Salon Politics reports with barely-concealed glee about George W. Bush’s slide in the polls from 60% approval ratings to 53% approval ratings from his first hundred days to now. Well, this bodes well for Democrats in 2002 and all, but the real question is: why are half the American people still supporting this idiot? He lost the popular vote, he may have lost the election, he put into place the most Right-wing cabinet of the past 70 years or so, and he’s pushing an agenda that looks like The Beast From 1982 (or 1994). The answer of course is that newsmedia soft-peddled the President while simultaneously providing a smokescreen by slagging Bill Clinton for several weeks after he’d left office. I remember watching an episode of NBC Nightly News shortly after the inauguration that ran a misty-eyed piece pointing out the similarities between George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan (W. is, in fact, a conservative! He does, in fact, favor tax cuts!), immediately followed by a segment entitled–I kid you not–ClintonWatch on the latest tidbits of the Presidential pardon fiascos (and I don’t mean those pardons of nonviolent drug offenders in federal prisons or of 1970s leftist activists).

Damn that liberal media.

People who know my reading tastes know that I absolutely adore Andrea Dworkin. Therefore I took a great interest in the Guardian’s publication of an article by Louise Armstrong declaring Andrea a true feminist icon much more so than the pop-glam roster offered up by Elaine Showalter. Armstrong argues that Dworkin’s power continues to be that she is entirely media-unfriendly and therefore her presence is (unlike, say, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s) unsanitized, dangerous, and polarizing. Which is precisely what a radical opponent to male supremacy ought to be. She may not be widely liked, but she will not shut up and she keeps people talking about male violence and its pervasiveness.

Great line for the day: I laughed out loud when I read

So strong a signifier has Dworkin’s name become that it is dragged in, higgledy-piggledy, whenever the speaker/author wishes to dump poo on advocacy with which he/she disagrees. I have seen her name yanked in out of left field, in the New York Times, for example, to say that an author displays an Andrea Dworkin-like attitude toward the genetic alteration of apples.

David Horowitz takes issue with his friend Andrew Sullivan and tells us why gays shouldn’t serve [Salon.com]. The answer: because they’ll fuck all over the place and this will undermine unit cohesion. He deftly silences any attempts to point out the homophobic nature of this argument by spending the opening passage fulminating about how political correctness silences arguments through charges of homophobia, racism, etc. This, of course, is poppycock; by far the most politically correct thing to be these days is politically incorrect, and anyone, no matter how hateful and idiotic, can take up the mantle of the martyr for freethought if he (or she) wants to be immunized against criticism, or hugged on stage by Elton John.

One thing I will give Horowitz: he’s a blithering buffoon but he has an accurate vision of the military. I can’t help but think Right on! as he says Of all social institutions, the military is the most pragmatic. Its task, brutal in its simplicity, is to develop the most efficient killing machine that money can buy and intelligence can devise. and To create the perfect killing machine, the military works hard to drain recruits of their individuality and their self-interested desires in order to make them think like cogs in a machine. An essential part of the military mind is that the members of fighting units don’t think for themselves but do as they are told. But then, of course, I realize that David thinks this is a good thing. Ultimately, I actually agree with Horowitz that this is an excellent argument to show why gays shouldn’t serve in the military. But that’s only because I think it’s an excellent argument to show why no one should serve in the military, for the sake of their own humanity.

Free content on the web suffers another blow as Feed and Suck go under [Salon] and are looking for a new buyer.

William Safire is so much better when he is in his crotchety conservative persona commenting on language than when he is in his crotchety conservative persona commenting on politics. For example, see this great invective against the use of the verbalized arch pause (er, um, ahem) to signify Here comes a little witticism, you ninny [NY Times]. People who have talked to me or read my online squibs enough should know that I myself indulge in the occasional er, um, or well. Personally, I try to restrict it to the (apparently British) usage of the pause as a way to understate or state that an answer is obvious or embarrassing. Nevertheless, I’ll be on the lookout for overuse of the Look, I made a pun! usage from here on out.