Or is Melissa just a bit annoyed at Peggy Noonan?

I just don't get Noonan lately. I've certainly had arguments with conservatives about Sarah Palin with conservatives (is she a brilliant retail politician, a la Ronald Reagan, or is she McCain's answer to Harriet Miers? And can you compare a management position with that which must be occupied—by definition—by a legal scholar?)

But John McCain heads up this ticket, and whatever else he is, he is neither an extreme right-winger, nor an idiot. There are, in fact, a number of ways in which his communication skills are far better than Obama's (e.g., his sense of humor is far superior to The One's).

Noonan used to be a bright writer; an interesting voice. A thinker. Now she's merely a silly classist hack. Over the past several years I've found her to be more and more unreadable: less thoughtful. Less challenging.

So there won't be much to miss, for me. Ronald Reagan, on the other hand, may be spinning in his grave.

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Two attorneys, two science teachers (high school level, college level). And my sponsee into the church, who is one of the few bright spots in my life—and with whom I should spend much more time.

"Have you seen An American Carol?" my sponsee asks, brightly.

"Oh, yes. I have. As a matter of fact, I'm sort of known as being a . . . [looking around at CalTech Girl, gesturing wildly, in an I-don't-have-the-vocabulary sort of way] an enthusiastic, pi . . . ."

"—cheerleader." CTG finishes.

"Right." I add. "I, um. I liked the movie. I thought lots of people should see it."

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It's like I just didn't let myself see it too clearly, or something:

h/t: Gregory.

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I trust that G-d will see to it that one of the following people show up, so that I don't cuss too much:

• The Stern Twin, who does not like to see her mother smoke, drink and cuss; nor her mother's associates. When we do, she gives us Stern Looks.*

• Baldilocks. Every time I cussed at the Palin rally (and the bloggers' "afterparty") the weekend before last she was able to point to a nearby child who might have overheard me. Eventually I realized that Juliette has a supernatural ability to transport children under the age of ten at will—provided someone in uses the F-word in her presence.

And it turns out that I used the F-word a lot. Who knew?

*The Stern Twin—whom I love as much as My Twin—always makes me think of this poem:

ON HEARING THAT THE STUDENTS OF
OUR NEW UNIVERSITY HAVE JOINED THE
AGITATION AGAINST IMMORAL LITERATURE

Where, where but here have Pride and Truth,
That long to give themselves for wage,
To shake their wicked sides at youth
Restraining reckless middle-age?
—W.B. Yeats

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But I cannot quite reconcile the notion that he has conservative or libertarian ideals, and still endorses Obama. Those two ideas simply don't go together.

AllahP thinks there's something not quite right about the break between Chris and National Review; like Ace, I'm fine with it. Though, perhaps, as usual, less brutal and less gleeful in my brutality. (That's why people read Ace, but do not read me. That, and his habit of "accidentally" downloading lesbian pron from time to time onto AoSHQ.)

Buckley is a great writer—and can be funny in a way that his dad never was—but isn't entitled to write a column in a magazine with a different ideology simply on the basis of his last name.

I don't want to sound mean, but no media organ is equivalent to an Ivy League school, where family connections matter more than nearly anything else.

Buckley's got talent, and he'll do fine. I don't think he was a terrific match for National Review, and I'm sure his erstwhile editors were just as sad as he was when it came time to part ways.

And, no,Ace: I don't buy that he did it just to get a property sold.

And, no, AllahP: I'm fine with having people in the tent who can't manage to pull the lever for McCain. I wish they would, for the sake of the WoT, but it isn't mandatory. Not everyone's going to have the stomach for that—particularly those who focus on immigration from a law-and-order standpoint, or on an economic basis.

My opposition to open borders is strictly a national security thing. Other than that, I'm pretty much a wetback-digger. Okay, I lied: I actually think that there is tremendous discrimination against Canadians, and those who aren't From the Americas. I'd love to see a system in place that respects freedom and capitalism, yet doesn't let a lot of people "cut in line." Unfortunately, that would require asking an American bureaucracy to do its job in an even-handed way, and with alacrity/competence.

What I would see as mandatory for a National Review writer would be not endorsing a corrupt socialist for the highest office in the land.

So it is a sad moment. But it was time.

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1 You might like Vox's take. Dude, we're not in "line world". There are other dimensions (and other candidates) besides left-right.

Posted by: Desert Cat at October 15, 2008 07:07 AM (6go9w)

2 Personally, I think it's the absolute perfect time to split with the Republican party if you hold 'conservative ideals.' Bush and Paulson's plan has got to be the least conservative thing that this non-conservative administration has ever done, hasn't it? Scratch that, the perfect time for conservatives to split with Republicans was in 2001.

Posted by: Levi at October 15, 2008 07:24 AM (UPHC3)

3 I read Buckley's article and the first thing Ithought was he's just another elitist. And he's fooling himself. He thinks you have to go to an Ivy League school to be president, just like some of my democrat friends. They believe strongly in credentialism. And Obama has jumped through the credential hoops. And Palin has not. So she can't possibly be qualified. And Buckley assumes that Obama won't do half of what he's promising, because Buckley is sure he'll do "the right thing" when he gets into office, because he's pedigreed. So basically, he's an elitist supporting someone he thinks is lying. Not really an argument I'm willing ot be swayed by.

Posted by: silvermine at October 16, 2008 10:45 AM (qsBMy)

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after being run for years by . . . the FBI.

And they have actual names and addresses at this point. Warms the cockles of my heart, it does.

h/t Ace.

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Darleen Click on the irony of a culture in which teenagers show "more class" than adults regarding those who live with Down Syndrome.

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Stacy McCain observes the death throes of the dailies and weeklies as I visit the monthly consumer magazines in their own last days. At least in the glossy four-color industry we knew we were in a business; the daily guys seemed to think they were participating in some kind of church.

Stacy:

That a newspaper is a business -- that it exists to generate profit by providing a product to consumers, in the same sense that a shoe store sells shoes -- is an alien concept to most journalists. Notions like value-added, market share and comparative advantage never enter the minds of most journalists, who conceive of themselves as pursuing a profession that has nothing whatsoever to do with commerce.

So much of what newspapers have done, they've done at the behest of consultants, or by following the conventional wisdom doled out in ASNE conferences and journalism trade publications.

Hey; it worked for a while.

RTWT.

Stacy's observations are, as usual, clear-eyed, and he combines new-media savvy with a deep working knowledge of beltway politics. For what it's worth, the man can also hold his liquor better than most; that's probably how he gets his scoops.

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Sarah at the top of the ticket, and Hilton at the bottom?

Via AllahP at Hot Air. He's right, though: we can't just walk out of Iraq with our little pet doggies in our little doggie-purses, teetering on our high heels . . .

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Racists.

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Keep your eye on the ball:

Newark, Blast Ring 4: Radioactive mutants from the National Jewish Democratic Council today tapped an angry Morse code press release message on the lid of the fallout shelter of another Jewish organization, demanding that it "immediately disinvite" controversial Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin from its fortified underground bunker.

"As an evangelical extremist Republican, Sarah Palin is no friend to surviving American Jews, or the former country of Israel," said NJDC chairman Mark Stanley. "Allowing Palin into a Jewish refugee shelter creates not only a partisan circus, but a health hazard for fellow Jews who will be exposed to her dangerous Alaska redneck cooties."

A spokes-tapper from the organization, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, defended the invitation of Palin to the join the group in the bunker, noting it had given similar invitations to several Democratic politicians after former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad appeared at the United Nations last week strapped with a 50-megaton nuclear device. However, all of the Democratic invitees canceled under pressure from the NDJC.

"Just because Senators Clinton and Schumer were vaporized in the attack last week is no excuse for you to continue hosting Sarah Palin," responded Stanley. "It is an affront to all Jews that you would actually share your freeze-dried kreplatch and tzimmes with this dangerous meshuggah shiksa."

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Via a notation from Ana Marie Cox on Twitter, A.O. Scott in The New York Timesdiscusses Wallace's voice, which he attempts to separate from Wallace's life.

Good luck, Buddy.

Special bonus: the headline is "The Best Mind of His Generation." Get it?

When, as an undergraduate with a head full of literary theory and a heartsick longing for authenticity, I first encountered David Foster Wallace, I experienced what is commonly called the shock of recognition. Actually, shock is too clean, too safe a word for my uncomfortable sense that not only did I know this guy, but he knew me. He could have been a T.A. in one of my college courses, or the slightly older guy in Advanced Approaches to Interpretation who sat slightly aloof from the others and had not only mastered the abstruse and trendy texts everyone else was reading, but also skipped backward, sideways and ahead. It was impressive enough that he could do philosophy — the mathematical kind, not just the French kind. But he also played tennis — Mr. Wallace, in fact, had competed seriously in the sport — and could quote lyrics from bands you only pretended you’d heard of. Without even trying, he was cooler than everyone else.

All this shone through Mr. Wallace’s fiction. He had the intellectual moves and literary tricks diagrammed in advance: the raised-eyebrow, mock-earnest references to old TV shows and comic books; the acknowledgment that truth was a language game. He was smarter than anyone else, but also poignantly aware that being smart didn’t necessarily get you very far, and that the most visible manifestations of smartness — wide erudition, mastery of trivia, rhetorical facility, love of argument for its own sake — could leave you feeling empty, baffled and dumb.

Another way of saying this is that Mr. Wallace, born in 1962 and the author of an acclaimed first novel at age 24, anchored his work in an acute sense of generational crisis. None of his peers were preoccupied so explicitly with how it felt to arrive on the scene as a young, male American novelist dreaming of glory, late in the 20th century and haunted by a ridiculous, poignant question: what if itÂ’s too late? What am I supposed to do now?

Yeah, well: one could almost say the same thing about female writers. Almost.

Cox characterizes the piece as "deft." Maybe. Certainly, the point is well taken that a high I.Q. and $3.50 can buy one a Chai Latte at Starbucks. So, you know: we've got that going for us.

I still think that what he did was really, really stupid.

And with that, I think I'll go to bed.

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Jan's appetite tonight at dinner will be either greater or less than usual, and her sense of smell with be more sensitive/acute. She's also due for an extra dose of estrogen soon, which should put her in a good mood once it kicks in.

If she won't or can't drink more than a half-glass of wine, that will clinch it.

Hm. The plot thickens.

For my own part, I've decided that married-without-children is a sensible middle ground between spinsterhood and motherhood. All of the benefits of marriage, without the downside of a demanding family life. Which frees me up to do . . . whatever it is I'm doing. So there.

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. . . in his own way:

I hate to tell you this, but we didn't "rape the earth." It was consensual. The earth was begging for it, Frank. And if you don't mind sloppy seconds, get in line.

Note: I hope that my readers all realize that Robert Stacy McCain is no relation to John McCain, et al.—unless, presumably, one goes back to Ireland. In which case they are probably both distant cousins of my husband's, and I'm related (via England) to James Whitmore.

And, for the record, Stacy is one of the last few holdouts in terms of not voting for his "crazy cousin John" for President. (Personally, I thought it would be me, but I fell like a libertarian domino around March of this year.)

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Racists!

Double-Plus Undead put a content warning on this one. But if I started doing stuff like that, wouldn't I have to "NSFW" my whole blog? (Still: even less SFW than usual.)

Aw, come on. 'S funny 'cause it's true.

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Arrgh, it be talk like a pirate day again. But they'll not be telling you which pirate ye need to be talkin' like. How about this one?

And here I be at the Auto Repair Place, wearing a T-shirt other than my Disneyland "Pirates of the Caribbean" shirt, with its skull-and-crossbones flag that be glowin' in the dark. Unfortunately, it be havin' polyester fibers it its fabric, so it be an easy T-shirt to overheat in.

I be thinkin' of cuttin' the sleeves off of it and makin' it into a muscle shirt. To show off my buff arms.

Christophe Twitter-tweeted the most half-assed Pirate talk I've ever seen in my life, in "spirit of the day": "R." Is that the text-talk/Leet speak version of Pirate-patter? Also, how would that sound in LOLCAT?

Hm. Nokitty be hoistin' the Jolly Roger. But we can haz:

more animals

Pirate Duckies!

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Nope. I don't think it was like Obama's "57 states" (he was just tired that night, the way I saw it).

I think she really is that ignorant. YMMV.

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Over at Malkin.

Extra credit: who wants to guess at the male:female ratio among users of "Anonymous"?

Among the males (which, let's just assume it's 99.99999999, for the purposes of discussion), how many have been laid?

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Is Zed looking for a new job?

Or is Muir just trying to make his girl-readers swoon with that suit?

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we'd be able to appreciate what idiots we are.

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1 I think part of the problem was that you let lobbying do stuff to the AMA and your healthcare systems. While I don't support wacko stuff like lobotomies (unless the guy's a serial killer or something, and even then I think just hanging him would be much less cruel), confining the insane is pretty much the best idea ever. Yes, it does tend to remove them from the public eye, and hence you get crazy shit like electroshock therapy (I don't care if it works or not, ain't nobody gonna stick electrodes up my ass and pump 300V into me). OTOH, I dunno. Maybe it can be difficult to draw the line as to what's mildly eccentric and what's [ahem] moonbat nuts. For example, I speak to myself. Very frequently. How should that be classified? Hmm. Maybe we should just have a 'reservation' for them? Corral all the crazies, and the greenies and the hobo hippies and put them in a nice, natural, picturesque environment... ...And then sell hunting licenses and day passes to those who practice the AoSHQ Lifestyle(tm). /I kid, I kid

Posted by: Gregory at September 18, 2008 12:43 AM (cjwF0)

2 Of course, that presupposes that the morons are actually able to take on the hobos--maybe, maybe not: some of those hobos are tougher than they look. I KNOW . . .

Posted by: Attila Girl at September 18, 2008 09:40 AM (TpmQk)

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