It figures. I go public with a few comments on my sudden appreciation for the Weekly Standard and what happens? They go and screw the whole thing up.

In the three or four weeks since I posted my remarks about the Standard each issue has had at least one or two articles that were seriously disappointing. That’s fine, really. When I subscribed to the magazine I hardly expected to feel great comfort with its ideological bent. I like to read things from across the political spectrum, and the Standard continues to fit the bill in that respect. However, some of the material published in the Standard recently has been more than objectionable from an ideological standpoint, it has been of highly dubious quality. I know putting out a weekly magazine, even a small one, is no easy task, but the Standard is so uneven it’s almost impossible to make a definitive judgment about its value as a journal of opinion.

Let’s begin with Fred Barnes. A Weekly Standard reader can save himself some time by skipping every article Barnes writes, all the more so if the reader is on the mailing list of the Republican National Committee or if he generally keeps up with what Ari Fleischer and Karl Rove are telling, or leaking to, the media. Barnes has one of the easiest jobs in American journalism and he’s not ashamed to let it show. What’s amazing is that no matter how many times someone calls him on it, he keeps at it.

The Sept. 30 edition of the Standard includes a piece by Barnes entitled “Where Incumbents Tremble,” a discussion of the current congressional races in Iowa and the effect, or lack thereof, of the state’s stance against absurd geographical gerrymandering. It’s interesting--it even includes two cool maps--but it sounds spoon-fed.

In the same issue there’s a bilious take on New York gubernatorial candidate Tom Golisano by James Higgins, “a partner in a private equity firm in New York.” It’s easily one of the meanest, nastiest, one-sided, and bitter articles I’ve read in years.

David Brooks, a senior editor at the magazine, takes top prize, however, for “The Fog of Peace,” subtitled, “The evasions, distractions, and miasma of the anti-war left.” It’s yet another of those, ahem, standard-issue articles in which the fringes of “the left” are spoken of in a manner that suggests they represent the opinion of mainstream liberals and the Democratic Party.

One surmises from reading this piece that Brooks dusted off his old bound copies of Commentary and applied all of its most shopworn diatribes to anyone to the left of Alan Keyes who has spoken in opposition to, or even skeptically of, waging war against Iraq. It’s not for Brooks to challenge the criticism put forward by a group of 33 first-class academicians. Why bother when there’s easy money to be made attacking the likes of Jane Fonda, Barbara Ehrenreich, Gore Vidal, and Ed Asner?

Brooks pretends to launch an assault against Frances FitzGerald, but he does so before even picking up his sword. His characterization of her article in the New York Review of Books is so reductive as to be insulting, not only to FitzGerald but to any thinking person who read her essay, regardless of whether they agreed with her or not. Brooks clearly is out of his league here.

Yes, Brooks takes a few shots at Noam Chomsky, but who hasn’t? Frankly, I’m no fan of Chomsky, and despite his reputed brilliance, I think he’s an easy mark.

According to Brooks, “the left” today isn’t engaging in a debate against Iraq or about anything else, for that matter. “They are just repeating the hatreds they cultivated in the 1960s, and during the Reagan years, and during the Florida imbroglio after the last presidential election. They are playing culture war, and they are disguising their eruptions as position-taking on Iraq, a country about which they haven’t even taken the trouble to inform themselves,” writes Brooks, who responds to these critics with the same sneering dismissal the neoconservatives have been tossing at their opponents since, oh, around 1973.

I’ve got to hand it to Brooks, though. He ends his article on a powerful note: “demolishing” such highly regarded military strategists as woman-about-town Susan Sontag and bon-vivant playwright Tony Kushner. Please, this is war. Can we be serious now?

The Standard’s next issue, that of Oct. 7, was not much better. The bulk of the magazine was taken up that week by “The Angry Adolescent of Europe,” by Christopher Caldwell, a piece dripping with animosity and parochialism. The descent continued a week later with “The Baghdad Democrats,” by Stephen F. Hayes and an unintentionally--at least I think it was unintentional--hilarious piece on marriage by Joseph Loconte.

Meanwhile, in the front of the book, the section before the feature well, the reader is subjected to, in reverse order, “Casual,” normally a non-political, slice-of-life essay, the latest of these featuring the perpetually grouchy Joseph Epstein mocking adult education and the aforementioned Brooks completely out of his element in South Beach, Miami Beach, Fla., and the “Scrapbook,” a cauldron of juvenile rants presumably directed at whomever that week has drawn the ire of the magazine’s interns, themselves obviously heavily influenced by the mindset on display at Free Republic and Lucianne.com.

Former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton make thoughtful statements about U.S. foreign policy, but according to the Standard’s “Scrapbook,” they are “ex-president[s] desperately seeking attention.” One wonders what the Scrapbook’s scribblers would have said about President Richard Nixon’s post-White House career, had they been cognitive adults at the time, of course. Throw in some cheap shots at such heavyweights as Jesse Jackson, Jesse Jackson Jr., Peter Jennings, and Barbra Streisand, and you have a section that reads like the Dartmouth Review, circa 1984.

I can’t help concluding that for those involved in producing this magazine, the entire project is something of an afterthought. I expect better. The Standard has delivered better. If they plan to continue calling it “The Nation’s Foremost Political Weekly,” and be taken seriously while doing so, these guys have a lot of work to do.

Today ten sites are added to the Review’s list of “Better Bloggers.” I was going to write a pithy introduction for each of them, but that would just take away from the time you would spend better by reading them.

A Skeptical Blog . . . CalPundit (Kevin Drum) . . . Fanatical Apathy (Adam Felber) . . . Free Pie (Kim Osterwalder) . . . Ignatz (Sam Heldman) . . . Interesting Monstah . . . Ruminate This (Lisa English) . . . Seize the Fish’s Journal . . . Skimble . . . VanitySite (Zizka).

Today I also note with disappointment the retirement of Eric Hallstrom and the decommissioning of his weblog Chilicheeze, one of the first blogs I began reading on a consistent basis. Best wishes on your future endeavors, Mr. Hallstrom.

William Safire today raises the specter of Islamist terrorism in the Washington-area shootings. Safire hedges, of course, that being a talent he perfected during the Clinton administration; “rarely mentioned,” he says, is the possibility that “the sniper may be a terrorist affiliated with Al Qaeda or otherwise inspired by Osama bin Laden. Odds are against such a conspiracy. . . . But the venue chosen by the most recent shooter is the capital of the U.S., a primary target of worldwide terrorism. Police have speculated that the sniper might well have an accomplice, perhaps a driver or supplier, which suggests a terrorist cell.” [Emphasis added.]

That there may be two people involved in the Washington snipings “suggests a terrorist cell”? Maybe we had better reopen the “Hillside Strangler” cases. After all, Angelo Buono and Kenneth Bianchi worked in tandem.

Yet another one of those breathless “How does he/she do it all?” articles that neglects to mention the subject’s coterie of assistants and the massive amount of free time that becomes available upon hiring household help, this one about Katie Couric, in the Buffalo News.

Two good articles in the Forward this week. The first questions the wisdom of creating democracies in the Middle East: “Arab diplomats are saying that such officious attempts may evoke greater resentment of the United States and other Western nations. Israeli experts warn that hasty democratization may strengthen militant Islamic forces, increasing instability in the region.” Talk about your no-win situations.

The second article discusses the apparent, but denied, rift between Commentary and First Things over the Catholic-Jewish inter-faith dialogue and sundry matters dealing with Pope Pius XII and anti-Semitism.

Clay Bennett’s cartoon in today’s Christian Science Monitor.

Dave Barry takes on teenagers and their aversion to newspapers with the assistance of Debbie Title of Crestview Middle School.

Father Richard John Neuhaus, editor of First Things, really cracks me up.

Here he is in the latest issue:

“You know about Father Mychal Judge, the gay priest who was killed giving the last rites to fallen firefighters at the World Trade Center? No you don’t. Fr. Mychal was not homosexual, never mind, as has been endlessly repeated in the media, ‘openly gay.’ He was a faithful celibate priest noted for his heroic service to all in need. The story of his being gay is a total fabrication of homosexual activists and their friends in the press.”

Says who?

“So says Dennis Lynch, a lawyer who was a close friend and collaborator of Fr. Mychal’s who knew him for ten years and has gone to the trouble of interviewing scores of others who worked with him closely. All of them agree that the legend of ‘the gay priest’ is nothing but propaganda. As you might expect, there are those who persist in claiming that they know Fr. Judge was gay.” [Ed.: The article is not yet online.]

Well, I guess that means we’re to put Fr. Neuhaus in the “Fr. Judge was straight” camp, though, if Fr. Judge couldn’t be celibate and gay I’m not sure how he could have been celibate and straight either.

No matter, the brave and fiercely independent Fr. Neuhaus, a former Lutheran minister, who having never married was able easily later in life to convert to Catholicism and move all but immediately into the priesthood, a vocation he has spent cavorting with war-mongering and gay-baiting neoconservatives, appealing to Richard Mellon Scaife for next year’s operating budget, and appearing at almost any conference that extends him an invitation, backs off this seeming assertion in the very next paragraph:

“I don’t know what to believe, but I have talked with Mr. Lynch and find his argument persuasive. For further information, he can be reached at deallaw@aol.com.”

I also have read Lynch’s argument as published in numerous outlets this year and I found it unconvincing, but then again, I was trying to be objective.

Is Fr. Neuhaus approaching the matter with an open mind? After all, Fr. Neuhaus has on numerous occasions expressed his disgust for gay men and women and particularly for gay clergymen, even those who adhere to their vows of celibacy. And it’s Fr. Neuhaus, not me, who has in print bemoaned the purported exclusion of “manly men” from the priesthood.

As a matter of fact, I e-mailed Lynch several specific questions about Fr. Judge in an effort to determine exactly how well he knew the man. That was nearly six months ago. I have yet to hear from him.

Much ado, much posturing, and much bluster surrounds a controversial ad used earlier this week in the re-election campaign of Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) against challenger State Rep. Mike Taylor (R). Some are calling it “gay baiting,” some question whether Democrats are being let off too easily, that there’s a double standard, while others are asking whether the ad “crossed the line.”

The ad in question uses footage from a television commercial produced for Taylor in the mid-1970s for a hair and skin care company he owned and operated. (A video of the Baucus ad that includes a portion of the old commercial can be viewed at Talking Points Memo and elsewhere on the web.) The reaction among bloggers has ranged from demonic rage on one side to a shrug of the shoulders on the other.

It’s tempting to conclude that the reactions vary depending upon the party affiliation or political philosophy of the observer, but I’m not sure that’s quite right. I believe the varied reactions to the ad depend on factors far more personal than that.

Watching the video, I felt empathy for Taylor, but I was not embarrassed for him. His anger and vituperation surprise me, as does that of bloggers, particularly gay bloggers, who have reacted similarly. If the wardrobe, the setting, and the photography -- all of which are very much of the period -- remained the same and only Taylor’s activity been changed, say, to depicting him tattooing a rose on a young woman’s behind, I think I would have reacted the same way.

My empathy and its attendant cringing have little or nothing to do with the purported “gay-baiting” nature of the Baucus ad. I think the ad pushes the envelope -- quite a bit in fact -- and if I were Baucus I would like to think I would not have used it, but I don’t think it’s “gay-baiting.” Instead, my reaction was the discomfort we all have felt at some point when confronted unexpectedly with some aspect of or action from our past that while not humiliating per se, we would prefer be forgotten.

An easy and quite apt example is the feeling many people experience when the family photos albums are pulled out in front of guests, particularly a guest who has not had the pleasure of this walk down memory lane, and one must face one’s former self yet again. Perhaps it’s the awkward mid-teen period featuring braces, eyeglasses, and a nose that didn’t quite fit one’s face. Or a youthful foray into one or another sub-culture, be it as a budding hippie, biker, or Trekkie. Each of us has our moments.

We are faced with a choice in such circumstances. We can endure, once again, the embarrassment or humiliation we always experience on this walk back in time, and do so with humor or in anger. Or we can add a narrative to the photographic images that is in some manner exculpating, eases our discomfort, and casts ourselves in a more positive light. Or we can rewrite history -- virtually expunge the episode from our public biography -- by removing and destroying the incriminating photos so they never see the light of day again.

Taylor either lost or did not have the opportunity to choose option three, rewriting history. The tapes were not destroyed; his opponent, or someone acting on his behalf, came into possession of them. That left Taylor with two options: enduring the embarrassment (either with humor or in anger) or adding an explanation to soften the impact he assumed was associated with the images presented. Taylor opted for the first of these, along with the subset of that option entailing endurance in anger, and quite briefly at that.

We cannot know for sure, at least for now, why Taylor made this particular choice. Perhaps it is something about the cultural milieu of Montana -- Big Sky Country, where men are men and the women are capable -- as some have speculated. Or more important, how Taylor feels within that culture. But that really isn’t our business, and at this point, it simply doesn’t matter.

Just as not all of us can understand Taylor’s visceral reaction to this ad, we cannot always explain our own aversion to certain aspects of our past selves. “I am not that person anymore,” we say, either silently or aloud, and of course our family and friends already know this. They are not mocking the person in the photograph, they are laughing at the period or character or awkwardness depicted, with laughter that comes at the expense of themselves and the memories floating through their minds. We know this on a certain level, and yet the emotions rise. After all, seeing one’s spouse or significant other wearing patchwork bellbottoms in a photograph or home movie taken 25 years ago is, in most instances, unlikely to spark a serious reevaluation of the relationship.

Reinvention of our selves, either our inner or outer selves, is a natural part of growing up and growing older. Each of us has engaged in this process to some degree. I have no doubt Taylor has done so over the course of what I understand has been a successful life, but I care not, nor do I choose to speculate, whether that reinvention has anything to do with his sexual orientation. In fact, I seriously doubt it has.

I wonder, though, the extent to which my own life has affected the degree of empathy I feel for Taylor in this situation, which is quite considerable, and whether the life experiences of others explain the wide range of reactions to the event.

Now, reinvention of the self, I feel safe in stating, is a special talent, even a preoccupation, of urban gay men, particularly those arriving in the city from small towns and conservative families. Many psychologists and sociologists, to say nothing of novelists, have observed and documented this phenomenon. My observation of friends and acquaintances over the past 15 or 20 years certainly substantiates it, at least to my satisfaction.

It is not uncommon to encounter gay men in their late 20s and in their 30s who are remarkably different people -- at least on the outside, for public view -- than they were during their childhood, adolescence, and college years, or even than who they were a few years earlier. People change, yes, but some people change dramatically. And a culture that places inordinate importance on youth, beauty, muscularity, masculinity, wealth, and taste -- as the urban gay culture does -- virtually demands reinvention of those who wish to win its acceptance. Like many cultures, its structure is selective, rigid, and hierarchical; its members can appear hypercritical, intolerant, and unforgiving; and its norms are competitive, expensive, unrelenting, and at times ultimately destructive. All of these qualities intensify the higher one scales within the culture.

There are rules to the game to help one along, but the rules can change without notice. Keeping up is crucial, but just staying in the game can become an end in itself. Everything exists and occurs now, and in this moment. Thus, one’s past is of no consequence: look the part, act the part, and you get the part. One can forget or rewrite one’s past because every other player is doing the same thing. One need not even have anything in particular about one’s past in mind. Regardless, such collective suppression breeds fear: fear that the unexpected revelation, admission, or exposure will lead to rejection.

I suspect my empathy for Taylor is an outgrowth of having lived in this particular culture and the degree to which I have not outgrown its associated mindset. I am not saying Taylor’s life has been anything similar to my own or that he has had any experience with the prevailing urban gay culture. I am saying that having lived among many who wished away their pasts in favor of a new and exciting present has given me an insight into the aversion a person might have, for whatever reason, to facing the past unexpectedly, without notice, by surprise. I’m willing to bet many other bloggers might feel the same way.

Herewith the latest additions to the Review’s list of “Better Bloggers”:

Blue Streak . . . Mark McEahern . . . Nitpicker . . . Noosphere Blues . . . P.L.A. . . . Self-Made Pundit . . . Too Much Logic . . . William Burton

More to come.

Stand back! Duck for cover! -- The wing nuts and war bloggers are going to go on a rampage today, the Nobel Peace Prize for 2002 having been awarded just moments ago to former U.S. President Jimmy Carter. -- I have the feeling this is going to get really ugly.

I was reading the always entertaining, immensely humorous, and consistently insightful TBogg today--as I do every day--when I encountered a quote that reportedly came from the ever reliable and thoroughly predictable Mickey Kaus:

In an earlier item, I suggested that Sen. Max Baucus of Montana was vulnerable to attack as weak on welfare reform. Apparently, Baucus’[s] GOP opponent, Mike Taylor, attempted to raise the issue earlier this year, and it didn’t take.

And do you know what? That wacky TBogg fooled me once again. He wasn’t making it up! It wasn’t a Neal Pollack-inspired riff. Kaus actually wrote that. And, of course, much more blather along the same vein. And he got paid for it.

As TBogg puts it, “Dick Morris is a political hack who pretends he’s a journalist. Micky Kaus is a pretend journalist who . . . ,” well, you’ll have to go over there and read the rest yourself.

Really, only Kaus could be surprised that welfare reform, a 1992 issue, “didn’t take” in 2002. Hell, the country’s about to wage war on Iraq, and Iran, and Syria, and whoever else is bugging the neoconservatives these days, but no matter, Kaus wants to talk about welfare reform, damn it!

Now, if only I could find my own dead horse to beat, over . . . and over . . . and over . . . and over . . . and over . . . and over . . .

The defense in the murder retrial of megalomaniacal bail jumper Ira Einhorn moved from desperate to deranged this week, with the has-been hippie’s attorney misguidedly calling friends and associates of the self-styled “planetary enzyme” to the stand.

Among those testifying yesterday was Anne Cavers, a former ballerina and now a “psychic archaeologist,” who claims to have something called “spontaneous clairboyance” and the ability to “detect the nature of objects,” a talent that I presume extends beyond categorization as animal, vegetable, or mineral.

According to a report in the Philadelphia Daily News, “Ira’s Defense Triggers Titters,” by Theresa Conroy, Cavers believes Einhorn was framed in the murder of his former girlfriend, Holly Maddux, because of the sensitive nature of his supposedly cutting-edge “psychotronic” research. Despite her purported psychic and clairvoyant abilities, Cavers has refused to say who killed Maddux.

Also on the stand, Eleanor Huddle, the self-proclaimed author of six books—a search on Amazon.com turns up no titles, let alone six—who, according to Conroy, “seemed dazed and befuddled on the stand.”

A third woman, Dorothy McComb, the only one of the Twilight-Zone trio who was not sleeping with Einhorn before or during the time Maddux’s remains allegedly decomposed in a trunk in the apartment, also testified yesterday. McComb said she stayed in Einhorn’s Philadelphia apartment during his absence in August 1978 and testified that she did not notice any unusual odors while resident there.

“After making that point, McComb went off on a rambling, nearly incomprehensible description of peeking inside the locked trunk on Einhorn’s porch and finding only newspapers. She said that although the trunk was locked, she was able to lift the lid partially,” according to Conroy’s account of the session.

“She also said that one night she had seen several big glass jars filled with a brownish liquid in his bathroom. But by the next morning, the jars, which contained a substance similar to the fluid that dripped from the trunk into a downstairs apartment, had disappeared, she said,” the Daily News reports.

Defense attorney William Cannon put McComb on the stand to establish that Maddux had been killed somewhere outside the apartment, possibly by the CIA or the FBI, but, as Conroy reports, “It was clear her testimony had missed the mark. Several jurors burst into laughter as she rambled on. One juror even turned her back to the witness stand in an effort to hide her giggles from McComb.”

I wonder if the French are at all embarrassed by the extraordinary efforts they went to protect Einhorn during extradition proceedings. And by the way, what ever happened to Einhorn’s friend and devoted supporter, married-into-it heiress Barbara Bronfman?

Man, I know I'm going to flamed for this one, but if you're tired of having to pretend you think the art work of other people's kids is adorable (I'm not that kind of person, of course), take a look at I'm Better Than Your Kids.

[Thanks, Professor Pinkerton.]

If you’re in Philadelphia this weekend, beware of maurauding foursomes of merrymaking middle-aged women, in town for “a girls’ night out.” . . . The Monologues is playing at The Forrest Theatre. Mercifully, eight performances only. Just kidding. Have fun, ladies.

Despite fears of sounding too much like Daniel Pipes, I offer the following housekeeping items:

THE MOVE

The major part of the physical move of The Rittenhouse Review and |||trr||| will take place over the next three days: Sat., Oct. 5, through Mon., Oct. 7. My “real world” boss will require my long-distance attention at 5:00 a.m. on Monday morning, so all of the hardware will be up and running by then. Nevertheless, please bear with me over the next several days.

LINKS

I am flattered beyond words by the large number of new webloggers who have asked that I look at their sites and provide a link from the Review. To all of them -- and to the readers I know will gain much from such future links -- please be aware that the list of “Preview Blogs” in the bookmarks file on my browser now numbers more than 50. It will take me some time to review all of these sites, in part because I recently have been negligent in checking already-linked sites for new and provocative material. Please be patient.

E-MAIL

I try to answer each and every e-mail I receive. However, this lately has been a difficult promise to keep, in part because of the impending move, but also because of the volume of mail received -- from friends, allies, foes, and enemies (for lack of a better word). Please know that each message received by the Review is read by me personally and that all comments, criticisms, and compliments are greatly appreciated.

THE SITE

During the past two weeks, Blogger has not been kind to my readers, nor to me, nor to others whose sites it hosts. I am in the early stages of examining software and hosting alternatives, but it will be several weeks before I can even approach some kind of decision about this matter. Your suggestions and advice are most welcome.

BOOKS

If you are a regular customer of Amazon.com, or even an infrequent or new customer of Amazon.com, please consider making your purchases through my friend and ally, Atrios of the highly regarded Eschaton, the only blog I check more than once a day. If you need assistance in this regard, please contact Atrios at atriosblog /at\ yahoo - /dot\ - com.

DONATIONS

Readers may have noticed that I do not have a link to a tipping box via Amazon.com, PayPal, or any other source. There are a variety of reasons for this, reasons I may outline in a future post. For now, however, the best way to express your support for The Rittenhouse Review is to donate to the gubernatorial campaign of Bill McBride, the Democratic candidate running against incumbent Florida Governor Jeb Bush. Please consider making the most generous contribution you can -- even $25 is greatly appreciated by the campaign -- by clicking here.

A FINAL WORD

Thank you, once again, one and all, for your continued support.

In honor of my great appreciation for the latest display of ignorance by Florida Governor Jeb Bush (R), I just donated, for the second time, to the election campaign of his Democratic challenger, Bill McBride.

And for the hell of it, I doubled my first contribution.

Please consider donating to McBride. You can do so online, using your Visa or MasterCard, here, in amounts ranging from $25 to $500. You’ll be glad you did.

A final note to my fellow Bloggers: Please consider posting a link to the McBride campaign and encourage contributions from your readers.

ADDENDUM: A note to Florida voters from the McBride campaign: “The registration deadline to vote in the General Election is October 7. If you have not registered yet, please contact the Division of Elections within the Department of State by clicking here.”

Gov. Jeb Bush (R-Fla.) yesterday told northern-state lawmakers he had “some juicy details” about the sexual orientation of two women, Geralyn Graham and Pamela Graham, who have been with fraud as a result of the investigation into the disappearance of Rilya Wilson, a Miami girl who has been missing for nearly two years.

Excerpts from the Associated Press report:

“As (Pamela Graham) was being arrested, she told her co-workers, ‘Tell my wife I’ve been arrested.’ The wife is the grandmother, and the aunt is the husband,” Bush explained, using his fingers to indicate quotation marks to emphasize the word “grandmother.”

“Bet you don’t get that in Pensacola,” Bush told his guests, a group of lawmakers from Florida’s Panhandle. [Ed.: Emphasis added.]

Never having been to Pensacola myself, I don’t know what one “gets” there, except for what I read in the papers.

And the last big story I recall coming out of Pensacola had to do with the tragic, unnecessary, and preventable death of one Chester Lee Miller, 18. [Ed.: The link was posted on Sept. 26 and some aspects of the initial account have changed since that time.]

There are, unfortunately, no “juicy details” in the story of Chester Miller, only sickening and depressing details -- the exception being the selfless and noble actions of Miller’s would-be rescuer, the aptly-named Janice Goodman, and her family -- details one wonders whether Gov. Bush is even aware of.

ADDENDUM: Be sure to read MWO’s take on the situation today.

Like many keepers of weblogs and web journals, I often am amused by some of the Google searches that bring readers to The Rittenhouse Review, and I occasionally share some of the more unusual inquiries with readers.

Several themes recur in these searches, some of which come from other sources, including MSN, Excite, Yahoo, and America Online. Two of the most common themes returned to the fore this week, both of which fall under a wide umbrella that might be characterized under the broader category of: “Is he or isn’t he?”

This week’s trigger was the misdemeanor guilty plea of Douglas Faneuil, a former broker’s assistant at Merrill Lynch & Co., in the ongoing investigation into insider trading in shares of ImClone Systems Inc.

That probe extends, at the very least, to: Sam Wacksal, the former chief executive officer of ImClone, and presumably, his daughter and father; Martha Stewart, chairman and chief executive officer of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Ltd., who today resigned from her position as a director of the New York Stock Exchange; and Peter Bacanovic, Stewart’s stockbroker at Merrill Lynch, who along with Faneuil, was fired by the firm yesterday.

So what is it that searchers at Google et al. are looking for? Well, the most frequent inquiries go something like this: Douglas + Faneuil + gay; or, Douglas + Faneuil + gay+ photo; or, Peter + Bacanovic+ gay; or, Peter + Bacanovic + gay + photo.

Now, let me state for the record at this point that it doesn’t exactly require “gaydar” to arrive at the conclusion, heretofore not mentioned at this site, that both Bacanovic and Faneuil are, indeed, gay. After all, have you seen a photograph of Peter Bacanovic? If not, look here. (There are two photographs on the linked page.) He’s plainly too good-looking to be straight. (Sorry, ladies.) As for Faneuil, well, I think this photo pretty much speaks for itself.

No, Faneuil is not my type, but Mr. Bacanovic should feel free to dial (###) ###-#### at any time, day or night. [JMC: What’s with the blackout? Editors are a pain, aren’t they?]

Moreover, a recent piece published by MSNBC.com referred to Bacanovic as an “urbane bachelor,” code words that even my great-grandparents in the old country would have understood. I wonder, is that what I am? An “urbane bachelor”? God, I hope so. It sounds like a great life. Well, except for that whole might have to go to jail thing.

I just heard through the grapevine that Vanity Fair is planning to jump on the release of the membership roll of the Augusta National Golf Club with a special feature in one of the oh-so-glossy magazine’s upcoming issues.

As I understand it, VF has opted against a thoughtful textual treatment of the controversy surrounding the club’s all-male membership -- a spat that has both the National Council of Women's Organizations and the United Daughters of the Confederacy up in arms -- in favor of a collection of never-before-seen photographs.

A rate card for the issue is being prepared as we speak. I have heard a rough draft of the card reads, in part:

Word has it that while Annie Liebovitz will rely largely on her tired-and-true group-shot format -- Ooh! Aah! So many rich people! All in the same room! -- some of the photographs will feature black-and-white or sepia-toned nudes or partial nudes of America’s top CEOs.

Reportedly, Liebovitz and her subjects are comfortable with the prospect of nude poses. “I’ve been sucking up to Graydon Carter, Tina Brown, and all of these head honchos for years,” Liebovitz says. “Hell, I already have ‘woo-woo’ shots of half of these guys. This is easy money, but I will not let it compromise what’s left of my artistic integrity.”

Let’s see if you can read between the lines.

Below are excerpts from an article in today’s edition of the Philadelphia Inquirer, “Einhorn Lawyer Asks Women About Feelings for Maddux,” by Jacqueline Soteropoulos.

Trying to establish a pattern of domestic violence that ultimately turned fatal when Holly Maddux decided to leave Ira Einhorn, prosecutors have called several women to testify about the telltale marks and bruises they observed on their friend in the years before she vanished in 1977.

But yesterday, during the second day of testimony in Einhorn’s murder trial, his defense attorney aggressively questioned two of the women about their own marital situations and impressions of Maddux.

“They seem to be, all be, the kind of ladies who are part of the pro-feminism movement, who might be termed man-haters,” William Cannon later told reporters. “I felt that these witnesses might have a bias against men in general.”

Cannon also said he detected a “flavor” of sexual attraction to Maddux from some of the testimony.

Genie O’Brien, who testified that she twice saw Maddux with facial bruises when they worked at a food cooperative in the 1970s, ridiculed Cannon’s suggestions.

“Desperate people do desperate things. The defense is very desperate,” O’Brien said after leaving the witness stand. “I think it just shows they have nothing substantive.”

Einhorn, 62, is accused of bludgeoning his former girlfriend and stuffing her body into a steamer trunk. Investigators discovered the trunk and its grisly contents locked inside Einhorn’s Powelton Village apartment in 1979, 18 months after the 30-year-old had disappeared.

Both male and female witnesses testified about Maddux’s blond and slender beauty.

O’Brien told the jury: “I always remember Holly as being very beautiful, winsome, demure... . I always kind of thought of her as Grace Kelly in blue jeans and a flannel shirt.”

But outside the courtroom, after listening to Cannon’s suggestions of attraction or anti-male bias, O’Brien said that she was not gay and never had romantic feelings toward Maddux.

Another witness, Penny Jeannechild, said she taught Maddux in a class and discussed relationship problems with her in 1975 and 1976.

Jeannechild, a former Inquirer employee who is the domestic partner of Inquirer television columnist Gail Shister, was closely questioned about being unmarried when she counseled Maddux.

“Well, what were you?” Cannon asked.

As Jeannechild hesitated, Common Pleas Court Judge William J. Mazzola cut in and asked the witness if she had a “significant other” in her life when she knew Maddux.

“Yes,” Jeannechild answered.

Jeannechild said later: “If homophobic misogyny is the best defense they have, their case is far weaker than anybody thought.”

I have long thought Ira Einhorn was the human manifestation of the pond scum covering the primordial soup. Amazingly, it turns out Einhorn & Co. come from a far lower level of prehistoric slime.

A great catch by Atrios of Eschaton: Pentagon advisor Richard Perle mau-mauing German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder.

Were it not for the move, I would translate the entire article, which can be found, in German and in its entirety, at Handelsbatt’s web site: here. Atrios has the shocking quotes in English.

It’s your ball, Atrios. Run with it.

ADDENDUM: David Yaseen of A Level Gaze is on this one too.

We note with sadness the passing of Rep. Patsy Mink (D-Hawaii), age 74, on Saturday, Sept. 28, of viral pneumonia arising from a case of the chicken pox.

A member of the House of Representatives for 24 years, Rep. Mink, known to her crudest opponents as “Patsy Pink” because of her determined liberalism, had just recently won the Democratic primary -- again -- in preparation for running for another term in the House of Representatives in November.

Rep. Mink’s unfortunate demise has important implications for the upcoming elections: She died two days after the deadline that would have had her name taken off the November ballot. As a result, when Hawaii voters go to the polls on Nov. 5, Rep. Mink’s name will be on the ballot, in opposition to Republican Bob McDermott, a state legislator.

“If she is reelected posthumously, the seat will be declared vacant and a special election will be held to choose a successor,” according to Ron Staten of the Associated Press. Given the predominance of Democrats over Republicans in the great -- very great -- state of Hawaii, a seat for the party of reason would be virtually assured.

Just as the very dead Gov. Mel Carnahan (D-Mo.) defeated the loathsome and apparently alive John Ashcroft -- who is now, astonishingly, the attorney general of the U.S. -- in the Missouri Senate race in 2000, leading his wife, Jean Carnahan, to take the seat in contention, something quite similar, though most likely less unusual, could happen in Hawaii.

The message to Hawaiians: Vote for the dead candidate.

It’s time to lay off New Jersey, a state that has been the butt of far more jokes than it deserves.

Please . . . Have these “comedians” never been to Montana or Alabama? (I think I just lost four readers. Or four visitors, I might say.)

The Daily Kos has the scoop on Sen. Robert Toricelli (D-N.J.) and how his departure from the political scene improves the chances of the Democrats retaining control of the U.S. Senate.

I’ll bet Christine Whitman (R) is wishing she hadn’t taken that see-nothing, hear-nothing, say-nothing, do-nothing job as the Bush administration’s “administrator” of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Well, except for the fact that as governor Mrs. Whitman was a disaster, worse, a catastrophe, something that has become all too plain as New Jersey residents cope with the fallout from the complete and utter stupidity, short-sightedness, and fiscal irresponsibility that characterized her stewardship of the Garden State.

Hell, even a dead person could outpoll her at this point.

Public Speaking: Write a speech for the president. [Link via TBogg.]

Poetry: Mullet haiku. [Also from TBogg.]

Painting: David Ehrenstein on Robert Rauschenberg. Bonus: Norah Vincent cameo!

Photography: The ultimate McMansion.

Politics: Posters from Micah Wright.

Psychiatry: UggaBugga on obsessive-compulsive disorder. At least the victim doesn’t suffer alone.

Public Safety: Last year alone: 547 dead and more than 111,000 seriously injured, at least a third of them children. Violence in the Middle East? An earthquake in China? No.

To: The Rittenhouse Review
Subject: James Q. Wilson
Sent: Sept. 27, 2002

To the Editor:

Thanks for your praise of my article in the Weekly Standard.

One thing worth noting: I think that James Q. Wilson would probably approve of most of what I mention in the article.

Here’s an interview I did with him where he explicitly endorses a lot of the ideas I mention, thought it might interest you: “Live With TAE.”

Read through your blog . . . very interesting.

Best,

Eli Lehrer
Senior Editor
The American Enterprise
Washington, D.C.

Point taken.

TAE: 1, TRR: 0.

Thank you for visiting the site and for writing to The Rittenhouse Review.

Yours truly,
James M. Capozzola, Editor

“There’s no doubt his hatred is mainly directed at us. There’s no doubt he can’t stand us. After all, this is a guy that tried to kill my dad at one time.” -- President George W. Bush.

(Thank you, Professor Pinkerton.)

We just received an urgent e-mail message from NBC News:

------------------------------------------------------

NBC News New York, September 27th, 2002

Good. Now Tim Russert will only bore his wife on Sunday morning.

Once again, and with all due respect to Esquire and the women they love, The Rittenhouse Review presents the latest installment in a continuing series, “The Women We Admire.”

Today’s honoree is Inge Probstein, a literature professor to students of all ages, brought to my attention by Michael Vitez of the Philadelphia Inquirer, and his article in today’s paper, “Teaching Literature’s Classics, She Created More Than a Class.”

Herewith a few excerpts:

In 1984, a former literature professor agreed to teach a small class to other retirees in Radnor.

Eighteen years later -- after 60 works of great literature, field trips, dinner parties, seders, and funerals -- they are still together, and the Tuesday morning class at the Creutzburg Center for Adult Education has become so important that they plan their lives around it.

What started as a class has become a community.

“My week revolves around this,” said Judy Zalesne, 65, of Bryn Mawr, who always sits in the same seat -- next to the teacher. “This class comes first. I try to plan vacations to leave Tuesday afternoon and come back Monday night.”

Inge Probstein has been their professor, the glue that kept them together. A refugee from Hitler, she came to America at 11. Her mother worked as a cook for the Dorrance family of Campbell Soup. Inge herself evolved from servant to scholar, from making beds to earning a Ph.D. in literature from Yale.

Her class started out in a back room but quickly expanded to 25 people, with a perennial waiting list, and moved to the “Big Room” -- the largest room in the onetime mansion. . . .

There they read the greats: Goethe, Dante, Balzac, Eliot, Tolstoy, Woolf, Twain, Marquez, Swift . . . Inge always let the class vote on books for the next semester.

Except one year, after the students continually rejected Chaucer, Inge decreed: “This is no longer a democracy. Next session we are reading Chaucer.” [Ed.: Emphasis added, probably unnecessarily.]

“She did her Ph.D. on Chaucer,” Zalesne said. “It was the best. Nobody dropped out.”

The retirees took this class because they’d never read these classics, or they wanted to read them again, after a lifetime of experience, and find new meaning.

Their exuberance spread beyond the class. When they were reading Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, Zalesne’s daughter got so tired of hearing about it at the dinner table, she told her mother: “You’re a Mann-iac!” . . .

Inge never married. She cared for her mother and her brother until they died. This class became her family.

One Monday in May, for the first time, Inge called her students and told them she wasn’t feeling well. There’d be no class on Cervantes on Tuesday.

Several students called to check on her, but Inge didn’t answer the phone. On Tuesday night, Thelma and Irwin Bessen, longtime students from Rose Valley, went to Inge’s home in Lansdowne. They found her on the floor.

She’d had a stroke. . . .

The stroke was so severe that Inge could not teach again. The class held an emergency meeting at Zalesne’s house during the summer. “We could never replace Inge,” Zalesne said. “But despite the tragedy, we didn’t want the class to disband. We’ve been together too long, and we’re kind of addicted to sharing insights.”

They recruited two retired professors to split the class, six weeks each. . . .

After class, Zalesne went to visit Inge at the Belmont Center for Comprehensive Treatment. The two sat outside in a gazebo in the early-autumn sun. Inge was frail. When talking about her class, she became sharp and passionate.

“Such an amazing life,” Zalesne said, reflecting later, “shouldn’t end this way.”

Indeed.

The excerpt below comes from an incredible story on page one of today’s Philadelphia Inquirer: “Teen Dies, Starved and Alone,” by Marc Schogol. I’m speechless.

Abused and starving, Chester Lee Miller, 18, was forced sometime this month to make a desperate 1,000-mile bus journey from the home of his mother and stepfather in Hazleton, Pa., to the Florida Panhandle, a place from which his natural father had earlier sent him packing.

Aboard the bus, in terminal after terminal, town after town, Miller said, he cried and begged strangers for help.

No one listened.

Weighing little more than 60 pounds, the famished teenager with sunken eyes finally arrived in Milton, Fla., about 20 miles north of Pensacola, only to be rejected again. There, authorities said, his relatives shut him out of their trailer home on Saturday and literally dumped him at an apartment complex.

“He looked like a Holocaust victim,” said Janice Goodman, at whose door Miller knocked, pleading again for help. “I never would have thought something like this would be in Florida or the United States.”

Goodman tried to help Miller, but he was by then beyond help.

Severely malnourished and succumbing to extensive organ failure, the youth died alone yesterday in a Florida hospital room.

His mother and stepfather, Lyda Miller, 37, and Paul Hoffman Sr., 38, who were charged earlier this week with aggravated assault and reckless endangerment, face additional charges, police said last night: homicide.

And in Milton, population 7,400, the stranger who took in the dying boy nobody wanted said her family is trying to raise money for a funeral.

“We’re trying to at least let him have a decent burial,” Goodman said. “It’s the least we can do.” A relative of her family has donated a burial plot.

Believe it or not, there’s more. Read the full story.

POST-PUBLICATION ADDENDUM

From the Pensacola News Journal, “Starved Teen Dies Seeking His Dad”:

Goodman said Miller stayed at her home about an hour, taking a shower and a nap. She said she tried to feed him a sandwich and a Sprite, but he couldn’t take it.

Goodman called her mother, Norma Douglas, who contacted the Milton Police Department. In turn, Emergency Medical Services was notified, and Miller was taken to Santa Rosa Medical Center.

While the case plays out in court about 1,000 miles away, Goodman is trying to arrange a proper burial for Chester Miller.

“Since there are no blood relatives, we’re going to try to bury him,” she said. “We want to raise money for funeral costs. We have a family plot we are willing to put him in.”

Goodman’s mother said the family is trying to help.

“He was handicapped, and we are trying to be his family,” Douglas said. “He has no family. The family he did have killed him. We want him buried with our family.”

FURTHER NEWS

Three articles from the Hazleton (Pa.) Standard-Speaker:

“Couple Facing Murder Charges”

“In a Neighborhood of Eateries, Boy Starved”

“Grandmother: ‘He Could Be Nasty’”

I figured out when we’ll know that webloggers have overtaken the traditional media: when the number of links to weblogs in the column to the right exceeds those to newspapers, magazines, journals, and broadcasters.

In the meantime, here are the latest additions:

Alas, a Blog

Beyond Corporate

L8R

Making Light

Nasty Riffraff

Room Sixteen

TBogg

There are more on the way . . .

[Note: The title of this post is an unintentional homage to Spike Lee and his film “Mo’ Better Blues.”]

Don’t miss . . . “Brit’s Faux Report” by Hesiod Theogeny of Counterspin Central.

H.T. has the goods on one of the most outrageously and blatantly biased news outlets and news readers in America: Fox News and its top liar, Brit Hume.

Hume titled his smear, “Former VP Al Gore Says One Thing and Then Says Another.” A better title might have been, “Brit Hume Writes One Thing and History Says Another.”

Let’s make this clear, clear enough even for the dittoheads: Brit Hume lied.

And again: Brit Hume is a liar.

You know, there was a time when people lost their jobs for crap like this. Now they get promotions, raises, and book deals.

In the market for a shredder? An air-hockey or foosball table? A portable basketball hoop? Golf tees? Mints? A giant stainless steel “E”?

“E” is in “Greed” -- Twice!

Artifacts, mementoes, souvenirs, and office equipment of all sorts from Enron Corp., the financially and morally bankrupt energy company and Bush administration farm team, are being auctioned beginning today at a site called DoveBid.

Current and former Enron employees from the “rank-and-file” may bid, but corporate officers, directors, and outside consultants -- a group that presumably includes Vice President Dick Cheney -- are barred from participating.

Don’t miss . . . “The Lefty Interview” with Jeanne D’Arc of Body and Soul, now online at the Lefty Directory. (Mlle. D’Arc was interviewed by Brian Linse of AintNoBadDude.)

The interview reveals Jeanne D’Arc to be as interesting as she is talented. Accomplished despite adversity, generous amid a culture of greed, a spiritually inclined intellectual amid soulless secularism, and I’m willing to bet, one of the best mothers in America.

Body and Soul is consistently well written, thought-provoking, even provocative, and ranks high among my daily, ever-increasing, list of “must reads.”

Okay, so I’m a little disappointed not to be invited to the desert island, but I don’t like hot weather anyway. What if we all went to the Falklands/Malvinas? In July.

Don’t miss . . . Teresa Nielsen Hayden of Making Light, who linked to the Review’s recent piece on the adoption of Finnish by East Timor, expanded upon it, added enlightened and informative commentary, and, happily, arrived at the same conclusion I did.

Be sure to read the comments section as well. Making Light has the kind of readership about which most bloggers can only dream.

This man once edited the New Republic? This man once wrote for the New York Times?

This man has a boyfriend? This man has friends? This man is not institutionalized?

It’s no wonder his fan club’s charter member is a Noonanesque “columnist” and bogus think-tank trough-feeder who coos over his every lying slimy word and then pines for more.

It’s no wonder his most vocal cheerleader is a fire-breathing art-school teacher with what might appear to be an amphetamine addiction who slurps up his drool and washes his butt on command.

The verdict is in: Andrew Sullivan is beyond the pale.

We’re done. Through. Moving on. Not worth the time.

Today I happened upon a site called Anger Management Course that has a photograph of a newfangled voting machine for the good state of Florida that even President George W. Bush, his almost equally dimwitted brother Gov. Jeb Bush (R-Fla.), and the Supreme Court could operate.

Hell, even Noelle Bush, high on crack (or “a rock-like substance that tested positive for cocaine”), could work this thing. As for Poppy Bush, well, I don’t know.

Gordon Baskin of Anger Management Course tells me the image comes from The British Club by way of the incomparable UggaBugga.

To: Rittenhouse Review
Subject: East Timor
Sent: Sunday, September 22, 2002

To The Rittenhouse Review:

Are you sure your article about Finnish becoming East Timor's language isn't from The Onion? It sounds remarkably like the scene in “Bananas” where the revolution has succeeded and the leader announces that Swedish will now be the national language.

Yours truly,
Ron
Zanesville, Ohio

Thank you for reminding me of “Bananas,” one of director Woody Allen’s earlier, somewhat funnier films. Although Allen is one of my many muses of late, I can assure you that the story indeed comes not from The Onion but from Helsingin Sanomat.

Now, it’s possible, given my limited grasp of Finnish, that Sanomat is a satirical publication, though the paper’s articles on domestic and international news generally appear to me to be well grounded in reality. However, with the Finns being such an outgoing, gregarious, talkative, boisterous, and rowdy people (Not!), I’ll admit I may have been completely taken in by their wry sense of humor. I’ll keep you posted.

Thank you for visiting the site and for writing to The Rittenhouse Review.

Yours truly,
James M. Capozzola, Editor

The Mossad, Israeli’s vast intelligence agency, known to employ Americans in its efforts to know everything about anything, and to sell secrets thus obtained to our country’s enemies, says, in one of its periodic allegations along this vein, that Yasir Arafat is one of the wealthiest men in the world, purportedly having amassed a fortune estimated at $1.3 billion.

Hmmm . . . Now, may I ask, what good would this purported fortune be to Arafat, who currently is holed up in his Ramallah compound, lacking water and electricity, surrounded by ditches and fences, with his nemesis, the demented Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, obviously intent upon killing him one way or another.

I guess I should also ask why Arafat escaped the vast hordes of Forbes researchers who assembled the magazine’s list of the world’s 500 richest people, a list on which Arafat’s name, once again, does not appear.

Don’t miss . . . Michelangelo Signorile on Peggy Noonan.

Don’t miss . . . Noonan being Noonan.

Don’t miss . . . Neal Pollack hijacking Daniel Pipes’s web site.

Don’t miss . . . Alas, a blog on the red and blue states.

Don’t miss . . . “The Fictional 15” from Forbes.

Don’t miss . . . Nicholas Confessore on pundits who know nothing about journalism.

Don’t miss . . . Arianna Huffington on Noelle Bush, father Gov. Jeb Bush (R-Fla.), and drug-related crimes.

Don’t miss . . . Joe Conason on the “Napoleonic Neocons.”

Don’t miss . . . Michael Kinsley, the best editor the New Republic ever had, on Iraq and evil.

Don’t miss . . . The Decade Boxes from HomeTownFavorites.com. Great for gifts, but order early: at least two weeks in advance.

Guess what?

I hate Gore Vidal.

But like him or not, here’s a news flash for you, courtesy of the Claremont Review of Books: Gore Vidal is -- hold your breath -- GAY.

The Claremont Review doesn’t say so outright, in part, I’m sure, because Vidal’s sexuality has been well known for some 50 years at least.

Of course, why bother saying Vidal is gay when you can print statements like these:

“Gore Vidal has always liked to be a naughty boy, but it is hard for him to keep it up at 77.”

“His perverse passions are beyond the wane.”

“He comes across as an aging scold, desperately applying the rouge.”

“To give him his due, he can still pretend to be aroused by a remarkable variety of objects.”

The author of this pathetic, utterly humorless set of sneers? The presumably heterosexual, perpetually chaste, eternally youthful, and persistently priapic yet utterly unarousable Christopher Flannery, associate editor of the Claremont Review, senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, and professor of political science at a place called Azusa Pacific University (located in Azusa, Calif., for those, like myself, who are unfamiliar with the school, no offense intended).

I look forward to some day welcoming Flannery into the 21st century. Hell, even the 20th century.

East Timor, the Southeast Asian nation wracked by violence for more than twenty years, has been looking for a national language and now appears to have found one in the most unlikely of places.

Considering East Timor’s location, one might assume its residents might, out of practicality, choose Indonesian, English, Malaysian, Thai, Vietnamese, or even Chinese. Instead, East Timor appears to be on the way toward adopting Finnish as its new language, according to a recent article in a Helsinki newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat, by Inkeri Koskela. [Ed.: Linked article has been translated into English.]

Why not stick with what they know?

Well, there’s the fly in the proverbial ointment: not everyone in East Timor speaks the same language. The country previously was a Portuguese colony and its older citizens still speak Portuguese, while most of the young speak a dialect known as Bahasa Indonesian. Moreover, according to Sanomat, “The original East Timorese language, Tetum, has a fairly primitive grammar and thanks to eight or nine different tribal dialects, even this language does not unite the population.”

Quite a conundrum.

“The language question surfaced when East Timor, together with the United Nations and the World Bank, started rebuilding the country’s educational infrastructure,” Koskela reports. “What would be the language of tutoring? Which language would be suitable for the schoolbooks?”

Early in 2000, the United Nations Transitional Administration for East Timor (UNTAET), established in October 1999 to administer the territory, began searching for a textbook series to educate the nation’s schoolchildren, their schools largely decimated by Indonesian, uh, militias.

The World Bank hired Nigel Billany, chief executive officer of Opifer Ltd., an education consulting firm owned by Tammi Publishers, which sent 30 different book series to East Timor for evaluation. “The evaluation team, which consisted of local teachers, finally came down in favour [sic] of the Finnish book series,” Sanomat reports.

“The fact that they wanted the books in a politically neutral language definitely contributed to the selection outcome. Portuguese, Bahasa Indonesian, English, and French are all associated with colonialism,” Billany told Sanomat.

“We did offer to translate the books into some other language, but they insisted on having them in Finnish,” said Tammi’s managing director, Pentti Molander.

In response to the local agency’s request, Tammi Publishers sent 220,000 copies of Opin Itse, or I’m Learning, a book intended for first and second graders, to East Timor, a country with a population of nearly 800,000. “There’s a book for every fourth East Timorese,” Koskela reports. “After the first year the feedback on the Finnish books has been good, report UN officials,” the reporter continues. “Local teachers have been satisfied with the material they chose.”

Why, oh why, Finnish?

Frankly, I can’t quite decide what to think of this.

As one who has been dabbling in self-instruction of the Finnish language, part of me wants to shout “HURRAY!” while the other part of me wants to catch the first flight down to East Timor and scream, “STOP BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE!”

As I understand it, children can pick up one language as easy as another, and more quickly than even the most linguistically oriented of adults, so everything will likely work out in the end. But Finnish? Finnish?

Finnish is, without a doubt, the most complicated and difficult language I ever have encountered. It shares almost nothing with almost anything.

Although Finnish and Hungarian are distantly related languages, they have little in common in their current forms. Finnish shares some similarities with Estonian and various regional and ethnic-minority dialects in northern Russia. And while Finnish has borrowed a little from Swedish and Russian, and a bit from German, and more, inevitably, from English, it stands on its own, reflecting the uniqueness of the people we call Finns.

Knowing a language other than English, even knowing any language at all, is of no help in learning Finnish. One who knows English and German, for example, can quickly pick up Dutch and will recognize at least some words in Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian, even Icelandic. A person who speaks, say, English and Italian is well prepared to study French, Spanish, Portuguese, and even Romanian. Such is not the case with Finnish.

Yet Finnish, after considerable study, is incomparably logical, almost mathematical in its precision. And Finnish is a beautiful language, rhythmic and rather musical, with fewer consonants than English and other Western European languages, a preponderance of vowels and vowel combinations, and spoken with a slight Scandinavian-style lilt, though the Finns themselves are not Scandinavians.

Those who have studied Latin will remember the ancient Romans’ six cases in the declension of nouns and adjectives: nominative, vocative, genitive, dative, accusative, and ablative.

Too much to handle? Try Finnish. It has 15 basic cases: nominative, genitive, accusative, partitive, essive, translative, inessive, elative, illative, adessive, ablative, allative, abessive, comitative, and instructive.

And if that’s not enough, there are 12 adverbial cases: superessive, delative, sublative, lative, temporal, causative, multiplicative, distributive, temporal distributive, prolative, situative, and oppositive.

Children can pick up one language as easily as another when it is an integral part of their environment, but I worry about the parents and teachers in East Timor who must quickly learn this unusual language in order to communicate effectively with their children and students, respectively.

Why would the authorities in East Timor choose a language so maddening in its complexity? Why choose a language spoken by so few outside of its home country? Why not jump head first into global commerce? Is this perhaps a nefarious plot by Nokia Corp. to establish a new low-wage manufacturing center?

Regardless, have these people not suffered enough already?

The latest issue, dated Sept. 23, of the New Republic is out. And right there, on page 10, is a contribution to “The Notebook” that could only have come from contributing editor Andrew Sullivan, who is in the same issue, inexplicably, with “Provincetown Diarist.”

Entitled “Their Man in Harare,” it begins:

“Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe has cracked down on his country’s press, harassing[,] and arresting journalists who have dared to expose his thuggish and corrupt land-redistribution policy. But Mugabe wouldn’t have to resort to such measures if Zimbabwean journalists were as pliable as [t]he New York Times’ Rachel L. Swarns.” [Ed.: The piece apparently is not, or not yet, online.]

Sound a bit familiar? I thought so too.

It rambles on in an attempt to smear Swarns (whom Sullivan criticized at his own site for writing a “puff piece” about the kleptocrat) and the Times as “Soft on Mugabe” and dupes of the dictator’s propaganda campaign, only to arrive at the predictable conclusion: “Actually, the propaganda machine misleading the Western world is our paper of record.”

As weblogger Ted Barlow has demonstrated, this charge is a tissue of lies.

On Sept. 6 Barlow wrote, “Sullivan can’t be bothered to research the woman he’s smearing, so I guess I’ll have to do it. Who is this Mugabe apologist, Rachel Swarns? A little Googling tells me that Rachel Swarns is the Johannesburg bureau chief of the New York Times. She was the co-winner of a first-place award for Best International Coverage (150,000+ readers) from the National Association of Black Journalists. . . . I don’t have NEXIS. So I just went to the New York Times [web] page and searched for stories by Rachel Swarns. Let’s look at some of the titles of some of the other ‘puff pieces’ she’s written to prop up Mugabe[.]”

Barlow proceeds to list twenty-six (26!) stories Swarns wrote about Mugabe in the Times just since late February. “[Y]ou’d almost think that Rachel Swarns has been a tireless critic of Mugabe. You’d almost think that the Times has done a great public service, publishing highly critical stories about his murderous regime several times a week,” he writes. “You’d almost think that Andrew Sullivan owes somebody a big apology.”

Now add the New Republic and editors Martin Peretz and Peter Beinart to the list of those who should be asking Swarns for forgiveness.

[Note: “After the Smear” is an unintentional homage to “After the Storm,” lyrics by Carly Simon, the words of which came into my conscious mind from my subconscious, by way of my unconscious, while I was writing this piece and listening to “After the Storm” on the stereo.]

Don’t miss . . . Hesiod Theogeny of Counterspin Central, an invaluable resource as we move into the campaign for Florida’s governorship between Bill McBride (D) and Gov. Jeb Bush (R).

Hesiod has the goods on everything you never wanted to know about Florida politics and were afraid to ask.*

Most of them are in the Archives, but here are a few to get you started: This one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, and this one.

* Unintentional homage to Woody Allen from my unconscious subconscious.

Courtesy of Media Whores Online today:

“i’m sorry but i pay for those soldiers to fight in a volunteer army. they are servants of people like me who will never fight. yes, servants of civil masters. and they will do what they are told by people who would never go to war. that’s called a democracy.”
-- andrew [[s]ullivan]

Well, that just got me humming today and eventually the words came . . .

It’s my war and you’ll die if I want to,
Die if I want to,
Die if I want to.
You will die too,
If I want you to do.

Note: The words of this ditty are an unintentional homage to performer Lesley Gore and Wally Gold, Herb Wiener, and John Gluck, writers of the original version, “It’s My Party and I’ll Cry if I Want To.” The words came into my conscious mind from my subconscious, by way of my unconscious, while I was writing this piece and listening to the song on the stereo. [Reminder: Delete “unconscious” later and hope nobody notices.]

Don’t miss . . . In Arguendo on the appalling Tucker Carlson twisting “facts,” Judy Woodruff missing the whole point, and the New York Post ignoring an attempt by reclusive right-wing billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife to dip into the Department of Justice budget for reimbursement of dubious legal expenses.

What is it with New York judges? Shades of Sol Wachtler here . . .

Acting New York Supreme Court Justice Marylin Diamond might be in some serious trouble.

According to a report in today’s Daily News (New York), “Hate-Mail Judge’s Hit List” by Michele McPhee, unnamed law enforcement sources believe Diamond is herself the author of numerous “bizarre messages that threatened her life” during the past three years.

Diamond, working with police on the case, identified some 20 litigants from her court who she thought might be sending the threatening letters. In response to the initial messages, the judge was provided with a 24-hour security detail that has been in place almost continually for the past three years, an expensive and highly unusual measure that could ultimately prove to be a total waste of time and money.

According to the Daily News, Ray Pierce, an FBI profiler and a retired detective with the New York Police Department, analyzed 48 letters sent to Diamond’s home and office over a period of three years and “concluded that the author of the deadly letters was the judge herself.”

“Pierce based his findings on a number of factors, including the fact the threats intensified when her security detail was about to be discontinued,” McPhee reports. “He told cops the only one with anything to gain by the letters was Diamond, sources said.”

Despite this conclusion, the police “have no hard evidence linking Diamond to the letters,” and New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said yesterday that the investigation continues.

Each person named by Diamond has been checked out, and cleared, by the police. Among those questioned was Tom Snowdon, ex-husband of fashion designer Cathy Hardwick, who criticized Diamond after his 1998 divorce, a case heard in her court. Also fingered by Diamond: billionaire Alec Wildenstein, whom the judge ordered pay $200,000 a month in alimony to his ex-wife.

Whoever sent the letters is clearly disturbed. “One letter contained what looked to be a piece of ‘skin from a person’s nose’ that turned out to be plastic, and another was filled with purported anthrax that was really biscuit mix,” writes McPhee. “In some letters, the writer called Diamond a pig. Others were anti-Semitic. All threatened her life.”

It appears that Diamond slipped up at least once and may have implicated herself in the twisted scheme. “At one point, [Diamond] turned over a letter with white powder during the anthrax scare, but the substance was found to be biscuit mix,” according to the report. “The same week the letter arrived, investigators found an empty box of biscuit mix in the garbage at Diamond’s East Side townhouse, sources said.”

Last week Diamond lost her round-the-clock security detail after the Daily News spoke with her about Pierce’s potentially devastating conclusions, which she termed “totally incorrect and grossly irresponsible.” The security force was reinstated, however, after a Sept. 15 report in the same paper sparked concerns in the Office of Court Administration.

Herewith the opening lines of Ann Coulter’s latest column, “So Three Arabs Walk Into A Bar. . .”:

“An American Citizen overheard three Muslims at a Shoney’s restaurant laughing about Sept. 11 over breakfast. ‘If people thought Sept. 11 was something, wait till Sept. 13.’ ‘Do you think that will bring it down?’ ‘Well, if that won't bring it down, I have contacts. I'll get enough to bring it down.’ Patriot Eunice Stone [Ed.: Mrs. Stone plays professional football?] took down their license plate numbers and called the police as the mirthful Muslims left.”

Now, here is Coulter’s punch line, so to speak: “I’d give you the names, but they’re too complicated. There’s a reason they use numbers at Guantanamo.”

Hilarious. RAOTFLMAO, as they say.

We would have thought Coulter’s expensive education -- Cornell, then Michigan, the latter resulting in a law degree the tuition toward which she paid at out-of-state rates all three years, we’re sure -- would have prepared her for the transliteration of Arabic names, but, alas, we have upon us yet another failure who nonetheless emerged bestowed with highly marketable, yet ultimately meaningless, degrees from two of our nation’s “elite” institutions.

Coulter continues: “According to accounts in [t]he New York Times, the men were uncooperative, refused to answer basic questions, gave false information and told contradictory stories. A bomb-sniffing dog reacted to the presence of explosives in both vehicles. After a careful search, however, no explosives were found and the men were released.”

Coulter citing the Times? And without a footnote, no less? What gives? Is this the same Ann Coulter who wished a horrible death on everyone working at the paper? Maybe she’s being sly, thinking something along the lines of, “That stupid Times, reporting about dogs finding explosives where there were none. Can’t liberals get anything right?”

Here’s another gem from the New Canaan sophisticate, her words dripping with racist and xenophobic condescension and contempt: “Who knew the Religion of Peace [Ed.: Coulter is referring, derogatorily in the article’s context, to Islam.] was so darn funny? Did you hear the one about the release of VX gas in Disneyland?” [Ed.: Emphasis in original.]

It goes on, as is always the case with Coulter: “By my count, the Muslims have given at least five versions of what happened,” she writes, with no substantiation of that count whatsoever. “Eunice Stone has given one consistent story. She has been interrogated by law enforcement officials and is corroborated by another witness,” adds Coulter, blissfully -- or deceitfully -- unaware that Stone’s account of the events at Shoney’s has not been called into question, only her interpretation thereof.

And still more: “According to the Boston Globe, the Three Stooges first told law enforcement officers they did it on purpose.” What was that about conservatives never calling anyone names?

And: “[T]hey tried out the hysterical-woman defense -- used to great effect by Democrats in the Clinton era. One of the Muslims tauntingly demanded to know ‘how many other people witnessed this event that supposedly took place, first of all?’ Well, at least one other person. Stone’s son was there and he heard the conversation exactly the same way. He just thought the men were playing his mother and him for suckers.”

How, Miss Coulter, could Stone’s son have heard the conversation “exactly the same way” when he, unlike his mother, was sufficiently astute to conclude that, in your own words, “the men were playing his mother and him for suckers,” which is exactly the point of confusion at the heart of the matter?

Our advice to Miss Coulter: Stop. Now. Take a breather. Take a vacation. Take a powder. You’re embarrassing yourself.

[Post-publication addendum: Don’t miss Pandagon’s take on Coulter’s column.]

Say! There’s a new kid on the block: Campus Watch.

Campus Watch, following in the noble tradition of the groundbreaking but crude Accuracy in Academia and the more learned and refined National Association of Scholars, has taken as its task “Monitoring Middle East Studies on Campus.”

It will come as no surprise that Campus Watch is a project of the Philadelphia-based Middle East Forum, of which Daniel Pipes is the director. The Middle East Forum publishes Middle East Quarterly and Middle East Intelligence Bulletin.

Let’s take a look.

“THE PROBLEM,” as defined by Campus Watch:

“American scholars of the Middle East, to varying degrees, reject the views of most Americans and the enduring policies of the U.S. government about the Middle East over a dozen administrations. Lest this characterization appear exaggerated, consider that, with only one exception, every American president since 1948 has spoken forcefully about the benefits to the United States from strong and deep relations with Israel. In contrast, American scholars often propagate a view of Middle Eastern affairs that, among other things, sees Zionism as a racist offshoot of imperialism, blames Israel alone for the origin and persistence of the Palestinian refugee problem, and holds Israel responsible for such problems as terrorism and fundamentalist Islam.”

“THE CAUSES,” according to Campus Watch:

“This bias results from two main causes. First, academics seem generally to dislike their own country and think even less of American allies abroad. They portray U.S. policy in an unfriendly light and disparage allies. The closer those allies are (first Israel, followed by Turkey, then at some distance Egypt and Saudi Arabia), the more hostile their analysis. In contrast, they apologize for the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Syrian Ba’th regime, and other rogue states. . . .

“Second, Middle East studies in the United States has become the preserve of Middle Eastern Arabs, who have brought their views with them. Membership in the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), the main scholarly association, is now 50 percent of Middle Eastern origin. [Ed.: Does this include or exclude Israelis?] Though American citizens, many of these scholars actively disassociate themselves from the United States, sometimes even in public.”

“WHAT WE DO,” according to Campus Watch:

“Campus Watch will henceforth monitor and gather information on professors who fan the flames of disinformation, incitement and ignorance. Campus Watch will critique these specialists, and make available its findings on the internet and in the media. Our main goals are to: Identify key faculty who teach and write about contemporary affairs at university Middle East Studies departments in order to analyze and critique the work of these specialists for errors or biases; [d]evelop a network of concerned students and faculty members interested in promoting American interests on campus; [k]eep the public apprised of course syllabi, memos, debates over appointments and funding, etc.; [k]eep the public informed of relevant university events; and [c]ontinuously post the results of our project on www.campus-watch.org, including articles, reports from campus and other relevant information.”

That’s one hell of an agenda. Presumably handsome financial support is on its way from the usual sources? (Mr. Scaife, please call your office.)

We are not unsympathetic to the oft-spoken complaint of conservatives that academia leans left; it is, in fact, a rather well documented phenomenon. One would think the grip of conservatives on “think tanks” and large swathes of the media would more than compensate for the disparity, but that, and the cause of the disparity itself, are topics for another day. We might point out, however, that advocates of divestment from Israel by university endowments have been overwhelmed by opposition from, well, other academicians.

Meanwhile, back at the Campus Watch web site, visitors will find an array of useful tools for countering the purported bias, inaccuracies, and failures of Middle East scholarship in American universities.

In what we can only assume is a list in progress, we find “Dossiers on Professors,” a dramatic appellation for what appears to be something of an enemies list.

Thus far, “Dossiers” have been posted at Campus Watch on the following professors: M. Shahid Alam, Northeastern University; Juan Cole, University of Michigan; Hamid Dabashi, Columbia University; John Esposito, Georgetown University; Rashid Khalidi, University of Chicago; Joseph Massad, Columbia University; Ali A. Mazrui, State University of New York at Binghamton; and Snehal Shingavi, University of California at Berkeley.

Where’s Edward Said? Neutralized already?

There are even “Dossiers on Institutions,” with the list of offenders to this point including Colorado College, Columbia University, Concordia University, Harvard University, New York University, Northeastern University, San Francisco State University, Stanford University, the State University of New York, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Chicago, the University of North Carolina, the University of South Florida, and the University of Toronto.

Go ahead and read them, there are not yet in place “need to know” restrictions on readership.

To counter the nefarious influence of the household names on which Campus Watch has assembled its “Dossiers,” the group provides a list of preferred or approved experts on Islam, Islamism, and the Middle East, including Ziad Abdelnour, Patrick Clawson, Khalid Durán, John Eibner, Joseph Farah [Ed.:!], Gary Gambill, Martin Kramer, William Kristol [Ed.: !], Habib Malik, Judith Miller, Michael Rubin, Robert Satloff, Jonathan Schanzer, Meyrav Wurmser, and the aforementioned Mr. Pipes.

Not Debbie Schlussel? Not Norman Liebman?

The site also includes a section called “Keep Us Informed,” which includes a helpful form for professors, students, and others to report campus misbehavior; “Reports From Campus,” sure to be packed with riveting accounts from the front line; and, of course, the requisite donation box.

One would think that academicians of any persuasion would have ample opportunity, through conferences, seminars, symposia, lectures, journals, and books, to criticize one another’s views without resorting to the establishment of a Watch group. After all, isn’t this -- the search for truth, new knowledge, countering falsehoods, and inaccuracies -- what scholarship is about? Does the professorate not engage in this activity on a daily basis, as a matter of course?

Organizations like Campus Watch are just another variant of the ongoing, indeed incessant, politicization of academia that their members profess to oppose and despise. Aside from on-campus agitation and irritation, their true purpose is to inflame passions among a wider audience, the intelligentsia, opinion makers, politicians, and the media. Sadly, at a time when rising tensions are the last thing needed, Daniel Pipes and Campus Watch have elected to throw gasoline on the fire.

Sent: Tuesday, September 17, 2002
To: RittenReview * earthlink.net
Subject: A thought that might cheer you up

Dear Mr. Capozzola,

All right, so you missed out on Smarter Andrew Sullivan and Norah Vincent Watch. But there's still Drying Paint Watch -- and that is bound to be more interesting.

Yours,
Michael Quinn

Dear Mr. Quinn:

You're correct. Drying Paint Watch is still available for hosting on Blogspot, as is Watching Paint Dry, which would make a great name if any readers are seeking a title for a new blog.

Thank you for visiting the site and for writing to The Rittenhouse Review.

Yours truly,
James M. Capozzola
Editor

Neal Pollack is some kind of genius. (Not appropriate for the children.)

My Irish mother will like this essay from the Boston Globe: It includes a smack at Frank McCourt. (Penance for the Pollack link, which I trust she won't click through.)

Three minutes is a long time. Sorry, Mrs. Beamer.

Does the mere existence of the Meretz Party in Israel drive Marty Peretz crazy? Did they choose the name Meretz just to get on his nerves? (Do you see it? The mirror image? Switch the initial letters?)

For the more scholarly types: Read Frances FitzGerald in the New York Review of Books.

Whacking Day cleans a pipsqueak's clock but good.

What kind of writer uses words and phrases like “characteristic inanity,” “umpteen,” “[d]on't get me wrong,” and “knee-jerk left,” and expects to be taken seriously? And what kind of "magazine" pays the writer to publish it?

Yesterday's history question was "What tragic event in American history occurred on this date 140 years ago?"

The answer, of course, is the Battle of Antietam, also known as the Battle of Sharpsburg, a pivotal clash in the Civil War, fought in and around the town of Sharpsburg and Antietam Creek in western Maryland.

More than 23,000 men were killed, wounded, or classified as missing in action. The death toll, estimated at between 3,600 and 3,700, makes Sept. 17, 1862 the deadliest day in American history.

For a brief but comprehensive account of the Battle of Antietam, along with several helpful links for further reading, hop over to the “American Memory” section of the Library of Congress web site.

Aside from the ASPCA and the Humane Society, there is no other more worthy cause at the moment than the campaign of Bill McBride, the Democratic candidate for governor of Florida, running against the predictably incompetent and corrupt Gov. Jeb Bush (R).

Give until it hurts.

President George W. Bush today decried the widespread ignorance of American high school and college students about key events in U.S. history.

With that chastisement in mind -- disturbing, given its source -- we ask, What tragic event in American history occurred on this date 140 years ago?

For those who may have forgotten or whose memory was not jogged yesterday due to the dearth of media coverage marking the events of Sept. 16, 1982, two words: Sabra and Shatila.

Collective amnesia, indeed.

This is as good as place as any to start your own research.

What happened 20 years ago today in Lebanon that this country's major newspapers uniformly have decided -- determined -- to ignore?

We'll admit it, we're nerds, or at least our editor can be at times. Underneath that handsome, suave, sophisticated, and very well dressed exterior lies a little slice of a geek, one who likes maps, flow charts, and Power Point presentations.

For that reason, but not that reason alone, we draw your attention to UggaBugga's map, "Exploring the Possibilities."

Original, creative, fascinating, comprehensive, and thought-provoking.