NBC is flooding the zone, synergistically:

If the NBC Nightly News series “The Secret to Her Success,” produced in partnership with iVillage, seemed like a transplant from the newly installed estrogen-fueled fourth hour of Today, anchor Brian Williams says it’s simply a coincidence. …

Throughout the week the series — which could have been ripped from the pages of Good Housekeeping or Redbook — has focused on female-centric issues including what medical tests women should have and how to ask for a family-friendly flex time schedule at work. On Wednesday, Ann Curry, the newly minted co-host of Today’s fourth hour, reported on studies that showed friendships have a direct result on women’s health. MSNBC.com ran photos sent in by viewers of themselves with their best friends.

Williams, acknowledging the lack of coincidence, says,

“Call it synergy, call it what you will, but it just made sense.”

Well, sure, if you’re a corporate behemoth trying to attract the wider female TV-viewing audience. But if you’re, say, a TV viewer interested in getting 19 minutes’ worth of information about the wider world on a program called NBC Nightly News, it means that you just might say to yourself: “What the hell is this?” and switch over to Charlie Gibson over on ABC.

Who isn’t advising Barack Obama?

On foreign policy alone, some 200 experts are providing the Obama campaign with assistance of some sort, arranged into 20 subgroups. On the domestic front, more than 500 policy experts are contributing ideas, campaign aides said. Veterans of previous election campaigns say the scale of the policy operation resembles the full-blown effort candidates typically undertake for a general election campaign rather than the more stripped-down versions common for the primary season.

You don’t need to be a politico to see that none of this is about Obama-love per se. Rather, it’s about the nausea brought on by the thought of a Clinton restoration.

The NYT’s David Carr is much more polite and circumspect than I was when I wrote “one, two, three, four, we don’t want your fucking war,” but he is just as skeptical as I am about Hollywood’s prospects for success with its current crop of antiwar movies:

“In the Valley of Elah,” a mystery about a returning veteran who disappears, starring Tommy Lee Jones and directed by Paul Haggis, opened last Friday. It will be followed into theaters over the course of the fall and winter by “Grace Is Gone,” “Stop Loss,” “Nothing Is Private,” “Lions for Lambs,” “Charlie Wilson’s War,” and “Redacted.” They all take as their central concern the price of America’s military and security activities since the attacks of Sept. 11. HBO, which has already waded into bloody waters with “Baghdad ER” and “Alive Day,” has commissioned “Generation Kill,” written by David Simon, creator of “The Wire.”

All of this is undoubtedly well intended, but will it be well attended?

No, it won’t. As Carr notes,

[H]istorically, audiences enter the theater in pursuit of counter-programming as an antidote to reality***

Yep. But Hollywood elites these days—like book and magazine publishing elites—make cultural products for themselves and for their own supposedly sophisticated crowd. That’s fine. They just shouldn’t expect to gain traction for them in the wider culture.

So it goes.

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*** The writer/director Billy Wilder, whom I’ve written about a lot, put it rather more plainly:

People don’t go to the movies to see the awful truth, which hurts.

That’s why Wilder snuck up on them with biting satires. Hollywood is both too stupid and too earnest for that these days. More’s the pity for those of us in the audience.

Not a moment too soon, Robert Gates, the defense secretary who inherited a hideous mess, plans to explain American foreign policy to a history-challenged nation:

Mr. Gates’s address comes as the Bush administration has been harshly criticized by the pragmatic foreign policy wing of its own party — including some who served with Mr. Gates under the first President Bush, like Brent Scowcroft, a former national security adviser. Those Republican Party elders say the White House has undermined national security needs with a more ideological foreign policy that includes trying to fulfill the president’s desire to spread democratic values, especially in the Muslim world.

Mr. Gates, in a speech prepared for delivery at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va., places a foot in the camps of both the hard-edged pragmatists and the lofty idealists — in fact, he describes the address as “a realist’s view of promoting democracy abroad.”

Unsurprisingly, because of where we find ourselves, Gates, even while trying to make a case for a third way, will underscore the need for America to see out what it started in the Middle East:

“For America to leave Iraq and the Middle East in chaos would betray and demoralize our allies there and in the region, while emboldening our most dangerous adversaries,” he said in the speech. An advance text was provided to The New York Times by a Pentagon official.

“It is our country’s tragedy, and our glory, that the tender shoots of freedom around the world for so many decades have been so often nourished with American blood,” he said. “The spread of liberty both manifests our ideals and protects our interests — in making the world ‘safe for democracy,’ we are also the ‘champion and vindicator’ of our own.” Advocates of pragmatism and advocates of idealism “must coexist,” he said.

I last wrote about foreign policy here.