A MEETING WITH the last man on the Moon.

THOUGHTS ON MESSAGING FROM READER RICHARD FRANKEL:

In Intellectuals, Paul Johnson’s evisceration of Marx’s empirical work and discussion of Marx’s theories changed my thinking.

Arguments that have little factual or a priori support can have lasting and significant influence.

The key to attracting adherents is presenting the idea in poetical terms that inflame flaws in human nature. Marx had the ability to select clichés that resonated with envy and the wish to believe in miraculous solutions to the problem of scarcity and self-fulfillment. He assured believers his ideas were “scientific” and moral.

Republicans better consider this reality when confronting Obama’s “rich are not paying their fair share” argument.

Countering with “taxing the rich more will not appreciably reduce the deficit” or “this will hurt small business” or giving statistics showing the rich pay quite a bit already will be inadequate. Logic and facts are inadequate. Envy and scapegoating of the successful Americans will only grow as Obama’s policies devastate the poor. Republicans must counter with a similarly emotional argument (e.g. “Obama policies are enriching the Washington elite.”). The Republicans must also call Obama out for inflaming “envy and hatred” so the public cannot be comforted that taxing the rich is altruistic. Yelling “class warfare” is too sanitized to elicit a competing public emotion.

Republicans must also fight Obama’s idea of “a balanced approach.” Republicans must confront the argument that government spending helps the poor and therefore cuts must be offset by increased taxes. Point to all the programs that merely enrich the elite (e.g., NPR and windmills). Show how, under Obama, the Washington suburbs have grown wealthy while other places in the country have grown poor.

Yes, the Hunger Games argument seems quite well-founded.

OFT EVIL WILL SHALL EVIL MAR: “One likely result of the Gaza War: a boom in missile defense that will probably make a lot of money for some Israeli and American companies. Israel’s impressive Iron Dome system is really shining.”

“BAZINGA!”

DIRTY SECRETS of the hotel industry. Plus, this shocking advice: “When dealing with any member of the staff, be nice. Make eye contact. Remember names. Say ‘please’ and ‘thank you.'”

The book is Heads in Beds: A Reckless Memoir of Hotels, Hustles, and So-Called Hospitality.

LISTEN TO AMY ALKON TALK ABOUT relationships and blame. Live from 10-11 ET.

A SHOCKING DEVELOPMENT: GOP Too Libertarian, Free-Market-y, Say Anti-Libertarian, Anti-Market Pundits.

SUSAN RICE, ABANDONED BY DANA MILBANK, AND NOW BY MAUREEN DOWD: “Rice should have been wary of a White House staff with a tendency to gild the lily, with her pal Valerie Jarrett and other staffers zealous about casting the president in a more flattering light, like national security officials filigreeing the story of the raid on Osama to say Bin Laden fought back. . . . An Africa expert, Rice should have realized that when a gang showed up with R.P.G.’s and mortars in a place known as a hotbed of Qaeda sympathizers and Islamic extremist training camps, it was not anger over a movie. She should have been savvy enough to wonder why the wily Hillary was avoiding the talk shows.”

Yes, she could have figured that out just by reading the New York Times on September 12, a story that surely came from inside national-security sources.

UPDATE: Obama And The Gingerbread Man.

ANOTHER UPDATE: “Lindsey Graham was on fire on ‘Meet the Press’ today. About the Benghazi attack and the statements various people made about it.”

MORE: Harry Reid: Don’t Expect Any Senate Investigation.

ANOTHER EMERGENCY POWER ITEM: Reader James Foster sends this link to the JuiceBox.

COMPETENCE: N.J. Transit Stored Trains in Low-Lying Areas Ahead of Sandy. “’They knew the storm was coming. Why did we lose any trains?’ All of those badly damaged locomotives and passenger cars were stored in yards in low-lying Hoboken and Kearny.”

UPDATE: Reader Drew Kelley writes: “It’s not like all that rolling-stock was a capital-investment by stock-holders, who were depending on management’s fiduciary responsibility to safe-guard that investment.”

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Don’t Shave Your Privates While Driving.

NEW ONES EVERY HOUR: At Amazon, Pre-Black Friday Lightning Deals.

MARK STEYN: “To an immigrant such as myself (not the undocumented kind, but documented up to the hilt, alas), one of the most striking features of Election Night analysis was the lightly worn racial obsession. . . . This is what less-enlightened societies call tribalism.”

Plus: “Everyone talks about this demographic transformation as if it’s a natural phenomenon, like Hurricane Sandy. Indeed, I notice that many of those exulting in the inevitable eclipse of ‘white America’ are the same people who assure me that demographic arguments about the Islamization of Europe are completely preposterous. But in neither the United States nor Europe is it a natural phenomenon. Rather, it’s the fruit of conscious government policy.”

It’s okay. Obama’s economic policy will soon have immigration flowing the other way.

CHARLIE MARTIN: 13 Weeks: Week 2, In Which We Eat. “Diet, schmiet, I’m eatin’ good. And I’ve lost 21 pounds, my blood sugar is down from 157 to 119.”

AS YOU GET READY FOR THANKSGIVING, let me put in another recommendation for Barkeeper’s Friend. I used it to get the knife-marks off of a bunch of stoneware plates the other night. It’s like magic! And speaking of magic, I’m still a big fan of the Mr. Clean Magic Eraser.

IT’S EASIEST TO FOOL THE PEOPLE WHO WANT TO BE FOOLED: Bloggers Spot More Dead Child Fakery by Hamas; CNN Fooled.

More here.

SHIKHA DALMIA: FEMA: Welfare Masquerading As Disaster Relief.

FEMA’s tragic missteps after Katrina earned it well-deserved disgrace. The Times blames those on the Bush administration, whose anti-government philosophy supposedly gutted FEMA. President Obama, the argument goes, straightened things out, and Americans should now “feel lucky” that the agency is there for them. Without it, local and state authorities wouldn’t be able to coordinate where “rescuers should go, where drinking water should be shipped, and how to assist hospitals that have to evacuate.”

So how did the new and improved FEMA perform post-Sandy, a storm for which it had lots of advance warning? Not so well.

It didn’t set up its first relief center until four days after Sandy hit — only to run out of drinking water on the same day. It couldn’t put sufficient boots on the ground to protect Queens residents from roving looters. The Red Cross — on whom FEMA depends for delivering basic goods — left Staten Island stranded for nearly a week, prompting borough President Jim Molinaro to fume that America was not a Third World country. But FEMA’s most egregious gaffe was that it arranged for 24 million gallons of free gas for Sandy’s victims, but most of them couldn’t lay their hands on it.

FEMA isn’t a first responder. It mostly writes checks.

BARRY RUBIN: Here’s How — As With This Israel-Hamas War — Western Elites Are Baffled by the Middle East. “Much of the Western elite no longer understands concepts which their predecessors took for granted during the last two centuries.”

Related: Walter Russell Mead: America, Israel, Gaza, the World. “As Israeli airstrikes and naval shells bombarded Gaza this weekend, the world asked the question that perennially frustrates, confuses and enrages so many people across the planet: Why aren’t the Americans hating on Israel more? . . . America is a big country with a lot of things going on, but the real force driving American support for Israeli actions in Gaza isn’t Islamophobia, Jewish conspiracies or foam-flecked religious nuts. It’s something much simpler: many though not all Americans look at war through a distinctive cultural lens. Readers of Special Providence know that I’ve written about four schools of American thinking about world affairs; from the perspective of the most widespread of them, the Jacksonians, what Israel is doing in Gaza makes perfect sense. Not only are many Jacksonians completely untroubled by Israel’s response to the rocket attacks in Gaza, many genuinely don’t understand why the rest of the world is so steamed about Israel—and so angry with the United States.”

In Bob Dylan’s phraseology, they’d rather see us paralyzed. And Israel dead.

AT AMAZON, pre-Black Friday deals in Sports & Outdoors.

MAYBE THE WAPO SHOULD HAVE RUN THIS GRAPH BEFORE THE ELECTION: This Graph Should Scare You.

ROSS DOUTHAT: “Liberals look at the Obama majority and see a coalition bound together by enlightened values — reason rather than superstition, tolerance rather than bigotry, equality rather than hierarchy. But it’s just as easy to see a coalition created by social disintegration and unified by economic fear.”

THE FORDHAM CENSORSHIP SCANDAL just gets weirder.

THE WORST HOTEL IN THE WORLD, and proud of it.

SCIENCE: Our Brains Can Do Unconscious Mathematics.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: PA State Universities Face First-Ever Faculty Strike. “A total of 115,000 students are enrolled in the system. Both enrollment and state funding are reportedly down.”