So: everything is about the New Hampshire primary.

In other news, Musharraf is blaming Benazir Bhutto for her own death:

Musharraf maintains the al-Qaeda affiliated pro-Taliban militant leader Baitullah Mehsud was behind the attack. But he has also said that Bhutto, who was shot at as she waved to supporters from the sunroof of her armored vehicle, was also partly responsible. She had been warned repeatedly that she was under threat, he told a gathering of journalists on Thursday, but she neglected to take the necessary safeguards and insisted on holding a rally at Liaqat Bagh Park, which intelligence agencies had specifically told her was dangerous. “She went of her own volition, ignoring the threat,” he said. And then she decided to stand outside the protection of her SUV. “Who is to blame for her coming out of the vehicle and standing outside? Who is to blame? The law enforcement agencies?” Musharraf asked angrily.

Those are hard questions to answer.

There are many unsettling mysteries surrounding the life and death of Benazir Bhutto. She was certainly no saint. And she’s a hard sell as a martyr for democracy. But there’s a lot riding on the battle over her legacy.

The next time you hear that the media is to blame for everything or that TV news executives and their corporate parents are conspiring to keep us stupid (former Dateline correspondent John Hockenberry tries to make that case, and then some, in this self-serving, bitter, and blistering attack on NBC, from which he was laid off in 2005), consider the headlines on Memeorandum at this moment.

In the political blogosphere, it’s not only “all about the horse race”—it’s all about the U.S. election campaign, which is eleven months away. There isn’t one item about anything that’s happening anywhere else in the U.S., much anywhere else in the world.

Here’s a sample:

Kevin Drum / Washington Monthly:NEW! MISCELLANEOUS OBAMA BLOGGING….

Marc Ambinder:
Some Clintonology — A hoarse, happy, Barack Obama blew

Michelle Malkin:
What about Wyoming? “Where real America is.” … Find

Dr. Helen:
Is Senator Obama a Rorschach Test?

Matthew Yglesias:
Clinton: Obama’s Too Liberal

If TV “news” has all but vanished in favor of entertainment—and Hockenberry, for all his bile, writes clearly about this subject at least [e.a.]—it’s because we Americans (and humans) like to be entertained.

 Stories from the edge were not typically reassuring about the future. In this sense they were like actual news, unpredictable flashes from the unknown. On the other hand, the coveted emotional center was reliable, it was predictable, and its story lines could be duplicated over and over. It reassured the audience by telling it what it already knew rather than challenging it to learn.

Well, yes. Because television is an entertainment medium, not a classroom.

Among the greatest frustrations of working in TV news over the past decade was to see that while advertisers and entertainment producers were permitted to do wildly risky things in pursuit of audiences, news producers rarely ventured out of a safety zone of crime, celebrity, and character-driven tragedy yarns.

Well, yes. See above about entertainment vs. school.

Here’s the Memeorandum headline that tells our nation’s story:

Glenn Greenwald / Salon: Jonah Goldberg and Glenn Reynolds warn of “social unraveling” if Obama loses

Folks, in the blogosphere (as in the media and as in the “public debate,” which, once upon a time used to be called the “national conversation”), it’s all about the culture war).

What a guy:

[H]e was an odd mixture of conservative (small “c”) and gleeful rebel, and liked nothing better than to, in the old-fashioned phrase, “épater les bourgeois” or discombobulate the pompously respectable. “Bring down the mighty from their seats?” he chuckled with immense relish.

Flashman is no more:

Sam Munson writes:

No-one would mistake the Flashman books for great literature. They’re full of cheaply-imagined sex and more than a bit of jingoism. But it would be impossible to deny their serious attention to historical detail, their capture of something essential about the vanished life of the British Empire.

Max Boot, eulogizing Flashman’s creator, George MacDonald Fraser, makes the inevitable comparison to Patrick O’Brian’s work:

Fraser has never really gotten his due. Another historical novelist of 19th century warfare—Patrick O’Brian—has received far more critical huzzahs. That is because his Aubrey/Maturin novels are more self-consciously literary, with relatively little action and lots of introspection, dialogue, and description. By contrast, Fraser’s books gallop along at the pace of a runaway mustang, with incident piled atop incident to keep the reader’s attention, many of them violent or salacious. …

O’Brian …was undoubtedly a novelist of great merit. Probably greater merit, in fact, than Fraser. But Fraser was more fun to read.

I’ll say.

Helen Rumbelow, writing in The Times (London), gives advice to women who find a Flashman book or two on the shelves of the guy they’re dating:

[T]here is one type of book so alarming that if you spot it you should gather your coat, write a note saying “it’s been special” and leave immediately. That is, of course, any book from the Flashman series, whose author, George MacDonald Fraser, died this week. Never heard of Sir Harry Flashman? Congratulations, this means that not only are you a typical woman, you are also hanging out with the type of man who is not called “jocular” at dinner parties. Vigilance is still required.

Hmm. I wonder what it says about me that Flashman is one of Mr. Hepzeeba’s favorite characters ever, and that I gave him the first book in the series to read … and that we’ve been married for decades? … Maybe we both enjoy a rollicking good story!

Fraser was also the author of a World War Two memoir, Quartered Safe Out Here, as the Telegraph’s obit notes.

A short, heavily-built man, Fraser held unashamedly reactionary views on law and order. He was particularly firm in his conviction that the use of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima was justified, believing that among the lives it had saved had been his own.

Nor did he have much time for fashionable attitudes about the emotional delicacy of soldiers and their need for counselling. His experience, in what he acknowledged was another age, was that war was a job that needed to be done, one accomplished by his generation without relish but with a common sense and resolve since vanished from the public spirit.

He aired his views in Quartered Safe Out Here (1992) and was touched when many young people wrote to agree with his sentiments.

More obits here and here.

John Sutherland contends that we Americans don’t get it.

With Flashman, Americans didn’t understand the inverted Victorianism that was Fraser’s gimmick. Instead of Thomas Hughes’s prig Tom Brown (he of the Schooldays) Fraser chronicled the British empire through the dandy-cad who roasts young Tom over the dormitory fire and is, to the relief of decent Rugbeians, expelled by the fearsome Dr Arnold (the most eminent of Lytton Strachey’s eminent Victorians) for drunkenness and hanky panky with the barmaid at the local pub.

Fraser was intending amusing travesty, but, underneath it all, the author really believed in Britishness. When the chips are down (when sepoys, for example, are murdering women and children in the Indian Mutiny) Flashman is a gallant and decent fellow (and no racist). Flashy, not unflashy Tom, embodies what made the empire work.

The Flashman novels spoke eloquently to the British reader. They articulated that mixture of cynicism, shame, and pride that contemporary Britons felt about Victorian values and Great Britain.

Hitchens wrote about Fraser and Flashman in Vanity Fair in 2006. (The full article isn’t available online. Here’s an excerpt.)