Is it There Will Be Blood? The last season of The Wire? Wild Hogs 2? No, the most thrilling footage you will watch this year is the stirring defense of freedom of speech by one Ezra Levant. The setting is an almost barbituratically bland conference room; the opponent a timeserving pencilpusher of a Nurse Ratched-- and Levant is like Olivier in Henry V, delivering the modern equivalent of the St. Swithin's Day speech in defense of his right to offend and the government's right to take its political correctness and shove it.

Here's the story:

Two years ago, Levant, editor of the now-defunct Canadian conservative magazine The Western Standard, had the cojones nowhere to be found in our mealy-mouthed dying dailies, and published the Danish Mohammed cartoons which had "sparked" ginned-up protests in the more irrational corners of the Islamic world.

Soon after, the self-appointed "supreme imam" of Muslims in Canada, which as Levant tartly points out is a part-time job, filed a complaint that publishing the cartoons was a violation of his human rights. Thus Levant finds himself hauled in front of a bureaucratic Kangaroo court with few of the standard protections of Anglospheric jurisprudence, defending himself against what is, simply, a thought crime.

Doubt it could happen here, this kind of "liberal fascism"? Let's go to the video, which of course is all over the blogosphere but nowhere to be found in our useless-on-the-big-things mainstream media:

The opening statement of a free man

Thought crime

Who really insulted religion?

In defense of offensiveness

Entitled to my opinion?

I am often accused of being a right-wing troll who is only here to savage liberals and pump up Republicans. I disagree with every premise in that statement-- that I'm right-wing or a troll, that I'm not a liberal, that I'm especially fond of the Republicans at the moment-- and my own description of myself would be something like "liberaltarian" (or possibly Bleeding-Heart Imperialist), but never mind. If you think I'm a Republiscum death-merchant, I'm now going to break the 11th Commandment-- and body-slam two Republicans, one living, one dead. Enjoy it while it lasts.

* * *

Henry Hyde will be remembered for two things. One of them was remembered reverently on right-wing sites last week: the Hyde Amendment barring the federal government from paying for abortions. I'm pro-choice (or to be more accurate, I'm resigned to the inevitability of abortion and therefore favor it being a safe and legal medical procedure rather than an unsafe and illicit one), yet I will grant the Hyde Amendment some admiration for bringing moral suasion to a political issue in the way that has always been best in our political tradition-- civil disobedience. We admire Thoreau for spending a night in jail rather than pay taxes for war-- abolitionists for defying the Fugitive Slave Act-- Rosa Parks for refusing to move. The Hyde Amendment was Congress saying, we will not spend your money on this. We will not be a party to its continuation, even if we can't stop it.

But then there's the other thing he'll be remembered for: hypocrisy of the highest order. Hyde went after Bill Clinton's adultery knowing full well that he too had been an adulterer, that he had betrayed trust not with some modern coed with easy morals and few worries about reputation, but with a married woman with children in the less permissive 1960s. When it came out he regretted that his grandchildren would have to know it, but he never regretted that he had cloaked himself in morality while sanctimoniously condemning his own crime in another. His epitaph ought to be the ringing condemnation from Howards End, for he had the same weakness and self-evasion as that other Henry:

"Not any more of this!" she cried. "You shall see the connection if it kills you, Henry! You have had a mistress--I forgave you. My sister has a lover--you drive her from the house. Do you see the connection? Stupid, hypocritical, cruel--oh, contemptible!--a man who insults his wife when she's alive and cants with her memory when she's dead. A man who ruins a woman for his pleasure, and casts her off to ruin other men. And gives bad financial advice, and then says he is not responsible. These men are you. You can't recognise them, because you cannot connect. I've had enough of your unneeded kindness. I've spoilt you long enough. All your life you have been spoiled. Mrs. Wilcox spoiled you. No one has ever told what you are--muddled, criminally muddled. Men like you use repentance as a blind, so don't repent. Only say to yourself, 'What Helen has done, I've done.'"

"The two cases are different," Henry stammered. His real retort was not quite ready. His brain was still in a whirl, and he wanted a little longer.

"In what way different? You have betrayed Mrs. Wilcox, Helen only herself. You remain in society, Helen can't. You have had only pleasure, she may die. You have the insolence to talk to me of differences, Henry?"

* * *

Mitt Romney is said to be set to give "the speech" on Thursday-- a long anticipated address in which he explains why Americans should not fear a Mormon in the White House. There is indeed something unfair about this requirement that he alone in the race must justify his faith-- it's hard to know why a grown man should believe that God gave a whole separate scripture full of inaccurate historical details to one Joseph Smith about 6000 years after civilization got going, but then it's hard to know why a grown man should believe that millennia ago, God disdained all of his humans except one lone tribe of Israelites, either. More to the point, it's hard to know why a grown electorate should want to see its president hard in the act of trying to swallow these things in a pew. Our brightest presidents-- Lincoln, FDR, Reagan-- have stayed far away from such places and done their own sermonizing and God-invoking without a middleman, and it's only the least subtle strivers (Nixon, Carter, Clinton) who make a big show of it.

But be that as it may, it's an important step for Romney, the press all says so. And he gave a preview of how he'll tackle the issue to Robert Siegel on NPR:

SIEGEL: One last point: In the CNN-You Tube debate, there was a moment when one of the people who submitted a question asked all the candidates whether they believed in every word of the Bible, and two of your rivals – Mayor [Rudolph] Giuliani and Gov. [Mike] Huckabee – both made a point of saying, "Well, in some parts it's allegorical, in some parts it should be interpreted, but yet, I believe in the Bible." And you seemed – if I read you right – to make a point of saying it's the word of God, and even when considering some modification, you backed up, said, "No, I'll just stick with that. It's the word of God." [That] left the impression – and I want to ask you – do you hold a literal belief, say, in the Genesis version of creation?

ROMNEY: You know, I find it hard to believe that NPR is going to inquire on people's beliefs about various parts of the Bible in evaluating presidential candidates, and actually, I don't know that that's where America has come to — that you want to have us describing our particular beliefs with regards to Genesis and the Book of Revelations, so —

SIEGEL: I raise Genesis only because creationism is a national issue in a variety of ways, and –

ROMNEY: Well, but then you could ask me a question and say, "Do you believe that we should teach creationism in our schools, in our science classes and so forth?" and I'm happy to give you an answer to that. But I don't know that going through books of the Bible and asking, "Well, do you believe this book? And do you believe these words?", that that's terribly productive. Particularly when we face global jihad, when we have 47 million people without health insurance, when we have runaway costs in our entitlements, to be asking presidential candidates about their specific beliefs of books of the Bible is, in my view, something which really isn't part of the process which we should be using to select presidents. My point is the Bible is the word of God, and I try and live by it.

Well, to paraphrase Tommy Lee Jones in No Country For Old Men, if this isn't the mush, it'll do till the mush gets here.

Romney's points seem to be:

1) How dare you ask me a specific question on this subject and not allow me to continue forming a thick fog of feelgood inanities?

2) How dare you ask me a question about religion in schools in a way that has anything to do with religion?

3) How dare you ask me about religion when there are problems with religion in this world that we should be talking about?

4) How dare you talk about what you want to talk about when I have talking points about health care and Social Security that I want to change the subject with?

And this is the Republican who might be leading the ticket? Any claims that brittle evasiveness and high dudgeon (as a defense mechanism against uncomfortable questions) are the defining characteristics of entitlement-Dems like Hillary evaporate in the face of this performance, which answers not a question, persuades not a doubter, but tries to get by on whining victimhood.

Mitt, you're a multimillionaire white boy with perfect hair. America's seen too many movies in which you're the bad guy to buy you as the poor lil' victim next to Erin Brockovich in the big finale. Be a man, tell 'em you were raised in your religion and right or wrong it made you the man you are, and you have a chance of getting past everyone thinking it's weird. Whine that it's unfair that they're swiftboating you, and, well, the last whiny rich white guy from Massachusetts to get the nomination didn't do so well in the end, either.

Here in Illinois, we have a governor (Blagojevich) whose father-in-law is a powerful alderman (Richard Mell) and gave him his start; a mayor of our largest city who is, of course, the son of a famous mayor (the Richard Daleys, J and M); an attorney general and a speaker of the house who are daughter (Lisa) and father (Mike Madigan); a county board president who is the son (Todd) of the previous officeholder (John Stroger), appointed when his father had an incapacitating stroke; and assorted other second and third generation names scattered about our politics. My son is good friends with the son of one of the rare exceptions to this rule, and the father and I have both made jokes about my son riding his son's coattails to power. Hey, third grade is none too early to start planning your political career in a state like this, where dynasty is destiny.

Illinois' politics are unusually corrupt, up there with Rhode Island or D.C., but it's not like the rest of the country can say too much when a second Clinton is running to replace the second Bush (who defeated the Junior to a powerful senator who, by all accounts, groomed him for the job from birth). So it is cheering to see someone-- even if it's the mercurial figure of Grover Norquist-- finally arguing that we need to do something about nepotism in our politics:

While Americans complain about Hosni Mubarak’s plan to replace himself as president of Egypt with Mubarak Junior, roll their eyes at Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, the son of the late President Hafez al-Assad, and giggle at North Korea’s Kim to Kim dynastic communism, we are about to hold a presidential election that may extend a sequence that gives the land of the free four years of George H.W. Bush, eight years of William Clinton, eight years of George W. Bush, son of, and the start of eight years of Hillary Clinton, wife of...

This creeping tendency to see elected office as a family heirloom is not just present in the executive. Congress is littered with the spouses and sons and daughters of former congressmen who wanted to keep the position in the family. The father of Representative John Dingell of Michigan served in Congress for 22 years and then handed the job to his son in 1955. The debate recently has been whether the incumbent will hand it to his wife or one of his sons...

A bipartisan revulsion at this recrudescence of an aristocracy – Democrats think there have been too many Bushes, Republicans think there have been too many Clintons – has led concerned citizens (OK, me) to launch a campaign to enact a constitutional amendment to ban this practice. The draft now circulating was written by the legal scholar Bruce Fein and reads:

Section 1. No spouse, sibling or child of an elected or appointed federal, state or local official outside the civil service may immediately succeed that official in the same elected or appointed office.

Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation, including exempting certain elected or appointed offices from its general proscription and defining the term “immediately succeed” to prevent circumventions.

Interestingly, even this proposal would not have prevented either of the presidential dynastic situations we've recently faced (nor would it have stopped Mayor Daley the II). (It also doesn't deal with the fact that Hillary could have run as early as 2000 by simply divorcing Bill.) For that reason, frankly, I would be happy to see it go further, and prevent any relative (as defined above) of the president from running for 16 or 24 years.

If people still remember Hillary fondly enough in 2016 or 2024 to elect her, she can try then-- but in the meantime, we'll have expanded our bench of capable candidates, not allowed it to contract to a few families with built-in name recognition. It may be mildly unfair to a few talented individuals of famous families-- but it is of obvious benefit to the nation in allowing many more individuals to run without all the cash and oxygen in their race being sucked up by individuals who have a famous name and, often, little else apparent to offer.

At first glance Mitt Romney seems the stereotypically perfect Republican candidate-- the blow-dried CEO turned can-do governor. But of course the first glance doesn't reveal what everyone knows-- that Romney is a member of a small, but unusually ambitious and influential, cult of like-dressed followers with strange beliefs, which seeks to infiltrate its way into places of power throughout society.

So far Romney's allegiance has been dealt with treating it as a private matter. But in a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal's Brian Carney, Romney was frank-- perhaps recklessly so-- about his desire to bring his beliefs and fellow acolytes into government in new, dazzlingly powerful roles:

"I would probably have super-cabinet secretaries, or at least some structure that McKinsey would guide me to put in place." He seems to catch a note of surprise in his audience, but he presses on: "I'm not kidding, I probably would bring in McKinsey... I would consult with the best and the brightest minds, whether it's McKinsey, Bain, BCG or Jack Welch."

The nation is right to wonder if it can withstand this onslaught of fanatical adherents of a strange faith in high office.

* * *

Although Hillary remains the Betty Noire of many on the right, many others have come to accept her as the least undesirable Democratic nominee. Part of this is a conviction that she'll be easier to beat, but it's also evidence of a sense that her liberal exterior conceals her inner Nixon, and that once in office, freed from the need to woo the Kossite left, she'll wage war ferociously, protect the Wall Street types she and Bill party with, and do other Republican-friendly things.

I think there's a huge amount of wishful thinking in this-- the Clintons are never free of an inner need to woo their base, and there's no evidence that a secret moderate, rather than a Mondalesque standard issue liberal, beats in her chest. Nevertheless, given the alternatives, it may well be that Hillary is, indeed, the Least Objectionable Electable Democrat from a rightwing point of view.

So who's the equivalent on the other side? Who's the Least Objectionable Electable Republican for Dems? Many would pick Ron Paul, antiwar libertarian, but there's too much odd about Paul's beliefs to keep that bubble alive for long. Rudy's thin smile conceals his inner Savanarola; McCain's a Teddy Rooseveltesque warrior; Thompson is, by now, running for Veep. No, we need a moderate, non-ideological triangulator, used to dealing with a majority on the other side in his state. We need a Republican Bill Clinton.

Which is where Romney comes in. He seems to have few solid views, certainly few things he would fight to the end for, but lots of ideas about good governance (and just as many about self-publicity). He's competent and slick. He's a businessman, which means he cares about results, and has no fixed ideas about anything that leads to them; the customer and the monthly sales figures are always right. He makes the hardcore ideologists on his side nervous, and wouldn't be afraid to sell them down the river if needed, which is why he might be acceptable to the other side. He's Bush with an actual track record in business, not just a few lucky breaks facilitated by cronyism, and thus has less to prove by bold, reckless changes of course.

In short, he's pretty boring, but he'd probably do fine. Yes, he belongs to a religion which believes in stuff other Americans find weird, because it's different from their own faith's weird stuff, but it's very hard to look at him and believe he's ever thought about it reflectively enough to form his own opinions. His real faith, even moreso than with Bush (as I wrote here), is in the latest business book shibboleths.

The Left's Nixon vs. The Right's Clinton. It's very possible that each side may be happier losing than winning next year, though they'd never admit it now.

It may be surprising to see David Broder, king of the already accepted conventional wisdom, take on something a little touchy in a column. Nevertheless, today he is one of the first to take on an elephant in the bedroom that no one seems to be talking about: the Constitutional and practical issues of having an ex-president hanging around his wife the president, injecting marital drama into national affairs.

I say one of the first, but not the first-- here at Mgmax's Blog, we covered this angle on November 2:

When she holds Cabinet meetings, he will likely be there. When she meets with foreign dignitaries, he will stay where Laura or Nancy would have gone. When she has to make a decision, we will always wonder if she did-- or he did.

Bill Clinton will have circumvented the 22nd amendment-- or we'll think he may have. We will have a co-president possibly fighting with the actual president over final decisions-- or not, depending on which ex-aide's tell-all book you read. Disappointed that his first eight years didn't give him the kind of big historical stage on which to be an FDR, Bill will join FDR as the only president with two more terms in which to make his mark by some outsize, self-dramatizing act in the post-9/11 world.

Or will he? The point is, we just don't know. We don't know what really goes on between them. All we know is the spin.

Okay, we weren't the first either, since we quote Charles Krauthammer. But anyway, Broder raises the issue too:

As my friend says, "there is nothing in American constitutional or political theory to account for the role of a former president, still energetic and active and full of ideas, occupying the White House with the current president."

No precedent exists for such an arrangement, and no ground rules have been -- or probably can be -- written. When Bill Clinton was president, the large policy enterprise that was entrusted to the first lady -- health-care reform -- crashed in ruins.

The causes were complex, and some of the burden falls on other people -- Republicans and Democrats in Congress, the interest groups and, yes, the press. But as one who reported and wrote in great detail and length about that whole enterprise, I can also tell you that the awkwardness of having an unelected but uniquely influential partner of the president in charge affected every step of the process, from the gestation of the plan to its final demise. She was never again asked to take on such a project.

And this was simply the confusion sown by having the first lady in charge. Put the former president into the picture -- however "sanitized" or insulated his role is supposed to be -- and the dimensions of the problem become even larger.

No one who has read or studied the large literature of memoirs and biographies of the Clintons and their circle can doubt the intimacy and the mutual dependence of their political and personal partnership.

No one can reasonably expect that partnership to end should Hillary Clinton be elected president. But the country must decide whether it is comfortable with such a sharing of the power and authority of the highest office in the land.

It is a difficult question for any of the Democratic rivals to raise. But it lingers, even if unasked.

Will anyone ask it before it happens, unasked?

Many of my earliest posts were motivated by a desire to show that the wild-eyed talk of impeachment-- remember that, back when the Cubs might be going to the World Series?-- was bad for the country, bad for the party that would propose it, and most importantly, extremely unlikely to happen, no matter how hot a topic it was on progressive websites read by the .0001% of us gaga about politics a year and a half before an election:

Impeachment dreams were never very realistic. Not this close to an election, when they would have introduced a most unwelcome reminder of the worst parts of the late 90s into Hillary Clinton's campaign. She had no interest in 24-hour talk-TV yammering about blow jobs, the meaning of is, executive privilege, Democratic payback-- and how we wasted the late 90s obsessing about such trivialities and playing tit-for-tat (so to speak) while our enemies planned 9/11.

Nor was there much more stomach for it among Congressional leaders, who never care for processes with unforeseeable endings. The big problem with the impeachment of Bush (or Bush, Cheney, Gonzalez; your real impeachment hounds plan to take out as many of their enemies in one go as Michael Corleone at a baptism) was that the desire for impeachment long preceded any specific charge.

Indeed, everyone who dreams of it seems to have a different high crime they're high on promoting... The Congressional leadership has no interest in letting the dogs loose to chase so many wild geese, just to satisfy the bloodlust at Daily Kos and The Nation and Camp Casey (and thus sew up the furthest left 10% of the electorate for the Dems, while alienating much of the swing voting middle).

But even I could not have imagined the delicious bit of comedy which was set loose in Congress today, the production of "Capitol Hi-Jinks" starring the honorable Moe, the distinguished Curly and the gentleman from Larry.

It started when Dennis Kucinich (D-Planet Zontar) announced his intention to impeach Dick Cheney. This was a typically inscrutable move from Kucinich, since removing Cheney would, so far as anyone could see, accomplish exactly zippo. Bush would still be president, and even if you believe Cheney secretly runs his brain, well, it's not the powers of the vice presidency that enable him to do so. If Bush wanted Cheney to stop by every Thursday and give him his orders for the next week, he could. (I don't endorse this view of how this administration works, by the way, I'm just saying.)

Steny Hoyer, who by all accounts is the Jeeves to Speaker Pelosi's Wooster, immediately set out to kill Dennis' Plan 9 From Outer Space by tabling it. With most Democrats and all Republicans being happy to diss impeachment as sooo last summer, this should have been an easy piece of stage management.

Except the Republicans, still ticked about SCHIP and other stuff, decided not to do Hoyer any favors. In the middle of the vote, Republicans started changing their votes to go against tabling and for debate on impeachment-- and soon the impeachment resolution was headed for actual debate on the floor of the House. With a substantial number of Democrats already having voted for it, confident that the measure would be tabled anyway, the Republicans easily produced a majority of 251-162 in favor of debate.

In a panic that debate and thus democracy might break out (Gentlemen, you can't debate issues in here, this is the House!), Hoyer was forced to send it to Judiciary instead to be buried.

And so impeachment moves closer to reality... or at least comedy... thanks to Republican support. Let us salute the 165 brave Republicans who did what was right, not what party loyalty demanded, and crossed party lines to support impeachment of their own sitting vice president... and deliver a big fat cream pie right in Steny Hoyer's kisser.

Valerie Plame, the world's best-publicized secret agent, soon to be played by Vera Farmiga in an upcoming movie, appears on an NPR show this weekend. Is it Fresh Air? Afro-Pop Worldwide? (Rumor has it she recommended Joe for that.) Car Guys?

No, it's the show whose name sums up the whole Plame-Wilson-Libby-Fitzmas affair to a T. The show whose name couldn't be more appropriate to every stage of this impeachable offense that wasn't. Can't guess yet? What show's title completes all of the following statements-- and if people hadn't consistently followed the instruction in the show's title, the truth would have come out and the whole affair would have collapsed in a weekend?

"Joe Wilson, guess who recommended you for the Niger job..."

"Actually, we in British intelligence have determined that Joe Wilson's report was utter bollocks and there is evidence that..."

"Patrick Fitzgerald, this is Richard Armitage. The person who told Robert Novak about Plame wasn't Scooter Libby, it was..."

"Tim Russert, Andrea Mitchell has a hot tip for you about who sent that ambassador to Niger. Maybe you should bring it up with Scooter Libby when you go meet with him. Apparently it was it was his wife, who works for..."

"David Corn, guess who it turns out revealed that Plame was covert, in the process of covering the story and hyping it up so excessively. Robert Novak only mentioned her employment; the first person to blow her covert status in print was..."

"WAIT, WAIT! DON'T TELL ME!"

Many commentators have made the parallel between Argentina's election of its First Lady as its next president and Hillary Clinton's run for the office in this country. Others have taken it a step further and recalled the Peronist history where Peron was succeeded at his death by his third wife, Isabel (not the one the musical was about).

But there's another history closer to home which is worth recalling as we consider the historic step of electing a First Lady-- and thus possibly returning a term-limited former president to office by other means. It's the tawdry and tragic tale of Lurleen Wallace.

* * *

In the ignominious tradition of Southern racist demagogues, Alabama Governor George Wallace had risen to national prominence as a fiery, oily opponent of federally-enforced integration. Though a Democrat, he planned to run against the Democratic nominee for president in 1968 on the American Independent Party ticket, hoping to force the election into the House of Representatives-- where he could wheel and deal with the eventual president on a truly national scale to roll back desegregation.

There was one obvious problem though: thanks to Alabama's term-limits law, Wallace would not be governor by the time the election rolled around, reducing his stature. So he adopted a not unfamiliar tactic: putting his wife, Lurleen, up as the candidate to replace him. Everyone knew, of course, that the modest and high-school-educated Lurleen would merely hold the office in title for her husband.

As it happened, there was another problem, however, much less well known to the public and, it appears, unknown even to Lurleen: she was dying of uterine cancer. Though a doctor had observed the signs of cancer as early as 1961, he had told George, not her, and George had failed to see that she was treated appropriately.

A hysterectomy and radiation treatments were performed during the campaign, while the Wallace organization lied to the press about her obvious declining condition. A few months after her inauguration, in May 1968, an emaciated and pathetic Governor Lurleen Wallace died at the age of 42. Though she had requested a closed casket, her husband insisted that she lay in state for all to see. He was running for president, after all, and a dead wife and grieving husband and children would prove to be the kind of publicity a campaign can't buy.

* * *

There is nothing so gothic about Mrs. Clinton's run for office. And she is obviously a very different sort of person than a semi-educated housewife with no political ambitions of her own. It is entirely plausible that she wants the office herself, for her own reasons.

But Lurleen's ghastly tale is a reminder of the drastic extremes to which hugely ambitious men will push their families in pursuit of office. And given the legendary opaqueness of the Clintons' marriage, we simply don't know what the equation of ambition and desire for office is between the two of them. I'm not attempting to advance a particular view of it here-- Bill as Svengali to her Hillby-- but to make the point that, we have no idea. None of us. Your guess is as good as mine.

So far the primary season has evaded the question, treating Bill as some figure of the past, as irrelevant to Hillary's term as Tom Cruise is to Nicole Kidman's next movie. At most he'll be a pleasant resource to draw upon, ready to add glamor and star power to state funerals (making one wonder what exactly Vice President Richardson is supposed to do for four or eight years).

But of course it isn't like Tom and Nicole at all, because the Clintons are still married. As Charles Krauthammer observes, "The cloud hovering over a Hillary presidency is not Bill padding around the White House in robe and slippers flipping thongs. It's President Clinton, in suit and tie, simply present in the White House when any decision is made." When she holds Cabinet meetings, he will likely be there. When she meets with foreign dignitaries, he will stay where Laura or Nancy would have gone. When she has to make a decision, we will always wonder if she did-- or he did.

Bill Clinton will have circumvented the 22nd amendment-- or we'll think he may have. We will have a co-president possibly fighting with the actual president over final decisions-- or not, depending on which ex-aide's tell-all book you read. Disappointed that his first eight years didn't give him the kind of big historical stage on which to be an FDR, Bill will join FDR as the only president with two more terms in which to make his mark by some outsize, self-dramatizing act in the post-9/11 world.

Or will he? The point is, we just don't know. We don't know what really goes on between them. All we know is the spin. Yet we don't seem to be willing yet to really think through the consequences of allowing a former president to pull a Lurleen Wallace and put himself back in office through his wife-- or the consequences of a former president who thinks he's doing that, only to learn that his Mrs. was no Lurleen Wallace after all. Who knows which alternative will turn out to be the case? Who's willing to ask the question-- before it's too late?

So as not to hijack further Brad DeLong's post, I've started this post for additional comment, though it remains to be seen if anyone cares to make one or not! See the beginning of the discussion here:

http://www.tpmcafe.com/blog/bookclub/2007/oct/30/i_think_paul_krugman_is_wrong

My last comment:

Again, keep in mind that I only post about things where I think groupthink needs a breath of air from outside. (Some call it trolling, I won't deny it bears some resemblances to it, but I'm not JUST stirring the pot.)

For instance, I've never posted about gay marriage. I'm for it, I think it's historically inevitable and it's humanely right, I'm clearly left of the Democratic party on that-- and the only interesting point I have to make would be about how ineptly it's been handled from a political point of view. So why post about that so ten other people here can agree with me? Nobody's learning anything from that. I should go post it at Free Republic or something and be the resident pinko there, instead of the resident wingnut here.

Now back to Prof. DeLong, who must be wondering what the hell happened to his subject here. Sorry, sometimes things that have been brewing for a while hop to the latest thread, regardless of subject.

The other day I posted about a Massachusetts race (The Incredible One-Day Significance of Tsongas v. Ogonowski!) which offered some very minor insight into how 2008 might play out. Today I am going to post about a much more major race which is of real consequence for 2008-- and, in the absolutely non-partisan, bare and phalanxed fashion in which I always post here, I will show how this is good news for candidates, or at least one candidate, on both sides of the aisle.

Bobby Jindal is the first national real-life example of a Hollywood type, the whip-smart Indian kid (see Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle). He founded the Young Republicans chapter at Brown, went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, joined McKinsey out of school, was an assistant secretary of HHS for the first couple of years of the Bush administration. Four years ago Kathleen Blanco narrowly beat him for governor of Louisiana, so he ran for Congress the next year and won.

Now, the national script has been that Blanco was an innocent bystander to the disaster of Katrina, sole work of the Republicans, one George W. Bush in particular. (You all remember all those speeches John Kerry gave about repairing the infrastructure in places like New Orleans. Practically the whole election was about that.) Well, whoops, turns out the people of Louisiana didn't quite see it that way. Blanco polled so disastrously that she dropped out, and Jindal found himself against 12, count 'em, Democratic candidates.

Normally that would be an easy walk to a win for anybody. But Louisiana has the rule that if no one polls over 50%, there's a runoff election. It's rare that anyone running for statewide office skips the runoff and wins outright. And Jindal was up against an especially ugly, racist and anti-Catholic Democratic campaign. Yet Jindal won 53% of the vote-- avoiding a runoff and, like Ruby Keeler in 42nd Street, coming back a star. (Or would a better movie reference be Rudy and Kumar Go To White House?)

Ah, but he won it because Katrina purged Louisiana of black people! you say. Well, turns out that's not so true. New Orleans is depopulated, but much of that population has moved to Baton Rouge and places like that. So they're still voting in Louisiana. Jindal may have been helped a little that way, but still, this is someone who won all but four parishes of the state, proving his appeal across all groups-- from black Democrats to white Catholics to white Protestants who once went for David Duke. Katrina elected him all right-- but not in the way lazy commentators will insist.

* * *

So what does Jindal's election mean?

First, it means Katrina is dead as a campaign issue. It probably always was-- it was never clear why it should have affected, say, the Mayor of New York City or a senator from Arizona-- but as part of the litany of Bush's sins (HalliburtonEnronKatrinaIraq) it had totemic power for some Democrats. Unfortunately, the people of Louisiana didn't get the memo and clearly blame their own hapless leadership and history of Democratic machine corruption, especially as contrasted with, say, Mississippi's Republican governor Haley Barbour. The rest of the world may blame Bush for the New Orleans mess, but Louisianans see Republicans like Jindal as the reform faction in their politics, and rightly so. So its utility as a weapon against the Republican candidate in 2008 is officially ended.

But I said it would help people on both sides of the aisle. And it does. The other huge beneficiary of Jindal's win is one Barack Obama, Democratic candidate for president. One of the unspoken themes of Hillary Clinton's electability has always been-- "I know you're not a racist, and you know I'm not a racist, but we both know that all those red-state hicks ARE racists-- and they'll never vote for a black skin, no matter how Harvard-educated and bestselling and charismatic he might be."

I personally never believed that, and the adoring crowds greeting Obama everywhere he went demonstrated to me that he was meeting an enormous hunger among white America for a non-crazy black leader, for someone who wasn't a guilt-tripping mau-mauer/con artist like Sharpton or Jackson, but would validate their sense of being post-racist. But it's hard to argue what's in other people's hearts.

For Louisiana-- for the state of David Duke-- for the place some pundit once described by saying, "Louisiana isn't southern America, it's northern Guatemala"-- to elect a brown-skinned person because he's simply way way smarter and cleaner than the alternative proves that we really are, two generations after the dawn of the civil rights era, living in a transformed America. Is racism dead? No. Is it possible to outvote it now in virtually any state of the Union (or the Confederacy)? The conclusion now must be yes.

That's very good news for Barack Obama, a mighty blow against one of the presumptions underlying Hillary's supposed inevitability. And certainly far from the worst outcome of this election would be Obama running for reelection in 2012-- against the equally young and impressive Governor Jindal of Louisiana.

An interesting pair of events spotlight the difference between rightwing talk radio and leftwing talk radio this week, and suggest why one is smashingly successful and the other is still amateur hour, 3-1/2 years after the founding of Air America:

• Randi Rhodes, Air America host, found herself face down in a gutter in front of an Irish bar in New York City, bruised and disoriented. Normally, this is not the kind of mystery that would take a whole hour of Law and Order to solve. Indeed, few of us got through college without something similar happening; we try not to keep doing it in middle age, however.

But goofs at Air America promptly made it into a great conspiracy. Rhodes apparently reported the stumble as a mugging at first; and one of her colleagues, one Jon Elliott, apparently having never heard the ancient proverb "When foot is in crosshairs, stop pulling trigger," raced to the air to declare Rhodes' fall further evidence that we live in Amerikkka in 1933:

Is this an attempt by the right wing hate machine to silence one of our own? Are we threatening them? Are they afraid that we're winning? Are they trying to silence and intimidate us?

Soon all the usual spots-- the Air America forums, Kos, Democratic Underground, etc.-- were buzzing with conspiracy theories:

IF this was a political hit from Blackwater or whoever, there is going to be the wrath of G-d on the perpetrators.

Adolph Hitler's right wing thugs regularly 'mugged' opponents and members of unpopular groups even before he came to power....Given Randi Rhodes courageous outspokenness about the sinister intentions of the right wing, it is not unreasonable to suspect that this non-robbery assault is an attempt by Neo-conservative thugs to silence her views.

What frequency is that, Kenneth? Alas for those whose sense of personal drama is fed by imagining that they live in the darkest and thus coolest of times, a day or two later Rhodes sheepishly admitted that, uh, she'd just tumbled down by herself in front of an Irish bar for unknown reasons. Rightwing bloggers have had fun ever since mocking the overwrought reaction to her accident. Are they trying to silence you, Jon Elliott? No, because you provide too much juicy material.

• Congress tackled a really important issue the other day: it wrote a private company suggesting that it needed to shut up one of its employees. The employee was one Rush Limbaugh, a popular talkradio host of the right, and the reason Democrats in Congress swerved across eight lanes of the First Amendment to try to silence him was to try to create an equivalent in public outrage to the "General Betray Us" ad placed in the New York Times (at illegal bargain rates) by MoveOn.org.

The premise was that Limbaugh had slandered our soldiers!!!! What had he done, quoted Dick Durbin or John Kerry verbatim? No, he'd referred specifically to one Jesse Macbeth, currently being prosecuted for posing as an Iraq veteran, as a "phony soldier"-- which in fact he was, in the sense that he claimed to have committed atrocities in Iraq when in fact he was discharged before completing basic training. But Media Matters, a nonpartisan watchdog group which watches the rightwing media for Hillary Clinton all day long, sliced and diced Limbaugh's actual quote to try to make it look like he'd been indiscriminate in using the term.

This would have been a pretty easy thing for Limbaugh to refute under the circumstances, but showmanship isn't being on the defensive, it's taking it to another level-- and Limbaugh, realizing that he had in his possession a letter containing the signatures of three possible next presidents of the United States, among many other luminaries, in the act of trying to shut up a private citizen, decided to auction it off as a fundraiser for the Marine Corps Law Enforcement Fund, a scholarship fund for children of soldiers and police officers killed in the line of duty. The auction, which ends later today, is now at over $2 million for the letter, an amount Limbaugh pledges to match.

I realize there are many whose gorges rise at the mere mention of Limbaugh, and I am no fan of the entire genre of talkradio ranting, but if one can overcome one's partisan feelings and merely admire how the game is played, this is brilliant showmanship on every level-- down to the Hallburton briefcase the letter is kept in. It embarasses his opponents, it makes them a party to reinforcing his claim that he is a stalwart supporter of the troops, and it just demonstrates such brio, such swashbuckling panache, in how one responds to one's enemies. Progressive radio will never emerge from the dank basement of conspiracy mutterings and appeal to a broad audience until it too can project this kind of sunny gusto for the fight, the kind that projects inner confidence and the joy of the thing well done. The first step in avoiding falling on your face is to raise your sights.

Tsongas vs. Ogonowski-- until yesterday most of us would have assumed that this was the straight to video sequel to Ballistic: Eck Vs. Sever. If you follow political news, however, you know that it's the race that a bored press is avidly studying the entrails of, trying to determine if it holds any significance for 2008.

Basically, the debate falls into two camps:

1) Mild significance. (It's so slow for news even that qualifies as news.) Ogonowski, whose brother died as a pilot on a 9/11 plane, did surprisingly well for a Republican in Massachusetts, narrowly losing; Tsongas, whose late husband Paul was a senator for a couple of millennia from the state, did surprisingly poorly, narrowly winning. This suggests that all Republicans are not doomed in 2008, each race is its own race and their message and their better candidates have some traction when divorced from an unpopular president.

2) No significance. The Dem state machine did the next best thing to putting up Tsongas' corpse for reelection and still pulled off a win, which just proves that old hacks shouldn't be allowed to pick weak candidates, but even if they do, it's a Dem sweep in the making.

Coming from Illinois, where we follow Machine orders religiously and thus voted in the closest thing to a corpse (the stroke-enfeebled John Stroger) so Mayor Daley could then replace him with his son Todd Stroger (who came pretty feeble to start with), I tend to agree with #1. In the battle of the dead relatives for office, Ogonowski & brother did suprisingly well against Tsongas and husband and the machine, suggesting that Dems should not take '08 for granted and Repubs should not be laying in supplies of sleeping pills and razor blades-- yet.

Still, one can't draw more than the tiniest of conclusions from such an unusual race. I mean, a state election is one thing, but it's not like the Democrats, faced with a candidate with a 9/11 connection, would nominate for president some ex-officeholder's wife with little track record besides standing next to her husband and smiling, right?

Who says the Bush administration never learns from its mistakes?

One of the main raps against the invasion of Iraq is the fact that significant WMDs were never found after the invasion. Well, for the war with Iran (and Syria, and as it turns out, North Korea), they're not making that mistake again. They're finding the WMDs first and going to war after.

The Times of London reports:

Israeli commandos seized nuclear material of North Korean origin during a daring raid on a secret military site in Syria before Israel bombed it this month, according to informed sources in Washington and Jerusalem.

The attack was launched with American approval on September 6 after Washington was shown evidence the material was nuclear related, the well-placed sources say.

They confirmed that samples taken from Syria for testing had been identified as North Korean. This raised fears that Syria might have joined North Korea and Iran in seeking to acquire nuclear weapons.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article2512380.ece

Israel's at war with Syria-- which means we're at war with Iran. The appeaser students who urged that their classmates not cause Ahmadinejad too much grief at his debutante ball at Columbia, because it will only play into the administration's drumbeat for war, are behind the times. And The Times.

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POSTSCRIPT: The initial tenor of the comments, as well as the fact that folks raced to disrecommend this entry, suggest to me that people imagine me licking my lips at the prospect of bloodshed in Iraq and saluting our Commander in Chief for finally getting into the gory work.

This is not the case. I fear the possible outcomes of going to war with Iran-- but unlike kneejerk pacifists, I also fear the possible outcomes of NOT going to war to stop Iran. I recognize that we have a real enemy (who has, in many ways, been at war with us since 1979, and certainly is actively at war in Iraq right now) and we will probably need to do something. And that appearing, at least, to be willing to go to full-fledged war is an important weapon in itself.

Furthermore, I fear that going to war is the one thing that would help the evil regime there. So checkmating their activities outside Iran, as this episode in Syria seems to have done, is perhaps the best thing we can do in the short term to worry them without giving them a propaganda coup to rally their populace with.

Anyway, if you want a concise overview of the war with Iran as it's beginning to play out, read here:

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/09/the_buildup_to_a_usiran_war.html

I said last week (in my post "The Day The Antiwar Movement Imploded") that the MoveOn ad alleging treason by General Petraeus would be the beginning of the end for the antiwar movement.

The odds continue to go up that I was right. I'd say right now, they're 72 to 25.

That is, as you may have guessed, the vote count on the resolution in the Senate condemning MoveOn's ad. 25 of the usual far-left Democrats (Kennedy, Durbin, Kerry) voted against it, as did Hillary, a couple (both of whom, Obama and Biden, are running for president) managed to be absent, but every Republican and almost half the Democrats voted for the resolution to condemn the organization that just months ago was claiming it owned the Democratic party.

It's hard to think of a comparable moment in American political history when the knives came out against a force that had gotten too powerful for its own good-- the Buckley crowd expelling the Birchers and the anti-semites from the respectable conservative movement in the 50s? The wave of 1920s anti-Klan legislation in midwestern states that drove it out of its original territory in Indiana, Ohio and Michigan? Something like these, I suppose.

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Meanwhile, history, in one of its delicate ironies, gives us another perfect example of how morally rotten some of our most leftist precincts have become.

In California, the regents of the university system will not allow their ears to be polluted by former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, who is untouchable for having stated the observable fact that there are relatively few women in the highest echelons of science.

In Columbia, the administrators will allow their grounds to be sullied by a speech by former hostage taker Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is acceptable despite having denied the observable fact* that six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust.

Add in the Duke "rape" case, the Ward Churchills and all the rest, and the bonkers-left domination of academia and the greater leftist movement may finally come under public scrutiny and, in many cases, the censure and abhorrence by decent people that it has long deserved.

* Yes, 1983Merman, it IS an observable fact. Quite simply so, in fact. As Billy Wilder wrote one Holocaust denier, "What a relief it is to learn that six million Jews were not murdered by the Nazis. Just one question, though. Where is my mother?"