People, People, People...

I 'gin to be aweary of all the monday-morning quarterbacking with regard to the aftermath of the Iraq war. Some of you out there seem really upset by the fact that Baghdad fell to our tanks and terrorism wasn't magically whisked away to the land of Nod. Andrew Sullivan seems to be worried that the lack of WMD's we've found since the war ended somehow undermines our victory. Mark Shea, the author of the "Catholic and Loving It!" blog, is ready to declare quagmire. The Post has been running this way for some time, and when the most hawkish liberal establishment paper starts to wobble, you can bet the rest are. The stupidity is complete.





Nothing demonstrates the problem with our surfeit of media than this, our lack of patience. Folks, Germany had not been de-Nazified, nor been given a democratic government, in July 1945, two months after the Third Reich surrendered. It defies my understanding as to why anyone would expect two months to take care of everything we need to take care of in Iraq. Running a foreign country is not an easy task. It's dangerous and time-consuming. Lots can go wrong. Some things have gone wrong, but I don't think those things add up to the trend that some of you seem to want them to. There are problems, but I have confidence, because we are led by a man who, as near as I can determine, is sincere in his desire to be benificent to the Iraqi people, and has the moral courage to see the thing through. If the poltroon from the southerly state whom I excorciated yesterday were still in charge, I would know the venture to be doomed. The man who retreated from Mogadishu would feel hypnotically compelled to assuage every negative voice on Iraq. But he isn't in charge, so I'm not worried. You may think this mindless of me, but consider two things: 1) no fretting by me is going to change the situation in Iraq for good or ill, and 2) all the naysayers have been wrong thus far.





On WMD's, on the other hand, we do have to confront the following dirty secret: they weren't the real reason we invaded. Saddam's chems, bios, and nuclear program made for a nice fig leaf for the international community, and removing any he had from him hands was obviously not a bad thing. But they were a side-issue against the greater goal.





The Bush Doctrine, issued soon after 9/11, was clear: there is no distinction between terrorists and states who support terrorists. Afghanistan, the crash-pad of Public Enemy Number One, was the first state to discover that Bush meant it. The link between the Taliban and al-Quaeda was evident. With Iraq it was more tenuous, but put your mind at rest. Saddam knew terrorists, and gave them money and safe haven. He had to go. Syria, Iran, North Korea, and Saudi Arabia will all be dealt with, according to different schedules and strategies. The fact that his WMD's are better hidden than we had anticipated isn't relevant. That's one less source of support for Hezbollah and every other cell of hate that plagues our world. Let's not be legalistic. Do you really think we can annihilate al-Quaeda, leave the rest, and be any safer?





The hand-wringers have been saying since before the second tower even fell that terrorism is the expression of a poor and benighted people struggling with oppression. And they're right, though perhaps not in the way they intend. And we're doing something about it. That doesn't mean it's going to be easy, or resolve itself as cleanly and telegenically as a season of Survivor. So fasten your seat belts; it's going to be a bumpy war.

A Rant for the Day

The Washington Post reports that Bill Clinton thinks Presidential term limits should be changed. He thinks that a young president who does his two terms should have a chance to be re-elected in the future, if the people should suddenly have a need that only he can fill ("I got a great corkscrew"). And of course, he's totally and completely not talking about himself. And Nixon wasn't talking about anything illegal during that 18-minute gap. Did we really give this clown eight years in the White House?





I know, I know, surprise, surprise. What else is Clinton going to say? But that's just it. What else is Clinton going to do, for the rest of his pork-rind-inhaling existence, than make statements about being President, about how the Presidency has affected his life, about his time as President and what the current President should be doing. He's going to be a lame duck for the next thirty or forty years, an endlessly running mouth. Which ordinarily wouldn't bother me, as endlessly running mouths are the single largest product of our media industry. But Billy-Boy is a $200,000-a-year endlessly running mouth. At taxpayer expense.





There used to be a time when politics was something you briefly did to serve the res publica, and then you went back to your farm or business or whatever you were running before you mounted your soapbox. Thomas Jefferson had no shortage of things to do when he was done in Washington. Is it unreasonable for us to expect Bill Clinton to find a legitimate line of work? He's climbed the cursus honorum of American politics already. Go back to Arkansas and find a big-haired girlfriend, will you? Or renounce your womanizing and be a good house-husband for Hillary, picking out fabric swatches and pestering the butler with stories about all those jobs you "created." I don't care. Just leave us alone.





While I'm huffing, when did this Presidential Library thing happen? Did Washington have a Presidential Library? Lincoln? Either Roosevelt? What petty glorification of the Commander-in-Chief is this? I can't imagine why anyone would think we needed to have every stately nuance of the Johnson Administration (Motto: "I Fought the Poverty, and the Poverty Won") set down for posterity. All of this Solemnity and Grandeur with regard to the Presidency merely balloons it into something it oughtn't be. The man is our employee, the COO we pick to keep the coasts defended and the money supply honest. Everything else is bullcorn.

I swear...

One of these days, I'm going to learn. I'm going to resist the urge to go out drinking on a weeknight. I'm going to NOT stumble in at 2:30 in the morning, NOT make do with four or five hours of sleep, NOT spend my day dogging it. I'm really getting to old for this sort of thing.


I have an excuse. It's a lame one, but I have it. There was a woman involved. Lord pity me.

By the way...

My "on deck" CD's have been ordered, and Unknown Pleasures arrived this past week. Being intriqued by what I saw and heard in 24 Hour Party People, I was really excited to get some Joy Division. I haven't stopped listening to it. The atmosphere is claustrophobic but utterly addictive. I find myself seeing with new eyes the looped, buzzing aesthetic of 80's New Wave. Punk had failed to kill Rock n' Roll, as it had promised, but it had (and has) utterly left it's mark upon pop music. The only place to go was inward, to the individual hell of the postmodern age. And if we can have some bouncy riffs and pavement-cool melodies along the way, then rock on.

Freedom of Speech

Here's an interesting and mostly fair article in today's New York Times on the growing movement of conservatism on college campuses. The article dispenses with the usual snideness regarding the concept of "young conservative" and actually tries to put what it's seeing in a non-ideologically-biased context. And it's the New York Times!





Thoroughly unsurprising is the reaction of left-leaning academics to the intellectual antibodies these young righties avail themselves of. One professor charges that the tilt to the right has put an end to "the openness of a number of students to new ideas and new ways of thinking." I hesitated to actually put that in quotes, as it seems so stereotypical. Arguments in bad faith are often worded thus: to disagree, even disagree vehemently with a position never means that you have weighed an idea and found it wanting. Oh, no. It must mean that you are emotionally shut-off from such ideas, that your brain crimethoughts them away.





But let us take the professor at his word, and accept that "students are much more willing to write off something as 'liberal talk' -- oh, I don't need to think about that, that's just ideology -- as opposed to thinking, in a complex way, about all of the different ideas and evaluating them." From what I remember of college, 18-to-21-year-olds are like that (as are just about everyone older). At what point were Professor Schneider and his ilk ever "open" to old ideas? Did they ever truly think, in a complex way, about concepts like the Laffer Curve or the anthropic principle? Or did they dismiss them as "bourgeois talk" - mere Republicanism?





No accusation is easier to make than "hey, you do it, too," and that's really not my purpose. If the young conservatives are ideologically driven, if they take their marching orders according to a set of dogma and deviate not from them, then that's something a university should challenge. But I expect that most universities are ill-equipped to do so, because they have only their own dogmas to fall back on. Thinking in a complex way about ideas does not mean, or should not mean, fuzzy-mindedness, and openess to new ideas is not the same as dedication to them. Until the professors can demonstrate a real willingness to consider all ideas, their platitudes to that effect will be met with rolling eyes.

Blame Global Warming

The weather 'round these parts has been excessively gloomy for May. Usually, we're preparing for 3 straight months of 90-degree temperatures by this time. Of course, that would require the sun to come out. It's been overcast and rainy for a week or more; very unpleasant.


Back in my college days, we used to call this kind of weather "Orwellian," because it conjured up images of 1984 in our heads. And in our own perverse way, we enjoyed it; the opaque sky seemed so much more frought with meaning and tension than any merely sunny day ever could. And there are still pleasures to be gained from the cloudy days. Conversations are more muted; there isn't any particular rush about one's tasks, and at the end, you tend to curl up in a chair with a book or a movie and enjoy the comforts of shelter. At the same time, I know what it is to miss the sun. One needs days to run happily between heaven and earth.

I'm off...

At least until Friday or so. Out of town on family business. Be good.

People Are Still Having Sex...

A collection of surveys of youngsters indicates that 1 in 5 kids is having sex before age 15. Worse, a study dated from September of last year shows that half of all mothers of sexually active teens think their kids are still virgins. One doesn't know whether to laugh or cry.





NEWS FLASH TO PARENTS: You're going to have to strictly control what your children do to keep them safe. Unsupervised teens do dumb things, especially at night. Don't let them go out with their friends if there isn't going to be adult supervision. Especially don't let them go to parties where there's going to be alchohol. Be uncool. Be a tyrant. It's your job.





On the brighter side, it seems that more high school students are virgins than not nowadays. Leaving aside the instant rejoinder that states sexual status and actual sexual status can differ, this would seem to give the lie to the more socially liberal who endlessly parrot that abstinence education doesn't work. It may not bear immediate fruit, but social trends take time to change. I think its safe to say that 1 in 5 teenagers weren't having sex before 15 back in the 60's. I think it's also safe to say that these kids didn't decide to keep their virginity from anything they learned in condom classes.





All of which begs the question of just how long we can reasonably expect youths to stay chaste, especially in a society that is baroquely overflowing with sexual imagery and content. A few hundred years ago, these teens would have been no less horny, instead, they would be getting married and starting families of their own. Of course, most of them would be illiterate and starting out into a wonderful career in subsistence farming, too. Yet in our infinitely wealthier society, a sixteen-year-old getting married nowadays is considered to be throwing his/her life away. Why, the kid won't even finish school, won't go to college, will make minimum wage in a series of dead-end jobs to support the family.





I can see this entry running away with me already, but I think I can safely conclude it with a thought: What purpose does it serve to extend the period during which a person is essentially unproductive, a boiling pot of energy stifled through years of half-labor in our various schools?

I see Queen Mab Hath Been With Thee This Night...

I've added a link to the Port Tobbaco Players website, given that the selfsame community theater eats up huges portions of my the hours of my week. Yesterday we closed Getting Away With Murder, and it has been an amazing time. And the director of Romeo and Juliet tapped me for Mercutio. The Love is Back.

Happy Weekend.

I'm a-cuttin' out early. It's rainy and nasty, and I've got a show. See you on the other side.

I'm Reaching Post-Critical Mass...

But I had to note the new link. Happy Fun Pundit is a funny, funny blogger, and his Top Ten Things I hate about Star Trek are sheer brilliance. I am filled with envy, and guilty for praising this fellow when I should be working. Curses!

On A Related Note...

The Congress of Racial Equality organized a protest on Saturday regarding the millions of Africans who suffer from disease and starvation. Against Greenpeace. You see, Greenpeace and other's opposition to pesticides and genetically enhanced foods means that Africans are more subject to the whims of nature and mosquitoes than are the rest of us. Greenpeace being protested. It makes the heart sing.

Oh, Fishy, Fishy, Fish!

Apparently the worlds ocean's are rapidly running out of fish, due to industrial overfishing, according to the Scripp's Institute of Oceanography. Fully 85-90% of those fish most likely to end up on our dinner plate are gone, according to the study. I have to admit I was skeptical when I first read this. If fish had become so rare, surely we'd note this in the price of fish? But it seems that conservations efforts in America have done better. It also seems that most of the damage was done in the early years of industrialized fishing, before survey-taking. None of which has stopped the usual crowd from bellowing about how nasty our species is. One fellow seems to long for the days when you could harpoon giant tuna from your rowboat. But such is to be expected.





What I keep thinking of is how often dieticians and other scolds tell us we're supposed to be eating more fish. I also keep thinking about how all this fish is probably most needed in those areas whose population is growing most swiftly (we are eating these fish, after all, not mounting them on our mantelpiece). And then I consider how no one at the Scripps Institute has anything to say about the problem but how we think there's a limitless supply of fish in the ocean when there isn't. What exactly are we to do about it? Go back to binging on beef? Tax the fishing fleets out of business? Start a quota and limitation system? I hear no answers.





Which doesn't mean that answers don't exist. I went to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's web site to see what they had done to conserve American fish stocks. The press release suggests that they've had a banner year, taking more species off the "overfishing" list than they're putting on, and showing gains in all numbers of fish for whom "rebuilding programs" have been put in place. I couldn't tell you what those programs specifically involve. I can't tell you how much real "co-operation" is going on between fishermen and the government. I suspect, to be successful, that the fishermen are going to have to provided with some kind of real, immediate incentive to rebuild the fish populations. I may look into this further.

Quiet of the Soul

The above concept has become something very important to me of late. After 26 years, being frantic about unimportant things is losing its appeal. Oh, I still do it, but I no longer feel justified in doing it. Since as long as I can remember, too much input coming in too fast seriously unnerves me. My brain can't handle it; the cerebrum shuts down and the reptilian brain takes over, lashing out. There is merit to steady, sustained energy. Jefferson wrote that it was the key to happiness. I've never agreed. I wonder now.

Who I am, Part 4: The Play's The Thing

I have always been a somewhat charged, not to say, hyperactive fellow. In my youth, they put me on Ridillin to control it. It's not as easy to control now. Even at the quasi-mature age of 26, I have occasional spastic urges that make it impossible to sit still. When I'm alone, only the most fevered concentration enables me to focus for more than five minutes on a single thing. Needless to say, this made athletics, especially team athletics, a barren pursuit for me. Who wants to stand in the outfield and watch the pitcher walk the opposing team when there's cool rocks and bugs to play with?





In other words, the theater was the only extracurricular activity that was really open to me. It appealled to my intellect and my hyperkeneticism, I could shout and be loud and indulge all manner of make-believe. After a few shows in high school, with the kind of praise that brings, I decided that the world was my stage, and set off to college determined to prove such. I was wrong.





I should have expected it, or at any rate, I should have responded more maturely. To begin with, I wasn't studying drama. I wasn't even going to a Theater School. My university's drama program was presided over by a sleepy old Lear bearing a striking resemblance to Admiral Akbar from Return of the Jedi, who had decide at his advanced age that the plays of Shakespeare were tiresome, and that the overbearing musicals of Sondheim and the plodding O'Neill wannabeism of Brian Friel were the way the organization would rise phoenixlike from the ashes. Being untrained in singing, and posessing few gifts for acting other than stage presence, I was doomed to bitter disappointment. The man never gave me a decent role after my freshman year, preferring younger students who unflinchingly believed in the New Order. I shall never forget the last set-strike of my senior year: standing on a bare stage that I had once dreamed would see me elucidate Hamlet or MacBeth, after having unconvincingly played a dying old man with exactly five seconds of stage time (time enough to die). I cursed solemnly and walked out, determined never to look back or perform in front of anyone ever again.





I gave the whole affair far, far more emotional importance than it was worth. I'd never seriously entertained the idea of being a professional actor. I hadn't had the training, and I didn't want to submit to the thousand indignities and labors that aspiring stars are heir to. New York and LA were full enough of "actors," I concluded. Better for me to study political science, to attempt to learn German, to expose myself to Kant and Nietzsche and de Tocqueville, to actually learn something about the human mechanics that govern our world. What was acting, if not bread and games for the masses?





Yet I kept coming back, all through college, hungry for that breakthrough, that recognition that I was brilliant, that never came. My junior year the old fellow went on Sabbatical and two English professors instituted a brief Reign of Terror, favoring those who opposed the Sondhiem juggernaut and punishing those who had grown fat under its auspices. We put on Much Ado About Nothing. Here at last was my chance at redemption. I had played Petruchio in Taming of the Shrew back in high school, surely Benedick was mine for the asking. I got Don Pedro, and proceeded to engage in a fit of despondency that annoyed friends to no end. Oh, the show was wonderful, I picked up many a pointer from the director, and had more fun than at any other show. But my image of myself had been shattered. I know what happens to a dream deferred. It doesn't explode, it doesn't barnacle over, it just shrinks down into a nothing that must be filled. I kept up the dance, went into senior year hoping for some manner of swan song, but it was well and truly over, and I'd have done better to accept it then.





That of course was six years ago. Yesterday I auditioned for Romeo and Juliet. Friday begins the closing weekend of Getting Away With Murder, Sondheim's only straight (ignore the pun, please) play, which is as clever and deep as his musicals are ponderous and overreaching. I play an unhappy young man who cannot seem to escape the will of his powerful father and make his dreams happen, personifying as he does the Deadly Sin of Sloth. I recently finished a seven-month run, off-and-on, with a traveling vaudeville show, singing and joking and dressing in drag and mugging for the crowds. I've done bit parts in Kauffman plays and played Algernon for the second time in The Importance of Being Earnest. All of which has been done under the auspices of community theater, and working with those who win awards for doing the same thing. I've even had my name in the paper.





The temptation is strong to throw all that out as a double-condemnation of those who Failed To See My Talent, but I know better. If I can manage to get cast nowadays, it's because I've managed to control that spark of scene-chewing mayhem with doses of perspective. I've learned the value of silence, of a soft voice. I no longer have any designs on conquering the world, only on rendering it as truthfully as is in my power. Maturity, to my mind, is learning how much you have to do to truly care for yourself, and it begins with the recognition that you are not your dreams.

New and Improved!

Recently I decided to budget myself two CD's per month, so I can get over the buyer's guilt. So far the system has yielded excellent results: I've finally broken down and bought stuff I've always wanted, and have given myself proud warm fuzzies for my discipline. And since I've promised more music commentary in my banner than I've yet delivered on, I've taken the trouble to add links (to Amazon) of my most recent purchases and what I have planned for this coming month. When I get them, I'll comment on them here.





I've already gushed over the new White Stripes, so I'll confine myself to the Kinks album. I've recently developed an interest in mid-60's mod and garage rock thanks to discovering The Jam not too long ago. The Kinks are of course the starting point for mod, and I decided to go with the album from 1966, Face to Face, more or less at random. It wasn't until it arrived that I discovered that the album had a great song I remember from the college-radio station up in Philly a few years ago, "Sunny Afternoon." Good stuff. Like their spiritual descendents, Blur, the Kinks fit into a lot of listening moods, from swinging to somber. This one's nice.

Exhaustion...

After performing a matinee yesterday, driving down to Solomon's for a Bob Dylan show (he rocked!), and then getting 4 hours of sleep before rushing into work early, I can feel the crash coming. Plus I have an audition tonight. June just can't come fast enough.

Who I am, Part 3: Pro Bono Publico!

[I know, I know, I'm a lazy bastard. Can't be helped. I've always believed that a writer should never force his muse, and my muse takes lots of mental health days. So let's get on with it.]





Politics, politics, politics, politics! No one likes it. Everyone mocks it. "Politician" has been a term of disdain for so long, it's difficult to imagine the mindset of someone who would use it any other way. Half of America is so fed up with the whole process that they don't even vote. The big parties differ only in the interest groups they pander to, and the minor parties have a snowball's chance in a atom bomb test of winning so much as one seat in Congress. Et cetera, yadda yadda, ad infinitum, and no, I'm not using this introduction as a strawman to break apart and convince you otherwise.





Where do I fit into all of this? I just registered as a Republican in my home state, and I basically held my nose while doing it. I was a Libertarian until the unsurprisingly major-party-favoring election laws around here basically forced the party into non-existence (it involved petitions and signatures and was largely preposterous as near as I can tell). I wasn't super enthusiastic about being a Libertarian either; their foreign policy attitudes remind one of the America First committees prior to WW2, and their underlying philosophy is essentially caustic to social order. But the Libertarians came the closest to my idea of what politics should be about, so I went with them. Now I'm back with the country-club swine and the Christian Coalition. Hey, it could be worse. I could be living in a country where there was one party to join, one man to vote for, and anyone who said it should be otherwise disappeared following a knock at the door.





My aforementioned political philosophy shouldn't, in fairness be called that, as a political philosophy that's strictly anti-political is only amusingly ironic the first time you pen it so. I am largely against politics. Oh, I grasp that they're a fact of life, that all groups and societies have pecking orders and organic dynamics wearing down at said pecking orders. I'm not naive. I can't even say that I'd like all politics, political life, and political culture to disappear. We've got to have something to talk to each other about, and the line-item veto is at least no more mind-numbing a topic than whichever masochistic wanker just got voted off American Idol (Do you care? I mean truly, why would anyone watch something so soul-crushing and uneventful if they didn't have to? I just don't get it).





No, what I'm really against is the excessive politicization of our culture, to the point where any issue of import is sent for Congress and the President to rattle each other about for a few terms and then try to slip under the Supreme Court's door when it isn't looking. Our 86,400-second-per-day news cycle demands that someone be saying something, about anything, at all times, whether it's actually new or relevant or more interesting that watching fleas mate or not. I think the example of Laci Peterson will be sufficient for my point: look, I'm sorry she died so horribly, and her unborn child with her. My heart goes out to her family. I hope they lock her husband (should he be guilty) up and throw away the key. Why do I have to hear about the daily developments of the case? What else do these people want from me?





The same cycle of faux-concern and instant-gratification is removing any sense of restraint from our politics. If one state or county wants to try school vouchers, the teachers unions nationwide raise the standard of revolt in the press, and pretty soon parents who just don't want their kids going to school in a drugged-out war zone have to ask permission from Congress, because All. Are. Concerned. What would be an easily passed or failed experiment in scholastic funding has become a Drama, with the usual cast of characters: the Call to Arms, the Covertly Condescending Opposition Statement, the Televised Shouting Match, the Backroom Deal, and the Anti-Pentagon Whine ("If we can spend this money on a B-1 bomber...")





We shouldn't be making decisions like this, in committee, with focus groups, weeping like Priam for Troy over whether we spend 3% more or 5% more on something that isn't going to solve the problem it's designed for. This is shadowboxing with democracy. This is not what was intended.





If you wanted to nail me down, you could call me a federalist, not in the Adams/Hamilton way, but in the devolution way. The federal government spends too much money getting too little accomplished. It creates numbers that have no basis in reality, lots of guns and bombs, and jobs that pay way better than mine and require half the work. Read the Declaration of Independence sometimes and see how many of the charges levelled against George III's government can be safely directed at our own. Then as now, ancient local liberties were being slowly ignored by a centralized power. That's not the way the Founders wanted to see things happen, and we could demonstrate a little bit of gratitude to their vision. Not every one of our little issues needs the sages of the U.S. Government to find answers for. Not everything is the business of society as a whole. We aren't a church, and we aren't an empire; we're a confederacy of free men and women endowing public servants with certain tasks. Everything else is our own bag to carry.





Returning to this way of thinking isn't going to be easy. We're going to have to give up a few things that we've gotten used to: bailouts, handouts, the freedom from actually having to participate in the res publica. I think it's worth it, though. Because the alternative frightens me.

Sentimental Sufi Poetry Quote of the Day

The alchemy of a changing life is the only truth.



-Jelalludin Rumi

Oh, ho...

Apparently Apple's iTune music service is selling like hotcakes. Sure, Appleheads are Pavlovian in their willingness to jump for Jobs' treats, but I think this underscores the point I made last week about online music. If the industry would just get on board and sell all of the music, all of the time, folks would go for it, and they could be making a buck off of MP3's instead of paying their lawyers.

The "Gotcha" Game

Yesterday the blogosphere had one of it's periodic political melodramas, this one regarding William Bennet's gambling. First the Washington Monthly weighed in. Then Jonah Goldberg of National Review gave the Monthly a piece of his mind. Others, such as Andrew Sullivan, took a more (for lack of a better term) nuanced approach. Eventually a principle was induced: It's bad to gamble, and it's bad to call people hypocrites for gambling. Unless it's good. I'm really tired this week.





Wiser minds than mine have already counted the angels on this particular pinhead, and I am loathe to add further fuel to a bonfire I am only partially interested in. One thing, however, does strike me as interesting. Goldberg talked at length in his piece about the moral "gotcha" game, whereby one looks for anything -- anything -- about an opponent that can cast him in an unpleasant light. Liberals don't like what William Bennet says, so they dug up the fact that he blows money on video poker to undermine everything he says. How great can morality be, if the people who want us to practice it can't even manage it?





This is of course dependent on one's view of gambling as moral or immoral, which is a question I have no intention of wrestling with. Otherwise Goldberg's point -- that killing the messenger does not change the message -- is a fair one, and I think his criticism of liberals playing the "gotcha" game on Bennet is apt. But he doesn't seem to see the game from the other side.





At the heart of Goldberg's fury is the oft-lamented moral blindspot that the Demmies have with regard to their recent hero-savior, Bill Clinton. Jonah complains that the libs get down on Bennet for presuming to Moralize While Gambling about Clinton during the Grand Impeachment Operetta, but they have not one word of sanction against a President of the United States who used his office to subvert the Constitution. They said that private (to the extent that anything in the White House is private) fellation didn't mean Clinton's policies were wrong or that he was a bad President, but they think private rounds of Five-Card Stud do undermine Bennett's ideas. Goldberg is right again here. But if you flip that hypocrisy around, you have Goldberg's position, and that of quite a few of the right (but admittedley, not all).





Here's the thing: The whole Paula Jones/Monica Lewinsky/Shag Me Rotten, Baby, Yeah Scandal was all about Getting Clinton. Don't get me wrong. I never liked Clinton after about the midpoint of his first term. I think he was a reprehensible President and a wormy little toadstool who deserved everything that he got. The fact that he tried to evade the very 1994 sexual harassment law that he pushed through Congress (the one that makes a man's sexual escapades judicially relevant if he's being sued for harassment) fills me with the kind of anger I normally reserve for copy machines and boy bands. The man was a liar unto his very soul, a gutless hillbilly gladhandler without principle or piety, a perennial candidate going through the motions of being President of the United States with his face crazy-glued to the camera lens and his master organ up Lady Liberty's arse. I feel no symapthy for him, and will pretend none (and all you feminists out there: the fact that you stood mum while he sidestepped that very same law you fell over yourselves applauding in '94, the fact that you threw every nasty caveman stereotype you claim to abhor at Jones and Lewinsky, that you lined up to protect this Lothario, tells me everything I need to know about you. Like your spiritual mother de Beauvoir, you don't care what the Power does to others as long as you have a room of your own).





That oddly cleansing diatribe aside, the fact that I even know Monica Lewinsky's name has everything to do with the fact that the Republicans were out to Get Clinton. I don't think anyone was ever convinced that the rights of Jones, Lewinsky, and all of the other shaggees in Bill's closet were more important to Gingrich et. al than making Clinton look bad. The fact that Clinton eminently deserved to be gotten doesn't change the fact that the GOP, especially after the '96 elections, would have seized on anything to undermine that man's astonishing (and thoroughly nauseating) popularity. They'd lost their nerve after the '95 budget battle and were basically out of energy with regard to implementing their ideas. Same with Clinton. Had the Lewinsky thing never reared its ugly head (bad pun! BAD!), TV Billy Sip-Sip Tuta would doubtless have spent his second term engaging in warm-fuzzy "dialogues," taking credit for the economy, and searching for something, anything that he could call a "legacy". Neither party had anything to say other than how rotten the other side was. In fact, so interested were they in "getting" one another that they barely noticed when a bunch of terrorists started blowing up embassies in East Africa. Clinton lobbed a few cruise missles and called it a day, and the Republican front-runner for the nomination could hardly be bothered to mention terrorism as a foreign policy priority.





My point is, this whole routine of "Well, where were you when X did Y" is as endless as it is childish (my own contributions to it in the thread above notwithstanding). Shame on the Washington Monthly for taking a cheap shot at a guy whose wrong is both arguable and unrelated to any of the arguments he's made. And shame on the Republicans for forgetting that making an adversary, even a vile adversary, into an enemy limits our capacities.

Brain...not...working...

I had a nice blog planned, deriving a clever point from the confluence of two items in the news today. But when push came to shove, the point vanished before my eyes into the ether. 'Course the meetings today didn't help. All institutions seem to exist for the purpose of producing documents containing mixtures of half-truths and unacheived ideals. All of which requires language that is as tedious to read as it is painstaking to construct. Blarg. I thought I was done with this when I got out of the editing game.





I'll have a point tommorrow.

Cuba Libre?

Reuters has a stomach-churning piece about how leftist artsies around the world are coming out to defend Castro from criticisms that he, you know, likes to jail dissidents, and that's a bad thing. Completely ignoring the fact that the rights of people are being trampled on, these honored members of the Useless Class are far, far more worried that the U.S. might suddenly invade Cuba like it did Iraq. An astonishing lack of priorities and sense of reality is apparent. If the Administration were planning to do that, you can bet we might have, you know, heard about it by now. And if telling the truth about Castro's ghastly regime is tantamount to a declaration of war, than just what exactly are these breezy artistes, making use of rights that Castro would deny them, defending?



David Horowitz may have it right. It's time to start naming these neo-coms.

Bloody Weather...

I'm not one of those people who looks forward to summer, aching for the chance to smear smelly cream all over my body and risk skin cancer so I can achieve a seemingly healthy bronzeness to my skin (for those of you who are, one word: wrinkles). In fact, I object to summer in general. I don't mind the school being out, but the heat and humidity are just for suck. Winter I'm no fan of either. Spring and fall are nice, pleasant, breezy seasons and I don't see why they have to end. Mmmmph. I'll blog better tommorrow.