"By the way, Janet Reno still walks the face of the earth. It's not too late to tell whatever truth she may have suppressed to keep her job."

I wrote that on April 15, 2014, and I'm digging through my archive this morning, looking for Janet Reno, because I see that Janet Reno has died. She was 78 and had been suffering from Parkinson's disease since 1995, when she was the Attorney General of the United States. Her name is associated with 2 painful events in the Bill Clinton administration, Waco and Elian Gonzales. Reno was also the person under the now-defunct Ethics in Government law who determined when an independent counsel would be appointed and when that person should be removed for misconduct, so she was connected to the Bill Clinton impeachment, since she caused the independent Whitewater investigation to begin and she allowed Kenneth Starr to complete his mission.

From the NYT obituary:

Mr. Clinton, committed to naming a woman as attorney general, settled on Ms. Reno after his first choices — the corporate lawyer Zoe Baird and the federal judge Kimba Wood — withdrew their names in the face of criticism after it was revealed that they had employed undocumented immigrants as nannies....

Two months later, she gained the nation’s full attention in a dramatic televised news conference in which she took full responsibility for a botched federal raid of the Waco compound of an offshoot of the Seventh-day Adventists, the Branch Davidians.

The assault, after a long siege involving close to 900 military and law-enforcement personnel and a dozen tanks, left the compound in flames and the group’s charismatic leader, David Koresh, as well as about 75 others, dead, one-third of whom were children....

Questions about her handling of the Waco raid resurfaced in 1999, when new evidence suggested that the F.B.I. might have started the fire that destroyed the compound....

... Elián González, the 6-year-old Cuban boy who was found floating on an inner tube off the coast of Florida after his mother and 10 others drowned in a failed crossing from Cuba by small boat... became a unifying figure among Cuban exiles in South Florida, who were determined to see him remain in the United States in defiance of the Cuban leader, Fidel Castro.

Ms. Reno favored returning Elián to his father in Cuba, and she became immersed in negotiations over his fate because of her ties to Miami.

Ms. Reno was on the phone almost up to the moment agents of the Immigration and Naturalization Service burst into the Miami home of Elián’s relatives and took him away at gunpoint.....

Waco was the subject of that 2014 post of mine, quoted above. That old post was titled "Dick Morris says Bill Clinton 'hated' Janet Reno but wouldn't oust her because he feared 'she would tell the truth about what happened in Waco.'"

"Reno threatened the president with telling the truth about Waco, and that caused the president to back down."

"Then he went into a meeting with her, and he told me that she begged and pleaded, saying that . . . she didn't want to be fired because if she were fired it would look like he was firing her over Waco... And I knew that what that meant was that she would tell the truth about what happened in Waco.

"Now, to be fair, that's my supposition. I don't know what went on in Waco, but that was the cause. But I do know that she told him that if you fire me, I'm going to talk about Waco."

Morris was on TV to discuss the Cliven Bundy incident. What bad luck for Hillary: It has people needing to talk about Waco again....

By the way, Janet Reno still walks the face of the earth. It's not too late to tell whatever truth she may have suppressed to keep her job. What is Morris saying? First, the point seems to be that Reno convinced Clinton that to oust her would give rise to inferences that he believed his administration had done something wrong in Waco. Then Morris adds his inference of what he "knew" it "mean": that there was some "truth" that had been suppressed that would come out.

But Reno's argument didn't require that there be anything more to tell, and Morris knows that, because he goes right to his "to be fair" remark. He doesn't know. And if there was some suppressed truth Reno could tell, why hasn't she told it yet? One answer is that she doesn't want to tell on herself, but that would have been true at the point when she was begging and pleading to keep her job.

Perhaps she left a note. More likely, we will never know.

Here are the names and ages of the 76 people who died at Waco, including Startle Summers, Hollywood Sylvia, Chanel Andrade, and Paiges Gent, who were only 1 year old. They would be 23 years old if they had lived. There were also four 2-year-olds, including one with the sad name Little One Jones.

As for Elian Gonzalez. He's 22, and he just graduated from University of Matanzas with a degree in  industrial engineering. He spoke at his graduation ceremony, promising Fidel Castro that he and the whole class would "fight from whatever trench the revolution demands."

"What Panetta is doing is a hit – a contract killing – for Hillary."

"Panetta at core is a Clinton person, not an Obama person. By accurately and truthfully describing the deliberations in the [Obama] cabinet, he makes Hillary look better, and he makes Obama look worse … And I think he’ll get his reward in heaven."

Said Dick Morris.

Should the GOP run Rick Perry against Hillary Clinton?

Dick Morris explains a key difference between the tastes of Republicans and Democrats:

Of the last eight people who have won the Republican nomination for president, six ran for the office and lost before they eventually got their party’s designation. To win as a Republican, it would seem you have to first go through losing.

Romney, McCain, Dole, Bush-41, Reagan, and Nixon all lost before they won. Only Bush-43 and Ford won without first losing. (And Ford inherited the nomination and almost blew it).

Not so in the Democratic Party. Of the last seven nominees, only Al Gore first lost before he eventually got the nomination 12 years later.

That's about getting the nomination, not winning the election. The GOP's last winner — who won twice — was the one who hadn't tried for the nomination before. It seems to me the GOP has terrible luck with its propensity to go back to the old loser who seems to have waited his turn.

Republicans don’t like to take chances. They want their candidates to have served their apprenticeship as losers. The Republican voters are agoraphobic, fearful of new situations and people. It takes them a while to get used to new candidates and those who have run once and learned their lessons have great appeal. So keep your eye on Perry.

Because he just might win the nomination and proceed to lose the election? Anyway, buried in that column — if you care about the thoughts of (speaking of old losers) Dick Morris — is some pushing of Scott Walker:

Walker... is interesting because he has been, hands down, the best Republican governor in recent years. He slew the teachers union, freed the schools, funded education, cut taxes, created jobs, and survived repeated political assassination attempts. He has the courage, fiber and vision it would take. 

And you know how much Republicans need fiber. 

Dick Morris says Bill Clinton "hated" Janet Reno but wouldn't oust her because he feared "she would tell the truth about what happened in Waco."

"Reno threatened the president with telling the truth about Waco, and that caused the president to back down."

"Then he went into a meeting with her, and he told me that she begged and pleaded, saying that . . . she didn't want to be fired because if she were fired it would look like he was firing her over Waco... And I knew that what that meant was that she would tell the truth about what happened in Waco.

"Now, to be fair, that's my supposition. I don't know what went on in Waco, but that was the cause. But I do know that she told him that if you fire me, I'm going to talk about Waco."

Morris was on TV to discuss the Cliven Bundy incident. What bad luck for Hillary: It has people needing to talk about Waco again.

Which we were already getting back to Waco because of that Malcolm Gladwell article in The New Yorker, "Sacred and Profane: How not to negotiate with believers." But that Gladwell article doesn't mention Bill Clinton or even Janet Reno, and certainly not Hillary.

By the way, Janet Reno still walks the face of the earth. It's not too late to tell whatever truth she may have suppressed to keep her job. What is Morris saying? First, the point seems to be that Reno convinced Clinton that to oust her would give rise to inferences that he believed his administration had done something wrong in Waco. Then Morris adds his inference of what he "knew" it "mean": that there was some "truth" that had been suppressed that would come out.

But Reno's argument didn't require that there be anything more to tell, and Morris knows that, because he goes right to his "to be fair" remark. He doesn't know. And if there was some suppressed truth Reno could tell, why hasn't she told it yet? One answer is that she doesn't want to tell on herself, but that would have been true at the point when she was begging and pleading to keep her job.

"Bill Clinton Does Not Want Barack Obama to Win."

Let me point back to this post of mine: "Bill Clinton did not come to Wisconsin to help Tom Barrett win the recall election."

I'm not convinced Clinton is devoted to the short game of reelecting Obama. I think he might be playing a long game: Hillary 2016.

Is Hillary setting herself up for a 2012 challenge to Barack Obama?

"There is a subtle distancing going on...."

"Putting Hillary Clinton on the ticket for vice president creates a ménage-à-trois."

Says Dick Morris. I thought this was going to be about the way Michelle Obama doesn't want another woman in the picture, but Morris's problem is with Bill Clinton.

Bill will be the unexpected roommate. Even if a President Obama can discipline Hillary and get her to play second fiddle, there is not the remotest chance that he can get the former president to accept such rules. Even if Bill Clinton wanted to rein in his newly prolific public expressions of rage and frustration, there is doubt that he is any longer capable of doing so....

The public Bill Clinton has morphed over the past few months from a statesman and philanthropist to a petulant, angry, cursing, spoiled narcissist, accusing everyone of being sleazy and biased and in so doing fashioning himself as a foil for Obama. This unattractive image is not the right one for the bottom of a ticket in a presidential race. And make no mistake, Bill comes along with Hillary.

If Hillary wants it badly enough, there's a very straightforward solution to this problem: Divorce!

"[Bill Clinton] can’t compute that he’s not the new kid on the block. It’s about his mortality — and immortality."

"He needs her to win because if she doesn’t become president, he goes down as a minor president. If she wins, it’s the Adamses and the Roosevelts and the Clintons."

A former Clinton adviser said to Maureen Dowd.

Hey, it better not just be Dick Morris again. Anyway, wanna psychoanalyze Bill Clinton again? (He fears death!) Dowd does.

From penetrating the world of prostitution to penetrating the prostitute.

Stephen Marche has this article in TNR rejecting the adjective "Shakespearean" as applied to the downfall of Eliot Spitzer:

Characters like Hamlet or Macbeth are destroyed by the virtues which lifted them to greatness in the first place. The most remarkable feature of the whole Spitzer debacle, his extreme hypocrisy, is maybe the one characteristic all Shakespearean tragic heroes lack. Macbeth may be a sociopath and Othello may be vicious, but they live out the consequences of their own characters with dignity. Exactly unlike Spitzer. His destruction is far more mundane--the guy who couldn't keep it in his pants.

Is Marche right? Think about it.

In this Bloggingheads clip, Bob Wright notes that the "average man" is deterred from using prostitutes out of morality, fear of discovery, or — and this is the most important — anxiety about entering "alien terrain." That is, you don't know how these things work, whether dangerous men might show up and hurt you and so forth. But because Spitzer prosecuted prostitution rings, he became "intimately familiar" with what this "alien terrain" is like. Moreover, in prosecuting these people, he probably gave a lot of thought to how they might have done things a little differently and gotten away with it. Being a smart, arrogant guy, he must have imagined how he would get away with it. It's not surprising, Bob says, that Spitzer behaved irrationally after he penetrated the world of prostitution, but what got him there in the first place? That's the difficult step that separates him from ordinary men. He got there by being a hardcore prosecutor.

Under Bob Wright's theory, doesn't Spitzer meet Marche's standard of Shakespeareanosity? Was he not destroyed by the virtues that lifted him to greatness in the first place?

By the way, at the end of the Bloggingheads clip, Mickey Kaus notes a Dick Morris connection. So if Spitzer really is a Shakespearean tragic hero, then Dick Morris seems to be Lady MacBeth or the ghost of Hamlet's father.

Big thanks to my son John Althouse Cohen for pointing to the way Bob Wright's theory undercuts Marche.

IN THE COMMENTS: Blake nails the Shakespearean point:

If Spitzer were a Shakespearean hero, a la Othello or Hamlet, his primary "virtue"--ruthless pursuit of the law--is what would be his undoing.

So, he'd end up having to prosecute his daughter for some wrongly perceived crime, and then she'd kill herself, and then his wife would go mad, and then he'd kill himself.

Take it back to Ancient Greece (where prostitution was the norm for men, though still disreputable for women), and he'd end up having slept with his daughter. Then Hera would blind him. Or something.

"Any rational observer has to conclude that John McCain has a better shot of winning than Mitt Romney does."

Says Dick Morris. Read the whole thing. It's pretty convincing — assuming Hillary is the candidate.

IN THE COMMENTS: This modest post opened up a great comments thread.

"Shame on you," says Bill Clinton, if you're worried the Hillary campaign is exploiting race.

So it's all in your head if you think the Clintons are doing anything to use race to beat Barack Obama.

Here's Dick Morris taking the strong position that they absolutely know what they are doing and mean to do it:

If Hillary loses South Carolina and the defeat serves to demonstrate Obama's ability to attract a bloc vote among black Democrats, the message will go out loud and clear to white voters that this is a racial fight. It's one thing for polls to show, as they now do, that Obama beats Hillary among African-Americans by better than 4-to-1 and Hillary carries whites by almost 2-to-1. But most people don't read the fine print on the polls. But if blacks deliver South Carolina to Obama, everybody will know that they are bloc-voting. That will trigger a massive white backlash against Obama and will drive white voters to Hillary Clinton.

Obama has done everything he possibly could to keep race out of this election. And the Clintons attracted national scorn when they tried to bring it back in by attempting to minimize the role Martin Luther King Jr. played in the civil rights movement. But here they have a way of appearing to seek the black vote, losing it, and getting their white backlash, all without any fingerprints showing. The more President Clinton begs black voters to back his wife, and the more they spurn her, the more the election becomes about race -- and Obama ultimately loses

Here's Mickey Kaus proposing what he thinks is a clever tactic:

He could try to make Hillary the pet candidate of Latinos the way he's being cast as the pet candidate of blacks--but that would require a shift to the right on immigrant legalization that he doesn't seem willing to make.)...

The more obvious move is to find a Sister Souljah--after Saturday--to stiff arm. The most promising candidate is not a person, but an idea: race-based affirmative action. Obama has already made noises about shifting to a class-based, race-blind system of preferences. What if he made that explicit? Wouldn't that shock hostile white voters into taking a second look at his candidacy? He'd renew his image as trans-race leader (and healer). The howls of criticism from the conventional civil-rights establishment--they'd flood the cable shows--would provide him with an army of Souljahs to hold off. If anyone noticed Hillary in the ensuing fuss, it would be to put her on the spot--she'd be the one defending mend-it-don't-end-it civil rights orthodoxy.

Centralize affirmative action as an issue in the campaign? How would that play out? It seems to me that the candidates would like to get race back into the background — but Hillary first must use it to defeat Obama.

IN THE COMMENTS: Our ghostly reader from the distant past, Sir Archy, has favored us with another visit!

To Professor Althouse.

Madam,

As a Ghost of a former Scotch Elector, dead these 250 years and more, I have seen many an Election, and voted in not a Few. My unfortunate Death put an end to my climbing the Polling Booth steps, as the Franchise was not extended in Scotland in my Day to the Dead. That my Ghostly Condition entitles me to especial Consideration in certain American Constituencies is a piece of welcome Intelligence; I shall endeavor to inform your Readers of the Progress of my Efforts to claim my Place, after these many Years, as an American Elector.

But enough of my Fortunes—let us think on those of Mrs. Clinton: That Mrs. Clinton will be elect'd President, can admit of no Doubt. Consider the Clintons' Past-Mast'ry of arousing Passion & exciting Fear. Consider Mrs. Clinton's prospective Opponents: A Gentleman of good Fortune & Family, but insipid and uninspiring Mien; a half-pay Officer gone into Politicks, who, despite his heroick Past, has anger'd Half his Party; and a former Lord Mayor, who would play Dick Whittington, had he either the Sagacity of the Original, or the Cat of the Character. Are any of these Gentlemen a serious Obstacle to the Clinton Ferocity?

Consider her principal Opponent within her own Party: He should be the only Force that could halt Mrs. Clinton's inexorable Advance upon the White House. He is a fine and accomplish'd Gentleman of African descent, yet his Armour provides the Clintons two Chinks into which to insert the Rapier: The First is that he is a fine Gentleman, and not used to such vengeful Blows; the Second is that he is African, which in America opens him to a variety of Trips beyond the Dreams of any Stiletto-wielding Assassin. The Clintons have him down and are now engag'd in trying the Joints of his Breastplate. We only await Blood upon the Ground as Confirmation of his Demise.

That Mrs. Clinton should be elect'd President ought to occasion sombre Reflection among the American Electorate. The Maxims of a Democratick Nation imply the continual Rotation of Power, and that a Man (or now, a Woman) may answer Ambition with Effort, and rise by way of Politicks. That Power be always the Provinance of one Family or the Other, is a Situation fitter to Spain in my Day, where Hapsburgs & Bourbons contended to oppress an Empire, rather than for a manly Nation, founded on the Principles of British Liberty.

Giving careful consideration to the Qualities of the various Candidates for whom I should vote,

I remain, Madam,

Your humble & obt. Servant,

Sir Archy

The mystery of a TimesSelect blog... and whether Hillary should run.

"Link to this" it says at the bottom of a post by "The Opinionator" by Chris Suellentrop. It looks like a blog, but it's in TimesSelect. I just don't understand the concept. Link so some small fraction of your readers can go there? Or did the link function to pierce the wall, allowing me to let my readers see the thing? Let me know if by chance that link worked some magic, but I'm going to talk about the post anyway. It's titled "Hillary, Don't Run."

In a bitterly divided and partisan nation, is there anything conservatives and liberals can agree on? Yes: Hillary Clinton, please don’t run for president. Lone Star liberal Molly Ivins kicked off a wave of anti-Hillary commentary with a column last week that began, “I’d like to make it clear to the people who run the Democratic Party that I will not support Hillary Clinton for president.”

Sen. Clinton’s primary shortcoming? Ivins believes she isn’t liberal enough: “Enough clever straddling, enough not offending anyone. This is not a Dick Morris election. Sen. Clinton is apparently incapable of taking a clear stand on the war in Iraq, and that alone is enough to disqualify her. Her failure to speak out on Terri Schiavo, not to mention that gross pandering on flag-burning, are just contemptible little dodges.”...

Conservatives are delighted about liberals’ newfound anti-Hillary animus. National Review’s Jonah Goldberg attributes the sentiment to Sen. Clinton’s recent moves to the right. “To be honest, I never understood what they saw in her in the first place,” he wrote in his weekly Los Angeles Times column. “[T]here’s something oddly satisfying in the possibility that Clinton being herself is politically disastrous. And, if she’s really just playing one more role according to some classically Clintonian political triangulation, there’s something equally satisfying to the prospect that even her fans aren’t falling for it anymore.”

Oh, wait, Suellentrop didn't take a position anyway. He's really only collecting links -- to Ivins and Goldberg and also to Arianna Huffington and Josh Marshall. I guess I should just copy his links and talk about the same subject myself. If so, should I put a "via Suellentrop" link? It's kind of screwy to do that if it doesn't get people to the post but just gives them a little experience of exclusion. And the main reason you do a "via" link is to send a fellow blogger some traffic. How can I be guilty of denying a blog something it's already denying itself?

A TimesSelect blog doesn't function in the blogosphere, but maybe that makes some sense for TimesSelect folks. They aren't really ready to read blogs, and it's nice to have a trusted voice to categorize and summarize what's being said by various commentators on the web, some of whom might actually even be bloggers. Look, I found Josh Marshall and Arianna Huffington for you!

Anyway, what do I think of these voices on the left and the right who are saying Hillary shouldn't run? Is the opinion trustworthy because it's on both sides? Not at all!

Those on the left don't like her -- as Suellentrop acknowledges -- because she's not far enough to the left. They ought to know that an excessively left candidate is doomed, but they don't want to face that horrible reality. These people were against Bill Clinton too, back before he actually did that thing that Democrats seem almost never to be able to do, win a presidential election. On the right, you've got folks who've loathed Hillary all along and who, of course, don't want the Democrats to win an election.

So how should Hillary hear these voices on the left and right who don't want her to run? As strong encouragement! But she's got to find a way to keep her hawkish credentials, or we'll be stuck once again with a Democratic candiate with an incomprehensible attitude toward national security who will push those of us who vote almost entirely on that ground to go with the Republican again.

But maybe it's already too late for Clinton. She's already lost too much credibility catering to the Ivins crowd. Being the front runner, she's got them at her all the time, making demands -- demands that she sacrifice all her potential to win in the end. Poor Hillary! If she finds a way through this ordeal, maybe she is good enough to be President.

From the overheated brain of Dick Morris: "Condi vs Hillary."

The Guardian has a long excerpt. A taste:

Hillary Clinton does not want any other woman to take what she regards as her just place in history. Yet, ironically, it is Hillary's candidacy that makes Condi's necessary and, therefore, likely. The first woman nominated by the Democrats can only be defeated by the first woman nominated by the Republicans....

Can Rice be nominated? The vacuum in the Republican 2008 field makes it quite possible that she can.There is no heir apparent. Dick Cheney's health isn't strong enough, and nobody else from the cabinet stands out. Rudy Giuliani and John McCain are the early front-runners, gathering together more than four out of every five decided votes in the polls. But Rudy is too liberal to win the nomination. And McCain showed his limited appeal to GOP primary voters in 2000, when he won the votes of Independents but lost the vast majority of registered Republicans to Bush.

As meritorious as these two men are, they aren't going to win the Republican nomination. Their likely demise will leave an enormous vacuum. There will be a search for a real candidate, someone of stature, someone charismatic who can beat Hillary. And the party faithful will turn to Condi Rice.

Morris's gimmick is to speak with certainty about the future. He already knows it will be Clinton against Rice. Why doesn't he just tell us who's going to win too? It would be interesting to know.

The color of movies.

Martin Scorsese just came out with two lists of ten films that have the best use of light and color.

English Language Films

1. Barry Lyndon (1975, Dir. Stanley Kubrick; Cin. John Alcott)

2. Duel in the Sun (1946, Dir. King Vidor; Cin. Lee Garmes, Ray Rennahan, Hal Rosson)

3. Invaders From Mars (1953, Dir. William Cameron Menzies; Cin. John F. Seitz)

4. Leave Her to Heaven (1946, Dir. John M. Stahl; Cin. Leon Shamroy)

5. Moby Dick (1956, Dir. John Huston; Cin. Oswald Morris)

6. Phantom of the Opera (1943, Dir. Arthur Lubin; Cin. W. Howard Greene, Hal Mohr)

7. The Red Shoes (1948, Dir. Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger; Cin. Jack Cardiff)

8. The Searchers (1956, Dir. John Ford; Cin. Winton C. Hoch)

9. Singin’ in the Rain (1952, Dir. Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly; Cin. Harold Rosson)

10. Vertigo (1958, Dir. Alfred Hitchcock; Cin. Robert Burks)


International Films

1. Contempt (1963, Dir. Jean-Luc Godard; Cin. Raoul Coutard; France/Italy)

2. Cries and Whispers (1972, Dir. Ingmar Bergman; Cin. Sven Nykvist; Sweden)

3. Gate of Hell (1953, Dir. Teinosuke Kinugasa; Cin. Kohei Sugiyama; Japan)

4. In the Mood For Love (2000, Dir. Wong Kar-Wai; Cin. Christopher Doyle, Mark Lee Ping-bin; Hong Kong)

5. The Last Emperor (1987, Dir. Bernardo Bertolucci; Cin. Vittorio Storaro; Italy/United Kingdom/China/Hong Kong)

6. Red Desert (1964, Dir. Michelangelo Antonioni; Cin. Carlo Di Palma; France/Italy)

7. The River (1951, Dir. Jean Renoir; Cin. Claude Renoir; India/France/United States)

8. Satyricon (1969, Dir. Federico Fellini; Cin. Giuseppe Rotunno; Italy/France)

9. Senso (1954, Dir. Luchino Visconti; Cin. G.R. Aldo, Robert Krasker, Giuseppe Rotunno; Italy)

10. Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1964, Dir. Sergei Paradjanov; Cin. Viktor Bestayev, Yuri Ilyenko; Russia/Ukraine)

This is clearly a very idiosyncratic list. Just look at the dates: Scorsese is pointing to the films that influenced him in his impressionable years. We already knew how gaga he is for "Duel in the Sun" (a cheesy Western sometimes referred to as "Lust in the Dust").

Maybe in the comments you can come up with some alternatives. Is there a movie that springs my mind for its color? Not really. Those extra-vivid Technicolor movies like "Vertigo" and "The Birds" crowd out more subtly colored recent movies that I find more appealing. Any ideas?

"Barking mad."

I've been trying to chase down the "barking mad" meme. 

Wonkette has a post a couple days ago about Googling "Zell Miller" and "barking mad": only 16 hits at the time, but it was still early. It's up to 74 now. But it's not just a reaction to Zell Miller. 

On "The Daily Show" in mid-August, Maureen Dowd called Dick Cheney "barking mad." Since then, I've been noticing the phrase, which I think is funny, because I have a literal mind, and I picture the person actually barking.

There's a great section of Spalding Gray's "Monster in a Box" where he describes going a bit mad and literally barking. But it seems to have become the standard way to call someone crazy. When did that happen?

I used Nexis to try to trace the meme down, but unfortunately I was using a newsgroup file that included British and Australian newspapers. I could barely see the American examples!

Clearly, the phrase has a British origin. But why the sudden outbreak here? And it's not just that people have gotten crazier lately, so don't try to sidetrack me. I know everyone likes to call people crazy in this election season, especially since "he's crazy" worked to down the most promising of the Democratic candidates in the primaries. Maybe it will work again: Cheney's crazy! Bush is crazy! Wolfowitz! And they're not just crazy, they're barking mad!

I'm going with the suspicion that Maureen Dowd is the American infection point. (Email me if you have another suspect.) Here's the Google result for "barking mad" and "Maureen Dowd." 213 results.

I see she made a big impression a year ago, after the Supreme Court issued its opinion in the University of Michigan affirmative action case, Grutter v. Bollinger. She wrote:

The dissent is a clinical study of a man [Clarence Thomas] who has been driven barking mad by the beneficial treatment he has received. It's poignant, really. It drives him crazy that people think he is where he is because of his race, but he is where he is because of his race. Other justices rely on clerks and legal footnotes to help with their opinions; Thomas relies on his id, turning an opinion on race into a therapeutic outburst. In his dissent, he snidely dismisses the University of Michigan Law School's desire to see minority faces in the mix as "racial aesthetics," giving the effort to balance bigotry in society the moral weight of a Benetton ad. The phrase "racial aesthetics" would be more appropriately applied to President George W. Bush's nominating convention in Philadelphia, when the Republicans put on a minstrel show for the white fat cats in the audience.

Ah! But the Maureen Dowd "barking mad" infection point could be traced even farther back, as a Nexis search revealed. I found an October 14, 1999, piece in The San Francisco Chronicle interviewing the writer Edmund Morris (author of the Reagan biography "Dutch") about what he thought about Dowd calling him "barking mad." (He said "Like all barking mad people, I feel perfectly normal.")

Well, I don't claim to have solved the mystery of the "barking mad" meme. My sketchy research leads me to think Dowd has only labeled three persons "barking mad": Morris, Thomas, and Cheney.

And she's already dealt with Zell Miller's speech, and she did not call him "barking mad" or even "mad." She said:

Zell Miller, playing Cotton Mather behind the cross-like lectern, made Mr. Cheney seem rational, with a maniacal litany of weapons he said Mr. Kerry had opposed that can destroy any mud hut in any third world country: B-1 and B-2 bombers, F-14A Tomcats, F-15 Eagles, Patriot and Trident missiles, and Aegis cruisers.

She did imply Miller was way beyond "barking mad" though, if he made the "barking mad" Dick Cheney seem rational. I guess Miller was so crazy, in her view, that one cannot speak directly of that craziness but can only indirectly approach the topic with a comparison to another person already established--in Dowdworld--as "barking mad."

And speaking of memes, is it Dowd who got the lectern-looked-like-a-cross meme going? "The Daily Show" used it later the same day. No, here's an earlier reference (in the NYT). I wrote about the lectern on the second day of the Convention, and, though I said it reminded me of a pulpit, I didn't see the cross. But clearly we can't blame Dowd or the NYT for setting off the observation that the lectern looked like a cross. How do I know? Because a Google search using the word "lectern" produced 409 hits, and a Google search trying the misnomer "podium" produced 7,350 hits.

Dick Morris on the "female state of the union address."

I don't consider myself to be in some kind of special position to say whether Laura Bush came through last night and said what women need to hear about the presidential election, so let me consult this column written by Dick Morris:

Her incredible speech reached women voters in a way that other speakers at either convention have failed to do.

Unlike her husband, the first lady drew explicitly the connection between the offensive operations in the War on Terror and the work to defend our families from the threats that haunt them

Her speech was almost a female state of the union address — taking each of the administration's policies and relating them to the concerns of the half of the electorate that the male political establishment doesn't understand and rarely appeals to.

Women, you see, can't really grasp foreign policy unless you restate it and couch each point in terms of the effect on the family. Men—other than Dick Morris, that is—really don't understand that.

Like presidents do in state of the union addresses, she brought Bush's policies home to each of us by naming real people, real families and real soldiers working for our freedom.

Dick, if you're going to praise a schoolteacher, use good grammar!

George needed to relate his education reforms to the average parents worrying about their children in school. Laura did it.

George had to explain why sending troops to Baghdad protected our families at home. Laura did it. …

Thanks for making appealing to women sound like translation for the mentally challenged.

Unlike the shrill sloganeering of Hillary Clinton and the ritualized comments of other wives of presidents, Laura Bush explained her husband's policies with a clarity and simplicity that reached everyone who watched it — except for the shortsighted and self-involved male commentators who didn't get it and put her down after it was over.

See, I would not have known that without the help of the un-self-involved commentator, Dick Morris. Here she was, reaching out to everyone, and I was thinking about where they got that crazy shower curtain backdrop and whether her amateurish delivery was charming or just boring. But apparently, she said a lot of things about children and family that really had a big effect on my half of the electorate.

Politics and "the testosteroned."

After writing that last entry, I was struck by this Andrew Sullivan statement:

Josh Marshall has just done a survey of his readers. It's an interesting contrast with mine. First off, the similarities. Josh's readers are 81 percent male; mine are 85 percent male. This is no big surprise: for some reason, political opinion sites (and magazines) always skew toward the testosteroned....

Last night, after Bush's big speech, I listened to some of the analysis, flipping back and forth over the cable news channels (avoiding commercials), and the one comment I kept hearing is that Bush needed to put something in his speech to engage women, and he didn't. Dick Morris leaned on this point. He (or someone else) seemed to think there needs to be special woman-friendly material, something warm and emotional. Maybe some anecdotes about an Iraqi child at school or an Iraqi mother who smiled because of some damn thing we did?

Speaking for myself, but maybe reflecting a few conversations I've had with other women, I just think there are many enjoyable aspects to life, and soaking up political material has a place, but not a huge place. Politicians can't get more of my attention by blabbing about those other aspects of life, though. And I'm annoyed when they waste my time and try my patience by thinking they can appeal to me with such tripe. It's not necessarily that women don't care about the traditional hardcore political issues like war and the economy, just that they are not as interested in spending time going over and over it. Enjoying politics as an avocation is different from caring about the actual political issues.

I've certainly noticed that I get the most traffic on this blog when I've written about a political issue and get linked by another blog that is much more political overall than mine is (e.g., Instapundit). But usually if I say something about politics, I'm speaking as more of a distanced observer of human nature and human folly. I'm interested in the way language is used in politics, because I like to analyze how it affects the human mind and because there is so much humor to be found. And I'm certainly interested enough in human nature to want to contemplate whether I would feel quite differently about all of this if only I was--in Sullivan's slightly inaccurate locution--"testosteroned."

So "for some reason, political opinion sites (and magazines) always skew toward the testosteroned." What is the reason? Well, of course, there's reason not to speculate about the reason. You can't do it without seeming sexist. Sullivan is perhaps well-advised to say "for some reason" and leave it at that. But if I had to speculate, I'd say that men might generally enjoy the feeling of being inside the big conflict, being in the game, and women generally experience politics as stress and discord. I don't think it's that women are more emotional than men, but that different emotions are being felt. I'm a big advocate of reason and think reason is a bridge between the (positions stereotypically associated with the) sexes. Both are concerned about problems and would like to find solutions. Some people feel stimulated by the fight itself and some feel moved to avoid conflict, but all want solutions.