FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: A LITTLE RESPECT AND A LOT OF B.S. EDITION.

I think they beat-corrected these? Or maybe I'm just shocked that it still kicks so hard.

This past week at Roy Edroso Breaks It Down we had plenty of the usual political stuff, but our two freebies today for the non-subscribing public (Stop crowding! They’re coming! There’s plenty for everyone!) are about two dead guys. First my reminiscence of the now-late James Chance and the shows he played with the Contortions back when New York City was better because I was young and living in it (and really, is there any other reason people say so? Well, I’ve discoursed on that in one of my evergreens). 

The second is for the newly-departed Donald Sutherland and an invitation to comment on your favorite of his performances, and we’ve already gotten great ones from our regular commenters (who are subscribers, get the hint – come on, $7/month is ridiculously cheap!).

Since we’re short of REBID poli-scorn, let me say a few words upon an exemplary piece of hackwork from the Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Henninger. The thing ran on Juneteenth – which reminds me, get a load of this shit:

It’s too little noted, as Trump tries to convince credulous reporters that he’s reaching out successfully to African-American voters, every single MAGA media outlet like the Examiner keeps giving evidence that they have absolutely no black readers. 

Anyway:

The headline suggests typical rightwing Limousine Liberals in Hollyweird Kulturkampf crap, but the dek promises a twist. One wonders: Is he talking about Ron Schneider and Kevin Sorbo? But no, it’s worse than that! After a typically gratuitous swipe at Kamala Harris (these guys never do any other kind; Vice-Presidents don’t do anything to be criticized for, but Henninger’s readers certainly know what party, gender and color KH is, and that’s enough), he gets after Biden making $30 mil at a Hollywood fundraiser rather than stroking the oil industry for a billion dollars like a real American. 

Henninger also repeats the latest cheapfake bullshit about Biden looking ga-ga, but unlike the usual lie diffusers he deflects with some pretended sympathy: “We’ll give Mr. Biden a pass on this one. Who wouldn’t be zonked after flying across nine time zones, even for $30 million?” That’s how the prestige-press pros do it, folks! 

But then we get to the nub:

Less easy to duck was the impression of a Democratic Party drowning in Hollywood glitz. The party’s public image is almost wholly defined by celebrities, and that’s not good for winning general elections.

As opposed to being almost wholly defined by enraged insurrectionists storming the Capitol and Rudolph Giuliani. At least Rudy’s hair dye runs down his face, not like the fancy stays-in-the-hair dye favored by effete showbiz liberals! After listing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Gavin Newsom as “celebrities,” or at least celebrity-adjacent, Henninger again affects to be reasonable:

The Democrats’ rejoinder is: Give us a break! Donald Trump is the most unalloyed celebrity ever associated with the presidency, or politics. True, but that isn’t the Democrats’ problem.

The list of celebrities joined to the Democratic hip runs forever. But the Republicans? Once past Mr. Trump, no one associates the GOP with shiny people. In the popular telling among sophisticates, the Republicans—whether their elected politicians or followers—could hardly be more out of it.

George W. Bush, elected twice, was derided as a Republican doofus from Texas. Ronald Reagan? A “minor” actor. The traditional Republican set of beliefs is dismissed as beyond the pale on pretty much everything—the culture, race, social values, fashion, even culinary preferences. Can a foodie be a Republican?

See, Democrats are associated with “shiny” people while Republicans are associated with a President so toxic he was never invited to a post-presidency GOP convention and a famous movie actor some unnamed person called “minor.” Even casual readers may begin to smell a rat, so Henninger tries a curveball:

The assaults on Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas may be about legal outcomes, but make no mistake, these attacks originate in the belief that they aren’t our kind of people. 

I’ve been trying to puzzle this one out and the only thing I can figure is these judges’ corruption and batshit wingnut wives are supposed to be relatable to the Average Joe. Duck, here comes another feint! 

Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation hearing made that clear.

I can’t even guess. 

The Democratic Party’s celebrity dependency has been background noise for decades and not a problem . . . until now. 

These people have been associating Democrats with celebrities for decades (remember this McCain ad?). I guess Henninger means it hasn’t been working… but this time for sure! 

This presidential election remains closely contested. With the cost of living the No. 1 issue, each swing-state vote deserves attention. In this high-stakes context, the spectacle of the incumbent president jetting from Europe to Hollywood is the kind of look Mr. Biden and his party don’t need. He’s Hollywood Joe.

I thought he was supposed to be Sleepy Joe, even Senile Joe. Suddenly he’s one of the beautiful people? Several grafs of GOP boilerplate ensue (Did you know Trump went to a black church, and there were even a few black people there?) before this whopper:

Mr. Trump himself could help by running off the rails, but he’s been almost disconcertingly pragmatic recently, shaking hands with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and endorsing former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a Trump critic, for the U.S. Senate. However improbable, a Trump turn to self-discipline could dilute the Biden campaign’s decision to run overwhelmingly against Mr. Trump rather than on the Biden record.

We’ve been hearing some version of a “Trump turn to self-discipline” since he came down the escalator and even his fans mainly like that he’s obviously deranged and might get mad enough to actually murder some people they don’t like. Normally I’d admire a bullshit parfait with as many layers as Henninger gives this, yet it’s such a slovenly job that I begin to suspect that he isn’t even using real bullshit. 

IF PIGS HAD WINGS.

The Wall Street Journal's Daniel Henninger, always shit, has surpassed himself today:

I like to think the WSJ art department, if there is one, had some fun putting FDR and Churchill out of scale with Trump. It looks as if the shades of these great men are sharing a laugh -- "Can you believe they're comparing this cheap crook to us?" (Hope the layout people don't get in trouble for this -- WSJ editors can be extremely shitty to the help.)

You can read the whole wretched thing if you like but you probably already get the picture -- The Democrats are puny Lilliputians trying to tie down the Orange Colossus, but destiny beckons:

No national leader plans to be in a position like this—not Roosevelt, Lincoln or Churchill. Mr. Trump will emerge from this crisis either as just another president or a president who led his entire country through a great battle. 

Or, option 3: As a sociopathic con man who blundered into a job far too big for his meager talents and yammered on TV about how mean everyone was to him while thousands needlessly died.

If Democrats choose to be the opposition in this battle, voters will judge that choice.

I thought in this "battle" the opposition was the virus. Isn't it a little early to go full Nazi on one's political opponents?

Some will say, from experience, that asking Mr. Trump to rise to presidential greatness is quixotic. He’ll never adjust no matter the circumstance. And yes, on Tuesday he was in a cat fight over ventilators with New York’s Democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo.

Ironically, Mr. Trump’s path to presidential greatness may begin by doing something small but desired by virtually all Americans: Separate himself from the pettiness of our politics.

If Henninger had an editor and that person didn't flag "Ironically" and ask "Do you mean 'in an alternate universe'?" -- well, who am I kidding, no one edits his stuff.

Mr. Cuomo is a governor with a job to do. Help him. If he wants to kvetch, let him.

This may be the most absurd part of Henninger's column -- between the famously self-pitying Trump and a governor begging for help in an exploding medical crisis, portraying the latter as the kvetch.

Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer have self-isolated from what the American people want from Washington now. With the rescue package finished, if they choose to stay small, let them.

I take it back. Saying the Democrats "have self-isolated from what the American people want from Washington now" when Mitch McConnell, having done everything he could to poison the Senate coronavirus bill that Bernie Sanders had to come in and unfuck, then actually recessed the Senate for a goddamn month, is bullshit of the lowest ordure.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

I was just listening to his "Girls Talk," and realized

some of you good people may never have heard "Trouble Boys."

•   Whoever wrote the dek for Daniel Henninger's latest at the Wall Street Journal -- "Donald Trump is running against two things -- immigration and free trade --that made New York City great again" -- had to have read the whole thing to the end, poor sod, because the column starts very differently, with Henninger pulling on his overalls and pretending to despise the Big City: Ted Cruz "had a point" with his "New York values" slur on New York, says Henninger, "but he blew it by not describing it so that even many New Yorkers would agree." Oh yeah? So what should Cruz have complained about that would touch on what the locals hate about their own home -- scumbag landlords, gentrification, subway delays? No, among the real New Yorker issues Henninger sees is how mean Bernie Sanders has been to rich people:

More revelatory of New York values, though, is Vermonter Bernie Sanders, ranting about “Wall Street” and “bankers.” To be clear: Those people, much mocked of late for living on Park Avenue and such, annually give tens of millions to support charter schools, scholarships to parochial schools, social entrepreneurs, and innumerable nonprofits and arts institutions. Most, Republican and Democrat, would do it without the tax deduction.

Then let's remove the deduction and see what happens! Anyway, why does Henninger even care what New Yorkers think when this is what he thinks of them:

...Andrew Cuomo and Bill de Blasio, like Jerry Brown in blue California, stay afloat on public unions and a liberal urban sea of smug, yuppie self-absorption. Donald Trump learned this week that these people don’t even bother to vote. In 2013, New York’s now-unpopular Mayor de Blasio won with 17% of eligible voters (turnout was 24%).

If only the Republican silent majority weren't too busy on Election Day lighting bums on fire to vote for Joe Lhota! Then Henninger has a mood swing (or a phone call from an editor who reminds him this is not the Fritters, Alabama Journal) and starts yelling at Trump for going upstate to appeal to rubes, because his trade policies which so excite the folks in Rome, N.Y. would fuck up New York City. Suddenly Henninger is the self-absorbed yuppies' best friend! But he still doesn't like the way they vote:

Also true, however, is that in 2012, an incredible 71% of Asians voted for Barack Obama because living in Democratic cities like New York, they rarely hear the alternative.

Really? They're unable to read the Wall Street Journal? Plus Charles Murray told me they were all rightwing anyway.

Mr. Trump, an entrepreneur, should be the ideal pitchman to New York’s many Asians, or to the black voters former Texas Gov. Rick Perry appealed to in his remarkable July speech.

You just know Henninger started that last bit with Jack Kemp and his editor said, "you know Kemp's been dead for seven years, right?" and Henninger thought a while and finally said, "hell, why not Rick Perry -- no black people are going to read this anyway."

I'LL TAKE IT.

There are plenty of reasons to celebrate the sudden consensus on the Confederate battle flag. For one thing, since the ball really got rolling there appears to be practically no one left on the sidelines to claim that the neo-Confederates are being oppressed. Usually these days, when someone points out outrageous beliefs -- or even just promotes non-outrageous beliefs of his own -- the counter-strategy is to claim oppression. Schoolbook writers wish to inform AP U.S. History students that antebellum slaveholders believed in white supremacy? "Orwellian," says Daniel Henninger at the Wall Street Journal. Want to see more minority writers? Then you want to "crack down on the number of Fitzgeralds or Faulkners or Cormac McCarthys," says Ian Tuttle at National Review (because literature is a zero-sum game). Don't want public money used to pay for privatized schools? You're George Wallace standing in the schoolhouse door, howls NR's Kevin D. Williamson! Conservatives have become the nation's biggest drama queens, yet scores of them are abandoning the Lost Cause and not even crying Boot Human Face Forever about it. That's impressive!

Well, not all of them. "Behold the Cultural Power of the Left," wails Rich Lowry at National Review:

On the Confederate battle flag, we are once again witnessing the sheer cultural power of the Left: take an irrelevancy (or at the very least a sideshow), make it the central, all-consuming issue, move the debate with astonishing speed, and then, after achieving the initial victory (in this case, removing the flag from the grounds of the South Carolina state capitol), demand yet more (now Wal-Mart and other retailers aren’t going to sell Confederate-flag paraphernalia and there will be a broader assault on anything associated with the Confederacy). This is the grinding wheel of the Left’s cultural war in action.

Sarah Palin gave him starbursts, but Nikki Haley has left Lowry limp. Now, I know Haley's just made a calculation here to sacrifice this many goobers for this much national cred. And I suspect, as the tide turned, Republicans both Southron and otherwise looked on the bright side and saw the big upside in severing the Party's connection to this symbol of Treason in Defense of Slavery. (Some of 'em are even trying to pin the flag to Hillary Clinton!) But that's politics, kids -- the scumbags who rule us won't get their asses off the stove unless someone turns on the heat. And now a significant number of citizens won't have to explain to their kids why their town tells them every day that they would put them in irons if they could, at least by that medium. Let us enjoy the moment.

UPDATE. Jonah Goldberg makes everything worse!

I agree with you, of course, about the moral horror that was slavery. I basically agree with you about the ultimate issues at the heart of the war. I may or may not agree with you about the extent to which southern soldiers saw the war for what it was, but that’s probably as much a matter of my ignorance as anything.

No comment.

...As a matter of reason alone, the United States flag stood for “white supremacy” too, at least when looked at through the eyes of African slaves and Native Americans. But I think everyone here would agree that while that may have once been one of many arguable interpretations of the Stars and Stripes, it no longer is (though I have no doubt there are plenty of professors out there who would like to argue the U.S. flag still stands for white supremacy).

I wonder if Goldberg knows what flag the Union soldiers carried into Richmond, and which flew when Lincoln came and the city's freed slaves gathered to celebrate their emancipation?

UPDATE 2. How's this for a Forced March through the Institutions? Rand Paul is agin' the battle flag now! The same Rand Paul who just five short years ago was explaining that the Civil Rights Act is anti-freedom. I've heard politics makes strange bedfellows, but this is practically Man on Dog.

UPDATE 3. Now Mollie Hemingway is comparing taking down Confederate flags and statues with the Taliban blowing up Buddahs, bless her insane little heart.

UPDATE 4. "I’ve been getting the feeling over the past few days that the Left is trying to troll us into defending the Confederate flag, simply by way of the trivial, obnoxious, and gratuitously partisan way they’re campaigning against it." I wonder if Mollie Hemingway is miffed that Robert Tracinski apparently doesn't read her stuff. In short, Tracinski wants some of the traitor relics to come down, but because of "love," not for the eee-vil reason the Left (whoever that is) is asking for it -- that is, as part of their endless "chipping away at America’s culture and seeking to expunge the parts of its history that don’t suit their ends." For example:

I have no problem striking the name of Jefferson Davis from our roadways, but I wouldn’t entirely expunge Robert E. Lee, and here’s where I think the campaign smacks of totalitarian-style overreach, attempting to send inconvenient history down the memory hole.

Orwell! Drink!

Lee’s reputation is not as a tyrant or fanatic but as a good and honest man fighting for a bad cause. I think it’s worth honoring him here and there, just so we are reminded that this combination can in fact occur.

You can read here the testimony of one of Lee's slaves on Lee's goodness and honesty ("Gen. Lee, in the meantime, stood by, and frequently enjoined Williams to 'lay it on well,' an injunction which he did not fail to heed; not satisfied with simply lacerating our naked flesh, Gen. Lee then ordered the overseer to thoroughly wash our backs with brine..."). Well, we all make mistakes; Lee probably had his slaves whipped but seldom, being so busy arranging to keep them in bondage through treason.

WHAT SCHOLARSHIP LOOKS LIKE TO A PROPAGANDIST.

Daniel Henninger starts his Wall Street Journal column with a description of the Memory Hole from 1984, and regular readers know what that means: Liberals are once again forcing citizens to listen to lies such as "humans cause climate change," "the Iraq War was a mistake," "homosexuals have civil rights," etc.

This time Henninger's villains are the so-called "teachers" who are doing the latest revision of the Advanced Placement U.S. History curriculum for the College Board. (Apparently they revise the thing every couple of years. Parson Weems and the Pledge of Allegiance aren't good enough for these tenured radicals!)

 "The people responsible for the new AP curriculum really, really hate it when anyone says what they are doing to U.S. history is tendentious and destructive," says Henninger. (And why might that be? Sounds like some little pinkos have a guilty conscience.) These pencil-necks are deaf to the "pushback" to the revise that has "emerged in Texas, Colorado, Tennessee, Nebraska, North Carolina, Oklahoma and Georgia," the intellectual jewels of our nation, and to the 56 real "professors and historians" who have signed a petition against it. No, they bask instead in the approval of something called the American Historical Association, which sure sounds like a union to me. And New York magazine and "one liberal newspaper columnist" have had the audacity to make fun of these good Americans; why, that's double Orwell with a side of Alinsky!

There's more, including a quotation from a non-committal press release from the historians (to give Henninger's readers that got-'em-on-the-run feeling cultural warriors crave) and a tear for fallen comrade Lynn Cheney. But after all that, these are the examples from the actual revision plans Henninger picks to show us how Marxist is all is:

An example: “Native peoples and Africans in the Americas strove to maintain their political and cultural autonomy in the face of European challenges to their independence and core beliefs..."

This is in direct contradiction to the "dancing darkies" and "funny drunken injun" view favored by conservative historians.

Or: “Explain how arguments about market capitalism, the growth of corporate power, and government policies influenced economic policies from the late 18th century through the early 20th century..."

 Market capitalism doesn't "influence," libtards -- it heals, it soothes, it liberates!

And inevitably: “Students should be able to explain how various identities, cultures, and values have been preserved or changed in different contexts of U.S. history, with special attention given to the formation of gender, class, racial, and ethnic identities. Students should be able to explain how these subidentities have interacted with each other and with larger conceptions of American national identity.”

Apparently, even worse than acknowledging that slaves and conquered Native Americans had it tough is acknowledging that they had feelings and human interactions at all.

Maybe as soon he wrote these down Henninger realized he had nothin', because immediately he goes for the bullshit totem of the hour:

Comedian Jerry Seinfeld got attention this week for saying he understood why other comics such as Chris Rock have stopped performing on campuses beset by political correctness...

See, it all adds up! A pattern is emerging in all their P.C. hoo-hah: Their ideas fail, and they blame censorship rather than acknowledge that a growing number of people are figuring out they're full of shit.

UPDATE. In comments, whetstone points out that I missed Henninger's coup de horseshit:

At one point the curriculum’s authors say: “Debate and disagreement are central to the discipline of history, and thus to AP U.S. History as well.” This statement is phenomenally disingenuous.

Try and guess how Henninger will prove their disingenuity. Give up? Here:

From Key Concept 1.3: “Many Europeans developed a belief in white superiority to justify their subjugation of Africans and American Indians, using several different rationales.” Pity the high-school or college student who puts up a hand to contest that anymore. They don’t. They know the Orwellian option now is to stay down.

The history teachers are disingenuous, see, because they claim to believe in debate, yet who's going to debate their assertion that slaveowners and conquerors believed they were superior to their subjects? The only possible reason is Orwell! Perhaps Henninger and his buddies should publish a study guide to prepare students to contest this point of view; better still, a video;  even better a Vine, showing Brad Pitt being nice to Chiwetel Ejiofor, then a card that says YEARS PASS, and then a clip of Ben Carson at CPAC.

THE YEAR IN BULLSHIT, PART ONE.

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

10. Dunhamania! Culture war, as we call the unpleasant ruckus that ensues when political obsessives blunder among the muses, had another big year, with conservatives shaking their fists at everything from opera to comic books. Rather than survey all these cases, let’s focus on the instructive example of the one cultural artifact that seems most reliably to excite them: That marketing phenomenon known as Lena Dunham.

Conservatives first developed a hard-on for the Girls auteur during the 2012 Presidential campaign, when she made a pro-Obama ad, and they have yet to detumesce. The brethren hate other entertainment professionals, of course, but Dunham pulls so many of their triggers — she’s liberal, she’s a tattooed hipster, she has the nerve to act sexy despite not having a nice build like Ann Coulter — that she has remained their #1 groovy hate fuck, the Jane Fonda of the Obama age, at whom they rage for her sexuality as well as her politics.

This reached critical mass late in the year when Dunham released a celebrity memoir containing (as tell-all tradition demands) salacious details, including the news that, when Dunham was seven, she looked inside her one-year-old sister Grace’s vagina and found she had stuffed pebbles in there. Truth Revolt reported that Dunham was seventeen years old at the time (later correcting this “typo”) under the headline “Lena Dunham Describes Sexually Abusing Her Little Sister.”

National Review’s Kevin D. Williamson dug in -- “Grace’s satisfaction with her prank suggest that Grace was expecting her older sister to go poking around in her genitals and inserted the pebbles in expectation of it… There is no non-horrific interpretation of this episode” -- even though he found the story “especially suspicious” — which just made it worse; imagine, lying in a celebrity memoir! When Dunham complained of this rough treatment — ensuring more press — the investigators of her celebrity memoir high-fived each other. “Lena Dunham is learning the power of the right,” gurgled Don Surber while strangling a pillow.

Then Breitbart.com investigated another Dunham story about a college Republican named Barry who took advantage of her, and found that -- get this! -- some details were not verifiable (“A longtime employee at the Oberlin library could not recall working with any student with a flamboyant mustache”). A guy from Dunham’s college claimed the memoir defamed him because his name is Barry, too. “Sue the bastards,” cried professional scold Rod Dreher. “That’s the only way they will learn. Make the publisher withdraw the whole damn book…” The publisher instead agreed to add “a disclaimer that explains that the Barry described by Dunham was not really named Barry” and pay court costs, per Fox News.

There followed much popping of rightwing corks. "LENA DUNHAM WALKS BACK FABRICATED RAPE CLAIM" unh-unh-unhed John Hinderaker at Power Line. RedState called Dunham part of a “Rape Accusation-Industrial Complex” of women who habitually lie about sexual assault in order to advance a “victimization narrative.” The American Spectator’s Ross Kaminsky went further, tying the case to what he called the “lie” that Michael Brown didn’t deserve to be gunned down, and declaring that the “true motivation” of “too many” feminists is “hatred of men.” Ann Coulter added that Dunham, like all women who disclosed sexual assault after an interval, was just “trying to get attention.”

Despite their best efforts, or perhaps partly due to them, Dunham remains on the best seller list — without resorting to bulk sales to think tanks, imagine that! — and in the celebrity pantheon. Conservatives, for their part, maintain their place at the wrong side of a peephole, banging on the fence with one hand and doing God knows what with the other. Between the sexual rage, the rolling-out of big guns to prosecute a flimsy piece of pop-art crap, and the ultimate, flaccid ineffectuality of their efforts, could there be a more perfect example of culture war?

9. The right comes out for income inequality. The term is relatively new to common discourse, and in years past was mainly engaged by wingnut think-tankers to explain why such a thing didn’t exist. But Piketty’s big book and Obama’s mention of income inequality in his 2014 State of the Union led lumpen conservatives to modify their argument to: income inequality doesn’t exist, and so what if it does.

When rich guys complained the poor were giving them stink-eye, conservatives rushed to comfort them the best way they knew how: By associating their opponents with Nazis. At the Wall Street Journal, venture capitalist Tom Peters compared resentment of the rich to Kristallnacht; in the same venue, Ruth R. Wisse asked, “Two phenomena: anti-Semitism and American class conflict. Is there any connection between them?” and answered yes, because anti-Semites often complain about wealthy Jews, which makes any complaint against American oligarchs, despite the impressive number of goyim among them, a veritable Blood Libel.

Daniel Henninger (also at WSJ — these guys know their audience!) suggested that Putin was getting belligerent because he “surely noticed” that “the nations of the civilized world have decided their most pressing concern is income inequality,” and were too busy coddling paupers to trouble with the Ukraine. Ace of Spades protested the real problem was “social inequality” — that is, the alleged contempt of Democrats for rich people who are rightwing and folksy, such as the Palins or the Duck Dynasty guys.

And forget about trying to level the field with a higher minimum wage — that’s socialism. If you asked why the current minimum wage isn't already socialism, the brighter bulbs would tell you, you’re right, it is — let’s get rid of it altogether! Libertarian Virginia Postrel wept over all the folks out there with multiple jobs — not because they had the work multiple jobs, but because “employers can’t offer, and workers can’t take, lower wages in exchange for better hours. The minimum wage sets a legal floor.” The injustice of it! In fact, if you complained about getting your tiny wages ripped off by your boss, that too was socialism, or at least rather petty of you.

The simplest pro-inequality argument was advanced by Ben Domenech, who attributed any concerns over the ginormous 99%-1% gap to “jealousy… in real life, the money doesn’t stay in Scrooge McDuck’s vault, it goes into investments which pay more people to do more things.” Scrooge McDuck may someday build a condo, and you may get to clean its hallways, which along with your others job(s) may permit you to rent a hovel. Now stop complaining, anti-Richite!

8. Conservatives fall in love with Vladimir Putin. When Putin muscled Ukraine in March, very few conservatives called for the U.S. to intervene militarily. Nonetheless they blamed the Commander in Chief because, in the words of Rand Paul, he “hasn't projected enough strength and hasn't shown a priority to the national defense” — that is, he hadn’t rattled a saber that no one expected or wanted him to unsheathe.

But never mind those details -- the real issue for conservatives was less geopolitical than psychographic — rightwing pundits, however pencil-necked, worship butchness and reflexively attribute it to their heroes, such as former cheerleader George “he’s got two of ‘em” W. Bush, while portraying their opponents as sissies.

Judging from conservatives’ previous investigations of Obama’s wearing of mom jeans while pretend-shooting and bike-riding, not mention his unwillingness to punch down on the poor, clearly the President fits their definition of a sissy. But it’s hard to identify a domestic conservative with whose roughness they can creditably contrast Obama’s affect. Mike Huckabee? Newt Gingrich? Chris Christie, being a bully, might do, but he betrayed the brethren by accepting Federal help on Hurricane Sandy.

With such a weak bench, it was perhaps inevitable that conservatives would find a foreign dictator to embrace. Putin is ruthless, rugged, and hates homosexuals — really, their dream candidate if they could get the citizenship thing sorted. They’d been contrasting bare-chested manly man Putin with metrosexual Obama on flimsy pretexts for years (“IT LOOKS LIKE OBAMA IS PUTIN'S BITCH,” etc), but Ukraine really brought it out of them. They were especially fond of funny pictures, but employed wordcraft, too, e.g. “Putin Treating Obama Like Half a Fag.”

Putin received perhaps his most eminent conservative blessing from Sarah Palin, who sneered at Obama as “as one who wears Mom jeans and equivocates and bloviates” and sighed over Putin as “one who wrestles bears and drills for oil.” But the most grandiloquent paean may have been that of National Review’s Victor Davis Hanson, who found “value for us” — meaning for the American People, I guess — in “Putin’s confidence in his unabashedly thuggish means, the brutal fashion in which a modern state so unapologetically embraces the premodern mind to go after its critics… Putin speaks power to truth — an unpredictable, unapologetic brute force of nature.” Hanson did put in some mild admissions that Putin was not really a role model, in much the same way that the Shangri-Las told us their guy was good-bad, but he's not evil.

Months later, with the ruble crashing, Putin’s cowboy diplomacy doesn’t look like such a winner, and Obama’s restraint looks rather better. Since Kim Jong Un doesn’t look so hot with his shirt off, conservatives may have to wait for a coup to rekindle their dictator-love.

(More later.)

MAMA WEER ALL CRAZEE NOW.

I don't need to devote a long post to this insane Daniel Henninger column in the Wall Street Journal, about how all the liberalfascism in America -- from CEOs getting canned for bigotry by liberalfascists disguised as businessmen, to college students denying famous wingnuts their Constitutional right to speak at their graduations whether they're wanted or not -- was caused by "an agreement signed last May between the federal government and the University of Montana to resolve a Title IX dispute..." For one thing, it's a fair cop -- surely you all remember the street dancing and republican baptisms that accompanied the signing of this agreement, because it signaled that Obama had "let the dogs out," in Henninger's words, for liberals to destroy conservatives' free speech. For another, Steve M. of No More Mister Nice Blog wrote it for me.

I will add one thing, though. Here's Henninger's kicker:

If it's possible for the left to have its John Birch moment, we're in it.

I speak a smattering of wingnut, and suppose Henninger is referring to the pride old-time conservatives take at  Buckley's rebuke of the John Birch Society back in the day. They sure showed those extremists 50 years ago, didn't they? Not like Obama! But it seems to me that conservatives have reconciled with the Birchers since then. After all, what did the Birchers believe? That a moderate U.S. President was a communist tool who was helping the U.N. and meddling scientists destroy America. Swap out the keywords "Eisenhower," "One-Worlders," and "fluoridation" for "Obama," "gun-grabbers," and "global warming,"  and it's clear that what used to be noxious Bircherism is now mainstream Republican thought.

Since I like to think the best of my fellow man, I'll assume Henninger brought the Birchers up on a bet, or out of chutzpah -- it would be too depressing to imagine he actually believes this shit.

UPDATE. In comments, Jeffrey_Kramer:

So: the decision by a Republican judge in Montana about what steps a university there had to take in order to compensate for a pattern of neglecting serious charges of sexual harassment and assault, was, in reality, a coded signal by the Obama administration that Brandeis students now had an official mandate to protest the appearance of Condoleezza Rice, thus fulfilling the maximalist dreams of liberal fascists everywhere.

The DaVinci Code was Euclid compared to this crap.

PROPAGANDISTS IN A HURRY...

...like to multitask. At the Wall Street Journal, Daniel Henninger does several grafs of the same Scary Putin Menaces Weak America stuff all the other conservative columnists are doing these days, then goes for the hat trick:

Running alongside these old realities is a new phenomenon, surely noticed by Mr. Putin: The nations of the civilized world have decided their most pressing concern is income inequality. Barack Obama says so, as does the International Monetary Fund. Western Europe amid the Ukraine crisis is a case study of nations redistributing themselves and perhaps NATO into impotence.

This week's other big rightwing add-on  -- that Crimea is all the fault of the environmentalists and we should frack our brains out because freedom depends on it -- at least has to do with oil, and is thus connected in some way with reality. But Henninger's implication that Putin has "surely noticed" and is spurred to mischief by the West's attempts to raise workers' pay is a new one -- particularly since, in the last Cold War, ordinary Americans' upward mobility was one of capitalism's greatest weapons against the Russians. I guess their hope is that they can scare people enough that they'll believe anything they say -- as usual.

UPDATE. In comments, satch takes a little trip down Memory Lane: "We can be certain that Vladimir Putin noticed a couple of things in 2008, starting with that notorious traitor and Commie appeaser Charles Krauthammer, who in his best Neville Chamberlain voice said: 'Well, obviously it's beyond our control. The Russians are advancing. There is nothing that will stop them. We are not going to go to war over Georgia.'" Ah, new realities, comrade!

D Johnston considers: "Two weeks ago, [Henninger] wrote a column about Putin the Strongman, and three weeks before that he did a column on how the President was too obsessed with income equality. It's like a mashup. Maybe this opinion remixing will become the next big thing in conservative circles." It's got youth appeal. I can imagine one taker at least.

STUPIDEST, WRITTEN, GOLDBERG, AGAIN*.

There are several things that are not good for Jonah Goldberg's arguments -- challenges, logic, a light rain -- but the worst results come when he tries to go off-road, i.e. abandons the simplest right-wing verities and tries to think for himself.

Case in point: The Satan statue that was proposed to make a point about religious imagery on public property in Oklahoma. Maybe what led Goldberg astray was that he noticed people were having lulz over it, and he didn't want to be the scold wagging his finger about Satan; long before he became a Professor of Liberal Fasciology at the Bulk-Order School of Conserviatrics, Goldberg was what passed in Republican circles for a comedy act, and funsies remain part of his Brand.

So Goldberg bravely eases his jalopy off the asphalt and into the sand. He acknowledges the statue is "a stunt — a clever one — exploiting the constitutional injunction against governmental favoritism towards religion" and that

...if you want to argue that erecting a tribute to Lucifer on public property is a bad idea, the Constitution is pretty useless. That’s no knock on the Constitution, mind you. Lots of wonderful things are of little utility in fighting Satan. Puppies, ice cream, the warranty on a Ford Pinto: These are as helpful in fighting Satan as a winning smile is in putting out a house fire.

(Did you catch the thing about the Ford Pinto? Years ago someone taught Goldberg the Rule of Three, and one of these days he's going to get it right.)

Unprotected by Constitutional argh-blargh, Goldberg floors it into the desert.

The Satan statue controversy is of course absurd, but absurdities are often useful in illuminating more substantial issues.

Uh oh.

America is becoming vastly more diverse — ethnically, culturally, religiously, and morally. In a great many ways that’s a good thing. But in this life, no good thing comes without a downside.

Double uh-oh. Here's where Goldberg may have begun to feel his wheels spinning. Being too lazy to rewrite, he had obliged himself to explain what, exactly, is bad about diversity. He couldn't just go "haw, diversity, amirite" like he usually does.

Consider immigration, historically a boon to America. Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam (a liberal in good standing) found that increased immigration hurts “social trust,” causing people to “hunker down” within their own bands of friends or alone in front of the TV.  Everything from trust in political leaders and the political process — both of which are at or near all-time lows, by the way — to voting and carpooling drops precipitously as more strangers move into a community.

By "immigration" I'm guessing he doesn't mean Satanists, and by "strangers" I'm guessing he doesn't mean that nice fratboy on a career track who moved into the condo next door. Since it came out six years ago, Putnam's cohesion study (and the gloat that Putnam's a liberal) has been required screeding for rightwing racists, but practitioners like Daniel Henninger and Rod Dreher can just stand there, go Ooga-Booga for three minutes, and disappear in a puff of smoke -- Goldberg's still got to get back to Satan without being any dumber than he's already been. Alas, there was no intern around to tell him to shut up about diversity:

Conversely, people increasingly look more to government — the police, local politicians, and bureaucrats — to solve problems that once could have been worked out in a neighborly conversation. This reliance on legal authority and entitlements further crowds out the charitable mechanisms and institutions of civil society, inviting yet more government intrusions.

So when we didn't have all these blacks and foreigners we didn't need cops? Here comes the flop sweat and the first, high-lonesome squeals of anxiety farting --

By the way, Putnam explicitly rejects racism as the culprit here.

-- which builds to a crescendo:

Rather, the cause is a breakdown in shared norms, customs, language, and the other often invisible and intangible but no less real sinews that bind a community together.

It was Cheetos, not chitlins,  we all knew where we stood!

Family breakdown, the decline in good blue-collar jobs, the decline of organized religion, etc., are all equally good or better examples of things sapping the strength from social trust and cohesion and encouraging government to pick up the slack...

It's big government, big government's to blame, I didn't mean black people shut up shut up FARRRRRRRRRRT.

From there it's Goldberg crawling out of the overheated wreck and across the blazing sands gasping "Funyuns... Funyuns..." and this pathetic denouement:

The unraveling of the old cultural, moral, and religious consensus has been a boon to individual freedom in myriad ways. But you can say this for the old civilizational confidence: It didn’t lack for arguments against state-sponsored devil worship.

Satan target achieved -- a lack of cultural consensus leads to devil worship, and since the Constitution can't stop it, we should get back to "civilizational confidence," which I guess means figuring out which Oscar-winning movies are conservative and following their example.

* Sorry, but I do get tired writing it all over again sometimes.

SOMETIMES YOU HAVE TO LET THE SUCKERS WIN.

Shorter Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal: After Walgreens, Best Buy, et alia learned some of their customers disapproved of their association with ALEC, they ended that association. What is this, Red China?

Attend the liberal hate crimes Henninger documents:

In December, articles appeared on progressive websites attacking Google, Facebook and Yelp for participating in ALEC's annual conference last year. The Web giants wanted to explore various Internet legal issues with the state legislators. 

And by "explore" he means "let them know how it's gonna go down." But they hadn't counted on someone else sticking their oar in:

A coalition that included the Sierra Club, RootsAction and the Center for Media and Democracy said it outputted 230,000 petition signatures in a "Don't Fund Evil" drive to separate Google from "right-wing extremists" at ALEC, whose sin is "climate denial."

This whole idea of so-called "right-wing extremists" pushing so-called "climate denial" is made up out of a whole cloth of facts.

The Sierra Club's site says Kraft, GE and McDonald's pulled away from ALEC in the past under pressure. To date, none of the Web companies have done so.

 Just like Mao Tse-Tung, these liberals.

...Here's the audio transcript of a radio ad created by ColorOfChange about CVS pharmacies, which supported ALEC: "CVS, when you hear that name, do you think of the law that protected Trayvon Martin's killer? Or laws that suppress the black vote." The ad never ran. But copies of the ad were mailed to CVS, John Deere, HP, Walgreens, Best Buy, BP and a dozen others. All disassociated from ALEC.

This is the Democratic left's modus operandi...

Yeah -- it's called democracy, speaking truth to power! But only of a kind: Since our Elected Representatives are useless, these liberal groups have decided to cut out the middleman and appeal directly to the corporations who own them. It's like serfs bringing their grievances directly to their overlords. Shout-out to the libertarians, this one's for you!

Henninger doesn't approve, though; he calls it "threatening companies that participate in politics with reputational destruction" -- that is, thinking badly of them, and saying so -- which is "the American left's version of Maoist shaming sessions." Why isn't he looking at the big picture, and applauding the fortuitous shift from representative democracy to feudalism? Maybe he's just making it look good; the house can't win every time.

THE ASSHOLIFICATION OF ASSHOLES.

There's already been enough conservative blubbering over the shutdown-shutdown -- as well as declarations of Good News for (People Who Want to Murder) John McCain -- that I could fill up my Voice columns with it for the rest of the year. But there's something particularly weird about Daniel Henninger's sobfest in the Wall Street Journal, in which he accuses Obama of "Romneyizing the Republicans." At first I thought he meant Obama deviously finagled Romney onto the 2012 GOP ticket, the way Deep Throat suggested Nixon did to the Democrats with McGovern in 1972. No such luck:

As in the presidential campaign against Mitt Romney, the Twitter feeds going out in the name of the president of the United States are virtually wall-to-wall propaganda...

Barack Obama is Romneyizing the Republicans. He's doing to Ted Cruz and the House Republicans what he did to Mitt Romney and the 1%. It may be voter brainwashing, but in the expanded media age in which we all marinate, it works.

Though he uses words like "brainwashing" and "propaganda," Henninger doesn't tell us what things Obama said about Ted Cruz and the House Republicans that were untrue -- and in any event they have been no worse than what Republicans have been saying about Ted Cruz themselves. Henninger complains the way a murderer may complain that the cop has put the cuffs on too tight:

Everyone recalls the 2012 campaign's carpet bombing of "the wealthiest," even after they'd been shelled with a tax increase. Barack Obama has found—actually, it was handed to him—a scapegoat analogous to "the wealthiest" and "the banks" for his campaign to suppress votes for GOP candidates in the 2014 elections. It's "tea party Republicans."

As "'the wealthiest'" (by whom I guess Henninger means the wealthiest) do not attract my sympathy even when they have been "shelled" by a six percent tax increase, and as the "tea party Republicans" were "handed to him" by the fucking Republicans themselves, I am left with the impression that Henninger is mad because the President has fought back against his political enemies, which is considered unsporting in a Democrat.

There's actually one way Henninger's proper-name-to-verb usage makes sense: In the sense of Vietnamization, the process by which Nixon was supposed to transfer responsibility for the war from the Americans who'd been fighting it on their behalf to the ARVN. Conservatives are used to talking about the Tea Party and its affiliated nutcake causes as if they were natural patriotic reactions to the tyrannical reign of the Kenyan Pretender. Phony scandals, birtherism, noisy buffoons in Colonial Williamsburg costumes -- these were all described as natural phenomena. But like the AVRN, they have been kept afloat by the largesse of wealthy patrons. Maybe by "Romneyization" Henninger is signaling that these people have been cut loose by The Movement, and must sink or swim on their own. Wingnut welfare never runs out, of course, but it may be better invested in the future.

UPDATE. Fixed misrendered acronym -- thanks, readers, for letting me know.

SOMETIMES YOU JUST HAVE TO PLAY THE ODDS.

Michele Catalano was once upon a time a stalwart warblogger (the precursors to rightbloggers), sworn to the War on Whatchamacallit and denouncing those of us who weren't as keen on it as traitors. Sample:

I get more and more discouraged, more upset at the tone the AWC [anti-war crowd] has taken. I will not this time apologize for calling them traitors. I will not back down from those words. When you support an insurgency against your country's soldiers, when you declare that you are in bed in with the enemy, then you are a traitor. And you should be treated as such. I wish that every vet who has returned home from Iraq would see those signs and act upon them.

And there's plenty more where that came from.

Flash forward to 2013, and here's Catalano's new thing: The goddamn Gummint is after her because quinoa!

Most of it was innocent enough. I had researched pressure cookers. My husband was looking for a backpack. And maybe in another time those two things together would have seemed innocuous, but we are in “these times” now...

NSA is the new MSM! What Catalano described as "six agents from the joint terrorism task force" paid her husband a call: "three black SUVs in front of our house; two at the curb in front and one pulled up behind my husband’s Jeep in the driveway, as if to block him from leaving. Six gentleman in casual clothes emerged from the vehicles and spread out as they walked toward the house..." Panic in Suffolk County! "All I know is if I’m going to buy a pressure cooker in the near future, I’m not doing it online. I’m scared. And not of the right things."

She even got this tale of woe in the Guardian. The usual suspects cried havoc: "A woman on Long Island says that her family was visited by authorities yesterday because of their Internet search history!" flashed National Review; "Yes, the federal government knows what you search for on Google," hand-wrung Reason.

But I knew her work, and waited.

Eventually, from TechCrunch:

Catalano asserts that the visit was likely prompted by her husband searching for the term “backpacks” in close conjunction with her searching for the term “pressure cookers” and her son reading the news. Or something. 

Turns out the visit was prompted by the searches, but not in the way most speculation asserted – by a law enforcement-initiated, NSA-enabled dragnet of the couple’s web history. It turns out either Catalano or her husband were conducting these searches from a work computer. And that employer, “a Bay Shore based computer company,” called the police on their former employee...

Actually TechCrunch is being kind (or something) -- the Suffolk County Police bulletin they worked from described his search terms as "pressure cooker bombs" and "backpacks." Now, I don't approve employers flipping out over stuff like that, even if their subject is married to an obvious nutcake like Catalano. But it's a far cry from the Federales doing a Google-enabled home-invasion, and it's a bit rich to hear such accusations coming from someone who once wrote, "It makes me angry to see how many people react with glee when something goes wrong with Homeland Security. These people who are wishing and hoping for Bush to fail are, in essence, wishing and hoping for another terrorist attack. Sick."

This would be a useful thing to remember the next time you hear wingnuts working their new "libertarian populism" schtick and denouncing the national security state that 10 years ago they all huddled against for electoral warmth. Or whenever you read anything by Andrew Sullivan.

In other words: If you know they're full of shit, when you squeeze 'em don't expect rosewater.

UPDATE. I should point out that many of the outlets that credulously carried the story have since updated to reveal the con, except people like Mollie Hemingway, for obvious reasons. Oh, and Catalano updated too:

The piece I wrote was the story as we knew it with the information we were told. None of it was fabricated. If you know me, you know I would never do that.

I was tempted to ask, how many times does that work? But then I realized there'll always be a whole lot of people who never catch on.

UPDATE 2. At the Wall Street Journal, Daniel Henninger talks about "Obama's Creeping Authoritarianism." Please see above.

UPDATE 3. Commenter Donald G. points out that Catalano eventually came out against the war -- and so she did, in March of 2013. Here's a bit of her day-late-and-dollar-short:

There were others out there like me. I talked to them at work. I talked to them in the school parking lot while we waited for our kids. I talked to them over email or instant message, people from across the country who had that twinge of regret. What we all had in common was this: we felt used. We felt taken advantage of. We felt manipulated. And we were admitting we were wrong.

So let history record that starting in 2003 America went to war on Michele Catalano's self-esteem. Key bonus line:

Not that I would have voted for Kerry.

Maybe she can start a support group with Andrew Sullivan.

UPDATE 4. Ain't it the truth: "This story would have had entirely different vectors and volume of skree," says commenter mortimer, "had she written, 'My husband, Hakim, who was Googling "pressure cooker bombs"...' I miss Annie Jacobsen."

THE CONSERVATIVE COMEBACK, PART 34,282.

Daniel Henninger at the Wall Street Journal:

Where Is the GOP's Jay Carney?

Wait... don't tell me...

Republicans need a party spokesman who is smart, articulate, credible and TV-savvy.

Yes -- remind us all of when we fell in love with Marlin Fitzwater!

The current Republican class in both houses may be the best in a generation. On economic policy, the party is more unified than ever around growth, and it wants to be the party of government reform.

So the problem couldn't possibly have anything to do with that.

The Republicans need a lamplighter out front every day—a smart, articulate, credible and TV-savvy party spokesman. OK, spokesperson. A Mary Matalin or a Kevin Madden.

I predict that in a couple of weeks Henninger will demand Republicans hire a charismatic, foul-mouthed dwarf to follow Reince Priebus around.

THIS TIME FOR SURE. Talk radio host John Phillips tells L.A. Times readers "How Chris Christie will be drafted to run for president." He explains that L.A. once had a mayor who was popular and black, but when the L.A. Riots made him look like a chump, voters put in a white guy. "Tom Bradley was the Barack Obama, before Barack Obama," Phillips says, and the riots currently raging in America's streets show he too is doomed to be replaced by a white guy. This obviously leads to Chris Christie, because the L.A. white guy mayor likes him:

I asked former Mayor Riordan if he sees any of himself in the New Jersey governor. But before I could get the words out of my mouth, Riordan jumped in, “Absolutely! I just wish I had his personality. I like him. He really tells it like it is... Obama has totally disappointed me.”

The punchline: Phillips' archive at the bottom of the article:

Also by John Phillips:

For Republicans in '12, it's Sarah Palin or another big, fat L.

His reasoning then: "If Obama blows it, the GOP can splurge. This is the Republican Party's best shot at sneaking in an actual true blue authentic conservative... The man for that job is Sarah Palin."

He wrote that in March. By this summer, it'll be, I dunno, Jeb Bush? Paul Ryan? Certainly someone who isn't running. As Daniel Henninger demonstrated, modern technology has made those people the only viable candidates.

SHORTER DANIEL HENNINGER: The more people see of Republican Presidential candidates, the more they hate them. I blame technology.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the conservative reaction to the Chile mine rescue. You'll never guess. Oh, you did -- capitalism saved the day and Obama sucks! Well, at least they aren't giving all the credit to Connie Mack.

Daniel Henninger's insane column has already passed into comedy legend, but it does us smart alecks no good to laugh at his gibberish -- in part because it's not aimed at normal people, but at the rest of the relatively small cadre of libertarian nutcakes who believe this sort of thing. It's not meant to influence the 2010 elections, the course of which I think is pretty well set by now, but to keep up the message discipline so the coming Republican gains may be interpreted as a victory for the most extreme rightwing ideas, rather than for a bunch of senior citizens who don't like that black President nohow.

PICADOR. At the Wall Street Journal, Daniel Henninger condemns "the blog-driven media Scream" (aided and abetted by "YouTube, the galaxy-sized video archive") that has caused nervous campaigns to fire operatives whose partisan gibes attract too much unfavorable attention. He worries this has made our political discourse "artificially civil."

Whom is Henninger shitting? In just the past few weeks we've had imputations of racism both for and against Jeremiah Wright's most famous parishoner, and endless variations on "bitch" aimed at Hillary Clinton. Even the relatively invisible John McCain has been accused of senility by Brit Hume. These people are not officially connected with any campaign staffs, but neither was James Callender. If there's a problem with the current election season, civility, artificial or otherwise, ain't it.

The main change would seem to be, in Henninger's reading, that some highly-placed people have lost their jobs over gaffes Henninger thinks would have earned a mere "trip to the woodshed" in the Arcadian past. But why would the defenestration of Geraldine Ferraro and Sam Power trouble him?

Henninger has previously decried the pernicious effects of YouTube, though in that case he was mainly concerned that the viral video vendor was making Republicans George Allen, Conrad Burns, and Rick Santorum look bad. Now he affects some sympathy for Democratic campaigners who are also caught in the great maw of citizen journalism. Knowing Henninger's history, we may be forgiven for wondering if this is a tactical ploy.

Henninger works for the Journal's editorial department, which practices a slightly different kind of advocacy than that practiced by bloggers and video guerrillas. True, they sometimes go in for small-bore character assassination; indeed, they might be considered the forefathers of the method now favored by top political bloggers. But in the main they prefer big-picture essays -- ponderous examinations of (to use Henninger's own contributions as examples) the death of diversity, the impossibility of empathy, the necessity of religious myths, etc. Their approach is not so often specific as miasmic; while they sometimes endorse candidates and policies, they are much more comfortable promoting a world-view that makes their opponents look morally confused, devoid of "guardrails," and philosophically unfit to run the country.

In short, they are culture warriors -- or, more properly, culture picadors, who weaken their prey with many cuts so that the matador of any given electoral season may more safely apply the coup de grace. Theirs is an unglamorous but vital role; they may not get glory, but they make glory possible. And they face limited danger in the arena. Among our pundit class there has always been one thing bigger than politics, and that's job security.

From their perspective, then, there may be something unnerving about the example of other supporting players who have lately taken a sword between the shoulder-blades. Henninger may have noticed that in our new media age, even some journalists have been known to take a fall. The threat remains distant, but why take chances? If Paris was worth a Mass, surely a Journal column is worth the odd profession of interest in civility, however far-fetched.

I'LL BET. "The prism through which I'd like to view Obama's appeal is Bill Cosby." -- Daniel Henninger, Wall Street Journal.

CLASSICS ILLUSTRATED. Contextual reading, or non-reading, taken to new heights today by Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal, writing about Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird and Clarence Thomas:

By now, "To Kill a Mockingbird" is wholly folded into the political life of the country. It is safe to say that most Democrats would consider the book to be an iconic testament to their legacy, liberalism's greatest achievement. One imagines that Harper Lee would agree with this.

Which statement is rendered odd by his next one:

But as with Justice Thomas's famously sphinx-like demeanor during oral arguments at the Supreme Court, there has been nary a peep in more than 40 years about the book's meaning from Miss Lee (it would sound absurd to refer to her as Ms. Lee).

Well, as long as we're speculating about the political beliefs of a closed-mouthed writer who said she wanted to be "the Jane Austen of south Alabama," why not go whole hog and suggest that, despite her presumed esteem for "liberalism's greatest achievement," she would also be a Clarence Thomas supporter?

First, it would sound absurd to Henninger to use attach "Ms." to her surname -- look, she's halfway to being conservative already! And Henninger points out that she defended (as any sensible person would) the use of the word "nigger" in her book, which seen a certain way supports Henninger's case, as this is a word with which conservatives are historically comfortable. Finally, Thomas grew up black and poor, and referred to his own hearings as a "lynching"; as Thomas was a party disinterested in the outcome, we may take his word for it.

Henninger determines:

We may assume that Harper Lee composed her remarkable story about the unjustly accused and gunned-down Tom Robinson so that some day a Clarence Thomas could rise from Pinpoint to the nation's highest Court.

The "a" is a neat dodge. But the clear suggestion that Lee was working, however unconsciously, to put Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court is about as valid as a suggestion that, in writing The Cradle Will Rock, Marc Blitzstein was working to make Jimmy Hoffa head of the Teamsters.

Near the end, Henninger seems to intuit that he has not made himself sufficiently explicit, and adds:

Today a black man is running for the presidency. Perhaps the campaign is too long and perhaps Barack Obama is too young and too inexperienced to be president. Consider, though, the current knock on Mr. Obama. It is that he won't attack Hillary with sufficient aggression, that he is too gentlemanly, even too "professorial" in demeanor. Presumably his critics would prefer the slashing tongue of a hip-hop performer than the self-contained Barack Obama, who epitomizes middle-class black achievement. Well, 15 years ago they preferred something other than the conservative middle-class black man sent to the Supreme Court.

Conclusion: liberals are so racist that they don't even want Barack Obama to run for President, and would prefer Ludacris or Busta Rhymes.

Henninger's piece is a classic example of Konservetkult criticism. He doesn't deduce Lee's view from her work, but uses shopworn conservative memes as shims to maneuver her into the correct position.

WRONG CROWD. The Wall Street Journal's Daniel Henninger wants very badly for the snake-handlers in the Republican Party to line up behind Rudolph "Rudy" Giuliani -- a job I think the evil former Mayor is handling okay by himself. But, as did a number of WSJ writers when they tried to get the "base" to eat unrestricted immigration (and got their asses handed to them), Henninger has a problem finding the magic words:

Mr. Giuliani, however, didn't exploit their enduring sense of alienation from the media. Instead, he argued with some force that their ideas deserved a seat at the national table. He didn't promise triumph, but he offered respect.

This respect is conveyed by Henninger's favored rubric for the wished-for compromise: "Political adulthood," which Giuliani has and which the yokels are invited to share. If you wonder how Cletus and Brandine would cotton to that if Henninger's Journal page happened to blow into their yard, remember that Henninger's not really talking to them, but to other wishful wingers, as evidenced by his bizarre attribution of blame in the standoff between the city slicker and the hicks:

In the '60s, the left introduced the "non-negotiable demand" into our politics. It's still with us. It's political infantilism. In real life, the non-negotiable "demand" usually ends about age six.

Stuff like this is clearly not meant for C&B -- "(clears throat) And 'you-all' certainly don't wish to be like those infantile hippies, n'cest pas?" -- but for Club for Growth types to harrumph over. Ditto the reference to the "pre-Vatican II grade schools and high schools of New York City" Giuliani attended. Yeah, that'll get the megachurched masses onboard.

I wonder why he bothered. Still, there are some entertaining turns of phrase:

He began by laying down a personal marker: "I can't be all things to all people. I'm just not like that. I can't do that." This opened the door a crack on the man behind the grand smile.

Grand smile? The horrifying rictus with which Giuliani greets opportunities to pander is very like the keys of a malevolent animated piano that hungers for human flesh.

I look forward to future columns in which Henninger characterizes Giuliani's cross-dressing as a tribute to Dolly Parton.