ALSO, WHY DO PEOPLE KEEP TELLING ME TO LOOK UP "LEMONPARTY"?

Pretty much everyone has noticed that violent mass events starring white people get handled differently in the press from violent mass events starring black people, and Waco/Baltimore comparisons seem to fit the pattern. Surely you must have been wondering: what is the libertarian position on this? Take it away, Ed Krayewski of Reason:

The comparisons to the police reform protests are the more problematic of the two. The Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates seemed to make that comparison in a series of tweets Monday night that emulating right-wing reactions to the police protest movement. One curious tweet asks "Why won't America's biker gangs be more like Dr. Martin Luther King?" What is the comparison Coates is trying to draw? If there were violent protesters in Baltimore with legitimate grievances—and they were urged by some to be more peaceful—does Coates believe the bikers, too, had some kind of legitimate grievances at the Twin Peaks restaurant? If he doesn't believe so, does he believe there are white people out there who believe that? I certainly haven't heard or read anything about either the bike gangs allegedly involved or anyone in the press trying to ascribe legitimate grievances to the thugs at the restaurant.

In other words, the libertarian position is they don't understand jokes unless they're in Klingon.

UPDATE.  Kevin D. Williamson does a version of this at National Review, with arguments on the order of oh, you're against calling black rioters "thugs" well what about Tupac libtards etc. Also, why doesn't "America’s most stridently progressive mayor, Bill de Blasio" shut down the Hell's Angels clubhouse on East Third? I might tell him that the Angels have been keeping that block clean and righteous for decades, as opposed to shooting it up Waco-style, but then I'd be playing Williamson's neither-Holy-nor-Roman-nor-an-Empire dork game with him, and life is too fucking short.

A CHANGE OF SCENE.

Hey look, Rod Dreher took a moment off from his endless war against the gays to address the Baltimore riots! His first instinct is to tell us the rioters have "lawlessness in their hearts," but list ye, sinners, for "the rest of us are destroying the basis for self-governance and order in our polis too." What can this mean? Later Dreher amplifies: He knows a religious school where they have a sexual assault problem, and the obvious reason is that society at large no longer adheres to "the concepts and the language of the Bible," which Biblelessness has apparently been transmitted atmospherically (you know, like Ebola!) to the religious school or something:

...the school’s leadership refuses to use the language or morality, or moral absolutes. It couches everything it says in the language of liberalism, which is to say, in consent and procedure...

Whereas previously the Holy Ghost wrote the disciplinary policies. This is also, per Dreher, why we don't have another MLK; I thought it was because we tend to shoot them. Inevitably:

This is why what is happening in Baltimore is linked to what is happening on Capitol Hill at the Supreme Court today. America in 2015 is a culture that defines the good as whatever the individual says it is.

Son of a gun, he brought it back home! Eventually, Dreher revisits:

It’s society’s fault. It always is. In this view, poor black people are always acted upon, and are never moral agents.

Also, Freddie Gray "was a layabout who had a bail bondsman the way other people have an auto mechanic," thugs, black fatherlessness, etc. -- why, it's as if Dreher remembered there were other people besides homosexuals for him to hate! He ends thus:

...we will get absolutely nowhere toward harmonizing our badly fractured communities if all we do is blame Somebody Else, or some abstraction — White People, Black People, History, Social Injustice — for our own sins and failings, both individual and collective.

If self-awareness were a virus, scientists could build a vaccine off Dreher's immunity.

UPDATE. Many alicublog commenters note the howling irony of Dreher complaining that a sexual assault policy is based on "consent and procedure." ("The language of 'consent and procedure' officially became the basis of our legal system in 1215," says Gromet. "Leave it to Dreher to find the High Middle Ages too liberal.") The lack of clarity among conservatives on the concept of consent is well documented, but it will always be worse with Brother Rod, an every-head-shall-bow-and-every-knee-shall-bend type who probably left Catholicism because they wouldn't let him into Opus Dei.

Kudos to Megalon: "You better watch it, America! The Rod From God is THIS CLOSE to opening a serious can of smite ass!"

Oh, and Dreher has a new Baltimore post up, basically a new entry in the Longest Way To Say 'They're Animals' Competition. And he cites Kevin D. Williamson as a moral authority! Here's an example of Williamson's writing on the riots:

Translation: All liberals are white (blacks are Mau-Maus or something) and they're all as scared of black people as I am.

THE VIOLENT BEAR IT AWAY.

Kevin D. Williamson at National Review:

Believe it or not, the article is about charter schools. Liberals don't like them, and some of them say it's because they're a racket but the real reason is liberals are communist tyrants:

The Left’s heart is still in East Berlin: If people want to leave your utopia and have the means to do so, then build a wall. If they climb over the wall — as millions of low-income parents with children in private schools (very commonly Catholic schools) do — then build a higher wall. If they keep climbing – and they will — then there are always alternatives.

Also liberals are George Wallace:

But then, standing in the schoolhouse door when the poor, the black, and the brown want to enter is an ancient tradition for Democrats.

And you know what else is CommieWallace?

It’s a funny old world when being “pro-choice” means that people who object to abortion will be forced at gunpoint to pay for them. But that’s progressivism: a purportedly secular movement with a whole lot of “Thou Shalt” and “Thou Shalt Not.”

In rightwing world, some of the brethren endeavor to advance arguments to which outsiders (or at least credulous editors who wish to be considered even-handed) might respond. But there seem to be fewer of these all the time. Maybe it's because that particular budget is all eaten up by high-end, big-ticket pundits like George F. Will and Peggy Noonan; maybe organizations like National Review no longer believe the arguments can travel very far outside their own circles. Whatever the reason, Williamson represents the future of the movement: Not evangelists, but jeerleaders.

UPDATE. Speaking of which:

Well, at least it's a nice break from them calling him Hitler.

UPDATE 2. If it isn't out of keeping to mention the ostensible topic of Williamson's column, it appears charter schools aren't doing so hot:

Underscoring the risk to bondholders such as Nuveen Asset Management, two New York schools are set to shut at the end of this school year after their charters were revoked this month for academic shortcomings. The closings represent a default under terms of the $15 million bond deal that financed the land acquisition and construction of Brighter Choice’s middle schools for boys and girls, which opened in 2010 under the same roof. 

While charter schools are gaining popularity across the U.S. as an alternative to local systems, their default rate reached an all-time high last year of 5 percent of outstanding issues, according to a biannual study by the New York-based Local Initiatives Support Corp. That’s up from 3.8 percent in 2012.

Look on the bright side, citizens --  you're not losing your money to a Big Gummint grift, you're losing it to an honest, privatized grift! (h/t Atrios)

SILVER LINING.

This National Review article by Kevin D. Williamson is just another Oooh Scary Hillary piece of shit for the regular crowd, and for anyone else not worth reading -- to give you some idea, he compares her with Nixon and the Marquis de Sade. But I'll show you this much, just because it's nice to know....

President Clinton had a diabolical knack for turning his self-inflicted problems into referenda on the moral standing of his opponents, or of anybody who happened to be convenient for the purpose; thus the Monica Lewinsky scandal became a question not of the president’s venality in the Oval Office and elsewhere or of his consequent crimes — perjury, etc. — but a public trial of Kenneth Starr for the crime of being a buzzkill. Everybody — everybody, friend and foe — knew that President Clinton and his minions were lying about the matter, but the Democrats place an extraordinary value on cleverness: They are the party of the student council, and Bill Clinton has spent 50-odd years proving to the world that he is the cleverest boy at Hot Springs High School, and his admirers loved him not in spite of his gross opportunism and dishonesty but because of those very things. Finally, the Democrats rejoiced, a man who can show those Republicans for the unsophisticated, unclever fools that they are!

...that the great GOP Clusterfuck of '98-'99 left such a stink, even wingnuts who were little children at the time are still pissed about it. Why, I bet Williamson is at this moment on a phone-throwing rampage!

UPDATE. Over at TownHall, Kurt Schlichter calls Mrs. Clinton, "a Lovecraftian monster, the Cthulhu of American politics," and Bill Clinton "an elderly leech" -- I think he was going for "lech," but was too engorged with Clinton rage to proof his own copy. Jesus, the election is 20 months away and these hate-wankers have already shot their loads. Really, where's there to go from here? Maybe Hitler, but in wingnut discourse Obama is Hitler, so that's out. Perhaps they can get some of their Culture Warriors in the Comics Division to create a horrible intergalactic tyrant who's like a thousand Hitlers, and then compare her with that. Or they can just fill pages and screens with BITCH and WHORE; really, it wouldn't harm their meaning and would save time.

THE YEAR IN BULLSHIT, PART FOUR.

(Here's the fourth and last installment of a year-end bottom-ten of the lowlights of 2014, culled from my archives and elsewhere. See also Part One, Part Two, and Part Three. Read 'em and weep!)

2. Germ warfare. It seems like so long ago, doesn’t it, when a fatal case of Ebola in Dallas was portrayed as the harbinger of nationwide plague and doom. Yet it was only October when Liberian Thomas Eric Duncan succumbed, and besides him in the U.S. the virus has claimed… one life. This shouldn’t seem surprising, because this country has the illustrious Centers for Disease Control and thousands of dedicated scientists and epidemiologists with whom to fight Ebola. It also has wingnuts, alas, who did their best impersonation of a hayseed trying to keep a doctor from practicing his witchcraft on a young’un.

Listen here, they said, CDC’s just Big Gummint, and so-called “scientists” and epi-whatchamacallits are just a bunch of pointy-heads trying to get more o’ that Big Gummint money for their global-warming hoax, and fer t’ help out the coloreds in Africa! Besides, Obama’s in charge, so natchurly everything’s gotta be a disaster!

When CDC declined to seal America’s borders, citing the best science, conservatives declared this was part of Obama’s one-world agenda to unite the globe in disease and misery. (Heather Mac Donald of City Journal actually claimed the “public-health establishment” wouldn’t quarantine other countries because it was “awash in social-justice ideology” and “influenced as much by belief in America’s responsibility for the postcolonial oppression of Africa, and suspicion of American border enforcement, as it is by a commitment to public-health principles of containment and control.”) They ramped up their own custom science: Rand Paul told us you could get Ebola from being in the same room as an Ebola person. Instapundit Glenn Reynolds, whose degree is not in medicine, wondered aloud “if this strain of Ebola is easier to catch than we think.”

At the Washington Free Beacon Matthew Continetti actually wrote a column called “The Case for Panic… Incompetent government + corrupt elite = disaster.” Everyone knows you can’t trust Big Gummint, said Continetti, so if they say don’t panic, you should panic! It’s just logic! Plus the only reason Obama wasn’t quarantining everybody was that “doing so would violate the sacred principles by which our bourgeois liberal elite operate.”

Reliable everything-worsener Jonah Goldberg found a frame of reference for Ebola... in a disaster movie that showed millions of Americans dying. “We now have our own version of Contagion playing out in real time,” burbled Goldberg. Scientists couldn’t save us — “they keep telling us they know what can’t happen right up until the moment it happens,” shivered Goldberg. Time for pitchforks and witch-trials!

And of course there was the usual bullshit from Jim Hoft.

As fear started to subside, some of the brethren began whistling and trying to look innocent (“The Only Ebola Panic Is Being Caused by Doctors and Nurses” — Tim Cavanaugh, National Review). News cycles being what they are, people have probably already forgotten that a bunch of conservatives actually tried to promote a national panic during a medical crisis. But maybe by now they've done enough pants-wetting over Saddam Hussein, ISIS, and other alleged world-destroyers that their fellow citizens will at least begin to form an appropriate character judgment.

1. Cons, cops, and the end of the “libertarian moment." After eight years of big-government projects such as unfunded foreign wars and Medicare Part D under George W. Bush, conservatives took advantage of the Obama era to play at being anti-government again. The Tea Party, with its molon-labe watering-the-tree-of-liberty lingo, was the most visible example (hey, whatever happened to them?); some public officials even played with nullification of federal laws. The more intellectual of the brethren were pleased to call this flavor of conservatism “libertarian” for, though it does not promise freedom for all (women who want to get an abortion are excluded, for example), it does promote hostility to government, which has served the conservative movement well since the days of Reagan.

This theme reached a sort of climax in April at the Bundy Ranch in Nevada, where an old white rancher refused to pay his legally-owed user fees and, surrounded by armed supporters, defied federal authorities’ right to collect his property in restitution. Bundy was celebrated not just by survivalist nuts, but also by elected officials such as Rick Perry and Ted Cruz, and by mainstream pundits such as National Review’s Kevin D. Williamson, who wrote, in an essay called “The Case for a Little Sedition,” “Of course the law is against Cliven Bundy. How could it be otherwise? The law was against Mohandas Gandhi, too, when he was tried for sedition…” Lest his neckless readers accuse him of siding with a half-naked fakir, Williamson also compared Bundy to the Founding Fathers, not to mention the architects of the previous year’s government shutdown, in which “every one of the veterans and cheesed-off citizens who disregarded President Obama’s political theater and pushed aside his barricades was a law-breaker, too — and bless them for being that.” Moving barricades, pointing rifles at federal agents — same diff!

Power Line’s John Hinderaker cheered as “PHOTO OF THE YEAR” a picture of "Bundy supporters, on horseback and, I assume, armed,” telling “federal agents that they were surrounded and had better give back the cattle they had confiscated”; later, Hinderaker explained “WHY YOU SHOULD BE SYMPATHETIC TOWARD CLIVEN BUNDY” (basically because “you” share his typical rightwing resentments — “[The Bundys] don’t develop apps. They don’t ask for food stamps” — and disapprove any law, or enforcement thereof, that discomfits rich wingnuts).

Most of these rebellion joy-poppers sidled away from Bundy when he made some peculiar racial remarks — which is ironic, as conservatives next got to display their libertarian cred when Michael Brown and Eric Garner were killed in confrontations with police, and black people and their allies started complaining about the suspicious circumstances, the lack of arrests, and the regularity with which this sort of thing seemed to happen.

At first some of the brethren agreed that this, too, required a Bundy-style show of solidarity; National Review even ran a story called “It’s Time for Conservatives to Stop Defending Police.” At the Washington Examiner, Timothy P. Carney said that, though there had been "guffaws" from "many liberals and a few conservatives" when the New York Times Magazine earlier that month suggested a new "libertarian moment" was upon us, the Ferguson case had brought needed attention to the growing militarization of police in the United States, and he expected a consensus across ideological lines against this "insane armament." He added:

There's another problem in Ferguson that calls up some wisdom shared by libertarians and conservatives: When you consider the police shooting of Michael Brown, the riots that followed, the crackdown in response, and the heightened protests after that, the whole situation between the town and the police was one of Us vs. Them.

But the part these guys never got is that the protest over the killings had something to do with the troubled relationship between black Americans and the cops. Indeed, they probably can't get this, because for conservatives racism only exists in its reverse variety, engaged in by "race pimps."

Some of the brethren, reluctant to lose their libertarian props, looked for ways around this issue: many blamed the cigarette tax law Garner was allegedly evading (Big Gummint strikes again!) rather than racism or police overreaction.

The waves of protesters who rose in the wake of these deaths did not see it that way; when some nut killed two NYPD officers, even such expedients as this were abandoned. Most conservatives raged that the protesters, a small segment of whom had called for killing cops, were all “anti-police” and thus to blame for the murders — as was Mayor de Blasio, because he told his black son to be careful around police — and that America must now coalesce behind its Blue Knights and cease to complain about their tactics.

In this they agreed with the NYPD union leadership, with whose apparent encouragement City cops have affected a reverse ticket blitz, reducing their quality-of-life enforcement. National Review's Ian Tuttle applauded -- "when your mayor takes advice from Al Sharpton... it is hard to blame officers who might try to minimize the protecting and serving they have to do." Yes, a writer for a prominent conservative publication was cheering a municipal union work slowdown -- which should give you some idea of how important this was to the brethren. The meaning of "Us vs. Them" was becoming clear.

After a few feints at a personal-responsibility argument that the guy to blame for the murder was actually the murderer, not the protesters, Williamson, that friend of Bundy's "little sedition," got with the program — “The mobs in New York, Ferguson, and elsewhere are not calling for metaphorical murders of policemen, but literal ones,” he wrote, and proposed as a solution… more aggressive policing: “the reality is that what causes American murders is our national failure to adequately monitor, restrict, or rehabilitate violent offenders with sub-homicidal criminal careers…”

This particular libertarian moment, I think we can safely say, is over. especially with a Presidential election coming up.  But never fear: it wasn't the first such moment promoted, and won't be the last. Conservatives like to portray themselves as freedom-lovers when nothing’s on the line, but they know by instinct that their best shot when it's time to woo voters is straight, law-and-order authoritarianism. In fact, if the past fourteen years are any indication, it’s pretty much all they have to offer.

THE YEAR IN BULLSHIT, PART ONE.

(Here's the first installment of a year-end bottom-ten of the lowlights of 2014, culled from my archives and elsewhere. Read 'em and weep!)

10. Dunhamania! Culture war, as we call the unpleasant ruckus that ensues when political obsessives blunder among the muses, had another big year, with conservatives shaking their fists at everything from opera to comic books. Rather than survey all these cases, let’s focus on the instructive example of the one cultural artifact that seems most reliably to excite them: That marketing phenomenon known as Lena Dunham.

Conservatives first developed a hard-on for the Girls auteur during the 2012 Presidential campaign, when she made a pro-Obama ad, and they have yet to detumesce. The brethren hate other entertainment professionals, of course, but Dunham pulls so many of their triggers — she’s liberal, she’s a tattooed hipster, she has the nerve to act sexy despite not having a nice build like Ann Coulter — that she has remained their #1 groovy hate fuck, the Jane Fonda of the Obama age, at whom they rage for her sexuality as well as her politics.

This reached critical mass late in the year when Dunham released a celebrity memoir containing (as tell-all tradition demands) salacious details, including the news that, when Dunham was seven, she looked inside her one-year-old sister Grace’s vagina and found she had stuffed pebbles in there. Truth Revolt reported that Dunham was seventeen years old at the time (later correcting this “typo”) under the headline “Lena Dunham Describes Sexually Abusing Her Little Sister.”

National Review’s Kevin D. Williamson dug in -- “Grace’s satisfaction with her prank suggest that Grace was expecting her older sister to go poking around in her genitals and inserted the pebbles in expectation of it… There is no non-horrific interpretation of this episode” -- even though he found the story “especially suspicious” — which just made it worse; imagine, lying in a celebrity memoir! When Dunham complained of this rough treatment — ensuring more press — the investigators of her celebrity memoir high-fived each other. “Lena Dunham is learning the power of the right,” gurgled Don Surber while strangling a pillow.

Then Breitbart.com investigated another Dunham story about a college Republican named Barry who took advantage of her, and found that -- get this! -- some details were not verifiable (“A longtime employee at the Oberlin library could not recall working with any student with a flamboyant mustache”). A guy from Dunham’s college claimed the memoir defamed him because his name is Barry, too. “Sue the bastards,” cried professional scold Rod Dreher. “That’s the only way they will learn. Make the publisher withdraw the whole damn book…” The publisher instead agreed to add “a disclaimer that explains that the Barry described by Dunham was not really named Barry” and pay court costs, per Fox News.

There followed much popping of rightwing corks. "LENA DUNHAM WALKS BACK FABRICATED RAPE CLAIM" unh-unh-unhed John Hinderaker at Power Line. RedState called Dunham part of a “Rape Accusation-Industrial Complex” of women who habitually lie about sexual assault in order to advance a “victimization narrative.” The American Spectator’s Ross Kaminsky went further, tying the case to what he called the “lie” that Michael Brown didn’t deserve to be gunned down, and declaring that the “true motivation” of “too many” feminists is “hatred of men.” Ann Coulter added that Dunham, like all women who disclosed sexual assault after an interval, was just “trying to get attention.”

Despite their best efforts, or perhaps partly due to them, Dunham remains on the best seller list — without resorting to bulk sales to think tanks, imagine that! — and in the celebrity pantheon. Conservatives, for their part, maintain their place at the wrong side of a peephole, banging on the fence with one hand and doing God knows what with the other. Between the sexual rage, the rolling-out of big guns to prosecute a flimsy piece of pop-art crap, and the ultimate, flaccid ineffectuality of their efforts, could there be a more perfect example of culture war?

9. The right comes out for income inequality. The term is relatively new to common discourse, and in years past was mainly engaged by wingnut think-tankers to explain why such a thing didn’t exist. But Piketty’s big book and Obama’s mention of income inequality in his 2014 State of the Union led lumpen conservatives to modify their argument to: income inequality doesn’t exist, and so what if it does.

When rich guys complained the poor were giving them stink-eye, conservatives rushed to comfort them the best way they knew how: By associating their opponents with Nazis. At the Wall Street Journal, venture capitalist Tom Peters compared resentment of the rich to Kristallnacht; in the same venue, Ruth R. Wisse asked, “Two phenomena: anti-Semitism and American class conflict. Is there any connection between them?” and answered yes, because anti-Semites often complain about wealthy Jews, which makes any complaint against American oligarchs, despite the impressive number of goyim among them, a veritable Blood Libel.

Daniel Henninger (also at WSJ — these guys know their audience!) suggested that Putin was getting belligerent because he “surely noticed” that “the nations of the civilized world have decided their most pressing concern is income inequality,” and were too busy coddling paupers to trouble with the Ukraine. Ace of Spades protested the real problem was “social inequality” — that is, the alleged contempt of Democrats for rich people who are rightwing and folksy, such as the Palins or the Duck Dynasty guys.

And forget about trying to level the field with a higher minimum wage — that’s socialism. If you asked why the current minimum wage isn't already socialism, the brighter bulbs would tell you, you’re right, it is — let’s get rid of it altogether! Libertarian Virginia Postrel wept over all the folks out there with multiple jobs — not because they had the work multiple jobs, but because “employers can’t offer, and workers can’t take, lower wages in exchange for better hours. The minimum wage sets a legal floor.” The injustice of it! In fact, if you complained about getting your tiny wages ripped off by your boss, that too was socialism, or at least rather petty of you.

The simplest pro-inequality argument was advanced by Ben Domenech, who attributed any concerns over the ginormous 99%-1% gap to “jealousy… in real life, the money doesn’t stay in Scrooge McDuck’s vault, it goes into investments which pay more people to do more things.” Scrooge McDuck may someday build a condo, and you may get to clean its hallways, which along with your others job(s) may permit you to rent a hovel. Now stop complaining, anti-Richite!

8. Conservatives fall in love with Vladimir Putin. When Putin muscled Ukraine in March, very few conservatives called for the U.S. to intervene militarily. Nonetheless they blamed the Commander in Chief because, in the words of Rand Paul, he “hasn't projected enough strength and hasn't shown a priority to the national defense” — that is, he hadn’t rattled a saber that no one expected or wanted him to unsheathe.

But never mind those details -- the real issue for conservatives was less geopolitical than psychographic — rightwing pundits, however pencil-necked, worship butchness and reflexively attribute it to their heroes, such as former cheerleader George “he’s got two of ‘em” W. Bush, while portraying their opponents as sissies.

Judging from conservatives’ previous investigations of Obama’s wearing of mom jeans while pretend-shooting and bike-riding, not mention his unwillingness to punch down on the poor, clearly the President fits their definition of a sissy. But it’s hard to identify a domestic conservative with whose roughness they can creditably contrast Obama’s affect. Mike Huckabee? Newt Gingrich? Chris Christie, being a bully, might do, but he betrayed the brethren by accepting Federal help on Hurricane Sandy.

With such a weak bench, it was perhaps inevitable that conservatives would find a foreign dictator to embrace. Putin is ruthless, rugged, and hates homosexuals — really, their dream candidate if they could get the citizenship thing sorted. They’d been contrasting bare-chested manly man Putin with metrosexual Obama on flimsy pretexts for years (“IT LOOKS LIKE OBAMA IS PUTIN'S BITCH,” etc), but Ukraine really brought it out of them. They were especially fond of funny pictures, but employed wordcraft, too, e.g. “Putin Treating Obama Like Half a Fag.”

Putin received perhaps his most eminent conservative blessing from Sarah Palin, who sneered at Obama as “as one who wears Mom jeans and equivocates and bloviates” and sighed over Putin as “one who wrestles bears and drills for oil.” But the most grandiloquent paean may have been that of National Review’s Victor Davis Hanson, who found “value for us” — meaning for the American People, I guess — in “Putin’s confidence in his unabashedly thuggish means, the brutal fashion in which a modern state so unapologetically embraces the premodern mind to go after its critics… Putin speaks power to truth — an unpredictable, unapologetic brute force of nature.” Hanson did put in some mild admissions that Putin was not really a role model, in much the same way that the Shangri-Las told us their guy was good-bad, but he's not evil.

Months later, with the ruble crashing, Putin’s cowboy diplomacy doesn’t look like such a winner, and Obama’s restraint looks rather better. Since Kim Jong Un doesn’t look so hot with his shirt off, conservatives may have to wait for a coup to rekindle their dictator-love.

(More later.)

GIVE MY REGARDS TO BUMFUCK.

PJ Media:

GOP Cities Have Cheaper Houses than Dem Cities

Ole Perfesser Instapundit:

WHY DO DEMOCRATS HATE POOR PEOPLE? Liberal Cities Like L.A. Face Much Higher Housing Prices.

TownHall:

Most Expensive Housing Markets in US are in Liberal Districts 

...Correlation or cause? Union work rules, land availability, and building restrictions (or lack thereof) are all likely in play.

I thought these guys believed in the free market, but they seem not to understand that when people want something a lot, the price goes up, and when they don't want it so much the price goes down. Ordinary citizens pay large sums just to visit New York City; it makes sense they would pay top dollar to live in it, unless you've convinced yourself that it must be awful because of all the blacks and socialism.

Conversely, I don't see anyone paying top dollar to live in Fritters, Alabama, despite the many advantages of Republican government. Sorry for your self-esteem, comrade, but that's capitalism!

UPDATE. I can't believe people are still going on about this. (Oh, of course I can believe it -- it's standard-issue Liberal Plantation crap.) As he has in the past, National Review's Kevin D. Williamson suggests that if you can't buy a three-bedroom house in the liberal city of your choice, you're being oppressed:

Progressivism is a luxury good for coddled urban professionals; it immiserates everybody else.

Why then, I wonder, don't New York's poor head out like the Okies of yore to the promised land of North Dakota? "Maw, I can smell the fracking from here!" Except the rent in those boom towns is no bargain either -- though of course you're probably closer to a Wal-Mart and a Chick-fil-A, so there are cultural advantages.

UPDATE 2. Williamson's other recent expression of sympathy for the poor is amazing: he would like to imagine shoeshine men paid more when they work on more expensive shoes, though he offers no method to accomplish this save the free market, which from recent evidence seems unlikely to come through. For this daydream philanthropy Williamson considers himself morally superior to liberal policy wonk Eva Longoria. I swear they recruit these people from nuthouses.

PLEASE KILL ME.

Remember Kevin D. Williamson calling for women who have abortions to be executed by hanging? We can now top it. (Who says the spirit of competition is dead in America?)

Ladies and gentlemen, at American Thinker, Laura McCall:

National Review Online roving correspondent Kevin Williamson recently tweeted an uncomfortable opinion about the status of post-abortive women. He feels they should be prosecuted for first-degree murder. His recommended instrument of justice is a bit archaic for our times, but I will leave that aside for now. 

I wholeheartedly agree with Mr. Williamson, even though I do not possess any formal education in ex post facto law, retributive justice, or even the organization and gradation of moral theories.

I agree because I had an abortion. That’s all I need to know.

Don't worry, she doesn't go into any of those agonized self-inspections one expects from abortion journalism -- in fact, she rather abruptly switches roles, from penitent to prosecutor:

Mr. Williamson is picking up the pro-life argument exactly where it keeps stalling out: at the place that occupies the next logical step in the sequence... If there are no societal consequences for such heinous behavior, what are we saying about the nature and gravity of the crime? About ourselves?

I would answer, "what it says about the nature and gravity of the crime is, it's not a crime; and about ourselves, good for us." YMMV.

The fact is, abortion is first-degree murder and many women should be prosecuted for it. Of course, as with any judicial process, there will always be extenuating circumstances and exceptions.

Come on, Laura, don't go wobbly on us now!

The people who can most effectively make this argument are women like me. We have a problem, though. The denial that helped us maintain an equilibrium following our crime also put us in a place we should not be. Many of us stayed there. We went on to marry and start families, and now they must be protected. We ingrained ourselves into the fabric of normal, everyday life, with its relationships, responsibilities and institutions. We constantly battle and weigh our aching desire to expose to others where we really belong. But who will listen? Who will adjudicate?

I will! Cut the sob-story, sister! I've seen your kind before. The killers all come cryin' to me, "Spare me, Your Honor, I got a wife and family!" But in the eyes of The (Ridiculous Fake) Law, you're still a lousy abortion-murderess, and you're gonna get what's comin' to ya. But you're right, hanging's archaic, so we'll give you lethal injection; and if it hurts more than it's supposed to, just remember: it's a market solution!

If this one fetuscide isn't enough to get her on the gurney, there are some other local crimes the DA might like her for:

Meanwhile, dichotomy abounds. This past summer, a gentleman in my neighboring community changed his morning day-care routine; he accidentally left his infant son in a sweltering car for hours, and the child died. The father was prosecuted. An acquaintance of a coworker sits in our local prison for having shaken his infant following a sleepless night of colic and crying. The child died of a cerebral hemorrhage. Dad is a married man in a professional career who has no prior criminal record or history of substance abuse.

Two suspicious deaths in the same jurisdiction, and no one looked at the self-abortionist in their midst? Reopen the files, I say. If we're going to kill people for having abortions, we might as go whole hog and profile them, too.

UPDATE. From McCall's comments section:

CONSERVATIVE (AND LIBERTARIAN) OUTREACH TO WOMEN IS GOING GREAT, CONT.

Last week I mentioned the  spate of  conservative complaints about Emma Watson's very measured feminist speech at the U.N., which apparently spoiled their bedtime Hermione fantasies. Since then, in Time magazine -- a major outlet of what was once called the Liberal Media, for reasons lost to history -- Cathy Young of Reason has delivered the libertarian response. Guess how that goes?

Sorry, Emma Watson, but HeForShe Is Rotten for Men

Until feminism recognizes discrimination against men, the movement for gender equality will be incomplete.

Lots of weeping about "anti-male biases in the court system," and how if a woman beats up a man (as they frequently do) no one sympathizes, whereas if a guy beats up a chick everyone gets bent out of shape, etc. This pretty much comports with what libertarians usually say about women's rights. I wouldn't be surprised if folks started catching on at last that social issues don't mean as much to libertarians as the transfer of wealth from paupers to the deserving rich.

While his colleagues were raging at Watson, Kevin D. Williamson of National Review kicked it old school with a rant about Lena Dunham. the Brooklyn actress who started driving culture warriors crazy during the 2012 campaign, and whom, despite their protestations of disgust with her tattooed ass, they just cain't quit.

Dunham wrote a pamphlet for Planned Parenthood (or, in Williamson’s view, “a gang of abortion profiteers”) called “5 Reasons Why I Vote (and You Should, Too),” spurring his column-length sputter. Mostly it was about  how voting is stupid (“the most shallow gesture of citizenship there is”) because people with whom he disagrees get to do it (and are only doing so “as an act of self-gratification,” not to get candidates elected) and seem at present to outnumber him and his lunatic fringe. But Williamson managed to stuff unchivalrous comments about Dunham in there, too, and plenty of abortion ravings, including an assertion that women have abortions out of a “desire to fit nicely into a prom dress."  "FWIW, I've been dumping of democracy/voting fetishization for almost two decades," cheered Jonah Goldberg in response.

Later Williamson went on Twitter to tell people that women who had abortions should be hanged as murderers. The boy will go far.

Our favorite stray ladyragebit, though, is a line from Bryan Preston at PJ Media. Angered to learn that Alicia Keys was appearing naked for some social justice thing, Preston seethed, “She and the [New York] Times see this as ‘empowering.’ Is it empowering that an insanely successful woman and mother believes that getting naked before the entire world is the best way to draw attention to her cause? Or is it just plain old attention-whoring from her, and sucking up to leftwing celebrities from the New York Times?” Fucking bitches, with their whoring and sucking! 

“Yet here she is,” sneered Preston, “being all empowered. Naked, to push for gun control.” And now, his piece de resistance:

Try confronting an Islamist madman like this.

Message discipline is message discipline -- squads of headchoppers roam America's streets! Even in the midst of ladyrage, there's always time to pick on Muslims.  

FRIDAY ROUND-THE-HORN.

•   Kevin D. Williamson has another in his series of columns on why his current abode, New York, sucks, apparently pitched at gomers who can't understand why anyone would want to live in one of them itty-bitty apartments surrounded by blahs when they could have a nice spread in Butte. In this case Williamson focuses on that "inequality" you stupid hippies pretend to be concerned about, which he attributes not to the lack of jobs suitable to a middle class such as manufacturing once provided, nor to the rich outsiders who increasingly buy up the properties, but to "progressive policies" such as rent stabilization (which mainly helps poorer New Yorkers, which may be why people like Williamson hate it so much) and, natch, high taxes. "When it comes time to pay for college or to leave behind a bequest for children or grandchildren -- an important means of building wealth within families -- you’re almost certainly better off in San Antonio or Provo than in New York or San Francisco," hmmphs Williamson. His beef seems to be that a Bible salesman's family of eight can't afford a house on Fifth Avenue. Well, that's capitalism, comrade, take it up with the Invisible Hand. Also, I have to ask, as I do of all city-dwelling city-haters: If that's the way you feel about your progressive hellhole, why don't you move to Provo? The American Enterprise Institute says telecommuters are happier!

•   Hey look, here's the new #Benghazi -- whoops, I mean the new Journolist (tired today, can't keep my ginned-up controversies straight): This time, we are told by he-man woman-hater Milo Yiannopoulos, America is being assaulted not by Dave Weigel and his combine of communist journalists, but by "high-profile editors, reporters, and reviewers from heavyweight gaming news sites" -- i.e., nerds -- who are "engaging in activism on behalf of their reporting subjects" -- i.e., talking shop -- which is "disturbing to many in the industry, who have long suspected a persistent bias and unusual levels of co-operation and co-ordination from senior journalists" -- i.e., bros who enjoy harassing women. "It’s basically Journolist for people who didn’t go to Harvard," says Ole Perfesser Glenn Reynolds (Yale Law 1985), proving its pedigree as bullshit. On a similar note, PJ Media's J. Christian Adams has his own shocking expose on the campaign software Catalist, which is used by Democrats, for which reason Adams tries to make this legal product sound somehow worse than, say, the data mining tools used by every damn corporation, though his real complaint shines out halfway down the page:

Unfortunately, Republicans have no functioning counterpart data tool to Catalist. They have multiple and competing shells of Catalist, but they have nothing on the collaborative scale as Catalist, largely due to the fact that Republicans won’t collaborate and are fiercely territorial of their competing data sets.

That Adams doesn't realize how funny this is just makes it better, don't you think? You can go there and gather mangoes yourself, but let me leave you with this choice tantrum-fragment:

Leftist players sacrifice their egos for the larger messianic call of destroying Republicans, obliterating conservatives, and ultimately gutting the Constitution.

No fair -- socialism is winning!

ANNALS OF THE CULTURE WAR, PART NEGATIVE GAZILLION.

In his Morning Jolt email, Jim Geraghty engages A.O. Scott's thumbsucker on the lack of adulthood in sitcoms, and for a couple of seconds sounds non-crazy ("Not all popular culture needs to hold a mirror up to us" -- boy, where's that synapse been all these years?); but then, alas --

It's not that America doesn't have any grown-ups or non-loser dads left. We dads didn't go anywhere; it's just that television networks don't make as many shows about us, and when they do, the kind of people who review film and television for the New York Times aren't as interested...

Remember a moment ago when I described "communities dominated by underemployed urban quasi-professionals, unmarried, without kids, without mortgages, without a career path or plan"? How large a portion of the communities of our creative classes fits that description? Or perhaps more specifically, how many people in our creative classes percolated for years in that sort of extended-adolescence Bohemian urban environment? There's nothing inherently wrong with that environment -- for a while, at least — but it's light years away from being universal. Our national storytellers may be quite convinced that they're holding a mirror up to society — but they're only reflecting their own limited personal experience.

They're elitists, is what they are, these arty-farties who live in (spit) cities and don't know how to change a diaper. Not like the shirtsleeves, shot-and-a-beer kind of pundit-dads you see hand-lathing shelves at the National Review woodshop in Skunk Hollow, Ala.!

This sort of "You Hollywood types are too insular" complaint usually gets dismissed as whining when it comes from a conservative...

Come on little synapse!

...but maybe it sounds more valid coming from a Latino or Asian-American, when they note how few movies at the Cineplex or shows on the dial reflect the stories and experiences of their communities.

Is Linda Chavez still alive? Our nagging needs minority cover. Get her busy on a piece demanding the return of The George Lopez Show.

Believe it or don't, there's even worse at NR today: Kevin D. Williamson considers Hamlet and Sons of Anarchy together because, he says, they both address "maternal guilt" -- wait, don't run screaming yet, because here comes the sheet-enseaming shot:

“Hamlet and His Problems” was published in 1921. Seven years shy of a century later, Sons of Anarchy presents the question: Is the theme of maternal guilt still “an almost intolerable motive for drama” [as J.M. Robertson said]? 

The model of motherhood that prevails in 2014 is fundamentally different from the model of 1921, so different in fact as to be an almost entirely distinct moral and social phenomenon. This begins with the world-changing fact that the progress from conception to birth is today optional. The millions of acts of violence that have been committed in utero since January 1973 inevitably have shaped our views of motherhood...

I ain't even kidding. There follows a catalogue of post-Roe horrors -- "feminist doublespeak, which regards the developing person as morally indistinguishable from a tumor," "the 117-minute meditation on sundry pregnancy horrors that is Ridley Scott’s 1979 film Alien," etc. -- meant to convey that as compared to the delicate, Jainistic Elizabethan era, we moderns wade through cord-blood in a global charnel-house where

meditations upon maternal guilt are hardly intolerable; they are, rather, inevitable... we have a different sort of problem than Hamlet had: His drama had to do with the degradation of his mother; ours has to do with the degradation of motherhood categorically. Dragging that into the sunlight is an unpleasant business, and a necessary one.

I wonder what his readers think this means; probably "See, Sons of Anarchy is conservative, just like choc-o-mut ice creams and everything else I like."  Me, I want to be generous to Williamson, in return for all the laughs he's given me: Maybe his is a stealth mission to discredit modern liberal arts education by his example.

SELDOM IS HEARD A DISCOURAGING WORD.

A lot of liberals are laughing because Cliven Bundy, the cowboy at war with the U.S. government and secessionist poster boy of the Right, made some of those insane comments about black people that have become a conservative specialty ("I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro... They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves...").

Don't laugh too soon. Insane comments about black people became a conservative specialty for a reason.

At Raw Story the headline on Arturo Garcia's story says "Conservatives begin backing away after Cliven Bundy’s remarks disparaging 'the Negro,'" but Garcia himself merely asserts that "Republican politicians began backtracking on their support" -- which is wise, because conservatives as such are mostly keeping quiet about it.

A couple have taken the opportunity to embarrass themselves; Dana Loesch, for example, is all over the place, softening Bundy's comments ("big government has negatively affected not just the black family, but all families regardless of ethnicity"), then implying Bundy was misquoted ("it’s justified to have a healthy suspicion of the New York Times"), then trying to change the subject ("what exactly does that have to do with the BLM?"). But mostly the brethren seem to hope we can get past this unfortunate business, and back to the war on the U.S. government, which they think is a winning position.

For conservatives -- and we're talking about the not-totally-insane contingent that acknowledges the existence of racism -- the subject is kind of an eat-your-vegetables thing. The ooga-booga stuff is so much more fun, and keeps the troops energized. Normally I don't like to drag rightblogger commenters into these things because of the high noise-to-signal ratio in their portrayal of conservative consensus, but it is depressingly expected that when National Review's Michael Potemra criticizes a racist rant  (of the passive-aggressive, what's-wrong-with-racism, "humans like to be among their own kind" variety -- you know, Rod Dreher stuff), nearly all of his commenters defend the racist (e.g., "an article saying what is essentially common sense and well known to be true by pretty much everyone is somehow considered out of bounds in our Orwellian culture"). These are the bitter-enders to which most of the top-shelf conservative writers aim their pep talks, and most of them know better than to get on their wrong side.

UPDATE. In what I expect will become a model for the genre, National Review's Kevin D. Williamson points out that sometimes liberators such as Gandhi have foolish ideas -- which is common sense, except that he seems to think Bundy is such a liberator. He also compares the Bundy standoff to John Brown at Harpers Ferry, which under the current circumstances is especially funny. Why Williamson isn't at the Ranch with a musket if he really believes all this -- wait, I think I answered my own question.

UPDATE 2. I was wondering when the libertarians would come stumbling in. Jonathan Chait having noticed that Where Secessionists Go, Racist Trouble Follows, Reason's J.D. Tuccille first assures everyone he's no racist, then:

[Bundy's comments are] contemptible stuff. It was also contemptible when progressives merged pseudo-scientific racist notions with their ideology...

Yes, Tuccille goes straight for "Woodrow Wilson was a liberal fascist, your argument is invalid." Also, Robert Byrd was a Klansman, just like all statists! After the history lecture, Tuccille goes for Routine 12, aka Blame the Media:

"Why do all these people with strong antipathy toward the federal government turn out to be racists?" asks Chait. Maybe it's because the cameras and journalists focus on one loudmouth on horseback, even as representatives of nine state governments meet in Salt Lake City at the Legislative Summit on the Transfer of Public Lands.

Maybe it was because the summitteers didn't threaten federal agents with guns, which has long been a sure-fire way to get in the papers. Come to think of it, why didn't the rest of Bundy's live-free-or-kill squad announce "Screw it, Salt Lake City is where the action is" days ago? Could it be that the promise of separatist violence is a big part of the draw?

UPDATE 3. Bryan Preston, I think you have a little spittle in the corner of your mouth:

Wanting people to be free, independent and self-reliant, and hoping for a government that fosters those values, equals racism now? Today it does, tomorrow it won’t, as soon as some prog hero talks good about working their way up from nothing without even having to resort to fake claiming to be a minority to further their academic career, or falsifying a wartime military career.

Libtards are all born rich and spend their days lying and draft-dodging. Say, maybe I've had George W. Bush wrong all this time!

Bundy’s remarks will have fewer real-world consequences than many uttered by Margaret Sanger, yet today she’s a progressive hero...

Again with the liberal fascism history lectures. Someone invent a time machine so these guys can feel superior somewhere besides the holodeck.

EXTREMISM IN DEFENSE OF FREEBIES IS NO VICE.

When I wrote last weekend about the Bundy Ranch situation -- in which Sagebrush Rebels threatened U.S. federal officers with violence -- I noticed that though conservatives generally applauded the gunmen, the higher-placed ones tried to be cute about it, praising the revolutionary sentiments which they know animate the tricorns-and-treason segment of their base while briefly admitting that Bundy has broken and is flouting the law.

An interesting angle has been to excuse Bundy as a freedom fighter whose duty is higher than legal niceties. National Review's Kevin D. Williamson, for example, compares Bundy to Gandhi and George Washington. I don't remember Gandhi pulling a gun on his enemies, but I fell asleep in the middle of that long Ben Kingsley movie, so maybe I missed that part. As for Washington, I believe he was fighting tyrants to found a nation, to which he colleagues had pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their scared honor, whereas Bundy just wants something for nothing.

Williamson does attach a cause to Bundy's freeloading, suggesting the response should be "legislation that would oblige the federal government to divest itself of 1 percent of its land and other real estate each year for the foreseeable future through an open auction process." So Bundyism in his view is about taking resources that belong to all Americans and giving them to rich people -- that is, traditional conservatism -- and, in lieu of getting enough votes to do it legally, threatening violence -- that is, next-wave conservatism, otherwise known as fascism.

But the best so far is former Republican Senate candidate Alan Keyes:

At the Bundy ranch: A 'Rosa Parks moment'?

Again, I didn't know Rosa Parks refused to pay her bus fare for 20 years and whipped out a gun when challenged, but I'm sure I don't read the same history books as they do.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the Mozilla/Brendan Eich thing. The more I think about it, the more ridiculous it looks -- especially when you consider most of the guys weeping over this displaced millionaire CEO wouldn't piss on a low-wage at-will worker if he were on fire.

UPDATE. Kevin D. Williamson has addressed the issue but, frankly, his post reads as gibberish to me; can any of you make out what he's trying to say? The best I can figure is, he's vaguely admitting that sometimes he's pleased when market and social punishments fall upon individuals, and sometimes he isn't, but that's irrelevant because liberals are fascists and America is turning into a fascist state in which the U.S. Supreme Court "increasingly" resembles an "American version of the Iranian Guardian Council." Maybe you can do better.

TODAY IN CULTURE WAR.

At National Review, Kevin D. Williamson wonders why people watch Jon Stewart when they could be reading The Road to Serfdom:

Mr. Stewart is among the lowest forms of intellectual parasite in the political universe, with no particular insights or interesting ideas of his own, reliant upon the very broadest and least clever sort of humor, using ancient editing techniques to make clumsy or silly political statements sound worse than they are and then pantomiming outrage at the results, the lowbrow version of James Joyce giving the hero of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man the unlikely name of Stephen Dedalus and then having other characters in the novel muse upon the unlikelihood of that name.

Ah, Williamson has been to college, I see. Later:

Mr. Stewart is the leading voice of the half-bright Left because he is a master practitioner of the art of half-bright vitriolic denunciation. His intellectual biography is that of a consummate lightweight — a William and Mary frat boy who majored in psychology, which must have been a disappointment to his father, a professor of physics — and his comedy career has been strictly by-the-numbers, from the early days on the New York City comedy-club scene to changing his name (Mr. Stewart began life as Mr. Leibowitz)...

There are plenty of insults here, but nothing that qualifies as criticism -- until Williamson abandons aesthetics, in which he seems to have no real interest, and addresses politics. He is upset that there are so many headlines on internet aggregation sites like "Jon Stewart Destroys Fox News Over Syria Coverage" and "Jon Stewart Destroys Bill O’Reilly."

Williamson seems unaware that headlines on the internet are often calculated to draw the attention of consumers, and thus monetize the enterprise (maybe because he works at a place where profit is not expected); he also seems unaware that other entertainers such as Ann Coulter are frequently portrayed as "destroying" their opponents for a different audience but for the same reason. He thinks "destroy" in these headlines actually says something about The Left:

...there is no substantive difference between what Mr. Stewart does and what, e.g., Ezra Klein does (“Ezra Klein Destroys Romney,” “Ezra Klein Destroys David Brooks,” “Ezra Klein Destroys Republican Opposition to Temporary Payroll Tax Cut,” etc.) because for the Left the point of journalism is not to criticize politics or to analyze politics but to be a servant of politics, to “destroy” such political targets as may be found in one’s crosshairs. For the Left, the maker of comedy and the maker of graphs perform the same function. It does not matter who does the “destroying,” so long as it gets done...

As a close follower of the New Zhdanovites, I often hear the liberal establishment blamed for Hollywood, pop music, the theater, comics, etc. but this is first time I've ever heard it blamed for SEO.

FINALLY, A JIM CROW THEY CAN GET AWAY WITH.

Conservatives finally have something to celebrate -- a wave of laws to deny public-accommodation relief to gays who've been discriminated against, so long as offending business remembers to cite the Lord or His equivalent. There's a bunch of it out there but National Review's Kevin D. Williamson will do:

Barry Goldwater, who set the great precedent for Arizonans’ shocking liberal sensibilities, had been an instrumental figure in the Phoenix desegregation effort but opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because he believed that by expanding the federal mandate it would lead to cumbrous and byzantine federal micromanagement of social affairs, and about that much he has been proved correct. The concept of “public accommodation” has been so inflated that as a practical matter no private sphere exists outside the home when the question of discrimination arises. That situation does not inculcate mutual toleration and respect, but the opposite.

And that's why there's still racism -- because Big Gummint won't get out of the way and let businesses say, "Keep walking, nigger, we don't serve your kind."  (Or "faggot," whatever.)

It's like they don't want any more votes, isn't it?

THURSDAY MISCELLANY.

How're conservatives reacting to Chris Christie Is An Asshole-gate? James Taranto at the Wall Street Journal:

Worse, the Christie administration's evident abuse of the Port Authority is reminiscent of the Obama administration's abuse of the Internal Revenue Service...

I already checked, guys -- no mention of Benghazi. For that you have to go a few rungs down the ladder to Greta Van Susteren, or to the sub-basement that is Michelle Malkin's alternate-universe Twitter.

Or maybe Breitbart.com -- hang on, this article by Joel B. Pollack is from November. Yet it may be relevant!:

Chris Christie Really Needs Benghazi
Benghazi is Hillary Clinton's most important weakness, no matter whom she faces in the 2016 presidential election. Among Republican contenders, only Chris Christie can claim it as a strength. That's because of his performance during Superstorm Sandy. Whatever his mistakes--i.e. heaping praise on Obama and backing a pork-laden relief bill--his performance was a sharp contrast to Clinton's dereliction of duty during Benghazi.

Has this bullet become any less magic? Then Christie should save himself by demanding a Benghazi investigation at once. It's not like he doesn't have the nerve.*

If you have 11 minutes to spare, this is what Christie's bit about being "misled by a member of my staff" reminds me of:



I guess National Review sent Kevin D. Williamson to Appalachia just so he'd have white welfare cases to harsh on, and thus escape charges of racism. Charges of stupidity will be harder to evade. Williamson admits there are few opportunities for the unfortunate residents of Owsley County, and can't even make the usual specious case that marriage would make the hillbillies rich. So his anti-government-assistance case boils down to 1.) some people have defrauded the system, something you never see investment bankers and other such higher-order beings doing, therefore the system has failed; and 2.) whatever this is supposed to mean:

In effect, welfare has made Appalachia into a big and sparsely populated housing project — too backward to thrive, but just comfortable enough to keep the underclass in place. There is no cure for poverty, because there is no cause of poverty — poverty is the natural condition of the human animal. 

Which Kevin D. Williamson evaded by luck, pluck, and virtue. The rest of you can go fuck yourselves. Liberty!

...The lesson of the Big White Ghetto is the same as the lessons we learned about the urban housing projects in the late 20th century: The best public-policy treatment we have for poverty is dilution. But like the old project towers, the Appalachian draw culture produces concentration, a socio­economic Salton Sea that becomes more toxic every year.

Maybe he means we should evacuate and demolish these poor hill towns, as if they were urban projects, and "dilute" their populations. Maybe send them to Mexico? They better hurry, the authorities may start to get strict about who they let in.

*UPDATE. I should add that I don't think this will negatively affect Christie's Presidential push. That he's an asshole is a large part of his appeal, and there's a whole country full of suckers who, like the folks who hire a hitman, are inclined to believe he'll restrict his viciousness to people they don't like.

UPDATE 2. Ah, here's the libertarian-branded response to Christie from Ed Krayewski at Reason:

The petty, retaliatory nature of the lane closure reminded me of something the Obama White House might do, something like closing down open-air spaces or websites because of a partial government shutdown or even getting Tea Party groups audited.

Refresh my memory: I seem to recall that libertarians were once perceived to be something different from conservatives. Anyone remember how that got started?

UPDATE 3. I'm even more convinced now that Christie will skate, notwithstanding his refusal to accept my Benghazi advice.

Meanwhile we have this from the Daily Caller:

As liberals support Christie during scandal, conservatives abandon him

The evidence: Guys like Erick Erickson who consider Christie a RINO continue to bay for his blood, "Democratic mayors in New Jersey who endorsed Christie’s re-election are also defending Christie," and David Axelrod thinks Christie will skate -- like me, so I guess I'm also part of Christie's liberal love-wave. I assure you it's inadvertent!

UPDATE 4. Meanwhile from the other side of the bullshit rainbow, The Washington Free Beacon:

U.S. Attorney Probing Christie Has Donated Thousands to Democrats

I tell ya, guys, we gotta get our story (as told by rightwing operatives) straight.

DA, COMRADE, PLEASE ONLY TO LAUGH AT STEVE CROWDER, RUSH LIMBAUGH, AND STARVING PAUPERS.

You know what's not conservatively correct now? Enjoying the comedy of Sarah Silverman. Kevin D. Williamson explains at National Review that Silverman thinks she's being oh so liberated but she's really "convention itself" because PC. For example:

But there are taboos and there are taboos. NBC and Conan O’Brien both apologized for airing a bit in which Miss Silverman considers the possibility of using racist sentiment to disqualify herself for an unwanted stint of jury duty by proclaiming, “I hate chinks.” Not wanting to be thought of as a racist, she instead proclaims, “I love chinks — who doesn’t?” If that was a step too far for the gentle souls at NBC, consider that that was the toned-down version; the original contained a slur directed at blacks rather than Asians.

So, I don't know -- she didn't say "nigger," so it wasn't funny? I don't get it. Well, kulturkampf, like comedy, is highly subjective, I guess.

Also, Silverman is in fact not really Jewish, because she went to an expensive school:

Miss Silverman is a kind of cultural appropriator, too, a native of New Hampshire and a graduate of the Derryfield School (this year’s tuition: $28,535) who constructed for herself a super-Jewish dramatis persona and practices a kind of postmodern Borscht Belt comedy heavy on Jewish ethnic humor.

I wonder if Williamson's seen how gentrified the Lower East Side has gotten -- oh, Christ, don't tell him, he may write another column. Where were we? Oh yeah: Silverman gave a TED talk and "the audience was less than impressed." Too bad they couldn't have booked Kevin D. Williamson for a comedy clinic instead. (Check this out, Chris Anderson: "Freud’s triune description of the human personality may be useless as a model of the mind, but it works as a method of classifying comedians." Is that Oh Wow or what?)

Oh, and guess whose name appears six times in this essay? No, it's not Molly Picon:

Barack Obama is a fan — it is not mere cultural accident that their careers are contemporaneous... 

It is only natural... that one of the more significant evangelists for Barack Obama and Obamaism would be a woman who starred in a faux French New Wave film called Féte des Pets (Fart Party)... 

...she has been as slavish a devotee of the Democratic cause generally and the cause of Barack Obama in particular... 

She makes get-out-the-vote videos that are in practice get-out-the-vote-for-Obama videos...

...Sarah Silverman, whose politics are as crass as her sense of humor, is a perfect cultural fit for the Age of Obama.

That's what we show folk call "giving 'em what they want." Sure, let him write about whatever makes him mad, just make sure it has plenty of Obama!

There are many nuggets of nonsense in the thing ("her career has been made possible by the same corrosive forces that enable the pornographer’s"), but all you really need to know is 1.) Williamson is the doofus who got mad at a lady who was using a phone in a theater and grabbed the phone and threw it, and 2.) the story is front-paged at National Review Online as "Infantile Sarah" (subhed: "A comedian for the age of Obama").

UPDATE. Jay B relates in comments that the "I love chinks" bit was performed back in 2001. Barack "Age Of" Obama and his comedy courtesan are playing a very long game indeed!

UPDATE 2. In comments also, Dr. Bethany Spencer, L.GM.: "Oh, I get it. This is one of those formulaic wingnut posts where the author lists a few things he doesn’t like then says 'because Obama' or 'because feminists' or 'because liberals.'" I believe Dr. Spencer has cracked the code.