IMAGINE THESE LINKS AS THE SCENES OF HORROR AT THE CLIMAX OF THE MAGIC FLUTE, AND AVERT YOUR EYES. The writers of The Corner have been removed to a new address. One imagines it padded, and attended by Union soldiers with soothing rattles and dolls, as in The Searchers ("It's hard to believe they're Right!" "They ain't Right - any more!")

Seriously, they've gotten even worse: Warren Bell is the new Jonah Goldberg! The displaced trickster-god of The Corner alternates between japes such as this --

When The Wall Street Journal runs those pictures (line drawing versions of photos) of people, their longtime policy has been to make the subject look about fifteen or twenty years younger. Don't you think it'd be awesome if they did that with Michael Jackson, showing him as a black guy?

-- and rubber-doll wrestling of the sort described here previously, but infinitely sadder: Responding to the Human Events "Dangerous Books" tsimmis, Goldberg opens, "Jon Chait asserts -- simply for the sake of offering insults -- that the contributors in particular and conservatives in general cannot 'distinguish between seminal works of social science and totalitarian manifestos' simply because both sorts of books show up on the same list. But he must know that, say, Robert George knows the difference between The Communist Manifesto and John Dewey's Democracy and Education...."

How should Chait, or any reader, know this, one wishes to ask, when the article in question makes no such distinction and Bad-Book Judge George published no dissenting opinion? But the rules of the rubber-doll match allow no animated opponents, and Goldberg achieves maximum thrash very well on his own:

Of coursebooks can be dangerous. Everything important, everything with the power to change mens' minds can be dangerous...

I disagree with those who would lump Darwin with Freud and Marx. But I don't think one can glibly say that just because the book was scientifically correct (speaking broadly, we've discovered lots of new things since then) and pioneering, doesn't mean it can't also be harmful. Darwinism certainly led to many horrors and abuses across the ideological spectrum...

Et eccch. After a while the Michael Jackson jokes come as a relief. You know when John Derbyshire and Rick Brookhiser step in as Voices of Reason, things are pretty dire.

While the soldiers are cleaning up shreds of rubber doll in Jonah's corner of The Corner, elsewhere the ravings are nearly as bad:

IF I WERE AN IRAQI I would have every reason to assume American troops will be there as long as it takes, since George W. Bush won an incredibly hard-fought election making precisely this case at great potential risk and cost to himself.

CONSERVATISM STANDS ATHWART HISTORY yelling stop -- and puts you on another road, sometimes a u-turn, sometimes just a different road. But you get somewhere. The Dems would just have you sit and stare at their Bill Pryor/etc. talking points.

LET'S BUILD A GIANT AIRSHIP. Let's face it: The 80s even had the best toys. It was Christmas morning in America.

Et ultima ecch. Or maybe not yet: "Given [your] opinions about the unseriousness of U.S. foreign policy and the value of euthenasia," says John Podhoretz to John Derbyshire (!!!), "you really ought to have voted for Kerry."

Finally -- for this night! And they must reanimate this dead night a hundred times! -- they descend into what I guess among this crowd must pass for porn. Oh dear, I can imagine Buckley muttering as his servant laces him into his leather vest, they'll never get the young people this way.

Hayek, wake up, they have gone mad! Somebody open a window.