WHEN THEY LET UNPROPERTIED WHITE MEN VOTE, HE KNEW IT WAS ALL DOWNHILL FROM THERE.

As I've noted before, whereas once upon a time they felt the need to at least pretend they liked Labor Day, conservatives now openly express contempt for the holiday, the socialistic innovations it celebrates (such as the 40-hour week and paid sick leave), and basically anybody who has managed to win wages enough to decently feed and house a family without employment at a think tank or megachurch.

Still, Kevin D. Williamson at National Review lays it on a bit thick. His "Red Monday" column (subtitled "We don’t need this quasi-Canadian, crypto-Communist holiday") reads like some bright kid tried to forge a P.J. O'Rourke column but couldn't manage the humor part. "Highly paid union men," for example, are hypocrites because they shop on Labor Day while retail workers must punch the clock; I guess Williamson's never heard of RWDSU.  And his big payoff is that "as a terminus of summer, Labor Day is disappointing," because it's still hot outside. I don't think Jerry Seinfeld in his prime could have put that one over. But the really creepy bit is this:

The Canadian typographical workers had been demanding a 58-hour work week and the repeal of anti-union laws. Parliament obliged, and of course the unions’ immediate response was to press for a 54-hour work week, and then a still shorter one, and so on, until everybody was French.

I mean,  at least when they used the slippery slope argument against gay marriage, it led to some juxtapositions that were actually humorous.

They must have some idea how normal people would react to this if they saw it. But, come to think of it, how would that ever happen?

THE CONSERVATIVE CRACK-UP, CONT.

At National Review Kevin Williamson commends himself on grabbing and throwing a woman's phone during a theater performance because she insisted on looking at messages or something. Williamson was ejected for his tantrum.

While I am torn on the merits (I am against unseemly behavior at the theater, which seems to apply to both parties here), I note that Williamson has said before that he believes in bringing back the stocks for "crimes that undercut shared community life and encourage the further atomization of our society." From his new post I would imagine that he sees the woman's behavior as such a crime and his own behavior as blameless, atomization-wise. And I'm sure his attack is nothing compared to the punishment fantasies his imagination summoned after the incident ("two parties of women of a certain age, the sad sort with too much makeup and too-high heels..." Yeah, he's given it some thought).

I note also that Williamson fantasizes general applause for his actions:

In a civilized world, I would have received a commendation of some sort. To the theater-going public of New York — nay, the the world – I say: “You’re welcome."

Radicals always think The People are with them, despite all evidence.

BTW Williamson is also the guy who said Gabby Giffords' emotional but non-assaultive response to the Congressional gun vote was a "childish display."

WHAT, THEY FEEL SHAME?

Yeah, I wouldn't sign it either.

UPDATE. They finally put Kevin Williamson's name on it -- guess he drew the short straw.

IT'S A SMALL WORLD. At National Review, Kevin D. Williamson snarls at the proles and their déclassé leader:

Could somebody please get Barack Obama to shut up about “outsourcing” until some undergraduate aide has explained to him what the word means? As it stands, the president is showing himself an ignorant rube on the subject, and that is to nobody’s advantage. 

The Obama campaign, as you probably know, has been running ads denouncing Mitt Romney’s role at Bain Capital, in which Romney made various business deals that had the effect of making a whole lot of money for Bain’s customers while also allowing a lot of dirty foreigners to eat, and God knows the world would be better off if a billion-some Chinese were hungry and desperate, that being an obvious recipe for global stability.

I think there must be some small, special sub-audience at rightwing publications, possibly comprising Megan McArdle and a couple of her commenters, who think that normal Americans watching their jobs and their whole economy circle the drain should give a shit about the Chinese the way rich investors do.

Because the Obama campaign knows that one of its most important constituencies is economically illiterate yokels — a demographic to which the president himself apparently belongs — it is on the airwaves claiming “Romney’s never stood up to China — all he’s ever done is send them our jobs.’’ (Whose?)

"Whose?" You know, to people like this, Americans today are like Mau Maus, Apaches, or any other dispossessed indigenous peoples; when they demand back what was theirs, the Williamsons snort and wonder how these wretches could possibly claim such a right --  was it they, after all, who built this perfectly lovely foreign office, pavilion, and fountain? Well, maybe their labor built it, but the thinking was all the colonizers' -- all the wretches did before was live on it, fulfilling in no way the demands of global capital. "Whose?"

What Williamson's defending is well-explained in BusinessWeek, where they don't have to try as hard to bullshit anyone. The magazine discusses the trend away from sending jobs to India (you will note they use "offshoring" and "outsourcing" more or less interchangeably):

[Latin America and eastern Europe] are challenging the subcontinent’s dominance in outsourcing as American corporations increasingly ship higher-level jobs offshore. India had substantial advantages in offshoring’s first phase: plenty of English speakers to staff call centers and enough tech talent to run remote data-processing and computer support centers—all at about a 60 percent discount to stateside workers. But having wrung substantial costs out of back-office functions, U.S. companies are exporting skilled white-collar jobs in research, accounting, procurement, and financial analysis. 

Because these jobs aren’t mass-processing functions, India’s forte, there are greater opportunities for countries such as Argentina and Poland, which have higher labor costs than India. Using an outsourcing firm to hire an entry-level accountant in Argentina, for example, costs 13 percent less than a similar U.S. worker, while an Indian worker would cost 51 percent less. But many employers moving higher-end jobs offshore care about more than just getting the lowest wage. “The higher-value outsourcing jobs require a greater understanding of business context and a higher amount of interaction with clients,” says Phil Fersht, chief executive officer of HfS Research, a Boston outsourcing research firm. 

Cities such as São Paulo have large groups of young people with engineering and business school degrees who speak English and are capable of doing everything from developing video games to analyzing mortgage defaults for U.S. companies...

In other words, having laid waste to American blue-collar jobs with cheap equivalents overseas, they plan to do the same with executive and even lower-management functions. (C-suite types, of course, needn't worry.) You have to spend a bit more up front, but in the long run it's worth it! 

The same people who used to bitch about foreign aid are now telling us we should be happy that our livelihoods have been wealth-extracted, because some of the skim went to workers in other countries. Are these fuckers still wearing American flag pins? The things should be setting their lapels on fire.

UPDATE. Some commenters recognize Williamson's POV as a libertarian schtick. Yes, it is -- see McMegan Junior Grade Katherine Mangu-Ward sneering at protectionists who "make the case that American jobs are intrinsically better or more valuable than Chinese jobs" and their "skewed, provincial view of the world."

Bonus it-figures from Mangu-Ward's item: "Matt Yglesias blogs about the story here, and his analysis is spot on." Yglesias, whom Chuck Gilligan more recently finds defending Apple's $22,800/yr as the correct wage for "geniuses" (those of us who are not geniuses will of course have to make do with less), will in the Romney Administration join the New York Times as its token liberal columnist.

DEPRAVED ON ACCOUNT OF THEY'RE DEPRAVED. National Review's Daniel Foster, you will be pleased to know, doesn't unreservedly endorse the decision of the Ayn Rand Hook & Ladder Company to let some poor guy's house burn to ground because the man hadn't paid them a fee. But his asshole buddies are asking what his fucking problem is -- as you might expect, Jonah Goldberg is the douchiest of the bunch, giggling dementedly because the loss of someone's home nicely sets up his zinger about compassionate conservatism (I guess Goldberg hasn't learned the difference between fires in real life and fires in cartoons); John Derbyshire is typically savage and Kevin D. Williamson thinks a scorched-cat picture is an appropriate response, perhaps believing that by not adding a LOLcat caption he is exhibiting admirable restraint. (Is failing a psychological test a requirement for employment at National Review?)

Foster seems to have been unnerved by the insight these attacks offer into the character of his workmates, and like a battered child attempts to restore equilibrium by lashing out against a common enemy, Paul Krugman:

I don’t have much more to add, except to note that Paul Krugman, in a brief blog post on the subject, makes a really bad analogy:

This is essentially the same as denying someone essential medical care because he doesn’t have insurance. So the question is, do you want to live in the kind of society in which this happens?

No. Krugman would have been correct if he’d said “This is essentially the same as an insurance company refusing to pay for someone’s essential medical care because that person never bought insurance in the first place.” And I don’t mind living in that kind of society at all.

Actually, since the guy's home burned down, the best analogy -- an exigent situation in response to which public servants refuse to respond because the piper hadn't been paid -- would be a guy bleeding to death in the emergency room of Fred Hayek Memorial Hospital. Which I assume they would also endorse, unless the guy were a fetus.

Do these creatures actually know any human beings?

UPDATE. Interesting, isn't it, that libertarian magazine Reason has yet to comment* on this? If I didn't know better I'd assume they were thinking, "Everyone knows we're assholes -- do we have to prove it to them?"

*UPDATE 2. "You spoke too soon," commenter atheist informs me; the Reasonoids are "already pointing out how this excellent example shows the clear superiority of the libertarian worldview, and mocking hopey-dopey statist Paul Krugman." Yeah. The thrust of the thing is that since a government agency did this, you can't pin this on the libertarians -- even though the agency was clearly operating on the libertarian principles that are allegedly sweeping the country. I'm surprised no one has suggested a fire department voucher system.

Nick Gillespie also asks the Patrick Bateman impersonators who inhabit Reason comments whether they would let the house burn down, and gets the expected results. My favorite so far: "I've never felt so viscerally that people are starting to talk about us [libertarians] like others talk about Jews." Hmm, the more successful they are, the more victim status they claim -- refresh my memory: How are they not conservatives, again?

(There's also supposed to be a Katherine Mangu-Ward video, but I can't see it in my browser; I assume God is trying to protect me.)

UPDATE 3. God abandoned me and allowed me to see that video:

HOST: "Do you think the firefighters did the right thing by just standing by?"

MANGU-WARD: "Y'know, it's actually an interesting story because it's all about the context…"

HOST: "So you have absolutely no mercy for these people?"

MANGU-WARD: "Y'know, I think that it's a question of free riders…"

Jesus Christ, they're just monsters, aren't they?