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It is fair to say that Britons have grown more familiar than they'd like with the real estate habits of ultra-Orthodox Jews in east Jerusalem. Judging by the coverage this hyperactive sectarian element garners in the British press, Israeli settler development is apparently better disposed to determine the course of events in today's Middle East than are the nuclear ambitions of Iran's mullahs, the parliamentary intrigues of Iraqi Shia, or the Turkish prime minister's threat of forced population transfers.

You'd be forgiven for not knowing about that last development-that is, if you're a regular reader of Britain's left-wing press, which has been eerily silent about the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's recent threat to expel 100,000 Armenians from Turkey. The threat was made in response to U.S. and Swedish resolutions recognizing as a genocide the Ottoman Empire's mass murder of over 1 million Armenians between 1915 and 1923. In an interview with the BBC's Turkish Service on March 17, Erdogan said that in light of international pressure to get his country to face up to the history of its last Islamic caliphate, out of whose ruins the modern Kemalist nation was born, he could turn very angry indeed. "In my country there are 170,000 Armenians; 70,000 of them are citizens," Erdogan said. "We tolerate 100,000 more. So, what am I going to do tomorrow? If necessary I will tell the 100,000: okay, time to go back to your country. Why? They are not my citizens. I am not obliged to keep them in my country."

There are three things to note about this thuggish statement. The first is that Erdogan's demographics are in dispute: a new study conducted last year suggest that only 10,000 Armenians reside in Turkey illegally, half of them having fled after a devastating 1988 earthquake hit Armenia; the other half having slowly trickled over the years as migrant workers seeking respite from the anemic post-Soviet Armenian economy.

The second thing to note is that Ankara not only denies that the atrocities committed by the Ottomans against the Armenians in the midst of World War I amount to a genocide-this, despite historical consensus to the contrary and the fact that the term "genocide" itself was coined in 1943 by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish scholar who had examined the Armenian example in depth-but it has also made it illegal to acknowledge or debate these events publicly. The 2005 penal code proscribing such action equates it with "insulting Turkishness," an offense Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk found himself guilty of retroactively after he gave an interview acknowledging the genocide four months prior to the law's implementation. He was prosecuted in 2005 and although the charges were eventually dropped, Pamuk's books were burned in the streets.

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It was telling, I think, that David Frum changed the name of his compelling website (for which I'm duty-bound to say I've written) from New Majority to Frum Forum. The title swap wasn't an indulgence of vanity so much as a sober assessment of reality: there will be no new conservative majority until conservatism rescues itself from so many cut-rate bargains with splenetic populism and cynical electoral strategies and refocuses its energies into formulating ideas that accord with a changing American society.

The heritage of Burke and Disraeli wants for resuscitation but resuscitation will have to wait until the Tea Party exhausts itself or a Congressman is knocked unconscious by a brick. Frum has been banging on about a conceptual and attitudinal rethink of the right for some time and his recent ouster from the American Enterprise Institute--for failing to hew to the party line on healthcare reform, or at least keep his mouth shut when deviating from it--can be seen as both inevitable and cataclysmic.

An intellectual gets sacked from a prominent think tank and the best he can typically expect by way of reaction is cocktail party palaver or the gossipy D.C. feuilleton. But Frum has not only positioned himself as the Cassandra of modern conservatism, he's taken very public stances against exponents of the 'movement' he deems most hazardous to its health: namely Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin. Even when pointing out where these figures fail as true disciples of the right, he has been accused of defying popular tastes. This is an odd offense for a conservative to commit, as celebrity--which even Palin and Limbaugh's defenders admit is their greatest joint asset--is nothing if not a "liberal" cultural phenomenon attributed to Barack Obama's election and global stature despite a very hollow record of accomplishment. Since when have gravitas and intellectual distinction trailed behind big box office in the corridors of the right? Frum's crime in the health care fiasco was that he was too able a translator and archivist of conservative ideas, demonstrating how the roots of Obama's policy were laid down at the Heritage Foundation twenty years ago, in response to Hillary Clinton's disastrous attempt to reform health care when her husband was in the White House.

It is never the sign of the vitality of any political movement to brand internal opposition as treachery or heresy. In embryo, all successful movements must account for a wide array of opinions and standpoints, the better to cultivate the good and discard the bad through debate. (This has even be done outside Ivy League universities.) Lest we forget, two common entry-ways to Buckley's National Review were liberal Roman Catholicism and ex-Trotskyism. As long as you were interesting, it didn't matter how you got there.

Nor does one have to be a Marxist to realize that all political tendencies come with harbingers of their future decline. The implosion of the anti-totalitarian left can be charted by a series of forerunner starbursts that appear more significant in retrospect: Michael Moore's scuppering of Paul Berman's critical investigation of the Sandinistas in the pages of Mother Jones in the mid-80's; a concerted effort, a decade on, led by Noam Chomsky to not only paint the Nato assault against genocide in the Balkans as neoliberal imperialism but to deny that genocide ever took place; an opposition to the U.S. invasion of Iraq which allowed no room for shows of solidarity with the victims of Saddamism; the co-operation between various 'socialist' parties in Europe with jihadist front organizations. The culmination of these events is as dire as it once was inconceivable: to be a 'progressive' today means to be a student of Brent Scowcroft.

Fortunately, that's begun to change now, too. I don't expect too many readers of The New Criterion to keep up with the regular output of Dissent magazine, but it has just unveiled a new group blog called "Arguing the World," corralled by my friend Alan Johnson, the former editor of Democratiya, an online literary journal that I also had the proud honor of contributing to in its short but influential run (it has since "merged" with Dissent). In one of the blog's maiden posts, Martin Bright sounds hopeful for a resurgence of the anti-totalitarian left as it used to be defined--at least in Britain--by the likes of George Orwell, Arthur Koestler and the recently departed Michael Foot:

I have been musing for some time about the future of the intellectual left in Britain. Where will discussion of progressive anti-totalitarian politics find a home? This is a serious question in a country that remains smug about the strength of its left-wing institutions (the party of government, trade unions with considerable influence, a surprising array of think tanks), while failing to grapple with the pressing issues of the day, let alone the future.

The left position on the Islamic extreme right (a real political force in parts of Britain) is still dangerously confused, for example. But we have also failed to develop a strategy for moving beyond the particular version of third-way politics developed by New Labour. We remain trapped in the headlights of the forthcoming election and so any grander theory of progressive politics will have to wait. Do we believe that the recovery will come as a result of the emergency Keynesianism of Gordon Brown and his Chancellor Alistair Darling (who will emerge as the real hero of the crisis)? Or will there be a new compact with the market via micro-entrepreneurship to drive the economy? We have no idea. And how we will embed the strides made during the New Labour era in the areas of women, children, and gay rights and anti-racism? We just don't know.

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The theory of "linkage" -- which argues that the U.S.-Israeli relationship in light of Israeli behavior costs American lives on Middle Eastern battlefields -- is perfectly named for our age of cyber punditry. Those red-lined bits of prose littered throughout blog posts and news articles act as brightly furnished stamps of authority substantiating any put forth thesis, however absurd or ill-conceived or unfalsifiable. For certain lazy minds linking is a fair substitute for original thought, an encoded ditto, where writing out what one means to say might actually compromise the writer's belief in it.

A week or so ago, Mark Perry, a former aide to Yasser Arafat and now the author of a book called Talking to Terrorists, of which idea he's very fond, published at a blog post at Foreign Policy magazine in which he made two big disclosures. The first was that Gen. David Petraeus had advocated inclusion of Gaza and the West Bank into U.S. Central Command's zone of operations (those territories are currently within the European Command's). The second was that Petraeus suggested that Israeli policy in the Occupied Territories was affecting the standing of the United States in the Middle East and making it harder for the United States to fight wars there. Petraeus had dispatched a CENTCOM briefing team to the White House which duly

reported that there was a growing perception among Arab leaders that the U.S. was incapable of standing up to Israel, that CENTCOM's mostly Arab constituency was losing faith in American promises, that Israeli intransigence on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was jeopardizing U.S. standing in the region, and that [U.S. Mideast envoy George] Mitchell himself was (as a senior Pentagon officer later bluntly described it) "too old, too slow ... and too late."

Perry later corrected himself; the briefers were only sent to Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Michael Mullen, said to be "stunned" by the idea of incorporating Gaza and West Bank into the U.S. military purview. Other corrections--deemed insignificant details by Perry--followed.

Nevertheless, this story made the rounds with the usual suspects of Israel critics, though not nearly so much as when the contents of Central Command's report to the Senate Armed Services Committee was published in the aftermath of a very well ventilated spat over Vice President Biden's visit to Israel coinciding with an announced east Jerusalem housing project. Within a document that ran the length of 56 pages there appeared the following:

The enduring hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbors present distinct challenges to our ability to advance our interests in the AOR [CentCom's area of operation, which includes Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as much of the Middle East]. The conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel. Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments and peoples in the AOR and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world. Meanwhile, al-Qaida and other militant groups exploit that anger to mobilize support. The conflict also gives Iran influence in the Arab world through its clients, Lebanese Hizballah and Hamas.

Suddenly, "linkage" was confirmed by a top American military figure and one not typically associated with progressive politics, making it all the more credible according to the "evidence against interest" axiom of weighing the merit of an argument. And these words were attributed to Petraeus himself in his testimony before the Armed Services Committee.

You'll note that nowhere in the above excerpt is it alleged that U.S. lives were being lost or imperiled at the expense of Washington's special relationship with Jerusalem, a relationship that has flagged noticeably during the Obama administration's repeated chivvying of Benjamin Netanyahu and his repeated inability to make sense of what's gone wrong. No matter. This idea fixe of Israel causing dead Americans gained traction in certain leftist and anti-Zionist quarters of blogland. Philip Weiss (who dreams of "Zionists" accosting him on Manhattan subway platforms), John Mearsheimer (co-author of the "Israel Lobby" thesis, which credits Ariel Sharon as the decisive factor in the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq), Robert Wright (a New York Times commentator who thinks jihadism is enabled by fighting jihadism), and other, more credible sources helped circulate it.

Commentary's Max Boot twice went to the trouble of examining Petraeus' very public thoughts on military strategy and the broader U.S. involvement in the Middle East, but to no avail.

Now comes Petraeus' direct response, well caught and filmed by Philip Klein of The American Spectator, during a speech the general gave at St. Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire. Here is Klein:

To start with, Petraeus said he never requested to have the West Bank and Gaza added to his responsibilities as leader of the military's Central Command. He said that "every year or so" commanders submit a plan that takes a geographic look at their areas of responsibility, and then there's discussion about whether it would make sense to redraw the boundaries. For instance, he said, last time Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Djibouti were shifted to the Africa Command.

"Typically, there's a question of should we ask to have Israel and Palestinian territories included, because what goes on there is obviously of enormous interest to the rest of the Central Command area, which is the bulk of the Arab world," Petraeus said. However, he emphasized that it was "flat wrong" to claim he actually requested responsibility for the areas.

He said the report was "based on 'bad gouges,' as a sailor would say -- bad information."

He also refuted the claim that he had sent a request to the White House, saying he "very rarely" sends things to the President, and only does so if he's specifically asked.

In addition, he explained that the quote that bloggers attributed to his Senate testimony was actually plucked out of context from a report that Central Command had sent the Armed Services committee.

"There's a 56-page document that we submitted that has a statement in it that describes various factors that influence the strategic context in which we operate and among those we listed the Mideast peace process," he said. "We noted in there that there was a perception at times that America sides with Israel and so forth. And I mean, that is a perception. It is there. I don't think that's disputable. But I think people inferred from what that said and then repeated it a couple of times and bloggers picked it up and spun it. And I think that has been unhelpful, frankly."

He also noted that there were plenty of other important factors that were mentioned in the report, including "a whole bunch of extremist organizations, some of which by the way deny Israel's right to exist. There's a country that has a nuclear program who denies that the Holocaust took place."

Petraeus continued, "So we have all the factors in there, but this is just one, and it was pulled out of this 56-page document, which was not what I read to the Senate at all."

The italics are mine, but the point is unmissable: Petraeus never "said" the widely distributed paragraph at all, but rather it appeared in a report CENTCOM handed to the Armed Services Committee. To expand on these direct comments, there is the content of that report itself, which does indeed carry a section entitled "U.S. Interests and the Most Significant Threats to Them." The interests are these:

• the security of U.S. citizens and the U.S. homeland;
• regional stability;
• international access to strategic resources, critical infrastructure, and markets; and
• the promotion of human rights, the rule of law, responsible and effective
governance, and broad-based economic growth and opportunity.

The most significant threats to them are these:

• Instability in Afghanistan and Pakistan
• Iran's Destabilizing Activities and Policies
• Situation in Iraq
• Instability in Yemen

The only section in which Israel is mentioned is titled "Cross-cutting Challenges to Security and Stability," which ranges in significance from nuclear weapons to the absence of the modern infrastructure for globalization:

• Insufficient progress toward a comprehensive Middle East peace [the excerpt reproduced and propagated]
• Militant Islamist movements
• Proliferation of WMD
• Ungoverned, poorly governed, and alternatively governed spaces
• Significant sources of terrorist financing and facilitation
• Piracy
• Ethnic, tribal, and sectarian rivalries
• Disputed territories and access to vital resources
• Criminal activities, such as weapons, narcotics, and human trafficking
• Uneven economic development and lack of employment opportunities
• Lack of regional and global economic integration

Petraeus also told Klein that bloggers had dangerously "spun" his Armed Services Committee testimony and, by way of offering apology for the misunderstanding to General Gabi Ashkenazi, chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Forces, was compelled to forwarded Max Boot's original "astute" analysis of the whole affair.

When a right-wing ultra-Orthodox party commissions 1,600 apartment units in east Jerusalem, it's called a binational "crisis." What's it called when a senior American military commander is forced to clarify his strategy for the Middle East to counterpart in a valued ally nation and all because a collection of ideologically motivated bloggers have trouble reading?

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Jeffrey Goldberg's surmise of the latest escalation in tensions between the United States and Israel is well taken:

There is much speculation that this kerfluffle over 1600 theoretical apartments on the wrong side of the green line in Jerusalem will lead to a rupture in American-Israeli relations, but analysts who suggest this are missing the point of President Obama's maneuverings. I've been on the phone with many of the usual suspects (White House and otherwise), and I think it's fair to say that Obama is not trying to destroy America's relations with Israel; he's trying to organize Tzipi Livni's campaign for prime minister, or at least for her inclusion in a broad-based centrist government. I'm not actually suggesting that the White House is directly meddling in internal Israeli politics, but it's clear to everyone -- at the White House, at the State Department, at Goldblog -- that no progress will be made on any front if Avigdor Lieberman's far-right party, Yisrael Beiteinu, and Eli Yishai's fundamentalist Shas Party, remain in Netanyahu's surpassingly fragile coalition.

But meddling in internal Israeli politics is exactly what the White House is doing, as Jeff indicates by the foregoing sentence. Obama is trying to do is one of two things: At most he's trying to change the democratically elected government of a foreign state (and I await the book-length thesis on pernicious influence of the "America Lobby" in Israel); at minimum he's trying to force Israel to undergo another Altalena moment by repudiating its reactionary and disruptive fringe, which claims to be acting on Zionist principles but in reality threatens the Zionist project. Bill Clinton tried this in 1999 and more or less succeeded, but that was because Clinton understood the Israeli mood better and was squaring off against a younger, less experienced Netanyahu who owned three very deficient commodities: a third world economy, a post-Oslo peace consensus, and a failed Mossad assassination attempt against a Hamas operative. Things change.

There is every indication that Obama is not up for the same challenge of Levantine power brokerage. For starters, It shouldn't be so difficult for a president who is currently mired in talks of "reconciliation" over health care at home to understand that international diplomacy very often follows domestic policy. Netanyahu is hostage to the ultra-Orthodox parties in his shaky coalition government, which is why his partial 10-month settlement freeze was a remarkable occurrence. It wasn't quite "unprecedented" for Israel, as his new-minted telephone frenemy Hillary Clinton put it at the time (a freeze of this sort was implemented during the Camp David Accords; then there's the simple but evidently forgettable fact that Israel froze and shattered every Jewish settlement in Gaza in 2005). But it was unprecedented for Netanyahu. His Bar-Ilan speech last July, in which he grudgingly acknowledged the two-state solution, marked the overdue end of the ideological platform of the Likud party. It also landed Netanyahu, however unwillingly, on the progressive side of an ongoing civil war between secularists and messianists that extends beyond the Greater Israel question to include social disputes, such as the one over Israel's marriage laws (taking nuptials out of the hands of the rabbinate). This civil war has its epicenter in Jerusalem where it's easy to be distracted by the more headline-friendly Arab-Jewish fighting. Yet right now there are settlers in the West Bank who have declared themselves enemies of state by vowing to build on hilltops where bulldozers can't tread and by denouncing their own prime minister--who is the most conservative the country has had since Menachem Begin--as a quisling and a sell-out. This is news that deserves wider U.S. reporting if only so that J Street can understand it.

The current Israeli political milieu also deserves better "maneuvering" by the White House, especially one which hasn't restored multilateralism as the regnant U.S. foreign policy but replaced it with multiculturalism. How shall we treat one of our longest and most natural allies in war and peace? By referring to a contentious piece of real estate in the South Atlantic as the "Malvinas" islands and taking an agnostic position on a long-settled conflict. (By the way, if Obama gets Livni into power, will she then be allowed to travel to Great Britain without fear of arrest?) From here it's easy to see how, for the sake of earning the respect of those great defenders of human freedom, Bashar al-Assad and Ayatollah Khamenei, our chief executive would proceed by "condemning" the Israeli government as an obstacle to the Mideast peace process whilst acquiescing to the Palestinian Authority's nose-thumbing of that process in the very same week.

Mere hours after Vice President Biden left Ramallah, the PA named a city square in the West Bank after Dalal Mughrabi, a woman who in 1978 landed on a beach between Haifa and Tel Aviv, lethally shot an American photographer, Gail Rubin (also the niece of U.S. Senator Abraham Ribicoff), then set about hijacking two buses with her PLO Fatah confederates. They eventually blew up the first bus, to which they'd transferred their hostages, and blew it up. Mughrabi and company killed 38 Israeli civilians, 13 of them children.

Now I think I know enough about Palestinian politics to be able to explain how the decision to honor this blood-boltered bitch was undertaken by Arafat-era hardliners without the endorsement or encouragement of the Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad and his pragmatic cohort, which are rightly more concerned with developing "de facto statehood" by courting foreign investors and freeing up enterprise in the West Bank. Even so, was this sordid naming ceremony conducted by Mahmoud Abbas's government not an "acute embarrassment" to the United States, to borrow the term the New York Times used to describe the east Jerusalem provocation? Greenlighting the construction of 1,600 new apartments in Ramat Shlomo does not involve the glorification of the murderer of an American national. One would think the U.S. State Department capable of weighing the difference.

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Charles Krauthammer and Bill Kristol have been making the rounds on television dismissing Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders as a "demagogue," which has got many conservatives abroad disgruntled and confused. Wilders, who was denied entry to the United Kingdom last year by the ever-fatuous (now sacked) Home Secretary Jacqui Smith on the grounds of his being a hate-figure and someone whose arrival might incite Muslims violence, has been idealized -- one hesitates to use the term "martyred" in this context -- by those on the right who see him as a platinum-dyed Cassandra of our time. Is Wilders not a minority voice challenging the suicidal Western passivity toward the "Islamization" of Europe? Are there not double standards in place which bar him, a mere speaker, essayist and documentarian, from travel to London whilst admitting radical imams who preach the murder of Jews, Christians and apostates and back up their preachings with material aid to jihadists?

There is merit to much of the right's defense of Wilders, but only up to a point. A fair summation of his willy-nilly politics is offered by this profile at the Swiss-German newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung (in an admittedly rough English translation):

His opinions do not arrange themselves into the left-right schema. The self-declared admirer of Ariel Sharon and Margaret Thatcher is opposed to big banks, the liberalization of the labor market and increasing the retirement age. He wants to close the borders... and is in agreement with the Social Democrats that the Netherlands has done enough in Afghanistan. At the same time, he constantly insists on the universal validity of human rights, especially for women and homosexuals. Dutch culture must be protected from foreign influences. Subsidies for the welfare [state] and culture, however, should be abolished. Pensioners, animals, disabled persons and the police should receive more state funding.

A gay-friendly feminist isolationist who applauds free-market principles and the war on terror as waged by others in the Levant. This sounds like a postmodernist's retelling of A Pilgrim's Progress. But Wilders has also called for the banning of the Koran, a view I've heard euphemistically described as "provocative" but is more accurately described as idiotic and totalitarian. Here is where Krauthammer and Kristol have their well-founded grievances.

It is impossible to believe in the notion of Muslim-run democracy without also believing in Muslims who do not adhere to the orthodox tenets of their faith, much less the Salafist and Wahhabist renditions of it. Clearly sixty percent of adult Iraqis have demonstrated that they are quite comfortable with terrestrial legislation and the electoral process, a statistic that, according to Wilders' theological-political interpretation, is simply impossible. Also, neoconservatives shouldn't be the only ones to point out that it is inadvisable in a cold war against a toxic ideology that must be fought intellectually and culturally to advocate for the censorship of that ideology's core literature. Would Richard Pipes or Robert Conquest or George Kennan have ever suggested banning the Communist Manifesto or Lenin's State and Revolution? Of course they wouldn't. They'd have also apprehended that the Velvet Revolution and the Solidarity movement could not have been successful without the participation of socialists, trade unionists and variegated intellectuals who still found something worth salvaging in Marxism even after seventy years of failed Marxist experimentation.

The "Wilders phenomenon," as NZZ calls it, has been best expressed in Switzerland's recent decision, undertaken by plebiscite, to prohibit the further construction of minarets, those architecturally optional adornments which function as call-to-prayer towers on some mosques. While Switzerland has hundreds of mosques at present, it has only four minarets, making this constitutionally amended rule both otiose and harmful at the same time: it does nothing to stop Islamism but everything to alienate law-abiding Swiss Muslims. There's also a sad irony in the fact that this referendum was the joint yield of the Swiss People's Party and the Federal Democratic Union, or as I prefer to call them, the only xenophobic parties in Europe that must express themselves quadrilingually. Try stumping for bourgeois cultural "unity" in German, Italian, French and Romansche.

I don't blame Ayaan Hirsi Ali for never wanting to see a minaret again in her life. And I don't blame Wilders for worrying that his homeland is becoming a playground for messianic butchers whose mantra is, as the great Wole Soyinka aptly phrased, "I'm right, you're dead." (For what's it worth, I also agree with Soyinka that England is the cynosure for Islamic radicalization, much more so than Yemen or Nigeria or Pakistan.) But a distinction must be drawn between liberal necessity and illiberal excess. Wilders has thrown in his lot with excess. And while his travel schedule should be as promiscuous as he likes, his allies and apologists might be a bit more discriminating.

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When Vladimir Nabokov had difficulty finding a publisher for his manuscript about an European pedophile loving and lurking his way through 1950's suburban America, he found one slightly encouraging respondent who suggested a slight tweak of the plot for purposes of marketability. Why not change Lolita "into a 12-year-old lad and have him seduced by Humbert, a farmer, amidst gaunt and arid surroundings, all this set forth in short, strong, 'realistic' sentences ('He acts crazy. We all act crazy, I guess.)"?

Every time some mid-ranking celebrity is caught with underage pornography on his computer (Pete Townshend just "researching" a memoir, Charlie Sheen driven to sexually confused distraction by the ruthless cunning of Denise Richards, the principal from Ferris Bueller's Day Off too unemployable to bother with damage control at all) or a hitherto unknown congressman is made to do some explaining to the wife and constituents, I cackle to think what might have been of transgressive postwar literature were it not for the artistic resolve of one Russian genius.

Rep. Eric Massa would have us believe that heterosexual 50-year-old Navy veterans like to tickle younger men in their employ. He would also like us to think that "groping" is something that can be done playfully but chastely. Look up "groping" in the dictionary.

Then there is this from those long, quiet nights at sea:

Clarke says that Massa's roommate, Tom Maxfield, was also assaulted. "Tom lived on upper bunk," Clarke say. "When you're on ship, you're almost exhausted 24-7. So a lot of times you sleep with your uniform on. Tom and Massa shared a stateroom together. Massa climbed up on the top of his bunk, which is hard to do--you never crawl up on somebody else's bunk. He wakes up to Massa undoing his pants trying to snorkel him." Ron Moss also confirmed hearing this story from Maxfield. Maxfield did not return calls and messages left for him--I'll update if he does.

And I'll eat my sock if that poor man comes forward or goes shallow diving in front of news cameras in the near future.

Massa's strongest defense is that he recently resigned from Congress not because of an Ethics Committee investigation into his rumored sexual harassment of male staffers but because of White House pressure against his opposition to the Democrats' health care plan--pressure exerted most memorably, he claims, by a nude Rahm Emanuel in the House of Representatives' gym shower. (Massa's strongest defense is still not any more hetero-erotic than any of the ethics charges against him.)

What is extraordinary -- and also extraordinarily unacknowledged in our narrative-driven, salacious press -- is how so much of the Obama's political career has hinged on sex lives of others, particularly the timing of their public exposure. He won his Senate seat in Illinois in 2004 because the Republican candidate Jack Ryan's ex-wife -- the woman who played "Seven of Nine" on Star Trek: Voyager -- chose an election year to say that Ryan used to take her to "a bizarre club with cages, whips and other apparatus hanging from the ceiling," forcing him coyly out of the race and allowing the entry of the always entertaining Alan Keyes. Had John Edwards' extramarital relationship and reproduction with Rielle Hunter been reported in outlets other than The National Enquirer before the Iowa caucuses in 2008, Hillary Clinton might well have found herself the recipient of Edwards' substantial votes in that harbinger contest and, quite possibly, the eventual Democratic nominee for president.

Now it is left to disgraced New York governor, himself the subject of sexual and criminal allegations and another reluctant antagonist of the president, to appoint Massa's replacement. Will it be someone more amenable to health care reform, or will a hapless and justifiably nihilistic David Paterson repay the party that disowned him by tapping another conservative blue dog Democrat who could jeopardize the biggest piece of social legislation introduced in a generation?

"Follow the money" is so passe. To see where political corruption begins and whence America's next loss of innocence is coming, follow the blacklight.

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Anyone who has kept up with politics lately is no doubt aware that certain intellectual attitudes and habits recur no matter what the subject under discussion. The rise of the Internet has democratized what was once the purview of the professional opinion journalist, policy analyst, or historian and thus made certain tendencies in the debate over domestic and international politics into full-blown categories of bad thinking. By my count, there are five main varieties of these without which there would be far fewer cable news channels, blogs, documentary filmmakers, and entries on The New York Times bestsellers list for non-fiction. All varieties are subject to overlap.

Tragic Manicheanism. The metaphysical battle between good and evil has many engaged spectators, some of whom are so chronically assured of evil's triumph that they appear to subconsciously root for it. This is the religious concept of original sin in political grammar. The tragic Manichean believes that everything one's own government or society does is bad and that all those who oppose it are axiomatically good. A very childlike worldview, it nonetheless caters to a large swath of people who believe that passion is a valid substitute for evidence.

The recently deceased historian Howard Zinn made tragic Manicheanism his academic legacy and personal fortune when he published A People's History of the United States, a bestselling volume on the occluded history of the republic written on behalf of its tired, poor, and systematically duped. As Michael Kazin, a leftist critic, has pointed out: "U.S. history for Zinn was... a painful narrative about ordinary folks who kept struggling to achieve equality, democracy, and a tolerant society, yet somehow were always defeated by a tiny band of rulers whose wiles match their greed."

Abolition, suffrage, civil rights, the welfare state are thus stray clearings of social justice in an otherwise uninterrupted vale of oppression. Zinn made no genuine attempt to explain why the underdogs--who represent 99 percent of the American population by his own estimation--have worn their servitude with shrugging acceptance, other than to say that they're easily "distracted" by wars and periods of patriotic fervor. This was no improvement on the Marxian notion of false consciousness. How could it be since Zinn's hero-victims transcend the narrow category of class to include anyone who's ever got a raw deal in the past 235 years?

The problem for the tragic Manichean is that, in the eternal struggle for the dominion of heaven, arguing that some angels quite like what the demons have done with interest rates and constitutional amendments is an unspeakable blasphemy.

Read more...

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