Matthew Parris is a well-known, often infuriating and always readable British journalist. He’s almost always at his best when he writes about his former employer, Mrs. Thatcher (see if you can find Return of the Mummy, a laugh aloud funny piece he wrote at the time of the last British election). Now here he is in the London Spectator on a new exhibition devoted to artworks depicting Mrs. T:

“Paul Graham’s giant photograph, entitled ‘8 April, 2002’ is stunning. The portrait is about ten feet high and twice as high as wide, but most of it is black. Lady Thatcher occupies only the lower part of the composition, whose bottom frame chops her off so that only head and torso appear: she has obviously been snapped while walking, and snapped unawares, for she is not looking at us. She is wearing black — uncharacteristically, but this was around the time of the late Queen Mother’s death. The overwhelming colour is black, but her face is pale and has the soft, delicate paperiness of old age. She looks a little stooped. Her glance gives little away beyond exhaustion — and inner strength. The portrait has a sadness about it, but it is not demeaning and she is not undignified. In a way, this is a picture of a magnificent ruin.

The viewer has absolutely no clue as to what she is thinking, what she is remembering, or whether she is thinking or remembering at all. Her expression is inscrutable — or empty.

If I had £10,000 I would buy this picture, but, as it was, I could only stand and stare. It is the best and perhaps the last study of Margaret Thatcher as former empress that will ever appear. In time it will become a feature of books and articles illustrating her later years, and for as long as she is remembered it will be associated with her.

And what is so very poignant is that, were she to visit the exhibition, that photograph would say nothing to her. ‘Well, dear,’ she would say. ‘I don’t much care for that. No colour. Perfectly miserable. Makes me look a wreck. And where are my legs? He pointed the camera wrong. Why didn’t he ask me to pose?’

And she would move on, reaching, perhaps, for a giant handkerchief with which to cover some of the smaller exhibits.”

Wonderful.

Well I did it. I have been an NRO reader for the last 2 years and have felt increasingly guilty for enjoying all of the talent for free. And what do you know, just as this guilt was building, a young girl showed up at my door selling magazines for her shool fundraising. I am now an official paying subscriber. It begs the questions, is National Review using Global Positioning Technology to find the people like me? Because if you are, it worked.

Let's not mince words.

Hillary Clinton is never going to be president of the United States. There is no more divisive figure in the Democratic Party, much less the country, than the former first lady. And I like her. But many women don't. Even Democratic women. Even working women. Not to mention non-working, independent, non-political women.

I was just watching "The Great Muppet Caper" (last day of the semester) and discovered an overlooked moment of Muppet insight. The gang have just caught jewel thief Charles Grodin red-handed and sweet, earnest Kermit asks, "Why did you do it?" Grodin shrugs and says, "Because I'm a villain." Plain and simple, no "root cause" nonsense. I'll remember that line every time someone tries to tell me we should be more concerned about why "they" hate us.

Catching up on G-File email now. Bizarre amount of hostility from people who think I'm trying to create more labels, split more hairs etc. I wonder if they even read what I wrote since I'm trying to make the case that the neo label is useless and pointless not that we need more labels. Also, getting some nasty email from paleo types who seem more than a bit panicked that the word neocon might lose some of its utility. Just for the record, I'm writing these things because so many readers asked me to. If it's not something you're interested in, don't read it.

Being a working mom is "the hardest job in the world." I'm still not sure why Bush kept saying that on the campaign trail in 2000, but he was right. I've spent the day trying to write a piece for another mag and deal with Cosmo and Lucy while Jessica's fighting for truth and justice at Harvard and it's been very, very stressful. I don't think the Federal Government could have helped much, but it's definitely hard.

Let's not forget Ramesh Ponnuru: Ram-Po; Michael Ledeen: M-Lead (faster, please); David Frum: D-Fr (pronounced Dee-Fer, soon to evolve to Mos' Deef); John Podhoretz: J-Pod; James Robbins: J-Rob

Was playing with a renamer at www.babynames.com and your new name could be Chinara Zuwena Lopez

What do ya think? If you don't like it try again.

Go have fun with Derb's name or others. I bet you could get a good one for somebody.

Does Studs Terkel qualify?

My bride is in Boston for the day, doing some panel at Harvard. So I'm spending the day teaching Lucy TV trivia. We're on M*A*S*H quotes right now.I'm trying to get her to say "I've eaten a river of liver and an ocean of fish!"

What are conservatives? They are people who will move heaven and earth, if they have to, who will ruin a company or a country or a planet, to prove to us and to themselves that they are superior to everybody else, except for their pals. They take good care of their pals, keep them out of jail—and so on.

Conservatives are crazy as bedbugs. They are bullies.

Shock and awe.

Class war? You bet.

They have proved their superiority to admirers of Abraham Lincoln and Mark Twain and Jesus of Nazareth, with an able assist from television, making inconsequential our protests against their war.

"I'm an alumna of Pepperdine University, a school which proudly owns a house/campus on Exhibition Road, literally across the street from the Imperial University, in the middle of South Kensington, right near Harrods, Hyde Park, the Albert Hall. Within two days of arriving for our first semester in London, our relatively small [American] class (37 students, 10 men, 27 women) was visited by a local police officer to instruct us on living in London. Her first question was to the women, 'How many of you brought mace?' Three girls raised their hands. She told us we couldn't use it, shouldn't even carry it, it was illegal.

"Had any of us brought any other type of weapon, such as a knife? Several of the men in our group indicated that they carried pocket knives. She told us to leave them at home too.

"Then she instructed us on how to properly be a victim. If we were attacked, we were to assume a defensive posture, such as raising our hands to block an attack. The reason was (and she spelled it out in no uncertain terms) that if a witness saw the incident and we were to attempt to defend ourselves by fighting back, the witness would be unable to tell who the agressor was. However, if we rolled up in a ball, it would be quite clear who the victim was.

"The feeling I got was, in London, it is not permissable to defend oneself. I also understood that this police officer thought Americans were more likely to be agressive and/or cause more damage to a potential attacker. She was warning us for our own good. I have to admit, she did not make me feel particularly safe."

Praisegod Barebones, a 17th Century British parliamentarian. Orson Welles must also be a contender. For what it's worth, I also (according to family lore) have a distant relation (late 19th Century) by the name of Archelaus Stuttaford - not a bad name, I reckon.

The best name-giver in fiction? Charles Dickens - without a doubt.

John, speaking as someone who is half Scottish, retribution will soon follow. Tales of Scots thrift, however, are, indeed, rarely exaggerated – as a child I spent every summer at my grandparents’ place near a small Scottish town called Tain. On one occasion the British newspapers were filled with tales of the disastrous collapse of (if I remember correctly) a nationally prominent travel company. The headline in the local paper:

“Tain man won’t lose a penny.”

An e-mail response: "You guys should really pounce on this harder. I've
been noticing this growing trend among liberal media
types and academia. On a recent NPR 'Fresh Air'
program, the guest being interview was Sarah Shays
(sp?), a former NPR reporter who is now heading up
some democracy-building NGO in Kabul, focusing on
women I believe.

"She kept referring to the Afghan culture, Taliban
sympathizers, and her clients' chauvinist-pig husbands
as 'conservative.' She would use the word 3,4,5 times
in one sentence. She'd pause, as if searching for
another word, then keep repeating 'conservative' over
and over again.

"I guess any word, like 'prehistoric,' 'backward,'
'repressive,' etc, that might criticize or pass
judgment might be a little too hot to handle (unless
you're talking about Western Civ. or Christianity,
then it's ok...)

"This really ticked me off, even though I only count
myself as very slightly 'conservative.' The tone of
the rhetoric is really starting to bug the crap out of
me.

"It's like the 'Bush is a Fascist' signs at the ANSWER
rallies. They're taking the word fascist hostage, so
what do we call Hitler or Mussolini now?

"I love reading the Corner!"

On the May 12 edition of MSNBC’s Hardball on which both your employee, Seth Mnookin, and my employee, Liz Swasey, appeared, Mr. Mnookin ridiculed Liz for suggesting that affirmative action run amok could explain New York Times executive editor Howell Raines’ failure to supervise his plagiarist former reporter, Jayson Blair.

Given the time constraints and format of Hardball, I might have let Mr. Mnookin’s condemnation of my employee’s position pass. However, on the following day on Newsweek.com, Mr. Mnookin’s Raw Copy, "What’s Race Got To Do With It?" accused Liz of "smearing" Howell Raines, being "intellectually dishonest" and "twisting reality to make her point" to such an extent that Mr. Mnookin said he "openly laughed at" her.

This morning, the New York Times ran "Editor of Times Tells Staff He Accepts Blame for Fraud," by Jacques Steinberg. The National Journal summarized the piece as follows: "New York Times exec. ed. Howell Raines, on whether Jayson Blair lasted as long as he did at the paper because of his race: ‘When I look into my heart for the truth of that, the answer is yes.’"

Despite Mr. Raines’ admission, Mr. Mnookin’s discredited piece smearing my employee remains the number two story on Newsweek.com. I ask that the piece be removed. I also challenge Mr. Mnookin to be man enough to apologize to Ms. Swasey.

Sincerely,

L. Brent Bozell

You might have seen this already, but Happy Fun Pundit has a great list of gripes about Star Trek. Longtime readers will recognize that I share a few of them.

Referring to Raines and Sulzberger, Andrew Sullivan asks, "Is there a company on the planet where an executive who had made such a decision would still be in place? If an Enron executive had made a similar decision, do you think Raines would be calling for him to stay in place?" It's a good point and first raised, I believe by The New York Sun in an excellent May 12 editorial which opens by comparing the following quotes:

"[T]he move to hold top managers personally liable for any misrepresentations made to investors — which the new corporate oversight legislation also does — is a watershed worth celebrating…C.E.O’s will no longer be able to feign ignorance about the details of the companies’ accounting, as Jeffrey Skilling haughtily did early this year at a Congressional hearing on Enron’s implosion."

—The New York Times, editorial, "Downsizing the Imperial C.E.O.," August 9, 2002

"But Mr. Sulzberger emphasized that as The New York Times continues to examine how its employees and readers were betrayed, there will be no newsroom search for scapegoats. ‘The person who did this is Jayson Blair,’ he said. ‘Let’s not begin to demonize our executives — either the desk editors or the executive editor or, dare I say, the publisher.’"

—The New York Times, news article, "Times Reporter Who Resigned Leaves Long Trail of Deception," May 11, 2003

From a reader:

Surely, you aren't going to take credit for stating the incredibly obvious?

Shoot, "predicting" that T'Pol would go into heat when the ratings dropped is like "predicting" the time of sunset or sunrise. Given a modicum of knowledge, it is obvious.

Any scifi/comic book geeks worth their intellect (like you and me) saw this one coming. I am only surprised that it took so long!

I don't know whether to say "duh" or "congratulations." I suppose that you'll settle for the latter....

[Name withheld]
10 year NRODT subscriber

P.S. Tell K-Lo that some of us like obscure Trek/Simpsons/Marvel references spliced into the running corner observations.

I never met Mark Cosslett, and wouldn't even have known his name but for his fatal accident. I do know one thing, and I knew it before he was gone: At a time when my family was looking for a hero, there he was.

From a reader:

I can't remember, but it seems as if it was you who said something like "Mind my words, if the ratings for Enterprise drop enough, you can bet that T'Pol will go into Pon Farr."

Well, guess what happened on last night's episode...

He's right. Here's the opening from my Enterprise review , with the relevant prediction:

Okay, the Vulcan chick is over the top.

By now, anyone who cares (if you don't, you shouldn't be reading this anyway) has seen or heard that the new Trek series, Enterprise, has a Vulcan sexpot named T'Pol. The producers learned their lesson from Voyager's 7-of-9, and have concluded they will never again be caught without a silicone-enhanced chick in a spackled-on uniform. It is cool that they've chosen a Vulcan to be the sex symbol, since Vulcans — while superior to humans in so many ways — have "not tonight, dear" headaches that last in roughly seven-year stretches (prediction: T'Pol will hear the Vulcan call of the birds and the bees, the Pon Farr, the moment the ratings dip).

With her over-the-top bitchiness and her under-her-top augmentation, T'Pol reminds me of that old Robin Williams joke about how he wanted sex to become an Olympic sport, just so we could see what the East Germans would come up with.

My syndicated column. It should have gone up yesterday but there was a glitch.

Look, I take a back seat to only a very few people when it comes to my contempt for Steve Glass. But isn't there something odd about journalists, particularly liberal ones, protesting the publication of a book and journalists, particularly conservatives, inveighing against the profit motive? I agree with Erich Eichmann and John that Glass is a feckless crapweasel. And I even agree that Glass's attempt to cash-in on his own transgressions is unseemly. But I can't get past the fact that the media are making a bigger deal about Glass's book than they would if, say, a murderer wrote one. When Mumia Abu Jamal -- the convicted, and rightly so, murder -- cashes in on his nefariously-earned celebrity, first amendment voluptuaries cheer. Isn't murder worse than plagiarism and fabrication? There's something vaguely self-serving in the hooplah over Glass and Blair, something which seems to say "We are so great, it is huge news for everybody when one of us stumbles. I am emphatically not ascribing these views to Miller and Eichmann, it's just that they got me thinking about it.

This is not really apropos, but it does remind me of a story. One of my best friends from high school went to Emory. When Kurt Vonnegut gave a lecture there, all the earnest young kids (there are a few at Emory, mostly in hiding) asked Vonnegut to sign their books for them. They all lined up with copies of Slaughterhouse Five, Breakfast of Champions etc. Except for one guy. My firend's fraternity brother waited on line to get his copy of "Back To School" with Rodney Dangerfield signed. People who've seen this classic of American cinema know why that's funny.

I saw it last night. It's good, not great. Parts are great. Parts are poor (dialogue and plot-wise). The Wachowski brothers seemed to have asked each other several times "Wouldn't it be cool if....?" And answered the question wrong. Nevertheless, it's very enjoyable and it's entirely possible the third Matrix will fix many of the problems with the second one. I'm not going to review it for NRO but, once again, Stephen Hunter does a
great job (though I think I liked it a bit more than him). Personally, though, it's a not a review I would read until after I saw the movie.

The revelation in the historian ROBERT DALLEK'S new book, "An Unfinished Life" that President JOHN F. KENNEDY apparently had an affair with a teenage intern got us wondering if former President BILL CLINTON, who has had his own problems in this department, had read the book.

We found him at the Asia Society Spring Gala at Cipriani at 42nd Street on Monday night. Mr. Clinton received a standing ovation when he arrived. When we introduced ourselves, he praised the work of our colleague, ELISABETH ROSENTHAL, who received an award from the group for her reportage from China. Then a well-wisher interrupted us. A Secret Service agent noticed that we were taking notes.

"Ms.," the agent said. "You cannot report on Mr. Clinton's conversation."

"It's O.K.," Mr. Clinton said.

We have to face up to the fact that we have a terrorist problem here. Last week’s Interior Ministry announcement that 19 Al-Qaeda members, 17 of them Saudis, had planned terrorist attacks in the country and were being hunted was a wake-up call — particularly to those who steadfastly refuse to accept that individual Saudis or Muslims could ever do anything evil, who still cling to the fantasy that Sept. 11 and all the other attacks laid at the doors of terrorists who happen to be Arab or Muslim were in fact the work of the Israelis or the CIA. For too long we have ignored the truth. We did not want to admit that Saudis were involved in Sept. 11. We can no longer ignore that we have a nest of vipers here, hoping that by doing so they will go away. They will not. They are our problem and we all their targets now.

Hamad bin Hamed Al-Salame wrote: "Oh foreign cave-dwellers, depart our country and go to hell!... Leave us. We are a believing people, and our government is wise... Go with all your ugliness and baseness... Go to hell. All your terrorist acts and bomb blasts will not make us bow our heads... Go to the place from whence you came, to the caves of Tora Bora, and kiss the feet of your masters who taught you to spill blood and kill innocents... They were the ones who taught you how to lie, deceive, and mislead the simple folk. Go, cowards... go to hell, or go to the heaven of your leader, who taught you sorcery in the caves of Tora Bora. Sit by his side in the dark paradise of ugly ideas and deeds... which if distributed to all the inhabitants of the Earth would suffice them until the Day of Judgment..."

"Go, idiots, and awaken all the sleeper cells... Wake them, and go with them, far from us. You have no place among us... Go to hell."(8)

In today's column I lament the media's inability to even entertain the idea that race was an issue in the Jayson Blair story. Courtland Milloy tells us that to even raise the question reveals pathologies far greated than poor Jayson's:

"That such obvious distress could so easily morph into a media feeding frenzy over questions such as "Did he receive preferential treatment because he is black?" and "Is diversity a good thing?" reflects shortcomings far more pathological than those displayed by Blair.

G-File is up. Check it out.

Tommy Chong arrested for selling bongs.

National Association of Black Journalists named Gerald Boyd journalist of the year prior to the announcement that he had been promoted to Times managing editor. When they introduced people on the dais at dinner that night, Harry Belafonte got a warm round of applause, as you might imagine. But Gerald got a standing ovation. I turned to Gerald's wife, Robin, and said, "Isn't it nice to know that you're married to a man who gets more applause than Harry Belafonte?" That was a special evening. [snip]

The issue in advancing newsroom diversity is that you have to get people into gate-keeper roles. You have to force your hiring managers to find talent and demand that every pool of applicants for any job includes at least one woman and one minority.

The Times report is candid about the severe criticisms directed at Blair by the two metropolitan editors--Joyce Purnick and Jonathan Landman--prior to his assignment to the paper's national staff. It is less forthcoming about the close mentor-protégé relationship that apparently existed between Blair and the Times' managing editor, Gerald Boyd, who also is African American. By the Times' account, Boyd was head of a committee that recommended Blair be hired, despite the reservations of other editors. Boyd, along with Raines, pushed the inexperienced reporter with a poor record onto the prestigious national staff.

What the Times does not note is that in 2001 it was the Blair who nominated Boyd for the National Assn. of Black Journalists' journalist of the year award for his role in producing the Pulitzer Prize-winning series "How Race Is Lived in America." When Boyd subsequently was promoted to managing editor, according to sources at the Times, Blair was selected to write the announcement for the paper's in-house newsletter.

On "American Idol" last night, the fans of contestant Kimberly Locke had "K-Lo" posters. Isn't there a copyright violation or something here?

K-Lo, I assumed you meant this pieace by Reynolds on sci-fi religion.