Well, Glenn Beck continues to score points against Obama Administration apparatchiks, if only because the later seem to go about pointing to the big red targets on their chests. In case anyone doesn't know it, White House Communications Director Anita Dunn, who has taken point in one war the Obama Administration isn't conflicted about, against Fox News, said some interesting things about Mao Tse-tung. Apparently giving some kind of pep talk earlier this year, she said this:

The third lesson and tip actually comes from two of my favorite political philosophers: Mao Tse-tung and Mother Theresa -- not often coupled with each other, but the two people I turn to most to basically deliver a simple point which is 'you're going to make choices; you're going to challenge; you're going to say why not; you're going to figure out how to do things that have never been done before.

And this:

In 1947, when Mao Tse Tung was being challenged within his own party on his plan to basically take China over, Chiang Kai?shek and the Nationalist Chinese held the cities, they had the army, they had the air force, they had everything on their side. And people said, "How can you win? How can you do this? How can you do this against all of the odds against you?" And Mao Tse Tung said, you know, "You fight your war, and I'll fight mine."

Now I think it is silly to suggest that Ms. Dunn ought to resign over this. Saying something painfully stupid, especially when she didn't seem to be acting in her official capacity, is not usually a firing offense. Give enough speeches, write enough blog posts, and sooner or later you will discover that you have done it.

But it was painfully stupid. To begin with, whatever Mother Theresa and Mao were, they weren't political philosophers. I remember when George W. was asked to name his favorite political philosopher, and he named Jesus. Christ wasn't a political philosopher either. Bush didn't escape criticism, and neither should Ms. Dunn.

And it doesn't help to claim that she got the comparison from Bush 41 advisor Lee Atwater or to say, as some of her defenders have said, that a strategist for Barry Goldwater once claimed to follow Mao's guidance. It was a dumb thing for anyone on either side to do.

Mao Tse-tung was the most prolific and monstrous mass murderer in the history of prolific and monstrous mass murderers. In raw numbers, neither Hitler nor Stalin can compete. He was probably responsible for the death of almost, and perhaps more than, a hundred million people. During the "Great Leap Forward," he caused the starvation of tens of millions. His personal physician recounted that Mao would eat turtle soup and listen to glowing reports of economic progress, while just outside his window the streets were lined with corpses. During the "Cultural Revolution" he set virtually every one of his subjects against every other, creating a horror such as the world may never have known before or since.

Now it's true that Mao was effectively ambitious, and it's logically possible to admire his ambition and some of his talents apart from the fact that he was a monster. But for purposes of rhetoric, this is a very bad idea. Imagine if George W. Bush had spoken admirably of the executive efficiency and fiscal management of Francisco Franco! This just isn't the best way to go about inspiring people. Besides, it risks sending some very bad messages.

Ms. Dunn spoke the way she did because she suffers from the common blindness of the Left when it comes to "progressives" like Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. But that's okay. She only the White House Communications Director.

Modern social science has long been in love with the idea of a virtuous past. Margret Mead's Samoan fantasy of a culture without adolescent angst or any form of sexual oppression stands out. Similarly, early studies of Chimpanzees presented us with a perfectly peaceful relative, who did nothing all day but eat and have sex. Think of it as a spa species. These scientific fantasies had their counterparts in, and frequently gave rise to, similar sexy dreams in popular culture. Herman Melville may be famous for Moby Dick, but he made his money on Typee, a semi-biographical novel that involved a couple of Americans and a lot of naked, brown women. And then there are the paintings of Gauguin.

All of this was nonsense, of course. Mead's Samoa was like everywhere else: fathers striving to protect their daughter's virginity and young men using their upper body strength to get what they wanted. Chimpanzees, meanwhile, have turned out to compare favorably only to certain dead Rap artists. Our nearest mammalian cousin is geared for war, and brutal in his politics.

Recent archeology has corrected a number of myths about the original Americans. It seems clear now that Native American civilizations were much more advanced and much more extensive than previously thought. It is also clear that they did not live in harmony with their environment, nor did their civilized life represent a model for modern civilization.

Andrew O'Hehir has a review at Salon of "Timothy Pauketat's cautious but mesmerizing new book, "Cahokia: Ancient America's Great City on the Mississippi." Cahokia was a great city in North America that thrived a little before Thomas Aquinas discovered Aristotle.

At its peak in the 12th century, this settlement along the Mississippi River bottomland of western Illinois, a few miles east of modern-day St. Louis, was probably larger than London, and held economic, cultural and religious sway over a vast swath of the American heartland. Featuring a man-made central plaza covering 50 acres and the third-largest pyramid in the New World (the 100-foot-tall "Monks Mound"), Cahokia was home to at least 20,000 people. If that doesn't sound impressive from a 21st-century perspective, consider that the next city on United States territory to attain that size would be Philadelphia, some 600 years later.

That's fascinating. Equally interesting and appalling is this:

Simultaneous burials of as many as 53 young women (quite possibly selected for their beauty) have been uncovered beneath Cahokia's mounds, and in some cases victims were evidently clubbed to death on the edge of a burial pit, and then fell into it. A few of them weren't dead yet when they went into the pit -- skeletons have been found with their phalanges, or finger bones, digging into the layer of sand beneath them.

That is more than remarkable. Throughout human history women have been considered a vital resource, and for obvious biological reasons: a few men can have about as many children as a lot of men, but reduce the number of women and you sacrifice some of your society's reproductive potential. Fifty-three young women is a real sacrifice.

And there is this description of a mound excavated in the late sixties:

This mound contained a high-status burial of two nearly identical male bodies, one of them wrapped in a beaded cape or cloak in the shape of a thunderbird, an ancient and mystical Native American symbol. Surrounding this "beaded burial" the diggers gradually uncovered more and more accompanying corpses, an apparent mixture of honorific burials and human sacrifices evidently related to the two important men. It appeared that 53 lower-status women were sacrificed specifically to be buried with the men -- perhaps a harem or a group of slaves from a nearby subject village, Pauketat thinks -- and that a group of 39 men and women had been executed on the spot, possibly a few years later. In all, more than 250 people were interred in and around Mound 72.

Another sacrificial site contained a lot of other good stuff.

Analyzing the strata of rotting gunk found therein, Pauketat concludes that there was probably an upside to Cahokia's appalling "mortuary rituals," which he suspects were officious public ceremonies  to honor the ruling family or to install a new king. The garbage dump reveals the remains of enormous Cahokian festivals, involving as many as 3,900 slaughtered deer, 7,900 earthenware pots, and vast amounts of pumpkins, corn, porridge, nuts and berries. There was enough food to feed all of Cahokia at once, and enough potent native tobacco -- a million charred seeds at a time -- to give the whole city a near-hallucinogenic nicotine buzz.

Civilization arose independently in the new world, evidence that the trajectory of human development was firmly pointed in that direction. I wonder why mass human sacrifice was so prevalent in Native American cultures. I note that the adolescence of human civilization was marked by despotism and bloodshed everywhere and always. It took a long time for us to mature, if indeed we have or ever will.

But I also note that this gruesome confirms, in an odd way, the natural human inclination to think in terms of justice and reciprocity. What were the ancient Cahokians trying to do, by slaughtering so many men and woman, and sacrificing so much bounty? Increase the aura of their upper class, to be sure. But they were also trying to bargain with the gods. In return for all this virgin blood, you big spirits need to make the crops grow and our enemies diminish. It is terrible to say so, but only a basically moral animal could think that way.

I was one of a number of scholars lucky enough to be invited to the Illinois Politics and Biology Summer Institute, sponsored by the National Science Foundation. The Directors include Ira Carmen, a political scientist who writes extensively on genetics and politics, and Gene Robinson, a biologist who spends his time working on links between the genes and social behaviors of honey bees. The Institute is meeting at the Institute for Genomic Biology on the campus of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

The pace is pretty brutal for this kind of thing: eight solid hours a day of presentation and discussion. Most of the NSF fellows are youngsters by my standard: working on their Ph.D.s, or just finished. I am learning to settle in as the designated old fart.

Today we covered the history of the American Political Science Association, founded in 1903 by, well, a bunch of Darwinists. But the APSA quickly ran away from biology following the historicist trend of the times. According to this latter perspective, human behavior and institutions were to be viewed as "socially constructed", that is, as if human beings constructed their institutions entirely apart from the natural world and its influences.

There were some good reasons for this. In 1903 there just wasn't enough known about biology, genetics, or evolution to usefully guide the social sciences. When such knowledge did begin to become available, there was enormous resistance on the part of most political scientists. For one thing, they didn't want to have to learn any real science. For another, there was fear that biological explanations would limit social progress and support regressive political ideas.

The coining of the phrase "Sociogenomics" (even the word genomics is rather new), indicates that the pendulum is finally swinging back toward nature as the foundation of a real political science.

The second topic we focused on today, and the one that was deeply fascinating to me, is the shift in the view of genes and how they operate. Many of those who fear genetic explanations of human behavior have the idea that genes are fixed influences, so that if a gene codes for some kind of behavior, then a person or organism that has one version will act one way and a person or organism that has another version will act another way. This view is sometimes called genetic determinism.

But it is not how genes work. Genes are composed of DNA and code directly for MRNA (which is now pronounced emarenay, I have learned). MRNA (messenger RNA) is used by cells to produce the proteins that in turn influence the structure and behavior and pretty much everything else that characterizes a living being.

Now here is the really cool thing: while DNA is fixed (except when changed by mutation), the expression of the genes in different Messenger RNA messages is flexible. The way the Chromatin wraps around itself determines how the genes will be expressed in the fully realized organism. That in turn can be influenced by the environment.

For example: adult honey bees ordinarily begin their careers as nurses, working to tend the larvae. After a few weeks the nurse graduates to the forager/soldier role. It begins its self-guided education by taking a few test flights from the hive, orienting itself with respect to the sun and the location of its home. Once it begins foraging in earnest, it will know how to return to the hive and indicate the location of flowers by doing a very expressive dance.

But sometimes the hive will lose many or most of its forgers when the environment turns against them. The foragers secret a pheromone that alerts the nurse/workers to their presence and gives the latter a sense of how many foragers are coming in and out. When the pheromone concentration in the hive drops below a certain level, the expression of the foraging genes in the workers changes and they become "precocious foragers" switching to the new role in the first week of their adulthood. Same genes. Different time table.

Likewise, when mother mouse licks her young, this maternal care alters the expression of genes that give the young a lifelong resistance to stress, and helps trigger maternal instincts in the females when they mature. Again, the same genes are expressed in different brain structures and behavior. That is so cool. Genetic influence is not genetic determinism.

Now, if I get this right, the genes that are under review in these examples exist as orthologs in human beings. An ortholog is a gene that exists in similar form in two species and that was inherited from a common ancestor. Some genes have been conserved with very little change over long stretches of evolutionary history.

One of the themes of this institute is that we are beginning to correlate genes with behavior patterns in human beings. More on that tomorrow, I think. Of course, what we don't know and won't know for a while dwarfs what we do know. It may be possible to correlate this gene here with that behavior over there, but we know very little about the chain of causation that connects the one to the other. What we are learning is that genes do not cause behavior, let alone passions and experience. Rather, gene expression exists in a dynamic relationship with human structure, experience, and behavior, as is the case with other creatures. I think this is the greatest show on earth.

My dear friend Miranda raised this question in an earlier comment:

I was watching the protest on CNN earlier today and I noticed that for some reason, the police in the footage had signs that read, "police". In English. Do you have any idea why? It reminded me of the "baby milk factory" incident.

I didn't know why. But this column in Slate has an answer:

Post-election protests continued in Tehran for the fifth day on Wednesday. In many photos, riot police wear uniforms with the English word police on them. Ambulances, too, bear the word ambulance in English. Why not use Persian words instead of their English equivalents?

Because everyone knows English. Like many capital cities, Tehran has its emergency personnel wear markings that are internationally recognizable. Street signs, too, are translated into English, and police cars are generally inscribed in both English and Persian. That makes the city more tourist-friendly without sacrificing clarity for locals. After all, the Persian word for police is the same: polise. (Persian, or Farsi, is an Indo-European language that uses an Arabic script, but people will often use Latin lettering, also known as Penglish or Fingilish, especially when typing or texting.) It's also the same word in French (police), German (polizei), Italian (polizia), Czech (policie), and many other languages. Iranian students are required to take English classes in high school. So using the English word for police actually maximizes the number of people who will understand it.

This is actually an important philosophical point. It occurred to me once while watching a film of Saddam Hussein reviewing his troops that he and they were dressed in Euro-American military garb. Just then I was reading one of Bernard Lewis's magnificent books on the Middle East. Lewis began by setting a scene: two Arab men sitting at a café, smoking, drinking coffee, and playing chess. He pointed out how much of Islamic culture has been imported (well, maybe not drinking coffee, and playing chess) from the West.

The idea of multiculturalism has been big of late, but it has been surprisingly weak. The reason is that it is based on a mistake. It supposes that there are a vast number of cultures in the world, when in fact there are only two.

One is the centered culture, centered in our people, our city, here. From the point of view of this culture, everything else is "out there." Everyone else is a foreigner, a stranger, an enemy. The ancient Greek word for stranger was the same as that for enemy.

The other culture is the culture of travel. No matter where you go, there you are. In the plains, the mountains look tall; from the mountains, the plains look low. See Herodotus.

Centered culture was once the dominate culture on planet earth. With the growth of trade, it gradually eroded. Herodotus noticed that in different places, people did things different ways, and that each looked strange and even disgusting to the other. With that kind of insight, travel culture was born.

The word "police" on the Iranian police car is a sign that travel culture is now supreme. For historical reasons, travel culture is almost the same thing as Western Culture. This may be a mere historical accident. But it is an accident that happened.

ps.  Late night and poor editing led to an error which has now been corrected.  Thanks, Lisa.

The American Left has always had a soft spot for Castro.  While President Obama was off schmoozing the French and the Turks (a necessary if largely fruitless business), the Congressional Black Caucus was visiting the Saruman of the Caribbean Fidel, and his brother Raul.  They put up no resistance to the sweet voice of tyranny.  This from the LA Times:

How's this for hope and change: U.S. officials flying to Cuba, not to interrogate prisoners at Guantanamo Bay but to meet with the Castro brothers in order to ease the 50-year tensions between the two nations.

The aging, ailing, cigar-smoking icon Fidel Castro had three members of Congress visit with him today in Havana, which resulted in the bearded one asking, "How can we help President Obama?"  In an effort to improve the relationship between Cuba and the U.S., Reps. Barbara Lee (D-Oakland), Bobby L. Rush (D-Ill.) and Emanuel Cleaver II (D-Mo.) were the first U.S. officials to meet with the 82-year-old former dictator since his intestinal surgery in July 2006.

"I'm convinced Raul Castro wants a normal relationship with the United States," Lee said after the meeting with the 77-year-old, the Associated Press reported. "He's serious."

"I think that what really surprised me, but also endeared me to him, was his keen sense of humor, his sense of history and his basic human qualities," Rush said. "I intend to do everything that I can when we get back to the States to make sure that normalization with our relationship with Cuba is given proper consideration both within the House of Representatives and the neighborhoods of America."

Mona Charen has some interesting comments:

"This is the dawning of a new day,'' exclaimed Rep. Bobby Rush, D-Ill. "In my household I told Castro he is known as the ultimate survivor."

Funny how easy it is to survive when you don't hold elections. And when all of your opponents wind up in prison or dead. And when even those who dare to whisper a word of dissent to your absolute rule find themselves harassed, beaten, humiliated, and imprisoned. According to the Black Book of Communism, more than 100,000 Cubans have served time for political offenses in Cuba's equivalent of the Gulag Archipelago since Castro came to power in 1959. Among those particularly singled out for persecution were human rights activists, homosexuals, and religious believers.

Castro is a tyrant.  What is it that makes him so attractive to people who never have to worry about being arrested in the middle of the night?  Why this fondness for a man and a regime that view independent librarians as a disease to be cured? 

Attitudes toward prisons are one of those things that constitute the cultural divide in America. The left sees prisons as a social failure. A better society would address the root causes of crime, and so few if any prisons would be needed. When people do commit crimes, gentler means of correction can be found. The right thinks that the root cause of crime is criminals, and criminals are a persistent product of human nature. Gentleness towards brutal people does not produce encouraging results. The right is closer to the truth (what else would you expect me to say), but as they say, the issue is complicated.

Slate has a fine piece by John Pfaff: "Five Myths about Prison Growth." Pfaff begins by saying that the growth of prison populations has to be cut back. He is probably right about that. But I am guessing that most of the myths he demolishes are myths dear to the left.

Here is the gist.

1. It is a myth that long sentences drive prison growth. The average prison sentence served is about two years.
2. Low-level drug offenders do not make up a significant portion of the prison population. Only about 20% of prisoners are there for drug-related offenses, and most of those are dealers, not users.
3. Technical parole violations do not drive prison growth.
4. Recent trends in prison growth do not represent a divergence from other nations. The U.S. has always been harsher towards criminals than most other nations.
5. Contrary to liberal dogma, the increase in incarceration rates has resulted in a decrease in crime rates. Other factors have to be considered. But Pfaff says that the increase in prison populations is responsible for 30% of the decrease in crime.

This is food for thought. Half of the people in prison are there for violent crimes. Another 20% are there for property offenses. The object of penal policy is to protect law abiding citizens from criminals. It may be that we can do this more cheaply if we spend more on drug addiction treatment, etc. But we are fooling ourselves if we think that this will make more than a marginal difference.

Well, it happens in France. From Breitbart.com:

SAINT-DENIS, France (AP) - Two Molotov cocktails were hurled at a synagogue north of Paris, the latest attack in what France's interior minister said Monday is a new wave of anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim attacks over the violence in Gaza. No injuries were reported.

President Nicolas Sarkozy met with religious leaders and reiterated the need to avoid "transposing" onto French soil a foreign conflict the country has been working to ease, his office said.

Firebombs broke a window and charred the walls of a pizzeria on the ground floor at Chabad House Ohr Manahem, in the town of Saint-Denis, said Isroeil Belinow, the synagogue's assistant rabbi. Belinow said police found 15 other unignited firebombs nearby.

Interior Minister Michele Alliot-Marie said France has faced a "very clear increase" in anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim attacks since Israel started an offensive against the militant group Hamas in Gaza on Dec. 27.

God bless these Islamist terrorists. They aren't any better at getting their bombs to go off than they are at aiming their rockets. But what about these "anti-Muslim attacks" that began with Israel's Gaza offensive? As Powerline points out, there don't seem to be any.

[Interior Minister Michele Alliot-Marie] declined to provide specific figures on the increase, though she insisted police have been instructed to protect religious sites and places of worship.

Okay. I grant you that Muslims in Europe or America are often subject to prejudice. That's wrong, and it should stop. But do they really have to be afraid? Jews do. Daniel Schawammenthal tells the story in the Wall Street Journal:

There have been arson attempts on synagogues in Britain, Belgium and Germany. Police last week arrested Muslim protesters who wanted to enter the Jewish quarter in Antwerp. Several Danish schools with large Muslim student bodies say they won't enroll Jewish kids because they can't guarantee the children's safety. In France, a group of teenagers attacked a 14-year-old girl last week, calling her "dirty Jew" while kicking her.

At rallies in Germany and the Netherlands over the past two weeks, protesters shouted, "Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the Gas." In Amsterdam, Socialist lawmaker Harry van Bommel and Greta Duisenberg, widow of the first European Central Bank president, marched at the front of one such "peace" demonstration. They didn't join in the background chorus calling for another Holocaust. Instead, they chanted, "Intifada, Intifada, Free Palestine." Mr. Van Bommel later insisted this wasn't a call for Jewish blood but for "civil disobedience" -- a laughable defense given that terrorists during the last intifada murdered more than 1,000 Israelis.

Jew-hatred is the canary in the coal mine, the little evil that should warn us of the big evil. It's that little itch in the back of your attention span that is screaming for you to pay attention.

In response to my last post, I received a couple of thought-provoking comments from DJ. I will deal with each in turn.

Genes may load the gun and environment, may pull the trigger, but for mankind not necessarily. In the animal kingdom genes establish a predetermined predisposition. A lion act differently than a monkey by reason of instinct. Both however are driven by a need to survive in their environment and their level of intelligence is no greater than what is needed to survive. Mankind with a much greater level of emotions is intelligent way beyond what is needed for survival and in addition expresses behavior unknown in the animal kingdom. You cannot compare the species.

I agree with you, DJ, that human beings are distinct enough from other animals to deserve their own category. In this, we are siding with Aristotle. But the difference is not nearly as great as you suppose. In fact many animals are quite capable of flexible responses to their environments. In an experiment I saw when I was in grade school, a couple of worms were placed in a t-shaped maze, with sandpaper on one side and food on the other. They learned after a few trips down the maze to turn right every time. Heck, I expect they voted for McCain.

More advanced animals can rapidly respond to very sophisticated problems with astonishing flexibility. Chimpanzee cultures have been observed, which include simple technologies for finding food that have to be taught. So I think you are wrong to say that you cannot compare the species. You can, and it's very illuminating.

Looking to the animal world for explanation for human behavior is a dead end street. Genes may load the gun and environment may pull the trigger but it fails to explain greed, avarice, deceit, hate, love, sacrifice, Hitler and Stalin. The animals are driven by a need to meet their survival needs only. Even their play is designed towards that end. A favored pet will follow anyone who provides its needs. Genes can be overcome but no animal in the wild can deny its preprogrammed nature. An eagle will always arrange the sticks to form a nest and not a cottage. Mankind with its enormous intelligence way beyond its need to survive cannot be compared to those creatures whose intelligence is limited to its survival needs.

Again, I cannot agree. Far from being a dead end street, there is a veritable metropolis of research results and research programs at the end of that road. Why are human males so much more likely to end up in prison? Over 90% of the prison population in every country is male. Well, males across a vast range of species are larger, better armed, and more aggressive. The simple reason is that they have to compete with other males for reproductive opportunities. Bigger males get the doe; the doe gives birth to bigger males. Or consider the testes to body-mass ratio. In primate species where the large male enjoys exclusive access to a harem, the ratio is low. Small balls. In a species where the males male promiscuously with all the females, the ratio is very high. The males have to produce enough semen to wash out the previous suitor. Super-soaker two thousand. What about human beings? Being in the middle with regard to behavior (mostly monogamous, but with cheating), our t/bm ratio is also in the middle.

I do not agree that all the things you mention cannot be explained, in part, by genetics. "Greed, avarice, deceit, hate, love, sacrifice," are all observed among animals. Hitler and Stalin are possible only in large, advanced societies, but the desire for dominion is present in the simplest societies.

The human mind is the result of what evolutionary theorists call "runaway selection." Sometimes a species trait becomes part of an adaptational dynamic where more keeps resulting in a net reproductive success. The peacock's tail, or the extraordinary antlers on the extinct Irish elk are examples. At some point in the history of our species, more intelligence and reproductive success became bound up in a feedback loop.

Human beings may be more than animals. They are at least animals. Evolution doesn't start from scratch with each speciation; it lays innovations on top of well established systems. Only we can write poetry. But just like the newt, we are composed of cells.

File under "someone had to say it, we just didn't think it would be her." I have read Katha Pollitt only on occasion, and she always struck me as one of the more strident feminist intellectuals. She writes a column for The Nation, which I also read only on occasion for the same reason I read National Review only on occasion. Neither has many surprises in store. Pollitt's recent column on Bill Ayers is a major surprise. Here is a lengthy passage, but I couldn't bring myself to cut any of it.

"I never killed or injured anyone, "Ayers writes. "In 1970, I co-founded the Weather Underground, an organization that was created after an accidental explosion that claimed the lives of three of our comrades in Greenwich Village." Right. Those people belonged to Weatherman, as did Ayers himself and Bernardine Dohrn, now his wife. Weatherman, Weather Underground, completely different! And never mind either that that "accidental explosion" was caused by the making of a nail bomb intended for a dance at Fort Dix.

Ayers writes that Weather Underground bombings were "symbolic acts of extreme vandalism directed at monuments to war and racism, and the attacks on property, never on people, were meant to respect human life and convey outrage and determination to end the Vietnam War." That no one was killed or injured was a monumental stroke of luck-- an unrelated bombing at the University of Wisconsin unintentionally killed a researcher and seriously injured four people. But if the point was to symbolize outrage, why not just spraypaint graffiti on government buildings or pour blood on military documents?

Spectacular violence, and creating fear of it, was the point. Along with beating people up and ridiculous escapades like running naked through white-working-class high schools shouting "Jailbreak!" It was what the Weatherpeople were all about.

"Peaceful protests had failed to stop the war," Ayers writes. " So we issued a screaming response. But it was not terrorism; we were not engaged in a campaign to kill and injure people indiscriminately, spreading fear and suffering for political ends." I'm not so sure that terrorism necessarily involves intentional attacks on people, but okay, let's say Ayers wasn't a terrorist. How about thuggish? Vainglorious? Egomaniacal? Staggeringly irresponsible? And illogical, don't forget illogical: as Hilzoy points out, the idea that because "peaceful protest" hadn't ended the war, bombs would is missing a couple of links. It's like a doctor saying, Well, chemo didn't cure your brain tumor, so I'll have to amputate your leg. It's not as if there was nothing else to try, after all. While Ayers and Dohrn were conveying their outrage, other people were doing the kind of organizing work that the Weather Underground despised as wimpy. Today Ayers blends himself into that broader movement, the "we-- the broad we" that "wrote letters, marched, talked to young men at inductions centers" etc., but at the time, Weatherpeople had nothing but contempt for the rest of the antiwar left. Writing letters? Off the pig! you might as well... become a community organizer! [My emphasis]

Wow. I posted on this topic, but I didn't write anything as good or as on target as that. She is certainly right to point out that Ayers's "we only bombed things" excuse is obscene. There is no way that someone planting bombs on public targets can be sure that no one will be injured or killed. The truth was that the "attacks on property" were play terrorism, "monkey warfare," as Abbie Hoffman called it in Steal This Book. The bomb that killed three Weatherpeople in the Greenwich Village townhouse, on the other hand, was intended to kill people. Ayers now claims that he refused to go along with this turn and decided to get out, but I agree with Pollitt that this is pure whitewash. Did he take steps to stop his colleagues from carrying out their murderous plans?

But what Pollitt shows is that Ayers was not only a terrorist (for all practical purposes) but that he was just as contemptuous of the real anti-war Left as he was of America in general. Ayers was the kind of Leftist who, if he had ever got his fingers on real power, would have rounded up his former friends along with all the regressives.

It's okay to have Ayers as an esteemed professor of education if you wouldn't mind an endowed chair for, say, a would-be Mumbai gunman who didn't manage to make the boat and years later claimed that he suddenly got scruples. Ayers is one of the Sons of Mary. Wealth and privilege and dumb luck smiled on him. That's alright. The world is like that. But it is important to know what it is. Well done Ms. Pollitt.

I thought my post on the New Yorker cover might draw a response.  It did.  Just after I posted it I noticed that my esteemed Keloland colleague Bob Schwartz also posted on the cover, presenting a case against the cover.  Bob has this:

Of course The “New Yorker” is standing by their cover despite the condemnation that is coming pretty much from all sides including both the Obama and McCain campaign’s. They state that the satire was obvious and that their readership was smart enough to figure out the real meaning.

The problem with that logic of course is that while the “New Yorker’s” readers might be smart enough, as the WND poll shows, not everyone is a “New Yorker” kind of reader and all that cover has really done is put an image to the ridiculous beliefs of those who refuse to do even the most basic research and who probably shouldn’t be voting in the first place.

Intrepid reader BB has this comment, in much the same spirit:

I should send BB a stipend for acting as a proof reader.  Thanks, Bob.  I corrected the typo.  As to the substance, what my colleague and reader seem to be saying is that political humor should be limited to the lowest common denominator.  Unless the bozos can get it, don't print it.  I could not disagree more. 

Did George Carlin worry about the goof balls who wouldn't get his satire?   I dare say not.  Political humor is supposed to be edgy, and ought to be clever.  It is frequently harsh and biting.  Sometimes it makes great demands of its audience, which is as it should be. But if you want it to be good, you can't put shackles on it or expect it to abide by Marquis of Queensbury rules.  Here might be my favorite example of political humor, or assassination, depending on your view.

The English actor and playwright Samuel Foote (1720-1777) was engaged in argument with Lord Sandwich in, where else, a pub.  "Foote," said Lord Sandwich, "I have often wondered what catastrophe would bring you to your end, but I think you must die either by the pox, or on the gallows."  Foote replied without missing a beat: "That would depend on whether I embrace your lordship's mistress, or your lordship's principles."  Not that was a good English foote to the arse.    There wasn't enough left of Sandwich to bury in a condom. 

Most political humor does not rise to that level of cleverness.  The New Yorker cover certainly did not.  But if you want to strangle cleverness in its crib, you need only insist that all comedy be in good taste, and that it respect the sensitivity of the issues.  The reaction to the New Yorker cover in the general press demonstrates that our political culture has become altogether too stuffy.  It's high time some good wits let a little air out of our shirts. 

I am beginning to suspect that one could predict Obama's support in any state by adding the number of Black voters to the number of white voters who ever owned, or even thought of owning, a lava lamp.  Hence Oregon (pronounced Or-ah-gen). With about half the precincts counted, Obama is leading Clinton by a cool 16 points. 

But Ms. C got lucky in Kentucky.  With 100% of the vote recorded, she once again flattened Obama 65/30%.  To put that in perspective, election watchers usually call a margin of 10% or better a landslide.  Margins of 20% or better suggest an election that was never really competitive.  When one of the candidates is a well-liked incumbent, or the other got caught in a prostitution scandal, that's when you expect such lopsided margins.  A victory of 35% usually requires both. 

Obama carried Louisville and Lexington-Fayette counties.  That's two small bruises on an otherwise solidly Clinton map.  By contrast, the exit polls tell us almost nothing, because Ms. Clinton took pretty much every defined group by 60% or more. 

Obama has a problem.  There a large stretches of territory in these United States where he couldn't be elected sanitation engineer.  There is a meme developing to explain this, if not explain it away: call it the Hillbilly meme. You can find a discussion of it at Salon. 

In analyzing the returns from last week's West Virginia Democratic primary, a phalanx of reporters and commentators have explained Hillary Clinton's landslide victory by pointing out that West Virginians are a special set of Democrats, white, low income and undereducated. Some, like Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo and Jonathan Tilove of the Newhouse papers, have linked the lackluster performance of Barack Obama in West Virginia to a larger Appalachian problem. ...

The legions of pseudonym-laden online posters who follow in political punditry's wake are less restrained in describing the shortcomings of Sen. Clinton's Appalachian supporters. They suggest it has to do with her voters being racist, toothless, shoeless, and prone to marrying their cousins. In short, they characterize these "special" Democrats in much the same terms they used in quieter times to describe Republicans...

However, the unnerving truth for the erstwhile party of Jefferson may be that Appalachia, for all its legend and lore, is not that different politically from the rest of the small-town and rural parts of the country where 60 million of us live. And that could mean trouble for the fall...

When you look at the earlier aggregate rural vote on Super Tuesday, the preference for Clinton is clearly not confined to Appalachia. Combining the results from 22 diverse states in the Northeast, South, Midwest and West on Feb. 5, Clinton beat Obama 55 percent to 38 percent among rural voters, according to an analysis in DailyYonder.com, the news Web site of the organization I head, the Center for Rural Strategies. Those aren't West Virginia margins, but they aren't close. They shine a light on a vulnerability that Democrats have shared through the last several election cycles. 

The reality is that when Democratic candidates run competitively in rural America, they win national elections. And when they get creamed in rural America, they lose. That was Bill Clinton's reality in winning as it was the reality for Al Gore and John Kerry in narrowly losing.

This is the problem that the Democrats face.  Their party is divided between hip waders and lava lamps.  When some who appeals to the hip waders gets nominated, the lava lamps fall into line.  But it doesn't necessarily work in reverse.  We might be about to watch the Party of Jefferson once again snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.