In light of the fear and loathing, encountering a truly excellent development in Pakistan is doubly pleasurable. First, because excellence, by its rarity, deserves celebration. And second, because it comes from a supposed area of unmitigated darkness. This development is a show on Pakistani television called Coke Studio. First broadcast in 2008, Coke Studio is a studio-based music show with a full orchestra and killer production values. PBS viewers of Austin City Limits and especially Soundstage will find the format familiar. However, in its second season, Coke Studio has dispensed with the studio audience. The resulting reduction of spontaneity is more than made up by the slicker production values.

So, what’s so special about Coke Studio? One way to answer that question is to see a couple of standouts. Exhibit A is the fabulous (in the classic sense of the word) Sufi itinerant Saieen Zahoor. On Aik Alif, Zahoor is accompanied by the Paki-Pop band Noori, who lend a modern smoothness to the archetypically rough-hewn mystical lyrics of Bulleh Shah, the pre-eminent eighteenth-century Panjabi Sufi. Zahoor is reputed to have left home at 13 to realize a mystic dream. Though it’s tempting to think of Zahoor as being in the mold of Delta Blues singers such as Robert Johnson, his class of illiterate, free, folk mystic has no real analog in the West. (The actual gypsy Reshma comes to mind as another exemplar. But assertively secular, singing mainly of lost loves and broken hearts, Reshma’s oeuvre is reminiscent of a Lucinda Williams.)

While I’m no reflexive fan of musical fusion, in this performance Zahoor’s dreamy raggedness and Noori’s Putomayo flavoring (“hip and saucy"!”) combine beautifully in the smoothly professional blender of Coke Studio. My translation from the Panjabi is limited by a weak grasp of the language or its melody. Yet the poet’s contemplative spirit shines through the ungainly verbiage.

The song below – Husn-e-haqiqi - is also a spiritual kafi in Panjabi, but there the resemblance ends. The words belong to Khwaja Farid, a nineteenth century poet. The singer, Arieb Azhar, is anything but a wandering mendicant. Rather, he’s a vodka-loving, Croat-Pakistani producer-musician with a definite awareness of his exotic stylishness. It will surprise nobody to learn that Huan-e-haqiqi has become somewhat of an anthem among subcontinental youth.

Though those two performances are the most interesting, Coke Studio’s episode archive is a great place to dip into a spectrum of modern Pakistani music from straight-ahead studio-folk to backup babes working over The Monkees! Anyone sampling this musical feast will undoubtedly find much to be curious about:

• Is this level of sophisticated programming emblematic of Pakistani television?
• Does the program reflect a purely urban, cosmopolitan sensibility? How does it play in Pakistani Peoria?
• How does “Pakistani music” fit with the wide and deep Indian musical tradition?
• What kind of crazily liberal Muslims were the Sufis, and did “regular Muslims (as heard and seen nightly on Fox News) IED them out of existence?

I refer anyone interested in these, and other, questions about Pakistan to the very accessible All Things Pakistan blog. For me, this musical encounter is pleasure enough.

Some people are not having manners
this I am always observing
For example the other day I find
I am needing Soap
for ordinary washing myself purposes
So I am going to one small shop
nearby in my lane and I am asking
for well-known brand soapThe shopman he’s giving me soap
but I am finding it defective version
So I am saying very politely –
though in Hindi I’m saying it,
and my Hindi is not so good as my English
Please to excuse me
but this is defective version of well-known brand soap
That shopman is saying
and very rudely he is saying it
What is wrong with soap?

Still I am keeping my temper
and repeating very smilingly
Please to note this defect in Soap
and still he is denying the truth
So I am getting very angry that time and with loud voice I am saying
YOU ARE BLIND OR WHAT?

Now he is shouting
you are calling me blind or what?
Come outside and I will show you

Then I am shouting
What you will show me
Which I haven’t got already?
It is a vulgar thing to say
But I am saying it.

Now small crowd is collecting
and the shopman is much bigger than me,
and I am not caring so much
for small defect in well-known brand soap
So I am saying
Alright OK Alright OK
this time I will take
but not next time

Nissim Ezekiel
from: Very Indian Poems in Indian English

I’m political! Who knew!!

Professionally, 2008 was indeterminate. Muddy. My experience starting a new venture is hard to compare with others’, especially given the amorphousness of consulting. But I confess that the ghosts of (regular) paychecks past have visited me more than once. I described the ups and downs of being self-employed to a childhood friend. Tridib put my ambivalence in stark relief by recalling our shared petite bourgeoisie upbringing in India. “Let’s face it,” he said, “you are basically a government servant type, as am I.” Ah, the bracing bluntness of old friends. Nevertheless, I remain determined to fight the entrepreneurial fight!

On the personal front, 2008 has been a year of highs. Chief among them was the opportunity to deepen and broaden my flying logbook. I flew two near-transcontinental trips – from California to Duluth, MN, thence to Springfield, IL and back, and a few weeks later, from California to Appleton, WI and back for that incomparable fly-in, Airventure. Each trip consumed an entire day, with actual flying time being in the 10+ hour range. The autopilot engaged and the plane purring contentedly, the long flight legs provided a great opportunity to observe and reflect.

Flying, as has been oft-observed, is humanity’s second-oldest collective dream, up there with immortality. To be above it all, to “slip the surly bonds of earth”, is divine sensation indeed. But flying is only partly sensual or spiritual. What it provides is a rarity in our circumscribed modern existence: a truly existential experience. No other enterprise places one so actively in the moment: existence precedes essence. The pilot’s actions determine the lived reality.

This connection is far more visceral than people who only fly commercial realize. In the few moments of take-off in a small place, you feel the earth’s slipping grasp as you as you escape her embrace. Within a few minutes, you feel her below you change from protective habitation to an incomprehensibly alien desolation wilderness.

And then, there is the magical experience of being in charge. A trained private pilot, in a well-maintained aircraft, is unambiguously in command. Not the air traffic controller. Not his boss or boss’s boss. Not even – for once – his wife! Before the flight, he decides on the route and stops. During the flight, he decides how to address the vicissitudes of weather and circumstance. After the flight, he decides what he takes from that particular flight by how he analyzes and logs it. Very little in life is so purpose-driven.

After all that analysis though, I return to the notion that the attraction of flight is elemental. Purely child’s play. The Kiwi poet Allen Curnow expresses it beautifully in A Time of Day:

---

A small charge for admission. Believers only.
Who present their tickets where a five-
barred farm gate grapes on its chain and will file on to the thinly grassed paddock.
Out of the afternoon pearl-dipped light the
dung-green biplane descendedand will return later, and later, late as
already it is. We are all born
of cloud again, in a caulof linen lashed to the air-frame of the age
smelling of the scorched raw castor oil
nine whirling cylinders pelt

up-country-smelling senses with, narcotic
joyrides, these helmeted barnstormers
heavier scented than hay,

harnesses, horsepiss, fleeces, phosphates and milk
under the fingernails. I’m pulling at
my father’s hand Would the little

boy for selling the tickets? One helmet smiles
bending over yes, please let me,
my father hesitates, I

pull and I don’t let go.

---

Happy 2009!

Interest, because the world is clearly at an inflection point - the old order changeth, giving way to the new, etc. How Americans choose to deal with the changing reality is reflected in their political choices. And who is elected to lead America will undoubtedly have a major impact on history.

Pleasure, or more accurately - schadenfreude - because while presidential politics is the highest stakes game there is, its principals are so nakedly trying to learn as they go along, slipping and sliding to political perdition along the way. Not just John “My Friends” McCain, but also Carly “Not Qualified to Run HP” Fiorina, Jeremiah “My Kingdom for a Mic” Wright, the “monstrous” Samantha Powers, the ever-hapless Tucker Bounds, and many more.

And finally, concern, because if these “leaders” don’t know what they are doing, who does? I feel a bit like Sherman McCoy in Bonfire of the Vanities:

And in that moment Sherman made the terrible discovery that men make about their fathers sooner or later. For the first time he realized that the man before him was not an aging father but a boy, a boy much like himself, a boy who grew up and had a child of his own and, as best he could, out of a sense of duty and, perhaps, love, adopted a role called Being a Father so that his child would have something mythical and infinitely important: a Protector, who would keep a lid on all the chaotic and catastrophic possibilities of life. And now that boy, that good actor, had grown old and fragile and tired, wearier than ever at the thought of trying to hoist the Protector’s armor back onto his shoulders again, now, so far down the line.

David Brooks, Ross Douthat, and a few other pundits are currently marvelous exemplars in a slow-mo “five stages of grief” type of enlightenment. (David Frum is the only pundit who instantly recognized the light at the end of the Rupublican Convention as that of a freight train.) These folks started off rah-rah-ing Palin. Since then, they’ve been talking themselves and their readers back off the ledge.

(Parenthetically, it’s hard enough being a journalist and committing your judgments to forever-Googleable bits. Add to that the pressure of having to opine in real-time, on television and blogs, and you have a logorrheic masochist’s dream profession.)

Others - sad to say they’re the majority - doggedly continue to ascribe the relentlessly unfolding messiness of the Palin selection on the ever-convenient “liberal media”. (Parenthetically, it remains surprisingly common for American commentators, even many who have traveled the world and theoretically gained perspective on the domestic US scene, to fail to understand the fundamental conservativeness of mainstream American media.) My Facebook friend and Forbes Online editor Rich Karlgaard is in the latter camp. Rich has even resorted to selectively quoting from the firebrand narcissist Camille Paglia’s Salon column on Palin’s supposed ur-feminism to bolster his repeated contention that Palin is a “good thing” for McCain and (scarily) for the country.

Until recently, I would have rolled my eyes at attempts to square the circle by an otherwise intelligent man. But I was reminded of something another lifelong Republican friend (the improbably named Pierre Redmond) once told me - “Sanjay, to do anything meaningful you have to pick a team. You can’t go through life evaluating everything everytime.” (That’s a rough paraphrase.) I believe that a misplaced “team affiliation” lies at the root of the wilful-seeming analytical blindness displayed by Palin-boosters.

To begin with, you pick a team - in Rich’s case “free-market conservativism” - that has an internally consistent analytical framework. Should the framework be resilient enough, it allows you to build on previous analysis without having to revert to first principles. That is all to the good. But what happens when your team decides to change games? Alert observes figure this out quickly. It’s not difficult. But what is difficult is deciding what to do next. Should you switch teams? Should you attempt to influence your team to reset the game? I figure that the more closely you emphasize with your team’s “brand”, the easier it is to go along with the new game. And it’s human nature to rely on brands rather than the reality behind them.

Breaking with one’s team is wrenching at best, unthinkable for most. It isn’t having to reexamine ideological underpinnings that’s the worst. It’s the Solomonic cleaving of social assumptions - old friends who now disapprove of your views, your freakish and presumptive new fellow travelers, etc. - that present the greatest disruption risk. Only the boldest, the true free-thinkers, are thus capable.

I’ve long found there to be a structural inverse correlation between free thought and modern conservatism. The finest counter-example to that notion was William F Buckley Jr. I’ve also been impressed by Andrew Sullivan, a prolific blogger at The Atlantic, even though his book The Conservative Soul: How we Lost it, How to Get it Back, is ultimately unpersuasive in its attempt to redirect the current of American conservatism.

Today I read a remarkable article by Wick Allison, the former editor of National Review (another WFB connection!) titled A Conservative for Obama. Its defense of conservatism and its rationale for a break with the Bush-McCain brand is remarkably cogent. (Its dour description of liberalism, not so much. But that’s a quibble.) Here’s Allison’s core argument for ditching his team:

Conservatism to me is less a political philosophy than a stance, a recognition of the fallibility of man and of man’s institutions. Conservatives respect the past not for its antiquity but because it represents, as G.K. Chesterton said, the democracy of the dead; it gives the benefit of the doubt to customs and laws tried and tested in the crucible of time. Conservatives are skeptical of abstract theories and utopian schemes, doubtful that government is wiser than its citizens, and always ready to test any political program against actual results…. But today it is so-called conservatives who are cemented to political programs when they clearly don’t work. The Bush tax cuts - a solution for which there was no real problem and which he refused to end even when the nation went to war - led to huge deficit spending and a $3 trillion growth in the federal debt. Facing this, John McCain pumps his “conservative” credentials by proposing even bigger tax cuts. Meanwhile, a movement that once fought for limited government has presided over the greatest growth of government in our history. That is not conservatism; it is profligacy using conservatism as a mask.

Today it is conservatives, not liberals, who talk with alarming bellicosity about making the world “safe for democracy.” It is John McCain who says America’s job is to “defeat evil,” a theological expansion of the nation’s mission that would make George Washington cough out his wooden teeth.

This kind of conservatism, which is not conservative at all, has produced financial mismanagement, the waste of human lives, the loss of moral authority, and the wreckage of our economy that McCain now threatens to make worse.

Towards the end of the article, Obama quotes from Robert Kennedy’s “Soul of America” speech from the ‘68 campaign. Delivered less than three month before his assassination, the speech has the trademark Kennedy humor, a characteristic appreciation of history, and most of all, a richly poetic vein doomed to lie fallow in American politics until Senator Obama’s emergence at the 2004 Democratic convention.

Obama picks one of his “favorite quotes” from the following wonderful riff on the limitations of Economics:

---

[the] Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

---

That is, indeed, a clever juxtaposition. It’s not difficult to see why Obama, RFK’s stylistic descendant, highlights the section. However lyrical though, it is far from the rhetorical gut of the speech. That is RFK’s truth-telling of the country’s two major challenges - Vietnam and its attendant unrest and alienation, and domestic poverty:

---

…we as a people, we as a people, are strong enough, we are brave enough to be told the truth of where we stand. This country needs honesty and candor in its political life and from the President of the United States. But I don’t want to run for the presidency - I don’t want America to make the critical choice of direction and leadership this year without confronting that truth. I don’t want to win support of votes by hiding the American condition in false hopes or illusions. I want us to find out the promise of the future, what we can accomplish here in the United States, what this country does stand for and what is expected of us in the years ahead. And I also want us to know and examine where we’ve gone wrong. And I want all of us, young and old, to have a chance to build a better country and change the direction of the United States of America.

---

RFK spends the rest of his speech - some 2800 words - describing Appalachian poverty, the mess in Vietnam and laying out the hard work ahead.

Critiquing the recent Rick Warren theofest starring the two major party candidates, my wife observed that Obama “dumbed down” his delivery for the (largely right-leaning) evangelicals, that Obama soft-pedaled to avoid antagonizing the (largely white) audience. Her comments reminded me of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ similar complaint about Senator Obama’s timidity:

---

Obama can’t bring the same moralism to bear on the wider he country which he applies to the black community, that he can’t point out to Americans that oil prices going up is a good thing. Polluting the world your children will inherit is a moral issue. A system that allows people to buy homes with no money down is a moral issue. Telling people that the best thing they can do after the worst terrorist attack ever on American soil, is go out an shop is a moral issue.I hear all of this talk about Obama as a post-racial candidate–but that only applies when its time for white people to pat themselves on the back. A truly post-racial candidate would be free to preach morals not just to African-Americans, but to all Americans.

---

The parallels between RFK’s and Obama’s respective situations are remarkable: Vietnam vs. Iraq, widespread poverty vs. the current economic meltdown. Perhaps Obama should hew less to advisors-generated tactics and focus more on speaking his mind a la RFK. Maybe “the real Obama” is more like RFK than Hillary Clinton.

So, if how third-party observers choose to use their money tells us what they really think, can the same be said for campaign expenditures? (Key: Expenditures as opposed to campaign rhetoric.) Now, we could dissect the strategy of either presidential campaign (e.g., the famous McCain Strategy Briefing). But we have to contend with incomplete information, possible misdirection, and sample bias. It may be more instructive to analyze the financial actions of the most interested market actors: congressional candidates.

We want to know - where are congressional candidates up for election putting their hard-bought campaign dollars? Are Republican candidates, for instance, tying themselves to the GOP candidate? Or are they assuming a posture of independence from the party establishment? (It goes without saying that all candidates in the 2008 cycle are either attacking or ignoring President Bush.) How much of each candidate’s campaign expenditure co-opts the Obama theme of “change”, how much focuses on the candidate’s individual brand, how much on party affiliation, how much on the economy, etc.

From data on each candidate’s media expenditure - along a breakdown similar to that implied above - we can find regression coefficients that essentially mimic the market price for each “meme”. These market prices could be aggregated regionally or nationally or through district segmentation (”hard red”, “leans blue”, etc.). Extrapolating based on such prices at the state level should provide a better forecast of the electoral dominos than opinion survey-based polling.

An illustrative instance comes from the following ad released by Senator Gordon Smith (R-OR). He is not only allocating dollars to the “bipartisanship” meme, he is explicitly attempting to leverage the Obama brand.

It’s mid-morning, the week after the Ides of March. Homeward bound from Las Vegas, this time on the northern route over Mammoth and Yosemite. Approached from the east, the ridgelines of the Eastern Sierra run uniformly higher than 10,000 feet, the peaks over 13,000. Abeam the Casa Diablo Mountains, I begin negotiating with 3CD about climbing to 12,500 feet – to stay clear of the high terrain and appropriately high over the protected John Muir Wilderness Area – and turn westward from my previous northwest heading.

I have been dropped by Joshua Approach; the high desert is too topographically challenging and too sparsely trafficked for low altitude radar coverage. No need to talk, I turn up the volume as Amanda fades out and Joni sings her signature sepia blues

I was driving across the burning desert
When I spotted six jet planes
Leaving six white vapor trails across the bleak terrain
…
The drone of flying engines
Is a song so wild and blue
It scrambles time and seasons if it gets thru to you

An unexpected alarm! At first I don’t even recognize that it’s the cell phone and stare at the gauges in confusion. Here? I’m getting a phone call at 11,000 feet over Lake Crowley? Hail technology! It’s my neighbor Bob, likely calling about our joint foray into commercial real estate barony. We have just begun the process of unraveling our partnership less than six months after anteing up for a “sure thing” office property. Dreams and false alarms.

I turn away from Bob’s call and begin looking for evidence of potentially interesting winds funneling through the high pass now straight ahead. Better to go up to 13,500 feet until clear of the pass. 3CD doesn’t protest but wallows hypoxically: till you get there yourself you never really know. Mono Lake, a shimmering mirror on the right, reveals a serration of inverted peaks.

A ghost of aviation
She was swallowed by the sky
Or by the sea, like me she had a dream to fly
Like icarus ascending
On beautiful foolish arms

Unexpectedly, I feel the prickling of tears. Could I be hypoxic? But I’m not remotely euphoric. I square 42 in my head without using my flight pad. After a few minutes I struggle out with 1764. No worse than I do at sea level. Not hypoxic, I think. Music-induced nostalgia; the response that can well me up during an Olympics commercials. I’ve spent my whole life in clouds at icy altitude, and looking down on everything.

I switch the heading bug again, this time to 220⁰. Time to stop scribbling on the pad and re-lean the engine. 3CD smooths out at 8.1 gallons per hour, but cylinder 4 is still giving me the finger on the EMAX display. I turn my attention out and below. The ground is high and close now. Frozen lakes. A ski gondola hut reminds me of James Bond. It’s only March, so snow everywhere. I’m over the pass. Yosemite is ahead to the right. I reprogram the GPS direct to Mariposa airport and twist the heading bug.

I was 10 when I first saw an airplane at close range, Didi was on standby and she let me check out an Indian Airlines HS-748 “Avro” at Palam on a foggy Delhi morning. Today, here over the Sierra Nevada, it is severe clear. Ridgelines to each side and far to the west. Then nothing. The world ends. Alison sings.

Now that I found you
I built my world around you

Soon Joni is back. This time she’s obsessing improbably over boom-boom-pachyderms in a blue motel room. The ground below me is covered only in white bedspreads. A small open field below has four pines marching across it like an advance column supporting a Sherman battalion in the Ardennes.

Half Dome and the deep groove of Yosemite Valley below and Joan is right, there’s nothin’ I wish to be ownin. I’ve been up high for 25 minutes now; I need to bleed off 9,000 feet in the next 20 minutes. Mt. Boullion moves to the center of the windshield. I reset the autopilot, disconnecting the attitude hold. Emmylou flew here once, I’m sure.

I don’t want to hear a love song
I got on this airplane just to fly
And I know there’s life below
…
The last time I felt like this
It was in the wilderness and the canyon was on fire
And I stood on the mountain in the night and I watched it burn

In summer this is prime forest fire country abuzz with air tankers and muddy with smoke. But not this early in the year. Besides, as of January, the Sierra snow pack is at 160% of its historic levels. This will be a very good year.

Mariposa does not have a control tower. But it does have cheap aviation gasoline and a very nice municipally-run pilot lounge. 15 miles out, I announce my position and intentions on the airport frequency. A student pilot with a lovely Spanish accent is working on getting her landings just right. Funny that getting back on the ground without bending metal is the trickiest part of learning to fly. I will learn later that she began flight training at this airport, moved away, began working with another instructor, and now returns on weekends to finish up with her original instructor.

I’ve been in the air for over an hour and a half, hydrating actively to combat the thin dry air. I feel an imminent urge to inspect the excellent facilities in the lounge. On cue, Hiromi peps into Desert Moon. I ignore the discomfort in my ears and steepen the descent to 1500 feet per minute. Ahead, I see the student pilot touch the runway, and then her engine roars. Slowly, her 172 wins its struggle with gravity.

Without digressing into an enjoyable recitation of WFB’s many qualities as a conservative stylist, his greatest gift was a witty facility with language. Dick Cavett wrote of WFB’s first appearance on his television talk show:

---

… I … find myself in the daunting world of hosting a talk show. I had seen a lot of Buckley on his own show — a formidable presence on the screen — and there he was on my next week’s guest list.

Because it was Buckley, I was nervous in a way I don’t think I ever was before or since. If you’d asked me what exactly I was nervous about, I doubt that I could have defined it.

Then I found out.

Conversation seemed to be moving along nicely when, in reference to something he had just brought up, I said, “I’m not really familiar with that.” Back came, “You don’t seem to be familiar with anything.”

Wham!

I think I nearly lost consciousness. It was a rotten thing to say to a beginner.

---

The exchange keys into WFB’s ability to torque a vapid and entirely common packet of mainstream communication (“I’m not really familiar with that”) into a Wildean stab of ridicule. WFB applied this ability to deconstruct received wisdom to commenting on American politics through the second half of the 20th century. Though he was, in a sense, a counter-example to my creative => liberal theory, his leverage was limited by the un-American exoticness of his expression. Cavett relates that the (presumably Liberal) college professor who alerted him to WFB’s brilliance went on to say that “If he had a little more of the common touch, he’d be a truly dangerous man.” The professor was surely referring to more than just WFB’s use of language — WFB was a notorious name-dropper comically prone to being impressed by celebrity — but his high-falutin’ speech was likely Exhibit A.

In his recent column in The Economist, subtitled Why conservatives are happier than liberals, “Lexington” quotes Syracuse University economist Arthur Brooks’ research finding that:

---

In 2004 Americans who called themselves “conservative” or “very conservative” were nearly twice as likely to tell pollsters they were “very happy” as those who considered themselves “liberal” or “very liberal” (44% versus 25%). One might think this was because liberals were made wretched by George Bush. But the data show that American conservatives have been consistently happier than liberals for at least 35 years.

---

Explanations are offered - conservatives are more likely to be married, parents, and churchgoers, and that “the conservative world view is more conducive to happiness than the liberal one”. Strangely, Lexington does not mention the obvious: that people happier with the status quo are more likely to be conservative. Contentment breeds conservatism, not necessarily the reverse.

Professor Brooks also reaches another interesting conclusion through his survey-based research: that partisans are happier than moderates:

---

Some 35% of those who call themselves “extremely liberal” say they are very happy, against only 22% of ordinary liberals. For conservatives, the gap is smaller: 48% to 43%. Extremists are happy, Mr Brooks reckons, because they are certain they are right. Alas, this often leads them to conclude that the other side is not merely wrong, but evil. Some two-thirds of America’s far left and half of the far right say they dislike not only the other side’s ideas, but also the people who hold them.

---

Intuitively, this seems more reasonable, if summarily disheartening. (Caveat: I have not read the original research. A brief look at Prof. Brooks’ column titles - yes I know editors write taglines, not columnists - that include Liberal Hatemongers and The Upside of Bush’s Foreign Policy creates the suspicion that we aren’t dealing with a detached observer. Then again, perhaps it is better to be happy than to be true.)