Media Bistro:

NBC’s Brian Williams took to MSNBC today at noon (1/8) and had this to say:

WILLIAMS: I interviewed Lee Cowan, our reporter who covers Obama, while we were out yesterday and posted the interview on the web. Lee says it’s hard to stay objective covering this guy. Courageous for Lee to say, to be honest.

James Lewis:

What adult would vote for a totally untested presidential candidate by falling in love? Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich, Senator Joe Biden, and a million other Democrats — that’s who. The New York Times stable of Leftie pundits is reliving the Decade of Love. The Washington press corps has the teenie bopper hots over Barack Obama — such a romantic name. A real African! Almost.

What does he believe? What has he actually done? Uhmmmm… Well…

It’s Son of Camelot! And he’s got the youth vote! Children just know these things!

This is straight out of Dumb and Dumber. If you despaired about the media’s endless love affair with Bill Clinton, the Master of Slick, because he Cares About You, you’ll get to revisit those feelings now. For we have a new national idol!

Children often have fantasies about a Good Parent — one who loves you and takes care of you forever and ever, who forgives your transgressions whatever they may be, who demands nothing, and never, ever hurts your feelings. Obama is now the Good Parent of the childish Left — a good majority of the Dems, it would seem.

In a child’s mind the Good Parent is often played against a complementary fantasy, the Bad Parent — call them Republicans in this case. The Bad Parent stands for the sterner aspects of reality. Since Leftism is basically an infantile protest against adulthood, Republicans represent what Sigmund Freud called the Reality Principle.

Even assuming those flying monkeys do bring Hillary the presidency this time, a fundamental strategic problem for democrats remains, William Voegeli points out. They may win one now and then, but the albatross of leftism is permanently hanging from their necks.

The Journals of the late Arthur Schlesinger have received a good deal of attention, but most of it has concerned Schlesinger’s writing style, personality, or the broad topic of keeping and publishing diaries. The strangely neglected question of Schlesinger’s politics is finally addressed by the New Yorker’s George Packer, writing as one liberal assessing another. “In [Schlesinger’s] long record of speeches, conferences, lunches at the Century, and dinners at Mortimer’s,” observes Packer, “there’s an unmistakable sense that liberal politics belonged to a small group of the rich and famous who all knew one another and knew what was best for the rest of the country, while knowing less and less about the rest of the country. . . . It’s possible, even if you agree with almost every position Schlesinger held, to find the smugness and complacency not just annoying but fatal. His crowd made liberalism a fat target for the New Right; Reagan and his heirs seized the language and claims of populism from liberals who believed that they had had permanent possession [of it] ever since Roosevelt.”

One subtext of the 2008 election is liberals’ effort to convey that they now “get it” – they understand the damage this elitism inflicted on their cause in a way Schlesinger never did. Packer’s critique of Schlesinger is one instance. Eric Alterman’s assertion that, “One of the great mistakes liberals made in the 1970s was to try to win in the courts what they could not win at the ballot box – thereby allowing their democratic muscles and instincts [to] atrophy and helping to inspire a right-wing backlash against which they were defenseless,” is another.

These mea culpas, however, always turn out to be sorta culpas. No sooner does Alterman identify judicial activism as one of liberalism’s great mistakes than his litany of the “catastrophes” that have befallen America during the Bush years includes “the attack on . . . choice.” The goal of this insidious attack is to re-democratize abortion policy, 35 years after the Supreme Court reduced the number of Americas who could affect it to nine. Roe v. Wade is the biggest land-grab of all the liberal efforts to secure a political victory in the courts that they couldn’t win anywhere else. Conservatives try to reverse this great mistake, and give liberals a chance to rebuild their democratic muscles, and Alterman sputters with rage.

The problem is that liberalism incorporated the agenda and the up-against-the-wall style of the various radicalisms of the 1960s in ways that now make disentangling the New Deal and New Left genomes impossible. According to James Piereson, the ideology that emerged from the 1960s was “punitive liberalism,” which “parted company from earlier liberal reformers such as FDR, Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson, who viewed reform as a means of bringing the promise of American life within reach of more of our people.” Punitive liberals wanted America to atone for its sins rather than solve its problems. Their goal was to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” as one of the era’s slogan’s had it. The comfortable, made numerous by the postwar boom, deserved to be afflicted because America needed to be redeemed. Arthur Schlesinger, for example, said that we all killed Robert Kennedy: Americans have become “the most frightening people on this planet . . . because the atrocities we commit trouble so little our official self-righteousness, our invincible conviction of our moral infallibility.” This heat-of-the-moment judgment, made in the hours after RFK was shot, was one Schlesinger repeated in a subsequent magazine article and book.

The current liberal attitude about the sort of bourgeois-baiting rhetoric and policies they favored 35 years ago is: don’t worry, that’s all behind us now . . . although it was completely defensible and really quite noble. Salon’s Joan Walsh writes, “Pushed by the civil rights, antiwar and women’s movement, the Democrats [in the 1960s] became the party of inclusion, of racial equality. The Democrats became the party that questioned unchecked U.S. military adventurism and untrammeled corporate power. In my opinion these were all good ideas, but the anxiety they engendered helped lead to 20 years of Republicans in the White House, interrupted briefly by Jimmy Carter after Nixon went too far. Reagan ousted Carter by continuing to hammer away at Democrats as the party of minorities and the poor. Sure, he talked about ‘Morning in America’ and that ‘shining city on a hill,’ but he mostly played on fears that liberalism had run amok.”

Walsh can’t or won’t ask whether there was something about liberalism that engendered the anxiety that Republicans could exploit. Favoring inclusion and opposing military adventures and corporate power doesn’t sound like a recipe for defeat. Canvassing for votes from people you’ve castigated as the most frightening on the face of the planet does.

Hat tip to the Barrister.

One of my classmates has the habit of posting the columns of Frank Rich, Paul Krugman, and some other leftwing editorialists on our class list, in place of his own opinions. (I suppose the reality is he is simply so accustomed to drawing all his opinions from those sources that he has no others of his own to post.)

Happily, life has gotten easier for him. It seems that last year, Evan Coyne Maloney created an Automatic Bob Herbert column generator, operating in much the manner of the Autorantic Virtual Moonbat located at the bottom of our right column. Just push the button, and you’ve got another one.

Hat tip to Frank Dobbs.

Jonah Goldberg, in the LA Times (now asking for registration), demolishes the leftwing fantasy of the American Empire.

Critics of American foreign policy point to the fact that the U.S. does many things that empires once did — police the seas, deploy militaries abroad, provide a lingua franca and a global currency — and then rest their case. But noting that X does many of the same things as Y does not mean that X and Y are the same thing. The police provide protection, and so does the Mafia. Orphanages raise children, but they aren’t parents. If your wife cleans your home, tell her she’s the maid because maids also clean homes. See how well that logic works.

When they speak of the American empire, critics fall back on cartoonish notions, invoking Hollywoodized versions of ancient Rome or mothballed Marxist caricatures of the British Raj. But unlike the Romans or even the British, our garrisons can be ejected without firing a shot. We left the Philippines when asked. We may split from South Korea in the next few years under similar circumstances. Poland wants our military bases; Germany is grumpy about losing them. When Turkey, a U.S. ally and member of NATO, refused to let American troops invade Iraq from its territory, the U.S. government said “fine.” We didn’t invade Iraq for oil (all we needed to do to buy it was lift the embargo), and we’ve made it clear that we’ll leave Iraq if the Iraqis ask.

The second verse of the anti-imperial lament, sung in unison by liberals and libertarians, goes like this: Expansion of the military-industrial complex leads to contraction of freedom at home. But historically, this is a hard sell. Women got the vote largely thanks to World War I. President Truman, that consummate Cold Warrior, integrated the Army, and the civil rights movement escalated its successes even as we escalated the Cold War and our presence in Vietnam. President Reagan built up the military even as he liberalized the economy.

Sure Naomi Wolfe, Frank Rich and other leftists believe that the imperialistic war on terror has turned America into a police state. But if they were right, they wouldn’t be allowed to say that.

There is something inevitably risible about millionaire Hollywood writers leaving their Malibu mansions and climbing into their Bentleys and Ferraris to play “striking worker” and walk the picket line. Even the liberal New York Times was moved to report sardonically on what it described as the “curious spectacle of a glamour strike.”

Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Jane Hamsher approvingly reports, was stung by the Times’ condescension. After all, the workers’ land and bread are at stake.

We’re talking about the stories that define our nation’s popular culture – a huge part of its identity. These are the people that think those up. Working writers.

“The trappings of a union protest…” You see how that works? Since we aren’t real workers, this isn’t a real union issue. (We’re just a guild!) And that’s where all my ‘what is a writer’ rambling becomes important. Because this IS a union issue, one that will affect not just artists but every member of a community that could find itself at the mercy of a machine that absolutely and unhesitatingly would dismantle every union, remove every benefit, turn every worker into a cowed wage-slave in the singular pursuit of profit. (There is a machine. Its program is ‘profit’. This is not a myth.) This is about a fair wage for our work. No different than any other union. The teamsters have recognized the importance of this strike, for which I’m deeply grateful. Hopefully the Times will too.

Joss Whedon, and some of the compatriots in the writing trade he mentioned, are a spectacularly talented bunch of people who have provided some very admirable entertainment. In the nature of things, these people individually possess extraordinary and highly negotiable talents, which are not easily replaced. People like Joss Whedon, when corporations fail to cooperate, can readily turn producer and become corporations themselves at will.

Fox mistreated Whedon’s Firefly Sci Fi series, and Whedon responded with a hit movie demonstrating just how stupid Fox Television executives really were. Presumably the guy who decided to drop Firefly and kill Angel is now selling insurance in Omaha.

Successful screenwriters are not in the least short of leverage in negotiating with the studios, and it is all just business anyway. The appropriate deal is just a matter for negotiation. There is no such thing as an abstractly “fair wage.” Multi-millionaires squabbling over shares of remote residual marketing rights are a long, long way from working for wages, and no amount of rhetoric will elicit a lot of sympathy from the rest of us.

Slavoj Žižek, in the London Review of Books, contemplates the peculiar position of today’s Left after the collapse of Communism.

One of the clearest lessons of the last few decades is that capitalism is indestructible. Marx compared it to a vampire, and one of the salient points of comparison now appears to be that vampires always rise up again after being stabbed to death. Even Mao’s attempt, in the Cultural Revolution, to wipe out the traces of capitalism, ended up in its triumphant return.

Today’s Left reacts in a wide variety of ways to the hegemony of global capitalism and its political supplement, liberal democracy. …

The response of some critics on the postmodern Left to this predicament is to call for a new politics of resistance. Those who still insist on fighting state power, let alone seizing it, are accused of remaining stuck within the ‘old paradigm’: the task today, their critics say, is to resist state power by withdrawing from its terrain and creating new spaces outside its control. This is, of course, the obverse of accepting the triumph of capitalism. The politics of resistance is nothing but the moralising supplement to a Third Way Left.

Simon Critchley’s recent book, Infinitely Demanding, is an almost perfect embodiment of this position. For Critchley, the liberal-democratic state is here to stay. Attempts to abolish the state failed miserably; consequently, the new politics has to be located at a distance from it: anti-war movements, ecological organisations, groups protesting against racist or sexist abuses, and other forms of local self-organisation. It must be a politics of resistance to the state, of bombarding the state with impossible demands, of denouncing the limitations of state mechanisms. The main argument for conducting the politics of resistance at a distance from the state hinges on the ethical dimension of the ‘infinitely demanding’ call for justice: no state can heed this call, since its ultimate goal is the ‘real-political’ one of ensuring its own reproduction (its economic growth, public safety, etc). ‘Of course,’ Critchley writes,

history is habitually written by the people with the guns and sticks and one cannot expect to defeat them with mocking satire and feather dusters. Yet, as the history of ultra-leftist active nihilism eloquently shows, one is lost the moment one picks up the guns and sticks. Anarchic political resistance should not seek to mimic and mirror the archic violent sovereignty it opposes.

So what should, say, the US Democrats do? Stop competing for state power and withdraw to the interstices of the state, leaving state power to the Republicans and start a campaign of anarchic resistance to it? And what would Critchley do if he were facing an adversary like Hitler? Surely in such a case one should ‘mimic and mirror the archic violent sovereignty’ one opposes? Shouldn’t the Left draw a distinction between the circumstances in which one would resort to violence in confronting the state, and those in which all one can and should do is use ‘mocking satire and feather dusters’? The ambiguity of Critchley’s position resides in a strange non sequitur: if the state is here to stay, if it is impossible to abolish it (or capitalism), why retreat from it? Why not act with(in) the state? Why not accept the basic premise of the Third Way? Why limit oneself to a politics which, as Critchley puts it, ‘calls the state into question and calls the established order to account, not in order to do away with the state, desirable though that might well be in some utopian sense, but in order to better it or attenuate its malicious effect’?

These words simply demonstrate that today’s liberal-democratic state and the dream of an ‘infinitely demanding’ anarchic politics exist in a relationship of mutual parasitism: anarchic agents do the ethical thinking, and the state does the work of running and regulating society. Critchley’s anarchic ethico-political agent acts like a superego, comfortably bombarding the state with demands; and the more the state tries to satisfy these demands, the more guilty it is seen to be. In compliance with this logic, the anarchic agents focus their protest not on open dictatorships, but on the hypocrisy of liberal democracies, who are accused of betraying their own professed principles. …

The big demonstrations in London and Washington against the US attack on Iraq a few years ago offer an exemplary case of this strange symbiotic relationship between power and resistance. Their paradoxical outcome was that both sides were satisfied. The protesters saved their beautiful souls: they made it clear that they don’t agree with the government’s policy on Iraq. Those in power calmly accepted it, even profited from it: not only did the protests in no way prevent the already-made decision to attack Iraq; they also served to legitimise it. Thus George Bush’s reaction to mass demonstrations protesting his visit to London, in effect: ‘You see, this is what we are fighting for, so that what people are doing here – protesting against their government policy – will be possible also in Iraq!’

The lesson here is that the truly subversive thing is not to insist on ‘infinite’ demands we know those in power cannot fulfill. Since they know that we know it, such an ‘infinitely demanding’ attitude presents no problem for those in power: ‘So wonderful that, with your critical demands, you remind us what kind of world we would all like to live in. Unfortunately, we live in the real world, where we have to make do with what is possible.’ The thing to do is, on the contrary, to bombard those in power with strategically well-selected, precise, finite demands, which can’t be met with the same excuse.

Acceptable in Fort Collins: A display called “Source of Life”

WorldNetDaily:

A special task force in a Colorado city has recommended banning red and green lights at the Christmas holiday because they fall among the items that are too religious for the city to sponsor.

“Some symbols, even though the Supreme Court has declared that in many contexts they are secular symbols, often still send a message to some members of the community that they and their traditions are not valued and not wanted. We don’t want to send that message,” Seth Anthony, a spokesman for the committee, told the Fort Collins, Colo., Coloradoan.

He said the recommended language does not specifically address Christmas trees by name, but the consensus was that they would not fall within acceptable decorations.

What will be allowed are white lights and “secular” symbols not associated “with any particular holiday” such as icicles, unadorned greenery and snowflakes, the task force said.

The group was made up of members of the city’s business and religious communities as well as representatives from some community groups. Members met for months to review the existing holiday display policy, which allowed white as well as multi-colored lights and wreaths and garlands.

In previous years, there also was a Christmas tree at the city’s Oak Street Plaza.

A vote on the proposal will be coming up before the city council on Nov. 20, officials said.

“As far as I’m concerned, the group ended up in a very fair place in which primarily secular symbols will be used on city property,” task force member Saul Hopper told the newspaper.

The existing holiday display rules were adopted in 2006 after a rabbi requested that the city display a menorah.

The only apparent exception to the completely secular rule would be at the Fort Collins Museum, where a “multicultural display” of symbols and objects would be collected to represent Diwali, Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, and Christmas among others.

“I expect criticism from people who feel like we are taking Christmas away. And I expect we will get criticism from people who think educational display endorses religions,” Anthony said. “(But) to the extent we can, recognizing that offending no one will be impossible, we want to be inclusive.”

City officials touted their own efforts.

“I am really delighted to see us taking this step,” Mayor Doug Hutchinson said when the task force was being assembled. “I think Fort Collins is a great city, and I think great cities are inclusionary.”

“Inclusionary” obviously means including Jewish holiday symbols, Hindu holiday symbols, and made-up holiday (Kwanzaa) symbols, but excluding traditional Christian holiday symbols.

The late James Dickey’s son, Christopher Dickey, took the occasion of the release of a new DVD-edition of the 1972 movie based upon his father’s novel Deliverance, to treat the film as a metaphor for the War in Iraq.

In the fiction of “Deliverance,” Ed (the Jon Voight character)’s sanity and bravery eventually save the day when he climbs out of the gorge. What I wonder is whether in the real-world crisis of Iraq there is enough sanity and bravery in Washington to deliver us from the evil that’s been created in Iraq. Unfortunately it doesn’t look that way. Whether we listen to the Republicans or the Democrats, the woman candidate for president or the men, all the major contenders remain reluctant to challenge the ersatz standards of strength set by the Bush administration. Sure, they snipe at each other, but none want to appear weak on national security. So we’re left with “Law, what law? Plan, what plan?” And we continue to float down the river as if without a paddle, unable and unwilling to climb out, with much more violence and in all probability worse humiliations yet to come.

And Mark Steyn rebuts.

In a column headlined “War and Deliverance,” their Middle East editor, Christopher Dickey, makes the picture the defining metaphor for “the Mesopotamian quagmire.” The Atlanta suburbanites in the picture include Burt Reynolds as the obsessive wannabe back-to-nature survivalist and Jon Voight as “the perfectly ordinary man, the just-getting-by guy,” but the one who, in the end, delivers his pals from the hell of their weekend in the country.

Unlike most of us, whose knowledge of the film relies on hazy memories from the 1970s and late-night TV screenings, Dickey knows the story in depth: His dad wrote the novel and the screenplay. And, as he sees it, the Burt Reynolds character with his “untested ersatz fortitude” is “Dick Cheney’s closet fantasy of himself,” and the Jon Voight character is “the rest of us, just scared and trying to get by.” As for the river whose rapids they set out to negotiate, “that’s the war in Iraq.”

Christopher Dickey paints with a broad brush: “On a grand scale they [the administration] could reinterpret the Constitution until it became meaningless.” (Monitoring jihadist phone logs being the reinterpretation into meaninglessness, unlike, say, partial-birth abortion, which is merely an ancient constitutional right the founders had cannily anticipated a need for.) So one’s first reaction to this is a faint flicker of surprise that Dickey doesn’t see Cheney as the mountain man and the Constitution as his rape victim. One’s second reaction is that the metaphor is dishonest. When it comes to “closet fantasies” about toppling Saddam, it’s not Dick Cheney versus “the rest of us.” Throughout the 1990s and all the way up to the Iraq war resolution, there were a lot of folks auditioning for the Burt Reynolds role: Bill Clinton, Al Gore and almost every other prominent Democrat indulged in just as much “ersatz fortitude” about Iraq and its WMD as Dick Cheney ever did. …

The real flaw in Christopher Dickey’s “Deliverance” metaphor: If Cheney is Burt Reynolds, and the rest of America is Jon Voight, and the river is Iraq, who are the hillbillies? Well, presumably (for he doesn’t spell it out) they’re the dark forces you make yourself vulnerable to when you blunder into somewhere you shouldn’t be. When the quartet returns to Atlanta a man short, they may understand how thin the veneer of civilization is, but they don’t have to worry that their suburban cul-de-sacs will be overrun and reduced to the same state of nature as the backwoods.

That’s the flaw in the thesis: Robert D. Kaplan, a shrewd observer of global affairs, has referred to the jihadist redoubts and other lawless fringes of the map as “Indian territory.” It’s a cute joke but a misleading one. The difference between the old Indian territory and the new is this: No one had to worry about the Sioux riding down Fifth Avenue, just as Burt Reynolds never had to worry about the mountain man breaking into his rec room. But Iran has put bounties on London novelists, assassinated dissidents in Paris, blown up community centers in Buenos Aires, seeded proxy terror groups in Lebanon and Palestine, radicalized Muslim populations throughout Central Asia – and it’s now going nuclear. The leaders of North Korea, Sudan and Syria are not stump-toothed Appalachian losers: Their emissaries wear suits and dine in Manhattan restaurants every night.

Life is not a movie, especially when your enemies don’t watch the same movies, and don’t buy into the same tired narratives.

Apparently, if you’re a member of the party of America’s urban elites and you need to visit (shudder!) a fly-over Red State and rub elbows with the Common People, you take care to be immunized for infectious diseases.

My Way News:

It got the GOP’s engines revving – a Democratic official suggesting staffers get immunized for several diseases before heading south from Washington and into the Red State wilds of NASCAR country to conduct research at a pair of races.

The reaction on both sides illustrates just how valuable candidates for elected office consider the votes of NASCAR fans who pack grandstands by the thousands every weekend and the donations of business leaders who spend millions to sponsor the sport.

It started last month, when an official with the House Committee on Homeland Security suggested that staff aides get immunizations before visiting health facilities at Alabama’s Talladega Superspeedway and North Carolina’s Lowe’s Motor Speedway, where the Bank of America 500 was run Saturday.

In an e-mail, a staffer who works for committee chairman Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., noted an “unusual need for whomever attending to be vaccinated against hepatitis A and B,” as well as “the more normal things – tetanus, diphtheria, and of course, seasonal influenza.”

The note didn’t explain why the committee saw such concern. It didn’t mention NASCAR or the races at the tracks at all. But the implication was enough to draw a snarky complaint from Republican Rep. Robin Hayes, whose district includes Lowe’s Motor Speedway.

“I have never heard of immunizations for domestic travel, and … I feel compelled to ask why the heck the committee feels that immunizations are needed to travel to my hometown,” wrote Hayes.

Thompson responded to Hayes that such immunizations are “are recommended for public safety professionals working in areas such as hospitals, holding areas and similar locations.” But the staffers were only scheduled to visit a few health care facilities – not work at them.

“What do they know about NASCAR that we don’t?” said Dr. David Weber, a professor of medicine and public health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

ABC News:

An eagle-eyed reporter for the ABC affiliate in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, noticed something missing from Democratic presidential contender Sen. Barack Obama’s, D-Ill., lapels.

“You don’t have the American flag pin on. Is that a fashion statement?” the reporter asked, at the end of a brief interview with Obama on Wednesday. “Those have been on politicians since Sept. 12, 2001.”

The standard political reply to that question might well have been, “My patriotism speaks for itself.”

But Obama didn’t say that.

Instead the Illinois senator answered the question at length, explaining that he no longer wears such a pin, at least in part, because of the Iraq War.

“You know, the truth is that right after 9/11, I had a pin,” Obama said. “Shortly after 9/11, particularly because as we’re talking about the Iraq War, that became a substitute for I think true patriotism, which is speaking out on issues that are of importance to our national security, I decided I won’t wear that pin on my chest.

Instead,” he said, “I’m going to try to tell the American people what I believe will make this country great, and hopefully that will be a testimony to my patriotism.”

Obama could also have just said that he thought politicians wearing US flag lapel pins had become a cliche, but he did not.

However diplomatically he puts it, stating publicly that he isn’t wearing the US flag because he does not support the war in Iraq is an extremely striking gesture of anti-patriotism.

There really ought to be an alternative lapel pin Obama could substitute, something featuring an emblem identifying the wearer’s membership in what Thomas Sowell likes to refer to as “the elect.” Perhaps a blue background pin with a gold halo on it would do the trick.

An editorial from a 25th Century edition of National Review has mysteriously made its way to the desk of the editors of the current journal of opinion. It warns about the errors of “Pelosians” and “Picardians” in dealing with the Romulan threat.

The Romulans are arming Cardasia to the gills while we stand idly by watching the Bajorans get slaughtered. The Pelosians, always eager to protect tribbles wherever they happen to sprout up, turn a blind eye to the fate of actual sentient humanoids and allies. Based on the most dubious science, they are willing to place a speed limit on warp drive, but images of actual Bajorans stacked like cordwood move them not a nanometer. We have had our disagreements with Klingons and Ferengi, but we can look on with nothing but admiration as they fulfill their promises and contracts with the Bajorans while we spend our days here on Earth debating whether the entirely defunct Organian Peace Treaty applies to non-signatories of that irrelevant piece of parchment. It’s enough to make one declare “Beam me up, Scotty. There’s no sign of intelligent life here.”

Kyle Smith in the Wall Street Journal discusses the recent Jodie Foster remake of Death Wish (1974).

What has come over liberals? Suddenly they’ve turned bloodthirsty. And they’re not just lobbing “Daily Show” coffee mugs or brandishing the rusty business end of their DEAN 2004 campaign pins. Liberals are locked, loaded and licensed to kill–at the movies.

The new Jodie Foster film, “The Brave One,” is the latest in a string of left-wing Bush-era movies about violence. These films–which range from popcorn flicks (the “X-Men” series, “The Hills Have Eyes 2”) to more ambitious works and Oscar nominees (“A History of Violence,” “V for Vendetta,” “Munich,” “Blood Diamond”)–so deeply entangle killing with liberal idealism, though, that at times their scripts are as muddled as EEOC directives or U.N. rules of engagement. For all of the critical acclaim that attended most of these films, few are as effective as “Dirty Harry” or “Death Wish.”

In “The Brave One,” for instance, possibly the first vigilante movie to feature a Sarah McLachlan soundtrack, a New York radio personality (Jodie Foster) specializes in monologues about the sounds of the city. She speaks with a maximum of NPR narcoleptic condescension, chewing each syllable of her airy drivel (“Are we going to have to construct an imaginary city to house our memories?”) as if reading to a toddler out of “My First Book of Cultural Anthropology.” Strangely, however, she is not the bad guy.

After her fiancé (apparently a Briton of Indian descent) gets killed when both of them are jumped by vicious white youths, Ms. Foster’s character spends weeks in a coma. One of her first remarks when she wakes up is directed at some white cops: “You’re the good guys. How come it doesn’t feel like that?” Shattered, she helps regain her poise with the aid of a black cop (Terrence Howard) and a saintly black woman friend. Meanwhile, in addition to the murderous gang of white kids, another villain emerges: a white businessman who owns parking garages.

This is more a checklist than a plausible plot, particularly when Ms. Foster’s character goes on a “Death Wish”-style rampage that requires the New York of 2007 to be portrayed as a place where you’re liable to witness a shooting every time you walk into a deli for a pack of gum. Nevertheless, she takes action, sometimes in self-defense but also by launching a pre-emptive, non-U.N.-sanctioned war against big-city thuggery. Behind her she leaves a trail of surprised-looking corpses, the audience cheering each one.

How can this be, since liberals renounce violence, even when directed against antlered pests or convicted serial killers, and greeted Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s crackdown on crime with, at best, sullen silence? The movie lets its heroine off the hook by implying that victim status has left her without control of herself, a notion she articulates with more NPR-speak (“inside you there is a stranger, one that has your arms, your legs, your eyes–a sleepless, restless stranger”).

This paper’s movie critic, Joe Morgenstern, derided that element as “modern-day Jekyll and Hydeism,” but it dovetails with two favorite liberal habits: to follow the psychological chain of causation behind a crime so far back that responsibility disappears in a blurry landscape of greater evil, and to maintain a fig-leaf of deniability for lawless actions.

Read the whole thing.

The film’s star, Jodie Foster, editorializes with the same profundity characteristic of many members of her profession:

Entertainment Weekly: What do you think is the larger social commentary of The Brave One, which in some ways plays as a straight-up Dirty Harry revenge movie?

Here’s my commentary: I don’t believe that any gun should be in the hand of a thinking, feeling, breathing human being. Americans are by nature filled with rage-slash-fear. And guns are a huge part of our culture. I know I’m crazy because I’m only supposed to say that in Europe. But violence corrupts absolutely. By the end of this, her transformation is complete. ”F— all of you, now I’m just going to kill people with my bare hands.”