Another Proposed Modern Catholic Advent Hymn

(Ref.: This post.)

Sons of David (And Daughters of Magdalene)

On a cold-swept mountain near Bethlehem
A crying babe was born
On a broken glacier near Bethlehem
A brand-new Light was born
Born of the House of David
Born for the Magdalene
Born for the Heavens above

Refrain

We were born in a manger
We were born for the stars
We were born of mere humans
We were born to go far

On a cold-swept mountain near Bethlehem
All of us were born
On a broken glacier near Bethlehem
Our new-found Light was born
We're sons of David's House
We're daughters of Magdalene
Born for the Heavens above. R.

God the Father made us for Love
Just like he made his only Son
Made us of Light from the first
So we wait for our making
To be sons of David
Daughters of Magdalene
To live in the Heavens above. R.

Advent Hymns by Modern Catholic Taste

After yet another round of modern Catholic liturgical music and reminders that in this blessed season we are to avoid being happy or even liking our eardrums, I've decided to offer my own liturgical offerings for Catholic masses. If it helps in their adoption, I can divorce my wife, become a Jesuit, renounce my Order, and "marry" another man.

Who am I kidding? That won't help, that'll make it a certainty.

First offering.

We Are Becoming (More Like God)

Jesus is coming
And we are becoming
More like God
We are the People of God
We are the People of God
And when Jesus comes
We will be worthy
Worthy of God R.

Refrain
Jesus is coming real soon
He was a baby like we've all been
Basically we're Jesus
Or on our way to being him

Soon Jesus will come
He will be born again
Born like he's never been
Born like we've been
As People of God
And when Jesus arrives
We'll be arisen
Arisen to be like God R.

Jesus comes tomorrow
Or maybe the next day
Then we will be like him
As we are the People of God
We are the People like God
Then we'll be with Jesus
And he'll be with us
All of us God. R.

5 Reasons Everyone Should Stab Himself in the Chest in His Twenties

1. You'll understand your body as never before. Until you've burst open your body with a sharp, bladed instrument, you tend to think of your pulse and heartrate as data. Oh, look, my blood pressure is up to 130/78, I may want to do more running or My resting heart rate is up to 60, I should check out on the internet whether that's a good idea. But when you feel the cold steel separate your skin, greedily seeking the fluids that make life possible, you'll feel the rhythm of your body as never before. Every heartbeat, every gush of suddenly bright-red blood exiting your torso will, however briefly, make you feel alive as you've never felt.

2. It strengthens you. Everyone knows that scars are tougher than skin, and you'll now have multiple layers of scarring, if you survive. Your skin, your muscle, your heart if your aim is good, will all have tangible proof of their ability to handle adversity, if you survive. More importantly than that, having torn open your body's largest cavity, you'll be psychologically stronger than ever before. Worried about asking for that raise? You've seen the black tunnel close around your vision, what's asking for an extra $3,000 per year compared to that? (If you survive.)

3. You'll never accept second-best again. If you survive, or even if you don't, cracking open your chest with a bladed instrument will show you that settling for something hurtful can only bring you pain, dizziness, loss of breath, numbness, tunnel-vision, and long term brain damage. Every auto loan, every mortgage, every relationship you consider after this, assuming you survive, will appear in a new light. Is this good for me, or is it like stabbing myself in the chest, metaphorically or not? Your whole life from this point forward, if you survive, will help you appreciate the finer things in life anew.

4. You'll find out who your true friends are. This will give you several new ways to find out which friends are friends for life, and which ones were lying when they chipped in on that cracked BFF necklace you each wear. Who fumbles around trying to tie a tourniquet on a chest wound, and who goes in the next room vomiting and crying? Who calls 911, and who actually applies pressure to the wound? Who throws away the knife, and who says, Aw, fuck it and stabs you in the places you missed? Who visits you at the hospital, and who waits until the funeral to show up?

5. You have great things to look forward to. No matter how this ends, a whole new adventure awaits you. If you survive, you'll have what is likely your first long-term stay in a hospital, together with people who care and check your temperature and blood pressure every 4 hours. You'll get to try new medicines, and your life will likely never seem the same ever again. If you die, you'll go to Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, or none of the above if you think that's something that might happen. And who knows? Either way, an eternal adventure (or not!) is just around the edge of a sharpened kitchen knife!

(Ref.)

New Right-Leaning Hacks Needed: Must Have Life Experience

There is a term for a family that pretends away terrible and self-destructive behavior, and it's not "healthy." It's time to confront some hard truths about our own, even if we often agree with them, especially if we do.

The Right's political chattering class is exactly as useless as that on the Left and the ... well, the rest of the Left.

Now, I need to clarify what I mean by "useless." I'm sure they're largely capable of tying their own shoes, and most of them can tie their one-to-two children's shoes quite well. I'm reasonably positive they can operate microwaves without emptying the utensil basket from the dishwasher inside first. Many of them show fluency with English somewhere between recent monolingual arrivals from Mongolia and people who graduated with journalism degrees; some are even functionally literate. At least a quarter have read the Constitution in toto. Some have met elected officials in a situation other than a very, very large dinner party, and a handful have met a range of successful and unsuccessful politicians during the candidate stage.

In fact, because most political coverage is not hard, as the subject is not hard, they are capable of writing more-or-less sensical things about politics with some regularity. In the sense that one uses their commentary to inform oneself about whether continued quantitative easing is a good idea or bad idea (without getting into the channels by which the liquidity enters the system), whether certain kinds of stem cell research are good or bad (without discussing at length the science that goes into this), and whether Harry Reid is a vicious partisan, they are generally useful.

In specialized situations, that is, when politics becomes hard, they are basically useless.

This is because they are essentially English or journalism or political science or sociology or psychology or some equally useless kind of major who have never worked a political campaign, run a business, done hard policy in an elected office, handled any sort of negotiations more complicated than demanding a raise from their parents, or indeed, had life experience of any significant sort other than bill-paying on compensation not quite as low as they'd have you believe.

If that sounds like Barack Obama's resume, you said it, not I.

Unfortunately for them and for us, right now, national politics is hard because there are no clear lines.

To frame this from a certain perspective:

We have been in a situation in which the House was refusing to fund the government because the majority has decided not to without certain conditions; a majority in the Senate wouldn't agree to any spending plan put forward by the House unless they meet yet more conditions; the White House wouldn't agree to anything unless its own conditions (similar to but not identical to the Senate's conditions) are met; and none of these groups have (quite) yet found a compromise.

So the object of these events is the funding of the government. It is the largest part of the leverage each side has with the other (because each side is, in the aggregate, seeing a negative reaction from the voters). However, what each side is negotiating over is not the government's re-opening, but rather over the terms on which the government will-reopen (or more accurately, the 17% of the government plus property under the control of the Park Service will re-open).

It is of course more complicated than that.

John Boehner was expected by his caucus to take a hard stand with a Senate Majority Leader who hates Boehner's caucus (and Boehner) and who does not want to negotiate and a President who hates Boehner's caucus (and Boehner) and who does not want to negotiate, while also trying to pacify or at least serve his caucus (who mistrust him and almost tossed him from his position earlier this year), while in turn not wanting to take a hard stand at all, but rather preferring to pretend to take a hard stand in an impossible position so he could yield quickly and claim the stakes were too high.

Basically, he was a man in an impossible position from which he cannot easily escape and who wanted nothing to do with this fight at all, yet has no choice but to be in it.

Yet Boehner is not the only actor on his side. He has a caucus of over two hundred individual Congressmen who do not particularly care about generic ballots, and indeed, really only care about the ones with their names on it. A huge portion came into office in 2006, 2008, 2010, and 2012; which is to say, they either swam against Democratic tides or came in response to anger at Democrats in general and Obamacare in particular. Many if not most of them either believe they were sent to defeat Obamacare, believe they will be primaried out of office if they don't make the attempt, or both.

Now, you'll note that I did not mention Ted Cruz here. That is because Ted Cruz has very little to do with this except in the sense that he is very popular with the people who could toss them in primaries.

You'll also note that I did not say these men and women are idiots, though many of them are. That's because their intelligence is not actually at issue in the way national pundits assume, because national pundits come from a group of people who are not only likely to have an IQ slightly higher than 100, but they assume everyone outside of their class and Nobel laureates is kinda stupid. What matters is whether these men and women have an instinct for political survival, and by and large, the evidence suggests they do.

From this complicated morass of conflicting interests and negotiating figures, someone with experience closing hard deals, mediating or negotiating between principals who hate each other and with conflicting desires, or indeed, someone who did something more complicated than writing a really kick-ass paper on political choice theory after college can understand that statements like "the Republicans are being stupid" or "the GOP is being stubborn" or "this is all Ted Cruz's fault" or even "Boehner is making the best of a bad situation" are remarkably simplistic and, let us not thread the needle too carefully, dumb.

Let me take an easy example here: Ross Douthat. (An easier example would be Conor Friedersdorf, but it's not fair to single out people suffering from actual mental retardation.) Not to pick on him; Douthat is an incredibly sharp fellow, and I don't say this just because he once worked somewhere besides the New York Times. But he rather clearly never worked anywhere in which negotiations happen before, because, as we see here, he apparently believes that Boehner agreeing to re-open the government would be a concession in terms by itself.

(Ignore Joseph Weisenthal. The Left is allowed to be stupid. They and their fellow-travelers in the media excuse each other all the time, so when they say dumb things, they get away with it. We have to be smart, or at least not stupid.)

Now, as I've laid out above, this is exactly wrong. By Douthat's reasoning, the plaintiff mediating in a lawsuit is conceding on the lawsuit itself, when really, he's conceding on how much money he will accept and the terms of the release in order to dismiss the lawsuit.

The concession will be over what terms Boehner accepts and includes in a spending bill (and in turn that his caucus accepts). Boehner is absolutely horrible at this sort of thing, as the 2011 debt ceiling showed, and as this year's tax hike also showed, and only part of his being awful at it is because he contrives to place himself in situations where he will lose by design.

It is the terms Boehner extracted during the debt ceiling fight in 2011 that so rankled his caucus, not the fact that he agreed to extend the debt ceiling per se. (Assuredly, some of his caucus were upset about that, but they're a minority of a minority and not wholly relevant here.) The terms he accepted -- and that his leadership team backed -- are part of why his caucus (and Ted Cruz!) and more importantly, his caucus's primary voters, don't trust him to make hard decisions and to take hard stands. This is because the terms were themselves concessions that satisfied virtually no one in his caucus.

It's why it's entirely reasonable to expect Boehner to try to sell something weak that by its nature would be a concession in terms to his caucus as the condition for funding the 17 percent of the government currently not technically funded. (This is, apparently, what happened.)

Again, I'm not picking on Douthat. He really is a very bright and persuasive fellow, and he has a knack for constructing conservative arguments in a way that is very hard for men and women of good faith to treat as ridiculous regardless of their place in the political spectrum. His last few years of work in particular have been incredibly good.

But he, and so many others like him, walked into punditry without understanding from their own life experience how hard things in human interaction work. This means they're very, very good (or sometimes terrible or mediocre) at making the philosophical argument for this policy or that policy; but they don't understand what really motivates most political actors, they don't understand so much of what those actors do, and so they fall back on easy, cheap, and ultimately stupid simplifications that do a disservice to their readership.

What this means is that right-of-center readers (and people who read right-of-center writers to understand the motivations and cross-currents in the conservative movement and Republican party) are being profoundly cheated.

The problem is that most of the people with life experience to explain these things have other things to do with their lives. Hell, this took two billable hours from my day, and I've only done the working-a-campaign part briefly and I do the negotiating-with-people-who-hate part every day of my life. The group of people who have all of the qualifications, or most, needed to do this have better things to do with their lives.

So here's my quick and easy solution: Every, single pundit on the right who draws a paycheck for these things needs to actually get some political experience first. Lefties get to do it, you should too. A state-level campaign is fine, but really, anything will do. Try to spend a term or so in office with real demands and real negotiations and real fights.

Then come out and tell us how the GOP is being stupid. You'll be right both on the substance, and on the particulars.

Why the Immigration Bill is Doomed to Succeed

Vidalia, Georgia, is actually a pleasant place. Most Yankees would think it a blip on the road as they drive through (do Yankees drive?), but it's actually in many ways a very pleasant Georgia town with nice people, a certain kind of picturesque landscape, and a subtly bustling work ethic.

Vidalia is (unfairly) famous for one thing and one thing only: its sweet onions. The soil in the Vidalia area produces a special kind of onion that is actually palatable raw, unlike most onions which require cooking or disguise inside of some other food. As with most agricultural producers, the farmers who produce those onions have historically relied on migrant day labor to harvest the crops. In pre-2013 PC-speak, of course, "migrant day labor" means "illegal aliens." (Now, it apparently means "undocumented already-Americans whom racists won't admit are already Americans.")

The onion crop is harvested by undocumented-already-Americans in the spring, and so in 1998, after the Immigration and Naturalization Service (the precursor to the lightning-quick and efficient Immigration and Customs Enforcement) spent over a year warning the farmers that they were cheating the wage and hour laws and the immigration laws and that this was, you know, illegal, INS decided to launch raids on the farms when the illegals, pardon, undocumenteds would be present.

That's harvest time.

The farmers squawked. Congressman Jack Kingston and the late Senator Paul Coverdell, both Republicans, took time out of failing to do anything in particular about the Clinton Administration and thundered at INS. INS knew who wrote their checks and who was President at the time and so backed down. The "compromise" the parties reached would be utterly unsurprising to anyone who has watched American immigration policy in execution for the last three decades: INS would agree not to deport any illegals, the farmers would pinky swear not to do this again, and the Republican Congressmen, one of whom had spent a decade thundering about illegal immigration, praised this humane solution.

Coverdell, absolutely immune to situational irony, implied that INS was duty-bound to ignore the immigration laws because the laws had been flouted and largely ignored for years by that point.

If any of this sounds familiar, it should. It is basically the way in which Republicans have approached immigration for nearly three decades: when the rubes are listening it's secure the border and our laws must be obeyed. When money talks, it's the rules are for suckers.

Senators Ayotte and Rubio are of course the most recent examples of this; they are hardly alone.
The problem is of course larger than immigration. It extends to the pro-life cause (Republicans are not nearly in danger of taking federal funds from Planned Parenthood, and abortion will be unsafe, legal, and common into the twenty-second century in no small parts thanks to the party), spending (John McCain is not the only Senator to rail against prolific spending in general and demand it for his home state), and indeed, almost everything else. (I could also take shots at former Presidents Bush and Reagan, but you get the idea.)

Yet today, the issue is immigration, so let's discuss that.

We Will Have Comprehensive Immigration Reform Precisely Because It's A Bad Idea

I feel I should put my cards on the table. My views on immigration have liberalized over the last eight years, spurred in part by my realization at the time that world birth rates are plummeting, and by the realization that Republicans dare not actually do anything to fix the mess they've created over the last three decades. I favor legalization of those here (blah blah exceptions) and a path to citizenship, albeit one significantly more arduous than legal immigrants face. (We should not, after all, reward lawbreaking, even if we must stomach it.) We don't make new people at home, so we need more of them, and as business interests just want a helot class, I want to deny them that.

I feel we also need to liberalize our unskilled and skilled immigration laws to allow more of both into the country.

But I also feel that it is important to be honest. An honest description of what I am describing, regardless of any soon-to-be-waived taxes or fines on which legalization and citizenship are predicated, is an amnesty. The immigration bill before the Senate now, with due respect to Congressman Ryan, is an amnesty, in the same way that the militia will be absolved of its crimes if it disarms is an amnesty. No one thinks the latter isn't an amnesty; merely because conditions are attached to legal forgiveness of lawbreaking does not change the nature of the forgiveness.

I say all of this because I feel we also need to know what elected Republicans have said for three decades. They say we must secure the border and our laws must be respected when facing the electorate. But what they are really saying by their actions is this:

We think you're too stupid to get this, so here it is. We don't care about being a permanent minority party under Democrat rule. We don't care about depressing and at the same time burdening the labor market in weird ways. We don't care about a political shift to the left because frankly that's where we live anyway. We don't care about enforcing the law, and that after what we've done for three decades you think we do, is a persuasive argument about ending elections permanently. We think you're all a bunch of dumb racists, you were too stupid to know not to elect us, and so we are going to have a big amnesty and make the next wave of this easier because our big money backers think you're dumb racists and half of them want a helot class. Dig? What are you gonna do, vote for the Democrats?

Now as I said, this is hardly limited to immigration. If you took the Republican Party at its word, you would expect to see men and women dedicated to cutting spending, balancing the budget, ending the slaughter of the unborn, enforcing our laws, beefing up our national security, and slowly easing down the welfare state. If you take them on their actions, you would expect to hear them talk about growing government, running deficits, keeping abortion legal, tossing our laws out the window, spending a lot on defense systems while shuddering at using them, and expanding entitlements.

The problem for Republicans is that on none of these things have they been honest. Ayotte and Rubio campaigned against comprehensive immigration reform and are now staking their credibility on it. The House leadership is a reminder that the House leadership is pretty awful and worse, hasn't really changed since the 2006 drubbing.

So when Rubio or Cornyn (haha!) or any other Republican other than John McCain promises there will be border security, no one believes them because no one is that stupid any longer. When they promise that there will be hurdles to jump before the people whose first act on entering our country was to break our laws can become citizens, no one believes them because those hurdles are already being horse-traded away, and again, three decades is too long for even Republican voters to remain stupid.

But the bill will pass anyway. Elected Republicans will calculate that the opponents of the bill are racists, because the fellow members of their class will say so, and will ignore the fact that it merely fossilizes decades of broken promises, burdens the labor market, dragoons employers into being federal agents, does nothing to alleviate labor shortages, depresses prevailing wages, expands entitlement spending, and incidentally treats our laws as dreck.

Because, and this is important, they don't care about those things either.

But the Party Will Suffer

The problem in the short term is not the anti-immigration-reform folks (as opposed to anti-immigrant folks, who are a fraction of a fraction of a minority, or the racists, who are less). Republicans know they'll just stupidly vote for Republicans, because the Democrats are at least honest about what they're doing.

The short term problem is that the upset people, racist or not, anti-immigrant or not, will jump like scalded cats, and media folks desperate to protect the Precious will latch onto this to prove Republicans are racist. Good-bye independent votes, hello President Clinton, Redux. That Marco Rubio cannot see this, and cannot see what he is creating, should permanently disqualify him from the Presidency.

The long run problem is that those same people will gradually wonder why they bother. They will be like those missing Republican voters in 2000 and 2012 who looked at what was on offer and couldn't figure out why to vote. Lest you think they were wrong to make that conclusion (and they were), you aren't going to argue them out of it. And God knows we don't try, and even if we did, I'm not sure what we'd say to them.

The problem is that in the long run, Republican voters will realize that their elected officials hold them in contempt, and accelerate the path downhill. That's a bad thing, though as I get older, the relative badness of it seems less with each passing day.

But don't worry. There will always be a few rubes left who believe Republicans.

A Review of Blood Song (Raven's Shadow #1)

Having been through more fantasy and science fiction series than any functioning adult should be comfortable admitting, I am leery of writing anything overly adulatory about the first novel of a series, especially when that novel is not merely good but quite possibly great.

This is because first-in-a-series novels are like first dates. On the one hand, you can end up meeting the woman of your dreams, whom you will marry and who will bear you a surprising number of children, with whom you will live in domestic bliss until the day you wake up and find at least some of your children with knives and shurikens at your throat and you're surprised because you used to hide those behind the liquor cabinet and then you smell their breath and realize they got into that, too.

On the other, it can be that sparkling first date that rapidly degenerates into forced picnics and awkward silences because the girl's roommate is a closet lesbian who is repressing her feelings because she's not sure if this is a phase and she doesn't want to upset her parents but she knows she's attracted to her roommate and so she tells her that you look like a child molester and once the seed is planted you can't even look at a panel van again, while she's around anyway.

I stress that I've never dated a girl whose roommate was, to the best of my knowledge, a closet lesbian.

With those caveats out of the way, before I say things like "this is one of the best novels I've ever read," let's get the downsides out of the way.

First, Anthony Ryan, the author of Blood Song, seriously could have used a copy editor, and just a little bit, a regular editor. The prologue drags. I understand there's a lot of setup here, but half of it isn't strictly necessary. The copyediting for what I presume was a self-edited piece is incredible, but there are a lot of homophone slips, enough that your eye doesn't pass over them like an angry wife when you're hung over and hiding under the blankets, but instead trips like an angry wife when she tries walking over the blankets and you're hung over and hiding under them on the floor.

Second, it's bad enough that Ryan uses that obnoxious British spelling for everything -- I mean, he's a Brit, so insisting on using spellings that the Oxford English Dictionary insists are wrong just because Americans use the right ones is a thing -- but he writes not like a Brit but a Canadian. It's a voice that sounds more American than British, which means I've probably insulted the poor fellow at least twice in this paragraph as far as he's concerned, but it's disconcerting to read American- or Canadian-style writing and stumble not just over "realise" but the word "shambolic," which is amazingly a word, albeit a ridiculous one.

Third, and this is actually a backhanded compliment, this is such a complete book that I'm not sure how he gets through the next one. It doesn't feel like Ryan is forcing a sequel, not yet anyway, but instead like this is such a tidy, neatly-wrapped book that it's hard to imagine what he'll prattle on about for 200,000 words, which his blog tells me is coming.

Fourth, having the obviously-Asian guy come from a distant land that uses Chinese symbolism and archetypes is not just a cliche, it is the only weak element of characterization in the novel.

Now, for the rest.

Blood Song is one of the best books I've ever read. I have a pantheon of twenty books/compendia ranging from classics of literature to autobiography to history to science fiction and fantasy to tragedy, an eclectic mix until you realize I'm likely disturbed at some level. I don't think a book has cracked into these ranks since law school. I think this one did. It is not just the typical coming-of-age-for-the-world-shaking-boy/young man. It is a deeply personal tragedy in which the world crumbles again and again around the protagonist starting at the beginning of his second decade of life and apparently continuing into the end of his third.

That's a lot of time to suffer time and again.

What struck me, though, was not just the grimly inspiring story, but the level of detail, understanding, nuance, and richness woven through the book. Lest I be accused of writing a high school book report in the ten minutes before class starts (a sin of which I was guilty at one time), let me expand on that. Imagine writing a story in which the whole world has a rich history, a cast of characters who forged that world within living memory, and a square area of a few thousand miles. Then open up that world into a part of a bigger one, and then collapse it into a tiny one.

Imagine trying to do all of this through two main voices and a host of actually-differentiated supporting voices. Imagine trying to tell that story without taking only fifty pages of sparse notes or three thousand pages of tedium. Imagine writing a Christian history of Christianity but with pagans and agnostics as the Christians and with a polytheistic Muslim sultanate to the South.

As someone who has spent, off and on, the last twenty years of his life fleshing out a handful of stories in his mind about a world he created for an Advanced Dungeons and Dragons (2nd Edition forever!) campaign, and who has subsequently tried to finish a single novel, just one, I am here to tell you that this is an insanely difficult balancing act. The fact that Ryan has managed such a trick without editors or other apparent support structure is not just interesting or impressive, it is more or less unbelievable.

One thing that struck me as I finished this book and as at least three children were screaming at me (this was at a little after 2 a.m., so I was having a comparatively easy night) was that Ryan managed to make every twist and turn in the novel not a gimmick or tiring cliche, but rather an internally consistent and explicable revelation to a sadly-limited narrator. This may be the most impressive trick of all -- it's one thing to spend years writing an intricate novel and making it readable, it's another altogether to engage a reader's suspension of disbelief and have it remain a vital and living thing as you jar it repeatedly through your work.

I have worked hard to avoid spoilers here and I will continue to do so. Suffice it to say that while I felt the novel's penultimate chapter predictable at some level when I started the novel, I was struck by how Ryan had made the protagonist's resolution of the surrounding plot actually in some dispute by the end. You'll see what I mean, if you read this.

Which, incidentally, you really should. It's cheap at three times the price and twice the time involved to read.

His finger touches God's

My good friend Ben Domenech has been putting out one of his usual, depressing-because-it's-so-insightful series, this time on modern video games, and the relationship between those who play, those who create, and the medium they share.

In probing the moral reaction to playing the bad guy in a video game, Ben recently asked,

Decisions like these have moral consequences. And if video game players take the games they play seriously, they should take the consequences of these decisions seriously as well. Do they? This will be the topic of the next entry.

As I am not a fraction the writer Ben is, I don't think I'd be stepping on his toes to answer this before he does, so: In response to his closing question, I think the answer is yes and no.

I think a few caveats are in order first. I have played, over the course of my depressingly-close-to-four decades of life, a lot of video games. I have played through dreck and I have bathed in sweet, pure metal. I have experienced the glory of Bard's Tale and Bard's Tale II and the pathetic, anti-religious hackery of Bard's Tale III. I marveled at Betrayal at Krondor, wept over the waste that was Wizardry 8, cursed my way past the damned bird in Ninja Gaiden, defeated the Kilrathi, fought alongside Euria, sought him out a game later, and finally defeated the Dark Harrier. I chased Diablo from Tristram to Hell, and then hunted down his remaining brother to boot. I followed the terrible saga of Man-Bot and Alchemiss to its bitter end, I helped revive the Grey Wardens, and I was Joe Musashi.

I have taken on the Gods of Olympus three times since 2005 alone, and I have lived the miracle that is Minsc and Boo.

But I am not a "gamer." I think that's a perfectly fine title to give yourself if you play video games for a living (sign me up), I think you can indulge in that sort of thing if you have a real job as long as you're not married with kids, but once you have hostages to fortune, it's time to be an adult and view video games for what they are: Escapism, stress relief, challenges, or just plain old time-wasters.

But with all of that, I think it's fairly easy to see why you shouldn't take too seriously what you do in a video game. Simply put, it's not real. I don't mean merely that you're controlling a rendered avatar with absolutely no impact on our existence, I mean that you're controlling a rendered avatar with absolutely no impact on our existence, with no impact on anyone's existence, who can be reset or recreated at will and who at any rate can do things like blow up planets with a few carefully chosen words.

But I won't play a girl. Nor do I ever play the evil guy. Every human sacrifice in a God of War game leaves me ill in real life. I feel dirty for the orgy scenes, too. I always play the Jedi. I always play the paladin. My wizards are pretty decent guys. Optimus Prime was one of my three heroes growing up, and God knows he couldn't just tell Omega Supreme to get it over with, just once. This either makes me a nutty hypocrite, or it means that there is some view of the question beyond the literal one.

I'm a practicing attorney, so I refuse to admit that I'm a nutty hypocrite. Make of that what you will.

I think the clue to understanding this lies in a premise that Ben implicitly rejected in a prior piece (on movies and video games), that video games are merely a new way of telling the same stories we once lived in books.

J.R.R. Tolkien once called his Middle-Earth saga his "sub-creation." He was not trying to coin a portmanteau, but rather to express a range of emotions and concepts about what humans, the product of Creation, do when they try to make something out of nothing. There is joy and there is glory in the act of small-c creation, and whether you believe (as I do) that this is because we are experiencing an echo of God's joy at his achievement or (as I do not) that we are just monkeys whose brains respond well to overcoming challenges, you will likely concede that the joy and glory are addictive.

It is this sensation -- this euphoria at creating -- into which the best video games tap. They invite us to feel like we are joining in the act of creation.

A god with no attachment to his creation is merely an instant of solipsism, and so we become emotionally attached to, and involved in, our sub-creations.

Of course, the overwhelming majority of those who play video games have never coded anything more extensive than the BASIC program their third-grade teacher taught them, and the overwhelming majority of the rest have never created anything like Dragon Age: Origins, or even been on the marketing team for it. And so even in the most open-sandbox worlds -- the Elder Scrolls games, any decent MMORPG -- you are no more creating than you are writing the copy of Anathem you just finished.

But the sense of creation matters, the feeling that you caused your character or world to be as it is right now matters, regardless of its truth. It's why Knights of the Old Republic is a decade later still viewed as one of the great games of all time, and Knights of the Old Republic II is considered a rushed disappointment. It's why Baldur's Gate and Arena (and its progeny) sold so well and influenced so much.

It is why half of the people enraged about the ending of Mass Effect 3 are so very upset.

I should offer two more caveats here. First, I am nearly finished with Mass Effect 2 and while it is a fun game, it is not a challenging game unless played on Hardcore or Insanity level (I find this remarkable because the last shooter I played was Goldeneye for the Nintendo 64 back in 1997), and it is a real miss by BioWare -- you aren't creating Commander Shepard when you play, you are creating the people who surround him.

Second, because I find the game so lacking in emotional strings of any kind (other than seeing what Tali looks like under that mask), I have not played, and likely will not play, Mass Effect 3. I have to assume Shepard remains the same cypher he's been to this point -- a real shame, because BioWare used live Origin's creed of We build worlds. I therefore not only have not seen the ending of ME3, I have deliberately avoided spoilers.

But consider this. Without reading the spoilers, in their own way, Holkins and Krahulik are satirizing what was apparently a keenly-felt sense of disgust from the people about whom BioWare used to care most, before being eaten by Electronic Arts (they're called "customers"). There are, generally, two threads of complaints about the ending of Mass Effect 3:

(1) The ending sucked because there's no pure, happy ending.

(2) The ending sucked because nothing you do to that point has anything to do with the ending choices presented: You're given two or three or four, I'm not sure how many, choices, each of which exist regardless of any actions taken to that point in the entire series, and whichever one you pick will turn into a fifteen-minute cut scene again independent of your actions and choices to that point.

Now, I have no way of judging the accuracy of these things, and I can say from playing ME2 that the BioWare guys have lost a lot of their plot and dialogue mojo from their days with Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Knights of the Old Republic, and even Dragon Age:Origins, a sense I understand is more pronounced in ME3 as in Dragon Age 2.

If you feel that you have been co-creating the story and the world of Mass Effect for three long (oh, Lord, the dialogue is soooo long) games, an ending that reeks of Deus ex machina is an insult, a letdown, and more importantly, a break in the feeling that you were co-authoring the story. Insofar as you feel you've created a Commander Shepard, you are entitled to help decide his ending, or at least to have your choices matter.

Now, the people who are only upset about the lack of a happy ending don't actually care about the character. They want a movie with a happy ending. I'm not going to poo-poo this; as my wife likes to say, if I want to cry, I'll watch the news. I view The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant as great because they're well-written and truly in every sense tragedy, much as I enjoy the tales of Arthur and the coming end of the Wheel of Time, but it's nice to escape to a world where the good guys win in the end, dammit.

But these people are not invested in the game the way an emotionally unstable person such as I would be. They're in it for the escape, not for the experience. Again, that's fine; I'm not emotionally attached to every character I've ever played. But it signals a critical mass who play for the thrill and the escape, not for the mental and emotional identification.

But the ones who want a say in the very structure of Shepard's final battle with the Reapers? They care. They cared about what happened to Viconia and Aribeth and Bastila, they cared about being the Avatar and the moral choices they made, they cared about whether Admiral Tolwyn would see justice, they cared about all of the great and small things in the worlds in which they thought they had played a part.

It is to BioWare's shame that they've lost track of those people.

I should note that you can have that emotional investment regardless of your feeling as author or agent. Homeworld is, to my mind, one of the greatest games made. The graphics are uneven by today's standards, and in 1999 or 1998 when it came out, they were noted as being deliberately rendered in a certain way for speed of play and a few other things.

But this scene:

is still one of the most affecting things I've ever seen. It's in part because of the Agnus Dei playing in the background, but the entire scene brings home immediately the emotional impact of billions of people dying in a firestorm, just minutes into the game, in a way that the destruction of Taris in KOTOR did not and could not. (That's arguably because the Sith tend to get all wasteful with planets, so you kinda expect that.)

There is a question around which I -- and to a lesser extent Ben -- have danced: I don't know how many people actually will experience or do experience this sort of thing as the years crawl by. Most people who play games play stupid crap games on their phones or on Facebook. My sense from meeting normal humans (and lawyers, but that's a different species) is that most would be bemused by this kind of attachment to video games even now, and I speak of those age 20-60. Getting hung up playing Angry Birds is one thing. Getting choked up because Aerie got kidnapped and turned into a vampire and the only way to save her is to kill her is another.

But those of us who write and imagine and talk and conceive for a living -- we will care.

You likely didn't notice, but third-tier blogger Dan Riehl and his erstwhile patron and chunin-rank pundit Mark Levin engaged in a minor series of hissy-fits over vaguely, sort of, nominally not-complimentary things about Michelle Malkin and Sarah Palin, respectively, that appeared at RedState.

Now, I should note that I have no particular beef with Mark Levin -- among second-rate bloviators and pundits, he's easily in the top fifth or so -- and I think Dan Riehl, though utterly inconsequential, is likely charming whenever he's let out of obedience school, so I hope it's clear that I'm not trying really hard to make this personal. Rather, I'm making a larger point about how the dimmer the bulb, the more any perceived slight on one's personal political avatar becomes an assault on one's household gods; how this engages the brighter bulbs in the same battles over time; and how that tendency threatens to turn a primary season that should be wholly about finding the best candidate to defeat Captain Kitten and his merry band of Neiman Marxists into yet another round of bloodsport internecine warfare.

Let's put Michelle Malkin to the side before we start (a sentiment I would that the conservative movement would consider seriously in a larger sense). Malkin, who is undeniably ridiculously bright, telegenic, and media-savvy, is basically only useful for making sure that a small, easily irritated, not-overly-clever segment of the voting population shows up at the polls and vaguely intuits that the Republicans will be less bad than the Democrats when it comes to letting the filthy brown people come to the United States. Instead, let's talk about Presidential candidates, declared and never-to-be.

I am a fairly big Sarah Palin fan; I have believed for almost three years that she is too smart and too sane to run for the Presidency, as doing so would endanger her family, her ability to make money, and her sanity. To run for the Presidency in the modern era means alienating yourself from your family, pretending you think the good people of New Hampshire and Iowa have even minor modica of common sense (for which you must rigorously ignore their voting patterns over the last two decades), eating bad food, wearing ridiculous clothing, and sleeping in the hotels and motels everyone else must to show that you can pretend you've slept in a hotel with less than three stars in living memory. All of that, of course, precedes the relentless harassment of your spouse and children, parents, colleagues, college roommates, and, unless you're Barack Obama, your doctor and/or your college registrar. Mrs. Palin has been through too much of that; so far, she appears to be vindicating my faith in her. My good money says she doesn't run.

But regardless of whether she does or not, the critical, the most important, the single-most-useful thing to remember about her is that she is a politician. Oh, Lord, she is crafty, and as Leon noted, you don't boatrace the two biggest names in Alaska politics in one fell swoop without being at least not-dumb. She has an eye and an ear for the media the likes of which we rarely see. If that useless pile of flesh John McCain hadn't wasted her talent, she would surely be a fresh, new face on the campaign trail this year or in 2016. But she is a politician, she is a Republican politician, and she is neither a goddess nor an avatar nor a living embodiment of anything. She's a mother of five who clawed her way up the chain, which means she also has good political instincts to boot; but she will use, chew up, and spit out whatever and whoever is needed to accomplish her goal.

That is what politicians do.

To be a successful Republican politician means knowing when to work with and when to buck the Party establishment, because if you don't, you're not a Republican, you're an independent or a member of a fringe group like the Constitution Party, the Libertarians, or fans of Third Eye Blind. How you balance punching the party in the eye and moving it along is the measure of your effectiveness as a politician. John McCain, in twenty years of trying, hasn't figured this one out yet, and not unrelatedly, he was doomed never to be President McCain. George W. Bush ran this gauntlet in 2000, and not unrelatedly, he became President Bush.

But there is nothing insulting -- or at least so insulting that a B-level pundit would feel the need to assert how seriously conservative he really is where everyone can laugh at him -- in saying that Sarah Palin sometimes runs with the Republican establishment. Of course she does. Her schtick is dependent on having sway inside and outside the party, and God bless her for pulling it off. I hated her endorsement of Fiorina (whose campaign was a waste from its announcement through its agonizing and entirely predictable failure) and I think her non-endorsement endorsement of Orrin Hatch is beyond ridiculous. But she needs to balance the ridiculous establishment endorsements against the rebel challenges or she will lose all of her influence in the party's establishment; and without that, she's a significantly hotter Rush Limbaugh with a lesser radio talent and a greater new media talent.

But more importantly, who cares? Even assuming she is running for President -- and she is not -- she hardly needs would-be-surrogates to defend her, to feign or feel indignation on her behalf. Part of why I'm a big fan of hers is that she clearly has steel in her spine, and the brains and mouth to back it up.

This is as true of the nominally real candidates in the race. Jon Huntsman's vanity campaign is well-enough funded -- if colossally stupid enough -- to hire people to insult his Party's base for him. (Dear Huntsman consultants: Before you get to the general electorate, you must convince Republicans to let you. Send my fee to Eagle, they'll forward it to me.) Mitt Romney's incredible astroturfing skills from 2007-2008 are doubtless even greater this time around, and if I cared enough, I'd probably be impressed. Rick Perry has a dangerously good -- if at times self-destructively petty -- campaign team, all of whom draw salaries for a reason. Michelle Bachmann has a long history of giving as good as she gets, which is just as well given the sometimes too-short relay time between her brain and her mouth.

Ron Paul and his delusional followers have long experience with onanism, so they don't particularly care what you think.

But one of these people will clear the primaries. (Obviously, not Ron Paul.) Because they are politicians and see voters as tools to achieve goals, they don't care what you or I think of them so long as we vote for them. Let me repeat that: THEY DON'T CARE. They see us as means to ends, and if the means happen to gripe while they get used, well, that's pretty amusing, but as long as the end is accomplished, the griping is irrelevant.

This fundamental inability to understand the politician's relationship to his constituents underlies everything from the intra-party rancor you inevitably see in primaries to Captain Kitten's election in 2008. I watched the dynamic play out in 2008, and it goes like this:

Step One: Beloved candidate is attacked/not properly appreciated/made out to be less than other, less-awesome candidate.

Step Two: Stupid people who believe Step One to be literally true rise to nominally beleaguered candidate's defense. Not-dim people sit back, with their hopes and dreams invested in the politician, but brains still engaged, and try to be reasonable.

Step Three: All-out war begins between the politicians' proxy-moron armies.

Step Four: Slowly more enraged by the attacks playing out between the cretins, the non-cretins jump into the fray.

Step Five: Someone wins the primary. A small portion of his opponents' supporters refuse to help because they are either too angry or too convinced of the awfulness of the winner because of the slapfights in Steps Three and Four. A larger portion won't go to the ground to help because of the same reasons, even though they'll vote for him.

Step Six: The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act passes both Houses through the use of parliamentary tricks unbecoming an adult Republic.

Our first, primary, and overriding goals should be the absolute destruction of the Obama Presidency by all legal and more-or-less ethical means, and retaking the Senate. Anything constructively aiding that goal -- including good-faith debate of each candidate's strengths and weaknesses -- is good. Anything else is like being a Ron Paul follower: Yelling for the way your pants feel afterward.

We didn't remotely grasp that lesson in 2008. We have two Supreme Court justices, one unconstitutional government behemoth of a health care law, and a gigantic regulatory mess to show for it. If we continue acting like Riehl and Levin are now, it will get worse from here.

Dear Friend,

Two days ago, I acted like a boor and a pig. Because I was speaking to union voters, I thought, "Who'd fucking notice?" Now Republicans are acting like they've never said that word before, like if they hit their thumbs with hammers while crucifying a teacher in a garage, the fuckers.

Talk about hypocrisy. We're talking about people who've had people near them comparing President Obama to Hitler, when everyone knows Dick Cheney is Hitler, the fucker. Not only that, they have the unmitigated gall to participate in the motherfucking political process, as if they're entitled to do so, without once carrying union cards.

Wanna know what's fucking bullshit? The fact that at least fifty Ohioans -- some of whom are adults! -- are still not registered with a local. FIFTY! Fifty decent, hardworking scabs who can't be bothered to fucking unionize even when we send them pictures of their kids at school. How many of those poor people don't have insurance?

Well, actually, that's a rhetorical question. We have their names, addresses, phone numbers, social security numbers, credit reports, paystubs, W-2s, 1099s, and, when appropriate, insurance cards. Thanks, Postal Carriers Local 388!

But let me tell you, goddammit, I'm fucking fired up, and I don't give a shit which cocksucking pussy faggot knows it. I'm fired up because Republicans have made it so that President Obama can't get a shit sandwich through Congress even with supermajorities in both Houses. I'm pissed off because Governor Strickland can't find his ass with both hands, a map, a flashlight, a GPS device, and a giant fucking neon sign with a glowing arrow that points directly at his goddamned rectum. Can you seriously fucking sit there and tell me you believe Ted Strickland is so fucking clueless he couldn't find his ass if Republicans weren't stopping him? I didn't fucking think so.

And Wall Street! Do you think President Obama has taken hundreds of millions from Wall Street just for his own gain? That's what those motherfucking Republican twats say -- they're still out there slandering our President. Anyone paying attention would know that he's said a lot of terrible things about Wall Street, and is this close to cutting off the unlimited stream of funds that has kept them afloat.

And that's because Congress told Wall Street to fucking shove it up its fucking ass with the fucking reform bill they just passed. It ended Too Big to Fail, or probably will, no one's sure, but only a fucking Republican would question it.

And that's because they're racists.

And health insurance.

That's why I'm fed up with Republican governance of this country. I'm asking you to donate so we can force Republicans out of the governor's mansion, and return Governor Strickland to office for a second consecutive term. I'm asking you to donate so we can toss the fucking Republican control of Congress, and help get Majority Leader Reid and Speaker Pelosi the super-supermajorities they need. And most of all, I'm asking you to help me get President Obama sworn in as President, again, two years early, for the first time. Because we can continue to change Ohio as we haven't been for four years, and the country for four years, in the right direction that we haven't gone yet.

Fuck you,

Chris Redfern
Chairman
Ohio Motherfucking Democratic Party

Sarah Palin has a son named Trig. Trig was born roughly four months ago. Trig has Down's Syndrome. Sarah and her family have a tough road ahead of them, as my grandparents did when my uncle was diagnosed with what is, apparently, a much more severe case than Trig has.

Sarah Palin is pro-life, and unabashedly so. Given that ninety percent of children diagnosed with Down's are murdered in utero, and that she is a woman in her mid-forties staring at a challenge for which she must plan not only the rest of her life, but beyond -- Trig will need certain kinds of medical and everyday life assistance for the rest of his existence -- she is rather walking the walk.

Sarah Palin is, by all accounts, a devout, or at least a frequently-church-attending, Evangelical. This probably influences, or at the very least, overlaps with, her pro-life views.

Sarah Palin is a Republican, and she is about to be formally nominated for the Vice Presidency of the United States. That alone would make her a hate object for the mouth-breathing Left. That she's a Christian, an ardent pro-lifer, and had the temerity to withstand the eugenicist impulse that animates the modern Left has driven them to apoplexy.

Sarah Palin has, based on what we know, three weak points for attack in the modern political world. The first is her relative lack of significant political experience. Given the empty suit at the top of the Democrat ticket, this is a profoundly unwise avenue on which to launch a frontal assault. The second is a "scandal" in which her husband apparently said mean things to a corrupt Alaska politician to coerce said corrupt Alaska politician into doing damage to the career of a police officer who, married to Ms. Palin's sister, had taken it upon himself to beat the living Hell out of her. If the Democrats and their pet yard apes in the media and blogosphere want to finish off the Lifetime-viewing demographic as Democrat votes, they are welcome to do so; if not, they'd probably need to stand clear of that.

So now it's family, everyone's weak point -- well, everyone not named Kennedy, anyway. The eliminationists cannot bring themselves to blame her publicly for not murdering her son in the womb, so they've decided instead to assert that (1) Trig is not her son but (2) her teenage daughter's and (3) Mrs. Palin chose to hide this from the world and lie about Trig's parentage.

As proof, they offer the following (no links; I don't generally link hate sites): Ms. Palin's pregnancy was not revealed until she was seven months along with Trig; she "doesn't look pregnant" with Trig in photos around that time; 43 year-olds have a hard time getting pregnant; and Mrs. Palin's daughter was out of school for mononucleosis for five months around Trig's birth, and everyone knows that mono only lasts three months, tops.

Pretty much all of these "facts" stem from a combination of basic scientific illiteracy and unfamiliarity with childbirth. Given that the average reader/diarist at Daily Kos is in her seventies and spent her entire life making sure that the percentage of the population that buys into Lefty fantasies decreases as a result of differential birthrates, the latter cannot be helped. The former is simply yet another reflection of the American public school system, and indeed, how science is taught and portrayed in our culture. Fortunately, some of us paid attention to science in high school (and college!) and some of us still have children.

It falls upon us to teach the barren, frigid Left a few things.

First, let's deal with how much Mrs. Palin was "showing." You folks may not be aware of this, but different women carry different ways. Generally speaking, for a healthy, full-term, ~8 pound baby, the mom is going to add an average of twenty-five pounds -- baby, amniotic fluid, placenta, breast engorgement, and, yes, some fat. Folks differ, though. My wife puts on around forty pounds, no matter how much she exercises or controls her diet. My mother put on fifty. My longest-running female friend has had three children, with add-ons of 15, 17, and 16 pounds. Her children came in at almost exactly 7.5 pounds each time, well within the healthy range.

But this is her fifth child, they say. Surely that would make her show more! The answer is Probably, but not definitely. By all accounts, Mrs. Palin is a determined athlete even in middle life. A big part of why women show more with more children is that their abdominal muscles get detached during their first pregnancy. (I'm sparing the science because I try not to confuse the reality-based community with things more elementary than a third-grader can comprehend. I'm therefore pushing them to reach up a grade.) However, as my wife, who was on a vigorous martial arts and exercise program well before our latest (our fifth) started coming along will attest, exercise can help correct this somewhat; and with a little rest and a break from childbearing, the situation is corrected even more.

Regardless of all that, if Mrs. Palin carries low and inside generally -- or even carried low and inside this time -- then this is a nonsensical point. Indeed, and this is ungentlemanly of me (even though I think it quite attractive): You'll note that photos of Mrs. Palin from around the time she announced Trig's incubation show a, er, softening under the chin and jaw. This happens to pregnant women, and rarely happens to other women without fat gain elsewhere.

So, um, given that her waist looks a scotch wider that before and now in those photos, and she gained that extra tissue under the chin, and that her activity level remained high, and that she looked like about fifteen percent of women look when having a child, we're going to have to chalk those remarks about her appearance to ignorance.

Now, the next one is going to skirt dangerously close to a human biology lesson, so any Lefties reading this, I strongly advise you to pop a couple of Excedrin before we start. Come back and read after you've given them about twenty minutes to take effect.

The next "fact" is that forty-three year olds have a hard time getting pregnant, ergo, it is unlikely that Palin spontaneously got pregnant with her fifth child. It is true that women trying for the first time to get pregnant in their forties encounter enormous difficulties. It is true that some women trying on their second, or third, child, have trouble conceiving in their forties. It is not true that women with multiple children have a hard time conceiving in their forties. This was a well-known thing just a couple of generations ago, as my grandmother could have attested when she bore my aunt at the age of forty-three, her twelfth child; as one of my oldest friends' mother could have attested when he, her third, was a pleasant surprise at age forty-four; or, throughout history, when women would find themselves with a fifteenth, a twentieth, or a twenty-seventh child on the way in her forties. Multiple long- or full-term pregnancies prolong a woman's fertility.

This is elementary medicine. My wife and I -- we try to be devout Catholics, though God alone knows if we're succeeding -- are trying to figure out how to stop having children before our forties hit. My solution is quiet contemplation. Hers is Smith & Wesson. Regardless of which method we choose, given how many we've already had, and how young we were when we started, an age basically identical to Mr. and Mrs. Palin's when they first got running, we know that births in our forties are not a small likelihood if we don't find some other way to channel our energies.

That leads to a point missing in all this: The older a woman is, the more likely she is to conceive a child with Down's. The statistics are skewed on live births, with the majority of Down's children being born to younger mothers, but this is influenced by (1) higher overall births to younger mothers, (2) the lower rate of conception among older mothers overall, (3) the higher affinities for abortion among the older segment relative to the younger, and (4) relatedly, a stronger cost:benefit ratio to those already inclined to exercise abortion, given the difficulties attendant in raising a retarded child with numerous physiological impediments. But when conception occurs, older women are significantly more likely, starting around thirty-five (decreasing somewhat with more prior children) to conceive a child with Down's Syndrome.

So, just to summarize this in one sentence: Is it really more likely that a seventeen year old girl raised in an extremely healthy environment with no history of fragile X or any other inherited condition of which we're aware would conceive a child with Down's than her forty-three year-old mother?

Now, this might be -- and will be, by the illiterate -- dismissed as ascientific ranting by some wingnut Quiverfull (or whatever they're called -- we're Catholic, not Protestant) theocrat. Concededly, I haven't bothered to cite or link anything in all of this, because I'm already spending valuable time offering basic science and human biology lessons to yard apes. But, as a sign of good faith, I'm going to offer you a resource that will show you that all of this is pretty elementary: Williams Obstetrics. Concededly, it's right-wing propaganda cloaked as the most-used obstetrics textbook of the last 100 years, updated every few years in a new edition. But check it out, just for giggles.

That leads to the third point: Mrs. Palin's daughter was out of school for mononucleosis for five months, and that's way too long, ergo, this is something like the average Daily Kos reader remembers from her youth in the Roaring Twenties, when diseases like that were used as cover for when a girl got herself in a family way.

I had mono. I was twenty-two years old and in law school. At the time, this was my daily regimen:

Wake up. Eat breakfast and two Snickers bars. Run two miles. Wind sprint one mile. Lift weights and do weighted situps for forty-five minutes. Jog a mile to cool down. Go to class, eating a candy bar or Power Bar on the way. Class, then lunch, then class, then home to read/study/play a video game/whatever. One hour of martial arts. Dinner. Read Shakespeare. Do 200 situps. Sleep. Repeat.

I was in, if I dare say so myself, damned good shape. I hadn't even had a cold in a year and a half.

I got mono just as I was writing on to journal at the end of my 1L year, so around May 20th or so. I weighed 170 pounds. I felt kinda feverish, a little tired, couldn't seem to muster enough energy to do everything I needed to. No big deal. Finished my write-on (and got my first pick!), went home.

Crashed.

I don't remember most of that summer. I remember losing twenty-five pounds. I remember sleeping and watching The Bold and the Beautiful. (TAYLOR!) I remember trying to pick firms to interview with when I got back to school. I remember breaking up with my girlfriend of the time.

I got back to D.C. in early August, and was still sleeping around 19 hours a day. I could barely eat. I started classes in August. I don't remember most of that. I remember meeting the woman who is now my wife. I remember our first dates. I was barely back up to 150 pounds. I ran fevers at odd hours. I was soaked walking half a mile in the cool mornings. This went on through November, six months later. I was never able to get back in the kind of shape I'd been in before.

Mononucleosis, more even than most infectious diseases, has a lifespan based on a host of factors. It is not a rote disease. It is not the common cold.

And more importantly than that, if anyone thinks folks in rural America are still using the "she went to the country" excuse to hide a teenage girl's pregnancy, well, that leads to the next point.

I know Lefties are very bitter, still clinging to their BUSH LIED sandwich boards and their Alinsky, but I have to offer them a warning nevertheless: It is a profoundly bad idea to attack Mrs. Palin on this route, even if it's true. Out beyond the limits of whatever city or suburb they're currently in, there are still a lot of Americans who live in unincorporated areas, or who live in cities of 20,000 or fewer. Many, many of these people are Democrats. Many, many of them, perhaps as a result of their own clinging, urge their daughters not to murder their grandchildren in the womb. Frequently, their daughters, obviously filled with false consciousness, heed this urging. Those rural Democrats then go on to raise said grandchildren either as their own, or virtually as their own.

Now, the bad part: A lot of those rural Democrats are -- in the parlance with which Daily Kos readers are most familiar from their upbringing -- Negroes. Coloreds. Darkies. (I'm trying, and failing, to remember what you people called blacks in the 1910s, without using the N-word or the equivalent. Comments are open. Help me out, if you can clear the cobwebs from your minds.) Your entire electoral strategy this year is to energize blacks and stupid college students/young professionals who haven't lived as adults long enough to realize how stupid voting for "change" really is. Do you really want to shave a few points off the former? How about those young voters who maybe had their idiot grandparents and parents save them from the abortionist?

And don't forget the Lifetime voters who might do the exact same thing you allege that Mrs. Palin did. Probably don't want to lose those, either.

(I presume you guys are cool losing poor white voters. God knows you've thumbed your noses at them every other way possible.)

Eh, then again, continue down this path. I love our odds this way. Life always beats death, in the end.

Arguably the worst series of ideas I've heard in a while, I'm ever impressed to find the short-bus riding Chuck Hagel on board for the dumbest of the ideas presented. Let's see: Our goals are apparently (1) to increase government spending (2) increase Federal subsidies of local concerns (3) increase Federal ties to local concerns and (4) give urban political machines the tools they need to expand their usual raft of graft, corruption, cronyism, and electing Democrats.

Yup. Exactly what you'd expect out of a Republican.

Donatism is one of the oldest, most tempting of heresies. It posits that the spiritual value of a sacrament is in direct relation to the spiritual worthiness of the dispenser; in shortest form, a corrupt priest cannot give an effective sacrament. There is something intuitive -- which is not to say correct -- about this heresy, which of course makes it all the more dangerous. It is a heresy, its intuitive attraction notwithstanding, because it suggests that there are limitations on God's desire or ability to share the incredible spiritual gift that is a sacrament, and the one performing the sacrament is capable of effectively interposing some taint on God's gift by virtue of being the channel through which the sacrament is provided. Over fifteen hundred years later, we still owe St. Augustine thanks on our knees for sending that heresy screaming into the night, even if it does come back even more often than Gnosticism.

Put Donatism to the side for a moment. It'll be back. (It always is.)

Properly, but for a self-imposed and -enforced ban on commenting at RedState, this post would be a reply to this comment at RedState. The subject to which the commenter was responding was Barry Obama (just this once, I'll refrain from calling him Kitten) and his poll-tested decision to renounce, sorta, more or less, his pastor of twenty years, for that pastor's unfortunately unoriginal take on liberation theology. (More on that here.) As von isn't here to defend himself, I'll at least do him the courtesy of quoting his text in full:

I can't and won't ask anyone else to subscribe to this view.

Having backed McCain for years, and advocated for him in these virtual pages, I intend to vote for Senator McCain. Why accept Cleon or Nicias when Pericles is available?* Yet, I have always found Obama's comments on race & Wright (the two are inseparable) sincere. He has repeatedly arose above an impossible situation. You can quibble with Obama's speech in Philadelphia, but the fact that one can only raise honest quibbles with such a serious subject is testimony enough to Obama's insights.

I respect that my view may not be widely held on this site. That's fine: I never was a particularly good Republican. Still, I want this written down -- even if, in this decadent age, writing consists of electrons pausing between states:

Barack Obama is a good man. He doesn't deserve this.

von

*Hi, Pretentiousness? Thy namesake is in my tagline (special expanded version; all that is good about western civilization is in the Funeral Oration):

If then we prefer to meet danger with a light heart but without laborious training, and with a courage which is gained by habit and not enforced by law, are we not greatly the better for it? Since we do not anticipate the pain, although, when the hour comes, we can be as brave as those who never allow themselves to rest; thus our city is equally admirable in peace and in war. For we are lovers of the beautiful in our tastes and our strength lies, in our opinion, not in deliberation and discussion, but that knowledge which is gained by discussion preparatory to action. For we have a peculiar power of thinking before we act, and of acting, too, whereas other men are courageous from ignorance but hesitate upon reflection.

No, Barack Obama is not a good man, and he does deserve this -- this being public scrutiny and ridicule for the ills with which he has associated himself. But that's two different things, albeit ones related at some level, so let's unpack them.

Now, in point of fact, I would offer that Senator Obama is a bad man. He is a bad man because on perhaps the simplest, basic test for common humanity -- the willingness to stop others from slaughtering mewling infants -- he fails. He proudly fails. On an issue that does not remotely touch on whether a woman's right to maintain control over her body is more important than her child's right to continue living -- that is, on the simple question of what happens to an infant who escapes the birth canal alive after a failed abortion -- it is Barack Obama's position that the law should turn its eyes away as the mother is delivered of her right to a dead child. Good men do not partake in that kind of barbarity. Good men do not treat a sobbing infant's right to life as conditional, or as a matter of mere politics. Good men -- indeed, men of even mediocre decency -- stand and say The least among us deserves his next breath as much as the greatest, and when given the chance to affirm it in law, do so unhesitatingly.

Senator Obama may or may not believe that the statement is true, but he explicitly refused to enshrine it in law. For that, he is a bad man.

But put that to the side.

Good men do not stand quietly by while scandal is performed before their eyes. Ordinary men of common decency might remain silent in the face of a leader -- a political leader, a spiritual leader, what have you -- portraying evil as good, and setting moral ills forth as morally neutral or morally good acts; you would expect that of an ordinary human, because to do otherwise is to risk shame, and excommunication, and a host of ills that rational, selfish men have no desire to inflict as pain on themselves. The lesson of every demagogue's rise, every tyrant's grasp of power, every flock led astray by an unhinged priest, is that the overwhelming majority of men who might otherwise object, who might cry out This is not right in fact remain silent, and even acquiesce, because there are terrible consequences for a social animal to reject the way of the herd.

I presume -- an abundance of evidence to the contrary -- that Senator Obama does not believe that America is damned for its collective sins, and does not believe that the American government and its (white) population continue to perform acts of extraordinary depravity (and, in the creation of the AIDS virus, magic) on its black population. I do not despise Barack Obama for being a social animal, or for being a man who is -- let us be honest here about the best possible interpretation -- too weak to reject the views of those whom he loves and befriends, from his wife to his preacher to his friends to his political allies, because in that way, he is very ordinary. Expecting heroism -- or, if you prefer, goodness -- out of men is a losing proposition on almost every level possible, and it is perversely easier to expect when the only danger is to a man's life and well-being, as opposed to his social standing. Funny world.

But good men do not sit idly by while malice and evil are taught as moral goods. Taking Senator Obama on the most generous, most reasonable possible interpretation -- that he sat, for two decades, in the pews of the church he has frequently lauded as his spiritual home, with his two young daughters -- then he has not, in fact, been a good man. He has been a small man, a mediocre man, an ordinary man. Good men do not sit idly by while evil prospers.

About twelve years ago, I was attending Mass at the church near my family's house, while I was home from college on summer vacation. The Pastor was expounding on the Gospel, trying manfully to tie it together with the First and Second Readings in a way he hadn't before, when out of nowhere, he began discussing abortion. We weren't talking about the little children, or millstones, or the rock on which I build, or anything even remotely related (if memory serves, Christ had fed the masses with bread and fish); instead, out of nowhere, this otherwise pleasant Dominican launches into what he clearly believes is a reasoned discussion on the licitness of abortion. No big deal, except he then goes on to offer that there's nothing in Catholic teaching that forbids procuring or inducing an abortion, and that there's a lot of misinformation out there. From there, it's off into a discussion about how we don't really know that an embryo (he used the words zygote, fetus, and embryo interchangeably; I've simply settled on the middle stage for this recitation) is human, so performing or procuring an abortion exists in that moral gray area in which the Church teaches that the informed conscience leads.

So I got up and walked out. I was four rows from the front, a couple of spaces in, and I left. I didn't say anything, though I drew looks. I didn't think I was doing anything heroic, because I wasn't; I simply refused, publicly, to be part of scandal. I never went back. I don't think anyone else got up.

I'm not a good man; in fact, I think I'm a pretty despicable, low, contemptible man. My act was almost certainly made easier by the fact that I had only an intermittent relationship with that Parish, and so had no real ties to break when I left. But I couldn't simply sit there and give tacit assent to a very, very bad thing.

Barry Obama never got up and left -- or more accurately, he claims he's now more or less, sort of, gotten up and left, but when it mattered, when he could have quietly refused to be part of something demonstrably wrong, he remained silent, and simply sat there. That doesn't make him a bad man; it makes him an ordinary man.

Before I go any farther, let's talk about Donatism. I'm Catholic: It is the teaching of my Church that one priest is as capable of ministering the sacraments as the next, because of the office and Order invested in them by God. (An Orthodox priest in one of the Churches in the line of Apostolic Succession is similarly empowered.) Thus, while I might prefer one parish over another, because of convenience, the presence of a cry-room, the style of the liturgy, the blessed absence of banjos, what have you, there is no greater and no lesser value to any Catholic Church I might attend.

I say all of that because I don't understand the concept of a personal, spiritual relationship with one's pastor. It literally makes no sense to me. I understand the idea of a priest as spiritual companion and to a very limited (but usually overstated) extent, intermediary; I understand the idea of a priest's words, or teaching, or example, being so important that it brings one to, or closer to, the Risen Christ. But I don't understand the idea of having one's spiritual identity so tied up in a priest's teaching that divorcing yourself from the priest is tantamount to, if not synonymous with, divorcing oneself from one's spiritual identity. Yet this was Obama's defense, until it was no longer politically expedient: I could no sooner repudiate this man than I could repudiate my left leg.

And that is Donatism. It is an explicit union between a mortal and the delivery of God's grace. And it is another sign that, at best, Barack Obama is not a good man, but an ordinary, weak one. The Change That We Have Been Hoping For is incapable of effecting the very least change imaginable to protect his daughters from venom; the only evil that can be repudiated is that of Republicans.

So don't tell me that Barack Obama is a good man. Good men are rare, incredible treasures.

And even good men deserve the consequences of their actions.

Or has not the good Senator tied himself to his pastor, in his published works, in his public image, in his speeches until the last? Has he not gone out of his way to associate with the man, and made his faith a cornerstone of his public person?

And has he not run for the Presidency of the United States, a contact sport where bean bag is not even in the exercise routine? Does he not sleep in cheap motels, eat indifferent and greasy food, sneak quiet cigarette breaks where possible, shake thousands of hands, and ritually avoid hard questions from reporters, all in the pursuit of the most powerful office in the world?

Barack Obama has pledged his health, some portion of his wealth, and years of his life grasping for near-ultimate power. He deserves scrutiny, because he wants that power badly enough to do serious damage to his life and the lives of those close to him. That last is extraordinary only relative to the general population; almost every other human to run for the Presidency does so. However, that simply means that they're all borderline insane, and they deserve the probing their psyches receive, for fear of what else lurks under that incredible ambition.

So the attempt to decouple a man's actions from their consequences -- a coupling vital to our laws, our ideas of right and wrong, the very fabric of our society -- is not merely wrong, it is insulting to the men who would trace effect to those consequences, and the good man who set them in motion.

So don't tell me that a man who has bent the last two years in a run for the Presidency of the United States, who would allow newborn children to die in trash cans, who sat silent for two decades as incredible venom was hurled at the pews in which he sat, does not deserve the consequences of his actions.

Tell me instead whether anyone can experience the consequences of their acts, if this man cannot.

FOR HE IS RISEN.

Don’t be surprised if many of the young people enthusiastically supporting Paul today wind up crossing the line in a general election and using some of that enthusiasm in support of Obama. I’m sure there are many who gravitate to Paul because of individual issues or out of anger against the establishment. Those followers will drift to third-parties or sit out the election altogether. But there are more, like me, who gravitate to him because of his faith in personal freedom and in the fundamental belief in the human spirit such conviction implies. Obama may not satisfy our thirst for liberty, but he certainly appeals to the human spirit.

A mighty fortress is Obama,
A bulwark never failing;
Our helper he amid the flood
Of mortal ills prevailing.

I am blessed to be standing in the city where my own extraordinary journey began. A few miles from here, in the shadow of a shuttered steel plant, is where I learned what it takes to make change happen.

I was a young organizer then, intent on fighting joblessness and poverty on the South Side, and I still remember one of the very first meetings I put together. We had worked on it for days, but no one showed up. Our volunteers felt so defeated, they wanted to quit. And to be honest, so did I.

But at that moment, I looked outside and saw some young boys tossing stones at a boarded-up apartment building across the street. They were like boys in so many cities across the country - boys without prospects, without guidance, without hope. And I turned to the volunteers, and I asked them, "Before you quit, I want you to answer one question. What will happen to those boys?" And the volunteers looked out that window, and they decided that night to keep going - to keep organizing, keep fighting for better schools, and better jobs, and better health care. And so did I. And slowly, but surely, in the weeks and months to come, the community began to change.

Through many dangers, toils and snares...
we have already come.
T'was Barack that brought us safe thus far...
and Barack will lead us home.

We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek. We are the hope of those boys who have little; who've been told that they cannot have what they dream; that they cannot be what they imagine.

Yes they can.

We are the hope of the father who goes to work before dawn and lies awake with doubts that tell him he cannot give his children the same opportunities that someone gave him.

Yes he can.

We are the hope of the woman who hears that her city will not be rebuilt; that she cannot reclaim the life that was swept away in a terrible storm.

Yes she can.

We are the hope of the future; the answer to the cynics who tell us our house must stand divided; that we cannot come together; that we cannot remake this world as it should be.

Because we know what we have seen and what we believe - that what began as a whisper has now swelled to a chorus that cannot be ignored; that will not be deterred; that will ring out across this land as a hymn that will heal this nation, repair this world, and make this time different than all the rest - Yes. We. Can.

Just one touch and He makes me whole,
Speaks sweet peace to my sin sick soul,
At His feet all my burdens roll,
Cured by the Healer divine.

That is who we are. That is the Party that we need to be, and can be, if we cast off our doubts, and leave behind our fears, and choose the America that we know is possible. Because there is a moment in the life of every generation, if it is to make its mark on history, when its spirit has to come through, when it must choose the future over the past, when it must make its own change from the bottom up.

This is our moment. This is our message - the same message we had when we were up, and when we were down. The same message that we will carry all the way to the convention. And in seven months time - right here in Denver - we can realize this promise; we can claim this legacy; we can choose new leadership for America. Because there is nothing we cannot do if the American people decide it is time.

So I run to Obama
Please help me Obama
Don't you see me prayin'
Don't you see me down here prayin'

I ask you to take this second path - this harder path - not because you have an obligation to those who are less fortunate, although you do have that obligation. Not because you have a debt to all of those who helped you get to where you are, although you do have that debt.

I ask you to take it because you have an obligation to yourself. Because our individual salvation depends on our collective salvation. And because it's only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you will realize your true potential.

When Barack's folk was in Red State land
Let my people go!
Disenfranchised so they couldn't stand
Let my people go!

I've now listened to and read dozens of his speeches, on television and in person and in print. Tonight was, in my judgment, the best. He was able to frame the attacks on him as a reason to vote for him. He was able to frame his foes as the status quo - beyond the Clintons or the Bushes, Democrats or Republicans. He was able to cast his candidacy as a rebuke to the Balkanization of the American public, a response to the abuse of religion for political purposes, a repudiation of the cynicism that makes all political commentary a function of horse-races and spin. It was an appeal to Democrats, Republicans and Independents to say goodbye to all that. It was a burial of Rove and Morris. And it was better than his previous speeches because he kept bringing it back to policy specifics, to the economy and healthcare and, movingly, to this misbegotten war. The diverse coalition he has assembled - including an ornery small-government conservative like me - is a reflection of the future of this country, its potential and its irreplaceable, dynamic cultural and social mix.

This is the America we all love. He is showing us how to find it again. That's leadership.

And, yes. We can.

Go, tell it on the mountain!
Over the hills and everywhere!
Go, tell it on the mountain!
That Barack Obama is born!

It is extremely disturbing to hear, not that Obama admires Reagan, but why he does so. Reagan was not a sunny optimist pushing dynamic entrepreneurship, but a savvy politician using a civil rights backlash to catapult conservatives to power. Lots of people don't agree with this, of course, since it doesn't fit a coherent narrative of GOP ascendancy. Masking Reagan's true political underpinning principles is a central goal of the conservative movement, with someone as powerful as Grover Norquist seeking to put Reagan's name on as many monuments as possible and the Republican candidates themselves using Reagan's name instead of George Bush's in GOP debates as a mark of greatness. Why would the conservative movement create such idolatry around Reagan? Is is because they just want to honor a great man? Perhaps that is some of it. Or are they trying to escape the legacy of the conservative movement so that it can be rebuilt in a few years, as they did after Nixon, Reagan, and Bush I?

I don't know. But if you think, as Obama does, that Reagan's rise to power was premised on a sunny optimism in contrast to an out of control government and a society rife with liberal excess, then you don't understand the conservative movement. Reagan tapped into greed and fear and tribalism, and those are powerful forces. Ignoring that isn't going to make them go away.

Obama, Obama, lama sabachthani?!

When I was at RedState, there were only three bloggers who I felt should never have been given posting privileges of any sort, for different reasons. Each was a Josh Trevino addition -- but let me be absolutely clear about something here: So was I. (Er, that doesn't make anything better.) Let me try it this way: Josh scores so many hits, you'd expect a few misses along with them. Moreover, given that his intent in his part of the creation of the site was to create a broad coalition of center-right writers, you have to give him credit for actually following through, even though the results were uneven.

One, Sebastian Holsclaw, left after the changeover from the Scoop platform to the Drupal model RedState is getting ready to abandon. Sebastian's problem, as far as I was concerned, was that he was so out of touch with the community as a whole that his posts were like dropping a snare drum solo into a performance of Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring. Bright fella, nice guy (from what I could see), decent-but-not-great writer, but just really out of step with the other writers and commenters.

The second, Charles Bird, still writes there. Frankly, I'm leery of sharing too many of my thoughts about him given his reaction to my departure, but that reaction is illustrative of two parts of the problem: Charles is and was a plodding, dim, extraordinarily conventional thinker, and his writing reflects it; but aside from comforting me that I wasn't the least capable talent on the front page of RedState, there's not much wrong with that. Bird's issues are two-fold, but inextricably intertwined: (1) Charles's blogging belongs first and foremost to that left-wing moron factory, Obsidian Wings, and it shows not only in his I-don't-expect-intelligent-reply style (and that he can't be bothered to change the hyperlinks in his work to redirect to his work on RedState), but also in the essential thrust of the work, which tends to be explicative to, for, and from the perspective of center-lefters. (2) Charles is more naturally comfortable with the Left, partially out of reflexive ideological sympathy, and partially out of the absence of two functioning prefrontal lobes; this in turn is why Charles has spent more than his share of time on his home site (the moron factory) taking shots at RedState. (I wasn't the one to whom he gave his cherry, if you catch my drift.) That post-semicolon part was the biggest reason I wanted him gone; sadly, as with my efforts to ban the (other) below-I.Q. 100 commenters at RedState, I was as much a miserable failure as Charles's teachers from kindergarten on.

(Yes, that's "not sharing too many of my thoughts.")

But I'm not here to address Sebastian or Bird. Instead, this is about John Cole.

A good friend of mine forwarded this a while back with the notation, "Pot, Meet Kettle." There's no point in excerpting it or commenting on it -- by now, anyone familiar with how John has degenerated will be able to sing along with it by knowing that he's upset with The Dread Rises for obsessiveness -- except to say that it's what prompted me to write this.

Flash back a loooong way. H.D. Miller -- remember him, anyone? Traveling Shoes? (H.D. has taken that blog private.) -- turned me on to him back in 2002 or 2003. Professor Miller would doubtless qualify as a wingnut in Cole's current lexicography, but back then, during an email exchange, he told me I should check out Cole's work.

I got a kick out of it. It was a fun read, he clearly didn't like my political priorities, but he clearly didn't like a lot of others', and he used to turn the odd good phrase. I was tickled when I found out I'd get to write with him at RedState, about two years later.

Now, this may surprise those of you whose experience with Cole is from mid-2006 on, but at one time, John was a fairly critical thinker. He pretty much always considered me a theocrat in waiting -- which isn't fair, I'm a monarchist if I'm anything -- but he was pretty up-front that (1) if I didn't bother him about it, he wouldn't bother me about it, and (2) that notwithstanding, common ground could make common fronts possible.

So: I recognize that abortion is murder, as is dehydrating one's wife to death; he thinks people should be free to commit these kinds of murder. Fair enough. At one time -- back before he voted for, and endorsed, Alan Mollohan and Bob Byrd -- we could agree that the growth of the Federal government is, ceteris paribus, a bad thing, and that efforts should be made to stop this. Of course, at one time, he wasn't actively opposed to winning in Iraq, either.

The critical issue, though, wasn't whether he and I agreed, so much as that you could tell he'd thought things through before he wrote, at least a large percentage of the time. Here in blog-land, that's a fairly rare event.

(Dark, funny secret: One of my posts that most set off the orangutans who inhabit the American Left was actually a composite work of the then-RedState crew, including, probably most heavily but for yours truly, John as the foremost contributor. Hint: Think late-summer 2005, and "yard ape.")

What's particularly hard about all this is that John is now just one more lefty. I can read the few bright lefties out there and think, Hm, maybe I don't agree, but that is a good insight, or even, Ya know, I think I agree with that. It says something that there is now nothing interesting about Cole except his on-again, off-again fascination with RedState. Basically, he's turned his site into a group-blog, slightly-wider-ranging version of B. Fred State.

John left around the same time Sebastian did -- sadly, Charles chose to stay after the switchover, and curiously, continued to post to the front through all of the 2006 and 2007, even though he now claims his work was purely in the diaries -- which more or less dovetailed with when I was agitating for him to leave. (There was no connection between my attempts and his voluntary parting.) The common theme for the three was that all spent a fair amount of their time shooting at RedState from their home blogs, only to turn up at RedState and pretend nothing had happened. At the founding of RedState, the operating principle was that only what's done on the site matters as to fronting privileges; however, I took that to mean that political positions taken elsewhere were not taken into account. Maybe it had changed two years later, and maybe it hadn't; maybe I was right, and maybe I was wrong. Regardless, it says something about a man if he'll tell one public audience something awful about you, then pretend in front of another public audience that there's nothing amiss.

Why did John go nuts? I dunno. I sometimes think it's ObiWi disease; sometimes, I think John's meds have failed; yet other times, I suspect he's simply grown senile.

For whatever reason, there's really no intellectual or substantive difference between anything he writes and the sort of pedestrian work you can find any time Markos Moulitsas writes for his page, or what the intellectual pin-cushions at Obsidian Wings spew at theirs. He's become an indistinguishable howl in the crowd, and I don't think his broken principles, such as they were, sting him any more.

Damned shame, really.