Should the Constitution be amended to empower the states, by a 2/3 vote, to repeal provisions of federal law?

Dana Milbank notes "the unfortunate echo of nullification," but nullification was the idea that individual states could disregard federal law they opposed. The Repeal Amendment would institute an orderly structural safeguard as part of the Constitution, a check on federal power that requires a supermajority vote of the states.

Instapundit thinks Milbank is being — pretending to be? — too obeisant to the original Constitution:

The amendment process, after all, is part of the Constitution. The Framers had no illusions that they were creating perfection, and believed in the sovereignty of the people and in the power of the people to revise the Constitution as needed, through the process they created. The idea that the text of the Constitution should be revised only through judicial reinterpretation is a modern conceit, and one that does no honor to the Framers at all.

Since the Repeal Amendment, proposed by Randy Barnett, can easily be portrayed as an effort to return to something closer to the balance of power provided for in the original Constitution, it is pretty silly to portray yourself as brimming with respect for the Founders when what you really support is the shift of power to the national government that occurred over the long stretch of time, a shift that the courts have allowed to take place.

You know what else is silly? This, from Milbank:

Lest you think this is a hair-brained scheme by one Republican lawmaker, consider that the Repeal Amendment... has won the endorsement of the man who will be the next House majority leader, Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.).

Let me dig up William Safire:

Folk etymology is the term for the creation of new words by mistake or misunderstanding or mispronunciation....In today's language, "Hare-brained" is often giddily and irresponsibly misspelled "Hairbrained," perhaps on the notion that the hair is near the brain.

Folk etymology... hmmm. There's also folk constitutional interpretation, isn't there? Or is folk the wrong word when it's journalists purveying the bogus constitutional wisdom?

"But he left me naked shorts, the best metaphor known to gnomes of Zurich since the snake in the tunnel."

But he left me naked shorts, the best metaphor known to gnomes of Zurich since the snake in the tunnel.

Just a William Safire sentence I like.

What do you look like in naked shorts? It's the koan of the day.

"She seems like a real fighter, someone who would stick it to the lobbyist and special-interest groups that have run ramped in Washington."

Writes one of the Detroit Free Press readers who are weighing in on Sarah Palin's speech:

Originally, I was a not too happy about McCain’s choice for a running mate, Sarah Palin … However, after her speech tonight I am beginning to see her in a different light. She seems like a real fighter, someone who would stick it to the lobbyist and special-interest groups that have run ramped in Washington. Her perspective between Obama and McCain was brilliant. … Palin hit it on the nail, the Democratic Party is about big government and high taxes. McCain has walked the walk on change while Obama has to date only talked the talk about change.

Hey, somebody notify Language Log! "Run ramped" is a fabulous eggcorn -- "a kind of word creation due to a mishearing that a glance at the written form would normally have corrected." The writer obviously meant "run rampant."

I love the association with the vogue use of the phrase "ramped up," which William Safire wrote about in his "On Language" column here:

Who is there to restrain this kudzulike growth of ramp, up and down? A myriad of readers (including those who prefer the adjective form, as in ''myriad readers'') have urged this department to take to the ramparts. In Old French, ramper was ''to creep or crawl.'' Its first appearance in English was in a 1390 poem: ''A litel Serpent on the ground, Which rampeth al aboute round.'' Three centuries later, John Milton contributed to its meaning of crawling upward: ''Surely the Prelates would have Saint Pauls words rampe one over another, as they use to clime into their Livings and Bishopricks.'' Shakespeare's contemporary Ben Jonson used it to lead off the couplet that has become the epitome of realism: ''Ramp up my genius, be not retrograde; But boldly nominate a spade a spade.''

Now, now, Ben Jonson wasn't talking about Obama, and I didn't read that part of the paragraph until after I pasted it in. I'm just interested in this word-root "ramp" and its present-day manifestations "ramp up" and "rampant" and how they converged in that eggcorn."Rampant" denotes a virulent growth, while "ramp" mostly refers to rising up. Not really that different, but "run ramped" seems like something from the 16th century.

"I promise this is on topic, so please bear with me. . . . One day, as a cure for a broken heart..."

That's the first line of the NYT Magazine's "On Language" column, broken off at the exact point when I realized they must have a guest writer subbing for William Safire.

A good column, by Jaimie Epstein, about the travails of looking for love on line when you're a language buff and you have to get to know people from their writing:

But just imagine what it’s like to be afflicted with an excess language-sensitivity gene. I mean, how would you feel if someone extolled your “skillful verbage”? Maybe he liked the way I threw my verbs around, but my nose picked up a whiff of “garbage.” And what about the onomatopoeticist who enjoyed the “slurshing sound of the waves”? “Slurshing” made me think “drink sloppily and quickly,” and combined with the motion of the water, the effect of his words was to produce welling seasickness, not the soothing rock and roll of the ocean crashing and uncrashing with romantic abandon along the shore of a secluded beach that he must have been aiming for.

Uh-oh, I just ended a sentence with a preposition!...

Hmmm... well, I would have sniffed at the phrase "my nose picked."

"Christianist."

With all this talk of the word "Christianist," I thought I'd do a Lexis/Nexis search to see how often it appears. In the Law Reviews & Journals database, "Christianist" (or "Christianists") is used only once, in an article by Robert J. Morris called "Intersections: Sexuality, Cultural Tradition, and the Law: Configuring the Bo(u)nds of Marriage: The Implications of Hawaiian Culture & Values for the Debate About Homogamy," 8 Yale J.L. & Human. 105 (1996)("Homogamy"? That's new to me.)

Despite the common law's formal deference to local custom, Anglo-Saxons in Hawai"i in the early 1800's hardly viewed Hawaiian custom as legitimate. Many of the foreigners who came to Hawai"i in the early 1800's called it (and its language) childish, simplistic, deficient, defective, heathen, pagan, native, and feudal. In doing so, they defined themselves in opposition to the Other and simultaneously changed the Other. They necessarily viewed Hawai"i as the despotic, barbaric Other; and a good part of this Otherness was the Hawaiians' sexuality.

Calvinist missionaries dealt with a culture that had aikane by calling christianist and capitalist culture "manly," Hawaiian society "feudal," and feudalism "effeminate." Any language other than the King's English was "emasculated."The discussion was in sexual terms, and the patriarchy-driven mission off-handedly acknowledged that "no nation on earth perhaps allows females a higher proportionate rank [than Hawai"i]." For Hawai"i, this was the "dawn of tyranny" under the new foreignization.

In the Major Newspapers file, there are only 25, with only one before 1990. It's in a letter to the editor of the Toronto Star, published on April 27, 1988:

Tom Harpur's column, New scientific views upsetting for atheists (April 17), may be amusing pap for the Sunday readers, particularly the smug christianists, but it is not an accurate or insightful depiction of the new physics....

PIERRE SAVOIE

Toronto

(Blame Canada!)

The usage is noted in a William Safire "On Language" column on May 15, 2005:

Two weeks after writing about the fervor of the late Terri Schiavo's ''Christianist 'supporters,''' Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker last month described Representative Tom Delay as a ''hard-right Christianist crusader.'' A few months before, soon after President Bush was re-elected, the conservative Weekly Standard reported that an Ohio cartoonist had sent out a communication deploring ''militant Christianist Republicans.''

Obviously there is a difference in meaning between the adjectives Christian and Christianist. Thanks to Jon Goldman, an editor at Webster's New World Dictionaries, I have the modern coinage of the latter with its pejorative connotation. ''I have a new term for those on the fringes of the religious right,'' wrote the blogging Andrew Sullivan on June 1, 2003, ''who have used the Gospels to perpetuate their own aspirations for power, control and oppression: Christianists. They are as anathema to true Christians as the Islamists are to true Islam.''

Not such a new term. You have to be careful about claiming coinage, as I learned to my rue (my 1970's baby, workfare, turned out to have been coined earlier; same with neuroethics). In 1883, W.H. Wynn wrote a homily that said ''Christianism -- if I may invent that term -- is but making a sun-picture of the love of God.'' He didn't invent the term, either. In the early 1800's, the painter Henry Fuseli wrote scornfully that ''Christianism was inimical to the progress of arts.'' And John Milton used it in 1649.

Adding ist or ism to a word usually colors it negatively, as can be seen in secularist....

As Christianist, with its evocation of Islamist, gains wider usage as an attack word on what used to be called the religious right, another suffix is being used in counterattack to derogate those who denounce church influence in politics. ''The Catholic scholar George Weigel calls this phenomenon 'Christophobia,''' the columnist Anne Applebaum wrote in The Washington Post. She noted that he borrowed the word from the American legal scholar, J.H.H. Weiler. The word was used by Weigel ''after being struck by the European Union's fierce resistance to any mention of the continent's Christian origins in the draft versions of the new, and still unratified, European constitution.''

Just some info.

ADDED: In the comments, amba asks for a definition of "aikne," which is not susceptible to Googling. Actually, it's printed in the article as "aikne." I'm not sure how that is meant to appear. I think it's aikane with a line over the middle "a." I've corrected that in the original text. Anyway, according to the article it refers to partners in a same-sex relationship:

Exact translation is not an easy task. Some concepts of the Hawaiian language were buried with the advent of Christianity and capitalism in Hawai"i. Aikane was among these. Aikane marks persons of any gender in a homogamous relationship. Despite Christianity, this meaning persists well into the twentieth century among those who know Hawaiian....

The traditional meaning of aikane as a same-sex lover is crucial. From the first day of Captain Cook's arrival in Hawai"i through the formative years of the American and other foreign presence in Hawai"i, the aikane of the chiefs (ali"i) of each island facilitated the foreigners' livelihoods, their use of land, their very existence.

Robscalithom predictions.

William Safire returns to the NYT op-ed page to do his usual "office pool" on predictions for the year 2006. Question 4 is about the Supreme Court:

The Robertscalito court will: (a) in the Texas case disengage from involvement in states' redistricting; (b) go the other way in Oregon, holding that federal power to prohibit substances trumps a state's authority to permit physician-assisted suicide; (c) decide that federal funds can be denied to law schools that prohibit military recruitment on campus; (d) uphold McCain-Feingold, enabling Congress to restrict political contributions but not expenditures; (e) reassert citizens' Fourth Amendment protection from "security letters" and warrantless surveillance.

His answer is "all." Some are more likely that others, though, especially (c). And "Robertscalito" is an awfully inelegant coinage for a notorious word maven. Much as I object to "Scalito," I still find it aesthetically appealing. If you're going to go toward ungainliness and make it "Robertscalito," leaving out Clarence Thomas becomes conspicuous. So in the interest of inclusiveness and aesthetics, I'll suggest: "Robscalithom."

What's with the phrase "gay men and lesbians"?

Why not just say "gay people" or "gays"? I've wanted to see some solid opinion on this subject for a long time. William Safire has a go at answering the question:

"Historically, gay represented both homosexual men and women and technically still does," says Chris Crain, editor of the gay weeklies The Washington Blade and The New York Blade, "but a number of gay women felt that gay was too male-associated and pressed to have lesbians separately identified so they weren't lost in the gay-male image." That led to such names as the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. (The Washington Blade began in 1969 as The Gay Blade, a play on an old expression about a gallant.)

Diane Anderson-Minshall, executive editor of Curve, a lesbian magazine in San Francisco, agrees that the one-word adjective was expanded to set homosexual women apart: "When, in the queer world, you say 'the gay community,' the majority of the time that conjures up San Francisco's largely male Castro District, or West Hollywood or 'Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,' so interjecting the word lesbian into the mix is a necessary reminder that we — gay women — are not simply a subset of that larger male world but rather our own distinct community of individuals."

Safire thus explains the usage. He doesn't opine about whether the wordy phrase should be the norm. I tend to think simpler is better, but it's helpful to have a good grasp of the origin of the longer phrase and the feelings it expresses.

A whole separate question -- which I'm just going to guess Safire has already written about -- is: when should people with a particular characteristic be called a "community"?

"Meticulously researched" = dull.

Per William Safire, explaining the tricks of writing blurbs for books. He also tips us off to some other synonyms for boring: "definitive," "exhaustive," and "profoundly insightful."

Replacing William Safire.

After New York Magazine ran a piece cataloguing the candidates to replace William Safire on the NYT op-ed page, Slate went looking for more daring ideas, one of which is Alex Kozinski, whom Slate calls "a world-class shit-stirrer." Well, they also call the judge a "practicing lawyer," so I can't trust their terminology. But I do think it's a cool idea.

"Kerry's hard-line, right-wing, unilateral, pre-election policy epiphany."

William Safire on Kerry's new hawkishness, as seen in the debate. Safire notes that Bush supporters have opted to ignore it:

Instead, the president focused on the Democrat's sugar-coating of his first-strike pill of prevention: his assurance that his pre-emption had to be one that "passes the global test" to make it legitimate. By ridiculing Kerry's notion that such a surprise attack had to have prior world-public approval, Bush was able to prevent his opponent from out-hawkishing him.

Highlights of Maureen Dowd's interview on "The Daily Show"

1. She compared President Bush to Luke Skywalker who has "the good light father" who is "his own father who believed in internationalism, getting along with the allies, and leaving the end of the Iraq war where it was" and Dick Cheney who is "the dark father, Darth Vader" (whoops of approval from the audience) "who believes in bullying and unilateralism and not leaving the Iraq war where it was." I haven't seen "Star Wars" in decades, but did Darth Vader believe in unilateralism? The Empire is the other side, so ... ack! I don't know. I'm not a "Star Wars" person, but if you are, feel free to quibble with Dowd on this. (Or go take Prof. Yin's "Star Wars" quiz.)



2. Alternate description of Dick Cheney: "He's barking mad."



3. The NYT columnists have offices next to each other, which they find amusing to call "Murderers Row."



4. William Safire has a private phone that doesn't go through the switchboard, for his secret sources. Jon Stewart says it's probably for phone sex and imitates Safire calling: "1-800-DANGLINGPARTICIPLE."



5. A prompt from Stewart about Safire and grammar gets Dowd to say that she once asked him if it's right to say "war on terror" when you can't really have a war against a tactic, which doesn't seem like a grammar question or a word usage question, per se. Safire said, "Yes, you can," which Dowd thinks is pretty funny because he answered not as "a word person" but as a "conservative." I think the better usage point here is that it should be "war on terrorism," because the war is on the activity, not the result of the activity. We're not fighting against fear. But I think "war on terror" has won out because it's shorter. And there's probaby a fancy name like "metonymy" for the rhetorical device. (What do you say, rhetoric fans? Is it metonymy?)



6. "Tom Friedman is a lovely guy and when he gets very frustrated about what's going on in the Middle East, he'll come into my office, and on a very rare occasion, and go 'Let's go get a daiquiri." Stewart finds this extremely funny and says, "Makes it sound like he's a temp." Does being a temp and getting a dacquiri have the same connotation that preferring daiquiris used to have in the 1970s when Johnny Carson made daiquiri jokes?

So what is the official Columbia Journalism Review position about factchecking quotes?

Zachary Roth at CJR Campaign Desk thinks he's found a way to attack me for "attacking" Kerry:

Ann Althouse thinks she's found another way to use the delaying-the-nomination idea to attack the Massachusetts senator. Kerry told the Boston Globe that "it used to be that the convention, after nomination, traveled to the home or the state of the nominee to inform them they've been nominated ... Harry Truman was in Independence [Mo]." Althouse, citing David McCullough's biography, says Truman was clearly at the 1948 convention, and delivered a speech. But that doesn't necessarily mean the convention didn't then travel to Independence to nominate him, as Kerry said. We eagerly await comment from historians of the presidential nomination process.

Since Roth is an arbiter of fairness, operating under the name of the Columbia Journalism Review and presumably dedicated to journalism ethics, how about some fairness to me?



First, I'm not looking for ways to attack Kerry. On what basis does he insinuate that attacking Kerry is my motive? I include in the very post he links a reference to an earlier post where I criticized Republican William Safire for getting the history of the conventions wrong. As I've said many times, I'm a moderate who has not chosen between the two candidates yet and don't intend to do so until October. I'm an observer of human nature and I found it funny that Kerry pompously chided the Republicans for not knowing history while making a glaring mistake of his own.



Second, so I didn't specify that the speech was an acceptance speech, but the link to the speech text has the words "I accept the nomination" as the third sentence and the pages in the McCullough biography leave no doubt this was an acceptance speech. Roth doesn't bother to check that as he stretches to find a way that it might somehow be true that Truman went to the convention but then left and had to be informed of the nomination later. Truman was already President when he was nominated as his party's candidate, as anyone writing about politics should know. What are the chances a President who is running for a second term would go to the convention without knowing he would be nominated and making an acceptance speech?



It doesn't take much of a historian to look up these prominent facts. It took about 2 minutes on Google for me to get this information. Instead of bizarrely trying to paint me as someone looking for ways to slam Kerry, why doesn't Roth criticize the Boston Globe for printing Kerry's quote without having enough of a sense of history to wonder whether Kerry might be wrong about Truman or checking the basic facts within the quotes?



Back in March, another CJR Campaign Desk writer, Brian Montopoli, responded favorably to a post I had made pointing out a factual error in a Kerry statement and criticizing the mainstream press reports for not noticing questionable facts within a quote and just repeating quotes without factchecking:

We come to this a little late, but, as University of Wisconsin law professor Ann Althouse pointed out over the weekend, Sen. John Kerry was wrong when he claimed during last Thursday's debate that "we have 111 people who have been now released from death row ... because of DNA evidence that showed they didn't commit the crime of which they were convicted."



According to the non-profit Death Penalty Information Center, 113 people have been released from death row since 1973. But in only 13 of those cases did DNA evidence play a significant factor in the prisoner's release.



In the other 100 (or so) cases, says the American Civil Liberties Union, "those exonerated were found innocent because someone came forward to confess committing the crime; key witness testimony was found to be illegitimate; or new evidence was found to support innocence."



The New York Times, Boston Globe, Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer, New Republic, CBS News, and countless other outlets all ran stories quoting Kerry without checking the facts to figure it out.



It's difficult for a reporter writing on deadline to fact-check every assertion that comes out of a candidate's mouth, of course. But in a primary season, once a misstatement such as this gets into the echo chamber, it's awfully hard to set the record straight.

So I'd like to ask Roth and Montopoli to get together and figure out the journalism ethics issue here. Do we take factual assertions within candidate's quotes seriously or not? Are we going to be critical of newspapers that repeat the candidate's quotes without factchecking the assertions within them or not? And if a blogger takes on the work that the newspapers shun and points out an incorrect fact within a candidate's quote, should a website devoted to the "critique and analysis of 2004 campaign coverage" show no interest in figuring out what the fact actually is and accuse the blogger of looking for ways to attack the candidate (the Roth approach)? Or should it express appreciation for the work of the blogger who has made up for the deficiency of the mainstream press (the Montopoli approach)?



UPDATE: This recent post of Roth's was pointed out to me, and, in fact, it shows that he does think news media shouldn't be "complicit in allowing the candidates to repeat their spin without criticism" and should "point out ... distortions, immediately and unequivocatingly, using their own reportorial (as opposed to editorial) voice." This is very close to my key point.

Kerry's embarrassing history lecture.

The Boston Globe reports John Kerry's response to criticism about his proposal to avoid accepting the nomination at the Democratic convention:

The senator chuckled at the criticism.



"Once again, the Republicans don't know history, and they don't know facts," he said. "The truth is that it used to be that the convention, after nomination, traveled to the home or the state of the nominee to inform them they've been nominated. Woodrow Wilson was at his house in Princeton, N.J.; Harry Truman was in Independence," Mo., he said. "They're trying to make an issue out of something that they're surprised by, because . . . they're very upset someone might have a way of neutralizing their advantage."

Yes, but wouldn't it be funny if Kerry himself got history wrong? It just so happens he did!



Read pages 637-646 of David McCullough's biography "Truman." Listen to the speech here. Truman was quite clearly at the convention in 1948 and gave a big speech, the first televised speech. The band played "Hail to the Chief," and Truman strode out. Here's a description:

[A] dispute occupied so much "prime time" that when the party's candidate, President Truman, came to the podium to speak to America on TV, it was 2:00 a.m. and most sets were turned off. Truman was dressed perfectly for TV, however, in a crisp white linen suit with a black tie for the cameras. And he'd prepared his speech on small notecards so he could face the cameras when he spoke....



One viewer who'd stayed up to watch Truman was TV critic Jack Gould of the New York Times. To him, Truman looked "relaxed and supremely confident, swaying on the balls of his feet." And he claimed that Truman's performance "removed any doubt that television was going to place an increasing premium on personality in politics."

Ah, how I would love to hear a candidate deliver a speech extemporaneously from note cards that he'd written up himself!



(Note: I criticized Republican William Safire for misstating the history of the conventions here.)



UPDATE: Thanks for linking to Instapundit and to the official Bush campaign blog. By the way, in my post title, I meant that Kerry was lecturing us and it was embarrassing for him to take such a pedantic tone and then turn out to be wrong (especially about one of his own party's heroes). I didn't mean to cast myself as a lecturer out to embarrass him, but if you want to see me as the lecturer, okay.

Convention drama, convention cliché.

William Safire, the former speechwriter, displayed some speechwriter vanity on Meet the Press when he was asked about Kerry's proposal to refrain from accepting the Democratic nomination at the convention. Safire said it would be "the stupidest move that John Kerry could possibly make." Why? His whole point was: could you imagine leaving out the classic applause line "I accept the nomination," which has been written into the candidates' speeches for 200 years? So that's the real issue: how to write the speech? (Actually a truly arrogant speechwriter would believe there were plenty of elegant ways to draw cheers and applause while refraining from actual acceptance.)



But is it even true that there have been 200 years of conventions culminating in candidates proclaiming "I accept"? According to William Kristol, on Fox News Sunday, before FDR went to a convention in 1932 to accept, the convention would take place and a delegation would travel to the candidate to tell him that he had been nominated weeks later. 200 years, 70 years--how accurate do we have to be? But, really, it seems to me that the key date is 1968, when the lesson was learned that you've got to have a disciplined convention that frames and flatters the candidate, not a real-life event of any kind. The convention is a big advertisement, and, in that setting, it's become a tradition to make the statement "I accept" feel like a dramatic climax, even though it is really a big, boring cliché.



So can you imagine a convention without that big dramatic moment? I'll answer Safire's question. Yes, I could live without that phoney climax. I'd miss my chance to quip from the sofa, "Wouldn't it be funny if he said no?" But I'd survive. In fact, I'd like to see the entire convention eliminated. It's just a big show, and it's not even an entertaining show. Please credit $14 million dollars to the U.S. Treasury and get off my television!

Safire isn't trying very hard.

William Safire has a nice discussion of the word "vitiate," which is a word that no one ought to use in normal communication (my opinion, not Safire's), but which has a term-of-art use in Congress. Bob Woodward's book recounts an incident in which President Bush's chief legislative aid used the word, causing Bush to say, "What the f**k are you talking about, vitiate?" After his discourse on the actual meaning of "vitiate," Safire has this to say about the President's use of the word "f**k" (which I ordinarily never write, but consider importantly quotable in this context):

In his account of this stupefyingly boring episode, Woodward -- who was obviously not present in the room -- quotes the president directly asking Calio what the word meant. In so doing, the reporter has the leader of the world's only superpower using a familiar expletive not in its literal verb sense, but in a slangy nominative similar to the usage that, when broadcast, causes great concern at the Federal Communications Commission. To my knowledge, nobody has called attention to this somewhat startling report, perhaps because the whole of Page 186 is so dull that the usual sharp eyes have glazed over.

Well, Safire is not trying very hard! Just Google the sentence Woodward quotes, and you'll get a list of mentions, beginning with the rather conspicuous article in Slate. ("Slate reads Plan of Attack so you don't have to.") The Slate article led me to discuss the quote, back here. I thought Bush was basically teasing Calio for using a ridiculous jargon word. The use of unnecessily odd words was a subject I had just commented on, after Justice Scalia used the word "reticulated" in an oral argument, and I saw Bush as someone who shared my opinion: you should have a good reason for using a weird word.

Anyway, Safire does do a good job of showing that Woodward didn't have much of a grasp on the word "vitiate," for reasons that are too boring to write, but have to do with the term-of-art use being "vitiate cloture," not "vitiate the filibuster." Safire goes on to reason that since Woodward must have misquoted re cloture/filibuster, there's a good chance he was wrong about Bush using the word the Times won't print. He's right that if there aren't known examples of Bush using the beastly old word, you ought to have a very strong source for your verbatim quote.

"I really think it's time we stopped flying together." David Brooks sustains a column-long metaphor about flying on specialized airlines, the like of which I have not seen since Prince's International Lover:

Good evening. This is your pilot Prince speaking.
U r flying aboard the Seduction 747
And this plane is fully equipped with anything your body desires...

Except Brooks is using his metaphorical device to critique partisan politics. His column caught my eye because he invokes my hometown (Brooks is obsessed with American geography):

The political divisions in this country being what they are, it's not enough that liberals and conservatives have different radio networks, different Web sites and different networks of friends. In order to eliminate all possibility of trans-partisan conversation, I really think it's time we stopped flying together. It's time to set up two different airlines: Liberal Air, with direct flights between Madison, Berkeley, Ann Arbor and the New School for Social Research; and Right Wing Express, which will have planes with no oxygen masks in case of emergencies because anybody who can't handle a little asphyxiation doesn't deserve to live.

Brooks doesn't usually go for humor this broad. Maybe he got a look at the Quizilla test (which I noticed via Prof. Yin): "Which New York Times Op-Ed Columnist Are You?" I took the test and didn't post it because, though I didn't mind being David Brooks, I couldn't identify with the quiz's description of Brooks:

You are David Brooks! You're exceedingly smart, but your writing is as compelling as wallpaper. You are a thoughtful though hard-line conservative, but lack any of Safire's verbal pyrotechnics. In addition, you dress like you're colorblind. Fall down, juvenile.

So maybe Brooks is trying to spice things up, to be more Dowd-y.

Note to Mithras: I didn't identify with "hard-line conservative."

Sidenote: Safire has "verbal pyrotechnics"?? Don't you mean Dowd? Safire is interested in language, but he's awfully mellow and restrained!

Interior decorating note re "compelling as wallpaper": depends on the wallpaper.

Safire's Pledge solution. William Safire discusses the Pledge of Allegiance case, which will be argued in the Supreme Court today, and proposes a solution. Although he thinks "this time-wasting pest Newdow ... is ... right," in that adding the words "under God" back in 1954 was wrong, he thinks taking the words out at this point, "offending the religious majority, would be a ... mistake now." So what's the solution?

First, he rejects the idea of "us[ing] the issue of standing to punt, thereby letting this divisive ruckus fester." That baldly assumes the Court uses the constitutional requirement that a litigant have standing to sue in federal court as a way to get rid of pesky cases. There's reason to suspect the Court doesn't apply the standing doctrine in as neutrally principled a fashion as it purports to do, but standing presents a serious constitutional question about the courts' own power. I haven't studied the briefs, but from what I've read about Newdow's case, I don't think he does have standing. More on that later.

The solution Safire does offer is "for the court to require teachers to inform students they have the added right to remain silent for a couple of seconds while others choose to say 'under God.'" Nice try, but there's a huge problem with that: it directs the teachers to lead the class, in a kind of religious exercise. The teacher would be essentially telling the students to examine their own beliefs with respect to the divine and assess whether they have the set of beliefs that makes it appropriate to say those words and to outwardly manifest those beliefs by either saying or not saying the words. Now, the recitation of the Pledge becomes even more of a display of belief in the classroom, as opposed to the historical or de minimis incantation, and to the recitation has been added an exercise of self-examination about religious beliefs, directed by the class authority figure.

How is John Kerry going to keep from boring us to death over the next 8 months? The NYT has some ideas. I can't believe we won't become immediately exasperated with Kerry's oratorical style: at my house we were complaining about it a couple minutes into his acceptance speech last night. That tone, which he uses most when speaking to a crowd, works horribly on TV. The crowd/TV mismatch for Kerry is really as bad as Dean's was (when Dean would yell and growl and scare people). I'd like to see Kerry just take a vacation, a long vacation, maybe two months (four months!) and then come back when we've started to miss him. But I know he can't do that, because the Bush campaign will be--must be--unleashed. But I'm hoping he'll do his speaking in more intimate interviews, where he really does come across well. William Safire writes:

I remember conversations ... over the years with a serious, low-key senator whose thoughtful mien and earnest deliberation belied his down-the-line lefty voting record. I found Kerry to be a nice stiff, not a rigid stiff, who wears and worries well.

You really can warm up to a stiff. Well, it's Kerry's job now to prove that. I think it's true though. I hadn't liked him (or any of the Democratic candidates) very much, and then I watched one of those long, languorous C-Span campaign trail shows where they followed Kerry as he made his way from shop to shop in some small town in New Hampshire. Somewhere along the line, I started really liking him! It was a mystery. Maybe it's a bit like having a stuffy, old lawprof, who seems nowhere near as exciting as the younger, livelier profs, but somewhere along the line, you just start appreciating him.

Note to readers: I'm not committed to either party's candidate.

UPDATE: Wonkette also has some ideas for making the next 8 months interesting, including "Allow Donald Trump to select the vice president via a series of mock-governing contests. (Omarosa's 'White House' experience will finally come in handy!)"

FURTHER UPDATE: Re how long it would take before we'd start missing Kerry, a reader writes: "I can only say you must have a much, much higher boredom tolerance than I do. When trying to figure out how many months it would take before I missed Kerry, I run out of finger and toes pretty quickly, and my gut tells me I'm nowhere near the right number at that point. Maybe I should try again with years, or perhaps decades would be safer."