WHEN LAST WE LEFT OUR HERO... Jay Nordlinger, after calling my post partly about his inauguration ravings a "piece of filth" and telling me to "go to hell," continued to be troubled by Newsweek, and then, unsurprisingly, by others:

There is a website called “Gawker,” billed as purveying “Manhattan Media News and Gossip.”

It is accessible by a device called a "personal computer," to which Nordlinger's correspondent has lately alerted him. Apparently the lad has been transcribing the messages Nordlinger has been commanding dispatch'd to the copy desk, and putting them on the "internet."

And it published this:

“Jay Nordlinger, for example, hated [Obama’s] speech because it was so mean to Bush, and therefore it was insulting to every white person who voted for Bush.” (The entire bit is here.)

Long, long ago, I left the Left, and the Democratic party, because these people were incredibly wrongheaded, malicious, and so on.

Yet somehow we recently won an election without his assistance.

They were particularly alarming on the subject of race: Race had seemed to addle their brains and curdle their souls. They couldn’t think straight on the subject.

Here are some examples of Nordlinger's straight-thinking on race:

He was so new, they had not yet quite gotten the hang of his name: whether he was “Obama Barack” or “Barack Obama.” He was just a state legislator. But they were so very excited, particularly on racial grounds: He was the one who would break through. He already had a hint, a heavy hint, of holiness about him... If you vote for McCain-Palin, against Obama-Biden, will you have to wear a big scarlet “R,” for racist?...

In any case, I was thinking: “What in the world in McCain’s record or speech, or in Palin’s record or speech, would lead one to think that either person were racist?” The answer, I believe, is nothing — except that some people think that Republicans or conservatives are bad. And that which is bad is racist. Ergo, “McCain + Palin = Racist.” (Oops, forgot the exclamation point: “Racist!”)...

But, thanks to affirmative action, the Jayson Blair case has to be a racial drama, in addition to a personal and institutional one...

Reaching his lowest, [Bob] Shrum unleashed an ad that smeared Sauerbrey as a racist, with a "shameful record on civil rights." (Just to be sure, he also blanketed black communities with a flier that did the same.)... The ad, however, worked its terrible magic. It apparently frightened black Marylanders, boosting their turnout and putting [Parris] Glendening over the top. According to Campaigns & Elections magazine, this was the "Most Brutally Effective Attack Spot" of the year. Today, Ellen Sauerbrey warns that the Bush campaign [of 2000] had better be prepared for more of the same...

I remember I must have written five pieces about race and the Lewinsky affair, during those short years. (The president made masterly use of race.) Color simply infects everything....

Etc. Nordlinger writes ceaselessly on the subject of race, and his theme is always the terrible injustice it does to mostly white Republicans. He usually adds something about how black people or Democrats are obsessed with it. It's always dicey to accuse an opponent of projection, but Nordlinger is the poster boy for it. And he has an amazingly thin skin about it, which is probably why he has become such a popular subject of ridicule.

CULTURE OF COMPLAINT, PART 83,992. At The Corner, Mark Hemingway is incensed that Obama joked in a speech to Moscow students, "I don’t know if anybody else will meet their future wife or husband in class like I did, but I’m sure you’ll all going to have wonderful careers." Michelle and Barack went to Harvard Law at different times, though Obama was at the time a student doing his summer internship at Sidley & Austin, where she mentored him. Newsweek calls the comment "a wee bit off," which is not good enough for Hemingway, who calls the publication Obamaweek.

"The statement is just wrong," Hemingway continues in a blind fury. "There is no 'technical' justification for it having any veracity that I can tell — 'in class' is quite specific. Next time you husbands embarass your wife publicly by not remembering a significant relationship detail. I bet you wish a major media organization would step in and spin it for you. Alas, you'll have no such luck." Because Obamaweek loves Obama and hates you ordinary people, whose casual statements Obamaweek will parse rigorously in order to embarrass your wives. And Obama clearly must hate his wife, too, to humiliate her thus.

Elsewhere at The Corner Jay Nordlinger flips out because a conductor at Lincoln Center said that he and his fellow Britons were "very pleased" at how things were going in America now, which Nordlinger took as a slur on George Bush. Despite a recent poll showing Obama much more popular with Brits than Bush, Nordlinger disputes the maestro's imputation: "There has been a new awkwardness in Anglo-American relations," he asserts. "Beginning with the return of the Churchill bust, continuing with DVD-gate, etc." Maybe the only Britons he knows are named Windsor. And, Nordlinger adds, "the administration has thrown cold water -- strange cold water -- on the idea of a 'special relationship.'" Strange cold water? Perhaps Obama imported it from Treasonstan.

Nordlinger finds this further evidence that there are no "safe zones" left where a decent, Obama-hating citizen can enjoy himself in peace. If you can't evade mildly liberal sentiments among artists at Lincoln Center, where can you evade them?

And they say liberals are touchy.

UPDATE. The Ole Perfesser catches Nordlinger's outrage. "I’m sorry," he says, "but the only way to fix this is to be an asshole, complain loudly, and make things even more unpleasant for the perpetrator than for you." This of course has been the Perfesser's modus operandi for years. He and the Missus must be a real ornament to the local arts scene. Maybe we should all pitch in and send them to a Decemberists concert.

HOW DOES HE DO IT?

At National Review, Jay Nordlinger quotes himself:

One day, no one thought of gay marriage (or few did). The next day, “civil unions” were the far-out, progressive position. The day after that, if you favored civil unions but not gay marriage, you were a Klansman. A Nazi. That’s where we are now. Try refusing to bake a cake for a gay wedding, or refusing to rent your hall for such a wedding. Just try it.

As enraged as Nordlinger is because you can't discriminate against gay couples, he is more enraged that Obama and Biden changed their minds on the subject:

Running in 2012, of course, both Obama and Biden sang a different tune. They had had an epiphany or something. (Is “epiphany” too religious a word for our modern society?) 

Here’s the grating thing: They scorn people who are against gay marriage as, basically, Klansmen and Nazis. The blink of an eye ago, they themselves were against gay marriage (officially)! But now the people who hold that same position — the Obama-Biden position until May 2012 — are Klansmen and Nazis?

I suppose someone called opponents of gay rights Nazis and/or Klansmen, but this is the first I've heard that Obama and Biden did so. Anyone got the link?

In a later post, Nordlinger again:

I watched the Kentucky Senate debate last night — the debate between Mitch McConnell and Alison Lundergan Grimes. I am a partisan Republican and an admirer of McConnell. Even if I were not, however, I think I would have the same view...

After that, I should have known better than to keep reading.

Grimes was a robot, and an often nasty one. She was scarcely a human being.

Why, this is the kind of reductive language I expect from Klansmen and Nazis!

Both posts end with Nordlinger weeping that politics is too dirty for him. Well, I'm glad something is. In addition to these deathless insights, Nordlinger does articles: This is from his latest one:

But I must say, I find it increasingly difficult to read things on the Internet. I click on an article, and I’m not taken to the article: I’m taken to an ad instead. Then there is this experience: Loud music will suddenly start playing...

Jonah Goldberg at least has family connections. I assume Nordlinger has lurid pictures of Buckley locked away somewhere; nothing else explains his persistence.

GOTV, PART 2. We'll be getting a tidal wave of bullshit from conservatives today, so we might as well start with Jay Nordlinger. The insufferable rambler looks back, through clouds of Glade Mist, to his first voting experience:

We were all lined up, and a professor walked by — very left-wing (obviously). And from Texas. Therefore, triply left-wing. You know the type? If you’re from the sticks — or what others perceive as the sticks — you have to be the most left-wing guy around. Something to do with an inferiority complex, I guess.

How often must the phrase Get on with it! run through the minds of Nordlinger's associates.

Anyway, he remarks to the person walking with him, “There they are, everyone exercisin’ his right.” It came out, “. . . everyone exercisin’ his raaaahhht.” He said it in an incredibly snide tone: a tone that said, “Aren’t they silly, thinking they are doing something genuinely democratic? They’re just pawns in a system controlled by money.”

That's some fucking eloquent drawl, isn't it? (Then again, Le Petomane could make his farts sound like talking.) (Which I suspect is how Jonah Goldberg writes his columns.)

You will be unsurprised to learn that Nordlinger is enraged that in New York (where he moved to escape the liberal Texans, presumably) voters may receive their instructions in Spanish. "Why would anyone who can’t handle the voting experience in English even want to vote?" he asks. "Have I just committed hate speech? (Come and get me, copper.)" What a scamp! But he must have felt nervous about it, because he follows immediately with a tale of his bravery in insisting on bilingual rather than Spanish-only trash receptacle signage:

I talked with our Hispanic janitors, who said, “They think we’re so dumb. They think we don’t speak any English at all. Even if we didn’t speak English, don’t you think we’d know what ‘trash’ was, after working as janitors for all this time?”

Condescension, thy name is White Liberalism; White Liberalism, thy name is Condescension.

The message is clear: When Spanish-only speakers enter a polling place (as several did mine this morning), the workers should refuse to assist them in Spanish, lest they be thought condescending. It should do wonders for their self-esteem, especially the elderly ones.

Also, Nordlinger wonders, what's the point in having sign language interpreters at large events? He supposes it "simply makes others — hearers — feel good." More liberal condescension! Maybe he thinks handicapped seating is a plot to keep the infirm from standing. Comes the revolution, those Tea Partiers in their Hoverounds are in for a rude shock from the Nordlinger Corps.

RACE, TO THE BOTTOM. From the latest edition of Jay Nordlinger's pensèes:

Was on the subway two days ago (New York), and there was this woman across from me reading this little blue book. It had a silhouette on the cover -- Obama. And it was -- well, one of those “little” books. A little secular holy book -- Obamite devotions. You can overplay the creepiness of the response to Obama. But you can underplay it, too.

Translation: Nordlinger saw someone reading a book with a silhouette of a black person on the cover (Kara Walker?) and naturally assumed it was Obama, as Chauncey Gardiner in Being There assumed all the black people he met served the same function as his maid Louise. This Nordlinger found disturbing, but could not say why without using those words that make people mad these days, so he just got mysterious -- more mysterious than he meant, as his handlers did not explain to him that the people on the other side of the telescreen can't see him, so when he pushed in his nose, shoved out his lower lip, and stuck his tongue out, his readers missed the significance.

On the other hand, when he describes how he would like black people to talk -- "“Enough. Not for our sake; not in our name. Commit injustices if you must — but not for our benefit, thank you very much. Look to the individual, of whatever color. The time for 'compensatory discrimination' has passed" -- they sound very much like Jay Nordlinger. So we may assume that he would consider them equals if they turned into him, which while pathetic is better than I had heretofore expected of him.

He also tells one of those "Mrs. Krabappel and Principal Skinner were in the closet with the liberals and I saw one of the liberals and the liberal looked at me" stories and follows it up with "I have never been employed as a just-the-facts-ma’am reporter. But I have done such reporting -- and, you know, it’s not very hard." Eventually I realized he was referring to the preposterous story he had just told, which includes several sentences of imagined internal monologue ("What’s the point of getting the appointment and donning the black robe if you’re not going to strike blows for justice?"). If this is "just-the-facts-ma’am" journalism, I deserve a Pulitzer Prize for Spot Reporting. For this post.

I am grateful to Nordlinger, though, for explaining that "The People United Will Never Be Divided" is "an old Allende-ist slogan and song." I thought it was by Sham 69.

OUR CONTRIBUTION TO THE NEW POST-PARTISAN ERA. Dropped a note at the Voice about early rightblogger reactions to the inauguration, and one of my japes drew the ire of Jay Nordlinger, who seems to think I was calling him a racist in the old-fashioned sense. I figured it would too much inside baseball to explain at length to Voice readers what Nordlinger's real stock-in-trade is, though I did link to this Nordlinger quote:

A quick comment on the Rush business -- on the quarterback business. [Limbaugh had said sportscasters overrated Donovan McNabb because he's black -- ed.]. I’m reminded of something that I’ve discovered in recent years. I work in Conservativeland, and I’m used to speaking freely. I’m used to not having to abide by a speech code or any other restriction of political correctness. And then sometimes I leave Conservativeland, and continue to speak freely--and sincerely--and then find that I startle people. They’re not used to hearing it.

Now, it seems to me that what Rush said is rather obvious: that people root for the black player, in whatever field, to succeed. That’s not necessarily wrong, incidentally. It may even be admirable. But it’s so...

[snip description of other silly liberals doing other silly things]

Rush considers himself a free man, and said simply what he thought was true. And I imagine that what he said is, in fact, true. And this is a great man, as can be judged, in part, by the quality of his enemies.

Nordlinger's world divides between those who are pleased to see members of minority groups succeed, and those (such as himself) who consider that to be "political correctness." As these things go, it's not Bull Connor. It's just the sort of defensive imputation of reverse racism that we've been hearing for years, and apparently haven't seen the back of even with the election of a black President of the United States.

UPDATE. Now Nordlinger claims himself wronged by Newsweek. Why doesn't he just write letters to the editor? But I am happy that this post brought "Conservative Guy" back to the comments boxes. Welcome home, prodigal son, we will kill the fatted calf.

WORDS FAIL HIM. AT NRO Jay Nordlinger talks about the great rhetoric of George W. Bush. "When all is said and done," Nordlinger shouts over derisive laughter, "his presidency may be known for its rhetoric (among other things). Then George W. Bush, the tongue-tied embarrassment, will have the last laugh — yet another last laugh. 'Misunderestimated' once more."

That'll show us. So what examples does Nordlinger offer? Here are all of them from the first half of Nordlinger's article (the thing just goes on and on), freed of his rah-rah framings and attaboy interjections:

He may be alive. If he is, we'll get him. If he's not, we got him.

Ozzy Osbourne: Mr. President, you should wear your hair like mine!
Bush: Second term, Ozzy, second term.

I fully understand... there will be times when people feel a sense of normalcy -- and I hope that happens sooner rather than later -- and that September 11th may be a distant memory to some. But not to me...

One of my jobs is to make sure nobody gets complacent. One of my jobs is to remind people of the stark realities that we face. See, every morning I go into that great Oval Office and read threats to our country -- every morning... Some of them are blowhards, but we take every one of them seriously. It's the new reality.

We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.

America has stood down enemies before, and we will do so this time. None of us will ever forget this day. Yet we go forward to defend freedom and all that is good and just in our world.

Some worry that it is somehow undiplomatic or impolite to speak the language of right and wrong. I disagree. Different circumstances require different methods, but not different moralities... Moral truth is the same in every culture, in every time, and in every place. Targeting innocent civilians for murder is always and everywhere wrong. Brutality against women is always and everywhere wrong. There can be no neutrality between justice and cruelty, between the innocent and the guilty. We are in a conflict between good and evil, and America will call evil by its name. By confronting evil and lawless regimes, we do not create a problem, we reveal a problem. And we will lead the world in opposing it.

I'm encouraging schoolchildren to write letters of friendship to Muslim children in different countries.

I'm going to talk about homeland security, but the best way to secure our homeland is to hunt the killers down one by one and bring them to justice, and that is what we're going to do.

In the face of today's new threat, the only way to pursue peace is to pursue those who threaten it.

My attitude is, the best way to secure the homeland is to unleash the mighty United States military and hunt them down and bring them to justice. And the best way to fight evil at home is to love your neighbor like you'd like to be loved yourself.

There will be times of swift, dramatic action. There will be times of steady, quiet progress.

This is an unusual kind of war because it sometimes will show up on your TV screens and sometimes it won't. Sometimes there will be moments of high drama, and, of course, good reporters will be going -- all kinds of hyperventilating, about this action or that action. And sometimes you won't see a thing.

Remember, these examples are offered as a defense of Bush's rhetoric. But seen plain, of what do they consist, really? One coherent if otherwise unremarkable attack on moral relativism, a bunch of threats that wouldn't pass muster in a Vin Diesel script conference, a few non-sequiturs (including the strangest application of "Love Thy Neighbor" this side of these guys), one decent joke, and a lot of filler.

While the editors of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations are probably tearing their hair out, I imagine Nordlinger is chuckling, and perhaps collecting a few C-notes from Jonah Goldberg. ("I never thought you'd have the balls to do it, Jay!" "I know. Sometimes I surprise myself.")

OBLIGATORY MLK POST. It's an alicublog tradition to call out some of our favorite conservative tributes to Martin Luther King Jr. on his Federal holiday. So far cowboy Alan Stang leads the pack, with his essay "UN-CELEBRATE MARTIN LUTHER KING DAY":

...the King holiday was proclaimed, after considerable, racist intimidation, when the nation knew hardly anything about him, not alone because it was inflicted so soon after his death, but because by court order the truth about him was suppressed. Yes, that is correct; we have a national holiday for a man whose wife got a court ruling that suppresses the facts about him until 2027 to spare the intense embarrassment she would have felt had the truth been revealed.

The fella's got a point -- after all, when word got out about Sally Hemmings, there went the Jefferson's Birthday Federal holiday!

Further into the column you can read some fascinating testimony from former Montgomery, AL Chief of Police Drue Lackey about the Freedom Rides:

Those four days on the road had turned into an habitual sex orgy by the time they reached the capitol. King was always seen on TV marching in the front row among clean, well-disciplined performers. It was all a sham. He stayed partying separately most of those days, and would only arrive in a chauffeured limousine for appointed press deadlines, leaving immediately after.

The Lame Stream Media shows white celebrities like Paris Hilton in sex tapes all the time, yet where are the photos of Martin Luther King snorting coke, banging whores, and vomiting in alleys? It's obviously a cover-up.

Most of the others put off at least until nightfall, what they had come for, as this mob had been bused in from across the country and around the world: unemployed Blacks, White students, party activists of both races, on promises of all the free food, booze and sex they wanted.

They reached Montgomery late on the afternoon of March 24, 1965, and spent the night at St. Jude’s where they had been invited. We kept security along with the National Guard, for the local Whites were up in arms. We witnessed them sleeping on the ground all together, and a lot of sexual activity went on throughout the night, with frequently changed partners. This is what the federal government sponsored: a bunch of communists and moral degenerates

So that's how they got those kids to walk into fire hoses and gunfire! You'd think they would have stayed home in Jew York and miscegnated in comfort.

Lackey is also the man who fingerprinted Rosa Parks when she was busted for what radio host James Edwards calls her "bus stunt" ("It never ceases to amaze me how lawbreakers [Parks, 'civil rights' activists, illegal aliens, etc.] are heralded as heroes," etc). Edwards, author of Racism, Schmacism (I'm not kidding), interviewed Lackey a few times in 2008; one of these days I'm going to have to snuggle up with a snifter of Hennessy and listen to them.

Bonus rounds:

• A black guy who says

King recognized the tyrannical nature of the government, and he would be standing shoulder to shoulder with Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Herman Cain, Allen West, and many others in an attempt to free not only blacks this time, but the entire nation from the very same government that was oppressing blacks during King’s lifetime.

That would be an interesting march, especially when King started regaling Limbaugh et alia with his plans for a guaranteed minimum income for Americans.

• At Human Events, Daniel J. Flynn tells us that liberals, labor unions, and Democrats are the real racists ("The New Harmony commune's exclusion of African-Americans, labor union cries of a 'yellow peril,'" etc), and African-Americans were in deep shit until they were rescued by Adam Smith:

A truly free market works as an antidote to racism. Though contemporary radicals would vociferously deny this, their forebears vociferously charged capitalism with negating racism... Capitalism and racism can't long peacefully coexist.

Exactly! Who can forget those black folk who sat down at segregated lunch counters, not because they were agitators or anything, but because the food there was so delicious and well-marketed that they'd risk a beating for it. Also, "the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott is one of many examples of money trumping bigotry during the civil rights movement," etc.

It's amazing King and all those other civil rights workers got shot -- didn't James Earl Ray and those guys know what a financial bonanza desegregation would be? Musta been socialists.

UPDATE. Michelle Malkin honors the day by demanding "Give the race card a rest," yelling about Al Sharpton, and listing what she considers examples of liberal "race card demagoguery" (sample: "DREAM Act radicals bitterly accused opponents of xenophobia and race traitorism"). Malkin probably wonders why no one invites her to give toasts at weddings.

Oh, and here's a guy who admits he thought in 2008 that Obama was going to "take our nation irrevocably down the multicultural path," but is pleasantly surprised to see him thwarted by "the rise of the Tea Party." When the honkeys in tricorners triumph, he predicts, "then will come the day MLK's dream is fulfilled." Just ask Glenn Beck.

UPDATE 2. In honor of MLK, William Teach beats up environmentalists:

Personally, I don’t doubt that MLK would have simply patted the eco-nuts on the head like a rather slow child still trying to master See Spot Run at age 10, since he seemed to be the kind of guy who wouldn’t want to hurt their feelings by pointing out what nutjobs they are.

Yeah, that's what King would be doing, all right. He'd also have a pick-up truck with a gun rack and a "The Next Time You Need a Cop, Call a Hippie" bumper sticker. It just follows naturally from what we know about the guy.

Later Teach invents more King insults for enviro-freaks, and adds, "do I really have to mention that Dr. King spoke more about equality, rather than 'social justice'?" I guess Teach isn't talking about the MLK who said, "Capitalism was built on the exploitation of black slaves and continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor," but about the one who sounds so convincing reading Teach's lines.

UPDATE 3. Thanks, commenter Jeff, for pointing out Jay Nordlinger's tribute at National Review. Nordlinger notes that King applauded the Presidential election victory of Lyndon Johnson, who signed the Civil Rights Act, over Barry Goldwater, who opposed it. Nordlinger adds this historical gloss:

An older MLK might well have been ashamed of that rhetoric, or at least regretted it. For one thing, Goldwater’s view of government and economics was the opposite of fascist: was the classical-liberal view.

Maybe the MLK of Nordlinger's imagination -- like that of William Teach's, and all the other speculators -- is actually one who escaped the assassin's bullet in 1968, turned 82 this Saturday, and suffers from advanced Alzheimer's Disease.

NATIONAL REVIEW COVERS THE ARTS. After yet another series of complaints about how artists say liberal things to which conservatives are forced to listen (presumably at gunpoint), Jay Nordlinger addresses an objection:

“That man and his wife can’t expect to go to folk concerts and not hear leftist politics from the stage! Come on! That’s like going to a Chinese restaurant and objecting to the sight of rice.” Well, maybe: I don’t know. Are there right-leaning folkies? Performers, I mean? I bet there are. And I bet many are closeted (as right-leaners are in the classical-music world).

What richness this adds to our picture of persecuted rightwing artists -- now joining the novelists, filmmakers and actors cowering in the attic, we have cellists and hammered dulcimerists! I would especially like to meet the folksinger who trudges from coffeehouse to coffeehouse, blaming the poor reception he receives for his renditions of "Where Has Spiro Agnew Gone?" and "Masters of ACORN" on liberal bias, and taking heart in the examples of Bob Roberts and The Goldwaters.

You might also enjoy this Nordlinger reader letter:

I was a very prolific jazz reviewer for years — live performances and recordings — but totally quit when Obama got elected. The constant e-mails, liner notes, and remarks at gigs that trashed Bush and the Right, while extolling the coming of The One, enraged me, and I just couldn’t take it anymore. Why should I spend one minute of my (volunteered) time helping jazzers when they obviously despise what I stand for?

I like to think this is from Nat Hentoff.

Nordlinger's colleague Benjamin Weinthal catches the bug, and tries an artsy angle on Iran:

Where does the musical film Cabaret, which depicts the rise of German fascism, intersect with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s appearance at the United Nations this week? “It is clear the future belongs to Iran,” said Ahmadinejad in an AP interview on Sunday, which conjures up the eerie beer garden scene in Cabaret in which a young Nazi stirs up jingoism with the song “Tomorrow Belongs to Me"...

The pressing question at the end of the Cabaret scene was posed by the British actor Michael York, who expressed justifiable disbelief about whether Germany’s aristocracy could exercise control over the Hitler movement.

I'm constantly hearing claims that the future belongs to some damn thing or other -- Microsoft, Linux, Matt Meola, walkable communities, et alia. Previously I thought these were just harmless enthusiasms or marketing gimmicks. Now I know they're Hitler! I expect this will be included in the next edition of Liberal Fascism.

Wait a second -- Hitler once said that "the future belongs to color photography." Gasp! His influence lingers to this day! Set the color saturation to zero, for democracy's sake!

COME ALONG, WE'RE GOING TO THE TRANS-LUX TO HISS WILLIAM BUCKLEY.

Jay Nordlinger, who practices what at National Review passes for whimsy, tells us (as he has apparently done before) that hissing is for commies:

Speaking of longstanding complaints: I have always objected to hissing. And, all of my life, the Left has hissed. They’ve hissed movies, plays, music, me — anything they don’t like. I’m sure that conservatives have hissed, along the way. Frankly, I have never been present for this.

Liberals also loudly unwrap candy at the opera, I'm told.

Believe it or don't, this is not the craziest thing that went out under Nordlinger's name today. Here's a letter he says he received:

My girlfriend works at a retail clothing store in Chicago. She has recently had some issues with her manager (long stories, details don’t matter). 

Today, she was told by the manager, “Because you do such a good job selling, the other employees are intimidated. They are intimidated by your success. We want to move you to a fitting room [outta sight, outta mind], so other employees have a chance on the floor. I just want to have an environment where all people are equal and everybody does the same.” 

She has already found another job, and is leaving. By the way, the store called her into a meeting a few months ago and told her, “Employees said that, in the breakroom, you mentioned having a Bush-Cheney shirt. Some of them thought that was offensive, so we would like you not to speak of it at work.”

Astonishingly, Nordlinger seems to buy this ridiculous story of a retail business where the manager doesn't want a super-salesman on the selling floor because liberal fascism: "We can accept this kind of country — just accept defeat, or a kind of dhimmitude," he sighs. "Or we can push back. Push back in myriad ways, at myriad turns." He doesn't name the letter's author; Heywood Jablome, I'm guessing; sounds like his work.

And then someone sends him another Penthouse Letter, which he also buys:

Here’s some pushback for you. Someone on my team once complained to my boss that I had weighty books on my desk, which intimidated her. It made her reluctant to ask me questions. (She was reluctant, all right, but for different reasons.) The boss asked me to keep my books in a drawer, rather than on the desk itself. I adamantly refused, and challenged my boss to fire me for my refusal.

I've half a mind to send him a letter about how my liberal boss was intimidated because I have such a big dick.

THEY WERE, LIKE, LOOKING AT US! Yesterday when I was young, it would please my friends and me to recount, often immediately after the fact, some great danger we believed we had experienced just by being in a certain place at a certain time. After we had been in a cheap chicken joint on The Block in Baltimore, for example, or at an East German security checkpoint, or in a redneck bar, we would afterward laugh excitedly about how close we had been to "getting our asses kicked," though in fact nothing bad had happened to us, or had even been likely to happen.

I wonder what age Jay Nordlinger is. In his most recent mass of twaddle, he quotes a correspondent describing some guy who wore a lot of different Bush T-shirt during the 2004 election campaign: "His shirts drove people crazy, absolutely crazy. He gave me a 'Dalton Aunts [for Bush-Cheney]' shirt to wear, and although I was never physically attacked, I'm fairly certain that I left more than one person on the Upper West Side with severe indigestion..."

We musta pissed them off so bad! You could tell by the way they were like walking around!

Later:

He wore a very loud shirt that said -- incredibly -- "BUSH WINS! Electoral Vote Final: Bush: 286; CBS News: 252." You have no idea -- none -- how incongruous that is in Central Park, unless you live here. It's sometimes said that you can get away with anything in New York, that the city is so big and diverse and wild, no one notices. Baloney. If you had worn a Bush-Cheney button in Carnegie Hall -- people would have noticed. (You should have been wearing a Kevlar vest too.)

You shoulda seen, man -- people, like, noticed us! Good thing there were tens of thousands of people around, and it was broad daylight, or we woulda got out ass kicked!

In fairness we must note that, in a sane world, Nordlinger's ass would have been kicked many times over. He rags on New York City continually, yet continues to live and take employment here; one wonders why he and the rest of his City-hating colleagues have not relocated to Fritters, AL, there to rub elbows with the hoi polloi.

Nordlinger also claims to have trouble buying a Christmas card because of evil diversity apparatchiks. Try Hallmark, asshole.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

I'm sure I must be someone; now I'm gonna find out who.
•   Amanda Prestigiacomo of The Daily Signal is enraged because the Washington Post ran a long tribute to our outgoing President and didn't do one for George W. Bush back in the day. But the Post is just giving the people what they want, as they say in show biz: Even casual observers will know that Obama is currently very popular, and that his 55% approval rating contrasts starkly with GWB's 34% at the same stage of his Presidency. (I guess WaPo could have done an 18-page "Thanks for the Recession" feature, but what advertiser would have plunked down money for that?) Cripes, even Republicans know this: It's no accident Bush hasn't attended a GOP National Convention since he left office; clearly no one at the RNC wanted to remind the public of how badly they fucked up the country last time they were in charge. In fact, the citizens may have begun to remember what Republicans are all about lately: the incoming Il Douche is at 37% the least-approved incoming President in recorded history. Nonetheless Prestigiacomo feels compelled to cry Liberal Bias, and even Conspiracy:

Perhaps the "fake news" scare was not only an excuse for Hillary Clinton's truly awful candidacy, but a move in a long game effort to get more conservative news suppressed, as if it hasn't been suppressed enough already.

Honey, it's so much simpler than that: If you don't want to get pelted with tomatoes, leave the stage when they start to boo.

•   Robert Tracinski, insufferable culture warrior, bitches out SJW Wars:

In ‘Rogue One,’ The Hollywood Empire Strikes Back 

'Rogue One' is a throwback to the highbrow Hollywood culture that the original 'Star Wars' film rebelled against back in 1977.

Manny Farber he ain't.

Not many people realize that the great conservative filmmakers of our age are George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. Forget about their personal political views, which naturally conform to the left-leaning Hollywood consensus. Think purely in esthetic terms. Lucas and Spielberg collaborated on the two great movie franchises that helped shape the culture of the 1980s: Star Wars and Indiana Jones. 

It’s not just that these films were nostalgic tributes to an old-fashioned style of story-telling, the Westerns and movie serials of the pre-Counterculture era. It’s that the stories were told in bright, primary colors...

But this new stuff is about people who believe in something, which is a drag:

That’s the other thing that’s disappointingly different about Rogue One. There’s a lot of talk in this film about “the cause,” including a scene in which the two lead characters have a tiff about who is more down with the struggle. This probably helps Hollywood leftists feel more at home, because lefties pull this sort of thing on each other all the time. But in the original Star Wars films, there was little discussion of or interest in “the cause"...

It's like when Victor Laszlo told Rick "Welcome to the fight" in Casablanca -- gross, right? It should have ended when Rick got Ilsa to fuck him! That's capitalism, baby -- I stick my neck out for no one! I guess it never occurred to Tracinski that Han joined the rebels for something besides pussy. Or maybe (a stretch, I know) Tracinski doesn't actually give a shit about culture at all, and is just getting with the new realities. Come to think of it, force-choking is a sign of American Greatness!  

• Yet another wan column from Jonah Goldberg, who has been observably demoralized since his Liberal Fascism racket got queered by the election of Republican Mussolini. Or maybe it's not demoralization; maybe he's just taking the opportunity, like other great artists working under constraints, of exploring new frontiers -- in Goldberg's case, of intellectual sloth. The column is mostly "Our Friend The Beaver" phumphering ("With a bullpen of writers like that, it’s no wonder that Washington’s farewell ranks among the great works of literary statecraft..."). Kudos to historian Kevin M. Kruse, however, for noticing this:

Of course, the era of radio and television necessitated — or created the perception of necessity — that presidents address the people directly. Whether that amounted to progress is for others to decide. But until Obama, it never occurred to a president to deliver a televised address from anywhere but the Oval Office.

What a maroon. (Also: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this scale model of the Wall here on my desk in the Oval Office, from which all presidential addresses are given.") Oh, and according to Goldberg Obama's speech was "grandiose" and a "campaign rally." He quotes literally about a dozen words of it. I'll be frank, I don't think he saw or read the speech - I think at best it was on in the background while he was playing Battleship with Jay Nordlinger, or trying to get his fist in his mouth (his own, not Nordlinger's, though you never know, Nordlinger sure isn't earning a salary with his writing). And people think liberals are demoralized! At least we don't have to pretend shit is gold.

SOMETHING TO CELEBRATE. Mario Vargas Llosa has won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and good for him. Rightbloggers are ecstatic, but mainly on political grounds. "A consistent voice against repression wherever he finds it and an eloquent champion of freedom in all its manifestations," declares Nick Gillespie. Donald Douglas is happy that the laureate doesn't like Che Guevara. The American Enterprise Institute proudly reproduces part of his Irving Kristol Award acceptance speech. Tyler Cowen seems to have actually read Llosa's fiction, but he's a special case.

Jay Nordlinger at National Review is very happy because while many previous laureates have been "anti-Americans, Communists, and other anti-democrats," and only won because "politics, particularly leftism, has seemed more important than literary quality" to the Committee heretofore, today's winner is "an advocate of a free economy." The judges must have caught freedom fever in the interim. (Nordlinger adds that Llosa is a "fine writer," but seems to consider this the gravy rather than the meat.)

This is the flip side of the pants-shitting rage that conservatives came out with when Harold Pinter won the Prize in 2005. Everything to them is politics, and for the most part they only get interested in literature when it serves their usual tedious yay-boo.

So far coverage from mainstream media outlets and liberal sites has been appropriately respectful and laudatory, as you might expect. It's gotten me interested in Llosa's work, with which I am only glancingly acquainted. Your recommendations for further reading would be appreciated.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...on the situation in Ferguson and the related rightblogger identity crisis: Should they let their lipstick libertarian experimentation go beyond the vanilla stuff, and into kinky places that might outrage Jennifer Rubin? Questions remain!

Lots of excess material here: In the section about rightbloggers claiming Ferguson has something to do with Second Amendment rights -- as if America would tolerate black citizens open-carrying en masse; forbid it almighty Reagan! -- I'd hoped to include this Tim Cavanaugh rant at National Review, in which Cavanaugh is so enraged that Tom Toles alluded in a disparaging manner to the NRA in a Ferguson cartoon that he starts emitting stank from every hole -- calling Toles "The Worst Cartoonist In America," snarling about "cheap and half-baked premises" and "barnacle-encrusted clichés," comparing Toles to "monstrous dictators," saying he "keeps his finger right on the pulse of 1979," calling his draftsmanship "visually repulsive" (not aurally repulsive, I guess)... it's so unhinged that Cavanaugh's lack of a coherent point doesn't explain it. Maybe it's a Nast/Tweed or a Goebbels/revolver thing?

UPDATE. If you want some idea of how the Ooga-Booga Squad is whipping the Lipstick Libertarians among conservatives, look at The Corner at National Review this morning. Samples:

• "Ferguson Protester to Cop: ‘F*** You, N*****’." (The protester is black and the cop is white, so you can imagine how this will enrage your typical NatRev reader.)
• Victor Davis Hanson: "The gratuitous looting and street violence, the almost instantaneous rush to blast the police by soon to be presidential candidate Rand Paul; the arrival of the usual demagogues — Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson ('state execution'), and the New Black Panther Party... so reminiscent of the Trayvon Martin Case..." If you're playing the Racist Pundit Talking Point Drinking Game, that's four stiff shots right there.
• Jay Nordlinger: "Black person kills white person. Zzzzz. White person kills black person — the world stops." Once again white people get the short end of the stick! Also: "Michael Brown’s life or Trayvon Martin’s life would be just as valuable if a person of a different color had done the shooting" -- which is to say, from Nordlinger's perspective, not at all.

JAY NORDLINGER SENILITY WATCH: Oh, Jesus:

Let me instead say this: I think many of my conservative colleagues are far too gingerly when it comes to liberal media bias. Far too timid, delicate, and forgiving. For a long time, complaining about media bias has been seen as uncouth. It’s something we all need to learn to live with, like death, taxes, and mosquitoes. Don’t be uncool by bitching about it, man.

The only thing that could make the idiocy more self-evident is if it were cross-posted at Sarah Palin's Facebook, Big Journalism, TimesWatch, Media Research Center, NewsBusters, or any other of the hundreds of other sites devoted to exposing the Lamestream Liberal Media. Even by the regular standards of conservative eternal-victimhood, this is rich.

I haven't been keeping up with the Nordlinger Senility Watch, BTW, because even when he lays out a beauty like this "Sigh, I Wish the IDF Could Walk Through Walls Like Back When I Was 60" post, I know he'll come up with something just as dotarded later, and it makes me lazy.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Song's been going through my mind for some reason. Weep, sad freaks of a nation.

•    I guess 2012 was the last year I paid attention to "Human Achievement Hour," the annual chest-thump in which the Competitive Enterprise Institute says Fuck You to the World Wildlife Fund's Earth Hour by asking True Sons of Liberty to burn up as much energy as possible in celebration of the stinking shithole we've made of the earth, I mean progress. The event remains hilarious. Got some links from a CEI publicist to "Human Achievement of the Day" posts about how guitars only exist because of capitalism and so forth. My favorite is about bitcoin:

These are still very early days, and bitcoin is still thought more as a volatile store of value rather than an emergent system of property rights, but the prospects for this particular human achievement are incredibly bright, if regulators do not find a way to stifle it (by regulating people rather than the system, for example).

This puts me in mind of Hearst on the trail of The Color in Deadwood, except Hearst's psychosis was not the type that kept him in his parents' basement. Murder and dismemberment were more his thing -- the sort of activities in furtherance of capital that the CEI pencil-necks are more likely to dress up in purty language than directly perform.

•   In the high-decibel world of wingnut blowhards it's tough to rise above the din, but in a column about the Bowe Bergdahl prosecution at PJ Media Michael Walsh amps it up:  In addition to standard-issue slur-slinging -- "the Coward-in-Chief and his deliberate thumb in the eye to the honor of the American military," "pathetic little pansy Bergdahl," "painfully stupid Jen Psaki," aargh,  blaargh -- Walsh bellows:

...it’s a rare instance of the military finally asserting itself against a rogue commander who is imperiling the nation and insulting it as he goes. Unlawful orders do not have to be obeyed, even from Fearless Leader; that’s a principle the U.S. clarified at Nuremberg. 

One imagines Walsh parachuting into Fort Bragg, a cigar in one hand and a pearl-handled revolver in the other, crying PATRIOTS! NOW IS THE TIME! Or maybe not: see, everyone's a disappointment to Walsh:

John McCain and Mitt Romney should both be hanging their heads in shame. They could have defeated him, and they chose not to. But that’s America in the 21st century — it never saw a fight it wanted to finish.

Maybe Walsh can stake out a little corner of his mental ward and declare that The Real America. I'll have to read Walsh more often; I haven't seen anything like him since the heyday of Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters.

•   The composer John Adams recently remarked at Avery Fisher Hall that Rush Limbaugh exercises "casual brutality toward women" -- which, really, is about as close to an incontrovertible statement as you can get -- and to National Review's Jay Nordlinger this is Hitler plus Big Brother:

To this remark, the audience responded with sustained and robust applause. In 1984, Orwell writes of the two-minute hate. The applause in Avery Fisher Hall did not last for two minutes, but it went on long enough... 

You’re never supposed to analogize anything to the Nazis. That’s the rule. But sometimes I break the rule. And I believe I got a whiff — just a tiny whiff — of Nuremberg in Avery Fisher Hall tonight. Collective hatred, and self-satisfied hatred, based on damnable lies.

I suppose this makes me Genghis Stalin, but Nordlinger is a fucking idiot.

TEACHER'S PELT. The big teachers' union fight is on in Wisconsin. The Republican Governor Scott Walker claims the government needs to severely curtail the union's collective bargaining power in order to save money; TPM notices that Walker blew a hole in the budget himself and suggests that he did so in order to create this crisis and break the union.

As the Christian Science Monitor headline demonstrates, the union is aware of the stakes: "We’re fighting for our very existence." Conservatives know it too. They have been full-throated in their denunciations not only of the union but of teachers in general, portraying them as parasites -- like Teamsters, only easier to beat up. National Review's Jay Nordlinger has been particularly obsessive in this regard. First:

Teachers used to be something like a holy caste, practically the most honorable among us. I come from a family of teachers. Everyone thought of it as a noble calling. Teachers earned too little, but that was remedied, over time.

Then everything went screwy. Teachers were not just well paid. (“Best part-time job in America,” Lee Iacocca once quipped, to the howls of many.) They were some of the most petulant, greediest, nastiest unionists around...

Then:

In a previous era, long ago, teachers were rather like missionaries. You practically had to take a vow of poverty to be a teacher. Often, a teacher [blah blah, miles in the snow]...

I would never go back to the days of missionary-teachers. They ought to be generously compensated. (Shouldn’t we all.)

Even Grandpa Simpson has his moments of generosity, I guess, but Nordlinger quickly catches himself:

But good grief: These grasping, lying, bullying unionists are enough to give the teaching profession a bad name...

Later:

And everything the teachers do, of course, is for the sake of “the children.” I wish the children could talk back, borrowing a phrase from anti-war movements: “Not in my name.”

Instead of playing in the yard and thanking God for their luck.

For decades now, union militancy has dragged the teaching profession through the mud, robbing that profession of its public spirit, even of its professionalism...

And so on. Funny as it is, I don't find the situation cheering. They're trying to turn teachers into a pariah class in order to normalize their removal from the middle class. The whole energy of our rulers seems devoted these days to squeezing that remnant, and if they are not completely successful in this grand opportunity to reduce its number and further weaken union power at the same time, they will keep coming back until they are.

Their cheerleaders ("Look, I am the daughter of union folk; I appreciate why unions were initially formed") spread the story that the rollback is unavoidable, as the morality for collective bargaining died with their parents' need for it, and anyway "the money is not there." Indeed it's not there, because it has been painstakingly relocated.

Though the state of American manufacturing is so parlous even the CIA is worried about it, "economic futurist" Jeff Thredgold is bullish. He explains:

The common wisdom notes that most of these jobs left in search of less-costly havens, initially Mexico and then China. This is certainly true for a share of the jobs.

However, the most important factor leading to lesser employment was major gains in worker productivity. We simply make more goods with fewer bodies. While overall U.S. worker productivity gains have run just under 3 percent annually over the past 10 years, productivity gains in manufacturing have run two to three times higher.

Maybe Thredgold has good reason to feel confident. There's just been an uptick in the mid-Atlantic manufacturing index. The big winner from this, so far, is Mexican stocks, as the uptick "indicated strength in one of Mexico’s most important export sectors," says MarketWatch. I wonder how much of that money is going to be left over for the guy on the line.

FADE FROM BLACK. National Review Online has posted no Martin Luther King observance today. This is a switch. In recent years, NRO writers have celebrated the great man's birth by explaining how he was really a conservative, or wishing aloud that they could still call people of King's race colored. Idiotic as these observances were, they still acknowledged the occasion.

But this year, nothing's doing, unless this thing by Jay Nordlinger is meant as a tribute:

DEPT. OF "I WISH I HAD SAID THAT": "George W. Bush has several black Americans in high-ranking positions, but often they're not considered black, because they are, of course, Republican. So here's my thought: Michael Jackson could have saved himself a fortune on cosmetic surgery just by becoming a Republican -- then, in the eyes of the world, he would have stopped being black."

But then, Nordlinger is capable of this kind of shit the rest of the year too. So it would seem that NRO is passing the holiday in silence.

One would like to think it is embarrassed silence, an acknowledgement that they have nothing worthwhile to say about the subject. I fear it is probably a different sort of resignation that has quieted them: with affirmative action dug in for a few more years at least, the President factoring no black votes into his electorial plans, and the most regular and readable black contributor to NRO a cursed pro-gay libertarian, the NROniks have probably just given up on black folk entirely.

OpinionJournal doesn't mention MLK Day either. Last year, a few days before King's birthday, they posted an article about Republicans and race -- basically praising Bush for speaking against Trent Lott, saying it gave him "racial capital that's much too precious to squander," and warning that "white Americans cannot continue to deliver nationwide elections to Republicans."

Maybe they've changed their minds, too.

UPDATE. Pandagon has some good Right-on-King notes, too.

UPDATE II. Here's something to contemplate on MLK Day. Did you know people made postcards of lynchings? I sure didn't, and I grew up in a culture of victimization that discouraged the pulling up of one's own bootstraps, gave Toni Morrison the Nobel Prize, and continues to stigmatize frat boys who think the term "colored people" is a real scream.

UPDATE III. At NRO's The Corner, Denmother Lopez finally drops some MLK love, sort of: a statement, posted without comment, from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Money quote: "Racial progress is a train that left the station decades ago..." Spin connoisseurs will note the cliche denoting finality ("left the station") used to describe "progress," which is by its nature ongoing. Think one can't have it both ways? One can with the right speechwriters.

THE LIMITS OF EVEN-HANDEDNESS. At Slate Will Saletan says do not trouble your lefty selves about the splinters in conservative eyes when etc. mote etc. Liberal complaints about conservative bullshit are "shrill," he says, because Clinton lied about arsenic and Gore and David Boies made a bad case to the Supreme Court in 2000.

Well, I was willing to admit he sort of has a point. Partisanship cuts both ways, and we are all sometimes guilty of overemphasis, selective exampling, and other tendentious traits.

But. Then I saw this shit at the Wall Street Journal opinion page, with Jay Nordlinger (two for two today, Mr. Nordlinger! Congratulations!) telling us what a bunch of sissies Democrats are. And so I figure, I'll be more inclined to go along with Saletan's other-cheekism if he can show me something in today's mainstream liberal media anywhere near as psycho.

If he finds something that qualifies tomorrow, that's okay. I'll probably find something even worse. Without trying too hard.

A FULL DAY. The Corner has been full of gems today. On the matter of the health care summit, its authors go passive-aggressive, either declaring that they don't care about it (Ramesh Ponnuru even going so far as to say he'd read a book instead!) to rustling up "reader" emails that declared Paul Ryan the big "winner."

Yuval Levin says Obama looked bad because "he doesn’t seem like the President of the United States -- more like a slightly cranky committee chairman or a patronizing professor who thinks that saying something is 'a legitimate argument' is a way to avoid having an argument." Maybe some of the 0.013 percent of the electorate who watched will agree with Levin; more likely the younger of them will be mystified by the spectacle of a President able to maintain, in complete sentences, a discussion with experts.

Levin later responds to Obama, who mischievously asked if the health care benefits government employees received, and which he proposes to give to all Americans, are "socialism": "Well sure they aren’t, but isn’t treating all Americans as though they were employees of the federal government a bit like socialism?" Now your boss has a new excuse when you ask for Martin Luther King Day off.

But this circus is just meant to distract you from the real crime, says Andy McCarthy -- that is, the Cruel, Inhuman And Degrading Interrogations Prohibition Act, which seeks to make some forms of torture expressly illegal -- or, as McCarthy puts it, "Democrats are saying they would prefer to see tens of thousands of Americans die than to see a KSM subjected to sleep-deprivation or to have his 'phobias exploited.'" (The Act was later pulled, in a great victory for Andy McCarthy and children who like to pull the wings off flies and wish to be assured of government jobs when they grow up.)

Ponnuru, tired of reading, emerges to provide an object lesson in Republican health care strategy:

Mickey Kaus argues that passing Obamacare is the only way the Democrats can disprove the Republican charges against it. "For months, both GOP and Fox hosts have been talking about socialized medicine and death panels and vicious Medicare cuts and the government coming between you and your doctor, etc. If Democrats pass the bill and none of this happens, Republican opponents will be more than defeated. They'll be discredited." Maybe. But if taxes and premiums rise and people don't see benefits from this big expensive comprehensive bill, maybe not. . . . Do Democrats really believe not only that this legislation is going to have positive effects but that its transition rules have been so well-designed that its short-term effects will quickly be seen as positive?

Translation: OK, we won't be able to get away with that bullshit anymore, but maybe the plan will take time to work. Then we can get started on our next line of bullshit!

And there's Jay Nordlinger, strewing aperçus like rose petals ("Calvin and Hobbes, Bloom County, The Far Side — where do they go? [That was merely rhetorical.]") He devotes a few paragraphs to the japes of panhandlers he and others have encountered:

I also mention, in my column, the most charming thing I ever heard a panhandler say: “Would you like to contribute to the United Negro Pizza Fund?” I did. That man was in Washington, D.C., I believe. A reader writes to say that he knew such a man in Albany, N.Y. — a man who used that line regularly. “I wonder who is training beggars to use that clever approach.”

Finally, a different reader writes, “You’ve reminded me of a sign I saw in San Francisco. The man said he wanted money for ‘alcoholism research.’” That’s the spirit! (No pun intended.)

Next week, he'll tell us that he saw some Mexicans on the subway singing "Guantanamero," and marvel that they had strayed so far from their homeland.

Inevitably, there is Goldberg. Challenged by a Ron Paul fan who imagines Goldberg has insulted him, he dances around, saying the Paulites don't really have anything ("If/when the Fed does get audited, it will be a lot like the search for WMDs in Iraq"), but "I'm with where Ron Paul where it matters" -- that is, he thinks his stupid Fed audit should be done even though it's useless. That's how Goldberg makes friends when he doesn't have a spare bag of Cheetos. And along the way he gives us one of the better Goldbergisms:

I also think it's funny how so many people (on the left and right) love to dismiss stuff from the MSM when it contradicts their ideological positions, but cling to it as God's proof they're right when it seems to confirm their position.

It's like he missed the entire internet, not to mention his own career.