JUST A FEW NOTES...

...on the Jonathan Chait bullshit, because for the most part Pareene has dealt with it ably and I only have this to add:

1. I assume all the very public complaints against "political correctness" raised in Chait's wake were smuggled out of liberal gulags on toilet paper as samizdat, right? No? Then what's the fucking problem?

2. Every single conservative response to Chait I have seen has been too incredibly stupid to take seriously -- and since many of them call Chait a p.c. hypocrite because he said bad things about conservatives (which is the same thing as a fatwa, apparently), I guess that makes me p.c. too. Hmmph! My many services to freedom of speech count for nothing, I see.

3. OK, one example: Here's a key section from Ace of Spades' offering on the subject:

Now, the PC Mob types will reject this distinction because -- and listen closely here-- most of them are Stupid and Inarticulate; most of them are in fact incapable, on a mental or emotional level, of making an academic or at least essay-like case. 

They are in fact low-thinkers. It is no accident that they favor the brutish, the primate-like, the animal-level sorts of "persuasions" of group hooting and feces-throwing. They favor this because this is what they are capable of, and no other. 

Thus, in a very real sense, to insist on the standards of rational discourse with such people does in fact predjudice them; it is the same as insisting a horse walk on two legs to enter a race. It is the same as disqualifying them outright.

Behold the enlightened discourse of which we would be deprived by some leftists on Twitter! I wonder if the editors of Der Stürmer ever thought of complaining that protests against their caricatures (carried out in the early-20th-Century version of social media, which I guess would be graffiti in cabaret bathrooms) were in fact assaults on their free speech. If not, we should congratulate the brethren for advancing the form.

SELF-AWARENESS DROUGHT CONTINUES.

Obama was in India and chewed gum during a parade. The Times of India had some fun with it:

NEW DELHI: In an ungainly sight, cameras caught US President Brack Obama chewing gum during the Republic Day parade on Monday. 

In the picture captured by cameras and posted on Twitter by some users, Obama was spotted removing his chewing gum while PM Modi was seen trying to explain something to the US president... 

Comments on Twitter included remarks by author Shobhaa De, who said, "Barack bhai working his jaws overtime and chewing gum! At least it isn't gutka. But seriously - gum during a formal parade?".

"Glad to see @BarackObama is so human. Like most Americans, he chews gum. Anyone know what brand?," was how noted film-maker Shekhar Kapur reacted.

I suppose you can say Allahpundit of Hot Air also had "fun" with the incident, though it's more the kind of fun that lonely and unliked children have with razor blades:

Video: Semi-retired president gonna enjoy his gum during major photo op with important ally

Not sure what the dialect-humor provenance is of "gonna enjoy his gum." Maybe it's a blah thing, I wouldn't understand?

To cleanse the palate, I believe formal diplomatic protocol in this situation requires him to offer Narendra Modi a piece of his Bubblicious. Two points. One: Is it Nicorette he’s chewing? That would explain, at least, why he couldn’t refrain from smacking away despite knowing he’d be on camera for hours with India’s PM during a formal state parade. How bad is this guy’s smoking habit, though, if he couldn’t make it through an afternoon without a hit of nicotine?

Wait, was it Bubblicious, or Nicorette? I don't know why Allahpundit missed the equally plausible options of ghat or black tar heroin.

Remember, this isn’t the first time recently that he’s been criticized overseas for chewing gum at an international summit. Indian media obviously noticed his “ungainly” display, as you’ll see below. Either he was jonesing awfully hard for a smoke or today’s the day he moved officially from the YOLO phase of his presidency to the WGAF phase.

This, I remind you, is about the guy chewing gum. Allahpundit goes on quite a while like this ("Does O chew gum during formal events here at home too? He’s done it a few times, if memory serves...") Here is the best line:

Two: This is the sort of trivial faux pas that the media would have hyperventilated over had it come from Bush...

Leaving aside the propriety of complaining about hypothetical offenses that you're in the very midst of committing in real life, I'd say if Bush had been seen chewing gum at a foreign event, it would have been portrayed as a bold example of American exceptionalism, like not dipping our flag at the Olympics.

Hey, anyone remember when the knock on Obama was that he showed too much respect for our foreign allies?

UPDATE. In comments, Jay B: "[Obama's] such an egghead, he was probably also walking at the same time."

BUT OLD MAN GOLDBERG, HE JUST KEEPS FARTING ALONG.

Jonah Goldberg tells us he had to house-husband for a bit and, after some humorous padding about how what a slob he is, does one of those pirouette-off-a-cliff segues for which he is justly famous:

But I also think about how hard it must be to be an actual single parent. It seems to me that this is the ground-floor argument conservatives should build up from when talking about marriage.

Maybe they should start with jokes about male housekeeping too. "Ah wipe mah ass ohna floor lahk a wormy dog," chortles Rick Perry.

Raising kids is just easier with two committed parents around. Put aside the moralizing for a second (moralizing I often agree with, by the way) and just talk logistics. It’s very hard to do all the things you want to do for your kids without a wingman (or wing-gal).

For example, his wife keeps a stick with a hook on it in the Subaru, for when Goldberg drops a bag of Funyuns under the brake pedal.

I’m not even talking about the financial part, which is huge. It’s simply harder to help with homework, show up at games, serve home-cooked meals, and generally participate in your kids’ life if you’re the sole breadwinner and sole parent. (Charles Murray has been making this point for a very long time.)...

I imagine Goldberg's comrades sitting around the McManse, marveling at how inner city single moms get their kids to soccer and ballet practice. (With our tax dollars via the socialist subways!) Inevitably Goldberg gets to his Murphy Brown section -- liberals are all rich white people who want blacks to breed unwed because something something plantation, whereas conservatives are racially indistinct reincarnations of the Founders, in whose world black families stayed together until sold off separately -- and then offers the traditional solution:

When Hillary Clinton & Co. talk about how “it takes a village to raise a child” they’re invoking wisdom from what P. J. O’Rourke called the “ancient African kingdom of Hallmarkcardia” to make the case for vast new federal bureaucracies, taxes, programs, regulations, etc. But the phrase itself contains a lot of truth. Unlike bureaucrats in Washington, neighbors, teachers, pastors, coaches, coworkers, and friends can help raise your kids, in ways large and small. Real communities involve extended networks of trust and goodwill. Fake communities have regulations, fees, subsidies, and checklists...

While Obama would rob the mega-rich of their precious savings -- savings they need to complete their yacht flotillas -- to subsidize community college, which will only cause the poors to get above themselves reading Derrida, Republican policies will nourish real communities by destroying all safety nets, forcing the poors to huddle for warmth with grampa and all the brats in their slums, thus reinforcing family feeling.

But much as Goldberg enjoys helping the underprivileged with morality lectures and tax breaks for the wealthy, he's really interested in Murphy Brown -- or a similarly well-aged avatar of liberals' refusal to join in the hectoring:

But elites won’t come out in favor of marriage as a social ideal (except for gays, of course), because as Charles Murray likes to say, they refuse to preach what they practice. 

Speaking of preaching, this reminds me of something I’ve been griping about for years: Madonna. Here’s how I put it in The Tyranny of Clichés....

Madonna! I wonder if, before settling for this, Goldberg spent five minutes bugging his intern: "You're young and with it. Who can we call a whore these days?" (He also tries to tart this nonsense up with "hypocrophobia," a perfect Goldberg neologism, in that it disguises incoherence with pretend erudition.)

Then comes a truly breathtaking argument:

This raises a fundamental problem for democracy. When certain lifestyles multiply, they become political constituencies rather than cautionary tales. If we didn’t have so many people in prison, there’d be no movement to give felons the vote. If so many people didn’t smoke pot, the legalization movement wouldn’t be doing so well. George W. Bush lavished praise on single mothers for the simple reason that there are lots of single mothers out there. If enough people go on the dole, then we stop calling it the dole and we stop shaming able-bodied people who turn it into a lifestyle. 

It doesn’t really matter what you think about the specific issues to understand the point. Everyone likes to think they’re principled, but principles can get overwhelmed when enough people violate them...

You're a bunch of whores and moochers and that's why liberals get away with it.

This was the real point I was trying to get at in my column earlier this week. We make all sorts of allowances for Islamic extremism because we are cowed by its numbers (and its willpower), not its arguments. If there were 1.6 million, not 1.6 billion Muslims around the world, there wouldn’t be nearly so much fumfering and fooferall about Muslim sensibilities.

In Goldberg's world, you're only nice to people -- blacks, single mothers, Muslims -- because you're ascared of them. After some more padding which contains, it should be noted for the record, the clause "JFK and Teddy were scummy dudes," comes this:

Principled people can deploy cost-benefit analysis too. For instance, I’ve long argued that if we could do it cheap and without losing any American or allied lives, we would be right to topple the North Korean regime. I believe that. I also believe that we should have wiped out the Soviets once we were done with Hitler provided doing so wouldn’t have meant a long and bloody third world war. But those options aren’t and weren’t on the table.

My fantasies are more righteous than your fantasies!

The trick is to uphold the principle while allowing for the fact that reality often doesn’t let us fully implement our principles without cost (a useful thing for Republicans to remember in their internal squabbles as well)...

Over years of following Goldberg's work, I'm noticed some patterns in it, and this is one: Usually when he leaves a hanging curveball, he won't take the effort to rewrite it into something better, but will instead try to confuse his reader with a barely-relevant parenthetical -- as here, where he clearly hopes you will associate a "reality" that "often doesn’t let us fully implement our principles without cost" with GOP squabbling instead of, for example, the multi-trillion-dollar Iraq War.

The rest is just dribbling, but I have to note this:

There’s a corruption of the soul at work when you can bleat and whine about the “Taliban wing of the Republican party” while effectively making apologies for the actual Taliban.

No link on "effectively making apologies for the actual Taliban," you may have guessed.

UPDATE. Goldberg's column is a rich vein for enthusiasts, and in comments mark f says he can't believe I left this bit unmentioned:

...liberal writers give [the Kennedys] a pass because . . . Camelot! Or something. 

It’s not just writers, though. It’s all of us. And that’s not always wrong (though it often is).

I agree  it's wonderfully Goldbergian -- especially the parenthetical pee-dance -- but, you know, I'm doing this in my spare time and can't do all the glosses Goldberg deserves, so thanks, mark f -- and thanks Yastreblyansky, who takes the trouble to source some of Goldberg's misapprehensions, e.g. one about Obama's community college plan, to which Goldberg objects in part because it requires "raising taxes on college-savings plans":

The college-savings plans in question are the 529 and Coverdell plans used by a little under 3% of the nation's families to pay for their children's tertiary education (the families have a median income of around $142,400 per year as opposed to $45,100 for the rest of us, and median financial assets of about $413,500, or 25 times the median financial asset value, $15,400, of families without the plans). 

I'm not clear about how keeping them tax-free helps the impoverished single parent in a more efficient way than free community college, since the impoverished single parent doesn't actually have any of the money involved. Perhaps the owners of the accounts plan to donate the interest money to the poor...

ON TO OSCAR, 2.

Birdman. At first I wondered why Iñárritu was sticking all that magic realism into a perfectly good New York backstage drama. It made me suspicious; maybe, I thought, he just didn’t want it to be All About Eve all over again, and that’s why he gave the central character, Riggan, washed-up former star of an old superhero franchise, the superhero himself as an alter-ego who spurs him to narcissistic fantasies and then (spoiler) destruction — you know, the way Jimmy Cagney told Raoul Walsh, when they were trying to figure a way to make Cody the gangster in White Heat more interesting, “Why not make him nuts?”

Still, White Heat’s a pretty great movie.

There is something old-fashioned and melodramatic about the Birdman Broadway plot: Riggan has put himself in hock to finance his stage adaptation of Raymond Carver stories (hello Room Service!) and it’s a mess (hello The Bandwagon!); he loses an actor during tech week, but rejoices when a young phenom steps in (hello 42nd Street!), only to find that the phenom is a total snake-in-the-grass asshole (hello Eve Harrington!).

Of course Iñárritu’s mise en scène is a little more, um, ambitious than Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s, and the main thing about Emmanuel Lubezki’s holy-wow camerawork isn’t the single-take illusion (though that helps with the paranoid-schizo vibe) but how grubby he makes everything look, from the backstage tunnels to the canyons of Manhattan — I don’t think there’s a clean surface in the movie until we get to the hospital. And the story itself has some very contemporary modifications beyond the Birdman bit, like Riggan’s tough relationship with his daughter who’s just out of rehab. Still, there’s enough razzle-dazzle in the dialogue that even the scene that (spoiler I guess) ends in a Sapphic embrace plays like something from Out of The Frying Pan (“Why don’t I have any self-respect?” “You’re an actress, honey”).

So why the weird stuff? Well, I think it’s like this: Riggan isn’t happy. But it’s not because he’s about to lose his shirt. No, it’s because he’s doing what actors do — but unsuccessfully, aimlessly, because he doesn’t really believe in it. (The play looks awful, and his why-Carver explanation is just ridiculous.) When the phenom starts throwing around actorly shit about “truth,” it drives Riggan crazy — particularly when it works on his daughter — because he knows he’s not coming up to scratch on that score and he thinks he should be. But the truth the phenom's talking about is limited, it’s grubby and narrow and circles in on itself. And the costumed superhero is coming around because Riggan is realizing he prefers something else — and, despite what we might have assumed if the movie didn’t show us different, it isn’t his old tattered stardom. It’s magic. Even when no one else sees it, even when it’s insane, he has it. And with that he can fly. We see him fly.

We don’t see him fall. Does he fall? But with that question the movie, and all its tunnels and circles, is over.

Bonus spoiler: I don’t know if it means anything but I have this in my notes: He shoots off his nose to spite his fate.

SNATCHING DEBACLE OUT OF THE JAWS OF DEFEAT.

I'm sure there's some wheels-within-wheels strategy behind the House Republicans dropping Fetal Pain like it's hot, but it doesn't look good, especially with female members forcing them to drop it:

In recent days, as many as two dozen Republicans had raised concerns with the "Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act" that would ban abortions after the 20th week of a pregnancy. Sponsors said that exceptions would be allowed for a woman who is raped, but she could only get the abortion after reporting the rape to law enforcement. 

A vote had been scheduled for Thursday to coincide with the annual March for Life, a gathering that brings hundreds of thousands of anti-abortion activists to Washington to mark the anniversary of the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion. 

But Republican leaders dropped those plans after failing to win over a bloc of lawmakers, led by Reps. Rene Ellmers (R-N.C.) and Jackie Walorski (R-Ind.), who had raised concerns.

This makes hard duty for conservative propagandists, and even such practiced hands as Mollie Hemingway are showing strain. She blasts the female Life-traitors for changing their minds (I thought that was a woman's prerogative, der hur hur), and rages that the bill, which from its title on down reads like something out of The Handmaid's Tale, is actually "easy legislation that is broadly popular (outside of American newsrooms, at least)," as if the will of the people for federal anti-abortion laws had been thwarted by the awesome power of America's increasingly-unread newspapers. (Sometimes I think the only thing keeping our Fourth Estate alive as a totem of soft power is the right wing's endless need for strawmen.)

But my favorite part of Hemingway's column is this:

Even if you’re not one of the majority of Americans who want to protect these children in the womb, this debacle should concern you.

Such exquisite concern-trolling hardly needs explaining but basically Hemingway thinks we can all agree it's bad when the GOP trips over its dick because "if Republicans can’t pass wildly popular legislation protecting innocent unborn children, what’s going to happen when they face difficult legislative battles?" Why, the Anti-Witchcraft Amendment may never make it out of committee!

SOTU WHAT?

I leave the recap to National Review's leading torture enthusiast:

Yeah, all in all a good night. It makes me sad I didn't activate PBS yet on my Apple TV. I missed David Brooks! Well, I don't want to hurt myself laughing.

UPDATE. Don't want to miss the Washington Times' coverage:

President Obama spent much of Tuesday’s State of the Union calling for civility in politics — then taunted Republicans over his two election victories, after many of them applauded the looming end of his political career.

Obama made a so-called "joke," which is straight out of the Alinsky playbook! Quick, someone write another column about American Sniper lest we lose momentum.

UPDATE 2. Speaking of which:

 

Snipermania is back! Now to get some of those hipsters dressing like troops instead of 19th Century dandies. I know -- let's wreck the economy again; then, they'll have no choice but to join up!

UPDATE 3. Here to make everything worse as usual, Jonah Goldberg:

Like a lot of people, I found tonight’s speech a chore. That’s less of a criticism of Obama than it sounds. I find all State of the Unions to be tedious, particularly this late in a presidency. I do think it was better delivered than most of his State of the Union addresses. I didn’t, however, think it was particularly well-written. “The shadow of crisis has passed”? C-minus.

There are at all times lots of middle-aged white guys scratching their nuts in their Barcaloungers, seeing sumpin' on TV, and going "meh," sometimes at muttering length, without having a particular complaint beyond how comfy their junk was sitting while they watched. But only a few of them get wingnut welfare and a national platform, and among their few obligations is to pad, pad, pad 'til it looks like business. Eventually we find that Goldberg ran out of proper stuffing in the first paragraph:

More telling, the last 15 minutes amounted to Obama’s golden oldies. His real foe is cynicism. We can all work together. There are no red states or blue states. We are all our “brother’s keeper.” 

The difference is that the first time we heard this stuff it had at least superficial plausibility because the Obama presidency hadn’t happened yet. Five, six, ten years later, it’s all pretty sad. It’s sad because it shows that Obama still thinks his original material is fresh when it’s actually played out (and some of it was piffle to begin with — don’t get me started on “my brother’s keeper”.)

Yeah, Obama thinks Americans will actually go for this "brother's keeper" bullshit. Well, how can you expect a secret Muslim to understand Christians anyway. Besides ha ha Obama because Jonah Goldberg knows what Americans really want: Bar-B-Q Ranch Lime Sriracha Cheetos, and torture. You're so over! This is the age of Presidential frontrunner Ben Carson!

Oh, there's more -- e.g. "[Obama] promises all sorts of 'free' stuff out of one side of his mouth and then insists we must raise taxes to pay for it. Oh, so it’s not free, huh?" Wait'll the sheeple hear about this! -- but I warn you, it's the sort of thing that, if they handed it to Joni Ernst last night before her speech, she would have told them, "Come on, nobody's gonna go for this."

ZHDANOV'S CHILDREN.

I like Clint Eastwood movies, therefore I want to see American Sniper, therefore I hope it's good. But I have to say, the political ravings about the movie are pretty annoying. Like a lot of people, I thought Dennis Jett's review based on the trailer at New Republic was stupid; but, as I've pointed out before, conservatives do this sort of thing all the time and no one cares -- because no one expects them to treat films or any other works of art as anything but propaganda. Here's Jim Geraghty at National Review:

I’ll reserve any serious comment on the film until after I have seen it – I guess I’m just not up to the standards of The New Republic –

Haw haw.

– but whether or not American Sniper is “pro-war,” it appears to be resolutely and proudly pro-soldier. And that is a giant factor in moviegoers’ enthusiastic embrace of it. Note that American Sniper isn’t afraid to showcase the painful and difficult parts of military life for soldiers and their families, and my suspicion is that audiences love that part, too – because showing the pain makes it honest. Clint Eastwood, Bradley Cooper and company don’t want to tell you only one part of Chris Kyle’s story. They want to paint as complete a picture as they can in the running time that they have. If you made the story about the battlefront, without the home front, or vice versa, you would only be telling about half the story.

So in the very next breath, Geraghty reviews the film he didn't see -- though I suppose "serious comment" is the crossed fingers behind his back. (This is the sort of thing I did as a kid when I wanted to pretend I had seen some big movie of the moment. I wonder if adults do this anywhere but in the pages of rightwing magazines.)

Geraghty also quotes TruthRevolt rageclown Kurt Schlichter on the subject and it's every bit the table-pounder you'd expect, with yips about "the narrative" and Michael Moore Is Fat. (Set the Hot Tub Time Machine to 2004!) Best part:

Next, chunky iconoclast Seth Rogen weighed in with his observation that American Sniper reminded him of the fake Nazi propaganda film at the end of Inglorious Bastards. What a scumbag. This came after we conservatives stood with him when the Norks threatened him over The Interview – even to the extent of watching his piece of garbage on VOD – while his hero Barack Obama whined about people actually exercising their free speech rights.

First, this supports my perception that the only part of arts journalism conservatives genuinely relate to is gossip columns. They don't know what art is, but they sure know who did what to whom! Second, it figures that Schlichter would be enraged that Rogen didn't repay the debt Schlichter imagines he owes "we conservatives" for yelling about North Korea in blogs and switching off porn for a couple of hours to watch this bro-com. Everything is politics to these people; movies, plays, novels, and choc-o-mut ice creams have no value for them except as symbols on a bloody flag to wave at their base. Sometimes I think when they relax at home in front of the TV, they actually watch a placard that says HOME ENTERTAINMENT PRODUCT (CONSERVATIVE).

Hopefully by the time I get to the theater they'll be yelling about some painter who made Jesus look bad or something, and I can watch my movie in peace.

A CONSERVATIVE MARTIN LUTHER KING DAY.

As we have done in years past, let's see what gifts the brethren have brought us for Martin Luther King Day. Ah, here's Ann Althouse's: She directs us to this passage from a phone tape of LBJ and MLK --

LBJ: We want equality for all, and we can stand on that principle. But I think that you can contribute a great deal by getting your leaders and you yourself, taking very simple examples of discrimination where a man's got to memorize [Henry Wadsworth] Longfellow or whether he's got to quote the first 10 Amendments or he's got to tell you what amendment 15 and 16 and 17 is, and then ask them if they know and show what happens. And some people don't have to do that. But when a Negro comes in, he's got to do it. And we can just repeat and repeat and repeat. I don't want to follow [Adolph] Hitler, but he had a--he had a[n] idea...
MLK: Yeah.
LJB: ...that if you just take a simple thing and repeat it often enough, even if it wasn't true, why, people accept it. Well, now, this is true, and if you can find the worst condition that you run into in Alabama, Mississippi, or Louisiana, or South Carolina, where... well, I think one of the worst I ever heard of is the president of the school at Tuskegee or the head of the government department there or something being denied the right to a cast a vote. And if you just take that one illustration and get it on radio and get it on television and get it in the pulpits, get it in the meetings, get it every place you can, pretty soon the fellow that didn't do anything but follow... drive a tractor, he's say, "Well, that's not right. That's not fair."
MLK: Yes.
LJB: And then that will help us on what we're going to shove through in the end.
MLK: Yes. You're exactly right about that...

Althouse's headline:

50 years ago today: LBJ and MLK talked on the telephone... "I don't want to follow Hitler, but he had a... he had a idea..."

The boys at the Daily Caller get the idea, and repeat the anecdote under a more explicit headline for their particular readership:

From The Archives: 50 Years Ago, Lyndon Johnson Urged Martin Luther King, Jr. To Be More Like Hitler

This year let us all remember the true meaning of MLK Day: Liberal Fascism!

Meanwhile at Canada Free Press, John Lillpop has his own idea of the true meaning of MLK Day, which he complains has been hijacked by black people:

However extensive the shutdown of government and private enterprise will be, there is one industry that will be open for business as usual, that being the race-baiting for profit business led by Barack Obama, Al Sharpton, and Eric Holder, among others.

I knew there was someone I forgot to send a card to! Lillpop also has an interesting idea about the goals of the post-Ferguson protests:

The fact that thousands of blacks marched in Ferguson, Missouri to demand the death of Police officer Darren Wilson, who had been acquitted of wrong-doing by a legally constituted grand jury in the death of criminal Michael Brown, is testament to the power and intensity of the vitriol spewed by Obama, Sharpton, and Holder.

One must wonder how Dr. King would view the facts surrounding the Michael Brown death. 

Would King join the protesters in demanding that the rule of law be suspended and that Wilson be freed from police custody and handed over to street gangsters...

Similarly, the civil rights marchers of the '60s just wanted to lynch Bull Connor. Another alternate history of recent events is supplied by  Dan Dagget at American Thinker:

...race baiters like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson demanded that Brown not be judged by concrete evidence of the quality of his character but that the color of his skin made him immune to such judgment.

That filing must have been be sealed. Release the Free-a-Brother Documents!

Furthermore, they declared that anyone who tried to apply such judgment (in effect, applying King’s Dream) was a racist.

Doesn’t that mean they were calling Martin Luther King Jr. a racist?

This is up there with "You say you're for peace and love, so how come you don't love me?"

UPDATE. At Raw Story, Scott Kaufman lists "12 statements by Martin Luther King Jr. you won’t see conservatives post on Facebook today." Pretty good, but he missed the ones in which King called for a guaranteed income. Wait'll the boys at Reason, who like to portray King as a victim of statism, find out the Reverend was a big ol' moocher!

UPDATE 2. Speaking of moochers, and with a hat tip to @WineJerk, here's Power Line's Paul Mirengoff with something unreconstructed:

It’s not surprising that transferring money from whites to blacks is at the core of Obama’s agenda. This was, after all, Martin Luther King’s final mission, as Mufson points out. And, as with any good socialist, it has been Obama’s mission since his days as a left-wing “community organizer” and before.

Give him credit -- unlike his comrades, Mirengoff isn't pretending to like King.

ON TO OSCAR.

The nominations are out, and spurred by some vestigial urge from my showbiz days I'm working on seeing the big ones and reporting back here whenever I get a chance.

The Grand Budapest Hotel. Wes Anderson heroes don’t usually have life-or-death crises; they suffer from misunderstandings. Some of these misunderstandings are large and threaten their happiness, but they’re nothing that can’t be straightened out, for in the Anderson universe good will and reasonableness are always popping out from around a corner, ready to set things right. Even criminals don’t give Anderson heroes much trouble. (The pirates in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou were less of a threat than the Pirates of Penzance.) His movies have been like children’s-edition versions of Dickens, which is a large part of their pleasure, and also their limitation — they have a great range of amusing characters and incidents, but the viewer is always aware that this is not quite the world.

The Mitteleuropan fantasyland of Zubrowka, in which The Grand Budapest Hotel takes place, is not quite the world either — the visuals are rich as frosting; you can see how much pleasure Anderson gets from the very idea of an early-20th-Century alpine funicular. There is also the very Andersonian mentor-pupil relationship of Monsieur Gustave, the Hotel’s brilliant concierge whose aplomb, we come to realize, is not only inventive and industrious but magnificent and brave, and Zero the Lobby Boy, who climbs but is not a mere climber, which Gustave recognizes by instinct and seeks to encourage. And around many corners come many helpful people to lend Gustave and Zero support — most memorably the secret order of concierges known as the Society of the Crossed Keys.

But these helpers can’t do everything. There is a probate matter that has the appearance of a misunderstanding, and Deputy Kovacs attempts to deal with it as such; he is (spoiler) murdered for this misapprehension. His assassins, and Gustave’s and Zero’s main nemeses, are Dmitri and his enforcer Jopling, two genuinely savage creatures beyond the reach of all sentiment or reason, whose evil industry seems a match at least for the energy and good faith of our heroes. Also, from near the beginning of the film a great war threatens, and in the end it does more than that.

The Grand Budapest Hotel has all the pleasures we’ve come to expect from Anderson. The amplified grandeur of the Lubitsch-y, cinema buffa settings make it even easier than usual to expect them. But Lubitsch for all his kitsch was pretty wised-up, and I think Anderson is getting to be, too. Much has been made of the film’s inspiration by Stefan Zweig, not least by Anderson himself. I take him at his word: The melancholy for a vanished world — a world, as Zero, seen in his old age in the framing device, tells “the Author” was probably vanished even before the story began, but embodied and upheld by Monsieur Gustave — feels genuine, and informed by the sadder lessons of history and life. It’s not that kindness and its effects have left the world; just that their value has to be treasured and transmitted, maybe in movies like this.

That framing device makes the point beautifully. We see the message passed by elderly Zero to the Author, and the Author passing it on, through literature (and through difficulties which are only suggested but which to anyone who lived in the 20th Century will be perfectly clear) to his people. The evil in this world, this seems to say, does not refute the rosy Anderson idea of life; rather, vice-versa. Our problems, that is, may not all be misunderstandings, but when we insist on understanding we can yet triumph.

HOW BULLSHIT WORKS, PART INFINITY-PLUS.

When every other outlet reports what the Quinnipiac poll says thus:

Poll Shows Low Approval Rating For PBA’s Pat Lynch, Officers Turning Backs On De Blasio (CBS News) 

New Yorkers Didn't Approve of NYPD Officers Turning Their Backs to Mayor de Blasio: Poll (NBC) 

Mayor de Blasio Finds Support in Handling of Protests, Poll Says (New York Times) 

Poll: New Yorkers Overwhelmingly Disapprove Of Cops Turning Backs On Bill de Blasio (Huffington Post) 

Majority of New York City voters oppose cops’ back-turn on de Blasio, disapprove of PBA’s Pat Lynch: Poll (New York Daily News)

Cops turning backs on de Blasio went too far, says poll (Newsday)

...then it gots to be librul media bias, and that's when you turn to the New York Post and Bob McManus:

De Blasio’s next lesson: He still hasn’t learned last year’s 

Bill de Blasio isn’t the first chief executive of New York City to need remedial education on the state’s political power grid — but he may be the most obtuse. 

And that’s no lie. 

Gov. Cuomo took the rookie mayor to school a year ago on three of the latter’s must-have public-policy initiatives. With Year Two cranking up, it’s time to check back...

Flip flip flip... paragraph #16:

Pestered yet again about whether an apology to cops might be useful in ending the standoff, he tendered this gratuitous gem on Wednesday: 

“The things that I have said that I believe are what I believe. And you can’t apologize for your fundamental beliefs.” 

Rough translation: Hey, cops, all those things that you think are so horrid, that you’re so mad at me about? I meant it all. Kiss my patootie. 

So, Bill the Peacemaker he surely ain’t.

Finally, graf #23:

Yesterday’s always-estimable Quinnipiac University public-opinion poll suggested that PBA President Pat Lynch’s rhetorical overreaches have damaged the union, something that de Blasio’s own polling operations couldn’t help but detect. 

And all those reports of discord within the PBA, while probably overstated in practical terms, show that the union’s leadership itself is also weary of the angst. 

Yet by ramping up the rhetoric, de Blasio increases the likelihood of a Cuomo crisis-intervention going far beyond the two-hour sit-down the governor had with Lynch and other union bosses this week...

Remember, there is a world of difference between a bullshitter and a bullshit artist.

UPDATE. Most of the brethren at this writing are keeping their mouths shut about this, but thank God for Free Republic commenters:

Quinnipiac can be counted on to release polling data that supports the media narrative...

Of course, NYC is full of far lefties, so who knows... 

In a city that elected a known communist by a significant margin, I don’t see why this poll is inconsistent with observed facts...

Unfortunatley, only about 20% of New Yorkers are intelligent while the majority are incredibly dumb. We’re talking sub morons that can’t handle complex thinking.

Why, they can't even spell "unfortunatley." My favorite:

Yeah, those morons voted for John F#*king Kerry as soon as they could after 9.11 

That should tell you all that needs to be known about that place. I wouldn’t even go there on a field trip, because the firearms I own would land me in jail, and being a smoker I’d go bankrupt. 

To hell with that place. It’s basically the ‘Tower of Babel’, as far as cities go. Well, NYC, and DC may run close together for that title....

I find these guys a lot more enjoyable when they're not pretending to like New York.

SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT.

Are you a male campus conservative seeking guidance? PJ Media's Spencer Klavan is here for you. Per his bio, Klavan "studied Greek, Latin, and Theater at Yale" and is committed to "putting the gore, sex, and rock 'n roll back into ancient literature," so he has a mix of intellectual pretensions and bro 'tude to which you will probably relate. Today he will tell you "How to Outwit a Radical Feminist." Not how to convert her -- that comes later, when your Jesuitical logic leaves her no choice but to suck your dick. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

There’s an intellectual war going on, and conservatives are surrendering. In elite universities all over America and Europe, incoherent and destructive ideologies are taking hold. Radical feminism, socialism, cultural relativism: these are philosophies founded on logical fallacies and barefaced dishonesty.

But they’re gaining ground...

No doubt they are, if conservatives are surrendering. What Is To Be Done?

This is a field manual from the trenches, written for the average soldier. I’m no expert, but I’ve been deep in enemy territory — first at Yale and now at Oxford — for more than five years now...

Trench warfare sure has changed since great-grandpa fought the Hun. He didn't have saving throws.

Our first enemy: radical feminists.

He was going to start with black people, but he knows you like rap music.

A radical feminist’s standard-issue weapon is called “the patriarchy.” It’s the baseline assumption that sexism is engrained into certain societies — into American society... 

To dismantle this nonsense, let’s consider what it implies. If, in their natural state, men and women were so fabulously equal, someone at some point had to establish attitudes and conventions that now insidiously subjugate women.

And come on, look at the pretty dresses they wore back in the old days. Why, some of them were queens.

Instead, throughout Western history, men have struggled to liberate women from the position of physical vulnerability that would restrict their freedom in a state of nature...

Women were always equal to men, and men have throughout history been trying to make women equal to men. So women are doubly equal, yet they're always bitching! Plus that 77-cents-on-the-dollar thing is bullshit, and Klavan can name two fake rapes.

Alright, private: at ease. You now have everything you need to defeat your first ideological foe. If you’re a campus conservative like me, you’ve been armed — now speak up! Radical feminism is a threadbare tapestry of irresponsible lies, and it depends on its ability to scare people who know better into silence. If you’ve got your own war stories or battle plans for taking on a radical feminist, share them in the comments. And be sure to tune in next week for the next installment of . . . The Campus Conservative’s Field Manual!

I think the idea is to make anyone who falls under the sway of this yak into an insufferable pedant who spends his college years making "war" on women who think they're feminists. The odds of success are slim, and by graduation the recruit will probably have become so embittered and socially inept that he'll have nothing but the movement to cling to. Hey, it worked on Ross Douthat.

UPDATE. One for the colonel, and one for the corps: See if you can make it through this from PJ Media:

Don't look at me, I done my tour of duty. Oh, well all right:

After Elsa’ magical breakdown, she flees, and in her seclusion, she learns to use her powers responsibly. As she practices and grows more confident, she is able to make beautiful things. 

Guns don’t create beautiful palaces or awesome clothing, but they do save lives and protect people.

No wonder these guys all have the thousand-yard stare.

UPDATE 2. OK, grizzled vet that I am, one more from PJ Media:

Why the New Counter-Culture Should Make Strength Central to Its Identity 

"Popular culture is currently at war with the notion that a man should be big and strong, because popular culture is at war with the idea of independence and self-sufficiency, and a big strong man literally embodies the concept."

Mostly it's about how liberals are all pussies and conservatives should get buff and beat them up, but here's a passage of particular interest:

What if Trayvon Martin had seen George Zimmerman on that rainy night in 2012, and thought, “Damn, that guy looks kind of strong”? Facing what appeared to be a fair fight, Martin would have thought better of jumping Zimmerman. The latter wouldn’t have had cause to pull his legally owned, concealed carry pistol. Trayvon Martin wouldn’t have died that night.

As it stands, since his lack of strength training forced him to kill Martin, Zimmerman's only been comfortable attacking women; maybe he should go to college (Obama will let him do it for free!) and join Spencer Klavan's howlin' commandos.

ASS MAN.

Professional scold Rod Dreher is on a tear. Here's one called "The Myth of Islamophobia":

The truth is that [journalists] loathe ordinary unenlightened people more than they fear jihadists. There is always this great unwashed mob of right-wing lunatics just looking for an excuse to carry out pogroms against Muslims in the wake of Islamic terrorism. The fact that these Muslim-bashing episodes are always just that — episodic, I mean — never seems to change their minds.

Come on, Muhammad, it doesn't happen that often! Jeez, you guys are as bad as the blacks.

Remember the fear in the media prior to the release of Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ movie — that the film would set off anti-Jewish pogroms around the country? Didn’t happen, did they? The concern within media circles was real; I remember it well. And yet, it was absurd. I knew that at the time, as did just about every Christian.

See, anti-Semitism is bullshit, too. Except in France, and whenever it's convenient to say so.

But this one's the jewel. Dreher starts out about how France suffers religious maniacs like the Hebdo assassins because it doesn't respect the authority of organized religion of the right kind anymore. Then:

I thought about that this weekend when I saw a photo of a blasphemously anti-Christian cover that Charlie Hebdo once published (it depicts the Holy Trinity having three-way anal sex). It would not occur to me that anyone should lay a hand on the Charlie Hebdo artists or editors who produced that filth...

But...

Yeah, you knew there'd be a but (and its homophone! Keep reading!):

...But the decadence represented by Charlie Hebdo is probably a greater threat to Western civilization than anything the Islamists can dream up, and it’s important to keep that straight even as we defend the right to free expression and a free press.

Why a greater threat? Because it belittles religions other than the One True? Ha ha, kidding! On and on about the horrible atheists and various Dissolutions of the Monasteries -- "This is what the party of Charlie Hebdo has done to France since 1789: murdered its Christian soul, and called it progress" -- until Dreher's agon reaches, or rather suddenly collides with, its logical conclusion:

Scrolling my Facebook feed last night, I found this New York magazine feature about the season premiere of HBO’s Girls, which featured a scene in which a man performs oral sex on his girlfriend’s anus. It turns out that this is a thing in pop culture now.

"In pop culture"? Please, nobody tell him. Also, Dreher has "an Orthodox Christian friend" who feels the exact same way about things: "He talks about how his parish is pretty faithful," says Dreher, "but so many of the kids raised in it still get sucked in and away from their faith by the culture of Lena Dunham, of Charlie Hebdo, and the rest." Sucked away! Christianity is licked! These two should do a podcast while Wachet Auf plays in the background, or vice-versa.

In the end, all the stupid atheists join ISIS and Rod is ascended into heaven in divine recognition of his faithful mopes. Four stars! (h/t Will Menaker)

DUMMITUDE.

The Charlie Hebdo case has given our usual suspects plenty of opportunity to cover themselves in glory. Charles C. W. Cooke finds a roundabout way to a what-France-needs-is-more-guns argument:

Certainly, things might have been different if the events had unfolded in heavily armed states such as Oklahoma or Texas — or, for that matter, if someone in an adjacent office had been possessed of a rifle of his own.

He's also pissed that New York City isn't flooded with Saturday Night Specials like in the old days -- then they'd be really safe! Cooke might like to study up on local history a little.

My favorite, though, is Cooke's colleague Matthew Continetti on the subject (h/t Adam Serwer):

Nor do I recall liberals standing up for the critics of global warming and evolutionary theory, of same-sex marriage and trans rights and women in combat, of riots in Ferguson and of Obama’s decision to amnesty millions of illegal immigrants. On the contrary: To dissent from the politically correct and conventional and fashionable is to invite rebuke, disdain, expulsion from polite society, to court the label of Islamophobe or denier or bigot or cisnormative or misogynist or racist or carrier of privilege and irredeemable micro-aggressor. For the right to offend to have any meaning, however, it cannot be limited to theistic religions. You must have the right to offend secular humanists, too.

These people have not been deprived of their "right to offend" -- they have been offensive, and the people they offended took offense. I don't remember any of these guys getting shot by black-masked liberals. They did get called names, but I'm not finding anything in the Constitution that protects them from that. Well, what can you expect from someone who wrote a whole book about the "persecution" of Sarah Palin by the "elite media," which left her begging for scraps at the side of the road.

I applaud the sentiments of the surviving Charlie Hebdo cartoonist and like to think Obama, in skipping (to the harrumphs of dumbbells) the Paris march headed by international free speech celebrities, has provided his own concurrence.

UPDATE. Commentary announces in a pouty headline that because Obama didn't go to Paris, he is "No Longer Leader of the Free World." Guess now it's Bibi Netanyahu, huh? Oh, who am I kidding -- for Commentary it was always Netanyahu.

UPDATE 2. The Crazy Jesus Lady snarls:

The march was, at bottom, a preening and only symbolic show? When has this White House ever shown an aversion to preening and symbolic shows?

Yeah, remember when he marched in Ferguson? Also, where's his flag pin?

UPDATE 3. As you might expect, Fedora of Freedom Roger L. Simon raises the crazy stakes:

Now I admit that was just a supposition. Just because I’ve never heard [Obama] link Islam and terror doesn’t mean in his heart of hearts he doesn’t. Though not a genius, he does have an IQ in triple digits and sees what’s right in front of his nose, I assume. He just interprets it differently. But why? 

Is someone whispering in his ear? 

Senator Dianne Feinstein has just informed us that, yes, there are Islamic terror sleeper cells in our midst in the USA. If that’s true, I wonder why Feinstein wasted so much of her time wounding the CIA during the last weeks of her tenure as Senate Intelligence Committee chair, but never mind. Could there be one of those cells in the White House?

And in case you were charitably disposed to think he's kidding --

I started this post thinking it was kind of funny...

Of course, "bullshitting" is not quite the same thing as kidding.

DON'T THINK OF IT AS A COLONY, THINK OF IT AS A PIED-À-TERRE.

Normally when we talk here about conservative urbanists, we're talking about Joel Kotkin, who likes to argue that the blue-state cities are over (despite much evidence to the contrary) and that America will rebloom in Minot, North Dakota. But we have a new contender: William S. Lind at The American Conservative posits "Conservatism for the City." So, is this about conservatives ginning up police mutiny against a Democratic New York City Mayor? No, this is a softer side: Lind tells us that "Paul Weyrich was also a strong supporter of New Urbanism, as well as the high-quality rail transit successful cities require"-- what a pity he never had the ear of the Republican Party! -- and "It is easy enough to identify good things New Urbanism offers conservatives," to wit:

At the top of the list is stronger communities. Community is a highly important conservative value because it is through community expectations and pressures that traditional morals are best upheld. People in communities care what their neighbors think of them. If they don’t, they feel the community begin to exclude them...

Conservative urbanists sound like a bunch of hipsters to me. "I was into the nuclear family before it was popular."

If community is too weak to enforce the rules and their enforcement must be left to the state, the battle for the traditional culture is already largely lost. More, the state soon becomes overly powerful...

So see, if we were doing New Urbanism right, we wouldn't need cops so much -- crooks would just get shamed off the street. Though making people ashamed for wearing bright primary colors and synthetics is a good start.

We have seen that in a number of cities that have adopted aspects of New Urbanism. Successful, thriving cities have reduced crime rates, always a conservative goal...

As opposed to the liberal goal of making crime go up. "But looking at what New Urbanism offers conservatives raises another question," segues Lind: "what might conservatism offer New Urbanism?"

Some answers are obvious. We offer the understanding that traditional middle-class values work. Without them, no city, neighborhood, or town, however well designed, is likely to function.

It's a good thing we have these guys around to promote middle-class values to city folk. Wait'll they hear about this in San Francisco!

Beyond these, my observation over the years of New Urbanism’s strengths and weaknesses leads me to identify three important things conservatives can bring to New Urbanism. Those three things are beautiful architecture, dual codes, and streetcars.

[Blink.] [Blink.]

Although many of New Urbanism’s founders recognize the need for beautiful buildings and know there is an objective, traditional canon going back to the Greeks that tells us what is beautiful and what is not, New Urbanism officially is neutral about architectural style. The reason is ideological. Like the rest of academe, academic architecture is dominated by cultural Marxism...

That explains the giant hammer and sickle on Philip Johnson's Lipstick Building.

Conservatism rejects cultural Marxism and all its works, which frees us from the spurious need to be “neutral” about architecture. We demand beautiful buildings.

For rich people anyway. The poor can continue to live in giant cinder blocks. Preferably somewhere we don't have to look at them.

That demand leaves architects with wide choice, ranging from the neoclassical—usually the best for monumental buildings—and Georgian to the Romanesque and the Gothic.

Mr. Developer, put some flying buttresses on that hideous but profitable condo! We'll pay for it by making everyone turn middle-class and get married, which generates wealth.

To flip over all the cards, Lind considers the stuff you see liberal cities doing all the time -- walkability, mixed use, etc. -- to be conservative; Democratic administrations apparently picked them up by osmosis while strolling past a CPAC convention. Oh, and streetcars, conservatives love streetcars! That's probably why Washington D.C., which is the bluest place in the country, is presently rolling them out -- the power of conservative suggestion.

Well, it's nice to see them grabbing liberal stuff and claiming it instead of the other way around for a change.

UPDATE. "I don't even know what expressions like 'cultural Marxism' mean," says John Myroro in comments. "Seriously, I am not being snarky when I say that contemporary use of terms which I thought I understood, words like 'fascism' or 'socialist,' now seem to be used simply as interjections or placeholders. Like saying 'man' or 'you know' in between words that actually signify." I hear you, comrade, but remember that our subjects here are professional propagandists, and they have been trained to believe terms like these have explosive power (at least among the elect, if not among normal people), so to these guys such expressions are more like what "Can I get an Amen" or "I don't think ya heard me" are to gospel tents.

If you want to read more about where Lind's coming from, mortimer2000 directs you his 2007 essay "Who Stole Our Culture?":

Sometime during the last half-century, someone stole our culture. Just 50 years ago, in the 1950s, America was a great place. It was safe. It was decent. Children got good educations in the public schools. Even blue-collar fathers brought home middle-class incomes, so moms could stay home with the kids. Television shows reflected sound, traditional values.

All ruined, now, and you will be unsurprised to learn Lind does not see a role for rapacious capitalism in its demise, laying it instead to "a deliberate agenda" of "Marxism" and "the 'Frankfurt School'" and all that shit, effected by cartoon characters with big beards and big black cherry bombs upon the unsuspecting sheeple. Thus was Gomer Pyle pre-empted by godless videoporn! Further down in this same essay:

We can choose between two strategies. The first is to try to retake the existing institutions – the public schools, the universities, the media, the entertainment industry and most of the mainline churches – from the cultural Marxists.

Wait, what about the cities, Mr. Lind? What about the streetcars?

...There is another, more promising strategy. We can separate ourselves and our families from the institutions the cultural Marxists control and build new institutions for ourselves, institutions that reflect and will help us recover our traditional Western culture.

Aha! Conservatives will build their own damn streetcars -- in Minot, North Dakota! Or perhaps at The Citadel in Idaho, where all the shooting ranges will be Gothick and walkable.

FUCK YOUR BLOODTHIRSTY GODS.

Today's events call to mind my foray into cartooning. 2006, bitches. I don't want to hear any shit from sub-literate wingnuts about dhimmitude today.

It's out of context but, as this whole blog continually shows, context means nothing to psychos anyway.

NEXT UP: THE WAR AGAINST MY RIGHT TO GRAB YOUR SWEET ASS!

So you probably heard that, in the fine PSA tradition of New York City subway ads telling douchebags to cool it, MTA has a poster campaign telling guys not to sit with their legs splayed out like they're in a Barcalounger with elephantiasis because, as anyone who's been on a train with them knows, it's rude because other people can use the seats they're blocking with their knees. Now, who could be against that?

Paging Men's Rights den-mother Dr. Mrs. Ole Perfesser:

So, if it’s okay to subway shame men, is it okay to slut-shame women? Slut-shaming is “defined by many as a process in which women are attacked for their transgression of accepted codes of sexual conduct.” So now men are attacked. Why is one form of sexism okay and the other not? And don’t give me the crap about the patriarchy. If you shame men in this way, you are a nasty sexist who deserves contempt...

Seats, lady. These guys are taking up extra seats. They -- oh, what's the use; their persecution mania trumps common sense every time. Some classic DMOP Mothering the MRAs routines here and here. I doubt anyone will top -- oh, hold on, here's Alex Jones:

THE TRUTH ABOUT “MANSPREADING”
War on "manspreading" shows why feminism is becoming increasingly irrelevant

Please, can we maybe take one or two places that used to be all-male, and to which we don't really want to go, and let these guys have them back?  They clearly need a safe space.

...UNTIL GOLDBERG WRITES SOMETHING ELSE.

Oh Christ, Jonah Goldberg again:

There’s an old joke in the newspaper business, now immortal on the Internet: 

“The Wall Street Journal is read by the people who run the country. The Washington Post is read by people who think they run the country. The New York Times is read by people who think they should run the country..."

Yeah, we've all heard that one, it's pretty good. Now what --

"...USA Today is read by people who think they ought to run the country but don’t really understand the New York Times. They do, however, like their statistics shown in pie-chart format. . . . The Boston Globe is read by people whose parents used to run the country, and they did a far superior job of it, thank you very much..."

My guess: Goldberg, after years of telling his own terrible jokes or overexplaining them, has moved on to ruining the classics.

But the joke is on us. You see, no one is running the country. 

I don’t mean that as a knock on President Obama. No president “runs” America because the government doesn’t run America — and the president barely runs the government. He can scarcely tell his own employees what to do. Civil-service laws and union rules make it darn near impossible to fire even grossly incompetent employees for anything short of pederasty or murder. 

I don’t have the space to rehash the Federalist Papers, but at the federal level there are three branches of government and each one monkey-wrenches the other, all the time. Meanwhile, do you know how many local governments there are in the United States?

Despite this chaos, some people think we're being run by Liberal Fascism. How'd that happen?

Cutting to the chase: People think the country is run by rich people but Goldberg says it isn't -- he knows because they told him:

In recent years, I’ve had the good fortune to get to know some famous .001-percenters. Guess what? Not only do they not run the country, but they’re often desperate to find out who does.

"Yes, very interesting question, Mr. Goldberg. When you find out, tell me! Now if you'll excuse me, my harem of Guatemalan toddlers awaits; Rolf will see you out."

But this thinking is ancient, says Goldberg:

The notion that there’s a class or group of people secretly running things is ancient. It was old when the Roman consul Lucius Cassius famously asked, “Cui bono?” (“To whose benefit?”)

I suppose if you pointed out that this conflates conspiracy thinking with simple causality, Goldberg's grammar intern would explain that "old when" doesn't have to mean the two things have something to do with one another. Saved by sloppy writing once more!

Naturally, though conspiracy thinking is universal, it's worser with the Left because they believe in nonsense like "systemic racism or sexism or white privilege" -- As if! -- whereas conservatives only believe in sensible things like media bias.

Toward the end Goldberg grows philosophical, by which I mean less coherent:

I think some people are scared of the idea that nobody is in charge, in part because they want someone to blame for their problems. Others don’t like this notion because they have an outsize faith in the power of human will. If villains aren’t to blame for our ills, then some problems cease to be problems and simply become facts of life.

Just when you're puzzling out how an outsize faith in the power of human will makes a person less inclined to fix problems, Goldberg pops his button:

Me? I like knowing no one is running things because, for starters, it means I’m free.

He could have just started with that and skipped the column. But then how would people know he's an intellectual?

MARIO CUOMO, 1932-2015.

You probably know, and there are lots of good writers talking now, about the career of Mario Cuomo -- about his early days as a ballplayer, "Hamlet on the Hudson," his Notre Dame address on abortion, and that barn-burning speech at the 1984 Democratic Convention that made him a national figure. A few things may be overlooked. Here, for example, is a nice story from Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx is Burning about Cuomo standing up for some Corona residents who were resisting eviction by real estate developers, and how that living-room campaign became his entree, thanks to the notice of Jimmy Breslin and John Lindsay, into politics. You might say he started out as a community organizer.

What I remember most clearly about Cuomo from my own years in New York is his first debate against Lew Lehrman in 1982. Lehrman at the time ran the Rite-Aid chain that's still all over New York. He was a rich, sleek avatar of the then-ascendant Reaganite movement whom the Christian Science Monitor described thus:

In [campaign] ads, as well as in person, Lehrman comes across as an affable, straightforward, well-meaning individual who wants to use his wide experience as a businessman for the public good... 

Lehrman esposes economic policies similiar to the proposals Ronald Reagan put forth in his 1980 presidential campaign... 

But as much as Cuomo tries to link Lehrman with Reaganomics, analysts point to a concern by many New York State voters that some of the state's economic woes -- including some of the highest taxes in the nation -- can be directly traced to overspending by state Democrats over the last two years of the administration of Gov. Hugh Carey and his lieutenant governor, Mario Cuomo...

He was also hot for bringing back the death penalty. Yeah, I know, he sounds like a nightmare, but you have to remember this kind of thing went over big with the yuppies and Reagan Democrats back then, and the race was close. When it came time to debate -- well, let Murray Rothbard, of all people, tell it:

Mario Cuomo, in contrast, proved to be a delightful candidate, a quintessential New Yorker: warm, fast, bright, and very funny. Even the fanatically pro-Lehrman New York Post admitted that Cuomo crushed Lehrman in their first and major TV debate -- a victory so blatant that the Cuomo forces actually worried about a sympathy backlash for Lehrman. In contrast, Lehrman came across as cold, serioso, monomaniacal.

Rothbard recalls some of the zingers Cuomo pulled on Lehrman -- including taking note of the fancy watch the Republican was wearing. I recall Lehrman was also wearing red suspenders that night, presumably to telegraph to the folks that he was a Wall Street honcho-type who would free-market them unto glory. At one point, Rothbard reports, "when Lehrman argued that businesses are fleeing New York because of its taxes and regulations, Cuomo riposted: 'Rite-Aid [Lehrman's drug chain] came to New York, and did very well, Lew.'" I remember this got big applause, and thereafter Lehrman spent a lot of time with his hands on his hips, perhaps to push back his jacket and show off those red suspenders, or to dissipate the considerable heat Cuomo put on him.

Cuomo managed to squeak into office then, and continued to stand up for the old-fashioned lunch-bucket Democratic values that pretty much everyone else in his Party was abandoning for third-way, neoliberal bullshit. He wasn't perfect, but he was one of a very few prominent, powerful liberals in the 80s and 90s who hung tough and held the line against the rapid sell-out of the poor and middle-class to the rich. Look at Jacob Weisberg marveling in 1994, "Nor has Cuomo gotten into the spirit of deregulation... Nor has he tried to get rid of rent control..." Weisberg meant these as criticisms, but after decades of asset-stripping by armies of Lehrmans, I see them as badges of honor. Oh, here's more Weisberg '94:

Cuomo has also often indulged, as in a speech he gave at Harvard in 1992, in old-fashioned liberal cant. Talking about the culture of dependency, he said, was blaming the victim. Welfare, he insisted, was a small part of the federal budget. Reform, he said, was “not the solution.” He has excused the rise in single-parent families by calling it “nothing new.” This is truly inexcusable. 

Cuomo's POV was certainly passing out of favor, and Weisberg's into it; very shortly thereafter, Clinton and Gingrich would make pauper-punching a bi-partisan sport, and their heirs are still trying to make poor people's lives more miserable and peddling marriage-makes-you-rich hokum. I'd say Cuomo will be missed, but I think we've been missing him a long time already.

THE YEAR IN BULLSHIT, PART FOUR.

(Here's the fourth and last installment of a year-end bottom-ten of the lowlights of 2014, culled from my archives and elsewhere. See also Part One, Part Two, and Part Three. Read 'em and weep!)

2. Germ warfare. It seems like so long ago, doesn’t it, when a fatal case of Ebola in Dallas was portrayed as the harbinger of nationwide plague and doom. Yet it was only October when Liberian Thomas Eric Duncan succumbed, and besides him in the U.S. the virus has claimed… one life. This shouldn’t seem surprising, because this country has the illustrious Centers for Disease Control and thousands of dedicated scientists and epidemiologists with whom to fight Ebola. It also has wingnuts, alas, who did their best impersonation of a hayseed trying to keep a doctor from practicing his witchcraft on a young’un.

Listen here, they said, CDC’s just Big Gummint, and so-called “scientists” and epi-whatchamacallits are just a bunch of pointy-heads trying to get more o’ that Big Gummint money for their global-warming hoax, and fer t’ help out the coloreds in Africa! Besides, Obama’s in charge, so natchurly everything’s gotta be a disaster!

When CDC declined to seal America’s borders, citing the best science, conservatives declared this was part of Obama’s one-world agenda to unite the globe in disease and misery. (Heather Mac Donald of City Journal actually claimed the “public-health establishment” wouldn’t quarantine other countries because it was “awash in social-justice ideology” and “influenced as much by belief in America’s responsibility for the postcolonial oppression of Africa, and suspicion of American border enforcement, as it is by a commitment to public-health principles of containment and control.”) They ramped up their own custom science: Rand Paul told us you could get Ebola from being in the same room as an Ebola person. Instapundit Glenn Reynolds, whose degree is not in medicine, wondered aloud “if this strain of Ebola is easier to catch than we think.”

At the Washington Free Beacon Matthew Continetti actually wrote a column called “The Case for Panic… Incompetent government + corrupt elite = disaster.” Everyone knows you can’t trust Big Gummint, said Continetti, so if they say don’t panic, you should panic! It’s just logic! Plus the only reason Obama wasn’t quarantining everybody was that “doing so would violate the sacred principles by which our bourgeois liberal elite operate.”

Reliable everything-worsener Jonah Goldberg found a frame of reference for Ebola... in a disaster movie that showed millions of Americans dying. “We now have our own version of Contagion playing out in real time,” burbled Goldberg. Scientists couldn’t save us — “they keep telling us they know what can’t happen right up until the moment it happens,” shivered Goldberg. Time for pitchforks and witch-trials!

And of course there was the usual bullshit from Jim Hoft.

As fear started to subside, some of the brethren began whistling and trying to look innocent (“The Only Ebola Panic Is Being Caused by Doctors and Nurses” — Tim Cavanaugh, National Review). News cycles being what they are, people have probably already forgotten that a bunch of conservatives actually tried to promote a national panic during a medical crisis. But maybe by now they've done enough pants-wetting over Saddam Hussein, ISIS, and other alleged world-destroyers that their fellow citizens will at least begin to form an appropriate character judgment.

1. Cons, cops, and the end of the “libertarian moment." After eight years of big-government projects such as unfunded foreign wars and Medicare Part D under George W. Bush, conservatives took advantage of the Obama era to play at being anti-government again. The Tea Party, with its molon-labe watering-the-tree-of-liberty lingo, was the most visible example (hey, whatever happened to them?); some public officials even played with nullification of federal laws. The more intellectual of the brethren were pleased to call this flavor of conservatism “libertarian” for, though it does not promise freedom for all (women who want to get an abortion are excluded, for example), it does promote hostility to government, which has served the conservative movement well since the days of Reagan.

This theme reached a sort of climax in April at the Bundy Ranch in Nevada, where an old white rancher refused to pay his legally-owed user fees and, surrounded by armed supporters, defied federal authorities’ right to collect his property in restitution. Bundy was celebrated not just by survivalist nuts, but also by elected officials such as Rick Perry and Ted Cruz, and by mainstream pundits such as National Review’s Kevin D. Williamson, who wrote, in an essay called “The Case for a Little Sedition,” “Of course the law is against Cliven Bundy. How could it be otherwise? The law was against Mohandas Gandhi, too, when he was tried for sedition…” Lest his neckless readers accuse him of siding with a half-naked fakir, Williamson also compared Bundy to the Founding Fathers, not to mention the architects of the previous year’s government shutdown, in which “every one of the veterans and cheesed-off citizens who disregarded President Obama’s political theater and pushed aside his barricades was a law-breaker, too — and bless them for being that.” Moving barricades, pointing rifles at federal agents — same diff!

Power Line’s John Hinderaker cheered as “PHOTO OF THE YEAR” a picture of "Bundy supporters, on horseback and, I assume, armed,” telling “federal agents that they were surrounded and had better give back the cattle they had confiscated”; later, Hinderaker explained “WHY YOU SHOULD BE SYMPATHETIC TOWARD CLIVEN BUNDY” (basically because “you” share his typical rightwing resentments — “[The Bundys] don’t develop apps. They don’t ask for food stamps” — and disapprove any law, or enforcement thereof, that discomfits rich wingnuts).

Most of these rebellion joy-poppers sidled away from Bundy when he made some peculiar racial remarks — which is ironic, as conservatives next got to display their libertarian cred when Michael Brown and Eric Garner were killed in confrontations with police, and black people and their allies started complaining about the suspicious circumstances, the lack of arrests, and the regularity with which this sort of thing seemed to happen.

At first some of the brethren agreed that this, too, required a Bundy-style show of solidarity; National Review even ran a story called “It’s Time for Conservatives to Stop Defending Police.” At the Washington Examiner, Timothy P. Carney said that, though there had been "guffaws" from "many liberals and a few conservatives" when the New York Times Magazine earlier that month suggested a new "libertarian moment" was upon us, the Ferguson case had brought needed attention to the growing militarization of police in the United States, and he expected a consensus across ideological lines against this "insane armament." He added:

There's another problem in Ferguson that calls up some wisdom shared by libertarians and conservatives: When you consider the police shooting of Michael Brown, the riots that followed, the crackdown in response, and the heightened protests after that, the whole situation between the town and the police was one of Us vs. Them.

But the part these guys never got is that the protest over the killings had something to do with the troubled relationship between black Americans and the cops. Indeed, they probably can't get this, because for conservatives racism only exists in its reverse variety, engaged in by "race pimps."

Some of the brethren, reluctant to lose their libertarian props, looked for ways around this issue: many blamed the cigarette tax law Garner was allegedly evading (Big Gummint strikes again!) rather than racism or police overreaction.

The waves of protesters who rose in the wake of these deaths did not see it that way; when some nut killed two NYPD officers, even such expedients as this were abandoned. Most conservatives raged that the protesters, a small segment of whom had called for killing cops, were all “anti-police” and thus to blame for the murders — as was Mayor de Blasio, because he told his black son to be careful around police — and that America must now coalesce behind its Blue Knights and cease to complain about their tactics.

In this they agreed with the NYPD union leadership, with whose apparent encouragement City cops have affected a reverse ticket blitz, reducing their quality-of-life enforcement. National Review's Ian Tuttle applauded -- "when your mayor takes advice from Al Sharpton... it is hard to blame officers who might try to minimize the protecting and serving they have to do." Yes, a writer for a prominent conservative publication was cheering a municipal union work slowdown -- which should give you some idea of how important this was to the brethren. The meaning of "Us vs. Them" was becoming clear.

After a few feints at a personal-responsibility argument that the guy to blame for the murder was actually the murderer, not the protesters, Williamson, that friend of Bundy's "little sedition," got with the program — “The mobs in New York, Ferguson, and elsewhere are not calling for metaphorical murders of policemen, but literal ones,” he wrote, and proposed as a solution… more aggressive policing: “the reality is that what causes American murders is our national failure to adequately monitor, restrict, or rehabilitate violent offenders with sub-homicidal criminal careers…”

This particular libertarian moment, I think we can safely say, is over. especially with a Presidential election coming up.  But never fear: it wasn't the first such moment promoted, and won't be the last. Conservatives like to portray themselves as freedom-lovers when nothing’s on the line, but they know by instinct that their best shot when it's time to woo voters is straight, law-and-order authoritarianism. In fact, if the past fourteen years are any indication, it’s pretty much all they have to offer.