Now I’m worried.

It took a posting by my dear friend Iocaste to make me really worried. And not just the usual Democratic “pessimism/malaise” worry, either.

Now, it’s not really the fact that this election is evidently going to be up to some goddamned know-nothing “undecideds” who can’t get their heads out of their asses long enough to pick up a fucking newspaper and read what a travesty this administration is. It’s not really that my preferred candidate (John Kerry) is mouthing much of the same old bullshit — “values,” “I stand by my vote to invade even though it was based on false premises,” etc. — as the other party. And it’s not even that the Kerry campaign is so disorganized that I couldn’t get a yard sign here in Texas for three weeks (I know we’re a red state, but come on! A yard sign? How difficult can this be?)

No, it’s that something like 45% of this country is solidly behind Bush. That is what worries me. These are people who either do not care, or positively like the fact that Bush:

a.) Openly states that he believes he is an instrument of God’s will on earth (this is the best evidence I’ve seen so far that the man really is on some kind of psychoactive medication)

b.) Completely misrepresented why we should have invaded Iraq (or wait, does that count as “lying?” Or is it only lying when it has to do with private sexual matters?)

c.) Abandoned Afghanistan to heroin-dealing, woman-enslaving, warlords

d.) Would destroy our environment because nothing should stand in the way of corporate profit (my personal favorite is the latest: relaxing restrictions on selenium – selenium, for crying out loud! This and DDT are what lead to the disappearance of bald eagles in California!)

e.) Can’t make up his fucking mind about whether or not we will ever win the war on terror (see the LA Times, the NY Times, or just about any other major news source) (oh, but wait. That probably doesn’t count as being an indecisive flip-flopper, does it? No, only pissant procedural votes count as really flip-flopping.)

f.) Would shred every treat we have because we can “go it alone” in the world

g.) Believes that the onset of global warming – and the reasons for that onset – are somehow up for debate. And more to the point, doesn’t even read his own fucking administration’s memos on the subject when even they come out and say that greenhouse gas emissions are what’s behind rising temperatures (see the NYT again).

h.) Lied – baldfacedly lied to the American public – about the costs of Medicare “reform” (oh, but wait, I forget. It’s only a lie when it’s about a fucking blowjob, not when it’s about matters of public policy and the state of our nation’s health care system. No. Only lies about blowjobs are actually lies. And in any case, George II didn’t actually lie. He only told a subordinate not to tell the Congress the truth about how much his policies were going to cost. And that’s a completely different thing from lying about a blowjob. Stupid me. I keep forgetting the basic Republican proof: blowjobs = lies. Lying to Congress = strong and decisive leadership, unless it’s about blowjobs, in which case see previous equation. QED).

i.) Refuses to enact any restrictions on corporate greed (we can’t sue HMOs if their medicines were approved by the FDA; we can’t sue any of the energy companies for the market manipulation that led to California’s electricity disaster; Medicare cannot compete against private-sector companies to provide medical coverage; Halliburton is running an open tab on the American taxpayer because they were the “only ones with the expertise” to run a no-bid contract on the “reconstruction” of Iraq; shall I go on?)

j.) Is actively using our nation’s “terror alert” system for blatant political purposes (would someone please explain to me what exactly I’m supposed to when the terror alert is at red? Enshroud myself in plastic sheeting and duct-tape as in some po-mo performance art piece? Report all hummina-hummina speaking furriners to the authorities? Move to goddamned Montana? Run around like a fucking headless chicken spending money on shit I don’t need and crying “oh woe is me, the sky is falling?” No really, what the hell am I supposed to do? Maybe I’m just supposed to “stick to my routine”).

k.) Is doing essentially nothing to enact socially conservative policies except to mouth bland and empty pleasantries about the need to protect marriage, fetuses, and inner-city children by promoting “values.” Pause for a moment: other than shutting down funding for Planned-Parenthood affiliates overseas – who weren’t actually providing abortions, mind you – what precisely has George II done about abortion? Other than suggesting we need to amend the Constitution in order to enact a narrow and specific theocratic code, and taking money that might have been used to feed people, or heaven forbid get them a decent-paying job, and spending it on what amounts to big ad campaign saying that everybody should get married, what precisely has George II done to “protect” marriage? Other than making schools “accountable” – which is to say, stripping federal funding from schools that aren’t performing according to some perfectly arbitrary standard – what precisely has George II done to make sure that “no child is left behind?”

Who are these people who would “stand by” (the latest bumper sticker going the rounds here in Texas) a man who has failed on every count?

Or, as a bumper sticker I saw here (in Texas!) said: will someone please suck George Bush’s dick so we can impeach the bastard already?

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Daddy, what’s a “value?”

No, really. What are values?

I mean it. I’d like to know. I mean, I hear this word all the goddamned time on the news, and I have no idea what it means. A sampling:

- “I’m going to carry the South because the people understand that we share values,” Bush said. (“Bush Raises Issue of Edwards’ Experience to Be VP” NYT 7/7/04)
- “I have chosen a man who understands and defends the values of America.” (“Excerpts From John Kerry’s Remarks,” NYT, 7/7/04)
- “On these and a whole host of values,” the vice president told the crowd, “John Kerry’s votes and statements put him on the left and out of the mainstream and out of touch with the conservative values of the heartland.” (“Cheney Goes After Kerry, Calling Him ‘Out of Touch’.” NYT, 4/4/04)
- “In the end it’s about values.” (“Kerry Invoking ‘Values’ Theme to Frame Issues” NYT, 7/3/04)
- “My fellow citizens, elections are about choices. And choices are about values. In the end, it’s not just policies and programs that matter; the president who sits at that desk must be guided by principle.” (Kerry’s speech at the Democratic convention, 7/29/04)

Let me leave aside for a moment the rather obvious point that choices are not, in fact, about values, but are, in theory, about interests (as any good economist will tell you). Let me go straight to the point: If “policies and programs” aren’t what matters, but “values,” what are values?

One answer is along the following lines: George Will recently claimed (“What’s the matter with Kansas? Not much.” Sacramento Bee, 7/8/04) that our nation’s affluence means that we no longer need to worry about things like “class.” Why? Evidently we’re all too wealthy to actually be exploited by others, I guess. (Does he even believe himself when he writes this stuff?) And because we’re all too wealthy to have to worry about petty material concerns, then evidently we can debate instead the more lofty things of morality and the “kulturkampf.” In other words, “values” are all the non-material things that we worry about when we’re not talking in “class warfare” terms about things like, oh, offshoring of jobs; the deindustrialization of our economy; a progressive tax structure; the ballooning deficit; the costs of health care, social security, education, and the war in Iraq, etc. etc. And I think, although I’m really not sure about the matter (because, as we all know, I’m a value-less pointy-headed intellectual posing as a godforsaken somdomite) that these “values,” when you get right down to the matter, consist of the following: the recriminalization of abortion, a refusal to brook the idea of civil rights of any sort for homosexuals (Cheney’s levelheadedness on the matter notwithstanding, the Federal Marriage Amendment is still a plank in the Republican Party platform), and an absolute commitment to sexual purity. Am I missing anything? I don’t think so. There used to be some racial stuff there, but Republicans haven’t had to wave the race card explicitly since, oh, at least Willie Horton. And gosh, that was the dark ages, really. I mean, it was like 15 years ago – no-one’s a racist anymore in this county. In fact, for me to even bring up Willie Horton is to engage in reverse discrimination race-baiting. Whoops. My bad.

If this is the case, then why is it that upper-middle class lefties like me are the ones talking about class, while poor white trash (oops, did I say that? That was supposed to be in my internal voice. What I meant to say, of course, was “NASCAR dads”) who are quite obviously too wealthy to actually be exploited in the material sense, much less an ideological one, are the ones talking about the lofty concerns of morality and the culture wars? Why is it, do you suppose? Is it that we intellectual metros are on the losing end of the new economy? Could be, except for the fact that last time I checked, my income is going up, not down, and I have a rather good health care and 401(k) plan. And I happen to work in a sector of the economy (higher ed) which is both a growth industry at the moment and peculiarly place-based and hence unlikely to be subject to off-shoring. So if the people who are benefiting from the new economy are the ones talking in “outmoded” “class warfare” type language, but the people who are losing from the new economy are the ones too affluent to be bothered by petty material concerns, then does what George Will say make any sense at all?

No, in fact in makes no sense. It is, to be precise about the matter, utter and complete horseshit. And in fact, this is the kind of shallow, fatuous grandstanding that worries me to the depths of my democratic (with a small d) soul. Because if we are not talking about policies and programs (would that be too much to ask for? I mean, seriously?), and we aren’t talking about “interests,” then what the hell are we talking about?

Is Arendt really so outmoded these days that no-one is worried about the fact that once we unloose ourselves from such “outmoded” secondary institutions as, oh, say, unions, or professional associations (those wicked, wicked carriers of “interests” and “class” identity) we are left with nothing to mediate between ourselves and the next demagogue?

Because that’s what “values” are, in the end. Demagoguery. They are empty code words that symbolize nothing substantive, nothing that has to do with actual public policy that might affect the running of the government and society, or in fact anything except who people sleep with and what they may and may not do once they have slept with someone.

Now, there is another story to be told here about what “values” might be. In sociology, there is an old, Parsonian, literature, that posits “values” as the high-falutin’ “sticking-bits” that hold societies together. You might think of this as the sociological version of Huntington’s thesis in “Clash of Civilizations” (and of course, all of this goes back to Durkheim). In this version, there are certain core “values” that hold people in a society together and which distinguish societies from one another. Examples of such things might be, I don’t know, “equality” or “justice” or “honor” or “piety” or – ahem – “freedom.” Now, in Parson’s view, “values” are always sort of vague – they have be broken down into slightly more specific “norms” from which we, of course, derive such things as laws, customs, and traditional duties. So, for instance, a value of “honor” might mean that you derive a “norm” which says that you have to murder your daughter if she is ever so unlucky as to have been raped. Or, for instance, a value of “equality” might mean that we derive a norm which says that everyone over the age of 18, regardless of their skin color, sexual taste, gender, or wealth, is entitled to one (and only one) vote in an election.

So if this is what “values” are, then will somebody, for heaven’s sake, please tell me what these “conservative” or “heartland” or even “leftist” values are? What are they, so that I can decide whether or not I “share” them with John Kerry, or Dick Cheney, or even Ralph Nader? And then, if it’s really not too much to ask, could you actually bother to specify the norms (or to use a phrase I guess Kerry isn’t comfortable with, “policies and programs”) that derive from these “values?”*

Because if you cannot , or worse, will not, state clearly what those “values” are – and how they devolve into particular norms, programs, and policies – then to say simply that you and I share values, but you and he do not, is…

What’s the word I’m looking for here, daddy?

Oh, yes. Demagoguery.

Or, to mangle the Bard, it is a bankrupt signifier, full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing.

Personally, and speaking as one of those who would almost certainly be thrown up against the wall when the revolution comes (the first thing they do, after all, is liquidate the intellectuals and the faggots) I’d like to see a little more class warfare in this country.

*Cheney recently – and perhaps quite unwittingly – demonstrated what happens when you actually bother to spell out the logic of the linkages between your “values” and specific norms and policies. Hence, he said (and I quote) “freedom means freedom for everyone…[it means] people ought to be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want to.” Here, the “value” we term “freedom” (a gloriously vague word) was specified, i.e., broken down into a norm. And specifically, Cheney believes that freedom means (among other things), that people ought to be able, “freely,” to enter into relationships with other people. And, moreover, that people ought to be able, “freely,” to enter into intimate relationships, perhaps even ones sanctioned and protected by the state, with members of the same sex.

Note, this specification of “freedom” is not at all conservative. It is, to be precise about the matter, a liberal and even radical notion. Who knew that Dick Cheney and I would ever agree on anything?

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[Note: my tirade on values was pre-empted by this morning’s news.]

My head hurts. Cheney now supports the idea of states rights when it comes to gay marriage: “Cheney’s gay marriage comments draw criticism from both foes and proponents” Associated Press 8/25/04 (I would cite the NYT article but the damn site keeps crashing).

To quote: “”With the respect to the question of relationships, my general view is freedom means freedom for everyone. … People ought to be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want to.”

Did I read that right? People ought to be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want to?

What kind of sicko “anything goes” liberal says that sort of thing?

But wait, it gets better: “The question that comes up with the issue of marriage is what kind of official sanction or approval is going to be granted by government? Historically, that’s been a relationship that has been handled by the states. The states have made that fundamental decision of what constitutes a marriage,” he said.

I need some aspirin and a shot of tequila to digest this little apercu.

Two hypotheses:
a.) They’re trying to appeal to moderate voters (though this seems hardly the issue on which to appeal to moderates, since my impression is that it is one of two things their base is absolutely rock solid on).
b.) Cheney is giving George a reason to drop him from the ticket and nominate McCain.

Can anyone else offer an explanation? I’m stumped. It couldn’t be as simple as Cheney’s daughter actually brought him around on the merits of a libertarian, states’ rights argument, could it?

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Like the cancer of drugs in our society, voting Republican destroys neighborhoods, and it destroys schools. I need only point my faithful readers to the fine pieces produced by my fellow Pimpgnostic THM for you to read of the consequences to our neighborhoods of Republican-endorsed policies such as:

(a) the deliberate under-funding of public transportation (after all, it can’t “pay its way,” so why should anyone support the lifestyles of the poor and carless, or worse, those latte-sipping luddite liberals who insist on walking or biking everywhere?);
(b) holding to the standard that the use, exploitation, and disposal of property are inviolable, and any imposition on them (such as the ghastly interference in the magical workings of the private sector that goes under the suspiciously Soviet-sounding monikers of “urban planning” or “zoning”) constitutes an unacceptable infringement upon individual rights to property, property, and the pursuit of more property; and
(c) because the “tragedy of the commons” is apparently a big fat lie invented by some snot-nosed and sniveling sociologist, all of the kinds of urban infrastructure services that were formerly provided under “gas and water socialism” have been denuded, privatized, or abandoned altogether. Hence, no sidewalks, no curbside recycling, no street-cleaning, no “beautification,” no urban forestry management, etc., etc.

What is the result of policies such as these? Come visit RBL sometime, and he’ll be happy to show you such scabrous suburbs as Hurst, or Plano, Texas. As Dan Savage pointed out in “Skipping Towards Gomorrah,” while it is true that the aesthetic horror produced by industrialization and poverty is often pitiable, the true ugliness of upper-middle class cities such as Plano is that people choose to live there, and choose to build these suburbs to look exactly as they do. Instead of dealing with the difficulties of living near people who don’t look like them and paying to create a livable, vibrant urban space, Planoids (Planoistes? Planoenos?) choose live 20 miles north of the moon and surround themselves with acres and acres of the same big-box warehouse stores, homogenous ticky-tacky garage-facing-the-street ranch houses, sidewalk-free cul-de-sacs, fast-food chain restaurants, acres and acres of shadeless asphalt parking lots, and bicycle death-trap six-lane 40 mph throughways, all of which you can find anywhere in America, and in which civil society positively withers and dies.

And schools? Oh Lord where to begin telling the story of the Republican assault on our nation’s public education system? Suffice it to say that all of the most recent Republican proposals as regards “fixing” what’s wrong with public education are like a mountebank’s claims that what needs to be done to the patient is to bleed him to restore the balance of humors. They take that which is most vital (viz., mouthy middle-class parents) and remove them from the system. They provide all of the incentives for individuals to exercise their “choices,” enclose their own little section of the commons, and stop giving a shit about anybody else in society. Let me say it loud and clear: yes we all want the best for “our” children, but we also – all of us – have a stake in the education of every blessed brat in this nation. You want hoodlums off the street? Pay to keep the bastards in that total institution we call high school. You want cheap workers for your fast food and your factories? Make damn sure they can read, write, and do arithmetic. You want good schools? Stop your bitchin’ and prepare to pay for the quality we all deserve. Vouchers, and “performance-based incentives,” and the continued insistence on the privileging of local interests (as in property tax-based funding) over a shared commitment to equality and justice all tend to one thing: the auctioning off of our common goods, the splintering of our common heritage, and the abandonment of our common commitment to the defense and protection of the most basic bulwark of our democracy: free and compulsory public education.

Whoo-eee. Boy am I ever glad I got that out of my system. Now I’m ready to swish back some chardonnay with my brie [ugh – why is that the Anne Coulters of the world smear libs like me with drinking chardonnay, of all things? Give me a good belt of scotch, any fuckin’ day of the week. Chardonnay, please. The brie, however, I’ll keep. It is, after all, French.]

All right, that dead horse has now been flogged, and flogged good. Next week I start talking about the present bee in my bonnet, namely values.

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Remember how government is always, already “bad?” How “small is beautiful” and “limited government” is a wonderful thing, how government “always” tends to the destruction of that fragile entity called “civil society,” and how we must “starve the beast?” Remember that? Can we remind ourselves briefly of just who exactly we’re talking about here? Among others, “the government” means:

a.) Fire-men and -women (the heroes of Sept. 11th),
b.) Police Officers (the other heroes of Sept. 11th),
c.) Public School Teachers (“the real heroes” according to a billboard here in Texas), and
d.) Members of the Armed Forces (laying down one’s life for one’s country is a darn good definition of a hero, if you ask me)

This is who the government is, people – it is not simply some faceless bureaucracy “over there” in Washington or Sacramento, or Albany, or wherever. It is the vast numbers of hard-working, tax-paying, people who work every day to arrest our malefactors, put out our fires, defend our borders, and teach our kids.

To disparage the very notion of “government” is to dishonor the hard work done by every civil servant at every level of government. To spit out the word “gub’mint” with the kind of disgust one usually reserves for “pedophile” or “terrorist” is to undercut the difficult, honorable work of every man and woman who toils day in and day out to see that the people’s business is conducted and protected.

Now, one could make distinctions between the kinds of work different branches of the government do: say, the “good bits” like the Army, or Homeland Security, and the “bad bits” like, I don’t know, the Departments of Housing and Urban Development, or Education, or the EPA. And one could support eliminating the bad bits while either preserving or even strengthening the good bits. One could do this by, say, gutting the enforcement powers of the EPA while at the same time ramping up funding for the Dept. of Homeland Security until you’ve hired so many people it actually starts to show up on the quarterly national economic indicators.

But this is not what the rhetoric of “government is evil” accomplishes. The rhetoric of “government is evil” does not make these fine distinctions. To say “Government is evil” is to say that the people who work for the government (teachers, firefighters, policemen, and just so’s we’re into full disclosure here, my parents) are Satan’s henchmen. The rhetoric of “government is evil” is what leads to the kind of ridiculous outcomes we’re seeing in states like Oregon, where they don’t have enough money in the state budget to pay teachers to the end of the school year, or hire enough state troopers to guard the coast.

Voting Republican – and hence supporting Republican ideas like opposition to “forcibly” integrated schools, support for abstinence-based (or –only) education, and espousing the rhetoric of “government is evil” – entails consequences that are ugly, mean, and costly. This includes greater racial and class segregation in public and private life; more out-of-wedlock pregnancies and no appreciable decrease in STDs; disorganized municipal government; a cynical and tired corps of public teachers; and the stripping-down of the actual fighting core of our armed forces (oh, guns and missiles they’re happy to pay for – because that provides local pork for manufacturing magnate donors. But actually upping the number of men and women under arms? Please. That would involve putting more working-class people on the government dole). But Republican voters, like all addicts, refuse to see the consequences of their own actions. So let’s keep the list going, shall we? Let me end this refreshingly purgative tirade (it feels kinda like barfing up a stomachful of barbiturates, really it does) with one last parallel between voting Republican and dropping a tab, namely the destruction of neighborhoods and schools.

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So I was in Georgia this weekend for my annual family reunion. For those of you who know me, this family reunion involves everything you would expect from the previous sentence: it takes place in a town that consists of a Methodist church, a Baptist church, a “founders cemetery” in which several of my ancestors are buried, a Masonic hall, and a “museum” (for a somewhat-famous dead writer to whom I am not related) inside an old filling station. And that’s it. No, really. That’s all. In fact, if you’ve ever seen Fried Green Tomatoes, it’s basically that town, only not in Alabama. At said reunion – which consists of a potluck supper in the fellowship hall of the Methodist Church, my people having been middle-class since like, forever – there were a whole lot of white people, eight dozen deviled eggs, a Tupperware tubful of pineapple sandwiches, gallons of sweet tea, jello salad, green bean casserole, pork BBQ, and way too many stories about people who have been dead for at least 50 years. Given the diet and the sheer boredom of it all, it’s a wonder any of us makes it past the age of 60.

But here’s the good part. Normally conversation is strictly limited to three things: the weather, the “organ recital” (“oh, great auntie Sue, how’s that arthritis?” “Just fine dearie, but did you hear about poor cousin Jeb’s diabetes?” etc.), and vicious gossip about relatives who are not present (either because they are dead, or because they couldn’t make it to the reunion. Why else do you think I make damn sure to go whenever I can?). This year, however, there was a subtle, but distinctly fresh breeze flowing through the murmurings at the reunion. It was in fact the sound of politics (gasp!) being discussed.

Now let me be quite clear here: the people who come to my family reunion are white, middle-class, straight (well, except for me), and Protestant big-time – we say grace before eating and everything. There is a whole lot of praise-Jebus’in goin’ on at these suppers, let me tell you. While the shades of Protestantism range from Episcopalian to C.M.A. (and yes, that is rather like moving all the way across the spectrum from eggshell to ecru), everybody there is a believer, and they make sure to say so often, and loudly. That means, in case you haven’t been paying attention, that these people are the heart of Bush’s popular base (no, not the white-tie crowd, the other base). But guess what?

There were Kerry supporters there. Not Edwards supporters per se – my people never really worked in mills, though we never really owned any, either – but Kerry supporters. And they were willing to admit it.

I find this enormously encouraging. It turns out that Bush’s handling of the war – by which I mean the invasion of Iraq – presents a bigger problem than I had thought among a lot of mainline Protestants. These are the people who normally say things like “Affirmative action? Black people should stop whining!” or “Death penalty? Fry those bastards!” or “I’m not a feminist! I don’t hate men!” or (and this is my personal favorite) “Gay marriage? But we have to protect our children!” (from what? Window treatments? Mojitos? Withering remarks about Capri pants?) But when it comes to Iraq, they basically agree that Bush misrepresented the WMD thing, and that that was wrong. Wrong enough that they’re going to vote for the other guy.

Thank goodness that even people who do not read, who watch Fox by default, whose local papers carry such “news” as “Macaroni Grille is coming to town!” and “four local boy scouts volunteer to help girl leukemia victim!” (you think I’m making this up, don’t you? Would that I were), even these people realize that what Bush has done is deeply, profoundly, wrong. And worse, dangerous for our nation.

That, I find encouraging.

But now back to the rant (which is almost done, I swear).

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Remember abstinence-based education? How it focuses on “values,” and if we don’t have “values” then we do all kinds of terrible things like get pregnant early, take drugs, become homosexuals, and go on welfare?

Right. So now we have something called the “True Love Waits” movement, where Baptists go around to high schools preaching and getting the kiddies to sign little pledge cards saying they’ll wait to get married before they get their bone on. It’s signing up tens of thousands of teens (and pre-teens) all over the country. And guess what? Not only are kids who sign the pledge more likely to get pregnant out of wedlock — because you sure as hell aren’t going to be buying condoms when you’ve told your pastor, your parents, your girlfriend, and God that you aren’t going to fornicate — but communities where lots of people pledge have the same rates of STDs as communities filled with “value-free” secular hedonists.

In other words, taking the pledge means you’re going to get pregnant and the clap (see Bearman and Bruckner, American Journal of Sociology, 106(4), also Bearman and Bruckner’s 2004 presentation at the National STD Prevention Conference in Philadelphia).

Let me say it again: taking the virginity pledge — as a cousin of mine and his new wife did, which they painstakingly explained to those of us gathered together to celegrate the fact that they they could now fuck with Jesus’s full blessing — means you are actively doing nothing about your risks of teen pregnancy or STDs. You may be doing something (such as inviting Jesus into your life for a little menage a trois, oh wait, I meant to say “three-fold cord“), but you sure as shit ain’t doing jack about the risks that always, already, go with having sex.

It is true that taking the pledge “works” in the sense that, on average, pledgers wait approximately 18 months longer before having sex (and a year and a half is an eternity when you’re a horny high-school teen, as we all know). But it does not work to reduce either teen pregnancy or community rates of sexually transmitted diseases.

But this is not something we see once we’ve sucked down the sickeningly sweet malt liquor of “values” rhetoric, since evidently having “values” are the only thing that matters, and if you don’t have “values,” then the world is going to end, you’ll get pregnant out of wedlock, and put yourself at risk for a social disease. Oh, wait – aack! I can’t think straight anymore! My brain’s been so fucked up by, what’s Bill Safire’s phrase? “Depth-polling the inherent contradictions that hold five Republican factions together” (NYT, 7/21/04, “Inside a Republican Brain”) or some such crank.

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