"Cyberculture was to be the fulfillment of counterculture."

Edward Rothstein writes about Fred Turner's book “From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism":

Ultimately, of course, such fulfillment was not to be had. But the consequences of the association were profound. One reason for the heady pace of innovation during the 90’s is that the motivation was never purely abstract, but was often accompanied by utopian passions. Software development occurred not just in the private realm, but also among collaborative communities that objected to corporate ownership. Even today’s Wikipedia — the online encyclopedia continuously being written by its users — can be traced to these ideas....

[S]o messianic were expectations, that many failed to see that cyberspace was not really a different realm from the hard-wired world of ordinary experience....

No, no, don't say it. I'm still trying to find counterculture fulfillment!

The "bipartisan love-in" Bill Clinton's "been engaged in over the last several years has resulted in jack-squat."

Says Arianna Huffington interposing deep thoughts for what might otherwise be "popping champagne corks" after Clinton's performance on "Fox New Sunday."

Huh?

Okay, I've got my bearings. You see, Clinton fans thought Clinton ruled. He stuck it to Fox News, you know. They're celebrating. And Arianna's the nerd at the party who wants everyone to sit down and have a serious conversation about what it all means. She begins with the assumption that Bill's been in a "bipartisan love-in," which I take to mean that he's been circumspect and presidential.

I'm glad the Chris Wallace interview is flying all over the internet, but I really hope that one person who will watch it over and over again is Bill Clinton. And that on the fifth or sixth viewing it might occur to him that the more cover he gives Bush and his cronies, the more they're able to increase and entrench their power.

Isn't it disturbing to picture Clinton watching himself on TV over and over again and becoming more and more convinced that he played it just right? Arianna assumes he lacks the intellectual complexity to see in it what people who aren't predisposed to love him find offputting, even shocking. He'd just replay and replay and chortle I rule.

Now that I've seen the reaction on the left, I'm convinced that Clinton went on the show planning to act the way he did. It wasn't Chris Wallace's specific question that set him off. He decided in advance to go on Fox News and unleash an attack on Fox News as soon as when he saw an opening. But he jumped too eagerly at what wasn't really an opening and he jumped weirdly. That he thought he was doing well suggests that he has surrounded himself with people who are pulling him out of the calm, rational center -- what Arianna mocks as a "bipartisan love-in."

But this country is full of people who aren't hotly partisan, who are put off by that strong stuff, and who need to see a demonstration of calm rationality. Now his over-the-top performance is being praised by those people who crowd around him -- that's the real love-in -- and he may succumb to their fawning inducements to hardcore partisanship.

And where is Hillary in all of this? Will she fall into the open arms of the hot partisans too? I'd like to think she's less susceptible to seduction. But it won't help in the long run if her husband inanely cozies up to the kind of people who watched him on Fox News and thought he was just great.

"We must recommit to victory in Afghanistan."

Concludes John Kerry in a WSJ op-ed. Great. Commitment to victory. Does he have anything to say about victory in Iraq?

...the disastrous diversion in Iraq has allowed these radicals the chance to rise again....

Somehow, we ended up with seven times more troops in Iraq--which even the administration now admits had nothing to do with 9/11--than in Afghanistan, where the killers still roam free....

[T]his administration has appropriated nearly four times more in reconstruction funds for Iraq than Afghanistan...

Last year we gave Pakistan only $300 million in economic support, about what we spend in a day in Iraq....

Is commitment to victory in Afghanistan more believable if it comes with commitment to victory in Iraq or if it's presented as an alternative to victory in Iraq?

"I can honestly tell you he never got tired of playing that song."

Danny Flores, RIP. He played the saxophone on the 1957 number 1 hit "Tequila!" You know the lyrics to that song, I bet. Or should I say lyric. And that was Flores growling it.

Don't you just want to get up on the table and dance?

AND: If you're thinking of doing the Pee Wee dance to "Tequila!" and putting on YouTube, you won't be the first.

“I just follow my own common sense... And the hell with the law.”

New York's town and village courts.

Nearly three-quarters of the judges are not lawyers, and many — truck drivers, sewer workers or laborers — have scant grasp of the most basic legal principles. Some never got through high school, and at least one went no further than grade school.

The NYT has done an extensive study of these obscure characters.

Audible Althouse #66.

This podcast has a morbid theme! Yet somehow I fall prey to hysterical laughter at one point. You've been warned.

Stream it right through your computer here. But the hysterical and morbid alike fall prey to a subscription on iTunes:

Unplayable 45s I won't throw out.

Here's "One":



This is a perfect example of a song I was embarrassed to like back when it was a big hit but that I'm not the slightest bit embarrassed by today. If you Google "embarrass," the first thing that comes up is Embarrass, Minnesota. I guess I like that.

I don't have much to say about Three Dog Night. Their name is a reference to sleeping with dogs to keep warm. The colder it is, the more dogs you need, so a really cold night is a three dog night, like maybe lots of nights in Embarrass, Minnesota, which I see calls itself "The Cold Spot," and highlights the record low temperatures (-57!).

You could make other band names using the Three Dog Night format -- just an idea for the comments. You know, like: Two Coffee Morning or Ten Blogpost Day. I never bought an album by Three Dog Night. In fact, this single was probably my brother's. Anyway, "One" was written by Harry Nilsson.

One is the loneliest number that you'll ever do
Two can be as bad as one
It's the loneliest number since the number one

And I do have an album by Harry Nilsson, the one most people who have one Harry Nilsson album have: "Nilsson Schmilsson." ("She put the lime in the coconut....")

UPDATE: Don't confuse this "One" with other "Ones." There's:

Darkness imprisoning me
All that I see
Absolute horror
I cannot live
I cannot die
Trapped in myself
Body my holding cell

That's not Harry's song. He also didn't write:

One love
One life
When it's one need
In the night
It's one love

But the song Aimee Mann sings on the "Magnolia" soundtrack: that is the right "One."

I don't usually talk about golf, but...

My nephew Cliff Kresge just won the Oregon Classic on the Nationwide Tour.

Are we safer?

We've heard that question a lot over the past few years. Now:

An intelligence assessment that the war in Iraq increased Islamic radicalism, worsening the terror threat, set off a sharp debate today among American political officials over credit and blame for the war and the broader fight against terrorism....

The new intelligence report, the National Intelligence Estimate, implicitly questioned assertions from Bush administration officials that the United States is now safer from terrorism than it was before Sept. 11, 2001, if not yet entirely safe, and that it would be less so under Democratic leadership.

Comments? You know you have to face up to this.

Clinton on "Fox News Sunday."

You read the transcript yesterday. You saw the clip. Now, you've seen the whole interview. Impressions?

Knowing he was going to get mad, I watched him carefully before he got mad. He had a very relaxed and jovial manner as he mused about his new life of philanthropy. Then Chris Wallace changed the subject and asked this:

When we announced that you were going to be on fox news Sunday, I got a lot of email from viewers, and I got to say I was surprised most of them wanted me to ask you this question. Why didn’t you do more to put Bin Laden and al Qaeda out of business when you were President. There’s a new book out which I suspect you’ve read called the Looming Tower. And it talks about how the fact that when you pulled troops out of Somalia in 1993, Bin Laden said I have seen the frailty and the weakness and the cowardice of US troops. Then there was the bombing of the embassies in Africa and the attack on the USS Cole... And after the attack, the book says, Bin Laden separated his leaders because he expected an attack and there was no response. I understand that hindsight is 20 20.... [T]he question is why didn’t you do more, connect the dots and put them out of business?

Now, Clinton has an answer to this question, and he could have just given it. But he aggressively inserts challenging complaints about Fox News.

I want to talk about the context of which this…arises. I’m being asked this on the FOX network…

So you did FOX’s bidding on this show. You did you nice little conservative hit job on me.

What Wallace asked just doesn't seem to be enough of a "hit job" to justify attacking the interviewer like that. For people who hate Fox News already, it might make sense, but he's on Fox News, being seen by the regular Fox News viewers. How is it a good strategy to rant on the assumption everyone knows Fox News is unfair? He gets irked at Chris Wallace in a personal way: "And you’ve got that little smirk on your face and you think you’re so clever." I hadn't been planning to think about Richard Nixon, but I got a Nixon vibe from this. He lets it show that he thinks about how his enemies are persecuting him.

Clinton leans way forward into Wallace's space. He even jabs him in the knee a few times with his finger. Meanwhile, he seems unaware of his own ungainly body. He's gotten quite fat, and his suits -- which he keeps buttoned -- don't fit him properly anymore. He's sitting with his feet apart and planted on the floor, and the pantlegs get hiked way up so that a wide band of white leg shows above each sock.

In the second half of the interview, he gets back to his original relaxed, jovial style. Pants still hiked up though. Wallace ends the interview, saying "Mr. President, thank you for one of the more unusual interviews." They shake hands, and Clinton, says "Thanks." There's just a glimmer of an expression on his face that seems to say uh-oh, I might have exposed myself out there.

Islamic fascists? Evildoers?

Sheryl Gay Stolberg has a nice essay in the Week in Review about the struggle to figure out what to call the enemy in the war on terrorism (or is it the war on terror?):

[The term "Islamic fascists"] turned up in one of the president’s speeches last year, and resurfaced in August when British authorities foiled a plot to blow up airliners headed for the United States. It was, Mr. Bush said then, “a stark reminder that this nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom.”

By Labor Day, Islamic fascists and Islamo-fascism were the hot new conservative buzzwords.

And then, just as suddenly, they were gone — at least from the president’s lips.

“The debate that we wanted to launch was about an ideological struggle against an enemy that has very specific plans, ambitions and aspirations, much like movements of the past, like fascism and Nazism,” said Dan Bartlett, counselor to the president. Addressing the term Islamic fascists, Mr. Bartlett said, “I’m sure he’ll use it again.”

But it seems unlikely Mr. Bush will use it again, given the outcry it provoked....

David Frum, a former speechwriter for Mr. Bush, said the president turned to “evildoers” right after Sept. 11, 2001, in part because it translated well in Arabic and in part because it appeared in Psalm 27, which Mr. Frum says is one of the president’s favorite psalms. (“When evildoers came upon me to devour my flesh.”)

But evildoers has a kind of comic-book sound, and in any event, Mr. Frum says, it isn’t specific enough.

Well, some of it is delivery. I'll bet Ronald Reagan could have sold "evildoers." But really, when did the Biblical start sounding comic-book-y?

Let's consult this article from yesterday's NYT: "Religion and Comic Books: Where Did Superman’s Theology Come From?"

[Peter] Parker had been walking home after competing in a wrestling match, vain in the aftermath of his victory, and as a robber dashed past him, he did nothing. That same robber proceeded to attack and kill Parker’s uncle.

Coming upon the scene, the nephew was struck by such guilt and remorse that he resolved to spend the rest of his life fighting crime.

As any fan of comic books, including Rabbi [Simcha] Weinstein, would recognize, Peter Parker is Spider-Man, created by Stan Lee and drawn initially by Jack Kirby and then Steve Ditko. Parker’s moment of moral awakening occurred in the first issue of the Spider-Man strip, published in 1962 and discovered by Rabbi Weinstein during his own boyhood in the early 80’s.

Something else that Rabbi Weinstein came to learn much more recently was that Lee and Kirby were Jewish — born Stanley Lieber and Jacob Kurtzberg, respectively. So it seemed to the rabbi no accident that their comic resonated with a quintessentially Jewish theological theme....

“... I knew the writers were Jewish. That’s a historical fact. And when I bought all the comics, and gave them my rabbi’s reading, I saw something there. Judaism is filled with superheroes and villains — Samson, Pharaoh. And it’s a religion rich in storytelling and in themes of being moral, ethical, spiritual.”

So the Biblical seems comic-book-y because comic books drew from the Bible. Does that mean we can't take "evildoers" seriously?

Weinstein, by the way, has a whole book on the subject: “Up, Up and Oy Vey!” Here's his website, where he calls himself the "Comic Book Rabbi" and writes about "Jewperheroes."

Imaginative filmmaking about living public figures.

Two weeks ago we were talking -- and talking -- about whether it was wrong for filmmakers -- in "The Path to 9/11" -- to make up scenes and dialogue depicting real public figures engaged in historical events. Here's another example of that sort of thing:

In Stephen Frears’s new movie, “The Queen,” Elizabeth II is shown driving a Range Rover at her family’s remote Scottish retreat, trapped in an unpleasant conversation with her eldest son, Prince Charles.

The subject is Diana, Princess of Wales, whose death that week has sent Britain into a convulsion of collective grief (not shared by the royal family). When an emotionally confused Charles begins to babble about what a good mother Diana was — physically affectionate, full of love — it is clear what he is really saying: “You never hugged me as a child.”

That’s it for him. Abruptly the queen gets out of the car and opens the back door, liberating a passel of eager dogs. Her voice lifts. “Walkies!” she trills.

The situation is of course imagined, the pair played by actors (Helen Mirren as the queen, Alex Jennings as Charles), the dialogue wholly made up and the filmmaker’s undertaking a daring one.

Imagine Queen Elizabeth demanding that the movie be yanked -- britted? -- the way Clinton did about "The Path to 9/11."

Languedoc.

Nina returns for the harvest. Seriously, if you are into wine or France, you need to hang out over on Nina's blog. Even if you abstain from wine and hate France, you might want to go there just because the colors purple and green are beautiful:

"The Netroots Hit Their Limits."

Says Time Magazine:

Moderate Democrats say it with remorse, conservatives with glee, but the conventional wisdom is bipartisan: progressive bloggers are pushing the Democratic Party so far to the left that it will have no chance of capturing the presidency in 2008.

Or maybe the Netroots aren't all that. Make no mistake, these online activists are having a profound impact on the Democrats and on politics in general. But the phenomenon is in its infancy.

But, according to the article, the total number of readers of these blogs is perhaps only about enough to elect a governor in California (if they were all in California), and the total amount of money they've raised in the last year is less than the amount you need to run for Congress in a single district.

No one recognizes the Netroots' limits more than the activists themselves, which is why they are changing their tactics. First of all, they're becoming pragmatic about policy goals.

They're laying off some topics, like gay marriage, and supporting some centrists.

What's more, the Netroots are, paradoxically, attempting to maximize their effectiveness by going off-line.

There's still, fortunately, the need to get out and interact with people in the real world... or at least to run TV ads and make phone calls. How horrific it would be if the strange folk who furiously type away on computer keyboards all day were calling the shots!

Now we know it's a publicity stunt.

Oprah's suing him for running an Oprah for President website, and Patrick Crowe continues to push for Oprah for President. And don't give me that oh, he's a retired math teacher crap. He's selling a book.

Patrick Crowe says he is having a blast promoting talk-show icon Oprah Winfrey for president. Winfrey's lawyers are not.

Crowe has been unofficially campaigning for the first lady of daytime TV for years. The Kansas City man's Web site comes complete with a campaign song and volunteer sign-up. He also sells "Oprah for President" T-shirts.

Please note. I'm not saying Oprah should win. (Her claims are based on copyright and trademark law.) I think there should be plenty of room for people to make websites and write books about public figures. I'm just saying that the guy is obviously not just some character who wants Oprah Winfrey to be President:

"It has become increasingly serious to me," Crowe, who opposes the Bush administration and its foreign policy, told The Kansas City Star for a story Friday. "I know Oprah can do better than that."

Mmm-hmmm. You figured out a way to get attention for your anti-Bush opinions in this noisy world of opinion.

Anyway, would Oprah be a good President? I think she's too litigious.

"I'd like to go back and do the impeachment again."

Says Henry Hyde, who prosecuted Clinton and has had time to reflect on what went wrong:

"I was soft on the treatment we received from the Senate. We couldn't produce a witness without their permission. I should have had the president come in and testify. And if the Senate wouldn't let me, I should have gone before the body and Chief Justice Rehnquist and made a motion. That would have dramatized that the Senate was not letting us try our case. A lot of things could have been done differently."

Oh, yes. It's a shame no one gets much practice at this, isn't it?