Belly Dancers, Billionaires and Bombers: William Booth of the Washington Post simultaneously reviews, interrogates and praises the new documentary “Reel Bad Arabs” — which “makes the case that Hollywood is obsessed with ‘the three Bs’ — belly dancers, billionaire sheiks and bombers — in a largely unchallenged vilification of Middle Easterners here and abroad.” The documentary centers around the work of Jack Shaheen, a retired Southern Illinois professor who painstakingly has cataloged decades of representations of Arabs on film. Ultimately, Booth explains, Shaheen is simply calling for balance — and a recognition of humanity: “Hollywood still shows black pimps and Latino gangbangers, but pop culture has also made some room for Will Smith and ‘Ugly Betty.’ ‘I’ve seen the Arab hijacker, but where is the Arab father?’ Shaheen says. What we need, he says, seriously, is a sitcom called ‘Everybody Loves Abdullah.’”

A Comical Cultural Divide: “Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean” is the very enticing title of an upcoming book-length analysis of the comics genre by Douglas Wolk. Serious comics criticism is, of course, much-needed and long overdue. Interestingly, though, the excerpt from the book on Salon is a pretty take-no-prisoners attack on a comics culture that is unnecessarily divisive: “The medium’s new enemies are internal: the much less casual snobbery of the commercial mainstream and the art-comics world toward each other, and cartoonists’ nostalgic yearning for the badness of the bad old days. Reading only auteurist art comics is like being a filmgoer who watches only auteurist art cinema, but more than a few art-comics enthusiasts wouldn’t dream of picking up a mainstream comic book, even as entertainment.”

YouWho?: Kathleen Parker of the Orlando Sentinel has a noteworthy response to all the YouTube political madness of late:

For a candidate little known outside of Alaska, for which he served two terms as a U.S. senator, Internet buzz about his weird videos beats no buzz. But has it really come to this? Presidential candidates making spoofy-goofy home movies to win votes?

To be fair, candidates are as much victims as benefactors of the YouTube age, trapped between two dimensions of reality that are fundamentally in conflict. One reality pertains to Americans who have neither the time nor the urge to “get” the latest hip thing. The other concerns the very real phenomenon of a parallel universe where younger, more technologically attuned Americans preside.

Candidates can’t afford to ignore either, but ultimately they’re forced to present two different faces to two different audiences — the plugged and the unplugged, the hip and the un-hip.

The question is: Which is the true face? Which persona will lead the nation? Come Election Day, it may not be so cool to be so cool.

That last question, of course, is a timeless political question — and one that requires a critical thinking electorate to answer.

YouInsurgency: While we might want to rachet down the “Internet buzz” on the presidential campaign trail, the mainstream media would like us to be very scared of how terrorists are manipulating the online world: “Al Qaeda and other terrorist factions are have all the media niches covered. The battle for hearts and minds has gone online and multimedia — and the more the rest of us know this, the better,” reports CBS. Apparently, the terrorists don’t actually see themselves as we do — in grainy, distorted streaming video. What a surprise.

It Wasn’t a WMD, After All: This one’s is a little dated — but we’d still like to give Mark Simpson the final word on “The Gay Bomb” (news of which we previously unearthed here): “The Gay Bomb is here already and it’s been thoroughly tested — on civilians. It was developed not by the U.S.A.F. but by the laboratories of American consumer and pop culture, advertising, and Hollywood. If you want to awaken the enemy to the attractiveness of the male body, try dropping back issues of Men’s Health or GQ on them. Or Abercrombie & Fitch posters. Or Justin Timberlake videos. Or DVDs of 300.”