THEY LEARNED NOTHING AND FORGOT NOTHING. I don't know if you've noticed, but Megan McArdle has taken off to work on some project (my understanding is it will be called The Koch Kookbook; each dish features the meat of an animal capriciously declared "endangered" by some ecofascist regime, and will be road-tested in McArdle's culinary lab). To hold the fort she has enlisted a new crew of Kids from McArdle. What sort of kids are they? True Blue Libertarian! And what do they believe in?

If you're driving through certain West African countries, you'll be stopped every few miles by armed men--often in police uniforms--who will demand payment in exchange for letting you pass.

I have a somewhat similar experience every time I drive from my home in Philadelphia to Washington, DC. As I'm driving up Interstate 95, I'll periodically be stopped by people in uniforms (thankfully not armed) who will demand money in exchange for letting me through.

Oh Jesus. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Tim B. Leeve in the Free Market 4Ever.

Obviously, there are important differences between these cases.

Whoa, big mainstream move.

In Africa, the roadblocks are mostly illegal and the payments are generally described as "bribes." In the United States, the practice is known as "collecting tolls" and is government-sanctioned

Just as so-called humans call health care a "right," and engage in a form of emotional commerce which they are pleased to call "love." Gawd, they're so immature.

Lee eventually tells us that "while I'm generally sympathetic to the idea of privately-managed roads, I've become convinced that the broader vision of 'free-market roads' is a conceptual confusion... the more I think about it, the less sense it makes." Good for him! But despite what could have been a life-changing insight, he can't let go of the dream -- he pores over the evidence, dazed, stricken even at what it might suggest:

A 2004 GAO survey found that four of the five privately-funded toll road projects started or completed in the preceding 15 years included non-compete clauses that restricted the creation of competing freeways nearby.

Capitalists exploiting a privatization scheme to dick the public! Who could have seen that coming? So, what have we learned?

To be clear, this isn't to say libertarians should oppose road privatization.

As I suspected.

The public has a right to freedom of movement along public roads, and this right can't be extinguished by transferring physical control of the road to a private firm. And libertarians should demand that private operators of public roads follow the same basic principles--non-discrimination, tolls not greatly exceeding the cost of building an operating the roads--that we'd apply if the government were operating those roads itself.

Demand! Preferably in a strongly-worded letter to the Chamber of Commerce, or to Reason magazine.

I remember when Mike Royko, disgusted by Roger Ebert's defense of Rupert Murdoch as a Citizen Kane type of mogul, said, "Roger's a nice guy but he thinks everything's a goddamn movie." These kids are even more misguided -- they think everything's an essay by Hayek. Movies at least are fun.

GOLDBERG ALWAYS MAKES IT WORSE. I hate to return at all to the highly depressing topic of Trayvon Martin, but it's never over until the fat laddy sings, so Jonah Goldberg's contribution must be noted. While the rest of the rightwing Ooga Booga squad, including Goldberg's teammates at National Review, pump the theme that because Martin smoked some weed and skipped school he probably deserved to be gunned down, Goldberg, showing that his stupidity sometimes trumps his laziness, goes for the angle shot: The problem, he tells us, is rich black people.

But what if we extend Charles Murray’s argument in Coming Apart to blacks in the top 2% — like Blow, Britt and most of the other black commentators out there. It seems plausible that at least some of these people are as removed from lower class black America as many white commentators are from lower class white America.

I pause here to imagine Goldberg getting a local bag-boy to take his Bubble Quiz for him and later, when he finds out the bag boy didn't know anything about NASCAR either, bursting into the supermarket to demand his money back, and to pick up three pounds of onion dip.

In that context, I could see how the Trayvon Martin story would hit closer to home than the vastly more numerous tragedies involving black-on-black homicide. The richest and most successful African-Americans spend a lot more time in elite “white” America than they do in Compton or East St. Louis. And, my hunch is, they’re more understandably more worried about white men with guns than they are about guns in their kids’ private schools.

But if black-on-black crime is the real issue, then why are they worried about white men with guns at all? Is it because these denatured two-percenter blacks, who don't know Compton and East St. Louis as well as Goldberg knows the mean streets of Scarsdale, have lost or never acquired the mystical ability of their lesser-born brothers to face down even gun-toting white men by yelling "Shaka Zulu" or something? (And they'd have to worry about this because you never know when someone will discover they got high and skipped school, rendering them fair game for any cracker with a firearm?)

But clearly, the fact that their kids go to private school renders their arguments hypocritical; those crests they put on their jackets render them bullet-proof, and Lord knows no one ever got called a nigger who was wearing a button-down shirt.

I do know this: I've read Charles Blow's column, and judging from Goldberg's response to it he either hasn't read it or can't read at all. I am open to either possibility.

I also think it’s a lot easier for rich black liberals to have an “honest conversation” about white racism than it is for them to engage in an honest conversation about the other problems facing black America that have little to nothing to do with white racism.

Goldberg's idea of an honest conversation being the rich black liberals going "homina homina homina" while Goldberg breaks to them the shocking facts of black-on-black crime. I hope that's what it is, anyway; maybe Goldberg, emboldened by this fantasy, will wander over to Harlem and try this gambit on a random group of corner-hangers. It should increase his stock of evidence.

I don’t think this explains everything, not even close. But I do think it might be one of the factors at work.

Or: "Yeah, it's bullshit, but I haven't written much of anything for weeks and K-Lo was threatening not to restock the snack machine."  (Alternatively: Faarrrrrt.)

UPDATE. Goldberg continues making everything worse with his longer column version on Wednesday:

Weak-tea Marxist rants about a system that parasitically feeds off black men sound absurdly antiquated when that system is run, at the top, by black men (Eric Holder, let’s not forget, runs the Justice Department).

By the same token, we could say that Americans have no reason to complain about the Obama Administration, since Obama and Holder and all the rest of them are Americans. (I'm kidding, of course; conservatives don't consider Democrats Americans.)

The rest is just more shit about how black people should listen to him and Heather Mac Donald and all the other honkeys about how to fix their black crime problem, a program that begins with treating incidents like this one as a Mulligan owed to white people.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the Trayvon Martin case. Basically it's the old Ooga Booga all over again.

UPDATE. Speaking of which, it seems the racist troll from the original Ooga Booga Voice column is back for this one, using the name "Flooob" this time for some reason. Same M.O. as before: Racial slurs, professions of contempt for white non-racists and their "precious blacks," and, when he's not getting enough attention, semi-coherent skeins of abstract filth. He's like the living Id of the modern conservative movement.

NEXT! Lately I've been too busy to do much more here than reprint what some asshole said and then say, "Jesus, what an asshole." But at the rate they're going crazy, that might just be enough. At National Review, Michael Walsh:

Surely, this is the ultimate expression of the suicide cult that is the modern Left, a subset of libertine takers that so loathes itself that it will dragoon the makers into underwriting the chalices of tasty hemlock it’s so eager for everybody to quaff in order to put itself out of its misery. If, as long as it doesn’t hurt anybody — it feels good, do it! Alas, it does hurt somebody — it hurts society, by robbing it of its future and burdening those lucky kids who make it through the contraceptive/abortifacient gauntlet with an unpayable debt to the very people who tried to get rid of them.

The closest thing to a point I can get out of this is: If you have sex without having a baby, you are robbing future generations which you did nothing to create. Actually I could Shorter it "GRRRRRRR GRRRRRR grrrrrrrrr [smash] GRRRRR" without doing it an injustice.

What's wrong with these people?

NEXT WEEK: THE MENACE OF RAINBOW PARTIES. Let's peek in at PJ Lifestyle and see what the Kulturkampfers are up to:

Once SNL took off though, the tone of network television would never be the same. If Bill Maher can call Sarah Palin a c*** with impunity, if Cee Lo Green can cheerfully sing a song titled “F*** You” at a Democratic Party fund raiser, well, the tone of the liberal overculture had to first be lowered from Leonard Bernstein on CBS’s Omnibus, Bob Hope hosting the Oscars, the swankiness of the Kennedy-era Rat Pack, and the Carson-era Tonight Show to get to that point. The original SNL was, in retrospect, one of the most powerful of the early battering rams in the New Left’s war on culture.

No, I'm not kidding, Ed Driscoll finds the invention of Saturday Night Live -- 36 years ago -- a fit subject for fist-shaking. His news hook: That a Kindle edition has recently emerged of a 26-year-old book about SNL that he read once. Word count: 3,771.

It's probably best that at PJ Lifestyle they leave contemporary subjects almost entirely alone: No hiphop, no fringe or independently distributed material, nothing anyone under the age of 40 is paying attention to. The closest they get to contemporaneity is John Boot's review of the new Springsteen album:

What [Springsteen] should not do is what he does on his latest album, which is to advocate violent revolution, class-and-politics-based bloodshed, and the murder of bankers and perhaps other capitalists.

Is it any wonder these guys think Rick Santorum is the wave of the future?

UPDATE. I should add that, over at Sadly, No!, Cerberus treats another PJ Lifestyle monstrosity -- Dr. Mrs. Ole Perfesser on how bitches run everything -- with fully deserved and richly detailed contempt.

UPDATE 2. It makes me sad sometimes, just how blind the culture warriors are to the meaning of culture itself. From a Forbes column by John Tammy:

It says here that HBO’s The Wire, which ran from 2002-2008, is the greatest television drama of all time... 

Liberals of the American variety seemed to like it for revealing how very crushing and insurmountable poverty is, conservatives perhaps liked it for televising the human error frequently behind poverty, not to mention the corruption inside media and government, and then libertarians including this writer surely enjoyed it for laying out the totally ineffective nature of the "war on drugs", and the sheer incompetence of government.

You read that and think, okay, you're halfway there -- now make the leap and recognize that ideological readings are reductive and beside the point, that there's something universal in a successful work of art that speaks not to your talking points, but to whatever's left of your soul.

Alas, the very next graf:

It’s said about The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins’ blockbuster novel that will be released in movie form this Friday, that it appeals to a broad demographic ranging from teens to senior citizens. If so, it’s fair to assume that a not insignificant portion of the book’s devotees see a political message within.

No, no...

Back to the malnourishment that pervades Panem, and underlies the story... as Bastiat long ago observed...

These people are hopeless.

THE WHINERS' CIRCLE. Noel Sheppard of NewsBusters is outraged at Robert DeNiro's "racist" joke at an Obama fundraiser:

"Callista Gingrich. Karen Santorum. Ann Romney. Now do you really think our country is ready for a white first lady?"  De Niro asked a star-studded crowd gathered in the backroom of Locanda Verde, a restaurant he owns on Greenwich Street in TriBeCa.

Someone in the crowd shouted, "No!" as De Niro quickly added, "Too soon, right?"

"Too soon, right?"

Politico's Jennifer Epstein noted that the attendees included Beyonce, her mother Tina Knowles, Star Jones, Whoopi Goldberg, Gayle King, Angela Bassett and Ben Stiller.

They probably also think it's "too soon" for another white first lady.

Small mistake there, Noel -- Ben Stiller is white, which kind of lessens your intended effect.

But just imagine what would have happened in 2008 if this occurred at a McCain-Palin event. Or if someone at a Gingrich-Romney-Santorum fundraiser asked, "Isn't it time for a white first lady again?" 

That would have been the end of that candidate's campaign. 

But because the joke is directed at white women, it's just fine.

"The joke is directed at white women...." I guess this is their answer to the "war on women" rhetoric; in phase two, they'll spread the word that only black women want birth control pills, so if you insist they be included in your health insurance you're evincing a touch of the tar brush. Electoral gold!

PJ Tatler ups the ante:

De Niro’s comments mark the second time in a week that an Obama fundraiser has created controversy. During one of five fundraisers on Friday, singer Cee Lo Green launched into a profane song that included the F-bomb and a use of his middle finger. President Obama, who has recently called for more civility in our public discourse and was present at the Friday fundraiser, has not weighed in on either Green’s performance or De Niro’s racial comments.

It's like they live in an alternate universe, ever-watchful for any sign of humor or high spirits that can be interpreted, however tendentiously, as offensive to their people. This used to be called "political correctness" and, believe it or not, it was once associated with liberals.

SHORTER GREG PFUNDSTEIN: New Yorkers are really against abortion, as proven by the enormous number of abortions that take place in New York.

AND NOW, FOR A MORE PRINCIPLED, INTELLECTUALLY-NUANCED VERSION OF THIS BULLSHIT... Tbogg treats with appropriate contempt the latest conservative cause célèbre -- i.e., a complaisant press has memory-holed the news of Malia Obama's Mexican trip, denying patriots the information they need to drive their pick-ups (freshly festooned with "Don't Re-Nig in 2012" bumper stickers) down there and tell little Missy what a traitor her father is and show her pictures of dismembered fetuses.

All he missed was the breathless coverage at libertarian mag Reason, where Brian Doherty sees the thin end of the wedgie:

Completely divorced from the question of whether a politician's children are fair game for political attack, or even having their existence and life mentioned, this unfolding incident--stories from earlier today about Malia Obama and a gaggle of buddies spring breaking in Mexico (a place normal American kids are advised to avoid) with Secret Service protection disappearing from news sites--seems to indicate the White House can get a wide range of sites to take down stories, even if it is just with gentle persuasion or appeals to some higher standard. And that is highly unnerving.

Yeah, and what's all this Secret Service bullshit? If they was real Americans, Malia'd be packing and wouldn't need them.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Libertarians are conservatives with social pretensions.

UPDATE. Belle of Liberty:

There’s not much danger of Malia disappearing the way Natalee [Holloway] did, although it wasn’t a really great idea to broadcast her location. But the fact that all the stories about her vacation are disappearing is an ominous sign of the future of electronic news. What if Malia had been vacationing in say, Malibu, and the White House had the Media yank the story because they didn’t want bad press – i.e., wasting taxpayers money for a 13 year-old’s holiday – just before a presidential election?

This is a beautiful specimen of a particular kind of nut-cluster: A candy-coating of pretended concern for the kid's welfare, holding together crunchy bits of crackpottery.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the Rick Santorum war on porn, which a surprising number of the brethren have characterized as Santorum turning liberal. I guess that's just how things go in the post-Liberal Fascism age -- if something seems uncomfortably authoritarian, just attribute it to those eugenics-loving Woodrow Wilson progressives and wipe the prints off the doorknobs. More interesting, maybe, is how a porn war became uncomfortably authoritarian to these guys. O tempora o mores! Poor Ed Meese is probably thinking he lived in vain.

UPDATE. In comments, zebbidie: "In future years, a future George Clooney will star in The Men Who Stare At Goatse."

YOU DIDN'T SEE NOTHIN'. Rick Santorum ups his religious-maniac cred by promising as President to pursue a war on pornography. This may be laying on the holy-roll a little thick even for Republicans, so rightbloggers have rushed to explain that the real issue is people talking about it, which violates Santorum's Constitutional right to say crazy shit and never be called on it. Allahpundit at Hot Air:

Question: Why is this suddenly coming up now? Did the media simply notice a longstanding statement on Santorum’s website about porn or is he actively circulating it, presumably to counter the meme that he’s anti-woman?

Robert Stacy McCain:

Exactly why the Daily Caller saw fit to assign its associate editor to write a 700-word “news” article, soliciting opinions from Eugene Volokh and Jonathan Turley, I don’t know. Why this cheap political “gotcha” hit-job deserved headline treatment at the Drudge Report, I don’t know.

But for intelligent people who call themselves “conservative” to fall for such a dishonest media stunt as this is ridiculous.

Pundit and Pundette:

It's aimed at the credulous folk (of left, center, and right) who, through prejudice and/or ignorance, buy the media caricatures of social conservatives and fear (or pretend to fear) what a President Santorum might do.

She talking about Santorum's own words, BTW, as something wiley rad libs are unfairly using to accurately characterize Santorum's position. What monsters!

This is basically an extension of the "Democrats are trying to distract you by bringing up our policies" bullshit conservatives have been peddling for weeks. Mention their absurd and malicious ideas about contraception and forced vaginal wanding, and they accuse you of changing the subject they were just about to bring up.

They're getting into a rhythm with it now. Expect colloquies like this:

A: In his last press conference, Mitt Romney said children living in poverty should be apprenticed to bootblacks, and be nourished only with stale bread and salt licks. Do you really support this position?
B: What about Solyndra, libtard? 

MORE CONSERVATIVE OUTREACH TO WOMEN. Today Ole Perfesser Instapundit made fun of a homeless guy raping someone at Occupy New Haven, then claimed she was raped because an Obama speechwriter felt up a cardboard cutout of Hillary Clinton in 2008.

These days it doesn't even feel like blogging anymore -- it feels like taking field notes for some giant abnormal psychology study.

UPDATE. From comments, whetstone:

I don't think it's so much that Reynolds is crazy as much as he's the world's shittiest pro-am Lee Atwater. ("Jon Favreau is DESTINED to be Obama's Willie Horton!")

Also, gocart mozart:

So, not only do they have difficulty with the "consent" vs "no consent" dichotomy but also with the "real" woman vs "cardboard cutout" woman thing?

UPDATE 2. The Perfesser hears about some women who are threatening to pull a Lysistrata. This presents a real opportunity for comedy, but the Perfesser gets overexcited:

Reader Troy Hinrichs writes: "They can bring it on. They do realize that knuckle-dragging troglodytes like Santorum, Romney, (and me — with 3) will outbreed them thus winning in the long run right? We already are but sex strikes will help us insure victory in the long run. And by looking at a lot of the Occupy types and hard lefties it doesn’t look like there would be many men to cross that picket line..."

Looks like Brooks "Beta Males" Bayne has a soulmate. They and the Perfesser should team up and hit the road; call it the Survivalist Treehouse of Comedy Tour.

JESUS SWEPT. I see the brethren are claiming victory in the war on contraception. Let's use Kathryn J. Lopez as an example:

And when asked, “What about for religiously affiliated employers, such as a hospital or university? Do you think their health insurance plans for all employees should have to cover the full cost of birth control for their female employees, or should they be allowed to opt out of covering that based on religious or moral objections?” 57 percent responded “Allowed to opt out.” 

That is most definitely news. 

Americans, according to the New York Times’s own polling, support the positon of the Catholic bishops on the HHS mandate.

Except religious employers already have been allowed to opt out -- because the insurers will be paying for the birth control, not them. This may be what the poll respondents think the Times is talking about. The questions might have been more specific

What certainly isn't demonstrated by this response is that respondents buy the bishops' line, which is that if anyone pays for their employees' birth control, Christ and George Washington will be crucified one on top of one another (front to back, so it looks dirty).

You'd expect rightbloggers to grab the more self-flattering interpretation, but K-Lo, wrapped pretty tight even under the best of circumstances, may be taking it a little far:

Proponents of the HHS mandate would like everyone to believe that high gas prices explain all the drop in support for Obama. But considering the president has taken a lead in defense of his coercive mandate, it’s mistaken to pretend his war on religious liberty isn’t part of his public-opinion wounds.

That's the America I remember from English dystopian fiction -- forget the economy, stupid, it's the war on religious liberty! Lopez seems to expect a holy-roller revolution to come charging over the hill, crying "Freedom of religion, not freedom of worship!" Just another reason to hope the Republicans nominate Santorum -- if they did, Lopez would probably bust out in stigmata, and start pimping a JESUS 4 VP campaign.

UPDATE. Also feelin' the surge: Old Perfesser Instapundit, who smells victory in a bunch of readers who tell him they've cancelled HBO over Game Change. No, I'm not kidding. This is the break PJTV has been waiting for! Quick, get Roger L. Simon to slap together that movie version of The Inferior Five the world has been waiting for. Jonah Goldberg was born to play Herman Cramer.

UPDATE 2. Commenter/comics dork John E. Williams is on the case:

I see there's a role for Dana Loesch. Think of the merchandising opportunities! 

UPDATE 3. They're still at it -- here's James Taranto's women-reject-contraceptives-and-Obama variation. They really seem to believe this, which may explain why their compatriots in the legislatures are pulling increasingly crazy anti-birth-control shit --

Arizona legislators have advanced an unprecedented bill that would require women who wish to have their contraception covered by their health insurance plans to prove to their employers that they are taking it to treat medical conditions. The bill also makes it easier for Arizona employers to fire a woman for using birth control to prevent pregnancy despite the employer's moral objection.

If they think this approach is such a winner, Santorum should abandon his recent quietism on the issue and begin all his campaign appearances with a pledge to overturn Griswold v. Connecticut. That should turn the tide in his favor soon enough, and give those of us who aren't insane time to get our passports renewed.

"$1 ABORTIONS IN OBAMACARE." Here's a little something I wrote for DecisionHealth about the latest anti-Obamacare talking point. It's fascinating how these things work; I wonder how long it will take for this one to become a full-fledged talking point, regularly tossed off on Sunday morning talk shows while everyone nods gravely.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the new breed of Breitbart acolytes and their early forays into belligerent table-overturning. So far they suck.

I interviewed Breitbart once. I respected his success as I might have respected that of Benito Mussolini -- that is, without approving in the slightest, though giving him points for exposing the stupidity and venality of the human race (as demonstrated by his own followers and by the "Main Stream" press who indulged his racket out of sheer gutlessness).

The dopes picking up after him are just as evil, but nowhere near as grand.

UPDATE. I should add that while Breitbart probably thought he was doing the Lord's work, the media manipulation business he was in is a blight on humanity. It's propaganda, and propaganda is not designed to enlighten, no matter how loudly the propagandist insists on his devotion to truth, but to cloud the minds of men.

KEYBOARD KOMMANDOS 4EVER.

The Koch Brothers are rich but they can't be handing out the big, big paychecks to every Tom, Dick, and Harry who arrives at the shape-up flexing his thumbs in prep for some X-teme political texting. So most of the dummies are paid in esprit de corps. They're set to churning out high-fives for a ridiculous nontroversy, disseminating insults from the conservative activist dictionary, and shaking their digital fists at everyone who does not respond with megadittos.

But sometimes Tom, or Dick, or Harry will glance up from his basement warren at his strawboss with a tired, confused look in his eyes. This may indicate that he's begun, if just barely, to suspect that he's not really a great citizen journalist, dishing out the zingers that will eventually drop the Lame Stream Media dragon and free the sheeple it holds in lieberal bondage, but a mere propagandist working in a sub-sub-contractor's hackshop. And for free!

He may be thinking: I didn't get into this to enforce someone else's groupthink. I wanted to tell my own story my own way. These people seem not to appreciate my individuality, my gifts, my beautiful soul. Maybe it's time to get that communications degree and join a PR firm, preferably one with a social media emphasis...

That's when you tell him about Omaha Beach. He may flee then and there. Or there'll be a pause, and maybe a faint crackling sound and smell of cordite as his pride flares up and burns out of his brain-pan whatever common sense he was raised with, and in that cleansing fire he will begin to see himself as an actual soldier in the cause, a battle-weary dogface who does his killin' with a keyboard, a guy who, when he gets to the Great Beyond, can proudly mount the final Hill with the Duke and Audie Murphy and whatshisname from Band of Brothers, confident that he's given his true, last full measure.

This is better than citizen journalism. This is dead butch!

He'll get back on the case, and for good this time. Because he's in the Army now. You can get him to write, or at least tweet or yell at hippies, stark raving crazy shit like "JEW-BASHING NYT COLUMNIST CALLS OBAMA 'ISRAEL'S BEST FRIEND'" and he won't even feel self-conscious about it. You can get him to tell the world that Blessed Andrew Breitbart was murdered by ObamaHitler. You can get him to use hashtags and wear T-shirts that would embarrass a self-respecting 12-year-old. He won't care. He's got that thousand-yard stare. He's part of something bigger than himself, bigger than any of you -- big enough to fight and die for, maybe even big enough to kill for -- try him, Cap; you'll see.

How does it end? Hopefully like the hippie communes that ran out of weed and quietly broke up, rather than like Synanon or the Branch Davidians. In either case, it'll be fun to watch -- from a suitable distance.

UPDATE. In comments, wjts wrote a monologue. Excerpt:

... Invective was flying, mostly from the libs. Lies of course - "Oh, you're a racist." "Oh, you hate women." "Oh, you're a paid mouthpiece for the Koch Brothers." Some guys couldn't take it. One fella - navyseal69@aol.com - caught an accusation of misogyny right in the face. Never heard from him again, and he had told me he had two Medals of Honor, four Purple Hearts, six Silver Stars, and a signed photograph of Janine Turner. Nothing to be ashamed of, but some men are cut out for the battlefield and some aren't. Me, I kept fighting. Every accusation that I didn't know what I was talking about I threw right back in that LibCom's face. "What percentage of the student body at top-tier law schools are of Hispanic descent?" they'd ask, and I fired right back with "What percentage of your mother was a Mexican whore?"...

Whetstone gets Shakespearean:

Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot
But he'll remember with advantages
What tweets he did that day. Then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words,
Ace of Spades, The Jawa Report
Atlas Shrugged, Instapundit
Be in their flowing Big Gulps freshly rememb'red
This blog shall the paranoid teach his son
And Breitbart shall ne'er go by....

That's good shooting, soldiers! Now get some shut-eye -- we got a big day of Alinskyizing ahead of us!

HUGGATE: THE IMAGE THAT TOOK DOWN A PRESIDENT!

Whole sordid story here!

Wake me when they've got him covering up a break-in.

My favorite bit so far, from PJ Tatler:

[Derrick] Bell wasn’t just seeking diversity in Harvard’s faculty. He was a virulent racist, who depicted President Ronald Reagan as a — not making this up — racist space alien who offered to buy all of America’s black citizens to erase the nation’s deficit.

Wow, Bell really believed that about Reagan?

That’s from a short story Bell wrote, that he later turned into a piece for HBO.

Gasp! Bell committed the crime of fiction!

It’s a smear. It’s insane. It’s evil.

Please, nobody tell PJ Tatler about... well, Western Civilization.

TODAY IN RUSH LIMBAUGH NONSENSE. It's a bumper crop, but surely Dr. Mrs. Ole Perfesser deserves some sort of distinction for claiming that Rush Fucking Limbaugh is being bullied by Sandra Fluke. I believe in Girl Power, but come on. One among many glorious passages:

Do I care if Fluke fucks 50 guys? No, but I do care if she uses her position to gang up with other mean girls (and guys) to ram a political mandate down the throats of companies who do not believe in what she is peddling.

Not only is the slut fucking 50 guys, she's also ramming it down their throats!  It's practically the perfect conservative sex nightmare; all it lacks is Fluke demanding an orgasm.

For the rest of them you may as well just go straight to Instapundit, which collects them better than I can -- except Perfesser Reynolds doesn't know how funny they are. Reynolds seems upset that some people want to use the power of boycotts against Limbaugh, which is a major reversal for him -- he usually loves boycotts when people like Rush Limbaugh call for them.

Me, I want Limbaugh on the air forever. He helps to clarify things. By 2013 I expect he'll be live-broadcasting from Klan rallies.

THE CONSERVATIVE COMEBACK, PART 844,392. It's hard to believe Andrew McCarthy actually served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney -- under Bush, granted, but still you don't expect actual mental cases to come out of those jobs. Now look what the poor, crazy bastard's descended to -- shaking his fist at Don Imus in the service of Rush Limbaugh in an essay called "Don Imus, House Pet." It's the case of McCarthy's life, and he's arguing it in the Court of Public Opinion! With luck maybe he can get the judge to sentence Imus to be waterboarded -- it's more exciting when it's extrajudicial, but times are tough and he'll take what he can get.

I'll boil it down for you: Imus, McCarthy tells us, is crude, "gratuitously insulting," insincere -- whereas the Balzacian Limbaugh "is able to reach and to teach because, as he noted today, his good-natured humor can be biting and illuminating without being nasty." No, I'm not kidding -- McCarthy not only calls Limbaugh's humor good-natured without being nasty, he actually offers Limbaugh's own generous self-assessment as evidence.

The really weird thing, though, comes when McCarthy finishes his Rush roolz/Imus droolz fan rant and moves on to conspiracy theories:

Here’s the pathetic thing about this episode: We’ve been given the playbook and still we don’t see we’re being played. “Pick the target,” Saul Alinksy said, “freeze it, personalize it, polarize it.”

Saul Alinksy! Slowly I turned...



It ends with McCarthy warning us that Barack Hitler is planning "to usher in a new order in which 'rights' become not what government must refrain from doing to you but rather what government must do for you," and this plaintive cry:

While Don Imus and the rest of the herd bleats over Rush, that is what is taking root. And if you don’t like it, prepare to be the next target.

I used to routinely ask if these people even knew any normal people, but now I'm just assuming that they were all raised in Skinner boxes and shipped to think tanks on their 18th birthdays.

SHORTER TIMOTHY P. CARNEY: From all his talk about contraception, I was nearly convinced that Rick Santorum was the best candidate for libertarians. How disappointed I was to learn he was just another liberal.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about that whole Limbaugh slut thing. It's interesting that this came up the week Breitbart died. I bet there are a whole lot of his fans out there thinking, "Even without Rush we must press on with our slut truth!" In other words, I don't expect them to behave any better from here on.

CAN THEY BOTH LOSE? I'll write more about it later, but I hope some of you good people are already savoring the Koch Brothers' attempt to take over the Cato Institute. Apparently after years of funding Cato, the Koches think it's time they turned the policy shop into a straight-up propaganda vehicle, and are trying to muscle some of their flunkies onto the Cato board -- including the human waste product John "Hindrocket" Hinderaker of Power Line.

There are all sorts of wonderful things about this. First, we might ask, why are Ed Crane and the other Catoites resisting this takeover? If the Kochs can turn Cato out with their money, doesn't that show that the Invisible Hand has anointed them as Producers, and judged the Catoites to be Looters and Wreckers standing in the way of Capital? Hell, when the Kochs bought Wisconsin, I didn't see Cato complaining -- quite the contrary.

Also lovely: Watching the libertarians tiptoe around it. At Reason Matt Welch, clearly unsure which dick to suck, issues a terse bulletin and ducks. And, Jason Kuznicki?...

I can’t understand how people who are so smart in business can be so boneheaded when it comes to activism. It’s a painfully stupid decision. Even if it were innocent — which it’s not — it still looks horrible. It’s as if the Kochs set out to prove every last thing that progressives have ever said about them.

...thanks for the gift of laughter.

I'd prefer to see them all die screaming in a fire, but this will do for now.

UPDATE. Jane Mayer's perspective is useful. As is KeninNY's at Down With Tyranny.

SHORTER JAMES POULOS: Our educational and religious controversies can be addressed with the healing power of yoga. Just make sure it's not the nude kind.

UPDATE. Link fixed.

THE SAVING REMNANT. Olympia Snowe has turned out the lights in the sane-people wing of the Republican Party, and the boys in the psych ward are pulling faces at her through the caged glass. Timothy P. Carney tries to tell us that the moderates are actually what people hate about Republicans, and now that they're gone everything's gonna be fine.

Moderates are as guilty as anyone of being intolerant when faced with conflicts within the GOP. Frum blasted as "Unpatriotic" those conservatives who failed to support George W. Bush's ill-considered invasion of Iraq, and urged all conservatives to "turn [their] backs" on these heretics. Brooks himself draws some pretty rigid boundaries of permissible dissent, excoriating as "nihilists" those who opposed the unprecedented and unfair Troubled Asset Relief Program in 2008.

This makes it look as is conservatives were fighting bravely against the Iraq War and TARP, but were muscled into line by RINOs David Brooks and David Frum.

Bullshit. Frum was talking -- in National Review! -- about a small group of paleos like Joe Sobran and Llewellyn Rockwell.  Actually, it was liberals who mostly got the accusations of unpatriotism from pro-war conservatives -- which is to say, nearly every single one of them. (I refer you to my posts from 2003 through 2006, or the pages of conservative magazines, or your own memory for evidence.)

As to TARP, I recall some screamers, but also a lot of this -- Rich Lowry:

It seems obvious now that we needed some sort of massive effort to try to prop up the banks and loosen the credit markets. (Remember: There’s always the possibility that things would have been much worse without whatever psychological benefit–if any–the passage of Paulson brought to the markets.) Perhaps the Paulson plan wasn’t exactly the right prescription. But the virtue of its open-endedness is that it allows Paulson the flexibility to adjust as warranted–witness the shift in emphasis to direct equity infusion.

Ross Douthat:

I don't think there's any question, at this point, that the bailout being considered will do real damage to the principles of free markets and limited government: The only question is how severe what Jim Manzi terms the "ideological costs" end up being. But as a layman in these matters, with no way of judging independently how materially awful the costs of inaction might be, I'm sitting here watching the House vote and the market drop and drop and thinking exactly what Larison's hypothetical American is thinking: If the defeat of the bailout is a victory for liberty, it's a victory whose costs I'm not prepared to bear.

Etc. In general, for conservatives it was Obama's election that suddenly made bailouts the greatest tragedy in the history of the Republic.

Carney has been peddling this line for a while -- that there's a secret, saving remnant that works behind the scenes in the Republican Party to keep it, and America, on the straight and narrow. Thus he feels compelled to describe what has clearly been the most powerful force in that Party for decades as a beleaguered minority. Why does he even try? Well, there's traditional conservative persecution mania, but I think another factor comes into play: Conservatives have fucked this country up pretty badly, and maybe they think if they pretend to have been cowering under the blows of David Frum all this time, they can convince some dummies that it was Olympia Snowe's fault.

I just hope for their sake that they aren't expecting normal people to go for it. One man's remnant is another man's fringe.

UPDATE. Some commenters point out that Snowe's voting record isn't as moderate as all that. Okay, let's stipulate that "moderate" in American politics has a meaning divorced from other realities. Still, I think this record, while not so hot, at least compares favorably to what Tea Partiers and other crackpots currently demand from non-INO Rs. And it goes to show how little accommodation of reality the new party elders will tolerate.

NEW FRONTIERS IN DOUCHEBAGGERY. Here's a guy at the Daily Caller who wants to fix it so you can only use food stamps to buy low-quality shit in packages designed to look ugly.

There should be humiliation and pain in government assistance. Every time someone accepts food stamps, they are spitting on the principles of independence, and they, not the taxpayers who fund the program, should be reminded of that fact.

He also seems to think that you can currently buy cigarettes and beer with food stamps.

There's no getting around it anymore: Everything you ever thought about conservatives, no matter how uncharitable, is true.

THE HARD BIGOTRY OF LOW EXPECTATIONS. The sad thing about the Santorum snob comment is, I can imagine a society where you don't have to have a college degree to have dignity and the prospect of a decent life -- because I was born into that society, and I've seen it under assault for years, as manufacturing jobs are pissed away and unions are busted by people who portray themselves as champions of the working class.

So I'd like to believe Santorum was trying to get to a sensible point about this, and just had the usual trouble expressing himself. But this is clearly not the case. From Robert Costa's tongue-bath at National Review:

"The last I checked, about a third of the people in this country have a college degree,” [Republican operative] Musgrave says. Santorum’s remark, she says, connects with voters who are skeptical of Obama’s emphasis on higher education, which is a costly endeavor for many families and unnecessary for many workers...

[Campaign advisor] Brabender acknowledges that Santorum’s jibes may not be warmly received by reporters or by every voter. But he does not expect Santorum to back away from calling Obama a snob or touting the benefits of growing the economy in ways that do not revolve around academic credentials.

“What Obama and Romney do not understand is that there is a lot of passion and anger out there,” Brabender says. “There is a sense that our basic freedoms are being destroyed. People are gravitating around somebody who is not shy, who stands up and says what they really believe.”

This is how you talk when you have propaganda instead of a policy. These people have no coherent plan for restoring a blue-collar economy except trickle-down bullshit draped in moldy populism.  They yelled when Obama bailed out Detroit and saved the kind of jobs they claim to honor, and propose to replace this approach with tax cuts and "passion and anger."

Refresh my memory: Who are the class warriors, again?

THAT'S ENTERTAINMENT. Luke Thompson was hoping I'd do something on rightbloggers slagging the Oscars. Sadly I'm too busy to pick corn out of that particular shit, but this bit from one of the crazy fucks at HillBuzz ought to be enough for anyone:

Last night I recorded the broadcast, and later I watched small snips of it, fast-forwarding through 95% of it and just stopping at a few of the winning announcements:
Actress: The winner: Meryl Streep for a role that made Margaret Thatcher look like a senile old woman rather than the magnificent world leader she was and is
Foreign Film: nominees from Israel, Belgium, Canada, Iran, and Poland. The winner: IRAN
Supporting Actress: nominees were 4 white women and 1 black woman. The winner: the black woman
Supporting Actor: The winner: Christopher Plummer for playing an older man who comes out as gay later in life.

Inevitably:

I reiterate that I have not seen most of these films.

The whole thing's a treasure, especially when she does the "You Hollyweird lieberals are so 'courageous,' here's what would be really courageous" schtick -- in my humble opinion, as well as it's ever been done:

Here’s what I believe would have been courageous: And entire Oscar broadcast without one snarky remark about Republicans, conservatives, family values, Christians or Jews. Beginning the show with the Pledge of Allegiance. Or an invocation. Having a singer sing the National Anthem. Giving free front row seats to members of the United States Military, veterans, wounded warriors, family of troops currently serving in harm’s way. Creating an “American Patriot” award, analogous to the Lifetime Achievement awards they present to someone who has had a long, illustrious career in Hollywood. [I would nominate Gary Sinise for this]...

Don't dream it, honey, be it. I believe Rick Santorum's got an old barn in Bucks County. Let's put on a show!

UPDATE. Right up there with this cowgirl are some crazy fucks from Iran, in their celebration of the A Separation win for Best Foreign Film. Talk about sore winners:

Iran hailed the country's first Oscar-winning film as a triumph over arch-foe Israel on Monday... 

A state TV broadcast said the award succeeded in "leaving behind" a film from Israel. Javad Shamaghdari, head of the state Cinematic Agency, portrayed the Oscar win as the "beginning of the collapse" of Israeli influence that "beats the drum of war" in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Wow -- movies really are magic!

THE CONSERVATIVE INTELLECTUAL TRADITION, IN REVIVAL.Ole Perfesser Instapudit:

THE HORROR: Pakistanis Desecrate Holy Korans in Smelly Sewage Ditch (Video).

Like black people saying “Nigger,” it’s okay when they do it.

I used to hear this one a lot on the playground, but I think even the dimmer kids realized it wasn't folk wisdom by the time they reached 9th grade. If the election doesn't go his way, maybe the Perfesser will haul out the one about fucking dogs to make hippies.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, wrapping three weeks of rightblogger sex madness. Probably have to do it again in another three weeks.

I'D LIKE TO THANK THE ACADEMY. I didn't see much of anything from 2011, but I do this every year regardless of qualifications, so here goes nothin'.

I will add that I saw The Artist recently and was very charmed, especially at the beginning. What great style, and what a lovely performance from Jean Dujardin as Valentin -- he embodies the star power beautifully, as well as the easy grace with which he dispenses it; his descent is believable, as is the humanity it brings out -- the scene in which he dismisses his driver is just about my favorite thing in the movie. But I have to agree with the people who say they liked it better when it was Singin' in the Rain. After a while the seriousness with which Valentin's downfall is treated annoyed me. The filmmakers had the tools, and the stylistic opportunity, to take it in the direction of King Vidor circa The Crowd, or Josef von Sternberg circa The Salvation Hunters. But they didn't; the Valentin agon was just a sad story, kicked along with cheap tricks rather than by character transformation. I think they were counting on Valentin's relationship with Peppy Miller to elevate it but, after a promising beginning, I couldn't see why it existed except as a vehicle for redemption. I missed the breezy confidence with which the adventure started. Though that is a nice dance at the end, and the dog is very cute.

Okay, the picks:

Best Picture: Hugo
Best Actor: George Clooney, The Descendants
Best Actress: Viola Davis, The Help
Best Supporting Actor: Christopher Plummer, Beginners
Best Supporting Actress: Melissa McCarthy, Bridesmaids
Best Director: Martin Scorsese, Hugo
Best Original Screenplay: Midnight in Paris
Best Adapted Screenplay: The Descendants
Best Animated Feature: Rango
Best Cinematography: Robert Richardson, Hugo
Best Art Direction: The Artist
Best Costume Design: Hugo
Best Documentary Feature: Pina
Best Documentary Short: Incident in New Baghdad
Best Film Editing: Moneyball
Best Foreign Language Film: A Separation
Best Makeup: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Best Original Score: The Artist
Best Song: Man or Muppet
Best Animated Short: The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore
Best Live Short: Time Freak
Best Sound Editing: War Horse
Sound Mixing: Moneyball
Best Visual Effects: Transformers: Dark of the Moon


UPDATE. 8:40 -- Holy shit, this show sucks. 


UPDATE 2. I'm 1 for 1!

UPDATE 3. This isn't Chuck Workman, is it? I see film history began in 1968 now.

UPDATE 4. Urgh, I lose.

UPDATE 5. More celebs yakking on film. I see now why movies suck -- the people who make them have absolutely wretched taste.

SHORTER ROD DREHER. This gay guy moved from the country to the city, he says, and one day he came back and told his mother he was gay, and she has snubbed him ever since. How dare he!

UPDATE. Dreher, in his own comments section: "I imagine most people who read this guy’s article will think of his mother as a hateful bigot. That seems wrong to me, even if she is rightly thought of as a bigot." Later: "For all we know, he flew into town and used a big family occasion to make this announcement, and caused a huge row." I've heard more than one queen say he was crazy about gay men, but none of them was as crazy about them as Brother Rod.

TONIGHT'S DEBATE. Except for Ron Paul they seem to have forgotten all about Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet they're eager to go to war with Iran.

The debacles of 2006 and 2008 were rougher on them than I thought. The Republican Party clearly suffers from a traumatic brain injury.

Are they going to have another one of these things? Then they should start by booing John King for 20 minutes for asking about birth control when it's clearly irrelevant to the Presidency, then spend 70 minutes talking about birth control and its irrelevance to the Presidency. Then, if there's time, Oscar predictions!

ICD-10 QUESTION. Anybody know anything interesting about the planned implementation delay in the ICD-10 medical coding standard? Comments if you like, my email for deep background.

Hate to bleg, but I'm asking for a friend, by which I mean a paying customer.

SHORTER HEATHER MAC DONALD. Since marriage makes people rich, it stands to reason that when there is no more marriage, everyone will live in the ghetto.

(This does not, of course, apply to Katie Roiphe or to homosexuals.)

SHORTER RICH LOWRY: Democrats are constantly telling people what Rick Santorum said. It's so unfair.

UPDATE. I mean, come on:

The former Pennsylvania senator criticized the president’s environmentalism as representative of a “phony theology.” The press snipped the remark out of the context...

Out of context! How can that be out of context? That's like saying you can't appreciate the pyrotechnic qualities of the Challenger disaster if you insist on focusing on the people who died in it.

UPDATE 2. commie atheist asks in comments, "Didn't Newt Gingrich already do that 'if you quote my exact words I will call you a liar' thing already?" Yeah. It occurs to me that Santorum is pretty Gingrichesque -- he regurgitates tropes from the right-blogosphere that sound great to the initiates but fill normal people with horror and contempt, and he has no sense of responsibility for what he's said.

His backers are no better. The Drudge Report committed the sin of repeating some heretofore unknown crazy thing Santorum said, and look at how they've reacted:

It's like they're not merely detached from reality, but hermetically sealed off from it.

FATHERS OF LIES. Kathryn Jean Lopez said something weird today -- yeah, I know, what else is new, but it struck me funny:

Internationally, this administration has been arguing for freedom of worship instead of freedom of religion. That’s not just semantics.

So I went and looked it up. Apparently this was a big rightwing thing back in 2010 (I don't see how I missed it; maybe I'm getting too old for this game): The more Jesusy conservatives (and Fox News) were then telling the world that Obama and his handmaiden Hillary Clinton had stopped using the words "freedom of religion" and started using the words "freedom of worship," in order to usher in a new age where people could pray all they liked but they couldn't go to the park, wave their Bibles at young fornicators and yell, "Howl ye, for the day of judgement is at hand," because Obama is Your God Now or something -- here, let one of those crazy fuckers who's still running this scam explain it to you himself:

The reason is simple. Any person of faith knows that religious exercise is about a lot more than freedom of worship. It’s about the right to dress according to one’s religious dictates, to preach openly, to evangelize, to engage in the public square. Everyone knows that religious Jews keep kosher, religious Quakers don’t go to war, and religious Muslim women wear headscarves—yet “freedom of worship” would protect none of these acts of faith.

Those who would limit religious practice to the cathedral and the home are the very same people who would strip the public square of any religious presence. They are working to tear down roadside memorial crosses built to commemorate fallen state troopers in Utah, to strip “Under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance, and they recently stopped a protester from entering an art gallery because she wore a pro-life pin.

Thin end of the wedge! Soon the sheeple will be so lulled by the incantation of "freedom of worship," they'll forget all about freedom of religion, and when Obama turns their churches into gay abortion bathhouses they won't remember why they're supposed to be upset.

It's all bullshit, of course -- Right Wing Watch did us all the favor of looking up all Obama's mentions of F of R, and found them numerous, decisively outpacing his mentions of F of W.

But being full of shit never stopped them before. And why should it? Now they've got a new spokesmodel for their madness:

Referring to the Obama administration, Santorum said: "You can see why they don't stand up for religious liberties. It's pretty obvious that they don't think religious liberties are particularly a high priority. When you have the president of the United States referring to the freedom of religion and you have the secretary of State referring to the freedom of religion, not as the freedom of religion but the freedom of worship, you should get very nervous, very nervous. 

"Because there's a lot of tyrants around the world who will talk about freedom of worship, but they won't talk about freedom of religion. Freedom of worship is what you do within the four walls of the church. Freedom of religion is what you do outside the four walls of the church. What the president is now seeming to mold, in the image of other elitists who think that they know best, is to limit the role of faith in the public square and your role to live that faith out in your public and private lives..."

People sometimes wonder aloud why Santorum has been saying so many absurd things lately. I'm becoming convinced that he's too busy campaigning to make up his own remarks anymore, or even think about what he's saying, and so is just taking handoffs from staff who comb the fringe right blogs and Opus Dei newsletters for material that suits his image as a hardass religious conservative.

Maybe he's as horrified as we are when he sees himself on the news later -- "I said what? OK, that's the last time we use copy from First Things!" At least it pleases me to think so. Maybe by the time we get to Super Tuesday he'll be cadging lines from Father Coughlin and Cotton Mather.

(Edited for clarity.)

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about that Virginia transvaginal wanding thing and the rightbloggers who love it.  I guess the headline at Glenn Beck's The Blaze sort of sums up their argument: "IF STATE-REQUIRED ULTRASOUND IS ‘INVASIVE’, WHAT DO WOMEN EXPECT OF THE ACTUAL ABORTION PROCEDURE?" As I've observed before, the whole concept of consent seems to elude them.

ADDENDUM. A day late, sorry, but because I hate to think that in the event of JS-Kit's demise we would lose Michael Bérubé's epic response to my plea for analysis of young Mr. Poulos' recent article on the lady problem, it is reproduced here:

Thank you for summoning me, Mr. Edroso! Though in the future I would prefer that you use the MLA "President-signal," a powerful beam that casts the silhouette of Edward Said over the cityscape of Manhattan (don't ask how. No, really, don't.)

I have determined, on the basis of my thirty years of advanced (and, on occasion, national-security seekrit) literary study, that Mr. Poulos' work is indeed modern, perhaps on the very cusp of the post-modern. To wit, forthwith, and without further ado, my textual evidence:

To the growing discomfort of many, that framework hasn’t come anywhere close to answering even the most basic questions about what women are for — despite pretty much universal recognition across the political spectrum that a civilization of men, for men, and by men is no civilization at all, a monstrously barbaric, bloody, and brutal enterprise. Given the existence as uttered forth in the public works of Puncher and Wattmann of a personal God quaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaqua outside time without extension who from the heights of divine apathia a few inherently meaningful implications about what women are for flow naturally from this wise and enduring consensus, but no faction of conservatives or liberals has figured out how to fully grasp, translate, and reconcile them in the context of our political life it is established beyond all doubt what many deny that man in Possy of Testew and Cunard that man in Essy that man in short that man in brief in spite of the strides of alimentation and defecation wastes and pines wastes and pines and concurrently simultaneously ironically, one of the best places to look for a way out of the impasse is the strain of left feminism that insists an inherently unique female “voice” actually exists that’s a claim about nature what is more for reasons unknown in spite of the strides of physical culture the practice of sports such as tennis football running cycling swimming flying floating riding gliding conating camogie skating tennis of all kinds dying flying sports of all sorts autumn summer winter winter tennis of all kinds hockey of all sorts penicillin and succedanea much good would come from a broader recognition that women have a privileged relationship with the natural world. That’s a relationship which must receive its social due — if masculinity in its inherent and imitative varieties (including imitation by quasi-feminized males of quasi-masculinized females!) is not to conquer the world.

Honestly, Roy, I think this pretty much speaks for itself. Modern, postmodern -- it speaks to us all.

I don't know about you, but I feel much improved by Professor B's address. We should have him at the Lyceum more often.

Tbogg got on this, and also noticed Poulos' follow-up. I refer you to SEK of Lawyers Guns & Money for a close read of that -- I only note Poulos' close:

If my claim is doomed to be met with an avalanche of contempt, it seems likely that in our lifetimes social conservatism as we know it will be mocked, despised, and shamed right out of existence. 

Hot diggity damn!

You might be deeply uncomfortable with that even if you do hope to see an America without a social conservative movement.

It would cut into my sources of material, but in this ObamaHitler Socialist Republic we all must make sacrifices for the greater good. Plus there'll always be something to mock, despise, and shame; it's not like Jonah Goldberg retired.

HOW HAS THE LEFT OPPRESSED YOU TODAY? asks James Taranto, reacting to conservative columnists who don't like Rick Santorum:

In liberal metropolises like Los Angeles, Washington and New York (homes of [Conor] Friedersdorf, [Jennifer] Rubin and this columnist, respectively), a high proportion of conservatives have internalized the assumptions of feminism. One of those assumptions is that female sexual freedom, an essential component of sexual equality, is an unadulterated good. Santorum's statements to the contrary challenge this deeply held view.

Similarly, black activists/poverty pimps talk about black people's social freedom as if it were an unadulterated good. But intelligent people can disagree!

Furthermore, contemporary feminism is, as we recently argued, a totalitarian ideology, by which we mean one that tolerates no divergence between the personal and the political. If you are not a feminist, you can enjoy a lifestyle of sexual freedom and also take seriously the idea that sexual freedom is bad for society. If you are a feminist, that is a thoughtcrime.

People who have read 1984 but haven't kept up with rightwing theology may wonder how this thoughtcrime is punished. Does Big Feminism run the boardrooms and factory floors, and are offending non-feminists fired from their jobs and forced to live in shanties in Butchtown?

No. In real life, the answer is: They are sometimes made fun of for obvious hypocrisy. It's their Room 101!

It figures that Taranto has confused "laughing at your ridiculous arguments" with totalitarianism. The crazy, misogynistic shit they're forced to defend in these days of Surging Santorum has made them so ridiculous, it must feel like torture.

THAT'S WHAT THE NEW BREED SAY. James Poulos, a promising young rightwing intellectual, breaks it down:

In a simpler time Sigmund Freud struggled to understand what women want. Today the significant battle is over what women are for.

I'm going to make a wild guess and predict: On the one side, babies and Jesus, and on the other side, sterility, plus maybe careers, soft drugs, Tumblr, and kittens.

None of our culture warriors are anywhere close to settling the matter. The prevailing answer is the non-answer, a Newt-worthy challenge to the premise that insists the real purpose of women is nothing in particular.

I'm liking my odds thus far.

If the conservative movement’s nominal unity is actually belied by a stunning range of right-wing views on the status and purpose of women (and believe me, it is), the left’s alleged philosophical uniformity on the woman question is a complete fabrication — despite the fanatical discipline and norm-enforcement of much of the liberal cultural establishment.

I'm not expecting to hear an actual explanation of this "stunning range" of conservative opinions of what women should be -- maybe it has to do with this idiotic CPAC slutwear debate -- but I am eager to hear about "the left's alleged philosophical uniformity."

The purpose of lifting the left’s Potemkin skirts is not to score tits for tats.

Uh-huh-huh-huh-huh.

Let me shorten things up: careworn liberal consensus blah blah Sandra Day O’Connor blah blah Planned Parenthood v. Casey blah blah suffering of the crucified Christ. OK, onward:

Lurking beneath this procedural non-judgmentalism was a stubbornly conspicuous judgmental end. Roe couldn’t be overturned, the plurality argued, because Americans might think the Supreme Court was bending to public pressure. The court’s solution was to bend to the public reality that millions of women had altered what it meant to be a woman — and what status that meaning conferred — by having or supporting abortions. On the bogus theory that all linear change is progress, the plurality embraced the immoderate view that a descent into barbarism is impossible.

I can only extrapolate from these bits of rightwing cuneiform that women's insistence on having abortions is commandeering the meaning of What Women Ought To Be from the people who by right should be deciding it: Male public policy dorks.

Continued on Page 2 >>

Oh shit.

Today, the left is increasingly torn between old-school modern liberals who think like O’Connor and new-school postmodern liberals who find their cognitive elders in thrall to a haute-bourgeois conventionality that the deep premises of their own thought seem to strip of authority.

OK, I get that the O'Connor team hearts abortions, but what's the postmodern crew about?

So postmodern Cynthia Nixon, who used to be straight but now isn’t, tells The New York Times Sunday Magazine exactly what establishment liberals don’t want to hear when it comes to the sexual politics of women — “you don’t get to define my gayness for me.”

Gasp! He's onto us! This was all the liberals at my liberal cocktail parties have been talking about all week -- the crack in the aborto-haute-bourgeois facade represented by Cynthia fucking Nixon.

Nixon was swiftly accused by the left’s cultural policemen of “aiding and abetting bigots and bashers.”

I may be old-fashioned, but it seems to me you oughtn't use the plural of "basher" when you're talking about one guy, particularly one who added, "it might be wise if Nixon articulated her feelings in a more thoughtful way that would not lead to LGBT youth stuck in Bible Belt communities ending up in 'ex-gay' boot camps." Call me childish-foolish, but I have a hunch deviation from liberal orthodoxy was not high on his list of concerns.

Reihan Salam

Oh Jesus Christ.

has hinted that typically left-wing implications of academic theories like “erotic capital,” including mainstreaming prostitution, point in directions quite at odds with the dominant but failing framework of liberal sexual politics.

I have seen Poulos in the flesh; I know he gets around. Yet to read this anyone would be tempted to imagine he'd been imprisoned in a faculty lounge since infancy. At union demonstrations against Scott Walker, the brethren would only be talking about "erotic capital" if it were the name of a strip joint in Madison.

To the growing discomfort of many, that framework hasn’t come anywhere close to answering even the most basic questions about what women are for — despite pretty much universal recognition across the political spectrum that a civilization of men, for men, and by men is no civilization at all, a monstrously barbaric, bloody, and brutal enterprise. A few inherently meaningful implications about what women are for flow naturally from this wise and enduring consensus, but no faction of conservatives or liberals has figured out how to fully grasp, translate, and reconcile them in the context of our political life. 

Ironically, one of the best places to look for a way out of the impasse is the strain of left feminism that insists an inherently unique female “voice” actually exists. That’s a claim about nature. Much good would come from a broader recognition that women have a privileged relationship with the natural world. That’s a relationship which must receive its social due — if masculinity in its inherent and imitative varieties (including imitation by quasi-feminized males of quasi-masculinized females!) is not to conquer the world.

Pardon me, I realize this (thankfully closing) section is long, but I have included it because I have something I wanted to ask about it:

What the fuck is he talking about?

Seriously. I'm not very well educated, and half drunk most of the time, but I do know how to read, and I swear to God I have no idea what he's saying. I don't know how "a civilization of men, for men, and by men" relates to anything else he said. I don't know what he means by women's "privileged relationship with the natural world," unless my browser has failed to show me the picture of a lady sniffing a purty flower that was supposed to explain it. And as to "imitation by quasi-feminized males of quasi-masculinized females," it sounds like Archie Bunker had one of those Flowers for Algernon operations.

MLA President Michael Bérubé, I know you read this thing -- help a blogger out. Is it modern?


(h/t Tbogg)

NOT EXACTLY JESUITICAL. In case you were wondering whether the Catholic Church really wants to get rid of birth control, here's what the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops came up with at the Congressional hearings today:

The bishops say that the White House’s proposal for insurance companies to directly pay for and provide contraception to the employees of Catholic universities and hospitals and other religiously affiliated institutions couldn’t work because “the cost of providing those service are born some place.” The Catholic Church opposes most forms of birth control.

Guess the new Magisterium says that if anybody pays for contraception, it's a reverse Inquisition.

At National Review, where they've all gone coo-coo for contraception, attend the ravings of Andrew C. McCarthy:

First, the Left is getting away with saying that religious organizations want to deny coverage for birth control. That is sheer idiocy. As I contended in last weekend’s column, contraceptives and abortifacients are cheap, cheap, cheap in this country. If there were enough months in the year, you could have two second-trimester abortions for less than I spend on pizza — to say nothing of flat-screen TVs, iPods, X-boxes and the scores of other extravagances that the “poor” in America manage to score without government mandates. What we are talking about here is not walling people off from birth-control — condoms will still be free in New York City, the pill will still set you back less than $4 per week, and so on. 

So, to recap: The proof that the Catholic Church doesn't want to deny birth control coverage is that "poor" people get all the good electronics plus birth control, and Andrew C. McCarthy spends a surprising amount on pizza (perhaps because he has it specially delivered by Gitmo slaves just for the lulz).

Why are we acting as if these people even have an argument, again?

SHE ENJOYED IT. I thought we'd have to wait for the general election for this kind of thing, but here comes Daniel Foster at National Review with a defense of Mitt Romney strapping that dog to the roof of his car:

See, some people think that Romney’s decision, 20 years ago, to strap his Irish Setter (ensconced in a canine travel crate) to the roof of his station wagon during a family trip was an act of animal cruelty. Was it? Depends on the dog. I can certainly think of some dogs who would be terrified of such a prospect. Others — including pooches I have known who favor riding in the front seat with fully half their body out the open window, jowels aflap — would probably find it exhilarating.

Later Foster affects to find carrying a small dog in a protester's papoose inhumane. Maybe his physical universe has different properties than the one the rest of us inhabit.

Expect this to become a conservative thing; for example, the new vaginal wanding forced on abortion patients in Virginia will be explained as an act of kindness because women who want abortions are all sluts who probably like dildos.

THE WAR ON VALENTINE'S DAY. Did you see that cute Google doodle today? Didn't that sixth-of-a-screen, nano-seconds long image of two gay men ruin it for you, like it did for Tim Graham?

The animation’s finish includes a half-dozen tiles featuring various ”couples,” including an astronaut and an alien; a dog and a cat; and a frog and a prince, reported the Post's Michael Cavna. "Some early viewers of the Doodle wondered whether the tile featuring two tuxedoed men holding hands would stir any controversy." Says the animator, Michael Lipman: “I think Google was pretty aware of everybody in those final squares and they decided [them] with purpose.” 

Gay advocates would likely claim that the cartoon before the end is awfully "heteronormative." Perhaps they'll complain that they don't like to be compared to love between an astronaut and a space alien.

I don't know what's sadder here: NewsBuster Graham's eagerness to show us that, oh no, the gayness wasn't sneaked in by stoned animators behind their bosses' backs but approved by the Google Central Committee; or the "gay advocates would likely claim" bit, apparently meant to exempt Graham from charges of bigotry on the grounds that the homosexuals in his head are totally bigoted against something ha ha joke (commonly known as the Goldberg Maneuver).

I predict this becomes the next big social conservative thing: Liberals, having previous ruined Valentine's Day with vaginas, are now double-ruining it by promoting sexual behaviors outside the approval range of Ludwig Von Mises. Wachet auf! 

UPDATE. In comments, Michael Bérubé catches the "frog and a prince" bit, and reacts: "You thought Tim could watch that little cartoon without thinking man-on-frog? You were wrong." Man on frog! Now you know how that slope got so slippery.

Oh and hey, Michael, congratulations on the MLA Presidency. Use your powers only for good, however much you're tempted.

UPDATE 2. Steve M. sinks the hook shot.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about this whole stupid birth control thing. Their latest argument seems to be that because insurers will use money paid to them by Catholics to finance birth control benefits, it's a violation of religious freedom. I had no idea they were so fastidious about where their money went. Prada better watch its investments or Ratzinger may switch designers.

WHERE THEY'RE COMING FROM. I see National Review has gone coo-coo for contraception coverage. Andrew C. McCarthy takes time off from his usual torture advocacy to steer the conversation into surrealism -- from making Catholic hospitals offer employees health insurance that includes birth control pills (triple Hitler to the beliggerati, a big yawn to even most Catholics) to a late-term abortion bill from years past which has nothing to do with what's going on now. McCarthy quotes his own long-ago attempt to scare people off voting for Obama, hoping in the heat of the present Pillmania it will rattle some bones:

Infanticide is a bracing word. But in this context, it’s the only word that fits. Obama heard the testimony of a nurse, Jill Stanek. She recounted how she’d spent 45 minutes holding a living baby left to die.

Hold on a minute -- Jill Stanek? Here's a sample of how Stanek's been keeping body and soul together since then: Waving dismembered fetus photos at Jimmy Kimmel.

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.... 

On June 25 the Survivors were holding a Face the Truth event in front of Grauman's Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Blvd (click photos to enlarge).... 

A Kimmel crew showed up to film a stunt across the street from the Survivors. You can see their light set-up and intended direction of the shoot in the photo, right (click to enlarge). 

But 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... 

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. 

The police were called, and of course they arrested a pro-lifer, Survivors founder Jeff White...

All inappropriate typography and ellipses in the original. (Follow-up here.) This is the sort of nutcake who's trying to control this debate, and with the help of dopes like Chris Matthews they may pull it off.

It's almost heartbreaking to consider what a fine country this could be if we weren't in the habit of treating babbling lunatics as if they represented anyone besides other babbling lunatics.

UPDATE. Thanks to commenter wjts for providing some background on that 2002 "Born Alive" bill via RH Reality Check.