Dear Reader (including those cruel bastards among you who will not release me from the curse of this parenthetical gag),

Here’s the exciting news: By the time you read this, I will be barreling toward Hershey Park, Pa., the Land of Chocolate (not to be confused with this land of chocolate). The Fair Jessica and I are taking our progeny and our niece to celebrate their ascensions from first grade and pre-K respectively. It’s a long promised trip. There will be water rides, roller-coasters, more Hershey bars than there are under Bette Midler’s pillow, and frivolity for as far as the eye can see. I expect Lucy to be happier than Helen Thomas at a Hamas rally.

What, too soon?

Feh.

Helen of Ploy

The only thing that bothers me about Helen Thomas’s long overdue retirement is that the circumstances have produced a backlash. For some, it’s the appearance that she was taken down by the Jooooooooz. This is no doubt how she sees it. The more interesting crowd of Thomas supporters are the people who actually believe she was some kind of serious journalist. She wasn’t that. For most of her career, her job was to keep the rest of the press corps from wasting their questions on the obvious question of the day. Later, her job became to ask unserious questions that everyone thought were somewhere between nutjob nonsense and anti-American or anti-Israel claptrap. “When will the president stop murdering the peace-loving people of Iraq to support the putrid Zionist entity occupying the Palestinians’ Holy Birthright?”

Dana Milbank and a bunch of others seem to think that these were impressive feats of journalistic seriousness and bravery when really they were banal examples of left-wing asshattery (hey, everyone can say “ass” now, the president’s Blue Ribbon Panel on Ass-Kicking says so). Serious and important questions are ones that reveal serious and important answers. They don’t need to be sharp and polemical (though sometimes that’s great), and they certainly don’t need to be measured by the question of what will get Anwar al-Awlaki to give you a shout out. “Go Helen, go Helen, woop-woop!”

Often, the best serious questions are the simplest ones. The one that comes to mind is when Ted Kennedy was asked why he wanted to be president and he couldn’t for the life of him come up with an answer; he just thought it was something he was supposed to do, like spend money on the poor or make a waitress sandwich with Chris Dodd at a bar.

What’s infuriating is the fact that so many liberal journalists who insist they’re neither liberal nor biased think that asinine left-wingery is hard-hitting journalism. But if a cranky carbuncle of hate had been asking similar questions from the right, Milbank & Co. would have been the first to recognize it as a waste of everyone’s time.

I usually cut old folks a lot of slack. But Helen Thomas is perfectly in control of her faculties, and she thinks the same things she’s always thought. Like the mushroom troll that she is, she will pop up somewhere soon enough and start ranting about how the Zionists pushed her off the public stage.

Already she is the preferred journalist for terrorists throughout the Middle East. Here’s Hussein Moussawi, a Hezbollah M.P.: ”Respected American journalist Helen Thomas’s answer shows . . . a courageous, bold, honest and free opinion which expresses what people across the globe believe: that Israel is a racist state of murderers and thugs.” And here’s a snippet from the Hamas-linked Al Qassam website: ”This statement by Thomas Helen reflects the opinion of American majority in USA and all masses who support justice and peace in Palestine an whole world.”

They can be forgiven for thinking that the journalist in question is some dude named “Thomas Helen.”

Make with the Yukety-Yuks

I’ve been talking to a lot of young-conservative groups recently, and I’m delighted to do it. However, as I am planning on doing some exorbitant work on my house soon, I wish I was also speaking to Fortune 500 CEOs a lot, too. But you take these things where you can find them, and it’s good to help the youth. It’s the only way you can be sure to keep those damn kids off your lawn. Anyway, the other night, I spoke to a small group of students and young professionals for the Young America’s Foundation. It was part of a two-day training conference on conservative communication and rhetoric.

My assigned topic: Humor in conservative communication and rhetoric. I warned them that it’s always dangerous to ask someone to talk about something they’ve never talked about before. “You can have a new speech or you can have a good speech,” I often tell folks. They stuck to their guns. Still, it worked out pretty well, I think.

Anyway, the first point I made had nothing to do with conservatism or humor, but it’s the most important one: Don’t bore the customer. Whether you’re a salesman, a politician, or a writer, if you’re boring, you can’t persuade anybody of much of anything. This doesn’t mean you have to be funny, or even try, but you have to be entertaining in the best possible sense of the word. All effective communication holds the reader’s attention.

In some fields – porn, for example – this is obvious. But in others, it isn’t. The best example of where effective communication is frowned upon is academia. And I think this is one of the reasons why academia has so little influence in American life. The full reason why academia has embraced a perverse form of obscurantism is something of a mystery to me, but I suspect part of it is a form of self-protection. Much of academia has become a guild where eggheads play with words. It’d be fun to talk about how it’s all about esotericism and gnosis and what not, but I think big chunks of academia are more like the Greek bus drivers’ union: They pretend there’s a secret to their job that makes them irreplaceable. You need the high sign to enter the Little Rascal’s club house, and you need to speak gobbledygook to get tenure. It’s the triumph of guild mentality over relevance.

At a more pernicious level, a great deal of academic jargon strikes me as so much verbal prestidigitation to conjure banshees of oppression that do not exist. You can’t really claim that America is evil, oppressive, or totalitarian. But if it’s in your job description to claim that it is, you’ve got to try something. So you bend, fold, spindle, and mutilate the language in order to make what is not so into what is so. It’s all St. Elmo’s Fire. (I wrote about this a bit in a G-File from 2002 called “Orwell’s Orphans,” and I think it holds up pretty well).

Order Now

Every few years, a debate breaks out in the Corner about whether the miracle adhesive technology that can solve any problem should be called “duct tape” or “duck tape.” I have no desire to wade back into the Great Schism myself. But whatever you want to call it, I think we can all agree that it could do the job of the “Goatee Saver” at a fraction of the price.

You’ve got to check out the picture. First, the dude looks like he’s halfway transformed into a Borg. Second, his lady friend looks like there’s nothing she digs more than to watch her man dry shave with a big piece of plastic stuck to his mouth. It’s as if she’s saying with her bedroom eyes, “My cyberkinetic moron boy toy is going to slice open his face, and that’s why I want him cleaned and perfumed and brought to my tent.”

Watch It Now If you’re interested, here’s the video for the panel I moderated at AEI on Wednesday. This was my first experience moderating a panel of any kind, so be gentle.

That’s all for this week. I’m off to happy fun land.