alicublog

2012-01-27T23:09:00.000-05:00

I'M A LONER, DOTTIE, A REBEL. Obama's snoozy SOTU address contained this bit about the military:

At a time when too many of our institutions have let us down, they exceed all expectations. They’re not consumed with personal ambition. They don’t obsess over their differences. They focus on the mission at hand. They work together. Imagine what we could accomplish if we followed their example. Think about the America within our reach.

Seems like a generic sort of rah-rah teamwork thing to me. But to Jonah Goldberg it's worse than Hitler:

That is disgusting.

What Obama is saying, quite plainly, is that America would be better off if it wasn’t America any longer. He’s making the case not for American exceptionalism, but for Spartan exceptionalism.

It’s far worse than anything George W. Bush, the supposed warmonger, ever said. Bush, the alleged fascist, didn’t want to militarize our free country; he tried to use our military to make militarized countries free.

Instead of killing scores of innocent Iraqis, Obama wants Americans to work together on the country's welfare. That's Librul Fascism! Also welfare!

Goldberg's not a joiner, I guess. Remember what he said when he actually had the chance to help George W. Bush "use our military to make militarized countries free"? "I'm 35 years old, my family couldn't afford the lost income, I have a baby daughter..." That's one of the great things about being Goldberg's kind of freedom fighter -- you never have to do any actual fighting.

(I expect he's always been like this. Can't you see him getting out of gym in high school on anti-collectivist grounds? "But mom, they told me to be in a relay race just when I really needed to go get a triple chili dog. So I said I swear by my life and my love of it Farrrt.")

2012-01-26T23:13:00.001-05:00

CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS. Charles Murray, best known for his book Niggers are Stupid (sorry, The Bell Curve), has a new one out called Kinder, Küche, Kirche 2.0 (sorry, Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010). We saw last week his promotional essay at the Wall Street Journal, which posited an America desperately class-riven but insisted it had nothing to do with money, and prescribed that upper-middle-class people show a good example and a constant wagging finger to their lower-class brethren, who had fallen into the unfortunate habit of making illicit babies and such like.

Well, Murray's been making the rounds, as has a quiz from his book which is supposed to tell you "How Thick Is Your Bubble" -- that is, how isolated you are from the real down-home white America that Murray thinks needs redemption. Among the questions: "Have you ever had a close friend who was an evangelical Christian?" "How many times in the last year have you eaten at one of the following restaurant chains? Applebee’s, Wafﬂe House," etc., and "Have you ever watched an Oprah, Dr. Phil, or Judge Judy show all the way through?"

Nonetheless I scored 63, as many of the questions had to do with low birth, manual labor, cheap beer, and stupid shit on TV and at the multiplexes, notwithstanding that I have become over the years a hoity-toity scribbler. But so what? Murray explains:

To my knowledge, sociologists haven’t gotten around to asking upper-middle-class Americans how much they know about their fellow citizens, so once again I must ask you to serve as a source of evidence by comparing your own experience to my generalizations. This time, I have a twenty-ﬁve-question quiz for you to take.

I hope it will serve two purposes: ﬁrst, to calibrate the extent of your own ignorance (if any); second, to give you a framework for thinking about the ignorance that may be common in your professional or personal circles, even if it doesn’t apply to you.

Even if it doesn't apply to me? This sounds like an invitation to consider myself possessed of special knowledge, and thus prepared for the lower-class reclamation work Murray has in mind. But this wisdom might also prepare me to exploit the shit out of my former class-comrades by appealing to their tastes and prejudices with an ad campaign or a political candidacy or some other such wallet-extracting device. Richard Nixon and Jimmy Swaggart would have scored very high on this test.

Which is really what I think he's after. He and his adherents aren't interested in saving America, but in saving themselves.

Conservatives are convinced, and always trying to convince others, that liberals are all sissies who have soft hands and never drink Bud, and thus are Out of Step with America. Thus liberals are presumed to be ignorant of, and to despise, real Americans; and when Obama tries to spread a little of the nation's wealth among them, it cannot be to help them at a time of great need, because he's not one of them (and why, a conservative would reason, would anyone help anyone who was not of their kind?), and so must be due to his Kenyan anti-colonial socialist whatchamacallit.

It must have occurred to some conservatives, though, that they themselves don't have the common touch -- right now they're fighting over whether to nominate a rich asset-stripper or a college professor/lobbyist for the Presidency. And they don't think it has anything to do with their ruinous policies, which seem designed to make life harder for the working people they're hoping to woo. So they're interested in this test, and trying to figure how to ace it by using Murray's Cliff Notes. (I can imagine David Brooks crying, O I've got this, I've been to Applebee's! For a general consulting fee I will take part in this project!) They think if they can get the Branson and Budweiser thing down, they can go among the rabble and not get laughed off the earth.

I look forward to seeing them try. Come on, Mitt, tell them how much you enjoyed Little Fockers.

UPDATE. In comments, Batocchio is reminded of the "You might be a redneck" routine. (You knew it was by Jeff Foxworthy? 2 points!)

professor fate wants to know why Murray didn't ask about porn. Well, you must consider his audience, which is not actual lower-middle-class people but joy-popping nerdcons who want to hear about a cleaned-up Real America -- "Leave It to Beaver," not Wisconsin Death Trip, or even Winter's Bone. Imagine though if he'd taken the thing more seriously:

- Have you ever done meth? Maximum of 7 points. 3 points if you've ever done it, and 1 point for each tooth lost as a consequence up to 4. (No points if you took it at a gay orgy and called it Tina.)

- Have you ever had your credit card refused by the Home Shopping Network? 5 points.

- Are you still paying interest on a rear-projection TV you dumped in the woods last year? 3 points.

Etc. Comments are a joy in general. "'Have you ever had a job that caused something to hurt at the end of the day?' Yes. (sniffle) My heart," says Spaghetti Lee. "I've taken Cosmopolitan quizzes that were more scientific," says DocAmazing. "I got 60 (I know and have eaten at all the restaurants, but I'm on a diet)," says redoubt. "What's unusual about this? I'm African-American." No points for you, redoubt -- this test's restricted!

UPDATE 2. Har, Tbogg: "I took The Bubble Challenge and, well... 21. It would appear that I am Cornel West." This is despite his working-class bona fides, which Murray's finely-tuned calculus somehow missed. Also scoring low on the test, the insufferable Ilya Somin:

I managed a middling 37 on his 0–99 point scale. As Murray recognizes, one can easily quibble about the details of many of the questions. For example, I not only have “attended” a Rotary Club meeting, but actually gave a speech at one when I was 17. Maybe I should get extra credit for the latter.

I should think they'd take points off. "Here's Ilya from Little Libertarians, he's going to tell us why he wears a suit and tie to gym class."

I would also have achieved a higher score if there were more sports-related questions.

I expect all the pointy-heads will start asking for Bubble Test Affirmative Action. "No, I don't know any Skynyrd, but I know I'm supposed to like Drive-By Truckers." "No, I didn't participate in sports, but I used to pretend to be Tom Landry when I was yelling at the gardener."

2012-01-24T21:47:00.000-05:00

STATE OF THE UNION. I think I get it: Obama knows nobody except DC nerds cares about this stuff, so he's going Hi NRG and throwing a baffling cloud of programs to get over. By the time analysts have sorted them out, everyone will be on to the next celebrity breakup or funny animal video.

Good for him, and for them. I get sicker every year of the thudding Kabuki, and the bizarre sound that makes the applause sound like ball bearings being poured into a dumpster.

At this point (9:36 pm) I most admire the Lock Them In School Till They're 18 Act, which is clearly designed to get Republicans to loudly insist on their Constitutional right to drop out of high school. Well played, Black Hitler!

Oh, it's also cool that he's getting the Navy to buy enough windmills to power three million homes. It's Swabby Capitalism!

UPDATE. Is this thing still on, or is this a Red Tails promo? Well, I suppose a Democratic President has to lay on the military references. And it was nice of him to wake up Joe Lieberman with the prospect of war with Iran.

I'm not gonna enjoy these things until with they come with the sounds of rapidly approaching tumbrels.

2012-01-24T21:31:00.000-05:00

COME BACK NEXT WEEK FOR OUR LATINO OUTREACH! As I've said before, I don't like to trawl comments sections, but sometimes it's too instructive to pass up.

Walter Russell Mead has an article called "Black Women Lead Shift To A Post-Blue World." As it's mainly about how black women are getting jobs -- "as increasing numbers of Black women enter the professional world, they are beginning to close the the earnings gap between themselves and their white peers" -- you might wonder where he was getting the "Post-Blue" thing. This seems to be the extent of it:

And the good news goes beyond the monetary: the [Washington Post] survey finds Black women to be more ambitious, more religious, and more optimistic about their future than many other groups, with a strong understanding of the value of hard work and achievement.

Condoleezza Rice, in other words, is not alone.

She's a Republican, see. (Unmentioned is this part of the Post story: "Half of black women surveyed call racism a 'big problem' in the country; nearly half worry about being discriminated against.")

Ole Perfesser Instapundit gets excited: "I wonder if their political views will evolve in response to this new entrepreneurialism?"

Well, you know what won't help? Mead's comments section:

Of course Black Woman are becoming entrepreneurs in greater numbers. The Govt has been picking winners and losers for a few decades now and Black Woman are at the top of their list... When a Govt takes from me to give a certain groups it deems “special” privileges that others do not get it’s called tyranny...

“Black women are setting up as entrepreneurs” — or as Affirmative Action gooberment or Big Corp. employees?...

They are essentially fronts for the men who know how to do the actual work...

I’d be ambitious and optimistic as well if the government was stacking the deck in my favor in the form of quotas and set-asides...

It is comic to hear you claim this is the result of “hard work and achievement”. It is anything but these. What silliness. Next you will be calling Obama competent...

To be sure, the fact that “…more and more Black women are setting up as entrepreneurs.” Is not good news overall.

Why does WRM capitalize “Black” while down-casing “white” when referring to the races? I thought we were striving for equality.

These aren't the fringe of Mead's comments -- they're the overwhelming majority. But what did you expect? They're the same people Mead cultivated with his Ooga Booga bullshit, and now they're understandably pissed that their hero said something nice about black women.

If only he could have tipped them off ahead of time that he was only doing it for propaganda purposes! Then we could have had a comments section full of "nudge nudge wink wink" and "Don't worry, Mead, I'm not gonna say that stuff I was gonna say about how they're all lazy." Well, maybe next time.

2012-01-23T10:58:00.001-05:00

MORAL SUPERIORITY COMPLEX. Megan McArdle, talking about a drug that prolongs melanoma sufferers lives but (possibly) only for a matter of months, suddenly grabs the banged-up doll with STOOPID LIBRUL written on its chest and denounces its terrible attitude:

I think the central difference between me, and the people who think that IPAB's reimbursement-rate powers will be a big help in controlling health care costs, is that the latter group tends to think that a lot of expensive health care problems are like back surgery--something that doesn't do any good, but gets done anyway, because of desperate patients and arrogant/ignorant/greedy surgeons.

It's a good thing doctors aren't unionized or McArdle would be calling for a federal investigation.

I tend to think that more of the questions are like this one. Is spending $50,000 to give a pancreatic cancer patient an extra 5-9 months of life a wasted expenditure, or a medical advance? On the one hand, 5-9 months isn't very long. On the other hand, for a typical pancreatic cancer patient, you've doubled their lifespan, which seems like a very long time indeed.

If we get better cancer treatments--

[Here she rolls her eyes at the doll]

which is what everyone says they want--

[Cap'n Happy and Mr. & Mrs. Bear look at each other and nod]

we're probably going to be asking those questions a lot. And either way, we aren't going to like the answer.

Oh, won't we? Once the Right Sort return to power and America gets its own austerity program, I expect the proper solution -- getting Big Gummint out of the healthcare business and letting those patients who can't afford the treatment die, as nature intended -- will become obvious. But unlike the liberals, who pretend they want better cancer treatments but really just want death panels, the Responsible People will not be to blame, because poor people getting the shaft is just economics, which is nobody's fault.

UPDATE. Commenter Mr. Wonderful gets to the point better than I do:

Megan's "let's face it"s invoke what she assumes we all grant are universal facts about human nature. She'll say, in effect, "let's face it, liberal parents want their kids to be able to get into good private schools, no matter what they say about public education."

But even when there is a grain (or more) of truth to what she says, once you invoke similar common knowledge (e.g., "let's face it: capitalism selects for the greedy, and human greed is a pan-historical and universal vice, so it should be controlled via rules and legislation"), she gets all libertarian...

It's a reliable theme in her writing. Liberals have all kinds of cuh-razy ideas, so let's forget it and go back to the reliable old-world wisdom of the American Enterprise Institute.

2012-01-22T22:52:00.000-05:00

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about Newt Gingrich's victory in South Carolina, which rightbloggers generally see as good training for Mitt Romney, who must take on some of the Gingrich magic in order to win the nomination and the Presidency. Surprisingly no one advised him to dump his wife, but some of them think he should be more of an asshole, which would be a neat trick.

At Hot Air Tina Korbe makes an unusual appeal:

It’s insulting to voters’ intelligence when these men claim to approach political problems as one unfamiliar with the behind-the-scenes realities of politics would. At the same time, though, it’s a mystery to me why none of them can find a way to turn their “insider” status to their own advantage. Yes, the nation has been in an anti-incumbent mood since at least 2008 and wary of political “insiders” who look to their own advantage ahead of the good of the American people, but that doesn’t mean we don’t want our representatives in Washington to possess the strategic savvy to thwart unwanted legislation and advance desired legislation...

Great idea. They should start touring the country with George W. Bush, Hank Paulson, and Dennis Hastert.

UPDATE. I gotta say, one of the fringe benefits of this gibberish is that it has Jim Hoft calling Ann Coulter an "elitist." Feed, cannibals, feed!

2012-01-21T16:59:00.000-05:00

THE NAGGY STATE. Shorter Charles Murray: Richer Americans can best help poorer Americans by lecturing them.

No, really:

The best thing that the new upper class can do to provide that reinforcement is to drop its condescending "nonjudgmentalism." Married, educated people who work hard and conscientiously raise their kids shouldn't hesitate to voice their disapproval of those who defy these norms. When it comes to marriage and the work ethic, the new upper class must start preaching what it practices.

Well, Murray's doing his part! The rest of you better man up in the nagging department.

This is his solution to income inequality -- which even Murray acknowledges exists between the "upper-middle class" and the "working class" (where are the lower- and middle-middle classes in this, I wonder?). You non-W.H. Brady Scholars may think it has something to do with inequality of opportunity. You're way off, Murray says; these days lower-class men choose to work less, out of perversity or something (oh, I forgot -- the Sixties™, they ruined everything).

It's not that white working class males can no longer make a "family wage" that enables them to marry. The average male employed in a working-class occupation earned as much in 2010 as he did in 1960.

It's not like prices haven't gone up since 1960, making "earned as much" a joke.

It's not that a bad job market led discouraged men to drop out of the labor force. Labor-force dropout increased just as fast during the boom years of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s as it did during bad years.

Booms don't boom equally for everyone. Murray notices that upper-middle-class workers have seen their incomes rise at a higher rate than the lower-class workers', but it doesn't occur to him that their employers had to pay them that much to get them to work -- else the workers couldn't afford the middle-class stuff that made those jobs worth having. (Though their employers seem to have caught on that they too can make do with less.)

As for the lower-than-upper-middle-class workers, why would anyone boost their incomes? Those poor guys were stuck. "Working-class occupations" became increasingly less than they had been; "boom times" or no, jobs for less-educated Americans offering sustenance-or-better wages have been draining away for decades, largely replaced by gigs that a family can't live on. Try making a living in retail these days.

Every normal person sees this just walking around. But guys like Murray never notice. To them, lack of opportunity is something The Poors can shake off by taking Soulcraft lessons from their betters. Yet inexplicably they haven't done so, despite ever so many helpful editorials.

So Murray wishes to authorize a flying squad of upper-middle-class people to abandon their fancy beers and cable TV shows and go out among the less fortunate and tell them what bums they are. I would propose we call them the Gladstone Gangs, after the British PM who used to pull this act with prostitutes -- except that would be unfair, as Gladstone sometimes tried to intervene on behalf of working people with something other than yak. So let's just add that to Murray's general legacy, and leave it to the judgment of future generations, if we have any.

UPDATE. That crazy fucker Bryan Caplan has read a whole book of that Murray stuff, and he's excited:

I'm not kidding. If Murray is right, traditionalists need to forget populism. Their "cultural differences" with the elite are largely cosmetic. Elites are the answer to traditionalists' prayers. They work hard, avoid trouble, get married, and give their kids a good home. The sooner everyone realizes this, the better.

Newt Swingrich is a man of ideas. Maybe we can get him to spread this gospel. Then it's sure to catch fire, perhaps literally.

2012-01-20T11:12:00.001-05:00

THE ICING ON THE CAKE. Obama singing some Al Green at the Apollo was very cute. How are the belligerati responding? Aware that it's a no-win situation for them, they're tryin' to hold it in; but their commenters -- like the posse at Weasel Zippers -- can't help themselves. They seem to have two themes -- the inevitable one:

What’s soetero doing singing a song by a Christian Minister? His butt buddies in the muslim brotherhood ain’t gonna like it…

The SOB is gay. Period...

When is Barney Frank going to sing “What, What in the butt?”...

And definitely a friend of Dorothy. Look up Man’s Country and the Down Low Club from Chicago. Enlightening...

Reggie Love is saying “Hey you bitches, don’t be dissing my down-low man!”

And the other inevitable one:

♫ Dang Me, Dang Me
They Oughtta Take a Rope
and Hang Me♫
High From the Highest Treeee ♫...

Note the reaction of the brothers and sisters in the audience. Cheering on the black (mostly white) brother who is overseeing their continued wretched existence as po’, oppressed minorities. When will these fools ever stop using the pigmentation of their skins as an excuse to fail. Gee, is that racist, commiecrats?...

You guys know that normally I don't trawl rightbloggers' comments sections for material, but I'm making an exception in this case because it feels so good to see these douchebags make such fucking idiots of themselves. Well done, Black Hitler!

UPDATE. Huh, hadn't heard of Mofo Politics. They seem to want to play in this space. Let's see what they have:

Terrorist supporter Barack Obama sings Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together”

Whatever, d!ckhead.

Is this a parody of a conservative site? I can't tell anymore. Well, at least I know Kathy Shaidle isn't kidding with "Obama’s white half tries to sing." I bet Shaidle does a mean cover of "Dixie."

2012-01-19T23:01:00.002-05:00

DEVIOUSLY CLEVER. Slow night, so I just opened up American Thinker and the first thing that crawled out was Kim Zigfeld:

Last week, Americans learned that they are, or soon may be, at war with Vladimir Putin's Russia.

Whut.

That is, of course, unless they do just exactly what the Kremlin asks, which is pretty simple, really, and consists largely of re-electing Barack H. Obama, the best friend the Kremlin ever had, as president of the United States.

Later: "[Russia's] principle strategy will be to threaten Americans with World War III unless they choose Obama." Aside from the obvious PR drawbacks of such a campaign, why would Russia want Obama in office, particularly?

Patrushev accused the United States of attempting to topple Iran's government and subjugate its population "by all available means" and implied that Russia would help Iran to shut down oil supplies to the United States through the Persian Gulf if the U.S. dared to try to block Iran's nuclear weapons program, which, he assured, is nothing urgent that Americans need to worry about.

But Patrushev (who is one of Russia's most strident haters of America and her values) said it all still might work out: "In the case of Vladimir Putin and then Barack Obama coming to power, the Russian-U.S. relationship, as well as the situation in the world as a whole, may see a strengthening trend." It seems that the prospect of Americans returning Republicans to the White House makes Russians at least as nervous as the prospect of the West unseating Russia's bosom buddies in Tehran.

Wait -- so the Russian guy accused the U.S. of trying to take over Iran? Who was running the country when that was going on?

Russia's Foreign Ministry simultaneously launched a scathing attack on the recently enacted U.S. defense budget, echoing the Soviet era in accusing the U.S. of violating multiple provisions of international law, including the Geneva Conventions, just by enacting it. Russia also accused the U.S. of violating the Conventions in conducting activity at its prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

I don't blame the Russian Guy for being pissed. But the U.S. defense budget -- who signs that? Keeping Gitmo open -- who's responsible for that? I thought those were President things. Yet Zigfeld tells us Obama is "Putin's patsy."

Maybe this is like that episode of The West Wing where President Bartlett had to temporarily sign over the Presidency so the feds could find his kidnapped daughter. Obama kowtows to the Kremlin, but then, when it's time to do something the Russians don't like, he hands the show over to Curtis LeMay IV or somebody, and lays low until it's time to suck up again.

In a way it's nice to know that our former Soviet enemies can still talk a line of we-will-bury-you bullshit. Unfortunately there's a global black market for bullshit, and American conservatives are its most reliable customers.

2012-01-18T22:47:00.000-05:00

WON'T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE 1%? You always know what's coming when Megan McArdle starts like this:

After a disappointing year, the big banks are pulling back on their bonus pools. A lot. This is going to be hard on bankers whose salaries are usually a very small part of their overall compensation--and yes, yes, before you drag out the world's smallest violin, let me agree that they have no entitlement to anything more. Nonetheless...

I'll boil it down to you: Bankers make all the money and money pays for things and boy you creepy little New York "creatives" are going to be sorry when they all Go Galt. (Why they should Go Galt, she doesn't say -- presumably the seething contempt of the masses will hurt their feelings so bad that they have to run away to Bumfuck, Arkansas and start a new Stock Exchange. Or go overseas and find a country that wants its economy destroyed by bogus financial instruments.)

So it's interesting to contemplate what it will look like, if the financial industry gets shrunk down to the size that many are hoping. The last time that happened, in the 1930s-1960s, New York had a lot of other businesses: shipping, manufacturing, and for that matter, being the corporate headquarters for so many national businesses. That's pretty much ended. New York is now a specialist city: creative industries, finance, and tourism.

It's sort of a Rorschach thing, really: I read it and think, yeah, wouldn't it be nice to have policies that would give cities back a manufacturing base through which poor people could make a living? Whereas she writes it and thinks, stinky bohemians don't know their place.

I will add that I never saw a family come into New York from the hinterlands and pony up food, lodging, and ticket money to watch a financial analyst fart through silk.

UPDATE. Tbogg shorters appropriately.

I suppose I should also link to a couple of my own past considerations of the New York revival topic. Everyone should have a part to play in the sustenance of the city, but whereas the working class once served as its backbone, those citizens have since been reduced to retainers for the rich, with their servants' quarters moved to the farther reaches of the boroughs. McArdle can't engage this reality, so she goes with the brokers-versus-bohemians puppet show; her fans will cheer for Team Pinstripe to beat up the hippies, and everyone can forget about the enormous remainder of the population, which struggles more every day to get by and could actually help if these idiots would first acknowledge their existence, their need, and their power.

Comments are also choice. Jennifer: "You'll know things are really bad when the Thermomixes start showing up in the pawn shops." Fats Durston: "Wow. New Yo'k, just like I pitchered it. Stockbrokers 'n' ever'thang." Etc.

2012-01-16T22:21:00.000-05:00

THE CONTENT OF THEIR CHARACTERIZATIONS. Every MLK Day you get conservatives talking about how Martin Luther King was kind of a Rick Santorum type. At The Heritage Fondation this year, Matt Spalding drew the short straw:

Conservatives, of course, have reservations about certain aspects of King’s legacy. For one, he became too close, later in his career, to the welfare state. He was enamored of the theology of the Social Gospel, the movement that undermined much of mainstream Protestantism in the 20th century. Later in life, he was a vocal opponent of American involvement in the Vietnam. And we now know that in his scholarship and personal life King was far from perfect.

Nevertheless, there are three ways in which King’s message is profoundly conservative and relevant.

And we move on to the platitudes that prove King was right-wing, e.g.:

He believed in work ethic and thrift and spoke against crime and disorderly conduct.

Whereas liberals lay around in beanbag chairs in between trips to cash their welfare checks at the liquor store which they also rob. Still, we must never forget that the man was no Reagan:

This forgotten aspect of King’s thought is told expertly in an article entitled “Where Dr. King Went Wrong”...

After a bellyful of this, it's almost refreshing to read racist loon Marcus Epstein's "Myths of Martin Luther King" at LewRockwell.com, in which he tells conservatives to stop trying to insist that King was one of them ("the problem with this view is that King openly advocated quotas and racial set-asides"). Here's a more up-to-date version of the same thing. Deranged, yes, but at least they know what conservatism is.

Unfortunately conservatives will never heed their advice, because they're still compelled to seek office and the opportunities to loot the treasury that come with it, and after a solid year of Ooga Booga and dog whistles they only have the third Monday in January to try and convince America that they were just kidding.

UPDATE. In comments, a couple of readers notice Spalding's "later in his career... later in life" schtick, like King was a good Chamber of Commerce type until he went to a be-in or something. "'Later in life'?" asks Doghouse Riley. "The man didn't make it to forty. The fact was in all the papers at the time." Fats Durston fixates on that "Where Dr. King Went Wrong" book, which according to Spalding posits that "King turned to the welfare state when he became disheartened by the emergence of the black underclass." "Yeah," says Durston, "no black underclass existed before the civil rights movement. It only arose because of, well, fuckifIknow, but probably hippies or late '50s jazz."

Provider_UNE is looking forward to February, when conservatives "start screeching like wild banshees about the lack of a White History month."

Worth noting also: Ole Perfesser Instapundit celebrated MLK Day by denouncing "corrupt and racist" gun controllers and pleading for "sensible gun laws" -- i.e., cheap and plentiful pistols in major urban areas -- "...that don’t oppress minorities or entrap honest citizens." If his sudden interest in racism and the oppression of minorities surprises you, please note that he was talking about early 20th Century Irish and Italian immigrants, not the you-know-whats. This is the Perfesser we're talking about here. (Oh, and now he's pretending he didn't know that "liver lips" has been used as a racial slur. Other prominent internet conservatives experience no such confusion.)

2012-01-16T00:21:00.001-05:00

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP about the Bain Capital film and the rightbloggers who may not like Mitt Romney but know that when creative destruction is challenged, that by God is the Water's Edge and all must stand as one against the common enemy, sociamalism. There was some good action among the Romney-haters who refused to jump in for the big win -- how can you not love a nontroversy that has Dan Riehl running to Campaign for America's Future for back-up? But I chose to focus instead on the explanations that when Bain Capital destroys a dream in one place, another is born somewhere else. It's like New Age meets Libertarianism.

2012-01-13T19:52:00.002-05:00

LIBERTARIANISM FOR PEOPLE WHO HATE LIBERTARIANISM. David French notices that lots of U.S. servicemembers are donating to Ron Paul's campaign. But he has an explanation that will allow his more old-fashioned wingnut readers to feel good about this.

First, these brave men and women aren't contributing to Paul because they're antiwar hippies -- "the idealists who seem to believe that just one more irrigation project, or one more new school, or a few more cups of chai (with some nice intercultural dialogue) will turn the corner in the Area of Operations." No, they're antiwar because, like David French, they hate towelheads.

The Middle East is a savage place that views human life cheaply and will never, ever be worth fighting to change, and in fighting to change these cultures, we simply make more enemies. So long as they don’t try to kill us at home, they can do whatever they want to each other, and if they do try to kill us at home, the response shouldn’t be nation-building or invasion but overwhelming punitive force designed to destroy our enemies, not transform cultures. We’ll call this school of thought “Rubble doesn’t cause trouble”...

Almost every Ron Paul supporter I’ve ever known in the military (and I know quite a few) is in the “rubble doesn’t cause trouble” camp. They’re not idealistic about peace, and they don’t necessarily believe the rhetoric that if we leave Iraq and Afghanistan, we won’t get attacked. They instead think we responded the wrong way to 9/11 and that the last ten years of costly war have proven them right.

French doesn't agree with them there -- he still wants America to roam the world looking for inferior people to fuck with. But because he respects our men and women in uniform (and needs them to do the actual fucking-with for him), he'll defend them against charges of being interested in peace.

Well, look, if Glenn Greenwald can use Ron Paul for his cause, why can't French use him for his? It's not like the crazy old fuck is serving any other useful purpose except posing for "Well, ya gotta admit Ron Paul is right about..." stories.

2012-01-12T09:41:00.000-05:00

THE PARTY OF PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY. Newt Gingrich says he's sorry he unleashed the hounds of hell on Mitt Romney's Bain Capital predations. But he has an explanation:

“I agree with you,” Gingrich said. “It’s an impossible theme to talk about with Obama in the background. Obama just makes it impossible to talk rationally in that area because he is so deeply into class warfare that automatically you get an echo effect. … I agree with you entirely.”

In a couple of months I expect Gingrich to reveal he cheated on his wife and blame it on Kenyan anti-colonialism.

UPDATE. Gingrich returns with an incoherent backtrack on his backtrack: "This issue at hand is neither about Bain Capital, private equity firms, nor about capitalism... Instead of accepting the responsibility to answer questions about his business background, the Romney campaign is throwing up a smokescreen about an attack on capitalism." Were voters supposed to look at "When Mitt Romney Came to Town" and think, "Well, I'm all for asset stripping and throwing people out of work, but this guy went too far"?

2012-01-11T22:02:00.000-05:00

PUTTIN' DOWN ROOTS. Nancy Nall informs me that Rod Dreher, whose recent retreat from the Big City and return to the country and the Old Ways in which he was brungded up was lovingly documented by David Brooks ("they decided to accept the limitations of small-town life in exchange for the privilege of being a part of a community"), is already dissatisfied with the quality of his broadband service in his new/old hometown of Fritters, Louisiana (he lives in the "historic downtown").

Before you say, “Oh, shut up, you and your First World problems,” I will point out that given the line of work I’m in — media — I have to have reliable broadband access to do my job efficiently. I’m already developing some work-arounds, and I can go to the coffee shop or to my mom and dad’s house (out in the country!) if I need to have fast Internet.

Ain't he able-bodied? Cain't he till the soil? Does he really go down to the General Store and ask where a feller who's In Media can git hisself some wi-fi?

This is such a small town that I don’t know that AT&T has any real economic incentive to upgrade its equipment to provide first-class broadband to people here. Is this something the town, or parish government, would have an interest in subsidizing, as an economic development initiative?...

[Insert Big Gummint lazy good fer nuthin' poors joke here]

You don’t realize how much our modern way of economic life depends on reliable high-speed Internet service, until you don’t have it. Towns and places that don’t have it are going to get left behind, economically.

Well, guess that's it, Rod will have to up sticks again. Where do you good people imagine he will land next?

2012-01-11T09:54:00.002-05:00

LIBERALS HAVE NAMES LIKE "CARL," AND CONSERVATIVES HAVE NAMES LIKE "LENNY." I think I've figured out the appeal of PJ Lifestyle, the Pajamas Media style section from which I got that bizarre "Hell on Wheels" review last week. It seems to be part of an alternate universe PJM is building, in which conservatives who have renounced the world -- you know, like this guy -- can feel at home. It goes Andrew Breitbart's Big Hollywood one better -- instead of just interpreting movies and TV shows according to doctrine, its writers apply their Procrustean standards to other leisure and cultural activities as well.

Take Kathy Shaidle's "George Carlin Wasn’t Funny: The Top Five Most Overrated Comedians." Understand first that Shaidle is one of those culture warriors who thinks we're all living in a politically correct pogrom; she wrote in 2010 that since the 1980s, "political correctness has gotten worse, not better. Yes, some of us joke about it, but we do so in whispers around the office coffeemaker, lest we risk our jobs."

Yet, brave soul that she is, she's willing to take on the PC shibboleths of our time, as she announces in her opening:

Yeah, I’m a heretic. I also fell asleep during Star Wars.

Bruce Springsteen? Pompous blowhard.

The Godfather? Long stretches of beige nothingness.

And The Who are better than The Beatles.

(Hell, I prefer The Monkees to The Beatles…)

But here’s the first “pop culture” contrarianism I’m a teensy bit afraid to confess in public:

George Carlin never made me laugh.

Now, if you've been around the internet at all, you know that contrarianism is actually a great way to get attention. Does everyone love "Mad Men"? Write about how it stinks and watch the clicks and quotes roll in!

Shaidle's got as much right to get in on this racket as anyone. But when you read her article, you find that her idea of contrarianism is very narrow -- that is, what she mainly finds unfunny about these allegedly funny people is liberalism.

When Louis CK talks about Tracy Morgan's gay jokes (in an interview!), Shaidle complains that he "sounds like the kind of person a comedian (like Louis CK) is supposed to be making fun of." Then she answers CK with a long Mark Steyn quote, and asks, "isn’t Steyn’s take patently superior? But Mark Steyn votes the wrong way, so no GQ 'Man of the Year' virtual tongue-baths for him."

On and on it goes: The Smothers Brothers were really fired by DEMOCRAT Senator John Pastore and one of them was mean to Penn Jillette -- that's how not-funny they are! Lenny Bruce isn't funny mainly because she says so -- and not that she needs back-up, but professional funnyman Nick Gillespie thinks so too, and Rush Limbaugh is funnier than Jon Stewart, so there. And Carlin's not funny because "like so many old hippies, he just wouldn’t go away." Plus:

And if Carlin was so brave, why didn’t he rail against two other words you REALLY can’t say on the radio and [most of] TV: “n*****” and “f****t”? Because fighting for the right to say them would shock his liberal fans...

Apparently the "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television" bit isn't funny, but this shit is a riot. (Oh, and I think the words she means here are "nigger" and "faggot." The PC speech police must have put in those stars against her contrarian will. Fight the power, sister!)

In the real world, where normal people might conceivably wander in and read your stuff, articles like this would be incomprehensible. But normal people seldom get to these articles, because they're not the target market -- which would seem to be the people of the Conservative Exodus. Even deranged separatists need something to read at the compound.

UPDATE. But I gotta say, I got a kick out of the one about how Twilight is okay even though it has vampires because it's pro-life. "Will these women follow Bella’s example and protect their unborn child?" asks author Rhonda Robinson. "Perhaps. If this film is as persuasive as its opponents fear." I wonder where the big fights between the Hollyweird lieberals who want to get rich off the Twilight franchise and the Hollyweird lieberals who fear its pro-life message take place. The New Republic, maybe?

2012-01-09T00:22:00.002-05:00

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about rightbloggers starting, with an auspicious and a dropping eye, to adjust to life after the carnival and Make Mine Mitt. It's starting to look like 2008 again, when the party bosses foisted that traitor John McCain on them. Well, they still get to run against a black guy.

Excised from the final draft was Tom Maguire, who didn't enjoy Ron Paul's attack on Newt Gingrich for his lack of military service as much as I did. Maguire pointed out that when Paul served he had not been stationed in a hot zone, and therefore was "not likely to be shot at," whereas when Gingrich had a chance to serve in Vietnam "in 1965, it was not yet clear to the public at large that the Johnson Administration had no strategy for winning the war." As Gingrich is an esteemed historian, he presumably foresaw both America's defeat and his own importance to the nation's future, and wisely kept himself safe home. What a patriot!

Oh, and there's that asshole Rod Dreher, who claims to both believe and endorse Rick Santorum's claim that if his own son came out gay he would not beat him with a tire iron until he straightened out:

I found out that in my small, very conservative and churchgoing Southern town, there’s a lot of affection for Ginger Snap, a local black drag queen. Ginger Snap has her own float in the community Christmas parade. I guarantee that if you polled the people along the parade route, both white and black, nine out of 10 would say that homosexuality is wrong and that same-sex marriage shouldn’t be allowed. But they will also watch Ginger Snap roll by on her float and wave.

No civil rights for you, but we shore enjoy you wearin' a purty dress on a parade float! I wonder how many of them hit on Ginger Snap when they're drunk.

2012-01-05T23:19:00.000-05:00

BOO FUCKING HOO. Yes, it's hilarious that John freaking Yoo is calling Obama's quasi-recess appointments an "Abuse of Executive Power... even with my broad view of executive power." Even if one didn't know the backstory of the Republicans' relentless obstructionism, that is rich.

But I kind of prefer the Ole Perfesser's comment:

A lawyer-reader emails: “If Richard Cordray were Sarah Palin, someone would file a qui tam action against him when he gets his first paycheck, and someone in Ohio would file a grievance with the Ohio Supreme Court’s Attorney Disciplinary Counsel seeking sanctions for Cordray’s clearly unconstitutional actions.” Well, not so much if Richard Cordray were Sarah Palin, as if Republicans acted like Democrats. Maybe they should give it a try — the Dems seem to enjoy it. And they did manage to prevent a Palin candidacy through sheer harassment.

He's talking about the people who impeached Bill Clinton for a blowjob. And "prevent a Palin candidacy through sheer harassment" -- look, no one's more disappointed than me that she's not running, but, why man, she did make love to this "harassment"; the resulting ressentiment was the source of all her power over the yokels. And when she bowed out it wasn't because she'd been chased off -- imagine DFHs chasing off America's Sweetheart! -- but because through tedious drumming she wore out her welcome as even an opera buffo version of a statesman, and retreated to take the short-end money as a celebrity spokesmodel.

Know what I like best about this? That it's not one of the Perfesser's rawr-we-will-crush-you posts, but instead one of those in which he claims victim status because a mean liberal fought back. Those used to piss me off, too, but now for some reason I can't get enough of them.

2012-01-04T08:48:00.000-05:00

NOT SINCE "THE DUKES OF HAZZARD"... Pajamas Media TV critic S.T. Karnick:

To be sure, in some ways ["Hell on Wheels"] pays obeisance to modern political and cultural clichés about the nation’s past. Predictably, the United States in 1865 is shown as dirty and corrupt, and life for many is depicted as short, brutal, ugly, dirty, and meaningless. The railroad encampment is a cesspool rife with drunkenness, violence, and sexual license. Although no longer slaves, all the blacks we see are impoverished manual laborers.

So: a documentary, then?

Fortunately, Hell on Wheels producers Joe and Tony Gayton don’t leave it at that. Instead, they convey numerous story elements that contradict the cynical contemporary view of the nation’s history in very interesting and important ways. In the very first episode, for example, common views of the history of American race relations and the origins of the War Between the States are subverted. A northerner is cruel to the former slaves who are working on the railroad, whereas the protagonist, a southerner and former slaveholder, is sympathetic to them and treats them fairly. Later we find out that even though he fought for the Confederacy, the Southerner had already freed his own slaves and suffered privation in order to pay them wages for their services.

Ah -- so, more of a Freaky Friday sort of thing.

Similarly, Sherman’s March and the Union’s conduct of the war in general are depicted as vicious and unconscionable, whereas the Southern cause is characterized as a matter of honor, which the characters — who would know, of course — clearly accept as true...

Ex-slaves in the North, by contrast, are shown as living under awful conditions that make a mockery of the Emancipation Proclamation... Ferguson foreshadows the argument that the black educator and political leader Booker T. Washington would make near the end of the century: that blacks shouldn’t wait around for political solutions requiring equal treatment from whites, but could only ensure their own betterment through hard work, competition, and entrepreneurship...

Having obliterated the southern half of the nation, the government’s activities in the postwar era seem largely confined to displacing Indians, killing Indians, and seeking out corrupt ways of amassing wealth for the politically connected few...

Readers, I haven't seen this show. Is it really the glowing tribute to the Lost Cause Karnick portrays? Because if so, I think America might be ready for my contrarian take on "Uncle Tom's Cabin," with Ian McShane as a tortured, foul-mouthed Simon Legree.

Even outside of the Southron stuff, the review is full if wonders, e.g.:

The real villain here is clearly government. As Cole’s entreaty indicates, the white people in the railroad encampment want nothing but for the Indians to leave them alone, and vice versa, but the government is intent on forcing them into separate worlds.

Also, in the machinations of the Republican-enabled railroad barons of the Gilded Age Karnick finds "strong parallels to modern-day congressional Democrats."

Well, you go to culture war with the culture warriors you've got, I guess. (h/t Dan Coyle)

UPDATE. "I have no idea about the show's historic accuracy," says Tod Westlake, a fan of the show, in comments, "but it's defintely entertaining. I believe this might have something to do with a literary technique known as 'irony.' I had to look it up, myself." On this head, DocAmazing recommends "Kung Fu," the old TV show about how rural Westerners loved Asians once they got to know/had their bullies beaten up by them. Me, I'm wondering if I had Once Upon a Time in the West all wrong. Maybe Frank and the weaselly railroad builder were the heroes. I mean, what did Harmonica produce?

2012-01-02T22:46:00.000-05:00

ANNALS OF COMMUNITARIAN CONSERVATISM, CONT. You may recall that last weekend David Brooks told his readers how Rod Dreher had moved back to his old homestead because small-town folks are so nice, and invited them to check out Dreher's "communitarian conservatism" (i.e., the scam formerly known as Crunchy Conservatism) at his blog at The American Conservative.

I wonder how those who took Brooks' invitation enjoyed this heartwarming recent post in which Dreher commiserates with an understandably anonymous doctor about what leeches the poor are:

["Dr. Smith"] said that many of the patients he sees “are people who are poor because they just don’t want to work. They’ve never had a job and they never will have a job. They’re fine with that.”

He said that the general public has no idea how much money is wasted on medical fraud and abuse by members of the underclass, and on treating people who have no intention of being anything other than dependents on the state, and who will demand treatment “if they as much as stub their toe” because they don’t have to pay for it...

The observable common behavior [of the poor] is so strange, irresponsible, and wholly dysfunctional that it’s hard to relate it to any norms we recognize as healthy, or even sane. But one is not permitted to say things like this out loud, or one will be accused of heartlessness, and worse.

Yet here's Dreher saying it out loud; what a brave fellow! Be nice to him, now, he just lost his sister.

It's been a while since I read the Bible. Was this Jesus guy Dreher claims to worship as big an asshole as he is?

UPDATE. Some commenters observe that Dreher, like his intellectual forebears, distinguishes between the "deserving poor" and the "undeserving poor." Slocum observes, "The Christian conservative thing to do would be to throw some money down on the ground and get a good ole bumfight going. That's how we see who deserves what."

Commenter g asks, "If you 'as much as stub your toe' and get treatment, the doctor gets the payment, not the patient. What motivation would the patient have to get treatment if he doesn't need it? Aren't most perpetrators of Medicaid fraud the medical professionals, not the patients?"

Medicare and Medicaid frauds do indeed enrich unscrupulous doctors, pharmacists, and health care professionals -- like these charming HMO execs I wrote about elsewhere, who are charged with shunting their sicker, less profitable customers off to hospices, from which they allegedly received kickbacks.

The Obama Administration has been working hard to cut medical fraud. But that's not the solution Christians would prefer; rather than crack down on the industrious capitalists who cheat the system, they'd prefer to throw poor people whom they suspect of malingering out of hospitals. They seem to believe that, like hippies, the poors fuck up the system out of sheer malevolence, not from any rational cause.

UPDATE 2. You know, I really shouldn't blame Dreherism on Christians. Many evangelicals support government services to the poor, and there's no reason to assume that all Jesus people share Dreher's way of looking at things. It's easy to be misled by the very visible public perches occupied by retributive Christians, and thus perpetuate the feedback loop that associates ordinary followers of Christ with religious hucksters.

2012-01-02T01:09:00.000-05:00

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP about the Santorum Surge and how evanescent I expect it to be. To give you some idea why, here's a quote from James Lileks -- yes, that James Lileks -- on Santorum: "Santorum's remarks are not a recipe for electoral success in the 21st century." And he said it in 2003. If that's what Lileks thought in 2003, by now Richard Viguerie must be going, "Christ, not that Jesus freak bullshit again."

On the other hand, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin have said nice things about him, so Santorum may expect significant support from the has-been grifter wing of the party.

2012-01-01T14:22:00.000-05:00

THE ENEMY OF THE GOOD. I got into a little beef with Glenn Greenwald about his column comparing Ron Paul's civil libertarianism with that of President Obama. I think I was a little unfair about it. There are after all plenty of good reasons to be pissed about Obama, the latest being that horrible bill that he just signed, despite his alleged "reservations." From the bill:

(c) Disposition Under Law of War- The disposition of a person under the law of war as described in subsection (a) may include the following:
(1) Detention under the law of war without trial until the end of the hostilities authorized by the Authorization for Use of Military Force.

As the "War on Terror" is basically a war without end, the ACLU is right to call it "indefinite detention." You'd think that would be good grounds for a veto. But we didn't get one.

So once again our MOR Democratic President disappoints. I must say that, while I've been expecting less than what was advertised since the campaigning Senator Obama went for the bailouts in 2008, he's gone even further than I expected.

Greenwald, though, chooses to use Ron Paul as a cudgel to beat Obama. This is the sort of dreamy, libertarian-with-an-explanation thing that makes me especially cynical and Realpolitiky.

Greenwald carefully stresses that he doesn't support Paul, but when you read his description of Obama --

He has slaughtered civilians — Muslim children by the dozens — not once or twice, but continuously in numerous nations with drones, cluster bombs and other forms of attack. He has sought to overturn a global ban on cluster bombs. He has institutionalized the power of Presidents — in secret and with no checks — to target American citizens for assassination-by-CIA, far from any battlefield. He has waged an unprecedented war against whistleblowers, the protection of which was once a liberal shibboleth...

And then read him on Paul --

The parallel reality — the undeniable fact — is that all of these listed heinous views and actions from Barack Obama have been vehemently opposed and condemned by Ron Paul: and among the major GOP candidates, only by Ron Paul.

Then you have to ask: If he feels that way, how can he not support Ron Paul? Obama as described by Greenwald is a tyrannical monster, and Paul's the only guy with any meaningful support willing to oppose his tyranny. From this perspective it would seem practically a war crime not to start up a government in exile and oppose Generalissimo Obama by any means necessary.

Greenwald says there are "all sorts of legitimate reasons for progressives to oppose Ron Paul’s candidacy on the whole." But he doesn't lay them out in the column, though he does mention the newsletters we've all heard so much about -- which issue has become the go-to knock on Paul, so much so that it's practically a diversion now; it makes it look like Paul is a serious candidate sadly undone by the unfortunate revelation of a peccadillo, rather than the avatar of a disastrous idea of government.

Paul, as he is advertised, wouldn't just put an end to the national security state. He'd put an end to the welfare state. No Social Security, no Medicare, no minimum wage, no FDA, etc. Even successful Big-Gummint projects like the Clean Air Act would be subject to new, corporation-friendly amendments.

Tyranny-wise, we'd be cutting out the middleman: Instead of having a government that sometimes enables and sometimes blocks the wishes of special interests, we'd let the special interests rumble for domination over all of us, with nothing but free-market pixie dust for protection.

Maybe you think it'd be worth it, because then the military-industrial complex would also be dismantled, and though we'd be fucked, at least the foreign babies would be spared. After all, in the enlightened, proto-libertarian Gilded Age, we didn't have any such foreign adventures -- well, okay, the Spanish-American War, and the Philippine Insurrection, and a bunch of little invasions that inexplicably took place without socialist inspiration. And yeah, okay, there were massacres. But at least it was fairer then, because sometimes U.S. troops opened fire on Americans too. Freedom!

Fuck that shit. I'm voting for Black Hitler in 2012.

UPDATE. In comments, Greenwald says -- very graciously, I would add -- that he did lay out the problems with Paul in his italicized "honest line of reasoning" that a hypothetical pro-Obama liberal would take. I am tempted to say that I didn't credit this because Greenwald had put it in the mouth of a fictional character with whom he doesn't agree, and so I did not consider it his own point of view; but to be honest, my eyes were too filled with blood to read carefully after I saw my own point of view characterized thus: "Yes, I’m willing to continue to have Muslim children slaughtered by covert drones and cluster bombs, and America’s minorities imprisoned by the hundreds of thousands for no good reason..." Jesus, Glenn, why not add "Mwah hah hah" and "Pathetic humans! Who can save you now?" while you're at it?

2011-12-30T11:56:00.004-05:00

BIG-TENT REVIVAL MEETING. I see that David Brooks has caught up with Rod Dreher. His column focuses on Dreher's rather sweet accounts of his sister's last days, the generosity of the people in his Louisiana hometown, and his decision to move back there from the Big City.

Even people who've read Dreher's nonsense over the years might find that story moving, and those regular readers of Brooks who are unacquainted with Dreher may take Brooks at his word that Dreher

is part of a communitarian conservative tradition that goes back to thinkers like Russell Kirk and Robert Nisbet. Forty years ago, Kirk led one of the two great poles of conservatism. It existed in creative tension with the other great pole, Milton Friedman’s free-market philosophy.

In recent decades, the communitarian conservatism has become less popular while the market conservatism dominates. But that doesn’t make Kirk’s insights into small towns, traditions and community any less true, as Rod Dreher so powerfully rediscovered.

And this may lead them to follow Dreher, expecting a warm, back-to-the-land, Wendell Berry sort of vibe which will restore conservatism to its rightful place in the public imagination.

Eventually they'll get to know the real Dreher -- the one who thinks a bride who shows a tattoo on her wedding day is a slut; who thinks gays, once given marriage rights, will mob and storm the churches and attack Christians (which, he explains, is why he keeps a gun in the house); who reacts to the Catholic Church's sex abuse scandals with articles like "How the cultural Left paved way for pedophilia"; who thinks Islamic extremists really have a point about how Godless we Westerners are ("I probably have, re: fundamental morals, more in common with the first 500 people I'd meet in Cairo, Damascus or Tehran than the first 500 people I'd meet in Park City, UT, during festival time"); who fills his idle moments yelling about dirty things he found on the internet; etc.

In other words, they'll find out that Dreher is a garden-variety Jesus freak with a mean streak. Some of them will be disappointed, because they wanted to believe that there really was someone out there who conformed to their homey vision of artisanal conservatism (though they wouldn't actually go out there and cultivate it themselves -- picture David Brooks sauntering into the general store in Bumfuck, asking where a man could get a manicure 'round these here parts).

But some, I imagine, will be pleased, because Jesus freaks with mean streaks are really what they think "communitarian conservatives" are. And, you know, I think they're right. Talk all you want about Russell Kirk, but what really filled the communitarian-conservative slot Brooks is talking about was R.J. Rushdoony and Jerry Falwell. I'm not surprised that Brooks finds it necessary to push Mr. Crunchy Con as the new face of that movement. He's mild-mannered, and he likes to grow tomatoes and play with his internet toys -- he'll pour you a nice glass of Bordeaux while his wife christens your kids in the bathtub. Who knows, it might work. People long ago learned to laugh at the ole-time string-tie preacher; only a few of us yet know how comical the new Dreher edition is.

2011-12-29T16:51:00.000-05:00

THE JON SWIFT MEMORIAL ROUNDUP IS POSTED -- Battochio did his usual bangup job, and the contributors are all stellar. It's a good way to remind oneself that not everything written for the internet is purposefully designed to sap your will to live.

2011-12-28T22:47:00.001-05:00

YOUR LIBERTARIAN IDEAS ARE INTRIGUING TO ME AND I WOULD LIKE TO SUBSCRIBE TO YOUR RACIST NEWSLETTER. Dave Weigel has a few posts up wondering aloud why gays and/or liberals aren't mad at Ron Paul for the homo-hate in his crazy newsletters. I doubt that Weigel has actually missed Digby, who sees Paul with penetrating clarity for what he really is, and others like her. But Weigel's not talking about people who have actual views on libertarianism. He means sentimental sorts like Dan Savage, with his live-and-let-die attitude toward Paul ("Ron may not like gay people, and may not want to hang out with us or use our toilets, but he's content to leave us the fuck alone"), and the self-identified liberals who tell pollsters they feel kindly toward Paul. He means the folks who might be down for a little rEVOLution, if only on weekends. The guy seems loose, and says he didn't mean it; why get into all that old stuff?

Paul has benefited from his novelty factor. Everyone else in the 2012 Republican Presidential field is selling schmaltz that seemed tasty enough in earlier iterations but has since attained a reek. Perry is George W. Bush minus 20 IQ points. Romney is the Nixonian organization man who, like Tricky Dick, has added a little nastiness to his affect to become a more electable New Romney. Gingrich is Gingrich, a straight-up nostalgia act. Santorum and Bachmann are tussling for the Christian Coalition dead-enders like it was 1988.

Paul seems fresh in this context because he's an overt libertarian. Republicans often dabble in libertarianism -- whenever they feel like they're coming over too hidebound, they flash it to relax the crowd -- but at the Presidential level, they usually have to confine themselves to the economic, Milton Friedman, trickle-down variant of libertarianism, because to get into social issues would piss off the Christians. But that worked very well for a long time, especially after Reagan linked the idea of rapacious capitalism with maximum freedom, and the huge trade imbalances he engendered meant everyone got cheap foreign goods.

(And libertarians were okay with that. Go to reason.com sometime, put "crony capitalism" in the search field, and see how few of the references come from before the Obama Administration.)

This variant isn't so useful since their crackpot ideas collapsed the economy; now Gingrich's feed-the-corporations economic plan has the same sad mothball smell his candidacy does. But they still can't get too deep into the libertarian social agenda, due to all those senior citizens whose prejudices are all that bind them to the party. And forget the other libertarian tropes. No one would believe them talking gold bug nonsense; Herman Cain, the conservative black hope till he imploded, was a Federal Reserve Bank chairman. And without their support for endless wars, what would be left to make them look butch?

Then there's Ron Paul. Not only does he go the whole nine yards on free minds-free markets -- he also denounces our foreign adventures economic and martial. He hates the Fed. He'll let you have raw milk. Freedom!

And he has a kinda-sorta gay rights record that both bigots and Dan Savage can be comfortable with -- he'd leave it to the states, just like abortion and racial integration. This is where his libertarianism really comes in handy -- you can believe that he personally endorsed at the vile things published under his name in those newsletters, and still believe, if motivated to do so, that his hatred of the State (but not the states) is so strong that it would actually protect gays, blacks, women, and everyone else even from his own ill will.

This is easier to believe if you forget that Paul is a Republican, operating comfortably within that party's framework for decades, and if you forget, or never knew, that libertarians are comfortable in that party for a reason. The right-wing fringe groups that attached to the GOP after World War II had their disagreements -- as with the National Review people and Ayn Rand -- but they also found plenty of common ground. It is almost charming to read Walter Olson on R.J. Rushdoony and his Reconstructionist loons, and how they -- unaccountably, to Olson -- "gained prominence in libertarian causes, ranging from hard-money economics to the defense of home schooling." Read Max Blumenthal on the subject and you'll see that the relationship of libertarians, Christian fundamentalists, Birchers, and other radicals was less contentious than synthetic. Think of Steve Forbes and Richard Viguerie -- for that matter, think of Rudy Giuliani and Pat Robertson.

These guys can always work together, because they all came out of the same Big Bang of hatred for the New Deal and its legacy: Big Government and the coalition that sustains it -- blacks, gays, unionized workers, women, et alia. Each conservative tribe has its own relationship to that legacy -- some of them (the more intelligent ones, generally) are deeply cynical, and some are as sincere as any schizophrenic street preacher. But all of them deeply hate that a bunch of minorities have coalesced to get something that they think belongs by right to them and people like them, and many of them have learned that it would be more effective (and, these days, more popular) to strike at the state that enables that coalition than at the minorities themselves.

What mania, particularly, animated Paul's newsletter stories of criminal-natured blacks and AIDS-drama-queen gays doesn't matter to me. I know that he's a Republican Libertarian and, having been born earlier than yesterday, that is enough for me.

2011-12-26T23:10:00.001-05:00

DISAPPOINTED. Oh please oh please oh please let it be true:

All along, the Tea Party voters have yet to unite behind a single candidate. They still aren’t united, but in Iowa, there is evidence that Rick Santorum may be surging ahead.

It would be fun, wouldn't it? Alas, there are a few things wrong with this assessment, not the least being that it was made by Dick Morris.

Most likely now, Romney will win Iowa and go on to win New Hampshire. But then, a kind of buyer’s remorse may set in as Republicans contemplate a nominee who backs Romneycare and once supported abortion choice. His past apostasies, combined with his religion, may give Newt an opportunity to come back in South Carolina. Then the two of them will slug it out down the road. But they may have company in the person of Rick Santorum.

The titans Romney and Gingrich battle to a draw and, with a leg-up from Jesus, little Rick Santorum takes the convention! Sadly, the battle is a trifle one-sided; the Gingrich campaign seems to be devoting energies better spent on, say, getting the candidate onto actual ballots to the development of weapons-grade bad analogies -- first they compared Gingrich's failure to qualify for the Virginia primary to Pearl Harbor, and now this:

Surely, in the most successful country in history, we can do what is necessary, we can be in the spirit of General Washington and the Americans who fought for freedom, we can go out, get the vote out, make the argument, stand up for freedom, and I believe we can have as big an impact in helping America remain free in our generation as they did in theirs.

Yes, Newt Gingrich is comparing the limping last leg of his comeback tour to Washington crossing the Delaware. When his defeat is inescapable, I hope he's man enough to come out in a Confederate uniform and compare the failed Gingrich Campaign to the Lost Cause, and wave his fans off to a rousing rendition of "Dixie"; failing that, he could come out in shades and a corncob pipe like Douglas MacArthur and promise "I shall return," or topple to the floor crying "Et tu, Brute? Then fall Gingrich!" or "Mother of Mercy! Is this the end of Gingrich?" or "OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW."

When the dust settles I'm afraid it'll be Romney with a briefcase and a fountain pen, trying gosh-darned hard to get America to switch insurance companies. Tsk. I knew this election would be bad for America, but I didn't think it'd run out of entertainment value before 2012 even began.

2011-12-21T22:44:00.003-05:00

SHORTER MARK KRIKORIAN: What good are wetbacks if we can't use them against faggots?

UPDATE: You think I'm kidding?

That’s part of the reason why California, the state with the largest share of immigrants in its population, has “the first state law mandating lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender history and social science curricula.” It’s not that immigrants demanded this nonsense; they probably don’t even like it very much. But their large-scale presence solidifies the position of the Left, making this kind of thing possible, and they aren’t turned off by it enough to rebel against it.

What you or I might see as a welcome trend toward greater liberty for all people, Krikorian sees as a fifth column of objectively pro-gay Messicans. You wonder why we can't have a serious discussion of illegal immigration? It's because for years the podium has been hogged by clowns.

UPDATE 2: "Don't tell me you haven't heard of Reconquistadora de la Rosa," Jay B. tells Krikorian in comments. "Gays in the WeHo/Castro set have been working for years with their maids, gardeners and central valley migrant workers to cement a Pink-Brown alliance. The deal goes, or so I've heard, that in exchange for the barest of benefits, illegal Chicanos will vote straight queer ticket. Eventually, the theory says, gay leadership will cede a 90% gay state back to Mexico in exchange for a permanent free state in Puerto Vallarta."

Several other commenters take Krikorian's post as further evidence that conservatives don't believe in democracy. Sure they do, the way Arnold Rothstein believed in the 1919 Cincinnati Reds.

UPDATE 3: Those who get out of the boat will also be treated to Krikorian's reminder that many Democrats were on the wrong side in the Civil War, which prompts this comment from the Good Roger Ailes: "Ultimately, the Democratic coalition of slaveholders and blacks proved to be unsustainable."

2011-12-20T22:34:00.002-05:00

THE CONSERVATIVE COMEBACK PART 4,789. Well, Gingrich is falling like a rock and none of them can tolerate Ron Paul. Time for a RedState brain trust including Moe Lane, Lori Ziganto, and Aaron Gardner to burst into the room with Plan 17. Whattaya got for us, Einsteins?

If this website has a purpose – if any conservative website or publication has a purpose – it must begin with electing conservatives to significant public offices. We have the chance to nominate a conservative for president and win the White House in 2012. We can fumble that chance away by settling for a nominee we can’t trust to pursue conservative policies in office, or we can make a stand for the best, most conservative potential president in the field.

I knew it! The Santorum moment has arrived! Or maybe a Bachmann revival...

That’s Rick Perry, and we enthusiastically endorse him to be the 45th President of the United States.

Whut.

They have to be kidding. Rick Perry, whom America perceives as a mentally challenged rodeo clown? The guy prominent conservatives pretend not to recognize on the street? That Rick Perry?

Perry is the most reliable conservative in the race. He has made his share of missteps over 25 years in public life, as have all the candidates, but when you think seriously about which of the major candidates would govern in the most consistently conservative fashion, the answer is obvious.

Fellas, there's probably a robot somewhere that would govern in the most consistently conservative fashion -- it wouldn't be hard to program; just get it to yell "More tax breaks for the wealthy!" and "I hates me a faggot!" at intervals, and to fart loudly when France or higher education is mentioned -- but it doesn't mean anything unless you can get people to vote for it.

The one knock on Perry is that his poor debate performances and periodic campaign trail gaffes will open him to the same vulnerabilities in office as President Bush: an inability to respond to criticism or explain his own policies.

The same vulnerabilities? Perry makes George W. Bush look like Pericles. Nobody, but nobody, is praying, "Oh Lord, send us someone just like George W. Bush, only stupider." Just the other day -- at a stage in the campaign when you'd expect him to work extra hard not to make any more dumb mistakes -- Perry misread Kim Jong Il as Kim Jong the Second. That's like something out of a Cheech and Chong movie. Most observers, having seen how much of an understatement "inability to respond to criticism or explain his own policies" is, have moved on to wondering if Perry can tie a shoelace without coaching.

Second, debating skill takes on outsize importance in the primaries, when candidates have to stand out on a stage crowded with 7 or 8 people who all agree with each other 80-90% of the time. All Rick Perry needs to do is step onstage and everyone will know how he’s different from Barack Obama.

Oh, it's no use. They think life is like an Adam Sandler movie, where everyone winds up preferring the moron-with-a-heart-of-gold to the stuffed shirt.

Third, the main job of the president is making decisions, not talking, and Alex Kaufmann makes a great point regarding how guys like Perry get things done:

Stick around, you have to see what they brought in the pinch-hitter to do:

Until yesterday, I wasn’t completely sure why I liked Rick Perry so much. I have a list of reasons, but none of them really got to the root of why I like him.

Yesterday the reason finally dawned on me. I watched this wonderful 11-minute video from Ben Howe entitled “The Rick Perry I Know”…

… and I had a revelation: Rick Perry is just like my Dad...

When it all gets too much for me, and I expect it often will, I'll just try to recall the image this gave me of Rick Perry in the deep woods, addressing a group of Boy Scouts around a campfire: "Guys, I know you haven't had anything to eat for a couple of days, but we're gonna make it out of these woods because I got me an idea. Now you remember when I asked y'all what direction the sun comes up in, and I got an equal amount of votes for 'West,' 'South,' and 'Mommy'? Well, I didn't know what to do with that, so I prayed on it and the Lord tole me that when we wake up in the morning hallucinating from hunger, we're gonna see Ronald Reagan big as life, and he's gonna lead us on outta here, and we shouldn't get scared if they place he leads us to looks like a ravine or a mess o' barb wire. Now try and get some sleep, and remember, bears ain't like dogs, when they sniff at you it don't mean they wanna play."

2011-12-18T23:03:00.002-05:00

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the Ron Paul surge and the rightblogger rush to stop it. For years Paul has been their little rock-and-roll, their token free thinker -- but whenever he gets close to winning some high-profile contest, they suddenly remember he's crazy, i.e., likely when in office to cut military appropriations.

Well, we knew all that Tea Party stuff was bullshit months ago. On to Mittmentum!

2011-12-14T22:15:00.003-05:00

DON'T TAKE THAT TONE WITH ME. Ohdear, The Anchoress again:

Just ran out for a Chai Tea Latte (and to get away from the noise of the non-stop leaf-blowers, around here) and heard this on the radio:
“Mitt Romney is in New York (blah blah) to attend three fund-raisers where he’ll get to meet some supporters (blah blah) paying $2,500 a plate (blah blah) and others on Park Avenue.”
On paper, it looks like the most innocent news report ever generated, doesn’t it?

Over the airways, with the newsreader’s emphasis, what came through was
“Mitt Romney is in New York (blah blah) to attend three fund-raisers! Where he’ll get to meet some supporters (blah blah) paying $2,500 a plate! (Blah blah) and others on Park Avenue!“
Message: Moneygrubbing! The One Percenters! The Evil Rich on Park Avenue!

Somehow this same news station manages not to overemphasize or breath exclamation points when the President comes into town to do a number of fundraisers costing thousands of dollars a plate, in ritzy neighborhoods...

Even assuming that this cheapjack mystic actually heard what she says she heard, those of us who actually live in this world will assume that the harried newsreader was probably just trying to make the copy sound like something other than blah blah.

But more to the point: Imagine thinking like this. Imagine hearing 1010-WINS or some damn thing and being offended by the political implications of somebody's tone of voice. It's one thing to be bothered enough to write about something stupid somebody said, but why would you report to your readers on the ideological bias of someone's "breath exclamation points"?

I write a lot here about the spectacular self-pity and eagerness to take offense of modern conservatives, but at this moment in their history I think they're verging into something new. There's always been in their discourse a kind of petulance that seemed to me beyond politics, and in a post like this it asserts itself and overtakes politics almost completely. You see revealed the habit of mind that prefigures all their crackpot ideas about justice, governance, and everything else -- that of the perpetually aggrieved fusspot, the one who thinks everyone's trying to put something over on her -- which is why, whenever she takes an absurd number of helpings from the food sample table, or brings 20 items to the 10-items-or-less line, or stiffs the waiter at the coffee shop, or occupies two spaces at the parking lot, she feels not only justified but righteous. She thinks she's anti-socialist, but she's really just anti-social. And the pinched, miserable blaming blather that pours off the stage of the Republican Presidential debates is not oratory nor statesmanship nor even politics, but the echo of her voice.

2011-12-13T22:39:00.008-05:00

SHORTER MEGAN McARDLE: I know this person who actually became poor and I don't feel a bit sorry for her, because then I would be dehumanizing her by denying her agency -- just as you would be doing if you felt sorry for other poor people and tried to give them advantages they wouldn't know what to do with, like jobs at a living wage.

UPDATE. Some commenters get out of the boat ("I almost left behind Lance and that puppy," shudders dex) and have the same awestruck, silent-upon-a-peak-in-Darien reaction I had to McArdle's show-stopper, "It's all too common for well-meaning middle-class people to think that if the poor just had the same stuff we do, they wouldn't be poor any more..." Not wishing to imply racism, which of course would be the worst crime one could commit against a conservative, I will suppose her insight is based on the continued uncouth behavior after their ascension to great wealth of the Beverly Hillbillies.

UPDATE 2. "The weird feeling that I get from the post is that Megan seems to think that she's being genuinely empathetic there," says Halloween Jack. "It's like an alien who is trying to explain to a mob of panicked and furious humans that the title of How To Serve Man works both ways." Well, I wouldn't go that far; McArdle probably thinks the sort of empathy normal humans feel is bathetic and gross, like the totally over-the-top wailing of mothers over their dead children that she saw in a movie once. Still, I guess even libertarians need something in their lives to take the place of empathy, and contorted rationalizations like I'm not condescending, you're condescending are it. Call them shoulder pads for the soul.

2011-12-13T22:31:00.003-05:00

MOOCHERS AND LOOTERS.

Are there no think tanks? Are there no Koch Brothers?

Well, I'm sure the guys at Reason would never -- oh wait.

This Yuletide I'm giving my charitable donations to bums hanging around liquor stores. At least I don't have to pay attention to what they emit.

2011-12-12T01:03:00.002-05:00

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, on Newt Gingrich's rise and the anxieties it's producing on the right. I don't mean to be optimistic, but it says something that a disgraced former Republican Speaker of the House is doing so well at this stage of the game. I don't recall the Democrats seriously considering Dan Rostenkowski for President in 2008.

I didn't mention Gingrich's obscene comments about turning children into janitors because Susan of Texas covered that once and for all herself.

My only regret is that I didn't catch up with Cynthia Yockey's "Why Newt’s lesbian sister is a good reason for gays to vote for him as the Republican presidential nominee" in time to include it:

Newt’s stance on gay equality and marriage equality is toxic, anti-gay, anti-American and anti-Constitution...

It is bizarre, however, that she pledges to vote instead for Obama, who also opposes gay equality and empowers his Department of Justice to use scorched earth tactics to fight lawsuits filed by Republicans and conservatives in favor of gay equality. After all, she could choose Fred Karger.

Oh, sorry, you were wondering why this makes Gingrich the logical choice for LGBT voters?

If Newt is the nominee, or, gulp, is elected president, the dialog between him and his lesbian sister will shine a very bright and cleansing light on the falsehood that opposition to gay equality supports family values in any way and will reveal that the true goal of this fraud is to gain control of the reproductive lives of as many followers as possible for purely selfish reasons.

Of course, with the United States in flaming ruins, there won't be much opportunity to act on this insight.

2011-12-07T21:52:00.003-05:00

GREAT CONSERVATIVE MINDS OF OUR TIME. Remember Steve Sailer? He's that straight-up racist (and not subtle about it either) who more paper-trained conservatives sometimes cite as if he were Orwell (by which I mean, they do so knowing that readers will have heard his name and have some idea they're supposed to admire him, though few of them have any idea what he actually believes).

He's got a new one about how Pasadena, Texas is full of Messicans and it's a dirty shame. At the end he gets ironical:

In contrast, those free enterprise-hating Vermont Democrats with their Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders don't enjoy Texas's economic dynamism. What a bunch of idiots those Vermonters are! Of course, they still get to live in their hometowns near their relatives and old friends, but that just shows how liberal they are. True conservatives know that the essence of conservatism is shattering communities and crushing ties between people and places that have grown up over the years.

I imagine it is heartbreaking when you think like Sailer does and then one day you suddenly discover Texas is full of Mexicans and you can't blame Al Sharpton.

Guess who thinks Sailer's post is great?

I don’t know that I’ve seen in ages the clash between two visions of American conservatism more acutely presented than in this passage from Steve Sailer’s short reflection on the transformation of Pasadena, Texas, from a blue-collar white and black town to one that’s 80 percent Hispanic, thanks to mass immigration. Sailer cites a press report saying how Houston is inevitably going to become a Latino city, because of the unstoppable force of demographic change.

Some of Dreher's commenters are queasy about this, and Dreher comes back in comments:

[Sailer's] pointing out that if your conservatism values the free market and associated liberties above all things, you cannot complain about what’s happened to Houston.

Yeah, ask Rick Perry about that one!

I tell ya, Obama's fucked up pretty bad, but all he has to do to win is get these guys to say out loud what they really think.

2011-12-06T21:15:00.002-05:00

ESPRIT D'ESTOPPEL. She's no Alan Bromley, whose stories about silly liberals whom he easily minced with his rapier wit remain models of the genre, but Pajamas Media's Belladonna Rogers is at least making a great effort. Here she's giving advice to some possibly real person who doesn't know what to say to liberals with whom she is, unaccountably and distastefully, forced to attend parties:

Before you attend another party, practice saying calmly, “I don’t accept the premises underlying your assumption.” Say it as many times as necessary to feel comfortable uttering that sentence whenever you encounter a liberal.

In the context of your dinner conversation, here’s how it would go:

“What do you mean?” the shocked liberal will ask.

“First, I wouldn’t assume that anyone to whom you put that question would vote for Obama under any circumstances.

“A second premise of your question is that I vote as a woman. That’s a classic Democrat assumption.”

Again, you’ll be facing a flummoxed liberal.

A word of warning: the more you say, the more the liberal’s response will turn to enraged apoplexy. By the time you’ve finished lucidly expressing your views, the liberal will react like a shrieking, psychopathic hyena being laced into a straitjacket.

Remarkably, this goes on for hundreds of words, with phrases inserted about the similarly ridiculous reactions to be expected when you talk to liberals as she advises: "Let the liberal experience the panic attack," "expect a temper tantrum," "The liberal will become irate, perspire profusely, then shout," etc.

I used to marvel at the longevity of this genre, but no longer. It's getting clearer all the time that what these guys want more than anything is to humiliate their opponents in public. But these chances don't come often in real life even when you're not champing at the bit for them, and thus might have the sangfroid to pull it off; for someone who's so invested in such scenarios that she must indulge fictional encounters that inevitably prove her superiority in argument, it must be nearly impossible. (Also, why are they always partying with liberals if they dislike them so much? Must need them to score drugs.) So the stories live on about how if you say the right words to a liberal he'll vomit with fear and you will be Queen of the May.

This explains more than anything else I can think of the vogue for Newt Gingrich.

2011-12-04T23:57:00.006-05:00

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the end of Herman Cain and the rightbloggers' rush to work his victim status. I wish I had room for this astute analysis from Freedom Eden:

Why was Ted Kennedy allowed to stay in office?

Why was Robert Byrd's KKK past excused?

Why was the path cleared for Obama to be elected without any thorough vetting?

Double standard.

All my subjects are daffy on this subject, but Freedom Eden actually seems to think Cain was preemptively removed from office by the same tribunal of lesbian environmentalists that installed Byrd, Kennedy, and Obama.

UPDATE. At the Daily Caller, David Meyers tries to cover the traces:

Throughout this campaign, the media has played up fringe, erratic candidates like Cain, calling them “frontrunners” and “faces of the Republican Party.” MSNBC’s comments about Cain were just another example of the attempt by some in the media to define and skew the American people’s perception of the Republican Party.

As I documented time and again, conservatives were all on Cain's jock in good times, but now that he's a liability he must be made an unperson: Meyers even says of Cain's recent front-runner status, "polls are often misleading." Somewhere Michael Steele is shaking his head and muttering, "I feel ya, bro."

2011-12-01T22:36:00.005-05:00

NO SALE. Look, guy, if you want to believe black people are your intellectual inferiors because Charles Murray told you so, okay, go live that way. But just fucking quit whining about it.

UPDATE. Comments are already hot. Some readers fault Ta-Nehisi Coates for his gentle treatment of Sullivan; DocAmazing finds his responses "perfect examples of the snug environment of the opinion writing community." Coates and Sullivan probably think they're Shaw and Chesterton or something, and very literary and historical. But the joke is that their conversation is at bottom more like Alex Haley's and George Lincoln Rockwell's ("You're an intelligent person; I enjoy talking to you. But, you're not pure black like your ancestors in the Congo"). Haley, of course, was drawing the neo-Nazi out; I don't know what Coates is up to. Maybe he's being wickedly ironical when, trying to explain his continuing respect for Sullivan, he compares him to V.S. Naipaul. I certainly hope so. The Atlantic has too many dunderheads writing as it is.

I take whetstone's point:

I'm actually happy about Sullivan being in reruns. Recently he'd been doing an okay impersonation of a person with some marginal amount of empathy, and had plenty of people suckered with his stance against torture (and I give him all the credit he's due for being more house-trained than Marc Thiessen). Made it hell to explain why I don't read or trust him. ("The Bell Curve? What's that, granddad?")

The guy called us all traitors. I don't care that he's not always totally nuts. Andrew Sullivan can go fuck himself.

2011-11-30T23:36:00.003-05:00

THE ETERNAL VICTIM/BULLY. Timothy Dalrymple is concerned that you can't get young wingnuts to attack gay marriage as easily as you can get them to attack abortion. His concern is puzzling for a couple of reasons.

First, he thinks the abortion thing is all but won. In defense of this proposition he shows a stirring video (starring David French!) "touting the growing momentum in the pro-life movement amongst the young." Other than that, he's got nothing except the closeness of the national split on the issue, and his own unwillingness to imagine what might happen in this country if abortion were made illegal tomorrow. (He probably imagines a Great Awakening, but I assure him the folks who would be Awakened, and what they would be Awakening to, would not be quite what he imagines.)

If he thinks he can get the female majority of Americans to give up their rights so easily, why should he worry about getting the straight majority to persecute homosexuals again? Should be a piece of cake.

Second, he's got the same built-in excuse for the failure of the fag-hating movement as all conservatives have on all subjects where public compliance is not total. He does have to pretend to cogitate a bit before he gets to it, which exercise has it own delights:

It’s tough to construct an argument against gay marriage without appealing for justification to scripture. It’s not impossible. One can appeal to natural law...

Stop, yer killing me (and my unborn child). But after this flailing, he gets down to it:

There are other factors as well. (a) There have been, in movies and television in particular, relentless efforts to stigmatize anyone who disapproves of homosexual relationships... (c) the gay rights lobby has very successfully made the argument that equal treatment in matters of marriage is a matter of basic human rights, in line with the Civil Rights struggle...

We come to it at last, and inevitably: the anti-gay-marriage movement is being oppressed! By Hollyweird, and by the liberal conspiracy to convince ordinary Americans that the guys who, fifty years earlier, they all beat up for fun are actually some sort of victims. But wait, Dalrymple hasn't waded up to his nostrils yet:

Consider this little bit of anecdotal information. As an editor and director for a large religion website now, I can tell you: It’s substantially easier to find Christians and evangelicals to write on the abortion issue than it is to find ones who will write on same-sex marriage. Academics in particular are terrified that anything critical of homosexuality or same-sex marriage will come up before hiring or tenure committees. One of the first subjects we addressed in our “Public Square” at Patheos was the same-sex marriage debate, and nearly every person I approached to write on the topic had to ask himself or herself: “Am I willing to give up the next job, the next promotion, the next award, because of my views on this topic?”

Stop and think a minute. First, these are "Christians and evangelicals" we're talking about -- in other words, Jesus freaks. They live, indeed thrive, in a land of megachurches, child-raping priests, and wealthy preachers whose primary occupation is the exploitation of ancient prejudices and superstitions for financial and social gain.

And for them hard times are good times. They're recession-proof. The same sordid rackets that sustained them in the time of Mencken are still in operation and more profitable than ever. There's no need for these guys to worry about the next job, the next promotion, the next award. The Jesus industry churns them out by the buttload. Hell, Dalrymple's got an intellectual-type job; the standards obviously aren't high.

So it is hard to imagine why Dalrymple or anyone would cry and complain that the academy is prejudiced against them. Haven't they got their own Bible colleges and such like? In fact, more than once I've said that conservatives in general, who are always belly-aching about the pernicious influence of Harvard and Yale and what not, should turn from the Satanic influence of such book-l'arnin' institutions, and get after happily and busily building their new City of God at Liberty College and Bob Jones.

Sigh -- they ain't making Christians like they used to. The early ones suffered all kinds of martyrdoms; the current crop are martyrs only in the comically pejorative sense. As filled with the Holy Spirit, as convicted of salvation and the rightness of their causes as they claim to be, they still bitch and moan that some snobby school won't give them tenure, and that they have to run to some fundamentalist funder to keep up their lifestyle which, from what I've seen, doesn't include a vow of poverty.

Jesus was a forgiving sort, but if he laid eyes on this lot I suspect he'd at least be tempted to go money-changers-at-the-temple on their sorry asses.

2011-11-29T10:45:00.002-05:00

YOU THINK YOU'VE GOT PROBLEMS? You may have heard already, but one of the geniuses at Rumproast, a fellow who blogs under the name StrangeAppar8us, has had a real and terrible misfortune. Now, we all have hard times, and those of us who are lucky in our friends have help getting past them. But StrangeAppar8us, I have been told, has suffered a traumatic brain injury and been left blind, apparently permanently. And I don't think he has doormat daughters like Milton's to whom he can dictate his excellent material. So he's gonna need a lot of help to get through, and to pay the gargantuan medical bills our best-in-the-world health care system has bequeathed to him.

Here's the link. Do what you can; I did.

2011-11-28T22:08:00.008-05:00

R.I.P. KEN RUSSELL. I can't leave his death unmentioned. A lot of people couldn't stand him -- John Simon, perhaps most prominently; on the subject of Russell, Simon was like an evangelist on Satan; after viewing a stage production Russell mounted of Madame Butterfly, which apparently ended with a sea of neon American corporate logos blotting out the Japanese landscape, Simon ended his review, "Russell should be forcibly restrained."

Well, it's been years since Russell's heyday, and we've had since then many lurid spectacles, but nothing like his. Compare Baz Luhrmann 's Moulin Rouge with, oh, I don't know, Lisztomania. While Jim Broadbent singing "Like a Virgin" is, I grant you, in admirably bad taste, it's nothing compared to Richard Wagner as Frankenstein Hitler, Rick Wakeman as Thor, or Roger Daltrey as someone who could possibly compose a symphony.

I think the difference is that Russell was a more serious filmmaker, in the way we used to understand filmmakers to be serious. Luhrmann's film, for all its frenzy, is a depressingly calculated gesture -- sure, Belle Epoque, American Pop, that's like chocolate-covered caviar, they'll eat it up. When Russell tickled the crowd, it wasn't because he was pandering -- he actually seemed to think Ann Margret straddling a phallic pillow while covered in baked beans made a great statement, and if it was only the stoners who swooned, well, so much the better for the stoners. It just happened that Russell's rise coincided with a baroque period in popular film, and so there was nothing to stop him -- certainly he wasn't going to stop himself. I can see how the idea occurred to John Simon.

If you want to see him in a slightly lower gear, try the early biographies he made for British television of Dante Rossetti, Isadora Duncan, et alia. I understand some of his late films are interesting, but I'm not familiar with those; maybe some of my readers can speak up for them.

2011-11-28T21:57:00.002-05:00

THANKS, TIM. Long hard day, but what the hell, I can spare a few minutes to do a post -- but no more than that, so I better go where the ducks are. Ah, here's a copy of the Washington Examiner. Let's find Timothy Carney's column...

Secular Left's intolerance of religious freedom

Dreamland, here I come.

Social liberals claim they promote tolerance, preventing oppressive Christian conservatives from "imposing their morality" on everyone. But the state of the culture war in America today is almost exactly the opposite: The secular Left is using the might of government to make it harder for religious people to live their own lives according to their faith.

They're going to make health insurers cover birth control, which Carney interprets as "The Obama administration is deliberately making it illegal for Catholics to live as Catholics. This is standard fare from today's Left."

Only 10 o'clock. Not bad! But I need a button, Tim; what other social liberal attacks on freedom have you got?

In many states, a homeowner breaks the law if he refuses to rent his basement one-bedroom apartment to unmarried couples.

And in some places, he even has to rent to black people.

Thank you, good night!

2011-11-27T21:04:00.002-05:00

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the rightblogger defense of Black Friday. They forgot about Thanksgiving pretty quick; they don't seem to relate to it as well as they do to the mass-consumerism of the day after. Also Black Friday boosterism is alleged to piss off the hippies though, as often happens with these things, they're the ones who seem pissed.

2011-11-25T15:45:00.006-05:00

DEFINING REALITY DOWN. Matthew Continetti, one of whose previous adventures in Great Thought was considered here in 2009, has done a little essay on Occupy. He thinks the Occupy protests are all about anarchism; he also thinks the utopian socialists of the 19th Century were anarchists, as is Noam Chomsky, because he wrote an introduction to a book about anarchism. Not content to mangle history, Continetti portrays the Occupy movement, as his fellow propagandists have been doing since the beginning, as one grand festival of sexual assault and protestor violence. Thus when he wants to connect the two, he just says, well, bad things happened at the communes, and bad things have happened at the Occupations; I rest my case. The thesis might be shortered Hippies Smell Because Socialism.

But his essay has one usefulness -- Continetti shows us at one point how logic works in his brave new world:

Apologists for Occupy Wall Street may say that these “black bloc” tactics are deployed solely by fringe elements. But the apologists miss the point. The young men in black wearing keffiyehs and causing mayhem are simply following the logic of revolutionary anarchism to its violent conclusion. The fringe isn’t the exception, it’s the rule.

"The fringe isn't the exception, it's the rule." Once upon a time even rightwing propagandists wouldn't be caught dead using a blatantly ridiculous paradigm like that. Ours is truly an age of wonders.

UPDATE. Commenters point out that Chomsky is an anarchist, though if this is indicative of his anarchism it seems unlikely to lead to the black-flag revolution Continetti seems to envision. Some also assert that the Occupy movement is at least functionally anarchist; if that's true, then so are outdoor rock concerts and pot-luck suppers.

2011-11-22T22:01:00.003-05:00

PRE-EMPTIVELY THE BEST COMMENT ON TONIGHT'S REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE: From National Review --

2011-11-22T21:40:00.004-05:00

WHY ARE YOU MURDERING YOURSELF? James Fallows is appropriately outraged at the police violence at some Occupy sites. Here's how James Taranto plays it at the Wall Street Journal:

Fallows sees the Davis incident as a political boon for Obamaville...
This Occupy moment is not going to end any time soon. That is not just because of the underlying 99%-1% tensions but also because of police response of this sort--and because there have been so many similar videos coming from cities across the country.

Read the Fallows piece, or even Taranto's quote from it, and you'll see immediately how tendentious this interpretation is. But it doesn't stop there:

What Fallows is predicting--perhaps hoping for--

Oh Jesus Christ.

...is what PJMedia.com blogger "Zombie" calls a "Kent State moment." Kent State is the Ohio university where, in 1970, National Guardsmen fired their rifles at a mob of rioting student-protesters, killing four. "Why would these left-leaning pundits and activists hope for fatalities amongst the protesters?" Zombie asks rhetorically:
But that's not what they're hoping for. . . . When a leftist hears the words "Kent State," the immediate association is that fateful day when the media published an iconic photograph of an anti-war martyr that was the final tipping point that convinced the majority of Americans to oppose the war.
But wait. Let's say, heaven forbid, that the Obamavillians get their "Kent State moment"...

So, building from a bogus premise, Taranto gets another wingnut to say that "leftists" want a "Kent State moment," and then attributes the sentiment to the "Obamavillains."

And then he just keeps running with it: "if Fallows and other bien-pensant pundits think the Obamavillians will advance politically by seeking confrontation with the police..." and "If the American public has any sympathy at all for the Obamavillians, there is no surer way of squandering it than to follow Fallows's advice and pursue a strategy of confronting the police."

I know they try to fool their readers, but it's something to see one of them doing it in a major newspaper so badly, so transparently, and with so little hope of success. Do they even believe they have normal readers anymore, or is Taranto just hoping Jonah Goldberg will send him a nice note? And does Murdoch -- oh, hell, we all know what he thinks.

The blogging thing really has been a net loss for journalism; the race to the bottom has run so deep that we now have Wall Street Journal writers publishing stuff that would make Jeff Goldstein think of trying a second draft.

2011-11-21T22:49:00.002-05:00

KEEP THE CRAP COMING. I'm way late on everything these days, gentle reader. I got me a job with a long commute, and between that and domestic bliss I hardly have time to run over here, yell JONAH GOLDBERG FARRRT, and take my bows. But I must get this one done. You all know World O' Crap? It's one of the few reliably funny current-events blogs, and its Smiler With a Knife, Scott Clevenger, is having a spot of bother, cash-flow-wise. And it's not just he that's got trouble, but also some poor woman who I assume is his mistress, and someone called "Moondoggie" who I assume is his mentally deficient adult son. It's a dark picture which you can limn a healthy green via his Pay Pal button. Please do, it'll make me feel good about myself, not to mention you.

2011-11-21T22:16:00.006-05:00

IT'S THE NEW STYLE. Every once in a while I come across some young rightnik and wonder what he's been up to. James Poulos we last considered here in his role as interlocutor for a Jonah Goldberg video fart-fest, from which no one could come out smelling good. Well, Poulos has been spreading his seed, lately with this article in Foreign Policy. I found it so unobjectionable that I had to wonder whether I'd misjudged him and everything else. So I went to his First Things blog:

With the recent death of Steve Jobs we should applaud the expansion of the use of technological i-devices he provided, in that we are more and more connected. But out of wedlock births seem to be on the rise nonetheless.

Okay, I feel centered now. (Update: Poulos didn't write this one, apparently; someone named John Presnall did. So hereafter I'm changing the proper names. Poulos actually quit PMC over a year ago. Maybe he's gone legit! I'll look into it.) Presnall isn't like those total internet madmen you shy your kids away from when they come stumbling down the bandwidth -- he's more like parfait crazy; there'll be a sweet, foamy layer of stuff about the problems of constant, empty connectedness in the internet world, and then suddenly BAM, flash mobs, technocrats and JOE PATERNO:

Meanwhile, people die. These dying people still care about sports—even college sports. They may be stupid in their concern, but the immense amounts of money that college sports generate for the apparatus of colleges and universities gives prestige to such important things that the tenured genii of the future provide for humanity. Or at least that is what I saw on the commercial advertising the greatness of any given particular school during the typical televised football game. The TV ads showed multicultural pictures of scientists dressed in lab coats and safety glasses.

All this reminds me of Pascal’s observation regarding the dress that the nobility must don in order to maintain their authority—their nobility is secure in their purple and ermine, i.e., sterile white lab coats with beakers in the laboratory background. ...

You know -- oh wait, gotta get this in:

But I am a product of all his “higher education” nonsense, and as a teacher I am pressured to perpetuate it.

Yeah, thanks, Professor. Postmodern conservatism, like postmodern anything else, is a great racket -- while Jonah Goldberg is attempting things that resemble arguments, however superficially, and embarrassing himself in front of anyone who can grasp their inferiority to other actual arguments, including those held by Ralph and Alice Kramden, Presnall doesn't have to bother -- he can just throw up signifiers of discontent with our lousy liberal society, where an accused child rapist enabler proceeds naturally from scientism-multiculturalism. Or is it vice-versa? Whatever.

Or maybe they're all doing that. Come to think of it, Victor Davis Hanson may be the granddaddy of the postmodern conservative mash-up. Curse these tenured radicals!

2011-11-20T22:42:00.001-05:00

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, following up on the continued rise of Newt Gingrich. A rightblogger consensus seems to be forming that Gingrich's lack of popularity is proof of his seriousness as a candidate. Also, he hates the Lame Stream Media so hard that he's bound to win, just as Sarah Palin was bound to win before she decided not to even run, for reasons none of them have figured out yet.

Among the outtakes, Doug MacKinnon:

Gingrich understands that Americans have to work harder and harder to not only take care of themselves and their families, but support the various freeloaders the Democrats enable in search of easy votes.

As such, they simply don't have the time to go to their favorite websites, blogs or conservative talk shows to always get honest reporting or facts.

I return again and again to this image of Mr. and Mrs. America crawling home after an 18-hour day at the collective solar energy farm and plopping down on their pallets, too exhausted to turn on the computer and read Mark Steyn, and I weep with laughter for my country.

2011-11-17T22:27:00.001-05:00

NICE WORK IF YOU CAN GET IT, AND YOU CAN GET IT IF YOU LIE. So Steven Hayward is doing one of those New Conservative things, sort of like Ross Douthat's Sam's Club conservatism, only newer and fresher so the suckers might not catch on.

For starters, Hayward swallows hard and admits that when Ronald Reagan cut taxes but didn't cut spending on anything except bums and black people, fun as it was, it wasn't really doing much for America. Well, except for this:

And yet, conservatives resist facing up squarely to this grim reality for a variety of reasons, some of them having to do with their undeniable successes of the last two generations. The first and most significant triumph was the creation of the conservative movement itself, which arose from the far fringes to the center of American political life in little more than a generation.

So all us College Republicans got jobs. Sweet. Look out, here comes another success:

The reduction in income and investment tax rates is of a piece with a broader reinvigoration of market processes...

Damn right it reinvigorated the market, which became so robust that a few years ago it ate all our money and jobs. The hits keep on coming:

Despite these cases of incomplete or counterproductive results, the conservative reinvigoration of markets and the discrediting of central planning was a positive correction to liberalism worldwide...

Because liberals suck.

That really could be the end of it, but like all bullshit visionaries Hayward has to do the reaching-out thing where both the enlightened conservatives and the liberals-who-suck have to come together to realize Steven Hayward's revolutionary plan:

Requiring the American people to actually pay for all of the government they receive is, as Niskanen and others have convincingly argued, the most effective way to limit its growth. Right now the anti-tax bias of the Right results in shifting costs onto future generations who do not vote in today's elections, and enables liberals to defend against spending restraints very cheaply. Instead of starving the beast, conservatives should serve the check.

Sane people who've been around the block can easily see right down to the marrow of this thing, which is: After years of conservatives looting the treasury, everyone's out of money, and you the punters will pay the bill. You liberals should like it, though, because we're going to "expand the current $1,500 per child tax credit to something closer to $5,000, which would wipe out a large portion of payroll tax liability and raise household after-tax income considerably." And that's whatchacall progressive. Oh, but you have to spot us the Paul Ryan Welfare-into-Coupons-for-Codgers plan. Fair's fair.

Hayward's very good at this -- he can even say stuff like "the experience of welfare reform suggests that there has been no 'race to the bottom' among the states to eliminate basic assistance programs" with a straight face despite its obvious absurdity. So he may get a book tour and a few C-SPAN appearances out of it. After all, he's already got one sucker. They can't all be as stupid as Dreher, of course, but in political writing, unlike politics, you don't need anything like a majority.

2011-11-16T22:16:00.001-05:00

WON'T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE ETC. Veronique de Rugy is always solicitous of the rich, and at National Review today she again attempts to wring tears from their lot, this time in the matter of income mobility:

After the first year year, roughly half of those who were millionaires (reporting over a million dollars in adjusted gross income) at some point between 1999 and 2007 were still millionaires. After two years, 15 percent — roughly 102,000 millionaires — retained that status. This decreasing rate of remaining millionaires persists, and only about 6 percent — roughly 38,000 millionaires — were millionaires for all nine years.

At her companion piece she tells us the former millionaires "face substantial downward income mobility over time." Perhaps they're all sleeping under bridges; I wish I knew where; what stories they must have to tell!

Then de Rugy refers to Stephen Kaplan, who says that "when you only look at data that stops in 2007, it obscures the fact that the wealthiest 1 percent took a sizeable hit after the financial crisis — their share of income went down to 17 percent in the last two years." Neither he nor de Rugy tells us how much that is in actual dollars, but it must be awful; in fact it may be that the former millionaires who are sleeping under bridges look down on them. Want a Kleenex?

It's an interesting thing to talk about while people are being thrown out of parks nationwide. Or does she even notice things like that?

UPDATE. Several commenters smell a rat. "According to her train of thought," says Nylund, "someone who made 10 million a year for 10 years, then retired, ceased to be a millionaire." Shhh, you're spoiling the magic of millionairism! Once you get into that club, you are not like other people, and so must be separated from them, your traces kicked over, and your finances disguised with bullshit statistics.

2011-11-14T21:14:00.004-05:00

MORAL DEGENERATE. Just last week Daniel Foster was pissed because some mean liberal implied that the Penn State pedophilia scandal had something to do with white male hegemony. I knew right then and there that Foster was not expressing moral outrage but jealousy, and that the only reason real rightwing craziness hadn't ensued on the subject was that the central committee had been caught off-guard and had yet to work out an angle.

And so it turned out. Steve at No More Mister Nice Blog has already torn up the idiotic Walter Russell Mead column about how the liberal 60s caused Joe Paterno and Jerry Sandusky, but there are other examples floating around, though none so ripe, to my mind, as the one at Bookworm Room:

Agrarian and frontier societies are, of necessity, self-reliant. (Yes, even Europeans once knew how to make do.) Right up until the 1960s, what separated America from other nations was that, until very recently in historic terms, it managed to be an amalgam of Western intellectualism and frontier self-reliance... And, by gosh, if self-reliance is the standard, those pioneers were virtuous.

You see where he's going: back in colonial times there weren't any child molesters! The usual villains are trotted out: Roosevelt, who "jump-started the notion of a comprehensive welfare system," and Obama, who because he disdained the Republican philosophy that "if you get sick, you’re on your own" shows "hostility to the classic American dream, one that believed it was a virtue for people to make it on their own."

But then it gets deep, brothers and sisters. Bookworm brings us "headlines in both England, where the dependency rot runs deep, and America," showing that in ObamaRoosevelt's America/England, "people abjure individual action," and that's how you get raped kids. These stories are about people failing to rescue distressed citizens, and this line from the peroration gives you a clear picture of Bookworm's reasoning:

That’s just two stories, right? What if I add a third, again from England?

Three! Holy shit, you're right, we're all moral degenerates! Eventually there's nothing for it but the Reich card:

Looking at these few examples, I can’t help but think of another culture that allowed itself to lapse into such a bureaucratic mindset that citizens either passively watched or actively engaged in the most heinous acts. I’m thinking, of course, of the Nazis.

By now Bookworm has worked himself into such a lather that he has to tell us how he'd have beat up Jerry Sandusky with judo or something ("I do martial arts because I really like it — but I also do it so that I can act").

Eventually he's all seethed out, and his mood swings skyward:

Fortunately, despite socialist government’s best efforts to mandate inaction (or, at least, to give people an excuse for failing to get involved), all is not lost. There will always be decent people who do get involved.

And then he starts telling us another kind of story -- tales of derring-do, heroism, moxie! You hope then that he'll realize that the ugly stories he repeated a few grafs back aren't an indictment of his fellow countrymen -- that ours is a big country with lots of different kinds of people in it, good and bad. We have no idea whether the heroes and villains were liberals or conservatives, only that all were tested and some found wanting -- surely that will remind him that not everything in this life is about his crappy little politics.

Alas:

Recently, a motorcyclist trapped under a car was lucky enough to find himself in the presence of proactive people, unconstrained by analysis paralysis, government regulations, or career worries.

For him, that's the significant thing -- not that men were brave, but that in being brave they rose above the welfare state. Oh, and also:

Barack Obama has stated clearly that his goal is to create precisely the bureaucratic, dependency culture that makes Penn State’s (and Nazi Germany) possible.

A million 60s-vintage Jerry Rubins gibbering in unison couldn't beat that.

UPDATE. Commenters sure had fun with this. "It's like No True Scotsmen," says Spaghetti Lee, "but the Scotsmen in question are the cast of Trainspotting." DKF notes that "Republicans have created their own culture of dependency on strawmen." Some of the commenters talk about what things were really like back in the early days of the Republic -- hint: it wasn't all virtuous self-reliance and knitting -- but this is overkill; the past, present, future, and any conceivable fantasy/parallel universes are bound by no rules of logical consistency when rightbloggers are in this sort of dudgeon -- so long as they get in two buzzwords per paragraph and at least one affirmation of moral superiority before the close, the means of conveyance is practically irrelevant.

2011-11-13T22:15:00.002-05:00

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the next President of the United States, Newt Gingrich. Gingrich doesn't seem like a fit candidate for rehabilitation to me, but what do I know -- look at Nixon.

Here's one that didn't make the cut, from NewsBusters:

Newt Gingrich Accused of Hating Mankind by 'Conservative' Kathleen Parker

Moments after being introduced by Face the Nation host Bob Schiiffer as a "conservative" columnist, the Washington Post's Kathleen Parker on Sunday referred to Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich as a "misanthrope" - aka a mankind hater...

Reminds me of the Gore Vidal joke about the candidate who circulated a rumor that his opponent's sister was a thespian. And Gingrich, we are told, is the intellectual candidate.

2011-11-10T08:07:00.003-05:00

I DON'T SEE ANY METHOD AT ALL, SIR. Regarding last night's GOP Presidential debate, I have not much to add to Charles P. Pierce's righteous commentary, except to marvel aloud at the hallucinatory quality that these events (what was this, the 32nd of them?) have achieved. My simple human interest in observing these cornpone con artists at work on their national profiles has not only waned, but evaporated; I could only spare about 20 minutes for this one; it was as mentally fatiguing as a bank of televisions simultaneously playing sermons by different evangelical preachers.

I will say that while Pierce is on the money regarding the principals' expressions of childlike faith in The Market, I do not see evidence that the magic of capitalism rises for any of them to the level of a theme that might define and animate a campaign, let alone the current Republican Party, as it did for Reagan. The idea, if we can call it such, that the market will fix everything is pretty comical in the midst of a worldwide depression, and I doubt even the candidates (with the possible exception of Paul) believe in it; they're only trotting it out because it's one of the concepts market-testing has shown will excite the GOP dead-enders from whom they are trying to cadge primary votes.

If the Free Market con was prominent in their stew of non-sequiturs last night, it's only because their other paternosters are almost exclusively negative -- hatred of Mexicans, hatred of hippies, hatred of the poor, hatred of sex, hatred of themselves -- and somewhere in their playbook it says Reagan had a sunny disposition because it's always morning in America. So every once in a while each these wretched, miserable people, sensing he or she was missing something important, would testify to the healing power of economic freedom, receive approving seal-barks, and then get back to the resentment-stirring that comprises the rest of his or her schtick.

Given all this, neither the latest confirmation of the magnitude of Rick Perry's ignorance, nor the parlor game of wondering when Herman Cain will just get it over with, put his hand up Michele Bachmann's skirt, and offer her the Vice-Presidency, can make these debates interesting to me anymore. I'll just wait for the general, when one of these poor schmoes will have to talk to a human being.

2011-11-08T19:23:00.002-05:00

WHY ARE YOU HITTING YOURSELF? The Washington Examiner crime section:

Occupy DC becoming increasingly violent, police say...

Citing injuries to five people outside the Washington Convention Center on Friday night, the mayor urged the demonstators to show restraint so that their protests are not discredited by violence. [italics mine]

If you're one of the few people who read several grafs further down, you'll see this:

Four of the injured people appear to be protesters themselves.

That's how the pros do, and by "pro" I mean propagandist.

2011-11-08T07:10:00.003-05:00

SHORTER JOE SCARBOROUGH: Barack Obama has taken a lot of Wall Street money, and his policies have made Wall Street very rich. So it's an outrage that he called Wall Street bankers or somebody like that "fat cats." Now, you know me, I'm a free-market guy, so you'll understand that I'm not asking for a genuinely anti-bankster President -- I just want one who'll take their money and kiss their ass... What, I'm still short? I'll just make my description of that scene from Casablanca longer and harder to follow. I mean it's not like they haven't all seen it.

2011-11-07T21:35:00.009-05:00

ALL THE GOOD THINGS HAVE BEEN TAKEN. Kia showed me this Megan McArdle column about the Occupy arrestees who spent a lot of money on rent and mortgages, and at first I couldn't see what was so awful about it, besides the usual awful McArdlisms, like compulsive goalpost moving -- you know, from some people having expensive homes to "a $795,000 one-bedroom apartment" to "the people at those protests-- [throatclearing]at least the ones who get arrested[/throatclearing]--really are, on average, unusually affluent." Like they moved to a park because the Hamptons were overcrowded.

But then I focused on this stuff:

Many New Yorkers believe that they should be given some sort of income tax abatement because of the expense of living there (with the lost revenue being made up from "really rich" people, natch). Slightly less affluent New Yorkers frequently believe that landlords should be forced to offer them "reasonably sized" apartments at a modest fraction of their income, because after all, otherwise they couldn't afford to live in New York...

...In fact, perhaps society should get busy making it up to you for all the hardships...

... After all, to state the obvious, that apartment costs so much because many, many people want to live in New York...

... Living in a blue state is a choice.

And then it hit me. She's not limiting herself to the simple point that some things are expensive and if you don't have the money you can't have it. She's talking about the desire to live in New York -- not just to move there, but to keep living there if you'd been there a while without getting rich -- as if it were the desire to live on Park Avenue -- no, better, to live in a fairy palace on a cloud, in fact, a palace and a cloud you wished to steal from your betters. It's not just that you can't afford New York -- it's that you're insolent to even think you should be tolerated there. You just don't deserve it.

If you've seen more than a few movies and heard more than a few songs and read more than a little history, you know New York's place in American culture. All kinds of people have lived there, cheek by jowl; not always comfortably, but enduringly. The poor haven't always had the best time of it, but they persist -- indeed, they still come by the boatloads to live there -- as do the middle-class and the rich. It's part of what even outlanders know and admire about it.

But over the past few decades, despite the legacies of an era when some more enlightened people ran the place, the city's been pushing the poor further out and giving them a harder time. And in recent years the middle class has been getting it, too -- by 2009, the Center for an Urban Future found, it took $123,322 to sustain a traditional "middle-class" life in the city. As the idea of raising a family in the city on a working-class job (with some comfort and occasional vacations, to boot) receded from living memory, those who would and should have been the backbone of the city learned to do with less, or to leave. And the rich, who had always had plenty, scooped up what they had to surrender.

To McArdle this isn't a tragic or even a negative development. It's the natural order of things, or maybe a course correction -- after years of everyone having at least a little something to live on, the Invisible Hand woke one day and realized that freeloaders and ne'er-do-wells were breathing some of the air He, in His wisdom, had reserved for the wealthy, and is righteously putting an end to it. After that He'll do something about their crazy idea that they're entitled to water -- once it's all been privatized, maybe they'll finally take the hint and just lay down and die, perhaps consoling themselves in their last hours with the Freedom of Religion, which the Invisible Hand is pleased to allow them, as it has no market value.

As someone who lived in New York for decades on the (relatively) cheap, I had a box seat for this turn of events. I knew what was happening was worse than unfortunate, but being in the middle of it, and very busy most of the time, and not wishing to be completely consumed by bitterness, I couldn't devote much time to thinking about the injustice of it. But some people have taken the time. Young as they are, they can see what's happening, because it's been accelerating so absurdly that you'd have to be blind -- or bought off -- to miss it. And that's why the worst people on earth are so mad to break them.

UPDATE. Amanda Marcotte rips it up.

2011-11-06T22:12:00.002-05:00

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the rightblogger escalation of the Occupy movement from a bunch of stupid hippies to the Manson Family.

BTW sorry for the paucity of posting here lately. Been busy working, which is good because it pays and bad because it's work. More later.

2011-11-02T22:08:00.008-04:00

BOO! In the midst of the Cain meltdown, what are the big rightbloggers thinking? Ole Perfesser Instapundit:

A JOURNOLIST REMINDER: There was this email group, called Journolist, where journalists got together and talked about how to bury stories that hurt Democrats and push stories that hurt Republicans. Here’s a list of the members.

UPDATE: Who, exactly, is the Cain story hurting?...

Good Christ. Journolist, run by that noted Bolshevik David Weigel* back in 'ought-ten! (I haven't bothered to check the current list, as these guys have made some hilarious misattributions to it in the past.)

Ann Althouse:

Journolist.
Who they were, where they worked.

(Via Instapundit.)

(If you don't remember what JournoList was, click the tag below for all my old posts on the subject.)

Flopping Aces:

Journolist Redux?….The Herman Cain Witchhunt

So, to recap: A joke candidate whom I have come to think of as Black Donald Trump has, after a string of buffooneries, had a previous buffoonery come back to haunt him. Because members of the press had the temerity to ask Black Trump questions about it, the brethren are darkly muttering about a defunct e-mail list which they had portrayed as the nexus of a liberal media conspiracy to protect Obama.

If Journolist still existed, of course, and its members really wanted to protect Obama, they'd be moving heaven and earth to elevate Black Trump to the Republican Presidential nomination. Obama might then get enough electoral votes in 2012 to save up for a third term.

The brethren haven't thought it through. But it's not about thinking. Journolist is a talisman to them, or more properly a trophy, because their squawking did manage to get it shut down and its libertarian founder fired from the Washington Post, which really showed those liberals. And yet the victory seems not to have brought them comfort; now that the night is dark and wolves howl outside the glow of the fire, they act as if the dead Journolist, or some progeny of it, yet lurks the woods, baying for their blood.

*UPDATE. Some of you have written to tell me that Ezra Klein ran Journolist, not Weigel. Sure, that's the cover story the big men tell saps like you. I can't say too much, but there's a reason Klein still sits pretty at the Post while Weigel is forced to forage at some content farm called Skate or something. (If you don't buy that, make it this: Klein, Weigel, what's the diff -- we collectivists don't acknowledge individual achievement.)

UPDATE 2. Commenters get into the retroactive-conspiracy frame of mind. "THE TIDES FOUNDATION IS BEHIND THIS!" (zuzu); "The Abraham Lincoln Brigade was responsible for credit default swaps" (gocart mozart); etc. I liked this from DocAmazing: "You can't win, Darth Wingnut. If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine." Maybe you have to be a follower of the Ole Perfesser to appreciate it.

UPDATE 3. Oh, Jesus, Dave:

[Ole Perfesser] Glenn's written another post about this, and he's pretty representative of the emergent defense of Cain: We can't trust the media, because they didn't cover or try to break other stories of sexual harassment when they reflected poorly on Democrats. How about this: The media should be tougher on all of these people?

Tougher on all these people -- yeah, look at the free pass the media gave Anthony Weiner! Why, if he were a Republican, he'd have been hounded from office.

Maybe they should get Weigel fired from Slake or whatever that thing is called. Then maybe he'll see how dangerous the liberal media really is!

UPDATE 4. At Balloon Juice, Tim F looks at the increasingly insane scandal spin and declares, "This is conspiracy building in the same way that making a 'house' with four Lego bricks counts as engineering."

2011-11-01T22:00:00.005-04:00

COFFEE BREAK OVER, EVERYBODY BACK ON YOUR HEADS. A few weeks back we looked in on The Anchoress and Rod Dreher, two rightwing God-botherers who nonetheless seemed to have been slightly intoxicated by a whiff of American Autumn -- The Anchoress declaring "those who support capitalism and free markets have a responsibility to demand that manufacturers and suppliers do the right thing," like Jesse Jackson or something, and Dreher siding with Occupy Wall Street against Rand Paul.

Could it last? Are they distributing hand warmers at the encampments, or at least boycotting grapes for old times' sake? Let's see what they're up to now:

The Anchoress:

A lot of people on Twitter are swooning over [Herman Cain singing at the National Press Club]. Some are declaring that “Cain just won the election!”

Which is silly nonsense. He hasn’t even won the nomination, yet.

Having said that, though, Cain has just struck a note that will resonate for many in the country, particularly African Americans in the churches. Don’t minimize the effect his lovely basso profundo will have on people who are looking for something a little human, a little authentic and a little consoling. Do not underestimate the impact this stirring little ditty will have on some.

Fifty years from now, there'll be a giant statue in Washington of Cain emerging from a rock with "Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan" chiseled on the side.

Later The Anchoress takes on liberal media bias. You'll find it in the most surprising places!

Former First Lady Laura Bush, and former first daughters Jenna and Barbara have been included in Glamour magazine’s Women of the Year issue.

That’s nice. Surprising. I can’t help wondering, though, why the magazine known for its photos has chosen such a cramped, graceless and uncomfortable-looking one to illustrate their story.

I mean, these are all-three beautiful, poised women. Glamour has them looking like they need to find a loo. Ah, well, what else would we expect, I guess? The other “Women of the Year” fare much better — their pictures are uniformly excellent, spacious, graceful and complimentary — but I guess Glamour couldn’t bring themselves to praise these three women without punishing them, as well, so they served up this unflattering pic.

Wait for it...

Small potatoes? Sure. But still, how petty.

In The Anchoress' world, self-awareness is a mortal sin. Now on to Dreher, who unsurprisingly has fallen hard for that David Brooks "Blue Inequality-Red Inequality" column with which Charles Pierce mopped the deck earlier. Brother Rod feels the spirit, especially the bit about the poor Red chillen suffering from their special Inequality because they have been prevented from getting married and Christening their babies by something or other:

It’s easy to scapegoat the one percent, in part because they really do deserve a lot more critical attention, but also because nobody loves them. It’s far, far more difficult to talk about the other things, because that involves making hard judgments about moral and cultural values, which, generally speaking, liberals don’t like to do (unless it’s against the white working class), and about facing how economic conditions can work against a building a culture of strong families and moral stability — something that most conservatives would prefer not to face. You could confiscate all the money of the top one percent and distribute among the bottom 99 percent, and that would do little to nothing to address this deeper culture of inequality Brooks identifies.

Well, if you also told them, "Get a marriage certificate and this 100 grand is yours," I think that might move the needle. Also, Dreher tells us that bastard Corzine is a Democrat. Fight the real enemy!

As an add-on, let us briefly treat (not successfully, I'm not a clinical psychologist) Megan McArdle, whose Occupy Wall Street post is more or less David Brooks', but stuffed with extra self-regarding prattle, and with a decent respect for your betters (I'm not being colloquial, she means your betters) standing in for God. Excerpt:

Similarly, in the 1990s, when I worked with a lot of mostly blue-collar and first-generation college grads (with a fair sprinkling of Ivy Leaguers, to be sure)...

Can't you just see them at the Blarney Stone, knocking back boilermakers and talking derivatives?

...I didn't hear nearly so much about the rich and how greedy they were--even though in the late 1990s, income inequality was almost certainly worse than it is right now.

Things were rough in the days of the Clinton boom, I tell ya. We didn't have iPods! But wait for it...

As IT consultants...

One is tempted to flip all the cards and call it a night, but let's upshoot this with a parting Shorter: All the OWS kids are just jealous, not like me, and my friend George Orwell agrees.

2011-10-30T22:33:00.002-04:00

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the rise of Herman Cain. I think we have time for a few more surprise GOP frontrunners before the primaries. So whattaya think -- Bobby Jindal? He might as well make some evasive statements which the press will dutifully cover, remind people that he just got re-elected with a big majority, and then walk off with a public image bonanza he may someday parlay into a more promising new job, like a Nawlins-themed cooking show.

2011-10-30T15:34:00.002-04:00

WEEKEND SHIFT AT THE BULLSHIT FACTORY. Earlier this week, James Pethokoukis and the AEI were telling us that there isn't any such thing as income equality, because lots of houses have air conditioners, etc. Rich Lowry, however, seems to acknowledge that, why yes, some chaps gets stuck at the bottom -- quite a lot of them, even.

This seems like progress, until Lowry tells us what his solution would be:

This stagnation is less a statement about the structure of America’s economy than about its culture. As Ronald Haskins, also of the Brookings Institution, wrote in an essay for the publication National Affairs, “economic mobility is constrained above all by personal choices and behaviors.” He argues that society’s leaders “should herald the ‘success sequence’: finish schooling, get a job, get married, have babies.” If Americans finished high school, worked full time at a job that matched their skills and married at the rate they did in the 1970s, the poverty rate would be cut 70 percent.

That again! Too bad this wasn't announced during one of the top reality shows, so Lurleen could hear it, run to the other side of the double-wide, smack Jethro in the head and yell "We has to git hitched, cousin, and give these babies a name; then we's movin' up econonomical ladder, Mister Lowry says!"

Lowry's nonsense is pimped by Ole Perfesser Instapundit, who adds his traditional dark musings about The New Class, i.e., "people who, well, have state-supported managerial or intellectual jobs..." He says this New Class in America is made up of people in whom he detects "anti-Americanism, and the various manifestations of what some have called Transnational Progressivism." Ole Perfesser Instapundit is a tenured employee of the state of Tennessee. Whatever else you can say about him, you can't say that he doesn't have nerve.

2011-10-27T22:26:00.002-04:00

YOU NEVER HAD IT SO GOOD. Jonathan Chait compares "inequality deniers" to global warming deniers. At AEI, James Pethokoukis gives his response:

In a way, Chait is correct that income inequality really resembled global warming. Both are issues that, to the extent they are even problems, could be be fixed though faster economic growth.

Don't huh-what yet -- Pethokoukis links to an AEI paper that proves, pinky-swear, that there's no real income inequality in America, either. Highlights:

...official measures... paint a bleak picture of the well-being of the middle class and the poor... This grim picture is inaccurate for several reasons. First, most analyses of economic wellbeing rely almost exclusively on narrow income measures that do not reflect the resources available to the household for consumption. These measures ignore taxes and in-kind transfers such as food stamps and often rely on underreported measures of income.

When you factor in the food stamps and the cash you make selling peeled oranges by the freeway on-ramp, you bums are swimming in wealth.

In addition, [between 1980 and 1999] the middle 20 percent of the income distribution experienced noticeable improvements in housing characteristics: living units became bigger and much more likely to have air conditioning and other features... The share of households with amenities such as a dishwasher or clothes dryer also rose noticeably.

Some of you layabouts even have refrigerators! Coming next: An AEI paper explaining that, when the authors pee down your leg, it's raining if you look at all the data.

Again I have to ask: Do these freaks even know any human beings?

2011-10-26T21:44:00.002-04:00

TRY, TRY AGAIN. You may remember when Hot Air's Tina Korbe was snarling at the Occupy Wall Street hippies with their "bag sex, in drugged-out meltdowns, in litter-filled spaces. Even if the ends they aim for are just (arguable), they haven’t pursued them honorably... Then, too, it seems the protesters are looking less for work as they are for the material benefits of work," etc.

Well, as propaganda that wasn't working out too well, so Korbe has a new tack: the erstwhile hippies have gotten a metaphoric haircut, and become quite noble and determined:

It’s becoming increasingly clear: Cold won’t chase these protesters away — at least not immediately. Nor are the NYC protesters alone in their persistence. Across the country (and even around the world), countless others have joined the movement — and appear similarly committed to sticking to their spots as long as possible... Sure, most of the protesters aren’t homeless, but many are jobless — and that’s the point.

Bums no more! The punchline is these newly-ennobled souls are actually not the victims of Wall Street or the banks or any of those things they think they're mad at, but of Barack Obama.

Many of the policies President Barack Obama has championed — not least Obamacare — have contributed to the country’s joblessness. So, it seems neither unfair nor inappropriate to say, regardless of whether they realize it or call it by name and regardless of who else has contributed to the borderline corrupt culture of a federal government in bed with business, the protesters are, in fact, protesting the Obama economy. And that would make those Hoovervilles … Obamavilles.

It's not as if she'd go down there herself and tell the kids this. They're probably as pissed at Tim Geithner as they are at anyone else. But she's not trying to sway them -- they were set-dressing to her as hippies, and they're set-dressing to her as the pathetic residents of the new Hooverville. She's just dressed and lit them differently, and she's trying to get the Silent Majority, whom she just knows is out there waiting for her show, to react to them appropriately.

Rightwing propaganda is generally an easy racket, which is why it draws such weak employees, but they can be fun to watch when they are obliged to make a fast change.

2011-10-26T07:57:00.006-04:00

THEIR WHOLE WORLD IS WANKING. The cops rousted Occupy Oakland last night with tear gas. Normal people are appalled or at least dismayed at the violence; conservatives, expectedly, are jerking off to the footage. Allahpundit:

Video: “The Man” 1, Occupy Oakland 0.

Haw haw, got them hippies good! Verum Serum:

Both the reports I cited said the arrests were peaceful...

The many sources that reported and (in case he can't read) ran pictures of the gassing he somehow missed, or saw but failed to cite. But he'll refer to them with appropriate disdain:

So how is the Kremilin’s network reporting this? Brutal arrests at Occupy Oakland. This is backed up by the lovely folks at Think Progress who have been dutifully repeated anything the protesters said about the raid...

Apparently Verum Serum is not only unable to read, he can't see pictures or video, either. Maybe he's actually blind, and they keep him in a basement, periodically hitting him with a stick and yelling, "the tyrant Obama and his flash mobs just ran in and hit us all with sticks!" whereupon Verum Serum stumbles to his Braille laptop and cranks out another screed.

They aren't making hardhats like they used to.

UPDATE. Robert Stacy McCain:

UPDATE: The NY Times reports on the Oakland riot, including reports that some protesters sang “We Shall Overcome” — as if these mangy white hipsters are victims of injustice and the Oakland P.D. is commanded by Bull Connor.

Yeah -- look how nicely dressed those black folks were when the police turned the hoses on them! That makes all the difference.

When the cops are tear-gassing and shooting beanbag rounds at you for protesting obvious injustices, you may be said to have received the Bull Connor treatment. And I must say it's a little rich for McCain to be using the civil rights movements as a stick to beat anyone.

2011-10-24T22:08:00.002-04:00

TALL BUILDINGS AND EVERYTHING. Don Surber and his fellow outlanders are convinced by a New York Post story that the hippies of Occupy Wall Street have pitched New York into a crime wave. Funny, their old story was that New York was already having a crime wave caused by black people. Make up your minds!

The recent gunplay has now pushed the number of shooting victims this year slightly above last year’s tragic tally -- to 1,484 from 1,451 -- through Oct. 16.

Four high-ranking cops point the finger at Occupy Wall Street protesters, saying their rallies pull special crime-fighting units away from the hot zones where they’re needed.

Steve M. of No More Mr. Nice Blog already called bullshit, but I must also tell the boys that New York is a very big city, with many precinct houses, and it's not like the citizens in high-crime areas go, "Hey, there's a protest downtown -- quick, let's all shoot at each other before the police can get uptown and stop us!"

I was going to say their idea of city life comes from The Warriors, but it's more like The Warriors as improvised by a troupe of paranoid schizophrenics.

2011-10-23T20:03:00.002-04:00

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the Iraq withdrawal and the death of Gaddafi, neither of which has made the rightbloggers happy. In the Iraq case, it seems to be for them like the end of a beautiful dream in which the death of Saddam Hussein was the death of Darth Vader -- something they could stretch out in endless sequels and prequels and keep raking in money and respect. Now it's over and they're pissed. Obama fucked with their shit.

Regarding Gaddafi, there've been some grousings along the lines of Big Peace's "Democrats Cheer Gaddafi’s Death: Whatever Happened To ‘No Blood For Oil!’?":

Heck, even Hillary Clinton, who looks more haggard each time I see her, received no any major criticism for describing the Libya operation and the killing of Gaddafi thus: “We came, we saw, he died.”

The hypocrisy is more than palpable.

You too? More like fuck you. I wasn't a big fan of the Libya adventure, and I wouldn't cheer anyone's summary execution, but I must say I've never seen a single one of these guys worry seriously about the torture, imprisonment, or death of any foreign belligerent (or any American suspected of collusion with them) before Gaddafi. Well, maybe Pinochet.

That goes for Bin Laden, too; they said all kinds of crazy shit when he died, but I barely saw anything resembling a human rights demurrer from them. But now some of them are getting all weepy over the Libyan butcher. We have, for example, White House Dossier:

Can anyone imagine Henry Kissinger, George Schultz or Madeleine Albright having a good laugh after taking actions that resulted in someone’s death?

Mainly I imagine these horrible people having a good laugh as they collected the checks. Also, I remember Schultz saying of Gaddafi, "You've had it, pal" in 1986; if the old bastard is still sentient, he's probably marveling that his old client lasted so long.

We can talk about Obama's hypocrisy all day, but in the end his Middle East agenda at least makes some kind of sense. The American conservative approach has demonstrably been to invade a place, fuck the shit out of it, rack up a trillion dollar bill, and then bitch when someone else cleans up the mess.

2011-10-20T16:36:00.002-04:00

SHORTER MEGAN McARDLE: Won't somebody please think of the 1%?

UPDATE. No, really --

I doubt Occupy Wall Street will be assuaged by learning that the top 0.1% now only receive 8% of the income earned in the US, even if that number is the lowest it's been since 2003.

I'm very upset with the liberal media -- they've obviously spiked my proposal, sent to all major networks, to give McArdle a Sunday morning show called Attend Your Betters, starring her and a bunch of dollies (whom she calls her "Board of Directors") having tea and telling each other how good it is to be away from the riff-raff. (I can tell you good people the secret of its inevitable success; once or twice an episode, we let assorted zoo animals loose on the set. No, she won't quit. It'll be just like the financial collapse: she'll never suspect things can go wrong again, so long as all the dolls have pretty dresses.)

2011-10-19T20:34:00.003-04:00

NEW TO OUR PLANET. John Hood at National Review sees Obama hanging out in a small Southern town where nobody lynched him. Something must be wrong.

But put the president in an unscripted moment with “average” people, such as those who ran into him yesterday at a restaurant in Reidsville, N.C., and you get glimpses of a stiff, stilted scold.

Here's the news report Hood worked from:

To one man, Obama said: “Now, you ate all your vegetables before you had dessert,” noting his wife’s focus on healthy eating...

“You’ve got to work hard,” he said to one pair of community college students.

One woman handed Obama a phone, telling him that her grandmother was on the line. “Hey grandma — boy this is an old style phone … I appreciate you.”

John Hood re-tucks his shirt and interprets:

Called me old-fashioned — though I no longer own an “old style phone” — but I’m not greatly interested in running into politicians who might choose to critique my choice of lunch items and the order in which I eat them. A skillful politician, say a Reagan or a Clinton, might smile conspiratorially and make a joke about how good my dessert looks, or flatter me by asking for a menu recommendation. He wouldn’t thank me for following his wife’s dietary pronouncements, then instruct a passing college student to study hard, then make fun of a grandson’s phone to his grandma.

Along with fairness, equality, and humanity, these guys seem not to understand the concept of normal human behavior.

UPDATE. In comments, Nom de Plume: "I found it shocking and vulgar when he held a very young person (or 'baby'), and pressed his lips to its face, a custom that I am reliably informed is known as 'kissing'. No previous elected official of my recollection has engaged in such behavior publically. I shall register my displeasure with the proper authorities."

harrison is surprised Hood was allowed to implicitly praise Bill Clinton's political skills. Praise for retired Democratic politicians, and dead MLKs, is acceptable for use in National Review propaganda -- you know, like barricading the door with the corpses of the enemy.

It is left for Halloween Jack to spell it out: "If Obama weren't able to schmooze with folks from all over, he wouldn't have made it past the primaries... That whole arugula-and-grey-Poupon thing was invented out of whole cloth by GOP spinners who were deathly afraid of someone who had charisma to spare..." We have to remember that sometimes they're trying to convince others, and sometimes they're just trying to convince themselves.

2011-10-18T16:43:00.003-04:00

ROLLING OUT THE BIG GUN. Occupy Wall Street has gotten so troublesome that the brain trust at Rightwing Central -- you know, Hitler, Dracula, Satan, the guy who invented reality TV, et alia -- has been forced to once again call in the man they call The Ano-Vaporizer to argue it down. Take it away, Jonah "This Poundcake Is Lo-Cal 'Cause I Injected It With Frozen Yogurt" Goldberg:

I grew up anti-Communist. I remain anti-Communist. I share with my National Review colleagues and forebears an abiding hatred of Communism. And that hatred extends to ill-conceived, poorly articulated, envy-driven jargon from street radicals.

Jonah Goldberg promises to reveal the secret connection between Josef Stalin and Maynard G. Krebs.

But at the same time I’ve got to say there’s something truly refreshing, even reassuring, about the all of the Marxist twaddle coming out of these protests. These Red goons, buffoons, ruffians and tatterdemalions didn’t spring forth ex nihilo. They’ve been living among us all of this time. All that is new is the opportunity for them to out themselves in YouTube videos and the rest.

None of you were actually expecting him to explain how Occupy Wall Street is communist, are you? It's Jonah Goldberg; lower your expectations.

I think we’ve all known that, but it’s useful to be reminded of it.

Farrrt, farrt farrt -- BTW, joy-poppers, this is where the whole Goldberg Gas thing comes from: the uncanny similarity between many of his rhetorical tropes and flatulence -- i.e., they're valueless, the merest residue of what was once substantial and nourishing; and they stink.

It’s also useful (as I argue in the current issue) to be reminded of the fact that given the flimsiest of excuses a great number of mainstream liberals will drop their apparently feigned resolve against leftwing radicalism and leap at the opportunity to express solidarity with the crazies.

Cut to grainy super-8 footage of Lucianne drilling young Jonah: "And who is this a picture of?" "Action Jackson. [sound of electrical charge] OWWWW! Fart." "Henry Jackson, Jonah! Or you may call him Scoop. And what is Scoop Jackson?" "[crying] C-c-cold war libr'l?" "Very good. Two more and you get a banana boat. Now, who's this a picture of?" "Hubert H. Humperdinck. [sound of electrical charge, sharts, dogs barking]"

So far, except for one honorable dissent from the editors of The New Republic, I haven’t seen any prominent liberals expressing any serious concern about what the occupiers are actually saying.

OK, let's tote it up: Goldberg hasn't made any case at all against the Occupy kids except to call them commies, which unsupported accusation he finds so convincing that he assumes liberals also accept it, and yet they go around acting like everybody doesn't know they're commies, which Jonah proved and I think we all know and farrt fartfart FA RAR R R R R RT. [Wow, that last one had undertones and overtones like the guitar in Teenage Lobotomy.]

The rest just goes on like that, but there's time for one Greatest Hit:

If the Occupy Wall Street mob swept the country, I’m sure some of these liberals would, eventually, find a backbone — particularly when it came time to redistribute their stock portfolios or seize their McMansions.

Yeah, that's when I was planning to get off the bandwagon myself. I mean, fun's fun, but this Olympic-size hot tub doesn't chlorinate itself.

Thank you, good evening, and farrt.

2011-10-17T22:10:00.009-04:00

POETS' CORNER. Some of you may remember that I wrote a book some years back, announced that it would be out soon, and then shut up about it. The only public reminders came from a commenter to my Village Voice columns who would regularly write things like "Hey Roy, when is your novel coming out? Or are you just going to write a dull blog for the rest of your life?" I suspect Mark Helprin.

As it happened, the publisher had gone under, and I was too busy/demoralized to do anything about it except drink and stagger around my crappy apartment wearing a cardboard dookie rope to which I had fashioned a crude imitation of a Pulitzer Prize medal.

Well, recently I heard that this e-book thing is all the rage, so I put the novel out in that form. Now you lucky people can buy it for $2.99 (cheap) at Smashwords, Barnes & Noble, iTunes, and who knows where else, and read it on your iWhatchamacallits.

As if that weren't enough of a come-on: Morgue for Whores is a neo-noir set in Brooklyn, and has lots of violence, sex, and hard-boiled palaver as only Roy Edroso, semi-known internet buffoon, can deliver. Cover art by frequent alicublog commenter and the pride of New Providence, John E. Williams. Enjoy!

UPDATE. Commenter Snarl says the B&N Nook edition is missing pages, so you may want to try one of the other formats available at the Smashwords link until I find out what the problem is. (Re-Update: I tried out the Nook edition, and found that while the page numbering is indeed screwed up, the pages themselves are complete and in sequence. Weird.)

UPDATE 2. In comments. John E. Williams says, "New Providence sucks." Noted!

2011-10-16T23:22:00.007-04:00

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about what I like to call the Nixonization of Occupy Wall Street. Catchy, no?

UPDATE. Reagarding a photo of protesters with a "Class War" sign -- which might shock the Little Old Lady from Dubuque, if no one else -- Ole Perfesser Instapundit lays on the bullshit:

And Reuters ran this pic, but I doubt many newspapers front-paged it as they would have a similar photo of masked Tea Party protesters proclaiming some sort of war...

Yeah, the MSM commissioned it and ran it -- but they didn't run it big enough to suit the Perfesser, the Perfesser bets! Well, I don't remember seeing this one on the cover of the New York Post, proving the rightwing media is preje-ma-diced, infinity:

I'm not sure why Reynolds didn't just pretend the picture was from Zombietime, and that Reuters tried to Photoshop it to look like Rick Perry was stupid or something -- it's not as if his minions would notice.

UPDATE 2. Give the commenters some! Hunger Tallest Palin reminds me that the whole thing about sleeping-bag sex, which Tina Korbe claims would incense MLK if he were alive and Thomas Sowell, was more or less claimed against King and his peeps, too -- in fact, some of the brethren still run that game ("Those four days on the road had turned into an habitual sex orgy by the time [the Freedom Riders] reached the capitol").

And D. Sidhe, yes, I know who Kalle Lasn is, but so what? The protesters are not the cat's-paws of Kalle Lasn, nor of George Soros, nor any of the other ooh-scary figures these operatives are trying to stick to it.

Fave one-liner from DocAmazing: "I don't expect originality from these loons, but a shot-by-shot remake of Joe?"

2011-10-14T17:49:00.002-04:00

SHORTER DANIEL FOSTER: Are you proud of me now, Dad?

[gets extra points for riffing off a two-month-old story; also for bragging on the Silent Majority of which he is apparently valedictorian, and for generally having the Youth for Nixon schtick down cold]

2011-10-13T22:08:00.003-04:00

COME LET US REASON MAGAZINE TOGETHER. At the Washington Examiner, "A libertarian camps out with Wall Street occupiers." The libertarian is Timothy P. Carney, whose bona fides are impeccable. Expectedly he finds the occupiers' grievances "unfocused," "scattered," "incoherent ," etc, but like Rod Dreher he has to admit, or pretend, that he sees something to approve in them:

They're right. It does undermine our democracy and harm our economy when hiring a former Senate majority leader, for instance, can be the best investment a company ever makes. Wealthy special interests do dictate policy too much, regardless of which party is in power. I don't know who made the sign under which I slept Sunday night, but I agreed with its thrust: "Separation of Business & State." The back read "I can't afford a lobbyist."

Aw, that's sweet. Inevitably, though, Carney has to explain to these kids why all their dreamy talk founders on the strong bedrock of libertarianism: they "don't seem to understand," he says, "that getting government more involved in the economy always gets business more involved in government." I'll bet if he said that to the guy with the sign, he'd be flummoxed! Maybe James O'Keefe can try it with a video camera.

Assuming, perhaps unfairly, that he hasn't already tried it and encountered an unhappy result, Carney should go back down there and explain to the protesters why they can't get something more for the 99 percent out of the 1 percent, because as Galtian supermen the 1 percent deserve every penny they've got. Also, that they should instead focus on reducing government to its libertarian essence, because in that state of nature everyone will get what they need -- except the losers, of course, who are always part of the libertarian vision. (In fact they're its most important part, because how could you be sure you've achieved Free Market Nirvana unless some people die because they don't have health insurance, or starve because they don't make enough money, or lose their home to conflagration because they didn't pay the Fire Department?)

He should tell them also that maybe 99 percent is too big a target -- they should count on ten or fifteen percent, or maybe more, remaining sunk in penury because they made bad choices. Couldn't we call our movement the 75-to-80 percent? Or better yet, the Winners?

C'mon, Tim, let's get the dialogue going. Maybe you can have 'em wearing tricorners before the weather turns cold.

2011-10-13T10:59:00.002-04:00

JUST A FUN LITTLE ITEM. Hee hee:

Solidarity hero Lech Walesa is flying to New York to show his support for the Occupy Wall Street protesters.

"How could I not respond," Walesa told a Polish newspaper Wednesday. "The thousands of people gathered near Wall Street are worried about the fate of their future, the fate of their country. This is something I understand."

Walesa's been a supporter of American unions for years, which is something that his Reaganite worshippers always manage to miss; it goes directly to their bone-deep, bonehead conviction that anyone who opposes them is a communist.

Really, I'm just putting this here to increase the chances that they'll hear about it. It's been a hard day and I'd like to refresh myself with the taste of their bitter tears.

2011-10-12T21:50:00.002-04:00

DO PEOPLE REALLY CHANGE? You might be tempted to think that, despite her long history of rightwing lunacy, The Anchoress is onto something as she rather surprisingly comes out for fair trade in chocolate and less exploitative working conditions for the folks who bring it to us. She's seen some heart-tugging videos, you see.

Go back a few posts, though, and you'll see she's still on about the flash mobs Obama is using to bring socialist revolution to America. Those of us who follow her know she'll be back at that popsicle stand soon, possibly tomorrow.

So what caused her current hiccup? Besides disturbances in her brain chemistry, I mean. Well, I wouldn't be surprised if it were the Occupy Wall Street stuff. While the regular kind of functionaries are furiously denouncing the damn dirty hippies, the volunteers are more prone to sentiment. (Which is why the functionaries often try to pull them back in line by telling them that the revolutionaries are actually hurting the common people.) Maybe The Anchoress has picked up on the general mood of uplift and social justice, and though she can't get with all this share-the-wealth crap, it may have softened her soul sufficiently that when someone showed her a sob story she thought, o let's be mad! In another era she'd be choking up to "The Impossible Dream" and wondering if maybe she shouldn't just go ahead and put on that Humphrey for President button. Later, of course, she'd be cheering the hardhats.

You can see it more plainly in Rod Dreher, who is in a mood, too:

You know, whenever I hear an American politician, especially a Republican one, denounce “class warfare,” I roll my eyes. What Rand Paul is doing here is implying that any questioning of the way our system distributes rewards is an expression of crypto-Marxism. Is this kind of thing really of no interest to Sen. Paul?

But Dreher is more hapless than The Anchoress; he doesn't have the same kind of sudden dissociative breaks; he has to talk himself into things, often in public. So further down he starts talking about culture war, and after some traveling music about Sarah Palin et alia...

Though liberals refuse to concede it, this line of attack doesn’t come from nowhere. What is invisible to so many on the left is as plain as day to conservatives: the liberal cultural overclass in this country looks down on their values. Candidate Obama’s gaffe in which he condescended to explain conservatives to liberal donors as “bitter” people who cling to God and guns blah blah blah...

Also, liberals recreate themselves by "yelling, 'Bigotry!' in its various forms (e.g., 'Racist! Sexist! Anti-gay! Anti-Catholic! Islamophobe!') at anyone who points it out that there’s something really disordered about their behavior." Rudely disordered! So there you have it: Everyone under the top one percent is getting screwed, but some prig on Fifth Avenue sneered at the salt of the earth -- see, it all balances out.

These have been the observations of an old man who has seen a few surges of popular enthusiasm in his time, and has seen what they came to. By which I mean, kids: don't get your hopes up.

2011-10-10T21:42:00.009-04:00

NO WAY TO GO THROUGH LIFE, SON. Jonah Goldberg says some guy says conservatives are obsessed with Elizabeth Warren.

Meh.

We could stop there; Goldberg isn't likely to make this argument any more convincing. Might be fun to watch him try, though.

But does anyone really believe that George Will(!) was challenged or threatened by Warren’s spiel?

George Will is the Most Interesting Man in The World.

That gets to my point: The reason conservatives responded to Warren’s “declaration” is simply that liberals were relentlessly hyping it. It didn’t become a YouTube sensation among conservatives. It became YouTube sensation among liberals who were inspired by it and then conservatives responded to that.

He's not obsessed, you're obsessed.

It’s an important distinction because to listen to liberals, Warren’s argument strikes fear into the heart of the right because it’s so powerful and super-terrific. It really doesn’t and it really isn’t.

Well that was elegant.

I’m sure Will wrote a column about it not to pay “enormous tribute” to her brilliant insight. Rather, it’s because liberals wouldn’t shut up about it.

Didn't you hear him? HE'S NOT OBSESSED YOU'RE OBSESSED!

In other words, the conservative response to Warren isn’t nearly as interesting as the liberal reaction.

And by "interesting" he means dur hur hur.

The real question is why is liberalism so arid and why are liberals so dejected that when a liberal politician offers a fairly trite exegesis on the social contract, leftwing bloggers stand up and cheer like it’s a St. Crispin’s Day speech?

The real question is why liberals are all jerks. Except he thinks he ought to fancy that up, so he gets a thesaurus, and calls Nordlinger to get the name of an awesome speech by whatshisname, the Hamlet guy, except not Hamlet because everyone knows that's Cuomo's dad.

I like to think Goldberg knows how stupid this is, but enjoys the fact that they have to let him get away with it. He has to have one admirable quality, at least.

UPDATE. Many alicublog commenters disagree that Goldberg has to have one admirable quality. Maybe the ability to appreciate absurdity isn't it -- I think Alanis Morissette would walk away from Goldberg muttering, "This guy doesn't understand irony at all" -- but there has to be something, if only because he's one of my favorite comic characters and I would like him to have the dimensionality of a Tartuffe or a Hank Kingsley. Maybe there's a little boy in Africa he writes letters to. ("Dear Mtumbo, how's it hanging?")

Spaghetti Lee reacts badly to "Meh." I understand; I've written about it before; it's the characteristic vocal tic of a specific type of suburban douchebag who thinks his unqualified, monosyllabic opinion on anything matters because you can't see his house from the road -- the bleat of the burgher who resents every moment the world isn't kissing his ass. I must admit Goldberg uses it perfectly.

UPDATE 2. Also in comments, Duncan takes offense at my rough handling of Goldberg. I see what he means, but believe he misunderstands me. As I intimated earlier, I view Goldberg as a character and not as a live human being. And in this incarnation he delights me. What look like my gross physical insults to him are only good fun and even in a way (excluding his wretched politics and writing) not unkindly meant. I don't think of Goldberg as fat so much as appetitive; or if he is fat, he is fat like Falstaff, or stately, plump Buck Mulligan, or Junior Samples -- that is, he is outsize, expansive, suitable for State Fair exhibits, one of those giants with whom the world sometimes demands our awestruck attention. His Cheetos are to him as the bow to Orion, and his farts as the wound of Philoctetes, except worse-smelling. I am not insulting him -- I am immortalizing him.

2011-10-10T07:05:00.001-04:00

A STEADY DIET OF BULLSHIT. Let's play a game: see if you can figure out whether Julie Gunlock was forced by her employers to write this horrible thing for National Review, or whether she burst into K-Lo's office juiced to rip the lid off the lefty plot to frighten kids with some junk about children going hungry:

Although Lily is just the latest politically charged plot to come out of Sesame Street...

From this toss-off, I judge the rightwing notion that Sesame Street, known to most of us as promoters of good citizenship and basic education, is actually a communist propaganda mill has been fully adopted by the Central Committee.

...the problem with this storyline is that it is absolutely false. In fact, Lily’s lucky to be “poor” in this country.

Paf! Just because the new Muppet isn't getting enough "food" to "eat" doesn't make her poor but only "poor," which translates from rightspeak to "I know all you homeless fakers are luxuriating in Starbucks bathrooms and eating garbage paid for by my tax dollars, and I resent the hell out of it as I fart through silk and stuff my fat maw."

The truth is, 94.3 percent of American households are able to put enough food on the table every day to feed their families. And despite the grim “facts” and figures thrown around by children’s television programs, celebrity spokespersons, and the mainstream media, the vast majority of children living in America are healthy and well fed.

Leaving only, what, about 15 million hungry? That's not so much and Gunlock sure doesn't know any of them. Plus there's that whole loaded term "hungry":

In fact, American kids have it pretty good. As I wrote on NRO back in January, the idiom “food insecure” — a term created by the U.S. Department of Agriculture — means one has either “reduced quality, variety, or desirability of diet” or “disrupted eating patterns and reduced food intake.”

So, far from hungry or starving, Lily suffers from a much less dramatic condition — unpleasant to be sure, but at its core, just a somewhat boring, irregular, and occasionally reduced diet.

Similarly, people who are being waterboarded merely experience occasionally reduced breathing.

I guess there's no game here at all, really. A lingering faith in human nature is all that kept me hoping that Gunlock heaved a big sigh, looked at the desktop photo of the aged, infirm mother her paycheck was supporting, and forced herself to write this literally monstrous piece. In reality there are enough soulless humanoids who would scamper with glee at the prospect of this assignment to fill several think tanks. Who knows, maybe one day Gunlock will be the business and economics editor of The Atlantic, assuming she hasn't been dragged off in a tumbrel before then. [h/t Kia.]

2011-10-09T23:03:00.004-04:00

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the rightblogger enthusiasm for their new avatar of conservatism, the late Steve Jobs. Generally they seem delighted that a cool guy who made money died, and give the Occupy Wall Street folks a hard time about it. I think they're so happy with this schtick because they know they won't have another chance for even so cheap a pseudo-irony anytime soon; if either of the Koch Brothers drops dead tomorrow, people will be dancing in the streets.

UPDATE. Commenter James Norris: "I would never have imagined right-wingers to pour out such accolades for an iconoclast hippie drug-addled half-Arab anchor baby."

2011-10-07T08:53:00.002-04:00

ANNALS OF McMEGAN. "Whenever I suggest that not everyone should go to college, I am met with cries of classism and snobbery. But here's the thing: I love studying in a way that most people just don't." -- Megan McArdle, who also explains that those non-studious non-McMegan types just sort of wander into college as if it were a blues bar on Beale Street, with no thought whatsoever of the job market, and would be better off if we made college prohibitively expensive (especially now that Megan McArdle no longer goes to one); this would also cause employers to hire high school graduates for desk jobs, of which there must suddenly be an enormous over-supply.

The whole thing is a nightmare, but I don't have time. Feel free to work it over in comments.

2011-10-07T07:03:00.010-04:00

THE END OF THE AFFAIR.. It was only when it came that I realized it had long been inevitable. But like all the other poor Gomers who followed her, I thought Sarah Palin was something special. Just a few weeks ago I actually found myself telling a very skeptical labor lawyer that next summer I expected Palin to ride like a Valkyrie into the convention hall and relieve the Republicans of whatever false idol they had put in her place.

She certainly kept a game face on to the end. Just weeks ago, when the prominent dopes of the GOP were cautiously essaying their ridiculous war on crony capitalism, Palin jumped in with both feet, and got a lot of the punters to go with. Any time a crackpot idea came down the pike, by the time it was in the public's view (thanks, Liberal Media ) Palin was at the wheel with her pedal to the metal.

But I still should have seen what was up when the more prominent apparatchiks, who are more dazzled by the prospect of re-looting the treasury than by any candidate, started bailing on Palin. Chief RedState buffoon Erick Erickson:

The ["Sarah Palin Cult"] is full of people with little prominence outside a twitter stream, a few nominal soapboxes imagined to be bigger they they are, and possessing a lot of bile and little grace inside an echo chamber of indecision 2012 dementia. About the only thing this cult lacks are thetans...

As Ann Coulter said, “Fish or cut bait.” Governor Palin has teased us long enough. Most of us are tired of it. She has harmed her own entry into the race and now, even if she got in, would only see a modest rise in polling.

Shorter'd: The Republican field has found several fresher, more exciting lunatics, we don't need you. And we of "little prominence" who followed her better get with the program, and pitch in for the big win behind someone normal Americans have not yet learned to hate.

Erickson is nothing if not a wind-sniffer, and would not have put himself out there if he didn't think the Palin dream was really over -- though, being also a coward, he drenched it in enough don't-get-me-wrong sauce that he could afterwards say "Oh, no, I didn't mean YOU" to every person involved who might someday be in a position to do him some good, or some harm-- from Palin on down to those campaign operatives whose ship-jumping skills were in order.

And that explicitly did not include those poor sods who carry the hods -- the salt-of-the-earth types who are now left standing at Palin Central, waiting on a train to Galt's Gulch and glory that will never arrive.

I note this with some sadness, and not only on my own account. Most of Palin's retinue will peel off without many tears to the Perry and Bachmann bandwagons, where their thirst for blood and bullshit may be slaked. But I spare a thought for those who actually believed in Palin -- who thought this venal con woman was the real deal, their mama grizzly, their wingnut messiah -- someone who, though swimming in unearned wealth and privilege, understood their underwater double-wide lives and, though incredibly averse to responsibility, would bravely take up the Old Standard and be the backwoods Boudicca of their redneck resurgence.

She was as close to a new Reagan as the Tea Party people had -- simultaneously sunny and impenetrable, a great grinning billboard behind which they could safely wreak their bitter vengeance on the hippies, ethnics, and paupers on whom they blamed the modern world. How long will it take for them to move on, and where to? And -- here's a strange thought, coming from someone who expected to see her crowned -- whether they did or not, are there enough of them that anyone will notice? Or was the whole idea that battalions of backwards-looking, flintlock-shouldering patriots marched with her just a scam as well? That would seem the cruelest thing for them to find: that they were doomed all along, and had only seemed close enough to victory to yearn for it because hucksters found profit in telling the world that they were.

2011-10-05T18:04:00.011-04:00

WON'T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE -- LET'S SEE, WHO DO WE HAVE HANDY? Charles C.W. Cooke at National Review:

Today I saw a side to the Occupy Wall Street protests which hasn’t been much reported — the impact on local businesses. A Vietnamese immigrant came up to me and, frustrated, asked me what the protesters wanted and when they would leave. He hasn’t worked for two weeks, he said:

I don't recall this issue coming up back in the days of large Tea Party rallies. (Come to think of it, given the Tea Party position on the subject of immigration, shouldn't Cooke have verified that his Vietnamese subject isn't here illegally? Maybe Cooke, who has a furrin accent himself, didn't want to open up a can of worms.)

Next Cooke should talk to the banksters' cleaning ladies, whose workloads I'm sure have increased since the Occupation began, especially in and around their employers' liquor cabinets and toilets.

UPDATE. At Hot Air, Tina Korbe learns that Americans are warm toward the protesters' slogan, “The big banks got bailed out, while we got left behind," but fancies this means they share her feeling that Obama is a monster for regulating offshore drilling, ergo, "Clearly, the American people understand the problem of crony capitalism better than the protesters themselves." It's amazing what they come up with when their whole philosophy is challenged by what's right in front of their noses.

UPDATE 2. In comments, Chuckling offers some primary reporting from the protest site.

2011-10-04T07:26:00.015-04:00

BRIEFLY NOTED. God bless Hank Williams Jr., who got in trouble for comparing Obama to Hitler. I'm giving him the same respectful treatment I gave the Dixie Chicks when they made their (non-Hitlerrific) remarks about Bush -- that is, snidely favorable comments. If a celebrity can't act like a buffoon in this country, then why the hell did Beaver Cleaver fight and die in Vietnam?

UPDATE. Making things even better is the coverage at Big Journalism, where I learn that Mike Tyson is a progressive and that Dana Loesch is still the master of schoolyard argument:

It seems that progressives are doing more to call Obama “Hitler” with their accusations than Williams implied with his remark.

That's their strength, you see -- you'd be embarrassed to say something like that, wouldn't you? These guys will smear themselves with poo just to keep the guards from grabbing them.

UPDATE 2. He can get tiresome, but I really do like HWII. His cover of "Kaw-Liga" is most kicking.

UPDATE 3. I see some of y'all don't like ole Hank Jr., though commenter Matt T ably defends him here. Again I am reminded of that unnamed New York Times editor who, years ago, blurbed TV listings for especially crappy, lurid old movies thus: "You want Hamlet, read it."

2011-10-03T14:38:00.008-04:00

IS LANGUAGE A VIRUS? DEPENDS ON WHO'S USING IT. At Hit & Run, Meredith Bragg mentions that Reason has interviewed Ken Burns, whose Prohibition documentary is available via [looter-moocher network] PBS:

"The telling of history need not be Castor Oil, the dry recitation of dates, facts, and events" says Burns, who rejects doctrinaire activism in his art despite calling himself a "Democrat for life."

Similarly, I understand that despite calling himself a libertarian, Matt Welch does not have resounding B.O., nor reflexively correlate occurrences in everyday life to scenes from obscure science fiction novels, nor stand too close to you when he talks. (Gillespie I don't know about.)

2011-10-02T21:29:00.002-04:00

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP about the rightblogger response to Occupy Wall Street. They seem to think it's a bunch of hippies being their usual dirty hippie selves, and a great occasion for hippie-punching. I don't know nothing about it, but anytime the rightbloggers and the New York Times are on the same page ("Look at these kids, sitting here with their Apple computers") you have to assume all right and justice is on the other side.

2011-09-29T22:04:00.017-04:00

DON'T LAUGH, YOU'RE NEXT. The whole ridiculous beef over The Onion's Congressional hostage joke is about this: the Internet is overstocked with miserable people whose miserable mission in life is to turn everything into the lowest kind of politics -- not the kind we have fun with here, but what the serious people call retail politics -- which is a great term for it, if you imagine these guys as telemarketers whose bosses have drilled them to never promise anything, to never take no for an answer, and to never go off script.

These people are as carefully trained as guard dogs, and they don't take well to humor. For one thing, it interferes with the sales pitch. They have their time-tested script, and they've learned how to react to every possible response -- but then some joker makes fun of it, and suddenly their logic is uprooted. Some of them may have the wit to roll with it, but generally the kind of person who gets hired for these gigs doesn't. (Maybe they had it coming in, but a few years of following the script will take it out of you.)

When they see a joke that rouses some political controversy, they're more comfortable. Because that's not this messy ha-ha stuff that interferes with business -- this is something that can be turned to their advantage, like a recent news item about some poor girl who would be alive now if only she'd had their product.

This kind of joke has a place in their decision tree. Does it make fun of the competition? That's good for business, and if someone squawks about it he's just being [see card G] politically correct. Does it make fun of the product? Then leverage the controversy. There are other emotional cues they can work -- outrage, sensitivity, concern. Are they fake? Hey, buddy, they just work here -- if the suckers buy it, it's as real as a paycheck.

Look, you know what kind of people these are. They have websites all about how Hollywood is trying to destroy America. They're constantly telling each other that the people on the TV are trying to sap their moral will. They read about street crime in a distant city, shiver in their Barcaloungers, and think: Obama is rousing the blacks against us! When they talk about their children, their homes, their encounters with friends or strangers, or anything at all, even something as simple as a joke, they're still giving you the pitch.

Because the pitch is all they know. Everything they see, whether it's from the front page or the gossip column or the street, they turn to their purpose. For them nothing in this world is merely what it is; everything is, must be part of the pitch.

And you? To them you can be someone they're trying to sell, or someone they're trying to recruit. But make no mistake: to them, that's all you are.

2011-09-29T07:45:00.008-04:00

DORKUS MALORKUS SPEAKETH. Attend Maximus Super Victor Davis Hanson as he sayeth the sooth! Well, it's soothing if you know how to take it. As is his custom, VDH bids us ware the Ides of March, then Delphically describes an America recognizable only to old cranks who spend their evenings with a glass of port and a volume of Heroditus open (in a place where visitors can easily see it), wailing that we are just like old Rome in her decline, except for our endless wars, which are great (though we really should be spending less money on them, and more plebes' lives).

VDH is full of stories, but sometimes he wanders:

Somewhere around 1985 in California I noticed that my students were hoping for a state job first, a federal job second, a municipal job third — and a private one last.

And this at the height of the Reagan era! We were told in those days that the kids had all become little Alex P. Keatons, high on trickledown and entrepreneurial as fuck. So either Maximus Super speaketh bullshit, or in '85 his young charges, having grown up under Governor Reagan, got an early whiff of the fraud and were opting out. (Or maybe they thought, "Jesus, if he can teach at a state school, I could be a fucking Dean!")

VDH also Sphinxes out some riddles:

Why is it more moral for a federal bureaucrat in a state-supplied SUV to shut down an offshore oil rig on grounds that it is too dangerous for the environment than for a private individual to risk his own capital to find some sort of new fuel to power his government’s SUV fleet?

Answer "what's morality got to do with it, cloth-ears?" (rather than the correct "You got me there, Senex Gloriosus!") and VDH will not let you pass, but will block the hallway and forcibly regale you, no matter how badly you say you need the bathroom, with his proposed solution to our nation's low, mean state: Tax the Poor ("Their noncompliance bothers the foundations of our society far more than that of the stingy, but minuscule, number of grasping rich") and restore "a different popular culture that honors character rather than excess," presumably by throwing non-Christians to the lions.

On and on it goes, with awkward modern correlations ("the elite have responsibility to use their largess wisely and not turn into the Kardashians") and stretches of senile dementia ("In our strange culture, that someone drives an overpriced BMW apparently means that our own Toyotas don’t have air conditioners or stereos" -- what?). You may wonder how he gets published. Well, they can't all be bellowing goons like Chris Christie or Mr. Reasonables like David Brooks -- sometimes the avatars of the New Feudalism must have a schoolly look, so that the half-educated may look upon them and think, aha, the rage I feel when I see impertinent minorities and nubiles on TV is not just a gut reaction, but the judgement of history!

2011-09-27T22:11:00.004-04:00

THE FAT MAN SINGS. I could have sworn it was just a crazy dream:

Judging from Christie's speech today, he's willing to milk this thing for all it's worth, lining up his union-busting reputation with Reagan and the air traffic controllers ("I cite this incident not as a parable of labor relations...") and even, ridiculously, with international affairs ("What we say and what we do here at home affects how others see us...").

Whether Americans at large will agree that yelling at unions is good training for the job of Commander of Chief in the War on Whatever, or that the absurd slogan "Leadership and Compromise" makes any more sense than "Rice Krispies and Beer," is moot. American politics has changed a great deal since William Jennings Bryan stormed the 1896 Democratic convention and swept the field, and even with a head start Christie would be sailing into a (you'll pardon the expression) big fat wind if he took this thing seriously. A lot of money has already changed hands, and the entry of a few new rich guys into the game isn't going to much change the outcome.

I'm rooting for him, of course. Not only because I love the idea of Rick Perry fluttering around in some conference room, petulantly asking his advisors why he can't use the jokes he brought in about lettin' out his drawers. If the GOP field is really listing into such chaos, it may encourage the ever-opportunistic Sarah Palin to come in and regulate. Then the debates, heretofore merely risible, will resemble the scene in Monty Python's Life of Brian where all the messiahs gibber simultaneously in the market. Panderfest will become pandermonium! If we're really going down the tubes at least we should have some laughs along the way.

Meanwhile we can get pleasure enough from classic messianic guff like this from Daniel Foster:

Christie absolutely owned the Reagan library tonight, a point made most clear during the Q& A by the earnest, trembling plea from a woman who begged, on behalf of her “daughter and granddaughter,” that Christie reconsider running for president.

“I know New Jersey needs you, but I really implore you — this isn’t funny — we can’t wait another four years,” the woman said. “We need you. Your country needs you to run for president.”

Christie responded: “I hear exactly what you’re saying and I feel the passion with which you say it and it touches me.” But Christie also said that the decision to run “has to reside inside me.”

Try to imagine Phil Gramm or Paul Tsongas in the lead role of this passion play! A few years hence it'll be just as plainly absurd.

UPDATE. Commenter Glen Tomkins makes an excellent point:

Not that I believe that Christie wants in, or would not stumble for other reasons, but I don't follow your point that the late start putting him behind the power curve with big donors would be a show-stopper.

We now live in a post-Citizens United world. The fact that a lot of big donors and aggregators have already placed their bets no longer carries the weight it once did. A lone crazed billionaire could step in, and for chump change compared to other business expences, single-handedly finance a major effort by any late entrant simply because their crazy happened to vibrate on the same harmonics as his own, much less whose policies promised an excellent ROI.

But that's one of the blessings of freedom, comrade: the market for buyable politicians is now wide-open and entrepreneurial, so rich bastards who once amused themselves by purchasing a basketball team and pitting it against his fellow rich bastards' basketball teams may now do the same with Presidental candidates. I just wish that crazy bastard Ted Turner would get into the act and pay George Clooney to run. What? He can still do cameos and cartoon voices.

2011-09-26T22:19:00.003-04:00

PUNCH & JUDY. Oh look, it's an affirmative action bake sale:

UC Berkeley 'Racist' Bake Sale Demonstration Sparks Outrage

In protest against an Affirmative Action-like bill awaiting Gov. Jerry Brown's signature, U.C. Berkeley College Republicans announced plans to host a satirical Increase Diversity Bake Sale, selling racially price-adjusted pastries on campus, SFGate reported. The bake sale is scheduled for Tuesday morning at 10am.

The announcement, posted on the group's Facebook page, advertised a pricing structure, ranging from $2 per pastry for white men to $.25 per pastry for Native Americans, with a $.25 price break for women.

What isn't mentioned in the HuffPo story is that this bake sale schtick has been going on for years -- at DePaul, Wesleyan, Bucknell, and elsewhere. (Here's a report on them from 2003.) The routine has been to set up one of these things, go fishing for outrage, and alert the media, and I'll be damned if it doesn't work. And it works especially well when everyone pretends it's never happened before.

I'm not averse to bread and circuses, but the bread is running out and our circuses really suck. No wonder these guys were so excited by James O'Keefe. At least he was pushing the envelope.

2011-09-25T17:09:00.004-04:00

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the Rick Perry fade and the resulting enthusiasm for Chris Christie. The GOP debates haven't been good for anybody, which is why I sort of sympathize with Don Surber's desire to reform them, i.e., remove all extraneous candidates and opportunities for unscripted moments:

What Mitt Romney and Rick Perry need to do is tell MSNBC, CNN and Fox News that it is over. No more games. No more audiences applauding death or booing gay soldiers. Mitt Romney and Rick Perry have given them their time, now they and the networks should move on...

These debates are a farce and a detriment to the electoral process. All they do is open Republicans to mocking by a liberal-biased media. To hell with the debates because they do not serve Republicans at all.

That whole Tea Party, power-to-the-people thing really caught on, didn't it?

2011-09-23T09:52:00.005-04:00

SHORTER THE ANCHORESS: Someone expressed the perfectly Catholic sentiment that homosexuals are disgusting and should be kept out of sight, and would you believe it, the filthy homos were rude to her! Is there no end to our persecution?

UPDATE. "If she watched the last GOP primary debate," comments Brazilian Rascal, "she likely got a heartwarming glow from the booing and hissing of a gay soldier that should get her through a few hard nights, though." Yes, but some people have complained about the booing and the hissing, and that's repression and oppression -- just part of the anti-Christian onslaught that started with gay people publicly flaunting a disgusting new practice called "fighting back."

2011-09-22T15:24:00.011-04:00

THE GREAT MAN SPEAKS. Elizabeth Warren delivers an awesome riposte to all that glibertarian why-should-I-pay-for-anything yak:

You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory — and hire someone to protect against this — because of the work the rest of us did...

It's so good that conservatives have sent to refute it their greatest intellectual champion -- Jonah "How Come They Don't Make Shrek Go-Gurt in Adult Sizes" Goldberg.

First, the classic Goldbergian set-up:

It’s a nice little riff, but I’m not sure it’s nearly as powerful an argument as the progressives who are hearing what they want to hear think it is.

You can almost hear Goldberg painstakingly stacking up the time-wasting words ("as powerful an argument as... the progressives who... are hearing what they... want to hear...") while his Mom dashes in with the talking points, and see him furtively gesturing for his action figures (or, as he calls them, "interns") to chortle dismissively.

First of all, the factory owner already pays a hunk — a big hunk — for the next kid who comes along. The “rich” already pay a very disproportionate share of that freight. Warren makes it sound like that’s not happening now, which is of course bunk.

Will it surprise you to learn that there are no links to supporting evidence in this section? Here's some background; bottom line, the Goldberg view is that rich people can pay as little as they want and still be victims, especially if you put quotes around "rich."

Meanwhile, if you listen to Warren closely, she could just as easily be making the case for if not a minarchist government, then something pretty close. Defending factories from marauding bands is an important function of government, but it doesn’t really take up much of the budget. Ditto fire departments... I very much doubt this mythical factory owner has much objection to paying for any of that stuff. So far all of her verbiage about the social contract is pious misdirection.

Warren's big mistake was not listing every service government performs -- for example, "#424: providing the rich factory owner with live employees by making sure everybody doesn't die from poisoned water supplies." But even then she couldn't win, because every time she named another such service, Goldberg would go, "No problem with that, minarchist," and when she finished, he'd go, "Minarchist says what? Farrrrt."

Of course conservatives believe in a social contract, albeit a more bare bones version than the one liberals believe in. Insinuations otherwise are a red herring.

As we tirelessly chronicle here, the conservative idea of a "bare bones social contract" is a social contract like Barebone's Parliament was a Parliament. On the very Corner pages wherein Goldberg burbles, the boys are talking about how eager they are to get rid of Social Security entirely ("I’m very surprised by your claim that Social Security’s designers and perpetuators have not attempted to perpetrate a fraud"). In the libertarian press -- which is the meth lab of modern conservatism -- they're already talking about doing away with public roads, and think the fire department shouldn't save your house if you don't pay them a fee.

In short, every time they see a taxpayer-funded service that does not exclusively benefit major Republican donors, they cry Big Gummint and seek to get rid of it. That's all they really stand for; the stuff in the smaller tents (like "culture war") are just sideshows to draw more rubes, so they can occasionally win an election and get back to pillaging the treasury.

Goldberg's close is a thing of beauty:

I think she’ll have to try harder if she wants to persuade people who don’t already agree with her.

Actually, a shit-ton of people already agree with her. I wouldn't expect Goldberg to consider it the other way around, though: the very thought of him trying harder would probably throw him into a cataleptic nap.

UPDATE.Ole Perfesser Instapundit and his Facebook friends take their own, rather sad shot:

you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; No, you did not educate them. You babysat them for 12 years. Then I hired them, taught them how to be responsible and show up for work...

...paid them minimum wage, then fired them before unemployment kicked in and hired some other suckers. Freedom!

The forces of evil society are further denounced in a graphic, in which the Wealth Producers complain that the fire department "want to shut you down for violating some inane fire code." Sometimes I think the libertarian movement is just one big agoraphobia support group.

2011-09-22T10:03:00.005-04:00

HE'S JUST SAYING WHAT THEY'RE ALL THINKING. Remember the GOP Tea Party debate, when Wolf Blitzer asked if a guy should be allowed to die of his illness if he doesn't have health insurance and a bunch of the distinguished yahoos in the audience bellowed in the affirmative? Most conservative chatterboxes have wisely kept them mouths shut about it.

So give some credit at least to John Hawkins of Right Wing News, who has stepped up and blown their cover with an article called "I Agree With the People Who Yelled 'Yes,' We Should Let Him Die at the Debate." He doesn't appear to be kidding.

First of all, as per usual when dealing with the Left, the actual question here is regularly being taken out of context. In Blitzer’s question, he wasn’t referring to someone who couldn’t afford insurance. He was talking about someone who had the money and just decided to spend it elsewhere.

So it's like the fable of the Ant and the Grasshopper. Surely you remember the ending, when the Grasshopper was slowly strangled the death by his diseased lungs?

Aside from the justice of allowing the sick and imprudent to die, Hawkins has an actuarial (if not actual) angle, too:

If we tell people, “Whether you buy health insurance or whether you don’t, we’ll still treat you and then, if you get too far in over your head with the bills, we’ll let you declare bankruptcy” — well then, millions of people will do just that.

It probably never occurred to Hawkins that the free rider problem is directly addressed in the Affordable Care Act, so that we can provide care to the needful without putting an undue burden on society (and in that regard it's already starting to work). In fact, that's a big part of the reason why we have the ACA in the first place.

But that's beside the point, isn't it? The real point is, why would anyone take seriously a guy who writes a column called "I Agree With the People Who Yelled 'Yes,' We Should Let Him Die at the Debate" and isn't going for Swiftian irony, but either a.) actually thinks we should let sick people die because they don't have the money or b.) just wants us to think he feels that way because he thinks it's butch or something? Behold John Hawkins' vision of America:

At some point, churches, foundations, or wealthy Americans would probably step in to provide clinics to try to give those people SOME help, but there would be people who fall through the cracks. That’s the downside of having a truly free society. However, the alternative of having an all-powerful government that tries to control every aspect of our lives to make sure we all “do the right thing” is much worse.

Usually people who take the freedom-isn't-free angle are talking about soldiers who die in wars to defend it; Hawkins thinks freedom requires that we leave some people to die because they crapped out at the health insurance casino, and if we healed them it might discourage others from putting their money down.

This man is on the blogroll of Ole Perfesser Instapundit and a member in good standing of the rightblogger top tier. I wouldn't bother calling for "decent" members of this lunatic's movement to denounce him, though -- not because that's an ancient, obnoxious rightwing trick and they can have it, but because I have no reason to believe the rest of them feel any differently.

2011-09-21T12:35:00.002-04:00

BOOK NOTES. Look out below:

The Atlantic's libertarian entrepreneur-turned-business writer and blogger Megan McArdle's PERMISSION TO SUCK, a look at how risk aversion is sapping America of its core strengths and how we have to embrace the possibility of failure - which she experienced when she was fired and dumped in the same week - if we want to find our passions, land the right job, and succeed in life, to Joy de Menil at Viking, in a pre-empt, by Gail Ross at the Ross Yoon Agency.

No free link -- thanks to whet for the info.

I hope these chapters are included:

The unintended consequences of giving money to bums -- they eat, sure, but also fail to upgrade their cardboard signs in ways that enrich our street life.
The real tragedy of the financial crisis: it gave Big Government an excuse to interfere with the production of wonderfully risky financial instruments.
The inspiring story of an enterprising chemist who developed a new kind of granite from which to make countertops.
How I bought the wrong $400 saucepan but learned how to make an omelette!

2011-09-21T10:17:00.002-04:00

RETITLED NOEMIE EMERY: "Republicans are waiting for 'A Dick' for 2012."

No really: Though Emerie suggests Republicans combine Mitt Romney and Rick Perry to get "'Mick,' their dream of a candidate," she's clearly more turned on by the penile Perry:

Mitt is the head and Rick is the heart; Mitt is Al Gore, and Rick is Bill Clinton; Mitt is Clean Gene, and Rick is Robert F. Kennedy; Mitt is Ashley Wilkes, and Rick is Rhett Butler. (Who would be Scarlett O'Hara remains to be seen.)

(I think I see her batting her eyes at Big Rick, though, to signal that she needs to be caucused, and often, and by someone who knows how to do it.)

Rick could scare people -- a valuable trait in a world with Iran and al Qaeda.

The bad guys aren't the only ones who need to be feeling it, either:

If Obama looks like a student, and Romney looks like a substitute teacher, Perry looks like the headmaster who comes in and brings order. Whoever coined the phrase "Wait till your father gets home" had someone like Perry in mind as the father.

America needs an ass-whoopin'! Some to git, some to watch! In the end it's a thrill for all. Perry may be dumb as a box of home-schooled rocks, but for a certain type of voter he's the Midnight Rambler. Well you heard about the Boston -- CHANK! (Goddamn!) Well honey, it's not one of those -- CHANK! (Goddamn!)

I see less chance of synthesis than of a Jekyll-and-Hyde scenario. And given the character of the GOP base I think I know which way they're going to swing.

2011-09-20T15:54:00.004-04:00

FANCY TALK. American Thinker seems to encourage the use of academic cred to promote wingnut doctrine -- as seen in the contributions of Robin of Berkeley, a psychotherapist who regularly attributes policies she opposes to the mental illnesses in which her training has made her expert.

Today's AT intellectual is Paul Jacobson, who tells us that Democrats are "The Postmodern Party." He chooses an interesting path to this conclusion. Rather than correlate Democratic beliefs to postmodernist precepts -- say, the Affordable Care Act to the works of Martin Heidegger -- which he perhaps intuits will bore and frustrate his readers, Jacobson skips to the McCarthyite phase and tells us that the postmodern menace is everywhere upon us:

... academic postmodernism has long been reaching out from its lofty eyries via its "educated" acolytes, who have been busy for decades quietly worming their way into American life from top to bottom, including not just politics, but education at all levels, entertainment, journalism, corporations, foundations, even churches -- everything that affects you and me. Postmodernism is much more than a philosophy; it is today's foundational cultural driver.

And here's his proof point:

If you doubt that expansive claim for postmodernist influence, consider the poll results published almost a decade ago by the Barna Research Group, an organization that does polling for Christian organizations. You'd expect evangelical Christians to hold to a cornerstone belief in an absolute (Biblical) standard of good and evil, right? Wrong. Barna's poll showed, astonishingly, that an overwhelming majority of evangelical adults (68%) cleave instead to postmodernist moral relativity.

I anticipated testimonials from Bible-beaters who were right with God until they found some of that Jack Derry-da in the corncrib, whereupon they commenced to fornicatin' and other forms of moral relativism. But the linked Barna report doesn't mention postmodernism; the firm's George Barna suggests such results arise because "people are left with philosophies such as 'if it feels good, do it,' 'everyone else is doing it' or 'as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else, it's permissible.'"

In other words, what scolds of an earlier, simpler time would attribute to rock 'n' roll, pornography, birth control, short skirts on the womenfolk, etc., Jacobson attributes to postmodernism -- the real root cause of sin. Let ignorant preachers flap their scriptures; for bigbrains like Jacobson, the devil is de trop, and Foucault rules in hell. (Jacobson does eventually move on from fundamentalists to Democrats, also blaming postmodernism for "the SEIU thug who bit off the guy's finger," as if political violence didn't happen before eggheads started telling everyone that language is a virus.)

This is far from the first pomo putdown seen at AT. They address other high-flown menaces, too -- in their current rotation you'll also find "Social Darwinism and Barack Obama."

It's become standard procedure for the pointier heads in the rightblogger world to lecture their readers on such obscure ivory tower terrors as The Frankfurt School, whom they portray as the godfathers of Social Security and ACORN. Andrew Breitbart's gotten deep into the act, and devotes a section of his book to it. And of course there's Alinsky, now an all-purpose rightwing swearword.

I can see the appeal. You don't see George F. Will doing much of this stuff; the big-time rightwingers are still shaking their fists at old-school demons like Keynes, and they rarely get schoolier than a solemn reference to Hayek or Chesterton. The new conservative intellectuals have to distinguish themselves from their mentors somehow, other than by their even greater mendacity and worse writing, and a new cast of supervillains is as good a way as any. After all, what does it matter what they call the enemy, so long as everyone knows to hate him?

UPDATE. It's late to notice, but comments are a joy, particularly the artistic ones, like BigHank53's memories of Jonathan Sokol and The Postmodern Lovers, and whetstone's evocation of Meredith Willson --

Are certain words creeping into his conversation?
Words like "gnostic"?
And "interlocutory"?
Well if so my friends,
You've got trouble...

Also Kia does a fine rundown on the real postmodern menace, i.e. posemodernists.

2011-09-19T01:14:00.008-04:00

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about Obama's proposed tax plan and how awful it would be if taxes were raised on the rich. I regret that Megan McArdle had yet to open her yap on the subject when I wrote this, but there's plenty of pro-rich stupidity on display nonetheless.

UPDATE. As of 3 pm McArdle has yet to weigh in on the subject but, a commenter points out, she has compared Netflix to Medicare, for no good reason except Netflix fucked up, which gives her something new and bad to point to and say to Medicare, "See that guy over there? That's what you look like." So we can't be too disappointed with her.

All the other wingnuts are huffing and puffing as expected. At National Review, Veronique de Rugy:

First of all, let me note that there is something unseemly about the idea that a super-millionaire like Warren Buffett should be setting tax policy, no matter how talented and successful he is as a businessman.

It's almost funny, in a pathetic way, to see a toff like de Rugy pressed to act the populist. Especially when -- disguised in overalls and a newsboy cap, and trying to carry herself like she's seen her gardener do -- she tells the boys and girls how persecuted her rich masters are:

The president spends a lot of time talking about the fairness of the tax code. The question here is, “Do the rich pay their fair share in taxes?” The top 1 percent of income earners pay 38 percent of income taxes and earn 20 percent of income, which is highly progressive...

As long as we're turning fairness apples into fairness oranges, we might also point out that the top 1 percent also control two-thirds of the national net worth, earn 24 percent of America's income, etc. Fairness-wise, I think we should just squeeze them till they poop gold coins.

2011-09-16T12:10:00.010-04:00

BLACKMAIL. The Postal Service is having money trouble, and the conservatarian line is that this is due to Big Gummint socialism so the USPS should be privatized:

Congress hasn’t been able to bring itself to allow the USPS to close 3,000 of its 30,000+ retail locations, so it’s hard to imagine that it will allow operations to come to a halt. Therefore, the important question is what sort of relief will Congress ultimately provide?

Let’s start with what it won’t do: consider privatization...

...if the USPS is to operate solely on the revenues that it generates, then it needs the flexibility that comes with private ownership.

Other such people admit that small-market citizens would find their service drastically curtailed by a new, profit-hungry privatized postal service (indeed, USPS is already talking about shutting thousands of POs to save money), but screw them because "there is no good economic reason to subsidize people who decide to live in remote areas"; they propose phasing in a new leaner, meaner mail service that will at first merely "charge double postage for mail to or from designated remote areas and... terminate Saturday mail service to and from those areas," then cut the rope and let the free market rule.

The thing that's most dispiriting about this is, the Postal Service isn't the brainchild of Barack Obama or FDR or Teddy Roosevelt, but of Ben Franklin -- it's explicitly mandated by the Constitution, and one of the services that for centuries was thought indispensable to any government worthy of the name.

But our leaders are so completely drunk on privatization doctrine that even having a goddamn local post office is thought to be too good for us. For years the USPS has been trying to serve the people while simultaneously meeting the business model that the free-marketers thrust upon them, and the inevitable telling of this strain is now being used as proof that, see, government doesn't work -- even in ways the Founders expected it to.

This is a milestone on our journey to a neo-feudal age. They're already taking about doing away with public roads. Soon enough everything will be market-driven, and you'll find indigents begging for water next to privatized reservoirs. And there'll be a little army of idiots in tricorners dancing around, convinced that this is a restoration of the original vision of America. It's a restoration, all right -- yea, even unto the Middle Ages.

UPDATE. Among many brilliant commenters, Alan points out Alison Kilkenny's article about the disastrous effect on USPS of the Postal Accountability Enhancement Act of 2006, which would seem to have been the set-up for the current crisis.

2011-09-15T11:13:00.003-04:00

SHORTER TIMOTHY P. CARNEY. There is a "small but growing trend toward free-market populism in Republican rhetoric, if not action" -- or, in plain English, a new line of bullshit. But it's important that I pimp this bullshit, because it will help elect Republicans, who will loot the treasury via favors to contributors, as per usual, while "we free-market populists take whatever drippings we can get," e.g. gigs with the Washington Examiner.

2011-09-14T11:08:00.003-04:00

TURNER DIARIES. The rightwing rap on Turner-Weprin in NY-9, as exemplified by John Podhoretz's post on the subject, is that Jews hate Obama because Israel, and in consequence are -- as conservatives have been wishing for decades -- abandoning the Democratic Party:

No one is saying a majority of such Jews are going to pull the lever for a conservative Republican like Rick Perry in 2012. But a more significant minority than usual might, and others, disgusted by Obama’s behavior toward the Jewish state, just may stay home.

You might expect the Hasidim to boycott the schvartze Obama, but Podhoretz says the NY-9 Jewish Turner voters are not necessarily Orthodox -- merely "older, heritage-proud, and were bathed from youth forward in Zionism."

But is it, as Podhoretz suggests, their Zionism that turned them? Maggie Gallagher of the anti-gay National Organization for Marriage thinks not:

NOM has a new poll coming out later today. We’ll have a chance to see how big an impact David Weprin’s “I’m an Orthodox Jew and I support gay marriage” speech had on voters in the district. Nobody appears to know how many Orthodox Jews there are in the district, but we hope to have some data on that, and on how many voters said gay marriage was an issue for them.

But really when 40 Orthodox rabbis tell their people its against Torah law to vote for Weprin, that has to be big.

Democrat Ed Koch’s endorsement of Turner was a huge factor. But so was [anti-gay] Democrat Dov Hikind’s endorsement and [anti-gay] Democrat Sen. Ruben Diaz. Both did robocalls for NOM to voters and so did a very prominent apolitical rabbi, Zachariah Wallerstein. Huge.

The "apolitical" Wallerstein thinks gays cause hurricanes and earthquakes.

If Gallagher's right, the course for Republican outreach in Jewish districts is clear: convince voters that gay marriage threatens the state of Israel. (In Israel itself, that would be a tough sell -- gays have served in the Israeli military for years and most citizens approve gay marriage -- but American Jews are often in the dark about how the folks in the homeland really think on major issues, so the scam could work.) GOP Jews might compare their Democratic opponents to Ernst Rohm, for example, or complain that Boy George stole their look.

If this race shows anything, it's that Republicans won't scruple to inflame ancient prejudices to win, and when times are tough this is more likely to work.

UPDATE. Some readers wonder what else was going on there. The ever-astute Liz Benjamin read some tea leaves and sorted some influences. To my mind: the economy sucks; Turner ran a campaign that soft-pedaled national GOP messages (unlike earlier local GOP candidates); the district liked Weiner but had no overriding cultural loyalty to the Democrats; and the economy sucks. Also gay marriage.

2011-09-13T14:54:00.004-04:00

AND IN CONCLUSION, FARRRT. At last night's GOP Tea Party debate, Michele Bachman attacked Rick Perry for immunizing them Texas gals agin HPV, and then claimed someone told her that the vaccine had made her little girl retarded.

The whole thing is a nightmare, but there's no nightmare that can't be made worse by Jonah Goldberg. His examination of the controversy is so stupid that through most of my reading of it I just lazily picked out examples of egregious mental flatulence, sort of like when kids play that license plate game on long drives:

I can’t make up my mind over this whole controversy. I think I’m torn because both sides are making good and bad arguments. [Farrt, "The book that I am doing my report on has many good things in it, and also many bad things, and now I have 73 words to go in this book report." ]

I think the charge of crony capitalism against Perry is valid generally and looks on target in this case in particular. [Farrrrt, I saw the Wall Street Journal had something about this but was too busy lining up Bon Bons on the sideboard and then pretending to be Pac-Man to read it, so I'll just "generally" accuse Perry of serious charges that "look on target."]

...I think his argument that he did this because he will always “support life” is dangerous hogwash. He mandated government inoculations against STDs because he’s a pro-lifer? It takes some pretty circuitous reasoning to get there [faarRRRrrRRRT, it's not like there's a direct link between HPV and cervical cancer, oops my intern just told me there is, well anyway government is the problem not the solution so how do you know government doesn't cause cancer huh farrrRRRRRrrrt.] and in the process you’ve conceded the case for pretty much every other kind of health-care intervention by the state up to and including Obamacare. [FARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRT VACCINATIONS ARE THE THIN END OF THE OBAMACARE WEDGE, HITLER VACCINATED EVERYBODY I AM PRETTY SURE FARRRRRRRRARARARARAARRRTsquirt] ...

My reverie was only interrupted by stupidities so gross they required a hard reset of my brain -- e.g., Goldberg's prescription regarding the claim of vaccine retardation ("I think Fox or some other news outlet should investigate"), and his closing:

I’ll keep noodling.

When I read that, I suddenly envisioned Goldberg lying belly-down on a conference room table, making flippers of his arms, and wriggling face-forward into a seven-pound gob of pasta salad while singing the theme music from Jaws. (Punchline: After he made it to the end of the table and stuck the belly-flop, Goldberg found he had left the lens cap on the camera. Farrt.)

UPDATE. All honor to commenters, with special thanks to Ray Stantz for his Shorter Jonah Goldberg: "I sense that soon the Party will denounce either Perry or Bachmann, but don't know which, so I am hedging my bets."