Today’s award for Leftism-which-Astounds goes to Keith Uhlich, who reviews films non-commercially (meaning nobody pays him) on several web-sites, including Slant Magazine. Uhlich did not like Universal Studios’ new 9/11 film United 93.

First of all, he didn’t like the film’s emotional direction.

It’s pornography, really, a kind of somber sub-Bruckheimer sideshow that stokes our anger instead of stroking our libidos, all building to an inexorable and anticlimactic cum shot—a sound-deprived descent into black—that does nothing more than empty us of any kind of constructive emotion. We’re constantly told to “never forget,” but on the evidence of United 93 I have to ask what it is, exactly, we’re being asked to remember beyond a Pavlovian sort of rage that constantly and deceptively folds back on itself?

But, worse:

while the stench of death and dread permeates every frame of United 93, it is nowhere near as strong as the stink of synergy. Certainly this isn’t the first Hollywood production done in by the competing corporate and personal interests that funded it (consider the unspoken implications—both commercial and propagandistic—of the film’s last-minute title change from Flight 93 to United 93), but it is the only one I’ve come across where the families of those onboard gave it their full-on approval. Not all the families, of course. All evidence suggests that the terrorists’ relatives were left entirely out of the creative process, an action which goes a way toward revealing the film’s hagiographic bias (how easy it then becomes to turn victims into heroes and adversaries into monsters) and points up the general ridiculousness of involving the families in the first place (too many cooks spoiling an already rancid broth).

What could be worse than a film which provokes emotions of sympathy for your own murdered countrymen, and indignation at the actions of fanatical mass murders? Films ought to be instructing the audience to identify with the viewpoint of the enemy, and blaming American corporations and the US Government. NYU obviously succeeded in training Mr. Uhlich to believe that the only proper response to enemy attack is treason.

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Hat tip to LGF.

I spend too much time every day arguing politics with college classmates via email. Reading some of today’s messages, I feel moved to ask: what is “liberalism,” really?

One could try to identify its ideological components, but it can be wildly inconsistent, and I think it is both more economical and more accurate simply to identify “liberalism” as identical to the consensus of the American elite, based upon the perspectives and assumptions, and the values and agenda, articulated by its own representatives in the establishment media.

Where the Right and the Left really disagree, I would contend, is on the credence, loyalty, and respect due to that consensus.

Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former Chief of Staff, and prominent public spokesman of the Pouting Spooks Against the Bush Administration, went postal in the Baltimore Sun yesterday, denouncing George W. Bush as a Jacobin and a revolutionary, precisely because Bush has spurned the consensus of the elect.

I think Wilkerson’s editorial was ideationally confused and stylistically turgid, but his piece does, nonetheless, still eloquently and accurately express his own indignation, and that of his class, at the rejection by George W. Bush (and an alternative American leadership) of the intellectual consensus (and the organic process continually manufacturing it) on which both the very identity, and the basic mechanisms of perceiving reality, of the American establishment are based.

Wilkerson is right to feel that Bush and his associates have dared to enter the temple and lain violent hands upon the idols.

Wilkerson emoting earlier on the same theme.

A small group of leftwing British journalists, university lecturers and bloggers who had grown disillusioned with their own side’s sympathy for terrorism, knee jerk anti-Americanism, and generally pathological outlook met in a London pub last year in order to discuss alternatives. That meeting resulted in discussions and debates which have ultimately produced The Euston Manifesto, an attempt at a redefinition of a political agenda for the Left, including a repudiation of some notably objectionable tendencies, and a reaffirmation of democratic and Enlightenment values.

This sort of thing, of course, is precisely what the American democrat would need to do to have any hope of ever winning a national election, but I tend to think the American left is incapable of standing up to its lunatic activist base.

There is always something inadvertently funny in the New York Times, Sunday edition. This week, there was a man-bites-dog story on the theme of New York City Leading the way nationally in Politeness. What supposedly setting a new national example with respect to civility consisted of, was first of all, punishing rowdy fans for entering playing fields and disrupting ballgames. Secondly, establishing a $50 fine for cellphones for using a cellphone in a theatre.

And finally, and classically New York, teaching other cities that when you have a problem caused by municipal government’s failures, let George do it! Just pass a law that the victim of vandalism (also, frequently, the victim of rent control) clean up the damage that New York City law enforcement failed to prevent.

When community groups from Toronto to Washington looked for new ways to fight graffiti, they turned to New York, which passed a law in January that makes building owners responsible, for the first time, for cleaning up after the vandals.

Mark Steyn offers an equivalent scenario:

You know what’s great fun to do if you’re on, say, a flight from Chicago to New York and you’re getting a little bored? Why not play being President Ahmadinejad? Stand up and yell in a loud voice, “I’ve got a bomb!” Next thing you know the air marshal will be telling people, “It’s OK, folks. Nothing to worry about. He hasn’t got a bomb.” And then the second marshal would say, “And even if he did have a bomb it’s highly unlikely he’d ever use it.” And then you threaten to kill the two Jews in row 12 and the stewardess says, “Relax, everyone. That’s just a harmless rhetorical flourish.” And then a group of passengers in rows 4 to 7 point out, “Yes, but it’s entirely reasonable of him to have a bomb given the threatening behavior of the marshals and the cabin crew.”

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Hat tip to David Ross.

Ohio State University at Mansfield librarian Scott Savage suggested several books for a freshman reading program, including David Kupelian’s The Marketing of Evil, which title associates a number of cases of the evolution of the American moral perspective, most notably the way in which homosexuality is viewed, to calculated and astute marketing by the organized left, and some other conservative titles.

A firestorm of argument over book choices erupted (primarily over the Kupelian book, of course), and events culminated in a unanimous faculty vote to file sexual harassment charges against the conservative librarian. Accordingly, three professors duly filed a complaint of discrimination and harassment against him, saying that the book suggestions made them feel “unsafe.”

Ace broke the story. Eugene Volokh comments. And Morgan at the excellent group blog YARGB summarizes and adds further details.

Charles Johnson found a hilarious profile in the Washington Post, which really paints an only too recognizable a portrait of the angry left blogger:

SHERMAN OAKS, Calif. — In the angry life of Maryscott O’Connor, the rage begins as soon as she opens her eyes and realizes that her president is still George W. Bush. The sun has yet to rise and her family is asleep, but no matter; as soon as the realization kicks in, O’Connor, 37, is out of bed and heading toward her computer.

Out there, awaiting her building fury: the Angry Left, where O’Connor’s reputation is as one of the angriest of all. “One long, sustained scream” is how she describes the writing she does for various Web logs, as she wonders what she should scream about this day.

She smokes a cigarette. Should it be about Bush, whom she considers “malevolent,” a “sociopath” and “the Antichrist”? She smokes another cigarette. Should it be about Vice President Cheney, whom she thinks of as “Satan,” or about Karl Rove, “the devil”? Should it be about the “evil” Republican Party, or the “weaselly, capitulating, self-aggrandizing, self-serving” Democrats, or the Catholic Church, for which she says “I have a special place in my heart . . . a burning, sizzling, putrescent place where the guilty suffer the tortures of the damned”?

Darfur, she finally decides. She will write about Darfur. The shame of it. The culpability of all Americans, including herself, for doing nothing. She will write something so filled with outrage that it will accomplish the one thing above all she wants from her anger: to have an effect.

“Darfur is not hopeless,” she begins typing, and pauses.

“Ugh,” she says.

“You are not helpless,” she continues typing, and pauses again.

“Weak.”

She deletes everything and starts over.

“WAKE THE [expletive] UP,” she writes next, and this time, instead of pausing, she keeps going, typing harder and harder on a keyboard that is surrounded by a pack of cigarettes, a dirty ashtray, a can of nonalcoholic beer, an album with photos of her dead father and a taped-up note — staring at her — on which she has scrawled “Why am I/you here?”

I read their stuff all the time, and this description rings true to me. Read the whole thing.

Quick! Call the ACLU, alert the editorial page crusaders, and queue up Warren Zevon’s Poor, Poor Pitiful Me on the stereo. My civil rights have been violated.

A book I ordered from a store in France arrived yesterday in an impressive purple-ziplocked baggie, bearing abundant evidence of official scrutiny.

You or I could probably tell that a padded envelope contained a paperback book just by feeling it, but the government needed to X-ray it.

This terrrible intrusion on my privacy struck me as very similar to having one’s emails data-mined. The government is applying a cumbersome, and rather clumsy, kind of mechanical mass processing in an effort to find the small threatening needle in the vast haystack of American international communications.

Since I’m not actually trying to exchange signals with al Qaeda or import botulism toxin, I and my French book are nothing more than background static to the people conducting those searches.

The reality is: they’d have to have enough of an actual interest in you to focus some real attention on you, before they could violate your privacy. X-raying packages, like data-mining emails, is meaningless to you, unless you actually are one of the real objects of all the searching.

Newsbusters story. video

They not only let these actors vote; they let them drive!

Article II, Section 1. The executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.
— Constitution of the United States .
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I’m not going to repeat the big news story of the day, except to note that documents released today, in a filing by the defense in the I. Lewis Libby case, indicate that Scooter Libby had the president’s permission to release to the press information contained in a certain previously classified National Intelligence Estimate.

The Left was jumping for joy today. The ebullient Andrew Sullivan ran the story under the headline, BUSH NAILED.

One so hates to spoil the little rascals’ fun, but the left’s joy, and fondly imagined hope for future legal havoc based on all of this, rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of the US Constitution.

There is no such thing as classified information which the President of the United States could potentially be prosecuted for publishing on the front page of the New York Times.

The president is the chief executive, the head of the entire Executive Branch. The Executive Branch of the US Government has no power to do anything, but by the will of the president. If any document or information is classified, it is classified by presidential authority extended down a chain of command.

The only purpose for information to be classified is to assist the president in defending the United States and in implementing his own policies. In a circumstance in which it were to the advantage of the president to declassify some document, or piece of information, in order to defend his policies in domestic political debate, it is completely within the competence of the president to classify or declassify either at will. And it would not be in the least surprising, if a president delegated the same authority on some occasions, at least, to the vice president, or even to the vice president’s chief of staff.

First they came for the child pornographers and sexual predators
and I did not speak out
because I was not a child pornographer or sexual predator.

Then they came for the terrorists (you knew it was out there!)
and I did not speak out
because I was not a terrorist.

Then they came for the dictators
and I did not speak out
because I was not a dictator.

Then they came for traitors and seditionists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a traitor or seditionist

Then they came for rogues in the intelligence community
and I did not speak out
because I was not a rogue in the intelligence community.

Then they came for me (Ok, so they’re not here yet but you know its just a matter of time)
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.

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Another required quotation from YARGB.