* I’m still plugging away at Robot 6. My posts today include a report on the taxicab that exploded outside the DC offices this morning and a piece on Tom Brevoort’s thoughts on the difficulty of maintaining series with female, minority, or international leads.

* A trio of strong pieces from the Comics Comics crew appear in the new Bookforum: Jeet Heer on R. Crumb’s Book of Genesis, Dan Nadel on the career of David Mazzucchelli, and Joe “Jog” McCulloch on alternative manga. (Via Chris Mautner.)

* My God, I really can’t remember the last time I heard horror sites go on about how terrifying a movie was like they’ve been going on about Paranormal Activity. “Awesome,” sure; “terrifying,” no. “Scariest Movie of the Decade,” apparently?

* Real-World Horror: It’s long been clear that Pat Buchanan is a Nazi sympathizer–he wrote a book about it recently!–which is just one of many reasons why I’ve long loathed Pat Buchanan and marveled at his continued place in the firmament of publicly acceptable punditry. But there’s something about his latest piece on the topic, “Did Hitler Want War?”, that is disturbing me more than usual. I mean, part of it is just the obvious ridiculousness of his “No” answer to that question. You don’t have to have recently read a thousand-page biography of Adolf Hitler (though it helps!) to know that “Hitler didn’t want war” is only true in the sense that he would perhaps have preferred to have Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union surrendered to him voluntarily, with Western Europe and Britain then dutifully entering into vassalhood, than to go through the time and expense of conquering them forcibly. (And I’m not even sure I’ll grant you that; Hitler and his ruling clique, and even the less Nazified elements of the German military, strongly believed in the salutary effect of military conflict and conquest on the character of a nation. They didn’t want to get into just any war, mind you–they wanted wars they could win. But given that natural precondition, war was a-okay.) But more than that, we’re living in a time where there is a cottage industry among this country’s right wing dedicated to confusing and obfuscating the origins and goals of Hitler and the Nazi Party in order to score short-term political points. Most notably this is being done by deceptively interpreting “National Socialism” as actually having something to do with socialism on the Left. Now, this is just plain stupid, like arguing that because it’s called The People’s Republic of China, the Red Chinese are Republicans. But it’s also outrageous, and offensive, and contrary to any number of readily available accounts of the thoughts, words, and deeds of Hitler and the Nazis. It is, in other words, a deliberate assault on the facts surrounding the deaths of millions and millions of people, including the systematic genocide of six million Jews in the Holocaust, which concept Buchanan cannot even bring himself to acknowledge. It’s morally monstrous and its practitioners are moral monsters.

* Your quote of the day comes from Ta-Nehisi Coates:

I think there’s this presumption that people who are anti-death penalty get there out of some sympathy for criminals, or some wide-eye naivete. Maybe some people get there that way. I came up in an era where young boys thought nothing of killing each other over cheap Starter jackets. I don’t have any illusions about the criminal mind. I don’t believe in the essential goodness of man–which is exactly why I oppose the death penalty.

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