STYLE COUNCIL.

Despite all of them being entirely wrong about everything, rightbloggers do show some variations in style; there is the manic fart-bluster of Jonah Goldberg, the quiet Renfieldian madness of Stanley Kurtz, etc. Noticing, indeed savoring these attributes is sometimes all that keeps me from abandoning the Scourge & Minister desk entirely.

Amity Shlaes' ideas are so horrible that it may distract you from her prose characteristics. She's basically an old-fashioned hack who apotheosizes or demonizes as circumstances require in a workaday manner, but without the natural energy of inspiration that animates many of her colleagues, which may be why (as I have noticed before) she sometimes falls short of relevant material and has to pad her work in unusual and amusing ways.

Shlaes' latest for National Review is an argument for putting kids in debate club -- an admirable cause. She is most secure when concatenating talking points and her style is bright and boosterish when she does ("debate’s social achievements are so great that the sport even earned the solicitude of the Boston Fed").

But then something or someone reminds her conservatism's the client, and so she cobbles an endless, ramshackle lede about why teens prefer listening to music to talking with their parents:

The trouble isn’t that children don’t know anything, though they may not. It is that the kids won’t talk. And they certainly won’t discuss. Or argue...

The psychologists have been the opposite of silent on their explanation for teen silence: rebellion. The pop-culture experts will tell you something about Marshall McLuhan and the earphones.

The pop-culture experts who arrived in a time machine from 1974, perhaps.

But there is another analysis. It is not that adolescents won’t talk. It is that they cannot. At some point habit becomes necessity and they are afraid to take the earphones out. Teens are just not accustomed to quality argument and aren’t likely to become so in the monosyllabic or one-sided classes that await them at university.

Stark terror prevents teens from removing their earphones, and from talking; that must be the reason behind the Plague of Silent Children we've all seen as the kids march soundlessly to their buses after school. Not only are they mute, they're also deaf, at least to "quality argument," which is readily available -- somewhere, I guess; maybe from the old Firing Line tapes in Shlaes' den. But who can blame them from disengaging, when all that awaits them in the World of Sounds is "monosyllabic or one-sided classes," presumably conducted by Ima Stupid Liberal at Indoctrinate U. (How come these guys never send their kids to Bible colleges, where presumably enlightened colloquy flows?) (j/k, I know why.)

This trend works out fine for screenwriters, professional athletes, software coders, high-frequency traders, and supermodels, i.e., people who talk only to people in their set. But inability to talk to grownups and strangers punishes those who work in sales, the law, or medicine. Or any other area when you have to interact. 

I didn't know before this that supermodels, coders et alia only talk to their own kind; is this out of Robert Putnam?

The anti-argument trend plays out of course in politics, where the habit of silence eventually does become a habit of ignorance. When, 20 years later, former teens start to talk, what one notices first is the poor quality and evidence-short nature of their argument. All you have to do is watch MNSBC to know what I mean: “Perception is reality” is the network’s mantra. It’s all pretty sad for a nation whose founding, celebrated this week, would not have happened without Publius and, yes, the Anti-Federalist Papers.

It took enormous effort and time, but not only did she get the wingnut money shot in there, she also gave readers to understand that if you don't send the little thugs to debate club, they'll grow into stupid liberals. It seems to render the rest of the article superfluous -- oh, right: word count; also the chance to deliver this delightful anecdote:

One person who gets this is President Bush. With remarkable frankness and grace, “43” stood up in the fall of 2012 told a room with hundreds of Texan high schoolers, “I wish I’d debated in high school.” At the same dinner, a speaker, the Mexican philosopher Roberto Salinas Leon, talked about free trade and Hayek, and President Bush nodded approvingly.

If the becoming modesty and nodding of a famous dumbass doesn't strike you as inspiring, wait till Shlaes works her magic:

Next to me, a freshman from Chicago’s North Shore sat right up and smiled. The kid knew about Hayek, and now he knew that a president had heard of Hayek too. Whatever you think of Bush’s performance, that night he gave free marketeers a great gift. He showed kids that powerful people loved free markets, something they never would have picked up from U.S. television.

Guess it's time for ol' W to make an inspiring national tour -- maybe even finally appear at a Republican Convention! And so another deadline is met and another check is cashed. The writing life is hard, though I suspect it's easier if you just don't give a shit.

UPDATE. "Shorter Amity Shlaes," says NonyNony in comments: "I don't know anyone younger than 30." L Bob Rife is amused to learn of "G. Dubb, the freemarket old pres who can talk to the kids." W's nodding, or rather Shlaes' appreciation of it, touches Jay B: "'Silence = stupidity' but 'Nodding = wisdom.'" Also, when "the Mexican philosopher Roberto Salinas Leon, talked about free trade and Hayek," extrapolates mds: "then, in the spirit of debate, a Mexican farmer whose livelihood was destroyed by Archer Daniels Midland was permitted to retort. Wait, no, that would be too one-sided."

D Johnston says debate club isn't entirely a feast of reason: "The first and most important thing you learn is not how to compose an argument or gather evidence, but how to read the judge and play to his/her expectations... In my experience, the people who really enjoy debate are the ones who enjoy manipulating people and take great joy in it." That may be why so many of the more damp-palmed pundits act the way they do. It's like someone gave them a rhetorical dictionary years ago, but they have no human experience to apply it to.

THE SEDUCTION OF THE IDIOTS.

Remember when Amity Shlaes told her fellow conservatives to make rightwing comics to re-educate the littlebrains? The Comintern seems to be responding: The two comics creators she hired to turn her anti-FDR book into graphic nonfiction, Chuck Dixon and Paul Rivoche, have been given a platform at the Wall Street Journal to tell us our favorite comics heroes were turned into a bunch of anti-American bums by liberalism, and that it's time for conservatives to "take back comics":

In the 900th issue of Action Comics, Superman decides to go before the United Nations and renounce his U.S. citizenship. " 'Truth, justice and the American way'—it's not enough any more," he despairs. That issue, published in April 2011, is perhaps the most dramatic example of modern comics' descent into political correctness, moral ambiguity and leftist ideology. 

We are comic-book artists and comics are our passion. But more important they've inspired and shaped many millions of young Americans. Our fear is that today's young comic-book readers are being ill-served by a medium that often presents heroes as morally compromised or no different from the criminals they battle. With the rise of moral relativism, "truth, justice and the American way" have lost their meaning.

Comics are apparently a public good (unlike, say, water) which must be kept pure so "young comic-book readers" hear only what a mid-20th-Century censor would approve. No, literally:

In the 1950s, the great publishers, including DC and what later become Marvel, created the Comics Code Authority, a guild regulator that issued rules such as: "Crimes shall never be presented in such a way as to create sympathy for the criminal." The idea behind the CCA, which had a stamp of approval on the cover of all comics, was to protect the industry's main audience—kids—from story lines that might glorify violent crime, drug use or other illicit behavior. 

Actually the idea was to protect publishers from the moral panic engendered by Fred Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent.  Thanks to the CCA, "there were still good guys and bad guys," sigh Dixon and Rivoche, but "the 1990s brought a change" -- though the change actually came in 1960s, starting with R. Crumb and Zap, and giving rise to a comic artist community that wanted to stretch the medium  beyond kiddie comics, not just in the underground but also in their own workplaces -- and by the 90s they had the power to do so. Whatever you think of the result, that change has clearly meant more choice in what buyers can find in the market -- but Dixon and Rivoche portray it as censorship and "political correctness," and themselves as victims:

The industry weakened and eventually threw out the CCA, and editors began to resist hiring conservative artists.

[Cite please.]

One of us, Chuck, expressed the opinion that a frank story line about AIDS was not right for comics marketed to children. His editors rejected the idea and asked him to apologize to colleagues for even expressing it. Soon enough, Chuck got less work.

And that's why everyone has AIDS today -- because the comics commissars blacklisted Dixon and Rivoche and turned the means of production over to loyal Party members like Frank Miller and Alison Bechdel, who Seduce the Innocent to this day. George F. Will may think being raped is the coveted victim-status of our time, but among his conservative colleagues the fashionable victim card is always that liberals refuse to do things their way, which they inevitably portray as censorship.

I can't blame them too much -- they have a book to sell and, as I have observed before, comics is a hard dollar. I'm mainly surprised that conservatives are still peddling the purification of culture. Their traditional appeals to racism and sexism I can understand, but do even Mississippians want the swears and sideboobs driven from their TVs?

COMRADES! IS NEEDED CONSERVATIVE COMICS TO BRING TRUTH TO MASSES!

In the latest culture war eruption, the horrible Amity Shlaes wants conservatives to start producing propaganda comics, but first she has to explain to her apparently geriatric shut-in audience "the oddly named genre of the 'graphic novel'":

Counterintuitive as it may sound, these graphic novels not only feature nonfiction but also lend themselves enviably to difficult nonfiction topics. Take Persepolis, a mauve-and-grey depiction of a girl’s life in the Iranian Revolution... Maus, another graphic novel...

Also, sometimes they even animate these drawings! What a world we live in.

What’s more, these long cartoon books have much the same capacity as films to entice the reader to delve deeper. As Bill Bennett, one who gets the medium, noted recently: “After reading the comic of The Iliad, then I read the children’s edition of The Iliad, and then I read The Iliad.”

I don't know what's funnier: The idea that the noted blowhard Bill Bennett "gets" graphic novels, or that he worked his way to The Iliad via comics.

What was and is troubling, therefore, is that the many of the more serious graphic novels are like Marx’s Capital — reinforcement weapons for progressive, or even outright Marxist, messages.

Shlaes mournfully catalogues some of these wrongthink funnies ("other graphic novels lionize redistributionists and revolutionaries"). The saddest bit, for me, is her description of "a hilarious but anti-capital comic"; I imagine the poor woman tittering and then shuddering, a la Justin Green's Binky Brown: But my thoughts -- no! -- impure thoughts -- no!

"But where are the conservative mangas and graphic novels?" asks Shlaes. Get this:

One explanation for the missing graphic novels is the political bent of the artists themselves. A number of these talents — some of the best, in fact — study and draw together in White River Junction, Vermont, not too far from the home of President Coolidge. A few years ago I traveled up to this cartoon heaven to find someone to draw my own print book, Forgotten Man, or even to help illustrate a bio of the local president, Coolidge. The artists had to work to live, clearly. But this kind of work, they let me know, and in the politest way, they would not take. I left impressed: At least they lived by their convictions.

Rather than wait for the Invisible Hand to starve the Vermont commie-artists into acquiescence, Shlaes  found someone else to do a comic of her book, and advises her comrades to follow suit. First she flatters them, though -- which makes sense, because the target audience, wingnuts with money, is probably thinking they spend enough keeping the thinktanks running and Jonah Goldberg farting out columns, so why should they pay for comics too?

Shlaes assures them she understands: "conservatives themselves have expressed no demand for graphic novels: After all, they have plenty of lively content of their own." When you've got the films of Dinesh D'Souza and books like God Less America to amuse you, comics may seem a useless luxury. Also, "giving in to the graphic style is perceived as dumbing down, and offends conservatives’ inner librarian." So you guys are too smart, too intellectual to do this "visual art" thing. But you should bite the bullet, pull out the wallet, and find some art-drones to do your funnies anyway:

But this attitude, high-minded though it be, is itself a bit of a manga. After all, almost nobody reads books these days. Not radio hosts, not newspaper editors, not union officials, not politicians, and certainly not children. By turning their collective nose up at graphic books, conservatives surrender education ground to the more artful progressives. In the case of economics, conservatives leave fans of markets, not to mention fans of balanced history, unequipped to rebut when the progressive cartoon books come along.

The dummies don't read, and they're being exploited by "artful progressives" -- so we must hire somebody to counteract them. After all, "these long cartoon books have much the same capacity as films to entice the reader to delve deeper" -- so even if they have no intellectual value in and of themselves, they may lead the sheeple on to Hayek and Ramesh Ponnuru.

This is how things look to someone who has no idea what art is for, and who thinks people only respond to it because they're stupid.

JESUS, FREAK. Mmm, that was a nice dinner. Wonder if there's something about the Terrible Obamatyranny of Birth Control for Catholics at National Review this evening... Oh, here we are, Michael Potemra:

The U.S. publication of the new biography Thomas Becket: Warrior, Priest, Rebel, by John Guy, could not be more fortunately timed: The recent controversy over the changing of HHS rules in a way that erodes previous protections for religious freedom has put the issue of church-state conflict near the top of the American agenda.

I wonder if they'll use this as a book cover blurb.

We all grew up with the story of the angry King Henry II thundering to his associates, “Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?” As Guy points out, this phrasing is apocryphal. More reliable reports render what the king said as follows...

I see Potemra's a student of Amity Shlaes' "when in doubt, pad it out" journalistic method.

King Henry’s men got the message. (Which, incidentally, makes the assassination of Becket the first recorded instance of an executive-ordered drone strike against a domestic opponent.)

Seen a certain way, the graduation of Potemra from Catholic torture enthusiast ("Was it appropriate for a Catholic TV network to provide a platform for a torture advocate? In my view, the answer is yes") to opponent of drone strikes would be an advance. But that would presuppose you could believe anything Potemra says about morality.

The fate of the four assassins offers a cautionary tale about power and loyalty. Far from rewarding their deed, King Henry soon turned on them, and they ended their lives in exile; in the words of a chronicler cited by Guy, they “spent out their lives” in the East, “in fasting, vigils, prayers, and lamentations.” Just two decades after their assassination of Becket, a visitor to Jerusalem found their graves there, with the epitaph “Here lie those wretches who martyred the Blessed Thomas, archbishop of Canterbury.”

Like I said, these guys are all about wish fulfillment. The Administration moves heaven and earth, so to speak, to provide contraception to non-observant employees of Catholics without requiring the Church to pay for it, and Potemra, having expanded this in his mind to an assault on his religion, warns by dire insinuation that all who serve the tyrant Obama -- yea, even unto Kathleen Sebelius! -- will be exiled and buried in unconsecrated ground.

Well, to each his own historical fantasies; I would rather fast forward some centuries to the day Henry VIII finally threw the Whore of Babylon out of England. Good times!  And Harry the Eight lies in St. George's Chapel, Windsor.

THE GIRL CAN'T HELP IT. This Bloomberg article is mostly -- like, about two-thirds -- about a famous inspirational quote ("Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not...") traditionally attributed to Calvin Coolidge, and how it probably isn't Coolidge's, but history's funny that way and "the only sure thing one can say at this point about Coolidge and 'persistence' is that our article is not definitive. It is an update. More to come."

Now what sort of lede can you put on that, besides "only read if you're really bored"? Here's the one that appeared:

The White House messed up its history. That’s the contention of critics who pointed to references recently appended to the biography pages of past presidents on the White House website.

Turns out the "messed up" bit of history wasn't the "persistence" thing, but a "Did You Know?" that asserts Coolidge was "the first president to make a public radio address to the American people." No, says the author, it was actually Warren Harding. Which leads naturally (at least in the mind of longtime conservative columnist and How That Bastard FDR Sank America into The Great Depression author Amity Shlaes) to the following:

What the Barack Obama White House did was introduce its own comments and facts to the extant biographies of the presidents on the White House pages. Some commentators such as Seth Mandel at Contentions, the Commentary magazine blog, interpret the effort to draw such parallels as an intrusion on past presidents. Mandel sees the Obama administration comments as evidence that the president, like many of his young devotees, doesn’t “have much memory of the political world before the arrival of The One.” You can agree or disagree with this criticism.

It's like a form of ideological Tourette's: You can't complete a pop history thumbsucker, or a movie review, or a grocery list without spitting up an attack on Obama. Thank God for wingnut welfare, which keeps people thus afflicted from having to beg in the streets.

Oh, by the way:

On this day in 1922, President Warren G. Harding, while addressing a crowd at the dedication of a memorial site for the composer of the "Star Spangled Banner," Francis Scott Key, becomes the first president to have his voice transmitted by radio. The broadcast heralded a revolutionary shift in how presidents addressed the American public. It was not until three years later, however, that a president would deliver a radio-specific address. That honor went to President Calvin Coolidge.

But that's from the History Channel -- what do they know?

SOTU, SO WHAT. Well, that was nice and anodyne. I understand the necessity -- the House is now flooded with Republicans, and Obama doesn't want to give them any handles to grab. And he didn't; the yap about Sputnik sounded silly from him, but it sounds sillier coming from the amateur stand-up comedians of the right. The whole thing was evasive that way -- telling the Republicans that he wants to cut government too, har har, and talking about how "contentious and frustrating and messy as our democracy can sometimes be" and how we're all going to argue but finally come together as if it's a sitcom premise -- Democrats! Republicans! Always a-fussin' and a-feudin', but when Al Qaeda comes to dinner, they join forces!

At least he told them he wasn't going to compromise on universal health care coverage -- though that would be more impressive if the Democrats hadn't already compromised like mad in Congress before the bill was even passed. This Administration is a blessing after the last one, and will probably look like a Golden Age after the one that comes next (if we survive it), but that's grading on a ridiculously steep curve.

Also, I don't see what the point was in electing an anti-American socialist Kenyan if he's gonna talk so fucking much about what a great country this is.

UPDATE. Paul Ryan just ain't cutting it. Nobody gives a shit about his three children and their alleged sufferings under a budget deficit. "Stimulus spending spree" isn't a very cutting charge after the President's gooey-sweet speech. And the "picking winners and losers" stuff isn't going to play well with millions of people who've been losers too long and know just looking at this obvious, lacquer-haired factotum for great wealth that if he's the one to pick, they'll be hurled into an even lower circle of hell.

And oh my Lord, "Share our principles," "the wisdom of the Founders," etc. If this doesn't lead to an offering by the Franklin Mint, it's a waste of time. People voted for Republicans because they were desperate, not because they're in love with their Revolutionary War reenactor schtick. Why didn't he think to give them something tangible -- like a co-branded half-price promotion with Dunkin' Donuts? "Buy a dozen donuts and John Boehner treats you to coffee!" Idiots.

UPDATE 2. Crap, it's late, haven't they got that dizzy queen Michele Bachmann's head screwed on yet?.. Oh Jesus, it's a freakin' forum in which Bachmann is only the nuttiest participant? Why are the other participants all mumbly young dorks talking policy? It almost makes you miss the guys in tricorners and knee-britches waving flintlocks and yelling "WATER THE TREE OF LIBERTY!"

UPDATE 3. Commenters tell me Bachmann's got an actual rebuttal going on, but I don't get CNN and the web outlets aren't working. I'll take commenter dex's word for it: "like coming back from the bar at 2am to watch infomercials in hell."

UPDATE 3.5. National Review's Fartmaster General Jonah Goldberg says, "I was truly surprised by how lackluster and clichéd Obama’s speech was," as if his profession of surprise and use of every liar's favorite word, "truly," will convince anyone he's recording his genuine response. (No doubt he was out back of the shop during the speech, impressing the interns by operating Kinect with his butt.) The rest of his post is about as believable. Despite heavy competition at NatRev, Goldberg's only real challenger is Mona Charen:

“America’s standing has been restored.” Still sniping at George W.? This must be some kind of record for gracelessness.

They keep this awful Reagan-era relic in a closet nine months out of the year for a reason.

UPDATE 4. Ann Althouse:

[Quoting Obama] Many people watching tonight can probably remember a time when finding a good job meant showing up at a nearby factory or a business downtown. You didn’t always need a degree, and your competition was pretty much limited to your neighbors. If you worked hard, chances are you’d have a job for life, with a decent paycheck, good benefits, and the occasional promotion....

When was that true? Who is he talking about? I'm 60 and I don't remember that ever being true.

I can remember vividly the tract-house neighborhood I grew up in, filled with factory workers who supported families and houses and cars on single incomes. And as I got older I saw some of them retire from the companies they started working for as young people, and collect pensions; they didn't have to become greeters for Wal-Mart. Many middle-aged people in America recall such events. Maybe Professor Althouse doesn't remember because then, as now, she was inattentive to what was going on around her. Alternatively, maybe she's just full of shit.

UPDATE 5. Looks like Obama got high viewership and approval numbers for the State of the Union -- which explains the redoubled stridency of conservative attacks on the speech this morning.

Several commenters step up to say they, too, remember single-earner, blue-collar families who managed to achieve the American dream in pre-Reagan days. Clearly these are false memories, as everyone knows that bastard FDR not only prolonged the Depression but also left America broke and powerless after World War II, with most citizens living in hobo camps. Read Amity Shlaes' next book to learn all about it!

ANOTHER BLOGGER ETHICS PANEL. Amity Shlaes, author of a book about the wretched failure of the New Deal, starts her new Bloomberg column by complaining of leftblogger incivility aimed at such blameless targets as Michele Bachmann and Eric Cantor. I have to admit, I was excited to see this. I have toiled lo these many years documenting the abuses of the rightwing blogosphere, and would have liked to compare notes with someone from the other side.

Alas, Shlaes only leads with three examples, and then moves on to her real theme, which is how bad the Obama is and FDR was. But she drags the bad-blogger schtick through the whole thing ("So here’s a new motto: more leadership, less bloggership"), to suggest it is evidence that the present Administration "isn’t comfortable yet at the summit of political power," and hence must order Josh Marshall, Matthew Yglesias, and Allison Kilkenny "out on a mission of distraction, trying to prove that everyone else is too far to the right."

It's noteworthy that, at this late date, people like Shlaes think bloggers are only making fun of them because the Obama Administration directed them to do so. We've been razzing them since before there was an Obama Administration. But Shlaes has made a good living for years as a conservative operative, and has only rarely acknowledged the less-credentialed voices out there -- as in this 2005 column of hers, in which she discourses on DNC Chairman Howard Dean: "Howard the Hound goes for blood, and his party values him for his following among bloggers." That's not very civil, but then she didn't feel she needed to be: her column goes on to explain how Blue Dog Democrats are going to destroy Howard the Hound's liberal dreams -- "rescue the party," in her terms -- and send him and his wretched bloggers into deserved obscurity.

Clearly things haven't worked out for Shlaes, and now in the ruins she senses that Howard the Hound and his bloggers have pulled a fast one on her. So she rails against the coalition that, she imagines, hectors her and her buddies to this day. Though she has disappointed me, I'd be a churl not to thank her for placing my kind near the center of the groovy socialist revolution. It's as close to power as we are likely to get.

KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK. Professor Bainbridge hauls out an old Chicago Tribune cartoon, which denounces that bastard FDR as a free-spending commie who, assisted by "pinkie" Ivy League aides, is driving America into a dictatorship -- just like Obama!

His analysis is seconded by the Ole Perfesser and, as is often the way with these things, appears near-simultaneously at Freeperland ("Well, we saw the outcome of that last one and the socialist president in the office then").

Oh please, please, please, rightwing nuts, please keep this up!

This theme of Franklin Roosevelt as History's Greatest Monster has been running around conservative circles since -- well, since Roosevelt. It got a revival during the "Jobless Recovery" fad of the early '00s. And the counter-historical books of Jonah Goldberg and Amity Shlaes gave it a big lift among the faithful during the last election, when conservatives prayed for a Herbert Hoover revival.

Ordinary American haven't heard much of this up till now, but maybe the Bainbridge/Freeper item portends it as the new rightwing talking point: Having dazzled the populace by gathering thousands of ordinary people to carry "Obama is a Socialist" signs, perhaps they think the time is right for some Great Depression Trutherism.

Keep it up, fellas. Please inform the American people that one of their best-loved Presidents was a communist who destroyed the country. Please instruct them on how America remained a ruined collectivist hellhole throughout the years of its greatest growth until Richard Nixon, or perhaps Ronald Reagan, made it the Valhalla we see today. Agitate to have the shameful presence of Roosevelt's monument (and that of his greatest boondoggle, World War II) removed from the D.C. Mall.

We'll do what we can to help spread the word. Vaya con dios!

A HOLLYWOOD BOMB. Andrew Breitbart tells The Hill he's starting up a right-wing Hollywood site.

His strategy is to prod conservative Washington to start caring about Hollywood. Breitbart has already signed several big names, including House Minority Leader Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio), incoming Minority Whip Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and Reps. Thaddeus McCotter (R-Mich.), Mary Bono Mack (R-Calif.) and Connie Mack (R-Fla.), to post entries on the site. He has also landed former senator and GOP presidential candidate Fred Thompson, MSNBC correspondent Tucker Carlson and a slew of other conservative thinkers from the National Review, The Weekly Standard and Commentary magazine to contribute.

Breitbart is also eager to include commentary from Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh and other conservatives who have stirred up controversy in the past. “I don’t consider them controversial,” he says.

This Zhdanovite spectacle will offer endless amusement when it opens in January. We have been supplied with a press release, and here are some highlights of the first issue:

Amity Shlaes, author of The Forgotten Man, on how Frank Capra prolonged the Great Depression: "I was at first intrigued to learn Capra had made a film called You Can't Take It With You and hoped it would have conveyed a positive financial message that would get audiences spending to unleash the power of free markets. Alas, it turned out to be a celebration of non-conformists, clearly meant to make viewers comfortable with the alien philosophy of the New Deal. Capra also missed a valuable opportunity to have Mr. Smith, when he went to Washington. denounce Franklin Roosevelt from the floor of the Senate."

Rush Limbaugh on the treasonous legacy of Citizen Kane: "Folks, I am going to go out on a limb here. Every critic, marching in lockstep on orders from the cultural Kremlin, will tell you that Citizen Kane is a great movie. But how many of them have ever run a business? They just don't know what they're talking about. And Orson Welles, who was mincing around in spats and leotards since he was a baby, practically, didn't know either. So he libeled a great fictional businessman -- though everyone knows his model was one of my personal heroes, William Randolph Hearst -- by making him out to be corrupt and lecherous to stir up class envy. My friends, I've spent hours with business leaders like Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump, and I can tell you, no successful leader has a fireplace that big."

A podcast by Fred Thompson on Frost/Nixon: "Now, the Dick Nixon I knew was a mahty man, the sort of feller who'd brush off a David Frost lahk a houn' scratchin' off a flea. I tell you it galled Nixon to have to sit there oan thet TV set an' tolerate those questions from a lib'ral Englishman with big ol' sideburns. But he did it so people would know the truth an' to this day I hain't seen a lick o' evidence that he didn't donate that big ol' check to the St. Jude Hauspital. But that's the kinda man Richard Nixon was."

Jonah Goldberg on The X Files: I Want To Believe: "Now there's still the politically correct angle of the pedophile priest. I don't want to get into the weeds debating the role of the Catholic Church. I can understand why people are angry about priests diddling little boys, though I wonder why no one examines the role of gay rights groups in this abuse, which I hope to address in a future column. But I Want To Believe is really about faith, no matter how much the filmmakers try to get away from it, and I think it's ironic that Hollywood is so adamantly against religion and yet they keep making these movies about people who want to believe. There's a tradition of this in science fiction that I hope to get to in my new book. The head transplant thing also addresses conservative doubts about science and where it goes when it's left unregulated -- though liberals are all for regulation when it comes to banks, you never hear them speaking out against this sort of thing."

IF I CAN DREAM. Ross Douthat defends Amity Shlaes' new book That Commie Bastard FDR from John Updike. Douthat says:

But one of the implications of Shlaes' book, which Updike is supposed to be reviewing, is that FDR could have given us the fireside chats and the rhetoric of government action and yes, even the stronger safety net without the counterproductive attempts at centralized planning and the relentless scapegoating of business...

"Even this stronger safety net"? Surely, in the ideal Depression of rightwing alternative history, nothing stronger than a free cup of joe on the way to the workhouse would have been offered.

That leaves the fireside chats, which would probably have gone something like, "We have nothing to fear but Stalin himself. So don't ask your government for a handout -- we're saving our few tax revenues for an invasion of Russia. Now I'm off to Warm Springs for my fifteenth vacation of the year. Work or starve, parasites!"

I look forward to Shlaes' next book, said to expose Thomas Jefferson as a syphilis-crazed Jacobin who should have listened to his wise Federalist opposition and retained the Alien and Sedition Acts, the loss of which caused 9/11.

The more obvious their failure and collapse becomes, the greater, it seems, their need for fantasy.

COME ALONG. WE'RE GOING TO THE TRANS-LUX TO HISS ROOSEVELT. Today the Wall Street Journal approves Amity Shlaes' attack on that bastard FDR. Highlight of Alonzo L. Hamby's review: "One question that Ms. Shlaes never quite answers is just what Roosevelt should have done to beat the Depression beyond practicing a Coolidge-like passivity." I shouldn't wonder!

Jesus, these fuckers never stop. Next week in the Journal: Magna Carta and FISA -- which was worse?