Well, the cat is out of the bag. Along with fellow Doublethink alum Peter Suderman, I’ve joined forces with several more superexcellent friends to create Culture11, your new destination for pop content, political commentary, narrative journalism, and…of course…MORE. Today’s fare, a representative sampling, includes:

Rod Dreher on the chickens taking over his life

Shawn Macomber on DNC convention protests as performance art

Alex Massie on Olympic tug of war

Me on Joe Lieberman as a faulty Bush legacy ejector seat

Among other delights: our staff blog, The Confabulum, and the biggest x-chromosomal chatterbox known to man, Ladyblog.

Alas, what all this means is that I won’t be around much longer to whisper into your ear at Doublethink. Like seersucker suits and white pants, come Labor Day, I’ll be nothing but a sweet and sunny memory. It’s a shame, as we always want partings to be; but That is Life, and my turn at Doublethink has been a lot of fun. Sonny Bunch is a blog partner anyone should clamor to have, and I owe a big thanks to you, the readers, as well as you other guys, the editors. I’m sure I’ll see you all around, one way or the other. But for now, check out my new digs, and let’s enjoy the rest of the summer…while it lasts.

A reliable source sends me a flash message at this early hour: the Russians have recognized them. Quite a silly think to do for a rampaging imperial power that could easily have just absorbed the little territories. Though I’m sure the reaction in the US will be this is absorption in all but name. I wonder what the reaction will be in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Wait, no I don’t. 

These two statelets are problems Georgia has never been able to resolve, and we must remember going forward that they are not the mere creations of Moscow. They have had a few colorable claims to sovereignty as it is — probably Abkhazia’s being the stronger one — and from a plain perspective, if the model of defusing conflict by breaking up states containing very restive enclaves was right in Yugoslavia, it is probably right in Georgia, too — and was before the Russians came. Debacliciously, had the West pressed Georgia to let those statelets go, we’d be in a far different and better situation today. 

So for reasons like those I think Western recognition of the pair should be swift, accompanied with a statement making it clear HOW and WHY recognition can be conferred for reasons other than the force situation on the ground. Indeed, recognition affords the West a powerful opportunity to explain to Russia that once you play this game, you must play it fair, i.e. both statelets must not become mere Russian garrison states. Sure, there will be bases. But we know how this works; we know the difference between Qatar and Kosovo. Abkhazia and South Ossetia have been stubborn obstacles to the normalization of the international system in Georgia, in a way that makes it extraordinarily difficult and even moot to ascribe fault. The main obstacle to integration, in my view, was our alliance with Georgia, and our desire to bolster Saakashvili’s regime. Now it strikes me that that obstacle, too, is pretty moot: the best way to keep Saakashvili in power (as shaky as he is, the alternative is probably worse) is to help a consolidated Georgia, free of fiercely independent ‘autonomous’ regions that it never could recapture, press the Russians back to internationally recognized borders, new and old, through a series of intense diplomatic moves (i.e. more sticks than carrots. But please use sticks the Russians care about, and not ones that will damage our own institutions, like the G8).

UPDATE: the wire report.

The Bad News Britons are taking their binge-and-vomit tour on the road, debasing themselves and threatening the public decency wherever they go. So says Sarah Lyall in the NYT:

They are the ones, the locals say, who are carousing, brawling and getting violently sick. They are the ones crowding into health clinics seeking morning-after pills and help for sexually transmitted diseases. They are the ones who seem to have one vacation plan: drinking themselves into oblivion.

“They scream, they sing, they fall down, they take their clothes off, they cross-dress, they vomit,” [Cretan town] Malia’s mayor, Konstantinos Lagoudakis, said in an interview. “It is only the British people — not the Germans or the French.”

Such are the perils of living in a place that’s increasingly becoming one of the most mirthless of all pink police states: a nanny whose rule is so regimented that she permits you the luxury of barhopping until the wee hours and screwing and spazzing your way across town after town. What works in Picadilly, however, is hell at 30,000 feet — or in anything less than the most debauched resort destination in the Mediterranean. Fortunately traveling Americans are usually too fat and lazy to make such an organized disgrace of themselves; our college freaks are bottled up more or less safely in Mexico. But it does us well to remember that fun itself can occupy the role Marx and Nietzsche attributed to alcohol: drug of consolation for the oppressed herd of international schmucks. Only in the old days, these poor sots were laborers; today they are just as often virtually as inefficient and redundant on the job as they are off. 

Read the whole article, which is hilarious and dreadful at the same time. But don’t buy the argument that the British are too ‘repressed’ somehow at home. It’s the other way around. No, it’s possible to be unhinged to the max and still, well, miserable:

“I think that in their country, they are like prisoners and they want to feel free,” said Niki Pirovolaki, who works in a bakery on Malia’s main street and often encounters addled Britons heading back to their hotels — “if they can remember where they are staying,” she said.

The opposite of the imprisonment in question is not the freedom practiced in hope of an answer.

At The Washington Post. It’s remarkable — though understandable — how sober and controlled the language of the Ukrainian president appears beside that of the US’s most nominally pro-Ukrainian commentators. After all, Yushchenko must operate in the realm of reality and responsibility. So he presents NATO membership as the logical outgrowth of a broader commitment to the prudential practices captured in a complex latticework of effective, cooperative regional security institutions. As opposed, that is, to presenting NATO membership as the urgent and final hope for Russia’s next would-be morsel, or as a bit of punishment for what Russia’s done to Georgia.

(I may as well add here that Russia’s ongoing occupation of territory in Georgia proper is a big mistake worthy of big condemnation…though hardly, even still, the behavior of an out-of-control paranoid imperialist regime.) 

Along lines like these, I’m not entirely sure that NATO membership for more countries, especially ex-Soviet ones, is really the huge deal most make it out to be. I was firmly against expanding NATO to Georgia and Ukraine this time around, but mainly because in the totality of the then-present circumstances, it was unnecessary, counterproductive, and problematic. France and Germany were right to recognize, however, that one day this might change, for a variety of reasons, and there’s no good reason to announce that NATO will never expand again. Nonetheless, there are natural boundaries at work in any future expansion plan. Obviously the aim of NATO is to set up a defensive alliance for Western civilization in Europe, so as to permanently prevent Europe from ever being the site of another world war. Well, not everybody gets to be a member of Western civilization in Europe, not even on an honorary/historical basis like Turkey.

Point is, Yushchenko’s argument is certainly colorable as sane and commonsensical from a Ukrainian perspective, along with several others, but as of now it doesn’t get the US where the US wants or needs to be. And oh yes — by ‘Ukrainian’ Yushchenko must mean western Ukrainian, because all those Russian-speakers on the eastern side are 100% not down with the program. Any NATO expansion, even under otherwise completely benign circumstances, must hinge upon at least the rough unity of a prospective member country’s people in favor of joining! Crazy idea, I know.

Julian posts the key Time interview grafs. I’m down, of course, but universal preschool AIN’T CULTURALLY CONSERVATIVE, dood! State-supervised socialization for toddlers? Not for my future aloof, elite offspring. I can unironically tell you one little bit of irony: a universal preschool regime will produce Barack Obamas even less frequently than our current crude regime.

The Verve is back. Maybe not better than ever, but still apparently pretty good, and you can’t make Urban Hymns every time, can you? Whatever this new record does, it will never — nor can anything else — resolve the essential conflict between those who rank Hymns first and those who think A Northern Soul was The Verve’s creative peak. It’s a generational thing. (Hipsters have no use for ANS. No, not because they wouldn’t recognize a soul if it hit them in the face. Jeez!)

At The Plank, Nate Silver has some numbers:

Republicans

Candidate  Fav-Unfav
Kaine       29-30 (-1)
Bayh        23-43 (-20)
Sebelius    14-45 (-31)
Biden       22-63 (-39)
Clinton     21-75 (-54)

[...] Joe Biden will not have a terrific amount of crossover appeal. On the contrary, though the animus might not be as personal as in the case of Senator Clinton, Biden will be seen my many GOPers as a partisan blowhard. One can argue, however, about whether this really matters. The notion that Obama was going to win over some large number of “Obamacans” had not realistically been in play for a couple of months now, as the GOP base has begun to rally behind John McCain.

Maybe. The interesting thing here is that the GOP campaign machine has hit Obama hardest on personality, and everyone knows how that line of attack would have developed had Hillary joined the ticket. I’m slightly biased here — I love Biden’s personality, and would choose him over any Democrat living if I had to be lectured at by any of them — but I wonder whether I’m completely alone in that regard. Hmm…

WITH ME: Peggy Noonan, David Brooks, Peter Lawler, Alex Massie, Megan McArdle

AGAINST ME: John Schwenkler, K-Lo, Bill Kristol (ironically), Jay Nordlinger [last time you'll see those names in a row]

ON THE FENCE: Gawker, Yuval Levin, Andrew Sullivan, Dean Barnett

Much more at Just Above Sunset.

I’m sorry, but of the many compelling (or intriguing, or plausible) arguments for why African-Americans should have their own search engine, this is not one of them:

[...] a black person searching for “whitney,” for instance, probably wouldn’t be looking for the Whitney Museum of Art, which comes up first on Google, or Whitney Bank, which comes up second. Instead, Taylor said, the searcher would likely be looking for Whitney Houston, who doesn’t come up in Google until No. 4.  That’s why a search for “Whitney” on RushmoreDrive, which is part of Barry Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp conglomerate, turns up the vocalist as its first result.

Similarly, a beltway hipster searching for “Poulos,” for instance, probably isn’t looking for Poulos Insurance, Inc., which comes up first on Google, or Dr. Poulos, Cosmetic Surgeon, who comes up third. Instead, the searcher would likely be looking for James Poulos, who doesn’t come up in Google until No. 4. That’s why a search for “Poulos” on…um…

sorry, that URL cannot be found. Wonder why.

Apropos of the Sonny-Schwenkler Torture Tussle, I’ll mention briefly the following as non inconsistent positions to take on torture and torture-related issues:

(1) Torture banned by treaties to which we are a party should not be practiced for any reason.

(2) The secret use of torture in outrageously extraordinary circumstances is probably inevitable.

(3) One dunk may not be torture, but repeated waterboarding is. 

(4) Unpleasant treatment can and does fall short of torture, even at some extremes.

(5) Such treatment nonetheless may come in for serious criticism on its own terms.

(6) And pose dangers for abuse that may not be adequately manageable. 

The main problem here is that foreigners have certainly sought asylum in the US on grounds of political persecution relying on testimony of abuse that closely echoes the sorts of non-torture measures the US itself appears now to be taking with at least some regularity. So even if those measures are defensible on their own terms, they may create or exacerbate broader problems that, in the balance, militate against those practices. That’s about as far as I want to push this for now.

Noam Scheiber, The Stump:

Obama’s strongest response to the Russia situtation may be the same one he’s used in other foreign policy contexts: By focusing on Iraq, we took our eyes off the real long-term threats to U.S. security. Global terrorism was one of them. Afghanistan and Pakistan were two others. The rise of Russia still another. Worse, Iraq has deprived us of all sorts of leverage we would have had with Russia. With our troops bogged down, we don’t have much of a deterrent capability. (Not that we’d want to threaten force, but you’d like all options on the table so the Russians know there’s a practical limit to their actions.) [my emph - JP] And we now desperately need Russia’s help in dealing with Iran’s nuclear ambitions, which we might not need as much if we weren’t in Iraq and vulenrable to Iranian adventurism there. (Which is to say, Iran has leverage over us thanks to Iraq, which we need the Russians to counterbalance.)

I don’t even know where to begin. Fortunately for Scheiber, we still have a few spare nukes to target on Moscow, just, y’know, to give Putin and Medvedev a sense of the practical limit to their actions. If for some insane reason Obama adopts and runs with this argument, he should be whipped out of Washington like a dweeb. But really above all this sounds like the kind of argument Hillary Clinton would make. Now that’s tough!

Camille Paglia, I am noticing slightly belatedly, turned in a pitch-perfect expression of the problem with the ‘let sleeping adulterers lie’ meme in post-Clintonian political commentary:

As a Democrat who was supporting him until Obama showed his mettle during the primary debates, I was shocked by how badly John Edwards has behaved during the lurid flap over his private life. I’m not surprised and really don’t care that Edwards had an extramarital affair, but what a craven, sniveling little worm he has turned out to be — fleeing into hotel bathrooms, pretending to know nothing about payoffs under his nose, offering a paternity test while the mother bizarrely refuses it, and canonizing his long-suffering wife while doing her dirt. Elizabeth Edwards too has been ethically compromised because of her aggressively sanctimonious defense of her husband’s reputation over the past year. Both of them well deserve their exile from the Democratic convention.

Not surprised, really doesn’t care, but oh, how every act and judgment call and moral disposition that surrounds the affair carries some kind or another of despicable, inexpungable taint! Of course, it’s impossible to ever have this reaction if the news never becomes public. As much as I hate press hounding and paparazzism, the answer to the Edwards Problem is not, contrary to Nussbaumian belief, giving horny young pols a suitable place to ram their rod. Edwards could, but apparently in fact could not, content himself with hookers; did that choice have anything to do with the illegality of prostitution? Or rather with the stunted relationships that it guarantees? I mean this both sincerely and perversely — it’s perilous to try taking even a beautiful, sophisticated, exclusive whore out for a romantic candlelight dinner, and hard also to get out of a a prostitute the sort of bent rise that’s made possible by, say, the gross possibilities of Seducing Miss Lewinsky.

Thru Sonny, Jamie Kirchick reminds me why Bush’s infamous size-up of Putin was such a load of bollocks:

I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straight forward and trustworthy and we had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul.

I suppose it’s fair enough that nobody, not even the President of the United States, can get someone’s actual soul just by looking them in the eye. But this all goes to show, now more than ever, why if you can only get a sense of a thing, instead of the thing itself, you just as often shouldn’t waste your time…and ours.

On a separate note, calling Putin a ‘thug’ is somewhat similar to calling Arnold Schwarzenegger a bodybuilder. Now, commandeering American Hummers? Total Russothuggery.

Anne Applebaum’s latest Slate column on Russia comes with a may-jor caveat: 

the word superficial is worth repeating here [...].

As in, Applebaum concedes that her whole column is strung together in a half-assed tissue of bad rhetoric and overcooked innuendo:

The Russian state’s open hostility, not only toward Georgia but also toward Ukraine and the Baltic states, is, in this sense, partly ideological. Genuine elections have taken place in all these countries; people who have not been preselected by the ruling oligarchy sometimes gain wealth or power. Georgia’s Rose Revolution and Ukraine’s Orange Revolution even involved street demonstrations that helped unseat more-oligarchic regimes. Thus it is not pure nationalism, nor mere traditional great-power arrogance, that makes the Russian leadership disdainful of Georgia and Ukraine: It is also, at some level, fear that similar voter revolutions could someday challenge Russia, too.

The whole business hinges on these bad-habitual fudge words that we hobble around on like intellectual cripples: ‘in this sense’, ‘at some level’. IN WHAT SENSE? AT WHAT LEVEL? Only by answering those questions is commentary taken from the realm of talking points in lousy drag to real analysis.

As it happens, Applebaum is right so far as the ’sense’ she means is ‘in a very small and insignificant sense’ and the ‘level’ she refers to is ‘vanishingly inconsequential’. The Russian leadership has no interest in True Democracy within its own borders. Obviously. But Saakashvili’s capacity to irritate the Russians only grew with his own slide into vain authoritarianism, and I guarantee you that Moscow would be equally annoyed by the independence of the Baltic States if those countries were run by chintzy local dictators. This zany idea of a Concert of Autocracies is simply not borne out in history; the last, and maybe really the only, time it happened with any consequence was during the Cold War, and even then the Sino-Soviet split was prompt and unforgiving, and most of what remained was the direct result of (clumsy and costly) Russian puppetude. Applebaum is simply wrong to emphasize so strongly this supposed Russian fear of democracies — and then to cop to the move so guiltlessly!

Like Kagan at his worst, it’s all thematic fanfare — the devil take the details — in preparation for the big policy takeaway:

The critical question now is whether the West is prepared to behave like the West, to speak with one voice and create a common trans-Atlantic policy.

Depends on the voice, one is inclined to say; if America wants to play this game fair and square, America must be willing at least sometimes to lend its pipes to a voice that is not entirely its own. Another alternative is to stop obsessing over the questionable value of Western solidarity. These things happen naturally enough, for reasons that have little to do with feelings and a lot to do with the prudence and costs of various policies within shared institutions. Turns out this is already happening, without any of the froth and fervor that’s typified the hectic reaction among anti-Russians right and left. The anti-Russia crowd is so very overworried about differing visions among ‘Old Europe’, ‘New Europe’, and America. Applebaum shivers at the sight of Old-Euro turncoats:

In recent years, Russia has preferred to deal with Western countries and their leaders one by one. Just last week, an affiliate of Gazprom, the Russian state-dominated gas company, added a former Finnish prime minister to its payroll—which already includes former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. If we hang together instead of allowing Gazprom to pick us all off separately, there is at least a chance that this minichill won’t last another 40 years.

I don’t know about this Finnish guy, but if anyone knows a thing or two about improper closeness with the Russians, it’s the Finns. And why has Applebaum ignored outright the way that Germany recoiled en masse when Schröder’s inappropriate move was made public? Perhaps because it lets all the wind out of her sails? Hark back:

Mrs Merkel’s Christian Democrats have called on Mr Schröder to resign. “He’s done grave damage to Germany’s reputation. Unless he quits, his job will look like a reward for his efforts [as chancellor],” Christian Wulf, the minister-president of Lower Saxony, told Bild yesterday.

“It stinks. It looks to me like sheer cronyism,” said Richard Bütikofer, the co-leader of Germany’s Greens. Even Mr Schröder’s old cabinet colleague Peter Struck, Germany’s former defence minister, expressed doubts. “I wouldn’t have done it,” he said.

Russia hasn’t pried the West apart, and it isn’t going to happen anytime soon — if the West stops trying to pry itself deeper and deeper into the former Soviet Union. This is the only point on which the US and Europe really differs — at least now, and at least officially. 

But perhaps the main takeaway here is that, contrary to Disney lore, the behavior of violent actors is not explained by the truism that we hate what we fear, and we fear what we do not understand. The Russian regime is not laboring under false consciousness; its critics — who see in Putin a paranoid freak worried about being run out of his dacha by a mob of Kasparovites, instead of one of the world’s most diabolically successful and popular leaders — may well be. 

Indeed, what possible gain from pulling Ukraine and Georgia firmly into the West could justify such a thrombo as Applebaum & Co.’s — if not the gain of actually, one fine day, triggering regime change in Russia? You’re not paranoid if they’re really out to get you…. 

Robert Kagan has a great, long article in The Weekly Standard about how wrong Fukuyama was and how right the other guys (i.e. himself) were about the end of history and the future of human progress. Touched off by the Russo-Georgian War, Kagan’s piece is full of sharp observations and the kinds of insights that make him the most respected (and possibly the most realist) of the neocon brain trust.

But there is some funniness afoot. One of the most bizarre aspects of the American reaction to the Russo-Georgian War has been the underlying similarity of the rhetoric coming from right and left. Though perhaps few want to admit it, the line between Obama’s world citizen and McCain’s world Georgian is not so dark or wide. At the outset of the war, my main criticism of the anti-Russia lobby had been that they reached immediately for the battle drums and pounded away in the face of an extraordinarily complex and ambiguous geopolitical situation. The main criticism aimed my way observed that few among the anti-Russia lobby were really lobbying for actual war with Russia, and, indeed, many commentators seemed much more interested in a rush to posturing than a rush to war — albeit, the kind of posturing that could quickly get you a war, like it or not.

So it is with great curiosity that I read lines like these in Kagan’s piece:

So what to do? Instead of figuring out how to accommodate the powerful new autocracies, the United States and the world’s other democracies need to begin thinking about how they can protect their interests and advance their principles in a world in which these are once again powerfully challenged. The world’s democracies need to show solidarity with one another, and they need to support those trying to pry open a democratic space where it has been closing [my emphasis - JP].

‘Solidarity’? A ‘democratic space’? It’s hard to find more pomo, eggheady, Euro-weenie language than that. Toughness pops in at the margins — what does it mean to be ‘prying open’ a ‘democratic space’, I wonder? Does it mean invading South Ossetia, as Georgia did? And what (here’s the rub) does Kagan mean by ’support’, another of this decade’s great therapeutic fudge words?

Kagan answers in some kind of mystical code, which revolves around the invocation of language reserved, I’m sure, for some race of bureaucratic cavemen that lives in an alternate foreign-policy world directly across from the Geico offices:

Whether or not China and Russia are susceptible to outside influence over time, for the moment their growing power and, in the case of Russia, the willingness to use it, pose a serious challenge that needs to be met with the same level-headed determination as previous such challenges. 

Yes, but what does that mean? Surely we never want to fail to meet a challenge with the clearminded focus we used to successfully meet similar challenges in the past. Tell me something I don’t know: like what you mean by ‘meeting’ the particular challenges we face, as opposed to the general challenge that you seem to be constructing out of parts with more differences than similarities. Kagan finally fesses up:

If Moscow is now bent on [whatever that means] restoring its hegemony [ditto] over its near neighbors [as opposed to far ones?], the United States and its European allies must provide those neighbors with support and protection [my emph]. If China continues to expand its military capabilities [build another tank?], the United States must reassure China’s neighbors [Japan? Or Taiwan?] of its own commitment [another classic therapeutic fudge-word] to Asian security.

China’s supposedly central contribution to the Resurgence of New Autocracies is incidental. But in order to avoid saying ‘we have to risk a war with Russia to satisfy our national and global interests’, Kagan has to waste space making forced analogies between The Russia Threat and The China Threat. No, it’s all about Russia — and those two magic words, support and protection. The first one is easy enough, ranging from sincere talk to the kind of unassailable humanitarian operations going on now in beleaguered Georgia. 

But protection? If this is pig latin for Put Ukraine in NATO before it’s too late, that at least I understand. Yet somehow I suspect the meaning of protection is somewhat more complex than that. At the heart of Kagan’s worldview is something that he quotes Reinhold Niebuhr, of all people, as calling ‘the world problem.’ I’m broadly sympathetic to Niebuhr’s big claims, but this one sends a shiver:

the world problem [as Kagan quotes] cannot be solved if America does not accept its full share of responsibility in solving it.

It is my firm conviction that the world is neither possessed of a great and unitary problem nor is one itself, that neither is it a problem that must be solved nor one that could be.* Solid too is my insistence that, whatever America’s responsibilities abroad, there is no ‘full measure of devotion’ that Americans somehow owe humanity and/or our own consciences. When I hear talk of fullness and comprehensiveness and the contemptibility of half measures and skepticism about driving policy by tests of emotional completeness, I run for the door.

If you read closely, Kagan wants to argue that the world problem is the eternal revanchism of regimes that will fight wars their own citizens would not, and that only the US can lead its allies in the eternal struggle to keep that kind of backsliding at bay. You can see the internal contradiction at work here, right? It is, at any rate, there; only by socially constructing the continuing crisis of a World Problem can Kagan or anybody mobilize the American people, who were never cut out for that kind of work and whose providence pointed them elsewhere, to fight to ensure that the threat which supposedly already exists never really comes into being. The moment we cease to think of international relations as a World Problem, the sooner we can recognize that dealing with Russia as opposed to China — or Russia in one sphere of activity or bad behavior as opposed to another — is an undertaking best pursued a la carte.

The main problem and paradox for the US is that, domestically, grand narratives and grand visions have always set the agenda and driven history — but, in our foreign dealings, grand narratives and grand visions have almost always mislead and disappointed us. The one instance in which this was not the case was the Long War from 1941-1991, fought first against the Germans and then against the Russians. (Our war with Japan, by contrast, had no romantic, thematic grandeur about it.) To think that this one exception to the rule ought to cement America in a paradoxical condition is to beg a radical reconceptualization of American foreign policy — one in which perhaps the best grand strategy is no grand strategy at all. And what could be tougher — or more postmodern — than that?

* I’ve edited this line for clarity. Thanks to Kerry Brennan.

Hillary’s name is being phonily placed in fake nomination, for the crap reason that not only Every Voice Must Be Heard (itself already a degenerate version of Gore’s Every Vote Must Be Counted) but Every Feeling Must Attain Climax:

“With every voice heard and the party strongly united, we will elect Sen. Obama president of the United States,” Clinton said in a statement released by the two campaigns.

Clinton had pointed to the restiveness of her supporters in an appearance at a private home last month, saying they needed “a catharsis” before falling in line behind Obama.

Nothing better captures the rotting head of contemporary culture quite like this preposterousness, which manages to outdo even the dumbest of Obama’s transcend-politics-thru-politics-itself routines. Speeches at least are supposed to be spectacles, whereas nominations are supposed to…well…nominate someone who might become the Party’s nominee. Yes, conventions are almost pure spectacle nowadays. But Hillary could have all the confetti and hand-clutching she wanted if she cared purely about spectacle.

No. She of the Politics of Meaning wants to politicize meaning itself [scroll down], a move five times more postmodern (as she herself freely admitted) and a hundred times more pathetic than anything her opponent managed to do on his way to whipping her out of pole position, and anything he has done since.

Megan, in discussing how stupid it is to tie abortion law to feelings, ends with a very libertarianish bit of dictum about how we don’t like the government to regulate things we “hold sacred.” I don’t really want to go too far into it, because there’s something great about just pondering this elegant throwaway line and seeing the implications unfold for yourself, but it strikes me that one such implication is the strange and tragic relationship between culture and politics…or between the State and the Sacred. [See Helen.] It may be that to hold things sacred at all, we must accept limits and failures in our ability to enforce our favored kinds of alleviation of suffering…whether that suffering happens to be that of a mother with an unwanted pregnancy or that of the fetus inside. Less than a claim to moral equivalency, this is a claim about the nature of morality in the context of the sacred. Uncomfortable, but we can’t always help what we wind up thinking about before breakfast, can we, now.

Sonny has joined Yglesias and I in the cool kids’ version of missing Lisa Kudrow — Shirley Manson nostalgia. In other Sonny-related news, Trent Reznor looks like a combination of Jacoby Shaddix and that dude from your frat who jumped up onstage that one time at karaoke and got like three bars into “Iron Man” before hitting himself in the teeth with the mic. 

Additionally, Sonny’s speculation that I will be starring in the DC version of The Hills is total madness, completely unsubstantiated. I have not had developmental relations with that show…. That freak you have seen wearing half a beard and half a seersucker suit, slugging down gin and grapefruits like Snapples, is some kind of body double, a nameless wonder I have never met personally who bears the same relation to myself as Sam Fogarino does to Nick Gillespie.

I have spent quality time with both, and the resemblance is as eerie as it is uncanny…but while my kooky lookalike is languishing in nouveau-riche hot tubs and hanging condoms on stuffed antelopes’ antlers in Falls Church drawing rooms, I will be here, in Washington, working for The People.

Georgia bids goodbye to the Commonwealth of Independent States. YA THINK?!?!

Quite a way with words, though.

Damn, those are some stop-trafficky-ly searching expressions on the faces of Ross and Reihan at the main site. Those penetrating eyes! That get-thither stare! More, please.

It’s Dan McCarthy by a mile, name checking Jello Biafra, Dead Kennedys, Telos, and George Will in a twisted appreciation of once — and Future? — Governor Jerry Brown.

In second place with a bullet, Dave Weigel:

The “evidence” for Johnson’s claim is the now-familiar murmurings of “sources” and GOP “operatives” (who appear in these things quicker than agents of H.Y.D.R.A.) and the fact—not reported in too many places, but never disputed—that when Lolo Soetoro became his adoptive father, the young Barack was enrolled in school as “Barack Soetoro.” 

But was there anything at all odd about that as it concerns a candidate for president? Bill Clinton was William Blythe III until he turned 14 and his mother married Roger Clinton. Gerald Ford was born Leslie Lynch King, Jr., and three years later his mother married Gerald R. Ford and unofficially re-named her son. The younger Ford didn’t legally change his name until his was 22 years old. Is Larry Johnson or one of his pseudononymous fellow travellers going to retroactively challenge their legitimacy or veracity? Probably not.