Same as it ever was. Dowd's column in tomorrow's NYT almost defies analysis. Of course, we've come to expect little else from MoDo. For the umpteenth time, Bush is made to be a child--this time complete with juice box and peanut butter and jelly sandwich and, of course, with an inability to comprehend world events. Unable to make heads or tails of pre-emption, Dowd's "Boy Emperor" calls in Richard Perle to explain the doctrine. From there the column rapidly becomes incoherent. She has Perle articulate a "Souffle Doctrine" (Josh Chafetz over at OxBlog adduces the same passage):

I have always dreamed of opening a chain of fast-food soufflé shops based on a machine that would automatically separate eggs, beat the yolks and combine them with hot milk and sugar, add the desired flavorings, whip the whites until stiff, fold them into the mixture and bake in individual pots without human intervention. Then conveyor belts would bring the glass-enclosed ovens to the table and patrons would get to see their meals rise. I've never found investors smart enough to realize the dazzling ingenuity of the Perle Soufflé Doctrine.

Uhhhh, ok. I'm not quite sure what cooking has to do with foreign policy, but Dowd, I'm sure, finds the comparison witty and brilliant. Later, her Perle advises, "You must puncture the souffle before it rises" and "You cannot make sublime crepes suzette without a fire." Here's where I throw in the towel; already my head hurts from attempting to understand it. And so his "You cannot deliver the sashimi unless you use the blade" whizzes right by me. I guess she's trying to show the incoherent gobbledy-gook that is, to her, the Bush foreign policy. Wouldn't it have been easier just to say so?


Well, clearly, no. That's the Dowd way--and it's utterly predictable. In an NRO column several days ago, Mark Goldblatt dissects her style and finds that "there's no substance underneath [the sarcasm] except for Dowd's conviction that she can peer into the souls of her political adversaries in order to perceive their true motivations." Sort of makes Goldblatt into a prophet--except that it's all so obvious, as Goldblatt would surely agree. He concludes, "If Dowd ever recognizes the true nature of stupidity, she may ratchet down the sarcasm and actually write something worthwhile again." I somehow don't think she's there yet.


And speaking of predictability...this column is a textbook example of Josh Chafetz's Immutable Laws of Maureen Dowd. Let's see here...

FIRST LAW: "All political phenomena can be reduced to caricatures of the personalities involved." Check.

SECOND LAW: "It's easier to whine than to take a stand or offer solutions." Has she ever offered an answer?

THIRD LAW: "It is better to be cute than coherent." Juice box or souffle, anyone?

FOURTH LAW: "The particulars of my consumer-driven, self-involved life are of universal interest and reveal universal truths." Souffles, crepes suzette, sashima...only in yuppy Manhattan.

FIFTH LAW: "Europeans are always right." How dare Perle call for Schroeder to resign!

Amiri Baraka "Strikes Back" (against Goro?). Or so reads the headline (at least the "strikes back" part) from The Post's report on the NJ Poet Laureate's latest anti-Semitic, anti-Israel blustering. I probably would have phrased the title a little differently--that is, not in terms of battle, but then again, maybe I'm alone in remembering that Baraka is, in fact, a character from the Mortal Kombat video games. Many have already weighed in on the controversy (see John Derbyshire excellent commentary and satire from NRO), and it already has the quality of old business. I'll only mention that the poem reads like something straight out of Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada (I'm almost ashamed to admit to reading it, but, alas, they made me). It seems these post-modernist, Marxist, Black Panther types think and write alike, denying the existence of truth (except their own, of course) and believing that "Who doo doo come out the Colon's mouth" is art at its finest.

What's the forecast for hell today? In an editorial today, the Washington Post actually endorsed three Republicans. I could hardly believe my eyes when I read, "Democrat James P. Moran Jr., does not deserve the job anymore." The Post endorsed his opponent, Scott Tate, as well as incumbent Republicans Frank Wolf and Tom Davis in their respective districts. Moderates all of them--the editors were nearly foaming at the mouth citing Tate's pro-abortion, pro-gun control stances--but they'll all be votes for Denny Hastert come January. A pleasant surprise from The Post, indeed.

Of Saddam and Hanging Chads. A humorous take on the recent elections in Iraq by Michael Rubiner in the NYT today.

A Profile in Greatness. I just finished reading John Lukacs's Churchill: Visionary. Statesman. Historian., and although the book is not, strictly speaking, a biography but rather a historical essay, it nonetheless leaves me thoroughly convinced of Churchill's greatness and his enduring legacy to human civilization. Lukacs has previously written several histories of the early, and darkest, years of Churchill's premiership: the 1940-1941 period when Britain was under attack and victory anything but certain. The eventual victory in World War II sometimes tends to obscure our perception of events; we may find it difficult to separate ourselves from the outcome we know to be reality. Hence, we do not always appreciate the role individuals played in effecting that result. And Churchill's part was key; writes Lukacs: "There was no one else who could have done what he did in 1940." But his greatness can be found elsewhere, too. Here we see Churchill the prophet and visionary (he was openly anxious about Hitler as early as 1930, three years before the German came to power, and in early 1953 he predicted that the Soviet Union would lose Eastern Europe by the 1980s); we witness Churchill the statesman, maneuvering between Roosevelt and Stalin during the war, disagreeing with Eisenhower in the 1950s, and struggling with appeasement and Britain's place in Europe; we observe Churchill the writer and historian, penning volumes upon volumes of histories and biographies, proving worthy of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Too, the great man's faults appear, his mistakes, his failures--his Gallipoli invasion gone awry in World War I, his being shouted down in Commons over the India question in the 1930s. An amazing man of extraordinary proportions, Churchill deserves each label Lukacs's title ascribes to him, and not without justice could he also be called defender of civilization.

Bloom and Bronte. Oh, yes, I nearly forgot to mention: Bloom includes among his geniuses Emily Bronte for her wonderful and, I think, too often overlooked novel Wuthering Heights, one that I've been meaning to re-read.

Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living! You said I killed you--haunt me, then! The murdered do haunt their murderers. I believe--I know that ghosts have wandered the earth. Be with me always--take any form--drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh God! It is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul! (Heathcliff)

Genius and Genius. Yale literary critic Harold Bloom has a new book out this week, aptly titled Genius, in which he lists those 100 writers he feels deserve that label. Bloom's claim to fame is, perhaps, his arrogance. (A running joke wonders in amazement that he didn't include himself in the book.) And that is precisely why I'm fond of him--steeped in decades of learning and reading (in his youth, he read 1,500 pages per hour), he is not afraid to lay everything on the table, even if it is misguided. That, and he is, for non-political reasons, an advocate of the Western Canon and an opponent of the School of Resentment and its isms. That said, however, Genius has forced me to reconsider the extent to which I consider myself a Bloomian. Still present is his analyzing literature in terms of Shakespeare--that, in some way, all writers after the Bard struggle with his influence; I agree with, and enjoy, this greatly enriching perspective. Bloom's Gnosticism, though, seems to possess more and more of his mind. Dostoevsky, whose genius to Bloom is undeniable, nevertheless is a "bigoted know-nothing" whose genius failed when depicting religion (most readers, myself included, find this to be the very font of his brilliance); he reduces the great Russian to a Slavic Jerry Falwell. Flannery O'Connor is declared to be not a Catholic or even a normative Christian, but a purveyor of Bloom's Gnostic "American Religion." He offers an excellent reading of Melville's Ahab as hero rather than villain and argues, much as he did for Macbeth in his Shakespeare book, that we are Ahab, which is convincing enough, but he then declares Ahab to be a Gnostic (not an entirely unreasonable argument) apostle of a simultaneously pre- and post-Christian (but not Christian) American spirituality, and, hence, America is similarly Gnostic and non-Christian. Yet the book has its merits, and while I am less Bloomian than I thought, I am no less a fan of Bloom himself. Even though, much to my chagrin, Joseph Conrad is not included, the book, premised on the idea that "time, which destroys us, reduces what is not genius to rubbish," is worth at least a selective reading. Disagree as we might with Bloom's analyses, we can only concur that these are, indeed, geniuses.

Saddam's Love? Andrew Sullivan cites an NPR report that Saddam's campaign song was "I Will Always Love You," that Dolly Parton classic made famous by Whitney Houston in The Bodyguard. What's next? "I'm Every Woman"?

The Civil War. A cosmopolitan reader and friend has informed me that Frank Wildhorn's musical The Civil War includes a song entitled "Sarah," which draws from the Sullivan Ballou letter for its lyrics. A recording can be had here.

The Young MacGyver. The WB, it seems, has its sights set on resurrecting that hero of the late 80s and early 90s...only younger--apparently in his early days at the Phoenix Foundation. (Here's the report.) Some may scarcely be able to control their excitement over this, especially the chance to see what new uses may be found for a Swiss Army knife, a piece of tin foil, and a stick of gum (and duct tape, of course). But as far as I'm concerned (and I am a MacGyver purist), this is treading on dangerously thin ice and risks destroying the image of the MacGyver we all know and love. Then again, this is the WB we're talking about, and they've never botched a show, right? Oh, wait...

Reality Bites. I'm no neocon, but I can't help agreeing with Irving Kristol's description: "A neoconservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality."

Can anyone say "League of Nations"? Granted, the League lacked strong enforcement provisions, as well as membership of the United States, and thus rapidly proved itself ineffective and irrelevant in resolving world crises. The United Nations has the United States and the authority to take action; if it becomes irrelevant (and it is on the verge of doing just that), it will be of its own doing. As the issue of Iraq currently stands, the French--it's always the French, isn't it?--are blocking the strong resolution drafted by the US and Great Britain; it prefers a much weaker version which would not authorize automatic use of force if Iraq fails to comply and would, hence, return the matter to the Security Council for, you guessed it, further deliberation. As usual, Charles Krauthammer has a masterful treatment of the situation in today's Washington Post. He correctly points out that the Security Council is "a relic of World War II," and any importance which is dubiously ascribed to it is threatened by France's blocking the strong resolution. Of course, the United States does not even need UN authorization--Congress has already authorized the use of force if necessary, Iraq has violated a series of UN resolutions since 1991, not to mention its consequent violation of the ceasefire (not treaty) ending the Gulf War. Call the bluff and force a Security Council vote, says Krauthammer. "Do [the French] feel lucky?"

Excelente! California's Proposition 227, which dropped bilingual education in favor of English-only instruction, was ruled by a federal appeals court to be constitutional. Here's one take.

Give 'em hell, Zell. Great profile of Senator Zell Miller of Georgia, probably every Republican's favorite Democrat. Just a regular guy from the backwoods who tells it like it is. Republican or Democrat, it's hard not to respect that.

Woody. Celebrities, it seems, think their fame somehow grants them status to be authorities on American policy. Barbara Streisand, with embarrassing results, has waged war on Republicans, and now Woody Harrelson, from his perch in England, enters the fray. He frames his tale of lies and deceit with a story about his driver, the "Woodman," who apparently has a much keener understanding of the world than Harrelson (says driver Woody: "the only language Saddam understands is brute force"). Harrelson is losing sleep over Iraq, so we all better listen to what he has to say. After all, he played basketball with an Iraqi in the 80s, so he's no doubt an authority. He unleashes the standard leftist litany: the US supplied Iraq in the 80s; 500,000 dead children; Bush=Shrub; et cetera, ad nauseam. It seems, too, that the once beloved barkeep must recently have read James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me: Columbus was a greed-driven maniac. Our leaders, he says, are modern-day Columbuses, waging "a racist and imperialist war" against "any non-white country they choose to describe as terrorist." Flags, yellow ribbons, and patriotic posters offend him. The economy is not sustainable; it's a "dinosaur tit" (a baffling description, since, as far as I know, dinosaurs did not possess mammary glands). And he has all the solutions for what ails us: honor Kyoto, join the world court, shut down oil companies and nuclear power plants. Reading it, I suspect that he intended to be comical, and yet I come away only frightened.

Gunsploitation. After reading MoDo's typically misguided column in the NYT this morning, in which she snipes at the president for his opposition to gun control and declares him and other Republicans to be in the pockets of the NRA, I sought expression for my quiet rage and found it in David Limbaugh's sensible piece from WorldNetDaily. In it, he takes on "opportunists" such as Sarah Brady, Ms. Dowd, and Tom Friedman, who are using the DC sniper to call for greater gun control. Brady recently took to indicating that the sniper could possibly be using an assault rifle, which sparks Limbaugh to wonder how this observation buttresses the assault weapons ban. After all, this fellow got his hands, potentially, on just such a weapon, ban and all. Gun-control proponents shamelessly use tragedies like these to advance their agenda. But more than that, I would argue, they are far more cunning and duplicitous, ready to capitalize on any situation. Ed Rendell, Democratic candidate for PA governor, has made little secret of his stance on gun control; in fact, he led the charge, several years ago, of big-city mayors in suing gun manufacturers. Running in a state with high gun ownership (and NRA membership) where many folks vote on this issue alone, Rendell, of course, has been rather circumspect in his pronouncements on gun control, declaring he doesn't want to take guns from law-abiding citizens. But as John Lott made clear in a recent NRO article, his desire for greater and greater restrictions on gun ownership was clear only three years ago when he told a group of gun-control advocates that he can't say publicly what he really wants to do. Maybe Rendell is more slippery than your run-of-the-mill politician, but his distortion of his views for political gain is despicable, no less than the exploitation of events for similar advantage.

War, what is it good for? The answer from Kelly: "war...has been the modern world's great deliverer of peace." Exactly. But anti-war ideologues and zealots somehow remain blind to that--they'd rather converse, "dialogue," negotiate, as though such tactics will usher in millennia of peace. What they fail to realize is that, for better or worse, war has been the common state of man. Donald Kagan, in his magisterial On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace, cites research indicating 268 years of peace in the past thirty-five-hundred years. Of the past two centuries, Kagan wrote, "the only thing more common than predictions about the end of war has been war itself." Or as Heraclitus put it over two thousand years ago: "Polemos pater panton"--"War is the father of everything." Yes, indeed--and of peace, especially. War and the threat of it are the best guarantors of peace we have. Use them wisely, judiciously, and measuredly, but do not be afraid to use them.

War and Peace, Nobel-style. Michael Kelly has a great column in today's Washington Post. He takes the Nobel argument a step further, insisting, quite correctly, that at the root of the issue are two different conceptions of peace: "a good, just, humane peace" and a peace created by war. The Nobel committee clearly supports the former view although it does not usually yield any sort of lasting peace--what good, Kelly asks, has Carter's 1979 Middle East accord done in preventing the 2,500 deaths in the past two years? Peace established by the US has typically been of the latter variety, and usually far more lasting--in the wake of wars or in view of its preponderant force. It's worth quoting Kelly at length:

Now, look at what American war-war (and the threat of American war-war) won: the defeat of the fascist attempt to rule the world; the defeat of the communist attempt to rule the world; the consequent rebuilding of a Europe protected by American arms into a democratic and peaceful continent for the first time in history; the rebuilding of an American-protected Japan into a democratic and peaceful nation for the first time in history; the emergence of a world in which, for the first time in history, the peaceful values of liberal democracy are the ascendant norm.

As far as peace has been possible in our century or at all, the United States has, more often than not, been its cause. But Nobel will never give its award to a Reagan or a Bush (41 or 43), for that would require, as Kelly says, admitting that America was a force for good, which "the Bourbons of Oslo will never, never do."

The Nobel Peanut Prize. So it was described by Bill Bennett on Hannity and Colmes last night, and not without some justification. The awarding of the prize to former President Carter seems to have been done for political purposes of attacking and embarrassing President Bush--a decision which serves only to enhance the irrelevance of the prize. It has been, after all, awarded to the likes of Yasser Arafat. But, as Jay Nordlinger argued in his NRO Impromptus yesterday, it is difficult to dismiss Nobel prizes entirely. Wise choices are few and far between, but the good ones are excellent--Lech Walesa, for example. Same goes for the Literature category, as Nordlinger also pointed out. Even so, I think we should be doubly outraged when the award is politicized--and, hence, trivialized--and given to less than worthy people (such as Arafat), or given for less than worthy reasons (such as those adduced for Carter's award, his actual contributions to humanity notwithstanding). Such dubiously justified awards diminish the accomplishments of civilization's truly great individuals.

Who says history isn't fun? I've long been captivated by the famous Sullivan Ballou letter, written to his wife a week before his death at the first Battle of Bull Run in 1861. Ladies, just imagine receiving such a letter. Fellows, imagine writing it, with its expressions of a love timeless, almost perfect, almost divine, still meaningful and moving after 140 years. A few excerpts:

Sarah, my love for you is deathless, it seems to bind me to you with mighty cables that nothing but Omnipotence could break; and yet my love of Country comes over me like a strong wind and bears me irresistibly on with all these chains to the battlefield.

My dear Sarah, never forget how much I love you, and when my last breath escapes me on the battlefield, it will whisper your name.

Forgive my many faults, and the many pains I have caused you. How thoughtless and foolish I have oftentimes been! How gladly would I wash out with my tears every little spot upon your happiness, and struggle with all the misfortune of this world, to shield you and my children from harm.

But, O Sarah! If the dead can come back to this earth and flit unseen around those they loved, I shall always be near you; in the garish day and in the darkest night -- amidst your happiest scenes and gloomiest hours -- always, always; and if there be a soft breeze upon your cheek, it shall be my breath; or the cool air fans your throbbing temple, it shall be my spirit passing by. Sarah, do not mourn me dead; think I am gone and wait for thee, for we shall meet again.

Does anyone even think such thoughts anymore, let alone write them?

Country Music and This Modern World. I poked fun at my mom when, over the past year, she developed an interest in country music. The likes of Toby Keith, Alan Jackson, and Kenny Chesney now alternate with Bob Durgin and Dr. Laura as her accompaniment while preparing dinner and cleaning up afterward. Of course, what I feared has now come to pass: I, too, have grown fond of the country genre. Although I never asked my mom why she suddenly went country on us, I suspect it was a result of 9-11. (My own turning point came some months later with Toby Keith's related "Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue.") Modern rock and pop offerings were simply not serious enough, not real enough, for a changed world, one which saw a return to the simpler things. MTV and CMT represent two entirely different worlds, as Stanley Kurtz pointed out in the current issue of National Review. Pink likens her man to a pill; Britney declares herself a slave and wants to be danced upon; Eminem unleashes every vulgarity in the book while saying nothing. Meanwhile, in America's heartland, Toby Keith has a list of things to do with his family and wants to rain hell upon terrorists; Alan Jackson knows Jesus, talks to God, and believes in hope, faith, and love; Montgomery Gentry love their hometown in all its rustic simplicity. MTV celebrates luxury, sex, and caprice--fancy cars, free love, booze; CMT embraces faith, family, and the hardships faced by everyday people everyday--cars that don't run, children that need to be raised right, dogs that run away. I have not turned entirely from rock and pop; it's too much a part of me to do that. But country music, with its willingness to address bigger and, at the same time, simpler issues, becomes vastly more appealing and, too, more appropriate for the seriousness of modern times.

Moby the Anti-Ideologue? I'm sure this is a gross and ghastly misreading of his song "Extreme Ways," but I cannot help, at least in one verse, finding a description of the ascent from ideology: "I had to close down everything/I had to close down my mind/Too many things to cover me/Too much can make me blind/I've seen so much in so many places/So many heartaches, so many faces/So many dirty things." Ideology obscures and distorts reality; it is a sort of inverted religion that relies on ideas merely, without the life-giving infusions of tradition and custom and convention. It seeks to create paradise in the here and now but in the end only produces, at worst, a sort of hell on earth and, at best, confusion and uprootedness. I read into Moby's lines, therefore, the realization of ideology's dangers (in the liner notes for Play, he comes close to as much when he lambastes fundamentalism of all stripes), its capacity to obscure and to blind, to cause strife and anguish. A mind shaped and captivated by ideology, if it can see through the muck, can only rise above it by shutting down, starting anew. A bit of a stretch, perhaps, but still not bad advice for the mind infected by ideology.

The Conservative Conrad. I, of course, am obsessed with Joseph Conrad, though not entirely for his (non-ideological) conservatism. Still, such gems as these are priceless:

The ferocity and imbecility of an autocratic rule rejecting all legality and in fact basing itself upon complete moral anarchism provokes the no less imbecile and atrocious answer of a purely Utopian revolutionism encompassing destruction by the first means to hand, in the strange conviction that a fundamental change of hearts must follow the downfall of any given human institutions. These people are unable to see that all they can effect is merely a change of names.--from Author's Note to Under Western Eyes

Election 2002. Rep. Tim Holden (D-Pa) is running some interesting ads in his campaign against Rep. George Gekas (R-Pa); both, of course, are running in the newly redrawn 17th district of Pennsylvania, of which I am not, incidentally, a resident. I had to chuckle, however, when I saw his one ad that touts his conservatism. "Tim Holden...A Conservative," it declares. "One of the fifteen most conservative Democrats in Congress." The tactic is sensible as far as politics goes; after all, although I'm not familiar with the demographics of the new district, it is, by and large, a conservative and Republican area, much like the rest of central PA. Unfortunately, being pro-life and pro-gun does not a conservative make. The American Conservative Union gave Rep. Holden a rating of 48 for 2001--good enough for a tie for second most conservative PA Democrat (with John Murtha, and behind Frank Mascara). His lifetime rating of 40 does, indeed, make him the most conservative of PA Democrats. And the score does put him in the Arlen Specter (lifetime rating: 42) league, but I hesitate even calling him a Republican, let alone a conservative. You know a Democrat's desperate when he campaigns as a conservative--something Sen. Specter, as far as I know, hasn't even done. Gekas may miss meetings by falling asleep in his car (or so Roll Call reported last year), but at least he has a better claim to the conservative label, however much politics has stripped that term of its meaning and however imperfect Gekas's record is. At least he'll vote for Hastert when January rolls around.