WELCOME TO THE TERRORDOME. How does a wingnut start his day? Some start by thumbing through new legislation with sinister-sounding titles. Like the "Healthy Choices Act" -- ooh, that must be double Hitler at least!

No need to work too hard, let's just skim the top, where the bill orders something added to the section of the U.S. Public Health Service Act that says vaccinations should be reported to the Federal Government (already Hitler, of course, but let's take it one outrage at a time). The Healthy Choices Act would amend this to also require the health professionals who administer the vaccines to report the following:

the age, gender, height, and weight of each person vaccinated to calculate the body mass index of such person

Skree! The Feds will also give grants to "ensure that BMI measurements will be recorded for children ages 2 through 18." Skree! And if your kid's a blimp, the Feds will stomp on your parental rights by providing you with "information on how to lower BMI and information on state and local obesity prevention programs." Providing information! Why, it might as well say "brainwashing"!

And if you don't give up your precious BMI, the Feds will jackboot your face by not giving you the federal grant! And how's a tea partyin' man supposed to Live Free or Die without federal grants?

SKREEE!

Watch Out for the Fat Police..

I guess in the age of socialized medicine everyone's lifestyle is everyone else's business. Except for promiscuous behavior of course. Women can sleep around all they want and the only thing men can do is pay for the abortions. Don't even think about what homosexuals do in public parks and restrooms.

SKREEEE!

The OP(formerly the GOP) wing of the socialist Republicrat party working with the RAT wing to push more of their unconstitutional, socialist agenda on the people. It's time to hammer Congress once again by contacting them folks! Keep up the pressure! Don't let up!

... have to keep the livestock in good market condition...

SKREEEE!

When are we going to start demanding government get out of our lives? Does no one lese see how this bill, an offshoot of Obama-Care (probably mandated by Obama-Care) will have the government telling us what we ALL can eat and when...

SKREEEEEEEEE!

How about we start by having Michelle Obama tell us what her BMI is? Dare I suggest the number would be appallingly high? Seriosuly, this Big Brother crap has to stop.

The punch line is, I'm not entirely sure the program is a good use of government funds and would like to see a reasonable debate on the matter. Unfortunately the only debate going right now is between supporters of a public health proposal and delusional, paranoid idiots.

UPDATE. The American Frozen Food Institute supports the bill. The American Frozen Food Institute! People, do I have to spell it out for you?

UPDATE 2. Biggest SKREEEEE of the day:

If we don't put a stop to this insanity on November we're doomed as a nation.

I would award Babalu Blog the Golden Straitjacket right now, but maybe one of them will declare that the Healthy Choices Act will blow up the planet Earth or destroy the universe or something. They're competitive that way.

UPDATE 3. Commenter Nathan sees the thin end of the wedge: "This will only lead to Crisconacht."

UPDATE 4. Trust RedState to bring the crazy! After headlining that "Ron Kind (D-WI-3) Wants The Government To Track How Much Your Daughter Weighs" -- your virginal, innocent daughter, America! -- spokesbuffoon Dan McLaughlin declares that the Federal health Nazis will be "ogling [your] children." My God, that's why they want those kids to slim down -- so they'll be model-thin for their child sex camps! Forbid it, almighty God!

Of course, if you could get these people to change their mental picture of the health Nazis' subjects to Gabourey Sidibe, they'd be demanding a mandatory national diet plan.

UPDATE 5. The Lonely Conservative expects that under the new law, the Feds will "send the kids to fat camp" or "make them do 'volunteer' work" -- but then mentions that New York already has a similar program, and does not report that local children in consequence attend fat camps or engage in forced volunteerism.

But he still has a complaint:

I can’t tell you how many people I know who’ve been told their kids are obese based on the Body Mass Index, but anyone with eyes can tell the children aren’t even overweight.

So -- the kids have to bear the stigma of an inaccurate body mass index. And there's no court of appeals for that, my friends! If the other children ever find out, Junior's middle school career is over! And even if they never find out (a safe bet, considering how health records work), the bureaucrats will know, and the faux-fatties will be the first ones in the ovens!

It's becoming clearer why this particular Conservative is so Lonely.

TRAITORS UNMASKED! Paul Cella, previously self-revealed as an insufferable pedant, now shows himself to be a nut. In some rightwing strokebook, he rails against the "open society" doctrine he claims has been adopted by his fellow conservatives as well as by liberals. America's strength, he says, is not that it has a free marketplace of ideas, but a restricted one, in which "seditious" ideas are banned lest they grow and gut-rot the Republic.

Well, surely he means genuinely treasonous notions, yes?

Conservatives have in past commonly stood foursquare in defense of this American tradition. And when one reflects on the fate of other nations, where particularly odious seditious movements gained political power, one is inclined to adjudge the conservative stance as a wise one. John Adams the conservative signed the Sedition Act of 1798; the liberalizing French King Louis XVI lost his head.

Why, even the Tea Party people would be offended by this, if they were capable of understanding what Cella is talking about.

It's been a while since I've seen anyone defend the Alien and Sedition Acts who was not drunk or kidding. But Cella never kids, and if he drinks I imagine he only does it when he's writing.

Cella is also enthusiastic for McCarthyism, and if you object to the blacklisting of many people whose worst crime was believing in Communism (and many others who were merely mistaken for them because they were liberals), he responds that Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White were guilty. He also says 9/11 and Fort Hood show that "diversity" is "nothing but a degraded version of the open society doctrine, despite the disastrous paralysis it produced, which cost us the blood of our finest." So I guess we have to ban that, too -- maybe he wants the Civil Rights Act repealed?

Cella fails to inform us whether he believes the music of Dave Matthews, on which he has previously raved ("Scripture tells us that the truth will set you free; Matthews’s lyrics provide the obverse"), rises to the level of sedition. It seems to meet his standard of proof (i.e., he doesn't like it).

The punch line? This gibberish is taken seriously by Ramesh Ponnuru and Jonah Goldberg.

The country's going to hell, but this conservative intellectual revival should be good for a few laughs before Armageddon.

FREEPERS SEE RED. When Paul Godat told me about this, I assumed it was some kind of hack. Even the mouthbreathers at Free Republic, I thought, couldn't be so deranged as to get after Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan for putting free tampons in the Harvard Law ladies' rooms when she was Dean.

But they are, Blanche, they are:

Nothing is "free." Someone always has to pay for it.
Whether it be health care, food, your mortgage, coffee, or tampons.

What a nightmare this woman is.

Excellent post. Thank you.
This Communist needs to be stopped

Free Tampons! Someone tell Rahm (”Take out your f****** tampon . . .”) Emannuel.

Lots of talk about her being a "bulldyke" and such like, too.

Kagan hasn't been my favorite nomination, but the wingnuts' internal combustion over her may make it so.

UPDATE. They also reference the bullshit ban-speech story. I used to think they all got morning memos, but now I think it's more like Slip Mahoney yelling "OK fellas, Routine 12!" at the Bowery Boys.

SHORTER RAMESH PONNURU: I think I can explain away the higher illegitimacy rates in red vs. blue states: Black people! They're like little blue states inside the red states, and so can't be held against white folk like us.

REPUBLICANS CONTINUE TO WORK ON GAINING THE WOMEN'S VOTE. Theblogprof criticizes TV food person Rachael Ray* for working with Democratic Senator Debbie Stabenow on child nutrition and obesity. Because, said theblogprof, Stabenow is "obsese" Also:

Rachel Ray who herself has likely never been referred to as slim made it by being promoted by an obese woman (Oprah), works for the Food Network that both promotes eating and is staffed by obese cooks...

Theblogprof is a bodybuilder, which may explain his rage against non-buff female forms.

I've tried to keep my mind clear of the reductive attitude that conservatives are just assholes, but some days it's tough. (Speaking of which, linked by the Ole Perfesser, who -- to disclose a trade secret -- is a very reliable source for nut links.)

*UPDATE. Fixed spelling of Rachael Ray's name. (Thanks Vern.) Why was I relying on theblogprof's word on anything?

UPDATE. Oh, like you wouldn't hit it.

LIBERTARIAN BULLSHIT OF THE DAY. Elena Kagan is apparently averse to answering direct questions about specific legal cases in her Senate hearings. At Reason Jesse Walker headlines his pick-up of the Daily Caller story "Free Speech for Thee, But Not for Me." Walker was going for a subtle joke here, but you couldn't tell it by the commenters, who gobble up the slam on the liberty-hating socialist Obama and other aspects of modern life that displease them:

Fat Jewish lesbians need a voice too, you insensitive clod. Especially if that voice sounds exactly the same as every other liberal from Harvard.

That was mean of me, she's a woman, not an "it". But then, the tests results have not come back yet....

My favorite part is when some of the brethren make fun of Nixon's disrespect for the Constitution, and an Old Guard type comes in to remind them that bastard Lincoln started it.

No wait -- this is my favorite:

Could we just exclude anyone who has worked as an attorney for the current administration from consideration? I think this is a reasonable standard that in no way constrains the Executive branch from putting their kind of people on the Supreme Court (which is definitely the administration's Constitutional privilege).

I believe there is precedent for this in the Court of Narnia Under My Sheets With A Flashlight.

(Revised to be less dumb.)

UPDATE. Making everything worse as usual, Megan McArdle:

I haven't generated great interest in the Elena Kagan nomination.

Why was she trying to generate interest in the Kagan nomination? Oh, right: Words, meaning, Humpty Dumpty, etc.

But I do think that David Brooks is onto something when he notes that her relentless careerism, her pitch-perfect blandness, are a little creepy... the driven, hyperachieving spawn of the Ivy League meritocracy...

What's disturbing is that this is what our nomination process now selects for: someone who appears to be in favor of nothing except self-advancement.

Rich as this was from Brooks, from McArdle it's a fucking tub of Double Devon Cream.

"What say you, Weenie? Shall we be vegan today? It would be rawther uplifting."

I'm sitting here writing this in my underwear in goddamn Texas, and Eloise at the Atlantic is talking about careerism. Fuck me.

COURT JESTER. The Ole Perfesser pretends to approve of the Kagan appointment. (In his current Alinksy-triple-agent mode, he can't be expected to make judgments on any basis but perceived advantage for his team, even in his alleged field of expertise, so who knows what he really thinks.) Key passage:

That said, however, there is little doubt in my mind that if the president were unconstrained, he would have picked someone more in keeping with his own ideological leanings — which is to say someone considerably to the left of Kagan.

Reynolds has been hanging out with Tea Partiers too long, and has come to believe that normal people will buy their vision of Obama as a dangerous radical who would appoint the corpse of William O. Douglas but that he trembles with fear at his impending removal by honkies in tricorners.

I think that a President who bails out Wall Street, moves but trepidatiously on gay rights and WOT justice issues, etc., may reasonably be considered a centrist and thus inclined toward an MOR Court pick. I also suspect that Obama sees the political advantage in giving conservative Republicans the opportunity to act like fucking nuts about it, which they are only too eager to do.

UPDATE. Jesus Christ -- imagine Bobo Brooks criticizing anyone for being a gutless careerist!

THE FEAST OF UNREASON. In 2008, enraged by untoward election results, RedState's Erick Erickson announced "Operation Leper," for the purpose of "tracking down all the people from the McCain campaign now whispering smears against Governor Palin to Carl Cameron and others" so that, when they were caught, Erickson and his colleagues might "make these few people political lepers."

In 2009, when Doug Hoffman screwed the pooch in NY-23, Erickson roared:

The GOP Establishment Must Be Purged as the GOP Loses in NY-23...

I am, however, serious that the GOP must purge its staff and leaders who have decided to always go with the liberal. In particular, the NRCC, NRSC, and RNC need some wholesale job terminations of senior staff.

(All typographic peculiarities in the original.) Now that -- at Erickson's urging -- insufficiently rightwing Utah GOP Senator Bob Bennett has been defenestrated by his own party, Erickson has declared new realities in effect. None of this "purge" stuff! Erickson has found a longer and more sonorous keyword, so listen up, "you media types who look for great meaning in all things considered":

Your shibboleths are crumbling around you and you grasp it not. As you struggle to interpret what the tea parties do and do not mean, you media types and others are getting Utah all wrong.

It’s not about a purge. It’s about an insurrection.

Actually "insurrection" doesn't even cover the great scope of it:

Now, the great disentangling of conservatism has begun.

If the next big Tea Party win comes soon and big enough, "great disentangling" will remain the password; if not, after some screaming for heads to roll, we will get a "grand expostulation" or a "disembraining" (Hurrah, arse-horns, long live King Erick!).

People who go in for purges, manifestos, battle flags, and fanciful names for their own movements are either genuine revolutionaries, emotional cripples, or both. The odds that Erickson is another George Washington are very, very, very slim.

UPDATE. I'm always impressed with the mockery innovations of my commenters ("get with the pogrom," "Gollum as interpreted by Gilbert Gottfried," etc). They also notice that Erickson's "your shibboleths are crumbling around you and you grasp it not" is, in the words of one reader, "irredeemably douchey."

Yeah, when they get into the Forsooth and Zounds lingo it's always a little creepy. Most rightbloggers are aware of poetic conventions -- from Gor novels, if nowhere else -- but, being propagandists rather than poets, they see only one purpose for them: To throw a little reverb on their spiel so's they sound scary and sepulchral-like. It's meant, I believe, as a signal for the punters to further suspend their disbelief. Though, the way they're acting these days, I'd say all of them have already gone the full limit.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the Nashville flood that is offered by rightbloggers as evidence that Obama hates honkeys. Me, I'm still waiting for that fucking Whitey tape.

I'd like to be more circumspect about accusing people of racism than I have become, but life's too fucking short. I'm about thisclose to calling everyone Nazis again.

THEY DON'T MAKE LIBERTARIANS LIKE THEY USED TO, PART 6,620. Over at libertarian flagship Reason, Tim Cavanaugh demands Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano be fired for burning little babies to a crisp at Waco.

Ha ha! Kidding! Cavanaugh actually wants her canned because she once claimed there was such a thing as rightwing terrorists, and because she isn't tough enough on the War on Terror to suit his libertarian tastes. Here's his Roger L. Simon impersonation:

...if you believe in the necessity of a Homeland Security Department, every day Napolitano is in charge of it creates an actual risk to life and property. Napolitano has a positive burden of proof: She needs to demonstrate some understanding of how to do her job, or she needs to be fired, for the security of the United States and the safety of the American people.

The True Sons of Liberty in Reason's comments are a joy ("This administration is incompetent re foreign affairs and the prosecution of the war on terror [yes, i'll call it that]...").

Refresh my memory: Why are they even pretending to be something other than conservatives again? Does it have something to do with Nick Gillespie's leather jacket, or Matt Welch's awesome new glasses?

UPDATE: To paraphrase Yoda (because, let's be honest, any comments box at Reason is pretty much a Comic-Con plus agoraphobia), better it gets:

Ray | 5.9.10 @ 4:03PM | #

Obama is scared shitless he will lose white women still mad that Hillary got beat. He won't be firing Napolitano come hell or high water.

Eminent Threat | 5.9.10 @ 6:13PM | #

Napolitano is a woman?

Plus she's a big lesbian! No, really, read a few of them. It'll put the Libertarian Purity Test out of business.

TOXIC DUMP. The Ole Perfesser is spreading bullshit about DDT, claiming that liberal enviroweenies are keeping it from New York bedbug sufferers because of ObamaHitler, as if there were no scientific reason to restrict its use. A useful antidote may be found in Kim Larsen's 2008 article "Bad Blood." A highlights:

DDT proponents are generally reluctant to acknowledge the complicating and protean factor of mosquito resistance. Entomologist May Berenbaum finds this galling. An expert on insecticide metabolism, Berenbaum is director of the entomology department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "Read the entomological literature of the 1950s," she said in a telephone interview. "Way before Silent Spring, scientists were already trying to understand resistance. That's what insecticide toxicology was all about back then. Resistance to DDT was first detected in Italy, in houseflies, in 1947!"...

After Berenbaum published the article, she said, she was barraged by e-mails demanding that she support her claims. "To get them off my back, I finally culled a list of peer-reviewed articles documenting resistance to DDT and other pesticides in pockets all over Africa. This is not my life's work. I spent 10 minutes--10 minutes--and I found 15 articles. What would I have found if I'd spent an hour?"

I've known New Yorkers who have solved their bedbug problems with commercial remedies that did not include DDT. It's difficult but it can be done. The Perfesser is full of shit.

Remember: These people are not uninformed, but uninterested in the truth.

WHAT TO DO ON THOSE RARE OCCASIONS WHEN LIBERTARIANS FEEL BAD ABOUT SOMEONE ELSE. Megan McArdle's heartstrings (or, perhaps more accurately, heartthreads, or body-cavity-strings) are tugged by some well-circulated and absolutely horrible footage of cops storm-troopering a family home in pursuit of a drug bust. She characterizes the folly of drug war justifications thus :

Have you ever had one of those arguments in a bar that start around eleven and wind up when the bartender kicks you out? It starts off on some perfectly reasonable topic, but as the hours and the drinks mount up, the participants are forced to stake out some clear logical positions, and in doing so, crawl farther and farther out along the limb they are defending . . . until suddenly you reach a point at which one of the debaters can either abandon their initial committment, or endorse the slaughter of 30,000 Guatamalan orphans. And there's this long pause, and then he says, "Look, it's not like I want to kill those orphans . . . "

This reminded me of the Iraq War, in which thousands of people were killed, often under conditions similar to those portrayed in the tape, or worse. (And some of them might have been orphans -- at least, for a few minutes before they expired.)

McArdle was on the other end of the barroom justification then. Later she admitted she might have been wrong about it (though, she insisted, that didn't mean the anti-war hippies were right). In subsequent posts she saw that Iraq was "improving," which she suggested meant the carnage may have been worth it:

The improvement may not last. And even if it does, there's still a fine argument to be made that the suffering which preceded it made the invasion a terrible, terrible idea. But the current strategy of ignoring the news from Iraq, or quibbling with it, doesn't lay a sound foundation for making that argument.

Maybe someone from Conservatarian HQ can ease her mind by explaining that even inappropriate drug raids help lift property values, and make neighborhoods more attractive to members of the Producer class. In libertarian land, there's a solution for every problem -- so long as the problem is how you feel about something horrible happening to someone else. And it always is.

Oh, almost forgot:

As an empirical matter, I believe that national health care is going to kill a lot more people every year than the Iraq War when fully realized.

CONSERVATIVE WISDOM ON THE STOCK MARKET DIPSY DOODLE: "Oh great, will Democrats look to use a stupid stock purchase stock error as a way to get more government control over the Stock Market? How about we just teach people the difference between a 'B' and an 'M'?" -- Scared Monkeys. When all you have is a monomania, every problem looks like an ObamaHitler.

On the other hand, it was a pleasure to watch the Randian supermen who populate comments at Megan McArdle's blog immediately start bragging about the gold and armament they'd laid in for the coming Galt-Go -- though not nearly as pleasurable as one response to them:

I grew up on a farm in Minnesota. Guys from Minneapolis in their big, beautiful, 4-wheel drive trucks used to drive down on the weekends. They knew a lot about their guns, but they didn't know shit about hunting. Also, any kind of real deer hunting was too cold for them, so they mostly sat in the coffee shops in town and spun bullshit to each other about how awesome their guns were...

That actually shut them up. Maybe glibertarians have some shame, after all!

ANN ALTHOUSE DOES BATTLE WITH... THE ONION. I shit you not.

At first glance this satire appears to be vigorously pro-free-speech, but I suspect that it's only pro-liberal speech. Maybe my suspicion is wrong, but I'd find The Onion a lot funnier if its satire caused its readers a little pain, instead of nudging them to laugh at people they already hold in contempt.

No doubt she would find it funnier, if by "find it funnier" you mean "howl 'what a hoot!' and point at doll wearing 'liberal elite' sign."

Althouse previously yelled at comedians whom she found "traitors to your craft" because they weren't making enough Obama jokes to suit her. (At that time she also called me "dumb or dishonest" for referring to her as a rightblogger, and probably thinks I mostly leave her alone these days because I fear her stinging wit.)

Thank God America has a Truth Squad at the ready to explain why this so-called "humor" isn't funny!

RELATED: The Truth Squad also finds that a planned Comedy Central Jesus show might be funny, but is the act of "cowards" and thus has no place on a comedy channel.

You know, I actually do miss Bush -- when he was President, they told us we could show our patriotism just by going shopping. Now, to show our love of country, we're expected not to laugh at "the kind of comedy that makes you comfortable" -- as opposed to the comedy stylings of, say, Andrew Klavan, with which we doubt most Comedy Central customers would be comfortable, though not for ideological reasons. A grim business, this War on Whatchamacallit.

UPDATE. Oh Jesus, Jonah Goldberg is bitching about the fucking Machete trailer.

Oh, and no, just for the record, I don't think this is actually inciting violence. But that's a lot more slack than liberals cut, say, Michelle Bachman or Glenn Beck. And they don't even wield machetes.

If it were anyone else in the universe (except Althouse) I'd say he had to be joking.

Between this and the Michael Moriarty Hitler movie, it's clearer than ever: With these guys, the culture war is a war on culture.

CULTURE WAR: INCOMING! Whaaaaa...



Well, I love Michael Moriarty's acting (see him in Who'll Stop the Rain or Larry Cohen's Q sometime), so who knows. And (perhaps this is related) I also have a soft spot for Hitler movies. (Max, for example. It's pretty silly at times, but it has lines like "You're a hard man to like, Hitler." Now how can you pass on that?)

But the Big Hollywood review of Hitler Meets Christ (God, the name sounds like a South Park episode) is not encouraging. For one thing, reviewer Joe Bendel refers to "the thankless role of Hitler." Is he kidding? Hitler's like Frankenstein's Monster -- just walk onstage and people go crazy! Fortinbras -- now there's a "thankless" role. Also:

Relocated from New York, the delusional Hitler and Christ now encounter each other in the seedier environs of Vancouver.

Stop giggling, people are trying to read.

The contrast between them is immediately striking. The Christ figure is neatly dressed, and essentially rational in his discourse, aside from his obvious identity crisis. By contrast, Hitler is slovenly, crude, and erratic. While on one level it makes sense their outward appearance would reflect the relative peace of their souls, one would expect the exact opposite from most “indie” films. It would be the martial Hitler who would be clean and presentable, whereas the Christ would be unkempt and widely emotional in his arguments. Yet, Moriarty has more surprises in store for the viewer.

I'll bet he does. Found via Balloon Juice, where a commenter supplies a winning antidote:

SHORTY OTD. Reason teases anti-Mexican bigots; in comments, its readers take offense.

NET NEUTRALITY: THE NEW WINGNUT FRONTIER. With an FCC ruling pending, the Net Neutrality issue is heating up. Tech people are generally in favor of it (so am I, after seeing what the rat bastard telecoms are capable of); most of the business press coverage positions it as a battle over whether telecommunications companies can cut off bandwidth arbitrarily.

Most Wall Street Journal commenters follow that line of thought, but some holler like this:

I'm sure Pelosi and Reid are dancing in the aisles up at the pollit bureau meetings over this one. Novemebr can't get here fast enough for me! Palin / Quayle 2012!!!!!!!!!!!

Huh what? To see where this is coming from, check out RedState:

Should the tens of millions of Americans on the Internet, we who make a living or keep in touch with friends and family, have our fate determined by a small band of fringe neo-Marxist radicals, or self-seeking lobbyists at Google? I say no...

Hands off our Internet, FCC. End the power grab now.

Yes, it's an actual wingnut talking point: Gummint mess with mah intanet! And they don't just mean the pipes: RedState commenters warn of the day "when Obama censors Facebook, and limits texting." Michele Bachmann agrees Net Neutrality is "censorship of the Internet." None of them can point to a Net Neutrality provision that supports any such claim but, to be fair, Obama Hitler Gadsden Cold Dead Hands Skreee.

I thought at first the ringleaders at least were paid off by the telecoms; I still haven't ruled that out. But I've come to the conclusion that by now any government action provokes this reflex in them -- now that it's run by Democrats, that is. I expect that when sanitation trucks come to pick up their garbage they peer from behind curtains with a shotgun at the ready, praying for the election of President Palin to allow them to finally get some sleep.

THEY DON'T MAKE LIBERTARIANS LIKE THEY USED TO, AND NEVER DID. The idea that Obama is covering for Muslim jihadists in the Times Square unexplosion seems to have been adopted by libertarians. Obama and other statists are defending "fundamentalist Islam," David Harsanyi suggests, in order to persecute libertarians' friends in the tea parties and Israel.

Between this and their traditional commitment to freeing the weed, I think libertarians are a good bet to become the regnant movement of the post-apocalyptic hellscape I'm increasingly worried I won't die soon enough to miss.

WORLD WAR IV MORE YEARS! In response to a Bret Stephens let's-keep-our-nukes column, National Review's Michael Anton strongly suggests that rogue states (Iran, the subject of Stephens' column, is clearly on Anton's mind) will at least give a hand to terrorists who will explode nuclear weapons in the U.S., "especially if they calculate that their role in the act will appear sufficiently ambiguous to minimize the chance of American retaliation." (He might as well just say that Iran is preemptively responsible, Minority Report style.)

Then he talks about deterrence, by which he seems to mean publicly threatening to blow up Iran if something blows up here:

Declaratory policy is what nations say about how and when and why they might retaliate in various circumstances. The purpose — and hope — is that by making terrible threats, we can make follow-through on those threats unnecessary by staying the hand of those whose hatred can never be assuaged but whose innate senses of self-preservation, rationality, and (yes) fear can be leveraged in our favor. Conventional wisdom and official policy alike hold that declaratory policy has no relevance or role to play in the fight against terror.

This is an unexamined assumption — a reflex or, better, a recoiling from where the inquiry, not to say the conclusion, must lead. It is understandable that no one wishes to wander into that dark, monster-infested forest — nor, worse, to be seen to do so. But sooner rather than later, someone — several of us — must. Stephens is saying: Let’s get on with it. He’s right.

This is, I guess, the sort of thing you can say when your readers think Obama is Hitler plus Stalin, hates America, and cannot be trusted to retaliate against people who attack the United States. Because that's the only way it makes sense.

Even if you despise Obama (and this can apply to Ahmadinejad as well as to wingnuts), you have to know that in such a scenario political expediency alone would demand of him some futile, belligerent gesture. The last guy invaded Iraq, for Christ's sake -- what sense did that make? And this time we wouldn't have to go through the charade of hunting for Weapons of Mass Destruction, either, because they'll already have blown up, in Times Square or somewhere nearby. The idea that no one's getting his ass kicked after such an incident is pure fantasy.

But only the punters are supposed to take this seriously, as Anton's doomy if, God forbid language indicates. If you let him and his buddies back in power, they'll blow up Iran one way or the other.

Extra points to Anton for pretending this offer to find diplomatic language for blanket nuclear threats is an act of great bravery. ("To discuss these matters is to risk one’s reputation and perhaps livelihood" -- as if these guys can't always get a job!)

IT ONLY COUNTS IN HORSESHOES AND RIGHTBLOGGING. This Michelle Malkin extended slur on immigration is well (though I assume inadvertently) encapsulated by Jules Crittenden:

Malkin on Faisal’s path to citizenship. The reporting doesn’t in fact suggest his marriage was a sham as Malkin suggests, but she goes on to note the extensive abuse of the marriage route to a green card by jihadis.

That template suits so many rightwing screeds: The example doesn't fit my argument at all, but it's a news hook so what the hell! I guess they've been talking about Obama as a Socialist Nazi for so long that they've lost all skill at, or interest in, logical connections.

THE PANIC ROOM. I see conservatives still believe that the shortest path to Republican victory is terrorizing the citizens. John Podhoretz complains that in the wake of the Times Square non-explosion, public officials have sought to calm rather than terrify, which he considers paternalistic:

The American people are far more sophisticated about these things than those officials appear to believe, and they can be talked to like adults... When [crisis-management] is done well, there should be no sugar-coating. The impulse to sugar-coat is a mark of the conviction among politicians that they are in the same relation to the body politic as a parent is to a child.

He's got a point. Ronald Reagan really did the nation a disservice by fobbing off that "slipped the surly bonds of earth" bullshit off on us when the Challenger blew up. He should have speculated aloud to a stunned nation about the astronauts' final moments of screaming terror, the devastating impact, and their atomized remains. That's leadership!

We're talking about a car stuffed with fertilizer that didn't blow up. I hope Podhoretz isn't a fire warden at Commentary. If the place ever went ablaze, he'd be showing off the George Costanza leadership model:

YOUR MOMENT OF GOLDBERG. Jesus Christ. Richard Cohen jokes, "[Commentary] asks: 'What Kind of Socialist Is Barack Obama?' To which any sane person would have to reply: 'Not a Very Good One.'" Goldberg rejoins:

If Barack Obama isn't a very good socialist, never mind a Very Good One — in super-serious capital letters — doesn't that mean he's still a socialist? Bob Uecker was not a very good baseball player, but he was a baseball player.

I like to imagine Goldberg showing this to someone literate, being told, "That's certainly a novel response to obvious sarcasm," and replying, "Thanks!"

UPDATE. This Goldberger is even worse, but the guy's unconquerable stupidity is wearing me down already. As to his reference in the title to this essay, in the words of Ray Collins in The Magnificent Ambersons, if he weren't so thoughtless I might think him rather offensive.

WINGNUTS DEMAND THEIR CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT TO SOFTBALL COVERAGE. Most of the time, when people talk about a "fair" reporter, I find they either mean a.) one who makes their own side look good, or b.) one who knows when to feint in a contrarian direction to give the impression of fairness. Dave Weigel, conversely, strikes me as the real thing. Having written for both liberal and conservative pubs and seeming to have friends on both sides, he may be said to stand among, but not of, his subjects. He currently serves as the Washington Post's expert spelunker of the caverns of the Right, and does such a good job of it that even the most brain-dead rightwing propagandists have been reluctant to come after him.

That is, till recently. The other day in his Twitter feed (where like many of us he is often unguarded and jocular) Weigel made this offhand comment:

I can empathize with everyone I cover except for the anti-gay marriage bigots. In 20 years no one will admit they were part of that.

OK, class, which part do you think got through to the belligerati: the "empathy with everyone I cover" part, or the "bigots" part? Matt Lewis:

Perhaps Weigel will turn out two decades from now to have been prescient, but "bigot" is awfully strong language for a person who is making the case for tolerance – and this comment simply reinforced a longstanding view among social conservatives that The Washington Post and most of the rest of the mainstream media are not only implacably opposed to their policy agenda, but personally hostile to them as well.

And blah blah African-Americans don't like gay marriage are you against African-Americans blah blah. The article also contains one of the more unfortunately emblematic clauses of our time:

When I confronted Weigel about his Tweet...

"How can he now go to the Family Research Council's 'Value Voters Summit' and objectively report on it?" says Lewis. "How can his coverage of a Rick Santorum speech, for example, be trusted? Some have wondered why the Post would hire a non-conservative to cover the conservative movement..."

What sort of person should the Post get for the job? Maybe someone who thinks, and tweets, the right way -- like Ben Domenech, the Post's former rightwing affirmative action hire, whose absence from the masthead Lewis explains to his audience thus: "Liberal bloggers quickly leveled plagiarism allegations, and Domenech resigned within days of his hiring." (A different sort of observer might have said Domenech was caught red-handed.)

Just think if the Post had the benefit of Lewis' counsel, and the wit to take it, back in the 1970s. With H.R. Haldeman covering the White House, the Watergate story would have been turned out very differently -- a triumph of even-handed reporting, perhaps celebrated with a White House dinner during Nixon's third term of office.

This isn't the only recent attack on Weigel. Newsbusters' Dan Gainor actually got after him for tweeting "I hear there's video out there of Matt Drudge diddling an 8-year-old boy. Shocking," which you would think even an abject tightass would recognize as a gag. And so Gainor does, grudgingly, but adds, "even if it's a joke, it's shocking to have an employee of The Washington Post claiming a prominent conservative had sex with an 8-year-old boy."

Weigel apparently didn't suffer this fool gladly, and Gainor responded, "Of course, then again, I wasn't the one making rape jokes." He also mentioned that "earlier in the evening, [Weigel] had commented about having too much to drink." Gainor leaves it to you, dear reader -- would you rather read someone who has been known to get drunk and make jokes, or a real reporter with impeccable ideological credentials?

This rightwing political correctness is getting to be a pain in the ass.

A FINE EXAMPLE OF THE GENRE (FART). This is, in so many ways, a perfect Jonah Goldberg post:

• Contains meaningless, undefended observation made in passing just to pump up Goldberg's opinions-per-square-inch ratio ("It's pretty nifty looking and a clever idea, though I'm not sure how useful or reliable it is");
• "Truthfully, I don't fully trust any web numbers from any source about any thing. But for a host of reasons, intuitive and historical, Google's numbers feel about right." Also: "But that's pure guesswork on my part."
• Goldberg pretends post will be controversial with the "suits," maintaining that precious Goldberg street cred;
• "Reader" claims Goldberg is right, which vindicates Goldberg's intellectual processes, ensuring there will be many more like this.

I also must applaud a few other Goldberg efforts today: His why's-ID-for everybody-less-offensive-than-ID-for-one-targeted-race post, and his David-Frum-made-me-look-stupid-with-unfair-debate-tricks, come-tell-me-how-great-I-was post. That man's a national treasure.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the Times Square unexplosion and the rightwing attempt to make something of it. Though I recently left New York after 30+ years' tenure, I remain loyal to and protective of it, and when I see these douchebags trying to play again their old "Have You Forgotten" bullshit -- in the absence of an actual explosion, for which they (nonetheless and of course) blame Obama -- I get a great deal pissed off. I know these people. They despise New York. And they only pretend to care about it when they smell political gain.

Ray Kelly has revealed the primary suspect is a white man and Bloomberg says there's no evidence that it was the work of Al Qaeda, but that doesn't stop these jerks from declaring Obama sharia etc. They begin to remind me of the guy Bukowski was sticking mail with in Post Office who roused his ire one day with his incessant, muttered insults on the job. Finally Bukowski jumped back and threatened the guy to a fight, and found the guy hadn't stopped muttering insults -- he was totally oblivious to anything Bukowski or anyone else said or did.

TALK TO THE INVISIBLE HAND. Joshua Green is pleased that new government regs made it easier for him to figure out the details of home loans offers, which in his previous experience had been difficult to parse ("I remember poring over lenders' estimates for hours trying to spot the junk fees and figure out which deal was best"). He thinks that's a good use of the power of government. At Ace of Spades, DrewM disagrees:

Look, congrats on the new home and all but the government doesn't exist to make it easier for people to understand what they are getting themselves in to when they are buying a house.

In a way this is a refreshing change from the usual "Blargh-har, gummint cain't do nuthin' right, Obamacare will kill you!" argument we get from rightbloggers. And it cleaves to the pure, doctrinaire libertarian argument that if you like any government services beyond national defense and the post office -- oops, forgot, the post office has been removed from the "acceptable" list -- you are a sheeple-looter.

The Obama fascist-socialist agenda is just kicking off and conclusive proof that it is destroying America has yet to emerge. So most of that kind of talk -- I was going to make a link here, but you can just go to Hit & Run and look around -- is speculative. You just know these government schemes will all end in Hitler! It just stands to Reagan!

And if even one of them seems to produce a good effect, there must be some mistake. DrewM advances the Randian argument that helping is futile ("I don't want to rain of Green's parade but being relived of individual adult responsibilities is not a triumph"). And he insists that if the Market did not provide this kind of service, it must not be worth having:

I bet there are banks or lenders out there that would provide this kind of service if requested or because that kind of customer service is a selling point for them. Why should the government take away their competitive advantage by mandating everyone provide the same information? How do we know the bureaucrats mandated the right information be shared? There's no feedback like in a market place, simply commands.

Americans' awareness of their own history has degenerated to the point where many citizens believe the American Revolution was a Tea Party at which the colonists battled socialism, and that the ensuing 200+ years have been a protracted struggle against socialism in its many guises (Indians, Spain, Hitler, Obama).

If they've heard of the FDA, they probably disapprove of it, and believe that without it the Market would have eventually gotten around to limiting the amount of rat shit they get in their canned food, and it would be much better than what we have now because it'd be from the Market. And the same goes for integration, voting rights, clean air and water, etc.

Like a lot of people, I could easily say "I'm libertarian when it comes to..." and then rattle off a bunch of stuff like gun rights, smoking bans, etc. I don't, though -- not because I'm ashamed of my positions, but because I'm ashamed to be associated in any way with libertarians.

THE WRONG CROWD. There was a big demo against Wall Street yesterday in New York. Needless to say, it was not run by Tea Party patriots. The unions called it, and cops say 6,000 showed. (I don't doubt they had that many at the very least -- I've seen them at work before and they can really get the peops out. AFL-CIO claims 31,000.)

I also see that, in a hilarious reversal, the Perfesser and other Tea Party fans are already trying to talk down this large, orderly, and successful protest as an affront to democracy. From his flustered tone, it appears even Perfesser Reynolds' insulated consciousness may have at least faintly sensed the irony in this.

Reynolds loves to gas about how Tea Party protesters are better than lefty protesters because, being rightwing, they have "real jobs"; how frustrating it must be for him to not be able to use it against the union guys, most of whom probably expend more sweat in an average workday than the Perfesser emits in a year of saunas at his health club.

The Perfesser also likes to brag about the few black folks who show up at the TPs. But it looks like this New York union event had, as these things usually do, a much healthier minority turnout than the Tea People ever get. Maybe in the Perfesser's view this is too much of a good thing, so to speak.

So his recourse is to call the protesters "thugs" "goons" because they peaceably confronted some bankers. Way to plump your populist cred, Perfesser! Maybe if a few more demos like this one get attention from the press, he'll go back to his traditional attitude toward protest.

THESE KIDS TODAY. Gunaxin is among my favored junk sites, but I was stunned to see them do Family Circus with naughty captions without even mentioning the Dysfunctional Family Circus. Even worse, at this writing their commenters reveal no awareness of DFC, either.

It makes me wonder: Do they know about Suck.com? Crayon? Ultimate Band List? Has the internet been around long enough that we have to teach youngsters about its early history?

Fuck -- I'd better find some agreeable college, design my own Continuing Ed curriculum in Internet History, and get out in front of what promises to be a great educational boondoggle! I'll be running an Ivy department in no time, and then I can just collect checks and fart out posts like the Perfesser. About time I got a sinecure! I'm a known entity!

BTW did you know SpinnWebe is still online?

CONCERN TROLLS. I subscribe to the Goldberg File 'cause I just can't get enough, and today the boy genius does a major shirt-retuck of triumph over a topic of recent interest:

Well, so much for "epistemic closure." The supposed Right Wing Industrial Complex... marches and thinks in complete lockstep... Just when this argument was about to implode from its own idiocy, a Godzilla-sized foot called "immigration" came stomping down on the delicate dorm-room-philosophical Bambi. Conservatives are split on the issue... Karl Rove, alleged leader of the homunculi within the right-wing colossi, Marco Rubio, the golden boy of the tea-party movement, and Jeb Bush, heir to the Bush dynasty, are just a few of the dissenters from the right-wing mob of unindependent minds.

You'd think the coffeehouses of the Right were ablaze with impassioned discussion of this issue. Hardly. The demurrals of these two candidates for office and one Republican political operative have been extremely watery, and are obviously made not to extend debate, but to cover asses. Take Rubio's allegedly bold stand:

"From what I have read in news reports, I do have concerns about this legislation," Rubio said. "While I don't believe Arizona's policy was based on anything other than trying to get a handle on our broken borders, I think aspects of the law, especially that dealing with 'reasonable suspicion,' are going to put our law enforcement officers in an incredibly difficult position. It could also unreasonably single out people who are here legally, including many American citizens."

He has concerns! Well, that'll touch off a firestorm. More likely it'll keep the Cubans in his home state from thinking he's a total fink.

This state law gives everyone in America a chance to posture over it, and thus is is catnip to prevaricating politicians of every stripe. Rubio, Rove, and Jeb Bush can't do shit about changing it*, but if they purse their brows and talk concernedly about how they're concerned, etc., citizens might get the impression that they're actually human -- and, in the precious seconds this misapprehension lasts, consider voting for them.

National Review's Jim Geraghty took a tack similar to Goldberg's earlier this week, when he suggested that Republicans' "Kindler, Gentler Arguments Against Arizona’s New Law" were actually more useful that those of Democrats because they were nicer ("there’s no accusations of hateful motives, no demonization of the proponents..."). Geraghty is of course in favor of the law -- but, with becoming tact, he acts like he's sorry about it ("I wish the Arizona immigration law wasn’t necessary"). That way you know he's considered every side of the issue before coming down on the one nobody ever doubted that he would take.

I'll be happier to accept their claims of open-mindedness when they they stop driving actual free-thinkers out of their party. As for the claim that Democrats should argue their points as National Review writers prescribe, I think there are fewer of them willing to consider the friendly advice of their mortal enemies than once there were. But maybe Joe Lieberman's still listening!

*UPDATE: Oh shoot, I forgot to add this: It's like Megan McArdle voting for Obama.

YOU'RE JUST LIKE ME, AND I MEAN IT IN A BAD WAY. Linked by Rod Dreher (always a bad sign), Kenneth L. Woodward at Commonweal tells us how the New York Times is just like a religion. It's one of those "I know you are but what am I" Liberal Fascism arguments -- oh yeah, you say the Church is always telling people what to do, but the "the Times exercises a powerful magisterium or teaching authority through its editorial board," ha ha.

The big differences Woodward doesn't mention are 1.) The Times can't damn its readers to an eternity in Hell, and 2.) if the Times had anything like the Church's record in protecting and enabling child molesters, it would have been closed down by the authorities years ago.

This sort of thing reminds me of the crappy "we're not so different, you and I" arguments given by fictional criminals like The Joker. No, asshole, we're not the same; you're a fucking supervillain, and none of your high-school Nietzsche bullshit changes it.

CULTURE WAR IS NOT OVER, IF YOU WANT IT OR NOT. Digging through some of my back numbers this evening, I came across old posts about World magazine, the rightwing Christian pub balls-deep in the culture war, which told readers that Prince was only okay to listen to if your English was so poor that you couldn't make out his sexy lyrics, that "baseball fosters the right mentality for sustaining a war on terrorism," and other gibberish.

These days I keep hearing that the Right is soft-pedaling such cultural issues in favor of a Tea Party anti-socialism pitch. I wondered if World had gotten the message. Thankfully, it appears they have not.

Take Marvin Olasky's Easter column. First he fills in the back story, Anne Rice style: In New York in the 1870s, a famous abortionist lived on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, enjoying "immense dining rooms and parlors furnished in bronze and gold" -- a clear victory for Satan. Then St. Patrick's was built, giving Jesus the upper hand. But then John D. Rockefeller, in an obviously Satanic challenge, built his Center:

At ground level the face-off has also been apparent: A two-ton statue of Atlas, the god in Greek mythology who carries the heavens upon his shoulders, faces the doors of St. Patrick. What holds up the world -- the economic and technological power housed in the skyscraper, or the faith of the cross?

Most people don't contemplate such questions...

But Marvin Olasky does! For years the Easter Parade has been a big deal on Fifth, and despite its Godless nature -- Irving Berlin certainly wasn't writing about Jesus -- Olasky approves; but this year the Parade wasn't all it might be, permanent-things-wise:

This Easter the mixture of refinement and ostentation that defined earlier parades was gone. Many women wore flowery hats, but men on display were less Hello, Dolly! and more Salvador Dali dada: They wore three-foot-high apple blossom branches, or tuxedo coats with shorts, or multi- colored bushy beards accompanied by white dresses.

Bearded men in dresses! What would Bing Crosby say? But it gets worse:

I wondered about the absence of the young: On a perfect-weathered day, sunny and 70, why were 90 percent or more of the strollers over 40?

Were the kids all in McCarren Park worshiping the vaginal tree? Well, on the plus side, Olasky saw a lot of them at Mass in the Hunter College auditorium; but on the down side, many cleaved instead to the latest ally of the abortionist and the Rockefellers: "I saw many other 20-somethings lined up to enter a glass cube: the above-ground part of Apple's flagship store on Fifth Avenue between 58th and 59th."

How will Jesus and Olasky be rescued from despair? By war on Muslims!

Will the Easter battle for the future feature not the cathedral and the statue, but the auditorium and the glass cube?

Maybe, but here's an O. Henry twist to this column: Will those latter two form an alliance against the Kaabah, an ancient granite cube in Mecca that is the center of the Muslim world? The cathedral and the skyscraper won World War II. What can the auditorium and the glass cube do?

And once their combined forces destroy the infidels, the auditorium and the cube can duke it out for supremacy! I'm surprised he didn't work in an NBA Finals theme.

Please remember that however the conservative spin doctors try to spruce up the public face of their movement, these guys are still back there being absolutely mad.

UPDATE. Commenters are especially excited by Olasky's symbology. "Wasn't it an apple that brought about the Fall from Paradise?" asks Halloween Jack. "(The company's symbol, after all, has a bite out of it, and always has; oh, and hey, it used to be rainbow striped, and we all know who's got that symbol these days, eh?)" Wheels within wheels, people!

NOT YOUR REAL FRIENDS. Proud as I am of my raw courage in the face of Islamicist oppression, I have to admit Glenn Greenwald has a very good point. "The various forms of religious-based, intimidation-driven censorship and taboo ideas in the U.S. -- what [Ross] Douthat claims are non-existent except when it involves Muslims -- are too numerous to chronicle," he says, but unlike most people who talk like that, he provides a nice little list of examples (including some productions of Terence McNally's gay Jesus play shut down by violent threats made right here in my lovely new home state).

He also reminds us that Douthat's buddy Jonah Goldberg is a big fan of censorship (which I've noticed also), and that Douthat agrees with him. It's almost as if these people aren't really interested in free speech, and have perhaps some ulterior motive for pretending that they are. Well, I sort of suspected that when they didn't rally to the defense of my farting Mohammed cartoon.

FOR SOME REASON THIS FAKE AD IS BOTHERING ME. As a new resident of America proper, I am cultivating an interest in ephemeral crap. This, apparently, is an 80s-style commercial created for Toy Story 3:



My intention is not to razz the makers, who did a pretty good job, but I sense something is off here and I'm not sure what.

I think it's that the bear isn't given any distinguishing qualities at all, either in copy or in interaction with the kids, other than his implied eagerness to receive affection. See this and this for comparison. In my experience even dolls are supposed to have a USP.

It's bugging me for some reason. What do you think?

THE GLIBERTARIAN ARGUMENT FOR THE ARIZONA IMMIGRANT LAW: "A reader says he’s suprised to see me support the Arizona bill. Well, I really don’t — that is, I don’t know if I’d have voted for it if I were in Arizona. I’m mostly reacting to the fact that — as demonstrated by Linda Greenhouse — the opposition displays that special combination of self-righteous outrage and bone-deep ignorance that really sets me off." -- The Ole Perfesser. Take that, hehindeed, Radley Balko!

Remember: They don't have any principles -- merely a sense of entitlement, resentment when it's challenged, and rage when it's thwarted.

ONE MORNING I SHOT AN ELEPHANT IN MY PAJAMAS. I just shot a rattler this mornin' that was threatening my cat. Ain't no thang around these parts; we all has firearms. Then I ate me that rattler and made mah woman a necklace out of his bones.

What? I have just as much evidence of my feat as our Governor has of killing that coyote. Neither of us had our security detail around.

There are some differences, I admit. I'm not running for reelection, which (along with my natural modesty) is why I'm also not dressing up my story with quotable quotes like "he became mulch."

And I don't have fans like Michelle Malkin to use my alleged accomplishment as proof that politicians she doesn't like are less than men:

This could cost Texas Governor Rick Perry the endorsement of PETA, but to save the life of his dog, it’s worth it...

In a related story, Florida Governor Charlie Crist screamed like a woman and jumped on a chair when he saw a mouse run out from under his tanning bed.

If you find that outburst about Crist weird and unseemly, remember: the sourcing is every bit as good as Perry's and mine.

I advise Mitt Romney, if he wishes to remain politically viable, to announce that he killed a dog -- not by strapping it to the roof of his car, his usual method of canine torment, but with his bare hands -- or with a scalpel, so he can work it into a metaphor about health care.

THIS IS JUST NICE: Some folks in Kuala Lumpur yelling "WAR CRIMINAL" at Tony Blair.



May he never be shut of them. Asshole. Now can we get someone to follow around Andrew Sullivan, too? (h/t Prog Gold)

WHERE I'M CALLING FROM, PART 3. I continue to like this "Texas" I find myself in. I haven't forgotten, however, that it's politically... retrograde. Our Governor calls Obama and health care "socialist" as casually as you or I might call Williamsburg "over," and loves to cheer the folks at home with talk of seceding from the Union. I never thought I'd say this, but I miss David Paterson.

And Perry isn't even the worst of the lot: There was some kind of bizarre Gathering of the Nuts last weekend at Tyler, where the purty roses come from, with Perry, Glenn Fucking Beck, and State Rep Leo Berman, who called Obama "God's punishment on us." No word in local press reports as to whether a cross was burned at the event, though maybe that happens too frequently thereabouts to merit notice.

Perry is a graduate of Texas A&M, and I note with interest this reminiscence from a speech he gave at the 2005 Muster:

We toted my footlocker up to the dorm, and then dad went outside and pulled George [Shriever] under a tree and delivered a message: “Make a man out of him.” It’s too bad dad felt compelled to say that, because my fish hole ended up being next door to George Shriever and Roger Matson. At any hour of the night, George would not knock loudly on the wall, my signal to come running. Sometimes he needed his brass shined or his sink cleaned or his bed made. Often, he just wanted me to sing him to sleep. But whatever George wanted, I did. I was his fish.

Well, I suppose old Yalies sound just as strange talking about their homoerotic rituals, too.

Here in Aggieland there's an alt-paper called the Maroon Weekly; I guess it's the local equivalent of the Voice. Instead of Tom Robbins or Wayne Barrett, though, here's what we had in this week's editorial section:

This past week, Obama took the first major step towards banning guns from all United States citizens...

Yes, you read that correctly. We will be subject to gun laws not created and voted on by our congress.

International laws that were adamantly opposed by the Bush administration, who preferred to use national gun control legislation. International laws that have been developed and promoted by organizations such as the United Nations and individuals such as billionaire businessman George Soros...

This nonsense, straight out of the emails your grandma has been sending you (and proven bullshit), is what the weekly whee-funtime paper thinks the kids will go for. They're probably right. Though there's a big college here, we don't have the traditional pinko collegetown thing going on. Most of the local entertainment district's storefronts are distressed and art-directed to look like Old West saloons and whatnot; the big dance club, Daisy Dukes (!), looks like a grainery. When the kids go out, they dress like they're going to appear in a Ke$ha video. It's like an alternate America where beatniks and hippies never existed, and youth style went straight from Elvis to backwards baseball caps.

I can live with that, though. No place is cool enough for me; my Voice readers may recall that I was constantly complaining about the nanny state New York had become when I lived there. Griping's just one of the privileges of citizenship. Admittedly Texas is part of a larger and more destructive madness that will eventually consume and destroy this once-proud nation, but that probably won't happen till after I'm blessedly dead. Everybody wins -- me, and the howling feral children that will inherit this blackened continent.

In the meantime there's so much that is not political to enjoy. A couple of weekends back I went to visit a friend in San Antonio, which was serendipitously having its annual Fiesta (we took in the River Parade). I just got a taste but it was nice: The Riverwalk is much prettier than the pictures let on; I took a long walk down down South Flores and saw some of the gentrifying shabby-chic; El Mercado was like San Gennaro with Mexicans, and the Norteño, like all the music here, was splendid. Part of the fun of just scratching the surface is knowing there's still so much more left to dig.

MORE TALES OF ORDINARY MADNESS. Yes, it's another post by The Anchoress about how the Democrats have broken the seventh seal and the end times loom.

Maybe she's beginning to bore even herself, though, because she puts some extra spin on it this time:

The only thing I am certain of right now is that what we knew of America before 2008 is not what we will know of America by 2012. I know that nothing is ever going to be what it was, and those on the right who think “if we can just get the right people in office, then everything will go back to normal,” are deluding themselves.

Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, etc. But here's how the crafty Dems and Satan will pull it off: First, they're going to make a Republican Governor of Arizona release the hounds on illegal Mexicans. Then all hell will break loose!

Meanwhile the Democrats and the press (if I am not redundant) understand how well they played the immigration card in 2006 -getting the right all hopped up in May to reap the rewards in November- and so they will be repeating that gambit – manufacturing parades and outrage once again, as they did before. The charges of “racist nazis” will fly; the press will fan the flames, and the situation will become toxic.

I expect that the right -which has done a very good job of ignoring deliberate provocation up to now- will end up losing its composure in this debate, and once that happens, once they let fly with their passions, they will be defeated.

I'm not sure what she means by "losing its composure," but it probably has something to do with Mexicans thrusting their jaws into redneck fists. So, you see, the Satanocrats will attack both Republicans and Mexicans with their passive-aggressive hopping-up of patriots!

Read around her post for extra lunacy: She believes, for example, that as the world falls into darkness the abbeys will become powerful redoubts (but this kind of wishful thinking is common among apocalyptics), and endorses the notion now popular with her fellow wingnuts that by drumming up the youth and minority votes, Obama is pursuing a "divisive strategy." Also there's her interesting idea that 2006 had less to do with exploding Republican scandals than with immigration.

But wackiest of all may be her contention that "I am neither Republican nor conservative. I belong to Christ first, not to a party, not to an ideology." Hell, in the very teeth of the Apocalypse she's spinning for the right, committed to making sure we know the poor Republican white people are (or rather, it is prophesied, will be) the real victims here.

A LIBERTARIAN MUGGED BY LIBERTARIANISM. As Arizona hunts down illegal Mexicans like dogs, it is touching -- in a hilarious way -- to hear Radley Balko wonder aloud at libertarian redoubt Reason that his good, freedom-loving friends the Tea Partiers could be in favor of such ungroovy measures:

There's obviously not going to be pure ideological unity at these events... But it's increasingly looking like the right's favored big government policies are a fairly important part of the agenda of a fairly large portion of the Tea Party crowd.

You're kidding! He'll get over it, I'm sure, as soon as one of his colleagues reminds him the Tea Parties have dozens of black people, or about the socialism of estate taxes.

TODAY ON BIZARRO WORLD: "[Civil rights legend] John Lewis, who spent his life presumably fighting for equality, now seems little better than racists such as David Duke, Jesse Jackson, or Al Sharpton," says... a guy who calls his site Confederate Yankee.

He's a previous winner, too, and was recently seen accusing infiltrators of trying to tar the Tea Parties with Confederate flags, despite his own loyalty to the Fallen Standard ("a Confederate battle flag is supposed to be a sign of bigotry and racism according to the leftist orthodoxy...").

Rightbloggers still complain about "pro-Che colors," though Che worship is hardly a going concern. Yet they give their respectful attention to neo-Confederates -- no doubt because they're a major bloc of the Republican-conservative alliance. They apparently don't expect anyone to notice the contradiction; the question is, do they notice it themselves?

ALAN SILLITOE, 1928-2010.. I've never read his fiction, though I've admired the bracing films made of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, but by chance I recently picked up his autobiography, Life Without Armour, which is so far very good. Though not quite the Angry Young Man they painted him as, Sillitoe had indeed been working-class and done mucky jobs -- "my job was to hump hundredweight sacks of alum and flour to a vat and empty them in, stirring to an even broth with the requisite amount of hot water to make the paste. Overall and boots got caked with the stuff, and I would go home stinking like a pig" -- before he found success as a writer.

I'm more eager to finish the book now, and get to his others. He seems to have been very serious about his craft, and describes some of his writing education, including attentive reading-aloud at home:

The cadences of style became apparent enough to help improve my prose, a revelation which could no doubt have come sooner with a nineteenth-century education in the Latin and Greek classics.

Reading my work aloud was a good way of ensuring that it had the fluidity and clarity of good English...

Clear English could be enriched by idiomatic or personal quirks as long as they fitted in with the narrative and echoed my inner voice, the way things sounded to me even before I had a pen in my hand...

During this long winter it became obvious that I had not been working hard enough on style: every word, every phrase, every sentence -- in every story and on every page of a novel -- had to be broken up and had to be knitted together again so that no loopholes in the prose remained.

I am reminded, writing that out, that work is a constant refrain in the book; when Sillitoe was young, he said, he took care not to get a girl pregnant because "those who did not take such precautions asked for all they got, and a bit more. As Arthur Shelton's father said, 'When you get married, a penny bun costs tuppence!'"

Sillitoe picked his Desert Island Discs last year. Some nice considerations here and here.

UPDATE: If the writerly stuff interests you, you may like the Writers Guild East tweet updates on today's New York City Mayor's Office of Film, Theater and Broadcasting seminar -- though it has more to do with careerism than craft.

TELL US ANOTHER ONE ABOUT "POLITICAL CORRECTNESS" WHILE YOU'RE AT IT. Holy shit: An Obama official makes a joke about a Jewish guy outwitting a guy from the Taliban at a pro-Israel gathering, where it is warmly received, and the rightbloggers rush to portray it as anti-Semitic.

Leading the idiot derby by a nose*: The Anchoress, who pulls one that I haven't seen since high school:

Is it anti-Semitic?

Maybe yes, maybe no.

Presumably, the Taliban member was of Arab descent, which would make him a Semite, as well. If one takes any of the views listed above, then the joke portrays both Arab and Jew negatively, and it is anti-Semitic.

Zing! After many lines of this kind of concise analysis, The Anchoress concedes that the joke may be what any listener whose head is not fogged with politics will know it is. But that doesn't let Obama off the hook: "...for all anyone knows, the White House might have omitted the joke from its transcripts because it was too pro-Jew for their tastes!"

What a miserable, joyless job Joke Patrol must be.

* Not meant as a reference to The Anchoress' Italian-American heritage, so please don't call the Anti-Defamation League.

I CAN'T WAIT UNTIL TOMORROW 'CAUSE I GET MORE HEROIC EVERY DAY. I see the organizer of that Draw Muhammed thing has backed out:

I made a cartoon that went viral and I am not going with it. Many other folks have used my cartoon to start sites, etc. Please go to them as I am a private person who draws stuff,

The associated Facebook page keeper has bailed as well ("This event was not supposed to be about hatred but its opposite").

Am I the only True Son of Liberty to stand for freeeeedom? I figured Mark Steyn would have churned out a graphic novel by now.