This is the Year of Living Embarrassingly. Just ask Charlie Sheen.

From Bin Laden’s blue (and I don’t mean ray) movie collection to Arnold’s revelation that, despite immigrating to the US more than 40 years ago, he has maintained European mores regarding domestic retainers, the famous are wallowing in public scandal. Unlike IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Arnold at least had a consensual misadventure with his housekeeper.

As the males elevate the scandal sweepstakes, the perennially embarrassed Lindsay Lohan may yet be able to rehabilitate her image. Drew Barrymore’s example proved more than 10 years ago that F. Scott Fitzgerald was as mistaken as Harold Camping when he proclaimed, “There are no second acts in American lives.” Given the right role (and a cosmetic surgery or two), Lohan can rebound in Scream 6: Laryngitis Kills.

Speaking of California seer Camping, he in fact wants a third act, as he has now twice staked everything on prophecy and then missed the date. He offers the following interview to the Kronosphere in hopes of procuring yet another curtain call.

The Kronosphere: Good morning, Mr. Camping. Thank you for sitting down with us.

Harold Camping: Thank you for giving me this opportunity to clear my good name.

K: Wrongly predicting the end of the cosmos must fling just about the worst possible egg on a prophet’s face.

HC: Yeah. But egg is still better than enormous stones flung in your face. That’s what they did in the old days to prophets who were wrong as big as I was. Ouchy.

K: This is the second time you’ve blown it. What gives?

HC: Turns out, I’ve been using a bad source to calculate the end of the world: the Bible. Both Matthew 24:36 and Mark 13:32 say no “man” knows the day—which rings the clue phone right there.

K: And the clue is?

HC: I should have been asking a woman.

K: Oh. You mean “no man” is a trick. Like the Nazgûl witch king’s prophesy of invulnerability.

HC: Right-o. Or Macbeth not being killed by anyone born of a woman. Prophesies are slippery little suckers with a lot of metaphor and a vinaigrette of the extremely literal.

K: I see. So what’s your new method?

HC: Instead of continuing to use numerology and the Bible—which doesn’t have any books written by women—I started casting about for a female source. And Rebecca Black’s video “Friday” just spoke to me like it was coming straight from Baalam’s ass. Its apocalyptic vision is rather obvious, but I’ve been too lost in Zechariah’s myrtle trees to heed it.

K: So you’ve studied the video. What’s your conclusion?

HC: The world is going to end on a Friday. Duh.

K: Explain.

HC: Note all the references to “Friday” and how critical the day is to the song’s message. Creating the earth may have taken seven days, but you need only one extreme weekend to completely trash it. Like a party at your parents’ house. Because time ceases with an everlasting paradise of one Friday after another. Something “everyone is looking forward to” and doesn’t “want…to end.”

K: I never thought of that way.

HC: You wouldn’t, but predicting is my business. Just. What. I. do. You probably never thought to count how many times she says “partyin’” either.

K: No, I can’t say that I did.

HC: The word is repeated an auspicious 17 times. As I explain in my book, the number 17 represents heaven! Could anyone reasonably conclude, therefore, that Black’s seventeen-fold description of a heavenly “party” is meaningless pop babble?

K: Um…no?

HC: Of course not. But let me go on. The video opens with Black’s more contemporary, grittier form of the celestial “alleluia” as she drones “oo-ooh-ooh, yeah, yeah.” Pages of the calendar fly off to show the days quickly shortening to the end times. Prophetically, we see that Thursday—the day before Friday, as Black reminds us—is judgment. Because judgment must come before paradise.

K: How do you know Thursday is judgment?

HC: Rebecca has an all-important essay due. Translation: The sheep and goats are about to be graded, and no doubt some of her goat peers will be gnashing their perfect goat teeth—and, I might add, ruining years of expensive orthodontistry. She herself is a safe sheep, however, because the calendar says she is “Thursday’s child”—Thursday being named after the Norse god Thor.

K: What are we to make of that?

HC: Obviously, as the son of Odin, Thor is the son of a god, so Thor’s Day is code for the Son of God’s Day. In another timely portent, “Thor” happens to be the name of a very successful movie out right now. You might say we’re living in the days of Thor—Thor’s Day.

K: The end times.

HC: In Viking talk, Ragnarok. The video sketches Black facing a sun and a dark, downward spiral. Look closely at that spiral and what do you see?

K: The kind of doodle bored, talentless middle schoolers make?

HC: To the untrained eye perhaps, but no, it’s a tornado. Or as I prefer to call it, a Thor-nado. Do you know Thor was the god of lightning and storms? And have you noticed how the recent plague of Thor-nados started after Black’s video and the Thor movie were released. It just makes my gray hair stand on end how all these things are coming together. Or it would if there wasn’t so much Brylcreem plastering my hair down.

K: Back to Friday.

HC: On Friday’s calendar page the young lady has written “I’m in love.” And the three keywords are “hooray,” “yes”, and “finally”—all words my followers and I naturally associate with the death and destruction of Armageddon. The key image is a digital clock that has counted down to midnight, the witching hour. Just like a time bomb in a James Bond movie.

K: Except no secret agent arrives with one or two seconds left to defuse the bomb.

HC: Game over, man, game over.

K: The calendar is important, but what about the lyrics of Black’s actual song?

HC: Songs are written in verses, just like….

K: The Bible!

HC: Precisely. In her first verse Black awakens early, looking fully made up and ready. Precociously nubile, too, which all called to my mind the five wise virgins of Matthew 25. Black knows you “gotta be fresh”—i.e., not stale, moldy, or defiled by the world. That bowl she’s “gotta have” is likewise a metaphor for the lamp in which the wise virgins placed their oil.

K: And that would make her cereal—perhaps Pops—the oil itself. Gotta have that, too. Right?

HC: Hey, who’s the prophet here?

K: Sorry.

HC: Little Becky prepared ahead, so she can stand and sing serenely while her family—representing the foolish virgins—rushes around, facing their certain doom.

K: Best not to dwell on that.

HC: No, because now is when the promise of Friday is realized in all its glory. Lo! It’s not a bus at all that arrives to spirit the young lady away. Rather we see a Sebring convertible filled with Rebecca’s friends. They joyfully invite her to join them on the journey to the land of Friday, where exams are forgotten and the only challenge is deciding which seat to take.

K: The seating arrangement does seem to be a critical question.

HC: Wisely, Black remembers Luke 14. Rather than seizing the front seat for herself, she sits in the back and waits to be elevated.

K: Good call, Rebecca!

HC: Once in the car, the friends and lighting are changed in the twinkling of an eye. Becky no longer needs a driver or even to stay in her seat as the hour of “7:45” has arrived. Did you get that?

K: Ummm…no.

HC: Read my book. Seven signifies the perfect fulfillment of God’s plan. Discerning the eschatological meaning of forty-five is more difficult, but as I wrote, 23 signifies God’s wrath. And 45 is two times 23 minus one. Quite obviously the meaning of 45 is double-plus bad wrath. We’re talking Old Testament.

K: Minus one?

HC: Yes, because the young lady will be spared the outpouring of the giant tub o’ wrathfulness. Also, 43 symbolizes judgment, so 45 derives from adding the number of Black’s friends (two) to 43. Prophetic numerology works on soooo many levels.

K: We’re almost out of time, but I have a couple of questions about the video. Things that have puzzled viewers that perhaps you can clear up. Why does Black reference her one friend—“my friend is by my right”—and not the other?

HC: Because not everyone who calls Rebecca Black “friend” gets to go to her party. See Matthew 7:21. The right hand represents her mercy, the left—

K: Everlasting darkness. So the second friend is going to be thrown under the bus.

HC: Yeppers.

K: Got it. What about the bobble-headed random rapper who shows up driving all alone, singing to himself?

HC: Notice his ominous color: black. He is in fact the dark horseman of Revelation 6:5, who comes to judge those left behind—those still on the purgatory school bus. Although he’s been “chillin’ in the front seat” and “chillin’ in the back seat” a bit like an alpha and omega ice cube, the “tick tock” of the bus ends his frozen placidity. With a “scream”—his word—he drives like a bat out of hell and announces it’s his time. He shouts to his victims, “We gonna have fun, c’mon, c’mon, y’all.” But I don’t think they will like Mr. Black Horseyman’s idea of fun!

K: Ulp.

HC: The important thing to remember is all will be well with Rebecca and her friends in perfect-skin paradise. All tears, acne, and evidence of bulimia have been wiped away. Standing on a heavenly elevation, she leads them in continuing cheers of “fun, fun, fun” now and throughout all eternity.

K: Any final thoughts? Like when is this all going to happen?

HC: I’m not going to be trapped again into a specific date, but I can tell you I’m 100 percent sure it will be a Friday. And soon. We-we-we so excited.

K: The excitement shows in your eyes. Thank you, Mr. Camping.

(Sung to the tune of Jimmy Dean’s “Big John”)

Ev’ry day on the set you could see him arrive
He stood six foot tall and weighed 285
Kinda broad in his jowls and as wide at the brow
Everybody knew he favored the chow, Big Newt

Literati said he charged too much to his card
But life with third-wife Calista was steely and hard
So one pudgy wave from his be-diamonded hand
Dimmed all the glitter of an enraged gay man, Big Newt

Big Newt, Big Newt
Big Bad Newt
Big Newt

A firefight started when they sensed he was weak
Timidly at first, mostly shooting some sheep
The cocktail party invite list unloaded their clip
But Newt responded, blabbing straight from the hip, Big Newt

Out of the billowing smoke and dust of tweets
Walked a Lego of a man, a Weeble with feet,
Squeezed tight in his clothing, he gave out a groan
Ragin’ ‘gin social engineering, he stood there alone, Big Newt

Big Newt, Big Newt
Big Bad Newt
Big Newt

Now the left’s exposed by their bylines and handles
Naked to the light of Newt’s mighty green candle
This is the way it always seemed to work
Big Newt smacking down the insider jerks, Big Newt

But when hot prose and gas belched out of the man
Everybody knew Newt had made his last stand
Crazed words like Howard Dean’s drunk-cowboy scream–
We all knew it was the end of the dream for Big Newt

Big Newt, Big Newt
Big Bad Newt
Big Newt

Harmon Killebrew has died, and one item that strikes me in his obituary is how far he has slipped down baseball’s all-time homerun list: number 11.

I don’t remember Killebrew’s actual playing days, as they were before my time, but my friends and I used to have a “Hall of Fame” statistics-based league we ran on the computer. And I have also always been a consumer of old-time baseball, reading the various versions of Bill James’ historical abstract. From both I became familiar with Killebrew as a one-dimensional player much as he seems in his photograph, capable of smashing a ball when he connected with it, but otherwise not particularly gifted: a quintessential designated hitter before the position was invented.

In terms of hitting homeruns, he was the closest rival in all of major-league history to Babe Ruth…at that time. Henry Aaron had broken Ruth’s record, but only through essentially hitting 30 homers a year for 25 years. Killebrew, in contrast, had the same build as Ruth, swinging big and missing big, so that his homerun frequency was second only to Ruth’s–and his strikeout frequency was even greater. (Ruth’s strikeout frequency would give him a pretty good eye compared with contemporary players, but in his day the Bambino held the record for most career Ks.)

I remembered Killebrew, therefore, as much higher on the list: number 5 behind Aaron, Ruth, Willie Mays, and Frank Robinson. What happened that caused him to drop five spots in a relatively short span of time? Steroids/performance enhancing drugs.

Here’s the current list of 14 all-time homerun leaders:

1. Barry Bonds
2. Hank Aaron
3. Babe Ruth
4. Willie Mays
5. Ken Griffey Jr.
6. Alex Rodriguez
7. Sammy Sosa
8. Jim Thome
9. Frank Robinson
10. Mark McGuire
11. Harmon Killebrew
12. Rafael Palmeiro
13. Reggie Jackson
14. Manny Ramirez

Italic indicates a player who did not play significantly from 1995 to 2005, which we can call the steroid decade. Bold indicates a player for whom the use of performance-enhancing drugs (PED) is assumed. Thus, eight of the 14 all-time homerun hitters played a substantial portion of their career during the steroid decade, and of those, only two are not assumed to have used PEDs: Ken Griffey Jr. and Jim Thome.

Personally, I think there’s a good case that Thome, too, used PEDs. Here is his rookie baseball card, and here is Thome more recently. Note that like Bonds, Thome seems to have gained a couple of head sizes. Statistically, he averaged 32 homeruns a year early in his career, but in his early 30s he started hitting 47+ homeruns per year.

Such statistics are not conclusive because a surge in raw power later in one’s career is something that happens to some baseball players without steroids–though seldom so dramatically. For two Hall of Fame examples, see Stan Musial and Aaron. Musial’s power curve peaked, however, in his late 20s, before tapering off the rest of his career, and Aaron’s was the result of a change in ballpark (he moved from Milwaukee County Stadium to the hitter-friendlier confines of Fulton County Stadium in Atlanta). If I were a betting man, I would bet Thome has used PEDs at some point in his career.

Which leaves Ken Griffey Jr. Although the much-beloved Griffey has been held up as a great player of the era who did not engage in steroids, circumstantial evidence casts doubt even over “the Kid.” Mostly such evidence is guilt by association: a heckuva lot of Griffey’s teammates at Seattle used PEDs.

Leaving Griffey aside, then, at least seven of the eight recent top homerun hitters used PEDs–and thus devalued the historical standing of players like Killebrew. This is especially true when one considers that players like Bonds, A-Rod, and others were able to hit for power as well as be gifted at other facets of the game. Whereas Killebrew, Frank Howard, and Ralph Kiner could become stars in the 50s to the 70s from power hitting alone, such sluggers would be limited by their lack of general athleticism to DHing and pinch-hitting nowadays. The steroid-era players tarnish the star of even someone like Reggie Jackson, who had more showmanship and charisma than these other sluggers but not that much more value on the field.

Scanning further down the list of all-time homerun leaders, another fact stands out: almost no one playing today who did not play through most of the steroid decade has any chance of breaking very far into the all-time list. One exception is Albert Pujols, who is only 31 and came in on the decade’s second half. Pujols has always vehemently denied PED use.

Otherwise, the dropoff in homerun production in the last couple of years means we are as unlikely to see 600+ homerun hitters as 300+ game-winner pitchers in the decades ahead (unless rule changes allow a PED comeback). In terms of the record books, the player who may suffer the most from giving up steroids is A-Rod.

From 1998 to 2007, A-Rod averaged 45.4 homeruns per year. Since then, he has averaged only 31.7. Whereas he once seemed a sure bet to get the all-time homerun record of 762, that achievement is slipping farther and farther from his grasp. He still needs five more 30+ homerun seasons, which would carry him to age 40 and 11,500+ at bats–putting him in the top five for that category.  Bill James’ statistical toy projects him to finish with 743 career homers…close but not enough to beat even the non-asterisked Aaron.

It’s no great surprise that commandos who killed Osama Bin Laden report the dead terrorist had a considerable stash of pornography at his compound. Recall that some of the September 11 hijackers spent one of their last nights receiving lap dances at the Pink Pony strip club. And lemon-sucking-faced Mohammed Atta evidenced in his last will and testament great concern about his genitals being touched and any women attending his funeral. A suicidal Muslim terrorist is often sexually repressed or at least deprived.

For that matter, Mohammed’s practice of marrying them young continues to this day, sometimes with fatal consequences. And pornography permeates the Muslim world, perhaps even worse than it does the West.

Bin Laden’s mansion gives Hugh Hefner’s a run for skankiest and least sexy fortress of worm burping. On the lighter side, the Kronosphere can report an exclusive scoop of the 10 most watched titles from Bin Laden’s library of lizard love:

1. Taliban Teasers of Kandahar
2. Posthumous Uses for Achmed the Dead Terrorist
3. Is That a Stick of Dynamite Under Your Hijab or Are You Just Glad to See Me?
4. Two Mullahs for Ukhti Sara
5. Young Helen Thomas’s Lover
6. Last Malongo in Mecca
7. Primary School Girls Gone Wild
8. Midnight Camelboy
9. The Harem and the Stuttering Eunuch
10. Women–and Men–of the IDF

Nothing featuring Sila Sahin, however.

It would be tempting to call 82-year-old Noam Chomsky a senile old dolt, but the word “senile” connotes an age-related deterioration of one’s faculties. To deteriorate, however, a mind must have at one time shown superior cognitive abilities. Although in fairness Chomsky’s work in linguistics indicates a specialized if arcane brilliance, his political thinking has never evidenced anything but his having the most warped of mental instruments. Hence, senile may be inaccurate and better replaced with “unsurprising” old dolt.

Nothing about his latest opinion, “My Reaction to Osama Bin Laden’s Death,” surprises–that much is certain. Anyone familiar with Chomsky would expect the morally challenged twit to be dissatisfied at American success in ridding the world of a vile terrorist long past his shelf-expiration date, Osama Bin Laden. It would not be Chomsky, after all, had his pose as ultra-rational sage led him to genuine even-handedness. For example, he writes:

We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic.

This obvious sound-bite means to provoke us with its absurdity but not at all the kind of provocation Chomsky would claim. He fancies himself thought-provoking, whereas what he seeks to stir in his reader is mere emotionalism. And he does so in the most dishonest fashion of any Internet troll: by pretending that whoever the analogy to us is in the Bush version of this week’s events–are we Pakistan? Bin Laden was president nor head of state, after all, of any nation–we should react only to the commando raid. As though May 1 happened in a vacuum.

In other words, suppose instead Chomsky and we remember the most salient fact he has omitted: we already feel the way we do because Bin Laden’s gang attacked us, killing thousands of our citizens and causing significant damage to our country. Even the worst Al Qaeda apologist would not be so disingenuous as native-born American citizen Chomsky and pretend Bin Laden’s killing occurred ab ovo. Likewise, had Bin Laden the means he would not only have killed our President–Bush or Obama–but he would have just as happily used a nuclear weapon to erase an entire American city.

Thus, we would not at all be surprised by what Bin Laden would do to us were the situation reversed–we would expect it–only that he had developed and demonstrated the capability. The last split-second thoughts through Bin Laden’s brain before an American  bullet turned all thinking off for good were not–despite Chomsky’s question–“Why would the Americans do this? Don’t they know how they would feel in my situation?” The man lived the way he did, never venturing out of his walled compound, because he knew what was owed him. He did not expect forgiveness because it was an alien concept to him and the faith he practiced.

Why, therefore, should we inflict Western values on Bin Laden, rather than treat him in accordance with his own customs? Isn’t Chomsky practicing an imperialist form of morality?

Chomsky, in fact, has written previously of a scenario more like the one he describes above than was Bin Laden’s death: the murder of Leon Klinghoffer, a 69-year-old wheelchair-bound American Jew, who was shot by Palestinian terrorists and his body dumped in the sea. In that instance Chomsky went out of his way to connect the dots, creating a cause-and-effect rationalization for Klinghoffer’s killers:

Leon Klinghoffer, was brutally murdered. That reflects the judgment of “the world.” It may be that the world saw matters somewhat differently. The Achille Lauro hijacking was a retaliation for the bombing of Tunis ordered a week earlier by Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres. His air force killed 75 Tunisians and Palestinians with smart bombs that tore them to shreds, among other atrocities, as vividly reported from the scene by the prominent Israeli journalist Amnon Kapeliouk. Washington cooperated by failing to warn its ally Tunisia that the bombers were on the way, though the Sixth Fleet and U.S. intelligence could not have been unaware of the impending attack.

To Chomsky, because Israel had attacked Tunis and the US failed to warn Tunisia, American tourist Klinghoffer’s murder was somehow mitigated. Yet Bin Laden’s killing was:

…a planned assassination, multiply violating elementary norms of international law. There appears to have been no attempt to apprehend the unarmed victim, as presumably could have been done by 80 commandos facing virtually no opposition….

Chomsky’s apologetics seem to work consistently against the US. Indicative of his prejudiced view is this little gem of propaganda:

I stress “suspects.” In April 2002, the head of the FBI, Robert Mueller, informed the press that after the most intensive investigation in history, the FBI could say no more than that it “believed” that the plot was hatched in Afghanistan, though implemented in the UAE and Germany. What they only believed in April 2002, they obviously didn’t know 8 months earlier, when Washington dismissed tentative offers by the Taliban (how serious, we do not know, because they were instantly dismissed) to extradite bin Laden if they were presented with evidence—which, as we soon learned, Washington didn’t have.

Why select a quote from Mr. Mueller from April 2002? Of all the things said in the almost 10 years since September 11 by so many in the American government, Chomsky cherry-picks a remark Mueller made and quotes only one word from it. And what does that word have to do with? The place of origin of the plot, not who the FBI suspects was behind it. On that basis Chomsky tries to pretend Bin Laden was only a “person of interest,” with as little credible evidence he engineered the September 11 plot as–get this–Chomsky won a fictitious Boston Marathon.

Further, Chomsky elides another critical fact: Bin Laden had been under American indictment since 1998 even had he been innocent of the 9/11 killings. He already had a $5 million price on his head. The Taliban had long refused American demands he be extradited and had even issued threats against American citizens in reprisal. What the Taliban, in fact, offered was to try Bin Laden under Muslim law, once provided with American evidence. This was an obvious stall, and only the hopelessly naive or dishonest would have given it any merit. Take your pick as to which best describes Chomsky.

For an authority on language, Chomsky has a way of letting his rhetoric run away from him:

Uncontroversially, [Bush’s] crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s, and he is not a “suspect” but uncontroversially the “decider” who gave the orders to commit the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, the bitter sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region.

How would you like to diagram that sentence? It is a reflection of the tortured thought process that went into composing it. Only in Chomsky’s immediate cadre of Bizarro-world America-hating leftists does such a statement about Bush versus Bin Laden fail to cause “controversy”–at least in those able to parse it. For most the primary reaction upon reading it is likely confusion.

Never mind, Chomsky is on a roll:

There’s more to say about [Cuban airline bomber Orlando] Bosch, who just died peacefully in Florida, including reference to the “Bush doctrine” that societies that harbor terrorists are as guilty as the terrorists themselves and should be treated accordingly. No one seemed to notice that Bush was calling for invasion and destruction of the U.S. and murder of its criminal president.

Presumably the editor felt compelled to insert the “Orlando” to help clarify Chomsky’s ravings. Once again he misstates to justify his mental discombobulations: the reason “no one seemed to notice” is Bush never called for any such thing.  Bush’s actual address stated “any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.” Clearly this doesn’t work for Chomsky’s propaganda purposes–how could the US be hostile to itself?–so he manufactures that “invasion and destruction…and murder” part. And poor Bush: we knew he was stupid, but who would have thought, without the steel-trap mind of Chomsky, that the ignoramus called for his own murder–especially given that the speech Chomsky refers to occurred more than a year before the invasion of Iraq. To “have noticed” what Bush was calling for would have required not only Chomsky’s brilliance but a crystal ball.

There’s a word for what Chomsky did, a word he likes to use about the statements of others: lie.

Having jumped from Iraqi commandos assassinating Bush to Nuremberg to Cuban airline bomber Orlando Bosch (or maybe it’s German toolmaker Bosch or Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch), Chomsky moves on to the name “Operation Geronimo”:

Same with the name, Operation Geronimo. The imperial mentality is so profound, throughout western society, that no one can perceive that they are glorifying bin Laden by identifying him with courageous resistance against genocidal invaders. It’s like naming our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Tomahawk… It’s as if the Luftwaffe were to call its fighter planes “Jew” and “Gypsy.”

Note the transition: “Same”? How is the relationship the same–that is the relationship between Bush, in Chomsky’s mind, calling for the destruction of the US…and naming the operation “Geronimo”? The similarity is that the imperialists are oblivious to their own obliviousness because the “imperial mentality is so profound.” Only Chomsky can see the truth, and that makes the two very different things the “same.”

“It”–whatever “it” is–is also “like naming our murder weapons after the victims of our crimes.” Although it’s not: how is “tomahawk” a victim? How is “Geronimo” a murder weapon?

Disorganized thinking such as Chomsky exhibits here–believing relationships exist that only you are privy to–is one symptom of schizophrenia.

Suddenly, as though he’s all written out, Chomsky ends it:

There is much more to say, but even the most obvious and elementary facts should provide us with a good deal to think about.

Too bad the obvious and elementary facts seem to exist only in the windmills of Chomsky’s mind.

I was never really a fan of John (Cougar) Mellencamp, even when he first became popular and before he became way politically left. To me his music is bland and just not interesting–someone I will change the dial when it plays on the radio, without necessarily hating it. He used to be compared with Springsteen, who was one of my favorites, but Springsteen’s obvious superiority has always made me disdain Mellencamp’s simplistic themes.

The one exception and the only thing I ever owned by him was the single “Aint Even Done with the Night.” Ironically enough, Mellencamp dismisses that song as “stupid little pop,” but it captured the mood of inexperienced male teenager pretty well for me growing up–the dichotomy of facing female desire mingled with expected reluctance:

Well I don’t know no good come-ons

And I don’t know no cool lines

I feel the heat of your frustration

I know it’s burning you up deep down inside

You say that I’m the boy who can make it all come true

Well I’m tellin’ ya that I don’t know if I know what to do.

I remember the video at the link, too, including its homage to James Brown at the end. The one thing, though, that I never liked about that video was the bald guy in shades. He always gave me the willies, especially when he mimics a saxophone at 2:45. Just a bit too much exuberance or something. Something about him always set my creep-dar off.

In looking at the video the other day I discovered why while reading its comments. It’s old news now, but the musician in question, Eric Franklin Rosser, went on to become a significant figure in a child-pornography ring, eventually making the FBI’s 10 most wanted list. Naturally, Mellencamp immediately distanced himself from Rosser, although the discography does not strictly support Mellencamp’s recollection of their relationship:

“Eric Franklin Rosser played in my band in 1979 for a very brief period of time,” Mellencamp said in a written statement. “I have not seen or spoken to him since.”

“Aint Even Done with the Night” was recorded in 1980, but let’s not nitpick. As far as crimes, Rosser’s involved girls aged 9 to 11 in the States as well as in all likelihood Thai girls invited to be students at his “music school” in Thailand. He was eventually arrested in Thailand, pleading for mercy on the grounds “he was a child masquerading in a man’s body.” He was sentenced to 16 years in prison.

Mellencamp was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2008 and has a new album coming out this month.

During the eight years of the Bush presidency, Republicans welcomed the return of executive power…and then some. Democrats, on the other hand, were rueful and chafed each time President Bush would make a remark about how much easier it would be to govern in a dictatorship. True conservatives warned that the unfettered, unilateral executive would someday return to opposition hands, and the GOP would regret empowering it with so many of the rings of power.

Barack Obama has arrived and handed the GOP the check for its eight years of executive excess. One item on the tab may be a second term for this Republican nightmare.

Consider just how easily President Obama has manipulated news events over the past two weeks. On April 27 he presented his long-form birth certificate to dominate one news cycle. Obscured in the hoopla at birthers’ expense–besides the obvious point that the reason the certificate was news at all was Obama’s own reluctance for so many years to provide it–were other events not so favorable to Obama’s fortunes. For example, the day after Obama’s weird press announcement about his certificate in which he said he no time for such silliness then high-tailed over for his appearance on Oprah, salacious information came out about Obama’s Kenyan father, including the likelihood he was a polygamist and that Harvard had asked the INS to provide them with reasons for expelling the elder Obama from the country.

Clearly this is the kind of silliness Obama has no time for, and thanks to his ability to manipulate a willing media, it vanished with little coverage. Non-entity Levi Johnston has had a longer shelf life than the much more interesting “slippery character” of Obama senior.

Regardless of how little importance one attaches to Obama’s parents and his upbringing–after all, his first memoir referred only to “dreams” of his father, not the actual man–undoubtedly halfway through his term such a story about a parent would normally be of more interest than his place of birth.

In terms of real news, Obama’s birth certificate also trumped–ahem–the first press conference ever given by a chairman of the Federal Reserve. Covering that and asking good questions would have had a much worse risk-reward ratio than beating up the birthers, so–despite our economy and the Fed’s importance to it–almost no one in the general public even knows the conference took place, much less what was said.

Compared with Obama’s dramatic build-up to his announcement of Osama Bin Laden’s death, however, the birth certificate play was the most timid of dress rehearsals. Not only did Obama show supreme moxie in cutting in on rival Donald Trump’s TV show, he was able to scoop virtually everyone. Thanks to Twitter, I knew around 10:25 p.m. or so what Obama was going to say–that is, about five minutes before he originally scheduled himself to talk–but the details were mostly inaccurate, and that something of this magnitude could be controlled at all with the information flow we have now astounds almost as much as the raid itself.

Since then, many have carped about the changing details and other mishandling by the administration of the story’s roll out. At the time I myself thought he should have started nearer to his original announcement, rather than letting precious minutes slip away in which people on the East Coast at least started going to bed. His Thursday speech at Ground Zero was very tepid. But all that misses the main point.

On April 20 just before Obama released his birth certificate, his numbers in the RealClearPolitics average of polls were 50.0 disapproval, 45.3 approval, or negative 4.7 percent. Today they are 42.4 and 51.5 , respectively, which is 9.1 positive, a swing of 13.8 points–and the trajectory is still going up. Nor is this the first time Obama has enjoyed such a bump of his own making: after Democratic losses in November, Obama’s tax-cut/budget deal produced a similar roil for the President. In other words, twice in just the last five months or so, Obama has managed to inflate his poll numbers almost instantaneously from likely loss to likely win, were the election held now.

Such events can work both ways, as the 2008 election showed, when John McCain went from a brief lead in the polls immediately post the Republican convention into a tailspin because of the financial crisis. Afterward his candidacy was doomed. Yet had McCain been in office and the actual President, he would have at least had a chance of benefiting from the news. No one wants such a meltdown to occur on his watch, but even a disaster of the magnitude of September 11 can accrue to an incumbent’s advantage, provided he can exhibit leadership and demonstrate to the American people that he is up to the crisis.

President Obama understands this. Although he has not proved able or competent in many ways as leader and chief executive, the ability of his machine to rise to the challenge and unabashedly play hardball politics–to win, baby–remains clear. Republicans who were sinking into complacency and believing their own narrative that Obama was Carter II have had cold water splashed in their faces–deservedly so.

In a little over half a term, Obama has consolidated leftist power to a degree never previously experienced in America, a shift as radical in its time as FDR’s New Deal. He took over a good chunk of the domestic automobile industry, the financial services sector, and student loans in their entirety. He has appointed two radical Supreme Court justices, begun the nationalization of health care in the teeth of widespread domestic opposition, and bankrupted the treasury to the point that almost everyone concedes tax increases and defense cuts are necessary. As recently as ten years ago it would have been unthinkable that a person with Obama’s first-term record of both substance and style would have had a snowball’s chance in Death Valley of winning a second term. The frightening thing is should Obama be re-elected, whatever moderating influence his desire for a second term has had on him will be gone, and as Al Gore would say, he can start “letting her rip.”

Consider, however, that Obama can afford to give much electoral ground from his 2008 triumph and still come out on top. Karl Rove points out that the census alone would shift seven of Obama’s votes from his to McCain’s column, but in a race Obama won more than twice as many EV as his opponent, who’s counting? Those who voted for him the first time would love to have that early faith vindicated and return to the fold, which is why it is so easy for Obama to enjoy these big jumps in popularity; the press, too, still likes to get that old tingle in its leg.

And then there is the lackluster GOP field, but that’s another story.

It’s true that Obama cannot produce new Bin Ladens at will to execute for increased popularity. Yet the one has been sufficient to stop the bleeding and reignite belief in Obama’s basic competence (deservedly or no). In 2002 and 2004, Bin Laden helped the GOP’s chances, and in 2012 he has for the moment saved Obama’s. The current President is no Jimmy Carter:  regardless of a helicopter crash now and then, this President’s re-elect mission goes on.

Osama Bin Laden is dead. Did he even matter anymore, and more importantly, where do we–the United States–go from here? That is. can we declare victory in the War on Terror, or is terrorism, like the poor, something we will now have with us always?

Islamic terror pre-dates Bin Laden and Al Qaeda, and the sorry state of Bin Laden at journey’s end highlights how little actual threat the 54-year-old hermit was by the time we served an eviction notice from planet earth on him. As Christopher Hitchens writes:

Ten years ago, did he expect, let alone desire, to be in a walled compound in dear little Abbottabad?

Ten years ago, I remind you, he had a gigantic influence in one rogue and failed state—Afghanistan—and was exerting an increasing force over its Pakistani neighbor. Taliban and al-Qaida sympathizers were in senior positions in the Pakistani army and nuclear program and had not yet been detected as such. Huge financial subventions flowed his way, often through official channels, from Saudi Arabia and other gulf states. As well as running a nihilist international, he was the head of a giant and profitable network of banking and money-laundering. He could order heavy artillery wheeled up to destroy the Buddhist treasures of Afghanistan in broad daylight. A nexus of madrassas was spreading the word from Indonesia to London, just as a nexus of camps was schooling future murderers.

And he decided to gamble all these ripening strategic advantages in a single day.

To be accurate, however, Bin Laden gambled often, but September 11 was the day when he finally hit the jackpot. Had the 1993 World Trade Center attack been as successful as Bin Laden hoped, does anyone doubt President Bill Clinton would have been pressed to move the eventual time-table set in motion in 2001 forward by eight years?

Indeed, Bin Laden in all likelihood expected much of what transpired, although it’s possible he thought he US would act as it did after the Beirut barracks bombing and Mogadishu. We would cut and run. More likely, however, as the Atlantic prognosticates,:

It’s clear that September 11 was intended to create a serious economic setback for the U.S. In a wide-ranging interview conducted by Al Jazeera’s Taysir Allouni in the month following the 9/11 attacks, bin Laden spoke at length about the extent of the economic damage the attacks had inflicted. “According to [the Americans’] own admissions,” he said, “the share of the losses on the Wall Street market reached 16%. They said that this number is a record.” His continued musings reveal how much thought he had devoted to the attack’s economic implications. “The gross amount that is traded in that market reaches $4 trillion,” he said. “So if we multiply 16% with $4 trillion to find out the loss that affected the stocks, it reaches $640 billion of losses.” He knew as well that the damage to America’s stock market was not the only economic impact. Factoring in building and construction losses, along with lost productivity, he concluded that the cost to the United States was “no less than $1 trillion.”

That was the immediate impact, the direct cost. America’s response to Bin Laden’s assault has proved much more expensive and must have exceeded Bin Laden’s wildest fantasies. It is ironic that the man’s solitary death–which brings new poignancy to the word “late”–has over-shadowed a more critical news story, America’s looming budgetary default. Although the significant demographic factors driving the American fiscal crisis can scarcely claim any relationship to Bin Laden, even so, our fortunes today are in inarguably worse shape now than on that sunny morning nearly ten years ago.

Likewise, the death toll from Iraq and Afghanistan has exceeded that of the World Trade Center, with Afghanistan’s count worsening by the year. And the home front–once united by Bin Laden in a way not seen since World War II–had the strains of the red-blue fissures of the 2000 election exacerbated to levels which sometimes seem reminiscent of the antebellum 1850s.

One can argue that a spark lacks significance unless it lands in tender, but surely the spark set off by Bin Laden was the most incendiary from an individual mad act since that of Gavrillo Princip in 1914.

Nevertheless, the mad dog has been put down, now, and not all the news since is bad. Throughout the Middle East we can at least hope that the fall of tyrants can lead to democratic springs. And although the new season may not usher in pro-American, peace-loving regimes, Islamic fundamentalism does not seem to be the strong horse it once was either.

In any case, as the debt default shows, we have more pressing problems to deal with. Terrorism is not dead, and it may never die, but it is not the threat to our existence it once seemed. With Bin Laden’s death comes a chance to re-do our risk assessment and consider where best to allocate scarce resources:

• Why are we in Afghanistan? Even were the Taliban to return to power, they were not a threat to us until mixed with the foreign influence of Bin Laden and his organization. Have we not done all required of us to prop up Hamid Karzai and rebuild the rubble we briefly bounced in 2001?
• Why are we giving Pakistan billions in aid?

The aid program promoted by Senator John Kerry, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, promised Pakistan $7.5 billion over five years, much of it delivered through the civilian government.

But so inadequate is Pakistan’s civilian bureaucracy and so rife are United States fears of corruption in the government that American officials, constricted by layers of their own rules, have struggled to find safe places to actually invest the money available. Instead of polishing the tarnished image of America with a suspicious, even hostile, Pakistani public and government, the plan has resulted in bitterness and a sense of broken promises.

In a scathing report, the Government Accountability Office said that only $179.5 million of the first $1.5 billion of the five-year program had been disbursed by last December.

If anyone had any doubts about who the biggest government sponsor of Bin Laden was, his location in a mansion less than half a mile from Pakistan’s premier military academy should put those doubts to rest. More than $7 billion buys less from corrupt bureaucrats than it once did.

In short, we may not have won the War on Terror by killing Bin Laden, but we have finished winning the September 11 War. We no longer have a vested interest in Afghanistan, and we no longer require Pakistan’s assistance to pursue that war. We are also not in a financial position to outlay colossal expenditures of dubious worth. Continuing the Afghanistan-Pakistan charade carries opportunity costs we can no longer bear.

Declare victory, President Obama, and bring American soldiers home.

As events continue to head south for the Obama presidency, the dilettante-in-chief reveals more and more frequently that the bemused and ingratiating smile of the campaign–so much in contrast to Hillary Clinton’s frozen-faced seriousness–masked a petulant and angry egoist. Perhaps the first whiff of the Big 0’s ego problem occurred when he lamented all that he’d given up in terms of sleep and time just to run for national office. He since has complained that Republicans were talking about him “like a dog.”

Especially in regards to the once sycophantic press, Obama now has little energy to devote to a charm offensive. Having grown used to an uncritical and worshipful deference, Obama reacts with spite to the normal give-and-take of press relations. Can one imagine Ronald Reagan handling the badgering of Sam Donaldson in the same manner as Obama does this local news reporter?

Note that the reporter had seven minutes to interview the President; is it at all surprising, therefore, that the reporter would try to squeeze as many questions in as possible and tend to cut off the notably loquacious Obama? After all, he has been known to give a 17-minute answer to a single question.

Worse than a question of style, however, which voters can decide for themselves whether or not they disapprove,  the recent retaliation of the Obama administration against a member of the press pool for releasing video of a protest bespeaks a desire to censor actual news.

“Everyone in an audience has video capability,” Marinucci said. “That’s a reality. God forbid if the president was attacked, would you just let citizen journalists record the event? This is not 1987. There is no such thing as pure print anymore, and you’re basically telling us we cannot record news when it happens and citizen journalists can.”

Organizers of last week’s fundraiser and the White House “have the right to do whatever they want to do” regarding media access, said Lowell Bergman, a professor of investigative reporting at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. He added that it is not unusual for an administration to retaliate against a news organization with whom it disagrees.

“The Nixon administration, and the Ford administration after it, barred CBS News cameras from the Pentagon and would not cooperate” with the network after CBS aired a series called “The Selling of the Pentagon,” Bergman said.

Not really a flattering comparison for “the most open administration in history.”

As noted previously on this blog, it is necessary to give Thomas Friedman some credit for his ability to provide other writers with such ample lampoon-worthy content: never have so many owed so much to so little. In contrast to Waylon Jennings–who used to sing about something called the Wurlitzer Prize in his mournful hit titled “I Don’t Want to Get Over You”–Friedman in a perfect world could warble karaoke lyrics to the same tune:

They gave me another Pulitzer Prize

For all the blogs I gave cheap content to

Writin’ these columns ’bout

Nothing clever or very new

Just a personal anecdote or two.

In Friedman’s latest offering, he outdoes himself in centering his piece on the most trivial of incidents, which is a neat trick, indeed, considering his Blakean history of holding the world in the palm of his hand and seeing eternity in a grain of sand.

When I was in Cairo during the Egyptian uprising, I wanted to change hotels one day to be closer to the action and called the Marriott to see if it had any openings.

Isn’t your heart already thumping like the only she-camel in a herd of bulls? Because Friedman spends most of his time at his hotel the best way to be “closer to the action” requires re-locating his quarters. And could any base of operations offer the more authentic, gritty experience of the Egyptian street than a Cairo Marriott? A lounge chair at poolside would probably be near enough to the demonstrations, after all.

The young-sounding Egyptian woman who spoke with me from the reservations department offered me a room and then asked: “Do you have a corporate rate?” I said, “I don’t know. I work for The New York Times.” There was a silence on the phone for a few moments, and then she said: “ Can I ask you something?” Sure. “Are we going to be O.K.? I’m worried.”

I made a mental note of that conversation because she sounded like a modern person, the kind of young woman who would have been in Tahrir Square.

Please.  How much buffoonish self-parody can one columnist compact into two paragraphs of prose?

• Friedman–connoisseur of Marriotts and 30-year NY Times veteran–has no idea whether he’s entitled to a corporate rate?
• A local asks Friedman, based solely on his employment, whether her country is “going to be O.K.”? Instead of relocating within Cairo, perhaps he should go back to New York City…because New Yorkers know the real deal.
• “She sounded like a modern person”? The Marriott often hires either cave women or time travellers from the Renaissance, so you have to judge the reservation clerk’s modernity by the timbre of her voice?
• Should a typical “modern” woman have been at Tahrir Square? When I look at most photos of the demonstrations, men predominate and the relatively few Egyptian women tend to dress conservatively. Perhaps a wise modern woman would know better than to attend. Ask Lara Logan.

Anyway, this trivial exchange is enough to spark Friedman’s mental propane barbecue, and he’s ready to grill him some chicken nuggets.

Let’s start with the structure of the Arab state. Think about the 1989 democracy wave in Europe. In Europe, virtually every state was like Germany, a homogenous nation, except Yugoslavia.

Czechoslovakia? Ukraine? Latvia? Does Friedman understand why Eastern Europe was so contentious before the Cold War forced conformity?

In the Arab world, almost all these countries are Yugoslavia-like assemblages of ethnic, religious and tribal groups put together by colonial powers — except Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco, which have big homogeneous majorities.

Well, I’m confused. After all, Friedman previously wrote of the uneventful conversation that started the windmills of his Don Quixote-like mind turning, “We’re just now beginning to see what may have been gnawing at her — in Egypt and elsewhere.” If Egypt isn’t one of the Arab countries likely to explode from multi-ethnic violence, then how could that be what the clerk’s comment was about?

Perhaps her question was in fact a concern over the amount of alcohol Friedman had charged to his credit card limit and the “are we going to be okay?” was a polite way of putting it before “we”–she and her hotel–went on the hook for a room reservation.

Friedman now lists which nations he expects to evolve in which ways. Yet it’s not as though the Middle East hasn’t before gone through periods such as the one facing it now. After all, most states previous to their current rulership had colonial periods, and if they succeed in ousting local dictators, the aftermath will be akin to when colonial rule ended. Without any changes to the formula, it’s likely to produce identical results.

With Eastern Europe those states that would have most likely transitioned to representative democracy without Stalin’s intervention after World War II presumably would be the ones to do so after the Cold War ended. At least that’s what we would have predicted in the case of Europe. Which Arab states are those?

There’s the rub: in Eastern Europe an external power prevented political evolution. In the Middle East a home-grown power base–fundamental Islam–declares representative democracy to be its implacable enemy. Does anyone doubt that remove Islam from the equation and political modernization of the Middle East would be a much easier proposition? Yet the word “Islam” remains curiously absent from Friedman’s column.

It is not multiethnicity alone or even primarily that hobbles the hopes of a politically liberal development of the Middle East, but Friedman wants to ignore the real elephant in the room.

To be fair, Friedman does discuss the Sunni and Shiite problem in Saudi Arabia, but only as another form of tribalism. That is, he does not address that fundamental Islam is opposed to the idea of democracy, even when other tribal divisions are absent. Otherwise, why would Sunnis in a 90 percent Sunni nation have any problem with pluralism–at least locally?

So what’s Friedman’s solution? The rise of a super-human “giant” such as Nelson Mandela or external “coaching” by the West–an idea at least as old as Kipling but not near as popular as it was 100 years ago. (The UN and President Obama apparently think a black face fronting the white man’s burden will make it more palatable to the locals.)

Absent these two conditions, Friedman says we should “prepare for Yugoslavia”…in a part of the world that supplies something a bit more critical than junky subcompact cars.