ORIANA FALLACI is expressing her contempt for anti-globalist demonstrators in Florence.

I DO NOT APPROVE OF FISTICUFFS, but I find it hard to fully disapprove of this.

UPDATE: Reader Trent Telenko writes:

You missed the real point.

We just saw a Hollywood director — as “Blue Zone” as you can get – play a violent, honor impugned, Jacksonian, at the cost of his movie’s distribution in the British film market. He did this when an “idiotarian” British distributor said Americans deserved the 9/11 attacks just as much as the Israelis deserve children-suicide attacks from the Palestinians while within arms reach.

It is time for you to begin a “Jacksonian Watch” because this will not be the last time this happens.

Walter Russell Mead’s book “Strange Provenance” goes on at great lengths about the “Jacksonian tradition” in American foreign policy as he describes it and three other “foreign policy schools.”

I prefer the term “cultural meme” because Americans are a mixture of all four of Mead’s schools. The ‘Jacksonian traits’ of Mead were also touched on in two recent American social histories. The first is by Gary Gerstle, “The American Crucible,” and second is by David Kennedy, “Freedom From Fear.”

Mead points out in his book that the Jacksonian traits surface most strongly when America is at war.

Trent Telenko also suggests that political correctness in the media makes actual violence along these lines more likely: “Those who make the rhetorical defense of western culture impossible, make the violent defense of it by Americans inevitable.” His comments along these lines are interesting, but too long to excerpt here. I agree, though, that the setting and participants make this brawl particularly noteworthy.

ISNTAPUNDIT reports from Salon’s Table Talk, where people are unhappy about the election results.

TONY PIERCE is selling a book based on his blog. I just ordered one.

WILLIAM SJOSTROM IS WATCHING ROBERT FISK’S ROCK. Closely.

UPDATE: Moira Breen has a Fisk-related comment, too.

BELLESILES UPDATE: Here’s a Scripps column by Jay Ambrose that gives Clayton Cramer some credit for discovering Bellesiles’ misdeeds.

CLICHE-O-RAMA: Steven Chapman is explaining British movie cliches, Teresa Nielsen Hayden is explaining aboriginal-culture movie cliches, and Sour Bob is trying to figure out which cliche he’s living.

DON’T SEND HATEMAIL TO THE ACIDMAN unless you are prepared for the consequences. I can’t tell you how often I’ve wanted to post something like that, but this is a family blog.

COPY-PROTECTED CDS NOT WORKING FOR YOU? BMG doesn’t care, and neither does EMI. Note to Karl Rove — it’s stuff like this that explains why Big Entertainment is such a good target for efforts that will demonstrate that Republicans can side with the little guy against big corporations.

GUNS AND GAYS: Teresa Nielsen Hayden observes: “Basically, I figure guns are like gays: They seem a lot more sinister and threatening until you get to know a few; and once you have one in the house, you can get downright defensive about them.”

THE MARC HEROLD DISCUSSION just keeps going on over at Angry Cyclist. Keep scrolling. . . .

NOW THAT SOME ISLAMIC CHARITIES have been identified as fronts for terrorism, American Muslims are giving to charities that keep the money in the United States. Though the article mostly spins it as bad, this seems like a good thing to me. It’s unfortunate that some legitimate charities helping people in need will get less money as a result, but this is what happens when people are scammed. In fact, it’s a good thing over the long term as it will give legitimate Islamic charities an incentive to root out the frauds.

TURNS OUT THAT JEFF COOPER’S APPLE PROBLEMS, which I linked to a while back, were mostly his fault. Though in a way that doesn’t really support the “Apple is easier to use” argument.

SOCIOLOGISTS OF THE BLOGOSPHERE TAKE NOTE: Ron Rosenbaum describes his treatment of Gore Vidal’s latest conspiracy screed as a “combination of fisking and misting.” This is, to the best of my knowledge, the first Legacy Media use of the term “misting,” though I agree with Charles Johnson that it doesn’t really apply: “You can’t have a MiSTing without robots. Everybody knows that. And Rosenbaum’s essay, excellent as it may be, contains no robots whatsoever.”

Yep. It’s still worth reading, though. And despite a distressing absence of robots, there are multiple references to Richard Nixon’s penis, something you don’t see every day. The references, that is. Well, or the penis. And thank goodness on both counts, actually. Anyway, here’s an excerpt:

In any case, much subsequent Vidal verbiage follows designed to prove the Sherlockian discovery that this is all “The Case of the Afghan Pipeline,” that the “Bush junta” countenanced or caused the murder of thousands of Americans in the hopes of provoking a war to expedite an oil pipeline that might increase the profit margins of their oil companies. Standard boilerplate Left conspiracy theory.

But then our essayist assumes a disingenuous passive voice and takes one passive-aggressive step beyond all that, into Protocols territory. That step can be found in this sentence: “Osama was chosen on aesthetic grounds to be the frightening logo for our long-contemplated invasion and conquest of Afghanistan …. ”

It’s really the first three words that give the game away: “Osama was chosen …. ” Poor Osama isn’t even given any credit for “agency,” as the postmodernists say. Couldn’t think it up by himself. He “was chosen”—implicitly by his white masters in the West, the “Bush junta”—to commit the mass murder of Americans (although remember: “we still don’t know” who did it).

Osama was chosen. Not a word about fundamentalist Islam’s hatred of America, of Jews, of the West. No, it was the West—we did it to ourselves. Well, the Bush cabal did it in our name. Is comparing Mr. Vidal’s screed to The Protocols extreme? Not as extreme as Vidal comparing George W. Bush to Hitler.

ROBERT FISK says that the strike against Al Qaeda operatives in Yemen was murder. William Sjostrom says that Robert Fisk is a moral degenerate.

EXTREMIST ISLAMISM IN AUSTRALIA: James Morrow has an unsettling report.

I TOLD YOU SO: There’s an interesting thread on Nanodot about proposals for an international treaty to ban nanotechnology research, and about the possibility that nanotechnology research might be moved entirely into the “black” military world.

ORRIN JUDD calls Garrison Keillor a “Gutless Weasel” for his nasty insinuations regarding Norm Coleman. The language is harsher than I would have used, but in fairness to Judd Keillor’s remarks are weasely.

What astounds me about the Left over the past few months is the way in which racism, antisemitism and homophobia have become the stock-in-trade of its house provocateurs. Some are still trying to deny that this is so, but the evidence just keeps piling up. It’s a downward spiral into nastiness that goes a long way toward explaining the election results all by itself.

I thought the Left was supposed to be against this stuff, but apparently it all depends, as Dale Amon suggests, on who’s doing the talking. I’m beginning to think that it was all just a scam — just as the Left’s enthusiasm for free speech on campus was a lot higher when the main beneficiaries of free speech protection were communists.

UPDATE: A reader writes:

For me, it was the Clinton sex scandals. Watching Susan Estrich falsely say on TV that what Clinton allegedly did to Juanita Broaddrick was not rape in Arkansas at the time–torture her by holding her down and biting her lip until the pain and bleeding were so great that she submitted to rape–literally made me ill. To think that these were the same people who thought that Clarence Thomas shouldn’t be confirmed because he was so far over the line for discussing dirty movies with a staff person and asking her out twice!

I took Anita Hill’s side in the Thomas hearings and I naively thought that feminists did so too as a matter of principle. But I learned in the Clinton rape allegations that most feminists (Gloria Allred being a notable exception) didn’t really care about what Thomas or Clinton had done–just what suited their politics. The feminist movement in the US may never recover the moral high ground–and when I hear Hillary Clinton sounding off about violence against women, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Yes, I think the moral high ground was lost for all time over that one — or, more accurately, was revealed never to have existed at all.

Estrich has recanted now. But, of course, not until after the political moment had passed.

MORE HUMAN RIGHTS CONCERNS over the air transport photos.

ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST: Reading between the lines in this story, I think that there may have been cooperation from other Palestinian groups in setting this guy up. Wouldn’t be the first time.

I WONDER WHAT JIMMY CARTER THINKS OF THIS?

Georgia Republicans’ roll continued Friday, as the GOP converted a third Democratic state senator and handed Gov.-elect Sonny Perdue control of half of the Legislature.

State Sen. Rooney Bowen of Cordele said in an interview he would leave the Democratic Party and join the Republicans because it would be the best thing for his South Georgia constituents.

Also Friday, Democratic Sens. Don Cheeks of Augusta and Dan Lee of LaGrange formally announced their decision to switch to the Republican Party.

Adding those three senators will give the Republicans a 29-27 majority, their first in the Georgia Senate since Reconstruction, to go along with their first governor since that era.

I’m not an election-trend tea-leaf reader, but this seems significant to me. Along with GOP successes in a number of other state legislatures, it certainly suggests that the elections were about more than the war.

HMM. THIS IS AN INTERESTING TWIST:

The U.S. citizen killed by a missile launched from a pilotless drone aircraft over Yemen was the ringleader of an alleged terrorist sleeper cell in Lackawanna, N.Y., administration officials said yesterday.

Kamal Derwish, one of two unindicted co-conspirators in the Lackawanna case, died along with the intended target of the attack, senior al Qaeda leader Abu Ali al-Harithi, who is accused of masterminding the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole in which 17 sailors died.

That would seem to strengthen the Buffalo case, wouldn’t it?

BLOGGERS ARE EVERYWHERE: Tom Maguire has a mole in the drug-war advertising establishment and he reports on the stupidity, er, plans.

TAPPED and TomPaine.Com are jumping on the Gary Hart 2004 bandwagon. Go for it guys. Just remember who was saying it over a year ago.

Advantage: InstaPundit!

HEY, MOXIE’S GOT A NEWSPAPER COLUMN NOW. Well, they do say you should write what you know.