ANNALS OF THE CULTURE WAR. What are the conservative art critics up to? At First Things, here's Ethan Cordray on zombie movies:

But what if this fascination is about more than just gross-out gore and action thrills? What if it represents a subtle, subconscious understanding that something is wrong—spiritually wrong—with our culture.

Zombies represent the appetite divorced from everything else. They are incapable of judgment, self-awareness, or self-preservation... And they aren’t just hungry for anything—they specifically want to eat the living, and even more specifically the brain, seat of rationality and self control...

As we become more and more zombified, as our culture becomes ever more adept at amplifying our desires through advertising, pornography, and a media culture obsessed with gratifying every appetite, we can see the inevitable results of that process shambling along on their rotting legs...

I notice that kids these days are also going for vampire movies and TV shows. Vampires seem to be the opposite of zombies, at least behaviorally; they are very self-aware, and Lord knows they wish to preserve their eternal lives. And they're hungry for blood -- as Christians are for the blood of Christ! Doesn't this say something positive about our society?

I can play this game all day, but no rightwing think tank is paying me to play it.

UPDATE. All the comments have been lovely, but I liked Jay B imagining Cordray's interpretation of "squeeze my lemon till the juice runs down my leg": "What if this song isn't about citrus juice? What if it's about yearning and the consummation of the sexual act?" I would actually expect Cordray to find in it a condemnation of the sexual act, because that's what, as a good little theocon, he has been trained to find -- you know, the way Jonah Goldberg looks at the work of David Simon and finds it conservative because fart snort black people.

It's also fun when commenters pretend to play Cordray's game ("No, no, no. Zombies aren't collectivists. Zombies are the Galtian Superman. Consider: Each zombie works for itself, without concern for other zombies...").

SHORTER JAMES POULOS: Tim Pawlenty failed to win the Republican Presidential nomination because he wasn't crazy enough.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the causes of the English Riots as identified by rightbloggers: gun control and black people. (Obama makes a guest appearance courtesy of Stanley Kurtz.)

UPDATE. As the best people will tell you, alicublog is all about the commenters. "You are perhaps familiar with the song We Didn't Start the Fire (the Blacks Did)?" asks Jason. There is some discussion of What Would John Lydon Do -- germane, given nee Rotten's seeming endorsement of riots late last year. Scott thinks Lydon'd be on it, but mds demurs: "You could be wrong. But ... you could be right. The looters could be black. They could be white. What's important is that their anger was an energy."

Dan Coyle even quotes another frequent commenter, Leonard Pierce, to the effect that "guns aren't magic" -- a sentiment that would probably mystify the subjects of my Voice columns, and set them to flinging away their current weaponry ("These things don't work! We've been conned! Quick, sell 'em to the people who watch Glenn Beck") and pooling their resources for fighter jets and tanks, wherein the real magic lies.

THE NEW QUOTOMATIC SELECTOR ENTRY (see masthead) is from an amazing Witherspoon Institute essay by Jennifer S. Bryson called "Pornography and National Security." Arguing a connection between porn and terrorism, it is full of sensational pullquotes, e.g., "Likewise, pornography is not a sufficient cause for terrorism," and "As terrorism researchers Daniel Bynum and Christine Fair point out in an article about the modern terrorists we have been pursuing, especially since 9/11, the fact of the matter is that 'they get intimate with cows and donkeys...'" (Also, "is anyone in the U.S. government tracking and surveying the presence and types of pornography on these media?" If no one is, I count it another unintended consequence of puritanical legislation.)

But the important parts, relatively speaking, are a.) approving quotations of Andrea Dworkin and b.) this:

I do not know what link, if any, exists between terrorism and pornography, but I do think this question warrants attention.

I admit it; if I had put this quote at the top, instead of near the end, I could have saved a lot of people a lot of time. But not nearly as much time as Bryson could have saved.

KINKY. Glenn T. Stanton is upset because at last night's GOP debate Michele Bachmann was asked the impertinent question "As President, would you be submissive to your husband?" (referring to her loony beliefs) by the Communist infiltrator Byron York of National Review. "Submission is clearly not a one-way street," Stanton insists, because all good Christian men and women are switches -- he has Biblical proof!

In fact, in I Peter, the text under discussion, Peter tells all of us, men and women, to “submit yourselves for the Lord’s sake to every authority instituted among men: whether to the king, as the supreme authority, 14 or to governors, who are sent by him.”

A king is kind of like a president. So not only are all of us called to be submissive to others, but had Mr. York bothered to review the text he was questioning Bachmann on — seems like a reasonable thing to do — he would have found that the text actually calls on Mr. Bachmann, and all other believers, to submit to the authority of the president.

See? The President tops the mens, and the mens top the womens. (Excepting, of course, the current President because he's a black socialist.) So Mrs. Bachmann isn't really getting topped, because the once and future white President is giving the orders. He likes to watch, apparently.

While National Review interns try in vain to distract him with a eucharist, Stanton wades deeper in:

Yes, Michele would be called, under her faith, to submit herself to the leadership and protection of her husband in their marriage. And I trust she is quite happy to do so. But no, it does not mean he is her boss, but rather that he is to — and this is critically important to understand — obey God’s command to him for “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.”

That last sentence is a honey, isn't it? No, he doesn't rule her, because he is ruled by someone else who tells him to love her. Like Stanton has never seen or experienced a loving D/s relationship! If he hasn't, he should haunt the rectories for a couple of weeks and see what he sees.

The Jesus gibberish gets so thick Stanton must revert to The Last Refuge of a Scoundrel, Theological Edition -- namely C.S. Lewis. However successful Lewis was as a children's writer, I'm afraid the bit Stanton quotes doesn't help much:

The husband is head of the wife just in so far as he is to her what Christ is to the Church. He is to love her as Christ loved the Church — read on — and give his life for her. This headship, then, is most fully embodied not in the husband we should all wish to be, but in him whose marriage is most like a crucifixion, whose wife receives most and gives least.

The snuff-porn component totally confuses me, but I think I saw a movie in Tijuana once where the wife received most and gave least, in terms of headship. Also I think it's something Dr. Mrs. Ole Perfesser's readers like to complain about.

The Republic hurtles down the chasm, and these morons debate the number of angels that can clusterfuck on the head of a pin.

UPDATE. Why York pulled this duty is suggested by the comments to a Right Scoop post on the rightwing columnist's "low-blow question":

Real tough guys [Chris] Wallace and York. They pee like puppies around Obama...

Establishment lib. Upper NY and Northeast. Sectioned off from the rest of us schlubs...

... Byron York has no clue about the teaching of submission in Ephesians...

Plus Rush Limbaugh is telling his listeners, "Now I guarantee you, I guarantee you that the favorite journalist of the mainstream media today is Byron York.” I predict that months from now, Bachmann's backers will still be snarling about that son of a bitch who asked her that question, and York will be saying, "Yeah, probably some son of a bitch elitist liberal!"

FROM THE LAMPPOSTS. At National Review, David French defends corporations that have succeeded by downsizing many employees and underpaying the rest:

Critics complain that corporations are “hoarding not hiring,” but ask yourself this: Wouldn’t you want to work for a corporation that has the cash reserves to not only weather economic storms but also invest in future products or innovation?

Not for $14,000 a year I wouldn't.

Decades of failed socialist experiments should have convinced us all that governments can’t hire nations into prosperity

Actually, during what French probably considers the most socialist of those decades, American workers could get blue-collar jobs that would feed and clothe their families and even elevate them into the middle class. Back then we called it the American Dream, but more recent, more Reaganesque and laissez-faire decades have taught many, many Americans to lose faith in it. Hence our race to the bottom, whereby citizens who once felt proud to live in a country where anyone might rise must content themselves to feel satisfied to live in a country where anyone might evade death by hunger or exposure.

French ends:

After all, rich people are people too.

Well, that's encouraging -- that means they might be made to feel fear, and reform.

ROD & THE SLUTS. I keep forgetting Rod Dreher is still churning it out, but close-watcher Ed Lederer won't let me forget. He directs me to this Dreher post at Real Clear Religion, on the topic of SlutWalks.

Still with me? Yeah, I know, it's almost too obvious what Dreher would make of these female empowerment events -- particularly when you consider that he once called a young woman a slut for displaying a tattoo on her wedding day. (When it was announced Bristol Palin would show up pregnant on her wedding day, of course, Dreher was pleased.)

After the obligatory caveat...

Nothing, and I mean nothing, justifies sexual assault. Not even a little bit.

...comes this:

And yet, these young women expect to present themselves in this hypereroticized sexual milieu in clothing designed to telegraph sexual availability, yet not face any threat of aggressive male sexual behavior? To call this bizarre and stupid is not to stand up for would-be rapists, but rather to recognize the world for what it is -- and, given nature, what it always will be, though we can discourage the worst behavior through law and custom.

In other words, nothing justifies rape, but wearing a halter top is (and will always be) an inducement to rape, and anyone who thinks differently is a hopeless idealist.

Anyone who suggested that a person ought to be able to walk through a slum wearing designer clothing and sporting a fat wallet without being set upon by thieves would be correct in theory -- mugging is a repugnant crime of violence -- but a fool in practice.

Hey, that's an interesting thought experiment. Let's recall what Dreher thought when a bunch of Jesus freaks went into the Castro to tell the homos they were going to hell, and received an unfriendly reception. Did Dreher tell the God-botherers, as he tells the SlutWalkers, that they were fools who should have known better? No, he flipped out:

...no peaceful protester in this country should be subject to this threat... Watch this, and tell me these people [Update: by which I mean the enraged activist core, not all gays -- RD.] aren't going to come against churches full force once they have the civil rights laws on their side.

And these aren't even comparable provocations: Gay people muscling anti-gay preachers out of their neighborhood may not be Marquess of Queensberry, but it sure isn't rape. Yet Dreher's outraged by the former and meh about the latter.

There's plenty of patented Dreher nonsense in the thing -- for example, the Appeal to Camille Paglia (every conservative's favorite lesbian next to Jenna Jameson), and an anecdote from Dreher's youth about a common-sense salt-of-the-earth Southern lady who would certainly agree with Dreher about this subject if she could be summoned for an interview from Louisiana or Fantasyland or wherever she lives. But the key ingredient, as always, is middle-class self-pity -- Hussies Protest Rape, Dreher Family Hardest Hit:

It's a place that I will have to educate my sons and my daughter to navigate successfully, at a time in which there are few clear rules -- which increases the risk to them. Frankly, I don't know who will have a more difficult time making it through this bewildering postmodern maze with their faith, morals, and sense of dignity intact: my daughter or my sons.

Once the kids get you safely stashed in a home, Rod -- watch out, they may say they're taking you to a monastery -- they ought to be fine.

SERVICE ADVISORY. Since my return to New York in October, I've been obliged to move several times. But I'm not such a hummingbird as I may seem, and always expected to come to ground at some point for longer than awhile.

Now I have, in a suburb of Washington, DC. Though this suits my interest in national politics, and vanity tempts me to portray it as a career move, that wasn't the come-on at all. I came here to live with Kia. If you know her work, you can see why I would be interested; if you know her, you might see how I could fall in love with her. If you saw us together, you would understand everything pretty quickly.

Though the fact is not at present top of mind, I can't actually live on love, so if you have any job leads in DC please shoot me an email.

SHORTER IAIN MURRAY: Britain's riots show that the place is full of lazy bums on welfare spending other people's hard-earned tax dollars on zoot suits and boom boxes. Also they have children out of wedlock. There, I've explained this in terms American wingnuts can understand.

UPDATE. Commenters say rude things about Margaret Thatcher. True, she disdained the very existence of "society," which term Murray comically invokes in his post, and championed the turbo-charged dog-eat-dog mentality Murray blames for the riots. But, he points out, she gave morals lectures while doing so, and these were the core of what Murray calls "social Thatcherism, whereby a free society recognized the importance of what once were called manners" (which project Murray laments the Iron Lady was "unable to finish," despite its great importance). Promoting rapacious, unchained capitalism while disdaining its predictable effects is an accepted form of conservative ass-covering throughout the Anglosphere.

As discovered by Matthew Yglesias and Judd Legum, National Review has become a clearinghouse for rightwing riot gibberish. I see Jack Dunphy has taken the opportunity to denounce police handling of the 1992 L.A. riots ("three days of rioting and destruction, most of which could have been averted had the LAPD taken a firmer line..."). Whoever thought conservatives would turn on the late LAPD Chief Daryl Gates? We live in an age of wonders. One of Dunphy's pet peeves is that cops protected firemen from mob attacks while looting was going on nearby; "Why, I wondered," says Dunphy, "didn’t they keep half those cops in place to protect the firefighters and have the other half cross the street to stop the looting?" "Jack Dunphy" is the nom de spume of an alleged LAPD officer who clearly longs for the top job, and it's too bad he didn't have it in '92; L.A. might still be burning.

OOGA BOOGA REDUX. As I've mentioned before, the hip thing among conservatives these days is to pretend that a black crime wave is sweeping America, and to blame Obama. Not only racist cut-and-paste trolls promote the theory -- rightbloggers have been doing their part, and now more classy-like conservatives seem to be getting on board.

Take Walter Russell Mead. Last month he contributed a laughable essay in which he described modern American cities as urban hellholes out of old Death Wish movies, a characterization even tourists wouldn't buy these days. Now he's gone fully native, and joined the Ooga Booga brigade:

For some time now, residents of some US cities have noted occasional incidents of seemingly random, racially motivated violence in which young Black males are involved. The hot weather and bad economy seem to be combining to generate a small but possibly significant uptick this year.

"Occasional incidents," "small but significant uptick" -- sounds confident, doesn't he? Crime in U.S. cities is at historically low levels, yet Mead repeats some of the black-on-white crime stories that have excited the goobers into a Little-Colonel-versus-Silas-Lynch state, and proceeds into deep political analysis -- nearly all of it absolutely ludicrous (Obama and Oprah are involved, and years after welfare became workfare Mead's still bitching about the Great Society), but I'll confine myself to this:

Some whites resent what they see as excessive privilege for Blacks reflected in affirmative action. Many believe that the federal government and the (largely white) upper middle class establishment wants to marginalize the traditional white majority in the US through a combination of deliberate immigration policy aimed at reducing white preponderance in the population and by favoring immigrants and non-whites for education and employment.

For people who feel this way, the reluctance of the mainstream media to cover racial flash mobs is sinister and disturbing.

First, the "reluctance of the mainstream media to cover racial flash mobs" is rich, since Mead's citations are from the mainstream media -- in fact, one of his sources mentions that "my BlackBerry started blowing up with news about what happened Thursday night at the Wisconsin State Fair." Anyone who bothers to look will see that those incidents have been very well covered. I realize these guys have been yapping about liberal/Negro media bias for decades, but I'm still a little surprised when they ignore evidence that appears in their own screeds. I am too childish-foolish for this world.

Second, who are these folks who believe in this media bias, and "resent what they see as excessive privilege for Blacks reflected in affirmative action"? In a word, racists. They actually think African-Americans, whose poverty levels and other social indicators reveal them to have things much harder than white Americans, are getting away with something. This is a rejection of objective fact to support a racially-obsessed idea of how society is rigged against them -- which is pretty much the definition of racism.

And there's no earthly reason to take the fantasies of such people seriously, unless you're a rightwing tool hoping to gin up a lot of race hatred in time for the next Presidential election.

I hate to be rude about it, but I'm sick of these fucking peckerwoods doing old Lester Maddox routines and thinking no one will notice because their jackets have patched elbows and they're gesturing with a briar pipe. That goes for Glenn Reynolds and the rest of those high-end bottom-feeders who peddle this swill. Let them fuck off to their own survivalist compound instead of trying to turn the whole country into one.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the S&P downgrade. Among the rightbloggers, the downgrade appears to be a terrible thing when mentioned in a paragraph including the word "Obama," but otherwise it's no big deal; in fact it can even be a positive good, so long as the author believes it may convince people to give up their Social Security in hopes that their neo-feudal overlords will give them a shed to lie in when they are too broken by work to move.

I don't think I'm being optimistic when I say that this probably won't go over with your average citizen, who may be tumbling to the fact that his alleged GOP saviors are in the thrall of a bunch of nuts who would kill him or anyone else in furtherance of their dogma. But it may not matter what he, you, or I think; the Villagers want full-on austerity, and probably believe that if the tea party people are a little dèclassè, at least their heartlessness is in the right place.

UPDATE. In the spirit of Shared Sacrifice, commenter EndoftheWorld asks, "Could you imaging the uproar we started seeing serious cuts in the sanctimonious blowhard industry? I mean, do we need a Cokie Roberts AND a Peggy Noonan? And paying a mexican child to cut and paste from AEI position papers has to be cheaper than keeping Krauthammer around." Well, now you're just talking crazy. If it weren't for the promise of such sinecures, young Republican weasels might avoid the think tanks and talk shops altogether, and take jobs as corporate lawyers or confidence men. Then America might lose its leadership position in the global bullshit market. We'd be lost!

While I am normally in perfect sync with Halloween Jack, I can't completely agree that this column represents "Megan McArdle... forced into a sudden attack of sanity." McArdle does see that the GOP shake-yer-foundations approach has been bad for the weakened economy, but then she has to spoil it by saying the Democrats are just as bad because... they blocked the elevation of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court in 1987. This absurd example of on-the-other-handism has been well-treated elsewhere, but it always bears repeating that Bork is a dangerous lunatic and if he were on the Court with the current crop of nuts, rightwing activists would no doubt have found a way to reverse Virginia v. Loving by now. For blocking him, the Dems of '87 don't deserve tongue-lashings about "borking" -- they deserve statues hard by the Jefferson Memorial and fresh flowers every morning.

UPDATE 2. If you want a quick refresher on Republican seriousness about deficits, I recommend Steve Benen's. Contra Verbal Kint, this may be the greatest trick the devil ever pulled.

WINGNUT WELFARE NOT MEANS-TESTED. At National Review, Conrad Black:

From my most recent NRO article, on a couple of stars in the conservative firmament: “There is nothing like Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham in other countries, nor much like them in this one. The packaging is leggy women with bright teeth and eyes and lots of blond hair, and they are charming, though not demure. The message is God, Christ, learning, and country. They are outstanding bearers of that timeless message that has reprehensibly few public champions, certainly not including the incumbent president.”

Given that this is what Black chooses to represent his article, you can imagine how awful the rest of it is.

That reminds me, though -- why is this press lord and con man writing for National Review? He certainly doesn't need the money, and since his talent, such as it is, seems to be for propaganda rather than anything soul-sustaining, I can hardly believe he does it for love. I mean, Chuck Norris I can understand...

My best guess is the NR editors got tired of his constant emailed "suggestions" and let him fill a page every so often just to keep him out of their hair. Either that, or he pays them.

OF COURSE THEY HAVE A STRATEGY...


...namely, fuck things up and then blame the black guy. Not that the black guy doesn't deserve blame, too, but I doubt things will be improved by President Rick Perry, who will upon inauguration give the last $32.98 in the Treasury to Thurston Howell III and ask America to pray for money.

I'm thinking of changing the name of this blog to "What -- Me, Weimar?"

UPDATE. Victor Davis "Buster" JoHanson looks at the stock tumble and sees, instead of the predictable result of a botched budget bill, this:

Only a private sector confident that of long-term government predictability and encouraged by a national culture that applauds manufacturing, energy and food production, and private health initiatives and reform can see us of this mess.

Pure lickspittle poetry, this. "Applauds manufacturing!" Our national culture is more accustomed to wave good-bye to manufacturing, and the jobs that go with it, as they are off-shored to increase the wealth of the "private sector" (which in Hanson's imagination comprises the rich sociopaths speeding us unto neo-feudalism and himself, their loyal gentleman farmer friend). I don't see how we could make such people any more "confident" without building them statues and renaming America Pottersville.

THE ANSWER IS ALWAYS ALINSKY. Eventually we may expect to hear conservatives who are convinced Barack Obama is a socialist explain why, if he's such a share-the-wealth type, he signed a Republican-driven budget bill with large spending cuts and no rollback of the Bush tax cuts. How does Stanley Kurtz, author of Radical-In-Chief, react?

Here’s my take on the puzzle of Obama’s leadership style. Obama is still every inch the Alinskyite organizer. He talks about uniting, even as he deliberately polarizes. He moves incrementally toward radical left goals, but never owns up to his ideology. Instead, he tries to work indirectly, by way of the constituencies he seeks to manipulate.

After this you may expect Kurtz to either a.) explain how, in the situation just concluded, Obama was a more polarizing force than the Republicans who used the debt ceiling to force a crisis, and how his capitulation to them manipulates constituencies to realize a radical-left goal; or b.) ignore what just happened and go on as if Obama had seized the steel mills.

You will be unsurprised to learn he goes with b. What makes this especially weird is that Kurtz previously addressed the debt ceiling crisis. On July 18 Kurtz favorably reviewed Spengler's take in the Asia Times:

In today’s piece, Spengler adds some new thoughts on [Radical-in-Chief], highlighting Obama’s pragmatic reasons for passing over the opportunity to nationalize the banks in 2009, and noting how the president could use a debt ceiling crisis to advance his preferred practice of gaining de facto, rather than formal, government control over the private economy...

Spengler’s inside knowledge of America’s banking system puts him in a strong position to game out what we may soon be facing. Agree with his position on the McConnell plan or not, best read his scenario now before perhaps facing it, or something like it, unprepared.

Spengler's scenario was that Obama would force a default, then "declare an emergency, summon bankers to Washington for crisis-management sessions, slash every form of spending except for coupon payments on Treasuries" and "perhaps even [demand] the right to dictate that banks make loans to the Democrats' pet projects in the name of job-creation..."

To put it mildly, that didn't happen. Back to the present post: While others offer more plausible explanations as to why Obama caved, Kurtz stubbornly sticks to his dogma:

Obama is a bad negotiator because Alinskyite’s don’t negotiate, they intentionally polarize. As for their own groups, here they try to placate all factions and hide their own goals. That about describes Obama’s performance on the debt deal, which included a dollop of both of these stances.

In other words, Obama gave in to the Republicans, instead of sowing chaos and seizing power as predicted, because he's an Alinskyite. They're tricky that way! And that also explains why all his fellow socialists are mad at him -- they don't get his Alinskyitism like Kurtz does:

The left yearns for Obama to take on the Tea Party in an overt ideological battle. But that is exactly the sort of thing Alinskyite organizers are forbidden to do. Bromwich asks why Obama has steadfastly refused to recognize the existence of the Tea Party. The answer is Saul Alinsky.

For Kurtz, I suspect, the answer is always Saul Alinsky. Obama invades Libya? Alinsky! Slow to support gay marriage? Alinsky! The lefty things he does are Alinsky, and the seemingly neutral or conservative things he does are also Alinsky. Why? Because he's an Alinskyite. QED.

"No true Scotsman" has got nothing on "All true Alinskyites."

UPDATE. Commenters are impetuous, Homeric. Some incline toward literary parody, like TKK ("As usual, the face of Saul Alinsky, the Enemy of the People, had flashed on to the screen. There were hisses here and there among the audience..."). Others use clever inversions, like wjts ("'Leading from behind' is classic Illuminati strategy... Weishaupt used to literally lead from behind, by stage-managing his group’s protests from the back of the room..."). Some go for plain mockery, like kia ("a double Kung Fu master of of Alyinskyology, the go-to guy, the terrier that always finds a rat or at least a picture of a rat or OK fine not even a picture of a rat a dried dog turd with whiskers stuck in it and raisins for eyes..."). But aha! Those are all Alinskyite stratagems, and reveal the commenters' true agenda! Well, this is just a little Lincoln Park and you're all Saul Alinsky hypocrites. The conservative deconstruction squad is not fooled!

UPDATE 2. For some reason this reminds me of the bits in John Ford's The Whole Town's Talking where Jean Arthur, hauled in by the cops to ID poor Arthur Jones (Edward G. Robinson) as Killer Mannion, decides to play tough and attributes a number of jobs she knows nothing about to Mannion. That part starts at 7:20 and ends at 8:40, with a lot of funny business in between. I encourage you to watch the whole clip just to steep in early Ford. What a grand director he was, even outside his milieu.

BOO FUCKING HOO. You can tell what Jonah Goldberg has to say is important because he begins with this --

...Look, I am past exhausted talking about liberal media bias. It’s real, we all know it, and people who deny it aren’t even fooling themselves. But some things just have to be pointed out. This morning I watched the first 15 minutes of the Today Show. I don’t particularly love or even like the program, but I find it useful to see what the producers think is the big news of the day. And sometimes Chuck Todd is on, and I like him. If I sound defensive about watching the show it’s only because I am.

It's the rhetorical equivalent of dancing outside a locked men's-room door. Obviously Goldberg has to get something off his chest besides crumbs from his second breakfast. So what is it?

Anyway, the first ten minutes was about Gabby Giffords’ return to the House yesterday. I’m not sure it merited the full ten minutes or trumped the hard news that later followed, but it’s a great story and everyone is rooting for the lady, so I’m fine with it.

Generous of him, isn't it?

But think about this for a second. The Giffords shooting sent the media elite in this country into a bout of St. Vitus’s dance that would have warranted an army of exorcists in previous ages. Sarah Palin’s Facebook map...

Oh, that again -- the never-ending "blood-libel" sob story that liberals made everyone think Sarah Palin shot Giffords. It's all people ever talk about! So what's the problem now? Is covering Giffords' return somehow disrespectful to the sufferings of rightwing slander victims?

In brief: People are saying mean things about the Tea Party, which is blood-libel-plus. Also:

Then last night, on the very day Gabby Giffords heroically returns to cast her first vote since that tragic attack seven months ago, the vice president of the United States calls the Republican party a bunch of terrorists.

Joe Biden! I'm surprised he took time off from posing for the marble bust they're making of him at the National Press Club to give a statement.

No one cares. I hate the “if this were Bush” game so we’re in luck. Instead imagine if this was Dick Cheney calling the Progressive Caucus (or whatever they’re called)...

To get the gist of the rest, find an old rubber doll, fill it with Cheez-Whiz, punch holes in the eyes and butt, and squeeze it. Jesus Christ. These guys just won a huge victory in Congress, and Goldberg's blubbering that someone spoke unkindly of them on TV. I'm beginning to think "liberal media" is the conservative adult equivalent of "mommy."

UPDATE. Several commenters rush to point out that this is, in fact, the author of Liberal Fascism lecturing other people on civility. But if we start getting into Goldberg's credentials as a buffoon we'll be here all night.

ANNALS OF THE CULTURE WARS, SMURF EDITION. Okay, Kulturkampfers, what are you on about this time? Sesame Street? The Easter Parade? Law & Order: Criminal Intent? Nope -- communist Smurfs, apparently:

As Papa Smurf and friends re-enter the cultural atmosphere, there’s no dodging the question: Are the Smurfs now, or they have ever been … communist?...

“They have a dictatorlike leader, and they all have defined roles,” said Technorati.com editor Curtis Silver, who wrote about the psychology of the Smurfs for Wired magazine’s website. “When it comes to their day-to-day life, they’re like a Communistic group.”

Please don't tell them about the matriarchal syndicalist cell known as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Now, consider life in the Smurfs’ village: Residents live in identical mushroom houses. Everyone dresses alike. They sing the same group song, over and over. They have no apparent deity.

Washington Times reporter Patrick Hruby's 1,279-word (!) article is inspired in part by a pre-existing silly debate among French intellectuals, and he does include a few voices of sanity and a cheeky conclusion. Also it smells of ripe link-bait. So maybe it's meant as a mere bagatelle.

But in the current conservative environment, even nonsense will serve to stuff the cannon. Nancy French at National Review:

Hollywood’s newest offering is a film version of the iconic 1980s television show, which ran for nine years on NBC. The little blue guys — and one girl! — are back.

And guess what? They are no longer Commu-Smurfs.

You didn’t have to be Joseph McCarthy to see the red undertones of the blue Smurf society...

She goes on like that, observably tickled -- but, one realizes with horror, it's not the very idea than anyone would be crazy enough to take this guff seriously that tickles her; no, French seems genuinely pleased that the Smurfs have been reeducated: "If the 1980s cartoon was some hidden message about how communism beats capitalism each and every episode, then this movie’s philosophical shift is a very welcome change in deed."

(Consonant with French's previous deep thoughts on feminism, illegitimate children, and premarital sex, she also offers this: "Though it’s wonderful she expressed more of her personality, beware that the Katie Perry-voiced Smurf does utter the sentence, 'I kissed a Smurf and I liked it.'" Though cartoon communism has been purged, can we accept this implicit comfort with lesbianism as a trade-off? Find out in French's next column!)

John Hawkins at Right Wing News at first seems relatively sane on the subject:

In the Smurfs’ case, sure, they should probably have Smurfberry famines caused by Papa Smurf’s meddling and Smurfs locked up in prison for speaking out against the government, but since when have cartoons ever been accurate? All in all, the show has a good message, its been around forever, and there haven’t been any waves of kids basing their economic beliefs on the Smurfs, so I think parents are safe to let their kids watch.

But then it hits you: wait a minute -- we're actually having a conversation about whether or not the Smurfs' obvious communist content is acceptable for children. Just because the author decides that, on balance, it's okay (though I suppose some concerned parents will arrange a Very Special Talk with their astonished kids afterward) doesn't mean the premise isn't batshit.

As a middle-aged American I'm sadly accustomed to seeing the ridiculous turn into the acceptable, but the mainstreaming process seems to be going much faster now. I've known for a while that some people will believe anything, but I worry that events will force me to the conclusion that some folks have a vested interest not only in the specific lunacies they disseminate, but in the destruction of reason itself.

UPDATE. Comments are as usual choice, but o'ercrowned today by mortimer's: "Hayek warned about all this in The Road to Smurfdom."

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the rightblogger coverage of the debt ceiling fight. Some squawked, some chest-bumped, but in the end, it would seem, they got what they wanted. Not enough of it, of course -- it's never enough. And that's the secret of their success.

UPDATE. Oh Jesus, Shorter Joe Klein: So what if Obama got walked over -- at least he wasn't impolite! I guess Klein thinks if Obama gets tough, it's like Mookie throwing a trash can through Sal's window, and black neighborhoods will erupt in riots.

UPDATE 2. All the comments are, guess what, great, but I have to pull up cleter's: "Obama should have told Geithner to mint a trillion dollar coin with Reagan's face on it. Republicans would have been powerless to stop such a thing."

NO COMPROMISE. I don't have high hopes for the resolution of the debt-ceiling crisis, particularly with the addition of a balanced budget amendment to the Boehner plan. Our opinion leaders appear to see the situation as this New York Daily News cover portrays it -- two sides being unreasonable. But it's the Republicans who are proposing big changes consonant with the agenda of their most radical constituents. And while the GOP jumps to please its Tea Party peeps, Democrats don't seem to hear their further-left members at all; the Reid plan is basically a softcore version of the Republicans'.

In other words, all the movement has been in the Republicans' direction, as the cannier conservatives have noted. If the Democrats really believe that massive cuts will further weaken the economy, they're doing a great job of concealing it. The situation offers little hope that significant new tax revenue from our wealthiest fellow-citizens will be included in whatever deal gets done. All the burden will be borne out here in Little People Land.

So a desperate GOP, holding only the House and strongly influenced by its fringe, yet pulls the country further right; and the Democrats, with the Senate and the White House, follow along, dragging their feet a little. Things may change, but they'd have to go awfully far in reverse before this becomes anything like what is traditionally called a compromise.

SHORTER KATHRYN J. LOPEZ: Dollywood told this lesbian to turn her "marriage is so gay" shirt inside-out. She complied, but brazenly persisted in being gay. Moral: I hate fags, I mean tyranny.

WON'T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE RANDIAN SUPERMEN? Dr. Mrs. Ole Perfesser reacts to the inclusion of apple slices in McDonalds' Happy Meals:

Great, I’m allergic to apples as are many people because of the pollen allergy. I have a friend who has very low sodium levels and when she goes to restaurants in New York City where she lives, she actually needs the salt. Mayor Bloomberg’s efforts to ban salt leave my friend frustrated and annoyed. I wonder how many kids have apple and/or pollen allergies? Human physiology varies from person to person. One person’s apples are another’s poison. Are regulators and perhaps Michelle Obama trying to kill me with their “good intentions”? And don’t they care about the children?

It is unsurprising that our would-be Galtian overlords sense great personal danger in a change in the McDonalds menu. But "frustrated and annoyed" by a possible reduction of salt in prepared foods? Someone tell Dagny Taggart one of the things on the table with holes on top is filled with salt. They don't want you to know!

UPDATE. Patriot Update tried to warn us back in January -- Walmart was the thin end of the wedge!

Michelle Obama and nutrition czar Sam Kass have taken the Food Police nationwide. Last week Wal-Mart announced that it is joining the first lady’s anti-obesity campaign by reducing the salt and sugar content of the food it sells.

As perfectly staged as Thursday’s White House-Wal-Mart press conference was, it is clear that this is not Wal-Mart’s doing. Wal-Mart has been coerced into complying. I kept looking for the Wal-Mart spokesman to flash a silent “distress” signal during the press conference.

Imagine those poor top Walmart execs living under such conditions! And to add insult to injury, Democrats want them to pay more taxes.

UPDATE 2. In comments, Doghouse Riley: "I have a friend who insists his spinach salad has never tasted the same since they made 'em wash the E. coli off." And Mark B thinks DMOP "should partner with [Megan McArdle] so they can negotiate with Mickey D's to put Pink Himalayan salt in the Happy Meals." Good idea -- it will help drive all the Poors out of McDonalds, and they can go eat in those outer-borough taquerias or whatever they call their food-hovels.

Several commenters wonder why DMOP hates the free market, but as Patriot Update showed, these corporation heads only appear to be making business choices based on market realities; they are in fact mind-control slaves of the Kenyan Pretender. When liberated by the Republicans, they will burn down the FDA and sprinkle bacon bits on your frozen yogurt.

UPDATE 3. Roger Ailes asks the burning question: Who is John Salt?

CHUTZPAH. An anti-circumcision bill is under consideration in San Francisco. The local ACLU has come out against it, there's a lawsuit against it, some Democratic state assembly members are trying to head it off, and the polling doesn't look good for it.

Still, dare to dream, Dennis Prager:

If the most left-wing major city in America starts arresting Jews who have their children circumcised there, some American Jews might awaken to the threat to Jews posed by the Left.

Maybe Prager can try an "Operation Chaos"-style vote freep to get it passed. Won't Rush be impressed if it works!

Can't leave Prager without noting this:

The anti-Israel propaganda on the left is so great and so effective that according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, “Many of the youths who survived the [Norway] massacre said they thought the killer, dressed as a police officer, was simulating Israeli crimes against Palestinians in the occupied territories.”

I must say, sticking somewhat to the subject, that it takes some balls to find an anti-Israel angle in the story of an Islamophobic mass murderer.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the rightblogger reaction to Anders Breivik's Norwegian rampage. As is customary with these guys, they imagine themselves the aggrieved party, put upon by liberals who connect their politics with Breivik's just because -- well, their politics are Breivik's. If my local ward-heeler went on a mass-murder rampage, I wouldn't feel obliged to explain to the world that not all Democrats are mass murderers, especially on such thin evidence of slander as rightbloggers present. For a bunch of internet tough guys they sure are pissy and defensive.

Oh, and it strikes me that in all their complaining, they don't have a lot to say about the dozens of people who were murdered in cold blood. It's as if victims only become worthy of their interest when they're killed by Muslims.

UPDATE. Comments brilliant as usual; I especially appreciate BigHank53 linking to Charles P. Pierce's story on the Spokane would-be MLK Parade bomber, and other right-wing nutcases.

Meanwhile rightbloggers, including big ones like the Ole Perfesser Instapundit, continue to insist that they're the real victims here. The various defenses of Jennifer Rubin genuinely surprise me; Rubin was clearly, spectacularly wrong, yet her comrades echo her belligerent response that even non-Muslim violence is a reminder of Muslim violence as if it were a home truth rather than a non-sequitur. And Mark Steyn actually disappoints me; the incident seems to have spooked him off his usual stylish insouciance, and thrown him back upon gooberisms more appropriate to dimwits like Jonah Goldberg.

So, if a blonde blue-eyed Aryan Scandinavian kills dozens of other blonde blue-eyed Aryan Scandinavians, that’s now an “Islamophobic” mass murder? As far as we know, not a single Muslim was among the victims. Islamophobia seems an eccentric perspective to apply to this atrocity, and comes close to making the actual dead mere bit players in their own murder.

The killer explained at length that he considered leftists responsible for the Islamification of his country, and then he went out and killed a bunch of them. He clearly despises liberals and Muslims, and mass murder is his preferred mode of self-expression. It's easy to see why Norwegians worry that some other nut -- possibly also quoting Mark Steyn -- might decide to cut out the middleman.

PRIDE (IN THE NAME OF LOVE) In preparation for what is expected to be the first legal gay wedding in New York State, Niagara Falls (courtesy of @LanceBass):


Goddamn, I'm proud to be an American.

I'M SORRY, AMY WINEHOUSE. Back when I was crushing copy for the Voice, I sometimes had a bit of fun with the antics of Amy Winehouse. Her bizarre behavior and drug escapades made for good copy.

As you may imagine, I feel kind of bad about it now.

It's a bitter kind of amusement to joke about musicians headed for an early death, and musicians sometimes play along. Lou Reed once finished neck-and-neck with Keith Richards in a poll of likely casualties, and Reed deadpanned that he was proud to be mentioned in the same breath as Keef, "a real rock star." To an extent this is whistling in the dark. Sometimes people who dance on the edge successfully complete the performance and move to firmer ground, and the examples of the survivors (like Reed and Richards) insulate us from the possibility that the dancer may take a very hard fall. It's all fun and games until someone loses a life.

I make a joke now and again about the possibility of my own untimely demise (though it's getting a little late for that). This is a leftover from my punk rock days, when I was living a good deal harder than I do now, and more inclined to romantic, Wertherian broodings. (The title of the unfinished third Reverb Motherfuckers album was Goodbye Cruel World, and I blush to think of some of the lyrics I wrote for it.) When you tend that way, you don't always know how serious you are about it until life gives you a clue. The examples of some people who went all the way helped convince me that in matters of self-destruction I was a mere poseur. Now, though I sometimes sink into despair, I'm less likely to act it out. But the pose has stayed with me in the domesticated form of a writer's schtick. Does everything seem ridiculous and beyond hope? Well, then, there's always oblivion, a good card to play when nothing else seems to work.

It's easy to forget that some of us aren't playing. All I really know about Winehouse is that she was ferociously talented, a very good songwriter and a great singer. I like Back in Black but only ever owned Frank, which I'm listening to now. Her idiom was old-fashioned but she inhabited it fully; it was the product of great craft but also wholly natural; you can hear her taking pleasure in her own sound without abandoning the meaning of her songs. Her work always had more than one thing going on in it. When the songs were moody, her pleasure lifted them; when they were playful, her craft gave them ballast. ("Fuck Me Pumps" would sound much cheaper without it.)

As a million second-rate chanteuses have shown, this is no mean feat. It's the kind of mastery that makes you believe the singer can do anything. When she started to fall, some of us thought it was something her talent, or some innate respect for it, would pull her back from. When she stayed down, some of us still couldn't take it seriously. Now the seriousness is inescapably proven, and along with the regret that comes with the passing of any major artist, I feel regret that it took this to convince me. Celebrities aren't friends, and we're not obliged to act as if they were. In fact it's presumptuous to do so. But, generally speaking, it's never a good thing to treat the sufferings of another human being as if they were unimportant.

UPDATE. All of the comments are good, but I would draw your attention to that of BigHank53. Go look; I won't do it the violence of excerption.

UPDATE 2. Great tribute by Maura Johnston at Sound of the City.

UPDATE 3. I'm taking What Would Tyler Durden Do off the blogroll. I've long appreciated his harshness, but this is bullshit.

AROUND THE HORN. I know, it's hot. But as someone who was born in July and spent a summer in east Texas, I advise that you screw your courage to a sticky place, and try not to look at the thermometer. Heat waves are unpleasant but, making allowances for the medically vulnerable, they're unlikely to kill you, while internalizing the endless newsbreaks about them could make you crazy enough to kill yourself. Like a lot of what's on the TV news, those stories use endless repetition and alarmism to keep you twitching. Ignore them. Stay mentally chill, and hydrate.

Speaking of crazy, Peggy Noonan endorses the Gang of Six plan, and says the only thing standing in its way is... Barack Obama, who talks too much and should instead "stay in his office, meet with members, and work the phones, all with a new humility." In reality, conservatives have been screaming bloody murder about the plan ("[Brent] Bozell: Republicans who support Gang of Six proposal ‘will walk the plank’'; National Review, "Worst Plan So Far"; etc). But they scream bloody murder about everything and then when it's done, whatever is done, declare victory. Noonan wants Obama locked in his office so he won't be at the champagne party when the inevitable agreement is reached. Given that said agreement will probably be awful, maybe Obama is well-advised in that respect.

My old Voice pal Steven Thrasher has an interview with Kitty Lambert who is expected to pop the cherry on New York's marriage equality act and be legally wed to Cheryle Rudd on Monday "in front of the specially rainbow lit Niagara Falls," thus destroying the institution of marriage and Maggie Gallagher's digestion in the most spectacular way possible. Yay!

BLEW PERIOD. Some sissy in a beret must have made him look bad, because Ace O'Spades is on about the artist menace:

The Police song -- Synchronicity I, I think -- goes...

Packed like lemmings into shiny metal boxes, Contestants in a suicidal race.

That is, all you wage-slaves headed to work each day are lemmings in a suicide machine.

You hear this an awful lot from artists. An awful lot. You see this basic idea -- the emptiness and awfulness of normal, quotidian life -- in dozens of movies, like the empty American Beauty, and damn, if they don't win Oscars a lot.

Death of a Salesman was about this. So, instant classic.

Spades prefers Tommy Boy, because "the heroes actually made good quality car parts so that people could fix their cars."

To each his own, you might say. Spades talks about these things as if only their allegedly bourgeois-hating creators could enjoy them -- because they "could not function happily within the confines of what most people would call 'a normal life,'" he says, "and are driven towards more Bohemian, atypical lifestyles." (Never heard of Wallace Stevens, I guess.)

But Synchronicity II*, American Beauty, Death of a Salesman et alia were hits. They weren't only patronized by scribblers and dabblers. Even people who make good quality car parts dug them.

It never crosses Spades' mind to ask why ordinary people sometimes go for songs, plays, and movies that suggest their lives might not be all they'd hoped. He doesn't know what art's for. In his view it's always about self-affirmation, always being told that you're right and that other possibilities would inevitably be worse. In other words, it's like his own political propaganda, only with tom rolls and explosions.

Among the essay's more poignant moments:

I don't begrudge them that. As someone who's wound up, whether by choice or by chance, in a sort of Bohemian limbo myself, I get why they chafe at the idea of 9 to 5 and nicely-trimmed suburban lawns, myself.

Pause to imagine Spades in Bohemian limbo: sharing a garret with other disaffected rightbloggers, deranging their senses with Mountain Dew and discussing 24 deep into the night. Then Spades made the big time, and it looked like he and his buddies were going to really change things; it would be Montparnasse all over again! Alas, inevitably came the disenchantment.

The rest is mostly bitching about those damned artists and their superior attitudes, but I have to point this out:

In fact, the number of artists a society can support is surely hard-capped at no more than, say, 1% at the very most, and only during a period of strong, strong economic activity, when artists who can't make a living on their art can get paid good wages as a waiter or something.

This is so obvious, isn't it?

So what the hell is the Artist scorn for all non-Artists?

As usual Spades is projecting massively. But as a conservative, he should have considered this answer: if that one percent of artists has succeeded financially despite overwhelming odds, why wouldn't they have contempt for people who hadn't made it, or were unmotivated to try? Here, this may help: try imagining them as investment bankers or captains of industry who consider themselves producers and everyone else looters and parasites.

*UPDATE. Commenters point out that Ace got this title wrong, so I fixed it. Some of them also draw a connection between Spades' peculiar idea of art and the Soviets', which, I have sometimes noted here, is increasingly adopted by American conservatives. Not every philistine is a would-be commissar, but with these guys you have every reason to be nervous, as they talk so much about lifestyle issues these days, and their Will to Power is so fierce.

kth notices that Jay-Z provides the kind of business-friendly messaging Spades could get with -- actually a lot of rappers do -- but that would require Spades to adopt an idiom with which I suspect he would not be comfortable.

UPDATE 2. Ed Driscoll puts his oar in:

Actually, it’s not artists; it’s leftists... a few months ago when I spent a week in Texas, I listened to several hours worth of songs celebrating working hard, living on a farm, patriotism, and essentially being a grown-up.

I spent six months in Texas. Maybe Driscoll's handlers played him nothing but Toby Keith and told him he was from Texas. Surely they didn't play him any Ray Wylie Hubbard. Or Brian Keane: "When you sing about your Wrangler jeans/Pickup trucks and Dairy Queens/You make the place I love seem like a bad cartoon..."

A COUPLE OF WHITE GUYS SITTING AROUND TALKING. Jonah Goldberg is puzzled that a private school and a journalists' convention are promoting "diversity" as selling points. I'm puzzled by Goldberg. Isn't he a capitalist? It should no more bother him that services are peddled with diversity than if they were peddled with HD, 9.0 megapixels, electronic brake-force distribution, or whatever. Hell, Violet from Peanuts bought a bracelet because it was hi-fi. Just because Goldberg doesn't want it doesn't mean other high-end consumers won't.

Maybe Goldberg thinks the proliferation of diversity talk is bad for America in some way. Will he grasp the nettle?

Whether you think that’s a good thing or bad — or a mix of the two — is a topic for another day.

Goldberg never fails to come down to our expectations.

John Derbyshire jumps in to make everything worse:

Last week the whole Derb family went to an Open House at the college our daughter will be attending this Fall. As part of the presentation there was a promotional movie for the college. One of the first words spoken in the movie was “Diversity.” I think it may actually have been the very first: “Diversity is our highest goal here at . . .” or some such.

Or maybe it said, "Your daughter will meet attractive black men"; with the blood pounding in his ears, Derbyshire may have misheard. Also, unlike Goldberg, Derbyshire is willing to say where he stands on the whole diversity racket:

The U.S.A. was born diverse and we have never had any choice but to cope with that original Diversity as best we can.

Just so: along with the Brits, Germans, et alia, hundreds of thousands of black people somehow wound up in America in the 18th Century, and it's been nothing but trouble ever since. I believe Charles Murray wrote a book about it.

Still, if managing Diversity demands such commitment of time, resources, and effort, above and beyond what is ordinarily required to keep a civilization going and an economy humming, isn’t it foolish to be taking on more Diversity? Especially in a world where, as one of your commenters points out, we are in rivalry with big nations that have no Diversity overhead at all?

Well, there's an exciting new theory of America's economic doldrums: we face a disastrous racial purity gap. Maybe one day Derbyshire will explain his plan for addressing it. I expect it will involve driving African-Americans out of the country with dialect humor.

UPDATE. Another classic Goldberg-Derbyshire tag team on the subject. (And another.)

UPDATE 2. Right out of the comments box: "What'ya mean 'we,' lime-sucker? Get your rotten-toothed, queen-humping arse back to Old Blighty and leave America to us Americans." You're the real racist, Roger.

UPDATE 3. Ha S,N!

RACE CARD. Rep. Allen West called Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz “vile,” “despicable” and “not a Lady," which is unusually pointed language for intramural Congressional squabbles, and the Democrats are making hay of it. Perfesser Instapundit interprets the situation thus:

RACISTS: Democrats Demand Allen West Apologize For Criticizing White Woman. I guess they figure he doesn’t know his place.

Hey, I didn’t make the racial rules for political discourse. I’m just following their previous application.

Ann Althouse gets in on it:

What's with West? Is he — as Think Progress would have it — into "making outrageous statements just to provoke a reaction"? Or have media folk on the other side of that "ideological clash" decided that the way to ruin Allen West's potential for a brilliant career is to portray him as hotheaded and irrational?

Portray? West's comments were impolitic, as even West seemed to realize, albeit briefly. Althouse adds:

In this context, let's remember all the discussion about how Barack Obama had to fend off the "angry black man" stereotype:

And she excerpts a year-old article with some quotes about Obama's rhetorical mildness, e.g.: "Rev. Wright almost cost [Obama] his run for the presidency because of fears of the angry black man... He is Mr. Equanimity and Mr. Consolation... That's how he negotiated his way through multiple worlds, and reached out across bridges." Trying to figure out what Althouse means is often an unrewarding chore, but the idea seems to be that because Obama's publicly even temper has been noted, noticing West's less-even temper is... shit, I don't know; again I rely on the Perfesser to interpret:

ARE THE MEDIA TRYING TO TAR ALLEN WEST with the “angry black man” stereotype?

Because I’m pretty sure that makes them racist.

Further down the food chain, we get stuff like this: "WOW, I think the DNC chair is a racist. She’s going after Allen West because he’s black. That’s the only reason for the issue. IF a white man had said what Allen West said it would have been overlooked. I’m sure of it.. Debbie Wuzhernamesmuck is a RACIST!" Not to speak of the commentary at the plankton level.

Having recently been confronted by unambiguous racists -- the kind who use "nigger" without irony -- I am perhaps more sensitive than I might be to this kind of thing. Their claims are unserious -- I assume even they realize that normal people would find them ridiculous, were they to stumble upon them. But they're still disturbing, because they presume that any claims of racism (except the kind made against black people) are phony and meaningless, so why shouldn't they have some fun with them, too? It would be nice to think they're doing this in hopes that, by laughing it off, we can get past the absurdity of racism itself. But I expect that if they need some base-shoring in 2012, we'll find that they're hoping for something entirely different.

NEAREST THE MERCHANT'S HEART. At Andrew Sullivan's site, a discussion of that flogging-for-prison thing I talked about earlier. Here's one conservative's reaction:


Maybe we should take this to its logical conclusion, and allow inmates to, say, cut off a hand to get out of two years of prison. Or maybe a leg to get out of five. Similarly, borrowers should be allowed to put up a pound of flesh if they default on a loan. Hey, it's their choice, right?

When did this sort of thing become debatable?

UPDATE. Among our brilliant commenters, with their references to Larry Niven and fafblog and so forth, Gerald Fnord comes out of the gate with "the problem with a system that will let you buy anything is that everything will be for sale... at which point no right is inalienable."

Quite so. The follow-ups by aimai et alia about kidney harvesting further remind me of those libertarian-style conservatives who want to let living citizens put their vital organs on the open market; they usually say it's Because Freedom, but I suspect they see it as a kind of extreme welfare reform -- instead of subsidizing the desperately impoverished, why not give them the opportunity to pull themselves up by their own ureters? Rich people have the need, and poor people have the kidneys -- problem solved!

When you get used to thinking this way, the idea of letting prisoners trade their own torture for early dismissal from prison seems like a no-brainer. These are the sort of people who go in for bland cost-benefit analyses of torture and, when the local school calls to report that their sons have been bullying other kids, breathe sighs of relief and satisfaction.

TAKNG THE PLEDGE.

No Time for Real Time
By Kathryn Jean Lopez

On this weekend’s Real Time with Bill Maher, the host presided over a discussion of imagined violent sex with two presidential candidates (Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum), courtesy of Air America’s Marc Maron and Dan Savage (who we last heard from on the joys of non-monogamy).

What a repulsive conversation. And it is not a first there.

Can we all agree to avoid that show? To avoid going on it. To avoid watching it.

The idea of Lopez looking for high-fives while all the fame-hungry Conerites pretend to tie their shoes is pretty funny, but no match for her next line:

I’d like to think most try to enter conversations on television hoping to bring something new and different but uplifting and constructive, that might move the conversation forward.

I guess whenever Jonah Goldberg goes before the cameras, the National Review interns jam Lopez's transmission, and secretly replace Goldberg's actual burblings with old tapes of Malcolm Muggeridge.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the debut of the Sarah Palin hagio-doc The Undefeated and the grand claims for it made by rightbloggers. Basically, they opened the thing in a couple of cowtowns, and it's supposed to be the biggest sleeper since Easy Rider. Those of us living in civilization will have to wait to see how good it is, but the bullshit of the Palin promoters remains ripe as ever.

Not included in the column is the review by Ben Howe of RedState, wherein he abhors and repents his prior lack of Palin worship.

I didn’t think she’d really done much in Alaska, or if she had, that it was enough to act like she was the second coming of Reagan. I thought that her contributions when being interviewed were bubble-gum and lacking of any real substance. I would never finish hearing a story about her and think, “Wow, I never thought of that before.” I just didn’t see that she had that much to offer.

But then he saw the movie --

I pride myself on my ability to know when something is baloney, almost instinctively. On Sarah Palin, I was so incredibly hoodwinked that the one word that my wife and I agreed described how we felt after watching it, was shame. Yes of course invigoration, satisfaction and all the other things you experience when watching a good film, but about how we had handled our vetting of Mrs. Palin, shame was the word that best described it.

Shame for not bothering to look up her record. Shame for not reading her story. Shame for turning the channel when she came on the tv. Shame for not listening to people that we had a great deal of respect for like Andrew Breitbart, Tammy Bruce, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity.

Keep in mind, this is a guy from RedState saying this. I tried to think of possible equivalents -- like a Daily Kos poster tearing his shirt and groveling because he never really appreciated Joe Biden -- but I think you'd have to go back to the Middle Ages, or to the Salem Witch Trials, to find such a (in the words of the padre in A Clockwork Orange) grotesque act of self-abasement. Maybe this is how these people keep the poor fish in their ranks from converting -- by offering conversion opportunities internally.

Well, read the column anyway, before the comments box gets taken over by racist lunatics.

THE FUTURE OF ECHO CHAMBERS. As most of my posts are about politics, I guess I qualify as a political blogger. But it's not really politics as such that motivates me. I don't see myself promoting any political agenda, and would be very surprised to hear that anyone had changed their party affiliation or views on an important subject because of what I've written.

In fact, for years I tried as hard as I could to avoid politics. But with the dawn of the blog era, it became hard to even take the online equivalent of a Sunday stroll without being confronted by politics in its most degenerate form. So was I spurred; but not by offenses to my politics so much as by offenses to my reason.

I can countenance and even be swayed by conservative arguments, but much of what I read by rightbloggers has less to do with argumentation than with propaganda, noise-making, and just plain bullshit. And, by whatever accident of my upbringing, that sort of thing just grates on my nerves.

Take the subjects of some of my recent posts. Their politics are obnoxious to me, but my complaints have mainly been against the sloppy and even deranged thinking with which they attempt to promote them: the focus on irrelevant detail, the projection of political import onto trivialities, the mistaking of racist slurs for arguments, the false assumption of victim status, etc.

And that's mostly what they've got. When you survey memeorandum or Blogrunner, what you see doesn't resemble Plato's Symposium so much as the mob of crackpot messiahs howling in the public square in Monty Python's Life of Brian. And it gets worse all the time.

I got some idea of where this may go next from the comments to my recent Voice column.

The topic was rightblogger promotion of the idea that America suffers from a black crime wave. After a few rounds of the usual lively back-and-forth, one commenter started frenetically cutting-and-pasting stories about crimes with black perps -- hundreds of them, sometimes with commentary like "MASSIVE CHIMP-OUT" -- and claiming they were "evidence" that the "libtards" were wrong and that blacks were terrorizing America.

I pointed out to him that hundreds of thousands of violent crimes are reported in America every year, and that his cut-and-pastes don't prove anything; his reaction was to scream obscene insults and to call for my death. (Other commenters tried to engage him and got the same thing.) He even brought aboard a couple of other commenters to yell insults at me, and at black people in general.

They've been at it for days now. And they're all very pleased because now they're the only ones left in that combox, leaving them free to beat their chests and holler undisturbed. They aren't reaching anyone who isn't already convinced, as they are, that black people are inferior, but that apparently doesn't matter as much to them as their reign over a tiny corner of the Voice website.

This occupation by racist psychos is an extreme case, but as spaces in which actual discussion may take place shrivel away -- and the very idea of discussion falls into desuetude -- I expect you'll see more of this kind of thing. Because when reason is no longer meaningful, the only standard left is force -- how many words you can paste, how many all-caps insults you can inflict; freeping writ large. People like Rupert Murdoch have always been able to do this to the venues they own, of course, but in our electronic age, any dedicated (that is, insane) party may do it to other people's venues; having no other model for the propagation of his ideas, he has no reason not to.

Maybe a new kind of content farm will emerge, dedicated to flooding every available space with propaganda instead of advertising. In fact, as our billionaires get further into political outreach, maybe that kind of advertising will outstrip the other kinds. What the hell, when they're that brainwashed, they'll buy anything.

In any event, it doesn't look like an improvement. Thanks again, internet!

UPDATE. The psychopath seems to have invaded these comments, too. My regular commenters seem to know how to handle him, but I'm still going to block him when I get home, so if you want your last licks, take them now.

UPDATE 2. OK, I've blocked him -- not something I like to do, but the guy's clearly deranged. Sigh. Isn't it strange that anyone would choose to so misuse his time on earth?

I feel like one of those cops on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, coming home to his family after a long day of dealing with the criminally insane.

FOCUSING ON WHAT'S IMPORTANT. Obama says "don't call my bluff," and the shirt-retuckers at National Review raise a point of order:

Will no one call Obama on his tough-sounding “Don’t call my bluff”? What kind of threat is “Don’t call my bluff”? In saying that, Obama is admitting he’s bluffing. A sensible threat might be, “Don’t assume I’m bluffing!” But no...

Soon they'll tell us that the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire, and get a wedgie.

Meanwhile Randall Hoven offers "The Speech Boehner Should Give" if by some magic spell the nation becomes remotely interested in what Boehner has to say. My favorite bit:

It has become clear to my House colleagues that the time for closed-door meetings and extra-constitutional commissions is over. We need to get back to the kinds of government processes we all learned in grade school civics.

Grade school civics! If we really wanted to teach the kids what goes on in our legislatures, we would just show them selected episodes of The Wire.