MRS. KRABAPPEL AND PRINCIPAL SKINNER WERE IN THE CLOSET MAKING JIHAD AND I SAW ONE OF THE JIHADIS AND THE JIHADI LOOKED AT ME. Joe McCarthy's Stupidest Godchild:

A friend poses the following: Imagine that there really were these fundamentalist Christian terror cells all over the United States, as the Department of Homeland Security imagines. Let’s say a group of five of these terrorists hijacked a plane, flew it to Mecca, and plowed it into the Kaaba.

Now let’s say a group of well-meaning, well-funded Christians...

I have to say I'm disappointed. After a week or two of ratcheting up the anti-mosque arguments to previously unseen levels of crazy, it appears they're getting fatigued, and are just taking the usual, ridiculous Oh-yeah-well-the Ayrabs-wouldn't-let-US-build-a-CHURCH "thought experiments" and making them more complicated.

Next time around they'll probably get to, "Let's say there's a planet that's all Muslim and another planet that's all Christian and the Muslim planet bombs one of the Christian planet's moons. No, two of its moons, because it's like New York, New York, and that should totally be worth two moons. And then Han Solo crashes the Millennium Falcon into one of the Muslim planet's moons..."

SOMETIMES THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IS BREAKFAST TACOS.



It's either La Mexicana, per this sign, or Las Mexicanas, per all the others. $1.50 each; two will do for most people. Also has Mexican Coke and Pepsi, and agua fresca, which they ladle out of a big jar.



I can't show you the tacos because I ate them before I could get my camera out.



Las Mexicanas also advertises local events, like this show at what is advertised at the website as El Grahams. I am interested to see this band, because I am into cable, too, and want to see how they convey this through Norteño. (I kid. In-toe-ka-bley are pretty good.)



If you're in Houston, then this place will do fine, though you will pay those upscale Houston prices ($1.60-$3).

NO DEPTH TOO LOW. Byron York says people think Obama is a Muslim not because of crackpot mass emails and other strenuous efforts by bottom-tier conservative propagandists, but because other members of his family are Muslim, which Obama has admitted, which means he's hiding something and people can just tell.

Pew asked respondents how they learned about Obama’s religion. Most who believe Obama is a Muslim say they learned it through the media. But 11 percent say they learned it through Obama’s “own words and behavior.” Perhaps they read the White House press pool reports, which often describe Obama heading out to play basketball or golf on Sunday mornings.

See, a real Christian male would never skip church to play b-ball. Maybe to watch it, but not to play it.

This bullshit will of course eventually wind up in crackpot mass emails and other strenuous efforts by bottom-tier conservative propagandists.

Just because York dresses and coifs himself like a character from The Paper Chase doesn't mean he's any better than the grubbiest rock-throwing Juggalo.

NEW ARTICLE UP AT ALTERNET, titled "10 Shameless Right-Wing Tributes to Ayn Rand That Should Make Any Sane Person Blush" -- which some may find mildly misleading, as not all the Rand rants I picked are attributable to traditional conservatives. Paul Ryan (R - Pluto) is one thing, but the men's-mag nut who wants a girl like Dagny Taggart -- as opposed to the sort of "whore or drunken slut" he is accustomed to find in "today's filthy dumpster of what we call the dating world" -- is another.

Or is he? In real life, Randroidism appears to be a reliable indicator that the libertarian you met at a party is not the good, do-your-drugs-I-don't-care type, but the FDA-denies-us-Laetrile-we-are-slaves-must-resist type who will eventually wind up at the Republican Convention waving a WHERES THE BIRTH CERTIFICATE sign. All "liberaltarian" bullshit aside, these people consistently prove again and again and again that they're basically conservatives minus the elementary social skills.

NO CLEMENSY. Totally with Scott Lemieux here:

My official reaction to the indictment of Roger Clemens is that I don’t like perjury charges that are an outgrowth from “OMG baseball players use different kinds of PEDs than the good, clean ballplayers of my youth did” witch hunts. On the other hand, something bad has happened to Roger Clemens, so you can see my dilemma here.

The steroid witch-hunt is bullshit, but even the faint prospect of Clemens washing shirts in a prison laundry proves it's an ill wind that blows no one some good. Clemens is one of a select handful of people-and-I-use-the-term-loosely for whom my liberal heart does not bleed.

Oh, who am I kidding? If they do send him away, I'll chip in to get him an ACLU lawyer. With any luck, he'll reject it on principle!

THE PEOPLE OF THE ABYSMAL. The explosions of stupid on the Right are too numerous these days to address in their entirety, but this one by Ilya Somin bears noting: Author Jack London (d. 1916) saying racist things = "racist elements of Progressive ideology."

After a long list of caveats through which his readers probably plugged their ears and hummed, Somin adds that this stop-the-presses info "undercut[s] claims that racism is primarily a product of the 'right' and that economic leftism and racial progress necessarily go together." So if the brethren were feeling squeamish about the recent conservative pile on black people, they can relax -- here's a long-dead lefty who didn't like Asians.

And this is as far as Somin's willing to go on the difference between art and propaganda:

Despite London’s reprehensible racism and socialism, I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong to admire his novels on literary grounds.

Not necessarily! But we'll see what The Committee thinks before making a final judgement.

Christ, I need a drink.

AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL. After he and his comrades did their level best to turn the discussion of the New York City mosque into a national Klan rally, Jonah Goldberg says

But there’s one point that I haven’t seen made that I think is really worth reminding people of. Simply: This is an incredibly tolerant country and, it has shown remarkable tolerance since 9/11. There has been no “anti-Muslim” backlash.

His defense is that Bush was nice to Muslims: "The supposedly 'crusading' and bloodthirsty President Bush could barely finish a sentence without saying 'Islam means peace.'" This would be more meaningful, of course, if any conservative had said anything remotely like that in the past week. Also:

The supposedly anti-Muslim 70 percent of Americans who don’t like the idea of building the Cordoba House near Ground Zero mostly also believe the owners have the right to do it if they can’t be persuaded otherwise.

Amazing that Goldberg knows this, as the CNN poll cited by his own magazine didn't ask if the builders had a right to build it.

I know he's allergic, but Goldberg might get a sense of the vox populi by looking at commenters who have come to yell at the Voice:

So you can rag on all the apes in flyover country all you want - we don't come to NY and find strippers, fags, and commies and stone them to death.

They do and will there in NY at the rate you people are appeasing them. If I thought for a minute you could keep them there - I wouldn't really be bothered to say or do anything... but they spread like rats.

Come to think of it, this cowboy puts the case about as well as their other writers -- maybe they should hire him.

OBLIVIOUS. Politico ran a surprisingly sarcastic -- dare one say, even satirical -- post called "Obama, the one-term president." After an intro echoing the usual bullshit about Obama's mishandling of the mosque situation ("I am not saying Obama is not smart... I am just saying he does not understand what savvy first-term presidents need to understand..."), Roger "Not the Insane One" Simon's article goes on to say that Obama was, like Lincoln and Eisenhower before him, a fool to put principle before popular prejudice:

You can go back to the mid-1800s and find a lot of legislators saying that Abraham Lincoln should stop lecturing people about ending slavery and listen to them about keeping it.

And there were plenty of lawmakers who said President Dwight D. Eisenhower was “disconnected from the mainstream of America” when he ordered the 101st Airborne Division to go down to Little Rock, Ark., to make sure some black kids could go to school with white kids.

Both decisions may have been “off-message,” which is about the worst sin you can commit in Washington.

...what’s the point of doing the right thing if your party is going to lose seats because of it?

Maybe Obama is disconnected. After all, as a former professor of constitutional law, he actually knows what the Constitution says.

His opponents have no such fetters. They know what they want the Constitution to say: yes to guns, no to gay marriage and never to mosques close to hallowed ground, though churches and synagogues are OK.

What’s so wrong with that? I’ll bet they poll great.

Ole Perfesser Instapundit linked to it. Guess what he thinks/wants his yahoo readers to think it's about?

UPDATE: Reader Troy Lovell writes: “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I have been wondering for quite a while about that. The only evidence for Obama being smart is that everybody says so. But don’t smart people usually reveal themselves by knowing lots of stuff or making smart decisions?..."


It’s the Peter Principle on steroids, I think.

He's not the only one. Scared Monkeys even goes so far as to quote part of the punchline ("when it comes to doing what is right versus doing what is expedient, you do what is expedient so that you can get reelected and do what is right in the second term"), and his takeaway is still "Is Barack Obama a one term President? That is the questions asked and answered at the Politico … the answer is YES!"

Dave Weigel says, "Sometimes, it becomes clear that people are linking to what you write without actually reading it." While it's possible that these people don't read what they're yelling about, I think it's more likely that they're purposefully misrepresenting it. Oafs feeding the fires of bigotry don't scruple over the fuel.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the New York mosque nonsense. I largely confined myself to big-time bloggers as subjects, which actually made the whole thing more depressing. The small fry are sometimes capable of interesting, if deranged, turns of phrase or trains of thought, which adds some zany charm to the whole business; the major leaguers, on the other hand, are just reliably prosaic and tendentious volume dealers in bigotry and bullshit.

Which doesn't mean you shouldn't click over and read it, of course. There's some jokes! And pictures!

BUGHOUSE. In the name of glibertarianism, The Ole Perfesser is peddling his DDT bullshit again:

RATS ON THE WEST SIDE, BEDBUGS UPTOWN: “TVNewser has learned the human resources department of TBS Inc. has sent out an email this afternoon alerting staffers of a bed bug problem in their New York City offices at Time Warner Center — home to CNN, CNNMoney.com and other Time Warner entities.” Bringing back DDT would solve this problem. . . .

Forgive the repeat...

DDT proponents are generally reluctant to acknowledge the complicating and protean factor of mosquito resistance. Entomologist May Berenbaum finds this galling. An expert on insecticide metabolism, Berenbaum is director of the entomology department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "Read the entomological literature of the 1950s," she said in a telephone interview. "Way before Silent Spring, scientists were already trying to understand resistance. That's what insecticide toxicology was all about back then. Resistance to DDT was first detected in Italy, in houseflies, in 1947!"...

After Berenbaum published the article, she said, she was barraged by e-mails demanding that she support her claims. "To get them off my back, I finally culled a list of peer-reviewed articles documenting resistance to DDT and other pesticides in pockets all over Africa. This is not my life's work. I spent 10 minutes--10 minutes--and I found 15 articles. What would I have found if I'd spent an hour?"

...but it's important that everyone get this: These people don't know what the fuck they're talking about, and they want you to follow them into the abyss.

HOW BULLSHIT WORKS, PART 335,392.Doop de doo*, just checking the internet for Arcade Fire reviews and... hello?

American Socialists Release Names of 70 Congressional Democrats in Their Ranks
Posted by Jim Hoft on Friday, August 13, 2010, 4:16 PM

The Socialist Party of America announced in their October 2009 newsletter that...

(October 2009? How'd they keep it quiet all this time?)

...that 70 Congressional democrats currently belong to their caucus.
This admission was recently posted on Scribd.com:

American Socialist Voter–
Q: How many members of the U.S. Congress are also members of the DSA?
A: Seventy

Q: How many of the DSA members sit on the Judiciary Committee?
A: Eleven: John Conyers [Chairman of the Judiciary Committee], Tammy Baldwin, Jerrold Nadler, Luis Gutierrez, Melvin Watt, Maxine Waters, Hank Johnson, Steve Cohen, Barbara Lee...

Etc., skree, etc. Story spreads among other vendors of rock-solid information, including American Thinker, which marvels at "the astonishing number of Democratic House members who not only belong to the Socialist Party of America, but even more incredible, don't mind if people find out about it." There they are, boldly appearing as names on something someone else wrote! It's like they're hiding their socialism in plain sight!

At that other fine news org, Wizbang, commenters add depth to the debate over just how socialist these socialistic socialists are ("the headline 'Socialists in the Democratic Party' is quite redundant"). Then comes the skunk at the picnic:

Whoever the "Democratic Socialists of America" are, this is basically the exact same list as the Progressive Caucus. Which I'm sure you don't like - but which is no more socialist than the GOP is fascist.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_Caucus

So, in short, I think you've been had. In fact, I'll bet money on it.

But they know how to handle spoilsports like that:

Judging by this post and many others you have made recently, you must have been instructed to go into high gear as the election nears. Your posts are all aimed at defending the indefensible and your sputtering attempts to undermine your opponents are becoming laughable.

Do you really think that such trite manipulations are enough for this crowd?

Back to the drawing board tiny troll. Perhaps there's still time to think of something more effective...

At the 2012 Republican Convention, long after this has faded from the memories of sane people, you will find delegates and perhaps even a speaker yelling about Democrats who are also Socialist Party members. Regular media will assume it's just a bit of campaign hyperbole which they certainly couldn't take seriously.

* (c)

UPDATE: Aha! Crazy Dave Horowitz breaks it down:

The Progressive Caucus is an organization of Members of Congress founded in 1991 by newly-elected House Representative Bernie Sanders (Independent-Vermont), who is a self-described socialist.

Do we have to spell it out for you!

Until 1999, the Progressive Caucus website was hosted by the Democratic Socialists of America. After the press reported on this link, the connections suddenly vanished from both organizations’ websites.

1999! That's why they call them sleeper cells, I guess.

UPDATE 2: DSA on their connection with the Progressive Caucus:

Like our friends and allies in the feminist, labor, civil rights, religious, and community organizing movements, many of us have been active in the Democratic Party. We work with those movements to strengthen the party’s left wing, represented by the Congressional Progressive Caucus...

We hope that at some point in the future, in coalition with our allies, an alternative national party will be viable. For now, we will continue to support progressives who have a real chance at winning elections, which usually means left-wing Democrats.

Similarly, I hope to own a Mercedes someday, but till then I am riding a Schwinn Varsity. Which makes my Schwinn Varsity a Mercedes.

UPDATE 3. Talked to the the Democratic Socialists of America's National Director, Frank Llewellyn. Regarding the document to which Gateway Pundit and others are linking, which suggests the DSA named 70 Socialist members of Congress, Llewellyn says, "that's just total fiction... They certainly didn't talk to me."

Llewellyn also denies Horowitz' charge that the Progressive Caucus website was hosted by the Democratic Socialists of America. "DSA posted a list of the Progressive Caucus members as a public service," Llewellyn says, "but it had nothing to do with those people having any connection to us." He said DSA took the list down because occasionally "some hopeless Republican candidate would seize upon the fact that the names were listed [at the DSA site], and issue a press release condemning the candidate as a socialist. We took it down because it was causing them this problem."

But Llewellyn does admit that "I wouldn't know" whether the 70 Reps are members of the Socialist Party, because "we're not the Socialist Party." So keep digging, citizen journalists! The truth is out there!

UPDATE 4. At last, some of the commenters are talking about Arcade Fire!

THE BARREL HAS NO BOTTOM, PART 526,020. Jennifer Rubin of Commentary is fast becoming the worst hack on the internet -- and believe me, that takes some doing. I've been following her work for a while, and while it's always been noxious, of late she's just been cannonballing into bullshit, and at the deep end of the pool.

There was, for example, her commentary on the Palestinian flotilla incident in June, grandly titled "Does Israel Have a Right to Defend Itself?" in which she explained with a straight face, "when the Israeli commandos were set upon as they were lowered from a helicopter, they acted to defend themselves" -- spinning the IDF forces from invaders to innocent victims of unprovoked attack in one sentence. In July, there was her post associating the raving racist Mel Gibson with... Barack Obama.

But her post today reacting to Obama's support for the New York City mosque takes the cake. In this case she doesn't have to reach for unreason, as she and the whole conservative movement have been obviously bughouse on this subject all along. But the ripeness of her raving is something to behold:

Obama has shown his true sentiments now, after weeks of concealing them, on an issue of deep significance not only to the families and loved ones of 3,000 slaughtered Americans but also to the vast majority of his fellow citizens. He has once again revealed himself to be divorced from the values and concerns of his countrymen. He is entirely – and to many Americans, horridly — a creature of the left, with little ability to make moral distinctions. His sympathies for the Muslim World take precedence over those, such as they are, for his fellow citizens. This is nothing short of an abomination.

First, there's the slovenly writing -- Rubin's supposed to be a professional, yet she artlessly vomits out her catchrages (Obama doesn't understand Americans, he's a "creature of the left," he can't make "moral distinctions," etc) without bothering to use minimal skills to concatenate them as even a grade-school polemicist could manage. As we know she's not talentless, we can assume either that she was too shocked and upset by Obama's statement to perform adequately -- which is a long-shot, as her hatred of Obama is demonstrably so intense that she must have been expecting this all along -- or, more likely, that she simply wanted to get plenty of outrage signifiers out there as quickly as possible so that the yahoos might feed on them, and had no interest in building an argument she neither needed nor could manage.

I mean, she's actually saying out loud -- in a magazine that is not, or was not last time I checked, scrawled in crayon on pieces of scrap cardboard -- that Obama prefers the "Muslim World" to the country he serves as President. This is the sort of thing you expect to hear from Tea Party crackpots, or deranged shut-ins burbling ungrammatically on the internet. Now you see it in the "respectable" magazines of the right.

If I were more serious about this gig, I'd try to get a degree in abnormal psychology, fast.

WHY THEY SUCK. I think we've all enjoyed those Bed Intruder videos and remixes. But some of us can't lay off politics even for lulz -- like The Anchoress:

It’s entirely possible that Dodson and his family will be helped out of the projects not by well-meaning but stale and bloated government programs, but by imaginative, energetic, opportunistic art, and a culture that craves people it can like and root for.

For me the worst thing about these people -- and, really, this is the animating principle of this blog -- isn't the policies they push, hideous as those are, but the fact that they reflexively make everything about their politics. The Anchoress, who spends her days portraying Jesus Christ as very like Newt Gingrich, is one of the worst such offenders.

GAYS CAN'T MARRY, STRAIGHTS CAN'T DIVORCE: CONSERVATIVE UTOPIA! Let's be fair to our anti-gay-marriage, social conservative friends. They don't just want to keep gay people from entering the bonds of matrimony -- they also want to keep straight people from ever getting out of them.

You may not have noticed, but no-fault divorce has become a big deal among this crowd. It appears inspired by New York state's brand-new impending no-fault law. So social cons and their audiences take a break from the monotony of beating on homosexuals, and lament that fewer people are trapped in loveless marriages than in grandpa's day.

At World magazine, Alisa Harris has a heart-rending story:

Two days after Christmas in 1993, Thomas McClintock's wife told him she was leaving him. After five placid years of marriage, he was shocked and willing to do whatever it took to keep her.

"I thought we were a good match," he said. "[Our marriage] wasn't all that great but it wasn't that bad and I thought it was something we could work on."

But days later she left her job, her dog, her house, her country, and her husband. She came back a few months later. They sat down and divided their finances. Then she was gone.

That bitch! Harris rubs Tom's shoulders and whispers there, there:

McClintock, then a resident of Virginia, said he considers himself a "victim" of unilateral no-fault divorce: "What other kind of legal contract can you end like that without any kind of legal consequences?"

I will have my pound of flesh -- closest to your uterus!

Poor Harris has a hard job. She unwisely acknowledges that Bible Belt and anti-gay states actually have higher divorce rates than the other kind. Here's her explanation:

States that have low divorce rates also tend to have low marriage rates. Arkansas, for instance, has the second-highest divorce rate (5.9 per 1,000 people), but it also has more marriages per year: 12.1 marriages per 1,000 people as opposed to Massachusetts' 5.9 marriages per 1,000 people.

Thus red states show their respect for marriage by having lots of them, and then getting divorces. Third time's the charm, Lutie-belle!

Among the remedies Harris' experts suggest: Covenant marriage, the double-secret-probation of wedlock. That should go over huge in New York! But Harris has to admit that covenant marriage's success has been negligible, and retreats into gibberish, implying that no-fault means criminal spouses go scott-free: "If a man beats his wife in the face with a barbell until she's unrecognizable, as one man did," she says, "then society should say this is wrong." Assault charges don't quite do it -- society should force that man to stay married to his abused wife! It'll teach them both a lesson!

There are plenty of others out there ("No-Fault Divorce is Institutionalized Evil"), but all you really need to know is that both Gay Patriot and the Heritage Foundation are against no-fault divorce. When they think it will advance their cause, they pretend they oppose no-fault divorce for the sake of women and children. But I think it's really just a knee-jerk reaction they have when someone escapes.

UPDATE. The good Roger Ailes writes in comments: "If we can force spouses to stay married, we should be able to force single people to get married. 'Do you, "Gay Patriot," take this woman, Kathryn Jean Lopez, to be your lawful wedded wife?'" I smell sitcom!

Also, M. Krebs suggests you "click on the 'Sign the Lame Duck Petition' link on the left and do something horribly nefarious." But I must warn you: 1.) I make money off these ads; it would be harmful to my interests to countenance such tomfoolery; and 2.) I have already used the link to send Congressman Nadler a message of protest under the name Heywood Jablome.

SHORTER JONAH GOLDBERG: Comparing conservatives to the Taliban is lame and nasty. Comparing liberals to Hitler is brilliant. Why? Because farrrrt. Whoa, he who smelt it dealt it!

THE BARREL HAS NO BOTTOM. Just in case you thought the conservatives screaming about the New York City mosque had reached, or could possibly reach, their apex of lunacy, here's a column from Breitbart's latest vehicle comparing Michael Bloomberg to Nazi collaborator Marshal Petain.

Mencken said no one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American people. I'm beginning to think counting on the psychosis of the American Right has become equally reliable.

(h/t Daniel Coyle)

SHORTER GREG GUTFELD: I hate Muslims so much, to get back at them I'll even pretend to like fags.

UPDATE. Comments are cherce. ("That tears it," says Jay B., "I'm going to open a library next to Fox.") But mds is a little behind the curve: "Imagine the whining" among conservatives, says mds, if the alleged bar can't get a cabaret license. "Islamists can build a monument to their conquest of America on an open grave, but we're denied a license by the leftist NYC government. Etc, etc." Sorry, Megan McArdle already got there. It's like they're preempting our satire!

ESSENCE OF PALIN. Sarah Palin, once again defending herself against reporters:

The LSM has now decided to use this brief encounter for another one of their spin operations. They claim I – wait for it – “appear to roll my eyes” when the lady tells me she’s a teacher. Yes, it’s come to this: the media is now trying to turn my eyebrow movements into story lines.

I'm actually sympathetic toward her on this score. But you know what would have really won me over? If she'd compared this attention to her facial expressions with the attention also absurdly paid to the facial expressions of Al Franken by wingnut shit-stirrers.

But that would never happen. Not only because -- to use a phrase traditionally employed by gomers -- it doesn't fit the narrative, but because it would require Palin to show sympathy for someone other than herself.

And I've never seen her do that.

She does defend her kids, but only when she fantasizes that they've been attacked by the media -- which isn't really a sign of interest in their welfare, but of an interest in the exploitive possibilities of one's own family that would have embarrassed Richard "Checkers" Nixon.

In other people's families, she's less interested. When Palin talks about "mama grizzlies," for example, she's clearly not talking about any actual people whose families are under threat -- such as single mothers who, unlike Bristol Palin, find it increasingly difficult to provide for their young. Her videos show lots of women, but we never hear a thing about their lives.

The sort of vulnerable mothers you or I might think of in this context never come up in Palin's mythology. Rather, it's all about winners: Grizzlies observed in their moment of protective rage -- rage being something to which her biggest fans of either gender can relate; mothers who are victorious just because they're angry (assuming that whoever they're mad at isn't holding a big old gun on them).

She doesn't bring up these symbols of motherhood to make her listeners sensitive to motherhood's perils and pains. She does it only to reflect glory upon herself, and her own brave, motherly defense of her clan against David Letterman and The Family Guy.

I still expect Palin to run for President, but her apparently ineducability to her own limitations may be a drawback to her. I think her awful poll numbers have very little to do with her affect as a politician (I actually think she's got a pretty good schtick), or with her politics, though they are perhaps a little more dumbed-down than even ordinary Americans can tolerate, at least so far.

No, the big thing Palin seems not to know or even be capable of noticing, and which ignorance may sink her, is that, except for the densest and most depraved rubes, anyone can tell that she doesn't give a damn about anyone except herself.

SHORTER MEGAN McARDLE. People who want to tax the super-rich are just jealous. If you want real fairness, cut social programs for the poor.

(You want to know what the real Reagan legacy is? That in a country where top earners once had a 91 percent tax rate, people like McArdle portray a 35 percent top tax rate on bazillionaires as bizarre and cruelly unjust. And get away with it.)

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, in which the rightblogger mishegas about the Prop 8 ruling, Michelle Obama's vacation, Mexicans and Muslims leads me to ask: Are conservatives a white people's movement? Yeah, I know, de facto they've always been, but recently haven't they observably given up even pretending?

I know they've got a few non-honky operatives, conservative blacks, gays, and what not, but from the way they use them -- like in those Tea Party scenes where they go, "See? We do so have African Americans!" -- it seems they've decided that minority representation is totally a symbolic thing, which one engineers to reassure one's white supporters that one's virtually minority-free movement is not racist.

But the lion's share of their rhetoric is turned toward denouncing the Other. You will hear far, far more from them about the damned blacks, Mexicans, etc., than you will about Paul Ryan's pathetic tax reform plan. Stack up their recent references to Ryan against those relating to the Ground Zero Mosque -- in both volume and ferocity -- and you'll see what I mean.

I usually try to be careful about saying such things, but fuck it: These people are counting on racism and homophobia to get elected. And it just might work.