"The vast majority of the memes circulating this week are in praise of Walz’s masculinity. Stereotypical masculinity, even."

"The kind conservatives perpetually worry that Democrats are trying to erase — the kind classically defined by such traits as stoicism, reliability, leadership and physical strength.... He is... offering to snowblow your walkway, map out the best driving routes to the airport and wait in the car until he’s sure you got inside safe.... The outpouring of love Walz is receiving — and the specific form it’s taking — makes it plain that masculinity isn’t under attack. Masculinity can be celebrated; people are longing to celebrate it. It’s the weird masculinity — the 'He-Man Woman Haters Club,' as Walz put it during an interview a few weeks ago — that people have a problem with. The kind that confuses leadership with authoritarianism, strength with domination, and protection with control.... I’d been trying to think of a better descriptor than Midwestern Dad to get at the aura Walz projects.... Soon I realized the perfect term had already been coined. 'Tim Walz has tonic masculinity,' I saw several fans write online."

Writes Monica Hesse, in "Masculinity’s check-engine light is on. Let Tim Walz have a look. Vice-presidential nominee Walz’s 'Midwestern dad vibe' comes with opportunities to rethink a whole tool kit of types" (WaPo)(free access link).

"Tonic masculinity" — did you know that term? My link goes to a Google search for the term, which doesn't have a Wikipedia article. I can see that it's one letter away from "toxic masculinity." And I can see that "tonic" can mean — to quote the OED — "Pertaining to, or maintaining, the tone or normal healthy condition of the tissues or organs." So... get your masculinity into a wholesome, healthy form, like that which his fans perceive in Tim Walz.

"It is a violent spectacle, blood-spattered, brutish and brawny."

"A fighter from California named Kevin Holland and a fighter from Poland named Michal Oleksiejczuk beat each other to a pulp inches from Mr. Trump’s face. The former president watched with interest as the American got the Pole onto the ground, secured his right arm and appeared to yank it out of its socket. ([Dana White, the chief executive of the U.F.C.] described it as an 'absolutely beautiful' moment in his post-match commentary: 'The arm clearly, at the very least, dislocated and possibly snapped,' he said.) Victorious, Holland emerged from the octagonal ring, walked over to Mr. Trump, bent down and shook hands, leaned in to hear the former president tell him something and clapped his left hand on Mr. Trump’s right shoulder...."

From "After Verdict, Trump Revels in Embrace of His Most Avid Base: Male Fans/The former president’s appearance at a U.F.C. fight in Newark on Saturday night showcased his hypermasculine appeal, and his defiance" (NYT).

This is just a little article about Trump going to the UFC fight right after the 34-felonies conviction. I had to look elsewhere for more on the broader topic of Trump's "hypermasculine appeal." A sprinkling of what my search turned up:

It's like "Saturday Night Live." Hard to believe I'm not watching a comic actor.

a snippet from Katie Britt's overly dramatic rebuttal. i will say that she is the best Alabama senator. pic.twitter.com/9Fm8h4yUA8

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 8, 2024

I think that may be how young people talk these days. I think it's learned from TikTok! It doesn't sound natural to me, but it may be the new reality as young people spend so much time watching videos. It may be contagious — like creaky voice and Valley Girl uptalk.

"Following the E. Jean Carroll trial feels like watching one 80-year-old woman realize there is just nothing she can do to rid herself of this omnipresence..."

"... and then realizing that we are, all of us, that 80-year-old woman. That we have been, for some time, subsumed and consumed by one man and his very strong MAGA base. In the future when sociologists and historians study this period of time, I wonder if this will be the most lasting psychological stain. Not any specific acts, but the general weight, the inescapable pull, the black hole, the fog, the fug, the reality that our atmosphere is coated in a thin, smoggy layer of Donald Trump...."

Writes Monica Hesse, in "E. Jean Carroll used to be somebody/Once you enter Trump’s world, your own world evaporates" (WaPo).

Trump is responsible for whatever bad acts he's committed, such as, if Carroll is right, raping a woman in a department store dressing room, but subsuming and consuming the entire world and coating it with thin smog... that's something that you're doing to yourself.

How to be a stickler in the fuzzy aura.

I'm reading "Listening to ‘The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling’ is exhausting work/A podcast promised clarity from Harry Potter author on how she feels about trans issues. But it falls to the audience to fact-check her" by Monica Hesse (WaPo).

Journalism is a business for sticklers. Reporters are discouraged from calling anyone transphobic, or homophobic, or racist, because doing so requires knowing what’s in their hearts when the only thing we can know with certainty is what comes out of their mouths. So what I can say is that what comes out of her mouth, or goes onto her Twitter account, has a fuzzy aura of harmful rhetoric. 

"With particularly dystopian flair, the formula shortage came to a head around the same time that a draft opinion leaked from the Supreme Court that would overturn Roe v. Wade."

"On one hand, women would be forced to birth children. But on the other hand, once those children arrive, there might not be food to feed them. A footnote from Samuel Alito’s draft opinion that gained some traction this week was about adoption. The footnote quoted a 2008 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which had noted that the 'domestic supply of infants relinquished at birth or within the first month of life and available to be adopted has become virtually nonexistent.' The inclusion of the study in an opinion that would overturn Roe seemed to suggest that there was no need to have an abortion as there were plenty of American couples who wanted children but not enough American babies for them to adopt.... [W]hat it tells me is: You have no idea. No idea how hard pregnancy is on a body. No idea that don’t worry, you can give it away does not respond to the reasons that many abortion seekers might be seeking abortions to begin with. The opinion’s biggest problem isn’t that it was cruel, it’s that it was incurious. It did not attempt to understand pregnancy or motherhood. It was the 98-page equivalent of, 'Why don’t you just embrace your womanhood and nurture your children?'"

From "A lot of powerful people seem to have no clue what motherhood means/The formula shortage is a reminder of why being a mom — even when it’s a choice — is hard in ways some powerful people don’t seem to get" by Monica Hesse (WaPo).

"Science isn’t Burger King; you can’t just ‘have it your way.' Take notes, Madame Speaker. I’m about to define what a woman is for you. X chromosomes, no tallywhacker. It’s so simple."

Said Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.), quoted in "Republicans thought defining a ‘woman’ is easy. Then they tried. Josh Hawley, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Madison Cawthorn opened their mouths and accidentally showed how complicated it is to define womanhood" (WaPo).

The article is by Monica Hesse, who writes:

And this is where I got the poor OED editor involved, just to make sure I understood exactly what Cawthorn was talking about. She explained that “tallywhacker” is likely an Americanism, a variant of the word “tallywag,” which means “the testicles; the male genitals,” though Merriam-Webster dictionary defines it as “a sea bass of the Atlantic Coast.”

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) was asked by a HuffPost reporter to define “woman,” and replied, “Someone who can give birth to a child, a mother, is a woman. Someone who has a uterus is a woman. It doesn’t seem that complicated to me.”

When the reporter asked him whether a woman whose uterus was removed via hysterectomy was still a woman, he appeared uncertain: “Yeah. Well, I don’t know, would they?”

[W]hen these lawmakers attempted to show how much smarter they were on gender science than a judge who takes things seriously for a living, what came out was gobbledygook.

Anyway, congratulations to Ketanji Brown Jackson for getting through the hazing process. I had to avert my eyes. I knew she'd make it, and so did everyone else who knows the game. Spare me the part of the game where you assert that your party had to do it because the other party did it that other time.

"[W]hen an alleged rapist writes a book about a brilliant but problematic novelist, and when that book is lauded and celebrated up until..."

"... the moment two women say the author assaulted them — when all that happens, you wonder how the 900-page tome reads in hindsight." 

Writes Monica Hesse (in WaPo). She bought the book after the publisher withdrew it. You can still download the Kindle version. [ADDED: You can even buy the hardcover book at that link. Amazon has its stock to ship. But the publisher, Norton, isn't shipping any more books, and it's not doing publicity.]

That takes some of the heat out of the argument that the book has been censored. I stand by my opinion — expressed here — that the book should be sold no matter what the author, Blake Bailey, may have done. The book is not doing any sort of active harm — where we might have a real debate about censorship. It's just the argument that the author is a bad person, and these are only allegations. I would support publishing the book even if Bailey had shot a man on 5th Avenue in broad daylight. Roth is an overwhelmingly important writer, and this was the biographer he authorized, which caused many people to give interviews to Bailey. It's unfair to the Roth to deprive him of the story of himself that he chose Bailey to tell, and it's unfair to keep that story from us.

But we can get the Kindle version. And maybe we're more interested in it now. Monica Hesse got interested — interested in reading the book with "hindsight." I guess that means that all the time she's reading about Roth, she's thinking about how she's hearing the story of this "problematic" man as analyzed by another problematic man. Let's see what Hesse makes out of her assigned task of perceiving the problematic through an extra layer of problematizing:

You find yourself scrolling to a random page and reading a description of Roth’s first marriage: “Maggie’s sinuses were, of course, the least of their problems. Even at the best of times she couldn’t resist interrupting his work on the thinnest of pretexts (‘Could you go out and get half a pound of Parmesan cheese?’).” One could write a whole essay unpacking the premises propping up this sentence. Why is it unreasonable for Philip Roth to be asked to purchase an ingredient for the dinner he is presumably going to eat? Who purchased the rest of the groceries? One assumes it was Maggie. Was her day not “interrupted” when she shopped for and prepared the meal? What is the difference between a “thin pretext” and a valid request, other than whether the asker is Philip Roth or his shrewish, sinus-clogged wife? 

Ha ha ha. That is rich. That's some really good feminist writing. Bailey is damned by his "thinnest of pretexts." He assumes Maggie just wanted to interrupt Roth, that there couldn't possibly be a legitimate reason for the person cooking dinner to ask the other person in the house to go out and buy a missing ingredient. Bailey seems to think that a person in a house with a Genius at Work must know not even to ask for help with mundane household matters.

Here — if you're going to Amazon to download the Kindle of the Roth bio (or anything else) — why not buy this sign to tack onto your study door and see how it works out with your stuffed-up spouse:

Weird WaPo headline catches my eye: "Kamala Harris knows things no vice president has ever known."

I have not read this piece yet. I'm just trying to observe my understanding as it dawns on me. My first thought was: What kind of fawning bullshit is this? I was just complaining that the mainstream media hasn't subjected Kamala Harris to any serious testing, and now here's this ludicrous headline ascribing special powers of knowing to her. 

I see it's in the "Style" pages, which is what we have in the newspaper today instead of what used to be called the "Women's" pages. So now I'm thinking of the old concept "Women's Ways of Knowing." Have you heard of these 5 "ways of knowing" — something about "women's cognitive development, dependent on conceptions of self (self), relationship with others (voice) and understanding of the origins and identity of authority, truth and knowledge (mind)"? 

Is that what this WaPo thing is onto? Harris "knows things no vice president has ever known" because no vice president has ever been a woman? And extend that to no vice president has ever been black.

The piece is by Monica Hesse. 

I keep thinking about how, at some point in Kamala Harris’s life, she has painstakingly reviewed her office wardrobe with the understanding that the difference between “slut” and “feminazi” is a few inches of worsted-wool hemline. At some point, she has approached a stranger in a public bathroom because the Tampax machine is broken again, and she has said, I’m so sorry, but do you have — and then she didn’t have to finish the question because women in bathrooms know that there is only one end to that question.

You know, I went through an entire life's worth of menstruating and never once asked as stranger in a public bathroom for a tampon. It's not something that just has to happen to every woman. Nor did I ever even consider whether clothes I wore to the office needed to get between “slut” and “feminazi.” I don't even know now which one is shorter, but why would it matter, since neither message is office-appropriate? Wouldn't you just be picking your length and deciding how much you cared about being appropriate? 

I'm not buying Hesse's portrayal of the necessary experience of a woman, but in any case, who cares whether vice presidents know these things, and didn't Hesse already go through this collection of thoughts when she contemplated a first woman president 4 years ago?

"I'm afraid I'm still not quite following what happened or who she is or why this is news"/"I think you are a member of an ever-expanding club"/"Count me in too"/"And me. I have now read three articles in WaPo..."

"... about this person. And although this was the better written of the lot, I'm still struggling with why anyone above middle school would care about Mason jar gardens and flower crowns"/"After reading this article I feel like I'm a dog chasing it's own tail. Why, why, why, for the love of humanity?!?!?"/"This is the second article I've seen in the last few days of Caroline Calloway, and I've never heard of her. I can't seem to glean from either this or the other article who she is or why I should care."

Comments on the WaPo article by Monica Hesse, "The messiness and meaning of Caroline Calloway." I keep seeing these articles about Caroline Calloway and half skimming them. It's like some kind of joke about the meaninglessness of everything.

We're told the story is "like boiling six seasons of HBO’s 'Girls' into a teaspoon, and injecting it into your veins." Yeah, okay, I'm going to just say no to that drug.

"At SI Swimsuit, we strive to continue to spread the message that whether you are wearing a one-piece, a two-piece, or a burkini, you are the pilot of your own beauty."

Wrote Sports Illustrated, quoted in "Sports Illustrated now has a model in a burkini. Can the swimsuit issue truly get woke?" by Monica Hesse (at WaPo), who calls that statement "gibberish":

Let’s revisit that Sports Illustrated public-relations gibberish. Let’s just bask in the utter nonsense of “pilot of your own beauty,” a phrase that sounds like it was cooked up on a Pinterest board run by Ivanka Trump with help from an Amelia Earhart conspiracy theorist. Pilot it to where? For why?

Heh. Reminds me of "I can land this plane" (Ron Rosenstein's famous quote).

I really don't care about the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition. I don't care if it goes under or figures out a way to steer itself to a safer course in these woke or benighted times.

But I am fascinated by the notion that I am the pilot of my beauty. I can't help reading it as a variation on the great old poem "Invictus" that ends "I am the master of my fate/I am the captain of my soul."

"Beauty" is a weak substitute for "fate" or "soul," but "pilot" works as well as "master" and "captain," and it's easier to picture a woman as a pilot than as a master (mistress?) or captain. And — since the context is swimsuits — a pilot can be someone who controls a ship (as well as an airplane).

In "Invictus," the poet imagines his soul as a vehicle, a separate thing from himself, but which he which he steers. That's odd, but it's also odd to think of your "beauty" as something you ride inside and steer.

When I try to Google the idea of feeling that you somehow exist inside a contraption that is your beauty, I'm flooded with articles inquiring into whether a person is beautiful on the inside. That's an old-fashioned concern. It makes me think of the old Jefferson Airplane song, "You're Only Pretty as You Feel."

In politics, calls for civility are always bullshit.

I've said it a hundred times, and I'm saying it again this morning, because I'm looking at this WaPo headline: "The exquisite shade of Nancy Pelosi’s applause at the State of the Union."

Incivility is loved and celebrated!

The columnist Monica Hesse writes:

The lasting visual image from Tuesday night’s State of the Union address was captured by photographer Doug Mills. It featured House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) applauding President Trump in a way that can only be described as . . . withering? Pitying? Lucille Bluth-like in its contemptuousness?

Only? I can think of some other descriptions: Rude. Out-and-proud assholean.

At his lectern, the president mentioned bipartisanship and turned to acknowledge Speaker Pelosi; she rewarded him by cocking her head, arching an eyebrow, and inventing, as comedian Patton Oswalt would put it online, a clap that somehow managed to be a profanity.

Its power was in its restraint. Pelosi was not booing the president. She was acknowledging his words. She was providing him, in the technical sense, with exactly what he was hoping for: approval. But this was a derogatory clap, make no mistake. This was mockery wearing a half-baked costume of politeness.

And it wasn't just that clap, it was the entire performance in her perch over his left shoulder

Her lips mostly remained either pursed or puckered, as if the entire speech was a bit of gristle that must be endured before it could be discreetly spit into a napkin. 

Gross. But somehow, because she's on your team, you're praising what would be appallingly disgusting if it were done by an old Republican.

She shuffled papers in front of her...  as if marking time for when it would all be over. Her applause was sparing, weary... Often, she was... bordering on rude.

Bordering on rude. Yeah. No. It was rude. Just plain rude. But it's funny to see that the border with rude is a border you care about it. But it's a metaphorical border, and you will draw and redraw it so that all your people are on the not rude side and all your opponents are on the other side. It's a weird, twisty-turny wall, and built out of bullshit.

MSM's ham-handed protectiveness toward Kamala Harris: "The unique harm we cause when we dissect a powerful woman’s love life."

Oh, it's just exquisite, the harm we inflict on the delicate female candidate! It's unique! It hurts their tender feelings, so shush now, and allow this fine woman to become President, where we can continue to feel responsible for protecting her.

Yeah, that makes sense. Sorry. I want a President who will protect us. So your protectiveness toward Kamala Harris completely backfires.

I'm reading Monica Hesse in WaPo. The quote in the post title is the headline for her column. She's fielding the news that former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown has confirmed that years ago he dated Kamala Harris and he appointed her to 2 commissions, which — as Brown put it — "may have influenced her career." At the time, Brown was 60 years old and 30 years older than Harris. He was the speaker of the state assembly, and she was an assistant district attorney.

Why aren't we supposed to talk about that? There are at least some questions. In the #MeToo era, we have to wonder about whether the man sought sexual favors. In the case of Harvey Weinstein, we've heard from women who say he pressured them to give sex in exchange for career advancement, and that implies that there were women who said yes and received the advancement that was denied to the women who said no. That is a system of discrimination that matters a lot, even if we're disinclined to condemn the women who went along with it. But it's one thing to refrain from condemning them and quite something else to say these are the women we want to trust with the heaviest responsibilities.

If Kamala Harris is fit to represent the United States in confrontations with the greatest thugs in the world — Putin, et al. — she doesn't need kid-gloves treatment, and saying she does and impugning us for not getting in line makes me much more suspicious of this old love/"love" affair than I would have been if MSM weren't bending over backwards to protect her.

A little of Hesse's verbiage:

Plenty of us have... spent an awful lot of time discussing Bill Clinton’s willie and Anthony Weiner’s wiener: it’s not that we don’t talk about the sexual predilections of male candidates. But we do talk about them in a different way. We talk about men abusing power. We talk about women not even deserving power. The distinction matters, because the conversation isn’t really about sex, it’s about legitimacy. It’s about who we think has earned the right to be successful, and what criteria we’ll invent, and who we’ll apply it to.

“Maybe we should stop accusing women of ‘sleeping their way’ to the top,” Erin Gloria Ryan wrote in the Daily Beast in 2017. “Maybe because men have been the ones sleeping women to the middle and bottom.”

It takes two to "sleep." Both the man and the woman are trying to get something, and whether the woman gets as much as she wants — whether she gets to "the top" or only "the middle" — is no more interesting than whether the man got really great sex out of the arrangement or not. If, later on, we the people are judging a candidate, we look at what that candidate has done — whether it's the one that wanted to get sex or the one who traded sex for something else — and we judge them on the individual details. Why would sex be off limits just because women are more likely to be the ones in a position to give sex in exchange for something else, and the men tend to be the ones who want the sex so much they dole out non-sex favors to get it? Yes, it's different for men than for women, but so what? We the voters are the ones in the down position, stuck needing to vote for one of these fallible human beings. Don't tell me what not to talk about!

Does it help your career, to date someone powerful? I’d assume so. Does it also help to play golf with someone powerful, or smoke cigars with someone powerful, or belong to Skull and Bones? I’d assume that, too. But for decades we’ve accepted those relationships — many of which benefited only men — as standard procedure for how executives and politicians get ahead.

No, actually we haven't accepted it. Feminists have been denouncing the "old boy network" for as long as I've been listening to feminists, which is about half a century. The "standard procedure" has been under attack and deserves to be under attack.

We're supposed to throw feminism out the window now in order to help the fragile flower Kamala Harris? Ridiculous!

Wonkette laughs at the idea of "duct taped Messicans wandering around the desert."

Obviously, Wonkette assumes you know Wonkette is good and the assholes are on the other side:

Mick Mulvaney ran around the Sunday shows to threaten ANOTHER government shutdown if nobody gives Trump a goddamn wall to "defend the nation" from the duct taped Messicans wandering around the desert, and also to threaten an invasion of COMMUNIST Venezuela. Mulvaney boasted that Trump will get his goddamn wall money "with or without Congress," but declined to say who in flyover country would suffer when Trump starts looking for the cash.

I'm seeing a lot of stories questioning Trump's statement on Friday about duct-taped women — "Women are tied up, with duct tape on their faces, put in the backs of vans" — but I wanted something more soberly written. Here's Monica Hesse in WaPo, "Why does the president keep talking about women and duct tape on the border?"

But women are not tied up, experts have said. They do not have tape on their mouths. When Trump repeated this claim a few weeks ago, my colleague Katie Mettler contacted many authorities on trafficking who have spent time at the border, and none of them had seen or heard anything resembling the violence he described.

Nevertheless, there was Trump on Jan. 4, dramatizing the traffickers who “have three or four women with tape on their mouths and tied up, sitting in the back of a van or car.” There he was on Jan. 6: “They nab women, they grab them, they put tape over their mouths.” On Jan. 11: “Taping them up, wrapping tape around their mouths so they can’t shout or scream, tying their hands behind their back and even their legs.”

Sometimes the tape is explicitly duct tape, sometimes it’s electrical. Sometimes it has a specific color, as it did on Jan. 10: “Usually blue tape, as they call it. It’s powerful stuff. Not good.”...

[T]here’s... a purity to the duct-tape anecdotes, in the sense that it describes behavior that’s purely evil. Black and white. Human trafficking, however, is often complicated: women who believe they’re coming to America for a job, for example, that later turns out not to exist.

The women are initially deceived — that makes it complicated? Really, I find that idea more puzzling than the details about tape.

Allegations of sexual assault are also complicated, as the president should know: He’s been accused of assaulting or inappropriately touching 19 women — and while he’s engaged in “locker room talk” suggesting he’s grabbed women, he’s also said his accusers are all lying. He nominated Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, and later mocked Christine Blasey Ford, Kavanaugh’s own accuser. He’s mocked the whole #MeToo movement, implying that victims have gone too far.

Sex trafficking is plainly much worse than even the most negative interpretation of what Trump and Kavanaugh are said to have done, and Hesse is not only equating these things, she is buying into the defense that when it comes to sex, you never really knows what goes on in private. I imagine that she might feel that she's only criticizing Trump, but look at the text. She asserted "Allegations of sexual assault are... complicated." Are. Then she shifted to talking about Trump and saying that he "should know." Know. You don't know things that are not true. To say he should know is to say it is true. Hesse sounds upset that Trump has "mocked the whole #MeToo movement," but to my ear, she too is diminishing the movement with this whole it's complicated business.

Now, I see what her point is. She's saying Trump created the especially evil picture so people would know to be angry at something that, portrayed accurately, might make them wonder whether the women are choosing to undergo suffering to get something they want. That is, Trump is lying because that's his motivation to lie. But is Trump lying? What is the true story?

I see this addition to Hesse's story: "Correction: An earlier version of this story cited a misleading statistic about assaults of migrant women. The reference has been removed." Shouldn't a "correction" be the right statistic? I'd like to know how wrong Hesse's original statement was. (Neither Google Cache nor Archive.org found it.)

This column would feel quite different if it nailed down the correct facts and then speculated about why Trump exaggerated. As it stands, I'm still wondering what the truth is, and how close Trump is to it. I see Hesse just giving up on what is true, and that's not the spirit of the #MeToo movement. Hesse engages in that who-really-ever-knows shrugging that rightly enrages those of us who care about rape.

Okay. Let me know when you find credible evidence.

"Everybody has beliefs about how men should behave... We found incredible evidence that the extent to which men strongly endorse those beliefs, it’s strongly associated with negative outcomes."

Said Ronald Levant, former president of the American Psychological Association, quoted in "How ‘traditional masculinity’ hurts the men who believe in it most" (by Monica Hesse in WaPo).

"The writer David Foster Wallace was once assigned to compose an essay on the resplendent, mindless pleasures of a luxury cruise ship."

"He reported instead feeling profound despair and emptiness in the face of so much unfathomable pampering."

Writes WaPo staff writer Monica Hesse about the newly opened Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. and I'd just like to say:

1. You're not David Foster Wallace, and you couldn't write like David Foster Wallace if you tried — if you (I want to say) killed yourself — and referring to something he was able to do is not even trying.

2. David Foster Wallace was horribly depressed, so the fact that he felt "profound despair and emptiness" somewhere doesn't say all that much about a place.

3. David Foster Wallace had endless fascinating things to say about that cruise ship — here, see for yourself — and it's just infuriating to read it summarized in a few words in a hack piece of journalism that seems designed to take a shot at a political candidate the reader is expected to hate reflexively.

4. Nothing was "unfathomable" to David Foster Wallace. He fathomed the hell out of everything.

5. Very expensive hotels are fancy and posh. That's utterly banal. If you look into the depths of your own banality and have something fresh to say about that, you might begin to deserve to invoke the name of David Foster Wallace — who, by the way, didn't put down other people for being tourists with a bit of extra money to spend on something that excited or comforted them with the promise of luxury.

"Kai the Hatchet-Wielding Hitchhiker: Why did we love him?"

More cogitation about instant YouTube stars of the lowly outsider kind — this time from Monica Hesse of The Washington Post. There are a lot of words here, but I don't think she makes any progress in the long-running game of Understanding the Internet. Her musings peak with: "It’s the issue of our responsibilities as viewers and our awareness of the latent toxicity in what we consume."

Our awareness of the latent toxicity in what we consume... hmm... yeah... suddenly I am aware of... why am I slogging through the verbal mush of another Washington Post column? What am I doing to myself?!

Like that, you mean, Monica?

"A cruise ship’s passenger log is comprised entirely of the exact demographic that is least prepared for a cruise to go to pot."

"A cruise is a giant boat full of your mother-in-law. Your mother-in-law does not belong in the wild."

So writes Monica Hesse in the Washington Post, where I guess mother-in-law jokes are okay. (What is it, the 1950s?) Oddly, Hesse is also claiming to love cruises. And she prefaces her disparagement of older women with "I say fondly."

"Say it out loud. Do it. Fred. Fred. In the South, Fray-ud. Fur-red-duh."

"It has the tonal quality of something being dropped on the floor, something heavy and damp-ish. Waterlogged paper towel. Fred."

Is the Washington Post smoking pot again?

IN THE COMMENTS: Simon asks, astutely:

"What would you say is the difference between visual aesthetics - which you often remind us are at [least] fair game, and even important - and aural aesthetics, which is what this piece is about? That is: what's the difference between Monica Hesse's piece and anything by Robin Givhan? Why is discussing the psychology of what they wore different to the psychology of associations evoked by a name?"

First of all, I do want to support the discussion of aesthetics in politics. The key is to do it well. Actually, I think Monica Hesse is doing it reasonably well, using broad -- and a bit potheaded -- humor. I've never noticed her before, but I always notice Robin Givhan. Maybe Hesse is taking a cue from Givhan on what it takes to get noticed in our word-cluttered world. Good! She got a Drudge link out of this one. Last night I dreamed I got a Drudge link! I mean... A Drudge link! A Drudge link! Think what it means...

Every day, journalists and media executives in newsrooms across the land hope they'll have something that catches Drudge's fancy — or, as he has put it, "raises my whiskers." Most keep their fingers crossed that he'll discover their articles on his own and link to them. Others are more proactive, sending anonymous e-mails or placing calls to him or his behind-the-scenes assistant.

Drudge's following is so large and loyal that he routinely can drive hundreds of thousands of readers to a single story, photo or video through a link on his lively compendium of the news.

I've had links that send me thousands, even tens of thousands, but hundreds of thousands. Hundreds of thousands?! The mind reels....

Now, back to Monica Hesse. She wrote about the sound of names, and Robin Givhan got all that attention over writing about cleavage. It was mostly criticism, but attracting criticism can be a game worth playing. (Where's my sandwich?)

But the important thing is to do some good analysis! When it comes to politics and aesthetics, I want to stress the distinction between the subjective and the objective. The effect of the word "Fred" on a particular columnist is only significant if it tells us something about how it will affect people in general. What is the psychological effect of a particular name? Most politicians fly under the radar by being named Bill. But even "Bill" has the effect of no effect. Our minds are open to subliminal influence. Look at what care we take naming our babies. We want to give them the advantage of name that has a good subliminal effect on those who hear it. It's worth thinking about how various aesthetic aspects of a candidate -- including his name -- will affect the voters. Actually, talking about these subjective effects can help us make it conscious and therefore overcome the things that shouldn't factor into our decisions.

But there is an objective side to this. What is the candidate doing? Fred Thompson didn't name himself, but Hillary Clinton chose to wear that low-cut top. We should notice when politicians are trying to manipulate us, both so we can overcome the manipulation and because it tells us something about the person doing it. Not everything is intentional. I certainly assume Hillary knew exactly where her breasts were in that top. (The alternative explanation, which I reject, is that she -- and her assistants -- are incompetent.) But Fred has probably been called Fred for decades and has no real way out of being called Fred. It's just his name. It's nothing he's doing, just something that might affect us.

Now, Hillary's decisions about dropping "Rodham" into the cleavage between Hillary and Clinton -- that means something.

AND: Here's some good commentary by Jill Colvin:

The fact that appearance is a relevant factor in any political campaign is a long-proven fact...

According to [research by Dianne Bystrom, the director of the Catt Center for Women and Politics at Iowa State University], both male and female candidates must work very carefully to balance stereotypical masculine and feminine traits. Candidates, she says, must be seen as strong, yet compassionate, forceful, yet friendly.... [W]inning women candidates are typically those who are best able to balance stereotypically masculine and feminine images and issues, posing with children as well as in formal suits, and discussing both healthcare and defense. Those who are seen as too feminine tend to lose races, while those who are seen as “too hard” work frantically to soften their images....

Perhaps the most provocative aspect of the whole cleavage controversy is that no one has yet criticized Clinton for dressing inappropriately... Instead, everyone except for Hillary’s campaign seems strangely pleased with the development. Even the latest Rasmussen poll shows that Hillary has been steadily gaining support in the last two weeks, and now leads Obama 43 percent to 22 percent.

UPDATE: And don't miss the diavlog with me and Robin Givhan over on Bloggingheads.