Category: Old Dish

“Before this election the Bush administration had taken every opportunity to give the extreme right-wing of his party what they’ve wanted on social issues, but they were doing it quietly. Now they’ll be more out front. I think there will be steamroller in January that will attempt to crush reproductive freedom. We’re talking about sending women back to a time when they were barefoot and pregnant.” – Gloria Feldt, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, in an absurdly crude and out-of-touch piece in Salon.

It seems former British prime minister, Harold MacMillan, slept. Here’s part of the letter he wrote to the Queen, about a major summit meeting with French, German and American leaders in 1959. It has just been released for public consumption:

After lunch, which was extremely good, Dr Adenauer delivered for nearly an hour a lecture on the dangers of communism and the best way to deal with it in the schools, in the factories and in the homes. I regret to inform Your Majesty that I fell asleep during the latter part of this oration.

A classic. Nice assessment of Eisenhower too.

That appears to be the new Bob Forehead term deployed by the Democrats. John Edwards, in particular, seems to have retired the “Working Families” mantra in favor of the “Regular People” formula. Maybe these things work. But the way in which these focus-group locutions deaden the language, rob it of any life or meaning or specificity is truly depressing. No “regular people” talk about “regular people.” My other problem with Edwards is that he’s a Southerner. For the Democrats to nominate a Southerner for the fourth time in four election cycles may make electoral college sense, but it still slights the parts of the country that are more dependably Democratic. Still, I like his politics – they seem sanely to the right of, say, Al Gore. And he has a touch of the Tony Blair about him: the slick yet somehow earnest combination. Hard to pull off.

WILL BLOGGING PAY? The prospects are looking brighter. John Scalzi just got a book contract because of a blog serialization. And my first pay check (thanks to you) comes in two weeks. Woohoo.

GREEN BUSH: Belated recognition of this administration’s tight diesel fuel emission standards. The news got some play, but we’re still a long way from denting the reflexive Bush-is-anti-environment chorus. The administration bears some responsibility for this. The diesel fuel decision is a real pro-environment call – not just blather – that the president should have gotten real credit for. It should have been announced in dramatic, news-making fashion, by the president himself. Instead, it was buried in turn-of-the-year blahs. A lost opportunity. If I were Mr Rove, I’d be planning several pro-green initiatives for the next two years, with major presidential backing for them. Get Matthew Scully to write the speech. Show why responsible conservatism cares about the natural world, its conservation, its health. There’s a record here. Trumpet it. And force the lazy hacks to change their script.

SCHEER ILLOGIC: Here’s a classic from Robert Scheer in the Nation:

In fact, the Shiite fundamentalists must be high-fiving in Tehran over the costly American makeover of Central Asia. These fundamentalists would be the biggest benefactors of any takedown of neighboring Iraq, as they were when the United States installed Iran’s longtime puppets, the Northern Alliance, as top dogs in Afghanistan.

Does Scheer really believe that the fundamentalist tyrants clinging to power in Tehran want a successful regime change next door? And yet he’s the one accusing the Bush administration of illogic.

Here’s the Advocate story about Herb Ritts’ early death. He died because his immune system was severely compromised by HIV. And here’s a German version of the same story. Odd that this should be restricted to the gay press. Or are we now headed back to the early 1980s?

DERBYSHIRE AWARD NOMINEE: “K-Lo: So DC’s first baby of the year was born to a lesbian couple. New York’s seems to have been to a black single mother. Don’t you sometimes feel like giving in to despair?” – John Derbyshire, National Review Online. I guess I’m used to Derb’s dismay at homosexuals, and you could explain this comment by saying he’s merely depressed by the absence of two-parent male-female families. But why the gratuitous mention of the race of the single mother? Once again, you get the impression that Derb would be happier if this country had fewer blacks and gays in it. No surprise he sympathized with Trent Lott.

A new blog on the scene. Written daily in the seventeenth century. Quite a talent.

BLAIR’S WELL-FOUNDED SOBRIETY: The British tabloids have had some fun mocking Tony Blair’s New Year’s Message about the terrible potential of the coming year. But Blair – again – is doing the right thing. Leadership means telling people what they don’t want to hear. It’s not just possible there will be a terrorist attack this coming year that is equal to or greater than the horror of 9/11/01. It’s probable. It’s not just possible that Saddam will unleash the vilest weapons in his arsenal in the coming war. It’s probable. My own view is that this year is probably going to be an awful one: full of death and conflict and struggle and because of them, economic distress. I think the era of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of evil, stateless men is imminent; and that things will likely get a lot worse before they get better. I sure hope I’m wrong, and that in a year’s time I’ll look back on this and wince. But Blair is right to have said what he did. Preparing people for the worst is what leadership sometimes means. And what should we do about it? I’ll defer to a piece in today’s Daily Telegraph on the vision of J.R.R. Tolkien:

The moral is the motto of the British redcoat: “Look to your front.” Don’t think about what other people are doing: you’ll get it wrong and it’s disheartening. Or, to quote Gandalf again – and Jackson picked out just these words to repeat in the first movie, varying the pronouns cunningly – “That [the future] is not for us to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

MUGABE’S NEW LOW: The only newspaper independent of the Zimbabwean regime hasn’t been printed in ten days.

BLAMING THE JEWS: Fascinating detail from the British government’s release of 30-year-old classified documents in the Telegraph yesterday. The British Foreign Office – like the State Department, a center of elite Arabophilia – blamed Israel for the deaths of its athletes at the Munich Olympics. A despatch from Jerusalem tried to explain why there had been almost no Arab condemnation of the killing of Jews:

Gayford Woodrow, the consul general in Jerusalem, sent a dispatch to the Foreign Office on Sept 12, six days after the attack, saying: “Before we reproach the Arabs too much, perhaps we might try to put ourselves in their shoes. “They are, after all, human beings with normal human failings. The Palestinians in particular have seen their land taken away from them by a group of mainly European invaders equipped with superior armed force and modern technology. Whatever one’s moral criticism, it must be agreed that the Munich operation was well planned and that the Arabs there carried it out to the bitter end. It is said that lives were really lost because of Israel and West German bungling incompetence.”

Ah those plucky terrorists. Not their fault if a few pushy Jews got killed.

“COMPLICATIONS OF PNEUMONIA”: I’m intrigued by the weird locution used by every single newspaper obit to describe the cause of photographer Herb Ritts’ death. The phrase is “complications of pneumonia.” Now I have no way of knowing for sure what killed Herb Ritts at 50, but it seems highly unlikely that it was pneumonia alone. Very, very few people with access to decent healthcare die of pneumonia alone any more. But the phrase is very reminiscent of the euphemisms first used a decade or two ago with regard to AIDS. With AIDS, the precipitant cause of death is often some kind of opportunistic infection, and in the beginning of the plague, pneumonia was a leading infection. Hence people could get around saying they had AIDS by stating some subsequent illness as the cause of death. So the question is: was the openly gay Ritt’s pneumonia a freak and dangerous strain that is newsworthy in its own right (like Jim Henson’s) or was it HIV-related? And do newspapers have some responsibility to tell us which? It seems to me that when an openly gay guy dies at 50 of pneumonia, any decent editor would ask a simple follow-up. Or are they still colluding in the shame that some still attach to an HIV diagnosis?

BEGALA AWARD NOMINEE: “The New York Times continues down the path laid down personally by crazed war-hawk Howell Raines to agitate for a war against Iraq.” – Eric Alterman, finally losing it, at Altercation.

A NEW YEAR’S BABY: This one has two mothers. And some would like to give this child almost no legal protection as the legitimate daughter of two women in a committed legal relationship. Wouldn’t it be better for the kids if their parents had the legal protection of marriage? Social policy from some conservatives: let’s increase illegitimacy and family instability if it helps us stigmatize gays. Or put another way: leave every child with gay parents behind.

Bush’s ‘mandate’ “includes using the taxing power to transfer wealth from working people to the rich. It includes giving corporations a free hand to eviscerate the environment and control the regulatory agencies meant to hold them accountable. And it includes secrecy on a scale you cannot imagine. Above all, it means judges with a political agenda appointed for life. If you liked the Supreme Court that put George W. Bush in the White House, you will swoon over what’s coming. And if you like God in government, get ready for the Rapture. These folks don’t even mind you referring to the GOP as the party of God. Why else would the new House Majority Leader say that the Almighty is using him to promote ‘a Biblical worldview’ in American politics? So it is a heady time in Washington – a heady time for piety, profits, and military power, all joined at the hip by ideology and money.” – Bill Moyers, paid for in part by your tax dollars, on PBS.

BEGALA AWARD RUNNER-UP: “Give the Republicans credit. They know what they stand for. Tax cuts. Guns. Bombs. Oil. Big business. Old boy networks. Privatization. Plundering the earth. Pillorying and padlocking the poor. Party-line votes.” – Derrick Z. Jackson, the Boston Globe.

BEGALA AWARD HONORABLE MENTION: “But W., who was always the Roman candle and hatchet man in the family, has turned his father’s good manners upside down – consulting sparingly, leaving poor Tony Blair to make the case against his foes for him, and treating policy disagreements as personal slights.” – Maureen Dowd. Notice “his” foes. Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are apparently only Bush’s personal enemies.

SONTAG AWARD WINNER 2002 (for egregious anti-Americanism in the war on terror): “It is not enough for Bush to be President of the United States, he must become the Emperor of the World. This unclothed emperor is, as they say in Texas, all hat and no brains. In the years before us, I fear there will be causes worth dying for. There will be tyrants so unstoppable that we will have to fight them to preserve our own freedom. But that is not the case now. Instead of standing up against tyranny, we are bringing it to our own doorstep. We have met the enemy, and it is us.” – Glenda Gilmore, professor of history, Yale University.

SONTAG AWARD RUNNER-UP: “Having swept the Palestinians into the arms of the supreme terrorist Ariel Sharon, the Christian Right fundamentalists running the plutocracy in Washington, now replenish their arsenal in preparation for an attack on the 22 million suffering people of Iraq. Should anyone need reminding, Iraq is a nation held hostage to an American-led embargo every bit as barbaric as the dictatorship over which Iraqis have no control. Contrary to propaganda orchestrated from Washington and London, the coming attack has nothing to do with Saddam Hussein’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’, if these exist at all. The reason is that America wants a more compliant thug to run the world’s second greatest source of oil.” – John Pilger, The Observer.

SONTAG AWARD HONORABLE MENTION 2002: “You are a disgrace to this country and I am furious you would even think I would support you and your aggressive baby-killing tactics of collateral damage. Help you recruit. Who, top guns to reign [sic] death and destruction upon nonwhite peoples throughout the world? Are you serious sir? Resign your commission and serve your country with honour. No war, no air force cowards who bomb countries without AAA, without possibility of retaliation. You are worse than the snipers. You are imperialists who are turning the whole damn world against us. September 11 can be blamed in part for what you and your cohorts have done to Palestinians, the VC, the Serbs, a retreating army at Basra. You are unworthy of my support.” – Peter Kirstein, professor at Saint Xavier University, in response to an email from a cadet asking for help advertizing a political science assembly.
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DERBYSHIRE AWARD WINNER 2002 (for right-wing hysteria and hyperbole): “In fact, Andrew McKelvey’s network [Americans for Gun Safety] kind of operates and sounds a lot like Osama bin Laden and the al Qaeda. A billionaire with an extremist political agenda, subverting honest diplomacy, using personal wealth to train and deploy activists, looking for vulnerabilities to attack, fomenting fear for political gain, funding an ongoing campaign to hijack your freedom and take a box-cutter to the Constitution. That’s political terrorism, and it’s a far greater threat to your freedom than any foreign force.” – Wayne LaPierre, at the NRA Convention, according to Americans for Gun Safety.

DERBYSHIRE AWARD RUNNER-UP 2002: “It counts as evidence that Fr. Maciel unqualifiedly and totally denies the charges. It counts as evidence that priests in the Legion whom I know very well and who, over many years, have a detailed knowledge of Fr. Maciel and the Legion say that the charges are diametrically opposed to everything they know for certain. It counts as evidence that Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger and others who have looked into the matter say that the charges are completely without merit. It counts as evidence that Pope John Paul II, who almost certainly is aware of the charges, has strongly, consistently, and publicly praised Fr. Maciel and the Legion. Much of what we know we take on trust. I trust these people.” – Richard John Neuhaus, First Things, still trusting whatever the Catholic hierarchy says about its members.

POSEUR ALERT WINNER 2002 (for stupendously pretentious writing): “If there’s anything that confounds the British more than American optimism, it’s baseball, which brings together on one bright pastoral greensward those twin nineteenth-century American deliriums: industrialization and individualism. Baseball turns into fun the oppressions of industry-management, productivity, accounting, specialization, even stealing-and yet the pageant of winners and losers in this proto-corporate world also allows for goodness to be measured, made immutable, and, thanks to the eternal vigilance of statistics, kept alive. Baseball is a game-some would say a ritual – of hope.” – John Lahr, The New Yorker.

POSEUR ALERT RUNNER-UP 2002: From Vanity Fair’s “Proust Questionnaire” of Gary Hart:
“What is your idea of perfect happiness?
HART: Reading The Odyssey in classical Greek on board a three-masted schooner off the island of Chios.”

VON HOFFMAN AWARD WINNER 2002 (for spectacularly bad predictions): “Why is Bush in free fall?
* Support for an invasion of Iraq has dropped from 72 percent to 62 percent in the past 14 days. Bush and his folks are so distracted by their diplomatic dance with France and Russia that they have fallen down on the job of convincing the American people that an invasion is needed.
* Bush has been hit with a continuous six-month fall in his ratings on “managing the economy” – from 64 percent approval on April 30 to 55 percent on July 2 48 percent on Oct. 22.
* By campaigning for Republican candidates around the nation, Bush seems to be undermining the case for a military emergency requiring immediate action against Iraq.” – Dick Morris, New York Post.

VON HOFFMAN AWARD RUNNER-UP: “Diplomacy with North Korea has scored a resounding triumph. Monday’s draft agreement freezing and then dismantling North Korea’s nuclear program should bring to an end two years of international anxiety and put to rest
widespread fears that an unpredictable nation might provoke nuclear disaster. The U.S. negotiator Robert Gallucci and his North Korean interlocutors have drawn up a detailed road map of reciprocal steps that both sides accepted despite deep mutual suspicion. In so doing they have defied impatient hawks and other skeptics who accused the Clinton Administration of gullibility and urged swifter, stronger action. The North has agreed first to freeze its nuclear program in return for U.S. diplomatic recognition and oil from Japan and other countries to meet its energy needs. Pyongyang will then begin to roll back that program as an American-led consortium replaces the North’s nuclear reactors with two new ones that are much less able to be used for bomb-making. At that time, the North will also allow special inspections of its nuclear waste sites, which could help determine how much plutonium it had extracted from spent fuel in the past.” – The New York Times, wrong yet again, October 19, 1994.

RAINES AWARD WINNER 2002 (for blatant but unacknowledged media bias): “[T]hat question, known as a generic ballot question, is a measure of national sentiment, and does not necessarily reflect how Americans will vote in the governor’s races around the country and in the handful of close Senate and House races that will ultimately determine the control of Congress.” – The New York Times, spinning their 47 – 40 Republican-Democrat poll of the weekend before the November elections. The Times editors so hate Republicans they even blew their own pre-election scoop.

RAINES AWARD RUNNER-UP: “In March, 2002, General Mofaz sent thousands of troops into the West Bank, repeating the exercise three months later after a spate of deadly suicide attacks by Palestinian militants. As chief-of-staff, General Mofaz directed some of Israel’s most controversial military operations. These included: The March 2002 assault on Jenin, where Palestinians claim a massacre took place – though UN officials later denied this.” – BBC News, in an article on the new Israeli Defense Minister, Shaul Mofaz. Well, did the massacre take place or not?

I don’t understand why Time couldn’t manage to say it, but the Financial Times gets it right. This was George W. Bush’s year. Slowly building toward ridding the world of Saddam’s threat, shrewdly identifying North Korea, Iran and Iraq as an axis of evil, demanding democracy from the Palestinians, presiding over modest economic growth despite a terrible global outlook, winning an almost unprecedented vote of approval in the November elections, capping it all with a Philadelphia speech that was a watershed in the GOP’s struggle with its own internal demons – by any measure, this was a spectacular performance. The high-point? The U.N. speech. Here’s the FT:

It was a defining moment of the year, when the leader of the last remaining great power bowed to international opinion not out of obligation but out of choice. At the UN, Mr Bush displayed the combination of power and restraint that has elevated his presidency in 2002. Under his leadership, the US has acted more multilaterally, more cautiously and more wisely than many had feared after the provocation of September 11 2001.

Forget the bloviations of the Hate-America-First crowd. History will one day credit Bush with patience, multilateralism and conviction. But right now, history is still being made. And there is a war to be continued and to be won.

TOP TEN WINNERS OF 2002:

10.Steve Jobs, for the iPod alone.
9. Roger Ailes, for kicking media ass.
8. Al Gore, for finally leaving the stage.
7. Ozzie Osbourne, for showing that love makes a family.
6. The Blogosphere, for coming of age.
5. Karl Rove. You can’t take away last November.
4. Steven Pinker, for the best book of the year.
3. Eminem, for making it out of hell.
2. Condi Rice, for making it.
1. Pat Tillman, for giving up a promising and lucrative NFL career in order to serve his country.

TOP TEN LOSERS OF 2002:

10.Janet Reno. Not even the primary.
9. Madonna. You’ve got to have off-years.
8. Jennifer Lopez, for talent-free ubiquity.
7. Michael Jackson, for child abuse.
6. Bernard Cardinal Law, for child abuse.
5. Howell Raines, for wrecking a brand almost beyond repair.
4. Trent Lott, for still not getting it.
3. Tom Daschle, for running on prescription drugs in wartime.
2. Gerhard Schroder, for self-defeating opportunism.
1. Saddam. You wait.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: “The cigarette is ‘somebody to whom I go asking for solidarity and comprehension and company and friendship when I am very tired or very angry or very sad or even when I’m very happy.'” – Oriana Fallaci, in the Financial Times. Don’t miss the rest of her Paglia-esque riffs on the threat of Islamism to the West.

MAMET ON ANTI-SEMITISM: The playwright David Mamet has an excellent little piece in the current Forward, about his recent trip to Israel. He’s tough on himself, for his absence when Israel is under such pressure. But he’s also got a typically good eye:

Before my trip, I was strolling through Newton. There, before me, was a broken-down Volvo of old, the vehicle of my brethren, the congenitally liberal. It was festooned, as are its kind, with every sort of correct exhortation: “Save James Bay,” “Honor Diversity” and so on. A most interesting bumper sticker read: “Israel Out of the Settlements.” Now this is a legitimate expression of free speech. Israel has been involved, as we know, in a rather protracted real estate dispute with several hundred million of its neighbors. This legitimate political expression, however, had all its “S”s transformed into dollar signs. Here we have, one would have supposed, a civilized person (one would assume that one could reason with the owner of a Volvo) sporting a slogan which could best be translated as “Hook-nosed Jews Die.”

Ah, yes. But the Volvo owner has accurately imbibed one of the potions now keeping the dying far left alive.

MORE EVIL: Alongside North Korea, one of the remaining truly evil regimes in the world today is the military cabal still holding the beautiful country and gentle people of Burma hostage. Here’s a story that should have garnered more attention: mass rape as an instrument of terror against the ethnic minorities in that country’s border areas. These thugs are genocidal.

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE: “Villain of 2002: George Bush. This illiterate buffoon cheated his way into the White House with the help of his well-connected family and friends. Having dismally failed to anticipate or prevent the atrocity of September 11, he spent the rest of the day zigzagging around the country like a jet-propelled chicken. His personal cowardice was mirrored in the country at large, and he fanned it to his advantage in the mid-term elections, and now, to foment an unprovoked war that has nothing to do with terrorism and everything to do with oil. His record on the environment is as appalling as you would expect. Bush is rightly despised throughout the world, and it is humiliating that Britain is seen as his only ally.” – Scientist Richard Dawkins, spewing what has now become the conventional wisdom among Europe’s decadent and ignorant liberal elites.

COMING SOON: The Dish will announce the 2002 winners of the annual Sontag, Von Hoffman, Begala, and Derbyshire Awards.

Back next Monday.

I’ve just read Charles Krauthammer’s typically insightful column and Jonah Goldberg’s response on the conservative splits over Lott. Oddly enough, I think both have a point. In the older generations, there’s definitely a split between the older paloe-conservatives and the former liberals aka neo-cons. But I think among the under 40 crowd, it doesn’t quite fall out that way. Part of the genuine moral outrage for the younger crowd is that it really is simply unthinkable to us that anyone, even jokingly, perhaps especially jokingly, could have a good word to say for the presidential campaign of Strom Thurmond. We came of age in the 1970s and 1980s, where the major issue wasn’t segregation but affirmative action. We started with the assumption that such views were repugnant, and have never mixed in circles where they weren’t. Perhaps we therefore come by such views less authentically than our elders; but they are genuine nonetheless. I think most “eagles” are completely at ease in a multi-racial, multi-cultural society, enjoy it, value it and are grateful for it. But many of us were never modern liberals as such, so we don’t fit the neocon label. At the same time, I know I have learned a huge amount from the neo-conservatives: their intellectual rigor, moral passion, and lively polemics. I was lucky to have been trained as a journalist at the New Republic in the 1980s and early 1990s, and will forever be grateful for having my somewhat insipid English conservatism buttressed and informed – though not overwhelmed – by neocon scholarship and debate. So rather than fight over our small differences, can we not celebrate the fact that neo-conservatism has so informed the conservative mind that a younger generation simply takes for granted the arguments that were once so fiercely fought for?

IDIOCY OF THE WEEK I: The Lott brouhaha has been revealing in many ways. It reveals how many liberals simply believe all Republicans are racists under the skin. It reveals how many conservatives actually aren’t racists under the skin. And it’s a good indicator that some in the Republican Party, who chose to run to Lott’s defense, do have serious “minority issues.” But two fatuous comments stand out. The first is by Bob Novak. I’ve long wondered whether Novak’s ubiquity on cable talk shows is some kind of Democratic plot. Just on a purely visceral level, he exudes contempt for his opponents, sneers every opinion, and almost always assumes bad motives on the part of his rivals. He’s about as unlovable a media entity you could possibly find, and he revels in the fact. But he’s also an old guy, a man of his generation, the kind of guy you’d expect to be befuddled as to why anyone could ever take offense at the notion that segregation was once a good thing.In the New York Times Wednesday, he opined, as good ol’ boys might, that Lott has “been treated badly by the White House, I think he’s been treated badly by his colleagues, for what was certainly, in my opinion, not a hanging offense… The Democrats wouldn’t have kept it alive if conservatives had said let’s not keep it alive. The conservatives all piled on, and when the president in his speech last Thursday said what he did, that opened the door wider.” The last part is indisputable. The pressure on Lott was largely created by conservatives and Republicans. But Novak’s assumption is that Lott’s voiced nostalgia for segregation was no big deal, that it was a one-off gaffe. Is Novak aware that Lott had said just such a thing in public before? Is he aware of Lott’s almost bizarrely troglodytic voting record? Has he thought for a second what the implications of that remark were? After all, it wasn’t a gaffe, a joke. It was an argument. And a completely repulsive one. There was more from Novak: “He’s damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t. The same [Republicans] were saying, `We can’t have a racist,’ then he comes out and says, `I’m for affirmative action,’ and they say, `Oh, we can’t have that.'” This statement assumes what some left-liberals assume: that your only two choices are to favor affirmative action or be a racist. But the whole point of the new conservative position on race is that there is another way — to empower minorities through greater choice in education, welfare reform, incentives for family cohesion, lower taxes and so on – that does not rely on quotas or crude racial categorization. If Novak hasn’t assimilated this, he’s as distant from the current conservative movement as Lott is.

IDIOCY OF THE WEEK II: The second fatuity came from Ann Coulter. She told the Times, “I don’t remember liberals being this indignant about the 9/11 terrorist attacks.” This is just gob-smackingly weird. First off, what does it matter what “liberals” think about this? The question is: What does Coulter think about this? Was Lott right or wrong? Second, plenty of liberals were indignant about the 9/11 attacks – although a few leftists weren’t. To tar all liberals with the Sontagian brush is unfair. Some were indeed pusillanimous with regard to the Afghanistan campaign; many of the same people are being equally craven when facing down the threat from Saddam. But many other liberals saw what was attacked on 9/11 and are now part of the battle to protect the West. And it does no one any good to ignore this. Instead, we should welcome them aboard. Some of them, after all, were here from the beginning.

“You know, if every “Woman’s Studies” department was closed, and the student loans were used to create businesses that hired women instead of studied them like tragic butterflies impaled on the patriarchal pin, we might be better off. Granted, we’d be without PhDs theses like “Rape Symbolism and Beatrix Potter: A Rake’s Progress,” but the culture would survive; the only noticeable effect at all would be a 17% decrease in Frieda Kahlo poster sales, and a 50% decrease in 33-year old college students.” – James Lileks today. I fear he’s right – which isn’t to say that real study of women’s history isn’t a great and important topic. The rest of the column – on some pain-in-the-ass Canadian who’s against Christmas – is a beaut.

BEAGLE NEWS: Always, always micro-chip ’em. Except mine won’t even allow me to clip her paws.