VEGAS, ONE NIGHT ONLY! Forgive my not keeping up better. In the words of Toulain Vantrecs, I've been... ill. Since I've just disappointed you all so terribly, this is a good time to announce that I will appearing at this year's Netroots Nations in Vegas -- not, as I had hoped, performing my Tribute to Morty Gunty, Come On, Lady... I Laughed When You Came In, but on a panel that will include Sady Doyle of Tiger Beatdown and the Sadlynauts, Damon Poeter and Brad Reed.

This is a disaster waiting to happen. First of all, the topic of discussion, near as I can figure it, has to do with comedy and political blogging, a combination as propitious as bourbon and frogurt. Second, I know Reed and Poerter, or whatever they're calling themselves these days, and while they can be very funny in private conversation, you give them a soapbox and they'll start bellyaching about the "working man" like W.J. Bryan in a Chautauqua tent till even the union delegates have to retire in disgust. Also, and I believe this is no surprise to my regular readers, Reed is in the advanced stages of tertiary syphilis, and frequently not in his right mind.

I'm still not sure why they invited me -- it is well known among the shut-ins support group we call the blogosphere that I am both pathologically shy and a hardcore alcoholic, and when pushed into the spotlight have been known to self-medicate till both my personality and speech are so distorted that members of my own family fail to recognize me (though they may have just been pretending, out of embarrassment). So, though I would like to please, and have rehearsed several passages from the Toastmasters' Guide which my friends at Daisy Dukes say are sure-fire, I fear we're going to end up with something like this:



The panel was assembled by someone named Amanda Marcotte, who is originally from Texas. Women from there, I have learned, usually marry at age 15; yet Marcotte, 20 if she's a day, remains unwed and childless. (She recently moved to New York, where her condition is common and therefore less shameful.) She will be on the dais, and if I can form words I will make a point of asking her if she hasn't tried putting more effort into her makeup and acting less bossy.

HARVEY PEKAR. He was a professional curmudgeon who bragged, often aggressively, on his working-class roots ("One day I had to fight five guys") and "fucked up a great thing" with Letterman mainly because he couldn't stomach even the appearance of kissing ass. But make no mistake, Harvey Pekar was a poet. The American Splendor comics with which the recently deceased Pekar made his name are full of incidents and conversations that the rest of us might have found dull, or merely diverting, if we had viewed them without Pekar's illumination. As it was, he made even the mumbled how's-it-going talk from street corners and cafeterias sing.

I don't have any of them on hand, but I remember several American Splendor stories with pleasure. I'm thinking now of one episode in which Harvey runs into a bearded day-laborer buddy (I think Gary Dumm drew this) who tells him how he got a job by making it clear in the interview that "I don't give a shit." Even in real life the story would tickle you -- the laborer puts his feet on the interviewer's desk, looks him straight in the eye, and throws a match in the wastebasket, setting it on fire -- but Pekar and Dumm highlight many small unnecessary beauties in it that give it more than anecdotal life. For instance, the worker explains that he immediately quit the job -- "They wanted me to be a human screwdriver. Fuck that!" -- and makes a sharp chopping gesture which is emphasized in the comic by a motion line. The gesture pops for us probably like it did for Pekar when he was listening and watching, and tells us something about the character. (I still wonder about that guy. He wore old-fashioned glasses, and smoked a pipe.)

And so on, through fights at work, bad dates, cancer, talking to this guy he knows. The stories are pretty good, but it's the privileged moments that stick: The way Harvey plops Joyce's bag in the trunk and slams the hatch, the way his body twists when he yells at a co-worker (and how she calls him "sweetie" though she's totally pissed, which just makes him madder), or the way two girls look at each other when a co-worker tries to sell them pickled okra as a cure for lady problems. Sometimes it looks very proletarian -- after all, his was a working life, and even his artist subjects tended to live in squalor -- and we may be grateful that someone was making art out of the sort of world most of us live in, full of bills and bosses and disorder, rather than the upper-class fantasies most pop crap revolves around. But the joy is not only that he noticed them, but also that his ear and eye exalted them.

The Robert Crumb collaborations usually led, as one might imagine, to more Zen results (like the hospital vignettes: "Bitch, you bettah help me!" "Mister, you keep talking to people like that, you're gonna have a haa-aard way to go!"), which just point up Pekar's gift for detail. Crumb, who can be very astute about these things, said Pekar's work could be "so staggeringly mundane it verges on the exotic," which is only almost right, because the mundane is exotic, always, if you know how to look at it. Pekar knew.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP. It's a post-mortem of the wacky conservative World Cup coverage -- from the imputations of anti-Americanism against soccer itself, to the pathetic insistences by rightwing nerdlings like John J. Miller that it was okay to watch the World Cup so long as you had your magic red-white-and-blue glasses on.

It's all good, or wretched, depending on how you look at it, but do spare a moment for the horrifying Matt Labash article I used as a framing device, "Living Like A Liberal." Labash strenuously imitates the style of P.J. O'Rourke, which should offend the sensibilities of anyone who has not been on cocaine and Reaganism continuously since 1980, and which I thought even conservatives had given up. Does anyone still think this "I shit in your rainforest! Hey, I was just 'letting it all hang out!'" crap is satire? O'Rourke always struck me as a transparently fake young fogey in the manner of R. Emmett Tyrell, buying the affection of older investors with spats, cravats, and unapologetic reactionary cant which at its most cruel probably looked to them like jokes, especially considering all the cocaine.

While I also find more recent rightwing schtick such as The Mildly Concerned Ivy League Grad annoying, it has at least the saving grace of novelty. I had assumed that O'Rourke impersonators would be as rare as Gonzos manques by now. Alas, there's at least one of 'em left to be stamped out.

Also, Labash thinks Bowling Alone is a liberal bible, and that people who prefer actual maple syrup to Aunt Jemima are just being contrary. I don't know if you can even sell that one in the cowtowns anymore.

NOBODY KNOWS THE TROUBLE SHE'S SEEN. Yeah, we have been a little content-light here, haven't we? OK, let's do a Sunday post. Culture war? Why not, it's a popular favorite.

Darleen Click gets mad at Joel Stein for some mild jokes about Indians (the subcontinental kind, not the Native-American kind):

Imagine if this appeared in National Review written by Jonah Goldberg... Of course, this is Joel Stein in Time so any attention by the MSM to this rather bizarre “humor piece” is even less than Clinton’s defense of Kleagle Byrd.

Goddamn librul racists! Stein is called out by Kal Penn, whom Click says "strikes the appropriate sacastic response" before remembering that Penn is the former Associate Director of the Obama White House Office of Public Engagement, and thus a racist, too, by definition. Rewriting being against the rules at Protein Wisdom, Click just forges ahead:

Penn doesn’t quite get it. Leftists get a pass when it comes to engaging in racist stereotypes because their motivations are always pure. Non-leftists are never motivated by anything but the most base of hatreds.

If only Penn had said that -- or even Ramesh Ponurru! But they didn't, so the job of explaining liberal racism falls to Click. Sigh. Why don't minorities appreciate how hard conservatives are working for them?

THE CONSERVATIVE REVIVAL, PART 43,899. At The Corner, Mike Potemra thinks he's seen another sign of American revival:

I had no idea, until seeing this commercial, that there was a roller-derby league centered in Manhattan. I went online to see when the next match was; turns out it’s Saturday night at the Hunter College gym. Tickets, unfortunately, are sold out. You read that correctly: The Saturday-night roller-derby match is sold out, in 2010, on the Upper East Side. The limits of the possible are changing in this country, continually, and not just in politics. If you stop and think about it, every day should be the Fourth of July.

No one warned this poor dork that the Gotham Girls roller derby shows, which I had the pleasure of watching last year, are more modern, punk rock, and girl-powerish than your average conservative culture cop could countenance. "This probably isn't a family-friendly entertainment," warns comrade Daniel Foster. "... the girls of the league have handles like 'Surly Temple' and 'Angela Slamsbury.'" (This is where Mom drops the meatloaf and Dad angrily rustles his newspaper.)

Foster also quotes from his own coverage of Gotham Girls as "a cub reporter writing arts & culture for a New York weekly," in which role he observed,

At what point did Gen-X’s fervent commitment to irony become indistinguishable from Gen-Y’s earnest enjoyment of kitsch?

You can see why National Review snapped this guy up.

Comrade Potemra is on the spot: Admit doubleplusungoodness, or attempt to defend the aggressively-named warrior princesses? He takes the coward's way out:

You mentioned both irony and kitsch; maybe roller derby succeeds in working at different levels simultaneously? And, come to think of it, maybe it always did? Quite coincidentally, I was reading yesterday a Franciscan religious tract from 1951...

Go ahead and read it all if you dare, but I warn you: it's the sort of thing at which even Ross Douthat might throw up his hands and cry, "Oh barf."

I wonder which of these boy geniuses will be the first to write about how hypocritical it is that he was refused admittance to a lesbian bar.

ALL CLASS. NYT:

Whether it is their residence, a second home or a house bought as an investment, the rich have stopped paying the mortgage at a rate that greatly exceeds the rest of the population.

More than one in seven homeowners with loans in excess of a million dollars are seriously delinquent, according to data compiled for The New York Times by the real estate analytics firm CoreLogic.

By contrast, homeowners with less lavish housing are much more likely to keep writing checks to their lender. About one in 12 mortgages below the million-dollar mark is delinquent.

But I thought ACORN was to blame. You mean the biggest culprits are actually rich white people?

Somebody tell the Tea Party guys -- I'm sure they'll readjust their outrage accordingly.

SHOOT-OUT AT THE FANTASY FACTORY. You may have been wondering what that crazy bastard Bill Whittle's been up to lately. Around the time we first heard of him, Whittle was trying to build a city in the sky. That didn't pan out, and he retreated to making lunatic videos for PJM.

But now -- with trumpets from The Ole Perfesser! -- comes Whittle's big play: Declaration Entertainment.

In a promo reel, Whittle explains that the hippies ruined Hollywood. "Everything I learned about the Vietnam War, I learned from Francis Ford Coppola and Oliver Stone," says Whittle. "From them I learned Vietnam was an unwinnable quagmire fought by drug-addled psychopaths, serially murdering innocent villagers just for fun."

That may not be what you got out of Apocalypse Now and Platoon, but you don't have the advanced mind Whittle has. Look, he's already moved on to another Hollywood target: "You know who the reliable standby enemy is in Hollywood films today?" he asks. "You are. "

At last! I thought when I heard this. The doctors told me the voices weren't real, but I knew they were after me and I was right!

Alas, Whittle's fantasy turns out to be more reliably Republican: "If you're pro-business, pro-military, pro-Christian, and for limited government and individual rights and responsibilities, then you and everything you believe are the enemy of Hollywood films today."

He turns the show over to a montagist who explains that Hollywood became godless, not because of hippies so much (Whittle must have been out for a smoke break when they made this), but because U.S. films are now using "capital from all over the world." Much like the rest of American business, we'd say, but it's worse in films because it means that, "instead of making American movies and then selling them to the world," these rootless cosmopolitans "make the world's movies and sells them to Americans."

And "it should be no surprise that the values that make it to the screen are very different than the ones Americans are used to seeing." This is punctuated by a little cartoon movie-going child blushing, and cartoon Mom and Dad covering his eyes, to underline the point: Not only Coppola and Stone, but also makers of sexed-up movies from Porky's to The Hangover are part of the anti-American flicker-bombing campaign!

And that's where Declaration comes in: They promise films without "anti-heroes standing up against tradition" or "greedy businessmen or CIA bad guys." (They don't promise not to show tits, though. Maybe they plan to take that up after the launch.)

How do you get these retro films? Just become a member! You'll go "behind the scenes" to see "your movies" being made. You can even "win chances to appear in the movies themselves" and tell moviemakers what you want them to film...

If this begins to sound more speculative than actual to you, your momma didn't raise no fool: Declaration says it will fund its movies with membership fees. As soon as enough of these come in, they'll get straight to work on The Joe McCarthy Nobody Knew. "Declaration Entertainment is not another production company," says Whittle, "it's a movement, it's a revolution..."

And unlike in other revolutions, you don't have to man the barricades -- you don't even have to attend a Tea Party. You just send in your money and Declaration's propagandists will do the heavy lifting for you. You can get in on the revolution for as little as $9.99 -- but there are also "executive membership packages" for $10,000, $50,000, and $100,000 which include perks like autographed scripts and on-screen credits. (Throw in a few more bucks and maybe they'll cast your niece!)

Based on this, Declaration promises to do for filmmaking what Pajamas Media has done for blogging -- that is, burn through its seed money and piss everybody off.

I see a way forward, though: DE should offer films with a high-weirdness factor which can be enjoyed by both serious patriots and giggling, stoned unbelievers -- like Michael Moriarty's Hitler Meets Christ. Plus there are old movies they can get cheap, like the recently revived If Footmen Tire, What Will Horses Do? , or even remake -- how does a new version with Bo Derek grab you?

These are economical work-arounds that can, with a little creativity in the bookkeeping department, keep Declaration afloat until the Republicans get back in and resume dishing out patronage.

GRADUATING CLASS WAR. I think I have discovered (via Josh Treviño) a new watershed in the internet's slow strangulation of journalism:

The daily routine seldom varied. Mr. Nicholson, 24, a graduate of Colgate University, winner of a dean’s award for academic excellence, spent his mornings searching corporate Web sites for suitable job openings. When he found one, he mailed off a résumé and cover letter — four or five a week, week after week.

Over the last five months, only one job materialized. After several interviews, the Hanover Insurance Group in nearby Worcester offered to hire him as an associate claims adjuster, at $40,000 a year. But even before the formal offer, Mr. Nicholson had decided not to take the job.

Having been in the business I can spot the signs, and the story of apparent layabout Scott Nicholson in the New York Times seems like obvious link-bait. Though it appears sympathetic to Nicholson, the coddling by his upscale parents is right out of old Al Capp parodies of befuddled permissiveness.

When we are told Nicholson "gradually realized that his career will not roll out in the Greater Boston area — or anywhere in America — with the easy inevitability that his father and grandfather recall," those of us who have long toiled at unexalted jobs may be forgiven the impulse to punch him in the nose; ditto when those of us who are not of his generation, and already imagine it to be weak and gutless, learn that such as Nicholson "were raised by baby boomers who lavished a lot of attention on their children."

I was surprised, though, when I came to reconsider the story, how my prejudices, thus inflamed, had caused me to overlook some pieces of information. Young Scott's of a particular class; his Grandpaw was a stockbroker, and the family seems in no way hurting for money. When I was told, “'Going it alone,' 'earning enough to be self-supporting' — these are awkward concepts for Scott Nicholson and his friends," I forgot immediately that both Nicholson and his friends were sufficiently privileged that this variation from the family tradition of smooth career transitions is mostly an emotional problem, rather than the dire economic one it is for millions of less-well-fixed kids and post-kids. (Three of them are entering law school as a fallback. Yeah, why didn't I do that instead of waiting tables?)

That is, I was roused to contempt for Nicholson's whole generation based on the example of some rich kid.

Were I a more paranoid sort, I might think that by using Nicholson as an avatar of disenfranchised youth, the Times was trying to minimize the situation of all jobless young people by making me think of them as slackers. But having been inside the sausage factories I know better. The story is more likely to have had its genesis in a specific access opportunity than in a memo from the Committee for Manufacturing Consent. But a clever editor who heard of it may have foreseen how it would come out, and looked forward to a wave of outraged and dismissive linkage from across the internet. So far I've only seen this, from an apparatchik who can read but still wants to believe ("On the other hand, this story shows that even the privileged, spoiled, affluent youth are hurt by the ObamaEconomy"). But give it time.

UPDATE. Some commenters think, no, this is just the Times typically looking at the nation's problems through the lens of the upper class -- as Linda puts it, "stories about the recession where people struggle along without their nanny, and find that the recession reconnected them with their soul, instead of making them live in a refrigerator box."

That's an understandable analysis but, being profoundly conservative in my outlook, I still tend toward a market solution, and believe that not even Times editors would fail to anticipate the reaction such a story might provoke among normal people. Back at the Voice I used to notice Times howlers about yuppie communes, how successful career women couldn't find husbands, etc. Those I put down to patrician cluelessness. But the Nicholson saga really seems to be asking for it. It's like their version of those hipster stories on which the internet has been fattening for a couple of years.

AND WE'RE JUST THE GUYS TO DO IT! Obama has failed them, so they're bringing their own "team of respected energy, environment, homeland security and response experts" to the Gulf to ask hard questions about the BP oil spill.

This A-Team comes from.... the Heritage Foundation, whose primary response to the crisis so far has been to defend BP, calling the Congressional hearings to which its executives were summoned a "public lynching," and remarking of the $20 billion escrow account to which BP freely agreed, "making 'offers you can’t refuse' may be a great way to run the mob, but it is no way to run a country."

Their first job will probably be spectrographic analysis of the tar balls to reveal their Democratic content.

You will not be surprised to learn that even before leaving the dock, Team Heritage has already come up with some damning evidence:

The President still has never visited Tennessee which was ravaged by deadly floods this spring. Tennessee shares a commonality with Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi beyond geography: a right leaning electorate.

Maybe they'll return with sad film footage of oil executives begging for help from the rooftops of investment banks.

Does this kind of thing con anyone? Besides the Perfesser, I mean.

A LITTLE BAD TOUCH OF DREHER IN THE NIGHT. It's a quasi-holiday, not much doing -- let's go see what Rod Dreher's up to.

How the cultural Left paved way for pedophilia

Ah, the crazy never sleeps at Dreher's.

He quotes a German article about a 60s pedophilia ring run by hippies and professors. Sounds awful, but really, "the cultural Left"? You'd be on much surer ground saying the Catholic Church is directly responsible for all those little boys its priests raped. After all, "the cultural Left" didn't prevent their pedophiles' punishment by sending them to other parishes. (Maybe if we had a stronger central administration...)

Wondering if this crossed Dreher's mind? You must be new here.

I would also like to know to what extent this Leftist anti-bourgeois pedophilia culture penetrated radical circles elsewhere in Europe. Anybody here know? One wonders if the leadership of the national Catholic churches -- I'm thinking right now of the Belgian church, and retired Cardinal Danneels, one of the Roman Church's most progressive top churchmen for decades -- assimilated any of this so-called progressivism in the way they thought about sexuality...

Yes, Dreher's actually trying to build a case that the global Catholic child abuse scandal was actually caused by hippies. To demonstrate his seriousness, he's doing it with a bleg!

Naturally he later denies it: "If you think I'm trying to 'blame' pedophilia on the cultural left (in Germany, or anywhere), you're deliberately misreading what I'm saying here..." ...in a post called "How the cultural Left paved way for pedophilia." Well, if Jonah Goldberg can claim Liberal Fascism isn't about how liberals are fascists, why not?

And I thought I trawled for hits!

UPDATE. Oh my, DocAmazing in comments: "And notice that [Ratzinger's] second-most-famous organizational affiliation was with a group of boys in shorts. Pimpfin' ain't easy." Pimpfin'! V. advanced.

FOR THE LOVE OF GALT, GO, ALREADY! It's always fun when the Galtniks declare that their rich entrepreneurial friends are outraged at this Obama and will rebel in an America of their own devising. Who can forget TigerHawk's on-camera Randroid meltdown about superior producers and inferior littlebrains? Or the unnamed "owner of several companies" who sported Galt cufflinks and pledged to starve his dry cleaners till Obama was brought down?

Now Wayne Allyn Root tells us about his friends, the backbone of America and all Republicans, apparently:

My friends are all part of the economic engine of America: Small business...

I've polled all my friends who own small businesses -- many of them in the Internet and high-tech fields. They all agree that in this new Obama world of high business taxes, income taxes, payroll taxes, capital gains taxes, and workers compensation taxes, the key to success is to avoid employees.

Getting rid of employees -- it's a wonder no one ever thought of that as a way to maximize profits! I was just talking about this to an automated voice at my bank the other day. But how?

My small business-owning friends aren't creating one job. Not one. They are shedding jobs. They are learning to do more with fewer employees. They are creating high-tech businesses that don't need employees.

Creating high-tech businesses that don't need employees! You'd think they're be praising Obama for stimulating their creativity.

And many business owners are making plans to leave the country.

Another innovation! When other people hear of this new "off-shoring" idea, Obama will be in serious trouble.

Root, you will be unsurprised to learn, is a big libertarian, as well as the author of the 2005 classic, Millionaire Republican: Why Rich Republicans Get Rich--and How You Can Too! Among his wealth secrets: "Own Real Estate in International Tax Havens." I smell sequel! Also, bullshit.

THE LEVEL OF DEBATE THE INTERNET DESERVES. Jonah Goldberg declares victory!

That sort of language clearly rankles my friend Will Wilkinson. I discussed the merits and shortcomings of patriotism with him for a special Independence Day edition of Bloggingheads. I found it to be a largely un-worthwhile discussion. Knowing in advance that Will is utterly immune to any romantic or sentimental arguments (as he might characterize them) for love of country, we were forced to restrict our conversation to sociological and other strategic rationalizations for patriotism. It was kind of like debating love of country with a Vulcan. Except, ironically enough, at the end of the day, I think it's pretty clear that Will is the one letting his emotions get the better of him.

Being your best friend, I briefly scanned the Bloggingheads in question to see whether Goldberg actually made Wilkinson flip out.

My data is incomplete. I could only stand a few minutes. I've heard there are people who have watched entire episodes of Bloggingheads, but I find it hard to believe such supermen exist. What human being could withstand such a punishing assault on their eyes and ears without willfully puncturing them with whatever sharp object was at hand in defense of their own sanity?

I did see Wilkinson ask Goldberg if the War for Independence was justified, and a flummoxed Goldberg reply, "The ends justify the means." Wilkinson gets into the why-not-secession theme, and Goldberg talks about a "Whiggish danger in going over these grievances," perhaps meaning "Wiggish," meaning he was thinking of the powdered wigs the Founders wore in paintings before returning to his customary reverie of a ham sandwich. His closer, characteristically: "This is something I've not spent a lot of time on, but I think it's an interesting distinction and I've always wanted to sort of learn more about it."

Despite retinal bleeding, I skimmed the rest and could not find the Wilkinson meltdown to which Goldberg refers, though before everything went black I did hear Wilkinson theorize that "wars are almost always bad," and Goldberg tell Wilkinson that you can't blame patriotism for war any more than you can blame oil for it. But I may have just hallucinated that.

Perhaps a Corner "reader" will "write in" to request proof, spurring Goldberg to point to 49:01, where Wilkinson blinks rapidly, proving his discombobulation before the mighty reasoning skills of his opponent. Till then I will have to assume Goldberg means that Wilkinson generally seemed to care about what he was saying and whether his argument made any sense, whereas Goldberg was digesting an entire pork butt and couldn't rouse himself to anything like full attention. Now, back to the decompression chamber!

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the Robert Byrd obsequies and how rightbloggers tried to make it about the endemic racist of Democrats. This "the real racists" bit never fails to remind me of Wile E. Coyote, hurtling into the canyon with a detached rock ledge in pursuit.

HAPPY FOURTH. Maybe you were wondering what the anti-abortion movement was up to lately. Here's the latest outrage from Jill Stanek:

The youth pro-life activist group Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust is picketing comedian Jimmy Kimmel's Los Angeles home as I type (read to end) and will be picketing his studio on Hollywood Blvd later today.

The group is demanding an apology, and here's why...

At some point the crew became aggravated by the pro-life activists because they refused to move along and turned one of the hot spotlights on Survivor Ryan Bueler...

Yes: A spotlight. The Hollyweird bastards attacked the fetus-defenders with star power!

Bueler refused to move and for 15 minutes there was a stand-off, during which time a bracelet he was wearing and his sign were partially melted, although he escaped uncooked.

Plus his Gummi Bears were totally ruined. Later Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust (great name for a band, BTW) infiltrated the audience at a Jimmy Kimmel taping and disrupted the show ("Apologize for burning teenagers with high-powered lamps!").



We celebrate our nation's birthday, not just because freedom is precious, but also because it is hilarious.

UPDATE. Not everyone loves America like I do: Here's The Anchoress lamenting the decline of public education from back in the days when she walked ten miles to school and had to live at the bottom of the lake, and proving her point with... an episode of "Jaywalking." Oh, hell, it's a holiday -- let even the developmentally challenged have fireworks! In fact, give them the M-80s and a blowtorch.

NEW CONSERVATIVE WISDOM: RACISM TAKES GUTS. Jonah Goldberg's latest mouth-fart is about reformed Klansman Robert Byrd:

Robert Byrd was a complicated man, but the explanation for the outsized celebration of his career strikes me as far more simple. He was a powerful man who abandoned his bigoted principles in order to keep power. And his party loved him for it.

Of course, if a Democrat of Byrd's era wanted to retain his bigoted principles, he could always become a Republican.

Given the hot new conservative trend toward neo-Confederacy, this may become a talking point: "All you liberals just like black people cuz it's popular. Only conservatives are tuff enuff to be bigots! That's why we keep Derbyshire."

SHORTER JOHN J. MILLER. I previously praised the work of new Poet Laureate W.S. Merwin, but since I learned that Merwin said bad things about George W. Bush, I realize that he is actually wrongthink and doubleplusungood.

UPDATE. In comments, Doghouse Riley does the longer shorter: "In conclusion, Paul McCartney, the Dixie Chicks, and Ward Churchill. Thank you."

HOW COME THEY CAN CALL EACH OTHER FAGGOT AND WE CAN'T? PART 56,232. Now isn't that nice? To make up for civil-unioned gay employees' shortfall in tax benefits versus married straight employees, Google is giving them a pay raise to cover the discrepancy. Conservatives should approve: No public funds expended and, after all, the new conservatism is enlightened and tolerant, not like those liberals have been trying to --

How many straight Google employees will go all “Chuck & Larry” just to make Google pay them a little extra money?

Google’s straight workers last seen practicing their lisps and learning show tunes…

What would happen if a company decided to pay heterosexuals employees more money based on their sexuality? I guess in this upside down progressive liberal world I shouldn’t even bother wondering anymore.

EVIL.

This discriminates against the straights for their "lifestyle" choice and they can sue for it. They can also claim that marriage has been devalued by the continued attempts to allow people who insist on labeling themselves with terms that differentiate themselves from the rest of society, yet demand to share the word that has always represented a union between a man and a woman.

What if a Muslim declared that his religion required him to have 3 wives and skree skree skreeeeee...

Never mind. I was right the first time -- they're just a bunch of deranged asshole bigots who haven't felt a pang for the underprivileged since Allan Bakke and who are flipping the fuck out because a few gay people are finally getting an even break.

UPDATE. Thanks, in comments, to Doc Amazing: "If they had any sense, they'd come out as bisexual and double-bill."

THE PARTY OF JOHN WILKES BOOTH. I noticed back in October of 2008 when Regnery unleashed The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Civil War, a "joyful myth-busting rebel yell" full of fun speculation for conservatives and their kin-folk like "If there had been no Civil War, the South would have abolished slavery peaceably." This sort of reasoning has spread like wild-fahr, as we saw from Rand Paul's argument that without the Civil Rights Act, folks would have jes' naturally started serving the white and the colored at the same lunch counter, and George Wallace would have stepped out of the schoolhouse door and cried, "Come and be learned, my African-American friends."

Now I see from Wonkette and TPM that Human Events is using the thing as a subscribers' premium.

If that doesn't work, they can always try The Turner Diaries, or perhaps a new Politically Incorrect Guide to Thurgood Marshall.

Will these rebs never be Reconstructed?

UPDATE. Today in "Conservative Will Tell You Who the Real Racist Is": Michelle Malkin*, who claims a New York Times "whitewash" of Robert Byrd's Klan past based on a headline, because that's as far as most of her readers ever get before realizing there's no cartoon or sudoku. (The Times article is explicit on Byrd's past.)

Back when Paul the Younger was thought-experimenting with the Civil Rights Act, BTW, Malkin got LaShawn Barber to pen a "Segregation: not cool, but still better than statism!" article. That woman will never miss a meal.

* That post is actually written by Doug Powers. (Thanx Q.) Does Malkin always use ringers for this loathsome duty?

QUACKS. American Thinker, heretofore better known as the freak show engaging the world's youngest rightwing pundit, is apparently working on its credentials as a long-distance psychotherapy practice specializing in Barack Obama.

First up, alleged shrink Robin of Berkeley:

Did Obama ever have a head injury? His stepfather in Indonesia was purportedly an alcoholic abuser. Was Obama subject to any physical abuse?...

Obama admits to a history of drug use in his youth. Did his usage cause some damage? Does Obama still use?

Also: Asperger's Syndrome, Schizotypal Disorder, and pedophiliac butt-fucking. If you think she's kidding, you don't know Robin of Berkeley! She also thinks everyone who voted for Obama is nuts, too, which could explain the urgency of her prose, as she might imagine that, with so many against her, she may be seized at any moment and put in a nuthouse. I for one wouldn't be surprised.

But it's not all bad news, for though the madman Obama has concealed his multiple illnesses from his slavish supporters, soon enough he will crack. Fellow "Thinker" Bruce Walker amplifies:

As Robin of Berkeley observed in her truly scary article, Barack Hussein Obama may well be have been a traumatized victim in his youth, perhaps of sexual abuse. If he is, then Obama will have personality disorders which simply cannot be cured (read Robin's article for the details). If Robin is right, then at some point, the true, hopelessly sick Obama will show himself before a horrified nation. Average Americans will no longer like the president. They will, instead, be saddened and repelled -- and they will emphatically expel Obama and his supporters from power or influence in our lives.

It'll be like Deke O'Malley's comeuppance at the Apollo in Cotton Comes to Harlem -- only this time, the white people will clean up!

Today Selwyn Duke tells us Obama has ADD. Again, the uninitiated may at first think this is just a rhetorical trope. But then one reads the thing and encounters Duke's diagnostic questions ("Can he grasp that if an oil gusher was spewing oil into the ocean yesterday, and the hole hasn't been plugged, that it will spew oil into the ocean today?") and the collapse of his argument halfway through into inchoate yelling about Marxism and such like, and realizes that Duke may in fact be an expert in ADD, at least from the patient side.

Still, maybe they'd better leave this sort of thing to the professionals.

UPDATE. Commenter Amok92 does me the favor of asking after Dr. Sanity, another of the Right's long-distance diagnosticians with whom we've had some fun in the past. She was going along pretty hot and heavy for a while, and a few months ago was raging at "the left's vivid (and psychotic) imagination, feverishly working overtime to reverse all those unwelcome facts and painful truths so they can remain in an endless childhood," etc. On April 8, alas, she reported she was "taking a break from blogging for a few months to take care of some personal issues and complete some projects." Get well soon, Doc!

NO GOOD DEED GOES UNPUNISHED. The Fed rounded up an alleged Russian spy ring that had been in operation for about a decade! Surely this is good news? National Review:

President Obama apparently knew that the FBI was about to arrest the members of the spy ring but did not raise the subject with Medvedev. This was a serious mistake. It reflects an unwillingness to face the truth about Russian actions and allows the Russians to perpetuate the notion that despite human-rights abuses, cooperation with Iran, and anti-American propaganda, there is harmony in its relationship with the U.S.

I'm not sure how failing to tip off Medvedev maintains the dastardly fiction of U.S.-Russian comity -- particularly in the face of a widely-publicized arrest of several alleged Russian spies. I am sure that if the Federal Government under Obama invented a perpetual motion machine, National Review would soon tell us it was a plot to destroy America's work ethic.

JAY NORDLINGER SENILITY WATCH: Oh, Jesus:

Let me instead say this: I think many of my conservative colleagues are far too gingerly when it comes to liberal media bias. Far too timid, delicate, and forgiving. For a long time, complaining about media bias has been seen as uncouth. It’s something we all need to learn to live with, like death, taxes, and mosquitoes. Don’t be uncool by bitching about it, man.

The only thing that could make the idiocy more self-evident is if it were cross-posted at Sarah Palin's Facebook, Big Journalism, TimesWatch, Media Research Center, NewsBusters, or any other of the hundreds of other sites devoted to exposing the Lamestream Liberal Media. Even by the regular standards of conservative eternal-victimhood, this is rich.

I haven't been keeping up with the Nordlinger Senility Watch, BTW, because even when he lays out a beauty like this "Sigh, I Wish the IDF Could Walk Through Walls Like Back When I Was 60" post, I know he'll come up with something just as dotarded later, and it makes me lazy.

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF GREAT AMERICAN MAGAZINES. Michael Kinsley does somebody a favor, I guess, revisiting the debate over Originalism, but the point he fails to address about Kagan critic Robert Bork is that he is a miserable old bigot who should never have been let out of the dustbin.

But I couldn't help but notice this bit:

[Bork] is an embittered man who will be even more disconcerted than I was to learn that the very bright and well-educated, but young, editors of The Atlantic Wire had never heard of him.

I thought The Kids from McArdle was a fluke, but apparently they're all about 12 over there and get their American history from flash cards. Maybe The Atlantic should rebrand itself as the new CosmoGirl.

SHORTER OLE PERFESSER. Megadittos to Camille Paglia, who agrees with me that liberals suffer sexually from their devotion to sterile corporate life, while we conservatives thrive in the me-Tarzan-you-Jane world of academia! Which reminds me of a paid advertising link...

THE LOST CAUSE. At first I wondered why Dave Weigel even bothered going on Andrew Breitbart's Big Government to explain himself to the rightwing hoi polloi. I hear they don't pay that well. And he gets the kind of reaction anyone could have predicted ahead of time:

This guys career can go south with the rest of the Main stream media.........he got what he deserved........he is just trying to save his own @ss

Man, I am happy that I never had to share a foxhole with you!

Dude, if you are pro G A Y Marriage, Open Borders, and Voted for ObaMao the ONE thing you are NOT is conservative. You may not even qualify as a RINO.

What I learned from this: You're ugly. You're an idiot. Lots of "libertarians" are really just leftists.

Meet a real journalist David [link to Lew Rockwell]

And those are the kind ones! But upon reflection, I guess the whole crazy conservative reaction to his case must be galling to Weigel. His career makes (or used to make) conservatism look classy. He worked hard and quoted accurately -- hell, he went out and talked to people worth quoting, which is unusual in itself. He was genuinely even-handed, as opposed to a difference-splitting Borderbot. He made the sometimes obscure tropes of wingerdom comprehensible to general readers.

Any sane conservative would see that the Democratic electoral strategy going forward will be to remind America about the birthers, the Joe Bartons, and the Rand Pauls of the world and make them the face of the conservative movement. It might have seemed useful to have one or two conservatives in the public eye who didn't seem totally insane or malignant. Well, that's all over now. It'll be Obama Iz Hitler and Debbie Schlussel-Cassy Fiano catfights all the way to the Convention. We'll see how it works.

A LITTLE RESPECT. Senator Byrd has died, and the usual assholes remind us that he used to be a Klansman, but neglect to mention that he changed his mind about it and apologized, representing a progress exactly the opposite of that made by the Republican Party, which is really why they hated at him. (UPDATE: Also this. The man had balls.)

Among Byrd's last acts was to hold the feet of the coal industry to the fire in the wake of disaster, rather than apologizing to that industry for such actions, which is the Republican way to do things.

Though there are drawbacks to the reflexive grubbing for bacon that was the hallmark of Byrd's generation of politicians, he at least brought some home to his constituents, rather than transferring it all directly to corporations. Some old ways were indeed the best ways.

UPDATE. You're going to see a lot of this sort of thing today: "Meanwhile, let’s try to refrain from trashing Senator Byrd too much and stay respectful. This isn’t the Democratic Underground, after all. We’re above that. I will, however... [torrent of abuse]." Mourning doesn't become them.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about rightblogger Gay Pride coverage. It offers some rare good news: The wingnuts appear to be keeping quieter during Pride. They're still wrong, and the smarter ones are disingenuous -- this weekend we had Kyle Smith suggesting an "end of the culture wars," which in his world means the rise of "Chris Christie and Scott Brown, libertarian-ish Republicans who are socially liberal but fiscally conservative." (Brown's against gay marriage, and Christie promised to veto gay marriage if it were passed in Jersey. Maybe that's what Smith means by libertarian-ish.) But at least we get fewer of their noxious gases this time of year.

The thing ran long, and one of my saddest cuts was Esther Green's "To My Liberal Relative." Green apparently likes to bug her relatives with rightwing bullshit, and one of them, a gay man, finally sent her a short note asking, "Seriously, can we please just agree to disagree?" Some people would have switched topics to the weather or something, but Green sent back an 858-word harangue, explaining that

It is precisely because you and ____ are gay that Obama scares me. He surrounds himself with people who are true believers in sharia law (Rashid Khalidi, Dalia Mogahed, and Rashad Hussain). Sharia law clearly states that gays are to be stoned.

Later, perhaps hoping that this will have softened her gay relative up, Green tells him that Obama is a Muslim. Bet the Green family is going to be very careful about its Christmas invitations this year.

MINOR OFFENSE. Wingnuts love their child prodigies. (Easy to program, and they have no trouble internalizing the philosophy, having learned all about it in their anal stage of development.)

Richard Brookhiser was 15 when he started at the National Review; Kyle Williams was 13 when he was enlisted by World Net Daily. And anyone recall the name of that little kid who wrote a book about virtue or something six or seven years ago, and was briefly their teen heartthrob?

Their most recent child star, 13-year-old Jonathan Krohn, was a hit at the last CPAC, but he hasn't been getting much ink lately -- at least, not the right kind -- so apparently someone at American Thinker thought it was time to roll out a new conservakid.

Behold:

My name is Sam Besserman, I'm eleven years old, I live in Beverly Hills, California, and ever since I can remember I have been subjected to political bias in school.

It's a dream come true -- only 11, and already he's learned his Conservative Victimization Tables!

The first time I noticed the bias was actually in preschool [italics his - ed.] where the teacher was reading a book about the importance of mothers and the inferiority of fathers. I tried to tell the teacher that dads might be just as important. The teacher responded in a sing-song, "No, listen to me, I'm the teacher."

Goddamn liberal bitches, always infantilizing our pre-schoolers!

The whole thing's like that, all commie thought police and suspiciously big words:

At Beverly Vista, my first teacher was a full-time misandrist and global warming wacko.

Some of you may suspect a hoax -- either because the kid's too young (especially for the Feminazi stuff, which usually doesn't hit conservatives until their first prostatitis episode), or because it sounds like a parody. Don't underestimate these people. I thought Mytheos Holt, who proposed at Big Hollywood that the brethren bring down Obama with parody websites and 4chan, was some kind of joke, but commenters proved him a true specimen.

If Besserman's a fake, the American Thinker commenters certainly haven't caught on. Remember: Just because they're increasingly ridiculous doesn't mean they're not serious.

(Thanks to Nancy Nall for the tip.)

UPDATE. Holy shit, R. Porrofatto found a video! Young Besserman appears on camera, but he doesn't use any big words. (Who'd like to see the outtakes video?) He does report that the bullies all yelled "Global warming is real" at him. Bullies sure have changed since I was a kid; maybe in Bev Hills they all get subscriptions to The Nation for their tenth birthday.

HAPPY PRIDE. It's small, but it's progress:

The adventurous Stanley Cup will make its first appearance in a gay-themed event this weekend.

The Chicago Gay Hockey Association invited the Blackhawks to join Sunday's Gay Pride Parade -- and the team said yes. So did the Chicago Cubs, who will have their own float for the first time.

I don't usually post feel-good items, but I wanted to do what I could to increase the possibility that this news would be seen by some bigot asshole wingnuts.

Like this one:

SODOMY IS SOURCE OF PRIDE, SEXUAL REPRODUCTION IS NOT!...

If Chicago's professional sports teams will be represented, I don't think Ernie Banks and the Blackhawks' Brent Sopel should be the only participants. I think in the spirit of having one's backfield in motion, the Chicago Bears should send a tight end and a wide receiver....

Who says pro athletes aren't role models for our children? If more big name athletes get involved in peddling "Gay Pride" more 10 year old might be inspired to become "Gay Pride" grand marshals. This is critical because some young people think it is alright or even cool to be straight.

I think this is supposed to be funny, despite the rhetorical hoarseness. Remember that line by The Replacements? "Kewpie dolls and urine stalls/Will be laughed at/The way you're laughed at now."

Yeah, this day gets better and better.

UPDATE. In comments, montag: "I think Moses would have gotten a double hernia carrying down all the commandments these guys want."

BATTING 1.000. Matt Lewis gets a statement on Dave Weigel from the American Spectator's R. Emmett Tyrrell:

"I thought he was a liberal. He had no sense of humor. Yet he did his job diligently."

No sense of humor! Good to see that Tyrrell -- a buffoon of long standing who for years invited comparison of himself to H. L. Mencken via an imitative byline photo and a constipated emulation of HLM's prose style, then declared, "I know thee not, old man" -- has not lost his gift of being wrong 100 percent of the time

U WERE DOIN IT RITE.



Whiny ass titty babies.

The problem with covering conservatives is: There's no way to do it without being offensive -- at least in the bar after work, or its email equivalent. Which is apparently a resignation-accepting offense at the Post.

They've run this country for most of the past thirty years. I don't see why we should continue to treat wingnuts like special needs children who have to be shielded from criticism.

FUTURE SCHLOCK. For years most of my own work has been online, and the subject by which most of my readers know me has been the blogosphere. I know as well as the rest of you that online is not only the present, but also The Future, because it is tirelessly presented as such by people like Jeff Jarvis on websites and in well-compensated speeches.

I've always been annoyed by that kind of talk, and most of the time if you ask me why I'll say it's because I'm a miserable old curmudgeon who likes newsprint and daguerreotypes and LPs, and for whom everything has to be old and in black and white. But that isn't wholly true, as this Reason article by up-and-coming libertarian Katherine Mangu-Ward and some interns reminds me.

The article is a kind of guide to online stuff, a popular favorite -- why, I've done that sort of thing myself, pimping mostly small local blogs of diverse agenda.

But the premise here is that these Randian super-genii will instruct you in "kicking your dead tree habit." No, there's no Kindle promo tie-in -- the object of ridicule here is not longform dead tree, but newspapers. The intro is all ha-ha-stupid-foolscap-people:

Newspaper. Personally, I never touch the stuff. But rumor has it there is a certain amount of distress about the impending doom of the news-on-dead-tree industry...

We assumed for the sake of the experiment that The New York Times would be the last to go. Since I refuse to sully my delicate hands with filthy newsprint, Jesse and Robby paged through Wednesday’s edition in search of facts and insights that would need replacing in the event that print news goes kaput.

Though I don't know much about mockery myself, the tone seems a little forced to me -- as if KMW were not trying to summon a new audience of strangers not yet educated to the superiority of the internet, but instead trying to stroke and signal the usual true believers, who are always up for a round of ragging on paper-pushers.

It reminds me of the preemptive gloating of folks like Roger L. Simon, who tells his readers all the time that the MSM is a dinosaur, dying, on the ropes, in extremis, etc. (We're still waiting for the body to fall, but never mind.) For years this has been one of the key tropes of the rightwing online community -- which came out of the rightwing offline community's contempt for the offline equivalent, the impudent snobs of the lying liberal media, usually short-handed as the New York Times.

The Times, it just so happens, is mentioned several times in Mangu-Ward's article, mostly derisively ("New York real estate obsessives have long since left the Times behind... the Times tech reviewer, appropriately enough, senses his own irrelevance...").

Mangu-Ward does give the online edition a left-handed head-pat at the end, though. Clearly the Times and whatever it represents will be part of The Future -- just not so big a part. If years of yap have yet to completely displace the Times, they have opened up some space for an alterna-press which, like alt and indie vendors since time immemorial, not only hopes but asserts that it's The Future, your future. And they mean it, man!

In reality, when the smoke clears you are likely to find that the main effect of such a revolution has been to transfer some power -- not so much to you, though, as to those who have positioned themselves to profit from revolutionary sentiment. Here's who Mangu-Ward recommends for opinion journalism:

As for the Opinion pages, Reason should meet your needs there. But if you must, it could be supplemented with the columns aggregated at RealClearPolitics, or you could enjoy a firehose of opinion at Huffington Post or Daily Kos. Want to come back over and over to a name you trust? Hit up brand name bloggers like Glenn Reynolds, Matt Yglesias, Megan McArdle, and more.

Glenn Reynolds, Matt Yglesias, Megan McArdle! That's some groovy revolution right there.

That's the real reason this stuff bugs me. It's not that I like the Times and newsprint so much. I don't, really. And I like the internet fine. But I've also seen some come-ons in my time, and The Future is one that never gets old.

SHORTER JOSEPH BOTTUM: Higher education is a liberal conspiracy to fuck your daughter.

UPDATE. Bottum's commenters are a joy for the expected reasons -- I particularly like the one who warns the Opus Dei wannabes who read First Things about the scourge of Jesuitism at Georgetown, and the one who thinks the knocked-up heroine did right to keep her baby because now she'll have someone to open jars for her in her old age. But my very favorite is the one who asks:

How do the girls who don't get to college get knocked up?

HE SAID SHE SAID. Moe Lane sniffs sex scandal!

Fun game for your morning: see how far you get into this report before you develop this sudden and burning need to go find a rock, and throw it at Al Gore. I personally made it to page 13.

Of course it's very different when something like this happens to a respected figure like Nikki Haley.

IT'S ARTHUR JENSEN'S WORLD -- WE JUST LIVE IN IT. Grab yer shootin' ahrns, morons -- Rupert Murdoch wants to make them Mescans legal so's they can bundle his papers or sumpin'!

In a model the AP compares to his coalition against gun violence, [NYC Mayor Mike] Bloomberg is rolling out a group of big city mayors and powerful CEOs called the Partnership for a New American Economy. The group will lobby Congress for comprehensive immigration reform at the federal level, arguing they need amnesty for those here illegally in order to run their cities and businesses effectively.

This won't play well with the Tea Party, but Mayor Mike is being joined by big business CEOs, and Republicans hate telling the heads of HP, Boeing, Disney and even News Corp. that they don't know what's good for America. Rupert Murdoch is on board, and he and Bloomberg even went on Fox News to hawk their plan this morning. (Murdoch may be the boss over there, but he's smart enough not to roll out this position on Glenn Beck or Hannity.)

The Castillo Chronicles has already bitten:

Murdoch the traitor who prefers to coddle illegals instead of help Americans take back their country especially since he has the bully pulpit to make a difference.

They can't grasp that while the ringmaster of the Fox News circus is happy to keep them riled up with titrated doses of jingoism, Uncle Rupert is not so much a citizen of the United States or of the (snort) "Anglosphere" as he is a citizen of the world -- as much at home in Red China as in Mexico City, provided his accommodations are suitably luxe.

But they'll forget about it soon enough. Psychologically they'll have to. We now live in a world where Lonesome Rhodes' unmasking would cause only about one or two news-cycles' worth of outrage before everyone began talking about his comeback. And anyway, most of the rubes think not at all about the men behind the cameras and the presses; they remain convinced that the guys and gals on the sets and in the byline photos are making it up as they go along.

UPDATE. Ha ha ha ha ha ha.

THE KIDS FROM GLEE IN THEIR DEGENERATE PHASE. The most productive McArdle Summer Replacement wonders why we should care about American ironing board manufacture gone to China:

Econ 101 aside, though, there's a more compelling moral reason to condemn this kind of tariff that should help break deadlocks like Matt's: Jobs lost at home are usually jobs created elsewhere, typically in poorer countries. If anything, jobs are likely to be gained when an industry moves to China, where more aspects of the manufacturing and assembly process are done by hand. They just won't be created here. If that's your focus, you have to make the case that American jobs are intrinsically better or more valuable than Chinese jobs.

I examined this from every angle, and find no evidence of a joke (which is not Ms. Mangu-Ward's strong suit in any case). She really thinks local (that is to say, American) suckers will just have to tough out a creative destruction phase, in which the Chinese get their jobs at a fraction of their wages, and the suckers get unemployment for a while and then whatever they can scrounge up. Some (okay, many) of them aren't going to make it, but who wants them around anyway -- they're not on Twitter and Foursquare and wouldn't have fun things to say if they were. But many of their kids will probably become New Technocrats. That should be some consolation to their parents in the hobo camps!

And as to them being Americans? There are no nations, there are no peoples; there is only money.

I'm beginning to think Mangu-Ward was raised in a Skinner box.

UPDATE. In comments, Freshly Squeezed Cynic explicates Mangu-Ward's use of Whataboutery; AC in BC suggests, "Surely the Atlantic can find an Indian to write something this stupid at one quarter the cost?"

SHORTER JONAH GOLDBERG: Farrrrrrrrt.

Jesus, the guy keeps topping himself. And he keeps announcing, basically, that he doesn't know what he's saying ("This isn't the best comparison because Petraues is no dictator") -- and yet keeps going.

This passage in particular will live in the annals of dumbassery:

Maybe a better comparison is to the experienced sergeant who may be formally outranked by the new lieutenant, but when the bullets fly, everyone looks to the sergeant for leadership.

Yes, Goldberg is explaining the Petraeus assignment with old WWII movies. Hopefully the General will bring a major offensive, so Goldberg can enact it on YouTube with Army Mens.

Also among my favorites: "Petraeus is a servant to his nation and history at this point" -- as opposed to, I don't know, when he was seven. And the ending! You have to imagine it followed by the stage collapsing and Goldberg climbing up out of the wreckage with a flowerpot on his head, hollering, "Uh-oh, Spaghetti-os!"

You know the drill.

SPEAKING OF WHICH, reader Donald alerts me that Jonah Goldberg is reviving the old Megan McArdle "you never had it so good" routine (i.e., you have iPods, why are you complaining?). I guess he didn't get the memo that they're supposed to shut up about this now that Obama is President.

I eagerly await a counter-post by one of his colleagues explaining that the Obama recession has destroyed capitalism, and Goldberg's 2,000 word walkback.

WHY I AM NOT A LIBERTARIAN, PART 4,229. Normally I don't respond well to baiting (I tend to throw my food dish and plead for dignity) but this National Post column (by our old friend Katherine Mangu-Ward!) that Adam Serwer dished me must be dug:

At first glance, any comparison between the gentle beeping of a Brooklyn mom dialing 311 on her iPhone and the roar of the Taliban pickup truck seems absurd. But it remains true that both want the same thing -- a targeted ban on ice cream.

The article actually compares an Afghan Taliban interdiction against ladies eating ice cream with an anti-Mr. Softee drive in Park Slope.

The Taliban (as reported by that great libertarian journalist Eve Ensler) disapproved of girls who dared eat ice cream. The Brooklyn moms complained of the incessant jingle of ice cream trucks in their neighborhood.

The Taliban killed and/or whipped the girls. The moms called 311. Don't you see the similarities? Mangu-Ward sure does.

This is why the Taliban and the Brooklyn moms can come to the same conclusion about ice cream bans. While they disagree on the parts of the self that need to be checked or limited -- and the Brooklyn moms prefer democracy to determine those limits -- they agree that state intervention to limit highly personal choices will make people better, and even freer.

In addition to the Taliban, the Park Slope mothers are also like "Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx and John Rawls," and Mangu-Ward is like Isaiah Berlin.

Those who lobby for and approve of such restrictions don't see the ever-growing list of banned behaviours as an infringement of liberty. Instead, they are a convenient and practical solution to the problem of what Berlin called "the divided self."

Now, I have myself twitted the anti-ice-cream-truck nannies of Brooklyn for the Voice -- not as neo-Taliban, but as dorks. I did not go the full Mangu-Ward distance there, nor in my other Nanny State items at Runnin' Scared, partly because I have a sense of humor, and partly because I recognize that neighborhood associations are within their rights to agitate against what they consider public nuisances and, in their formalized state, even use legal power to deny a liquor license to a restaurant, limit the number of street fairs on their blocks, etc.

Being an arty-farty and an anti-social, I generally prefer fewer rather than more restrictions on both art and commerce. And I think in the Bloomberg era the City's gotten way too protectionist. But I also live on planet Earth. I do not think every attempt to use legal means to alter the public space is automatically the equivalent of a Taliban death threat, for the same reason I do not think Big Gummint is being unfair to poor little BP: because I am neither a libertarian nor a fucking nut.

WHO'S TODAY'S KING OF THE CRACKPOTS -- THOMAS SOWELL OR JON VOIGHT? Sowell:

When Adolf Hitler was building up the Nazi movement in the 1920s, leading up to his taking power in the 1930s...

Yep, right out of the motherfucking gate.

Just where in the Constitution of the United States does it say that a president has the authority to extract vast sums of money from a private enterprise and distribute it as he sees fit...

Technically, it has not been confiscated by Barack Obama, but that is a distinction without a difference.

With vastly expanded powers of government available at the discretion of politicians and bureaucrats...

Clearly he refers to the Power to Cloud Men's Minds, with which Congress invested Obama in 2009.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt arbitrarily took the United States off the gold standard, he cited a law passed during the First World War to prevent trading with the country's wartime enemies. But there was no war when FDR ended the gold standard's restrictions on the printing of money.

At about the same time, during the worldwide Great Depression, the German Reichstag passed a law "for the relief of the German people"...

You know, even in wingnut writing, there is such a thing as trying to do too much. Equating FDR with Hitler calls for a post of its own, surely. (Sowell also refers to both "czars" and "useful idiots," putting Obama on both wrong sides of the Russian Revolution.) Just feed the talking points to Glenn Beck and have him do a DVD, TS!

Voight:

Dear President Obama:

You will be the first American president that lied to the Jewish people, and the American people as well, when you said that you would defend Israel, the only Democratic state in the Middle East, against all their enemies.

That promise to defend Israel was in the Oath of Office you didn't get to see: The one they had later in the basement, with body shots!

You have done just the opposite. You have propagandized Israel, until they look like they are everyone's enemy - and it has resonated throughout the world.

That was a hell of a thing -- who'd have thought that such hotbeds of philo-Semitism as France, the UK, and especially Turkey could be turned against Israel by one measly Presidency?

The Jewish people have given the world our greatest scientist and philosophers, and the cures for many diseases, and now you play a very dangerous game so you can look like a true martyr to what you see and say are the underdogs.

Yeah, they're scientist and philosophers, and you play with that baby toy See 'n Say like a little baby. (In fairness to Voight, this may be a corruption of his original; we understand the Washington Times no longer has proofreaders, or editors, or a dictionary.)

Your destruction of this country may never be remedied, and we may never recover.

Way to rally the crowd, Joe Buck! "To arms, citizens -- we may get out of here alive yet!"

I give it to Sowell. Voight has been soaking his brain in Hollywood for decades, and so has an excuse. Also, unlike Sowell, Voight has a useful skill.

MORE N00BS. I lost interest in the Kids from The Atlantic Megan McArdle Summer Replacement series, which is no big deal, as they seem to be working Summer Fridays every day of the week.

But go over there yourself and see what you think -- you don't need my help to find the obvious qualities in stories like

• "The Growing Geek iPhone Backlash";
• Katherine Mangu-Ward's pretense of concern that statists are forcing paupers out of the banking system (since the Obama people have messed with overdraft fees, "protecting" indigents from overdraft ass-raping whenever their desperate checkbook juggling goes wrong -- now how are they ever going to learn that poverty doesn't pay? -- the cash-starved banks have been forced to charge everyone for checking, which is socialism);
• Courtney "Is It Time For My" Knapp ripping the lid off that Slovenia-United States soccer match. Was the U.S. victim of a bad call? The story they don't want you to see!

Alternately, if you value your sanity, you can let TBogg substitute Susan of Texas guide you through the work of Fatherhood Expert Tony Woodlief ("Excuse me, I seem to have something caught in my throat. Cough*bullshit*cough. There, that’s better").

LOOK, I HATE TO SAY IT, but the Facebook Fox News Discussions Page...

...doesn't it just prove everything?

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the Joe Barton fiasco and the rightbloggers' insistence on making it worse. They -- ugh, you know what, read the thing; I can't provide a gloss here because that would require a new, more retarded version of I LOVE OIL GUYS MORE THAN U.S. BECAUSE IS LIKE REAGAN JESUS ME IS, IS TOO! and so far even conservatives (hopped up on whatever catecholamine killing one's own soul produces) are too worn out to provide one.

UPDATE. There's nothing for me here, so I will disappear:

If BP cut corners on safety and if the cut corners greatly increased the probability of this disaster, it deserves every legal penalty we can throw at it. But let's not forget that a prostitute can be raped, church-going family men can commit rape, and you're more likely to get away with rape if everyone thinks the victim deserves it.

If she turns up while I'm gone, please let me know.

TRAIL OF TEARS. Jesus Christ, these guys are still crying that BP got hosed by the U.S. Government. Reihan Salam goes the extra distance:

Shakedowns of this kind have a long and undistinguished history... During the westward expansion of the United States, the federal government “negotiated” with sovereign Indian nations in a similar spirit.

Yes, he's actually comparing BP to the fucking Indians. Soon I suppose Tony Hayward will have to watch his yacht races from a reservation.

UPDATE. Also, "the Muslims who were burned alive in Gujarat in 2002." Jesus.

SHORTER CRAZY JESUS LADY: Jimmy Carter Jimmy Carter Jimmy Carter Jimmy Carter Jimmy Carter Jimmy Carter Jimmy Carter Jimmy Carter Jimmy Carter.

JAY NORDLINGER SENILITY WATCH, JUNE 18. Since his Bloomberg post yesterday:

Thursday, 3:25 pm: Public high schools teach nothing but enviro-communist propaganda these days!

Thursday, 11:06 pm: Remember my earlier post mocking some guy who said "staid and formal hockey mom"? No? Here, let me tell it again.

Thursday, 11:18 pm: Unions are still angry at Thatcher. Good!

Friday, 2:21 pm: Classical musicians are a bunch of communists! You remember when I complained about this before, right? Well, now that Obama has sent back Churchill's bust, I wonder if these communists, the British ones, I mean... Classical musicians are a bunch of communists!

Friday, 3:22 pm: I hate that "serial" music they've been making us listen to. Give me Brahms, I say! The other day, I thought someone was making a joke about it. Turned out they weren't. But if they had, how I would have laughed.