Lincoln-Douglas for the Brain-Damaged

The next weeks will provide evidence that the economy has not hit rock bottom, although the culture may have, when people in New York, Boston and elsewhere pay $50 or more to watch Bill Maher and Ann Coulter debate issues of the day.

To promote these historic events, part of a series titled "Minds That Move the World," Ms. Coulter deigned to give the "treasonous" New York Times an email interview, invoking Aristotle, Winston Churchill and Lincoln-Douglas as models for the encounter.

Closer to the mark would the old CNN freak show "Crossfire" demolished by Jon Stewart two years ago when he told Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala they were partisan hacks who “should be doing debate, which would be great, but you’re doing theater.”

On his weekly HBO show recently, Maher has looked lost without George Bush to riff on while Coulter, who reached a high point of loony invective by naming John Edwards a "faggot" and wishing him dead, is fighting a losing battle against Rush Limbaugh for the attention of the addled.

But give them this much: They are stimulating the economy with spending by people who are not likely to be doing anything better with their money.

Obama's Preening Pastor

What emerges from watching the endless YouTubing of Jeremiah Wright is not the picture of a religious or political fanatic but a world-class attention-seeker. In those operatic video clips, there is a dashiki-dressed performer playing to the crowd, a soulmate, not of Louis Farrakhan, but of Bill Maher, whose imprudent comments on 9/11 cost him his network gig.

Now Obama's pastor is back on stage, coming out of his recent retirement, with Bill Moyers on PBS tonight and at the National Press Club in Washington next Monday, flamboyantly defending himself to the possible political detriment of his former congregant:

"I think they wanted to communicate that I am unpatriotic, that I am un-American, that I am filled with hate speech, that I have a cult at Trinity United Church of Christ. And by the way, guess who goes to his church, hint, hint, hint?"

If Hillary Clinton's campaign were paying him, the Rev. Wright couldn't being doing more for them than to keep Obama's embarrassment front and center in the days leading up to the final critical primaries.

But we may be underestimating him. By continuing to call attention to himself, Wright may be deviously trying to show that Obama is not under the Svengali-like influence of a dangerous man, just bedeviled by the antics of a showoff.

If so, that would be too subtle for most voters. All that may register with them is Obama's unfortunate choice in a spiritual adviser.

Nixon/Frost: Poster Boys for Opportunism

Last night Bill Maher interviewed the ghost of David Frost and brought back a rush of memories about Richard Nixon, the 1970s' president who lied and broke laws with heartfelt sincerity.

Maher deferentially let Frost, with customary sliminess, rewrite the Iraq war into a little misunderstanding in which Americans and British went in willingly, without bothering to mention that up to 2 million people in London and hundreds of thousands in New York and Washington were in the streets protesting before it started.

But Frost, now immortalized in a play and upcoming movie for his post-resignation interviews, is remembered by contemporaries as a perfect match for Nixon, poster boys for smarmy opportunism. Typically, his "hard-hitting" interview with the disgraced President was the result of relentless cajoling.

The James Lipton of his day, Frost snagged unctuous sitdowns with Presidents and Prime Ministers, while earning the scorn of the Monty Python and Beyond the Fringe satirists, who called him the "Bubonic Plagiarist" for stealing their satirical approach to the news in his other incarnation.

For an approximation of Frost at his zenith, imagine a tireless, disingenuous combination of Jon Stewart and Larry King with unlimited ambition and greed.

His counterpart, Nixon, ended in disgrace but Sir David Frost, a multimillionaire and now host on the Al Jazeera English Channel, is still with us, pimping his way through history.

Organized Disbelief

The bad news for devout individualists is that even the forces of Atheism are getting organized.

Today’s Washington Post has two reports on the trend: “In America, Nonbelievers Find Strength in Numbers” and “In Europe and U.S., Nonbelievers Are Increasingly Vocal.”

Understandably, jihadists and George W. Bush have alarmed multitudes with the consequences of religious fervor, but “a legion of the godless rising up against the forces of religiosity in American society,” as the Post puts it, may not be much comfort to those who believe literally in the First Amendment.

With Christopher Hitchens’ best-selling screed and Bill Maher’s rants against the Ten Commandments, it’s getting harder to hold onto some public space against irrationality of all kinds.

Atheists of the world, unite? And do what?

Media Mash-Up

While George Bush tells Old America his new plans for the plantation tonight, the Democrats will be engaging New America in cyberspace on the first candidate mash-up, a power-to-the-people event hatched in a Swiss Alps resort.

The President will be endorsing the proposals of Petraeus and Crocker, his overseers of the Iraq outpost, as Bill Maher badgers Barack Obama about the Ten Commandments.

Symbolically, unconnected citizens will be passively watching their TV sets as the electronic elite point and click to, in Arianna Huffington’s words, “take control of designing the debate you want to see--picking and choosing what issues you want to hear about and which candidates you want to hear from.”

Some citizens may find all this enlightenment too much to bear and go to bed early. Wake us when the media discovers an alternative to autocracy or anarchy.

John Kerry, Stand-Up

He’s at it again. The 2004 Democratic nominee who took himself out of a possible ’08 re-run with a badly told joke is back going for the funny again. The reviews suggest he shouldn’t give up his day job.

At a Democratic fundraiser last week, Kerry had a limerick about his Senate colleague who got into trouble by being on the D.C. Madam’s phone list:

“There once was a man named Vitter/Who vowed that he wasn’t a quitter/But with stories of women/And all of his sinnin’/He knows his career’s in the — oh, never mind.”

Jon Stewart and Bill Maher are safe, but John Kerry shouldn’t despair. It won’t get any laughs but he is doing good work by joining Hillary Clinton in introducing a bill
requiring the Pentagon to brief Congress on contingency plans for withdrawing from Iraq.

There’s more than one way of being a stand-up guy.