Today's Drudgetapostion: Qaddafi looking up, Obama looking down (and Irene coming up).

I love the kinetic energy here:



Qaddafi's unbowed head aims up and to the right, in the position associated with optimism and progress. Obama's head points in the opposite direction, down and to the left. Qaddafi is wrapped up in his own thoughts in this image, and Obama is all about ice cream. Meanwhile, as we read from right to left and top to bottom, the next image is the path of Hurricane Irene and the lines sweep us back up to the image of Qaddafi.

No one who has laughed at the Michele Bachmann corndog photo can deny that the ice cream functions as a phallic symbol. In this light, one notes that the ice cream is soft-serve. See the swirls? The ice cream swirls harmonize with the swirling pattern of a hurricane and the swirling thoughts in the mind of the Libyan monster.

Does Obama care? — the brilliant Matt Drudge subliminally prods us to ask. Is he childishly preoccupied with a swirly dessert (as he vacations and vacations and vacations)? Look up, Mr. President! Qaddafi is still standing! The hurricane is coming!

The headlines under Obama increase our feelings that he is allowing everything to collapse:

NATIONAL DEBT RISES BY $3 MILLION EACH MINUTE...

Obama sets record: $4,247,000,000,000 debt in just 945 days...

(Both links go to the same story.) Above him, we see "Man busted near Nat'l Mall with fireworks-packed car 'fitted with turret, multiple tubes'..." (Scary! But it wasn't — go to the link — a terrorist.) (Addition phallic imagery implied by these explosive tubes.)

And speaking of the "Nat'l Mall," glance down and to the left a notch, and you'll see the image of the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial, newly unveiled on the National Mall. Martin Luther King marched on Washington, and now he's there permanently. We sent Barack Obama to Washington and — the Drudge images say — he won't stay there, he keeps leaving, and he's not paying attention to the business of Washington. Meanwhile, in Tripoli, Qaddafi is intent on staying put, a strong man 'til the end. Obama is the soft center to a ice-cream manwich, with the hard men on either side — Qaddafi and King... and the violently disruptive woman Irene coming up behind him.

This has been another edition in the ongoing Althouse opus: The Art and Genius of Matt Drudge.

ADDED: Some art theory about lines and directions, from the artist Georges Seurat:

Harmony is the analogy between opposites and the analogy between elements similar in tonal value, color, and line, considered in terms of the dominant, and under the influence of lighting, in gay, calm or sad combinations.
The opposites are... For line, those forming a right angle....

Gaiety... in terms of line, lines above the horizontal.

Calmness in terms... of line, the horizontal.

Sadness in terms... of line, downward directions.

More here:

... Seurat believed that lines and angles... important to communication.... Ultimately, if the painting is a performance, it is a type of performance in that Seurat does not clearly give a political or ethical statement in his painting so much as he attempts to elicit one from the viewer (it COULD be about prostitution; it COULD be about the bourgeois and their instability as a social class; but we have no absolute way of knowing).  That indeterminacy is probably the most important part of this painting’s autonomy.  The idea of the painting as a dream state makes sense in this respect: dreams are ambiguous, and their meanings are speculative.

For painting, substitute website montage... and discuss!

Post-impressions.

Today was an incredibly busy day, beginning with that 8 a.m. "Week in Review." Around 1, I went in to the law school to record an episode of BloggingheadsTV, and I had a nice encounter with an individual who was turning a humble whiteboard into a work of art:



My questions -- are you a pointillist? and do you like Seurat? -- did not get much of an answer, but nonetheless... who will dare erase the whiteboard?

So... on to the Bloggingheads. It's not up yet. But I'll just tantalize you with my notes, which I drew on during the hour+ that we recorded:



(Enlarge.)

How is Jayson Blair's girlfriend like Presidential candidate John Kerry? They both spontaneously launch into quoting "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."

The info on the girlfriend comes from the great public service feature, "Slate reads the prevaricator's book so you don't have to." The info on John Kerry comes from last Sunday's Maureen Dowd swoon, my aversion to which appears here. Here's the Prufrock part:

But there was Mr. Kerry flying from Boston to New Orleans on Friday, sipping tea for his hoarse throat and reeling off T. S. Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."

"There are so many great lines in it," he said. " `Do I dare to eat a peach?' `Should I wear my trousers rolled?' `Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets/The muttering retreats/Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels/And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells."

Well, why not have a big Prufrock revival?

Here's a nice website with the text of the poem tricked up with links (quite a few of them dead though), to miscellaneous things, like the Seurat painting below, for "Arms that are braceleted and white and bare."

Feel free to pick through the Prufrock quotes and find phrases from which to construct wisecracks about Jayson Blair and John Kerry. There are plenty of juicy ones, though you won't find "Should I wear my trousers rolled?"--one of the "great lines" Kerry "reeled off." It's:

I grow old . . . I grow old . . .
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.