I sometimes wonder . . .

If I've lost my mind. Consider:

The whole William Jefferson debacle. The situation seems clear enough: there was a mountain of suspicion, and a warrant was obtained from a judge and duly executed. As The NRO's "Windows on the Week" points out, casting their prose from Jefferson's point of view:

Stymied, the feds spend nine months trying to get you to cooperate before finally going to a court to seek a carefully limited search warrant. And then they do the search. So then what do you do? You start screaming, naturally. This is outrageous! I am protected by the Constitution! Okay, it’s a little lame, given that the Constitution doesn’t protect felonious behavior. But hey, any port in a storm. And here’s the kicker: When you scream, the House leadership, from Speaker Denny Hastert on down, comes to your defense—staking Hastert’s and his party’s reputation on the claimed constitutional right to use a congressional office to hide evidence of felonies. It’s great for you, but it does leave some people asking: Was that in the Contract with America?

This is an incredible situation in which the law, the politics, and (almost certainly) the truth are all on the side of the GOP. When Howard Dean was asked two weeks ago on Meet the Press if Jefferson, if indicted, should resign, Dean simply said, "Yes," and left it at that. Nancy Pelosi has done everything but load up Jefferson's car for him. The Democrats know that Jefferson ruins everything they've built up as regards "the culture of corruption" since the special prosecutor in the Plame case was appointed. People understand marked bills in a freezer. They understand graft. And thanks to Dennis Hastert, the Dems are about to slip away.

Mark my words: the next time Dean is asked about Jefferson, you'll not hear an answer so straightforward. Of course Jefferson should resign, Dean will say, "but one should not overlook to strong-armed tactics of Alberto Gonzales's Justice Department so on and so on . . . the possibly illegal blah blah blah . . . the separation of powers yada yada . . . even Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, whom I have the greatest respect hummana hummana."

Incredibly--almost defying belief--Jefferson demanded that the contents of the search simply be returned to him. Gonzales and two others at Justice threatened to quit if the White House caved on this, and good for them. President Bush's 45-day cooling-off period seems the best that can be carved out, for the moment.

There is probably one way for the GOP to gain yardage on this, and that is for the old W luck to kick in. George W. Bush has been the most fortunate man in the history of the world when it comes to political enemies: Anne Richards, Al Gore, Terry McAuliffe, John Kerry, Dan Rather, Daily Kos, Moveon.org, Howard Dean, Nancy Pelosi, Cindy Sheehan, Harry Reid. Watch, as spring turns to summer and the silly season approaches, for Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton to parachute in for pro-Jefferson, anti-Bush rallies in front of the Capitol. These will be just what the GOP needs.

Aaargh

Apparently Kyle Farnsworth exists to break the heart of every Yankee fan. His assignment tonight was simple: keep the Royals from scoring in a 4-4 game until the Yankees could make mincemeat of the woeful Kansas City bullpen.

One tragic inning later, 7-4 Kansas City.

Thanks.

Rain delay as I speak, 7-5 KC, bottom of the ninth. This is the team that lost 13 in a row, boys and girls.

Update:Tying run on third, one out . . . Giambi hits into a double play. 7-6 your final, people.

Kyle Farnsworth will have ten million Yankee fans in Bellevue by August.

GOP blunder

Democrat Congressman William Jefferson threw the GOP a life raft, and the GOP turned it into an anvil.

Here was a case singularly qualified to stop the Democratic challenge of "GOP Culture of Corruption" in its tracks: a good old-fashioned case of straight-up bribery circa 1983-93, with memories of ABSCAM and of Leon Rostenkowski's basement resembling the Home Furnishings department at Marshall Field's. Contrasted with Tom DeLay's trial (in which Ronnie Earle seeks to prove that two legal acts equal one illegal act) or Scooter Libby's troubles (a classic case of an investigation in search of a crime if there ever was one), here was something people could understand: marked bills in the freezer, unsavory foreign characters with odd headgear, boxes and boxes of incriminating evidence holed up in an office.

So as NRO makes clear, the GOP folded with four aces.

One must ask: for what? For the principle that a congressional office is a sanctuary? Might one hide kilos of cocaine in one's office? A nuclear suitcase? By all accounts, the FBI did backflips to comply with something about ten spots above the letter of the law. (I'll go way out on a limb and assume the FBI was not blind to the political implications of rifling a black Congressman's office.) But apparently some far-reaching notion of the separation of powers (nothing in the Constitution or the judicial history, by all accounts) would keep the GOP from exploiting this moment for even the smallest political advantage.

George Will was right: if the GOP does lose any chamber, it will have deserved to.

Enron

Via NRO's The Corner: The Enron Verdict. Lay guilty on all counts, Skilling on most.

Strange, how life in Houston has just rolled along these past five years, as more and more criminal activity was revealed.

Also: funny thing. A month ago I was jogging down River Oaks Boulevard, a half-mile stretch of enormous mansions running between Lamar High School and the River Oaks Country Club. Coming the other way was a man: short, gray-haired, apparently in his sixties, the only other individual in sight besides me. We got closer, closer--and as he passed me going the other way, we said hello, and I saw who it was: Ken Lay, in shorts, a t-shirt, and baseball cap. All by himself, out for a walk a few blocks away from the luxury apartment he now (well, for now) lives in.

Just seemed odd--no security detail or anything. Just Ken Lay out for a Sunday stroll.

Farnsworth v Papi, et al

A night after helping Scott Procter and Mike Myers nearly burn Fenway Park to the ground, Kyle Farnsworth comes through in the biggest at-bat of the season. John Harper of the Daily News has the details.

Yanks 8, Red Sox 6

Some victories are like some defeats, and leave you shaking your head.

Like this one. And yesterday.

This week, I've calculated that this is the weakest starting nine Joe Torre has ever run out for an extended length of time.

Matsui out, maybe for the season. Scheff just back from injury. Posada and Damon hurt. Bernie Williams looking old enough to have batted behind Joe Pepitone.

Beyond the starting nine, Shawn Chacon out. Jared Wright maybe missing a start. The Unit apparently trying to re-make himself as Jamie Moyer at the age of 42.

Tonight: the Unit gives up five runs in three innings. Manny, two homers. Big Papi at the plate, bases loaded, go-ahead run on first.

And a Yankee victory.

And: player of the game. Melky Cabrera.

Go figure.

Gore, Part 2

In the coming weeks, we're going to be hearing a lot about Al Gore as a suitable alternative to Hillary in '08. This is true, for three clear reasons.

First, the consensus is growing that Hillary cannot beat the likely GOP nominee in 2008, either Guiliani or McCain. The Dems, really, have no one but themselves to blame, as the single defining characteristic of the contemporary Democratic pol is a visceral, all-consuming hatred of George W. Bush. This may help the Dems this November (I'm dubious) but will do them next to no good in 2008. For the first time in 56 years, since 1952, neither a sitting President nor a sitting Vice-President will be a contender for the Oval Office. What's more, Cheney's not running, nor Jeb, nor Condi. Furthermore, McCain and Guiliani are especially insulated against ties to W., McCain because of his well-known personal animus toward Bush, Rudy for his distance from Washington, and because his heroism on 9/11 was used (mostly by Dems) to flog Bush's supposedly weak performance.

As I wrote yesterday, the challenge to a Hillary candidacy is clear: hold every state Kerry won, then win either Ohio or Florida. Two years out, does this seem like a plausible scenario? Hillary would be more likely to lose Pennsylvania or Wisconsin (or, against Rudy, New York) than make gains on Kerry's run.

(Two digressions here. First, a GOP collapse could always happen. Another terrorist attack throws everything into doubt, and nobody knows about Iraq. Second, the notion of the GOP salivating over a Hillary campaign has familiar echoes from the past, going all the way back to 1968, when the Dems dreamed of facing Nixon; of 1980, when Reagan was seen as a candidate with stronger negatives than Bush 41 or Howard Baker; to 1988, when the Dems openly rooted for Bush to beat Dole in the primaries; to 1992, when the GOP couldn't wait to take on Clinton; and to 2000, when the Dems feared McCain and continued to underestimate Bush 43. Be careful what you wish for. Okay, back to the post.)

These fears on the Dem side have opened the door for Gore. Will he run, and will he win?

Maybe, and no--not the general election, anyway.

Jim Taranto, at Best of the Web , offers three reasons why not. First, the greatest speech of Gore's life was his concession in 2000, indicating he is more relaxed out of politics. Second, the Dems will do whatever the Clintons want. (More to the point, the Clintons destroywhoever gets in their way. If Gore would run, you could expect some plants in the MSM regarding his shortcomings as Vice President and his alleged unelectability.) Third, the climate--the one factor that distinguishes Gore, aside from his position on Iraq--won't always be as cooperative as it was in 2005.

The third point strikes me as the weakest. Gore often begins his speeches by asking a rherotical question in that unctuous, grating tone of his: "Have we been having some crazy weather lately?" He has been known to describe the nine-month period between the Asian tsunami and Hurrican Katrina as "a nature walk through the Book of Revelations." But it doesn't matter. To Gore and his ilk, hot means global warming, cold means global warming; dry, wet, snow, sleet, all mean global warming. No proof, no piece of evidence, will convince them otherwise.

That said, barring a flood that permanently puts the Atlantic Ocean up to the Statue of Liberty's armpit (a common image around the web) people just aren't going to vote on glaciers. Most people know that people have very little to do with climate, and what we could do to affect said climate would require massive sacrifices for minimal results.

What is left then, is Gore himself. And Part 3, tomorrow.

Gore Chic

There was a scene in Part I of the "Election Day" episodes on The West Wingin which one character (Bradley Whitford, in the role of Santos campaign manger Josh) screams about blogs posting exit polls that were almost certainly incorrect. (This is, of course, an echo of early exit polls in the 2004 election that were 60-some percent female, hence slanted Dem, hence non-reflective of the actual actual voting population and a result that launched a thousand HuffPostings.)

Anyway, one of Josh's colleagues tells him not to worry. "Anyone who reads 'Barney's Blog' was up at six forty-five to vote anyway."

The comment is, I think, reflective of a kind of Dungeons-and-Dragons aspect to the Blogosphere. What gets discussed here is not often discussed much anywhere else, even if what gets discussed here shows up in print journalism. It would come as a suprise to a lot of people that 260 million or so American citizens do not known who Scooter Libby is, or how Deibold supposedly stole the 2004 elections, or about a book called The Party of Death. I discovered this world in 2000, dove in for good during Rathergate in 2004, and have remained ever since. So sometimes I follow a story for a week or so before I realize that, by and large, very few people, by and large, have been following as well.

This brings me to this week's blogosphere phenomenon, Gore Chic.

Al Gore is back! Or so we're told.

The first hint of this was in, to be fair, the print version of New York magazine, the My Weekly Reader of the "Everyone I Know Voted For Kerry!" set. In a loving portrait, John Heilemann makes the following points:

1. The previous hurricane season has has vindicated his concern--some call it obsession--with climate change.

2. The current state in Iraq has vindicated his forebodings about the war.

To wit:

The burst of enthusiasm for Gore owes much to his emergence, since 9/11, as one of the Bush administration’s most full-throated critics. On state-sanctioned torture, wiretapping, and, crucially, Iraq, his indictments have been searing and prescient, often far ahead of his party. He has sounded nothing like the Gore we remember—calculating, chameleonic, soporific—from the 2000 campaign. He has sounded like a man, in the words of a top Republican strategist, who “found his voice in the wilderness.”

There is also the anti-Hillary sentiment, a sentiment fueled in equal parts disdain (the anti-war netroots, and all the attendant money) and fear. The plan for Hillary in 2008 is simple: hold every state Kerry won, then win either Ohio or Florida. But Hillary vs. McCain or Guiliani in either state? For once, the Dems seem gripped by the next-in-line protocol that has ruled the GOP since Goldwater--in a narrative that places Hillary in the role of Bob Dole, circa 1996. Heilemann again:

But the Gore boomlet is also being driven by another force: the creeping sense of foreboding about the prospect of Hillary Clinton’s march to her party’s nomination. “Every conversation in Democratic politics right now has the same three sentences,” observes a senior party player. “One: ‘She is the presumptive front-runner.’ Two: ‘I don’t much like her, but I don’t want to cross her, for God’s sake!’ And three: ‘If she’s our nominee, we’re going to get killed.’ It’s like some Japanese epic film where everyone sees the disaster coming in the third reel but no one can figure out what to do about it.”

Then, there is That Movie. An Inconvenient Truth, Gore's global warming movie, essentially a film of a slide show, if you need it, but apparently the hit of both Sundance and Cannes. Arianna swoons--is it possible that Al Gore is actually cool?

He's saying no -- but you can hear the "Run, Al, Run" chant growing louder.

"Democrats are looking everywhere to find their presidential candidate," Graydon Carter told me. "But the solution may be right under their noses."

And I think that the pressure on Gore to run will only increase as we move toward 2008.

Sure, that's a lifetime away in politics. And the shelf-life of movie buzz isn't very long -- I doubt people will be debating the relative merits of X-Men 3 and The Break-Up two months from now, let alone a year and a half.

But the debate over global warming is only going to heat up -- and Gore has a whole campaign planned to ensure that it does.

"We are planning to train a thousand people to be able to deliver the presentation all over the country," he told me, "so we can more quickly reach the tipping point."

And finally, the Kos Kidz bring their 0-21 record to bear. His anti-war bonifides in place, his environmental hectoring finally bearing fruit, Gore is the ideal candidate of disaffected alienation. In a fantasy straw poll, named so specifically because it includes Gore, Gore scores 68% over about a dozen Dem rivals for the nomination.

Money breeds money the way momentum breeds momentum. If the GOP loses one or both chambers in November, Hillary becomes a palatable candidate, as representative of the little-of-this, little-of-that strategy the Dems are attempting. If the GOP stays in control, the Dems will be ready for a psychic purging, and serious money behind him, Gore would emerge as the likely alternative.

Having built all this up, one must ask, will it happen?

No.

More on this tomorrow.

Prediction

Five months out:

Both houses remain GOP. Dustin Hawkins at Townhall.com makes the most persuasive case. Dems keep pointing toward 1994 as the model, but--lacking an agenda--this won't fly. Pretty soon, we will be hearing about 1986: a seven-seat pick-up in the Senate with a GOP president in his second term. Even here, though, the comparison is strained. To truly gauge Senate races, the trick is to go back six years, to the previous election of a particular Senate cluster, and calculate who was elected (usually for the first time) when variables were almost entirely in their favor. (A sports analogy would be Roger Maris, who hit 61 home runs in 1961, when 1) he had a 295-foot right field foul pole to aim at (this was old Yankee Stadium, whose dimensions had been configured to pad Babe Ruth's home run total), and 2) the year of American League expansion, when two new teams introduced 20 pitchers--fully twenty percent of the league--who otherwise would have remained in the minors.) In 1986, a group of first-term Senators were up for re-election, having been brought in via Ronald Reagan's landslide six years earlier, and whose fortunes were tied to Reagan's. With Reagan underdoing second-term blahs, and with rumors of Iran-Contra already circulating, the GOP took a beating.

And what have we this year? In 2000, the Florida imbroglio obscured what was a thrashing for the GOP in the Senate, a loss of five seats (later six, when Jim Jeffords went independent). In 2000, the GOP was at its lowest ebb since 1992; it is almost inconceivable that, six years later, the group that acted as a drag on the party might fall further. Rick Santorum may fall in Pennsylvania (though it will be funny to see the Dems celebrate a victory by a pro-lifer, Bob Casey). Jim Talent (whom I had higher hopes for) may fall in Missouri. But five seats? Don't see it.

In the House, Hawkins writes that no more than twenty-four GOP seats are even competitive, with the GOP leading in sixteen. The Dems need to grab every seat leaning their way, plus reverse half leaning against. Can't be done.

Priorities

The Daily Howler, I've come to realize, is just about the best leftist website around. Mostly a review of--and a criticism--of what resident Howler, Bob Somerby, sees as the laziness and stupidity of the left-leaning media (Matthews, Klein, et al). He has repeatedly asserted that the MSM's habitual repeating of the "myths" surrounding Al Gore (inventing the Internet, discovering Love Canal, being lectured by Naomi Wolf) cost Gore the 2000 election. This is a debatable point. He has lately asserted that the weather calamities of the past year or so prove that Al Gore was right all along. This, too, is a debatable point--though one I find absurd. (I've become a bit of a nut on the subject of the 1900 Galveston Hurricane, a storm that made Katrina resemble a soft summer shower. I don't know that there were two hundred private automobiles in all of the United States in 1900--was the Galveston storm a product of greenhouse gases? Okay, anyway . . .)

Today, The Howler seizes upon a news item we might refer to as The Telling Detail:

A CARTOON PRESS CORPS: Only Elisabeth Bumiller could overlook the mordant humor in her presentation. At the start of this morning’s “White House Letter,” she describes the press corps’ conduct during a recent plane ride:

BUMILLER (5/22/06): Reporters en route to Arizona on Air Force One last week opted to watch the movie ''King Kong'' in the press cabin. Not so Tony Snow, the new White House press secretary and former Fox News commentator, who told reporters that he spent the flight in the staff cabin watching Gen. Michael V. Hayden's confirmation hearings to be the new C.I.A. director—on CNN.

Howler: Got milk—and cookies? While Snow watches Hayden’s confirmation hearings, the “press corps” chooses King Kong!

Readers, let’s review: It’s the middle of a work day. An important hearing is under way. The press corps is stuck on a long plane ride. And they choose to watch an inane, year-old movie! Only Bumiller could offer this fact and fail to see the dark humor involved—the portrait it paints of her hapless cohort, the people who steward our discourse.

Over on NRO's Media Blog, Stepehn Spreuill observes:

These are the same people who were complaining a few weeks ago that they couldn't get anyone to change the channel from Fox News — probably so they could watch Free Willy 3: The Rescue on HBO Family.

I think I'm supposed to write, "Heh."

Yanks v Mets

One of the dark corners of broadcasting is how, on Friday nights, due to contractual loopholes that would bring a smile to the Sphinx, the Yankees aren't usually on on MLB.com. And on Saturdays, the Fox game blanks everything else out, so yesterday, instead of watching a thrilling Yanks-Mets cliffhanger, Houstonians were treated to Cubs v. White Sox.

Sometimes I wonder why I even bother . . .

I remember growing up in Phoenix, which was treated like a suburb of Los Angeles for all CBS Sports cared. With no NFL team (and not caring either way, as Frank Kush's Arizona State Sun Devils were fine with us) a city full of transplanted Easterners and Midwesterners was treated, Sunday after Sunday, to another 10-7 shoveathon courtesy of "Ground" Chuck Knox's 1940s-style offense, a game plan which somehow placed more emphasis on going the width of the field than the length of it.

And yesterday, in order that we might watch the Cubs, we were deprived of this (courtesy NRO's The Corner:

If You're a Mets Fan ... [Andy McCarthy]
that was the most brutal loss in years.

Pedro Martinez was brilliant for seven innings — but the game is NINE innings. I know times have changed, and managers are now ruled by pitch-count rather than the game-situation. But it wasn't so long ago that the very thought that a guy pitching a shutout would come out of the game — any game — after only seven innings was heresy. To come out when it's at home, against the Yanks, with 50,000 screaming fans packing the stadium, and a national television audience ... I can't even wrap my brain around that.

Great contrast: the Yankees' elegant, immortal Mariano Rivera -v- the Mets' new, $10 million-a-year-Mariano-Pretender, Billy Wagner. There was a big, inane to-do at the start of the season over which team now had the better closer. What a joke — like comparing Rembrandt to the guy who painted my living room.

Wagner, asked only to get three outs in the ninth without blowing a four-run lead, imploded — managing to give up two hits, walk three and hit a guy in his 31 pitches of work. He was pulled. The Yanks went on to tie the game, and finally took the lead in the 11th.

Rivera — who took a tough loss last night because Johnny Damon was playing too shallow to get to a catchable fly to center — closed like the thoroughbred he is: making a one-run lead stand up by striking out the side to end the game.

Verrrry bad for us Mets fans. This is the kind of loss that can send a team into a major tailspin ... and Wagner (who is good pitcher even though he's no Rivera — as if anyone is) is probably praying for a long road-trip. He has lost the home fans for the foreseeable future.

For the Yanks, by contrast, this is a big lift. They have a ton of injuries and they played terribly today: four errors, and their comeback happened only because Wagner was awful, not because they did much to deserve their good fortune (although Damon did redeem himself for last night by running hard on an injured foot to beat out what would otherwise have been a game-saving double-play for the Mets). But the Yanks hung in and toughed it out — which is just what they have to do for a while til they get healthier.

UGH!

No, we in Houston were treated to a 7-0 snoozer notable only because the Cubs catcher punched the Sox catcher for no good reason.

The Sports Guy Guy

Bill Simmons, as I've written, is a hero to bloggers everyone, the fellow who quit his job as a sportswriter for the Boston Herald, poured every spare penny into his own personal website, and by dint of effort rose to be The Sports Guy, probably (far and away) the most popular feature on ESPN.com, albeit on Page 2.

The reasons for his full popularity are in full flower with today's feature, his monthly mailbag, during which Simmons inveighs not only on sports, but on the portions of the American pageant a sports freak might be drawn toward, such as "24," Las Vegas, "Survivor," how to deal with a non-sports mate, and which NBA player a straight male might wish to, um, get cozy with.

One characteristic of a great writer is that he seems to be writing just for you; you read, and go yes, and yes, and yes again. When I was young, Richard Braughtigan and Kurt Vonnegut did the trick; later on, Frederick Exley and John Updike; later, Nabokov and Edmund Wilson. Now, this guy. My sentiments are reflected not only in him, but in his readers. One example:

Q: I feel like a teenage girl who was saving myself for Mr. Right but through no fault of my own ended up pregnant in the trailer park with Mr. Mario Williams. Almost three months of my life wasted listening to talk radio and checking the sites and waiting for Reggie with bated breath. My man crush was already in full effect and I was planning my Madden season. I am a grown man with a beautiful wife, good job, and soon a house in the 'burbs. And I just teared up a little bit. I hate sports.
-- Josh, Houston, Texas

SG: And that's why the Texans had to take Reggie Bush -- it's one thing to make a shaky personnel decision, it's another thing to kick your fans in the teeth. I'm becoming more and more convinced that every professional sports team needs to hire a Vice President of Common Sense, someone who cracks the inner circle of the decision-making process along with the GM, assistant GM, head scout, head coach, owner and whomever else. One catch: the VP of CS doesn't attend meetings, scout prospects, watch any film or listen to any inside information or opinions; he lives the life of a common fan. They just bring him in when they're ready to make a big decision, lay everything out and wait for his unbiased reaction.

I mention this only because the Texans would have called in their VP of CS on the night before the draft, explained their Mario Williams plan, and then the VP would have scratched his forehead and said, "Wait, why would we pass on Reggie Bush? Our fans will be devastated -- we can't do that to them. Plus, what if he's fantastic on another team? What if he takes the league by storm? Our fans will be catatonic. Can we even risk it? Why would we risk it? Can't we just take Bush? What's wrong with taking Reggie Bush?"

And then everyone in the room would have gone, "Hmmmmmmmm."

As a Houstonian, I endorse both the letter and the response. As I've said repeatedly, Charlies Casserly, as GM of the Texans, performed the impossible: he has turned Houston, Texas, into a baseball town.

And now he's off to the NFL comissioner's office in some capacity. I fear for football. Can a whole sport finish in last place?

Simmons's entire column is like the above, including a slap-down of some presumptive Vegas tourists who deserve a slap-down:

Q: A few buddies and I are heading to Vegas in about a month. We'll be there for three nights. Where should we stay? We're debating between The Flamingo, The Luxor, and The Tropicana, in that order. Any thoughts or suggestions?
-- Ryan, Arlington, Va.

SG: What are you guys, homeless? If you're looking for a cheap casino, stay at the Monte Carlo -- it's right on the Strip, the dealers are always friendly, there's a surprisingly good vibe there, and they hire their cocktail waitresses directly off the pages of Juggs Magazine. I think it's right around the same price as the three casinos you mentioned, with the added bonus that you might have water pressure in your bathroom and a bed cover that isn't carrying 15,000 different forms of DNA.

Another underrated place is the new Westin casino, right across from Bally's -- the rooms are nice and nobody ever gambles there, so you can play $5 blackjack and crap tables until you pass out. I had a phenomenal craps run there three months ago -- maybe my greatest since the magical Gallo-Simmons Foxwoods run in 1999 that received its own SportsCentury episode -- although it was a little tainted when everyone else at the table didn't applaud at the end. I mean, I carried that table for 40 minutes -- we were a good 10-15 minutes past the whole "Let's applaud this guy for a great effort" point and probably seeping into "I have to catch his eye, give him a nod and profusely thank him for what just happened" territory.

Actually, screw that, I'm not recommending the Westin. I still feel cheated over the whole thing. Stay at the Monte Carlo.

I rather enjoy the Westin, but my enjoyment raises a point. The Westin's rooms are new, clean, with a kind of art deco theme. I went there in March, paid for by McGraw-Hillm, for a professors' forum, and discovered again the sublime thrill John Updike has mentioned, of getting on an airplane with a ticket someone else has paid for. My only problem with the rooms is this: when is anyone in a hotel room in Las Vegas? Most people I know use Vegas hotel rooms to sleep and dress for dinner. This last time, I checked into my room at noon on a Thursday and thought, "Cool, great room," and then I checked out twenty-four hours later and thought, "Shouldn't I have gotten more use out of such a nice room?"

And this is every time I go to Vegas.

How the World Works, Part IV

George Will's writings were a revelation to me--a kind of intellectual distillation of what drew me to politics in the first place, specifically Ronald Reagan's blending of Christian Conservatives, anti-communists, fiscal conservatives and big-business entrepreneurs.

Will was famous as a cheerleader for Reagan: his defense build-up, his re-moralization of the Cold War, his hog-strapping of inflation, his tax cuts and tight money policy that led to a the economic growth we are still feeling, a growth interrupted by only two minor recessions (1991-92, the derailment of Bush '41; and the post- 9/11 headache). At the same time, Will became legendary (among conservative circles) for his nagging observations regarding Reagan's deficit spending (more debt under Reagan that debt than Washington through Carter combined, etc.).

Thing is, Will has thought nothing of stepping off the Republican reservation if he thought the Republicans had turned heretic to the conservative movement. At the time of Reagan's retirement, he placed Reagan at the "front rank of the second rank" of presidents; something that history might well revise upward, on the grounds that Reagan's anti-communism ("Bring down this wall!" and all that rot) far outweighed, and indeed justified, his out-of-control spending. Will excoriated Bush 41 for his ineffectual domestic policies (Bush's foreign policy having proved slightly more successful). And Will has remained true to his small-government, federalist, anti-deficit spending, anti-imperialist roots. He has refused to blindly defend George W. Bush in Iraq, and--almost alone among conservatives--he has openly criticized Bush's NSA wiretapping, in execution if not in theory.

So along comes a Will editorial today: entirely predictable, and I mean that as a compliment. Will, who is at least as intellectually rigorous on his own side as with the opposition, objects to both the rhetoric and the legislative overreach of the so-called "values voters." A sample:

It is odd that some conservatives are eager to promote the semantic vanity of the phrase "values voters." And it is odder still that the media are cooperating with those conservatives.

Conservatives should be wary of the idea that when they talk about, say, tax cuts and limited government -- about things other than abortion, gay marriage, religion in the public square and similar issues -- they are engaging in values-free discourse. And by ratifying the social conservatives' monopoly of the label "values voters," the media are furthering the fiction that these voters are somehow more morally awake than others.

Today's liberal agenda includes preservation, even expansion, of the welfare state in its current configuration in order to strengthen an egalitarian ethic of common provision. Liberals favor taxes and other measures to produce a more equal distribution of income. They may value equality indiscriminately, but they vote their values.

Among the various flavors of conservatism, there is libertarianism that is wary of government attempts to nurture morality and there is social conservatism that says unless government nurtures morality, liberty will perish. Both kinds of conservatives use their votes to advance what they value.

In other words, expansion of the state by way of, say, proscriptions against gay marriage (in the Constitution, for Pete's sake) or the NSA wiretaps (to pick up one of his other points) are a betrayal of the conservative movement. This is an arguable point. More importantly, this is a thread of an argument Will has made again and again and again for going on thiry years, twice a week in the newspaper, once a week in Newsweek, once a week on Brinkley (as I still think of it). For anyone with so much as a cursory examination of American commentary, this would come as no surprise.

By the way, everytime something like this is written, it is interesting to watch the tinfoil-hat group respond.

At Huffpost, the responses take three forms. There is, first, the "Finally, some sense from this guy!" comment:

George Will stomping on the latest Rovian catch phrase? Maybe there is a God...

And second, we have the Bush-is-Satan chrorus, led by this:

i'm a values voter -- and i can't WAIT to do my part to evict the lying, cheating, corrupt, me-centered, regressive, christo-fascist, smug, deviant, murderous, law-evading, paranoid, anti-woman, 'culture of life' f***wads! i only wish i could vote in more than one district!

i have a feeling that, shortly, someone even more powerful than george will is going to call the conservatives out about the absolute hypocrisy of the phrase "values voters." and i'll be popping my organic popcorn and setting up my lawn chair to watch the fireworks.

it is such a pleasure to watch the steady decline and fall of the bush junta.

And extended by this take-a-shot-for-each-moonbat-talking-point response:

Well, gee golly, George has it right for a change. They should be using the phrase "back door Diebolds", or "NH phone jamming", or "FL Hanging Chads", or "weirded out OH exit polls, cut off voters' from rightful precincts," "gerry rigged TX precincts", etc. "Value voters" sounds too kinky, and not truthful at all, like the Bush speak we keep hearing on such words as "democracy", "freedom", or phrases like "Mission Accomplished", "A turning point", "Victory in Iraq", "War on terror" when it is actually a "War on ordinary Americans", etc.

And finally, the lengthy attack on Will featuring an absolute misunderstanding of his body of work:

You can always count on George to write something vapid and irrelavent.
Not everybody is a values voter George. I'm not. I know what a "values" voter really is. Do you EVER tire of pointing out the obvious? What you should be doing is ripping Bush/Cheney unmercifully for destroying your brand of conservatism but you just don't have the balls. And you aren't honest enough. And you write like no one else is smart enough to understand you because you think your smarter than everyone else. It's called condecension George.

You are wrong about what "values voter" means as well. It means you vote Republican because you are a racist gay hater. It means you vote Republican if you value your reputation among your fellow lilly white rich zenophobic neighbors. It's a code word George. It means if you go to church on Sunday you are bound to vote republican because they will stop gay marriage. This is what annoys you George. That "social conservatives"(code for bigot)are so obvious now in their desperate attempts to hold on to power. You know subtlety is important when using race and bigotry and discrimination to attract a base. George these phrases and names of groups are all the rage for your type. Family and Values are on so many fund raising pacs names that it's hard to tell them all apart. Your so full of shit you make me sick. You sit idly by parsing words while your party destroys our country. You don't care because you have yours. That's the only "value" you and your ilk have ever cared about.

You are a phony and a liar always a willing doormat and bootlicker for the Republican Lie Machine. You can't just write stuff and have everybody hail you as some kind of genius George. Theres no law that says we all have to believe your bullshit. We don't. Never did. Never will. Your on your way out and you realize now YOUR own legacy is tainted by your life long association to the Good OLE White Boy establishment. What you thought was going to be a badge of courage is turning into a scarlet letter as you enter your twilight. Too bad. I don't feel sorry for assholes like you George. I'd shut up and retire if I was you and quietly disappear. America has no use for you now other than to ridicule and deride you and we know you can't handle that.

Okay, too easy, I guess. I'm not blind to the fact that gay marriage was helpful to the GOP in 2004. In fact, I'm of two minds. I'm in favor of gay marriage, but, as badly as I wanted Kerry not to assume the position of Commander-in-Chief, I took a certain perverted comfort in the use of the gay marriage issue to thwart Kerry's bid. Shoot me.

However, I bring all this up because I think Will is on to something big: namely a coming rift in the reliable GOP voting bloc, something that nothing less than a presumptive Hillary presidency might fix. There is a decided segment in the GOP that might be determined federalist/realist or pro-defense/libertarian or somesuch. They became famous under Reagan's tent as the "leave us alone" crowd--and as a fifteen year-old in 1980, wanting nothing more than to be left alone by everyone and everything, I saw Ronald Reagan as my standard-bearer. These are the people who understand that the price of gas is a product of worldwide market value, that it will go up in the summer and down in the fall. They know that the current three-tiered immigration bill is a sham, that the GOP has been nonfeasant in its ability to control spending, that the free speech restrictions known as "campaign finance reform" are a restriction of our most basic rights. We see the evangelicals as what they are: as a means to getting our people in, as a necessary element (we would never say evil, because we sort of like them, and to a certain extent admire them) to electing our people.

Abortion? Probably,l reluctantly, pro-choice, but anti-partial birth.

Affirmative action? Against.

Eminent domain? As for recent Court decisions, don't start with us. Outside of tax cuts, our admiration for Bush's domestic policies stops with his judges, notably Roberts and Alito.

Gay marriage? some are (like me) in favor, some against, most really don't care. If a dude wants to get it on with another dude, who are we to mind? But, in keeping with our philosophy, we don't want things jammed down our throats by the Massachusetts Supreme Court. Should one partner be allowed to go on another's health plan? Yes.

We make up, let me wildly guess, thirty to forty percent of the GOP voting bloc, though every time I think of us I revise my numbers upward. And the one thing--the only thing that kept us on the reservation and out there, voting, in 2004 was who would lead us in the fight against Islamofascism.

My group's support for Bush's war has not wavered, though we might be upset here or there as regards its execution. But what Will has put his finger on is the disenchantment we have toward a free-spending, rights-ignoring, simple truth-denying administration that cannot see beyond its nose.

Yes, as soxblog pointed out today, Bush has gotten the big things right. That, plus a robust economy, may help them in November. But--as with Al Gore's stumbles in 200--given the facts on the ground, it will be far, far, closer than it should be.

Re: SUV

A reader from Scottsdale (okay, my sister-in-law Karen) writes:

Although I have a Jeep Cherokee and my sister has a Rodeo, neither of us has a third row of seats, like in the big SUVs (and the guys both drive more gas conscious sedans). Unfortunately this means that anytime Lori & I want to go somewhere with Ella, Stephen & Alexis (which is multiple times a week) we have to take two cars. I can guarantee you that the next time either of us buys a car it will be a large SUV with a third row of seats (and keep in mind my sister Lori is purchaser of all natural, biodegradable cleaning products. . . a protect-the-environment kind of gal). We would like to do the right thing, as well as save money on gas, but unless we want to pull a Britney Spears and put Lori's infant on our lap, looks like we are stuck with taking two cars for now.

Indeed.

Great minds, etc.

What I wrote last week:

The war against SUVs is one of those endlessly fascinating sideshows of American life, waged by people who are either uninformed or myopic or both. It seems that half the people on HuffPost raging against the Vehicle of Satan travel by private jet. And Andrew Sullivan, who seemingly ranks SUVs two notches below torture, betrays an almost touching ignorance of the duties and obligations involved in raising a family. When one mother wrote Sullivan to state, Look, I've got three kids, they legally all must be in child seats, and an SUV is pretty much the only vehicle large enough, Sullivan's incredible response was, Well, why not put them in a station wagon? The answer to that, of course, is that current child restraints are about as big as bathtubs, and that a mother and father could squeeze one or two of the smaller ones (infant-3 years) in a station wagon--and only if no else rode in the car. My youngest brother's three kids--two of them extremely tall for their ages--would not fit in his car were it not for the third row of seats. Beyond that, the saving in gas between an SUV and a standard mid-sized--a Taurus, say--is marginal at best, so even if a bachelor drives his SUV to work alone he's scarcely doing any harm, at least not enough for it to be anyone's business.

What my newly adopted hero, Mark Steyn, in a review of Frank Gaffney's book War Footing, wrote this week:

The telegram has been replaced by the email and the Victrola has yielded to the CD player, but, aside from losing the rumble seat and adding a few cupholders, the automobile is essentially unchanged from a century ago. Yet as long as industry "reform" is intended to force Americans into smaller, less comfortable, less safe vehicles, it's hard to see anyone taking it seriously. (As a world-class demography bore, by the way, I don't think it's coincidence that the only Western country with healthy birth rates is also the one that drives around in the biggest vehicles: the nanny state can't mandate bulky child seats and then require a young family to drive around in a Fiat Uno.)

Tears bedim these eyes.

Been gone!

I've been gone for two days. Not that anyone cares, but you wouldn't believe the trouble I've seen.

That aside. Two outs, bottom of the ninth. Posada. Two-run ding-dong.

AAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!

There are teams I've admired, teams I've rooted for. Four teams I've loved: Larry Bird's Celtics, Jake Plummer's Sun Devils, Pete Carroll's Trojans, and--head and shoulders above them all--the Yankees of Torre, Jeter, Rivera, and Bernie. What a ride.

Funny thing is, eight years ago this month, in a similar game, I sat in Arlington and saw the Yanks choke away a 9-2 lead to scratch out a 16-14 victory against the same Rangers. David Wells started, and he bitched about Yankee fielding so much that Torre and Jeter (who actually liked Wells, which wasn't easy) called him out to the extent that, two starts later, he pitched a perfect game.

These were the 1998 Yankees, maybe the greatest team ever, a team that could win a game 16-14, and come out the next day and win 2-1. With Yankee teams, post-2000, the Achilles heel has always been the seventh and eighth inning, the everlasting pursuit for Stanton, Nelson, Mendoza. Will Proctor, Farnsworth, Dotel fill the bill, set the stage for Rivera? Time will tell.

For now: Posada. To quote Vin Scully: Long fly ball, deep right field, SHE IS GONE!

Van Helsing and Mother's Day

Today, a special Mother's Day tribute. I wrote a week ago that Cinco Paul turned me on to movies--not entirely, though. When my brothers and I were young, my father was often away on business, my mom would--more than anything--take us to the movies. Sometimes it would be all of us to something PG (Rocky, The Bad News Bears). Sometimes she would leave my brothers with a babysitter and take me to something R: North Dallas Forty, . . . And Justice For All. Occasionally she would break down and take one or both of my younger brothers along with me to somethng R; most memorably, Saturday Night Fever, whose language she dismissed by saying, "Well, you know, they dolive in New York." (My mother, who grew up in New Jersey, was well acquainted with the notion that to say "F-- you" to someone before noon was to say, "Good morning," and to shout "Get the f--- out of here," was to express mild disagreement.)

So, as a special Mother's Day Tribute, I will take on the Van Helsing movie quiz from Jim Emerson's blog, with my best mom-guesses wherever I can.


1) What film made you angry, either while watching it or in thinking about it afterward? The Contender. I understand that Republicans will always get slammed in Hollywood, but their portrayal here was downright ghoulish. For my mom, The Silver Bears, a film she saw with my father and trashed to me the next morning, a film notable almost entirely as the film debut (and, leaving aside Leno-as-Leno portrayals, his more or less curtain call) of Jay Leno.

2) Favorite sidekick Me: Paul Reiser's Modell in Diner. Mom: Hmm. Have to think about that one.

3) One of your favorite movie lines Me: "What'd you do, place?" (Woody Allen in Love and Death, in reponse to a fellow soldier's saying "He was our village idiot.") Mom: "I'm majoring in Gavin." (Jessica Lange, Everyone's All-American).

4) William Holden or Burt Lancaster? Me: Burt, due to Atlantic City. Mom: William Holden, due to Picnic (see next).

5) Describe a perfect moment in a movie. Me: DeNiro and Pacino in the coffee shop in Heat. Mom: Holden and Novak's dance in Picnic.

6) Favorite John Ford movie Me: Liberty Valance. Mom: none.

7) The inverse of a question from the last quiz: What film artist (director, actor, screenwriter, whatever) has the least–deserved good reputation, artistically speaking. And who would you replace him/her with on that pedestal? Me: Oliver Stone should be replaced with . . . nobody. Mom: dunno.

8) Barbara Stanwyck or Ida Lupino? Double Indemnity, The Lady Eve--I'll say Stanwyck, and I'll bet Mom votes with me.

9) Showgirls-- yes or no? Harmless stuff, but I'll vote no. Don't even bother asking my mom.

10) Most exotic or otherwise unusual place in which you ever saw a movie I once saw Happy Together upstairs at Star Pizza. My mom went with her mom to see Butterfield 8 at Radio City Music Hall.

11) Favorite Robert Altman movie Me: Nashville, by a nose. My mom: I'm guessing The Player.

12) Best argument for allowing rock stars to participate in the making of movies Can't think of one for either of us.

13) Describe a transcendent moment in a film (a moment when you realized a film that just seemed routine or merely interesting before had become become something much more) The Rocky-Mickey reconciliation scene in Rocky. My mom always talks about Holden and Novak, so I'll leave that here, too.

14) Gina Gershon or Jennifer Tilly? Me: Gershon. My mom: I'm guessing Tilly, after Bullets Over Broadway.

15) Favorite Frank Capra movie For both of us, I'll say It's a Wonderful Life.

16) The scene you most wish you could have witnessed being filmed Me: Paul Newman's summation in The Verdict. My mom: I'm guessing here, but when the professor reads Redford's story in The Way We Were.

17) Robert Ryan or Richard Widmark? Me: Widmark, after he pushed the woman in the wheelchair down the stairs. Mom: she'll probably go Widmark, for his solid career.

18) Name a movie that inspired you to walk out before it was finished Me: Grand Prix. Went when I was fiove or six with my mother's mom (Nanny, we called her).I couldn't get into the drama and found the endless racing boring, and asked to leave, so we did. My mom: never heard tell.

19) Favorite political movie I, and probably my mom, would choose All The President's Men.

20) One-sheet you'd like to have Me: Swingers. Don't know about my mom.

21) Jeff Bridges or Jeff Goldblum? You're kidding, right? Bridges in a walk, from both of us.

22) Favorite Ken Russell movie Next question

23) Accepting the conventional wisdom that 1970-1975 marked a golden age of American filmmaking in which artistic ambition and popular acceptance were not mutually exclusive, what for you was this golden age’s high point? (Could be a movie, a trend, the emergence of a star, whatever) I'll say the two Godfather movies, and I think Mom agrees.

24) Grace Kelly or Ava Gardner? Me: Kelly. Mom: I'm thinking Kelly, not least for her work with Cary Grant.

25) With total disregard for whether it would ever actually be considered, even in this age of movie recycling, what film exists that you feel might actually warrant a sequel, or would produce a sequel you’d actually be interested in seeing? Me: Excellent question. First, LA Confidential deserves a sequel called White Jazz, another book by James Ellroy. Second, Coppola needs to make amends by directing Godfather Part IV, something along the lines of II, with Andy Garcia as Vincent and flashbacks to Michael Imperioli as young Sonny, with DeNiro as the middle-aged Don. I ran the second of these past my mom and she agrees.

Anyway: Happy Mother's Day, Mom, and go Sun Devils (save when they play the Trojans).

In defense of us

First this: something happened to both my desktop and my laptop: the band that shows the URL of whatever I'm reading somehow went on the blink. So links are out until I fix this.

So I'll simply write this.

Byron York (at present, my role model in all things, a reporter as well as commentator), writes this at NRO from John McCain's commencement address at Liberty University:

While McCain's speech at Liberty University was about reconciliation, he did take a jab or two at the occasional villain. Like…bloggers:

When I was a young man, I was quite infatuated with self-expression, and rightly so because, if memory conveniently serves, I was so much more eloquent, well-informed, and wiser than anyone else I knew. It seemed I understood the world and the purpose of life so much more profoundly than most people. I believed that to be especially true with many of my elders, people whose only accomplishment, as far as I could tell, was that they had been born before me, and, consequently, had suffered some number of years deprived of my insights. I had opinions on everything, and I was always right. I loved to argue, and I could become understandably belligerent with people who lacked the grace and intelligence to agree with me. With my superior qualities so obvious, it was an intolerable hardship to have to suffer fools gladly. So I rarely did. All their resistance to my brilliantly conceived and cogently argued views proved was that they possessed an inferior intellect and a weaker character than God had blessed me with, and I felt it was my clear duty to so inform them. It’s a pity that there wasn’t a blogosphere then. I would have felt very much at home in the medium.

Okay, me again. Couple of comments:

1. If McCain thinks the blogosphere is the bastion of the uninformed young, he's crazy. The notion of a nineteen year-old sophomore blogging on Bushhitlermustdie.org in some Founders' Hall someplace is the popular cliche of the genre, but it is woefully misinformed. Dean Barnett, the sainted Soxblog, goes over his hate email every day and has written more than once about the explosion of pissy, hateful bloggers in the over-40 category.

2. One of the wonderful things about the blogosphere is its utter meritocracy. Come to play, or don't come. Be good or be gone. Idiocies are exposed fairly rapidly (for this, see Cole, Juan, who nevertheless may end up tenured at my pal Cinco Paul's Yale University), and inaccuracies are pounced upon. The blogosphere has taken by storm the educated over-40 set, those who have peddled idiocies since their respective ages of reason, and now have to watch said idiocies pounded to bits. No, Super Bowl Sunday is not the number-one day for spousal abuse, if for no other reason than that during a football game a husband is either unaware of his wife's existence or shocked by her fanaticism for the home team (see McDade, Roseanne). No, Thomas Jefferson never wrote "Dissent is the highest form of patriotism." No, George Bush 41 wasn't stunned into rapture by a supermarket scanner (for no other reason than trade shows do not exist to push seven year-old technology.) Again and again, it's more often people my own age who push the nonsense, and less so people my students' age.

3. Finally, a story along those lines. Two summers ago, June 2004, I was at a conference at Evergreen State, in Washington State, near Olympia. This is one of those woodsy, fanatical leftist colleges that post, outside the library, signs proscribing perfume. Perfume! Anyway, the people I dealt with at the conference were marvelous and filled with humor--until it came to the hated Bush. This happened to be the week that Farenheit 9/11 opened up in Seattle, and on the Thursday night of the week I was there, a group of professors drove an hour north to Seattle, then waited two hours in line to see it. The following day, all were predictably swooning over the event. One of them, knowing I was from Houston, told me, "You'd better see it here. You know they're going to try and close it down in Texas."

They're going to try and close it down in Texas.This from a doctorate, a professor, for God's sake, in her early 50s. When I went home to Houston, I emailed her that the movie was playing in a theatre not four miles from Bush 41's house. Her response was, Really, how can he live with the shame?

The Other Joe McDade

Was googling myself, seeing how far up the food chain this particular corner of heaven had moved, and came across this re my namesake in Talkleft.com. Fourth item. I had always known about Rep. McDade's legal troubles, but I was stunned to find who else was involved, and what became of him.

Our readership and "The West Wing"

So far: My parents, my sister-in-law, my high school friend Cinco, my work friend James Wright, stranger-just-a-friend-I-haven't-met Chumly Felix from Pennsylvania. These are the ones I know about.

"West Wing" fans among them: zero.

So, in that spirit, my latest review:

Not with a bang but a . . . not exactly a whimper, but what now?

I was a late convert to "The West Wing." I spent the first four seasons--the Sorkin seasons--catching the show every third or fourth episode and thinking, Well, that's nice. I saw the agenda (Clinton + Kennedy + Galbraith - any whiff of sexual scandal) and was put off; it seemed that the left wing had created a robot president for its own purposes. It was not until BRAVO, until way ast 9/11, that I began to realize the majesterial quality of the writing and acting, the way the show rewarded a viewer's attention.

It is with almost a sense of grief that I ponder over the last few episodes. The run-up to the election, the debate, the nuclear accident, Election Days I and II--all of these shows brought back the marvelous tension of November, 2004, and the sight of Michael Barone flipping through county-by-county polling data in Ohio. Since then? We've buried Leo, in an episode I suppose could go no other way. We've seen Josh melt down for the fiftieth time, and then go on vacation--for two episodes. Sam Seaborn has appeared, then disappeared, for the same two episodes--NBC or the production company didn't even think to shell out the bucks for a C.J.-Sam reunion this past Sunday. Could we just have had Sam in the bullpen, minding the store in Josh\'s absence? Would a thirty-second hello have killed anyone?

One must let a great TV show, like a Brett Favre, go out on its own terms. "St. Elsewhere" had its autism, "Newhart" its it's-all-been-a-dream sequence, "Cheers" its life-goes-on-tomorrow. Perhaps only "Hill Street Blues" hit precisely the right chord, with blameless Norm Buntz thrown off the force at the end of an otherwise (in the words of Joyce Davenport) "better than break-even day." "The West Wing" has decided to go the soft route, wrap a few details up, put C.J. with Danny, make Charlie C.J.'s assistant, put Josh with Donna, Sam with Josh, Vinick in Foggy Bottom, Santos's kids in public school and Bartlet back in New Hampshire. Fair enogh, but is there anything else? Who will be Vice President? Not Vinick, not C.J., so does anyone care?

One other note. NBC's decision not to film a "West Wing" retrospective (and instead simply replay the show's first episode) is shabbiness of high order. "The West Wing" is one of the best ten TV dramas in history--it deserves better.

The Left Wing

Via Mary Katherine Ham at Hugh Hewitt, the Media research Center's Top Ten Left Wing Moments From the Left Wing.

Look, I love "The West Wing." I took its liberal politics as read from the start, the emoptional craving its creators had for a Clinton who kept his thing in his pants. The only time I found the enterprise objectionable was when one character (usually Bartlet or C.J.) went off on a left-wing rant that kept everyone stunned into silence by its brilliance. (There are parallels, believe it or not, to Mike and the Mad Dog on WFAN--a thought for another time.) Ham provides the best example, CJ.'s anti gun screed:

"This is our fifth press briefing since midnight and obviously there is one story that's going to be dominating the news around the world for the next few days and it would be easy to think that President Bartlett, Joshua Lyman and Stephanie Abbott were the only people who were victims of a gun crime last night. They weren't. Mark Davis and Sheila Evans of Philadelphia were killed by a gun last night. He was a biology teacher and she was a nursing student. Tina Bishop and Belinda Larkin were killed with a gun last night. They were twelve. There were 36 homicides last night, 480 sexual assaults, 3,411 robberies, 3,685 aggravated assaults, all at gunpoint. If anyone thinks those crimes could have been prevented if the victims themselves had been carrying guns I'd only remind you that the President of the United States was shot last night while surrounded by the best-trained armed guards in the history of the world. Back to the briefing."

The lack of logic in this is breathtaking (is she advocating that armed guards do the president no help?). Instead of someone saying, "But wait a minute . . . ." The show has Danny turn to Leo and say "She's good" in reverent tones.

Also, with Mother's Day tomorrow, a thanks to my mom for turning me on to Hewitt.

I heart Lileks!

Wow. Wow. I pump Lileks today, now this.

A sample:

. . . and Jack Bauer will not be able to save you this time, my friend. If there is an attack on our country we will double our aid to the Iraqi patriots, double our funding to Hezbollah and its female auxiliary wing Sisboombah, and double again our attempts to secrete through your borders weapons both chemical and biological.

Ah – er, reduce everything I said in the previous paragraph by half. We will START doing those things. Yes, that is the thing that is the ticket: start. We will also use our fearsome weapons of unspeakable lethality to destroy your planes before they are even built, let alone launched. We can sink your mighty aircraft carriers by shouting in unison, so great is our national will.

Oh. My. Gawd.

The World Around Us, Part III

I came late to the internet, late to blogging, late even to the use of a computer as a research tool. As late as 1996--and it embarrasses ne to recall this--I forbade my Comp II students from counting internet research as one of their five mandatory sources. I used to hold mandatory scavenger hunts in my composition class (based on Prof. Kingsfield's use of same in the TV version of "The Paper Chase") that compelled students to hunt through the University of Houston or Rice Library, to Xerox and list each item in turn ("an article published in Time magazine the week you were born"). Do a scavenger hunt on the internet? Never. I'd spent 13 years of higher education in those smelly old stacks, so they could damn well spend one Saturday afternoon.

It was through National Review that I made two discoveries. The first was in the mid-nineties, when a NR article I read aadvanced the notion of newspapers delivered through telephone wires or even through the air, the notion of sitting in a jet plane at thirty thousand feet and I paraphrase, "reading Anthony Lewis on your laptop." (Deliberate ugh line, but I was fascinated.) My next discovery I remember distinctly. Spring, 2000: I was walking through the faculty room at one of our campuses and saw a scrap of paper on the desk. I picked it up, saw it was something typically trenchant and graceful by George Will--but at an unusual length, five or six paragraphs. The subject was a chuckle (if that's correct) about how many environmentalists were being driven crazy by SUV purchases.

(Pause here. The war against SUVs is one of those endlessly fascinating sideshows of American life, waged by people who are either uninformed or myopic or both. It seems that half the people on HuffPost raging against the Vehicle of Satan travel by private jet. And Andrew Sullivan, who seemingly ranks SUVs two notches below torture, betrays an almost touching ignorance of the duties and obligations involved in raising a family. When one mother wrote Sullivan to state, Look, I've got three kids, they legally all must be in child seats, and an SUV is pretty much the only vehicle large enough, Sullivan's incredible response was, Well, why not put them in a station wagon? The answer to that, of course, is that current child restraints are about as big as bathtubs, and that a mother and father could squeeze one or two of the smaller ones (infant-3 years) in a station wagon--and only if no else rode in the car. My youngest brother's three kids--two of them extremely tall for their ages--would not fit in his car were it not for the third row of seats. Beyond that, the saving in gas between an SUV and a standard mid-sized--a Taurus, say--is marginal at best, so even if a bachelor drives his SUV to work alone he's scarcely doing any harm, at least not enough for it to be anyone's business. Okay, back to the post.)

I saw the url of Will's missive: nationalreviewonline. This was funny: my favorite magazine had an online version? I knew so little of the internet that it took me a half-hour's serious typing to find the home page of National Review Online.

(Pause again. National Review distilled my thinking, as an insitution, the way George Will did as an individual. My only regret was that it took until 1987, when I was in graduate school and the course of my career was in motion, for me to discover The Most Consequential Small Magazine Ever. Even in the relatively conservative confines of USC, there was a decided liberal bent to the editorial pages of the Daily Trojan, the only real outlet for expression on campus. There was no Dartmouth Review, no Heterodoxy, no publication to cause this-or-that grievance group to steal, then destroy, an entire press run. I had come to USC expecting to transfer into the film school, but was bored to death by camera and lighting classes. This was my stab at journalism, but I only felt at home in the Entertainment Department, and I knew I didn't want to go to some paper in Iowa and do puff pieces about local theatre while waiting for the in-house film critic to die. So, it was off to the English Department.)

(Pause again, Part II. When, in 1987, as a graduated student at Binghamton University, I came across Natinal Review, I thought--as I've thought a few other times--that God had read my mind. To turn the page and say yes, yes, and yes again. My first year in Houston, I developed a every-other-Saturday afternoon ritual: drive of the laundromat on Alabama and Shepherd, load my clothes in the wash, cross Alabama, cross Shepherd, buy the newest NR at Bookstop, buy a big cookie at the old Whole Foods next door, come back, load the dryer, and read while the clothes spun behind the glass circle. Good times. Okay, back to the post.)

It amazed me how much my life changed in about two weeks: discovering links, web pages, Jonah Goldberg, etc. George Will was published sporadically in the Houston Chronicle; one would have to wait years for a new book to take in his view of events years past. Here I could read him, every Thursday and Sunday. The effect on my was as if Bartleby the Scrivener had been shown a Xeros machine and electricity on the same day. When I had been in Binghamton I needed to cross the campus every morning for the Daily News and Post, then--around four, before an early dinner--make my way to the news stand in the Student Union for the delivery of that morning's New York Newsday. Now? Fiteen hundred miles away, and Mike Lupica, Phil Mushnick, and Roger Ebert were a few key strokes away.

Then there was this: finding brilliance I never would have discovered otherwise. Mark Steyn. Michael Kelly. And James Lileks, a Twin Cities columnist whose daily "bleats" move so effortless from this . . . .

On the way to Target I was listening to the Medved show; he had a fellow who was parsing the particulars of the Iranian President’s missive. Since this was HATE RADIO, of course, you could expect all the callers to demand the expunging of Persia from the crust of the globe, right? Well, one after the other: callers defending the Iranian president. Progressives who regarded any talk of an Iranian threat as a fear-mongering distraction. Muslims who accused the host of a Zionist agenda. Right-wing isolationists. Christians who agreed with the Iranian prez: why, this was a sinful nation. Of course, the show always skews towards the disagreeing call, but it was still immensely depressing. Mind you: the guest was against attacking Iran. The show’s topic wasn’t even how to handle the nuclear threat. The topic was the Iranian president’s letter, and the phone banks were full of people who agreed with it.

When your world view is made up entirely of round holes, your mind is a lathe that can turn everything into a cylinder.

. . . . to this . . .

And then the grocery store. They had a sale on, God help me, DaVinci cheese. I couldn’t help wonder whether this was a movie tie-in. But no, it’s part of a series of “masterpiece” cheeses, all named after famous painters. The Vincent VanGogh is particularly good, as is the Rembrandt, but I’m waiting for the Dali (looks solid, but it’s actually quite runny) or the Duchamp, served up in giant pink wheels that look like urinal cakes. Or the Michelangelo, aged 80 years and very bitter. Or the multi-artist sampler, called the Vasari. Ba-dum bum! Art history major humor! Can’t get enough.

. . . to this . . .

Today I left a handwritten note weighed down by a rock for the contractors. Should they show, anyway. It’s my best guarantee of getting my point across. By noon today the water in the top tank was down another inch since the previous night; by three it was down another inch, which means the Oak Island Water Feature, after their repairs, leaks more. The note was simple: It has been one month since you restarted repairs. The project still leaks. The project still drains. Fix it. Now.

I left the note, not expecting anyone to come. After all, it was sunny and warm, a perfect day for working . . . on someone else’s project. Someone else who still has goodwill to be wasted. But when I came back two hours later, the note was gone – apparently they’d showed up to check the water level. This constitutes “work” – not showing up Monday, showing up Tuesday to fill it up, then showing up Wednesday to check the level. As opposed to calling me, say, FRIDAY, and asking if I’d fill it up Sunday and call them Monday morning with the results. But of course I’m thinking like a homeowner, not a contractor. If there’s anyone deaf to the sound of Time’s Winged Chariot, it’s a contractor. Time slows, expands, moves sideways, becomes a 2-dimensional Mobius loop, refracts into anti-time, wherein the project actually moves backwards.

Anyway, the note was gone, so I expect someone to come by tomorrow and take the thing apart some more and engage in more inefficacious jiggerypokery. They have until June the First.

After that: the nuclear option.

Again: Good times.

The World Around Us, Part II

In my lifetime, a few things have changed not at all, or barely, and a few things have changed a great deal. The quality and safety of cars and planes has changed, but the speed of transportation has about held constant. A long-distance drive usually rounds out to a mile per minute, a cross-country flight is four hours.

Wait, let me start over. What has changed in my lifetime--the greatest and most comprehensive change I have known--has been in the area of communication. I can remember when there were six television stations on my hometown of Phoenix: the three networks, PBS, KPHO (one of the leading independent stations in the country) and Channel 15.

(Wait, while I'm writing here, I should pause and mention the Channel 15 of the late seventies and early eighties. This is a station that deserves a sliver of Phoenix history, a station reknowned for allowing 60s-70s TV shows a last blaze of glory before consignment to the dustbin: "Room 222," "The Partridge Family," and so on. It was also slightly known for its mid-day feature, "Good News Only," during which an anchor, "Jovial" Jack O'Reilly, sat in a swivel chair and read from a sheef of typescript he held in one meaty hand. There was also the case of the Channel 15 helicopter, the Bluebird of Happy News, piloted by a fellow whose name escapes me. We were treated to reports from the helicopter, and shots of the pilot climbing the building stairs to the helicopter, all of which--I think--was designed to obscure the fact that the Bluebird of Happy News, the helicopter, did not, in fact, exist. Finally: For awhile, every night at seven, Channel 15 would give way to a pay-movie station called ON TV, which my friend Bobby Paoletti's house had until it went out of business in 1982. Okay, back to the post.)

It is hard to explain to people about the march of technology in the last thirty years. Until I turned twenty-two or so, I would watch two baseball games a year on TV: NBC's Game of the Week, with Joe Garagiola and Tony Kubek (and, later, Vin Scully with Garagiola, and Bob Costas and Kubek in the B game), then Al Michaels with Tim McCarver and Jim Palmer on ABC's Monday Night Baseball. For a Yankees-Red Sox or Yankee-Oriole game, especially for NBC, my family would plan a day in advance, would actually shopfor hot dogs and chips to enjoy with the game. What else was there? Middle of the week, Catfish v. Spaceman, and we would have to rely on--maybe--the local news getting the score. There was no ESPN, no sports radio, no internet. Here we were, the last quarter of the twentieth century, and communication was blocked off to us. We had no way of knowing the score.

Now? Twelve gsmes a night on our package. Instant scores on the internet. Fifteen outlets providing updates. Amazing, man.

Just one example.

The World Around Us, Part 1

From Scottsdale Arizona comes this from our most loyal reader: No more office memos! Stick to the news of the world!

Just finding my way here. Blogs seem to exist on a continuum, from soxblog,(who not only shies away from personal commentary, but sneers at people--see Sullivan, Andrew--who indulge in it) to The Irish Trojan, who cheerfully, unapologetically shares the X-Rays of his broken arm and the progress of his finals studies at Notre Dame Law School. (I'll say this for Irish--he is perhaps the only person on earth who could sell tickets to a slide show of his family's trip to Yellowstone.) Me, more of a middle line. Little bit of my life, much more of the world around us.

(I re-read the above paragraph and realized I should throw in a full disclosure, which used to be known as "name-dropping": I've gone in with Irish Trojan and three others in the rental of some bandwidth, something Irish apparently knows everything about and me next to none, other than what the final product will look like, but I'm witholding all queries until he finishes his finals and drives to his summer clerkship at a law firm in my boyhood hometown in Phoenix. See: read Irish Trojan, and you get to know him that well.)

Three stories about the world around us. Part One: George Bush and his Fish. I saw a small headline on Huffpost Monday, in which President Bush counted as the greatest moment in his Presidency the occasion of catching a 7.5-pound perch in his Crawford ranch lake. This seemed, at the moment, no more than a sneer by the Huffers, who seize upon every possible moment--no matter how small, no matter how juvenile--to expose the President as Chimpy McHitler. Anyway, I looked at the headline, forgot about it and moved on with my life.

Until this morning, where via the left-wing (but sensible) Daily Howler I learned that this had become a big story, at least one of the top five, according to Keith Olbermann. Howler picks it up, by quoting Olbermann (Howler quotes in bold):

OLBERMANN (5/8/06): I`ve got 33 questions about Hayden, but let`s get the fish thing out of the way first. The president obviously wasn’t serious, but he wasn’t misquoted either, it wasn’t mistranslated. He answered seriously about his worst moment as president. Why didn’t he answer seriously about his best moment? And why does this weird joke seem to have resonated so strongly on the Web and on talk radio?

Really? It was “obvious” that Bush was joking? In fact, we would have thought that was obvious too. But it hadn’t seemed obvious at Digby’s own site, where Tristero, quaking with rage at this outrageous statement, worked his way inside a Bold Leader’s head. We’re sure that Tristero is a fine dude. But what follows is utterly foolish. And increasingly, this is who we’ve become:

TRISTERO: There are, [in my opinion], only three ways to understand this comment, assuming it's true. Quite possibly it's the pathetic whine of a deeply, perhaps clinically depressed man who believes himself a total failure. Or maybe this is a man so uninterested in his job, let alone in serving his country, that he has no business whatsoever being president. Or perhaps this is simply an arrogant bastard who holds in utter contempt anyone who dares to ask him a question, so he responds with the stupidest thing he can say. (Obviously, nothing precludes all three or some combination of two.)

The fourth possibility—that Bush was joking—doesn’t seem all that “obvious” here. But wait a minute! Tristero may have considered that option, although it isn’t clear:T

RISTERO (continuing directly): To be all pre-emptive about it, someone's bound to comment that maybe this just shows how much of a down-to-earth regular guy Bush is.
Yeah? All the down-to-earth regular guys I know don't have their own lake, fer chrissakes. Those people are filthy rich, even if they wear jeans on their estates. But there's a character thing here, too. The down-to-earth people I know who hold important jobs are mighty proud of of what they do and mighty happy with their achievements. And they can tick them off without thinking too hard about what they might be. And, even as a joke, they don't talk about catching a big perch when a newspaper asks them to name their best moment in more than five years. They name their accomplishments. Or, if they're trying to play up the down-to-earthiness, they name their children or something they did with their spouse.

Soon, Tristero was transmitting insight from another source—and debunking the thought that it would have mattered if Bush had been joking:

TRISTERO: One of the trackbacks informs us that Bush was laughing when he boasted of this. As if that makes it any less bizarre a statement—that's just the old "I'm jes' regular folks" nonsense Bush pulls, to distract people from the fact that he's a rich prick who has an artificial lake stocked with sport fishes on his private estate.

Well actually, it would be much less bizarre if this statement was meant as a joke—except in Dumb Loud Pseudo-Liberal Land, where we increasingly live, hatching our feel-good but born-loser strategies, just as we did in the past.

I'm supposing that, if sworn to oath, Bush would list as his finest moment either 1) his presence in the weeks (as opposed to the hours) after the 9/11 attacks, or 2) the capture of Saddam Hussein. Agree or disagree with his policies, one must concede that boasting is simply not Bush's way. One could plausibly accuse him of being flip about a serious question--though I'd argue both ends of that statement.

But to brood over an offhand statement like you see above is to engage in stark, utter madness. Every time I think the GOP is finished, along comes another event like the Alito filibuster or this, and I'm heartened.

Though the principals mentioned above are not Democrats per se, they are part and parcel of the one thing that might mean trouble for the Dems in November. At least a half-dozen times I've heard the Tim Russert wannabes ask a Dem what they would do about Issue X (Iraq, Iran, gas prices, immigration, the deficit), and the jaw-dropping response has been, "We don't need an agenda. We're the opposition."

All throughout the nineties, the GOP kept ignoring Rush Limbaugh's pleading not to bring their face to a knife fight. Too many GOPers felt that Bill Clinton could be beaten simply by pointing at him and saying, "Will you look at that guy?" Similarly, every time someone on the Left points at W and screams, "Will you look at that guy?", I'm reassured.

Office spaces, part II

Why are faculty fights so venomous?

The stakes are so low.

Old joke. But true. Yesterday, this e-mail was forwarded to me from our Senate Delegate. It concerned someone who went after my job four years ago when our two departments merged. He crashed and burned in the process, has been nursing his wounds ever since. A few of the references make by obscure, but you can pick up the tone.

His letter:

I recently obtained a listing of all class assignments for this Spring Semester at NE with the five course headings that fall under A & H. The section count, which includes regular and second start classes that made, is as follows: ENGL, 77; ESOL, 24; ARTS, 10; SPCH, 10; PHIL, 4.
I had been told that there were several Assistant Chairs in our Arts and Humanities Department. Since ESOL never has had one, I suggested that Jeff Kamm apply for next year. When Jeff wrote to Joe, he was told that Melinda Payne is an unofficial Associate Chair, a position previously held by John Harvey, who now directs the honors program. That title does not match the position described on p. 19 of “Department Chair Guidelines.” Joe added that Darryl Lauster and Linda Amadon are “Lead Instructors” for their respective disciplines, Arts and Speech. According to “DC Guidelines” (19), that term was supposed to be completely eliminated from organizational charts and vocabularies. Joe seemed to indicate there are no “Assistant Chairs” in A & H.
As you know, full-time professors must teach between 13.5 and 15 equated hours unless released to perform other official duties. According to the above list of assigned classes, there are several full-time faculty who appear to be teaching less than 13.5 eq. hrs. I would like to know what other assignments these faculty have that account for their reduced teaching assignments.
I understand that a full-time ENGL professor normally teaches five 3-hour sections. The following faculty appear to have less than five: James Langston (2 sections), Cynthia Williams (4), John Harvey (3), and Darryl Lauster (1). Joe seems to be teaching three sections, two of which are “off campus.” I guess he is paid two overloads. Melinda Payne and Linda Amadon are both teaching at least 15 hours. Do they receive overload pay as well?
As FAC chair from NE, are you able to ascertain what “release time” the above faculty have and why? I would think that such information is available to everyone.
If you would like to review the class assignment list or Joe’s response to Jeff, let me know. I know this is a busy time of the semester, but please respond at your earliest convenience.

Thanks,
"Hank"

There is no better example of petty, mealy-mouthed smallmindedness than the above. My response here.

Cinco Paul

Allow me to take a moment to wish a happy birthday to a special friend of mine.

There are many things I could say about Cinco Paul, a screenwriter and father of three, husband to a brilliant and wonderful doctor, and all-around great guy.

His website, by the way, is here.

What I'll say is this. When I was young and stupid, when we both were on our high school debate team, I messed him over worse thn I've ever messed anyone over in my life.

I don't know how many people could supply a ready answer to the following question: What was the worst decision you ever made in your life? For me, it is easy. Messing Cinco Paul when I did. Worst thing.

And how did he respond? He was my enemy for six months. Then, neutral. And finally, he took me in as a third to the friendship he had with his friend Marty Sliwinski, and a world I had no right to enter. This was a world of movies, of books, of plays--something tht had always been a rumor.

Tem years ago this month I achieved my PhD, an honor I would not have achieved if not for Cinco pushing me to be the person I could be. Cinco, God love you.

Office Spaces

In a perfect world, I suppose I would never have an office--at least not one in a work space. Have an office, you have a place you're supposed to be, a phone you're expected to answer--in short, you cease to be a moving target. Day after day, I sit in my office and ask myself: why do people call me? Why do they come by?

Answer: There is something to be done. And my visitor or caller can either not do it, or doesn't know how to do it, or would rather I did it. And, quite frankly, I'm just as clueless and lazy as my visitor. Or caller.

So: to have an office, with working hours--not so good. It is the jealousy I have for my faculty, who teach their classes, meet with students as needed, go home at noon and take Fridays off. More than anything, it is the elusive nature of their professional lifestyle that has persuaded me to join them next year, when my term as Department Chair expires.

In essence I'm reverting back to graduate school, during which--if I didn't want to talk to anyone--I would pull my Irish tweed walking cap down over my eyes as I walked to class.

I came to my job through a couple of flukes. When I was hired in 1994, there were three other English teachers in the department: two women nearing retirement, neither of whom wanted the aggravation; and another woman, who had proved herself so manifestly incompetent for the job that I was the choice by default.

I was 29 years old. I was still in graduate school. When the Dean held her senior staff meeting I was the youngest person in the room by a dozen years. But I had an office--with a door that locked. And my own phone line. The ultimate prestige, right?

Or so I thought at the time. In eleven years doing essentially the same job, I've been in four offices. They are as follows:

1. The office on the second floor of my campus-in-the-mall, a windowless little number so completely out of the way for anyone that I wuld sometimes lay my swivel chair on its back, turn the lights off, lay down, use the back as a cushion for my head, and take a nap. Next door was cosmetology, and at night when I came home I could smell hair oil in my clothes.

2. An office I shared with the chair of Social Sciences, a not-bad work space save for two elements. First, there was a single phone and a single phone line, which meant that anyone could reach us, but we needed to take turns reaching anyone. Became a hassle during adjunct staffing, that two-day run-up when we figured which scheduled classes we would run and which not, then call up professionals with Master's Degrees and ask them to teach a class for ninety dollars per week. Second, the social sciences chair had a theory that fluorescent lighting caused brain cancer, and so she insisted we light our offices with lamps only. This office was windowless as well, with the result that, lamps or no, we spent our workday essentially in darkness. Still, she brought a TV, so all was forgiven, though our mornings required a rough compromise: she could watch "The View" from 10-11 and I could turn my radio to the Jim Rome Show.

3. The campus way out there. When our college expanded, we had some land grant or write-off or whatever place our campus in the middle of an industrial park. It was here we moved, with the hope that our student population would follow. Didn't happen, in part because no student live nearby. Meanwhile, one of the offerings of this campus are large windows facing west, so that in the afternoons, habitation is done at one's risk. The sun came in through the windows in Monetesque rectangles and the sunbeams burn the computer screens.

4. The classroom for nine people. Discussed here, a room with me with me in the middle, surrounded by collapsing cubicle walls and several dozen concentrations.

5. Starting at the end of next week: an office shared with the latest social sciences chair. This may be the best of all. Two desks, three-sided, with drawers and things rising to six feet high--high enough, once I claim the back desk, for me to hide behind, should I not want to talk to people. Fifteen more months, then no desk at all. And no phone. And try to find me on a Friday.

More Keystone State Fun

On the subject of Pennsylvania, more:

1. Despite its role as the cradle of liberty (See: Independence, Declaration of) Pennsylvania has produced but one President: James Buchanan, notable for being the only bachelor President, and of being in that seven-decades long string of mediocrity between Jackson and Teddy Roosevelt, a slump interrupted only by the sainted Lincoln (though Polk had his moments, as did Hayes).

2. The above fact was delivered by another native Pennsylvanian, John Updike, during a Q & A that followed a reading this past January at Houston's Alley Theatre.

3. The mountains known as the Southern Tier lie at the northen portion of Pennsylvania. Their virtual mirror image, the Northern Tier, combines with the Southern to form the Twin Tiers, whose east-west bisect is roughly the New York-Pennsylvania border. (I can remember one local Binghamton news broadcast, the CBS affiliate; at the start of its broadcast a legend representing the aerial view of the tiers would appear behind his head. The anchor (curly hair, triangular face) had a mannerism he would employ every weeknight: teasing us with two lesser stories and then saying, "But the BIG story this evening . . .")

4. It was on the above-mentioned station that ESPN stud Trey Wingo got his start. Two things stand out. First, he would sometimes run a trivia contest, but caution the viewers not to call until ten-thirty, because he needed time to get back to his office and answer the phone. He was, in other words, asking the contestants to call his office number. One night, I thought I had an answer: for what NFL team did Richard Nixon draw up a play in the Super Bowl? I called in at 10:31. Wingo answered.

"Miami," I said.
"No, Washington," he replied.
"Are you sure?" I asked. "He told Shula that Griese could hit Warfield with a down-and-in."
"Washington," he insisted. "He drew it up for George Allen."
"Fine," I said.

The following morning I went to the top of my closet and brought down The Red Smith Reader , a compilation of some of the greatest columns by the greatest sports newspaper columnist of all time. And there it was: Smith's account of the Dallas-Miami Super Bowl, with a description of Nixon's words (see above) to Miami coach Don Shula. All that day, I entertained thoughts of driving to the television station and confronting him (kind of like that ESPN phone guy does in the current commercials), but reasoned he would let himself off with a technicality. Okay, so Nixon didn't draw it up for Shula. Big whoop. And who knows what he did for Allen? Red Smith (at least as far as The Red Smith Readeris concerned) was silent on the question.

"Fine," I said to an imaginary Trey Wingo, as I drove to my summer job as a security guard at Binghamton General Hospital. "You win this time. But we'll meet again."

Over the next few months, I took whatever satisfaction I could by smirking at the televison ad that played in the afternoon, during commercials for "As the World Turns." The ad showed a baseball game featuring a succession of Trey Wingos: Trey pitching to Trey hitting to Trey fielding. The truly hysterical (to me) part was that, instead of standard baseball gear (something, I thought, a sports anchor should be able to acquire without undue difficulty), Wingo instead wore a baseball undershirt (white shirt, long colored sleeves) and sweatpants. No, wait, this was the hysterical part: on both the shirt and pants was stencilled, in big letters, "CORNELL." This was truly rich, one step up from saying, "My roommate at Harvard had a tie like that" to a new acquaintance.

So I smirked, albeit alone. Trey Wingo, I thought, I feel sorry for you.

Anyway, that's enough about Pennsylvania for today.

Email from a stranger

From Pennsylvania comes this:

I live in PA. and the best congressman we ever had was named Joe McDade.
You must be related because you have a great blog.

Me: Well, thank you very much. A great group of McDades (Mostly Scots, some Irish) emigrated to both the Northeast and Louisiana between 1750 and 1945. Though not related in any discernable way to Congressman Joe McDade (R-PA), I feel a bit of kinship with him that goes deeper than our similar names. My family, and I assume his, both settled in the Northeast. Furthermore, when I pursued my Master's Degree at Binghamton University in New York State, the campus was a short drive from the Pennsylvania border and the upper reaches of Rep. McDade's district.

It is said that, per voter, New Jersey is the most expensive state to run a statewide political campaign. Most people who live in the northern part of the state get their local television from New York City, and most in the southern part of the state get their local television from Philadelphia, so anyone running for statewide office (or in a presidential primary) must buy airtime in both expensive cities. On a much smaller scale, most people the norhern portion of Pennsylvania close to Binghamton (Susquehenna and thereabouts; the region is called the Southern Tier)get their local TV from Binghamton, and so it was that in the run-up to election day, 1988, the televisions of my students and classmates were bombarded with "Re-elect Joe McDade" ads. It made for some gentle teasing.

On election day I drove down to Susquehenna, hoping to find a placard to steal, but couldn't find a one.

Me, I'm named for my father, Joseph Skelton McDade. He was named for his maternal grandfather, Joseph Skelton. Incidentally, my dad emailed and stated that he wanted to comment, but that Joe McDade commenting on Joe McDade's blog felt unseemly. Basically, that's all you need to know about him.

Best of the best of the Web!

Anyone who follows the internet with any discernment knows that James Taranto's blog, (via Best of the Web , via the Wall Street Journal.com) is the best blogsite online. Also, anyone who notices must understand that Taranto is pretty much the best punster since Shakespeare. And he encourages submissions.

So here's mine.

First, the article: Hicks punished.

Get it? Hicks punished. Like white trash. So I pounced on it.

Ah, I'm a living joke.

More on the copyer, page 2

I followed more of the Harvard plagiarist for two reasons:

1. How the Hell did she get a book deal?

2. How would Huffpost deal with it?

Well, in keeping with my new theorum, as a Huffpost response chain lengthens, its chances of becoming a criticism of George W. Bush approach one:

This is just her preliminary, exploratory effort for the 2008 presidential campaign.

She's a chip off the old Bush.
By: TDoff on May 02, 2006 at 12:56pm

The critics rave

Good Lord, I hope I'm wrong.

DJ Gallo of ESPN's Page Two

F-minus: Houston Texans
Picking Mario Williams over Reggie Bush? Wow, wow, wow. Unbelievably awful.

And, to follow up, Skip Bayless of ESPN.com Page 2 :

And now Vince and LenDale are teammates in Nashville? With chips on their shoulder pads larger than Dolly Parton's famed attributes? Vince says he'll make it "tough" twice a year every year on his hometown team, the division rival Houston Texans, for not even considering him with the No. 1 pick. LenDale says he'll run with a "32-team chip" on his shoulder.

People tend to forget how important LenDale White was to USC's success.In 10 years, the Texans won't look nearly as idiotic for passing up Reggie Bush. But they'll live in greater infamy for ignoring the Jordanesque Young and letting him fall to Bud Adams, who moved the beloved "Love Ya Blue" Houston Oilers to Tennessee and renamed them the Titans. Oh, the pain for Houston fans.