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New Girl Media Unplugs Old Girl Network

Pope Benedict met artists from around the world in the Sistine Chapel on Saturday and urged them to inject spirituality into their work, saying contemporary beauty was often 'illusory and deceitful," reports Reuters. Compare Papa Ratzi's open invitation to engage in an expansive search for truth with President Obama's secretive, craven attempts to use the art community as a tool of the state to propagandize his own not-so-hidden statist agenda. Grazie tanto to darling friend and blogbuddy Miss Kelly for the heads up. (REUTERS/Osservatore Romano photo)

"Like me, Jackie became politically involved because of Sarah Palin," writes self-described "California girl, proud conservative, palinista, future politician" Rachelle Friberg, bearing witness to the Amazonian clash between New Girl Media and Old Girl Network that played out upon the national stage last week when MSNBC warhorse Norah O'Donnell tried to play "gotcha" with fresh-faced 17-year-old filly Jackie Seal at a Sarah Palin Going Rogue book-signing event in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The usual suspects used the occasion to present Palin supporters as clueless cultists, but we're more interested in the folks who are paying attention. Here's Rachelle:

I actually got to know Jackie a couple months ago on Twitter. When I first met her, I was struck by how mature, articulate and intelligent a young woman she was. Like me, Jackie became politically involved because of Sarah Palin. She is an amazing girl, and I wish I had become politically aware when I was her age. While she may be young, she is already a very talented blogger who has a great future ahead of her. I actually recently wrote about her and other great, young conservative bloggers who are out there making a difference one post at a time. I find it so amazing and incredible that Sarah has brought so many people together. While Jackie and I do not know Sarah personally, we and millions of others have formed a bond that will last a lifetime.

"The so-called 'Staircase Group' by Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827) is arguably the first major original painting in American art," writes collector and curator John Wilmerding in today's WSJ. Read the whole thing for its historically and aesthetically rich appreciation of the Philadelphia-based artist, inventor, scientist, soldier, writer, naturalist and museum founder. The take-home point for our discussion here: "The full-length format … speaks to its final originality. Heretofore it was reserved in the Old World for upper-class and royal portraiture. Peale inverts its use for American figures who are ordinary, relaxed and democratic." Sarah Palin and the Tea Party/Town Hall Movement come to mind.

Then comes Dr. Melissa Clouthier, who begs to differ with those like Politico's Kenneth P. Vogel who say the Tea Party Movement requires "the emergence of a national leader, group or structure" to become a "sustainable bloc with the power to shape the GOP and swing elections." Freedom Works Press Secretary Adam Brandon explains:

We were never looking to own or control it. The focus needs to be on the issues at hand.

Clouthier nails it:

Asking the “who’s in charge” questions about the Tea Party movement is to fundamentally misunderstand conservatives. Conservatives do not like being told what to do. The notion of subsuming self-interest for “the greater good” is anathema to them. That makes replicating the Borg-like work of ACORN and Moveon.org organizations nearly impossible on the right. When conservatives see a goal, they’ll take 50 roads to get there. The left will get on the Huffington Post highway and ride along together.

In related commentary, it's the town hall, stupid, Bill Whittle tells Scott Ott at PJTV:

Let's remind ourselves of what the essential part of a representative democracy is all about. It's a town hall meeting. Who's in charge of a town hall meeting? Nobody … There are rules and procedures so that equals can come to an assignment of responsibility based on their equality.

The final word goes to the totally adorable Tucker Carlson, who had this to say on Fox and Friends this morning:

There's something about Sarah Palin that drives a certain kind of liberal wild, and I don't know why. I'm not a psychiatrist.

But I personally wish she'd stop calling people "sexist." That's what liberals do.

Carlson may not know why Saracudda drives a certain kind of liberal wild, but we do. 'Been blogging about it for years: It's the tribalism, stupid.

Update: Instalanche! Thank you, dear professor.

Update II: "I am the last person in the entire b-sphere to link it, but I’m delighted to do so, writes Attila Girl." Never too late.

Killing me softly with soft lies

The blogosphere, twittersphere and Fox News are all over David Letterman's gratuitous trashing of Sarah Palin, but frankly, my dear, we don't give a damn. Same old same old (see below). Above, the "Heart of the Republican Party" (in the provocative words of Chris Cillizza of the WaPo's "The Fix") strides across the stage at that big-tent Senate-House fundraiser the other night,

"Distorting history is not truth-telling, but the telling of soft lies," writes Charles Krauthammer on a must-read [psycho]analysis the "disturbing ambivalence toward [his] own country" demonstrated by President Obama's recent international "Moral Equivalency Tour":

Obama undoubtedly thinks he is demonstrating historical magnanimity with all these moral equivalencies and self-flagellating apologetics. On the contrary. He's showing cheap condescension, an unseemly hunger for applause and a willingness to distort history for political effect.

Krauthammer's thoughts recalled our own post of four years back on the dangers of tellig half truths, "I certainly can fudge what I say," illustrated with one of Chris Muir's insightful Day-by-Day cartoons, which we now republish for comparison and contrast:

"I can certainly fudge what I say"

"A man who tells lies, like me, merely hides the truth. But a man who tells half-lies has forgotten where he put it," says Claude Raines' Mr. Dryden in "Lawrence of Arabia" (screenplay by Robert Bolt, 1962), foreshadowing by two generations the sorry place to which the postmodern project has led many of our nation's Bush-bashing intellectual elites today.  Take Sy Hersh, investigativoid journalist extraordinaire formerly of the New York Times and most recently of The New Yorker. Chris Muir's cartoon, above, says it all. As Chris Suellentrop wrote in New York Metro yesterday:

There are two Hershes, really. Seymour M. is the byline. He navigates readers through the byzantine world of America’s overlapping national-security bureaucracies, and his stories form what Hersh has taken to calling an “alternative history” of the Bush administration since September 11, 2001.

Then there’s Sy. He’s the public speaker, the pundit. On the podium, Sy is willing to tell a story that’s not quite right, in order to convey a Larger Truth. “Sometimes I change events, dates, and places in a certain way to protect people,” Hersh told me. “I can’t fudge what I write. But I can certainly fudge what I say.”

Bill Clinton's "It depends upon what your definition of is is" comes to mind, of course, not to mention Dan "False but Accurate" Rather's characterization of Bubba:

I think at the core he's an honest person . . . I think you can be an honest person and lie about any number of things.

Then the Boschian horrors of the entire postmodern project, from Rousseau on down, come spilling out. If you've got the time, check out Mark Brittingham's heroic "The Cold War is Not Over: Europe and the Post-Modern Left [from the comments at One Hand Clapping]:

Thus, the Post-Modern [sic] project enjoys both the energy of moral outrage and a philosophical cover for its errors that prevents anyone from undercutting the outrage.  Attempts to point out its philosophical shortcomings are nearly useless because the expressions of this philosophy are maddeningly jargonesque and impenetrable.  In this, Post-Modern Leftism is enormously attractive to any party having a gripe against the modern world.  Every failed state, every ethnic hustler, every ideological movement, every intellectual poseur, and every tyrannical thug has a stake in feeding and propagating this modern variant of Rousseau's Hydra.  Its energetic rise in modern Europe will prove to be one of the great ideological challenges of the 21st century.

We happened to read some of Rousseau in the original French in our undergraduate days, and even then, we knew "the noble savage" never existed except in the utopia-addled minds of reality-challenged intellectuals.

Roger L. Simon to write VDH screenplay?

"The key was that the initial planting of the vineyard involved a delicate balance," wrote Victor Davis Hanson in The Other Greeks: The Family Farm and Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization. "The farmer had to be careful not to opt for either extreme, and instead to be aware that conditions adverse to full production ironically prove hospitable. So the growing practice of viticulture in the early polis —much more so than livestock raising or grain growing — must have reordered Greek values and contributed to the peculiar Greek notion of harmony and moderation … Hard work, not natural bounty was to be lionized."

"Should be required reading for all Pauline-Kael-bubble residents, from President Obama on up or down. Somebody should make a movie of it. Get Roger L. Simon on the phone at once!!! This could be box-office gold," we wrote (only half in jest) in the comments of Victor Davis Hanson's "Obama Versus the Way of the Universe," an eye-opening "farmer's tale" of the military historian's own mugging by reality at age 26, when — in a reversal of the "How 'Ya Gonna Keep 'Em Down on the Farm?" narrative — the gentleman farmer realized that trying to make nice to a neighbor willing to take advantage of a young man's naiveté was a loser's game. A few snippets to whet your appetite, and then be sure to read the whole thing:

I wish the President well, but he is butting up against human nature. And that is a fight one cannot win…

Only someone who has not been in the real world, but only marketed rhetoric without consequences (e.g., if Obama had a bad day organizing, or legislating, was he fired?) could believe such things.

In short, Obama reminds me a little of myself — at 26. I had left the farm for 9 years to get a BA in classics, PhD in classical philology, and live in Athens for two years of archaeological study — all on scholarships … I had forgotten much of the culture of the farm where I spent years 1-18.

Then after the requisite degrees I left academia, and returned to farm 180 acres with my brother and cousin — and sadly was quickly disabused of the world of the faculty lounge.

Then follows the coming-of-age drama of internalizing the tragic view of human nature and a word of warning to the starry-eyed Utopianists currently at the wheel of the ship of state:

Obama will come to his senses with his ‘Bush did it’, reset button, moral equivalency, soaring hope and change, with these apologies to Europeans, his Arab world Sermons on the Mount to Al Arabiya, in Turkey, in Cairo, etc., his touchy-feely videos to Iran, his “we are all victims of racism” sops to Ortega, Chavez, and Morales. It is only a matter of when, under what conditions, how high the price we must pay, and whether we lose the farm before he gains wisdom about the tragic universe in which we live.

A sojourn at an elite university, you see, can sometimes become a very dangerous thing indeed.

"This is one of your finest articles to date as it deftly sums up the incredible hubris of 'The One' and illustrates that credible deterrence — not good intentions and empty blather — indeed keeps one's 'neighbors' honest and leads to a tolerable existence," writes Scott in the first of dozens and dozens (128 as of this writing) of insightful comments to VDHs post. We'll quote a couple for you to savor and then urge you — and especially President Obama & Company! — to read 'em all:

Thrasymachus: The question is not will Obama come to his senses (he won’t) but will enough Americans come to their senses, and soon enough, to save our collective patrimony. Jimmy Carter never got it and never will.

Ron Kean: I’ve learned that those who raise their voice usually expect the same from you or see the obsequiousness as a license to continue rude domination.

Allison Aller: From when I first started reading your blog, it was your experience in agriculture that gave you baseline credibility to me. All your classical study was very important icing on the cake (and it sure enabled you to write well!) … but it is the dealing with the world as God made it — in nature and in human nature — that brings wisdom and perspective.

Great dramatic potential. What do you say, Roger L? Maybe self-avowed "no longer brain dead liberal" playwright David Mamet would be interested.

Update: Maggie's links.

Leftist elites: Unwitting servants of a totalitarian impulse?

"The European Union is what Americans would call a shotgun marriage," former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky told Paul Belien of The Brussels Journal recently. Belien reports:

In a speech he delivered in Brussels last week Mr Bukovsky called the EU a “monster” that must be destroyed, the sooner the better, before it develops into a full-fledged totalitarian state.

Mr Bukovsky referred to confidential documents from secret Soviet files which he was allowed to read in 1992. These documents confirm the existence of a “conspiracy” to turn the European Union into a socialist organization . . .

The idea was very simple. It first came up in 1985-86, when the Italian Communists visited Gorbachev, followed by the German Social-Democrats. They all complained that the changes in the world, particularly after [British Prime Minister Margaret] Thatcher introduced privatisation and economic liberalisation, were threatening to wipe out the achievement (as they called it) of generations of Socialists and Social-Democrats -- threatening to reverse it completely. Therefore the only way to withstand this onslaught of wild capitalism (as they called it) was to try to introduce the same socialist goals in all countries at once.

Echoes of the Gramscian underpinnings of the Soviet Union's insidious infiltration of our own elite institutions last century -- blogged here, here and most recently here, where we cited Eric S. Raymond's checklist of the Soviet Union’s "memetic weapons" of propaganda internalized by our fellow Americans of the left. How would we feel were we to learn that our own political worldview -- in our case Darwinian libertarian -- was the result not of a lifetime of experience, reading, debate and analysis but, rather, the result of a bioterrorist-like attack on our thinking, where a virulent strain of counterintuitive, morally relativistic, international progressivist ideas had been released into the water supply of academic discourse and turned inquiring minds into unwitting servants of a totalitarian impulse?

Update:  Roger L. Simon's fisking of the dhimmitude of Newsweek exemplifies Raymond's "memetic weapon" of blaming the victim and forgiving the perpetrator of violence:

I don't know if there is a more fuddy-duddy publication than Newsweek (unless it's Time). Now they are tut-tutting those Europeans who have the temerity -- in the post-cartoon riot world -- to be concerned with protecting free speech and other Enlightenment values through new immigration standards that encourage assimilation. Not surprisingly the Newsweekies title their article The End of Tolerance, meaning Europe's, of course, not those Sharia-bound Muslims whose tolerance is legendary.

Update II:  Neo has an excellent post on "Conspiracy theories, Arab and otherwise," but as we said in her comments, "Just because I'm a conspiracy theorist doesn't mean there aren't evil-doers out there trying to take over the world."

"Preferring truth to wishful thinking"

"Original thinking often flourishes under conditions of intellectual marginality," writes Austin Bramwell in The American Conservative [via Arts & Letters Daily], worried that "as the Right’s popularity has grown, its intellectual challenge to the Left has diminished":

Unfortunately, the conservative movement, having discovered a mass audience, risks squandering the intellectual marginality that once made it so interesting and daring.. . .Yet few worry that conservatism will go flabby. The tenets have already been settled, they think; all that is left is to promote them.

Few may worry, but some do, including ourselves.  As we wrote here recently in a post about James Piereson's Opinion Journal capsule history of contemporary conservatism:

The forces of darkness are always waiting just beyond the campfire, and even as Hayek's individualism and the neoconservatives' cultural defense of capitalism are ascendant, this is no time to sit back and declare victory.

Bramwell recalls the rise and fall of the liberal project by way of warning:

Conservatives should not let the intellectual restlessness of their early years give way to decadent complacency. It has happened before in American political life -- to American liberalism—with unhappy consequences both for liberalism and the nation.

The story of liberalism’s decline is often rehearsed these days, by rueful liberals and gleeful conservatives alike. Few, however, tell the more interesting story of liberalism’s ascendance.

A few delectable details:

The people, in [the liberal elites'] view, remained stubbornly benighted, saw political problems in naïve moralistic terms, and could not carry out the project of reform. Accordingly, liberalism’s leading intellects began to fashion a new ideology that called for elite social scientists, rather than a virtuous populace, to address the problems of the modern world.

In his 1922 classic, Public Opinion, Walter Lippmann argued that ordinary people lacked the intellectual resources necessary for even the feeblest grasp of modern complexities. A piqued John Dewey then responded with The Public and Its Problems, billed as a refutation of Lippmann. It turns out, however, that Dewey conceded nearly all of Lippmann’s points . . . elite social scientists should rule.

Hillary -- despite carefully orchestrated protestations to the contrary precipitated by her purposeful quest for the presidency -- exemplifies this mindset. Bramwell continues:

Liberalism came of age in the New Deal, which finally succeeded in replacing representative government with a European-style administrative state, staffed by the nation’s ablest, most idealistic men. After World War II, when the national mood no longer favored reform, liberals turned to an even more elite institution—the Supreme Court—to continue remaking American society. For a generation, liberalism so dominated American life that, while conservatives saw conservatism as the taste of a saving remnant, liberals became convinced that their ideology expressed the natural sentiments of the American people.

Intellectual sclerosis, however, soon set in . . . As Nixon put it, the Democrats became the party of acid, amnesty, and abortion. They have been losing power ever since.

Will intellectual complacency condemn conservatives to go down that same black hole?  Bramwell cites three strands of original thinking on the Right -- all libertarian -- that offer hope.  Our ears perked up at one of them in particular, "a loose network of what John O’Sullivan has called 'evolutionary conservatives' [that] attempts to understand politics in light of genetic science":

Unlike many conservatives, evolutionary conservatives remain undaunted by the apoplectic reaction of liberals to Charles Murray’s Bell Curve and Dinesh D’Souza’s End of Racism. Steve Sailer, for example, the most talented evolutionary conservative, writes with rigor and imagination on such scabrous topics as race, IQ, voting patterns, and national identity. Though other writers treat these ideas as taboo, perhaps because they seem to undermine American ideals of equality and self-reliance, evolutionary conservatives pride themselves on preferring truth to wishful thinking . . . Human biodiversity is important; we owe it to ourselves to try to understand it.

That's the same Steve Sailer of VDare.com who linked to our most recent Darwin vs. ID post a couple of weeks back in his provocative must-read essay "The Left Doesn’t Like Darwin Either."  A few appetizers:

I'm not going to end that dispute, but please allow me to explain why it's not as dire an issue as most of the participants on either side assume. The logic of natural selection is widely recognized to be virtually tautological [and] most people seem willing to accept Darwinism as long as they don't have to believe in nothing but Darwinism.

A belief in miracles, unlike a belief in magic, presupposes a belief in natural laws, which is a necessary condition for science. Thus, Christendom could develop modern science, while China could not.

Yet what critics of Darwinism fail to understand is that this a priori dislike of miracles is the appropriate professional prejudice of biologists.

No matter what the metaphysical implications, we can't forget Darwin's great insight about our world: selection matters. Life is not 100 percent Lamarckian. People vary, and we can't always mold them into whatever we want them to be.

The left has long hated this insight because it suggests that there are limits to the effectiveness of social engineering.

Haven't we always said?

The leftist utopian dream was doomed from the start because it denied the economic logic of nature and human nature.

And Thomas Sowell would agree.

Some bedfellows are stranger than others

"Be angry at democracy, if such things anger you. No party is ever the complete choice of all its voters, and no election is ever without a little mixing of issues, writes Joseph Bottum in his provocative essay about the future of conservatism, "The New Fusionism" in First Things: The journal of Religion, Culture and Public Life [via Milt's File]:

As nearly every commentator has observed, abortion and the war on terror are now linked at some of the most practical levels of partisan political calculation.

This fact is usually noted by way of indicting the conservative coalition: The presidential election featured two-faced foreign-policy activists using religious voters -- “poor, undereducated, and easily led,” in the famous formulation of the Washington Post -- to advance their empire-building agenda. Or maybe it featured hypocritical religious leaders cynically trading support for the Iraq war in return for help confirming anti-Roe judges. Regardless, the joint effort was a purely political arrangement.

But the author hypothesizes something beyond mere political calculation may lie behind the recent bundling of those strange bedfellows -- social conservatives and neoconservatives -- in the name of re-electing President Bush last year:

“The remoralization of America at home ultimately requires the remoralization of American foreign policy, for both follow from Americans’ belief that the principles of the Declaration of Independence are not merely the choices of a particular culture but are universal, enduring, ‘self-evident’ truths,” William Kristol and Robert Kagan wrote in the journal Foreign Affairs back in 1996. “That has been, after all, the main point of the conservatives’ war against a relativistic multiculturalism."

The angry isolationist paleoconservatives are probably right -- this isn’t conservatism, in several older senses of the word. But so what? Call it the new moralism, if you like. Call it a masked liberalism or a kind of radicalism that has bizarrely seized the American scene. Mutter darkly, if you want, about the shotgun marriage of ex-socialists and modern puritans, the cynical political joining of imperial adventurers with reactionary Catholics and backwoods Evangelicals. These facts still remain: The sense of national purpose regained by forceful response to the attacks of September 11 could help summon the will to halt the slaughter of a million unborn children a year. And the energy of the pro-life fight -- the fundamental moral cause of our time -- may revitalize belief in the great American experiment.

Now comes Hillary, jumping into the big bed -- Reagan's big tent is so yesterday -- smack in the middle of the bundling board between the social conservatives to her right and the neoconservatives to her left, embracing the war even as she moderates her position on abortion in recognition of a tilt toward the pro-life position in the nation. We're trying to imagine Hillary aligned with Darwinian libertarians like ourselves, let alone two other bedfellows named by the author on the foreign-policy activists' side of the putative fusion:

The actor Ron Silver, who spoke at the Republican National Convention last summer, and Roger L. Simon, a popular mystery writer turned popular blogger, are examples of liberals who, though reoriented on foreign policy by the attacks of September 11, seem nonetheless to remain solidly pro-choice. And then there are the pro-intervention libertarians, from the Instapundit blogger Glenn Reynolds on, who have only the smallest interest in the life issues, and that mostly in opposition to the pro-life side.

It would take a miracle.  Or maybe not.  Argues Bottum:

The opponents of abortion and euthanasia insist there are truths about human life and dignity that must not be compromised in domestic politics. The opponents of Islamofascism and rule by terror insist there are truths about human life and dignity that must not be compromised in international politics. Why shouldn’t they grow toward each other? The desire to find intellectual and moral seriousness in one realm can breed the desire to find intellectual and moral seriousness in another.

When we think of intellectual and moral seriousness, the ever-calculating Hillary does not come to mind. ("There is nothing organic to her politics," as Jay Cost wrote in Opinion Journal last week).  But a number of our favorite bloggers who also happen to be deeply religious do come to mind. La Shawn, of course, but also several recently discovered bloggers we've stumbled upon -- Blue Goldfish and Dancing the Tide -- who've caught our blogging eye and ear. Perhaps a new kind of missionary work is going on in the blogosphere, quietly winning hearts and minds through reasoned argument and gentle persuasion. Even so, don't look for us to lower the metaphorical bundling board anytime soon.

"Wonderful theory, wrong species"

Ted Kennedy, horrified that GW appellate-court nominee Judge Janice Rogers Brown has "criticized the New Deal" -- tributary of his own out-of-the-mainstream political career -- tries to convince himself she and other GW nominees are "outside the mainstream." (Senator Edward M. Kennedy Online Office photo)

"The things she says and does could lead other blacks to begin to think independently -- and that in turn threatens the whole liberal house of cards," writes Thomas Sowell re Janice Rogers Brown, associate justice of the California Supreme Court nominated by President Bush for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. In advice-and-consent limbo for more than two years, her nomination is expected to enjoy a coveted up-or-down vote of the Senate in the next few days thanks to last night's "Group of 14" deal, blogged here. "She is a champion of property rights and an opponent of the Nanny State, both of which directly oppose the position of today’s Democratic Party," notes the Blogger News Network. Now here's Judge Brown in her own words, excerpts from a speech to The Federalist Society at the University of Chicago Law School a couple of years back [thanks to blogfriend Mr. Kurtz for the link]. It's full of quotable quotes, and you must read the whole thing to savor the excellence of her thinking, her scholarship and her rhetorical style:

We are living in a world where words have lost their meaning. This is certainly not a new phenomenon. It seems to be an inevitable artifact of cultural disintegration.

It is my thesis today that the sheer tenacity of the collectivist impulse — whether you call it socialism or communism or altruism — has changed not only the meaning of our words, but the meaning of the Constitution, and the character of our people.

[Socialism's] ambitious project was the reformation of human nature. Intellectuals visualized a planned life without private property, mediated by the New Man. He never arrived. As John McGinnis persuasively argues: "There is simply a mismatch between collectivism on any large and enduring scale and our evolved nature." As Edward O. Wilson, the world's foremost expert on ants, remarked about Marxism, 'Wonderful theory. Wrong species.'"

It's the tragic vs. utopian view of human nature we're forever blogging about. Brown continues:

I have argued that collectivism was (and is) fundamentally incompatible with the vision that undergirded this country's founding. The New Deal, however, inoculated the federal Constitution with a kind of underground collectivist mentality. The Constitution itself was transmuted into a significantly different document.

At the risk of being skewered by historians of ideas, I want to suggest that the belief in and the impulse toward human perfection, at least in the political life of a nation, is an idea whose arc can be traced from the Enlightenment, through the Terror, to Marx and Engels, to the Revolutions of 1917 and 1937. The latter date marks the triumph of our own socialist revolution. All of these events were manifestations of a particularly skewed view of human nature and the nature of human reason. To the extent the Enlightenment sought to substitute the paradigm of reason for faith, custom or tradition, it failed to provide rational explanation of the significance of human life. It thus led, in a sort of ultimate irony, to the repudiation of reason and to a full-fledged flight from truth -- what Revel describes as "an almost pathological indifference to the truth."

Can you say Marcusian inversion?

For complex reasons, attempts to impose a collectivist political solution in the United States failed. But, the political failure was of little practical concern, in a way that is oddly unappreciated, that same impulse succeeded within the judiciary, especially in the federal high court.

It thus became government's job not to protect property but, rather, to regulate and redistribute it. And, the epic proportions of the disaster which has befallen millions of people during the ensuing decades has not altered our fervent commitment to statism. The words of Judge Alex Kozinski, written in 1991, are not very encouraging."'What we have learned from the experience of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union . . . is that you need capitalism to make socialism work.' In other words, capitalism must produce what socialism is to distribute." Are the signs and portents any better at the beginning of a new century?

Better watch your back, Teddy. Talking heads are saying Judge Brown's going to be a shoo-in.

Update:  Beautiful Atrocities links with "A Message from Barbara Boxer."

"I can certainly fudge what I say."

"A man who tells lies, like me, merely hides the truth. But a man who tells half-lies has forgotten where he put it," says Claude Raines' Mr. Dryden in "Lawrence of Arabia" (screenplay by Robert Bolt, 1962), foreshadowing by two generations the sorry place to which the postmodern project has led many of our nation's Bush-bashing intellectual elites today.  Take Sy Hersh, investigativoid journalist extraordinaire formerly of the New York Times and most recently of The New Yorker. Chris Muir's cartoon, above, says it all. As Chris Suellentrop wrote in New York Metro yesterday:

There are two Hershes, really. Seymour M. is the byline. He navigates readers through the byzantine world of America’s overlapping national-security bureaucracies, and his stories form what Hersh has taken to calling an “alternative history” of the Bush administration since September 11, 2001.

Then there’s Sy. He’s the public speaker, the pundit. On the podium, Sy is willing to tell a story that’s not quite right, in order to convey a Larger Truth. “Sometimes I change events, dates, and places in a certain way to protect people,” Hersh told me. “I can’t fudge what I write. But I can certainly fudge what I say.”

Bill Clinton's "It depends upon what your definition of is is" comes to mind, of course, not to mention Dan "False but Accurate" Rather's characterization of Bubba:

I think at the core he's an honest person . . . I think you can be an honest person and lie about any number of things.

Then the Boschian horrors of the entire postmodern project, from Rousseau on down, come spilling out. If you've got the time, check out Mark Brittingham's heroic "The Cold War is Not Over: Europe and the Post-Modern Left [from the comments at One Hand Clapping]:

Thus, the Post-Modern [sic] project enjoys both the energy of moral outrage and a philosophical cover for its errors that prevents anyone from undercutting the outrage.  Attempts to point out its philosophical shortcomings are nearly useless because the expressions of this philosophy are maddeningly jargonesque and impenetrable.  In this, Post-Modern Leftism is enormously attractive to any party having a gripe against the modern world.  Every failed state, every ethnic hustler, every ideological movement, every intellectual poseur, and every tyrannical thug has a stake in feeding and propagating this modern variant of Rousseau's Hydra.  Its energetic rise in modern Europe will prove to be one of the great ideological challenges of the 21st century.

We happened to read some of Rousseau in the original French in our undergraduate days, and even then, we knew "the noble savage" never existed except in the utopia-addled minds of reality-challenged intellectuals.

Mugged by reality?

"Ah! Li'l Greenie looks so stark over there in the muddy lot," writes a heartbroken Ann Althouse as she says goodbye to "The Little Car that Could" and gets behind the wheel of Silvio, the sleek, silver Audi TT Coupe (the 6-speed Quattro) that will take her where she's going from now on.

"I don't know if you've noticed, but I'm a political moderate. More than any ideology, I care about rational discourse," writes Ann Althouse:

In the year that I've been blogging, I've taken a lot of different positions, some left and some right. What I've noticed, over and over, is that the bloggers on the right link to you when they agree and ignore the disagreements, and the bloggers on the left link only for the things they disagree with, to denounce you with short posts saying you're evil/stupid/crazy, and don't even seem to notice all the times you've written posts that take their side. Why is this happening? I find it terribly, terribly sad.

We more than admire and respect this learned, thoughtful woman, whose recent posts about the air-bag-cushioned loss of her "L'il Greenie" VW -- who "gave his life for us" -- are sheer poetry.  Not to mention the grace of her writing and her artist's eye for heartstopping beauty in unexpected places like "a scrambled corner of my office desk." But "why is this happening?" caught us up short. It has been ever thus, at least in our experience.

Those of the right, who believe government ought to get out of the way and provide incentives for citizens to become proud, contributing members of society vs. those of the left, who know what's best for us and are into squeezing the money out of the productive citizens' pockets to perpetuate dependency -- humiliation, at bottom -- for the "little people." As for leftists' trashing of a lovely human being like Ann because she writes something they disagree with, we suspect that has to do with the left's current plight of waking up to find themselves on the wrong side of history.

Update:  Ann responds that she is "trying to reach out to the left and say: Behave better! Engage me! But I read [Sissy] as telling me that's hopeless."  Sounds about right.

Update II:  One year later, Ann's post is still alive and well and the talk of the blogosphere.

"What drives the deranged Bush-hating left"

Masaccio's "Expulsion from Paradise" 1427. Fresco. Brancacci Chapel, Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence, Italy

"The old Christian thing was to do good, in the knowledge that we are capable of terrible evil," writes David Warren in what Charles Johnson colorfully describes as "this perceptive column on what drives the deranged Bush-hating left":

But the "new man" believes that he is good in theory, and thus does not recognize the evil in his deeds [Rousseau's "Noble Savage"]. We make a desolation and call it peace.

There you have our post-modernity in a nutshell: an unthinking elision of the moral into the psychological, creating a "nuance" where no nuance exists. And by so doing, the previous translators externalized the evil that Dostoevsky's character had discovered in himself . . . [avoiding] the word "wicked" and usually [putting] the word "spiteful" in its place.

What we see on the streets of Ottawa, instead, is an almost pure fanaticism -- that radical spirit of alienation that ultimately motivatest the Jihadis, too.  This nihilism is the splinter in the heart of our modernity; it rejects everything; it proposes, finally, nothing in its place.  It is the devil himself speaking out of his void, leading finally to the silence of Iago.

And yet the tragedy of these people -- whose fanaticism puts them beyond the pale of give-and-take in party politics, and whose views, should they spread, would take the whole democratic order down with them -- is that they know even less about themselves than they know about the world they condemn. They are angry, but finally they don't know why.

They don't believe in evil, as a category; yet it haunts them externally on every side: "Bush" being only the straw man of the moment. And unlike the actual Mr. Bush, they do not believe in grace, either. They see evil everywhere. They rail, and they rail.

It's the classic tragic vs. utopian view of human nature in its latest manifestation on the canvas of contemporary politics. As we always say, Christian or not, it bears repeating:

We believe deeply that the denial of "life's dark side in ourselves" is the key to what's wrong with the utopianist left world view.