GOODNESS RESURGENT. Well, they say you can't keep a good man down, and Michael Moore seems to be recovering nicely from his post-election depression. It helps to find worthwhile things to do, things that keep you so busy you don't have time to dwell on catastrophes past.

Luck helps too. If you hate Jews, for example, it's normally impossible to find situations in which you get to laugh at the conduct of the Israeli army. Normally, they roll out fast, kick some Palestinian ass, and go back home grimly triumphant. But Allah has been smiling on his adopted son Michael; according to IsraPundit:


What could be more fun than watching Jews carrying crying Jews out of their houses in Israel? Maybe only one thing, but it's a thing so good that it takes away the sting of getting  thrown out of Israel. You can help use a grieving mother to score cheap political points against the commander-in-chief of your country. Cool:


But what happens when the grieving mother leaves the media stage for a while? Why, you can fill in the time helping to organize a brand new liberal way of supporting the troops. Who wouldn't want to get in on something like this?


Yes, if you're a good man, you have to go the last mile in supporting the brave troops who are trying to free Iraq from Halliburton, parliamentary democracy, and the Great Satan. Allah be praised.

More fun than a barrel of monkeys, and it definitely lifts the thunderheads of depression, even if a lonely cloud or two remains and starts following you around with a video camera. What are you supposed to do about persecution like this?



The nerve. As if a REAL film producer doesn't have enough tricks up his sleeve to thwart and even upstage an amateur like what's-his-name. What do you do? You grab a bigger headline than he ever could:


But is this the whole story? Not on your life. A REAL celebrity knows when to take a hard look all the way around the table and go "all in." The XOFF News Team has learned that Michael Moore has signed a seven-figure deal with the ABC show Extreme Makeover to devote an entire season to the largest single challenge in the history of cosmetic surgery and the allied arts: to make Michael Moore attractive.

No expense will be spared. Teams of surgeons have been gathered from around the world, as well as dentists, ophthalmologists, personal trainers, clothing designers, hair stylists, and makeup artists. Their specific objectives include pioneering new surgical techniques to raise a recognizable human face from the melted-pudding-with-a-mouth Moore presently possesses, eliminating hundreds of pounds of flab and cellulite without actually requiring Moore to employ any self discipline or exercise in the process, and subtly altering Moore's eyes to eliminate (or reduce) their look of low animal cunning and sadistic megalomania.

Robert Ruth, a spokesman for Extreme Makeover: Michael Moore Edition, says, "There's no question that it's a risk. Michael is about as repulsive a person as anyone could imagine. Up close, he's even worse than he is in public. Two of our producers have already gone on long-term disability, and three more have quit. But that's what makes reality television so exciting. We'll succeed or fail live on TV in 22 weeks of the most grueling beautification project ever attempted. Be sure to tune in."

We can't wait. How about you?

While you're waiting, here are a few other delicious morsels about our favorite suppurating boil:

Two Peas in a Pod.

Palme D'Or for Michael Moore.

Michael Moore's Little Oysters.

Abuse of Power, Chickenhawks, and the Limbaugh Defense.

Plus, a link to the site of our good friend Dave Hardy: MooreExposed.com.

-- Maureen Dowd

PROFESSIONAL JOURNALIST. Like many people, I suppose, I used to read Maureen Dowd's columns and think, "What the hell is she talking about?" She makes references to current events, but the landscape is always rearranged in ways that make it oddly remote from reality, as if she were living in some alternate universe. At that point, I could have taken the wise course followed by thousands of other readers and simply shrugged, turned on my heel, and walked away. But there was something about her that gnawed at me, as if, contrary to superficial appearances, there really was a sentient human being lurking inside her delusionary world of mangled quotes and malicious mixed metaphors.

Then I read the following passage in one of her columns from January 2005:

In all those great Tracy/Hepburn movies more than a half-century ago, it was the snap and crackle of a romance between equals that was so exciting. Moviemakers these days seem far more interested in the soothing aura of romances between unequals.

In James Brooks's "Spanglish," Adam Sandler, as a Los Angeles chef, falls for his hot Mexican maid. The maid, who cleans up after Mr. Sandler without being able to speak English, is presented as the ideal woman. The wife, played by Téa Leoni, is repellent: a jangly, yakking, overachieving, overexercised, unfaithful, shallow she-monster who has just lost her job with a commercial design firm. Picture Faye Dunaway in "Network" if she'd had to stay home, or Glenn Close in "Fatal Attraction" without the charm.

The same attraction of unequals animated Richard Curtis's "Love Actually," a 2003 holiday hit. The witty and sophisticated British prime minister, played by Hugh Grant, falls for the chubby girl who wheels the tea and scones into his office. A businessman married to the substantial Emma Thompson falls for his sultry secretary. A writer falls for his maid, who speaks only Portuguese.

(I wonder if the trend in making maids who don't speak English heroines is related to the trend of guys who like to watch Kelly Ripa in the morning with the sound turned off?)

Art is imitating life, turning women who seek equality into selfish narcissists and objects of rejection, rather than affection.

I realized, of course, that the whole column was really about herself , and then in an instant I realized that all her columns are really about herself. The distorted politcal topology she delineates day after day is , in fact, an accurate rendition of the "Universe of One" inhabited by a very lonely, insecure, and needy lady named Maureen Dowd.

If you'll think about this notion for a moment, it makes such great sense that it seems to explain everything that is otherwise unexplainable in her whacked-out commentary. She doesn't much care about using leader dots (that's ellipses for the snobbish among you) to transform the meaning of quotes into terms that suit her because she is accurately quoting all that she really hears or listens to. She still does it even though her journalistic sins in this regard have been formally recognized:

Dowd's critics, especially James Taranto, have often accused her of editing quotes and adding ellipses so as to change the quotes' intended meanings; the word "dowdify" has been coined to describe this habit. The word has been used as parlance among conservative journalists and bloggers to describe any wilful misinterpretation of a quote.

But she cares no more than Mrs. Malaprop about the ignominy of having such a pattern of blunders named for her. Why? She regards herself as a wit, and she believes that wit exists not to illuminate the topic but the speaker. She is always performing in a drawing room peopled by those whose admiration she desires. Every word of her writing reflects this perspective. She affects a chatty, breezy style reminiscent of cocktail party gossip as her preferred voice for condemning outrageous global-scale crimes against humanity. She is deaf to the dissonance of a catty little girl voice issuing from the throne of the star chamber. She cannot hear herself because she is always merely seeing herself talking brilliantly. Amd that's what she wants from us. When she refers to Rumsfeld as "Rummy" she practically insists that we see her scowling and gesticulating in her couture dress while sipping a glass of chic white wine. The real purpose of calling him Rummy is to convey her superiority to him, and the reason for talking about national and international policy is the same. She is showing us exactly where she wishes to be placed in the scheme of things, which is always, invariably, at the center of attention.

It gets easy to understand Maureen Dowd's columns when you have internalized this model of her universe. Whatever she seems to be writing about, she is always talking about something that is obsessing or troubling her in her own life at the moment. If you doubt it, take a look at her recent columns about her favorite bete-noire George W. Bush. These are important because they mark her return after a mysterious "hiatus" from her job at the New York Times, which began at least as early as the first week of June:

Where's MoDo?...  Have you noticed any of President Bush's critics at the New York Times or Air America Radio being shipped off to a prison camp lately? Me, neither, although the official explanation for Maureen Dowd's current hiatus is still pending....

Yet in her very first column after returning to work, she wrote:

It's amazing that the White House does not have the elementary shrewdness to have Mr. Bush simply walk down the driveway and hear the woman out, or invite her in for a cup of tea. But W., who has spent nearly 20 percent of his presidency at his ranch, is burrowed into his five-week vacation and two-hour daily workouts. He may be in great shape, but Iraq sure isn't.

It's worth stressing the fact that her little razor slash about a five-week absence from the White House comes hard on the heels of her own (minimum) eight-week absence from her duties at the Times. When we dial in the "Universe of One" effect, we can see that Maureen is clearly troubled about some aspect of her own vacation hiatus. But what? We can obtain a clue here by examining the always fertile realm of Dowdian equivalencies. For example, she chooses to equate the President's physical "shape" with the plight, the nationwide "shape," of Iraq. She may regard this as wit, but for those who are truly concerned with the suffering of U.S. troops and Iraqis in wartime, the jest falls a bit flat. It's flippant, and because it calls more attention to a turn of phrase than to the elements it manipulates, it's more self-aggrandizing of the writer than demonstrative of anything like truth. The Iraq War is being pressed into service as a punchline, nothing else.

But Dowd has somehow equated them in her own mind. It must be that there is something cosmically important about the term "great shape." This is confirmed by another of her equivalencies, seen in the phrase "five week vacation and two-hour daily workouts." The thoughtful reader must conclude that Dowd has the subject of exercise on her mind.

Can we possibly prove such a theory? Yes. Turning to her latest column, (titled My Private Idaho, and note the possessive pronoun) we read [emphases mine]:


I think we can now begin to put the pieces together. Beginning in January, Maureen decided she was fed up with not being able to find a boyfriend who was her social superior (or at least her equal). Returning to that column, we can now read it with the following emphases:


It would seem that her affair with a very powerful and well connected married man had just gone south. She thought he viewed her as an equal -- and definitely more acceptable than the "jangly.. overexercised" wife -- but he dumped her for a mere chick, probably a famous but callow Kelly Ripa type. Interestingly enough, the exercise motif attaches to both rivals, including Kelly:


And so Maureen finally decided that the only way to get her lover back, or to find an equally powerful replacement, was to get her aging body into peak condition. She hired a personal trainer and even went to the extreme length of taking a leave of absence from the New York Times, the better to commit herself to getting into "great shape."

Sadly, though, where the spirit was willing, the flesh was weak. Either she lacked the discipline to stick to her regimen, or her pecs and glutes and abdominals were too far gone. At any rate, she "got bushed" and finally took "a vacation from (her) vacation." Nothing has improved. She feels guilty. All this time, she should have been caring "more for body armor than body fat." And she's wasted all those months on what turned out to be no more than  "le loafing." Worse, the old boyfriend, whose heart she thought might grow fonder in her absence, refused to meet with her; he didn't even have the common decency to "simply walk down the driveway and hear (her) out, or invite her in for a cup of tea."

That's what's so supremely galling about George W. Bush. All those supremely powerful men are the same. Everything comes easily to them, and the women they should be consorting with are simply used and -- as soon as they make any demands -- contemptuously discarded as "selfish narcissists and objects of rejection." Nothing works. If you make a name for yourself by being fabulously witty about torture and roadside bombs, they dismiss you as a bitch who talks too much and leave you for the first bimbo with a great ass "who speaks only Portuguese." Then, if you stoop to catering to their basest instincts by slaving in the gym to develop a body to die for, they completely forget about you while you're away. Life sucks. It's kind of like a long bloody war of attrition in the middle east where you just can't win and you can't seem to walk away, and all the time the men who are responsible for making you so miserable just lie and smile and play with their toys and get away with everything.

It's hard to know what to say. Maureen, we're sorry things aren't working out for you. Maybe Rummy really will leave his wife one day. You can never tell.

*To be perfectly honest, this photo isn't completely 100 percent accurate. But it's true in certain terms. Think of it as a photographic, uh, ellipsis.

TOURING AGAIN. The Rolling Stones are back, and some people seem to be upset that their new album contains a song (or two) that are sharply and expressly critical of the Bush administration. The offending cut is called "Sweet Neocon":


Frankly, it's hard to get too upset about this. What's really annoying about rock stars involving themselves in politics is their self-righteous seriousness -- Bruce Springsteen touring to raise money for John Kerry, Linda Ronstadt lecturing her concert audiences about foreign policy, the Dixie Chicks sounding off about Bush on foreign soil. "Sweet Neocon" might have been slightly irksome had Jagger recorded it on a solo album, but when it issues from the legendary Rolling Stones, it gets processed through the wry, mocking tone that infuses all their music. It doesn't matter what they say about it; the most sententious and serious lyric in the world becomes a satire of itself when Mick's voice snarls it and Keith's guitar spanks it on stage.

That's why I'll offer a sincere warning to the left -- don't make the mistake of thinking the Stones have joined your, or any, movement. They are first, last, and always the "greatest rock and roll band in the world," and the world they have lived in for the past forty-some years bears little relation to anyone else's. Just when you think you have their attention, they'll flash you an evil grin and disappear back into rock-star wonderland.

By the same token, I'll urge any offended Christians to remember that "Sweet Neocon's" charge of hypocrisy falls from the same wagging tongue that ended the radical era with these lyrics:


If you've forgotten this, he hasn't. While he was singing it at Altamont, people were dying in the audience. It became more than just a lyric that day, and it's impossible to know just what he means by seeming to mount a pulpit at this point in time.  It's probably impossible for him to know what he means by it.  Is he half aware that some of that old persona still clings to him and that anything he says will be taken -- by those who have half a memory or half a brain -- with a grain of salt the size of a stone? Ask him. He'll probably flash that grin again, the one that has made him the world's oldest bad boy and the only surviving (make that thriving) dinosaur of an age that is long gone and yet still viciously present under the skin of a brand new century. Maybe there's "no sort of meaning in it," and maybe there's another sort of meaning than he or we suspect.

THE BEST WE CAN HOPE FOR. Last night, the local Philadelphia news programs led their broadcasts with the jubilant report that vigils were underway in the city, led by mothers of U.S. troops in Iraq, demanding that the war be brought to an immediate end and that all the boys be brought back home. We saw mothers singing, mothers speaking in pulpits, candles burning... all very moving stuff in the liturgical trappings of a religion that seems to be despised except when it can serve as a useful prop. And that's all it was, because the nature of the moral authority that we were being urged to acknowledge was laid out clearly by Maureen Dowd in one of her recent columns:


This does seem to be the position of those who hold that it's impermissible to level criticism of any kind against a grieving mother who calls the President a terrorist and claims that America is not worth dying for.

Don't worry, my dear progressives. I'm not launching another attack on Cindy Sheehan. I'm just trying to reconcile a couple of contradictory elements that seem to be very much in play here, and I'm hoping to resolve them in a constructive manner.

Contradictions? Well, yeah. Anyone perusing the internet orgy surrounding the Sheehan Show can't avoid noticing that whenever a commentator does criticize maternal grief as a credential for making foreign policy, he is likely to be branded with the charge of being a "chickenhawk," a term that flew hither and yon at great velocity during the 2004 Presidential campaign, when progressives discovered they had a war veteran on their ticket while the Republicans didn't.

During that campaign, it seemed the only moral authority belonged to those who had served not just in the military, but in combat. Everyone else was disqualified from having or expressing any opinion whatsoever about the war.

So now I'm curious: what form of government would sort out the competing claims of moral authority and keep the childless non-veterans in their place? Could it still offer freedom and equality to any but a handful of its citizens?

It seemed an impossible task at first, but the more I thought about it, the more I began to see a way through the complexities. The first step is to figure out what it is progressives mean when they talk about freedom and the role of government in securing that freedom. They understand freedom in terms of what human beings should be free from rather than free to do, since doers are almost invariably oppressors. Therefore, the basic human rights they are concerned with are the right to be free from unequal treatment of any kind, ill health, pollution, sudden death of any kind, offensive rhetoric of the kind that might diminish self esteem, and any kind of restraint on rhetoric that might be construed as immoral in traditional (i.e., religious) terms.

It's also important to understand the meaning of equality in their context, which has to do with long-term social justice. For example, it's useful to think of the people who are alive now as mere representatives of all the foregoing generations of whatever groups they belong to by virtue of race and sex. Since women have been, reputedly, treated less than equally in the past, they can be treated more than equally now and in the foreseeable future in order to make up for the continuing agonies of their dead forebears. (And conservatives claim progressives don't believe in life after death...!)

Obviously, such definitions of freedom and equality make it clear that liberty in the American tradition is obsolete. To ensure true freedom and equality, certain discriminations do have to be effected. Howard Stern can expect to be free from Christian moralizing that might make him feel like a sinner, while Christians cannot expect to be free from Howard Stern's particular brand of life philosophy. White men cannot expect to be admitted to colleges until after many compensations have been made to women and people of color; any sense of liberty they feel to pursue their own archaic definition of equality is harmful to society as a whole and should be strenuously discouraged.

Note that once we have defined equality in historical rather than census terms, most of the problems associated with establishing a progressive and free democracy have been swept away. Ironically, there is even constitutional precedent for what must be done. The founders declared black Americans to be counted as three-fifths of a person for counting purposes and did not accord them a vote. The right of infinite compensation thus enables the progressive state to assign percentages of voting weight according to the degree of historical injustice that must be compensated for. For example, white men who have never served in combat could be assigned a voting weight of 0 percent, while mothers who have lost children in combat could be assigned a voting weight of 100 percent, and all other groups and constituencies would lie somewhere in between.

We're ready now to start envisioning the actual government(s) that could enforce the progressive concepts of freedom and equality. First, at the level of national government, the only citizens who could be authorized to hold office are combat veterans and parents who have lost children in combat (except possibly grieving white fathers, who are probably deadbeat dads anyway, if not the child abusers who brainwashed their sons into volunteering for death in battle.)

This may seem a fractious group to put into high office, but in fact, it works out rather neatly. Yes, many combat veterans tend to be hawks about foreign policy, but many veterans still fall into the category of converted pacifists. And yes, not all parents of those killed in combat are reliably pacifist either, but chances are that the hawkishness they display on occasion has more to do with not tarnishing the memory of their lost child by craven surrender than with being  gung ho to start a new conflict. The split between hawks and doves in this groups will, at any rate, form the basis for political parties, and it looks very much as if the result will be the Doves as majority party and Hawks as the permanent flag-waving minority. (Somebody still has to make speeches and touch off fireworks on the Fourth of July, after all).

There will be those who carp that this model gives us a pool of potential officeholders that numbers in the mere tens of thousands. But all these things are relative. The aggregate number of voters isn't going to very large either, since only those people who have actually served in the military or have children who (have) serve(d) in the military will be eligible to vote in national elections. This will ensure a fine and moral focus on foreign policy issues and will entirely prevent them from being decided by any tide of public sentiment in the event of destabilizing emotional events like terrorist attacks.

I also anticipate the criticism that a national government so completely oriented around foreign policy issues might result in neglect of domestic matters that greatly affect various freedoms, as defined above. This potential problem is resolved by two long established progressive strategies. First, most domestic legislation dealing with freedom can be written directly from the bench, by federal district courts and, obviously, the U.S. Supreme Court, which will have to rewrite the Constitution on the fly, as it were. But the courts will be well stocked with progressives who can be trusted implicitly to sort out the various freedoms at issue in a way that accommodates social justice in the historical sense -- without a lot of reactionary foot-dragging.

Even more importantly, many of the key freedoms -- health, economic, environmental -- are really best handled at the global level, by the many institutions already in place seeking international laws capable of enforcing social justice in worldwide terms. It also makes sense to transfer authority for taxation and regulation of commerce, trade, healthcare, religion, and the protection of the earth from mankind to such global institutions. Of course, Americans in this scenario will have to get used to seeing themselves in this larger perspective as the racist, sexist, rich white men of the world and expect to be treated accordingly, but they will learn to get used to it, because the kind of morality represented by the list of "freedoms from" and social justice in historical terms is pretty inescapable.

The various state, local and municipal governments can go on pretty much as they do now, and it's possible that as much as forty, no, say thirty, percent of the populace will be authorized to vote for candidates at this level. And to be perfectly clear about one bone of contention, make no mistake: all felons past and present WILL be allowed to vote in state, local, and municipal elections. The bad old days of tyranny will be done for in this new government model.

I leave it to others to work out the many huge positive impacts the progressive government model will have on our great nation. You know the one I mean. The one we all love so very very much.


UPDATE. Michelle Malkin is sick of the whole subject, and we don't blame her. Please email her and let her know that it's all going to be fixed soon, courtesy of what we've worked out here. The freedom and equality idealists will probably stop sending her unspeakably obscene messages when their moral purpose has been achieved.