Yep, again. And all because of Sofia Coppola’s movie, which they don’t even like too much:

No matter that some critics savaged the Coppola film. Even the highbrow world of French culture recognizes the power and profitability of the woman who is still portrayed by some history teachers—incorrectly—as the heartless spendthrift who told the poor to eat cake if they had no bread….

Le Figaro has issued a special 112-page glossy magazine on Marie Antoinette’s life as “princess, icon, rebel.” The women’s magazine Atmosphères has devoted most of its current issue to her “secrets.” The weekly Le Point put a portrait of the queen on a recent cover with the caption, “Misunderstood, decapitated, Marie Antoinette, the remorse of the French.”…

The Louvre is promoting the sale of dozens of related items at its museum store, including a $160 children’s costume modeled on a portrait of Marie Antoinette at the age of 7.

The Paris confectioner Ladurée, whose towers of colorful macaroons grace the film, is running advertisements paying “homage” to the queen, with a Marie Antoinette “collection,” including a white and milk chocolate ganache cake imprinted with her carriage.

The perfumer Francis Kurkdjian consulted 18th-century accounts of Marie Antoinette’s taste in concentrated scents in creating a perfume in her honor. Baccarat has produced it as a limited edition of 10—selling for $10,000 each—as well as a $450 version in a less expensive crystal.

The fashion designer John Galliano made Marie Antoinette his muse in his haute couture show in Paris early this year. Lalique has made crystal earrings and a pendant inspired by one of her portraits. The Raynaud porcelain house is selling copies of her royal dishes, the knife maker Couteaux de Sauveterre a $280 limited edition jackknife engraved with the initials MA.

We do actually have one in America, it seems. Martha Stewart may have been played for tabloid effect in both the press and the courts. The Enron boys, however, are going to be facing hard time.

There was a time in the not-too-distant past when white-collar criminal prosecutions were delicate affairs, where prosecutors worked hard not to treat wealthy and powerful defendants as anything as distasteful as, well, criminals.

No more.

The tactics and strategies used in the successful prosecution of the former Enron chief executives, Jeffrey K. Skilling and Kenneth L. Lay, highlight the transformation that has occurred in recent years in the investigation and prosecution of white-collar crime, a change that has brought many of the techniques applied to drug cases and mob prosecutions into the once-genteel legal world of corporate wrongdoers.

No longer are defendants allowed to surrender themselves quietly, outside the view of the press. Now, as Mr. Skilling and Mr. Lay learned firsthand, there are “perp walks” where the handcuffed defendant is brought in by law enforcement for booking. Cases are not resolved with a fine or a short stay in a “country club” prison; now defendants face decades of real jail time, sentences that can preclude them from being considered for minimum-security prisons.

Witnesses are squeezed, with threats against family members and stints in solitary confinement. Those who fail to cooperate are indicted, or deemed unindicted co-conspirators, a designation that places potential witnesses in a state of indefinite legal limbo. And companies that want to settle a criminal case can often do so only by taking the once unusual step of waiving their right to protect the confidentiality of their communications with their lawyers.

“Our prosecutors will use the tools legally available to us to solve these crimes and bring the perpetrators to justice,” said Bryan Sierra, a Justice Department spokesman.

It has been a frequent observation of writers and cultural critics that “nothing has changed [in our culture] since 9/11.” That’s nonsense. Everything has changed—not all of it directly because of 9/11, but it’s hard not to see that day as a demarcation point.

There has been a massive societal change—it has simply gone unremarked. We have become a more brutal, more competitive, less forgiving, colder, more pragmatic, less sentimental, less tolerant, very impatient, deeply selfish, and much, much meaner people and culture.

There have been signs of this everywhere. It has been especially pronounced in business (there has been little mercy shown to cheats, and entire industries [media] are in a desperate race to stay solvent amidst the technological changes); in the celebrity universe (there is no slack cut for illegal behavior: not even for poor little shoplifting Winona Ryder and poor out-of-control Lizzie Grubman; and even fan faves like Tom Cruise can wear out their welcome when they step over a line); in the media (gotcha!, takedowns, smearing, and snark are everywhere you turn); in the workplace (the mergers, takeovers, endless bloodbaths and purges and layoffs and downsizings); and of course in our poisonous partisan politics (though the Democrats have been blind to the implications of this [there is little tolerance for those who cry "victim"], and they will regret it). It has also been reflected in television culture (for example: Survivor, American Idol, The Fear Factor, The Apprentice—zero-sum games, all of them).

The thing is, the purveyors of what we think of as “culture” haven’t quite caught up to this yet. And we, of course, are loath to admit ut. (It’s not so easy to embrace your inner reptilian.) But the signs in the “real world” of our having recognized that we are, yes, primitive below our civilized veneer are there for anyone with the eyes to see.

We have changed. We are no longer the same soft people that Osama bin Laden saw when he decided to attack America.

Because they are willing to betray their ideals—if they ever had any—just to undermine their mortal enemy Bush and his “illiberal ends.”

Exhibit A is Kevin Drum, discussing Peter Beinart’s new book The Good Fight (which I mentioned in this post, about engaged progressives with foreign policy ideas):

So what is it that Beinart really wants from antiwar liberals? The obvious answer is found less in policy than in rhetoric: we need to engage more energetically with the war on terror and criticize illiberal regimes more harshly.

Maybe so. But this is something that’s nagged at me for some time. On the one hand, I think Beinart is exactly right. For example, should I be more vocal in denouncing Iran? Sure. It’s a repressive, misogynistic, theocratic, terrorist-sponsoring state that stands for everything I stand against. Of course I should speak out against them.

And yet, I know perfectly well that criticism of Iran is not just criticism of Iran. Whether I want it to or not, it also provides support for the Bush administration’s determined and deliberate effort to whip up enthusiasm for a military strike. Only a naif would view criticism of Iran in a vacuum, without also seeing the way it will be used by an administration that has demonstrated time and again that it can’t be trusted to act wisely.

So what to do? For the most part, I end up saying very little. And Beinart is right: there’s a sense in which that betrays my own liberal ideals. But he’s also wrong, because like it or not, my words — and those of other liberals — would end up being used to advance George Bush’s distinctly illiberal ends. And I’m simply not willing to be a pawn in the Bush administration’s latest marketing campaign.

I don’t have a very good answer for this dilemma. And I’m not very happy about it. Feel free to whack away in comments.

This is why the anti-war liberals have no credibility: even in a time of war, they put party above all else. And they are not ashamed to say so.

Add to the growing list of political documentaries (a trend I’ve discussed here and here) a really juicy one, by Aaron Russo, surfaced at Cannes, to wild applause. It’s called America: From Freedom to Fascism.

Using interviews with U.S. Congressmen, the former IRS Commissioner, former IRS and FBI agents, tax attorneys and authors, says the release, Russo “proves conclusively that there is no law requiring citizens to pay a direct tax on their labor. His film connects the dots between money creation, federal income tax, voter fraud, the national identity card - which becomes law in May 2008 - and the implementation of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology to track citizens.”

One HuffPost reader comments:

I can’t wait to see the troglodytes in the Bush Junta or its lick-spittle sycophants here claiming this to be another Michael Moore-like propaganda piece.

My picture didn’t make the cut on Andrew Sullivan’s “view from your window” series. It didn’t even get to him. For some mysterious reason known only to the Computer Gremlins, it didn’t want to attach itself to my email, despite three tries.

Here is is, a week late: