JONAH GOLDBERG'S I KNOW YOU ARE BUT WHAT AM I? I'll say this for him: Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism is full of fun historical facts, including these hilarious biographical details for Rabbi Michael Lerner: "When [Lerner and his bride] were married, they exchanged rings extracted from the fuselage of an American aircraft downed over Vietnam. The wedding cake was inscribed with the Weathermen motto 'Smash Monogamy.'"

But the book doesn't offer much in the way of analysis. As in his writing for National Review and elsewhere, Goldberg treats facts as dirt-clods to hurl at his opponents; the task of condensing them into a case that fascism comes out of liberalism (and that modern-day liberalism is still just a putsch short of fascist dictatorship) is well beyond him.

We get a hint at the problem early on, when Goldberg defines fascism. "Scholars have had so much difficulty explaining what fascism is because various fascisms have been so different from each other," he says. But he is unwilling to take as a guide such apparently definitive statements as Mussolini's ("the resolute negation of the doctrine underlying so-called scientific and Marxian socialism") -- even while calling Il Duce "The Father of Fascism" -- prefering instead to emphasize Mussolini's youthful enthusiasms for Marx and socialism, which Goldberg accepts as proof that Marxism, socialism, and fascism are all the same thing -- that is, liberalism.

As a perhaps semi-conscious defense of this selective reading, Goldberg notes that "as a pragmatist, [Mussolini] was constantly willing to throw off dogma, theory, and alliances whenever convenient" -- yet he doesn't seem to grasp that this statement cuts both ways; if Mussolini was just conning people when he denounced the Left, why couldn't he have been conning them when he embraced it?

So Goldberg offers his own definition:

Fascism is a religion of the state. It assumes the organic unity of the body politic and longs for a national leader attuned to the will of the people. It is totalitarian in that it views everything as political and holds that any action by the state is justified to achieve the common good. It takes responsibility for all aspects of life, including our health and well-being, and seeks to impose uniformity of thought and action, whether by force or through regulation and social pressure. Everything, including the economy and religion, must be aligned with its objectives. Any rival identity is part of the "problem" and therefore defined as the enemy. I will argue that contemporary American liberalism embodies all of these aspects of fascism.

If the charge at the end surprises you, you have missed a trick: by "all of these aspects," he doesn't mean all at the same time. Any little piece of the bill of particulars, regardless of context, will serve. Thus, the fact that Mussolini supported old-age pensions and a minimum wage becomes as important to understanding his fascism as hyper-nationalism and the one-party state, because "takes responsibility for all aspects of life, including our health and well-being..." appears in Goldberg's definition.

You can imagine how this figures in Goldberg's classification of the Great Society and national health care as fascist phenomena. Indeed, there isn't an American welfare program or idea in the book that Goldberg doesn't find fascist or proto-fascist (this includes George Bush's compassionate conservatism). One wonders why he failed to mention the fascist provenance of Home Relief or the Sermon on the Mount.

Once you start using history and logic so irresponsibly, anything goes. For example, when we come to Hillary Clinton, Goldberg's "First Lady of Liberal Fascism," we are offered her 1973 Yale graduate paper arguing for granting legal autonomy to children in court cases as evidence of her fascism. Many of us might question the scope of Clinton's youthful claim, but it takes a Goldberg to compare Clinton's arguments to those of Robespierre and Hitler on the grounds that they, too, advocated "'capturing' children for social engineering purposes." Goldberg follows with some characteristic broken-field running, saying that Clinton's project "is in no way a Nazi project" -- and then compares her to Stalin and Mao ("they share a sweeping vision of social justice and community and the need for the state to realize that vision").

Clinton took a side in legitimate competing interests, and the most evident legacy of her efforts may be seen in the relatively mild legal and policy efforts of the Children's Defense Fund. But Goldberg finds her fascist because "while there are light-years of difference between the programs of liberals and those of Nazis or Italian Fascists or even the nationalist progressives of yore, the underlying impulse, the totalitarian temptation is present in both." And didn't Goldberg explicitly use the word totalitarian -- in italics -- in his bill of particulars? Close counts in horseshoes and Liberal Fascism.

If you think this is rich, see what he gives Norman Lear. Yes, that's Norman Lear the TV guy. The sitcom maker's formation of People for the American Way, and his despair at "the spiritual emptiness of our culture" and "our obsession with numbers, the quantifiable, the immediate," draws this analysis from Goldberg:

Lear's cri de coeur is an almost pitch-perfect restatement of the neo-Romantic objections to modern society that inspired fascist movements across Europe and the search for 'a cause larger than ourselves' of the American Progressives. He might receive an appreciative hearing from the early Paul de Man, Ezra Pound, and countless other fascist theorists and ideologues who denounced the Western -- particularly Jewish -- obsession with numbers and technical abstraction.

From wan, warm-hearted boilerplate to fascism in two easy sentences! And it can be used on anyone who pleads for deep feeling -- even Mr. Spock! ("It is almost a biological rebellion, a profound revulsion against the planned communities, the programming, the sterilized, artfully balanced atmospheres...") Try it at home yourself!

There are many similar howlers in the book. The barbarities of Leftist radicals in the 60s -- despite Goldberg's admission that these people sought to "differentiate themselves from liberals, whom the hard left saw as too concerned with politeness, procedure, and conventional politics" -- are connected to official Democratic politics because Howard Dean once spoke nostalgically of the Civil Rights Act and Hollywood made Easy Rider. Goldberg glides over the blacklists of the 50s -- he has previously spoken sympathetically of them -- but takes care to remind us that "[Joe] McCarthy's political roots lay firmly in the Progressive Era." The Da Vinci Code is linked to "the Nazi attack on Christianity." And there are all those brain-farts ("The white male is the Jew of liberal fascism") that have been the joy and solace of Sadly, No! lo these many weeks.

Goldberg is on firmer ground documenting the often deplorable overreach of the Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt Administrations. Of course, you may have already learned about many of their atrocities from Howard Zinn, Gore Vidal, and other liberal writers. That liberals, socialists, and progressives mainly took it in the neck from Wilson doesn't bother Goldberg -- after all, the Nazis fought the Commies, and they were all fascists. And I doubt Goldberg would even acknowledge that the more coercive aspects of the Roosevelt Administration are now rejected by most liberals, and indeed mainly defended by conservatives.

And that's really what this book is about. Throughout Liberal Fascism Goldberg inserts complaints that liberals unfairly call conservatives fascists -- a slur that, in our age of blogospheric intemperance and extraordinary renditions, is even harder to escape than when hippies were yelling it. Well, he'll show them. Having heard the "Why do you think they called it National Socialism?" routine for decades, I have some idea of the depth of Goldberg's well of resentment. Though he has plowed up a lot of source material to stuff his magnum opus, that sense of ancient grievance permeates and dooms his book. Goldberg betrays a palpable need to get all his (and previous generations of American conservatives') grudges in, from Rousseau to John Kerry. And he's got to prove they're all fascists. Even a skilled polemicist would have collapsed under the weight of the task, but a skilled polemicist would have known enough to rein it in a little. Goldberg doesn't. Whenever he does manage to string a few points together, The Quest calls him unto a new absurdity.

That won't matter to the built-in market of Coulter fans and dittoheads who have already adopted Liberal Fascism, but unaffiliated readers will probably be flummoxed. As for those of us on the other side -- the real fascists, if you will -- it is, as tradition dictates, just the latest, if also the largest, of Goldberg's gifts of laughter.

TURN OFF THE DAMN TV AND GO OUTSIDE. It's time for some deepthink on TV cop shows:

In all, then, I think it’s clear that the show sends a consistent and obvious message, conveyed through the central characters’ continual physical, psychological, and legal intimidation of people not convicted of any crime or even under formal arrest.

It is this: we are living in a police state, a society in which the government has unlimited authority over the individual. And this, the producers appear strongly to suggest, is a good thing, as it results in the restoration of order at the end of each episode (albeit with the occasional cheesy irony or fashionable ambiguity), as mysteries tend to do. The fact that this “order” involves the reduction of citizens into subjects, of taxpayers into servants of a privileged elite through the continual threat of violence by police, seems of little consequence to the producers, as it is never dealt with fundamentally and critically in the show’s story lines.

So who wrote this crap? The Derrida Professor for Semiotics at some fancy-pants college, talking about Dragnet? No, it's by credentialed culture warrior S.T. Karnick, talking at Big Hollywood about Law & Order: Criminal Intent.

Why would a conservative bitch about cops muscling suspects on TV? There's a simple explanation: The interrogations on L&O:CI are not the manly sort Jack Bauer dished out on 24, they're clear examples of liberal fascism. No, I'm not even kidding:

Both characters [Bobby Goren and Alex Eames] annoyed me in essence, I suspect, because they were such perfect specimens of a particularly common and grating type of contemporary American: the Priggish Urban Liberal-Progressive Busybody Knowitall Pseudointellectual Snob. And in doing so, the show conveyed a point of view firmly based on authoritarianism, exemplifying the contemporary worldview that the political writer Jonah Goldberg calls liberal fascism.

Karnick finds Vincent D'Onofrio, the big guy with the weird interrogation methods, an "unappealing character type." That I can buy, but then Karnick tells us where else he finds this particular type:

...it thoroughly infests current-day TV news and talk shows, newspaper columns, Slate and the Huffington Post and other fashionable politico-cultural websites, contemporary art shows, your neighborhood Starbucks, and other such locales made repellant by their presence.

I dislike Starbucks because the coffee is crap, not because the baristas tower over me and read back my order in a halting, urgent whisper. What the hell is Karnick talking about?

Though he also doesn't like the lieberal storylines -- too many guilty businessmen; Karnick would prefer the shows be about "the usual domestic violence or street crimes that most murders result from," which sounds like a ratings goldmine -- Karnick mainly finds evidence of liberal fascism in the way the actors pull faces:

The progressive-authoritarian political agenda was strongly evident in the story lines and dialogue throughout the run of the series, but D’Onofrio and Erbe added much to the effect by conveying it continually through their facial expressions, gestures, and vocal inflections. The smug looks they passed to each other during their interrogations of suspects were downright insufferable, given the enormous power these detectives were given to detain people, subject them to intense questioning, and manipulate them psychologically in the attempt to send them to prison for felonies.

And not only do they evince liberal fascism by giving suspects That Look and taking That Tone, they're prejudiced -- there are certain suspects they exempt from physiognomological oppression:

...D’Onofrio was notable for his habit of looming into an individual’s personal space by edging ever-closer to the person, using his size (he is tall, bulky, and pudgy) to intimidate them. This was something Goren seemed particularly inclined to do to wealthy, successful people. The poor, by contrast, didn’t usually get that sort of treatment. Of course, since the latter were seldom actual suspects and had little sense of personal power, he had less desire to intimidate them, as he seemed well aware that the crimes he was chosen to investigate were always committed by the rich and powerful, and in particular those from the private sector, not government.

Clearly conservatives should hold a tea party in TV Land to demand a fairer distribution of smug faces on cop shows.

There are plenty of other things wrong with their culture-war obsession, but really, these guys are mostly hurting themselves. You'd think their friends would tell them that obsessively analyzing such things as Vincent D'Onofrio's eyeballs and facial muscles is turning them into total dinks. Those people aren't real, S.T. -- they're characters, and if they're weird it's because they're on TV, and viewers like unusual people.

Oh Christ, I've said too much -- now his next essay will be about Monk, and how obsessive-compulsive liberal fascists gesturally oppress him at theater benefits and Panera.

(h/t Dan Coyle.)


UPDATE. Great comments. Though I still advise he play outside, Gocart Mozart has another Kulturkampf case for Karnick to get on:

Batman and Superman always went after Galtian super villians like the Joker or Lex luther. They never beat up on the crack heads. Fuckin' liberal fascists!

That'll keep the rightdorks' comboxes hopping like they haven't since Revenge of the Sith.

OTHER THAN THAT, PRETTY MUCH THE SAME THING!

The current New Yorker cover, showing some prominent American presidents of years past agog at a Donald Trump speech, is gentle anachronistic satire, like the radio playing "Shoo Shoo Baby" in A Matter of Life and Death. Yet some media folks think they have to debunk it. At Mediaite, Joe Concha says:

In other words, if presidents like Franklin or Teddy Roosevelt or George Washington witnessed the kind of rhetoric offered up by Trump, the reaction would be horror, disgust, shame. To that end, wouldn’t it be interesting to see the cover reversed with Trump on the outside looking in at Washington, who was a slave owner since the age of 11? And just how well did our first president treat the 318 slaves he owned at his estate in Mount Vernon (Virginia)?

The Founders were hypocrites, see; at least Trump doesn't have slaves (and if he does they're probably in Qatar), so who are we to look down on him? I won't bore you good people by explaining what's wrong with this analysis -- instead, I'll mildly divert you with an even worse one by David Harsanyi at The Federalist. He begins:

It is not exactly surprising that The New Yorker offers us a pristine example of the smugness that permeates the Left these days...

I put a funny picture of Obama with a Hitler mustache on my Facebook page and nobody paid any attention, but let some elitists put their funny president pictures on fancy glossy paper in front of a bunch of boring "journalism" and suddenly it's a big deal!

As you might expect, Harsanyi isn't worried about Washington's slaves, and uses The Father of Our Country merely as a stick to beat his own enemies:

In a Politico podcast this week, Obama claimed that, “[The] Republican vision has moved not just to the right, but has moved to a place that is unrecognizable.” Funny, I felt the same way when I heard this State of the Union Address. But since we’re on the topic: What would George Washington have to say about a leading Democrat candidate who deploys calculated class war and diluted Marxist economic theories?

I imagine he would say, "What is class war and Marxism? Away with this strangely-dressed person, lest I forget my own Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior."

Harsanyi is particularly incensed by the Big Gummint sins of the Roosevelts  -- "[FDR] brandished executive power in ways that would almost certainly make a President Trump look like a piker," "[TR] embraced some of the ugliest pseudoscientific aspects of progressive racism and chauvinism," etc. But he is outdone, and at the same website, by one Julian Adorney. Adorney's essay is called "The Uncanny Parallels Between Donald Trump And FDR," but he's really frying bigger fish:

FDR may not have been Hitler or Mussolini. But the difference was one of degree, not of kind.

And it's hard to say which one's worse, as Adorney goes on to tell us about the Japanese-American internment camps and the S.S. St. Louis, but not about the Second World War, in which FDR unaccountably endeavored to destroy his fellow fascist Adolf Hitler. Maybe he was jealous!

I notice this FDR-as-Hitler shtick is getting popular with conservatives. Looks like Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism has trained a generation of wingnuts to spread the story of Adolf Roosevelt, in hopes of attracting swing voters. Good thing for these guys there aren't that many WWII vets left to beat the shit out of them.

UPDATE. Many spectacular comments, e.g.: Jay B: "I'm sure that conservatives were against Japanese internment at the time, when it mattered." (Find Yastreblyansky's comment on how Robert Taft wanted to deal with them, too.) Megalovanian: "Antifascism is the fascism of liberal fascism." And Gromet, on Adorney's "difference of degree, not of kind" thing: "FDR gassed my grandparents with Zyklon-W. Same kind of thing as Zyklon-B, just 20-something letters less in degree, so instead of killing them it employed them, fed them, and freed the world of fascism for them."

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...of my Top 10 Stupid Rightblogger Tricks. Special double-length column, no extra charge!

Long as it is, I had a couple of outtakes:

Wingnut lawyer calls civil rights hero a “fraud.”

John Lewis, now a Democratic Representative in Congress from Georgia, marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965 and got his skull cracked for it. Lewis also got attacked by new President Donald Trump around the weekend of MLK Day 2017, after Lewis criticized his repulsive civil rights record, and Power Line’s John Hinderaker backed Trump thus: “Lewis is invariably described as a ‘civil rights icon,’ but the man is an utter fraud.”

How a man cruelly beaten in the cause of civil rights might be considered a fraud - especially by a guy whose greatest sacrifice to his own cause might be working late on Friday — Hinderaker didn’t explain. “There is no reason to treat John Lewis with kid gloves,” he sniffed, “and Donald Trump doesn’t do so.” Or, to paraphrase: You may be a national hero, but I am a shameless and energetic hack in the service of a buffoon, and history shows that I have the advantage.

Liberal Fascism for Dummies.

Normally I’d leave this spot open for Jonah Goldberg, and God knows he has plenty of worthy entries this year — like this one, in which he mused that in the post-Lincoln era, “I’d like to think I’d have been in the Radical Republican camp myself.” Try to imagine the inventor of the “Marion Berry cocktail… equal parts Jaegermeister, Kaluha, Bourbon and Coke; ‘So black not even the man can keep it down!’” hanging out with Thaddeus Stevens.

But Goldberg has been outstripped by Dinesh D’Souza, longtime rightwing operative and convicted felon: While Goldberg got his most recent fame boost in 2008 with Liberal Fascism, a dumb book about how liberals are the Real You-Know-Whats, D’Souza has published The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of American Left, which, on the evidence of D’Souza’s August column, “THE SEX PERVERT AS ANTI-FASCIST,” appears to be similar in theme and even dumber.

I can hardly encapsulate it here, but the basic idea is that Frankfurt School Marxists tricked college kids into having orgies: “Marcuse’s celebration of outright perversion was a mantra that could not be more perfectly timed in the 1960s.” And getting all sexed up like this also made them liberal Nazis, because “while the rutting bohemians of the 1960s had no idea, Marcuse surely knew that the Nazis and the Italian fascists were themselves – almost to a man – bohemians.”

Hitler, for example, “was a painter and artiste before he went into politics,” wrote D’Souza; he listened to Wagner, and “was also a vegetarian.” And you stupid liberals think arts appreciation and tofu make you enlightened — if actually means you’re a Nazi!

Even being gay is part of the liberal Nazi nexus — did you know about Ernst Rohm? Indeed, “the Nazi atmosphere in those days… far more closely resembles that of the Village Voice or the Democratic National Convention than it does the National Review or the Trump White House.”

He’s got us dead to rights there. I just wonder why the guys marching around chanting “Jews will not replace us” don’t get in on the sex and bohemianism; I mean, I hear they can’t even beat off. Can merely hating Jews and pluralism really be enough of a payoff?

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about all the liberal fascism going on around here, from the martyrs Brendan Eich and Donald Sterling to Condi Rice to some guy in New Hampshire who apparently wanted to set his own rules at a school board meeting. They're all victims!

Among the outtakes: When a Rutgers professor applauded Rice's decision to bail, the Washington Examiner's Charles Hoskinson knocked the prof for appearing on "Russian government-supported propaganda channel Russia Today" and added, "judging from her willingness to appear on RT, Kumar's frequent criticism of U.S. media methods does not extend to those of government-sponsored propaganda outlets." Among the Americans appearing very, very frequently on Russia Today: The libertarian writers of Reason magazine.

UPDATE. I also neglected to include in my roundup Charles C.W. Cooke's "The New Fascism," because life is short and I hadn't seen it yet. It is everything aficionados of his work would expect. Short version: Rich people make market decisions that punish Jesus freaks, so liberals are fascists. He is especially pissed that a couple of guys who are against gay rights were denied a show on, get this, HGTV. (I wonder if anyone will tell him.) Later Cooke tried to explain himself to people who can do basic logic:

“But you like the market,” they have argued. “And this just the market working. HGTV did what it thought best for its bottom line.” 

I do like the market, yes. I like HGTV, too. But my criticism isn’t aimed at HGTV or the market, both of which are merely tools. It’s aimed the culture that informs them.

And so young Cooke turns Culture Warrior, which has the expected effect on the quality of his work: The rest of his entry is basically variations on "sputter, sputter."

I want television to be run by private companies that are responsive to public opinion. But does this mean I have to like that public opinion? Hardly... if it did, I would be required to be fine with the public’s apparently being so intolerant of the private views of its entertainers that anyone who steps out of line must be quickly removed from their sight.

I always assumed Cooke was new to America, but I'm beginning to wonder if he's ever spent a day here, or ever watched TV or talked about it (or anything else) with people who were not graduate students.

UPDATE 2. Also, here's something I left out of the If-I-don't-win-a-Hugo-it's-liberal-fascism section: A rant by John C. Wright at the Intercollegiate Review, full of references to Orwell and sententia like "the lamps of the intellect were put out one by one, first in society at large, then in literature..." as if Obama's America were identical to Nazi Germany.

As funny as Wright's Auschwitz cosplay is, his attempt to explain how people refusing to praise your stupid tits-and-lizards books = tyranny is even better:

Custom is encouraged by countless social cues and expressions of peer pressure. It is subjective, informal, covert, feminine, and indirect.

Custom is feminine? Bet he came up with that one when someone called him out for cutting the line to have his picture taken with Power Girl.

No one will arrest you if you don’t tip the waitress, but your friends will look at you askance and recoil as if you exude a mephitic odor. 

Sounds like he follows Dr. Mrs. Ole Perfesser's method of social criticism. As for the mephitic odor reaction, well, there's more than one possible explanation for that.

WILD SURMISE. The Anchoress complains at great length that Keith Olbermann called Bush a fascist. "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means," quoth she. Hey, there's a new one.

Last month, The Anchoress offered Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism, in which Hillary Clinton is called "First Lady of Liberal Fascism," for sale at her site. Though she hadn't read the book, she said, "The cover is brilliant," and "For thoughtful folks on both sides of the aisle, this book may be a useful opening to begin once again listening to each other instead of simply shouting down."

I don't have a punchline. When anything, even ignorance, achieves such perfection, one can only marvel.

BECAUSE YOU CAN'T SPELL THANKSGIVING WITHOUT LIBERAL FASCISM.

In his Morning Jolt thing he sends around to subscribers (here's a heavily-edited version some guy put on the internet), Jim Geraghty makes fun of the OFA PR campaign encouraging liberals to tell relatives about Obamacare at Thanksgiving dinner. Fair enough. I myself wouldn't bring it up, though if one of them came at me with some bullshit I would say, "that is some bullshit" and take it from there.

As often happens when a conservative has half a point, Geraghty keeps going until he has negative-a-point-and-a-half:

Our friend Jonah gets a lot of grief over Liberal Fascism, usually from people who have never read the book, and who usually go on to insist they don't need to in order to criticize it.

(I have read it; it's a piece of shit.)

But there is a creepy quasi-fascist vibe in this effort to turn families' holiday gatherings into an opportunity to dissuade critics of the president's policies...

When you say the word 'fascist,' people usually picture Mussolini speaking from a balcony and his high-booted goons marching around in public squares. Because we don't see those images in American society today, a lot of people recoil from labeling anyone in our modern politics with the term "fascist." 

Also because a lot of people aren't nuts.

But Mussolini wrote, "for the fascist, everything is in the state, and no human or spiritual thing exists, or has any sort of value, outside the state." Among the Organizing for Action crew, there seems to be some irresistible compulsion to take something outside the state -- Thanksgiving dinner -- and co-opt it for the purposes of the state -- or its leader, or its agenda.

Meanwhile over at his National Review blog, Geraghty encourages his readers to send out Thanksgiving cards devised by the Heritage Foundation with messages like "Let's be thankful Kathleen Sebelius isn't coaching our football team." This isn't a fascist use of the holiday at all, though, because, as Professor Goldberg has taught us, faaaart.

UPDATE. The remainder of Geraghty's thing is even worse, in a way: When a fellow wingnut suggests that maybe income equality on the massive scale we're seeing in this country isn't good for democracy, he sorta sees the point ("All societies have winners and losers, but modern America's winners are separating from the rest of us rather rapidly"), but retreats into victim-blaming:

A big question that is likely to dominate our politics in the coming years is: How much are the "losers" of modern America responsible for their circumstances?... if most of our countrymen getting the short end of the stick are folks who "worked hard and played by the rules," some significant chunk of them exacerbated their problems with bad decisions: They dropped out of school, had children before they were ready, abused alcohol or drugs, pursued unrealistic career paths... 

If most of you who are punished by inequality are blameless, comfort yourselves that your suffering also touches the nation's whores, junkies, and MFAs!

Obama has talked in the past about a “culture of irresponsibility,” but he’s mostly used that phrase in the context of Wall Street, and in fact pledged to “protect consumers from bad mortgages and greedy credit-card companies.” In his world, it’s always the big powerful corporations making trouble for the person in debt, not the person who actually ran up that debt. 

Quite a few Americans want to hear that we ourselves are most responsible for the quality of our own lives. If we could overcome that, the rest of the problems would fall like dominoes.

I guess Geraghty had to satisfy himself that income equality, like everything else, is not Wall Street's fault before he could really enjoy sending out his Heritage Foundation Thanksgiving cards.

Again I have to ask: Do these guys even know any real people?

NATIONAL REVIEW COVERS THE ARTS. After yet another series of complaints about how artists say liberal things to which conservatives are forced to listen (presumably at gunpoint), Jay Nordlinger addresses an objection:

“That man and his wife can’t expect to go to folk concerts and not hear leftist politics from the stage! Come on! That’s like going to a Chinese restaurant and objecting to the sight of rice.” Well, maybe: I don’t know. Are there right-leaning folkies? Performers, I mean? I bet there are. And I bet many are closeted (as right-leaners are in the classical-music world).

What richness this adds to our picture of persecuted rightwing artists -- now joining the novelists, filmmakers and actors cowering in the attic, we have cellists and hammered dulcimerists! I would especially like to meet the folksinger who trudges from coffeehouse to coffeehouse, blaming the poor reception he receives for his renditions of "Where Has Spiro Agnew Gone?" and "Masters of ACORN" on liberal bias, and taking heart in the examples of Bob Roberts and The Goldwaters.

You might also enjoy this Nordlinger reader letter:

I was a very prolific jazz reviewer for years — live performances and recordings — but totally quit when Obama got elected. The constant e-mails, liner notes, and remarks at gigs that trashed Bush and the Right, while extolling the coming of The One, enraged me, and I just couldn’t take it anymore. Why should I spend one minute of my (volunteered) time helping jazzers when they obviously despise what I stand for?

I like to think this is from Nat Hentoff.

Nordlinger's colleague Benjamin Weinthal catches the bug, and tries an artsy angle on Iran:

Where does the musical film Cabaret, which depicts the rise of German fascism, intersect with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s appearance at the United Nations this week? “It is clear the future belongs to Iran,” said Ahmadinejad in an AP interview on Sunday, which conjures up the eerie beer garden scene in Cabaret in which a young Nazi stirs up jingoism with the song “Tomorrow Belongs to Me"...

The pressing question at the end of the Cabaret scene was posed by the British actor Michael York, who expressed justifiable disbelief about whether Germany’s aristocracy could exercise control over the Hitler movement.

I'm constantly hearing claims that the future belongs to some damn thing or other -- Microsoft, Linux, Matt Meola, walkable communities, et alia. Previously I thought these were just harmless enthusiasms or marketing gimmicks. Now I know they're Hitler! I expect this will be included in the next edition of Liberal Fascism.

Wait a second -- Hitler once said that "the future belongs to color photography." Gasp! His influence lingers to this day! Set the color saturation to zero, for democracy's sake!

FRIDAY ROUND-THE-HORN.

•   The imbecility of the Sony/North Korea thing could not achieve full ripeness without a contribution from Jonah Goldberg. He talks about the 1940s, when Jack Kirby and Joe Simon, the creators of Captain America, were getting menaced by New York Nazis, and Fiorello La Guardia phoned them to pledge his support. Alas, New York's current mayor has disappointed Goldberg:

New York mayor Bill de Blasio didn’t call the management of Landmark Theaters in New York, where Sony Pictures was slated to premiere The Interview, and say, “The city of New York will see that no harm will come to you.” He didn’t say much of anything at all.

1.) I wonder if Goldberg called de Blasio's office to confirm this. 2.) I can imagine Landmark receiving such a call and saying, "Thanks a lot, Mayor! Wait'll I tell the management of Sony Pictures that you'll ring the theater with cops if they release the picture -- that ought to change their minds about cyberterrorist threats!" 3.) Doesn't Goldberg know that La Guardia smashed pinball machines, and was therefore a Liberal Fascist? Farrrrrt.

•   Oh Jesus, Goldberg just sent out his G-file email on the same subject. It's not on the internet yet, so allow me to treat you to a key passage:

The collective U.S. response to North Korea’s assault on Sony has been disgusting and dispiriting. I don’t think we should bomb North Korea over this... but the correct response is to flip Kim Jong-un the bird. What form that bird-flipping would take is open to debate.

Open to debate?

I’d like it if the TV networks all ran The Interview at the same time.

 Yeah, let's have a debate about what the nets run. Didn't this guy write a book called Liberal Fascism?

I’d like Barack Obama to call the leaders of the House and Senate to a private screening of The Interview at the White House, just like Woodrow Wilson did with Birth of a Nation.

Wilson, the biggest Liberal Fascist of them all! Goldberg is becoming a National Greatness Conservative, I guess. Wait, it gets betterworse:

Obama’s conduct in this episode has been better than others, but not very good. This is the kind of moment great politicians seize.

"What? Hollywood's making a sequel to Arthur? I'm still president, Mommy, let's nationalize Warner Brothers."

It’s the kind of moment they pray will fall into their lap. First of all, short of C.H.U.D.s, there’s really no better enemy than the North Korean regime. The Left can’t really shout racism about hating on the Norks...

I never thought I'd say this, but I thought this sort of who-would-win-in-a-fight-between-Axl-Rose-and-a-blade-of-grass gibberish was beneath Goldberg. But then, ours is an age of new lows.

•   Michael Coren at Breitbart.com:

AS OBAMA WAVERS, CANADA’S HARPER IS THE TRUE LEADER OF NORTH AMERICAN VALUES

"North American values?" This is weaker than that "Anglosphere" shit.

The Conservative leader has been in office for more than eight years now and his response to the terror attacks was entirely typical. Firm, resolute, controlled, slightly boring but utterly uncompromising.

Boring and uncompromising -- aw, but ain't that North America?

While opposition leaders and liberal newspapers were reluctant to even describe the crimes as terrorism, Harper used the word repeatedly and spoke of the need to combat this darkness internationally as well as domestically. Indeed, along with Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbot, Harper has led the world in candour concerning Islamist aspirations and the need to affirm western values.

Apparently Harper says "terror" and "Islamicism" a lot, which is why a Mountie can just roll up in ISIS territory drinking a Brador and no one can touch him. Also he's "the first leader to officially boycott Hamas," and thinks "Canada should not have to pay fines and be punished for their environmental policies," and is shutting down Canada's socialized medicine program -- kidding about that last one, guys, but though Coren doesn't approve of everything Harper does, "it’s liberals and socialist who most despise him," and after all isn't trolling what North American Values are all about?

BOO FUCKING HOO. You can tell what Jonah Goldberg has to say is important because he begins with this --

...Look, I am past exhausted talking about liberal media bias. It’s real, we all know it, and people who deny it aren’t even fooling themselves. But some things just have to be pointed out. This morning I watched the first 15 minutes of the Today Show. I don’t particularly love or even like the program, but I find it useful to see what the producers think is the big news of the day. And sometimes Chuck Todd is on, and I like him. If I sound defensive about watching the show it’s only because I am.

It's the rhetorical equivalent of dancing outside a locked men's-room door. Obviously Goldberg has to get something off his chest besides crumbs from his second breakfast. So what is it?

Anyway, the first ten minutes was about Gabby Giffords’ return to the House yesterday. I’m not sure it merited the full ten minutes or trumped the hard news that later followed, but it’s a great story and everyone is rooting for the lady, so I’m fine with it.

Generous of him, isn't it?

But think about this for a second. The Giffords shooting sent the media elite in this country into a bout of St. Vitus’s dance that would have warranted an army of exorcists in previous ages. Sarah Palin’s Facebook map...

Oh, that again -- the never-ending "blood-libel" sob story that liberals made everyone think Sarah Palin shot Giffords. It's all people ever talk about! So what's the problem now? Is covering Giffords' return somehow disrespectful to the sufferings of rightwing slander victims?

In brief: People are saying mean things about the Tea Party, which is blood-libel-plus. Also:

Then last night, on the very day Gabby Giffords heroically returns to cast her first vote since that tragic attack seven months ago, the vice president of the United States calls the Republican party a bunch of terrorists.

Joe Biden! I'm surprised he took time off from posing for the marble bust they're making of him at the National Press Club to give a statement.

No one cares. I hate the “if this were Bush” game so we’re in luck. Instead imagine if this was Dick Cheney calling the Progressive Caucus (or whatever they’re called)...

To get the gist of the rest, find an old rubber doll, fill it with Cheez-Whiz, punch holes in the eyes and butt, and squeeze it. Jesus Christ. These guys just won a huge victory in Congress, and Goldberg's blubbering that someone spoke unkindly of them on TV. I'm beginning to think "liberal media" is the conservative adult equivalent of "mommy."

UPDATE. Several commenters rush to point out that this is, in fact, the author of Liberal Fascism lecturing other people on civility. But if we start getting into Goldberg's credentials as a buffoon we'll be here all night.

WILLING SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF. When last we attended kulturkampfer Andrew Breitbart, he was telling us that the Hollywood blacklist of the 50s was nothing compared to the dirty looks conservatives get in filmland these days.

Now he devotes a Washington Times column to Jon Voight's recent right-wing ravings, which he claims were "swiftly attacked by establishment entertainment journalists expertly wielding the tools of the new McCarthyism." How's that for a hook: Voight is marked for death!

Those who are not fans of the genre may be disappointed at the thinness of the plot. When blogger Jeffrey Wells says of Voight, "I finally get what Angelina Jolie has been on about all these years," Breitbart thunders, "Mr. Wells went well below the belt by attacking Mr. Voight's parenting skills. And for what? Because one citizen expressed his contrarian political opinion in a town that doesn't embrace free speech anymore." Variety's Peter Bart repeats an anecdote demonstrating Voight's awareness of his own intellectual limitations; Breitbart, mortally offended, says that Bart is "desperately attempting to be as cruel as possible" (before repeating some dirt on Bart!), and announces, "[Bart's] message to Mr. Voight: You're dead. Hollywood never forgets."

Like I said, it's for fans -- if you're not familiar with the form, you may have trouble getting into the story, especially if you know that failure to toe the liberal line hasn't done much harm to Bruce Willis' career. Or Arnold Schwarzenegger's. Or Trey Parker's and Matt Stone's. Or Judd Apatow's, etc.

Breitbart anticipates this argument, but his rejoinder is less than convincing, and even less than coherent:

Those who argue that Mr. Wells' point of view is not representative of a larger mind-set among the Hollywood elite should think back to 2005, when Barbra Streisand publicly canceled her subscription to the Los Angeles Times for the crime of hiring a conservative to pen editorials a few times a week. That writer, Jonah Goldberg, went on to write the book "Liberal Fascism," which hit No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list. Perhaps the title resonated with the masses.

So Babs cancelled her subscription and Jonah Goldberg went to #1? What does that have to do with... well, anything? Never mind -- Breitbart throws us a twist ending ("Is it any wonder Jon Voight didn't have his opinions published in a hometown rag?") and brings up the closing credits. So it doesn't make sense -- neither does David Lynch! The critics will eat it up!

Competing for rightwing box-office is Weekly Standard's current cover story, "Hollywood Takes On The Left," which tells us about David "Airplane" Zucker's new comedy film, all about Rosie O'Donnell and Barack Obama and other deranged liberals. The cover promises an inspiring story of plucky wingnuts saving the day, but that's all marketing; Zucker and author Stephen Hayes know what the audience really wants when the lights go down, and they play it as a paranoid thriller. Zucker's partner, Steve McEveety, worries about losing his shirt. The star, Chris Farley's brother, says, "If it's the last movie I do, I'll go work for Steve's company." Zucker says he's "donated his career" to defeating Obama with this movie, and "Shouldn't I be allowed to say that?" and "Why can't I put it out there?" as if pleading for his little movie's life before a liberal death squad.

Yet such problems as Zucker et alia are having seem to be the kind any less-than-hot production company might reasonably expect ("Zucker had originally hoped to cast Dan Whitney aka Larry the Cable Guy as Malone, but a timing conflict kept him from getting it done"). But don't tell the wingnuts that. Their version of Hollywood entertainment doesn't come from movies, but from outrages. Breitbart and Hayes are those happiest of entertainment figures: showmen with a winning formula.

MORE NAGS & SCOLDS. The panic recently exhibited at National Review's The Corner over the possibility that women might be learning sex tricks from gay TV gagwriters has spread to one of the Review's other stupid blogs. An unnamed author at Phi Beta Cons, a NR blog devoted to denouncing schools as PC indoctination centers, says Sex and the City ain't the only liberal porn-squad turning our daughters into tramps:

PBC's Candace de Russy, along with others, fought a mighty battle to ban sex fairs at an upstate New York state college that featured various toys and manuals for every manner imaginable of the polymorphous perverse.

The author refers to de Russy's ravings over a 1997 SUNY New Paltz exhibition, which made de Russy a heroine among conservatives and a laughing-stock among everyone else, but did nothing to stem the tide of collegiate sex. Which just goes to show that, among the cognoscenti, no culture war skirmish is considered a failure if it wins another job for another otherwise worthless wingnut.

The author also complains about the Columbia University student health services website, which two or three years ago "advised on such questions as how to manage a threesome and how to clean a bloody cat-o'nine-tails between sadomasochism sessions." This raises two questions. First, why do conservative sex critics always sound like their most recent contact with BDSM was Tom Lehrer's "Masochism Tango"? "Bloody cat-o'nine-tails between sadomasochism sessions," yeesh. Again I plead for field work: someone take these noobs to a munch.

Secondly, noting the subject-appropriate shift in the hook, will this sex madness go 'round the horn, so to speak, among NatRev blogs, with similarly subtle changes of emphasis? Perhaps the Liberal Fascism blog's Jonah Goldberg will claim that the Nazis liked sex (not that conservatives don't like sex but it's different because boy I sure hate Nazis don't you? which I believe is central to my point); Planet Gore will claim environmentalists just want to turn down our thermostats so we'll all have to huddle for warmth, leading to orgies; and Larry Kudlow will talk about how great sex is when you're coked out of your mind.

Meanwhile Crunchy Rod Dreher's summer replacement host does her best to get with the Puritan program. She starts with Seventeen magazine, an easy lay-up (gasp! sex tips! children read this! etc), but then gets greedy and tries to blame modern sexual mores for some girls in Massachusetts who purposefully got knocked up, when it's clear the precocious breeders were merely emulating their sisters in the trailer parks and planned communities of the red states.

Next she'll blame liberals for teaching the young'uns to dip snuff, because we're all about the sex and drugs. In fact, if things stay uncomfy for conservatives in general this summer, as they retreat into madness and fantasy they'll probably come up with all kinds of crackpot equivalences. The alleged liberal fondness for group sex, for example, will be linked to our collectivist ideals. And libertarians will be presumed to masturbate compulsively.

MORE UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES. I see (and he sees) that Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism is gaining some traction. Jeffrey Lord at the American Spectator:

SO LET'S SUM UP what America would look like in an age of Obama.

To start there would be no more driving SUVs. No more Rush. For God's sake absolutely no driving your SUV while listening to Rush. No more eating whatever you want. Definitely no keeping your home as warm or as cool as you prefer. No capital gains cuts because they are unfair. Your guns will be banned. And if you have a different opinion on global warming? All those lofty supporters of rights for terrorists are going to strip every oil executive in America of theirs in a heartbeat, live and in living color...

What do we have when the sole purpose of the government as run by the chilling principles of Obamaland is to "use the political process" to remove freedoms large and small one by one by one?

Someone needs to speak it plainly.

The word is fascism.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the banning of SUVs, Rush Limbaugh, private thermostats, guns, etc, not to mention "a Nuremberg-style trial for oil executives," are extremely unlikely unless the power of the Supreme Court is severely curtailed. I guess that's something to worry about, as in recent years there has been a lot of talk about judicial overreach and proposals to term-limit its Justices and allow Congress to overrule their decisions.

UPDATE. How could I forget Ross Douthat and his proposed Supreme Court Supermajorities? The future of the Republican Party, ladies and gentlemen! Should bring the "Impeach Earl Warren Democrats" back into the fold.

MORE ON THE NEW FASCISM. Yesterday I posted on The American Spectator's John Tabin, who compared a popular Obama music video to "Triumph of the Will." Today Tabin responds:

Maybe I wasn't clear. No, I don't mean that I smell liberal fascism in "everything inspiring" or "any show of enthusiasm by fifty or more liberals for anything or anyone whatsoever." I mean that a bunch of people beatifying a politician by reciting, in unison, a speech of his that climaxes with the words

We are one people, we are one nation, and together we will begin the next great chapther in the American story with three words that will ring from coast to coast, from sea to shining sea: Yes we can, yes we can, yes we can, yes we can, yes we can, yes we can, yes we can, yes we can

is a message devoid of any content beyond a call to unity of the collective as an end unto itself, complete with a very deliberate aesthetic embodiment of that message. If that doesn't strike you as even a little bit fascistic, I guess I can't help you.

From Ronald Reagan's address to the 1984 Republic Convention:

The President. Is there any doubt that they will raise our taxes?

Audience. No!

The President. That they will send inflation into orbit again?

Audience. No!

The President. That they will make government bigger then ever?

Audience. No!

The President. And deficits even worse?

Audience. No!

The President. Raise unemployment?

Audience. No!

The President. Cut back our defense preparedness?

Audience. No!

The President. Raise interest rates?

Audience. No!

The President. Make unilateral and unwise concessions to the Soviet Union?

Audience. No!

The President. And they'll do all that in the name of compassion.

Audience. Boo-o-o!

The President. It's what they've done to America in the past. But if we do our job right, they won't be able to do it again.

Audience. Reagan! Reagan! Reagan!

The President. It's getting late.

Audience. Reagan! Reagan! Reagan!

To be fair, I could have picked another example of political convention call-and-response from either side of the aisle. "A message devoid of any content beyond a call to unity of the collective as an end unto itself, complete with a very deliberate aesthetic embodiment of that message" would properly describe any one of them. So would "classic American political oratory." The fact that Obama's supporters also have cool music and the ability to sing something other than "No!" "Boo-o-o!" and "Reagan!" doesn't make them fascists. It just makes them better at it than the people Tabin supports.

And I suspect that -- rather than any genuine fear that Obama is the new Hitler, Jesse Dylan the new Goebbels, and Yes We Can the new Horst Wessel Lied -- is really what's bothering him. In the Jonah Goldberg era, allusions to the Third Reich are the new "no fair."

TODAY YOUR LOVE, TOMORROW THE WORLD.

What the...

Jay Z’s American Fascism

Remember those stories about how NWA was going to turn your kids into foul-mouthed murderers? David P. Goldman has revived the formula for PJ Media -- with an extra shout-out to liberal fascism!

Who would have believed that a performing genre (it is a stretch to call it “music”) dominated by convicted and confessed criminals, brutally misogynistic, preaching and practicing violence, would come to dominate American popular culture?

Someone who's ever seen Jimmy Cagney shove a grapefruit in Mae Clark's face, that's who.

Violence is not only a legitimate form of expression: it is the only manly form of expression, as in his rap “D.O.A.”...

One should not conclude from this that Obama favors criminal violence, but rather that the popular response to Jay Z’s evocation of felonious rage is so great that Obama finds it convenient to exploit it.

Jay Z appeals to the same kind of rage that Hitler and Mussolini exploited during the interwar years. Never in the postwar period has the United States had youth unemployment in the 25% range for over half a decade...

Despite some demurrers -- inserted, no doubt, to keep the men in the white suits off his tail -- Goldman's clear implication is that Jay Z is Obama's Ernst Rohm, enforcing the Kenyan Tyrant's big takeover with an Ooga Booga Army of brownshirts.

Religion can't compete, because the kids aren't going to church anymore, says Goldman. His best advice to fellow conservatives is to heed the example of the Orthodox Jews' stubborn resistance to modernity:

It is an extended war of attrition to recreate a conservative majority from the grass roots up, in the face of a truly evil effort to exploit the rage and frustration of young Americans. It will last the rest of our lifetimes and more.

Maybe Goldman can give this as a speech at the 2016 GOP Convention. I bet it achieves some real movement at the polls!

For a competing but equally valid conspiracy theory, check out Michael T. Snyder on how Jay Z's mobbed up with the Illuminati. Obama isn't mentioned, but Hillary is -- it's a long game!

UPDATE. Famous rapper Jay B has one of the many normal-person reactions in comments: "Jesus Christ, I guess the last 35 fucking years of conservative race panic over 'rap' flew past this guy, seeing how he's just now heard about this new fangled rhyming ghetto thing. He takes on literally the only rap artist that my mom knows about and who seems to rap with about the same amount of rage as the average mall walker and still, even after all this time, tries the ol' 'if you can call it music' bullshit. It's like this was beamed in from 1988. Someone should sneak him a copy of It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold us Back, he might never go outside again."

JONAH GOLDBERG UPDATE. After doing battle with The Economist and Newsweek, he suggests that he's been plagiarized by... Cal Thomas.

This isn't something you expect from best-selling authors, though neither is the giant "NUMBER 1 AUTHOR" badge he's been sporting. The fellow is a constant source of wonder.

UPDATE. Now the Great One sez Obama is a fascist, or fascism, or something:

As I discuss at length in the book, totalitarianism was for Mussolini a way of uniting businesses, classes, regions, religions, institutions and people from "all walks of life" -- in Obama’s words -- in a common cause for the common good.

Liberal Fascism shouldn't have been a book -- it should have been a special edition of Mad Libs.

LISTEN TO THE PROPAGANDA, LISTEN TO THE LATEST SLANDER.

 I feel better already. Getting rid of the Muslim Ban and the "Patriotic Education" bullshit is a good start.

But watchman, what of the Right? They keen, they burn! Attend one of the hot new vendors of wingnut poop, The Epoch Times, which today dropped this: 

That was actually just the email come-on: The thing itself is called  "Ideological Alignment Pushing America Toward Totalitarianism, Experts Warn," and it's a caution. Take this:

The formation of a totalitarian state is just about complete in America as the most powerful public and private sector actors unify behind the idea that actions to stamp out dissent can be justified, according to several experts on modern totalitarian ideologies.

(The "experts" actually cited by author Petr "Not A Typo" Svab, BTW, are "Michael Rectenwald, a retired liberal arts professor at New York University" mainly famous for promoting Milo Yiannopoulos and his own r-u-triggered @antipcnyuprof account, and James Lindsay, another from an apparently inexhaustible supply of "gay people are oppressing us" types.)

So Tubby's only been out of office for a day and already we're Hitler's Germany! I'm not kidding either -- several grafs in the thing refer to "Adolf Hitler, leader of the National Socialist Workers Party in Nazi Germany." ("Socialist," you'll be saddened to learn, was not in boldface type.) For instance:

Hitler initially didn’t control the spread of information via government censorship but rather through his brigades of street thugs, the “brown shirts,” who would intimidate and physically prevent his opponents from speaking publicly.

The tactic parallels the often successful efforts to “cancel” and “shut down” public speakers by activists and violent actors, such as Antifa.

Gee, sounds awful -- until you realize they don't mention any specific canceled/shut-down people because even Epoch Times readers might think, "Oh, you mean like when Josh Hawley loses his book deal (at least for a couple of days)? Or students decide they don't like their commencement speaker? Who gives a shit?" (The people who really get persecuted for speech, as I have observed repeatedly, you seldom hear about.) Svab goes on:

Dissenting media in America haven’t been silenced by the government directly as of yet. But they are stymied in other ways.

In the digital age, media largely rely on reaching and growing their audience through social media and web search engines, which are dominated by Facebook and Google. Both companies have in place mechanisms to crack down on dissenting media.

For rightwingers, "Crack down on dissenting media" means "enforce their own terms of service on their own platforms" -- as when President Tubby, after whipping up his goons to storm the Capitol, got his plug pulled by Twitter and all the wingnuts cried censorship.  

Google gives preference in its search results to sources it deems “authoritative.” Search results indicate the company tends to consider media ideologically close to it to be more authoritative. Such media can then produce hit pieces on their competitors, giving Google justification to slash the “authoritativeness” of the dissenters.

See? Google considers the New York Times "more authoritative" than QAnon Catturd Infect Your Computer News -- clearly librulmedia BIAS.

It goes on and on like this -- they marvel that "Alex Stamos recently labeled the widespread questioning of the 2020 election results as 'violent extremism,'" as if the Capitol siege were a hundred years ago instead of two weeks -- and who needs it, but you should understand what ET is peddling is right in line with what a lot of these guys are focused on -- not only the usual pencil-necks like Rod Dreher but also now-former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who I am told to my astonishment is prepping for a Presidential run with material like this:

Stands to reason, I guess: You can't run against the disastrous mishandling of the pandemic, unemployment, racism etc. the day after you were in charge of them all. Maybe in a month they'll try it! But till then and in any case, the conservative cri de boor will be Liberal Fascism.

UPDATE. Also what all the wingnut kids are into: transphobia! From Holy Rod Dreher:

And so, on the first full day of a Biden presidency, female school athletics is sacrificed to wokeness. 

??? 

From an executive order sent down from on high today:

Every person should be treated with respect and dignity and should be able to live without fear, no matter who they are or whom they love.  Children should be able to learn without worrying about whether they will be denied access to the restroom, the locker room, or school sports. [Emphasis mine — RD]...

 Gasp! 

This means that schools that get federal funding have to treat biological males who identify as female as if they were female. With this order, the federal government declares that the biological advantage that male bodies have over female bodies, in terms of strength and endurance, does not matter — at least not in schools that receive federal funding.

I can easily imagine Rod squinting at LSU women's basketball games, trying to figure out which ones used to be a dude so he knows who not to beat off to. (Ha, just joking -- Dreher and 99% of these guys never gave a shit about women's sports until it became something liberal to blubber over.)

DAMNED LIBERAL OSCARS SNUBBED ROB SCHNEIDER AGAIN.

At rightwing ladymag Acculturated, Mark Tapson has written the ten millionth conservative complainer about how the artistic commissars are prejumadiced against them:

The culture leans sharply left, and in our current, highly-polarized political climate that means conservatives in the arts tend to be treated as outsiders at best and pariahs at worst. Listen to the personal experiences of conservatives in Hollywood, for example, whether “above the line” (the stars, producers and directors) or below it (the rest of the crew), and you will understand why most keep their politics in the closet to avoid bad vibes, ostracism, and/or outright hostility. The left, of course, dismisses complaints of blacklisting and bias as paranoid whining, but they are very real indeed.

Wow -- someone in Hollywood was hostile to you? Must be your politics!

Tapson has a more specific gripe, too: He claims the New York Times best-seller listings are cheating rightwing authors like Dinesh D'Souza of their proper rankings:

The Times says its list is based on “surveys” of “a wide range of retailers who provide us with specific and confidential context of their sales each week. These standards are applied consistently, across the board in order to provide Times readers our best assessment of what books are the most broadly popular at that time.”

Confidential context? Best assessment? Broadly popular? This sounds suspiciously unscientific and non-transparent, and does not address the evidence of the sales figures themselves. The once highly-regarded “newspaper of record” is notoriously leftist and D’Souza is a lightning rod for Progressive animosity, so the idea that there might be some manipulation of the list is not only not ludicrous, it’s likely.

This goes back to something I've been saying forever about wingnut whining -- for example, when they complain that Yale and Harvard are prejudiced against them, I always say: Why not quitcher bitchin' and instead make Bob Jones and Liberty University the intellectual lighthouses to which the best students flock? Then you won't need to worry about Yale and Harvard! Bypass the gatekeepers! Be the star you are!

Similarly, why worry about the Times rankings at all? (Shoot, Regnery doesn't -- they say they'll stop using the Times rankings in their marketing which, given their bulk-sales-to-gomers approach, probably won't make any difference.) Conservatives having been saying for decades that the Times is untrustworthy and irrelevant -- why not instead lobby for the New York Post, Breitbart et alia to have their own lists, and then you can all enthuse that D'Souza's Liberal Fascism for the Even Dumber is #1 on the American Thinker Best Seller List?

The answer's pretty obvious: These guys don't really believe what they say they believe. They don't want the path cleared so they can be judged by the wide world on their own merits. What they want are the glittering prizes their enemies dispense, because somewhere deep in their blackened little souls they burn with desire for the approbation of the people they spend their days raging against, like spurned teenage suitors. And, if they can't have the prizes, they can at least retain the boogiemen -- Hollyweird! Eggheads! Shut Up and Sing! -- that they and their yokel supporters can invoke whenever they feel like having a good cry about how persecuted they are.

For his coda, Tapson then tacks on another popular rightwing favorite: Let's Put on a Culture! (A nice one, not that entarte kunst those liberals do.)

The upshot is, it’s time for conservative artists to do more than complain about the culture bias; it’s time for us to -- first and foremost -- create great art (or none of the rest of it will matter), and secondly, create alternative distribution channels to disseminate it: magazines, networks, publishers, production companies, studios, awards shows, foundation grants, everything the left used to create the current infrastructure that favors its worldview.

The technology for this transformation is available. The funding is available (if only moneyed conservatives had the vision to use it effectively). All that’s necessary is the will.

Yep, all it takes is the will, and the endless, fruitless quest to get Rupert Murdoch to finance your hard-hitting dramedy about the Knockout Game. I hear this kind of thing a lot, and the payoff is nearly always a dud or a grift -- take the sad cases of Liberty Island and Declaration Entertainment. It's not that I think they can't do it; it's just that I think the real conservative artists are just making their art rather than boo-hooing about bias -- notwithstanding the former is much harder than the latter. Try to imagine Evelyn Waugh crying that the Labour Party was keeping him down.

I understand the emotions, but outside of ungovernable obsession I don't understand why they post and print so much about the subject in public where people can see it. I can see bitching at the liberal media if you're a politician -- it may convince your voters the stories they tell on you are false. But what's even the point of crying about how Big Artistry isn't fair to your play, book or film when your readers probably only ever watch Game of Thrones and Clint Eastwood movies, and only ever pick up a book to smash flies? Maybe it's an easy space-filler for when one of their propagandists calls in sick.

UPDATE. I realize that quoting wingnut comboxes is the lowest form of comedy but I ain't too proud for it when the lulz are this good: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit aggregates the story and her commenters are -- well, look how some cowboys answered "Is it Time for Conservatives to Create an Alternate Culture?"

Go over there and look, it's hilair. Sample: "I thought conservatives already had an alternative culture. I thought it was called church."

LISTOMANIA. At the Voice I succumb to the classic end-of-year syndrome with a Top-10 list of stupid rightblogger tricks. Since you're the late-show real people, you get bonuses:

#15: Jonah Goldberg Handles Criticism. National Review's Jonah Goldberg kept close watch on the reviews for his book Liberal Fascism, and when he was not praised leapt to his own defense. "I knew I was in trouble when the interview just wouldn't end," he observed of his Jon Stewart appearance, "and I got the sense it wasn't ending because Stewart didn't feel like he 'won' so he had to keep going." Then he whipped out reader e-mails to prove he had actually triumphed over Stewart. Goldberg collegially called the Economist's dis "craptacularly lame," and responded to Newsweek's by quoting in his defense other bad reviews ("even The New York Times and Slate's Tim Noah conceded it's not what they consider an 'Ann Coulter book'"). He kept this up through Christmas Eve, denouncing an old New Republic pan of which its editors happened to remind him. We imagine in April he'll hold a little awards ceremony for himself using statuettes from Happy Meals.

#14: Striking a Blow against Political Correctness. "You're cowards. Not because you fear and condemn a single word. But because you feel that condemnation, all by itself, constitutes some kind of winning argument." The word is "niggers," which Old Punk did not use in a Huckleberry Finn context, but in reference to black people he didn't like. Memories of this brave resistance to the forces of liberal brainwashing may give comfort to its authors in these, er, dark days.

#13: Sarah Palin's Last, Best Hope. When questions of Vice-Presidential nominee Sarah Palin's experience came up, The American Scene's Noah Millman admitted "that she's totally unqualified to be President at this point in time," but proposed a possible future-retroactive solution: "If McCain were to die in February 2009, I hope Palin would have the good sense to appoint someone who is more ready to be President to be her Vice President, on the understanding that she would then resign and be appointed Vice President by her successor." The plan might have worked were it offered in the form of a tile puzzle and omitted both Palin's and McCain's names.

#12: Prop 8 Explained. An author at Ace of Spades relates his trouble with gay-rights protesters in Los Angeles: "The group attempted to block an intersection just as I was entering it. They ran in front of my car when they saw that I was almost past them. When I stopped, a couple of them ducked down behind my car out of my view. They were hoping that I would put my car in reverse so they would get bumped and become 'justified' in focusing their rage against me and my vehicle." We understand the Chinese government had a similar explanation for the unpleasantness at Tiananmen Square in 1989, with the significant exception that the Tiananmen Square incident actually happened.

#11: "B" is for Bullshit. When Pittsburgher Ashley Todd claimed that a mugger, enraged by her McCain bumper sticker, carved the letter "B" for Barack into her face, rightbloggers rushed to defend her story even when they weren't sure it was true. One said he deleted his "earlier notes of skepticism" because he was afraid "CNN will quote me when they say 'Even conservatives smell a hoax...'" Others just broke out the champagne over the "potential Pennsylvania Willie Horton game-changer." When it fell apart they drank the champagne anyway, but in a less celebratory, more unconsciousness-seeking spirit.

A MATTER OF TASTE. Ace O'Spades, no fan of Mike Huckabee, declares that "MSM ♥ Huckabee" and that if he were to declare for Huckabee, "I think I might as well declare my party as 'Democratic' while I'm at it. Why not? Why not cut out the middleman?"

Huckabee, we remind our readers, is against universal health care, gay marriage, and abortion, and is an Iraq bitter-ender. But Mr. O'Spades supports Fred Thompson for the nomination, so Huckabee is a de facto Democrat.

As I've said before, the old lefty slogan, "The personal is the political," has been adopted wholesale by the Right. Whatever they like -- movies, football teams, choc-o-mut ice creams -- is conservative, and whatever they dislike is liberal. That makes it hard to take them seriously when they write, for example, that liberalism is fascism -- it basically just means that they think liberals, and fascists, are like some band they think is boring or some girl who frosted them at a party. The tragedy is, if they restricted themselves to suitable topics, both they and we would probably be more content.

UPDATE. In comments, Chad says that liberals do the same thing. He means the first part -- the damning of insufficiently-pure Democratic candidates as Republicans manques. I have both seen and done something like that in respect to our hated Hillary.

But to get a real equivalent to O'Spades' complaint, you'd have to find somebody who thought Dennis Kucinich isn't anti-war enough because he doesn't use the debates as opportunities to whip out a gun, take Hillary Clinton hostage, and threaten to kill her if the troops don't come home. And was a supporter of Chris Dodd.

As to the second part, I always want to believe the worst of my fellow man, but I don't see liberals doing the everything-I-like-is-liberal thing so much. I don't see Matthew Yglesias making lists of Top Ten Liberal DJs or Scott Lemieux giving space to any embarrassingly burned-out and incoherent celebrity just because of the celebrity's liberal cred. But prominent conservative outlets do this sort of thing all the time.

UPDATE 2. Q.E.D.: The Perfesser points to "December movie trailer reviews." A normal person would be hoping for something like this. Seasoned readers of the Perfesser, alas, will have their low expectations met:

No Country for Old Men - By all appearances, a twisted but well-made movie with a deficit of moral fortitude, more or less in the vein of Pulp Fiction. Which is to say, it will probably win multiple Academy Awards from Hollywood liberals.

The rest of it is basically the guy saying, "That looks good, I think I might go see that." More grist for the Konservetkult style guide.