Another exhibit demonstrating that people seem to have recently decided that any distinctiveness is a sign of psychological deformity (see my previous post). This time, a family faced with an adult son who liked being alone put him in therapy for four years. To cure what? I have no idea. The story ends particularly badly, with an attempted suicide, but even if that hadn't happened, there's still something dreadfully wrong going on here.

I'm a little wary of these light, pseudo-psychological pieces in newspapers. But this kind of treatment for non-existent illnesses doesn't sound like an isolated incident to me. And, tangentially, if it's not, it's really no wonder we end up spending so much on healthcare. Maybe, indeed, all our extra spending is stuff like this combined with superior end of life care.

Well, last night was clearly the best Gilmore Girls episode of the season so far, and one of the best Veronica Mars episodes, too. A few thoughts below: feel free to leave your own.

1: Did Veronica go visit Claire in her dorm room at the end of the episode? Why is Claire in a dorm room? Wasn't she expelled? Alternative hypothesis: there are apartment buildings near Hearst that look a heck of a lot like dorm rooms.

2: It was interesting, although not necessarily bad, that Veronica called the sexual assault (forced violation with an egg) a rape, rather than an "assault" or even a sexual assault.

3: Meanwhile, Rory Gilmore has just regained nearly everything I ever loved about her-- acidity without ill will, independence without stupidity-- and acted about fifteen years older than her mother.

4: My girlfriend predicted most of the April storyline, although she thought it would be menstruation rather than appendicitis, which to my mind would have been a slightly better pick. Maybe they're saving that for another day.

Enough with Mike. Let's just bash two easier targets. First, the Times, which has allowed a ferociously snarky piece about Marshall Wittmann to appear in their news (!) section [the exclamation point almost feels like an idiocy at this point: who expects the Times to be unbiased?]. Sample quote, from its lede:

Except that the said spokesman, Marshall Wittmann, is one of the great career vagabonds, ideological contortionists and political pontificators ever to inflict himself on a city full of them. To say that Mr. Wittmann defies classification is like saying Paris Hilton defies modesty. But in his peripatetic soul, he is a Washington Original, a man without a political country going to work for a senator without a political party. Mr. Lieberman, a longtime Democrat of Connecticut who was re-elected as an independent and calls himself an “Independent Democrat,” has not ruled out becoming a Republican. Mr. Wittmann, meanwhile, is a Trotskyite turned Zionist turned Reaganite turned bipartisan irritant turned pretty much everything in between — including chief lobbyist for the Christian Coalition, the only Jew who has ever held that position.

But there is old media bullshit, and then there is new media bullshit.

Matt Yglesias, everybody, whose pompous unseriousness hits new levels of teeth-punching self-righteous bloviation. (He is like Ackerman, but less knowledgeable about music). Where to begin? Let us just dispense with feeling regret about the war and sadness about the seeming death of a brief liberal moment in the Middle East that resembled in its barricades and elections the halcyon days of 1848. That's for an unserious, war-hawk publication like The New Republic rather than Yglesias' finely tuned foreign policy organ, The American Prospect. In this gem of an article, Yglesias expresses such careful foreign policy prescriptions as "operat[ing] through legitimate mechanisms" and "operat[ing] with sensitivity." Well that's a hell of a lot better than TNR's advocacy that foreign policy in this country not return to Baker-Scowcroft realism. I mean, Yglesias is right, his prescriptions are so much more specific than The New Republic's entire special issue, entitled "Iraq: What Next?" After all, Yglesias calls for "rules of the road"; he equates Iran and India when talking about the Non-Proliferation Treaty. What a mensch.

We are, on the way to left-"realist" foreignpolicy candyland, treated to the usual trash of Yglesias' thinking about politics in the Middle East, which is long on innuendo and short on reason. Let's fisk:

Lebanese Arabs found that the United States' enthusiasm for their new government didn't extend to protecting it from wide-ranging Israeli military strikes on their civilian infrastructure or efforts to strangle their economy. Lebanon, it seems, faced a mandate not only to restore democracy, but to initiate a new round of civil war by somehow disarming Hezbollah.

Thus spake Yglesias-ta. And yet, I thought he endorsed "operat[ing] through legitimate mechanisms"? I suppose that allowing two sovereign nations (Iran & Syria), one of which was specifically enjoined from moving troops or armaments into the Lebanon after it had assassinated a popular reformist politician (Syria), fight a proxy war through a terrorist group (Hezbollah) using long range missiles (Fajr-3) and other banned weaponry (including the Chinese C-802) on a country which had pulled out of Lebanon unilaterally (Israel, 2000), and not encouraging the disarmament of a terrorist group (Hezbollah), said disarmament which is a point of international and domestic Lebanese law (UN Resolutions 1701 and 1680 and 1559, the Ta'if accords) is completely legitimate. My mistake.

Should we try again? Yglesias bombasts:

For years, Bush had informed them that no pressure would be brought to bear on their Israeli occupiers to settle the territorial issue until the Palestinian Authority reformed its internal procedures and ended the corrupt and authoritarian rule of the Fatah Movement. Eventually, Yasser Arafat died, elections were held, and the main Palestinian opposition movement, Hamas, won. Palestinians were then informed that there would be no negotiations. Having been ordered to vote, you see, they voted for the wrong party.

But you see the style, yes? Bush's participation in the Quartet, his calls for settlement withdrawal, a policy that was begun with George Mitchell, carried through the farce of Oslo, engaged in by Barak and Clinton at Camp David: Yglesias reduces this to no pressure, the Israelis to occupiers. Yglesias describes the Palestinian Authority's corruption only indirectly, as if it were a serious political group, rather than a collection of warring factions held together by European money, whose only goal at times seemed the perpetuation of statelessness. As Leon Wieseltier put it to Kushner (although Yglesias is also a worthy addressee), "if he really seeks to understand Middle Eastern terrorism, he might ponder the extent to which statelessness, too, can mean fucking people over." But whatever, that's okay, because, as Yglesias informs us (with the calm interpolation of "Eventually, Yasser Arafat died," serving as the only admission of the Authority's revanchist irredentism) the Palestinians voted for the wrong side, and then we Americans took our ball and went home. That this interpretation of Condoleeza's shuttle diplomacy, the tragedy of the Gaza post Sharon's unilateral withdrawal, the refusal of Hamas to recognize Israel's right to exist or renounce terror, the continuing behind-the-scene negotiations between Abu Mazen and Hamas, that all of this could pass for American rejectionism in the Prospect illustrates what one can make of Yglesias' thought and that of the magazine which publishes him.

Friends in the know tell me that Yglesias is at work on a book about serious issues. One only hopes that it is about Washington Wizards' basketball, about which he also knows little, but can do less damage.