"Hillary's voter base consists of middle-aged to elderly white women who identify with her caustic, stubborn, bulldog resilience."

Says Camille Paglia, who observes — as I have on many occasions (I insert Paglia-style) — that Hillary is a poor example of feminist heroism because her political success has thus far "glaringly been a subset to her husband's success."

Hillary's recent remarks about politics as a "boys' club" resistant to uppity women was sheer demagoguery. By progressing farther than any woman presidential candidate, she has become a role model for future aspirants. But by attaching herself so blatantly to anti-male rhetoric - particularly in view of her debt to her husband - she is espousing a retrograde brand of feminism no longer applicable to the US.

If Hillary loses, batten the hatches against a mass resurrection of paranoid, paleo-feminist martyrs, counting their wounds and wailing at the blood-red moon.

Fortunately, if Hillary loses, she'll lose to a black man, which will make it a lot harder for critiques like that to work. And those young feminists who love to cry misogyny — aren't they attached to Obama?

The conservative mindset. The liberal mindset.

This half of a Pogo cartoon strip by Walt Kelly says it all:



Photographed from the framed original on display at the Mustard Museum in Mount Horeb, Wisconsin.



Why is that cartoon at the Mustard Museum? The other half of the strip mentions mustard twice, and the Mustard Museum has diverse things mentioning mustard...


(Enlarge.)

... plus a lot of mustard:



In case you're wondering about the second half of the strip: The mouse goes on to say, "Bong! Bong! Bong! Corned beef on rye on the nose and all is mustard." The alligator (Albert) says, "A delicious time of day." And the rabbit says, "Some time call! Corned beef on rye on the nose an' all is mustard! What's that amount to?" The mouse answers, "To you, a buck fifty, with java, two clams even." So the old Father Time character says, "Strike that liberal."

IN THE COMMENTS: More than one commenter doesn't understand the comic strip, and I explain it here.

And here's a link to the Mustard Museum website.

"Pope Benedict is a teacher, not a showman. And like a teacher, often you have to rely on his eyes to convey his innermost thoughts."

I'm not a follower of the Pope, and I haven't been following the Pope, but I'm incredibly glad to see our old blogfriend vbspurs — AKA "Cheers, Victoria" — live-blogging Pope Benedict's trip to New York. Without her, I would not have known that Kelly Clarkson sang "Ave Maria" to him in Yonkers.

ADDED:

"University of Michigan legal blogger Ann Althouse called Brian Leiter a 'jackass,' to take a famous example. (She also called him a 'nerd.')"

The Boston Globe makes the University of Michigan take the heat for my — famous! — transgression. Here's the 2004 post where I called him a "nerd" after he insulted me. I expanded on my point in the comments, where I called him a "jackass." I have since that time had a sandwich and a nice conversation with Professor Leiter.

"Historians are generally ambivalent over whether hot-tempered leaders have fared any worse than the placid."

Writes WaPo's Michael Leahy in a long article about McCain's reputed hotheadedness:

Harry S. Truman once threatened bodily harm in a letter to a reviewer who wrote disparagingly about the musical talents of his daughter. Richard M. Nixon ranted, and so did Bill Clinton. George Stephanopoulos once described Clinton's "purple rages," which left Stephanopoulos, often the subject of Clinton's private lashings, so shaken that he broke out in hives, sunk into depression and began taking an antidepressant.

Wait, who cares about Stephanopoulos's emotional problems? Who reacts to anger with hives?

"Clinton could flare up," remembers John D. Podesta, a former Clinton chief of staff. "You might have to endure five minutes of him yelling. But you could challenge him. . . . He would sometimes get mad when [aides] pushed back -- but it was a passing moment; tomorrow would be fine. You didn't get in the doghouse for pushing back."

"Temper can sometimes be a political instrument," said James A. Thurber, director of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University. "There are sometimes calculated displays of temper, which is what Lyndon Johnson used to persuade people. . . .

"But sometimes somebody's temperament can get in the way of aides telling him the truth, which happened [during the Vietnam War] with LBJ. His temper scared some [aides] away, which was not good for anyone. . . . That's always part of the risk with a strong temper . . . and so it's always relevant."

Get less wimpy aides.

It sounds as though Stephanopoulos wasn't up for it. Nothing wrong with that. Reposition yourself in media and snipe from a distance. It's my preference too.

But enough about Stephanopoulos. My real question here is: How much emotional volatility is good for a President? We will — in all likelihood — face a choice between a candidate who's too hot — McCain — and a candidate who's too cool — Obama. But it's not too late — superdelegates take note! — Hillary Clinton may be just right.

She's the baby bear's porridge on the table of presidential politics.

IN THE COMMENTS: The inimitable Trooper York:

Everyone thought that Boo Boo Bear was a cute little bear like the ones you heard about in stories. But actually he was a freak. He was really into drugs and was a total enabler. Yogi threw him out of Jellystone after he got caught robbing picinic baskets to snort the condiments when he couldn’t get any drugs. He hung out in Gentle Bens guest house until the night he killed his wife and her waiter friend. He was homeless for a while which wasn’t so bad because he was used to eating out of garbage cans. He hit bottom when he was arrested with a sex toy in his fur, meth in his pocket and a rope tied around his penis. When asked what the hell he was doing with the rope, Boo Boo said “Some people thought it was too small, some people thought it was too big, but with a rope it’s just right.”

(Ricou Browning & John Florea, Gentle Ben, The E True Hollywood Story)

Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd get around to the subject of the Clinton-Obama debate.

It must be hard to think of new things to say, when everyone's been talking about the debate for days. You could talk about what people have been saying, but Dowd doesn't do that:

The thorny questions Obama got in the debate were absolutely predictable, yet he seemed utterly unprepared and annoyed by them. He did not do well for the same reason he failed to outmaneuver Hillary in a year’s worth of debates: he disdains the convention, the need for sound bites and witty flick-offs and game-changing jabs.

Does he "disdain" all that because he's lofty and idealistic, or because he's not very good at it? Remember the time he said "You're likeable enough, Hillary"? That seemed to lead directly to his loss in the New Hampshire primary and the agonizing prolongation of the primary season.

He needs to be less philosophical and abstract, and more visceral and personal....

He needs to not be the magical screen for projection that made us see what we wanted when we looked at him. He has one amazing thing that he can do better than anyone. How can he be expected to do anything else anywhere nearly as well?

[W]hen a voter from Latrobe asked in the debate why he doesn’t wear a flag pin, he high-hatted it as a “manufactured issue,” then, backing in tepidly, added, “I could not help but love this country for all that it’s given me.”

Asked about his friendly relationship with the former Weather Underground anarchist William Ayers — an association that The Wall Street Journal suggests could turn into the Swift Boat of 2008 given Ayers’s statement that “I don’t regret setting bombs; I feel we didn’t do enough” — Obama defended him with a line that only the eggheads orbiting his campaign could appreciate. Ayers, he said, is “a professor of English in Chicago.”

Obama has to prove to Americans that, despite his exotic background and multicultural looks, he shares or at least respects their values and understands why they would be upset about his associations with the Rev. Wright and an ex-Weatherman.

Dowd thinks Obama knows he needs to prove something like this and that he's trying, but what can he do? Dowd says that, since the debate, he's seemed "eager to show he was not highfalutin." Of course, he's eager. But what can he do? Saying he didn't grow up rich, hugging a vet, and ending a speech with “God Bless America” — the 3 things Dowd cites — do nothing to address questions about his patriotism.

Frank Rich begins with talk about the talk about the debate, specifically, the criticism of the ABC moderators, George Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson:

Ludicrous as the whole spectacle was, ABC would not have been so widely pilloried had it not tapped into a larger national discontent with news media fatuousness. The debate didn’t happen in a vacuum; it was the culmination of the orgy of press hysteria over Mr. Obama’s remarks about “bitter” small-town voters....

Mr. Obama did sound condescending, an unappealing trait that was even more naked in his “You’re likable enough, Hillary” gibe many debates ago.

(I'm reading this after calling attention to the same Obama quote above.)

But the overreaction to this latest gaffe backfired on the media more than it damaged him. For all the racket about “Bittergate” — and breathless intimations of imminent poll swings and superdelegate stampedes — the earth did not move. The polls hardly budged, and superdelegates continued to migrate mainly in Mr. Obama’s direction.

Ahem. Check the trend in the Gallup daily tracking poll.

However out of touch Mr. Obama is with “ordinary Americans,” many Americans, ordinary and not, have concluded that the talking heads blathering about blue-collar men, religion, guns and those incomprehensible “YouTube young people” are even more condescending and out of touch.

Eh. Who cares? Obama isn't running against the media. It doesn't matter whether we like the media — which Rich is part of — less than Obama but whether we like the other candidates less. We will always bitch about the media, especially when they wound our favorite candidate.

That's all I have to say about Rich. Unlike Dowd, who makes every sentence interesting, Rich rambles through the second half of his column. Some people have more money than others — did you know?

Charter Communications internet service has had a regional outage in Madison since Friday evening.

I know it's regional, because that's what the recorded message tells me when I try to call. It was confirmed by a representative doing an on-line chat with me just now. (I'm on line at a café.) She told me I could have my account credited for the lost service if I call another number, but I don't feel like spending time on the telephone waiting on hold and so forth, just to get a few dollars. Why don't they program their computers so that the credit is automatic? I wrote that suggestion to the person who was chatting with me and suddenly lost contact with her. Just another outage? Or are they under instructions to break off contact if you say certain things?

"It’s like trying to claim that John Hawkins is unfairly labeled a 'right wing news blogger' ..."

"... and then providing a link to his site, which is called RIGHT WING NEWS."

Rachel Lucas cracks me up as she lashes into a lame Glamour blog post that complains about how female "political bloggers" are getting marginalized as "feminist" bloggers while citing 2 bloggers whose blogs are completely concentrated on feminism.

Surveys have shown that most political blog readers are straight men. Now, why on earth would straight men bookmark sites that have articles about periods and fashion and the Weekly Feminist Fuck You when they could just as easily bookmark a site that doesn’t?...

Let’s say the majority of political blog readers were straight women, as were the bloggers themselves. And say there’s a ton of male bloggers out there, too, trying to “break into” this Girls’ Club. How well do you think it would work for them to name their blogs things like Masculinity.com and had entire categories devoted to hot rods, power tools, mens’ fashion, and things like “The Monday Man-centric Fuck You”?

And Dr. Helen adds:

My guess is that some "feminist" blogs ... get the attention they do because they are feminist blogs, not in spite of it. As Rachel points out, they don't even mention real political blogs such as Michelle Malkin (nor do they mention Ann Althouse) both political bloggers who happen to be women. I wonder why.

Eugene Volokh says:

[A]s Rachel Lucas points out, how do you ask "Why are all the big political bloggers men?" and miss Michelle Malkin? And if you mention some of the somewhat lower-traffic but still prominent bloggers, why ignore Megan McArdle and Ann Althouse (an omniblogger, but with a good deal of political and policy content)?

To answer the second question, I think that when you don't hew to the hardcore all-politics style of political blogging, people are less likely to list you as a political blogger (as Volokh's ambivalence about me indicates). Now, I got included in that Village Voice survey of the right-wing political blogosphere, but look how much I confused the author (Roy Edroso):

ORIENTATION: "Moderate" Democrat who disapproves of nearly everything the Democratic Party does

TONE: Free-associative...

CANDIDATE: No coherently stated preference...

MODUS OPERANDI: Favors piquant reversals...

WHAT TO EXPECT: Something—a news photo, a quote, a gum wrapper on the sidewalk—will annoy her and she'll go to McCain....

The truth is I'm not a normal political blogger (or a normal law blogger). And by "normal," I kind of mean... male-style. I'm not surprised to be left off any normal list, and I was pleased that Roy included me and took the trouble to understand me as well as he did — which was on the level of one of those male comedians who do routines about how women don't make any sense.

I am doing something different here. It's something that feels instinctively right to me. This blog is a true expression of my mind — and I am a woman. I'm not saying there's one style of blogging that is the real female kind, but I think there is something female about what I am doing and what I want to do. (I think something of the same thing is true about Megan McArdle, who drives some people crazy. And I give credit to Roy for including her in his Village Voice survey and trying to understand her too. He called her a "lipstick libertarian" and identified her "tone" as "self-referential.")

So maybe Glamour has a bit of a point that Rachel Lucas missed, which is that the idea of what a political blogger is has been defined by what male writers tend to do. Women can do it too, but a lot of women writers, like me, want to do something else. I'm gratified that I get noticed as a political blogger at all, because I'm not the political type. I don't think like John Hawkins or Markos Moulitsas. I operate in the political sphere and drive political people crazy by completely indulging myself being myself. I'm glad this gets to count as political blogging and that, being on the inside of political blogging, I can have something to do with stretching the definition of political blogging.

Double rally on the Wisconsin Capitol steps: Free Tibet + Pro-China.

At the top end of the steps, there were amplified speakers denouncing China to a crowd waving the Tibet flag. At the lower end of the steps, there was a silent crowd waving the Chinese flag, the Olympic flag, and the American flag.







There were some Free Tibet protesters at the lower end too. One man in particular shouted his criticisms at the pro-Chinese flag bearers. The pro-Chinese group was extremely well-focused on being quiet and polite. I'll post a couple videos, but unfortunately, I botched a recording that showed the pro-Tibet man yelling and two Chinese students turning to talk to me very politely trying to explain why the criticism was not fair.

The first video surveys the scene:



The second video shows a man on the "Free Tibet" side shouting "Freedom of speech! Freedom of Religion!"

Mmm.

Shortribs. My favorite.

"The Monongahela River, which runs cleaner than when they were young (not a good sign)..."

I didn't expect to encounter such a subtle line in a WaPo article about whether Obama was right about the bitterness of people in small towns in Pennsylvania. The reporter who injected that piquant irony is Alec MacGillis.

It's a bad sign that the river runs cleaner, because it means that the factories upstream are closed.

The relationship between economic vitality and the environment is complex. Factories could be made cleaner, and when manufacturing moves overseas, the factories probably run dirtier. Still, I wonder: Why don't environmentalists celebrate economic recessions? Don't economic setbacks advance their goals? Perhaps they do celebrate quietly, maybe in the private chambers of their own hearts. It's not good PR to exult at misfortune.

Busted because the park is closed and then publicly humiliated.

Glenn Reynolds flags this New York Post story:

CNN personality Richard Quest was busted in Central Park early yesterday with some drugs in his pocket, a rope around his neck that was tied to his genitals, and a sex toy in his boot, law-enforcement sources said.

It was after 3 a.m., and the park was closed, so he was arrested for loitering:

"Mr. Quest didn't realize that the park had a curfew," [his lawyer] said. He was simply "returning to his hotel with friends."

At a hearing in Manhattan Criminal Court, Quest agreed to undergo six months of drug counseling in return for an "adjournment in contemplation of dismissal," which means the misdemeanor charges against him will be dropped and the case sealed if he stays out of trouble and completes his drug program.

He was released with no bail after spending most of the day behind bars.

Glenn says:

WELL, THIS IS EMBARRASSING...

Best line from the story: "It wasn't immediately clear what the rope was for."... Really, with this sort of arrest on his record, he might as well just run for Congress. He'll fit right in!

My first reaction was to laugh at the rope too. (And then to worry that kids might get the idea to experiment with rope and hurt themselves.) But now, I'm outraged that the public humiliation was out of proportion and unrelated to the offense.

It's not illegal to walk around with a rope tied around you like that. (It was under his clothes, I'm assuming, but even if it wasn't.) Being in a park after hours is a piddling offense. Don't police normally just tell you the park is closed and let you walk away? That happened to me and my then-husband once, and we just got in the car and drove away, laughing at the police and saying, mock hippie-style, "The park is closed? You can't close a park, man." I'd have been shocked if the police had arrested us and searched us for that, not that we had drugs on us. We didn't.

It was mildly bad and slightly stupid of Quest to have a small amount of drugs on him, and he deserves the same treatment as anyone else for that offense, but I don't see why it's acceptable for the police to injure him gratuitously by revealing private information about him the way they did.

UPDATE: Glenn updates his post to respond to mine, and calls attention to a rather strangely put detail in the NYT report of the incident:

The police noticed Mr. Quest at 64th Street and West Drive at about 3:40 a.m., the official said. As he was being escorted out, he volunteered, “I have meth in my pocket,” according to an official briefed on the case. The police searched him and recovered a small amount of methamphetamine in a Ziploc bag.

Glenn says:

So had Quest not volunteered that he had methamphetamine on him, he might have gotten precisely the treatment Althouse suggests, simply being "escorted out" of the park. And -- assuming this NYT report is correct -- why did he do that? Beats me.

I find it hard to believe Quest is stupid enough to have said "I have meth in my pocket" unless he knew they were about to find it on him.

ADDED: Mark Steyn weighs in.

The internet's not working!

So here I am in Madison, and, dammit, I'm at Starbucks. How the hell did I end up here? In New York, I'm stuck going to Starbucks, because there are no indie cafés with WiFi in my neighborhood or in the places I go around Manhattan. But when I come back to Madison, like this weekend, I shun Starbucks. But this morning (and last night), Charter Communications had a regional outage — I tried calling — so I left the house first thing in search of a café.

It was like in this "South Park." You get up, you try to get on line, you freak out — the internet's not working! — and you head right out to a café to get your morning internet. In the "South Park," they actually go to a Starbucks. (Why does their Starbucks have free WiFi? I've never encountered free WiFi at a Starbucks.) So I run downtown, heading for one of my favorite Madison cafés, but it's Saturday and it's not 8 yet, so, that's the one niche that Starbucks fills in Madison: It's open all the time.

But now it's after 8, and I can café hop. I can't find an electrical outlet here anyway, and I'm down to the last 11% of my charge.

Am I addicted to the internet? Let's just say that "South Park" — which you should watch — hits close to home.

IN THE COMMENTS: George said...

It's worse than you think, Professor—You're an addict, and you're dealing the stuff.

Ah! You're right! Bloggers are the dealers in the world of internet addiction.

Greg in Madtown said:

It's even easier on the near-east side of town. Three independent coffee shops within four blocks of my house, and Escape Java Joint (with free wireless, of course), is only closed 6 hours/day (midnight-6am). I'm not advertising -- I don't work there -- it's just great to live in a city where I can pay for internet by the cup, even on Christmas. (Again with those atheists!)

Thanks for the tip! And, look, my favorite Madison food blog has reviewed it:

Rooms lead on to rooms all painted mellow colors. Our original guess was it used to be a dentist's office, but according to the barista, before Escape was a coffee shop, it was an arcade and a thrift store in the recent past (which we vaguely remembered), and in the more distant past a machine shop and wagon maker.

Wagon maker. Layers of history.

What was the biggest lie at the Clinton-Obama debate?

My son John Althouse Cohen says it's this, from ABC's moderator Charles Gibson:

I would be remiss tonight if I didn't take note of the fact that today is the one-year anniversary of Virginia Tech. And I think it's fair to say that probably every American during this day, at one point or another, said a small prayer for the great people at that university and for those who died.

Here's the transcript of the debate. I challenge you to find a bigger lie.

I mean, you could stake your life on a bet that what Gibson said was false and he knew it. He had to. Even hedged with "probably," there is absolutely no chance that "every American" said "a small prayer." Surely, some said a big prayer, there must be quite a few people who didn't realize it was the anniversary of the shootings, and plenty who never pray about anything. I'll bet Christopher Hitchens didn't say a prayer. There are atheists in America, Mr. Gibson! (Run for your life!)

On the subject of the debate and lies, didn't Hillary Clinton say she lied about the sniper fire in Bosnia? (My other son, Chris, pointed this out in the comments section of my debate live-blogging.)

From the transcript:

Well, Tom, I can tell you that I may be a lot of things. But I'm not dumb. And I wrote about going to Bosnia in my book in 2004. I laid it all out there. And you're right. On a couple of occasions in the last weeks, I just said some things that weren't in keeping with what I knew to be the case and what I had written about in my book.... [I]t just didn't jive with what I had written about and knew to be the truth.

I just said some things that weren't in keeping with what I knew to be the case. That's the definition of lying.

And I love the "I'm not dumb" part. Take note of this strategy for getting Hillary to confess to lying. Corner her with 2 options: either you're stupid or you're a liar. I'm a liar, dammit! Don't call me dumb!

Slate's anti-Obama ad.

A joke, of course. (Slate can't be anti-Obama.)



AND: Does Obama mean to give Hillary the finger here?



Based on the way he laughs when they get it, I'd have to say yes. Especially ironic, since he's pushing the line about how he's the one taking politics to a higher level.

"PAUL CAMPOS BECLOWNS HIMSELF YET AGAIN, and Brian Leiter pinches the red rubber nose."

Says Glenn Reynolds — you can tell it's Glenn from the all caps — linking to Leiter.

Here's the underlying Campos compost:

Leiter thinks various members of the Bush administration are war criminals, and that their worst crimes - crimes for which they should apparently be subjected to Nuremberg-style prosecution - include the systematic torture of helpless prisoners in the name of a phony "war on terror."

Anyone who believes this must also acknowledge that John Yoo's eagerness to make specious legal arguments in support of torture seems to have led directly to lots of people being tortured, some to death.

Under such circumstances, it takes a twisted sense of moral priorities to get outraged about the (very slim) possibility that Yoo might lose his academic sinecure because he went out of his way to help the U.S. government commit war crimes.

In the end, I suspect that for Leiter, as for so many professors of this or that, words such as "torture" and "war crimes" are indeed nothing more than words, with which they can continue to play their petty and useless academic games.

I don't know what's more common among law professors — "eagerness to make specious legal arguments" or willingness to apply the label "war crime." And sure, there are plenty of petty and useless academic games ... but why is Campos so sure he's outside of these games as he makes his pronouncements?