NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN.

At the seething cauldron of post-gay-marriage panic that is Power Line, Paul Mirengoff has a theory, important enough to be expounded in not one but two posts. How could a court with all these Reagan-Bush appointees so disappoint Mirengoff as this one did? For one thing,

It’s commonly acknowledged that the trajectory for young men is to move to the right as they begin to assume the responsibilities of adulthood, including paying mortgages and helping to support and raise children.

But Supreme Court Justices are almost always past age 50 when they are appointed. By then, the children are, or soon will be, raised; the mortgage has, or soon will be, paid off; and the Justices are looking forward to grandchildren.

These developments shouldn’t drive anyone to the left, but I believe the aging process itself often does. Why? Because conservatism, especially conservative judging, is predicated on the absence of a certain kind of sentimentality (I say “certain kind” because there is a sense in which the main strand of conservatism is quite sentimental). It is predicated on not letting “feelings” dominate the decision-making process...

Let me see if I'm getting this: Men get more rightwing as they age, except for some of them, who grow childish-foolish and want to be nice like the Bird Lady in Mary Poppins. But why would lawyers, of all people, be the ones to go "sentimental"? Anyway:

The same-sex marriage opinions illustrate the point. Justice Kennedy’s opinion overflows with sentiment. It is sappy. (Kennedy’s sentiments, by the way, are in line with those of Mr. Conservative, Barry Goldwater, the classic example of a conservative who moved leftward in his advanced years).

Yeah, Goldwater's gay rights stand wasn't a natural outgrowth of his libertarianism, it was just senile dementia... Hey, wait a minute, Goldwater was never a lawyer. Why didn't he get more conservative?

...The Obamacare cases also were arguably influenced by age. Forget about what Justice Scalia calls the the Chief Justice’s “sommersaults of statutory interpretation.” In my view, Roberts’ opinions are really about caution. In the first case (on the individual mandate), he was at pains not to overrule the legislature. In the second (on subsidies), he was desperate not to upset the health insurance market.

Caution is an attribute associated with advanced age.

So judges and Barry Goldwater, but not other people, get liberal as they get older, but some also get cautious... This isn't really hanging together, so for his follow-up post Mirengoff hauls in some guy  to spell it out: These judges who don't vote his way are just "soft," Some Guy says, partly because they "have essentially made it in life," but mainly because the evil spirit of liberalism steals upon them and drains their essence:

For virtually all my lifetime, liberalism has ruled the culture (including and importantly academia), and being a conservative just takes a lot of energy. For example, it is not only anti-male and anti-white bias that accounts for the fact that so many leftist airheads get jobs as professors; it’s that when you’re on board with the received liberal wisdom, you swim with the tide rather than against it. 

Swimming against it produces harder thinking (which is one important reason conservatives like debates and more often than not win them), but it also requires a lot of energy. Sooner of later, for most people, it starts to run out.

So liberalism challenges conservatives, thereby making them mentally stronger, but also physically weaker, which is how the Court's conservatives lost the secret Feats of Strength that actually decide their cases. (Ginsburg's thin but she's wiry!)

I guess Mirengoff's beginning to despair that he'll ever get on the High Court and has decided to grace his readers with his Scalia-grade bullshit. Or has the conservative breakdown reached the stage where they're just trying to confuse people?

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.

THE YEAR IN BULLSHIT, PART THREE.

(Here's the third installment of a year-end bottom-ten of the lowlights of 2014, culled from my archives and elsewhere. The previous installments are here and here. Read 'em and weep!)

4. The Eternal ObamaHitler. In January 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. There are many conservatives on the internet who sound as if they’re writing from survivalist treehouses where they wait, gun at the ready, for UN troops to try and put them in FEMA camps; you expect such people to peddle every daffy Obama story that churns up. But Reynolds’ theory may help explain why the ones who manage to hold down jobs in the non-tinfoil world also circulate them; perhaps they do so more in sorrow than in psychotic rage, clucking (as Reynolds did recently, in a column speculating that a Congressional spending billing passed “because NSA has ‘dirt’ on John Boehner”), “Sad what this country has become under the Obama Machine.”

Or it may be that they’re just political operatives who’ll throw any shit that comes to hand. But I try to be generous.

You may know that GM had an ignition-switch problem that it handled badly, possibly causing dozens of deaths. But did you know, as PJ Media’s Bryan Preston reported, “the Obama administration may have been covering up union shop GM’s deadly ignition switch flaw”? Wake up sheeple! Fox News’ Eric Bolling went so far as to suggest that the Obama White House “bankrupted GM" -- that is, bailed them out -- "...to make sure that the old GM was responsible for these deaths because they knew they had a problem and the new GM could go on with business as usual and then they would look like heroes.” “Did GM Bailout Cost Lives?” asked wingnut foundation the National Legal and Policy Foundation. “Congress needs to take a very close look at this — and perhaps the newly-Republican Senate will do so after January,” said Ed Morrissey of Hot Air. Maybe they can work it in between #Benghazi hearings.

But it’s not all tyrannizing and murdering in this Obama alt-reality universe: There’s also Obama playing pool, which became a thing (“WHILE THE WORLD BURNS, OBAMA FIDDLES, GOLFS, AND SHOOTS POOL”). Also Obama saluting a Marine with a cup of tea in his hand, ditto (“speaks volumes about President Obama, not only concerning his underlying disdain for our military, but also as regards basic decency”). And that tan suit business which, Jesus, I’m looking at it now and I still can’t figure it out. And golf, but that’s sort of an evergreen with them by now.

As seen by the brethren, Obama’s villainy informs everything he says and does; it’s so complete it’s mythic, like the strength of Paul Bunyan or the wiles of Br'er Rabbit. If Obama skips a military funeral, for example, it suddenly becomes unprecedented, even though other Presidents have done it. The most outrageous statements may be attributed to Obama and they will be believed, even without evidence. When his friends celebrate his birthday, Mollie Hemingway of The Federalist explains, it pollutes the very institution of birthdays (“One, it’s childish. Birthdays are for kids”). Why, he commits treason even when he frees an American P.O.W. — that’s how twisted he is!

Despite this superhuman power, it goes without saying that Obama is also wrong about everything — for example, he says “horseshit” when he clearly should have said “bullshit” (this from Power Line’s Paul Mirengoff, a master of both).

Given this view, it should come as no surprise that their rhetoric verges on the hysterical when they discuss him — see National Review’s Andrew C. McCarthy (“So now Obama, like a standard-issue leftist dictator, is complementing lawlessness with socialist irrationality”) and Deroy Murdock (“Obama now rules by decree… Obama’s predecessors have signed executive orders and, more or less, left it at that. But Obama pounds his chest as he does so”), Politico’s Rich Lowry (“Barack Obama, American Caudillo”), the Washington Post’s Marc Thiessen ("Is Obama considering surrendering to the Taliban?”), Rod Dreher ("as far as the Obama administration is concerned, traditional Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are vestiges of barbarism”), former Texas GOP Senate candidate Darren Yancy (“a 6 year reign of terror against Christianity, liberty, the Constitution, self responsibility, employment, and economic opportunity”), actual Congressmembers Rep. Mark Meadows, R-NC (“he has declared war, and not just on Congress but the American people”) and Rep. Randy Weber, R-TX (“On floor of house waitin on 'Kommandant-In-Chef"'... the Socialistic dictator who's been feeding US a line or is it 'A-Lying?’”), et alia.

Pundits like to tell us that political mudslinging isn’t anything new — look at Adams and Jefferson, etc. But with all respect to James Callender, the Founders lived in a simpler time before rapid-response teams, social media, and vast armies of citizen journalists who have turned what used to be quadrennial mudslinging into a constant, suffocating shitstorm.

3. Torture as an American value. I’m not sure how old you have to be to remember when torturing prisoners was something the United States simply didn’t do. As a lad I, like many Americans, was shocked to learn about the My Lai massacre; if I had been then told that Lt. William Calley also waterboarded and hung from chains his Vietnamese victims, whether they were Viet Cong or not, I’m sure I would have been even more shocked. Maybe Dirty Harry did that shit, but not John Wayne.

I am old and jaded now, but I must admit, when after the Senate released the torture report in December a number of Americans, including a former Vice-President of the United States, told us that torture was great and it was actually the citizens who balked at it that were anti-American, I was still a little shocked.

It’s not that I expected better of the cheerleaders. The Republican response to the Senate Report, for example, was just the kind of ass-covering that could have been predicted from members of that august Party. “The rendition, detention, and interrogation program [the CIA] created, of which enhanced interrogation was only a small part,” they said, “enabled a stream of collection and intelligence validation that was unprecedented.” That is, we haven’t been attacked since, so it stands to reason everything we did, including the 13th Century barbarities, must have helped.

And I can’t say I was exactly surprised by those conservatives who don’t belong to any Congressional committees who nevertheless jumped up and said torture, what’s the problem? Like Commentary’s Max Boot, who seethed that “the release of the Senate report will only aid our enemies who will have more fodder for their propaganda mills” — as if the torture weren’t worse than people finding out about it; as if in fact the citizens of the nations we conquered weren't already well aware and we, the American people, weren’t the last to find out.

There was the libertarian perspective from Reason’s Scott Shackford: The torture itself wasn’t the problem — the problem was Big Gummint. “Strip out the torture and terrorism and you've got any other troubled government program,” Shackford shrugged, and offered what he must have thought was a brilliant correlative: “Was the Department of Health and Human Services honest with those charged with oversight about the state of Obamacare health insurance exchanges prior to their launch, and has it succeeded in providing affordable health insurance? It's the same argument.” Obamacare is torture too, basically, but you don’t see Democrats complaining about that!

About the attempted deep thoughts on the subject by Jonah Goldberg (“In other words, we have the moral vocabulary to talk about kinds of killing — from euthanasia and abortion to capital punishment, involuntary manslaughter and, of course, murder — but we don’t have a similar lexicon when it comes to kinds of torture”), the less said the better.

There were also straight-up psychos like the person who wrote “Yes, Christians Can Support Torture” for The Federalist. (Depressingly representative quote: “Prolonged torture designed to crush the spirit of an individual is different from interrogation techniques, even ones that inflict pain.”) Probably the nadir, though, is represented by internet tough guy Steve Hayward of Power Line, who snarled at “the handwringing of the media and liberals” and suggested in future we just take the detainees (whom he took care to call “terrorists,” although a significant number of them had no proven connection with terrorism — that’s how professional propagandists work, folks) out of CIA custody and “hand them over to the Hells’ Angels,” haw haw.

The most interesting (in the clinical sense) part of Hayward’s essay addressed the reasonable conclusion that if we torture, we’re not better than other totalitarian regimes; nonsense, Hayward huffed, American exceptionalism “does not and has never meant that the United States is above or immune to the basic rules of political life, especially the basic instinct to defend itself against enemies. The fact that we do so without apology (except from liberals) is a good part of what makes the U.S. exceptional today…” So this is the conservative defense of a practice condemned by civilization for centuries: That we torture, but we’re still better because we do so with an all-American sneer on our faces.

The surprise wasn’t that these people would lie about torture and, when the lie was exposed, just laugh about it — I’ve known that about these people for a long time. I guess what shocked me was the confidence they showed that ordinary Americans would agree with them, and that their confidence might be justified.

(More later.)

THIS HERE'S A ZOO AND THE KEEPER AIN'T YOU/AND I'M SICK OF IT, I'M SICK OF YOU.

The Wall Street Journal is really pissed Bill de Blasio is cruising into the New York mayoralty:

Occupy City Hall

...The Occupy movement that in 2011 pitched street camps in the U.S. from Wall Street to San Francisco posited a tale of two Americas and class resentment unseen for many decades. The movement faded, but if the opinion polls are right, New York voters are about to elect the Occupy movement to run America's largest city.

As with Obama, no election is legitimate if the Democrat wins or is expected to.

The Big Apple is on the verge of electing a man whose explicit agenda is the repudiation of the conservative reforms achieved by a generation of city leaders from both parties, which transformed New York from a terrifying urban joke into the nation's municipal crown jewel.

Thereafter, we get a reading from The Gospel According to Rudy and scary puppets labeled "Living Wage" and "Rent Control."

But not once does Journal address the question of why New Yorkers are prepared to vote for de Blasio -- except for this pathetic specimen:

Bill de Blasio, the Democratic nominee, is leading Republican Joe Lhota by more than 40 points. Conventional wisdom holds that this is happening mainly because New Yorkers are "tired" of Mayor Mike Bloomberg. Losing access to 16-ounce cups of soda is insufficient reason for what is likely to happen to New York.

I've been in exile a couple of years but I can say this with confidence: The soda thing isn't why the citizens are turning toward de Blasio. (For one thing, de Blasio supports the soda ban.)

If New Yorkers are tired of Bloomberg, it may be because between him and Giuliani they've had nearly twenty years of crackdown government and they're sick of it. It doesn't help that Bloomberg acts as if he's just as sick of them. Last week, for example, he altered the terms of the Met Museum's lease so that they can charge a flat fee (if you can call $25 flat), which may end the possibility of cheap admission to one of the world's great museums in one of the world's great cities -- where many residents can't afford it (and Joe Lhota doesn't seem to care about that either).

The Journal also complains that de Blasio "has held no real job," but after three terms of a guy who's a massive business success and treats his constituents like kitchen help, that's not much of a knock.

Polls show that citizens are divided over stop and frisk, but the Journal might take a hint from the fact that a clear majority of them are willing to throw it over and even risk a return to the horrors of CBGB and Mean Streets if it means an end to a corporate governance model that's always warning it can continue to provide good services only by selling out the city's patrimony. If they can also get a thumb in the eye of the suck-up press that enables it, so much the better.

I'm two hundred miles away but if de Blasio wins I'm gonna party.

UPDATE. Oh, as if I needed another reason to celebrate, Ron Radosh at PJ Media:

Whether you call it the new Popular Front uniting unabashed Marxists, revolutionary activists, and liberal Democrats, as [Sol] Stern does, or a “new New Left,” as [Tom] Hayden does, it threatens the well-being of our entire country. We may not live in New York City, but we cannot ignore what is happening there.

Yeah, when you watch TV shows set in New York, you won't be able to relax -- you'll be thinking, "The whole thing is run by commies!" Plus when you go there on business, you'll have to worry about squeegee men nationalizing your wallet.

UPDATE 2. Har, hellslittlestangel in comments, "The Journal doesn't give Giuliani enough credit. Thanks to his reforms, murder rates are at their lowest since the 1960s in the entire country." And tigrismus on the Journal's gripe that de Blasio "has held no real job": "The Journal author wrote this in rivets." Hey, be nice: There's a good chance whichever factotum wrote that editorial does cardio kick-boxing on his lunch breaks.

Also amusing: Wingnuts hung up on the fact that de Blasio expressed admiration for the Sandinistas, for God's sake, instead of the Contras as a true Reaganite would. "Bill de Blasio remains a fan of burning synagogues and persecuting Jews," babbles Daniel Greenfield  at FrontPageMag. "So it seems a fair question: Is Bill de Blasio still a Sandinista at heart?" asks Matthew Hennessey at City Journal. Must be tough having to go out at Halloween dressed as Daniel Ortega and find nobody's scared of you or even knows why they're supposed to be.

Try something else, fellas -- hey, did you know his wife is black? It may come to that, or to the shctick Paul Mirengoff thought was killer at Power Line back in August:

Public Advocate Bill Di Blasio is running because he doesn’t think there’s anyone sufficiently Progressive in the field. He rides his bicycle through the hip Brooklyn brownstone belt trolling for voters and needs no prompting to tell you that he’s Italian and his wife is African-American.

Yeah, why would anyone in New York go for a guy who rides a bike in Brooklyn? That's like eating pastrami without mayonnaise.