LIKE CONSERVATISM, EXCEPT WORSE.

You may have heard that Rand Paul, who declared for the GOP Presidential nomination today, has changed his stances and his image remarkably in recent months, going from a heavily libertarian son-of-Ron drone-fighter to a fuck-Islam Jesus freak. And you probably assume he's doing that as an act to appeal to the snake-handling Republican war pigs that stand between him and the nomination.

But should we doubt his libertarian bona fides? I say no, but that's because I don't think much of libertarian bona fides in the first place. Attend Matt Welch of libertarian flagship Reason: Sure, he says, the holy-rolling is a little bit much, but --

Like his father, former Libertarian Party presidential candidate and Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, Rand has never hid his religion under a bushel basket when courting libertarian voters because he doesn't have to. Arguably alone among large swaths of the American electorate, even atheist libertarians tend to respect the ways in which religious organizations and communities fill vital roles in civil society. Indeed, even as outspoken an atheist and libertarian as Penn Jillette is quite open to the ways religious groups benefit society.

He's got a point. As I've noticed before, libertarians who'll go to the mat and paint their faces blue for legal weed and raw milk suddenly get all big-tentish (or downright conservative) when the subject is abortion. (Or women's rights in general.) And we've been seeing libertarian-fundamentalist fusion lately over the sacred Constitutional right to refuse service to gay people looking for wedding cakes -- from William McGurn of the Wall Street Journal, for example, who does us the favor of explaining in his "Indiana’s Libertarian Moment" article why fundalibertarians feel as they do:

In 1964, when the Supreme Court upheld the Civil Rights Act’s requirement that hotels serve African-Americans, blacks, especially in the South, effectively had their ability to travel restricted by the possibility they couldn’t secure lodging. In contrast, no one today suggests gay couples can’t find a baker or photographer for their weddings.

If they can get you to buy this, expect them to come back in, oh, a nano-second to ask, "Hey, why do black people need this so-called Civil Rights Act anymore either? They have hotels.com!"

Some of you may conclude from this that libertarians are max-freedom except when it comes to people they don't resemble. I'm sure that's true for a lot of them, but the thing to keep in mind is this: the apparent contradictions of libertarianism disappear when you consider the true goal of its advocates is not greater personal liberty at all, but to devolve all government power to for-profit companies -- to privatize prisons, highways, and even natural resources once thought to be the birthright of all people, so that everything becomes that highest end of human effort: a revenue stream for the rich. In other words, what conservatives try to disguise about themselves, libertarians proudly own. I leave it to you whether that's a point in their favor.

SEASON 7, EPISODE 8.

(Yes, we're back to Mad Men recaps. Patience, we don't have many to go.) Don Draper's arc is beginning to look like Tony Soprano's, and I don't expect a better end for him. Tony had some glimpses of a better way that he turned out unable to benefit from (I still recall him contemplating nature and being grateful for life while Paulie was breaking some guy's leg); Don gets so many messages from the great beyond that I expect William Burroughs to start talking to him, yet he doesn't seem to get anywhere either.

The flashbacks to Rachel Katz and (implicitly) Midge Daniels make sense in the same way that Don's season-6-ending whorehouse monologue made sense: Don is too intelligent not to contemplate the past (his past, anyway), but not enlightened enough to react to it in a constructive way. But that Hershey meeting flash-bang is really beginning to look like a misdirection, not to say a con. Is Don really just a charming zilch? So far in the interrupted season 7 we've seen him act slightly nicer than previously to the people he loves, but everyone else he seems puzzled by. (He reacts to Cosgrove's monologue with the same bewildered expression he gave Cosgrove's tap-dance in "The Crash.") It's getting so the sordid sequelae of his sexcapades are just another of Mad Men's guilty pleasures -- fun to see the coupling, fun also to see the regret and/or horror afterwards. As regret/horror go, Rachel's sister at shiva and the waitress really delivered. But what's any of this ever going to make Don feel except sad, and do except drink? For a guy who reads Dante at the beach, Don's not really a heavy thinker.

I realize season premieres, or half-season premieres, are mostly set-up, so there's no reason to be disappointed by the lack of significant action in this episode. The most interesting thing to me about Cosgrove is that, delicious as his vengeance is ("Shit" -- Pete Campbell), it also means he's not going to write that novel. And Peggy's drunk date is charming because she's charming, and it's nice to see this poor messed-up Draperstein's Monster relax a little, and her date isn't (or hasn't yet been revealed as) a programmatic Mad Men sexist scumbag -- unlike the McCann creeps in the Peggy-Joan meeting whose hair-raising misogyny is dialed up so high I thought it might be a dream sequence, or that Allen Funt would jump in to pull the plug. Joan's reaction to that scene -- bitterness toward Peggy, and highly unsatisfying retail therapy -- is, given what we've learned about Joan, no less depressingly expected than the Don reactions I've been complaining about. But thanks in large part to the brilliant Christina Hendricks, whose elevator scene bears watching without dialogue, I now find Joan more interesting.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

One of the funniest things by two of the funniest people of all time.

•    It is axiomatic that Jonah Goldberg can make anything worse, and the Indiana RFRA case is no exception. Here he shows evidence of having been crammed with some libertarian revisionism: Goldberg argues that the pre-"clarification" RFRA was not like Jim Crow because Jim Crow was really about economic oppression -- because everything is! -- and had nothing to do with anything so gauche as violent prejudice against a despised minority, and still less to do with political power:

Of course, the more infamous Jim Crow laws were aimed at barring blacks from being able to vote. But there was a pernicious logic to such efforts. Denying blacks the vote, even in states where they were the majority of citizens, guaranteed that they couldn’t overturn racist state economic regulations. 

In fact, says Goldberg, Confederate businesses loved serving black people, but because a flood of emancipated black workers caused a labor shortage (forget it, he's on a roll), both blacks and black-loving shopkeepers were Jim Crowed into submission not by the Klan nor by the White Leagues, but by Big Business -- you know, the people conservatives worshiped as gods until Tim Cook said he was gay. "Ultimately," says Goldberg, "the federal government had to use just coercion to crush unjust state-government coercion," without mentioning that his own magazine was against that "just coercion" every step of the way; they affect to feel sorry about that now, and one would like to think that they'll apologize for their absurd attitude toward gays fifty years from now (if they and the nation last so long), but alas, Goldberg shows that they haven't really learned a thing:

In Indiana, the most vocal and arguably the most powerful voices against even the perception of anti-gay discrimination have come from the business community. And, one suspects, there are plenty of people in the wedding-planning industry eager for such business. 

We could impose a fine on recalcitrant religious wedding photographers. But the market already does that, every time they turn away paying customers.

They still think Title II is an injustice and don't want it applied to anyone else.

•  One Bob & Ray thing isn't enough: Enjoy this bit -- first four minutes of this clip from the Letterman show, but the rest is okay too -- in which "Barry Campbell" talks about his disastrous opening in the play "The Tender T-Bone."

•    From the Weird Reaction file: You may have seen the fascinating story of a suitcase full of photos, receipts, and diary entries chronicling a German businessman's extra-marital affair forty-five years ago that has been revived as a gallery show. Most of us find it interesting or creepy or a spur to reflection. Ole Perfesser Instapundit, however, reacts thusly:

IT WASN’T AN AFFAIR, it was performance art. Bow down and don’t criticize, philistines!

Most of the time I think Reynolds is just putting it on for the rubes, but sometimes it seems he really is that weird mix of Babbitt and Nathan Bedford Forrest he plays on the internet.

•    Speaking of the arts, I went over to Acculturated to take in the latest by Mark Judge, or Mark Gauvreau Judge or Gark Jauvreau Mudge or whatever he calls himself these days. He's sighing over a 1954 Sports Illustrated cover showing a pretty girl in a modest one-piece bathing suit largely obscured by sea spray. As you may have guessed, this inspires a meditation on how much sexier things were before sideboob.

More than fifty years later, the Pamela Nelson photo ignites my passion more than anything that is in the hyped, recently published 2015 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition. The photographs in the new swimsuit issue are dull. The poses are clichéd, similar, and the models look like cyborgs. There is the arching-back pose. The bedroom-eyes-on-the-beach shot. The backside shot (or shots). Did I mention the arching-back pose?

In our culture today, pornography has excelled at titillating the masses, but is poor at capturing the soul. And no matter what our sex-drenched society tells us, sex is sexier when the soul is involved.

Every single one of the poses named above comes with a link, so Acculturated readers can decide whether they want to beat off to contemporary or vintage pin-ups -- which I guess is how some people measure cultural seriousness. Chacun à son gout is very very true...

•    Still speaking of the arts, this is from a report on wingnut intellectual George Nash's speech to the Philadelphia Society last month:

“Many conservatives, of course, including many in this room, are laboring valiantly and effectively in the realm of cultural renewal,” Nash said. “But as a historian I am constrained to note that the ‘progressives’ in this country continue to predominate in the production of culture, and in the manufacture and distribution of prestige among our cultural elites. As long as this imbalance continues, the fate of post-Reagan conservatism will be problematic.”

Do remember this, dear reader: You may think of novels, plays, ballet, music, etc. as works of art that illuminate the human condition, but to the great minds of the conservative movement they are merely widgets in "the manufacture and distribution of prestige among our cultural elites." Their policies are inhuman, that is, because they don't really relate to humanity.

WHEN LAST WE LEFT OUR HEROES...

I'd like to forget about Indiana, but it keeps exponentiating stupidity like some kind of Moron Collider. Some jerks menaced an anti-gay-marriage pizzeria, and the brethren declared this the fault of the reporter who revealed they were anti-gay-marriage. PJ Media's Scott Ott claimed the reporter "fabricated" the story "out of nothing" (that is, she accurately reported what the pizza people said); then people started menacing the reporter.

By the way, does anyone here approve of pizza shops getting death threats? I didn't think so. I suppose if you really did, you'd have adopted the successful gamergate model  and I'd be hearing how the threats were just satire. But the big story in rightwing circles is that you, me and Ted Kennedy have the pizzeria pinned down with Kalashnikovs.

"The left doesn’t care who gets hurt, so long as they get what they want," raved Ott. "Leftists use Gay people as blunt instruments to hammer only Christens," agreed Samuel Gonzalez at Right Wing News. "They don’t have the guts to go after Muslims who literally throw Homosexuals off roofs in the Middle East." (I don't normally bother to say this, but all rightblogger spellings/capitalizations are verbatim.) And of course the Daily Caller's resident drama queen Jim Treacher cranks it to eleven:

The social-justice bullies of the modern left got what they wanted. Gay marriage is legal in Indiana. But that’s not enough. Nothing will ever be enough, because they need to think of themselves as victims.

That last line must be some sort of inside joke.

...Exit question for gay-marriage enthusiasts: If you’re so sure you’re right, if your stance is so strong, why do you feel the need to destroy anybody who so much as dissents from it?

Why do I what? I don't remember calling in a death threat to the pizza parlor -- but Treacher's not talking to me or you, he's declaiming to the galleries as he plays the lead in The Tragedy of the Victims of Big Gay, and hams it way up. That's what all these guys are doing. If they can get enough people to buy their martyr act, they seem to hope, they might get them to think American Christians are actually being ground under the heel of homosexuals. It's win-whine!

UPDATE. Matt Welch of Reason:

The bad news, for those of us on the suddenly victorious side of the gay marriage debate, is that too many people are acting like sore winners, not merely content with the revolutionary step of removing state discrimination against same-sex couples in the legal recognition of marriage, but seeking to use state power to punish anyone who refuses to lend their business services to wedding ceremonies they find objectionable. That's not persuasion, that's force, and force tends to be the anti-persuasion among those who are on the receiving end of it.

Like Title II of the Civil Rights Act. Well, I expect they'll get rid of that soon enough. (Welch quotes Rod Dreher in support of his argument, which is just perfect.)

RFRA ROFL: MORE WRECKAGE FROM THE INDIANA CRACK-UP.

Some of the libertarians are getting very worked up over this Indiana thing. Makes sense; after all, the real issue behind all the cake-and-florist agitation is public accommodations as a civil rights issue and, as you may remember from Rand Paul's spirited if temporary stand against the Civil Rights Act, libertarians have never fully accepted the justice of making white people do business with black people, so making straight people do business with gay people must seem to them a gruesome flashback.*

Timothy P. Carney, for example, has thoroughly melted down at the Washington Examiner, doing a better impersonation of Carol Newquist from Little Murders even than David Brooks:

Religious liberty is the terms of surrender the Right is requesting in the culture war. It is conservative America saying to the cultural and political elites, you have your gay marriage, your no-fault divorce, your obscene music and television, your indoctrinating public schools and your abortion-on-demand. May we please be allowed to not participate in these?

Gays, abortion, jungle music -- the injustice never stops.

But no. Tolerance isn't the goal. Religious conservatives must atone for their heretical views with acts of contrition: Bake me a cake, photograph my wedding, pay for my abortion and my contraception.

This will make a great schtick for pride parades: Big Gay puppets lumbering down Fifth Avenue hissing BAKE ME A CAAAAKE!

But for sheer entertainment value you can't beat the religious maniacs. The Anchoress claims she's been busy with some holy shit and after a brief Indiana post scuttles back to it, but in between riddles us this:

There is a staggering amount of hysteria and outrage being spewed about Indiana’s RFRA by many of the same people who — just mere weeks ago — were spewing in hysterical outrage about the nation’s growing so-called “rape culture”, and this despite disputed claims that 1 in 5 women are raped on college campuses, and a highly dubious accusation of gang rape on a college campus.

See, you and your gay friends are all liars. Rape liars!

Rape, of course, is an indisputably heinous act; because it forces a woman to engage in something she does not want to do, it must always be roundly decried and despised by all sane people.

That's kind of a strangely mild description of rape, isn't it -- "forces a woman to engage in something she does not want to do"? Makes it sound like dusting, or going to her boyfriend's office party. Eventually we see why Thee Anch portrayed it thus:

But, that being the case, what shall we make of the fact that, for the most part, the very same entities who (disputed “rape culture” claims aside) quite rightly insist that a woman should never, ever be forced to engage in acts against her will, have pivoted toward Indiana to demand that “other” people be forced to engage in acts against their wills?

Should governments, or new agencies, or pundits for that matter, really be positioning themselves over people and telling them that if they do not submit to what is demanded of them — and engage willingly — then they will be forced to take it, and like it?

 This is the real War on Women: dusting, rape, and gay cakes.

Doubtless someone will say, “these two issues are not at all the same.”

Wow she's pyschic!

I’d argue that to the people being shoved down, they look exactly alike. 

I’m going back to my project. Comments remain closed.

SLAM! When she comes back, watch out for the spraying hot chrism.

UPDATE. Normal comments policy is, when we delete a troll, we also delete comments in response, but I must say those comments are still pretty funny out of context, so carry on and good job all around.

UPDATE 2. * That's why Ramesh Ponnuru is so calm about the nearly-even split in public opinion over this issue. In the context of the fake story these guys have been pushing -- evil libtard homos versus Christianity -- this would be a disturbing result, since it would suggest America is divided over "religious liberty." But in view of the real goal -- which is to trim back our traditional understanding of civil rights -- it's actually an advance.

GAY? WHO SAID ANYTHING ABOUT GAY?

Shorter Mollie Hemingway:  RFRAs are for letting Indians get their eagle feathers back and cute little kids wear their hair long, and not for the don't-wanna-serve-gays stuff for which this one's obviously tailored (and which I usually endorse but am keeping mum about until this whole thing blows over).

UPDATE. Hey, America's libertarian flagship says the law's not so bad, liberals are just trying to "signal" to their liberal buddies by opposing it -- you know, like with the hanky code. Who would have guessed they'd take that approach?

UPDATE 2. Speaking of signaling, here's neo-neocon:

I’ll also add that I wonder if the forces driving the anti-Indiana campaign would be interested in making an exemption for devout Muslims who run businesses and don’t want to be forced to be part of gay marriage ceremonies. Somehow I think they might.

'cuz you liberals luvvv gays but you luvvv Muslims more I bet. The brethren seem to think this is some sort of team sport that you win by projecting as hard as you can.

UPDATE 3: Ross Douthat is Just.. Asking... Questions!

4.) In the longer term, is there a place for anyone associated with the traditional Judeo-Christian-Islamic view of sexuality in our society’s elite level institutions? Was Mozilla correct in its handling of the Brendan Eich case? Is California correct to forbid its judges from participating in the Boy Scouts? What are the implications for other institutions? To return to the academic example: Should Princeton find a way to strip Robert George of his tenure over his public stances and activities? Would a public university be justified in denying tenure to a Orthodox Jewish religious studies professor who had stated support for Orthodox Judaism’s views on marriage?...

What if a Muslim didn't like gay people, would you not like the Muslim -- oops, I see neo-neocon had already covered that; okay then,

6) Should churches that decline to bless same-sex unions have their tax-exempt status withdrawn? Note that I’m not asking if it would be politically or constitutionally possible: If it were possible, should it be done?

Also, what if Superman fought Batman on a red-sun planet? Who would win? Who would win in a fight between Bon Jovi and a blade of grass? Just asking questions, here. Finally, what if we could make everyone get gay-married because you love gay people so much? You wouldn't like it? AHA HYPOCRITE! Off to the club to celebrate a great rhetorical victory with the rest of the fuzz-chinned pipe-suckers.

UPDATE 4. Dana Houle points out that some of the wingnuttier wingnuts used to consider Mike Pence a statist trimmer. This suggests that he hopes the new law will shore up his base. It sure has worked on Rod Dreher, who wails that opposition to the law means we're in "post-Christian America" and pledges allegiance to the GOP:

Because religious liberty is the most important political issue to me, it is hard to imagine sitting out the 2016 presidential election, as I have done the past two times because I couldn’t stomach the Republican nominee. It is impossible to imagine voting Democratic in 2016, because the Democrats are actively committed to legislating contempt for traditional Christians like me... 

Voting Republican is no guarantee that religious liberty would be strengthened in SCOTUS rulings in the future, but there is some hope that a GOP president would nominate justices sympathetic to religious liberty concerns. With President Hillary Clinton, or any conceivable Democrat, there is no hope at all.

I always knew he'd come back to the fold.

UPDATE 5. Pence has spoken -- Washington Times:

The situation has been upgraded to Hilarious.

UPDATE 6. Yeah, it appears "You and your fag friends are the Real Oppressors" is today's Shorter Entire Right-Wing Universe. Among others, Ben Domenesch portrays homosexuals as crafty demons who acted all needy and cuddly and then suddenly ass-raped Uncle Sam:

The notable thing about Culture War 4.0 is its consistent rejection of tolerance in favor of government enforced morality. Remember your Muad’Dib: “When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles.”...

It was all well and good when tolerance was about conservatives and religious types swallowing their objections and going along with things – but now that the left is being asked to do the same thing? Forget about it.

So, I guess gay people are in charge now! At least our het concentration camps will be tastefully designed.

UPDATE 7. Come on, dude, you're making this too easy:

Actually, I think Down Our Throats would make a good title for the off our backs of the anti-gay movement, when it inevitably emerges.

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.

ANNALS OF LIBERTARIANISM, PART FFS.

At The Federalist, Georgi Boorman gives us the usual rightwing schtick about ISIS (i.e., Obama's a pussy let's get our war on):

Despite Boko Haram’s purported pledge of fealty to ISIS, apparently neither organizations’ bloody rampages have reached the level of egregiousness that stirs the executive branch to crush the evil gobbling up Iraq and surrounding territories. President Obama has told us repeatedly that there will be “no boots on the ground” save for “advisers, trainers, and security personnel.” Regardless of whether the advisory missions happen to put those advisers in a combat role, the goal, apparently, is to keep us “out of another ground war.” 

Whether this be on principle of non-interference or sheer ignorance of an organization that will, if unchecked, eventually threaten global stability, the result is inaction (save for a few airstrikes).

By "a few airstrikes," Boorman of course means over 1,300 as of December 2014. At The Federalist, bullshit walks and talks!

The U.S. military wears a heavy boot, but at the moment it does nothing more than cast a shadow over the growing terrorist threat.

With a prose style like that Boorman will go far in the movement. But she still has to thread the needle: something that looks like a solution to ISIS but doesn't come with blinking QUAGMIRE tags all over it. Her Big Idea: Bring back privateers!

“Privateers” were given letters of marque permitting them to capture and plunder enemy ships; an admiralty court adjudicated on the legality of the capture... 

To fight war tourists like Jihad John, hire some guns! Maybe they'll be dashing, shiver-me-timbers young libertarians looking for adventure! Or Somali pirates fresh out of prison!  (Probably, though, they'll be petty criminals and navy rejects with nothing left to lose.)

Some will rightly point out the potential for abuse, as there almost certainly will be, as with all social and governmental institutions. However, the U.S. government would be holding accountable a much smaller group of individuals, whose scope of operations are far more limited than the expansive U.S. military. If abuse were to be found, processes for investigation and prosecution would be in place to swiftly bring to account and deal punishment for violations, as they had in the past.

You know, like with Blackwater.

Some less rational factions will undoubtedly hail this as a crazy right-winged conspiracy to privatize the military. But Founders did not design a Constitution with powers that undermine other powers. If letters of marque were a tool of privatization, what good would it have been to include provisions, just a few lines below this, “to raise and support armies” and to “provide and maintain a Navy”?

I dunno -- the Post Office is also in the Constitution, but conservatarians want to privatize that, too. Self-evidently, their dream is to strip the federal government for parts and empower privateers to handle all its former functions. Of course, the ones who would be fighting ISIS for us would be flying no flag but the Jolly Roger, and if it should turn out that someone else is offering better pay than Uncle Sam, there's nothing to stop them from turning their guns around. That's what happens when you love the market more than your country.

ZHDANOV NEVER LEFT.

This pops up in the middle of a Charles Two Middle Initials Cooke rant about how PC is intimidating professors and you liberals who think Ted Cruz looks like Joseph McCarthy are actually The Real Joseph McCarthy:

But the truth is that if Arthur Miller were writing The Crucible today he would likely be less interested in effusive senators from Texas and more interested in the more modern pathologies that the Cruzes of the world tend typically to disdain. Presumably, Miller would look at our universities and our media, at our malleable “speech codes,” our self-indulgent “safe spaces,” our preference for “narrative” over truth, and at our pathetic appeasement of what is little more than good old-fashioned illiberalism, and he would despair.

It seems never to have occurred to Cooke that if his analogy is sound, then The Crucible is already about speech codes etc. -- because it's not a news report but a work of art, which pertains to the universal, and resonates with anyone who has experienced mass hysteria and its attendant repression in whatever form. Other people know that; that's why the play is always getting revived. Audiences get the connection. Cooke might get a theater company together to alterna-stage The Crucible to look like Oleanna if he likes.

I suspect that Cooke's not interested in universals, though: What he wants is an already-famous property that's about how college students are oppressing conservatism -- or, failing that, to get people to believe that the dead author of the famous property was really a rightwinger and just didn't know it. You know, like they do with George Orwell and many others, to avoid the hard work of making (or even seriously engaging with) any art themselves.

UPDATE. Jonah Goldberg tells his colleague: You say McCarthyism like it's a bad thing.

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)

THIS YEAR'S MUDDLE.

After hearing blessedly little from or about him in recent years, I see Hugh Hewitt has become the Important Conservative Journalist of the moment. At National Journal, Shane Goldmacher tells us in "It Had To Be Hugh" that "Hewitt, a professor of constitutional law who often sounds the part, isn't a conventional right-wing talk-radio host" and has "the demeanor of a friendly academic"; he also says Hewitt's "relationship with the mainstream media is complicated." At Power Line John Hinderaker says "Hugh tries to elevate our discourse about politics and public life" and "believes that, day by day, intelligent conversation with important, knowledgeable people on both sides of the political aisle can bring us closer to realizing the democratic ideal."

This does not much comport with the Hugh Hewitt I've been observing lo these many years. For example:

In 2005 an Iraq War correspondent suggested to Hewitt that he didn't really know what was going on at the front, and Hewitt rejoined that he did indeed know because he was at that moment broadcasting from the Empire State Building and "the Empire State Building... has been in the past, and could be again, a target..." Also, "in downtown Manhattan, it's not comfortable, although it's a lot safer than where you are, people always are three miles away from where the jihadis last spoke in America... Although you are on the front line, this was the front line four and a half years ago." Hewitt's primary residence at the time was in California.

By 2006 the war wasn't as popular as it had been and Hewitt explained that turncoats like Andrew Sullivan and Peter Beinart had only "turned defeatists" because they "feel disdained" by President Bush, and that the President should have them over to the Indian Treaty Room for a chin-wag: "Even if some are too far gone into opposition to be recalled, some will wake up." Ah, what might have been!

Hewitt also does his bit for organized religion: When Tom Hanks was pushing his Da Vinci Code movie and said "we always knew there would be a segment of society that would not want this movie to be shown," Hewitt warned Hanks, "Tom: Careful now... stick to the obvious – it is an absurd piece of invention that makes for a fun thriller – and all will be well." Nobody crosses the professorial Hugh Hewitt! When Jeff Jarvis (!) said something negative about the religious right, Hewitt said, "it is a useful exercise to run through Jeff's piece and substitute 'the Jews' for the 'religious right' and all pronounces referring to the 'religious right.' Jeff is of course not anti-Semitic..." That's elevating the discourse!

And Lord, does he go on about that Emm Ess Emm. You can catch Hewitt doing the traditional goldurn-librul-media schtick anytime, but a particularly good example of his "complicated" relationship with it is this 2004 bit in which he suggested that Michael Kinsley, who'd just taken over the L.A. Times editorial page, should hire Roger L. Simon, Laura Ingraham, Max Boot, Jim Lileks, and Mickey Kaus. But what's the difference, Hewitt went on, "even a reinvigorated editorial page and opinion page won't help much given the senior staff's refusal to deal with the poisonous bias in the 'news' reports..." Kinsley for some reason didn't take his advice, and Hewitt must have been pissed: In 2005, when Kinsley's paper did a story about a couple of North Koreans who offered an obviously untrustworthy defense of their country, Hewitt pretended to believe the L.A. Times -- or, as he called it, The Pyongyang Times -- was peddling Nork propaganda.

Hewitt's devotion to the "democratic ideal" is such that in 2011 he was trying like hell to get Herman Cain and Ron Paul bounced from the Republican primary debates so the establishment candidates could have more time on camera.

Other Hewitt nuggets: "The only reason [Chris] Muir [creator of the horrible Day by Day comic] isn't widely syndicated is MSM bias." There's also Hewitt pretending to be outraged at the treatment of John Murtha a year after supporting that treatment.  And Hewitt predicting in 2005 that the Catholic cardinals, inspired by "the cruel death of Terri Schiavo," would elect an American Pope.

And given that one of Hewitt's plums is the right to ask questions at a Republican debate, we should recall this brainstorm of his from 2013:

Proposed opening question for the first GOP presidential debate in the fall of 2015: "Was the 'shutdown showdown' of October 2013 good or necessary -- either or both -- and why?"

I don't have any idea how it will be answered by the 10 or so potentially serious candidates who may be on that stage, but the difficulty of predicting the best answer can be found — where else? — in two movies about war.

But what's the use -- every so often a rightwing apparatchik like Hewitt is elevated and promoted as a fair-minded voice of alternative reason; in fact it's happened to Hewitt before, in a 2005 New Yorker blowjob ("Hewitt is definitely a Republican, but he is no mere mouthpiece"). If Hewitt really thinks the MSM is as nefarious as he portrays them, maybe he'd consider they might only be promoting him to make conservatism look bad.

UPDATE. In comments, The_Kenosha_Kid: "Don't make fun of the dangers of working in the Empire State Building! I saw a documentary once where it was attacked by a giant monkey."

Hardcore spelunkers can also read Hewitt's 2008 propaganda ebook, "Letter to a Young Obama Supporter." At the time, I reviewed its mendacious and definitely not "friendly academic" approach, though I missed some of Hewitt's youth outreach, such as this let-me-put-it-in-terms-you'll understand explanation of why Obama's lack of experience should concern the youngs:

If you could be given golf lessons by either Tiger Woods or the local club pro, guitar lessons by Eric Clapton or the guitarist for the garage band playing downtown, cooking lessons by Emeril Lagasse or by the night cook at the local diner, which choice would you make in every case?

 I like to imagine Hewitt laying aside his pen after that one and sighing with satisfaction, "eat your heart out, Greg Gutfeld."

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

"I got drugs to take/and a mind to break"

Thanks to Chuck Gilligan for steering me -- these guys do Britain & Mike Skinner proud.

•   After that last post I hate to subject you good people to a Megan McArdle streak, but this is irresistible:

Fans of Tbogg already grok the internet tradition of conflating McArdle's conspicuous-consumerism with her crap political views, but I  think anyone can appreciate that she's seriously miffed Canada has $1.4K Thermomixes but America does not (guess the one she was kvelling about in 2011 got a dent in it or something), and gets her editor to indulge her in speculating at 1,400-word length on the Economix, e.g. "QVC's 'gadget' price point seems to top out at 'Dyson vacuum cleaner,'" tee hee. If they haven't sent her a new "test" model by now this isn't the rotting corpse of a Republic I grew up in.

•   It's clearer than ever that Obama consciously trolls rightwing idiots as a hobby. I'm not sure what to think about the universal voting proposal, but it has elicited some choice gibberish from Peggy Noonan:

Most of us are moved by the sight of citizens lined up at the polls on Election Day. We should urge everyone to care enough to stand in that line. But we should not harass or bother those who, with modesty and even generosity, say they are happy to leave the privilege of the ballot to those who are engaged.

How dare we refuse their generosity by demanding they participate in our stupid "democracy"! Next we'll be demanding they pay taxes! (I wonder what the Crazy Jesus Lady thinks about Ben Carson's request at CPAC last year that conservatives drag their grandparents to the polls even if they say, “I’ve given up on America, I’m just waiting to die.”) Oh, and here's Noonan explaining her apparently brand new idea that Presidents named Bush are bad (except the next one -- he'll be swell!):

George W. Bush broke his party after his 2004 re-election, in part with his immigration proposals and the way he advanced them, with aides insulting his GOP opponents with insults—“nativist,” they said—and, in the end, by two unwon wars.

That's up there with "He dressed badly and was not a good mixer,  in addition to being a serial killer."

•   Remember the Oppressed Children of Sperm Donors whose lamentations I covered a few years back? Well, they're back at The Federalist, where two anti-donor activists rally support for those Dolce & Gabbana guys who called test-tube kids "synthetic children." The authors note that some people were upset about this because they had donor-enabled offspring, nephews etc., and here's the authors' stern rejoinder:

It is important to note, however, that infants, toddlers, and all of these “miracle” beings are too young to protest their own objectification.

I hear ya, sister -- I didn't ask to be born into this fucking world, but my mother got knocked up in a time before abortion rights. Rough luck all around! Oh, and also:

I am indeed a human being. My liver, heart, hair, and enzymes all work the same. I’ve discovered it is my psychology that is different and not-quite-right, due to my conception.

No comment.

•   Since it's nearly the weekend, here is your latest installment of What Is Rod Dreher Whining About Now?

UPDATE: I’m all for praying with the body. We do that all the time in the Orthodox Church. But yoga is a Hindu discipline, not a Christian one, and the syncretism of mixing yoga with Christian worship is troubling.

This has been What Is Rod Dreher Whining About Now?

THE HACKMAID'S TALE.

The latest surge of Poors-Must-Learn-Morals-from-Their-Betters gush, inspired by the new Robert Putnam book but rooted in traditional Marriage Makes You Rich boilerplate, is best known by its David Brooks effusion, covered here. Since then we've had Ross Douthat and all manner of idiots shaking the scold-stick on this subject. But leave it to Megan McArdle to accelerate the stupid like a Hadron Collider:

There is one place this change might come from: Hollywood. Entertainment is a surprisingly powerful venue for articulating social norms, and if Hollywood decided that it had a social responsibility to promote stable families and changed its story lines accordingly, that might actually do some good. 

Yes, the Artist Formerly Known as Jane Galt wants private enterprise to pitch in with some free propaganda.

I'm not talking about sticking a few propaganda story lines into Very Special Episodes of some sitcom, which wouldn't do a darn thing. Rather, I'm saying that if Hollywood actually believed that married two-parent families were overwhelmingly optimal, that would naturally shape what they wrote, in a way that would in turn probably shape what Americans believe, and do.

Hang on -- this suggests that Hollywood product currently militates against marriage. Is that so? I must have missed the successful sitcoms "How I Met Your Baby-Momma" and "My Three Sons (from Separate Mothers)." And looking at last year's top-grossing films, I'm having a hard time figuring how they could have shoehorned marriage into movies about wizards and superheroes; maybe they could have had Katniss from the Hunger Games movies falter until a priest rushes in to marry her to some guy, like Popeye deriving strength from spinach.

Of course, McArdle's offer isn't serious --

But this is an inherently socially conservative message, and Hollywood is about the furthest thing you can name from socially conservative -- our entertainment industry tends to send socially conservative messages only accidentally, as it did with "16 and Pregnant." And there is nearly as much social distance between David Brooks and your average Hollywood show runner as there is between David Brooks and the kids whose lives he wants to change.

-- it's just more ressentiment for the regular crowd, who sometimes need help believing that social-net-shredding policies have less to do with the parlous state of the poor than evil Hollyweird cokewhores.

UPDATE. Hang on, asks Meanie-meanie, tickle a person in comments: "Hollywood who? Or is that a surname? Joe Hollywood from Detroit? Or maybe Frank Hollywood from Miami?" Tsk, Meanie -- it's a metonym for the cultural apparat -- you know, what such people used to call "Jews." Or maybe McArdle doesn't know this, and imagines herself handing out Operation Hitching Post slide decks to a bunch of guys who look like Robert Loggia, wear their shirts unbuttoned to the plexus, chomp fancy cigars, and produce all the movies.

MORAL RELATIVISM.

You've heard about the NYPD sneaking into Wikipedia to edit brutality victim Eric Garner's page and those of other victims so that they might better reflect the cops' own view of events. Probably you figured this is the sort of bullshit that's so egregious even conservatives wouldn't approve out loud. Well, you forgot about City Journal, also known as Late-Stage Giuliani In Print, where the problem is always The Black Guy. Here's Matthew Hennessey (whom we last saw asking "Is Bill de Blasio still a Sandinista at heart?") on the subject:

Cue the predictable howls of outrage at this attempt to whitewash the cold-blooded murder of an innocent man. The technology website Ars Technica called the edits an attempt “to sanitize Wikipedia entries about cases of police brutality.” Think Progress said they were an example of the police department’s fumbling its response to “increased scrutiny” after recent protests. 

The outrage is misplaced, however. The real scandal is that anyone thinks Wikipedia is a reliable source of unbiased information.

[blink. blink.]

...At best, Wikipedia is an approximation of the truth. If the philosophy is come one, come all, then the NYPD has as much right to fiddle with the entries that pertain to it as anyone else. Let the edits fall where they may.

In other words: See, Wikipedia isn't perfect, so why are you complaining that we're smearing it with shit? (In other words, their traditional argument when it comes to healthcare or any other public equity they've fucked up.)

Just in case you're not yet sure where Hennessey is coming from, here's his portrayal of the Garner case:

Garner’s death was caught on a cell phone video and has been viewed by millions across the country, but what happened on the day he died remains in dispute.

You know, like everyone saw the Apollo 11 moon footage, but there's still a perfectly understandable controversy over whether it was fake. Also global warming!

Reactions to the video vary. Some think the cops murdered Garner; others think he goaded them into taking him down. Some see Garner as the victim of an out-of-control police force targeting African-American men. Indeed, Mayor Bill de Blasio called Garner “a father, a husband, a son—a good man.” Others say that he was a career petty criminal with a chip on his shoulder.

In either case, I'm sure all good people can agree that Garner deserved to die.

With so much to disagree about, it’s no surprise that Garner’s Wikipedia page has become a battleground.

For people like this America needs a Master of Bullshit degree, perhaps bestowed with a cattle brand.

WHAT IS ROD DREHER WHINING ABOUT NOW?

What is Rod Dreher Whining About Now? Some literary types have taken a vacation from reading white male writers:

The internet has been abuzz recently with debates over reading lists and reading habits. Writer K. Tempest Bradford caused a bit of a stir when she challenged readers to stop reading straight white cisgendered male authors for a year. Sunili Govinnage generated her share of outrage when she reported on her year spent deliberately not reading white authors.

As a normal person, I say: who gives a shit? Read whatever you like, free country, and as long as Dan Brown or his seasonal equivalent draws breath white male writers will still have a Place at The Table. But Rod Dreher -- well, to give you some idea, he reads this part of the Gawker story...

Many of the responses generated by these articles and initiatives have been supportive — even from those white male authors ‘targeted’ for exclusion.

...and responds thusly:

Of course. Dhimmis.

Eventually Dreher explains the moral imperative behind his condemnation of other people's choice of reading material.

You would scarcely believe the money and effort going into promoting my upcoming Dante book. Maybe it will pay off, but chances are it will not. The competition is unbelievably stiff. 

And even if a book does get a lot of media attention, that guarantees nothing. My 2006 book Crunchy Cons got a lot of favorable press and Internet discussion. There were good reviews in The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, a front page Washington Post Style section feature, and an All Things Considered essay from me, related to the book. And yet the book never made back its modest advance, and almost certainly never will.

Who says there's no God? Dreher goes on and on about hard it is for Rod Dreher to sell a book, till finally he gets down on one knee to tell us that when you buy a Rod Dreher book, you're striking a blow for freedom:

So, if you are one of the people willing to spend money on books, I say God bless you, no matter whose books you buy. Every writer who is not Stephen King or Danielle Steele or in that category is in the 99 percent. I hope you’ll buy good books, and I hope you will buy my books. But I’m glad you are buying books.

See? He's for inclusiveness, and those monsters who encourage you to buy Roxane Gay instead of him are for dhimmitude! The choice is clear, particularly if you're the type who buys books not to read but to leave about the house as identity signals.

This has been What is Rod Dreher Whining About Now?

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.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Tom T. Hall sure writes a lot of songs about musicians.
This one really needs an uptempo rock cover.

•     Stephen F. Hayes of Bill Kristol's Get Your War On thinks the Iran Letter was a masterstroke:

A final point: The Cotton letter has already achieved its goal. We are, finally, engaged in a serious national debate about the threat from Iran. That is something the Obama administration has avoided for six years. No more.

"We have engaged a serious debate" is press-agent for "people think we're idiots." Also, Hayes hauls out the customary oh-yeah-what-about-traitor-Dems-and-the-Russians examples, apparently just because he can't help himself, as these examples certainly don't help his cause:

Of course, the past behavior of Democrats doesn’t justify the Republican letter on Iran.

[Vaporlock vaporlock quick give me the index cards...]

The letter needs no justification.

[Dammit, shoulda pulled the fire alarm instead!]

...Unlike, say, John Kerry or Ted Kennedy, and unlike David Bonior and Nancy Pelosi, these senators gave no succor to dictators and despots.

Of course not -- when we blow up this Middle Eastern country, somebody good will take over! Isn't that how it always works?

•     In a grand act of slur reclamation, Charles Two Middle Initials Cooke of National Review pimps his "Conservatarian Manifesto," in which the sort of thing we use the word to make fun of -- i.e., bullshit libertarianism -- is claimed as the Future. In Kang and Kodos terms, it's "Miniature American flags for some, abortions for nobody." As with anything associated with the Future these days, there's a Kids & Tech angle:

The first thing is that young people are just used to customizing their lives. They are used to Facebook. They are used to their cell phones. They are used to building their own computers. Yet they are routinely asked to vote for the DMV. They haven’t rebelled against that, but there will come a point where that sort of homogenization starts to irk them.

Surely der kinder will rise up against Net Neutrality -- that's just an FCC "power grab"!  -- and prepare to go overseas and fight ISIS, cognizant that "in 1945, the British, overnight, handed the baton to the United States," etc. I can see this going over big with the MySpace generation.

DEATH, TAXES, AND AUTHORITARIANISM.

Over and over and over again I have to remind people that the conservatarian enlightenment on police power and civil rights --which starry-eyed opportunists tell us is coming any day now -- is never going to happen. This is partly due to the necessity of keeping the racist element of the Republican base enthralled with ooga-booga, suggesting that blacks are animals that must be kept at bay by Blue Knights, and partly due to the authoritarian equity to which they always return when an election gets close. Remember how the Justin Amash wing of the GOP was going to save us from trumped-up foreign wars? Look how that's working out.

But no one ever learns. On March 5, Leon Neyfakh had a story at Slate called "Cops and Conservatives: Could the DOJ’s Ferguson report lead the right to abandon its love of law enforcement?" Neyfakh interviewed "one of the most prominent conservatives in the criminal justice reform movement" who told him, this time for sure! Well, here we are a week later, and two cops have been shot in Ferguson. Here's Jazz Shaw at Hot Air:

Leaders from the local level all the way up to Eric Holder are pursuing a policy of appeasement in the face of mayhem with tragic results which should not be coming as a surprise... the state and the feds have essentially delegitimized the law enforcement structure and punished those charged with keeping order. And not just the police, but even the courts as well. Under such a public specter, why should the law abiding have any confidence that they will be protected under the rule of law? And why would those contemplating criminal activity feel any fear of the consequences of their actions? (Yes, “fear” is the correct term, even if you don’t care for it. Criminals should fear the long arm of the law. It’s how deterrence works.)

Expect more such lawn-order ejaculations in the days to come. By 2016 Bernie Kerik will take the stage at the Republican Convention riding a tank and wrapped in Kevlar, and "prominent conservatives in the criminal justice reform movement" will not be in attendance.

GULF WAR III - THIRD TIME'S THE CHARM!

I found this charming video via the (so-far) single-tweet account of the American Security Initiative, which Ryan Cooper of The Week informs me is basically Saxby Chambliss, Evan Bayh, and Norm Coleman trying to sabotage a deal with Iran. (Jennifer Rubin refers to it as a "bipartisan group," which pretty much proves it's bullshit.)

To summarize, a sinister van drives into what looks like Toronto, while the radio plays clips of those great Americans Lindsay Graham and Bibi Netanyahu warning us about Iran's nuclear ambitions. But ha, too late, Obama sold us out and blam -- the nuclear device blows the doors off the back of the van.  (The van rears up like a horse just before the explosion, which may be how fission works; I was never good at physics.) Then we hear one lonely siren, indicating the nuclear explosion has wiped out several whole blocks of Toronto.

I wonder how they would be talking to us if they respected our intelligence?

REVIVAL MEETING.

David Brooks says he has "taken [my] column in a spiritual and moral direction of late" -- or rather he says people (presumably  A-list guests at Brooks' Vast Entertainment Space) have noticed that he has -- and explains that he has seen how well rich kids behave and how badly poor kids behave and so he is convinced that America needs poor kids to have more of what the rich kids have, namely money. Ha ha, kidding! The poors must have "social repair," which is less expensive than money. His models are England's Second Great Awakening and the Great Depression, events which few of us beyond fundamentalist lunatics and Stanley Kurtz would care to live through. Here are some of Brooks' specific remedies:

Reintroducing norms will require, first, a moral vocabulary. These norms weren’t destroyed because of people with bad values. They were destroyed by a plague of nonjudgmentalism, which refused to assert that one way of behaving was better than another. People got out of the habit of setting standards or understanding how they were set. 

Next it will require holding people responsible. People born into the most chaotic situations can still be asked the same questions: Are you living for short-term pleasure or long-term good? Are you living for yourself or for your children? Do you have the freedom of self-control or are you in bondage to your desires? 

Next it will require holding everybody responsible. America is obviously not a country in which the less educated are behaving irresponsibly and the more educated are beacons of virtue. America is a country in which privileged people suffer from their own characteristic forms of self-indulgence: the tendency to self-segregate, the comprehensive failures of leadership in government and industry. Social norms need repair up and down the scale, universally, together and all at once.

Cool speech, bro, but I liked it better when Jules Feiffer first wrote it in Little Murders:

What’s left? What’s there left? I’m a reasonable man. Just explain to me… what have I left to believe in? I swear to God, the tide is rising. Two hundred and fifty dollars. Gimme, gimme. We need honest cops! People just aren’t being protected anymore. We need a revival of honor and trust. We need the army! We need a giant fence around every block in the city. An electronically-charged fence! And anyone who wants to leave the block has to get a pass. And a haircut. And can’t talk with a filthy mouth. We need respect for a man’s reputation. TV cameras. That’s what we need, in every building lobby, in every elevator, in every apartment, in every room. Public servants who are public servants. And if they catch you doing anything funny -- to yourself -- or anybody -- they break the door down and beat the living -- A return to common sense. We have to have lobotomies for anyone who earns less than $10,000 a year. I don’t like it, but it’s an emergency. Our side needs weapons too. Is it fair that they should have all the weapons? We've got to train ourselves. And steel ourselves. It’s freedom I’m talking about! There’s a fox loose in the chicken coop. Kill him! I want my freedom!

Carol Newquist's prescription differs in some particulars from Brooks', but then Newquist didn't have an editor. Also Newquist was operating in late-60s New York, a situation of genuine danger, not Cleveland Park in an era of steadily-falling crime rates. Finally, Newquist is a character in a play, and the author had the opportunity to show us what had driven him crazy. With Brooks we can only guess.

UPDATE. I should have foreseen that Brooks' rightful owner, Charles P. Pierce, would have more and better to say on the subject. Sample: "Brooks reaches these completely unsurprising conclusions by quoting a few horror stories from whatever book is on his nightstand these days." His close is killer.