Monday, May 11, 2015

SEASON 7, EPISODE 13.

First thought: Is Max Gail the new Brad Dourif?

I understand the necessity of the VFW scenes and even enjoyed the details, like the low-rent strip tease and the Hill's Coffee donation can (though Weiner made the room itself look Overlook Hotel bleak; if he weren't so eager to get cosmic, what would these scenes look like?). It's important for Don's journey that he tell somebody about what happened in Korea when he doesn't have to tell it (just as it was important that he spill his guts about his childhood to the guys from Hershey), and it's important for the cultural mirror people keep telling us Mad Men is that he express it, and the other vets receive it, as a fragging story of a sort that would become familiar after Vietnam. (But forgive me: I've known a few veterans; if one of them tells another vet he doesn't want to talk about the war, doesn't that normally end the conversation?)

Speaking of cosmic, Betty has revealed herself to be kind of Zen, albeit Westchester Zen: "Why was I ever doing it?" is a brilliant insight, and not accidental. (I bet she's a really good psych student.) Have I been mistaking her remoteness for severe emotional damage all along, when it was actually just a different kind of strength than what the Joans and Peggys have been trying to work their liberated selves up into? The matched shots of Betty bravely struggling up the stairs, even giving a gracious greeting through pain as she climbs, with Sally reading her letter seem to say so. I guess both things can be true. Remember all those times Joan gave Peggy frost for what she read as Peggy getting above or at least ahead of herself ("all you did was prove to them I'm a meaningless secretary and you're a humorless bitch")? Joan was insisting that, despite lacking the tools and opportunity Peggy had, she was also entitled to dignity. With these scenes the show does that on Betty's behalf. I wish there could be a Sally spin-off so I could see what she does with this knowledge.

As far as end-tying, this is by far the most elegant of the series, and what I'm guessing is the Pete Campbell resolution is the least. I'm not even a Campbell hater, but there's only one way his Trudy-in-Kansas fantasy makes sense to me: as a pale echo of Don's proposal to Megan -- an attempt to enforce normality and stave off the shadow of death. It may work out better for Pete than for Don because he has a smaller secret. Oh, yeah, that one: We have one more episode for that mantelpiece gun to go off.

I doubt that it will, though: Pete's drama can't be as big as Don's. The night this episode debuted I followed the stunned Twitter reactions to his Oklahoma adventure but when I finally watched the episode, it made perfect sense -- including Don's disposal of the Caddy. Keep in mind that so far Don hasn't really "lost it all" -- he's still very well-off and if he took a bus back to New York he could work his investments, maybe write a book, and wait out the McCann non-compete. All he's done so far is a bit of ritual self-mortification; the phonebook beatdown is a bit severe, but he seems to bounce back pretty good from it.  The weirdest part of this journey is that so far the America Don left behind so he could reinvent himself in New York still looks, upon his return, like a hell -- it's much richer than it was in Dick Whitman's childhood, but the people are still vicious and stupid. That's why Don blesses that Li'l-Abner punk. "You're lucky you feel guilty," he tells him, "that's the only difference between you and those animals right now." As far as he can see, that's the only difference between Don and the animals he grew up with, too. Giving the kid the car is a weird way to shine a light, but it was available and it cost him little. We'll see in the finale if he has to give up something that costs more.

Friday, May 08, 2015

FRIDAY 'ROUND THE HORN.

Friday I got Monday on my mind.

   Last summer Michael Webster took some photos at Coney Island and, as is usual with him, saw the scene differently than your average joy-popper would. The package is at Burn magazine and is called "Too Many Black People in One Place." I wrote the accompanying essay. All the work predates Ferguson and Baltimore but still holds up pretty well. Give a look when you get a chance and tell me what you think.

   As we all know, my credentials as an equal-opportunity blasphemer are impeccable. Jonah Goldberg's position is similarly consistent -- that is, he was a moron before the Pamela Geller uproar and remains one today. His latest, "Progressives Love Anti-Religious Art — as Long as It’s Anti-Christian" is just another fatty serving of the same congealed ressentiment he's been dishing for years -- it even contains references to Piss Christ and "Mapplethorpe’s hide-the-bullwhip oeuvre." (It's like his mother was scared by a Duchamp readymade while she was pregnant.) Goldberg knocks people who don't think Geller has a Constitutional right to her bullshit, but who's that?  Just a tiny sliver of idiots. Most normal people don't much care how the avatars of the world's major superstitions are portrayed (at least not the ones they don't believe in!) and, I would imagine, consider Geller an nuisance on the level of Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church, looking for chances to stir the shit. (You think reactionaries like Peter King are turning on Geller because they love Mohammed?) But Goldberg portrays the real problem as snotty bohos with their so-called "art" who get fans and grants while he has to float in the oceans with nutcakes and humiliate himself with his shit writing on a regular basis.

Thursday, May 07, 2015

BRINGING A CORKED FORK TO A CULTURE WAR.

Remember when some nudniks put up a few posters of Obama as The Joker Except Socialist and declared a groundswell? No? Well, that's understandable.

How about anti-Obama billboards, which moved such dignitaries as Jonah Goldberg to exegesis ("In an academic setting, one could defend at least some of the ideas captured in the billboard; Lord knows I've tried")? No? That's understandable, too.

How about those Miss Me Yet billboards? Come on, they were all over the news and still have a Wikipedia page! They're the reason Obama didn't get re-elected in an alternative universe.

How about those other times when a couple of guys put up some posters about Obama or some other Democrat and it was big news among the belligerati?

Well, guess what:
‘STENCH OF CORRUPTION': ANTI-HILLARY STREET ART HITS L.A. AHEAD OF FUNDRAISERS
Several pieces of artwork critical of presidential candidate Hillary Clinton have appeared around Los Angeles and Beverly Hills ahead of a trio of pricey fundraisers the candidate will attend this week...
Did you hear that? Breitbart.com says several pieces!
Of course, anti-Hillary street art is nothing new; just last month, an unknown artist posted signs all around Brooklyn that lampooned Clinton supporters for claiming certain words used to describe her were sexist.
Everybody to mom's basement for the afterparty! And wait'll the sheeple get a load of the #Benghazi blimp!

Wednesday, May 06, 2015

IN WHICH ROD DREHER COMPARES THE PLIGHT OF BLACK PEOPLE IN AMERICA TO GUESS WHAT?

I had a minute, so I figured I'd go look at Rod Dreher's blog for some crazy. He's nothing if not reliable:
There’s a racist joke that speaks to an ugly truth here: “Q: What do you call a millionaire black brain surgeon? A. [racial slur].” The idea is that for people who hate black folks, nothing that black folks do matters; it’s who they are that the racist cares about.
Got that? OK. Take a breath. Now:
Similarly, for many (though certainly not all) modern people liberal conviction, it doesn’t matter that orthodox Christians serve the poor, or do good in their own communities. What matters is their stance on homosexuality.
Him and the New Black Panthers ought to rap about this. Keep building bridges, Brother Rod!

Tuesday, May 05, 2015

CONSERVATIVE OUTREACH TO WOMEN AND MINORITIES CONTINUES.

You may have noticed the snit libertarians had over "vagina voters" who weren't giving us menfolk a chance at the presidency because misandry. The term had been used by assholes before ("Thanks, vagina voters. Thanks a pantsload. Enjoy your unregulated vaginas..."), but Brendan O'Neill's article at Reason spread the usage till it reached the attention of Rush Limbaugh, emperor of its natural constituency, who did what you'd expect with it ("you know me, just trying to stir the pot out there" ah shaddap).

Over at PJ Media (aka "Roger L. Simon's Tax Write-off"), Susan L.M. Goldberg ("a writer with a Master's in Radio, Television & Film") asks "How Will the Republicans Combat Vagina Politics?" After complaining that today's sheeple "don’t know a thing about [new AG Loretta] Lynch beyond the fact that she is black and a woman" -- not like in the dear, dead citizen-scholar days of Alberto Gonzalez! -- Goldberg prescribes:
In an increasingly visual culture, what candidates will the Republicans proffer to fit the demographic bill? Even Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio are too white and too male for this tough crowd. If they took a few lessons from Sofia Vergara they might stand half a chance. You know, jazz up that accent, tease the hair, get loud with the wardrobe, be ethnic. Sure, it was a strategy that kept your demographic out of office for the past 200 years, but times have changed. Race is in. Desi Arnaz would stand a better chance than these family values-laden dudes.
Happy Cinco de Mayo! Other conservatives focus on the racial mixture of the Freddy Gray defendants, which appears to prove to them that there's no racism except against Whitey. The best exemplar is neo-neocon:
But I can’t help but reflect that this case might have gone down differently if this information about their races had come out earlier.
How?
But although their names were released early on, their races were not.
Yes. How?
Not only that, but most of the speculation I read prior to learning their races indicated, or at least hinted or guessed, that they were all white. Typical is this article that appeared in the April 22 Atlantic:
And she gives us a quote that says lots of Baltimore cops are black -- that is, it implies the opposite of what she says. Maybe she's not actually trying to make a point at all, just... well, effusing would be a polite word for it.
...I also wonder what would have happened had Freddie Gray been white, with the same set of fact circumstances otherwise.
You mean if White Freddie Gray got killed? Not much chance of that.
Would there have been much of an outcry? 
Or what if all the officers had been black; would that have defused the protests entirely? Or would it not have mattered?
Or what if all of the officers had been white...
And so on, into "who would win in a fight, Bon Jovi or a blade of grass" territory. Anyway, neo-neocon finally tells us how mad she is that black Baltimoreans were happy to hear about these indictments ("something like a reverse OJ Simpson phenomenon") -- though I don't know why, given the mixed racial composition of the defendants; maybe she assumes the citizens don't know about that, just like they don't know Loretta Lynch's credentials -- and eventually starts calling these citizens a "mob" (four times in two grafs! I hear neo-neocon's a shrink in real life; wonder if she'd consider that some sort of a tell if a patient started doing it?).

Personally, I don't see how they have any choice now but to nominate Ben Carson.

FUCK YOUR BLOODTHIRSTY GODS, CONT.

I hear Pam Geller held a Draw Mohammed event in Texas which drew some unwanted attention (well, unwanted by normal people, anyway -- I'm sure Geller is delighted). I wonder why she didn't invite me -- I have after all been the internet's boldest, baddest blasphemy-be-unto-him artist since 2006:

I'm joking, of course -- the noted rageclown Geller doesn't do free-speech events, she does skree-kill-Mooslims events, in which I have no interest. Nonetheless, I defend to the death their right to harrumph harrumph harrumph. Now where's my medal?

UPDATE. Nobody likes Pammy.

Monday, May 04, 2015

SEASON 7, EPISODE 12.


The very best thing in the entire episode, and maybe in the series, was the scene at the Wisconsin house, and the dark daughter lurking in the shadows of the home of Di the Death Waitress' ex-husband: blandly resentful, shaggy, never giving a sign of being part of these waxy, pale Christians (and vice versa), she gave me real chills.

The ex-husband was pretty good too, not ostentatiously crazy, merely vicious -- a man with a good enough explanation for his ugliness that you might not at first consider how horrible a husband he must have been, and must still be (did he really say in front of his wife that she didn't know any better?). I begin to see not only why Diana left, but also why Don is so obsessed with her -- her horrible pre-life replicates his own, except she had no magic to escape it with. Don is retracing his own steps through her.

In the home stretch Mad Men is getting stranger, and it’s easier to see why it has to in Don’s scenes than in anyone else’s because he’s the haunted one — everyone else is trying to figure out the life they’re in, and Don is trying to figure out the life he never had. Several people have speculated that Don is already dead (“and he’s finally realizing it”), and that’s getting to be a good bet, but for the moment I’m looking at it as a simpler proposition: Don knows that the life he took up is not his, that it’s unsustainable, and he’s leaving it behind.

His departure from the Miller meeting signals this by being super-weird; no one makes anything of the newly-imported hotshot leaving in the middle of a presentation except Ted, and his reaction is absurdly inappropriate — it looks like, “Oh, that son of a gun.” (I thought people would beginning clearing their throats when Don spent all that time staring out the window at the crucifix in the sky.) And Don is super-weird through most of the episode; tightly-wound in his meeting with Boss Hobart, hallucinating Bert, unconvincingly lying and apologizing at the Wisconsin house, there’s nothing comfortable about him until he decides to make that detour.

Maybe after a while the heightened scenes with Peggy and Roger will seem as necessary, but like I said, Peggy has a more real-life problem to figure out, so the roller-skating and badass slo-mo strut are jarring. Peggy’s become such a knotted-up, suffering careerist that she’s earned a more genuine nervous breakdown. Joan’s fight with the arrayed forces of sexism is more realistic, and it’s interesting in a trad TV social-commentary way. But we came here, or at least stayed here, not to see the Sixties spin out, but to see what happens to Don. It won’t be long now.

Thursday, April 30, 2015

THE NEW ABNORMAL.

A little walk down memory lane:
In January [2014] Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit addressed some Obama conspiracy theories: “…that the NSA may have been relaying intelligence about the Mitt Romney campaign to Obama operatives, or that Chief Justice John Roberts' sudden about-face in the Obamacare case might have been driven by some sort of NSA-facilitated blackmail.” 
Yeah, you might shrug, there are plenty such crazy notions out there. But Reynolds went on: “A year ago, these kinds of comments would have been dismissable as paranoid conspiracy theory. But now, while I still don't think they're true, they're no longer obviously crazy. And that's Obama's legacy: a government that makes paranoid conspiracy theories seem possibly sane.” 
Reynolds’ main theme was the IRS “scandal,” one of a long series on alleged wheels-within-wheels Obamaspiracies that have not gotten the traction he and his colleagues think they deserve. But it’s his idea that crackpot theories about Obama are somehow legit because of other crackpot theories about Obama that’s really interesting...
This week you may have heard about the U.S. Army exercises in Texas and how that state's governor, apparently inspired by conspiracist wackos like Alex Jones anticipating the Day of the FEMA Camps, has instructed the commander of the Texas State Guard "to keep a watch over the exercises and help keep local law enforcement agencies and their citizens informed."

What's Reynolds' opinion? Dunno, but his hired hand at Instapundit tells the troops:
This is why I love Texans. And kudos to Abbott for doing what he thinks is right, knowing the onslaught of mainstream media criticism to come. A healthy dose of suspicion is warranted, especially with this Administration.
You can read the explanation from the Army here, but they haven't overthrown the tyrant Obama so their word is no good.

These people used to issue tinfoil dispatches like this from the darkest corners of public discourse. Now it's part of mainstream conservatism. It's as if Robert Welch had challenged Eisenhower for the 1956 Republican Presidential nomination and gone on Face the Nation to demand Ike answer charges that he was a Communist dupe. This will be a difficult period in American history to describe to our descendants, if we have any.

Wednesday, April 29, 2015

A CHANGE OF SCENE.

Hey look, Rod Dreher took a moment off from his endless war against the gays to address the Baltimore riots! His first instinct is to tell us the rioters have "lawlessness in their hearts," but list ye, sinners, for "the rest of us are destroying the basis for self-governance and order in our polis too." What can this mean? Later Dreher amplifies: He knows a religious school where they have a sexual assault problem, and the obvious reason is that society at large no longer adheres to "the concepts and the language of the Bible," which Biblelessness has apparently been transmitted atmospherically (you know, like Ebola!) to the religious school or something:
...the school’s leadership refuses to use the language or morality, or moral absolutes. It couches everything it says in the language of liberalism, which is to say, in consent and procedure...
Whereas previously the Holy Ghost wrote the disciplinary policies. This is also, per Dreher, why we don't have another MLK; I thought it was because we tend to shoot them. Inevitably:
This is why what is happening in Baltimore is linked to what is happening on Capitol Hill at the Supreme Court today. America in 2015 is a culture that defines the good as whatever the individual says it is.
Son of a gun, he brought it back home! Eventually, Dreher revisits:
It’s society’s fault. It always is. In this view, poor black people are always acted upon, and are never moral agents.
Also, Freddie Gray "was a layabout who had a bail bondsman the way other people have an auto mechanic," thugs, black fatherlessness, etc. -- why, it's as if Dreher remembered there were other people besides homosexuals for him to hate! He ends thus:
...we will get absolutely nowhere toward harmonizing our badly fractured communities if all we do is blame Somebody Else, or some abstraction — White People, Black People, History, Social Injustice — for our own sins and failings, both individual and collective.
If self-awareness were a virus, scientists could build a vaccine off Dreher's immunity.

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

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

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


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

Tuesday, April 28, 2015

LOOTERS.

As you may expect in the wake of the Baltimore riots, on the right it's all ooga-booga all the time. The Mayor of Baltimore said that in giving citizens space to demonstrate, the city had also given "those who wished to destroy space to do that," which to normal people means that if you choose to have a free society, as opposed to a police state, some people will abuse the privilege. To professional bullshit artists like Paul Mirengoff, however, it was evidence that the Mayor was telling rioters to go nuts. Fox's Lou Dobbs said the mayor had "basically have given a free pass to those who are tearing up property," and his guest Keith Ablow responded, "if you want to tear down the system, you might be taking your cues, by the way, from a president who has given the appearance that there is every justification for any level of anger at our country because we're such despicable people." Further proof that ObamaHitler is responsible, from Warner Todd Huston: "Priorities: Obama Sends THREE Reps to Freddie Gray Funeral–Sent ZERO to American Sniper Chris Kyle’s and British PM Thatcher’s Funerals."

At American Thinker, Thomas Lifson decried the "paltry number of arrests" in Baltimore, and quoted his colleague, racial obsessive Colin Flaherty, who said that it didn't matter that crime has gone down in Baltimore, what's important is that "in Baltimore, police will not arrest black criminals" (apparently they were just giving Freddie Gray a lift -- as they've done frequently to others), and the cops, the statisticians, and the media are all siding with their friends the Negroes against persecuted white people:
The idea that crime in Baltimore is going down comes up every time a case of black mob violence hits the local news. Which is pretty much all the time. Everything except that black part, that is, which they leave out.
This, folks, is the modern conservative movement -- a toxic stew of racist paranoia and Nixonian lawn-order. It has nothing to do with that "libertarian moment" PR campaign from last summer, the memory of which gets more grimly funny every month. There's an election coming up and they need to get as many horrified honkies as possible into the van.

Speaking of libertarianism,  here's Robby Soave at libertarian flagship Reason having a rap session with the Baltimoreans:
Violence is violence, and it’s wrong. That’s a foundational principle of libertarianism, for one thing.
Fight the power! Next week he'll tell them about the grave injustice of affirmative action and the Civil Rights Act.

Monday, April 27, 2015

SEASON 7, EPISODE 11.

The key moment was when Jim Hobart from McCann told the SCP partners they'd "died and gone to advertising heaven" and they all sat there looking miserable. Actually I take that back -- they looked like they didn't know how they should look. In fact I think even the actors didn't  know how they should look -- because the feeling was too ambiguous. The moment was clearly meant to show that, though advertising is what they do all day, are good at, and claim to care about, Pete, Roger, Joan, Ted and Don (well, maybe not Ted) are only now acknowledging that it's not really that important to them.

But what is, then? Joan's got the clearest gripe about the move -- McCann's a sexist shithole and she'll have trouble there. Roger -- well, his name was on the door, and so was Don's for a while. But neither of them ever showed any thirst for permanence before -- shit, they're both practically estranged from their children. And Pete's reaction looks like nothing but pique. Really, Jim's right -- this is like minor leaguers complaining they got sent up to The Show. The only reason to complain is if you're sick of baseball.

So what do they want? I fear Joan and Rich Cracker are going to be spun off into an entrepreneural love nest. Pete may devote some of his spare time to becoming a better human being, and I have to admit his tip-off to Peggy (coming after a mommy-baby flash that was very well handled) and his chivalry with Trudy make that look like an interesting project. (Question: Pete told Peggy about the McCann move but Don didn't?) Sterling can have a sitcom with Mme. Calvet, something like Green Acres in Québécois.

But what about Don? I think showing up at the Waitress of Death's apartment red- faced drunk in the wee hours was about the most human thing I've seen Don do, and the most pathetic. If it means anything, it means Don's going to have to bottom out before he can get anywhere else. But that's a big if.

I liked Peggy's truth-telling scene with Stan, and all honor to the undersung Jay R. Ferguson, who has a certain preening, thoughtless sort of art-monkey down cold, and who showed here that even a doofus can get institutional sexism if you give him absolutely no chance to evade the point -- like, have someone he loves make it. (At this point his relationship with Peggy seems more realistic to me than Don's.) I guess the only problem with it was the truth-telling; to me, it's a sign the show is ending and people are going to start spelling out what they want. And I fear it's going to be things like respect in the workplace, a financially comfortable family life, and a bunch of other dull shit that's perfectly fine in and of itself but hardly worth all that artistic effort. Shit, maybe Draper will go back to Pennsylvania and make that old whorehouse into a Hilton.

P.S. There's been a Campbell at Greenwich Country Day for generations, but suddently family history is an issue? What'd I miss? P.P.S. With Trudy's eloquent complaint, it's official: Women in 1970 are sick of this shit. Was it Virginia Slims?

Sunday, April 26, 2015

IT CAN'T MISS.

From: Central Committee
To: The Brethren
Re: Bruce Jenner - Next Steps

Now that Bruce Jenner has come out as both a woman and a Republican, we find ourselves at a crossroads. Some of us are apparently sticking with the traditional conservative approach toward LGBT issues. In fact we’ve heard from a few of you who disapprove of our use of the term “LGBT,” suggesting we revert instead to the schoolyard phrases favored by our movement's founders. But the Central Committee thinks these comrades are missing a big opportunity.

We direct your attention to John Nolte of Breitbart.com. John is no friend to gay and trans people, as shown by his columns such as “GAY MARRIAGE IS THE MEDIA'S VEHICLE, DESTINATION IS TO DESTROY THE CHURCH” and “BULLYING GLAAD GOES ON ANOTHER CENSORSHIP RAMPAGE,” and his Homer Simpsonesque jokes about homosexuals. Yet when Jenner came out, John grasped the nettle. First he announced that liberals are the real bigots. This is SOP, though we give John credit for claiming that “the last person to use the word ‘fag’ in my presence was a liberal celebrity, and the look on my face made vocalizing my disapproval unnecessary.” Imagine, John hanging out with liberal celebrities, let alone intimidating them with his facial expressions! We applaud his nerve.

But John pushed things further in a way I’m not sure many of us fully appreciate. Please note this line from his column:
Unlike the elite media, conservatives and Christians are the true liberals.
And this one:
Like sex outside of marriage or lying, homosexuality is a sin, being gay is not. 
Now, to an outsider this will sound like gibberish, or perhaps even typos; but if you’ve been attending our workshops, you will recall our maxim, “You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few logical chains.”

Let’s be honest: Gay rights has been a disaster for our movement; we’re losing share on it every day, and for various reasons (cough deep south cough) we can’t back down on policy. But John’s assertions may flip the board for us if we follow up properly.

First, if we can get voters to accept, even on a subconscious level, John's proposition that conservatives are the real liberals and that being gay is not the same thing as being homosexual, we may shake up the current paradigm to the point that voters don’t know what to believe.

And that’s when we’ll activate our follow-plan — one we caution must remain top secret until after the roll-out, and for which we are currently seeking volunteers.

The theme we’ll be promoting is this: Conservatives are not only the real liberals — they’re also the real gays.

You will notice the people identified as “gay” at present are mostly college-educated and high-earning, and favor hair and clothing styles most citizens cannot afford either financially or socially. They also have a strong interest in the arts. It should be clear that these so-called gay people are actually just liberal elitists, pretending to be gay because they think it makes them look like victims, which is the highest aspiration of the liberal (see also their tiresome identification with black people and women).

Many of these “gays” even go to the extreme measure of having sex with members of their own gender, often on a regular basis, which only shows how desperately they pursue the mantle of victimhood.

Conversely, real gays (that is, conservatives) don’t need to make a show of their status by having gay sex. They are good Christian people, married or attracted to members of the opposite gender, who oppose gay marriage and the liberal fascist attempt to force other Christians to make cakes for them — and just happen to be gay.

Volunteers for this project will be expected to come out as gay. You may let it be known, in a casual way, that you’re not that kind of gay, but you must be disciplined enough not to make a big deal of it. If your status is challenged, simply say: Who are you to define me, to tell me how to define myself? Show sympathy for their blinkered vision, and pray (good and loud, and where people can hear you) for your oppressors to learn toleration.

Keep your temper as liberals sputter and make themselves unattractive over this; soon enough, when the idea has taken hold, you will be able to post photographs of your opposite-sex partners with captions like “I love my gay husband” so no one gets the wrong idea. After a while, when gay marriage bans and RFRAs have been instituted with the support of us gays — and our straight allies — people will come to wonder what all the fuss was about back in the dark, dead days of discrimination. Then we will truly be able to say that we have overcome.

Friday, April 24, 2015

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.


Good day for this. Never a bad one, really.

•   At National Review, Mona Charen snarls in "Racial Milestones and a Corrupt Press":
You can do this all day, I know, play “What if a Republican had done...” But the contrast is so galling, it simply must be noted. Today’s Washington Post carries a story about the confirmation of Loretta Lynch as attorney general. The inside headline, on page A7, proclaims “Lynch Will Be First Black Woman to Head the Justice Department.” A glance back at the coverage of Condoleeza Rice’s confirmation as the first black woman Secretary of State? The headline was “Rice Confirmed Amid Criticism.” The story accompanying that headline featured Democrats’ slams against attorney general-nominee Alberto Gonzalez, but not a word about the history-making moment of confirming the first black woman secretary of state.

This tears the veil off the “first blah blahs” the press and Democrats make such a fuss over. It’s completely partisan. It has nothing to do with true pride in the accomplishments of once oppressed peoples. Conservative women’s accomplishments are illegitimate. Black conservatives are invisible...
The Washington Post is only one hydra-head of the Liberal Media, so I went to see what other treasonous news orgs had reported on Rice's milestone. The New York Times:
Condoleezza Rice, a scholar of the cold war who was President Bush's closest foreign policy adviser during his 2000 campaign and throughout his first term, was sworn in as secretary of state Wednesday evening, hours after the Senate confirmed her by a vote of 85 to 13.
Ms. Rice, who is the second woman, and the first black woman, to become secretary of state...
Talk about burying the lede! Worse, CNN didn't get to Rice's race/gender qualifications till the third paragraph. And NPR, well, you can imagine, the first line was probably about how she was a fascist or something --
The Senate votes 85-13 to confirm Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state, making her the first black woman to serve as the nation's top diplomat.
-- okay, well then surely those commies at the Associated Press --
WASHINGTON (AP) — America's first black woman secretary of state took the ceremonial oath of office Friday surrounded by family and friends...
Look, it's no fair, that Democrat bitch got a headline! Elsewhere at National Review, you can read Mona Charen's racial opinions about Obama's Secret Service protection: namely, that Obama has torn the races apart, so now if someone sic-semper-tyrannises him "it’s a good bet that close to 100 percent of blacks and a good percentage of others would believe that a demonic conspiracy brought him down." Yeesh. Maybe cook gave her some runny eggs this morning.

•   Rod Dreher's blog remains a mix of persecution mania and book peddling, but I have to to tell you he surprised me in his latest sermon on how the gays are persecuting Christians:
We must try, anyway, because if we are going to hold on to the orthodox Christian faith in this increasingly anti-Christian culture, we are going to have to learn how to endure, and to endure joyfully.
I ran out of time this morning on the stage, but I wanted to talk briefly about how we will have much to learn from the African-American experience. A black friend’s grandmother, encouraging her children in the 1940s not to let their spirits and their dignity be broken by white hatred, counseled, “Don’t be the kind of person they think you are.” That’s great advice for Christians going forward.
Sure, they experienced slavery, segregation, and lynchings. but Big Gummint made us bake a cake. Now for a rousing rendition of that old cracker spiritual, "Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Gay."

•   Speaking of whiners, here's Mollie Hemingway claiming we're heading toward a joyless Orwellian dystopia of "comedy speakeasies" where "people will have to have the password. But they’ll also have to be patted down for recording equipment," etc., because comedians are ascared someone will hear their jokes outside the club and some tattletale will get them sent to PC Jail. What's her evidence for this? 1.) The New York Post said David Letterman's audience was "'stunned' by his 'sexist' joke"; 2.) "Jamie Foxx was accused of transphobia"; 3.) Trevor Noah lost his Daily Show gig -- no wait, that didn't happen; rather, he "received criticism." And... Michael Richards. No, really. If a white guy can't yell "nigger" over and over onstage without getting a hard time for it 12 fucking goddamn years ago, we're headed for totalitarianism. Maybe if Hemingway keeps this up, the conservative movement will gain strength from all the shitty comics who finally have an excuse for nobody liking them.

Thursday, April 23, 2015

BOO FUCKING HOO.

The latest martyr to the cause of No Homos is Ryan T. Anderson. Unlike Brendan Eich and the Duck Dynasty guys, though, Anderson has no inherent celebrity or entertainment value: I guess they've gotten to the point where they no longer even need avatars people might know, and are just breeding victims in their own propaganda labs.

Previously known mainly to people who cover anti-gay gasbags for a living ("Says Glee corrupts youth: 'We should be as concerned about what the FOX TV show Glee has done to corrupt a young generation as we are about anything the Court has done'"), Anderson recently received flattering coverage in the Washington Post (strange are the ways of the liberal media! I thought they were all in the tank for Gay ObamaHitler) as "a fresh voice on same-sex marriage," "fresh-faced" and "millennial," who tours the country lecturing on "anthropological truths that men and women are distinct and complementary," illustrating his points with polygamy scare-stories from The New York Post.

This was especially hilarious to me because I last paid attention to Anderson in 2007 when, as an assistant editor at First Things, he was already on the moral-panic beat, complaining that Princeton freshmen had to watch a sexual assault prevention program that had gross stuff in it like "sexual skits, innuendo, 'coming-out' scenes, gay kisses, and other nonsense that some students don’t want to be forced to sit through." If only they'd make sexual assault prevention programs that even rightwing plants can enjoy!

Along with the sex angle, Anderson was (even then!) working the victim-status angle. From my post:
Anderson spends the rest of the article complaining that liberals make jokes about him and his buddies. Normal people learn to shrug this kind of thing off, but for wingers snide comments are hate-speech or bad-touch or something. "Professor [Lee] Silver’s attack wasn’t really aimed at Professor [Robert George]; it was aimed at the students," Anderson claims, because a laff on a prominent conservative buffoon sends students "a message about which points of view are acceptable and which are unacceptable. 
Well, little Ryan has grown up, and advanced from vicarious sufferer over the martyrs of his movement to abused saint himself.  After the Post story came out, his old high school first publicly acknowledged this accomplishment, then ham-handedly rebuffed him. To you and me, this would be tsk-worthy, but to Anderson's brethren it is the iron boot of repression.

"The shunning of Ryan T. Anderson: When support for gay marriage gets ugly," thunders Damon Linker at The Week. Rod Dreher needs two posts to wring his hands over it: "Intellectually bankrupt, morally corrupt," sputters Dreher. "Illiberal elitist liberalism at its ugliest. These people have the power, and will have the power." (He's talking about high school administrators, remember.) At The Federalist, credentialed wingnut Joseph Bottum plays the old trick of telling us he's cool with gay marriage, more or less, but since the Facebook posts of Anderson's high school he's outraged by Chappaquiddick: "Our lives and our discourse are narrowed to only a trickle of intellectual light if we encounter someone like the intelligent and serious Ryan T. Anderson—and simply close our eyes in holy dread." Etc.

I'm not sure what the long term strategy is here: Maybe they just want to get this idea spread around enough that young conservatives for whom there is no room on the wingnut-welfare gravy train can go out on the street with a tin cup and a cardboard sign that says PLEASE HELP, I AM A NO HOMOS MARTYR and wait for donations. Or maybe they think people will go back to persecuting homosexuals because they feel sorry for conservatives.

Wednesday, April 22, 2015

ROOTS.

An "embarrassed" Ben Affleck admitted Tuesday that he asked producers of the PBS documentary show "Finding Your Roots" to edit out the discovery that one of his distant ancestors owned slaves... He said he spoke with show host and Harvard scholar Henry Louis "Skip" Gates, and lobbied him to take out his scandalous family history. "Skip agreed with me on the slave owner but made other choices I disagreed with," Affleck wrote. "In the end, it's his show and I knew that going in. I'm proud to be his friend and proud to have participated." -- NBC News.
"I don't know how to tell you this, but... Do you know about Nathan Bedford Forrest?"
"The founder of the Klan? Wait a minute -- are you saying one of my ancestors -- was Nathan Bedford Forrest?"
"No."
"Thank God. That would have been terrible. You have no idea how much I despise that man."
"No, I'm saying that Clayton Sykes -- who wrote a book in 1962 called Nathan Bedford Forrest: The Greatest American, and who actively petitioned to get Forrest's face on Mt. Rushmore until he died in 1975 -- was your paternal grandfather."
"This cannot possibly be made public."
"I don't know why not. It isn't your fault, after all."
"Let me put it another way: I cannot possibly allow this to be made public."
"I see."

+ + +

"But my parents were decent people from Asdofel, Missouri."
"Perhaps you've heard of the Monster of Asdofel, a deranged white supremacist who over six years raped several black women in western Missouri, leaving politically charged notes behind. One of his victims was your mother, whom he took for an African-American, probably due to his astigmatism. Though it was hushed up, documentary evidence proves that you are the child of their union."
"I'm torn here. On the one hand I'm related to a monster, on the other I'm related to his victim. Hang on, let me call my agent. [calls agent.] He says the men who are about to burst through the door should seize and destroy your notes."

+ + +

"So you're saying your have evidence that every single member of my family from 1945 onwards, including my little nieces and nephews, are neo-Nazis?"
"I'm afraid so."
"There's only one course of action left for me, Gates. Prepare to -- dammit, what's wrong with this thing? Oh, I see; it's got one of those trigger locks. Well, would you accept a bribe?"

+ + +

"Your great-grandfather, it seems, was Adolph Hitler."
"Dr. Gates, please! My fans must never know! Name your price."
"All right: No more Deuce Bigelow films."

Tuesday, April 21, 2015

LONG SHOT.

At National ReviewCharles C.W. Cooke has advice for the Republican Party. Along with the usual ObamaHitler schtick, we get this:
...it should by now be obvious to conservatives that the last American Golden Age obtained not during George W. Bush’s rather disappointing tenure, but in the mid- to late- 1990s, when the Republican party ran both houses of Congress and Democrat Bill Clinton ran the executive branch... 
Sure, Jeb Bush is an impressive man. But to nominate him at this moment would be to push Republicans in the wrong direction and to force them into doing something that they should really not want to do: namely, re-litigating – and perhaps even defending – the political decisions that were made between 2000 and 2008... If they are offered a choice between “Clinton” — a name that evokes peace and prosperity — and “Bush” – a name that has been rather run through the mud – [voters] will almost certainly choose the former...
So: If they remind voters of their record and their opponents' record, the GOP is in deep shit. Sounds right.

Cooke's advice is almost as funny. He says the Republicans will "need to work out what exactly it is reacting to within the country’s soul." What might that mean? From the article, a hint:
Exactly who can will hinge upon where the country finds itself by the end of the year. If by early 2016 it has become clear that America is tired of Barack Obama’s celebrity; that Hillary’s status as a permanent member of the elite class is beginning to grate; and that Washington is seen as an out-of-touch club for the rich and the famous, then the Republican party might consider borrowing a slogan from a century ago and offering the public a 1920s style “Return to Normalcy.” With his homespun tales of one-dollar sweaters, his quiet Midwestern roots, and his down-to-earth everyman appearance, Scott Walker would do well running such a campaign — as, indeed, might a John Kasich or a Rick Snyder.
Scott Walker ain't like them rich folks nohow! Lookie this sweater! That'll set the hustings aflame. Elsewhere Cooke writes, "In an ideal world, our elections would be held on paper..." I don't think they can even win the Rotisserie Presidency with material like this.

UPDATE. Commenters remind me that the notion of Scott Walker as a humble People's Friend is made extra hilarious by his recent participation in the "Koch Primary" for the financial support of the libertarian kazillionaires. Also, I see Walker has decided to outflank Bush and Rubio by going full anti-immigrant, which I guess is supposed to be part of the "Return to Normalcy" program Cooke mentions; it must be a great success because Walker's already got people like Rich Lowry whining on his behalf ("Scott Walker, Over the Target, Taking Flak").

Monday, April 20, 2015

SEASON 7, EPISODE 10.

Mathis is now my new favorite character, too bad he’s [SPOILER] fired. First of all, his inept use of Don’s line gave me my first belly laugh of the season. (His foul mouth, which Don also mentions when he fires him, is one of the tiny cracks starting the avalanche of obscenity that would be the 70s and ever after.) Second, Mathis got to something profoundly important about Don that no other male on the show has been willing to approach. (Which reminds me: Don’s supposed to be a genius but he’s nothing but glib; Ginsburg was supposed to be a genius but he was just nuts. Mathis the hack is the only “creative” on this show with any insight on actual human beings.)

Mathis gets to Don partly because he talks back to him, which is something Don never has to take from subordinates. But the lack of respect for his talent and position is nothing compared to the slap about him being nothing but handsome, and Mathis’ relay of the story that Lucky Strike scion Garner was in love with Don and wanted to jack him off. That hits Don where he lives; earlier, when Cutler called him out for his hyper-masculinity (“a bully and drunk… a football player in a suit”) it was just ridiculous, but hearing about how Don’s sexuality affects men really pisses him off. It suddenly lights up all the gay stories in the show, and also Don’s much-discussed history as a victim of sexual abuse. For a moment we and Don have to face that his behavior is compulsive, that his fetish for objectification comes from being objectified, a reaction to the real story of his past…

…which Sally brings up, come to think of it, at dinner later as a way of peeling Don off her nubile classmate. Here too both Don and we get the benefit of the insight: Sally sees the desire to please “just comes oozing out” of Don. She’s hip enough to get that, but too young to know what it comes from. She knows about the poverty (the last time she showed any admiration for her dad was when he finally shared that with her) and she knows (or says she knows) something about sex, but she doesn’t know how deep and twisted it can get. Don’s send-off is as honest as it can be and as hopelessly square as it has to be: “You’re a very beautiful girl,” he tells her – how many other girls has he told that? – “It’s up to you to be more than that.” That’s a pretty open brief. Hey, maybe she’ll join Baader-Meinhof! Or The Runaways!

The Joan-Rich Cracker story was cute, and gives more room to Christina Hendricks’ great Season 7b performance, but it’s inconsequential except as a counterpoint to Don’s alleged big question – “What do you see for the future?” – to which everyone at SCP has transparently bad, short-sighted answers. That kind of cable-zen garbage gives me the itch, but so does the hoary story of monsters of ambition reaching beyond their busy schedules to find true love. If this season ends with Joan having a baby with Rich Cracker in his penthouse, may the shade of Douglas Sirk strangle Matt Weiner with his ectoplasm.

I have to say I approve of all the kids on Mad Men behaving sort of like they’re in a Bresson movie; it really makes them seem a different species from the grown-ups. The funny thing is, Betty has always acted a little like that too. (It’s one of the reasons why she was so fearless with the East Village hippies – she regarded them as less successful child-adults.) But Betty is not really a child, and her handling of Glenn when he spills about his enlistment looks very gentle and correct till you remember she’s been emotionally manipulating him since he was a little boy and she doesn’t even have a clue that it’s fucked up to do that to minors (though maybe the psych classes will help). “Don’t tell me that” was a great preface to “you did this for me” because the thing Betty really wants is not to be told.

Sally’s understanding of Vietnam is on a par with her understanding of her father: she doesn’t know much except it stinks. How I wish we could have a Sally spin-off and follow her through the days of Johnny Rotten and Ronald Reagan.

Thursday, April 16, 2015

EITHER I'M TOO SENSITIVE/OR ELSE I'M GETTIN' SOFT.

I can't even tell if they're kidding anymore. Paula Bolyard at PJ Media:
What is it going to take for voters to turn on Hillary? I suspect it’s not going to be Benghazi, Filegate, Travelgate, Whitewater... But fear not, all is not lost. I do think there is one thing that would be guaranteed to sink Clinton in our shallow, cult-of-celebrity culture: Pictures of Hillary doing those “yoga routines” she said were in the emails she deleted from her servers. 
Imagine a picture of a sweaty, haggard-looking 67-year-old Clinton in yoga pants appearing on every Facebook feed, mobile device, and news outlet in the country. It would be a devastating blow to her campaign. (Think I’m exaggerating? See: Dukakis in the tank, Nixon in the first televised debate, and Howard Dean’s Rebel Yell for other examples of campaign-ending memes.) 
But this raises some questions. If you were in sole possession of the hypothetical picture of Hillary in yoga pants, would you leak it to the press and/or her opponent’s campaign? Is all fair in love and war — and campaigns?...
I just can't tell. It has some of the characteristics of irony, and it's possible the is-it-moral question is Bolyard's way of tipping us off that she's not serious. Or maybe it's only morality she's not serious about, because at the end she solicits reader input, and gets the sort you (and doubtless she) would expect ("You don't need yoga pix. The ones on the beach are just as good..").

It is difficult to escape the conclusion, uncharitable as it is, that her premise is actually, boy if we could get our hands on those yoga pictures that would be the end of Hitlery Klintoon!

Elsewhere at the same site:


For the time being I'm going to assume they're not in control of any rhetorical apparatuses, and are just free-associating ancient slurs in a kind of Tea-Party Tourette's.

UPDATE. Yeah, I know, if I go collecting lame anti-Hitlery stories we'll be here all day, but I am compelled to note this entry from William A. Jacobson of Legal Insurrection:
Hillary has an Elizabeth-Warren-Like Family Lore Problem
Contrary to stump speeches, only one of Hillary’s grandparents was an immigrant.
Gasp! It's #Gen-ghazi! Heritage is a big deal for Jacobson: You may recall his whole ugh-how-woo-woo-woo campaign against his previous hard-on, Elizabeth Warren. During Warren's 2012 Senate race, Jacobson was constantly frothing over her claims to Native American heritage. Warren somehow overcame this brilliant strategy, but Jacobson sticks at it to this day: See his April 6, 2015 post, "Jeb Bush is more Hispanic than Elizabeth Warren is Indian." (I think he just likes to take any excuse to think and talk about her, which may be why he was telling his presumably perplexed readers last December that Warren was a shoo-in to beat Clinton for the nomination.)

Really, if you're throwing the kitchen sink 18 months before the election, what will you have left to throw next fall?

Wednesday, April 15, 2015

SAY IT LOUD.

I've been saying that the essence of libertarianism is the elevation of "them that has, gets" to the level of holy gospel, and hey, here comes David Boaz of the Cato Institute to prove it. Boaz likes those check-off boxes that let you devote a few bucks of your taxes to different funds and wonders, why can't the whole thing be like that?
Why not take this one step further? Why shouldn’t taxpayers make direct decisions about how much money they want to spend on other government programs, like paying off the national debt, the war in Iraq or the National Endowment for the Arts? This would force the federal government to focus time and resources on projects citizens actually want, not just efforts that appeal to special interests.
They're all "a republic, not a democracy" until it comes to money -- and of course Boaz isn't for letting the moochers use the tax system to loot the makers (as they do now -- ask Mitt Romney!), but rather for the makers with the most bucks to decide what services will be available to the little people:
Entitlements would be the biggest problem. About 60 percent of the federal budget now goes to entitlement programs. Medicare and Medicaid make up more than 20 percent of spending, and most of that comes from general revenues. Should taxpayers be able to withhold their hard-earned dollars from such programs? In a free society, they should. So how do we handle a shortage of funding? Congress could change the spending parameters to fit what the taxpayers are willing to supply.
The more money you have, the more dollar-votes you have on this. Like it is now, in other words -- but with no need for subterfuge, because that's the difference between libertarians and conservatives: Libertarians don't feel shame, so there's no need to be sneaky about it. (h/t Brent Cox.)

Tuesday, April 14, 2015

STOP THE PRESSES.


I haven't said anything about the douchebags who've already declared because a.) the prospect of a Ted Cruz presidency fills me with dread, not humor; it's like, "Haw, Hitler is 30 miles outside Paris!" b.) Even if she wins 50 states the Hitlery Klintoon candidacy will never be anything but sad to me -- sad in the way Robert Downey Jr. doing one more fucking Avengers movie is sad, and of course sad for the nation, but mostly sad because there cannot possibly be anything human about it -- even if she were suddenly struck with enlightenment or the seventh degree of concentration, even if she became luminous with self-knowledge, her campaign of necessity would be this big lumbering thing that demands attention for burritos (and gets it mainly from agents of arghblargh). Plus I may have to vote for her. c.) C'mon, Rubio's not old enough to run for President!

But this Pataki announcement blows the game wide open. Wait'll the kids get a load of the Pride of Peekskill! He's lawn-order, and he knows the rent is too damn low! He's every awful thing they want without the distracting layers of marketing that make the real candidates so extra loathsome.