SLOUGHS OF DESPOND.

'Round rightwing world, there has of late been much lamentation and weeping over the ruin Obama is alleged to have made of America. This is of course just their way of trying to distract the rabble so they might forget who George W. Bush was and let the Republicans get back into power, whereupon they will begin a war with Iran, force paupers to subsist on protein powder (but not the good kind the yuppies get!), institute the Yacht Needs Cleaning Income Tax Credit, and generally complete the neo-feudalization process. But right now they're really gnashing their little teeth out and it's fun to watch.

Take the ultimate wingnut Memorial Day essay by Town Hall's Slaverin' Kurt Schlichter:

Like everything about the Community Organizer-In-Chief and his cronies, everything about the carefully choreographed charade we’ll see this Memorial Day is a lie... 

It’s a pose, an act, a scam. You can see it in the faces of the liberal politicians as they are forced to stand there onstage each last Monday of May, pretending they wouldn’t rather be anywhere else in the world than in the sun listening to people talk about what, at best, liberals consider suckers, and more often consider outright babykillers.

(His readers nod sagely from their Barcaloungers and wash down another burger with another craft beer.)

Look at Obama’s face as he walks behind the floral tribute in front of the cameras at the Tomb of the Unknowns. Tell me he’s thinking about the men who stormed ashore at Normandy and not about getting out of there and teeing up.

He’ll talk a good game – they all will, but it’s all a lie. If he cared, he wouldn’t have squandered the victory in Iraq to satisfy his America-hating pals on the left. ISIS, the JV team? Obama lied, and tens of thousands died – and those were the lucky ones.

The whole froth is a delight -- some sections, e.g. "They spit in our warriors’ collective face every time Jenjis Kerrey’s equine mug flashes across the TV screen as he rushes back to the Middle East to tongue kiss the Iranian Islamonazis..." you can easily imagine being read by Patrick Magee in A Clockwork Orange. But "and those were the lucky ones" is sublime -- her heroes spent, America  cowers before the coming reign of Hitlery ISIS!

At National Review Victor Davis Maximus Super Hanson brings the back of his wrist to his forehead, flutters his eyelids, and mourns the wreck Obama has made of the Middle East to which C-Plus Augustus once brought order and stability. Also unlike Bush, Obama won't suck up to the Saudi pashas  -- and have a care, soothsays Hanson, for "their financial clout and the availability of Pakistani bombs for Sunni petrodollars" (also, they share our values!) -- plus Obama hates Israel, perhaps because "it resembles the United States too closely, and thus earns the reflected hypercriticism that so many leftists cultivate for their own civilization," but he loves his fellow black people, whom he and "the elites" subsidize with "huge, unquestioned redistributionist entitlements for the inner city." You see the problem: Obama gives more attention to America's despised underclass than to Arab sheiks and Israel. Vanitas! 

Hanson's colleague Quin Hillyer actually revives the #Benghazi-is-worse-than-Watergate thing ("a few goobers rifling through the office of the opposing political party" etc) and denounces the Clintons in general for "putting all the rest of us at substantially greater risk of annihilation" (hysteritalics his). But it's the American people who seem most to disappoint him. "A goodly number of Americans apparently are aware of the scandal yet still fall at [Hillary Clinton's] feet," he gasps. The punters also "believe quarterback Tom Brady cheated but say in the next breath that he’s a good role model for children." Of course, dummy, you want to say to him, how long have you lived in this country, Brady's rich and butch! But by then Hillyer is on about our "culture" and how it "celebrates depravities" and  "we're now told that we can't spank a misbehaving child; that we can't read Huckleberry Finn because it features the 'n' word; that we can’t name sports teams in honor of Indians" etc. and eventually Hillyer is holding his knees to his chest, rocking and reminiscing on Pat Moynihan and the Moody Blues.

The best, however, is Rod Dreher having the expected 100,000-word meltdown over gay marriage in Ireland. Here is, in every sense, the nut graf:

Understand that by “liberalism,” [Matthew B. Crawford] means not the social politics of the Democratic Party and its supporters, but the entire Enlightenment framework of social and political ideas. All of us Americans, whether we call ourselves liberals or conservatives, are liberals in this sense. I am no different. I believe in free speech, freedom of religion, civil rights and the other hallmarks of liberalism. Now that liberalism has evolved into hostility to what I believe to be true about religion, morality, and human nature, I — like all orthodox Christians — have to face the fact that liberalism, which all of us Americans took in with our mother’s milk, may ultimately be alien to our faith, because in the end, it enthrones the choosing Self over God or any conception of external, transcendent Truth.

Keep this in mind when they come whining at you about gay wedding cakes -- these guys think that the Enlightenment, whence came the American idea of freedom, is anti-Christian. And you know what the next step would be. I'm beginning to think Dreher's half-hearted praise of the "hallmarks of liberalism" is just so much taqiyya.

AN ILL WIND THAT BLOWS NO ONE SOME GOOD.

There's been a lot of sputtering among the brethren as Republican Presidential candidates run screaming from W's Iraq War (Washington Times: "As GOP hopefuls flee Iraq War, Rubio to tout hawk credentials"; The Hill: "Rubio: I wouldn't go into Iraq either"). The prize, however, goes to Quin Hillyer at National Review. After some stuff about how Saddam Was a Very Bad Man and there were so WMD (or "weapons of mass murder... WMM — a better term than WMD" -- Hillyer has some marketing skills), he gets to the money shot:

Fifth, while this is only a satellite effect of our involvement in Iraq, it actually served as a net-plus politically for George W. Bush in his re-election effort against John Kerry — a net-plus without which Bush probably would not have won. This is from memory, but I think the “for-or-against” Iraq poll questions in that campaign were about a net wash, but the “who do you trust to be strong in defending American interests” question still favored Bush significantly enough to have made the difference — along with high turnout in anti–gay-marriage initiatives — between winning and losing. And if anybody thinks that subsequent Bush performance made that a pyrrhic victory, I have two names for them: Roberts and (especially) Alito. As frustrating as the Supreme Court is, imagine how badly off the country would be if Justices Rehnquist and O’Connor had been replaced by justices Laurence Tribe and Hillary Rodham Clinton. And imagine how much more badly bungled so much other domestic policy would have been under Kerry. Ugh. 

So, hundreds of thousands dead and Iraq and our nation's foreign policy credibility in smoldering ruins, but at least Bush got reelected and a couple of wingnuts on the Court. Purple fingers all around, not all of them caused by gangrene.

UPDATE. In comments, Jay B shorters this one "I like to think your son died so that Sam Alito can deny you healthcare." (All the comments are good, definitionally.)

Plus I'd like to correct "Iraq and our nation's foreign policy credibility in smoldering ruins"; Iraq's may still be smoldering, but the ruins of our credibility are not; they're cool, have kudzu growing over them, and show little evidence of their former exalted state, besides mass.

THE OLD WORN CHANNEL OF POLITICS.

This Netanyahu thing reminds me in some ways of the visit Hungarian freedom fighter Louis Kossuth made to the States in 1851, as described by Francis Brown in his biography of New York Times founder Henry Raymond, Raymond of the Times. As Brown has it, Millard Fillmore and the conservative Whigs didn't want Kossuth to have too prominent a reception, on grounds that "public concern with what was held to be solely a European matter endangered American neutrality and held the threat of war," and abstained from welcoming him to Washington. But the proto-Republican Senator William Seward and Raymond "saw political significance in [Kossuth's] visit" and whooped him up when he came to New York, which effort did not go unresisted:

The city's bells peeled, and cannon boomed from Governor's Island, Bedloe's Island, the Navy Yard, and Brooklyn Heights. He came ashore at Castle Garden -- the Battery's trees were black with cheering boys... 

 At the Irving House more than 400 prominent New Yorkers and distinguished guests gather for the municipal dinner for Kossuth. In the banqueting hall, where evergreens masked the salon's columns and the Stars and Stripes was linked with the Hungarian Tricolor, the dinner moves slowly through its many courses and the wine was passed and repassed. The evening's guest of honor spoke for more than an hour. Toasts followed. That to the press belonged to Raymond, and as he prepared to respond, his figure dwarfed in the gay assemblage, [New York Courier and Enquirer editor] James Watson Webb challenged his right to speak. Cries of "Raymond!" "Webb!" echoed through the banquet hall, and when quiet was momentarily restored, Raymond tried to explain that he was only performing a duty assigned to him. Webb once more challenged his right. There were cheers, hisses, and boos, and as confusion mounted, the police were called...

So not everyone liked that idea, either. Also, Kossuth had a unfortunate taste for meddling in American affairs, just like Netanyahu. And, Brown reports from a contemporary account, "on this excitement the Times gained laurels and subscribers, and the Hungarians dollars and sympathy..." which analogizes nicely with the hopes of many rightwing Bibi's Boys who've been trying for years to get Jewish-Americans to love the GOP.

There are some major differences between the 1851 contretemps and this, though. For one, the White House eventually relented and received Kossuth, Congress invited him to be the first foreigner since Lafayette to address a joint session, and even Daniel Webster was inveigled to a Kossuth dinner where he "offered somewhat indiscreetly a toast to Hungarian independence that made Kossuth momentarily happy." ("The Hungarian question has settled down into the old worn channel of politics," Seward observed.) For another, Kossuth was according to Brown widely popular in America as "a symbol of European liberty"; Netanyahu, not so much. 

Also, there is no record of Seward or other Kossuth admirers like Abraham Lincoln crying aloud that Kossuth was their true leader, not this so-called President of the United States, as so many conservative nuts have been doing lately. (Quin Hillyer's ravings at National Review -- e.g., "Netanyahu — who spent far more of his formative years on the American mainland than Obama did, and who took enemy fire at the age when Obama was openly pushing Marxist theory..." -- are perhaps their ripest expression, though as we get closer to speech time maybe some of them will compose and perform a "Bibi for President" anthem.)

Finally, one may say that the Young America adherents who were hot for Kossuth and other European revolutionaries had at least the advantage of idealism on their side, not to mention fewer American historical examples to show them how badly these enthusiasms can turn out.

UPDATE. Well, that was bizarre. Say, how about we invite Iceland president Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson to Congress to tell us how we should handle our rogue bankers? (I admit the analogy with Netanyahu isn't perfect, as Iceland is not trying to muscle anything out of us.)

ACTING OUT.

Conservatives have had such a hard-on for Lena Dunham over the years that I've gotten not one but two Voice columns out of it. I'll never want for material, it seems; at National Review, Quin Hillyer ejaculates this under a big picture of Dunham:

If girls act like Lena Dunham’s character on Girls, they are sluts.

Hillyer's not just hard for Dunham, though, or even for women. This is one of those yeah I'm politically incorrect so what you pussies articles conservatives sometimes put up to feel butch. But it seems like it's been a while since we've seen one; it certainly seems as if Hillyer's had his sackful stored up a long, long time, and does not have complete control of his apparatus. For example:

And yes, I did say “aliens.” That is the precise, and precisely accurate, word for illegal immigrants. We won’t let the language be denuded any further just because somebody’s feelings got hurt. We long ago lost the word “gay.” The Left is now expropriating the word “marriage.” Several years ago, somebody tried to take away the perfectly wonderful “niggardly.” Well, I’m sorry, but they can’t have “alien,” too. And if Barack Obama happens to be miserly, then, well, he is niggardly, too.

 At National Review, no one suggests to your date it's maybe time to go home, apparently.

It's like he's reading slurs off fast-moving cue cards. Why is he straining so hard? Here's a hint:

Meanwhile, back to marriage: Many on the left say not only that the state should legally recognize just about any commitment somebody might decide to solemnize, but also that the state should penalize a private decision not to bake a cake or create a bouquet for a particular commitment ceremony. Now that should be grounds for civil disobedience. Hundreds or thousands of people should stand in solidarity with the baker. 

Except Hillyer can't get hundreds or thousands of people to do this, not because we live under Liberal Fascism, but because even relatively apolitical people would look at his rant and recognize he's not making a point about liberty, but just being an asshole. The politically incorrect bit can be fun once in a while, but it gets old fast -- and these guys have been at it for decades. (When was the last time you pulled down the P.J. O'Rourke and had a laugh about how bad the poor smell?) I think Hillyer must know the squares won't get it, and so sprays his spoor as a signaling device for such Republican Party Reptiles as are still around. There may not be as many of them as there once were, but at least they get his jokes.