Independence

You'll notice Barack Obama is now wearing a flag pin.

-Charles Merkwerkdigliebein the Post

No I won't. Displays of crass patriotism are our national stock and trade, so whose bling says what about which nationalism is irrelevant at best. There's plenty of bad news about Barry, whether you're a progressive dreaming of gay marriage in Darfur or a Krauthammer dreaming of animals that can be bred and slaughtered. I popped into the Burlington Coat Factory in downtown Pittsburgh earlier in the week to buy some socks, and they had a special on American flag underwear. If I could've found a pair with a coiled snake and a Don't Tread on Me blazon across the ass, I'd've bought them for my next trip to the bathhouse. The waning days of the Roman Republic at least produced their various and sundry Ciceros; we got Jesse Helms instead. On the positive side, we blew our wad on ugly suburbs and billion-dollar planes that can't fly in a drizzle. Our rise was swifter, and our decline will be as well. We shall leave spectacular ruins, although, unlike the Romans', our roads won't even survive one generation after the sack of Washington.

Happy Fourth.

Idiocracy

A former law professor who has spent much of his career as a behind-the-scenes bureaucrat, Mr. Medvedev showed a wide-ranging knowledge of foreign and domestic issues, confidently answering questions for 90 minutes without notes and speaking at length without stumbling. The president, who is 42, spoke only in Russian but did not need an interpreter to understand questions posed in English.

-Reported in the Times

One notes that this description is fairly run-of-the-mill for non-Anglo national leaders. I mean, hell, I could talk fluently for 90 minutes about politics, speaking at length without stumbling, and could take and respond to questions in two languages without interpretation, although my responses in French, my second language, would lack native fluency. To be able to discourse for an hour or two on the content of one's profession hardly seems like a superlative qualification; more like a prerequisite-to-hire. Yet Americans persist in their surprise at finding other people and their various leaders and potentates to be less . . . moronic than we are.

From the "I would use the ring from the desire to do good" file

Liberal--a power-worshipper without power.

-George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language"

Power is given only to those who dare to lower themselves and pick it up. Only one thing matters, one thing; to be able to dare!

-Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment

Why is Barack Obama now defending and supporting the "FISA compromise"? Because odds are that Barack Obama is going to be the next President of the United States.

The folly at the heart and foolishness in the brain of the Yes-We-Can wing of the Democratic Party is not so much that it expects Obama to be an agent of Change, because after all every new emperor has his own prerogatives and policies, but instead that it imputes to him immunity from the Actonian imperative. He's no Brünnhilde.

Glenn Greenwald (linked above, if you didn't click through) has been writing voluminously about what he believes to be the perceptual basis of the Democrats' constant caving on "security" issues--namely, the need not to appear "weak on defense." He rightly points out that this is perceptually and tactically flawed, that nothing is gained through these efforts to appear "tough". Unfortunately, Glenn's own analysis is flawed. Barack Obama doesn't support the President's unlimited power for reasons of appearance. Barack Obama supports the President's unlimited power because he thinks he's going to be the President.

I Told You So, Part Zillion

Watching vero possumus transmogrify before progressive eyes into status quo ante is less entertaining than it ought to be because it lacks an element of suprise. Still, it's good for a grin. Barack Obama made such fast work of it, leaping to the defense of defenseless nuclear Israel, then proceeding to wrap himself in an American flag, arm himself to the jowls, climb atop the Statue of Liberty, and fire warning shots in a wild, easterly direction, lest the Hordes mistake New York for Vienna and the twenty-first for the seventeenth century. Yeah, but they'll show him. They're gonna vote for him, and they're gonna give him money, but by motherfucking god, they're gonna blog about their disappointment.

A Carolingian King

When last we encountered Christopher Hitchens, he was lecturing a pride of mangy alleycats on the hygienic virtue of hair-of-the-dog. We offered him some spare change; he accused us of accomodationism, threw his bottle at a passerby, wept, retched, and began reciting the Magna Carta in the original gibberish. Now he has returned to tell us that we might assuage our besotted consciences by sending books to Iraq. Can it be long before we find him weeping like Sally Struthers and cajoling our guilty souls toward redemption "for just ten cents a day." My favorite paragraph:

As anyone who has read the Arab Human Development Reports will know, the Arab region—which at the time of the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad was one of the world centers of humanistic learning and philosophy—is in a profound crisis of intellectual unfreedom. It boasts of no great centers of study; it translates pathetically few books from other languages and cultures; it is prone to waves of intolerance and fanaticism under which books are actually burned. Thus the attempt to reverse this trend and to lay the foundation of a liberal and cosmopolitan education for the next generation of educated Iraqis is of the highest importance from every conceivable point of view.

"Every conceivable point of view." Yeah, except for the points of view that predominate during the "waves of intolerance and fanaticism under which books are actually burned." Does Slate have a copy editor, or is that too, like, old economy?

Back in the day, of course, the Abbasids and the Ummayids were all up in Europe's shit, their flourishing, cosmopolitan culture having figured that it might as well camp out in Iberia for five hundred years. If Hitch had been alive in those days of yore, he'd have been lining up to praise Charles Martel, defender of barbarous medieval Christianity against the liberating armies of the educated East.

John McFlames

It appears that Chris Matthews, the prolix terrier behind the desk of the pornographically titled Hardball, said that John McCain is "kind of a Martin Luther." Oh, you mean he's a zealot and an anti-Semite? Yes? No?

Martin Luther looked at the gorgeous absurdity that was Renaissance Catholicism and thought to himself, "You know, what this really needs is an injection of dourness," and then he set about trying to out-Ferdinand Ferdinand on the question of the Jews. I am firmly convinced that had their never been a Reformation, we would have attained to a glorious, renewed Paganism centuries ago. Plenary indulgences, for instance, were positively Babylonian. High theater became the dull meeting house, and all the pomp and faggotry of men in costume and boy choirs and incense and trilled Latin Rs faded into bad congregational hymning. Yes, it is true that we got Bach out of the deal, but we also got John Calvin, who haunts America in particular to this day.

Personally, I'd describe John McCain as a kind of wannabe Tamerlane.