CODE RED. The Ole Perfesser gets mad at Josh Marshall's essay on the violent tendencies on the right. Oh yeah, says the Perfesser, what about Ken Gladney and the Kennedy assassination? It's not an edifying discussion.

Actual violent political gestures are thankfully rare these days, and I don't see that they have a significant number of defenders even in the overheated environment of the blogosphere. We do see some half-assed shooty-shooty posts sometimes. I don't worry much about those leading to violence, but I do think they feed, and feed on, another tendency that is dangerous in a different way.

Each side has people who will, when exiled from power, get a little paranoid about the people who aren't. I was suspicious of Bush, but generally refrained from calling him a Nazi, except in jest, and I am famously shrill and unreasonable. About some other people's ideas I have been less circumspect. I am not immune from nor averse to a little hysterical speech.

The sort of thing that's going on now with the right is different in one regard: imputations against Obama of alien ideology -- commie, Nazi, whatever -- aren't coming exclusively from the cheap seats (though there's plenty of that). Representative Michele Bachmann talks about re-education camps. Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich talk about Obama as a euthanasiast. Congressman Paul Braun says Obama's planned expansion of federal volunteer groups like the Peace Corps is "exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany and it’s exactly what the Soviet Union did." Republican National Committee leaders tried to get Chairman Steele to escalate his denigration of Democratic policies from "collectivist" to "socialist" -- and he finally got the message. Jeb Bush says he doesn't know whether Obama is a socialist. Senator Jim DeMint says, "we’re about where Germany was before World War II where they became a social democracy." Etc.

This isn't Code Pink -- this is Republican political leadership. They're endorsing the idea that the policies of the duly elected government are not just wrong, but fundamentally illegitimate. That's why I'm disinclined to parse the funding and provenance of the tea parties and health care town halls -- what difference does it make how much FreedomWorks has to do with these eruptions when the leaders of the opposition have already declared Obama, in effect, a foreign agent?

The real danger is not violence but political dementia. The default if not official position of the opposition is that the party in power is literally the enemy of the American way of life. This also soaks up the birther, Obama-is-a-Muslim, and other cults born of a desire to negate the results of the last election. The guys who think Obama was born in Kenya may not get their citizen grand juries credentialed, but they have the comfort of knowing that their comrades don't acknowledge Obama as a real American President, either.

When the hollering started and some of these guys claimed it mean that America had conclusively rejected the Obama Presidency after seven months, I thought they were just exaggerating for political effect. Now I begin to think they really believe it. And so we find ourselves trying to right a badly listing ship of state with a large percentage of our countrymen convinced that their first order of business should be to throw the rest of us over the side.

One bright spot: the Perfesser is going on about Black Panthers in defense of the gun issue, still apparently oblivious to the historical fact that it was the Panthers that made Ronald Reagan a gun controller.

GUN NUTS. A guy brings his guns to an Obama speech. The Ole Perfesser asks, why you stressin'? Then, after considering whether "these aren’t agents provocateurs but rather militant gun-rights activists trying to counter 'denormalization,'” he asks:

Plus, if people had showed up with guns at Bush events, do you think the press would have spun it as evidence of Bush’s unpopularity?

Oh brother, the old "If it were Bush." Los Angeles Times, May 18, 2001:

Armed Man Detained in Park During Bush Jog

The Secret Service detained a man with a gun in a Des Moines park where President Bush was jogging, local police and White House officials said.

Secret Service spokesman Jim Mackin said the man was about 60 yards from Bush when he was spotted by officers. He said the man had a permit for the gun, but he was detained because he was so close to the president. Mackin said the man appeared to be in the park for reasons completely unrelated to Bush's visit.

New York Times, February 8, 2001:

Officer Shoots Armed Man Near White House Fence...

An accountant who worked for the Internal Revenue Service years ago and has been engaged in disputes with the agency fired shots outside the White House fence today and after a 10-minute standoff was shot in the knee by a Secret Service agent, officials said.

The incident sent the police and heavily armed Secret Service agents swarming across the White House grounds and into the surrounding streets about 11:30 a.m. White House officials said President Bush, who was exercising in the residence area of the White House at the time, was never in danger. After being informed of the gunfire by the Secret Service, he resumed exercising, Ari Fleischer, his press secretary, said...

Not a lot of what-if-it-were Clinton in these dispatches. But that's one of the drawbacks of the MSM which the blogosphere was built to correct.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP. It's a miscellany, offered under the excuse that it's summer and I should get to be trivial on that account, but really because I've been kept too busy to function at normal levels. You, being the real people, can be entrusted with the truth. I expect a letup or a nervous breakdown presently, after which things will go back to normal.

Meanwhile I see Ross Douthat is concerned that "the country suddenly has two political parties devoted to Mediscaring seniors," which is touching. Maybe he should be printing up large-type editions of his Sam's Club Republicans book and distributing them at senior centers. More than a few of them will think it's a government publication, and that Republicans are still in charge. Maybe it owes to my own advanced age, but I'm beginning to incline toward that explanation myself.

A SIGN OF PROGRESS. Of a sort, anyway. Rightwingers are disowning an Obama-is-Hitler sign! It'll be temporary, of course, as Obama-is-Hitler is one of their steady tropes. But at this critical moment, any outrage multiplier is useful, even if it puts them off their usual game for a few minutes.

Meanwhile the Weekly Standard's John McCormack assures his credulous readers:

Now, Dave Weigel points out that the Obama-as-Hitler posters are produced by the group of many-times Democratic presidential candidate (and absolute nutter) Lyndon LaRouche.

And David Freddoso tells us, "Don't blame conservatives for LaRouche's Obama=Hitler signs."

Almost simultaneously, the Lyndon LaRouche website tells us "Do Not Believe A Word Obama Utters" and praises the Town Brawls: "The anger is real. The hatred for the Obama policy is real." Also: "The fact is: Obama is out to commit genocide. And he's got members of Congress goose-stepping behind him."

This is a wonderful schtick: Obama's opponents consider him a Nazi, but claim his supporters are really the ones calling him a Nazi, and direct us to these "supporters," who call Obama a Nazi.

I had so little hope for health care reform that I suspected Obama's rush to pass it was an intentionally Pyrrhic plan to marginalize his enemies. If I was right, he's certainly getting his money's worth.

TRAWLING THE BACK CATALOGUE. Michael Rubin at The Corner:

Obama Still Flailing for the Clenched Fist?
Iran’s Alef News and Jahan News are reporting that the Obama administration sent the Iranian government another letter in the past couple days, reportedly with regard to the three detained Americans. The newspapers report that the Iranian government has yet to respond.

Maybe they should try sending them a cake in the shape of a key.

(See also Hanson, Victor Davis: "I think we are going to collectively sober up and realize that we just did what we always said we would never do: bargained for the release of hostages from terrorists." Sometimes, despite all evidence, I think he's trying to be funny.)

THE EMPRESS OF I SCREAM.

The Legislature, in a special session, voted to override former Gov. Sarah Palin’s veto of roughly $28 million in federal stimulus money intended for energy projects. A three-fourths majority in each chamber was needed to override the veto. The House voted 30 to 9 to accept the money, and the Senate voted 15 to 5. Ms. Palin initially said she would not accept about one-third of the $930 million designated by President Obama for Alaska, citing “strings” that could bind the state to federal mandates and increase the size of government.

Maybe she spoke truer than we thought when she said she was leaving the statehouse for Alaska's own good. The management of actual funds have nothing to do with the totally symbolic politics Palin practices. Hers is going to be the most interesting campaign since Lonesome Rhodes'.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP about the health care town brawls. The common elements of these spectacles and their defenses are familiar to regular readers of the rightblogs -- assertions of great power derived from the true will of the people, inevitably coupled with persecution mania, and of course references to Hitler and threats of civil war. I know it sounds tedious, but it's really something to see how they lug this same formula from topic to topic and from event to event like a carney wagon lugging a freakshow to the cowtowns.

I regret not having included Oliver Willis' report on the town hall held in Harold Ford's old district; Willis says this is "the only majority black district in Tennessee," yet the bellowing crowd of alleged constituents seems awfully majority-white.

GEORGE SODINI LIVES! Latest hot-button at Dr. Helen's place: irate ladies crazy-glue cheater's penis. Dr. Helen is against (so, as a practical matter, am I, and so is local law enforcement, which has charged the gluers, though not so strongly as Dr. Helen prescribes). Comments commence:

I think marriage is a joke (I have never been married and will likely never be married).Back in my casual sex days before AIDS (early 1980s), I remember how many slutty married women were around. Left, right, everywhere. I thought at the time, "What man is stupid enough to PAY FOR this woman not to work, while she's doing whatever she wants sexually?". I'd be in favor of penalties for adultery in marriage, it just is not going to happen. The trend is in the OPPOSITE direction (i.e. no-fault). There won't even be a return to Pumpkin leaving the marriage without most of the man's assets if she cheats. Sorry, it's just all a bit silly. And men can be incredibly gullible and naive.

...But then this goes with what I've always said about women all along. When you play with women, you're playing with fire...

...Men pay for women. Period. If women ever pay for men, for any reason, the man is a thief.

A story: My daughter has been married twice and divorced twice. She made off with money and treasure each time. She has taken after her mother (a very good teacher) in that for her whole adult life she has been taking money from men for her sexual favors. Including the two times she was "married". She has never once been punished or reprimanded for her behavior. She is now almost 46 y/o and finds that her body's sexual appeal has left her stranded.

This is why I approve and endorse Dr. Helen's place: so that these people have a better public forum than a Pittsburgh health club at which to address their grievances.

THE CONSERVATIVE COMEBACK PART 343,922. I see the new story is that the Obama birther story was actually spread by Obama supporters seeking to malign the loyal opposition. As a connoisseur of authentic conservative gibberish, I have to applaud; the only way they could top this would be to claim Rush Limbaugh, Jim Inholfe, Lou Dobbs et alia were kidnapped and replaced with liberal birther body doubles.

I doubt they'll bother, as the birther thing was designed as a shadow campaign anyway. The new thing is the Obama Joker Socialist poster. It was advertised as a sign of the impending overthrow of Obama when there were only two photos of locations where the actual poster had been actually posted; now that there are six or seven such photos, we can't understand why the White House has not yet been liberated.

Confederate Yankee does an odd, rather forced riff on it:

Knowing the universal desire to turn a quick buck, I imagine that it won't be too long before someone comes up with the idea to PhotoShop President Obama as other movie villains.

Just be care which villain you decide to use.

While Two-Face is a logic choice (and an extension of the Batman-related theme), other selections might just earn you a visit from people who don't smile much.

Then he shows a picture of Bullseye from Daredevil. Because, haw haw, get it? Pew pew. See, he was just telling you what would be a bad idea. He bets you're getting mad at him now, which makes you a liberal fascist. Heh. Pew pew!

I'm beginning to see it this way: Republicans were in power for so long that their adherents haven't had any experience of exile and humiliation since their teen years. Thus their only models for a response to it are flaming bags of dogshit and ring-and-run.

BEHIND EVERY SILVER LINING, A DARK CLOUD. Bill Clinton went to North Korea and got two Americans freed from its prisons by issuing an apology on their behalf. This reminds us of Jesse Jackon's independent mission to Damascus in 1983, by means of which he got Navy Lieutenant Robert O. Goodman back from the Syrians. President Ronald Reagan, who had not approved of the mission, nonetheless had the brains to say of it afterwards, "You can't quarrel with success."



Our current rightbloggers, on the other hand, seem to think Reagan was a pussy.

"Color me disgusted," says Macsmind. "As you know I’ve been married to a Korean for 26 years, and I am well familiar with the conditions inside the North." (Blink twice for "I am being tortured," Mrs. Macsmind! It's not like back home!) "Put it this way, when the truth comes out, the regmine will make Stalin’s and Hilter’s look pale in comparison." Yes, and that's a grand reason to be disgusted that two Americans were freed from this hellhole.

"I want them out, but this way?" says Atlas Shrugs, who would obviously have preferred World War III. "Apparently the price was this photo-op," cries Wizbang, showing a photo of Clinton sitting next to Kim-Jong Il, which will irretrievably disturb the international balance of power. Adds: "Perhaps it's only coincidence that President Obama's approval ratings, and those of Obamacare, are in free-fall. The release of these two journalists, nearly five months after their arrest, does take the focus off of lots of bad news for The White House lately, if only temporarily." That bastard! Kim must be with ACORN, somehow.

Some, we must say, are working the more laudable Questions Remain angle. "I can’t help but wonder if anything tangible was exchanged and that has me holding my applause until the other shoe drops," says Darleen Click of Protein Wisdom. Thus, when the Norks invade Middle America as a result of Clinton's treason, she can claim plausible deniability.

Others look for damage to Hitlery. "Pretty sad, that it took Bill Clinton to do Hillary Clinton’s work," says Fire Andrea Mitchell. "Apparently it took Bill Clinton going into Hussein Obama mode blaming America for basically everything to get those Lee and Ling pardoned. Its no wonder why dictators eat this stuff up and Hussein never disapoints." "It’s probably a little like the Bill-Hill relationship," says Jules Crittenden of the mission. "He pretends to be sorry for hostile acts and says it’ll never happen again." Haw haw! Even though he managed to cheat on her, he's still whipped! How awful it must be to be Bill Clinton instead of Jules Crittenden, who posts pictures of women instead of getting his cock sucked by them.

The Conservative American sets up an elaborate joke:

‘Exiled’ former President Billy Bob Clinton has “Negotiated” the release of two young female interns from Nokomon, just as we predicted... We applaud, of course, the release of both Laura Ling and Euna Lee and we wish them speedy and safe travel home to their loved ones. And, yes, we know they are journalists not interns. It’s a joke aimed at Clinton, not the two women.

Presumably his readers laugh in slow motion. But Questions Remain! "So what Did Clinton REALLY offer in exchange for the women? (Why am I reminded of John Belushi asking, 'How much for your daughter?' in the movie, The Blues Brothers?)" YOUR daughter, America! Think about that while these two bitches enjoy their "freedom"!

Prairie Pundit does visual analysis, sees double treason:

The photo that accompanies the story shows a gloating Kim apparently happy with the groveling of two US Presidents. That appears to be the happiest I have ever seen him. Clinton's look is one of grim determination. The chances of reaching a negotiated settlement of issues between the US and North Korea still remain remote and if such settlements are agreed to, the chances that North Koreans will honor them are also remote.

And pictures don't lie. Look at how sick FDR looked at Yalta! It was a cinch Russia would outperform us on the world stage.

Oh, and the Big Boys? National Review, after very briefly noting the rescue, refers us back to John Bolton's article about what a catastrophe the meeting preemptively was. The Ole Perfesser seems not to heave heard the news at all, or what spin he should adopt, hehindeed. Which you have to admit was the smart play -- it's a wonder more of them didn't avail it.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the state of birther play. The immediate surge of comments from people convinced that the President is an alien suggests a high level of message discipline. One writes, "I think I've figured out why Obama won't release the actual birth certificate, thus stoking the fires of the 'birther' movement. It's so that pathetic lefties, to whom the most important thing in the world is to believe that they're smarter and cooler than middle and working-class white people, will have something they can sneer at, day after day..." I figured they'd catch on eventually, yet it doesn't seem to have convinced them to try another strategy. Maybe all of us just want attention.

OBAMA PENIS OF SCANDAL! Atlas Shrugs suggests conservatives fight lies about Sarah Palin with "legitimate stories" about Barack Obama. For example, "why not tell the truth about Obama and his reported strange sexual predilections? My question is, it is well known that Obama allegedly was involved with a crack whore in his youth. Very seedy stuff."

In come some wonderful reader offerings:

It's not like one must dig very far to witness his predatory weirdness.
Here in an official White House photo, BO proudly displays his chubby after touching Crowley's thigh. Yuck...

Amazingly, no one mentions Cheney's dick, though another reader says, "In body language terms, the only one showing off his manhood is Crowley. His legs are wide apart... Crowley is the only 'man' in the group." Also:

and, as far as his chubby goes, please, everyone, do not forget the series of photos of obama chasing a woman reporter down the aisle of his campaign jet, clutching an obvious hard on in his trousers.

the series of pictures shows a disturbance at the front of the plane where he is talking on the phone, an aghast woman reporting retreating from obama down the aisle from where she was sitting in the seats next to him, and obama grabbing and flaunting his obviously hard dick.

pamela should be able to come up with the series of photos, because i believe that she ran them here.

The post turns up ("The man lifts his leg, pivots, and thrusts his pelvis"), but the original YouTube video has been removed by the user. Clearly the user was clubbed into submission -- but with what?

Once these get out, no one's going to pay any attention to that birther shit.

THEIR BARREL HAS NO BOTTOM, AND THEY'RE STILL GOIN' DOWN. The White House released this nice photo of Sgt. Crowley helping the hobbled Henry Louis Gates down the White House steps while Obama walks in front of them. When I saw Rich Lowry's ridiculous caption in The Corner -- "Who Would You Rather Have a Beer With? The conscientious guy, concerned with helping those around him? Or the oblivious guy, striding majestically alone?" -- I checked the source and thought, hmm, American Thinker -- Lowry's really bottom-feeding this afternoon.

Later I read the AT rant: "Barack Obama, heedless of the infirmities of his friend and fellow victim of self-defined racial profiling, strides ahead on his own. So who is compassionate? And who is so self-involved and arrogant that he is oblivious?" When his fellow-travelers began to link his post, he puffed out his chest even more: "I think this photo constitutes another major Obama blunder."

Before you could say "Obamaracist blundergaffe", the photographic evidence of Obama's hatred for his own kind, unwittingly leaked by White House publicists who are normally so good at covering his evil tracks, became a full-blown Thing among the brethren. A number of them gathered 'round the photo, and divined portents and meanings therein. "Obama looks like he’s ready to get these two and the awkward situation they represent out of his house," says Jules Crittenden. "Skreeeee skree muslin skreeee," says Atlas Shrugs.

Wake Up America compares this photo of Obama not helping someone to a photo Bush helping someone, and believes it proves something, which he invites his readers to fill in (pushes in nose, pushes out lower lip, sticks out tongue). This becomes a popular favorite in his community.

Dr. Melissa Clothier, Ed Driscoll, and others get in on it, as does the Washington Times, which calls Obama walking down the steps a "gaffe."

Mark Steyn appears at The Corner to apprise his colleague Lowry that the photo has "has gone around the world, and has been generally considered to be worth the proverbial thousand words" -- that is to say, now resides in the scrapbooks of rightwing diehards alongside their pictures of Obama as a bushman and "Ashley Told the Truth" posters.

Clearly Obama should have wrestled Crowley for the right to help Gates, like Tony Randall did with that Boy Scout in the credit sequence of The Odd Couple.

To call this dog-whistle politics does discredit to dogs, who have good instincts.



(Above: Photo of Negro soldier playing "Goin' Home" at FDR's funeral. That none of the other mourners offers him a Kleenex proves Democrats hate black people.)

UPDATE. It just occurred to me: have you ever noticed how many pictures there are of Tina Turner smiling in the presence of Ike Turner? Using the rightblogger standard, this proves she was lying when she said he used to beat her up.

OBAMA'S MEDAL OF FREEDOM TREASON. Did a short roundup at Runnin' Scared of rightwing reactions to Obama's Medal of Freedom picks. I see they're still mad at Desmond Tutu's unfortunate cracks about Jews. Well, 'twas ever thus -- who doesn't recall the ceaseless re-examination of Bill Cosby's extramarital affairs when he won the Medal in 2002?

Anyway, when it comes to anti-Semitic honorees, Walt Disney -- class of '64 -- will always be my favorite, especially as described in this delightful White Power site article ("It is easy to envision the 'hick' from a Missouri farm recalling all the stories of Jewish treachery and perfidy he had heard in his Midwestern upbringing"). It may not be strictly the truth, but then, neither was Pocahontas.

Debbie Schlussel's is by far the cream of the crop; she doesn't even like the breast cancer fighter lady and thinks Jack Kemp was a fake conservative. Schlussel must wake up excited every morning. She's like that kid in Reagan's "there must be a pony" anecdote, but instead of looking for the pony, she's always looking for the shit.

SHORTER JONAH GOLDBERG: Liberal scientists want us to die, so they're wasting time on this global warming baloney when meteors are the real menace. Here, intern, put in some P.J. O'Rourke-type similes and send it to TownHall. But don't make them too good -- we don't want anyone to catch on. (h/t wonkette)

BIRTHER -- WITH AN EXPLANATION. We have officially entered the age of the crypto-birther. Andrew McCarthy livens the pages of National Review -- where birtherism was allegedly debunked but, we can see by now, is merely the birthplace of its new cover story -- with new schtick. The first part of McCarthy's con job -- a yap about how Barry wouldn't let us call him Hussein even though he's a big fat Muslim, what a liar -- is almost like a primer for the New Birtherism: it's not the (we're not saying it's a) crime -- it's the cover-up! And then, the literal nut graf:

The editorial desire to put to rest the “Obama was born in Kenya” canard is justifiable. The overwhelming evidence is that Obama was born an American citizen on Aug. 4, 1961, which almost certainly makes him constitutionally eligible to hold his office.

Almost certainly! But -- QUESTIONS REMAIN! Later, "This certification is not the same thing as the certificate," etc.

Some of the brethren hear the dog-whistle loud and clear: Marathon Pundit, while affecting distance from the conspiracy ("I believe that Obama was born in Hawaii"), nonetheless is convinced by McCarthy's penetrating analysis to demand, "Okay, Barry, cough it up. Let's see your birth certificate."

See, he's not one of those nuts: he has the good sense to quote the magazine that rebutted the birthers before going birther himself.

You can have the bow-tied twit version from Roger Kimball who, while declaring himself "sick of the Obama birth certificate wheeze," gets quickly to the "and yet, and yet..." His alleged concern is Obama's mendacity -- proven by third-hand accusations that Obama inflated his resume regarding his job at Business International Corporation; why, he was merely a "junior copyeditor"! -- which leads Kimball to assert that Obama has "consistently misled the public about his personal history." I mean, if a man will lie about his first job out of college, what won't he lie about?

I think Doghouse Riley said it well in comments to the last post on this:

"Full of shit" doesn't cover it. The phrase suggests a world in which being full of shit would be contraindicated, where anyone of sound mind would avoid it, in which "shit" would lie in opposition to "gold," or "delicious snack cakes," or, metaphorically, Facts, and where one would try one's damnedest to avoid being filled with shit... That is, it's a real-world phrase, and Real is not the world these people inhabit, and hasn't been for a long time.

They're hard at work on a sort of homemade mind trick that will allow them to simultaneously denounce and disseminate fraudulent information. It's thoroughly transparent to normal people, but at least it will help hold the thicker fellow travelers who are either embarrassed by birtherism or wondering why the White People's League hasn't stormed the White House with a rope.

UPDATE. Someone named Mark Joseph has turned this nonsense into a Zen riddle: "The only thing weirder than the Birthers are the anti-Birthers, who blame the Birthers for being conspiracy theorists yet actively feed the conspiracy by refusing to call for President Obama to release his birth certificate." This is very symmetrical, and suggests the obsessively concentric artworks sometimes created by mental patients. He also claims "most Americans" are "beginning to wonder why the president doesn't put this one to rest once and for all" -- a fond hope, certainly, which regrettably comes without polling data -- and compares Obama to Mark Sanford. Do these guys even know any normal people?

AS NIGHT FOLLOWS DAY. At National Review, which yesterday allegedly "bailed on the birthers," Mark Krikorian:

The whole birther thing is lunacy, and I'm glad NRO smacks it down so thoroughly. But Glynn Custred of Prop. 209 fame elaborates, in an e-mail, on a point briefly mentioned in the NRO editorial:

The question of Barack Obama's birth certificate has provoked a surpisingly aggressive response from the White House and near hysteria from Obama supporters. If the question is so crazy, and especially since conservatives have joined the Obama supporters in their condemnation of those who asked them (Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coulter, the National Review), why all the fuss?

Promoted by the Ole Perfesser, of course. Soon the world will know who the real villains of the birther story are -- and it's not the people who believe in it and promote it!

I knew they were full of shit, but I really thought they'd wait a few days before proving me right.

THE NEVER-ENDING STORY. It was strategically necessary for National Review to abjure the birthers. They have been giving their movement and the party to which it is attached some bad publicity, which Democrats had been exploiting. In its current, fragmented state, the conservative movement cannot be said to have leadership, but National Review at least has a historical place in it. Though Rush Limbaugh plays with birtherism and Lou Dobbs stumps for it, the magazine's demurrer allows critics like Alex Koppelman to say that "the right bails on Birthers."

You'd like to think so. But these ideas, if we can so dignify them, don't die, but merely hibernate. They were declaring FDR a socialist in the 1930s; after a blessedly long interval, during which this was only whispered in their salons, they have taken to declaring FDR a socialist again. As someone once said, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.

You can see it burrowing even in the hour of birtherism's alleged defeat. National Review takes care to mention that, as far as they know, the birth certificate story "originated with a Hillary Clinton supporter." It's one of the many knocks on Democrats the authors use to help their readers take the pill, but it's also something they can come back to when they're reassessing the evidence. After all, it didn't come from their labs, so there might be something in it they've missed; and didn't Henry Waxman tip his hand once in an unguarded moment? There are no coincidences, people.

Their movement colleagues are less clever. Macsmind suggests that Clinton may be behind the present birther movement and "may very well be working somehow behind the scenes to sink Obama’s plans." He also mocks the validation of "Hawaii’s Health Director, and Barack Obama supporter" who "has 'certified' his birth certificate. 'It’s there I saw it!' Guess that settles that." Eventually he says, "who cares," which preserves his plausible deniability, and when it all comes back he can show off the quotes around "certified" as proof that he was never really taken in.

There remain plenty of folks out there -- including the esteemed Tom Maguire -- who have no need for such games, and will keep hope alive. They may not enjoy a full birther Restoration, but this will stay in their bag of dirt -- along with Kathleen Willey's cat, the Whitey tapes, and other such detritus -- to be sprinkled at the margins when the next big push comes around. Count on WHERE'S THE BIRTH CERTIFICATE signs at the 2012 Republican Convention, at Palin revival meetings, at Tea Parties, and everywhere else the boobs may take the bait.

GOLDBERG RETURNS! Jonah Goldberg is back from a European vacation, where I imagine he made Clark Griswold look like Bernard Berenson, to bring some life to The Corner with a breathtaking series of inane posts. There's one in which he compares the Henry Louis Gates case to the Tawana Brawley case -- the only evident similarity between them being that the principals were black -- and concludes that liberals don't care about the truth. There's another in which he says Obama's taste for golf betrays a "double standard," though the only clue as to what he might mean is that "poppa Bush's golf outings during a very minor recession hurt him terribly in his reelection bid," which would make the holder of the double standard the U.S. electorate.

I would be embarrassed to mention his admission of germ paranoia if he hadn't brought it up himself. Be warned; it leads to a series, ending with reader reminiscences about how they couldn't get enough wiping paper in foreign countries. There's a psychology paper in this somewhere.

Eventually he is made to focus on the current events analysis that has justly made him famous. John J. Miller comes in complaining that from what he's seen, the new G.I, Joe movie doesn't have enough American military uniforms to suit him, not to fulfill Hollywood's historic mission of "public diplomacy of creating goodwill abroad." (I should think they'd be grateful to us just for the loud, ugly crap to watch on dates.) You know Goldberg couldn't resist this, and gasses about the commies in Hollywood trying to make our fighting men look bad, and in so doing makes a passing comment about the Bourne movies that spurs a reader to remark that the anti-American content is present in the Bourne novels as well. Another reader says Hollywood totally anti-Americanized the property. This puts Goldberg into a fog, from which he is stirred by Jonathan Adler, who asserts that "There's plenty of evidence Hollywood leans left, but the Bourne movies are not among them."

Goldberg grasps the nettle, which is on a rose bush in an entirely different county:

Jonathan - You write: "There's plenty of evidence Hollywood leans left, but the Bourne movies are not among them."

To the extent I understand your argument, it seems to be that because they made a good movie from a good book, and despite the fact it is a leftwing interpretation of the book, it cannot count as proof that Hollywood is left-leaning. How does that work?

As Goldberg is a legacy pledge, and because they are both talking gibberish, Adler is obliged to respond with the slightly exasperated deference of bearded doctors in Three Stooges shorts ("My point [perhaps inartfully made] is that the decision to make the Bourne movies is not evidence of Hollywood's ideological leanings..."). Fortunately for him, it's getting late and Goldberg has a date with the director's cut of Road House.

I'm glad to see him back. The Corner is pretty tedious without comic relief.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP about the Gates controversy, which in the Bizarro universe that is my beat is all about the racism of Henry Louis Gates and Barack Obama, and the necessity of absolute deference to authority unless you're Tea Partying, in which case it's all groovy revolution. Since I wrote it I see that the 911 caller in the case has denied making a racial classification of the suspect, which leads Legal Insurrection to suspect intimidation: "Whalen has been pilloried by the blogosphere as being a white racist neighbor (actually passer-by)... So it is natural, but unfortunate, that Whalen falls into the trap of playing the skin-tone game." Thus do our liberal racists thwart conservative attempts to get beyond race. Jack Dunphy does his bit by explaining to Obama and his "Ivy League pals" that if "you're running your mouth about your rights and your history of oppression and what have you" to a cop, you're likely to get shot. Somehow I think they already knew that.

I'VE SEEN THE FUTURE, BROTHER, IT IS MURDER. As farewell addresses go, Sarah Palin's won't make people forget George Washington's. She praised her own truncated term of office, and the troops, whom she used to attack the media. She also attacked Hollywood, which enlists "delicate, tiny, very talented celebrity starlets" in their "anti-Second Amendment causes," against which "patriots will protect our individual guaranteed right to bear arms." She warned against "enslavement to big central government," because "it can't make you happy or healthy or wealthy or wise," which comes instead from "God's grace helping those who help themselves." She portrayed her resignation as another way of guarding Alaska "like that grizzly guards her cubs, as a mother naturally guards her own." She also encouraged supporters to "enjoy the ride."

This sent me back to the transcript of her resignation remarks. I don't think I've ever seen an official transcript with so many words rendered in ALL CAPS. ("I wish you'd hear MORE from the media of your state's progress and how we tackle Outside interests - daily - SPECIAL interests that would stymie our state.") She praised Alaska, her performance on energy management and "bi-partisan Ethics Reform," and claimed to have "slowed the rate of government growth" -- in fairness she has reduced the state's ranking from largest corporate taxer to fifth-highest. Also, "we broke ground on the new prison." She complained of her legal bills and the media.

I fully expect her to be a major force in the Republican Party, and that her jumble of resentments and uplift will strongly inform its national political approach.

IN THE GHETTO. There's a book out called I Can’t Believe I’m Sitting Next to a Republican! Christian Toto enthusiastically reviews it:

Nearly every field features liberals unwilling to consider “evil Republicans“ as peers. Conservative TV scribe Burt Prelutsky tells the author that liberals don’t “have to listen or discuss. They’re the good guys, and there is no other side"...

School administrators won’t leave their ideological perches, but it’s a parent’s duty to fight back if only to prevent the problem from worsening.

Conservative professionals not named Limbaugh or Hannity risk plenty by speaking plainly about their political ideas, according to Stein. Right-leaning psychiatrists get ostracized by their fellow doctors. Professors seeking the fast — or even turtle-like — track to tenure better plot out a Plan B.

I thought these guys were populists, yet they mainly discover prejudice against their kind while toiling in academia, TV, TV reviewing, and psychiatry. We also hear of the indignities they suffer in Hollywood and in journalism, and at "cocktail parties." There are no reports of abuse from sawmills and factories. Are they treated well in such places, I wonder, or have they just never been to them?

Toto concludes:

What Stein wants is a world where liberals respect conservatives enough to break bread with them without trotting out the “fascist” label. Sounds like a modest request, right?

We may be years away from such a place in society, if it ever comes to pass. But for now conservatives can take solace in the fact that they’re not alone. Stein does a credible job of illustrating precisely that with enough humor to cushion the pain.

I'm trying in vain to recall any equivalent tales of woe, book-length or otherwise, from liberals during the Reagan and Bush years. When Republicans ruled the earth, I'm sure a few of us must have felt misunderstood and isolated. Yet we never managed to make an industry out of complaining of it.

Of course, conservatives also complain when they hold power. The poet laureate of the style during the reign of W was Alan Bromley, who seemed never to go anywhere without encountering torrents of liberal abuse. Peter Berkowitz and the genius behind Mallard Fillmore have done some fine work in this vein, too -- but I better pull back now or we'll be here all night. (I will say that other authors in the genre find also that liberals like to beat up other liberals. What hateful people we must be! It's a wonder anyone talks to us, let alone votes for our candidates. Yet here we are.)

How this wallowing in victim status may effect their electoral chances I can't say -- though I do observe that nobody likes a whiner -- but it can't be good for their tender psyches.

ROD DREHER'S IMAGISTERIUM. Former film critic Rod Dreher hears about a movie (by the auteur of "one of my favorite Catholic movies," yet) and starts talking censorship. But with an explanation! First:

Unlike in the US, censorship is legal [in Britain]. You may not believe in censorship -- and please, let's not have that fruitless debate here, American readers; the US government is effectively powerless to censor anyway, so it's not a real issue -- but consider the moral point the critic is making here in his essay...

You'd think that were that as far as the c-word is concerned. But hold on, Brother Rod's comin' round again:

As I said, in the US, we haven't got censorship in any effective way, so I see this debate for us as being one about what we choose to censor -- that is, to treat as completely incompatible with civilized discourse and bounds of art.

It's as if he didn't have a dictionary, or the "c" section had been ripped out of it.

The American version of the critic's point would go something like this: In America, discussions of a film's moral qualities, with regard to declaring it "obscene," comes down to the feeble principle that if it doesn't harm children, there are no grounds to judge it so harshly.

What happens when a society loses the will and the capability of condemning "art" of this sort? What happens when there are no grounds to ban snuff films, or at least pornographic films that simulate raping and then murdering a victim, depicted onscreen for pure pleasure. What happens to that society?

We get the mail, go to work, to the mall, pay taxes, raise families... sorry, what was the question again?

We are a civilization that lacks the courage to condemn. We lack the vision to see clearly, and the spine to damn what is damnable. This is not going to end well for us.

We've been hearing this since the turn of the last century and somehow we managed to win World War II. As to this whole proposed discussion about what movie the brethren would choose to censor (none of them take the bait, though one offers a hilarious condemnation of the "Catholic movie" Dreher starts by praising), he might as well have asked them what underage movie star they'd like to fuck. The ensuing debate would have been as bootless, but a lot more interesting.

MORE PREDICTIONS OF SUCCESS, MODIFIED FOR NEW REALITIES. Joel Kotkin has an essay about the failure of the blue states and the prospect therefore of red states surging to bring Republicans back to power. To the surprising extent that it relies on long-term data -- that "red-state strongholds such as the Dakotas, Idaho, Texas, Utah, and North Carolina, dominated the list of fastest-growing regions recently compiled for Forbes," versus the "decades-long meltdown" of blue states -- one might ask why this historic growth did not elect John McCain and a Republican Congress in 2008. Kotkin briefly mentions "the failure that stuck to Republicans in the wake of the Bush presidency," but with becoming reticence doesn't say anything more about it, except to predict the same thing happening to Democrats, presumably for the same reasons.

The future is unwritten and anything can happen, but if you're going to mine demographics for electoral gold you might take a moment to consider why they failed you in the last test. Part of the reason, which Kotkin misses, is that the red state growth of which he speaks has not been limited to villages and hamlets, but largely occurred in and around cities, some of which grew less red in consequence. One of the fastest-growing urban areas in the U.S. in recent years is Raleigh-Cary, North Carolina in Wake County. Wake went mildly for Bush in 2004, but strongly for Obama in 2008 -- enough to turn the state.

Kotkin shares the tendency of many political demographers toward wishful thinking. Back in 2004 some of them thought the GOP could get a lift by splitting Texas into five states. A look at the map showed that some of those new states would be Democratic, and while the Republicans might have gotten a few new senators out of the scheme, they would have given up some electoral college votes in the process. It was schtick, but pleasing to the sort of people meant to be pleased by it. As I said, anything can happen, but these games, while encouraging to the Outs at any given moment, tend to have less impact than the state of the nation when the actual polls open.

There Kotkin has a better chance, as the economy may well suck in 2010 and 2012. But on that head he relies on standard Republican class-war rhetoric about "media pundits and café society": that Democrats favor a "creative class" solution (which is somehow also supposed to fatten the "public-sector unions" -- maybe he thinks the Freelancers Union and the Writers Guild are public-sector), which in his view cannot work, and that if the economy does recover, one of his sources tells him, "People will compare and move to the places that are affordable and don’t have the fundamental tough tax and regulatory structures." You have to wonder why they wouldn't have done that already -- especially since Kotkin keeps telling us that they have. But he is prepared for that: "a generation of out-migration may be slowing down temporarily due to the recession," he says -- an odd note of discouragement against his many claims of ever-burgeoning red-state vitality.

Part of the problem has to do with the purpose of exercises such as Kotkin's, which is not so much to lay groundwork for a genuine Republican resurgence as to predict one so that Republicans will feel better about themselves. Just before the last election, Kotkin was going on about the "new localism," in which the recession would make "individuals and corporations look not to the global stage but closer to home, concentrating and congregating on the Main Streets where we choose to live -- in the suburbs, in urban neighborhoods or in small towns." As part of this pitch was the reliance on extended family -- "This clustering of families, after decades of dispersion, will spur more localism" -- you might easily have gotten the impression Kotkin was expecting citizens to cling to their traditional homes. Now that politics demands a different interpretation, he posits us as atomized seekers after financial opportunity, ready to blow off Mom and Pop for the sunny vistas of Scottsdale, Arizona.

Prediction is a mug's game under the best of circumstances, but if you keep dishing out visions while working a slide rule, there's always a chance that fortune will provide circumstances that make you look good. But that's not the same thing as having a good argument.

WHY LIBERTARIANISM IS BASICALLY A WHITE THING. Jonah Goldberg of National Review on the Henry Louis Gates thing and his alleged reader mail about it:

About half the readers think Gates is hilariously in the wrong. The other half, give or take, think that the cop was transparently to blame for the whole mess. That's a gross generalization of several dozen e-mails, but I think it reflects how conservatives, like Americans generally, are of two views when it comes to cops. One side is inclined to distrust them, see them as potential abusers of authority — mere men with badges and guns...

Goldberg doesn't provide any examples of conservatives who back Gates, which just shows how lazy he is, since such "examples" could be easily produced if Goldberg would unclog his piehole long enough to order an intern to create them. (Needless to say, Goldberg himself does not back Gates, whom he thinks was "trying to bully the cop.")

If Goldberg had to mine the blogosphere for examples, though. this would have been much harder to manage. I have been all over the rightwing blogs and have seen very, very few conservatives who thinks Gates was in the right (Tigerhawk is about the best of these). A few reluctantly accept that Gates might be telling the truth. (Goldberg's colleague Robert VerBruggen accepts that the arrest was absurd, but sourly adds, "Now, I'm sure, Harvard will be holding all sorts of special counseling sessions for everyone to whine some more," as if Gates were pulling some mau-mau bullshit by being in the right.)

Most of the brethren take the attitude of American Power -- that Gates should have been grateful that the police were diligent enough to arrest him, and that his complaints prove that he is racist against white people. VDARE agrees: "if anyone was being a racist here, it’s Gates." When they hear another famous black person is involved, they really go crazy ("Big Mouth Al Sharpton Has a New Friend").

BitsBlog goes further and asks if Gates is actually a scholar. He is angered that people refer to him as "the nation’s pre-eminent black scholar," and (for want of a better word) explains:

Adolf Hitler was purposed to have dismissed Albert Eintien’s Jewish Theory of Relativity, as if atoms recognized ethnic bounds. Like atoms do not recognize ethnicity, neither does scholorship. If a person is indeed a scholar there no need to preface ths distincton. It is not like truth is the least biet dependant on race.

So when the Associated Press describeS Henry Louis Gates Jr as a black scholar, you have wonder about Gates scholarship.

No wonder the cop found Gates' Harvard ID insufficient.

Many conservatives also mention they never would have said such harsh things to officers of the law as Gates said, which sort of conflicts with their self-image as tea-party revolutionaries in the mold of Nathan Hale.

As a general rule, you may on occasion see these people speak against official overreach if their own kind is subject to it. But it is rare that you see them deliver any of this libertarian, anti-statist love to a liberal -- and vanishingly rare that you see them give it to a black person, for some reason I just haven't for the life of me been able to figure out.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, considering reactions to the Sotomayor hearings. As usual, the upshot is a victory for the right -- either in that Sotomayor had to pretend (or really be) less lefty than our communist President really wanted, or that she will inevitably overstep when on the Court and finally awaken the sheeple. Ron Schenck says it's no big deal: "She will be a reliable pro-Roe vote, but she may disappointingly surprise some of her most ardent supporters when she gives a little bit to the other side," and "she is not the worse we could have gotten; and she replaces one of the worst on the Court, so the balance won’t change." He is referring, of course, to William O. Douglas. Nonetheless Schenck counsels his compatriots to call their senators and to "Pray! I do believe prayer changes things -- even Supreme Court justices!" This is an opposition strategy I can thoroughly endorse. It should be noted that Schenck is something of a moderate, and more radical factions may have other plans.

WALTER CRONKITE, R.I.P. First I have to credit those rightbloggers who have been gracious about Cronkite's passing, or have observed de mortuis nil nisi bonum.

Naturally there have been plenty of assholes. MacRanger announces, "Pinko Cronkite Bites the Dust. And good riddance. The original 'surrendercrat' is dead. Walter Cronkite along with congress caused us to lose in Vietnam." That the guy thinks Cronkite helped lose the war because of an anecdote about a President who, far from being influenced to bug out of Vietnam, slipped from office and left it to his Republican successors to bollocks up, would alone justify discounting his slur if his whole career hadn't already; to paraphrase Ray Collins in The Magnificent Ambersons, if he weren't so thoughtless we might think him rather offensive.

Not much less thoughtless but offensive nonetheless are John Podhoretz and Say Anything, who suggest that Cronkite could learn a thing or two from bloggers, of all people. "There are no Walter Cronkites any more, and while I bear personal animosity to Cronkite himself, good riddance to that era," says the latter (I assume no slip). "But to have a big, giant, sloppy mish-mash of information available for the public to pick through than a carefully managed stream of news being spoon-fed to us by talking heads on television who became so trusted nobody dared question them."

From that last sentence fragment I guess that he means the mish-mash is better. While I enjoy the big scrum as much as the next guy, as my coverage ceaselessly shows, it is also full of bullshit, and there are disadvantages as well as advantages to the caveat lector approach, particularly considering the dangerously elevated public relations and permanent campaign components of the blogosphere.

But let's not forget what these people are discounting: the career of a man who did local reporting when there was no internet, and barely phone service, to assist him; who went to North Africa and Europe to cover a hot war (and, in his middle age, Vietnam); who anchored a news organization which, whatever else you want to say about it, went everywhere for news; and whose work won the respect of real journalists. This blog thing we're doing, it's okay, but what Cronkite did was on an entirely different level. It's amazing that, in the face of all evidence, any of these pissants have the nerve to claim they've surpassed it.

Read this, basement boys. You have anything that compares? Kerning, perhaps?

UPDATE. Ain't no death-dis like a Christian death-dis -- The Anchoress:

After his retirement, I would read profiles and interviews with Cronkite, and I found myself thinking of him – even when I was still a “liberal Democrat” – as something of an elitist.

Yuh don't say.

So, RIP, Mr. Cronkite. I will not blame you for the media excesses we will have to endure for the next week to ten days.

Because what would be the point? She will blame instead Hitler/Obama.

NEXT WEEK: HOW FREE CONCERTS IN CENTRAL PARK SAP THE NATION'S WILL. At City Journal, Myron Magnet denounces not only that bastard FDR, as is the style these days, but also that bastard Fiorello LaGuardia. He attacks the "European-style New York" Roosevelt and LaGuardia engendered as anti-democratic and destructive of self-reliance.

When it comes to actual negative results from our "struggling under the accumulated burden of eight decades of 'progressive' government" in New York, though -- and eight decades should be enough time to produce a good dystopia, I think -- he mainly tells us that it's expensive, and that rich people pay too much for it.

He does claim that New York's "public services, even vital ones like the subway, work badly" -- compared to what? Public transit in Tucson? -- "because they operate less for the convenience of their users than for the sake of their unionized, overpaid employees," and because we have "no democratic levers of change, such as voters’ initiatives and referenda." But he fails to tell us where public services work significantly better, probably because New York doesn't compare well with other places. He might suggest low-tax New Hampshire, for example, but even the most conservative governance is not going to make us resemble that sparsely-populated, rural state in any case (though I like the idea of Town Meeting Day). And Magnet is presumably too smart to offer as an example that Valhalla of "voters’ initiatives and referenda," California.

You can just imagine his exasperation that New York no longer has the high levels of crime and grime of previous decades. Then this would be so much easier to put over! Oddly, the name "Giuliani" does not appear in his essay. Maybe Magnet denounced him, too, and the editors cut it out; or he started to praise the former Mayor, but realized that this would fit badly with his chronicle of decades of urban degeneracy.

So Magnet retreats to rhetoric ("As opposed to FDR’s immense governmental machine throbbing mightily at the end of history, how much grander is Edmund Burke’s vision of society," etc.) and warnings of future perils and further shores. Our allegedly socialistic regime will yet destroy our democratic spirit, he warns -- "Once you start talking about government’s equitable distribution of wealth... you have begun to leave democracy behind" -- just as it has in ruined Europe's, such as it was. He has plenty of horrible examples of genuinely anti-democratic behavior from there -- such as "France prosecuting Brigitte Bardot, and Switzerland and Italy prosecuting Oriana Fallaci, for anti-Muslim statements" -- but no convincing argument that they're coming to pass here. Couldn't he have mentioned our bicycle lanes? They've got to be will-sapping, somehow

The worst part is when he describes, at great length, the insufficient fighting spirit of Dutch and British soldiers. You can tell he wants to say that we're catching it, too. But to paraphrase Bogie, there are certain sections of New York, Magnet, where I wouldn't advise you to try and pontificate.

IT'S BIRTHERIFFIC! The tale of the soldier who refused to serve in Afghanistan on the grounds that Obama was born on foreign soil and is therefore not President -- an evasion of duty the soldier apparently had a right to pull as a reservist, which fact he initially concealed in order to drum up publicity for his cause -- has done us the favor of drawing out some heretofore unrevealed birther bloggers. I didn't know, for instance, that Tom Maguire of Just One Minute was one of them, but I may be forgiven for missing that as he's obviously trying to have it both ways:

AS TO THE BIRTHER CONSPIRACIES: I have no idea what the current state of play with the birther conspiracies might be (and I am not sure I want to find out), but the I will reiterate the one idea I might be able to pass off as original - Obama's mother and maternal grandparents would not have been cooking the paperwork on Obama's citizenship status in 1961 in order to preserve his Presidential viability in 2008; they would have been doing so in order to enhance their own chances in a custody scuffle with the Kenyan father...

Maguire's not like those nuts -- he's got an original conspiracy theory! And one with which he harasses poor, sane David Weigel at the Independent ("In his comments section Dave Weigel implicitly accedes to the notion that the Dunhams had a powerful motive to fudge Obama's citizenship... My follow-up comment is being blocked there, at least for now..."). This is a great way to show the world that you're not nuts, though maybe Maguire should march around outside Weigel's apartment with a sign that says "RELEASE THE MAGUIRE COMMENTS" to really cement the impression.

DirectorBlue has an even more wizardly fake-out: "Well, I'm certainly no conspiracy theorist when it comes to Barack Obama's birthplace, having done my best to help debunk the birth certificate controversy. But this article, from Ghana's leading newspaper, certainly won't help dull the outcry any."

Riddlemethis at The Astute Bloggers is more forthrightly in for the big win. Learning that the recalcitrant soldier had lost a Security Services gig with the DOD, Riddlemethis roars, "Is this what can expect from our DOD and the Obama administration: intimidation, termination, and bullying. Seems that Obama has a very large problem on his hands and has really got to show the birth certificate and everything sealed for that matter." Obama's really stepped in it this time! Riddlemethis will now watch developments with his nose that much closer to the screen, and a rag handy to wipe away the fog his breath leaves on this glass.

Not all of them are crazy in precisely this way. This Ain't Hell don't buy this birther crap nohow -- which is why he's mad that "the Obama Administration renews the paranoia from the birthers." Why would Obama sic the dogs of birtherism on himself? Maybe just to show off, like Houdini. When This Ain't Hell finds out that about the soldier's prevarications, he adds, "That still doesn’t let the Left off the hook, though." Jesus, everybody's in on this conspiracy to protect Obama by attacking him.

This story, today's insane jabber about Obama's pitch at the All-Star Game, and their other deranged obsessions further convince me that they're not even trying to argue against Obama to their fellow citizens anymore, but are just constructing an alternate reality in which to ride things out for a couple of terms.

NANNY STATE DIARIES. Rod Dreher, back at the porn trough:

[A high-school teacher] said he worked in a counselor's role there as well, and routinely dealt with students who were seriously messed up by their porn habits. For example, he said, he believed that many of the guys he worked with had no idea how to relate to women in a healthy way; the power of pornography, working consciously and subconsciously, caused the men to have badly distorted views of women, views that stunted and even paralyzed the men emotionally.

Taken in isolation, that statement is not objectionable -- in fact, it could be seen as admirable. Pornography has its uses, but it's a very poor video-game substitute for human relationships, which is why we try to restrict it to adults, teenagers being presumed insufficiently mature to take porn in stride.

But this is Rod Dreher we're talking about here, and this is his very next line:

My wife brought up the story of a handsome, popular Southern Baptist pastor in Dallas who, back in the 1980s, confessed to being the serial rapist who terrorized an apartment complex here.

And, brothers and sisters, it was the demon porn that set him off! Suddenly we've abandoned the protection of pre-adults and moved on to the hoary idea of porn as insidious demonic force.

Then, Lord love us, Dreher starts talking about Ted Bundy.

There are a few reasons why Dreher always spins off this way. One is his traditional rejection of feminism. "Feminism was supposed to raise the consciousness of men," he says elsewhere, "but it has made so many women just as raunchy and sex-obsessed as many males." This in an article about Bratz dolls, which he admits feminists probably wouldn't like, though he forebears to say why -- probably because it might have to do with their peculiar equanimous ideas about gender relations, which conflict with the ones Jesus taught him, rather than general sex-hatred. (At the same time he's creeped out by lesbian separatists. No pleasing this guy.) The idea that women might require respect outside of a restrictive religious context blows his mind.

The other has to do with Dreher's idea of life in general. He's alarmingly sympathetic to plural marriages between/among nymphets and middle-aged men in a religious context. But the notion of sexual fantasy nauseates him. With God, all things are possible indeed: if a grown man picks the right faith he can live like Humbert Humbert minus the guilt, but if he or anyone looks at Miss November not only is he doomed, but so is society.

Since the topic is naked ladies and gents, the normal reaction is to laugh it off. Still, it's worth remembering that these guys -- a major factor in our national governance till recently, and champing at the bit to get back into it -- actually think this way about everything. Because it's really the thought that a human mind might, with the merest provocation, be spurred to thoughts Dreher can't control that rattles him.

Nonetheless, as usual, his commenters are a joy. "Softcore 'porn' is indeed everywhere, including the pews in front of me at church all too often (especially during the summer)," says Zach Treed. " Few things are as mortifying to the eyes as approaching holy Communion while following behind an intermittent parade of hardbodies who can't, or won't, dress any differently for Mass than a stripper dresses for the start of her dance." Where has this church been all my life? h/t Nancy Nall.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP. Bored with Palin, I was delighted to find that Going Galt is still a thing. Regrettably, I missed that Tea Party Nation promises "on July 30th, Conservatives are 'Going Galt'":

On that date, we are asking Conservatives all across the nation to "Call in Conservative". On July 30th, Conservatives will not work, we will not buy. Instead, we will spend time with our families and friends. We will show President Obama and Congress who REALLY drives this economy.

To be fair, they've been frothing nonstop since the election, and could use a day off. I'd say it will be a relief to all of us, but have a sneaking suspicion they'll be blogging with more than usual fervor that day. So it really is a net loss. But we already know that even if we pay them off with votes or tax relief, they still won't shut up.

POSITIVE SPIN. Legal Insurrection has a post today called "If Palin Were President Now." I expected the next line to be, "She would quit." Alas, the professor who runs the site, launched unto internet fame by his obsession with President Obama's mustard, is not joking. But neither is he serious. Among his assertions:

If Palin were President, we would not have:

• A debt and deficit rising so far out of proportion to historical norms as to threaten the near-and-long term viability of the country's ability to service the debt without destroying the value of the dollar, and passing on to our children and grandchildren unsustainable burdens.
• A stimulus package filled with pork and giveaways to political constituencies, pushed through under false and fraudulent claims of job creation, and exaggerated claims of immediate economic disaster which themselves hurt the markets, in a process so disgusting that not a single Representative or Senator read the bill before voting.

There are within these and his other points numerous links, mostly to other Legal Insurrection posts, all of them about Obama's malfeasance and none of them about what Palin would do to correct it, though at the end he bothers to tell us that Palin does not have a "Master of the Universe complex" like Obama, and that "at least Palin understands how to put the brakes on government power," an assertion which could hardly be extrapolated from her record. So the general argument is that Palin would be better than Obama because Palin is Palin and not Obama.

The professor's lack of positive arguments is understandable. It is difficult to say how the governor of a state largely dependent on revenues from oil, corporations, and federal largesse would apply that experience to the economy of the United States. As for the foreign policy angle (Palin would not pursue "a foreign policy which strong-arms allies such as Israel and Honduras, while paying deference to enemies such as Hugo Chavez and Mahmood Ahmadinejad," the professor says), his proposition is so muddled with mischaracterizations of Obama Administration policy that he might as well say that Palin would not bomb Tel Aviv and claim that as an advantage.

It's also understandable that he would offer something with at least the form of a positive argument. Nearly all the arguments being made on Palin's behalf have to do with her spunkiness, the loyalty she engenders among rightwing Republicans, and above all her alleged victimization by mainstream media outlets (which she nonetheless floods with access), talk show hosts, and the guy who knocked up her daughter.

The professor may have perceived that some readers would not be satisfied with qualification by complaint, and come up with a title that promises a positive case for Palin. If the words that appear under it constitute nothing but further complaints, so what? Maybe someone will see the title and remember that the case has been made, by somebody and in some way, as they return to barricades to denounce Conan O'Brien or Charlie Rose or whoever the next target of outrage is.

THEY DON'T MAKE LIBERTARIANS LIKE THEY USED TO. Megan McArdle:

A Democrat of my acquaintance, who makes something, but not a huge something, over $200,000 a year while living in Manhattan, was recently grousing to me about the surtax. "My taxes on a marginal dollar are going to go up almost 1000 basis points!" said he.

(There is some dispute as to what 1000 basis points amounts to in this case; a commenter works it out to about $800, but it could be more.)

This is true, I agreed. And just what, I wondered, had he thought was going to happen if he elected Obama? Not clear. Our subject had listened to Obama talk about taxing people who made more than $250,000, which seemed entirely reasonable; he hadn't realized that being single, his tax hikes would start much lower than that--that he, too, was "the rich". Mentally speaking, the rich don't live in eight hundred moderately roach-infested square feet in an unfashionable neighborhood of New York.

By the way, here's what 800 square feet looks like. The "moderately roach-infested" is added, I would guess from precedent, to dog-whistle to the outlanders who seem to comprise most of McArdle's audience that New York real estate is grimy as well as expensive. (And of course it works.) I marvel that she didn't add something about muggers, panhandlers, or people who use their hands when they talk.

I do not come naturally to sympathy with the Democrat of McArdle's acquaintance, as I make a fraction of what he makes and live in a smaller apartment, though my neighborhood, swinging Greenpoint, is very fashionable, or so the magazines tell me. But if the loss of $800, or even a couple of grand, to fees for government services is of such pressing concern to someone who makes over $200,000, he must be an even worse money manager than I am, and my heart goes out to him. Maybe he should fire his accountant, or take a smaller room when he vacations in Cozumel.

McArdle's sympathy, expressed in comments, is much greater:

The problem is, in New York, it's really easy to be so tapped out on $200K that you do, indeed, notice the extra missing money -- his average tax burden is already in the 40-50% range, as mine was when I lived there. It's just not comparable to anywhere else. And it's no good saying that they chose to live in New York -- most people living in New York couldn't earn their "fabulous" income anywhere else.

That seems a strange attitude for a libertarian like McArdle to take about it. Isn't this guy supposed to vote with his feet, or Go Galt, or something? That would sure show the rest of us parasites.

Yet she talks about him as if he were a migrant farm worker about to be driven into the barren wastes. I've stopped minding all their jabber about how sorry we'll be all when they've left, but it's really annoying to hear from them how badly they'll suffer if we drive them out.

(By the way, didn't McArdle say she was voting for Obama? Or did she back off that? Like many of my class, I'm too shiftless to look it up.)

UPDATE. The invaluable Susan of Texas demonstrates to us in comments that McArdle didn't vote for Obama because she forgot to register to vote. This makes a great deal of sense. First, it's obvious from McArdle's blog that politics doesn't interest her very much. Second, why would such a Randian superperson as she trifle with voting? The fact that a bum like me gets as many votes as Alan Greenspan proves that voting is a levelers' ruse to promote the Reign of Witch Doctors. When you get as much franchise as your gold bars will buy on the open market, that's when she'll remember to fill out a registration form. And when Detroit makes supercars designed by Howard Roark, that's when she'll learn to register a car.

THE AIRING OF GRIEVANCES. If you're having trouble understanding the depth of conservative commitment to Sarah Palin's ridiculous assumption of martyrdom, John Derbyshire offers an instructive sidelight at The Corner. He starts with a typical "The Fuhrer was sweet, the Fuhrer was kind" defense of Pinochet, but gets to his bigger fish: a new film by "Chilean commie film director Pablo Larrain" called Tony Manero, which sounds like an American Psycho-style knock on the Pinochet years (I haven't seen it, and evidently neither has Derbyshire).

That's bad and silly enough. What lifts Larraín's feeble bit of ComSympery to the level of outrage is the particular cultural icon he picked on as the target for his venom. It is none other than Tony Manero, the character played by John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. Larraín's wretched, filthy movie is in fact titled Tony Manero.

Is there no decency any more? No restraint? No respect for our cultural heritage?

Chile had a narrow escape from Marxist-Leninist tyranny. We should never cease to remind the Left of that, if only because it annoys the hell out of them. Pinochet, with all his many faults, was a patriot who saved his country. We should keep saying that, too; and Pablo Larraín's absurd movie gives us the opportunity. It might all have gone unmentioned for another year or so if not for Larraín; but, as Tony Manero says to the customer in the paint store: "You brung it up."

I charitably assumed at first that Derbyshire was making a subtle joke, but as the screed wore on I realized that he was genuinely enraged that an art film few Americans will see trifles with the sacred images of Tony Manero and Augusto Pinochet. Even stranger, he found this cultural offense a suitable launching pad for new and louder defenses of the murderous dictator, to which most Americans are likely to respond, "Who are Pinoshay and Ayendi?"

It was unavoidable and understandable that, with conservatives largely out of power, they would spend more time complaining. But so much of their time these days is spent raging at irrelevancies. It's as if they believe their rage itself is incandescent and, if allowed to burn brightly enough, will attract voters like moths. The Palin eruption, in which her abandonment of the responsibilities of office is portrayed as victimhood, is only their biggest such bonfire of vanities at the moment.

This compares badly even with the conservative culture-warring of olden times, for which I find myself growing almost nostalgic. They make Pat Buchanan look like Isaiah Berlin.