You may be watching the Oscars, but I’m reading about cow-fucking.

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How many of these did you own?

This Boston Globe story on Mitt Romney is pretty unbelievable. It assails the governor for his out-of-state speeches and runs a bevy of quotes by Democrats who are unhappy with him. But the cherry on top is that the authors end with a bit of political analysis about whether or not Romney’s strategy can work:

”Romney has put himself between a rock and a hard place because he is trying to pursue two incompatible strategies: To run for reelection in a socially progressive state, and running a national campaign appealing to right-wing social conservatives,” said state Democratic Party chairman Philip W. Johnston. ”I think it’s virtually impossible to do both. Only a political genius could do both, and I don’t know anyone who’s accused Mitt Romney of being that.”

The Globe‘s analysis of the situation comes not from a poli-sci professor, or political expert, but from the state Democratic party chairman? Are you kidding? And they end the piece with his ad hominem attack, without giving Romney a chance to respond? Disgraceful.

Paul Mirengoff has discovered the soul-destroying truth about television.

I first realized this truth a few years ago. I had spent the better part of a summer working on a gigantic piece of investigative journalism about a financial scam at a ritzy Virginia country club where a bunch of high-powered D.C. personages were taken in by a small clique of Hawaiian grifters. It was a great story. When the piece finally appeared in print, it promptly disappeared. No letters to the editor, no notes from readers. Or family. Or friends.

That same week I appeared on a cable-news show for 30 seconds, debating a 20-something girl whom I had never heard of, on a topic so inane I can’t recall it now. The next day, I got phone calls from everyone I’ve ever met: friends, family, acquaintances from college. They were all incredibly impressed, not because of anything I said, but because I had been on TV. For the first time in my professional life, I went into a deep depression.

Print journalism leads inexorably to television. There’s no way around it. The real money–and the real exposure–is in front of the camera. For a while I tried to fight this gravity, but in the end I gave in because the ugly truth is: I like it when my friends and family think I’m doing something interesting with my job.

The lesson is that if you’re going to live in the world of writing, you have to understand that while television gives you all of the peripheral rewards, it is neither substance nor sustenance. Writers who confuse television with those things turn into jerks. You know who I’m talking about.

Conversely, the writers who don’t give in are better for it. The four journalists I admire most in the world (Andy Ferguson, David Grann, Matt Labash, Anthony Lane) never do TV. For this purity of heart, they deserve our admiration.

Charles Johnson notes that the first link on the AARP’s Social Security blog is to Daily Kos.

Immediately following the 2004 election, I was talking to a friend who’s a Democratic activist and I told him that in order for the Dems to become competitive nationally, they’d have to jettison the Kos-Moore wing of the party. My friend insisted it was impossible because the Kos-Moore wing is the Democratic party. The ascension of Howard Dean and this AARP link to Kos now suggest that my friend was correct.

But I’m still not buying it. If you’ll remember, Howard Dean was the future of the Democratic party for almost a year–until he got clocked 70 to 18 percent in the Iowa caucuses. (The 70 percent was the combined total of the two establishment candidates, Kerry and Edwards.)

In politics, you can do a whole lot with smoke and mirrors. You can puff up movements and people, making them seem bigger than they really are. But elections strip away all of the hype and reduce illusions to brutal, numerical truth.

We’ve already seen the Kos Democrats puff themselves up once. We’ve seen them looking invincible. And then the election came, and it turned out there was no there there. Now the cycle has started again. I won’t be surprised if, after the next national election, we find out that the Kos Democrats are still running about 50 points behind centrist Democrats even in their own primaries.

And when that happens, Democrats will kick themselves for being suckered into the hype, again. Peter Beinart has his work cut out for him.

First off, thanks for the email wishes for my speedy recovery.

Secondly, I did want to mention one other movie I did watch the other night, this time in the company of my wife: Fatal Attraction. We had both seen it before but this time around, it struck me as more creepy than erotic. (I first saw it when I was in high school and what resonated the most was the sturdiness of the kitchen sink. Moen. Buy it for looks. Buy it for sex.) There was also no question (at least for me) that Anne Archer is hotter than Glenn Close. That said, Close’s portrayal of Alex Forrest was terrifying. By day she was a professional (wait–wasn’t she an editor?!) and by night, she was certifiable.

“Let that serve as a cautionary tale,” warned the Mrs. I said the same goes for her, if, um, she decides to have an affair with a lesbian who may turn out to be psycho.

Lisa de Moraes on Quentin Tarantino’s decision to direct the season-finale of CSI:

CBS actually is the last of the major broadcast networks to secure the services of Tarantino, who, by sheer coincidence, always find himself “into the whole mythology” of only the most popular shows on TV rather than, say, the really good but struggling series that might benefit enormously from his patronage — shows like “Arrested Development” . . .

You’ll recall last week’s article on Belgium’s Bush urinal sticker. Now it seems that one Belgian has

filed suit against the makers of the offending sticker. He will almost certainly lose his case, but the motive is sweet. The gentleman served under a U.S. commander during his time in the military and notes of his family:

My father was a policeman during World War II, and for his activities in the resistance he received several medals. His brother survived a concentration camp but suffered severe physical problems for the rest of his life. Look at the huge number of graves of American soldiers, sometimes of age 17 or less, who gave their lives for our freedom. I am really ashamed to be a Belgian after this humiliation and insult to a friendly nation that has helped us. It was not their war, but still they gave their lives to protect our democracy.