NATHANIEL BRANDEN REDUX. From the twitterverse, Ben Domenech:
In the related story at Coffee & Markets (the deformed progeny of Andrew Breitbart's Big Government and RedState) Ryan's staffers tell Domenech that reading Rand wasn't required of them ("The paranoia this meme has spawned is quite incredible," says Domenech, "...the meme is completely false"). It's an LSM smear, your argument is invalid, etc.

We do appreciate Domenech's service to either truth or the PR team at Ryanville. But debunking this very Big Lie takes very little space, leaving Domenech with time to kill. Rather than insert Latin dummy copy or perhaps some of his famous mash-ups, Domenech starts freestyling, and tells us that Ayn Rand is a totally awesome, world-class philosopher:

While Rand’s books may fail as literature, any full education requires you to be as familiar with Rand’s philosophy and intellectual arguments as you are with, say, Immanuel Kant’s — who Rand famously despised.

Sigh. Ben, haven't you got the hang of this thing yet? If you want to imply slander, you have to assume that the slander is slanderous. Otherwise it's like liberals are spreading the word that Ryan loves Jesus. Except, of course, Jesus is not as great as Rand.

Failing that, you could tell the punters liberals think Rand is no good, so it's their bad intentions that make this a big deal. Okay, go ahead, and try not to fuck up:

Suggesting people should read Rand is hardly a bad thing. But it appears the left thinks this is a dangerous thing. Yes, many of Rand’s ideas are dangerous, but primarily to the persistence of crushing bureaucracy, the redistributionist power of the state, and the equality enforcers who would destroy the pursuit of individual exceptionalism.

Ah, that was much --

The Simpsons illustrated this quite well.

Sigh, again. The last line is linked to a clip of The Simpsons' parody of The Fountainhead, posted at Popmodal, "the conservative alternative to YouTube," to which its Randboy poster has attached the commentary, "only problem I have with it, though not seen here, is Lisa saying, 'The Fountainhead, isn't that the Bible for Right wing losers?' Isn't that a contradiction? Losers? Then they go on to depict the story of an individual that would not conform blah blah blah..."

If you're trying to get people to take your story seriously, it helps to change out of the Atlas Shrugged PJs first.

UPDATE. Some commenters are confused by the existence of a "conservative alternative to YouTube." Are YouTube's resolution rates antithetical to conservatism or something?

One Guest points out, "There's a conservative alternative to everything... They have an alternative to school, they have an alternative to real colleges, they have an alternative to Wikipedia, they have an alternative to real museums, and their alternative to the media worked so well that it became the media."

Just so. The new breed is positively allergic to discordant points of view; where do you think sad cases like Domenech -- who has grown up so insulated that he literally doesn't know how to argue a point -- come from? They don't see the need to proselytize (after Bush v. Gore, why bother?) and they certainly don't think they can learn anything from non-believers. So, on the Christian fundamentalist model, they create alternative worlds where they may be safe from the the risk of ideological miscegenation.

Wait'll their son comes home with a hippie girlfriend, though. That'll be a wacky half-hour of family fun.

UPDATE 2. Speaking of alt-cons, gaze upon The People's Cube, where laughs come cleared by the central committee. It's like Krokodil if the censors themselves were writing it.

And Susan of Texas, thanks for informing me that there really are Atlas Shrugged PJs. I'm disappointed -- I was hoping for a model festooned with a sleepy l'il Atlas. He's shrugging 'cause he wants to go nappies!