"Is Barack Obama headed for some sort of meltdown?"

The Anchoress asks:

Is he clinging to his podium and teleprompters because he has lost his protective shields and does not trust himself without them? The starry-eyed adulation of the press has simmered down to a mere gaze of hopefulness and longing, accompanied by the barest of criticisms, and Obama translates that as the press being “against” him.

She's analyzing a lot of those photos at the WH Flickr page:

... I keep seeing these awful White House approved photos, and they daily jar me because they seem to reveal the president in very unflattering, troubling ways, like the work of an obsessed and Obama-hating photoshop expert.

They are mostly unflattering when seen by people who don't like Obama — admittedly, that's an increasing group. People who like him look at those pics and think they are wonderful.

And this reminds me of something I was saying the other day about liberals. Liberals — I'm generalizing — are so engulfed in their belief that they are the good people, the smart people, that they forget to step back and look at things from the perspective of people who don't agree with them.

Because of that they present not just photographs but ideas in ways that provide raw material for their critics. For example, when Obama enthused about the "blue pill"...



... he made it easy for Sarah Palin to make the devastating "death panel" charge.

Now, you might want to say that conservatives do the same thing — and cite Sarah Palin's "death panels" as an example. But the 2 things are really quite different. Obama thought he was being smart and reasonable and persuasive and imagined everyone feeling lifted up by the enlightenment he bestowed. But Sarah Palin — I think — knew she was inciting the other side. Sarah-haters would grab that stink bomb and run with it. They'd assume that she is an idiot who'd said something terribly stupid. Plunging forward with arguments they believed were — as usual — thoroughly smart and good, they'd propagate a phrase and thereby hurt themselves. Which is what happened.

It's ironic that liberals are the ones who like to say they are nuanced. But it's the opposite of nuanced to be so convinced of the goodness and the smartness of your words and your very being. It's simplistic and cartoonish. And dangerous. It leaves you open to attack when you don't anticipate how your words (and pictures) will appear to your opponents. And then when those opponents take your pretty pictures and words and turn them against you, oh, how it must hurt.

Poor Obama!

The sexual power of Carrie Prejean.

I've been checking my Site Meter quite a few times in the last day. I've been pleased and then a little ashamed of myself as I see the phenomenal power of one particular post title to attract search engine traffic. This post was originally titled "Things the Site Meter dragged in." I've tweaked it a little to make my point. I'm not traffic-greedy — not too much. Just trying to make my point.

While I was hanging out on Site Meter, a couple other things got my attention. It's my general policy not to respond to bloggers who attack me — otherwise it would be a traffic-building strategy to attack me — but I do make exceptions as the whim strikes me. So, let's look at what Roy Edroso — of Alicublog and the Village Voice is saying about me.

He takes my Carrie Prejean post and intersperses it with comments in fisking fashion, and I'm going to fisk it back at him. Ready?

THE OLD DARK HOUSE. Hadn't been over to see the Ann Althouse site for a long, long while, but I retain a soft spot for her, so when tipped today by the Perfesser (with the irresistible tease, "Teenager? Is TMZ threatening to post child pornography?") I took a chance. Professor Althouse was talking about the Carrie Prejean sex tape:

But TMZ — I don't read it much, but, again, I'll guess — does not itself parade as Christian. Prejean does, and so she will be held to the high standards of Christianity, while TMZ can say and do whatever it wants. ("When we are cursed, we bless; when we are persecuted, we endure it; when we are slandered, we answer kindly. ")

TMZ is following Rule 4 of Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals":

Scripture and Saul Alinsky? This explains so much: Althouse is The Anchoress!

Despite his inclusion of that St. Paul quote, Edroso cuts my quote of Alinsky's Rule 4, which happens to use Christianity as the example of the effectiveness of demanding that your enemies live up to their own rules. Alinsky wrote: "You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian Church can live up to Christianity." It's hardly some odd quirk of mine to combine scripture and Alinsky. Edroso, in his usual fashion, looks for ways to make me look flaky — along with the other bloggers he's made it his business to mock. (The link to The Anchoress hints at Edroso's approach. Check out his latest Village Voice column for a more comprehensive example of how he works.)

Back to Edroso:

This argument that hypocrisy doesn't exist for the Elect...

What argument? Where did I argue that Christians aren't responsible for hypocrisy? I simply don't.

.... is by now an old rightwing favorite....

So just pull it out of you frumpy bag of liberal complaints about right-wingers. I thought you were trying to fisk my post, Roy. But, no, I'm either this distinct writer that you love to make fun of or I'm indistinguishable in the blurry mass of rightish bloggers that you've looked at before and have grown weary of squinting at.

... and the quality of Althouse's reasoning hasn't changed much from the old days.

Well, you haven't come close to nailing anything I've said in this post, so why bother to be specific about anything I've said in the past? You can't even read the post currently in front of your face, yet you think everyone already knows what it is I've said in "the old days." Maybe Roy is tired and on autopilot. But maybe, as he worked his way through what I'd written, confident in his ability to spew snark, he saw that my post actually cohered and that it was pretty damned sharp and funny, and he consciously decided to blur his observations so he could still get his post up. The poor wilted man. The option of actually liking what I'd written is inconceivable within the little framework he's built for himself. What would happen to that Village Voice gig?

But the Jesus stuff was a shock. I went down into her comments...

He couldn't figure out anything to say about what I wrote — "the Jesus stuff" — and, desperate, he dove into the comments looking for something repulsive. What he came up was from Florida, a specific, familiar commenter here:

... a quick scan suggests that the old let's-pretend liberals (what were their names, again? Rainbow? Sunshine?) seem to have fled or outed themselves, and the remnant are leaving stuff like this:

What's difficult as hell to do is to live up to the standards that would be set up for Christians by the butt-buggering sodomites. The rapists of 13-year-old children.

Christians could never live up to the sodomites' expectations.

Thankfully, though, Jesus doesn't require that. And we know they'll spend eternity burning in hell.

So at least there's that comfort.

"Jesus stuff"... "stuff like this"... Roy is not editing and dealing with sloppy word repetitions, and, worse, he's not bothering to figure anything out. It's just stuff. He found the most unsightly quote and then — without reason — counted on his readers to believe that it exemplifies what is generally in the comments at my blog. How utterly flabby and lame.

Now, as for the comment he cherry-picked, Edroso has no idea what it means and makes no attempt to figure it out. He has not, like the regular comment readers here, been exposed to the way Florida writes and the things he writes about. He doesn't know about Florida's longstanding Roman Polanski theme — which began here and which involves a fair amount of antagonism toward me. It's likely that Edroso thinks he's come across some rabid homophobia, but, in context, I know that "butt-buggering sodomites... rapists of 13-year-old children" refers to Polanski and the Hollywood-type liberals who've defended him. Florida's comment is not part of a mass of "stuff like this" in the comments. It's something particular, incisive, and satirical, and, if you are going to focus on it, you'd better take some time to figure out what it means. But Edroso is happy to see something that looked like shit and to splatter it onto his post and then, childishly, to demand that onlookers see how ugly things are over at Althouse.

Amazingly, Althouse is still removing comments...

Huh? Where did that come from? What comments does he think I've removed? He's trying to pin that one comment on me by asserting that I moderate the comments, so that anything that is left, I've approved of. That is either a lazy mistake or a nasty lie. My approach to the comments is well known: I have a strong free speech policy, and I leave vile things in. To imply that whatever is left has my stamp of approval is cheap and unethical.

... perhaps because they don't come up to the standards of this gem, or because they're actually messages from her employers trying to reach her because her phone has gone dead and her windows are boarded up.

He ends with a comic image, intended as a play on my name, the "old house" that he's used in his post title. Unfortunately, he hasn't built the foundation for what could have been a well-written joke. The material he thought he had just wasn't there.

Den Beste isn't still blogging, is he?

Roy makes a second attempt at humor, and, while I'm familiar with Den Beste, I have no idea why this is supposed to be funny. Althouse is The Anchoress... Althouse is Den Beste? Everything is melting in the mind of Roy Edroso.

"My waffle-y wedded wife..."

A reader writes: "I love your blog and immediately thought of you when I watched this at the Anchoress' blog." The video:



The Anchoress post is here.

By the way, I did laugh — more than once — during our recent and oh-so-private wedding, but I won't tell you the things that made me laugh (other than sheer happiness).

"How cheaply we give ourselves away, how thoughtlessly we toss our valuables to those who will trash them."

The Anchoress has been thinking about this a lot lately, both in the context of writing for free (as a blogger) and in the context of Carrie Prejean posing naked — or, as The Anchoress puts it "toss[ing] her Holy Thing, which is her loved-into-creation body – the Temple of the Holy Spirit – to the Dogs."

So, do you throw your pearls before swine?

The Pajamas Media blogging enterprise has collapsed.

Jeff G. (at Protein Wisdom) has the letter from Roger L. Simon, which buries the bad news in a statement about how Pajamas is turning its attention to its web TV efforts. I wonder how many people watch Pajamas TV. In the comments over there, Showy writes:

Those guys certainly know more about web advertising than I do, but it seems like a strange business decision to me. My first thought on reading this was, “I can’t imagine having less interest in anything than I have in watching ‘Ask Dr. Helen’ or ‘Hugh News’ on my computer”. Not to pick on those two, per se, but it’s true. So I checked the web stats on Alexa, and appeared to me that Protein Wisdom alone had more views over the past 6 months than pjtv.com, the portal for all of their shows (probably a reasonable facsimile for views of all their shows combined). Yet they’re going to dump PW (and presumably others) in order to focus on PJTV? When you factor in that probably a solid half of the readers of these sites are stealth-reading them from work, and that it’s rather harder to stealth-watch a 20 minute video clip, I have a hard time seeing how this is going to work out for them.

Jeff G. retorts:

Maybe I’ll start a free version PJTV. I’m sure I can play all those characters.

I must say, I can barely stand to watch any political talking heads TV shows, even on network TV and cable TV. I just have no patience waiting for people to say something that I could read in 1/10 the time. I've clicked over to PJTV a few times, but after less than a minute, I always leave. Why am I looking at these folks? Put it in writing! Yes, I know I do Bloggingheads, but that's an active conversation for me. Do you watch Bloggingheads? At least with Bloggingheads, I can make whatever little embeddable clips I want to use to set up a discussion in writing.



I'm reading more comments chez Protein Wisdom, and SGT Ted mirrors my thinking:

Well, crapo. The reason I use the intertoobs is because I don’t LIKE the talking heads “we’ll tell you what we think is important and you won’t have any way to respond” Bullshit of TV. If I want TV like programs, I’ll turn on the goddam TV. I like the people doing the PJMTV when they are blogging, but I don’t want to watch them go blah blah.

Instapundit says:

YEAH, the PJM ad-network model isn’t working. I don’t have much to do with the PJM business side, but online ads just aren’t producing revenue like they were a few years ago, and the blog-network thing was apparently a tough sell. Hence the emphasis on PJTV. How will that work out? Stay tuned.

Well, we will, of course, stay tuned to Instapundit for further updates on this and everything else. But do you want to watch him on web TV? I mean, surely you must want to watch him when he's talking to me... or do you? (Hey, that's one of the few times Bloggingheads put me on the left.)

Ace, another PJM blogger who's about to lose his income stream, says:

Damn. I was finally starting to make an amount of money I wasn't utterly embarrassed by, too....

[T]he model for payment was pretty transparent and intuitive -- paid per impression. One could figure out one's quarterly payment just by eyeballing one's Sitemeter. BlogAds paid okay, but there are always those patches where no one really wants to buy ads, making income kind of unpredictable.

This is one of those patches. I usually have 2 or 3 ads running via BlogAds, but haven't even had 1 ad in the last couple of weeks. You can see why BlogAds is a less risky business. It doesn't pay you because you have traffic. It pays you because they sold an ad to run on your blog. How much does it pay? When I sell an ad, it pays me a percentage of the price I set myself (and can adjust up or down as I see fit). (Feel free to buy an ad!)

Some of you long-time readers may remember that I rejected my offer from Pajamas Meda back when it started:

Did you get your offer from Pajamas Media yet? Are you going to put on the pajamas -- take a flat fee to commit the top four spots on your sidebar for a whole year? I thought Pajamas implied a bloggy freedom, different from a corporate, mainstream mentality. Are we supposed to marry Pajamas and give up on Henry Copeland's delightful BlogAds, which has been beautifully designed with a feeling for the spirit of blogging? Ah, I don't like pajamas anyway. I want to blog naked. With Henry.

Will Henry take them back?

I did some pretty harsh anti-Pajamas blogging back in the day. (Including stuff aimed at Jeff G. Remember when I wrote what my old commenter Icepick said was "that the grossest thing Ann has written on this blog"?) It was a huge ideological issue for me at the time: the freedom and independence of bloggers. Looking back on those old posts, I can see I've lost some of my lively romanticism about blogging. I had a very intense feeling about how subversive this all was. That somehow went hand in hand with the anticipation of waves of money flowing in — and who would channel more of it to me, Henry or Roger?

But these are hard times for everyone. Any business could fail in this environment. So, what does it say about how good that business model was in the first place? My concern was always, which business model is better for us writers, and I thought it was Henry.

ADDED: The Anchoress — a PJM blogger — weighs in... and, as one of several reasons why she doesn't want to do web TV, reveals that "the Lord’s overgenerous endowment in my chestal area makes any notion of camera work unthinkable, particularly in HD where the girls might terrify some." How large do breasts need to be before they make it impossible to appear on television? And can't you just adjust the camera frame? On Bloggingheads, we're all just heads — and maybe a bit of shoulders — unless, of course, you're Arianna Huffington:



UPDATE: I'm still waiting for Dennis the Peasant — PJM's biggest antagonist — to join the conversation, so let's read that other relentless Pajamas antagonist, Steve from Hog on Ice:

This is probably what’s going on: PJM always lost money, so it was paying people out of venture capital. As the capital dissipated, people had to be fired.

PJM’s new hope is PJTV, a pay video site. Where you can pay to watch Glenn and Helen Reynolds. This is not unlike asking people to pay to be punched in the face. It will fail. I can’t understand why anyone would think it could succeed....

I used to see the PJ fiasco as the result of greed, treachery, foolishness, and dishonesty. These days I see it more as the evidence of a curse.

Go to the link for his curse theory. It includes Obama and the GOP and the G-O-D. He ends with Biblical verse:

Woe to thee, O land, when thy king is a child, and thy princes eat in the morning!

I keep telling myself to go cook breakfast, and I'm taking this as a sign.

"How was I going to photograph one man, in a suit, for many years to come?"

Photographing George Bush.

***

The Anchoress writes:

[T]he second photographer ... describes the "cult of personality" he saw developing around W after 9/11, and says he found it "shocking" to see in America. Because this is about Bush, we do not know what he thinks about the Mega-cult and magic thinking surrounding Obama.

There are hugely important differences. Bush fought his way into office as a normal politician, a decent guy, not any sort of hero or god. Then, he was the man who happened to be President when dramatic events events occurred, and the people looked to him to do what was needed. Any glorification of him was a consequence of those events and not through a conscious campaign to inspire a cult of personality. (There is an exception or two. I'm thinking of "Mission Accomplished.") When the love subsided, he and his people did little — too little — to pump us up again. Bush soldiered on accepting the hatred and — apparently — doing what he thought was right, with the solace that history would — ultimately — respect him.

By contrast, the entire plan to bring Obama into office depended on the glorification of the man, whose actual experience was so bizarrely limited that it took some nerve to claim to be ready. Magic was required. The cult grew up not as he held power and needed to respond to a crisis. The cult was the campaign to bring him into power. It depended on our projecting all sorts of hopes and dreams onto him, and he knew it. Inside, he may have felt embarrassed by the whole enterprise, but he'd figured out that it could work, and he was right. Now, I think this worked because he really is a solid, normal person who remained grounded in the middle of all this craziness. And I like to think that, now that he's President, with his steely nerve, his intelligence, and his groundedness, he'll do the job that must be done. The trickery is over.

About that inaugural ball dress...

I hated it. I'm just seeing the pictures this morning, and I can't even conceive of why she put herself inside that sheaf of fabric. (Yes, I mean sheaf. It certainly was not a sheath.) But I don't want to talk about it. You can read what The Anchoress says.

***

Was I supposed to watch inaugural ball crap on TV? I didn't exactly forget, but I was tired of watching simmering crowds. Show me few seconds of choice video and leave me alone. Here, Katharine Q. Seelye followed the evening festivities:

All night they’ve been leaning back and forth in lieu of dancing, and stepping on Mrs. Obama’s dress; he’s been saying he wants to dance with “the one that brung me,” and he tells the crowds that his wife is doing everything he does except backwards and in heels. The difference is that for the last few balls, they have actually looked exhausted.

So he's dragging himself through these things for the benefit of the folks who worked hard for him. And he's stepping on that bulky, drapey dress. Shouldn't that have been the #1 consideration? Michelle Obama needed a dress she could dance in — that her husband would look elegant and capable moving around. So were they leaning back and forth in lieu of dancing because they were exhausted or because the puddle of fabric at the floor had him stepping on it even when the dance had zero foot work?

***

Ah, well, the party's over. Get to work, now. Step on it. And try not to step in it.