FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: DeSANTISMANIA!

Not bad for movie music!

Over at Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, our two freebies are DeSantis-centric.  (Face it, the guy's just hot copy!)  There’s the funny one, imagining what his strategy sessions must be, given not only his own fash politics but the congenial home he gave to the Nazi-riffic edgelord Nate Hochman. (You’d think Hochman having bylines in the New York Times and National Review would be a tip-off, but there is none so blind etc.) 

There’s also the more serious one about DeSantis’ “Slavery: A Land of Contrasts” curriculum. It’s pretty clear to everyone what he and his racist buddies are up to, so I spent some time on the conservative propagandists who thought it was a good idea to pull the “me or your lying eyes” bit over it.

Today there was also a good opportunity for a REBID flashback: for not the first, nor the second, but the third time, the Wall Street Journal has given Supreme Court Justice/corrupt old hack Sam Alito space in the paper to cry that people misunderstand him just because he takes gifts from people who have business before his court – indeed, the first of the two journalistic cat’s-paws in this instance (the second being the longtime rightwing operative who got Alito in the first time, James Taranto) is David Rivkin, who himself has a case on the SCOTUS docket. Talk about balls! 

Anyway, the routine is predictable – people who find his frequent Journal blowjobs improper “are really after ideologically congenial rulings,” though if that were the case it would seem more efficient to bribe rather than criticize the guy. Also Alito sometimes rules slightly differently than Clarence Thomas – and his jurisprudence is distinguished by “an emphasis on historical context,” i.e. homos can’t get married. All Alito’s findings that comport with the Federalist Society wish-list are explained as a product of his intellectual discipline, and those that don’t comport with it – just kidding, none of them don’t! 

The authors rub their hands over the prospect of overturning Chevron, which they call “increasingly disputed” because Leonard Leo wants it dead, and Alito, nervy to the last, compares resistance to himself and his fellow SCOTUS wingnuts to the resistance to the Warren Court over Brown v. Board of Education – which would be your tip-off, if you hadn’t already figured it out, that Sam Shady isn’t trying to convince anyone – he’s just trying to show you how far beyond giving a shit he is that he’s been caught red-handed. 

Anyway, as we used to say back in the day, I caught his act.

I will also add something I wrote elsewhere about the artist who recently left us:

Sinead O’Connor... was magnificent and died too young, but she lived and worked the way she wanted to, or rather the way her muse required, and you can’t say that about many. Whether that was worth all the hardships is not for me to say. What I will say is that she was done dirty after she ripped up that asshole pope’s picture — I always hated that son of a bitch — and I am pleased to see people acknowledging at this moment that she was right, and I bet the message carries better now that more people are educated about the savagery we’re all up against – or, to use the simple term, woke. There was a lot wrong with the 90s, and the general reflexive contempt for the weak and those who defended them was the worst of it. It took me a long time to get it myself.

P.C. B.S.

I keep hearing from conservatives that political correctness is ruining everything. For example, at National Review, which runs stories about PC at about the rate The Federalist runs stories about Caitlin Jenner, Ian Tuttle extrapolates from an advice column at a site you never heard of that the peecee people "would do much to crack down on the number of Fitzgeralds or Faulkners or Cormac McCarthys" and supplant their brilliance with "the Afro-Cuban lesbian experience," har har; also,

No doubt over the next several years book clubs across America will pore over many a bestseller fitted to Gabbert’s advice, in the process sacrificing better authors — e.g., Homer, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton.

If Ian Tuttle knows where the next Shakespeare is, he should tell his editor, so they can use him to replace Kevin D. Williamson, Dennis Prager, or one of National Review's many other shitty writers. (For perspective: previously Tuttle told his readers "If you’re looking for a genuinely open-minded academic experience, Brooklyn College may not be the place for you" because the school refused to take money from the Koch brothers.)

Anyway, a lot of prominent liberals (including Amanda Marcotte, conservatives' favorite feminist voodoo doll) are saying Laura Kipnis got a bad rap from hypersensitive apparatchiks-in-training at Northwestern, and good for them (the liberals, not the apparatchiks). The other day Edward Schlosser had a long piece at Vox, of all places, complaining about student noodges. You'd think that if PC were as much of a menace as it's been portrayed, conservatives would be happy to at last have bipartisan support in fighting it. Well, here's James Taranto at The Wall Street Journal:

As we read the Schlosser piece, we felt more Schadenfreude than sympathy, and we wondered if that reflected poorly on us. (Spoiler: Nah.)

Instead Taranto complains that liberals like Schlosser are only upset because they're getting it in the neck, and are fundamentally incapable of understanding the pain of censored "outgroup" conservative academics like Glenn Reynolds, Ann Althouse, Harvey Mansfield, William A. Jacobson, et alia. Taranto explains:

Social systems have existed—think of the American South under slavery and Jim Crow—in which a dominant ingroup governed itself in accord with liberal principles while subjecting the outgroup to a combination of oppressive rules and often-cruel whims.

Time for a Poor Wingnuts' Campaign! Back at National Review Charles C.W. Cooke says

Of course Jonathan Chait is turning against political correctness and campus self-indulgence. Of course Vox’s editor, Ezra Klein, is now peddling lefty academics who are willing to stand up to the mob. Of course the good denizens of Jezebel are beginning to wonder aloud whether a feminism that eats the likes of Laura Kipnis is useful. If neo-McCarthyism “becomes a salient part of liberal politics,” Schlosser writes in his conclusion, then “liberals are going to suffer tremendous electoral defeat.” The American Left has started to rebel at the exact moment that its own interests are being hurt? Naturally. This isn’t about standards; it’s about power.

Cooke's essay is called "Is the Tide Turning against PC?" but it's not clear that he wants it turned if it means linking arms with those people. So I guess PC must not be such a big deal after all.

Sympathetic as I am toward Kipnis, I never thought so myself -- if some dumbasses want to play thought policeman in select programs at elite colleges, I figure, let them waste their parents' money and God help them when they graduate. And let those other dumbasses turn their tattered propaganda equity now this way, now that, trying to catch the wind. (Good luck explaining the menace of "social justice warriors" to downsized factory workers!) We who have free souls, it touches us not.

UPDATE. Comments are all glorious, but special thanks to commenter atheist for invoking La Rochefoucauld: "Our hatred of favorites is but a love of favor, and our scorn of those who enjoy it is only a balm to our vexation at being deprived thereof." Conservatives had their way exclusively for several centuries before the Enlightenment, and have been sore ever since they lost the franchise.

UPDATE 2. What causes political correctness on campus? Joseph Bottum at the Weekly Standard:

It’s possible to ascribe the situation to the presidential elections of 2008 and 2012.

Ain't even kidding.

The guidelines for Title IX issued by the Obama administration have shifted power to the outraged, and everyone seems to know it.

Everybody Joseph Bottum talks to at the Club, anyway. But wait, Bottum allows that the roots of PC do go deeper:

The reaction to Bill Clinton’s sex scandals, leading to his impeachment in 1998, may have been the first hint of a new choosing of sides, followed by an abiding anger over the outcome of Bush v. Gore in 2000. But the fate of the Democrats is not quite the same thing as the fate of radicalism, and to find the real springs of what is now washing over the nation’s schools, you have to go back, I think, to the fall of the Iron Curtain, 26 years ago.

Everything Democrat causes everything bad, and the same goes for the Soviet Union! In fact the title of Bottum's column is "I Still Blame the Communists." I expect if you swapped out "political correctness" for "riots in Baltimore," "Ebola," "potrzebie," etc., it wouldn't have to be changed much. Sometimes I think they work from Mad Libs.

LET US CLASP HANDS OVER THE BLOODY CHASM.

Ole Perfesser Glenn Reynolds thinks Obama should pick a Republican for Attorney General because bipartisanship:

Perhaps President Obama — and, for that matter, future presidents — should take a lesson from the way we handle the Department of Defense, and apply it to the Department of Justice: Consider naming someone outside his own party as attorney general... 

Having a Defense secretary from the other party makes war bipartisan, and reassures members of the opposition that the powers of the sword aren't being abused.

Defense -- you mean Chuck Hagel? I remember that confirmation fight -- here are some typically bipartisan Instapundit posts by Glenn Reynolds from that time:

CHUCK HAGEL: “Let the Jews Pay For It.” Related: Obama Expected To Pick Hagel.

WHY IS CHUCK HAGEL STILL IN THE MIX? [quote from Jennifer Rubin screed about Hagel's unacceptable positions, including "poisonous animosity toward the Jewish state."] Personnel is policy. If Obama appoints Hagel, you’ll know what his policy is, regardless of what he says. 

CHUCK HAGEL: It was a war for oil! [quote from Billy Kristol screed about how Hagel's "far left" and "vulgar and disgusting charge" proves he's a peacenik nogoodnik; "Is President Obama really going to nominate this man as secretary of defense?"] Well, really, isn’t Hagel a perfect fit?

SO HOW’D THAT HAGEL HEARING GO? “It is very clear from the testimony that Sen. Hagel will not be bringing the potato salad to the next Mensa picnic.” And that’s from a Democrat... 

DAMAGED GOODS: Hagel's Brand Suffers from Confirmation Battle. I think the original plan was to nominate a Republican who could take the blame for defense cuts — and actions. I don’t think Hagel can fill that role usefully now, even if he’s confirmed.

Etc. After Hagel got in, Reynolds did posts on him like "JAMES TARANTO ON MILITARY JUSTICE: Hagel’s Science of Logic: The Secretary compounds Obama’s unlawful command influence," and "WITH THINGS FALLING APART ALL AROUND THE WORLD, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel Is Talking About the NFL. UPDATE: From the comments: 'And even there, he’s punching above his weight.'" That last one, by the way, was from nine days ago.

So yeah, reach out, Obama. The Perfesser's got your back.

Their occasional swinging of the bipartisanship incense pot probably doesn't convince much of anyone anymore, but it's always good to be reminded that our cynicism is amply justified by their mendacity.

Speaking of bullshit, guess who agrees with Reynolds, and in the sort of convoluted language that shows he's hoping no one holds him to it:

I'm not sure I want war to be bipartisan but the idea of a Republican AG would really restart any number of conversations that have stalled out or stopped due to acrimony all around.

Ladies and gentlemen, Nick Gillespie for the libertarians, serving their traditional role in these interparty disputes.

FRIDAY AROUND-THE-HORN.

•  Matthew Continetti was for years a reliable defender of the great and powerful Bush. Then he realized that gravy train wouldn't run forever, and so devoted himself to defending even greater Americans such as Sarah Palin, and to other variants of rightwing aargh-blaargh. Lately he's switched his specialty to  long hit pieces on Obama. In the latest installment, Obama goes to Italy and has dinner with local luminaries at the ambassador's residence. Continetti wants us to know this is an outrage, so he tells us the residence has an art collection that "includes Roman sarcophagi and centuries-old imperial busts" -- whereas Bush's Ambassador to Italy lived in a youth hostel -- and Obama and his guests dined on "the finest foods and most delicate wines," whereas Bush ate hardtack and salt beef. "The dinner conversation, according to Politico’s Carrie Budoff Brown and Jennifer Epstein," Continetti went on, "touched on architecture, on art, on science, and on urban planning," whereas Bush... well, we hardly have to go on. The whole thing is full of easy layups like that, along with some more bizarre bits, like the backhanded slur on the Obamas' daughters ("'With his daughters around less,' Politico reports -- without saying exactly where Sasha and Malia, neither of whom is in college, have gone..."). Throughout you can almost see Continetti mincing around and flapping his hands; look at these foofy liberals with their wine and their architecture! But for me the key section is this:

I like to imagine the conversations at these parties...

God that Bibi is so unreasonable, who are your favorite authors, it’s time for a real conversation about race, is Homeland like real life, this is the sushi place to go to in Los Angeles, you are a real role model for young men not only in this country but all around the world...

And so on; eventually Continetti criticizes "the phoniness, the small talk, above all the endless putting on airs" of a conversation he just made up. It's like a transcript of teenage girls dishing on that stuck-up bitch in homeroom, but it's actually one of Conservatism's Great Minds writing what he probably thinks is social criticism, or at least a good way to pay the bills until he figures out who to suck up to next.

•  "This has to hurt: A plurality of respondents in a new Fox News poll 'believe the administration of former President George W. Bush was more competent [than] the Obama administration,' the Hill reports," says James Taranto. It would be more impressive if the sentence did not contain the words "Fox News poll," which people who can remember two years back know is a important qualifier. More interesting to me, though, is the brethren's weird relationship with Bush: Except for a brief outbreak of "Miss me yet?" signs, they've been acting like they don't know the guy for five years.  My first thought was that the recent wave of rightwing "reform" programs, which are suspiciously reminiscent of Bush's compassionate-conservative con, are part of the reason. But the Bergdahl bullshit figures too: As I pointed out earlier, these guys are feeling confident again that all they have to do is blow a bugle and America will again mistake them for Sgt. Rock -- just like back in Nineeleven days! They may bring the baseball and bullhorn back for 2016 -- in fact, if all goes well, they might even finally let W. attend their convention.

•  Speaking of Bergdahl, here's some ripe spew from Some Guy at RedState:

Other than the obscenity of a man who was introduced into politics by a brace of convicted domestic terrorists spouting words he seems to have learned while watching Blackhawk Down and rooting for the Mohamed Farrah Aidid clansmen --

You almost have to admire it -- it's like he managed to connect his bile duct to his fingers without  engaging his brain.

-- “we don’t leave anybody behind” — the statement isn’t even vaguely true.

In trading five senior Taliban field leaders for a US deserter, Barack Obama passed on an opportunity to retrieve four other Taliban captives, three of whom are American citizens... 

If Obama had really cared about “leave no one behind” he would have driven a harder bargain and brought three other Americans home with the feckless Bergdahl.

And that would have given us three more excuses to impeach him!

•  Sometime I wonder if Rod Dreher even knows what he's saying anymore. Andrew Sullivan got all huffy about that mass grave of infants recently discovered at a Catholic facility for unwed mothers, so Dreher, who was Catholic about eight religions back, raves about how important it is for his former Church to prosecute sexual sin. At one point:

Given that most religions and cultures have purity codes governing sexuality, it’s terribly unjust to single out Catholicism for special contempt. Why do purity codes exist? Leaving aside religious revelation, it doesn’t take a degree in cultural anthropology to understand why any society would have the need to regulate sexuality, for the survival of the group. In a resource-poor society, one without advanced medicine, strong rules governing sexual behavior may be harsh but necessary. Andrew has written at length, and with gratitude, about how he once thought he was given a death sentence with his HIV diagnosis, but medical advances have made it likely that he will live a normal life. If he did not live in a technologically advanced, wealthy society, and if he did not have health insurance that pays for his expensive treatment, the sexually transmitted disease he carries would likely have killed him by now. In the not too distant past, no small number of people died of sexually transmitted diseases, and a shocking number of women died in childbirth. Sex had real life-or-death consequences, and that’s before one gets to the issue of maintaining a livable social order.

Uh... whuh... so, sex is a sin because Sullivan has HIV which you get from sex and, though he's doing alright now, in another era and/or income bracket he would have died from it? Or maybe "Sullivan has HIV" is all he means. I don't know. Is this what they mean by speaking in tongues?

•  Finally, can you guys tell me which it is: Was Noah Rothman unaware that the interpretive dance at Normandy was France's doing, not Obama's, or was Rothman just hoping to lead his readers to believe otherwise?

NEVER FORGET.

From James Taranto's Bergdahl thing:

There are some intriguing similarities between young Bergdahl and the young [John] Kerry...

No, it's not just a casual slur. Taranto proceeds to connect the 2004 swift-boating of decorated naval officer Kerry with the transformation of Bergdahl into the Manchurian Candidate by wingnut propagandists. Only in Taranto's view, that's a good thing. He actually compares Bergdahl's youthful despair ("the horror that is america is disgusting") with Kerry's reports to Congress on Vietnam atrocities, and even duplicates the swift-boat team's bizarre characterization of same ("[Kerry] stood before the television audiences and claimed that the 500,000 men and women in Vietnam, and in combat, were all villains -- there were no heroes") as if it were still convincing to anyone besides diehards this far beyond its sell-by date.

Then Taranto issues some clouds of gas to suggest that, despite centuries of tradition, the top brass secretly disapproved the Kenyan Usurper's scheme to reclaim the soldier because, allegedly,  the rescue efforts cost them men. (I never realized before this Saving Private Ryan was bullshit.) Not that these losses are confirmed, nor need they be; if "the Pentagon has been pushing back against claims, noted here yesterday, that the Army did take casualties as a result of the early search for Bergdahl," says Taranto, well, they have to do that, but never mind:

Today's Times features an even more detailed debunking, under the headline "Can Bowe Bergdahl Be Tied to 6 Lost Lives? Facts Are Murky." Murky they may be, but the Pentagon's defensiveness on this point belies the administration's suggestion that the military is heedless of costs when it seeks to rescue captured servicemen.

Don't try to find a coherent argument in that paragraph; as they used to say in Vietnam, it don't mean a thing.

And anyway, it doesn't matter what the generals say, or even what common sense says -- what's important is what some soldiers who served with him say about Bergdahl, and if they didn't like him, then rescuing him was a bad idea. True, the soldiers themselves didn't say he should have been left behind to die, but that sort of analysis is above their pay grade -- Taranto can handle that.

If the writing and reasoning is more slovenly than usual for Taranto, it's easy to see why: Like most conservatives who haven't yet gone full Rand Paul, he expects all he has to do is put up some gush about "the centrality of honor to military culture" and blow Taps, and everyone will accept that he speaks for George Washington and all the grunts and dogfaces since Valley Forge. It remains to be seen whether, after years of deadly foreign misadventure promoted by their propaganda,  many people still believe them.

NO ONE GOES THERE ANYMORE, IT'S TOO CROWDED.

Hitting 7 million customers doesn't prove Obamacare is a good program. But at least it has given us the gift of laughter via the reactions of its opponents. I especially like James Taranto's at the Wall Street Journal:

In a way it's the oddest bit of ObamaCare propaganda we've seen so far. "This Is What an #ACASurge Looks Like" was the title of a Saturday post on the White House Blog by senior communications adviser Tara McGuinness.

"The line started forming at 5 a.m. in front of an enrollment center in Miami," McGuinness boasts. "The final deadline to get covered in 2014 is in just two days, and Americans are literally lining up at grassroots events across the country to make sure they're covered. This is what momentum looks like"...

The first thing we thought of when we saw the pictures was the photos we've recently seen on Twitter of Venezuelans waiting in bread lines. Waiting in line to purchase necessities is a characteristic not of a prosperous free society but of command economies under repressive regimes. Closer to home, one doubts even the Transportation Security Administration would be so tone-deaf as to advertise long airport lines as an indication it's doing a great job.

If you can't complain about how no one wants it, complain there are long lines to get it. Plus communism. You can't lose!

Oh, and even better:

It may be that the people who waited in line to buy ObamaCare were doing so primarily to express their allegiance to Obama.

He's got a point. I have a health plan through my job, but I was thinking of buying an Obamacare plan anyway, in order to show my loyalty to WHAT THE HELL WHO EVEN THINKS LIKE THAT.

Has Alex Jones weighed in on this yet? Maybe it was space aliens.

THURSDAY MISCELLANY.

How're conservatives reacting to Chris Christie Is An Asshole-gate? James Taranto at the Wall Street Journal:

Worse, the Christie administration's evident abuse of the Port Authority is reminiscent of the Obama administration's abuse of the Internal Revenue Service...

I already checked, guys -- no mention of Benghazi. For that you have to go a few rungs down the ladder to Greta Van Susteren, or to the sub-basement that is Michelle Malkin's alternate-universe Twitter.

Or maybe Breitbart.com -- hang on, this article by Joel B. Pollack is from November. Yet it may be relevant!:

Chris Christie Really Needs Benghazi
Benghazi is Hillary Clinton's most important weakness, no matter whom she faces in the 2016 presidential election. Among Republican contenders, only Chris Christie can claim it as a strength. That's because of his performance during Superstorm Sandy. Whatever his mistakes--i.e. heaping praise on Obama and backing a pork-laden relief bill--his performance was a sharp contrast to Clinton's dereliction of duty during Benghazi.

Has this bullet become any less magic? Then Christie should save himself by demanding a Benghazi investigation at once. It's not like he doesn't have the nerve.*

If you have 11 minutes to spare, this is what Christie's bit about being "misled by a member of my staff" reminds me of:



I guess National Review sent Kevin D. Williamson to Appalachia just so he'd have white welfare cases to harsh on, and thus escape charges of racism. Charges of stupidity will be harder to evade. Williamson admits there are few opportunities for the unfortunate residents of Owsley County, and can't even make the usual specious case that marriage would make the hillbillies rich. So his anti-government-assistance case boils down to 1.) some people have defrauded the system, something you never see investment bankers and other such higher-order beings doing, therefore the system has failed; and 2.) whatever this is supposed to mean:

In effect, welfare has made Appalachia into a big and sparsely populated housing project — too backward to thrive, but just comfortable enough to keep the underclass in place. There is no cure for poverty, because there is no cause of poverty — poverty is the natural condition of the human animal. 

Which Kevin D. Williamson evaded by luck, pluck, and virtue. The rest of you can go fuck yourselves. Liberty!

...The lesson of the Big White Ghetto is the same as the lessons we learned about the urban housing projects in the late 20th century: The best public-policy treatment we have for poverty is dilution. But like the old project towers, the Appalachian draw culture produces concentration, a socio­economic Salton Sea that becomes more toxic every year.

Maybe he means we should evacuate and demolish these poor hill towns, as if they were urban projects, and "dilute" their populations. Maybe send them to Mexico? They better hurry, the authorities may start to get strict about who they let in.

*UPDATE. I should add that I don't think this will negatively affect Christie's Presidential push. That he's an asshole is a large part of his appeal, and there's a whole country full of suckers who, like the folks who hire a hitman, are inclined to believe he'll restrict his viciousness to people they don't like.

UPDATE 2. Ah, here's the libertarian-branded response to Christie from Ed Krayewski at Reason:

The petty, retaliatory nature of the lane closure reminded me of something the Obama White House might do, something like closing down open-air spaces or websites because of a partial government shutdown or even getting Tea Party groups audited.

Refresh my memory: I seem to recall that libertarians were once perceived to be something different from conservatives. Anyone remember how that got started?

UPDATE 3. I'm even more convinced now that Christie will skate, notwithstanding his refusal to accept my Benghazi advice.

Meanwhile we have this from the Daily Caller:

As liberals support Christie during scandal, conservatives abandon him

The evidence: Guys like Erick Erickson who consider Christie a RINO continue to bay for his blood, "Democratic mayors in New Jersey who endorsed Christie’s re-election are also defending Christie," and David Axelrod thinks Christie will skate -- like me, so I guess I'm also part of Christie's liberal love-wave. I assure you it's inadvertent!

UPDATE 4. Meanwhile from the other side of the bullshit rainbow, The Washington Free Beacon:

U.S. Attorney Probing Christie Has Donated Thousands to Democrats

I tell ya, guys, we gotta get our story (as told by rightwing operatives) straight.

WHEN ALL YOU HAVE IS A DEATH CULT, EVERY OBAMA LOOKS LIKE A HITLER.

The White House is having a "Youth Summit"...

...offering young people from around the country an opportunity to discuss the Affordable Care Act and other issues with senior White House officials. White House Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Google+ followers ages 18-35 are eligible to apply to attend this White House event on December 4.

Interested in joining? Sign up for your chance to join other White House social media followers at the #WHYouth social.

This anodyne event has me halfway between "good for them" and "so what." But among my usual subjects, it's Hitler. No, really -- The Right Scoop:

White House youth. I think it has a certain ring to it…don’t you?

Jim Geraghty of National Review:

It's Springtime for Obama. #WHYouth

Bryan Preston of PJ Media:

We Have a ‘White House Youth’ Now?... It’s about the cult, not the country, with this administration.

(Preston also complains Obama's "hosting this 'summit'" -- Scare quotes! So-called! -- "not to talk about our nation’s history or anything that all Americans could get behind. It’s hosting this summit to transmit its talking points about Obamacare." To appease the right -- always a big concern with Democratic Administrations, alas -- I advise the President to say "Columbus sailed the ocean blue in fourteen hundred and ninety-two" before launching into his explanation of national policy/fascist propaganda.)

It's a sign of the times that, while normal people would be embarrassed to be associated with this nonsense, rightbloggers are actually reveling in this comparison of a bunch of kids visiting the White House to Nazi bund meetings. "The hashtag #WHYouth prompted all sorts of Hitler Youth-related mockery," giggles Breitbart.com. "The Photos ‘shop themselves and the tweets roll on," whoops Mary Katherine Ham at Hot Air. My favorite is RedState's Moe Lane:

Somebody in the Obama administration had an opportunity to say You know, fellows: perhaps we shouldn’t describe this upcoming young person summit thing in a way that could be heard as “White House Youth” – only he or she didn’t, and so here we go again.

It's not his fault -- they keep making him compare Obama to Hitler! Just like all those people on the internet who wouldn't be wasting their weekends Photoshopping a toothbrush mustache on Obama if he weren't always going around annexing the Sudetenland and gassing Jews.

I've been joking about this for years, but it's worth noting that Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism has had a powerful effect on modern conservatism -- mainly by lowering the brethren's reading levels, but also by convincing them that slapping a swastika on anything they don't like is analysis, and inspiring a million puke-streams like "Top 50 reasons people keep comparing Obama to Hitler" (and no, that cowboy's not kidding, nor taking his meds, apparently).

It's been going on long enough that I wouldn't surprised if it were damaging the conservative brand. Or maybe just clarifying what it stands for.

UPDATE. Meanwhile, for upmarket conservatives, James Taranto at the Wall Street Journal:

ObamaCare and the Totalitarian Mindset

That's how the toffs do it: Don't say Hitler, use abstractions. Less messy.

OTHER THAN THAT, PERFECT ANALOGY.

James Taranto, comparing Obamacare to the Iraq War:

One of the strongest critiques of the Iraq effort--as this column acknowledged in September, in a different context--is that it took hubris to suppose that the U.S. could simply export democracy to a distant land and expect it to have a quick, benevolent and transformative effect on the entire region. That was frequently characterized as the "neocon" view. If so, isn't ObamaCare the perfect example of "neocon" hubris in domestic policy?

Because it's hubris to think you can implement a national health care system -- just ask most of the civilized world -- whereas invasions are always cash money.

Taranto also addresses the Katrina-Obamacare analogies that have been a key element of current wingnut schtick, and attacks Joan Walsh for saying most of the dead in Katrina were black; in one estimate, they were only 44%, "well short of 'most,'" says Taranto, and in another they were 51%, but Walsh is still wrong because "it was a bare majority." Plus which, three-fifths of 51% is 38%.

Taranto also accuses Walsh of racism against white men. I can see why this would upset him.

EMOTIONAL SHUTDOWN.

Most people probably wonder what these guys are thinking, but from my perspective the shutdown is a natural consequence of a certain habit of mind that conservatives have been cultivating among their Republican homunculi for years.

Though wingnut theology goes back much further, and certain practitioners just naturally think this way and would have done so no matter when they came up, I'd put the origin of this particular wrinkle around the time of the Clinton impeachment.

You have to remember that during the Reagan era, a lot of conservatives thought the party, so to speak, would never end -- that they'd created not only an Administration but an Age, a historic era in which every citizen was taught from birth that nothing couldn't be fixed with a tax cut and the poor had no one to blame but themselves. (You can see it in the way they still invoke His holy name, especially in extremis.)

Then Clinton got in. He was a DLC trimmer and almost as bad as the Reaganauts, and you might say his victories were at least a partial tribute to Reaganism. But Clinton's yak also included some of the old Democratic equities as a point of distinction, and his lines about working hard and playing by the rules must have hit conservatives like a gut-punch -- here they'd been selling America a survival-of-the-fittest gold rush, and Clinton was giving them home and hearth -- and getting away with it!

A saner opposition would have appreciated this turnabout philosophically, as a grifter might laugh ruefully upon discovering someone had managed to grift him. Certainly some of them did. But the true believers simmered and stewed, because for them it was not just a reversal of fortune, but of their whole way of looking at the world. And when they got their chance, they came up with both the 1995 shutdown and the Lewinsky Impeachment -- kamikaze missions of the sort that make no sense unless you actually believe that God is with you, and that the seemingly unconvinced American people will follow once they realize it (which they never do).

In the Obama years these folks have been no less crazy, but much busier. As I've detailed in these pages and at the Voice, they've devoted so much time and energy to developing unflattering caricatures of the POTUS -- he's a socialist! He's a crony capitalist! He's two slurs in one! -- that they can no longer actually see what he's doing, nor why anyone would vote for him, leading to their great confusion in 2012 when their "unskewed polls" turned out to be total bullshit.

In fact they still can't understand why Obama won, and in many cases they can't even admit it -- the Wall Street Journal's James Taranto has made a habit of referring to him as "President Asterisk," on the grounds that the IRS scandal proves he stole the election, and the brethren lap up this soothing alt-history.

In choosing to shut down the government, an expensive and injurious procedure, just to show how much they hate Obamacare, they're looking at two well-known survey findings -- that voters don't like Obamacare, and that they don't want to shut down the government over it -- and deciding one is very meaningful and the other is, well, skewed, based on the fairy tales they've been telling themselves for years.

They offer defenses: For example, James Poulos argues at Forbes the "pro-democracy case" for the shutdown -- that is, it's not Boehner's boys who are holding us hostage, "it’s the government that’s holding us hostage — hostage to one-time votes made in Congress for the usual farrago of not-so-idealistic reasons." The rules require that Republicans win enough votes of their own to repeal the law, as they always promise to do, but  the voters wouldn't go along with the gag, so the only thing a true pro-democrat can do is run the ship of state into a reef.

This doesn't make sense to a normal person; none of their arguments do. But they don't have to. They may as well put Because Reasons in all their column spaces. They're not trying to convince outsiders that their cause is just; they're just adding some stuff that looks like arguments to the furnishings of their Reagan Dream House to better resemble their increasingly vague memories of reality.

"YOUNG MAN, THAT'S THE FUNNIEST THING YOU'VE SAID ALL NIGHT! SCREW THE IRISH!"

A passage from James Taranto's latest at the Wall Street Journal:

Life Imitates 'South Park'

 "After the TV show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy begins showing, metrosexuality becomes a major fad among both the men and the boys, and they all begin to act effeminate. At the school bus stop, instead of their usual winter clothing, Stan, Cartman, and Kenny wear unmasculine clothing. Kyle, who does not want to conform, is beaten up by a metrosexual gang at school. Mr. Garrison and Mr. Slave, the town's gay couple, are opposed to the fad since they feel that the gay culture should be unique to gays. The women of the town are initially in favor of their husbands' improved hygiene and willingness to communicate, but soon tire of the men becoming increasingly self-absorbed."--Wikipedia.org summary of "South Park Is Gay!," aired Oct. 22, 2003

"Booker OK With Speculation That He's Gay: 'So What Does It Matter if I Am?' "--TalkingPointsMemo.com, Aug. 27, 2013

Haw, see it's funny because... uh... 'cuz fags.

Historically in the world of comedy, there's no laugh too cheap to get -- cf. Albert Brooks,"I tell you one thing, when he said ‘shit,’ I almost died!" But when you don't even bother to construct a joke because you know your audience will go for anything Politically Incorrect, you may have actually created a frontier.

GIVIN' 'EM WHAT THEY WANT.

My column this week mentioned some of the many conservatives who blithely assumed the ghettos would be aflame after the Zimmerman verdict because, well, you know [pushes in nose]. At Mother Jones, Lauren Williams noted some of the pre-eminent racial dead-enders on the case:

Bill O'Reilly recently asked guests on his show whether a not-guilty verdict would cause people to "run out and cause trouble," or worse, "damage the fabric of the nation." The Washington Times ran an online poll Wednesday asking readers, "Will there be riots in Florida if George Zimmerman receives a not-guilty verdict by a jury of his peers?" Seventy-four percent said yes. Sean Hannity had Mark Fuhrman (of O.J. Simpson trial fame) on his show this week and asked him the same question. His response, according to Newshounds, a Fox News watchdog site: "I just think it's kind of pathetic that a court of law cannot be in a vacuum of the legal system without the influence of the public threatening to do great bodily harm to people and property. It's really a pathetic statement for our country." Last October, speculation that African Americans would riot from coast to coast if President Barack Obama lost to Mitt Romney swept conservative news sites.

David Weigel did a few columns on this, the more recent of which features a Drudge front page pretending "America gripped by second night of fury," and links to similar gibberish from the Daily Mail and Jim fucking Hoft. Weigel's column is called "Who's Disappointed About the Lack of Mass Zimmerman Verdict Riots?" and the answer is pretty clear: Conservative specialists in the old Ooga Booga.

At the Wall Street Journal, James Taranto takes off from Weigel's column -- but goes in a, let us say, counterintuitive direction. His over-reactors are nameless "British newspaper" and "conspiracy website," as well as "the Broward County sheriff and the Sanford police" who "put out a public-service ad in which cops, teenagers and James Jones of basketball's Miami Heat urged viewers: 'Raise Your Voice, Not Your Hands.'" See, the local cops tried to preemptively chill people out  -- that's pretty close to Michelle Malkin crying, "Zimmerman verdict: NOT guilty -- Calls for race riots in 3, 2, 1..." Robert Stacy McCain predicting "If #Zimmerman is acquitted, black people will riot," etc.

Also, Taranto finds one of those real-racists on which conservative commentary thrives: "Today New York's Daily News does its best to inflame the situation, front-paging an editorial that likens Zimmerman's killing of Trayvon Martin to half a dozen decades-old cases," which is, yes you guessed it, "an outrageously racist bit of yellow journalism, imputing guilt to Zimmerman because the color of his skin is similar to that of men who committed horrific crimes decades ago. The News editorial reflects the perverse nostalgia for pervasive racism--and for the moral clarity and righteousness that accompanied it--that is common among liberals today..."

Meanwhile elsewhere in Wingnut World: National Review's alleged cop Jack Dunphy tells us about the Fire This Time in L.A.: "...as I write this Monday night there is a group causing a ruckus on Crenshaw Boulevard, disrupting traffic, vandalizing cars, and briefly storming a Walmart... Except for a few torched trash cans, there were no fires and no widespread looting in L.A. Monday night. But that could change if this keeps up.." Briefly storming a Walmart! Helter skelter! By tomorrow Dunphy will report himself pinned down by price-gun fire, but determined to get word out to civilization about the Trayvon Riots.

And after Jamelle Bouie explains to him that "black-on-black crime" -- the traditional means by which conservatives pretend to care more about black lives than black people, when such a distraction is needed --  just means that black people who commit crimes tend to live near other black people, whom they victimize, Dunphy's colleague Patrick Brennan just keeps repeating his mantras: "it’s disproportionately being committed by blacks... African Americans commit dramatically more crime, especially violent crimes and murders, than whites do... still committing crimes at shockingly disproportionate rates... blacks are much more likely to commit more murders than whites... it becomes apparent that black-on-black crime is a special problem... lots of blacks are committing crimes..."

Brennan and the rest of him know their audience and what keeps 'em coming back.

UPDATE. In comments, synykyl: "Given that young black males are by far the most likely victims of gun violence, shouldn't conservatives be calling for a national campaign to arm them? Conservatives aren't racists, and they believe an armed society is a polite society, so why haven't they jumped on this idea?" Well, you see...

IN PLAIN SIGHT.

James Taranto, who thinks the American gynarchs are waging "war on men," catalogues the unkind comments women have made about him (e.g., "woman-hating troll"). While butchly insisting these barbs don't bother him, Taranto laments that the ladies are brutal in ways he and his fellow oppressed males would never be:

All this viciousness was in the service of denying that there is, as we wrote in yesterday's article, a "war on men." Well, imagine if a prominent feminist journalist wrote about the "war on women" and dozens of conservative male writers responded by subjecting her to similar verbal abuse. Would that not be prima facie evidence that she was on to something?

Taranto seems not to have heard of that key figure in the "war on women," Sandra Fluke -- pretty prominent and a journalist as well as a law student. It wouldn't be hard to get up to speed: I wrote a couple of columns about some of his colleagues' reactions to Fluke (for example, "Rush Calls Some Slut a Slut and Everyone Gets Sand in Their Collective V@g!n@"), but if Taranto doesn't want to endure my prose, he can just put "Sandra Fluke" and "whore" into Google.

You know, I'm just kidding. I'm sure Taranto has heard of Sandra Fluke. I'm even fairly confident that he knows where the power actually resides in male-female social relationships. He's just very good at pretending not to.

UPDATE. In comments, Jay B: "Uh, yeah. It's almost like Amanda Marcotte doesn't exist. Or Jessica Valenti. Or Joan Walsh. Or Naomi Klein. Or any woman writer at The Nation. Imagine though if those people existed, I'm sure conservatives would be gallant." Amanda particularly seems to attract the psycho freaks of the right, probably because she pretty clearly doesn't give a shit, an attitude known to infuriate bullies.

UPDATE 2. Removed reference to "screenwriter" among Fluke's achievements -- I had conflated her with Lena Dunham, for obvious reasons.

GOODBYE TIN-FOIL HAT.

I mentioned the other day that some of the brethren think Obama used mind control like some kind of supervillain to get his minions to persecute the Tea Party. Today James Taranto takes this to a whole new level.

First he recounts some recent secret-message fantasies by various press dopes. For example, Kimberley Strassel says Obama "publicly call[ed] out by name political opponents whom he'd like to see harassed." I guess "harrassed" was part of the telepathic rather than the verbal component of the President's public statements, as I don't recall hearing them or seeing them in the transcript -- or maybe Obama's magic powers rendered all but bureaucrats blind and deaf to them.

Then Taranto explains:

Jaded political observers listened to Candidate Obama and heard (depending on their leanings) either a viciously desperate politician or a feisty fighter. Agents of the government heard President Obama, their ultimate boss, urging them to turn their attention toward evildoers. 

As we've repeatedly argued, if that is the extent of Obama's involvement in the scandal, it is much more worrisome than if the persecution of dissidents was carried out under his direct orders. It would mean that the government itself--the permanent institutions of the state, not just the administration currently in office--has turned against the citizenry and the Constitution.

So, if Obama directly told IRS officials to intimidate the TP people, it wouldn't be as bad as if he used mind-rays to make it happen on the zombie hordes. Of course if they had evidence of direct non-magic intervention by Obama, I'm sure they would be happy to have it to put in a bill of impeachment. But they don't, so they have to impeach Washington, if only figuratively, as Obama's magic co-conspirators.

It doesn't say much for their cause that even as the hearings proceed, they're devoting this much effort to the Harry Potter version.

SMART ASS.

James Taranto is laying the contempt on thick in his best Professor of Liberal Fascism manner -- "complete sophistry," "embarrassing philosophical error," "philosophical narcissism," etc, so you know he thinks he's got a Good One. His target, A. Barton Hinkle, made the crucial error of embarrassing Taranto, who had defended the proposition (not that he necessary thinks so himself! Read the fine print!) that the institution of marriage rather than any specific marriages would be harmed by gay marriage.

Hinkle rightly found this to be nonsense: "After all, you would not say a virus 'threatens humanity' if, in fact, no individual human person was ever harmed by the virus."

For his rejoinder, Taranto postulates a virus of his own:

The Hinkle virus is so fast-spreading that it soon infects every person alive, but it is largely benign. It has no effect on men, and only two effects on women: (1) it is passed on to any children they have, and (2) any children they conceive after infection will be born homosexual.

Blink. Blink.

The Hinkle virus would seem to fit its namesake's criterion that it does no harm to any individual human person. We have established as a condition of the experiment--and we trust that in the real world Hinkle agrees--that it is not harmful to a woman to give birth to a homosexual child, nor is it harmful to a child to be born homosexual. And since the virus affects the sexual orientation only of the yet-unborn, it should not disrupt any existing heterosexual relationship.

Yet it should be obvious that the Hinkle virus would threaten humanity by dramatically reducing the incentive to reproduce...

Taranto could as well have said "any children they conceive after infection will be born male" -- nothing wrong with being male, right? -- or "any children they conceive after infection will be born female" -- nothing wrong with being female, right? Which in the long run would have an even more dramatic effect on reproduction, if not on the "incentive to reproduce." We could use this, I suppose, as proof that masculinity presents a threat to mankind without blah blah. Or femininity!

But Taranto's point isn't really that "X may harm humanity without harming particular humans." It's more like You liberals think homosexuality is harmless, but what if everyone turned gay? 

He follows this with reams of universals-vs.-particulars guff to retroactively class it up ("Humanity is not 'simply the sum of the humans in it' any more than A. Barton Hinkle is simply the sum of the cells in him, or those cells are the sum of the atoms in them"), but they don't relate to his virus analogy at all. They're just fancy cover for a dumb joke about gays -- such jokes being among the last pieces of armament the anti-gay-marriage side has left.

Like I said before: This is how you know you're winning.

HOW YOU KNOW YOU'RE WINNING.

Back in December, James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal had an article headlined, "The Sure Thing? Reconsidering a prediction about same-sex marriage." Though a few years earlier he had predicted gay marriage would win the day when the Supreme Court got hold of it, Taranto said, "now we're not so sure." (As he also described a pro-gay-marriage decision not as one that would enfranchise millions of his fellow citizens, but as one that would "declare the traditional definition of marriage unconstitutional," you know where his rooting interest lies.)

In a new column, Taranto returns to the subject and pulls what he probably considers a clever trick play:

The administration does not go so far as to urge the court to strike down all state bans on same-sex marriage. Instead it urges a novel solution that would have the effect of abolishing nonmarital civil unions, until now the compromise of choice between supporters and opponents of same-sex marriage.

You can hear the chortles in CPAC back rooms: Heh indeed, by pushing "gay" "marriage" Obama's killing civil unions! How do you like that, gay people? You should join us at CPAC -- er, on the downlow.

This schtick comes with rhetorical appurtenances. One: You're Denying Our Right to Self-Expression:

As a legal matter, the administration's position seems odd. The effect of banning same-sex marriage in civil-union states is purely expressive: The states are in effect declaring that homosexual relationships are inferior to marriages. That is a value judgment with which many people disagree, but why should the state not be free to express it--especially when the expression has no material effect?

Two: Obama is Applying the "Chicago Way" to His Fellow Travelers and They Will Fall In Line:

The likeliest answer is political: that the administration has concluded (or anticipates that the court, which is to say Justice Kennedy, will conclude) that imposing same-sex marriages nationwide would be disruptive in the way Roe v. Wade was--but the civil-union states are socially liberal enough that they would accept such a ruling.

Three: You're Only Hurting Yourself:

For supporters of same-sex marriage, however, there's a danger that adopting this legal compromise would shut down an avenue of political compromise.

These are not the kind of arguments you hear when you're losing. The struggle will continue, as it still does over the civil rights of black Americans. But the losing side will become increasingly legalistic, hair-splitting, and petty. That's how you know you're winning.

UPDATE. Speaking of which, here's Rick Moran reacting to the news that GOP macher Rob Portman, inspired by his gay son, has turned over on marriage equality:

As more and more Americans realize that they are related to, or work with, or live next to someone who is gay, it is inevitable that acceptance follows. This doesn't mean that opposing gay marriage is bigoted. People of good conscience can disagree (something the left refuses to acknowledge while trying to ram gay marriage down the throats of people by co-opting the legisalture and using the courts to gain their objective).

Translation: Yes, we're getting tolerant, but what about all these homosexuals trying to ram their big, hard gay marriage down my throat? Where's their tolerance?

I expect the brighter bulbs among the rightbloggers will keep quiet or roll more gently with it. Maybe we'll see a pro-equality, anti-drone Republican Party in 2016. Baby steps!

WARNING: TRUST THE SHORTER, JAMES TARANTO EDITION

Shorter James Taranto: James Fallows was punked by an internet joke about Fox News being dumb, and admitted it. Ben Shapiro was punked by an internet joke about Chuck Hagel belonging to a fictional pro-Hamas group, and refuses to admit he was punked or even that it was a joke. If you've ever read my bullshit before, you can guess which one I'm siding with here.

UPDATE. Taranato thinks I have a reading comprehension problem. I guess I'm supposed to pay closer attention to his more-in-sorrow-than-anger, both-sides-do-it tone than to his argument, such as it is:

The difference is that whereas the Fox joke [Fallows fell for] could easily be confirmed as a joke merely by checking out the Zombie Rainbow page that was its source, the "Friends of Hamas" joke [Shapiro fell for] came from a reporter for a major newspaper--that is, somebody whose job involves trading on his own reputation for credibility.

Except Shapiro himself disputes this in his bizarre, belligerent response to being caught out, in which he claims his real source says he has other sources for the story besides the reporter ("Our Senate source denies that Friedman is the source of this information. 'I have received this information from three separate sources, none of whom was Friedman,' the source said"). Talk about an uncooperative client!

Taranto spends the rest of his item explaining that, while Mistakes Were Made, Shapiro made a harmless slip that merely led to the uncorrected smearing of Hagel, whereas Fallows thought a joke about Fox News was real, which is why such errors will henceforth be known by people who talk rightwing code to one another as "the Fallows Principle." What am I missing?

A LITTLE GOOD NEWS. At Zero Hedge we hear from Brandon Martin, who believes the Republicans and the Democrats are colluding to make America socialist; that there is a secret "Liberty Movement" majority afoot which would have swept the polls in 2012 if only Ron Paul had run (then why didn't he, one wonders), but because he didn't they contented themselves instead with ousting RINOs like Allen West; etc. Key passage:

Second, if you subscribe to the well documented idea that elections, at least at the federal level, are entirely staged (which I do)...

At PJ Media one Vik Rubenfeld weighs the traditional reasons conservatives give for Obama's victory (including "dependency on big government handouts on the part of some pro-Obama voters" and "mainstream media bias") and, while he finds much merit in these, cottons to this one:

For decades, adults have been told, and more importantly our children are now taught, that America owes penance due to a past history of racism. It is inevitable that this would play a key part in the reelection of the nation’s first black president.

Rubenfeld concludes that "some percentage of pro-Obama voters decided that putting racism in America’s past would be a deciding factor in their vote," referring perhaps to the voter survey that took place in his mind when he saw a white girl reading a Toni Morrison book.

Over at the Wall Street Journal we get the high-class version of this from James Taranto, who tells us once again about "the increasingly open hostility toward whites from mainstream left-liberals." (Does that mean that if race riots come back, I get to loot? Sweet.)

At Glenn Beck's The Blaze, we get a Kulturkampf kvetch from one Richard Mgrdechian, who tells us "HOW SHORT-SIGHTED LEADERSHIP HAS SABOTAGED CONSERVATIVE POP CULTURE," whatever that is. In 2012 "Republicans once again missed the boat on popular culture," he says. His solution (besides the customary hundreds of words about the need to "leverage the power of popular culture"):

The way I do this is through music. You might have heard of the band I manage – it’s called Madison Rising. We’re somewhat of an anomaly in the music industry, being a pro-American rock band and all.

That's just one example. There's also... well, that's the only example he gives, actually. Did he mention he manages a band called Madison Rising?

Meanwhile Joel Kotkin asks, What's the Matter with Connecticut? Don't you blue states realize it was in your economic best interest to vote for Mitt Romney and the Republicans, who were "the ones most likely to fall on their swords to maintain lower rates for the the mass affluent class in the bluest states and metros"? Yet you voted for Obama! You guys'll be sorry! (Kotkin has been lecturing on the imminent death of the blue states for years; he's basically the guy who expects you to fail and, when you succeed, concludes that you must secretly be miserable about it.)

The bad news is these lunatics live among us. The good news is that Republicans ain't getting their thumbs out of their asses anytime soon.

ANOTHER DAY IN BIZARRO WORLD. At the Wall Street Journal, James Taranto tells us several ways in which black people are oppressing white people. For example, the Obama campaign sent a survey to the President's constituents, asking "Which constituency groups do you identify yourself with? Check all that apply" -- and there was no box for Whites! "The danger for the country," says Taranto, "is that a racially polarized electorate will produce a hostile, balkanized culture." About three hundred years too late to worry about that, buddy.

Taranto also pulls the you-were-bigots-first argument:

For a century after the Civil War, Southern white supremacists were an important part of the Democratic Party coalition. They were defeated and discredited in the 1960s, and the Democrats, still the party of identity politics, switched their focus to various nonwhite minorities.

Since history is like a game of musical chairs, this wiley Democrat shape-shifting left Republicans no choice but to play the role of Racist Assholes from the 60s onward. And people keep blaming Republicans for it! The white man is truly the white man of liberal fascism.

You know who else isn't to blame? Rightwing Assholes. Andrew Klavan explains that when Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh say "retard" and "slut," it's only because they're righteously indignant over liberal lies. Even this, they might have borne with good grace and perhaps an occasional "faggot" or "feminazi," but the damn liberals provoke them still further with their decorum: "They don’t use words like retard and slut. They don’t raise their voices. You could invite them to dinner without embarrassing yourself." Now what self-respecting sociopathic teenager wouldn't go ballistic over that? And once again, conservatives get blamed for something that isn't their fault.

Meanwhile intellectual titans Glenn Reynolds, Nick Gillespie, and Ross Douthat all say America is like The Hunger Games because there are rich people in Washington, while in giant forced labor camps like Salt Lake City and Dallas everyone lives off hardtack and dreams of a day when the white man's vote is worth something again. Extra credit to Ole Perfesser Reynolds for making this half-hearted attempt to shore up his crap metaphor:

Even in upscale parts of L.A. or New York, you see boarded up storefronts and other signs that the economy isn't what it used to be.

Yeah, someone told me they saw Michael Bloomberg the other day fighting a bum over a dead pigeon.

So, to recap: Liberals destroyed America, then bamboozled citizens into thinking the conservatives did it, leaving conservatives no choice but to act like jerks and write very poorly. Or, as I like to think of it, another day in paradise.

UPDATE. As a bonus, your moment of Goldstein, celebrating a spike in gun sales:

...at a certain point, when you can survive the loss of heat or the shutdown of an electrical grid for two weeks — when you can provide for your family and keep them safe and protected while all those who rely on government run about confused, carping, demanding, frustrated... all attempts to ironize away the concept of self-reliance and rugged individualism in favor of the glories of an overarching and protective federal government, a campaign the left has for years carried forth in the academy, in government, and through popular culture, dissipate like the insubstantial rhetorical mists they’ve always been. 

And once that fog lifts, people may once again choose liberty over tyranny.

I expect some day Jeffy will give us that post-structural version of The Turner Diaries we've been hoping for.  Or maybe his greatest achievement will be the day he sees some tweakers in a hostage situation on the TV news, yells "THIS IS IT!" like Gary Oldman in JFK, and runs stripped to the waist out his front door into a police ambush.

UPDATE 2. Comments are as usual magnificent (come on Foster, you ain't even looking). "Yeah," says Jimcima, "it really sucked when the 99 cent store that used to be between Bulgari and Tiffany down on Rodeo went out of business." zuzu and others wonder when liberals stopped being potty-mouths. (Never, says I! Even now I am working on a cognate of "slut" and "retard," a sort of ultimate weapon of Alinskyite ridicule; "sluttard," my prototype, is too cumbersome for my flow, but maybe I can train the masses to accept it, like they accepted "Thee" for "The.")

Goldstein, as usual, is a great source of inspiration. Fats Durston reacts to "attempts to ironize away the concept of self-reliance and rugged individualism":

God, if I see another movie with Bruce Willis as a caring federal bureaucrat whose agency defeats the villains with targeted food stamp distribution, I swear I am going to make my own indie film where, for once, the climactic scene will be a mano-y-mano fistfight.

Really, I should just front-page the comments and hide the posts.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about last week's Vice Presidential debate and Joe Biden's unconscionable lack of deference toward Paul Ryan. (I must say, James Taranto's Ann Althouse gag is pretty good. Who knew he had a sense of humor?)