Vox Popoli

Andrew Sullivan demonstrates that he’s not only got a giant fork sticking out of his back, he’s beginning to turn green and smell:

If gun rights are civil rights, why would anyone feel the need to hide the fact that they own one?

Gee, that’s a really tough one. Here’s four reasons off the top of my head. I’m sure I could come up with more if I thought about it for five seconds.

A) They’re worth hundreds of dollars.
B) Criminals who require them for nefarious purposes usually prefer to steal them rather than buy them.
C) Governments continually demonstrate a desire to confiscate them.
D) Liberals have been screaming for decades that the Second Amendment is a collective right, not an individual one.

Does anyone still think this guy is intelligent? I can’t understand why anyone ever did.

No wonder they’re getting their heads handed to them. Mr. Dr. Helen points out a laughable metaphor from a media boss:

“The Googles of the world, they are the Custer of the modern world. We are the Sioux nation,” Time Warner Inc. Chief Executive Richard Parsons said, referring to the Civil War American general George Custer who was defeated by Native Americans in a battle dubbed “Custer’s Last Stand”.

It’s not about the battle, it’s about the war, Mr. Parsons. And you’re right, like the Sioux nation, the old media was there first.

So, where should we put the rez? And should we let them have casinos?

Every now and then, someone who wants to make a movie about one of the EW novels contacts me. This sort of thing is exactly why I tell them that I have very little interest in it:

When the historian Dee Brown published “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” in 1971, it became an instant sensation. In an age of rebellion, this nonfiction book told the epic tale of the displacement and decline of the American Indian not from the perspective of the winners, but from that of the Indians.

But the fact that Mr. Brown’s work has been translated into 17 languages and has sold five million copies around the world was not enough to convince HBO that a film version would draw a sizable mainstream audience. When the channel broadcasts its two-hour adaptation of the book, beginning Memorial Day weekend, at its center will be a new character: a man who was part Sioux, was educated at an Ivy League college and married a white woman….

Nicolas Proctor, Mr. Brown’s grandson and one of three people who oversees his estate, as well as an associate professor of history at Simpson College in Iowa, said that as a historian he was “always kind of shocked that history is not moving enough, is not evocative enough and rich enough to keep people from having to get in there and start monkeying around with it.” He said that the estate had no control over the film’s content.

Mr. Proctor said his grandfather wouldn’t necessarily be surprised by HBO’s tinkering. “I don’t think he ever thought anything historically accurate would come out of any film version,” he said. Still, before this, “nobody had ever before gone and gutted it and turned it into a love story.”

I hate Hollywood. Truly hate it. I hate the drivel they produce, I hate their smug pandering to the lowest common denominator, I hate their predictability, but most of all, I hate their unjustified arrogance in insisting that they can tell a better story than the most successful storytellers.

Even Peter Jackson, who did a much better job than I expected with The Lord of the Rings, couldn’t keep himself from occasionally sticking his fingers in, turning Gimli into the stock comic character. Oh, it was funny at times – “Toss me… don’t tell the elf”, but mostly it was lame and it didn’t add anything to the film. I thought the people at Walden did a better job with The Chronicles of Narnia, despite the limitations of the child actors.

Still, Shadow would make for a pretty good movie. I just hope Walden doesn’t mess around too much with The Dark is Rising. Besides LOTR and Narnia, that’s the childhood book I most wanted to see on screen.

Is there anyone here who is a Latin expert? I need to translate a paragraph into Latin and I want to make sure that it’s correct. If you can do it tonight, please email me.

Thank you.

This doesn’t surprise me in the least:

The very outrageousness of “Rant” is supposedly part of its appeal. But Mr. Palahniuk has been walking a thin line lately. In this book and its unpalatable predecessor, “Haunted,” his outrages feel perfunctory, and his new tricks are old tricks, executed by a writer recycling his best gambits for less and less coherent reasons.

So “Rant” is a mash-up of earlier, better Palahniuk sucker punches, with elements of his “Fight Club” especially conspicuous this time. This book, like that one, has a violent, ritualistic secret society and a shocking identity switcheroo at its finale.

This cracked me up, after having spent a fair amount of time delving into Fight Club over the last two weeks. Never get excited about a writer who has early success with a novel or even a work of non-fiction that is largely self-referential. Palahniuk is following the same path previously trod by McInerney and Eggers, and to a certain lamentable extent, Camille Paglia.

The ability to write about yourself and your life is very, very different than the ability to write about your ideas. Switching to non-fiction for the time being has turned out to be a really productive move for me, as it’s enabled me to see how my fiction has been stuck in a bit of a thematic rut.

By the way, someone asked what Paglia book is worth reading. She has only written one book, really, Sexual Personae. And it is very worth reading; after reading it for the second time, it definitely gave me some ideas that found their way into Wrath. The various collections of essays and selections of her favorite poems are basically fluff that you can either read if it amuses you or ignore without missing anything.

Oh, sorry, I guess it was illegal aliens again:

Six men from New Jersey have been arrested in an alleged terror plot against soldiers at Fort Dix, according to law enforcement sources.

Investigators said the men planned to use automatic rifles to enter Fort Dix and kill as many soldiers as they could at the New Jersey military base. Fort Dix was just one of several military and security locations allegedly scouted by this group, authorities said.

The suspects, identified as Dritan Duka, Eljvir Duka, Shain Duka, Mohamad Shnewer, Derdar Tatar and Agron Abdullahu, have been charged with conspiring to kill U.S. government employees. Separately, the Duka brothers have been charged with being illegal aliens in possession of firearms.

The Dukas, believed to be Islamic radicals, are in the United States illegally, while Shnewer is a U.S. citizen born in Jordan, according to the Justice Department.

Good thing we’ve got all those soldiers in Iraq, so this sort of thing can’t happen here. You know, they were probably just angry about Congress holding up the President’s immigration reform plan, I’m sure they never would have planned something like this if we’d only made them citizens….

As Rudy Giuliani is already in the process of learning, the Republican base is not going to turn out for anyone who is pro-abortion, even if they loudly declaim their personal hate, hate, hate for the slaughter of unborn children:

Under abortion: He [Thompson] checked the box for: “Abortions should be legal in all circumstances as long as the procedure is completed within the first trimester of the pregnancy.” He did, however, support a number of restrictions on abortion: requiring parental notification, allowing states to impose waiting periods, and eliminating all federal funding of abortion. Lastly, he said Congress should leave legislation on abortion to the states.

No doubt Thompson will pull a Kerry-Romney double-reverse gainer should he decide to throw his hat in the ring. I wouldn’t be surprised if he stays out, though. Most of the “enthusiasm” for him isn’t genuine, it’s merely the predicted dissatisfaction with the party’s chosen frontrunners.

If a liberal Massachusetts governor wearing a poorly-fitting Ronald Reagan mask is the most convincing thing on offer, no wonder the Republican base has been desperately casting about for something better. But Thompson is simply more of the same, only uglier.

As for the notion of him as some sort of Hillary-killer, that’s simply laughable. It’s as obviously baseless as the idea that Texans, Iowans and Montanans would be impressed by the Savior of New York City. Due to his unique stance that combines anti-war and anti-illegal alien positions, Ron Paul is the only Republican candidate who has even a snowball’s chance of beating the Lizard Queen, his relative anonymity notwithstanding.

“We have the duty to protect the life of an unborn child.”
– Ronald Reagan

UPDATE: Rudy should be dropping out any day now. “Federal tax returns made public by the former New York mayor show that he and his then-wife, Donna Hanover, made personal donations to national, state and city chapters of Planned Parenthood totaling $900 in 1993, 1994, 1998 and 1999.”

He can try to blame it on his ex-wife, but he’s toast anyhow. Good riddance.

Impeach President Bush. Now.

President Bush signed an agreement creating a “permanent body” that commits the U.S. to “deeper transatlantic economic integration,” without ratification by the Senate as a treaty or passage by Congress as a law.

The “Transatlantic Economic Integration” between the U.S. and the European Union was signed April 30 at the White House by Bush, German Chancellor Angela Merkel – the current president of the European Council – and European Commission President José Manuel Barroso.

I knew Bush was a lying, treasonous weasel from the moment I heard the words “compassionate conservative”. But I had no idea that he’d surpass Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter as one of America’s worst presidents. He already ranks down there with Lincoln and FDR in my book. In the eighteen months preceding his passing the baton to Hillary, he may yet reach the utter depths of Woodrow Wilson.

James Lileks’ column gets canned by the Star Tribune:

As it happens, they’ve killed my column, and assigned me to write straight local news stories….I don’t want to write about the Internet. I want to write on the Internet. I’d rather develop content than report about content developers. It’s that simple, and it’s also a matter of recognizing my failings: I am not Biff Deadline, Ace Reporter. I can do long stories with lots of color, all aslosh with subjective opinions, but writing straight news – clearly, simply, briskly – is a skill I lack, and I take off my hat to those who’ve mastered that discipline.

My column will end a week from this Friday.

The Strib’s reader’s representative can be contacted here. It’s not likely to make any difference, you understand, but at least it will annoy them.

I grew up reading the Star Tribune, mostly by default. The only thing I really remember about it was the way it would make the same wildly errant predictions about the next year’s tax revenues based on tax increases or tax cuts. Every single year… they never figured out that a static revenue model doesn’t work because people adjust their economic activity depending upon the price of things. Nothing like possessing an economic understanding that’s only 200+ years out of date.

I’ve never really been a Lileks fan, but over the last 20 years, he, Sid Hartman and Steve Aschenburner have been the only writers who contributed anything worthy of note there. Readers won’t miss CJ or Kersten, but if there was any literary justice in this world, Nick Coleman wouldn’t just be demoted to metro reporter, he’d be taken outside, stripped, whipped, covered with asphalt and utilized as a human speed bump on Washington Avenue for his countless crimes against Minneapolis newspaper readers.

The Red Star has always been a paper run by clueless individuals stumbling blindly about. I contacted them back in 1991 about writing an electronic game review column, but they were quite confident that no one was interested in reading about games. So I went to the St. Paul Pioneer Press, who immediately decided to publish the column. It ran for years and was nationally syndicated, first by Chronicle Features and then by Universal Press Syndicate. To put this in perspective, you can probably count the number of Star Tribune writers who have ever been syndicated on the fingers of one hand.

Good luck, Mr. Lileks. Here’s hoping you find a different situation more suitable to your talents soon.

Speaking of newspapers, this history of the Quint State Claxon-Ledger is more than a little amusing. And the dedication is certainly fitting.

The backpack just spontaneously decided that it didn’t want to be there anymore:

A backpack exploded in a parking garage attached to a Las Vegas hotel early Monday, killing a man who had picked it up and injuring another person, authorities said. The man had removed the backpack from atop his car when it exploded shortly after 4 a.m. on the second floor of a parking behind the Luxor hotel-casino, said Officer Bill Cassell, a police spokesman….

The Luxor is a pyramid-shaped hotel at the south end of the Las Vegas Strip.

It’s a good thing we’re fighting the terrorists in Iraq, so we don’t have to fight them here. Because once the decision is made to bring the game to our home field – a decision that doesn’t depend on what’s happening in Iraq – it’s going to be uglier than most people now imagine.

I rather expect Me So will go from denying up and down that she was calling for internment in that silly little book to claiming that she was the first to see the need for it.