has dominated the headlines for more than three years now. He also doesn't mention the Bush administration's weak response to Hurricane Katrina.

Later, he also noted that Diana Irey is making an issue of Pork, one of Reynolds' pet issues, in her campaign against John Murtha. It does not appear to be working.

Investigations and Gridlock

Hugh Hewitt endorses a Democratic victory in the election, or that's what I assume when he says, that a Democratic majority means "endless investigations and gridlock." Doesn't that sound great?