LAST GO-ROUND FOR RAND. Though Paul the Younger has capitulated, at Reason the libertarians hold aloft the Old Standard:

But this controversy does raise the very important topic of the government’s central role in American racism. First and foremost, Jim Crow was a legal regime, one that relied on state and local laws to restrict the political, social, and economic liberty of African Americans... we’re talking primarily about state action, not about some failure of the free market.

Similarly, slavery was a legal regime. As with Jim Crow, those poor white Southerners had no choice but to obey the law despite their inclinations, which would naturally have had them follow the enlightened, emancipating course of the Free Market -- that is, surrendering their unpaid laborers.

That's why white Southerners rejoiced when Jim Crow was overthrown. Further proof that the gummint that gums least gums best!

What planet are they from, and can they be sent back?

UPDATE. The rightblogger consensus is that Rand Paul was smeared by being quoted accurately -- the liberal media is more nefarious than we knew! -- and that Jonah Goldberg works very short days.

LIBERTARIANS IN THEIR OWN WORDS. This Rand Paul thing just gets better and better. Now Reason's Matt Welch has informed the troops that the expected liberal attack on the Son of the REVOLution has come to pass, "using as prime evidence his recent statements in opposition to the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act."

The comments are fucking delightful. It's like Free Republic for the high school debate team.

First, there's a lengthy discussion over whether or not to buy gold.

When the Wealth Producers get back on track, some -- perhaps hoping like Rand to convince onlookers that they too would march with MLK in defense of his so-called "rights" -- explain that in our modern, racism-free Valhalla, the Free Market would fail to reward segregated businesses: "Even if an owner wanted to run one, nearly all white people would refuse to eat at it, and it would go out of business." One says that if he were black, instead of "not knowing" a racist storeowner is "saying 'damn n-----' under his breath while he serves you, patronize his business and give him money," he'd rather the guy identify himself as racist; then, the thought-experimental black would be discriminated against, but he would live to see his white neighbors drive the racist out of business, perhaps with the aid of Superman. It would make a lovely After-School Special.

They also bitterly lament that, despite their solicitude toward African-Americans, the stupid liberals will call them racists anyway. This I suppose makes them moderate libertarians.

More hardcore commenters just get right to the nut -- if businessmen want a black-free establishment, Congress shall make no law! Some take the logical next step, and argue that the Civil Rights Act should be repealed ("If it is possible that the Civil Rights Act was the right thing to do in 1964, isn't it also possible that things have improved enough in nearly fifty years that we can now go back to respecting personal autonomy and property rights like we did before?").

Favorite isolated incidents:

[Joe] Scarborough sounds more like a liberal the longer he hangs out at MSNBC.

So Rand Paul thinks that it is okay to ask minorities to help support businesses with their taxes (to pay for police/court protection, roads, infrastructure, etc.) yet be prohibited from being able to patronize them?
They PAY taxes? News to me . . .

This is one of those things that is better left alone. Just lie about an answer and be done with it.

That last cowboy seems to have caught on. It remains to be seen if Rand has. (UPDATE: Apparently!)

I doubt this will scuttle Rand's campaign -- it is, after all, Kentucky. But if the incident informs more people of what libertarianism's really about, it will have been worth it.

UPDATE. James Joyner pitches in. Sure, maybe things were bad for black people back then....

The problem, circa 1964, was that there really was not right to freely associate in this manner in much of the country... More importantly, it meant that, say, a black traveling salesman couldn’t easily conduct his business without an in-depth knowledge of which hotels, restaurants, and other establishments catered to blacks.

...but now we have the internet, so we can get rid of the Civil Rights Act and make something like Yelp for black traveling salesmen seeking Jim Crow accommodations. Maybe we can call it HALP!

UPDATE 2: The Poor Man has the transcript of "Rand Paul’s speech to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Birmingham, Alabama in April, 1963 (hypothetical)."

NOW ASK HIM ABOUT BROWN VS. BOARD OF EDUCATION. I'm mildly surprised about the Rand Paul matter. I'm not surprised, mind you, to learn that Paul is against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 -- and don't let his hemming and hawing fool you, he is against it; if the government doesn't have the authority to enforce the law, it's meaningless.

Nor am I surprised that Paul's supporters would try to play the victim, as if asking Paul about it were a dirty trick.

No, I'm only surprised at how few of them feel obliged to say they disagree with Paul on the Civil Rights Act but support his candidacy anyway. They're going all in -- saying, yeah, what do we need this gummint interference for, anyway? They must really believe that Tea Party thing is magic and will sweep out all evil, socio-molistic ideas, including desegregation.

A special prize should go to Another Black Conservative:

Here is the Catch 22. If Paul says he fully supports how the feds forced the private sector to end segregation he loses libertarian street cred, but by only supporting the results of the Civil Rights Act and not the actual legislation, Paul gives the left room to paint him as a racist.

That's a neat trick -- supporting what the Act achieved, but not the "actual legislation" used to achieve it. That's like saying you like milk, but disapprove the manipulation of cow teats. (ABC is finally reduced to suggesting "boycotts and the free market" as an alternative. Yeah, those lunch counters would have desegregated in a jiffy if, instead of sit-ins, those guys had gone to those lunch counters and said, "We refuse to patronize your establishment and are going back to Columbia University.")

Dan Riehl dishes out the "tough mope," telling his followers yes, it was "unfair" forcing Paul to dance around the question of whether the force of law should be used to prevent racial discrimination, but "this is politics," dirty as it is, and Paul has to learn to lie about it.

The Constitutional battle was fifty years ago. It was lost.

Which side of the battle do you suppose Riehl was on?

UPDATE. A Paul defender* agrees that boycotts and would have ended discrimination, because whites-only businesses "must have suffered significantly for their policies," and would have caught on to this fact sooner or later. Touchingly, he speculates of blacks who left the Springfield, Missouri area after the 1906 lynchings: "Wherever they choose to live after 1906, their economic influence guaranteed that they would be served equitably by businesses."

UPDATE 2. Mediaite gives it the old college try:

Except, regardless of what he may privately believe, Paul hasn’t publicly expressed outright opposition to the Civil Rights Act– or, at least, the part of the Civil Rights Act it would be scandalous not to support.

He's against using the power of the law to require businesses to desegregate. What part is he in favor of? The let's-feel-good-about-it-existing part?

*UPDATE 3. The "Paul defender" mentioned above says in comments that his post was a parody. I want to believe him, but I can't be too hasty -- so many people got badly burned believing Joe Lieberman was a Democrat. Still, his other material suggests he's telling the truth.

I hope that doesn't mean I have to go through the rest of them and see whether they were kidding or not. I frequently get the feeling that Liberty Pundits has to be shitting me.

YOU'RE STILL DOING THINGS I GAVE UP YEARS AGO. Ah, the Reason Draw Mohammed contest has commenced. Nick Gillespie delivers the "tell":

Our Draw Mohammed contest is not a frivolous exercise of hip, ironic, hoolarious sacrilege toward a minority religion in the United States (though even that deserves all the protection that the most serioso political commentary commands). It's a defense of what is at the core of a society that is painfully incompetent at delivering on its promise of freedom, tolerance, and equal rights.

This signals to conservatives (whom Reason seems of late dedicated to attracting) that this is no airy-fairy liberal enterprise, done for silly aesthetic reasons or shits and giggles, but a manly anti-jihad.

So if you're the kind of guy who supports, for example, the recent shut-down of the Tarleton State University production of Terrence McNally's gay Jesus play Corpus Christi, you can still spit-ball the Prophet; that Jesus play was at a state university, after all, and would have been paid for by gummint money, which should not even exist, and if it does exist should only fund endeavors which might be supported by a plebiscite of local farmers and tinsmiths. Whereas Reason is supported by a Foundation, which is more libertarian because its funds are not stolen at gunpoint by gummint stormtroopers, but contributed by the rich people who would in a perfectly Randian world be our natural leaders.

For those of us who were drawing insulting pictures of Mohammed years ago, this is all very 2006.

ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND. With Robert Stacy McCain, it's pretty predictable. Covering the Burns-Critz race for the late John Murtha's Congressional seat, Sunday:

I’ll be back to update in a little bit. However, I must not end without reminding you of this quote from February 2009:

If we are doomed to destruction, as least let it be said that we died fighting. But those who never fight, never win.

In a word . . .
WOLVERINES!

On election day, McCain gives us a story about a Gold Star Mom voting for Republican Burns; then, hopeful news for Burns ("The Burns people are encouraged by what they’ve seen, and cautiously optimistic... Roughly 30% turnout can be expected, which is good for the Republican candidate") and suggestions of Democratic election fraud ("OK, yeah, sure")...

...then, just three hours after "the music in the grand ballroom right now just hit Lynyrd Skynyrd’s 'Gimme Three Steps.' That’s a good omen," Burns concedes.

This is very like McCain's drill during the late hours of the Doug Hoffman NY-23 campaign last year: Predictions of a Hoffman "revolution", and laughing off the "'GOP divided' spin job" until, undone by a GOP divided, Hoffman conceded. (In that instance, though, McCain waited 'til after the election to start talking about election fraud.)

Who knows if McCain "lost it" at any point during the Burns campaign, or if he'll come back later to tell us, "BURNSMANIA LIVES!"

Maybe it's because I'm born to lose and a Mets fan, but though I prefer winning, I'm not inclined to count chickens before they're hatched, nor to feverishly whoop up everyone else to count them with me, as McCain does. Perhaps this is a psychological weakness on my part. Certainly, aside from the occasional episode of blind rage, McCain seems to suffer no ill effects from his fantasies, which in any case must be more pleasant than forebodings of doom. Of course he doesn't seem to learn any lessons from them, either, but who wouldn't rather be happy than educated?

JONAH GOLDBERG GOES BIRTHER. Oh Lord: First Jonah Goldberg asserts that Birthers have been given a bad rap (suggesting, oddly and without evidence, that the New York Times thinks Truthers are "okay"); then he publishes some of their speculations at The Corner. Finally, they're finding a use for that heretofore-mostly-empty Big Tent!

Normally I can resist the temptation to believe in an afterlife, but the idea of William F. Buckley seeing this wreckage from the flames makes it much more difficult than usual.

NO GUTTER TOO LOW. Now, surely no one would try to make something ugly out of the selection of a Muslim-American Miss USA... oh crap:

I saw this last night and couldn't believe this country now has a Muslim MS USA. Good God Almighty these Muslims smell our blood all over the streets of the country today ...Goodbye America as the Muslims swallow up the USA right in our faces and laugh their sand chafed asses off at the wussification of this dying land....

Debbie Schlussel, who informed us that Miss Michigan Rima Fakih was funded by supporters of Hamas and Hezbollah (I guess that means they bought gowns for her), now suggests that her elevation to Miss USA may have been "rigged," and declares that "Barack Obama will exploit this as propaganda for Islam." Why does pageant owner Donald Trump hate America?

Michelle Malkin, seeing she'd been beaten to the Muslim-bashing punch, is reduced to muttering, "She nearly tripped over her gown."

These people are just mad they're not old enough to have protested Jackie Robinson signing with the Dodgers.

UPDATE: Snort, Good Roger Ailes in comments: "The Miss USA people were concerned that if a Christian was selected, they wouldn't own the rights to her inevitable sex tape."

UPDATE 2: Wow, full-fledged bigot eruptions across the internet. You'd think they'd be delighted that a woman of Arab descent is posing in a bikini (and maybe took part in a pole-dancing contest) -- what could be a stronger refutation of dhimmitude? Or maybe that's precisely why they're incensed. How can they get their fellow honkeys pumped for a race war against Muslims if some of them look good in a bikini?

The saddest example is Jules Crittenden. He knows he's supposed to get with the rightwing program, but he just can't keep all the contradictions from overheating his computer:

It’s only ranting feminists and religious extremists who have a problem with this. Debbie Schlussel suggests Hezbollah links, which would be different...

Daniel Pipes, with a laundry list of past Muslim pageant winners, says something about affirmative action but I don’t entirely get his point. Not enough information. If they are the only Muslims who ever competed, then maybe...

Didn't I see something like this on Star Trek?



UPDATE 3: At first I thought: Good Lord, the Ole Perfesser is making sense! Should have realized it was actually guest blogger Radley Balko. Sadly, he's not the only one filling in, and Ann Althouse brings the crazy.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about a couple of culture war skirmishes that came up lately: First, the battle to convince America that the 20-year-old series Law & Order actually died of liberalism; second, the battle to do something tea-partyish with the remake of Robin Hood before anyone could see it and find out that it's just a movie.

These guys seem to think all film, video, and broadcast products are documentaries. It's a wonder they haven't denounced Citizen Kane for its anti-business message.

Go look. It has to be seen to be disbelieved.

HO-HUM, ANOTHER AMATEUR BLASPHEMER (PLUS: A BULLSHIT LIBERTARIAN ANGLE!) Guess who's back? Mark Goldblatt! Longtime National Review readers may recall Goldblatt as the author of Africa Speaks, a book with which he hoped to show that

If not for the French — who've retired all such trophies — African Americans would currently rank as the most hypocritical, most paranoid, most pretentious group of people on the planet.

You'd think the world, or at least the rural Deep South, had been waiting years for such a book, but alas, it o'ertopped no bestseller lists; Goldblatt attributed this to booksellers' prejudice against white people ("Whiteballing"). Yes, really.

I haven't read Africa Speaks, and so cannot judge it. I can report he has a new book out called Sloth which sounds pretty interesting. And he hasn't given up offering his usual brave opinions of dark people.

His new bit, to nutshell, is that because Allen Ginsburg once yelled blasphemies (or so Goldblatt heard) at a Muslim cabdriver who approved of Salman Rushdie's fatwa, Goldblatt may refer to the attempted Times Square bomber as a "Muslim dirtbag." And, like the great Ginsberg, he too will "shit on Islam."

There are many levels of So What to this assertion (though I imagine if someone called Goldblatt a Jewish douchebag a lot of people would flip their lids). Yet these are mere words -- certainly nothing like my brave Muhammed cartoon, which I reproduce here:

Did that in 2006, Goldblatt! Now leave this religion-bashing stuff to the pros, and go back to making fun of black people. You're good at it, and your conservative friends will approve just as heartily.

Added punchline: Goldblatt's rant appears in Reason, the libertarian magazine. If Goldblatt can call Islam shit, I guess I can call libertarianism bullshit. Or "conservatism." But I repeat myself.

FREE SEX FOR ME, BUT NOT FOR THEE. The New York Post does another of its bogus trend stories: "No more sex in the city: New York women are going celibate — and they feel happier than ever." The article names about seven professed celibates, including... Courtney Love.

No one would take this boob-bait seriously, right? Ah, you've forgotten the ever-credulous rightbloggers! Cassy Fiano:

Sex in New York City has apparently become so devalued, so unimportant, that it’s being compared to fast food or cheap junk food.

Several of her male readers immediately boarded Greyhound buses, their shoulder-bags stuffed with Devil Dogs.

It’s as if a light bulb suddenly went on in these girls’ heads, and they realized — the feminist brainwashing was a lie. Sexual empowerment is a myth. Slutting around like Samantha on Sex and the City does not bring you love or happiness or freedom.

If you were wondering if there were a "Sex and the City" reference anywhere in the article but in the title -- no. I expect that, because they'd used the widely anticipated movie sequel to sell the story to their editors, the reporters tried to squeeze any reference they could out of their subjects -- "So are you more a Miranda, or a Samantha?" But even those dumb n00bs didn't fall for it.

Doesn't matter to Fiano -- she clutches the hook, and yells about the awful consequences of sex for girls a good long while before admitting:

I’m not saying women should wait to be married before they have sex. It’s the ideal, obviously, but I certainly fell short of that ideal.

She natters on awhile before coming to her primary argument:

I can tell every single girl out there who sleeps around with abandon that there is one thing that will stick with you forever: you will regret it.

One wonders: why? Because no one will fuck them as good as their fathers? Because McDonald's had a virginity sweepstakes? No:

There will come a day where you will meet that man, and you will wish you could take it all back. Giving yourself away to any stranger you barely know is not empowering. It’s degrading.

Holy fucking shit -- Fiano's using the hyper-Christian anti-kissing argument!

I blame this half on Hollywood, and half on feminism.

Wow -- she felt so strongly about it that, though she had only two Mad Libs spaces left, she left "Obama" out of them.

Believe it or not, Fiano's not the saddest specimen associated with this. Consider the Ole Perfesser:

WHAT’S WRONG WITH A Ding-Dong now and then?

Related: One-night stand etiquette: The importance of “politeness and dignity.”

UPDATE: Oh, celibacy is hipster-trendy now. Enjoy it, guys . . . .

The Perfesser, married to Dr. Mrs. Ole Perfesser, is giving sexually active single people a hard time*. Now why do you suppose that might be?

UPDATE. Speaking of "Sex and the City" as a rightwing sex-scold object lesson, I had forgotten about the mini-boom in the genre a few years back. There was a classic by Wuzzadem, now unfortunately removed from public view, in which Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda, and Samantha were blamed not only for mainstreaming deviant sex practices, but also for homegrown Muslim terrorism; and that of a fellow whom I thought (in that happier, more innocent time) was named Russ Douthat. Also, the related musings of a three-named lady wingnut and Lisa Shiffren . And the dam broke when the SATC movie came out.

It's an easy lay-up for them, I guess. The series and films are basically modern variations on the old wild-oats-and-settle-down stories parodied in SNL's "Married in a Minute" sketch; the addition of sexual content allows wingnuts to either shake their fists at the sex or praise the pro-marriage message, as the occasion warrants.

* Sure, it looks like he's siding with them, but you don't know the Perfesser like I do! The punchline is that the stupid city slickers, who have not learned the lesson of the rooster like good country folk, are going celibate -- though the linked article just makes the whole thing even more obviously a put-up job ("Well, I just figured being in the Post would be funny"). It's amazing what people will do to get their name on the internet, which is odd, because all you really need is a Blogspot account.

UPDATE 2. If you like this sort of thing, check out Joanna:

And as far as "only after one thing" - have you noticed what the feminists are up to these days? For some reason it's a feminist goal to match men in 'sexual freedom'; not sure why you complain that he does it too. As any Sex and the City followerista will tell you, it's perfectly okay for women to use men as sex objects. Now men have to watch themselves. No man starts out as the hard, careless, selfish, kick-you-out-of-bed icicle that needs nothing more than 20 minutes from you. One of the more liberated of us probably broke his heart first, and now he's free to pass along the favor. Ahhh how beautiful freedom is.

The next time some chick calls you an asshole, blame it on feminism. Wave a copy of The Feminine Mystique at her and cry, "They made me a criminal!" (And here's a tip: It's always more convincing when you throw in something about how before Women's Lib you used to hold doors for women. That really gets them thinking!)

LIBERTARIAN BULLSHIT OF THE DAY. Shorter Michael C. Moynihan: Get the U.S. Out of the U.N. (He dug deep for that one.)

Elsewhere the brethren consider The Nation's opposition to the Kagan nomination. A healthy portion of the comments are about how Kagan is ugly and/or gay.

They and the Free Republic commenters probably wouldn't disagree on much, except the Free Republic posters giving them wedgies.

RELIGIOUS MANIAC. National Review torture enthusiast Andy McCarthy really wants America to learn that Islam is the enemy, but nice Muslim just won't cooperate. No mater, he's got an answer:

I just watched the latest installment of Peter's intriguing interview of Fouad Ajami. I'm sure Mark will have his own take on it, but, despite my admiration for Mr. Ajami, I was unimpressed. He seems to make Mark's point that there are moderate Muslims but not a moderate Islam. In purporting to refute this notion, Mr. Ajami basically says that he was brought up as a moderate Muslim in a family that was similarly "secular" and moderate. OK, but Islam is certainly not secular — that's a contradiction. If Ajami is saying that his family chose to live in a secular fashion that did not incorporate many Muslim traditions (he mentions that women in his family did not wear the veil), that means they were resistant to various tenets, not that those tenets are not part of Islam.

I understand why he might feel this way. In my darker moments I feel that Christians who have been taught by their mullahs that abortion is murder are similarly a menace to society. Just because they seem to conform to our way of life doesn't mean there aren't many Scott Roeders out there, sleeper cells waiting to kill us because they hate our freedoms.

But then I remember that while some of them are indeed homicidal maniacs, the overwhelming majority of American Christians, thank God, don't take their religion that seriously. And if you believe in America at all, you must expect American Muslims to similarly assimilate into our pluralistic society.

Unless what you're really against is pluralism, and what you're really for is diligently stirring the shit in hopes of making this a truly Christian nation at last, with blood and thunder.

UPDATE. In response, Mark Steyn is his usual raghead-hating self (while professing "respect" for Mr. Ajami, who must by now be wondering what they mean by that word).

But Mark Krikorian is, amazingly, even worse: He mentions one Hispanic writer who suggested that white people leave his people alone and watch out for Muslim-Americans instead, then adds, "I suspect lots of apologists for mass immigration would like to make this argument explicitly, but refrain because they know it would disrupt their united front with Islamic groups." This is really unfair; Think how nativists would object if I tarred them all with the ravings of Mark Krikorian.

Krikorian also points with pride to his own earlier post in which he said "Look, I understand why conservatives get irritated by the leftist whining of so many black 'leaders,' and even much of the black public..." and a bunch of other stuff that normal people would prefer to have covered up.

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.