I’ve been so disappointed by the fourth season of “Big Love” I’ve taken to sending jeering e-mails to a friend who still likes it. My latest said I’m starting a petition to send it back to Univision and restore the original Spanish dialogue, because surely this allegedly prestigious HBO drama was kidnapped from its ancestral home in the telenovela big house.

But then, watching it, I realize it’s been like this since at least the third season, although that one stopped just this side of the line between incredible-but-entertaining and ridiculous-and-insulting. This season is turned up to 11.

What happened? In the first season, the story of a polygamous Utah businessman balancing a household of three wives was promising and interesting. It raised questions: What is family? How do we integrate religion into our Monday-through-Saturday lives? What do we owe our community, and what do they owe us? When we’re pulled in more than one direction, how do we keep from being pulled apart? And so on. The second season was even better, once the producers figured out that sex with three women on consecutive nights isn’t all that interesting, even by HBO standards, and started looking at the toll polygamy takes on women, both in the suburbs and in the creepy rabbit warren of Juniper Creek. It was in many ways a replay of Carmela and Meadow Soprano’s tango with the mob in that other show, but it was still worth exploring, and raised another question: Why do we cling to the chains that bind us? (Answer: Because they make such pretty jewelry.)

If anyone’s asking questions now, they’re right out loud and in the script: Don, will you take the bullet? Was that baby you’re caring for kidnapped from an Indian reservation? Could it be because you’ve never really dealt with the miscarriage you suffered in Season 3? And so on.

I swear, if it weren’t for David Simon, HBO would be toast with me. “Entourage” moved from ridiculous-but-entertaining into just-plain-offensive virtually overnight; whenever I land on it now I stay long enough to see whether they’re still serving the same tired salad of misogyny sprinkled with screeching homo-hatred (“Ari: Keep your eyes on Andrew Kline. Lloyd: Keep my eyes on him how? Ari: Pretend he’s Zac Efron’s ball sack.”), with a side of sure-I-believe-Jamie-Lynn-Sigler-likes-short-fat-penniless-guys. Look, one of the gang has a new girlfriend! She’s tall, beautiful and anorexic. Look, Ari’s on a rampage! He’s insulting his gay assistant again. Actually, Ari’s the most interesting character on the show, in the sense that it’s interesting to watch the blackly self-loathing Jeremy Piven deliver lines like this:

Mrs. Ari: What time is it?
Ari: I don’t know. My cock doesn’t wear a watch.

And he ran away from a David Mamet play? I’m not the world’s biggest Mamet fan, but he’s William Shakespeare compared to this.

Hurry hurry hurry, “Treme.” Which is sort of a nice segue to the bloggage. (Yes, I know, a bit early, but I’m having a bad morning, people. I am Ari Gold today.

Anyway, I’m told the parents of this young actress will be featured extras in “Treme.” Although now I’m looking forward to their daughter’s career:

And for anyone who’s ever had a relative whose last words were “Hey ever’body, watch this,” the sad tale of one man’s attempt to top his last wacky party stunt. Must reading. For once, the comments on a Free Press story are worth a look: He’s GOTTA be a white guy. Well, hell yes.

The cock crows 10:30. Time to start the day.

This seems to be going viral — I read it on Facebook, where it’s now being talked about more or less openly — and it deserves, nay requires, its own entry:

The John Goodman character in “Treme,” the upcoming David Simon series for HBO, finds his roots in our very own Ashley Morris. One of his friends is opening the bag based on this photo, which makes it sort of obvious. Ashley was a Saints fan, as we all know.

The confirmation I got warns it’s more of an “inspired by” character, rather than a “based on,” but I for one can say that if I hear Ash’s great FYYFF rant coming out of the mouth of John Goodman, I can die happy.

Premiere is April 11. Can’t. WAIT.

What to say about David Letterman? Cad? Sexual harasser? Sugar daddy? All of the above. My head hurts. I’m struck by this unsourced gossip, via Defamer, which implies a gig working for Dave was win-win all around, if you didn’t mind occasional sexual service in return for having your law-school bill paid. For the record, I disapprove. For all the good that will do.

A man I know once told an approving anecdote about an ambitious female journalist who got a coveted job by sleeping with the right people, that this is the way of the world, who are we to judge, etc. Well, I’m judging. Consenting adults aren’t always co-equals, and the more comely young assistants there are in the world willing to do kneepads work with the boss in return for graduating from law school debt-free, the tawdrier the world gets. I’m not after a perfect one, just one a little less tawdry.

Whatever happens to Letterman is obviously up to his bosses. My guess is, he’ll survive and thrive. He has a lot of fans, and he’s good at his job. He’s no hypocrite; while he mines his personal life for material, he’s never claimed to be perfect.

A topical Top 10 list.

Well, OK. Pals, this week has been brutal, and today dawned — if that’s the word for it — overcast, rainy and chilly. Which means it’s a perfect day to go to Costco and buy in bulk. Also, I’m looking forward to tonight, when I chaperone one of the middle-school dances our community is known for. I’ve been told by opposing parental camps that they are either a) fun affairs with lemonade; or b) dodgy dens of misbehavior approved of by short Polish-speaking film directors. I volunteered to help so I could see for myself, but I’m not expecting to see much beyond option A, above. If nothing else, it gives me yet another hammer to hang over a certain seventh-grader’s head: If you don’t do X, I will shake my booty on your dance floor. Talk about a motivator.

Now to do the crossword puzzle and try to beat Eric Zorn’s time. Have a great weekend, all.

Yes, Jeff, I did see “Mad Men.” I’m gonna be doing some spoilin’ here, so take a minute and leave the room if you must and OH MY GOD THEY RAN A LAWNMOWER OVER THE ENGLISH GUY’S FOOT. I’m not sure what this show is trying to tell me this season, but for now I’ll settle for Joan’s deadpan summation: “One minute you’re on top of the world, the next some secretary is running over your foot with a lawn mower.”

At first I saw the sale of Sterling Cooper to Putnam Powell and Lowe (aka, the Brits) as the sort of thing dramatic series television has to do to stay fresh — that is, import some villains. Conflict = drama is Screenwriting 101, and when you’ve created a fairly vast cast and made them all “interesting,” the big risk is that the audience is going to start liking them, too, and then you end up with shows like “M*A*S*H,” where everyone wears a halo by the time the Very Special episodes roll around, and after that — meh. So you bring in some antagonists. “The Sopranos” paroled a new one every season: Richie Aprile, Ralph Cifaretto, Feech La Manna, Tony Blundetto et al. The crime-family story structure made it perfectly acceptable to bump each one off when their dramatic possibilities had been fully explored. Tony even said it out loud, before making his move on Feech: “Did I learn nothing from Richie Aprile?” Your writers sure did, Ton’. Other shows have to make do with more ridiculous farewells; remember when “L.A. Law” threw Rosalind Shays down the elevator shaft? That was awesome.

So the Brits, with their terrible swift sword of cost-cutting and bean-counting, are this season’s bad guys. I’m not so sure where they’re going with it, other than wacky symbolism — how amusing that the mower in question is an all-American John Deere. The show has too much respect for reality to have SC sold again at season’s end (at least I hope so). But once you’ve severed the foot of your parent company’s rising young star, you have to go somewhere with it, and I hope they have some ideas. If nothing else, it did wake up the season with a roar at close to its midpoint. I watched the scenes where Stumpy MacKendrick is being shown around the office, and was impressed by how…comtemporary he seemed, with his empty platitudes and English-accented bullshit. “You…are a very impressive young woman,” for instance. I can’t believe I used to swallow crap like that. I can’t believe people still dish it out.

(One of my old bosses was fond of writing mash notes to her favorites, little missives I came to call Wowsers, because they all started the same way: WOW. The remainder was full of empty superlatives that by their very volume and pitch were transparent crapola: WOW. I have never read a story as moving and funny as yours. I feel so grateful and proud to work with such a magnificently talented staff...and so on. She would have felt right at home at Putnam Powell and Lowe.)

And how amusing that the cost-cutting of this season — 30 percent of the staff, we’re told — somehow spared dumb Lois, promoted from the switchboard but barely capable of basic secretarial work, and certainly not able to navigate a riding lawn mower around an office full of tipsy partiers without maiming one.

My other favorite detail: The Brit-speak, shedjools and curriculum vitae and enjoy the delicatessen.

Someone — can’t remember who — mentioned that Joan’s gory dress in her final scenes foreshadows a certain blood-smeared pink Chanel suit coming by year’s end. Hadn’t thought of that. It’s even the same nubby wool.

So, Jeff, what’s your take? Where are we going with this?

Me, I got web work to do. Do I have any bloggage? Maybe.

John D. and Catherine T. finally give some dough to a working-stiff journalist, and it’s not me. But it is money well-spent. Here’s hoping his bosses don’t lay him off.

Roger Ebert came home from Toronto with bad news: Indie film is effectively comatose. There goes my second career. (Can you people tell I’m kidding when I say stuff like that? I hope so.)

Web work. Russian drills. Later.

God, I hate it when NPR tries to be hip. I also hate it when they show willful obtuseness in the face of pop culture. On this score, I’m impossible to please, and should probably just tune out when they try something like an “appreciation” of Patrick Swayze, which didn’t quite work. Terry Gross could have handled it, but she’s got her own fish to fry, and can’t be popping in to the other shows to give them notes.

It’s hard to say what was wrong with the Swayze piece; maybe it was done by someone too young to really grasp the dual wonder and disappointment of the guy — he was always the best thing in a bad movie, but couldn’t really make the leap to good ones. He belonged in a different era, when his Gene Kelly combination of physical grace and unquestioned masculinity could have been packaged in his own “Singin’ in the Rain.” Either that, or he needed to live a little longer, until Quentin Tarantino could have built a script around him, like he did for John Travolta and Robert Forster. As it is, he’ll be remembered for doing his best work in individual scenes where he could shine — the last few minutes of “Dirty Dancing,” the Chippendale’s sketch from “Saturday Night Live” — rather than one single movie.

If you’re a fan of “Point Break,” I don’t want to hear about it.

And while I hate it when bloggers link to their own past work like it’s some sort of scholarship, I reread what I wrote about Swayze at the time of his diagnosis last year, and I’ll stand by it. You can read it here.

I just watched the “Dirty Dancing” clip again. Great dancing, of course, but why did the rest of the movie have to suck so bad? Why is Jerry Orbach glowering when everyone around him is happy? Why is the orchestra leader conducting, when we’ve already clearly seen they’re dancing to a record? And when the old people join in I have to pull the covers over my head and die a little bit.

(You know a movie I’d pay to see? One about Jennifer Grey’s nose job. I know it’s been discussed on TV, but a smart movie that drills down into plastic surgery and all its implications, using Baby’s rhinoplasty as a through line? That would be worth doing.)

Oh, and my all-time fave Excruciating NPR Pop-Cult Moment is when Noah Adams tried to lead a segment explicating the career of the late Big Pun, the rapper. Yeah, that guy. Yeah, Noah Adams. It’s still one of the funniest things I ever heard.

Friends, it appears that casting a couple worms in the job pool this morning has eaten up my blogging time. What are we thinking of “Mad Men” so far this season? I’m thinking it’s simultaneously wonderful and awful, which is, I hasten to add, a very good thing for me. I love entertainments where everyone involved points at the highest rows in the house and says, “That’s what we’re aiming for” and then maybe falls short, but dies trying. The mood so far this season seems to be “the thing that’s coming? It’s getting very close…” It’s not quite there yet, so we’re seeing a lot of Peggy slowly getting the message about what women are worth, really, and Betty ditto, and we really need more Joan, but so far it’s hard to see how it’s all coming together. The last scene this week was wonderful, all of Betty’s hopes deserting her at the time hope likes to do so — in the middle of the night — while the primordial ball-and-chain of all womankind wails from its crib. (Yes, it’s a joy, too. It’s both. That’s the point.) She’s going to have the worst post-partum depression ever.

I’m getting a little tired of the hollaback lines and scenes we’re all supposed to titter over. From the un-seat-belted children playing with dry cleaner bags in the first season, we’re now expected to gasp over the OB nurse telling Betty to get ready for her shave and enema. standard for childbirth back in the day. This feels forced.

What say you? I’m off to the gym to think about it.

Today I plan to spend most of the day at the Volkswagen dealer’s, getting the car serviced. I assume the internet service is still a single crappy, for-your-convenience 90’s-era PC with track ball mouse — yes, way — so I’m taking a bunch of work that will benefit from no internet distractions.

That includes you guys.

If I’d had time, I’d have written something yesterday for today, but yesterday was like today, only sunnier and warmer. I did get a chance to see “Hung” on demand, the latest set-in-Detroit series to take advantage of those fat tax incentives. I believe most of it is shot elsewhere, but the credit sequence and the pilot had some serious D-town locations, the most amusing being the final scene, in which the main character finds his son waiting in an all-night line to buy concert tickets. The line is at Harpo’s, and both Alan and I guffawed at the idea of a nice suburban mom allowing her teenage son to spend the night outdoors at the corner of Chalmers and Harper Avenue in Detroit; he’d be safer in South Waziristan. I seem to recall the former Mrs. Eminem used to buy her drugs in that neighborhood.

Otherwise, I liked the pilot. The rest? We’ll see. Anything with Jane Adams can never be a waste of time.

No bloggage, but why I love the New York Times: Their reporters can use “Stygian” in a lead.

Back later, I hope.

I started this season of “Big Love” the way I do most HBO series runs in the post-“Wire,” post-“Sopranos” age — hopeful but prepared to be disappointed. And, to be sure, this chronicle of polygamy-on-the-DL-in-the-suburbs hasn’t been all that. The ratio of soap opera-like plot developments to the less flashy, more interesting glimpses of the human heart has been a bit lopsided, but OK, it’s television. And there’s a reason soap operas run for years and years — it’s always fun to check in on others’ action-packed lives.

But beyond the soapy stuff (writers, I saw Sarah’s miscarriage coming like a brass band), the show is still finding the sorts of stories that make HBO’s native series so much better than Showtime’s. Things are building to a climax in the world of Bill Henrickson and his extended family, and it’s fun to watch.

At this point I should probably note some spoilers are coming. You’ve been warned.

One theme, this season, has been how Bill’s choice to take additional wives has affected and compromised those women, as well as others who come in contact with them. His life is a wreck. All three of his wives are miserable and coping in their own ways. A fourth entered and left the family in a matter of hours. His business partner, also multiply wed, saw two of his brides run off together, a payoff we’ve been waiting for since season one, when a single shot of them playing footsie under a card table suggested they had their own special bond. And the poison is seeping into his children — a pregnant teenage daughter, a son in love with wife No. 3, a tween girl up to various nefarious activities. The more recent children, those of wives two and three, are too young to raise much hell, but their day is surely coming.

The early season questions were mainly about how the sex stuff works. This season, Bill lost a whole bottle of Viagra down the bathroom sink drain, which left him suggesting an evening of cuddling to wife No. 2, but she’s already got his number — what really makes Bill’s dick hard are his various business interests, all of which seem to involve high-wire negotiations, slamming doors and blood oaths.

But this week was an emotional payoff of sorts. Bill, who has been groping toward an understanding that polygamy has a truly evil side (don’t expect him to grasp that he’s part of the problem, not for a few more seasons, anyway), will have to confront it directly, now that his sister-in-law-to-be has had her neck broken, fleeing a forced marriage to a truly insane FLDS “prophet” and his transgendered first wife, and…

I told you it got a little soapy from time to time.

Anyway, this episode was the best of the season, as each wife digs into her personal hell and shores up the bunker walls. First wife Barb is even more the bullying boss lady. Second wife Nikki finds, for the first time in her life, a man she actually wants to have sex with. Third wife Margene, the current baby factory, is overwhelmed by the cacophony of children’s voices she endures all day and dreams of trips to the grocery store. Meanwhile, back at the Juniper Creek compound, Hollis Green stirs his creepy stew, and caught in the middle is poor FLDS pawn Kathy, the bride-to-be, with her signature braid delivering the death blow after a brief flight to freedom. Will it dawn on Bill, the part he plays in all this female misery? Of course not. But that’s why it’s fun to watch.

Discuss, if you like.

Or, we can continue to talk about Rush Limbaugh. I wonder how much those Dominican prostitutes charged him. I figure he had to hide C-notes in his flab rolls and let them go exploring. Some things just cannot be expected at market prices.

I leave you with a joke I heard the other day: One of these things is not like the others: Herpes, AIDS, gonorrhea, a house in Detroit. Can you tell which one? The answer is: Gonorrhea, because you can get rid of that.

It’s important to keep a sense of humor in dark times. Remember that.

Well, this has certainly been an …interesting campaign season, hasn’t it? Two weeks ago, I thought there was a good chance Obama was finished. Last night, it’s looking as though McCain is toast. All of it — “suspending the campaign,” Palin’s foreign-affairs cram course (which, unfortunately, brought the “Caribou Barbie” image home — world leaders and colorful native costumes sold separately!), the Letterman thing — makes him look desperate and weak, and that’s a very bad thing to be when you’re running for president at a time like this.

(“The Letterman thing,” I realize, makes me sound like one of those “low-information voters” who votes based on who did better with Ellen and Tyra, but the truth is, no one has aged into his Jack Paar elder status quite as gracefully as Dave. Doing the late-night chat shows is as important as doing “Meet the Press,” and McCain should have known that.)

Today, though I know the chat about this will be lively, let’s try to give one another a break. One reason I’ve come to hate the four-year election cycle is how easily I allow my buttons to be pushed, how culture war pushes everything else to the side. Deb spoke yesterday of yelling like a crazy lady when she sees a McCain yard sign, and I know exactly what she’s talking about. I’m grateful there are so few signs of any sort on my block, because I really don’t want to start doing the same thing. For a while when the war was going very badly, one of the houses in the next block had a sign in the yard that was phrased as a command: SUPPORT PRESIDENT BUSH AND OUR TROOPS. I had to avert my eyes. I didn’t want to put a human face to the house. I wanted the social lubricant of neighborliness to remain intact as long as possible.

I bring this up because we’ve already had a player carried off the field here, our old pal Jeff the Mild-Mannered, who wrote me last night:

I seem to be provoking more unpleasantness than is my preference, and it isn’t a position i’m used to occupying; that, and at 47 i’m already on lisinopril, and don’t need to up my dosage, so i’m just going to gracefully bow out through the election week. When i’m tempted to be extremely un-mild mannered in response to others, it’s a sign i need to pause and reflect and (forgive me) pray.

Others have written similar thoughts, and have taken shorter time-outs, and surely others have simply stopped commenting and reading without announcing it. One of my conundrums as a blogger has always been how I might “monetize” this site, and it reminds me of how I was always told to monetize my career when I was a columnist. People would say, “You need a niche, a cause, something people will associate with you,” but I could never do it. If I made this site all about politics I would doubtless pick up more outside linkage, and traffic, and maybe 35 more cents in my Google Ads account at the end of the month, but I’d hate doing it. I’d rather keep this blog about a lot of different things than one big thing, and attracting people who are interested in a lot of different things and like to comment on them.

One thing I like about Jeff is his willingness to take unpopular positions here, and I’ll miss him. Even though he’ll be back in six weeks or so.

Let’s keep talking about the events of the day. Let’s just try to remember that the other guy is not necessarily the enemy.

If you need to, when feeling overheated, you can play this video, and repeat as needed:

Puppies! All better now.

A little bloggage:

“Mad Men” fans, take note. Emma turned me on to this Flickr set of an artists’ images inspired by the show, but did you know this same artist has a shop at Zazzle? I’m getting the Betty-smashes-a-chair T-shirt as soon as I hang up with you.

Amy Welborn, Catholic blogger, left Fort Wayne earlier this year and has written about her impressions of her time there. You Fort people might like it. Or might not.

Gym-bound. Back later.

I keep meaning to call up my old screenwriting prof and ask what he thinks of “Mad Men.” Watching Joan sadly rub the bra strap mark on her shoulder this week was a revelation of great writing — exactly the sort of detail that reveals everything about a character without a word being spoken, with the added bonus of being something I’ve never seen before. God, I love this show. I hope you do, too.

It’s hard to do even one good season of television like this, but the mark of greatness is how it flowers in its second, and I haven’t seen a second season like this since “The Wire,” and before that, “The Sopranos,” so take that however you will. The gorgeous thing about this show, set in the world of Madison Avenue ad firms in the early ’60s, is how we know what the characters don’t — that their world is about to be upended by the cultural storm of the ’60s. It’s like a disaster movie, when we can see the killer sneaking up behind the clueless sap about to be hit with an ax, only in slow motion and with all the carnage emotional. But the early breezes of the coming storm are already starting to blow. This season is focusing on the women, who have a mighty load of resentment to tote around from week to week. This week, a marriage shattered and a woman who’s been successful in the one feminine strategy that transcends eras — knowing how to work a bodacious bod — finally realized the limits of her power, and both of these events were conveyed the way they are in real life, with strained conversations, a flicker of expression across the eyes, a change in a tone of voice.

I once read some advice on playwrighting: No character needs to walk onstage and say, “I’m tired.” All he needs to say is, “Has anyone seen my magazine?” In “Mad Men,” characters love and compete, support and betray, sometimes at the same time. A few weeks ago, a woman named Peggy seemed to be having a flirtation with a young priest. He pushed her away with a gesture and comment aimed directly at the most vulnerable spot in her psyche. This week he was back, trying to coax her into confession, and his plea was 50 percent wheedle and 50 percent genuine concern. Neither acknowledged the elephant in the room, a very early-’60s thing to do. The final scene showed several characters at the end of the day — Peggy in the bathtub, Joan the bombshell rubbing her strap mark, and the priest stripping off his collar and picking up his guitar. He strums a couple of tight chords, then belts out “Early in the Morning,” which you might not know was Side 1, Track 1 of Peter, Paul & Mary’s very first album.

The song takes the form of a prayer, and the prayer says what most prayers say: Help me find the way. It’s the perfect prayer for that character at that moment in time, and it serves as distant thunder for the coming storm and — as this show is justly famed for its maniacal attention to perfect detail — the album it’s on was released in 1962, and guess what year it is in “Mad Men” this season?

You just can’t watch this show and fail to be impressed. Not if you’re paying attention.

Bloggage later. I have a busy morning tomorrow and I think I won’t be back until afternoon. Talk amongst yourselves.

Because the New Yorker was made for ink-on-paper reading and it arrives days and days late here, I didn’t get to the George Packer essay everyone was talking about until Saturday. I read it poolside, presumably in the presence of actual conservatives, based on recent election results.

“The Fall of Conservatism” lays out, perhaps too optimistically for my money, how the political movement that defined my adulthood lost its way and now teeters like a shack on the beach awaiting November’s hurricane. My initial reaction: Well, we’ll see. Pat Buchanan gets the money-shot quote, paraphrasing Eric Hoffer: “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” I’ve seen the racketeers for some time now; it seems like a hundred years ago that I started telling people the success of buffoons like Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh indicated the right had run out of steak and was selling nothing but sizzle, but obviously I was wrong about that one. Packer mentions in passing the two great rocky shoals conservatism wrecked itself on — Iraq and Katrina, but these were only rocks that showed above the waterline. It’s one thing to argue that government is always incompetent; it’s quite another to staff government agencies with incompetents and then, when they’re revealed as such, yell, “See!? See!?”

I might add that it’s one thing to praise business and unfettered capitalism like some sort of god, and quite another to look the other way when corrupt financial markets can drain billions from American pockets and reward the perpetrators, but that’s another discussion.

Here’s what struck and saddened me: The way the GOP gained power through what Kevin Phillips called “positive polarization.” Divide and conquer, basically, but not only divide — demonize. People who disagreed with you weren’t just wrong, they were evil. In the midst of it, a woman called my newspaper and informed my editor she would be canceling her subscription because a certain female columnist had described herself as a feminist, and this was simply too much to be endured. Packer thinks it’s on its way out. I can only hope so:

Yet the polarization of America, which we now call the “culture wars,” has been dissipating for a long time. Because we can’t anticipate what ideas and language will dominate the next cycle of American politics, the previous era’s key words—“élite,” “mainstream,” “real,” “values,” “patriotic,” “snob,” “liberal” — seem as potent as ever. Indeed, they have shown up in the current campaign: North Carolina and Mississippi Republicans have produced ads linking local Democrats to Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama’s controversial former pastor. The right-wing group Citizens United has said that it will run ads portraying Obama as yet another “limousine liberal.” But these are the spasms of nerve endings in an organism that’s brain-dead.

We’ll see. I lived in deep-red country for 20 years and learned to get along with people who considered a self-described feminist to be a she-devil. Part of my belligerent attitude of late has to do with leaving that place for a more purple-hued environment, but I worry that positive polarization has caught me, too. I certainly wouldn’t pay for a newspaper that carried Ann Coulter’s column. Maybe that’s the real legacy of the last 40 years: We disagree, therefore, you suck.

Anyway, I think Roy gets it right: Do not count out this movement, even with half its teeth missing, syphilis overtaking its bloodstream and the odor of the grave emanating with every howl:

The conservative heavy thinkers to whom Packer gives much credence may feel as if the world has passed them by, but the racketeers really run the show. As formerly grumbling conservative operatives learn to love McCain and go all-in for the big win, philosophy is the least of their concerns, and their whither-conservatism thumb-suckers become mere padding for pages filled with stories about Obama’s Muslim past, inability to bowl, and other such boob-bait. If you think they can’t pull it off because their approach lacks intellectual vitality, you may be overthinking the whole thing.

Josh Marshall makes some good points, too.

That’s what I did on Saturday, when I had to readjust my pool chair six times to find the right balance between out-in-the-sun (too bright to read) and under-the-umbrella (too cold to concentrate). It didn’t even touch 70, but the pool was open (and heated) and by god, we were going. The lifeguards sat around glumly in sweats, hoping no one needed saving. Sunday was warmer and Monday was downright hot — upper 80s. I went to sleep last night with all the windows open and the ceiling fans on, and woke up 90 minutes later with the blinds banging and cold air rushing in to reclaim us. Again. Current temperature: 48, and fuck you very much, Canadian air mass. Frost warning (!!!!!!!) tonight.

As the previous post demonstrates, I finally took up Alan’s fancy shotgun and took my chances on the skeet range. The double I got on that station wasn’t typical, but I did pretty well — hit maybe 30 percent of the faces of my enemies rendered in brittle ceramic clay pigeons, some fairly tough. I didn’t get any of the “rabbits” — targets launched to roll along the ground — but I came close, and I nailed a few in the incredibly satisfying ways they blow apart. I thought “vaporizing in midair” was my favorite, but then I experienced “breaking into three pieces, each spinning off on its own symmetrical trajectory,” and that was the new standard of excellence.

For what its worth, none of the targets carried the face of the president. Hey, I’m evolving!

So, bloggage of a related note: Anyone see “Recount”? What did we think? I found it surprisingly engaging for being unafraid to take on fairly complicated legal concepts, but nearly unwatchable just the same, if only for its arousal of the old we disagree/you suck anger. I came away hoping someone learned a lesson or two in that mess, and maybe, by 2006, we did — the corrupt GOP establishment that nearly turned Ohio 2004 into a rerun of Florida 2000 was ejected on its ear. But the elements that let the fiasco happen are, most likely, still in place somewhere. I thought Gore did the right thing at the time, but when I see what actually happened as a result of that election, maybe not so much.

Skipped Rob’s torture session this morning, so I’m off to ride my bike until my legs fall off. Make merry in the first day of quasi-summer, when the furnace will likely come on.