SHORTER MEGAN McARDLE: It's absurd to think you can help poor people by giving them money; they'll just spend it on cell phones and TVs and food and stuff. What they really need to do is live in better neighborhoods. It worked on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

UPDATE. Ermagerd.

THAT'S WHAT THE NEW BREED SAY. Media Research Council:

‘Liberal Media In Full Advertising Mode for Obama Reelection’ [NewsBuster's Tim] Graham Tells FNC’s Cavuto

It sounds a lot like the conservative durn-liberal-media schmaltz we've been hearing for decades -- probably because it's short and suggestive; a relatively staid, simple reference that's meant to trigger a dream world of dark conspiracies in the minds of the targets.

But this here's the internet age -- the consumers have turned into producers, and they're not content with dog-whistles. They want to tell you all about their dreams.

The Anchoress:

The headlines having to do with anything touching the president or his party (with one profoundly heartening recent exception) simply blare the official line, which is often “that thing you just saw wasn’t what you saw” and then — after the first thrust of a story has died down, or a shiny scandal has been generated to divert attention and energy elsewhere — the corrections and clarifications come, but not on the frontpage, not on the broadcasts...

World Net Daily:

STATE-RUN MEDIA'S FAKE POLL NUMBERS...

Ever since the skewed CNN poll a few weeks ago (CNN’s president recently resigned due to lack of ratings), voters have looked at the methodology of polling companies with much skepticism, and rightfully so. Evidence recently came out that confirms voters’ suspicions. NumbersCrunchers, an anonymous poll analyst, tweeted a graph that shows the degree of oversampling of Democrats employed by the recent presidential polls, all of which show Obama in the lead. Polls were conducted by CBS/NYT, ABC/Washington Post, Tipps, Reuters … and even Fox News.

Yes -- even Fox News! Elsewhere you can read how Obama and the media are willfully turning America over to jihad and "the coordinated attack on the First Amendment threatens the lives of Americans who dare to criticize Islam and organize to expose Muslim Brotherhood operations on U.S. soil..."

Graham had better get with it. If you want to make it in right wing world these days, it's not enough to cynically use stupid ideas to stir up the lunatics -- you have to be a lunatic yourself.

ANOTHER COUNTY HEARD FROM. I see the Crazy Jesus Lady is selling herself to Mitt Romney as a campaign consultant. (That worked so well last time.)

Wake this election up. Wade into the crowd, wade into the fray, hold a hell of a rally in an American city—don’t they count anymore? A big, dense city with skyscrapers like canyons, crowds and placards, and yelling. All of our campaigning now is in bland suburbs and tired hustings. How about: New York, New York, the city so nice they named it twice? You say the state’s not in play? It’s New York. Our media lives here, they’ll make it big. How about downtown Brooklyn, full of new Americans?

Yeah, they'll love Mitt in downtown Brooklyn. "Good morning, moochers! Here's five bucks, someone bring me a coffee."

Time for the party to step up. Romney should go out there every day surrounded with the most persuasive, interesting and articulate members of his party, the old ones, and I say this with pain as they’re my age, like Mitch Daniels and Jeb Bush, and the young ones, like Susana Martinez and Chris Christie and Marco Rubio—and even Paul Ryan...

Surrounded! It'll be a chain gang of charisma! Maybe they should all wear running suits with "Mitt" on the back. I can see it now: "Screw this, I'm going back to Florida, Christie ate all the donuts again." Oh please oh please oh please...

Forget it. Not even Romney's that dumb.

NONE DARE CALL IT NUTS. The economy sucks, so Mitt Romney should be blowing it out, but he keeps coming up with ways to keep things close. It's been hell on my nerves, so I can only imagine how it is for rightbloggers -- oh, here's some indication:

Washington, DC – The Obama agents, through the DHS and other assorted colluders, are plotting a major ‘Reichstag’ event to generate racial riots and produce the justification for martial law, delaying the November 2012 elections, possibly indefinitely, a DHS whistleblower informed the Canada Free Press on Tuesday.

The ‘Reichstag Event’ would take the form of a staged assassination attempt against Barack Obama, “carefully choreographed” and manufactured by Obama operatives. It would subsequently be blamed on “white supremacists” and used to enrage the black community to rioting and looting, the DHS source warned.

If this bit of Ooga-Booga is too strong for you, you can follow instead the moderate camp, who have declared Nakoula Basseley Nakoula the new Elian Gonzalez, believe the White House press pool plots to protect Obama, and oh yeah, think the Democrats actually put out the anti-Muslim movie themselves for reasons no doubt to be revealed by an upcoming crayon scrawl on a piece of cardboard.

American conservatism is turning into one big conspiracy theory.

UPDATE. Gene Healy of the Washington Examiner finally sees the loony 1933 Gabriel Over The White House. His reaction:

A presidential drama that flirted with fascism this earnestly would be laughed off the screen today (which may be why TCM lists Gabriel as a "comedy"). But as the "Cult of Obama" shows, many of us still believe in authoritarian powers for the president.

Even their pennysaver columnists are getting in on the ObamaHitler thing. Romney must be fucking up worse than I thought.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the Middle East riots and the avalanche of bullshit the brethren brought to it. Enjoy!

WE'LL BUILD A WORLD OF OUR OWN THAT NO ONE ELSE CAN SHARE. Zombie, a site best known for generating wingnut outrage over gay street fairs, does Rightblogger Routine 12:

Memo to non-leftist bloggers, reporters, and culture-shapers: TAKE THE GODDAMN GLOVES OFF.

We need hardly bother with the frankly silly notion that Zombie's fellow crap-and-spittle merchants suffer from reticence, but I'd like to know what brain-fart led to "culture-shapers."  Maybe the author was leaning toward "culture warriors," in honor of the ancient conservative rite of yelling at TV shows, then realized nobody takes that seriously anymore. "Culture-shapers" may have seemed a good modification, suggesting that the brethren can go out under cover of darkness and slip some Spanx on the culture to force it into the shape they prefer.

How to do it? The title of the post is "Narrative Wars: Slap the Honey Boo Boos with Truthaganda." Zombie is talking about "last remaining undecided voters in America," and bases his characterization on the fact that a reality TV show about hillbillies beat out some reality TV shows about rich politicians making promises to America.

That seems like a reasonable preference to me, but Zombie believes those people are dumb -- "If candy canes and wreaths start appearing in store windows and a few notes of muzak 'Jingle Bells' remain audible above the screaming toddlers, then the Honey Boo Boos figure Christmas must be coming up soon" -- and "get their information through a sort of unconscious osmosis of the general national zeitgeist."  So here's his plan:

The goal is to create an enveloping data matrix which gives the Honey Boo Boos a sort of half-aware impression that the narrative we’ve concocted for them is not simply a partisan narrative fighting for their allegiance but rather is simply the way things are. 

To that end, the headlines need to be as unsubtle as possible, but still hewing to reality — reality through our lens. 

I call this approach “truthaganda"...

I'll spare you: It mainly means recreating rightwing talking points like "OBAMA TEAM TWEETS COMMUNIST PROPAGANDA" in oversize red letters. "Even a Honey Boo Boo can get through those headlines," he says; "they’re short enough to survive the three-second attention span."

That someone actually thinks this about his fellow citizens doesn't surprise me, but I am a little surprised that he would say it out loud in a public forum. It suggests to me that Zombie is not actually concerned with influencing those voters. He's like a teenage boy who doesn't have a girlfriend and declares it's because girls prefer jerks, and so he'll be a jerk himself, and then they'll all come running. Having been a teenage boy myself, I recall that such a person is usually not seriously mapping out a seduction strategy, but looking for sympathy from like-minded loners.

And God go with him. Political blogging is fun, sort of, so long as you don't take it too seriously. If you start thinking it has an impact on actual events, that's when you're in trouble.

SHORTER WILLIAM A. JACOBSON: The fact that even Republicans think we're idiots proves that we're winning.

GOING UP PAST NINE-ELEVEN. Ole Perfesser Instapundit told such people as listen to him twice to go see this thing by Sarah Hoyt about 9/11. So I figured it would get eventually to where it got to:

On the one hand, part of me wants to laugh at the terrorists. They thought they could break us. They thought they could scare us. They underestimated both the size of our territory and the mettle of my people. 

And part of me thinks of the psychological twisting that has taken place since then: people who blame their own country for the actions of barbarians; people who kowtow to the barbarians and claim to be multiculturalists because that sounds so much better than vile cowards; people who think that a country the size of ours, as wealthy as we are should do nothing to deter attackers because we’d be protected by our halo of purity and goodness...

And I thought as I read it: So, somebody's still doing this -- using 9/11 as a long stick to beat people who didn't have anything to do with it, but whom they never liked. It brought me back to 2001, and the many years thereafter when this was a popular shtick -- the decadent left and the fifth column and all that.

And today: Not so much. Nobody calls himself a warblogger these days; nobody thinks "Democracy! Whiskey! Sexy!" is a foreign policy statement. Even the excitable Jim Lileks is subdued, having abandoned his former dreams of annihilation for mysticism ("Now, as ever, we live between the sharp notes. Gather them all together, and you have the melody of the centuries"), like a former Weatherman who, when it all came down, went up the country and today raises watermelons and gets stoned and talks to Gaia.

In their ratholes and caves, some holdouts still practice the dark craft, but their former sympathizers have ceased to follow, occupying themselves instead with Clint Eastwood's chair and other Western novelties.

And Osama Bin Laden is dead.

Whattaya know: In the long run, freedom works.

UPDATE. Paul Bedard at the Washington Examiner:

9/11 bumped by gay flag, Michelle money plea on Obama site

September 11th turned out to be just another day on the Obama-Biden campaign website: A fundraising memo from first lady Michelle Obama, a pitch for gay rights including a rainbow-colored American flag, and a campaign picture under the headline "Photo of the day--September 11th, 2012."

Oh, there were two tweets to commemorate the 9/11 attacks, but finding them was hard.

By comparison, the Romney-Ryan campaign features two blog entries, one from Mitt Romney and the other from Paul Ryan, and a 9/11 news release. The Romney campaign homepage featured a tweet and Facebook note about 9/11.

Two blog entries, a tweet and a Facebook note! Never forget!

Now Romney's burnishing his foreign policy cred by blaming Obama for the attack on the U.S. embassy in Libya. My sources tell me his next step will be to accuse the President of not wearing big enough flag pins.

It's enough to make a fella miss Quemoy and Matsu.

UPDATE 2. It's redundant at this point to say comments are great, but here's a taste: Big Bad Bald Bastard tells our subjects, "To paraphrase Ving Rhames in Pulp Fiction, 'You've lost your 9/11 privileges";  KC45s examines Lileks' poeticisms and remarks, "Finally, we know who writes Sting's lyrics"; and Fats Durston redoes St. Crispin's Day:

...Then shall their names,Familiar in the mouth as freeper handles--
Jonah the Whale, D'Souza and Douchehat,
Erick son of Erick, Juggs and Ace--...
But we in it shall be remembered--
We few, we fappy few, we band of botherers... 

Nice.

JESUS. I guess sticking God in the Democratic platform defused that issue, huh?

Also, Some Guy at Wizbang has a post called "Confirmed: Democrats Love Killing Babies, Hate God and Jews" -- and he's not kidding. At first one can hold out faint hope that he is: "If a man who happens to be white talking to an empty chair is a dog-whistle for racism," he says, "it’s pretty obvious from the last few days that Democrats love to kill babies but hate god and Jews." This seems to at least struggle toward some sort of irony, however weak -- but then he comes roaring back:

What percentage of voters approve of taxpayer funding of partial birth abortion on demand? Less than 15%. That’s a horribly extreme position. Yet it’s the centerpiece of the Democratic convention. If Republicans run from this battle they are fools. It’s slam dunk victory. 

It’s time for some major league push back on the media when they call republicans extremest. Big time.

It turns out that what seemed like irony was just a sulky abdication of responsibility for his own loony claims -- if liberals get mad when we call out their godless, baby-killing ways, it serves them right for calling Clint Eastwood's chair racist. (I sense that wouldn't be bothering him if Eastwood's sad routine had become a chair d'coeur rather than a national laughingstock.)
 
It's time for Obama to namecheck the Flying Spaghetti Monster in a press conference and end this. Given the horrible associations Republicans have brought to the Almighty, he'll probably gain a couple of points.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the convention. Enjoy.

THE LIBERTARIAN REACTION TO OBAMA'S SPEECH:

Libertarians are supposed to be socially-liberal beards for conservatives -- you know, "I'm not for gay marriage but my libertarian boyfriend is." When they start talking about Obama like Rush Limbaugh talking about Sandra Fluke, it may be time for the Koch Brothers to consider some new investments. 

UPDATE. You will hear in the days to come many libertarians and conservatives bitching about the Democratic convention's hyperpatriotism -- why look, here's David Harsanyi, who is both, doing so at Reason -- which just goes to show that they don't have a sense of humor. After forty years of star-spangled lawn-order Republicanism, this convention's turnabout was a grand joke. That Obama's warm-up act was Biden, who basically broke the GOP's Neverforget spell with "a noun, a verb, and 9/11," and that the Obamas totally did the Reagan-Mommy thing, only spices the jest. It's not as good as having them all die screaming in a fire, mind, but it's pretty good for a Thursday night. Four stars! 

NOT JUST A FLUKE.

The numbers show that females aren’t fooled by the phony “war on women.” In 2008, 57 percent of women voted for Barack Obama; 43 percent voted for McCain. The latest Washington Post-ABC News poll shows a substantial shift: Fewer than half of female registered voters now support Obama—he’s at 49 against Romney’s 43 percent. Polls of registered voters, rather than likely voters, tend to skew Democratic.
In his acceptance speech, Romney urged, “Now is the moment when we can stand up and say, ‘I’m an American. I make my destiny.’ ” Women can say the same. Wasn’t it Democrats who used to argue that biology isn’t destiny?

-- "Desperate Democrats," Kelly Jane Torrance, The Weekly Standard

Tonight on Twitter:

Etc.

You know, you assholes aren't fooling anyone.

P.S. Bill Clinton just kicked your ass.

TWEETS ERICK ERICKSON HAD TO SCRAP AFTER HE GOT IN TROUBLE: "The podium hides Rahm's light loafers #SanFrancisoDemocrats" "Lily Ledbetter's vagina is Dems #Ashheap of History" "Patrick's sweating like they found his gay porn stash #AlsoBlack" etc.

But I think it's a mistake to try and get Erickson fired over this, as some have proposed. I didn't see the advantage in getting Josh Trevino kicked off the Guardian either. Let the world see who they are and what they represent. If people are more impressed than appalled by them, then the cause is lost anyway.

I DREAMED I SAW J.P. MORGAN LAST NIGHT... What'd you do for Labor Day weekend? Lexington Green of Chicago Boyz did this:

We should have an annual Creators Day as a national holiday. We have a “Labor Day” to celebrate workers paid salaries and wages. That is fine, and there are historical reasons for it.

Among those "reasons": A centuries-long struggle against slavery and feudalism. Surprised he didn't mention it.

But it is not enough. We also need a national day celebrating the people who make those jobs possible and bring them into existence in the first place. Otherwise the day appears to be a glorification of “workers” in opposition to a faceless someone or something that signs the paychecks, some unnamed “other” that is not “the people” but nameless bag of money. That is morally and factually wrong and needs to be rectified.

If you're tempted to dismiss this as a fringe Randroid fantasy, please note that it's Instapundit-approved. Also, that conservatives have been going on like this for years. Their traditional hatred of unions and collective bargaining has metastasized: They now think people who work for a living are just another special interest group, mooching off the libertarian magic of management. They sulk over this, and demand the peons show them respect.

No wonder Romney's leaning on his business credentials. The public at large may or may not believe that a corporate raider can do the trick for America (and that the returns he may produce will somehow go to them, rather than -- as is traditional -- to his investors). But the conservatives who once denounced Romney certainly need a better reason to be excited about him than his renunciation of his own RINO past. His identification with the C-suite gives them that: They can trust that when it comes time to stomp some fingertips clinging to the lowest rung of the middle class ladder, he won't hesitate. In that, at least, he's one of them.

READY FOR HIS CLOSE-UP. Every possible gag has been played on it, so I will only try to imagine what was going on in Clint Eastwood's mind. I like to think he went back in reverie to the 1972 Academy Awards, when he was shoved onstage to cover as MC for a tardy Charlton Heston and, after a Sergio Leone standoff with the cue cards, hissed at the cameras, "This ain't my bag, man."

Eastwood has better acquitted himself at the Oscars since, but he may have been thinking lately that, back in '72 when the hippies were taking over Hollywood (and he was talking like a hippie himself, to his shame), he really had a chance to turn things around, to tell the longhairs where to get off, but he lacked the skills and hell, maybe the guts to do so -- all those people, watching at the same time! No retakes! -- and wilted under the pressure.

Since then, however, he had been elected Mayor of Carmel, and attended many dinners where critics pantheonized him; the world still laid roses at his feet, even though his voice was now just a husk and when he got all action-heroic for the cameras he looked like he was taking a stress test at a cardiac clinic. Part of him knew better, but another part of him -- the Hollywood part -- thought that if they loved him that much, he could do this thing and make them buy it. Never mind the script. He only had to do ten minutes. And hell, it was just television. He'd been a TV star before most of these punks had been born. Now that he was a living god, not only a star but an auteur, he could glide out there like Orson Welles doing Carson and everything would just fall into place. And if it didn't, well, there was always jazz piano.

I mean, I don't care, do you? If he makes Gran Torino: The Early Years I'll still go see it. Politics is bullshit, and it deserved what he gave it.

JUST LOOKING IN. Being of sound mind and body, I have not even tried to watch convention coverage, though in a moment of perversity I sought out the transcript of Chris Christie's speech. First, I was surprised to learn that the delegates applauded his father's use of the communist G.I. Bill to go to college. (Mark Levin was right -- the RINOs have taken over.) Second, I have to commend Christie on the line, "They [the Democrats] believe in teachers' unions . We believe in teachers." That's up there with, "Your enemy is not surrounding your country, your enemy is ruling your country" as an example of fine political dada.

But almost as good was Christie's closing: "Leadership. It takes leadership that you don't get from reading a poll. You see, Mr. President, real leaders do not follow polls. Real leaders change polls." Well, sure; Christie's got a 54% approval rating despite a 9.8 state unemployment rate. Such is the power of incumbency when the opposition is weak -- which is mainly why Obama has a 14 point lead in Christie's own state. The governor probably doesn't know it, but he ended his speech by defining the Republicans' problem. Now we'll see if anyone in Tampa has a solution.

READER, I MARRIED HER.

Not much will be happening on this blog for a week, or at Rightbloggers for two weeks, as Kia and I are on honeymoon. See you after. P.S. Couldn't be happier. photo (cc) Nobuhiro Izumi.

UPDATE. We are now in Barcelona for the hmoon. I seldom go to old Europa anymore since booking agents stopped paying me to yell over "music" at concert venues. We could have gone to Pismo Beach and it would have been fine, because wherever she is, there is Eden, but this ain't bad. Will write more when I have more to tell (and bandwidth to tell it) besides "Roy glowered at the cashier and wished he knew how to challenge prices in Catalan, or at least knew how to say, 'I'm from New York, cabron, or at least I used to be, and furthermore I am sick with a knife.'"

Mainly tho: Thanks for your beautifully expressed best wishes, which we both appreciate vastly. And to my foreign readers who have been bitching about the months-long restrictions on comments: I see what you mean and deliverance, I hope, is at hand.

UPDATE 2. And deliverance comes from an unnamed commenter, who says: "Instead of going to alicublog.blogspot.com, give the address as alicublog.blogspot.com/ncr (ncr is 'no country redirect') This keeps you on the US site, where the commenting works as it should." We've checked and it works. Hurrah and thanks, whoever you are.

RAPE: WHAT A BEAUTIFUL CHOICE. Given the Akin mess, it was inevitable that we'd get columns about the happy rape babies whom evil liberals want to murder. Timothy P. "The P. is for Libertarian" Carney:

Jenni was conceived when her mother was raped by a boyfriend as a teenager. She is a human reminder of an uncomfortable truth denied and minimized by people on all sides of the abortion issue: Rape can result in pregnancy, which means it can create innocent babies...

Her smiling face and growing family -- she has three kids of her own -- is also damning to pro-choice people who argue that abortion is a necessity for a woman impregnated by rape.

The last bit is very clever, as the actual pro-choice argument would be that what's "necessary" is that raped women have the option of abortion; Carney prefers that you think of fantasy feminazis demanding mandatory abortions.

Throughout Carney draws moral equivalence between Todd Akin and pro-choice people:

One consequence of this mindset in Prewitt's opinion: Most states lack laws explicitly denying the rapist-father's potential custody rights. Prewitt attributes this to denial -- both by the likes of Akin and by those who can't conceive of a rape victim wanting to raise her child.

On one hand we have a guy (and his party) who want to force women to bear their rapists' children; on the other hand, we have people who don't. Clearly both should be ashamed. But Carney solomonically allows that once the rape baby emerges, the father should be denied custody. Look, ladies, he's meeting you halfway.

Throughout the column the rapes are downplayed and gotten over quick -- there was some unpleasantness, yes (in one case multiple incestuous rapes over a course of years which netted the perp all of 18 months in prison "due to lack of evidence"), but in the end someone made it into the world and grew up to be a pro-life speaker, and that's what matters, isn't it?

This poor world is full of snares and traps, and when we dodge a bullet (or scalpel, as it were) we must be grateful. But we should also try to make our post-partum lives less of a nightmare, which is the part folks like Carney always seem to miss.

RACE TO THE BOTTOM. Godly Rod Dreher, writing from his months-long Paris vacation, on the Pussy Riot sentence:

These three nasty pieces of work will do their prison time, then be released and emigrate, where they can make a handsome living going into Western venues, conducting orgies in museums, shoving chicken legs up their privates in supermarkets, and parading before Western liberals as free-speech martyrs. The Slag Solzhenitsyns. Now that’s a great name for a feminist punk band. Such decadent times we live in.

Before you start yelling at him, look at what he said in another recent post about how hard the state makes it for him to homeschool his kids (which is total bullshit): "In other words, to protect my ability to educate my children in a conservative way, I’m learning a strange new respect for libertarianism."

Libertarianism! The one thing that could make him worse, and he's managed it!

How is it even possible for one person to be such an asshole? It's like the guy takes lessons.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the whole Biden "put y'all in chains" thing. The whole is overflowing with stupid, so I couldn't get it all in -- here's something
from one of the guys arguing that Obama and Biden hate black people, "Why the Republican Party is a better fit for African Americans," containing a show-stopper about Romney's July NAACP appearance:

The truth sometimes is supposed to hurt and Mitt Romney stuck the needle filled with truth serum deep inside the vein of every single member of the audience when he spoke at the NAACP. 

They should put this on flyers announcing future Romney appearances. Sounds better than The Tingler!

SHORTER JOHN FUND: White Republican Thad McCotter submitted false petitions to get on the ballot three elections running. Say, do you people know the difference between election fraud and voter fraud? No? Ahem, as I was saying, this just goes to show that we have to stop black people from voting without photo I.D.

HOW GOES THE CULTURE WAR? Well, we have Allahpundit yelling at Devo for writing a song that makes Mitt Romney look bad, and Michael Moynihan yelling at "leftist" travel book publishers for saying nice things about dictator-run countries in the travel books they're trying to sell to people who want to go visit those countries. (These days I don't see how conservatives even pretend to understand capitalism.)

And at Power Line, Steven Hayward asks, "WHY IS THERE NO LIBERAL AYN RAND?" He's taking off from Beverly Gage who, slightly less stupidly, asks, "American conservatives have a canon. Why don’t American liberals?" Sure we have a canon -- it's called Western literature. And it beats the snot out of the sad, long-form political pamphlets wingnuts like to name-check. You will learn more about the human condition from the works of novelists, playwrights, and poets than you ever can from a thousand power freaks' blueprints for the mass production of Procrustean beds.

And frankly, I think these alleged smart guys steep themselves in PoliSci because Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky and the rest confuse them and make them feel bad. They know they're smart, yet here are all these famous writers making them feel all this stuff their parents told them is wrong and bad. Much better to follow someone who writes with a slide rule.

Let these freaks thumb their suspenders, go "Well, as Hayek says..." and call themselves edumacated. We that have free souls, it touches us not.

UPDATE. Excellent comments on this, with references to Singapore, Orwell, Jeffrey Sachs, et alia. Both Sides Do It raises a good demurrer:

Political philosophy is almost entirely a liberal project.  In some sense liberal political philosophy fuckin' created Western political culture.  Human rights grew entirely out of liberal institutions consciously advancing specific liberal political conceptions...

That's really the reason those assbutt Republicans can even ask that asinine question in the first place. There is no liberal Ayn Rand because whereas conservatives have the One True Canon, there are multiple liberal traditions and conceptions of the political good. Almost as if liberals cared about advancing the best argument and finding the best conceptions of political organization instead of rationalizing a political order that made you feel superior to other people.  

I would add that when conservatives grab hold of the better class of writers who write about politics and ideology, they tend to dirty them up. Their Orwell reclamation project is a fine example, but there's also Burke who, among other things, denounced the crimes of Warren Hastings -- crimes which your typical rightwing imperialist would not even recognize as crimes, because they happened to have been committed against dark-skinned foreigners. That Burke is not in the same universe as Ayn Rand, or as Burke's current, dimmer fans.

UPDATE 2. I had to add this, from a Facebook post response by one Brian Middleton:

For some reason this made me think of Austen's "Emma," and specifically the scene where Emma is thoughtlessly rude to Miss Bates at the picnic. When Knightley points out to Emma how hurtful she's been, she is deeply ashamed of herself. 

Here's why this is an essentially lefty moment: Miss Bates is completely powerless. She is poor (as Austen characters go), with no stature or influence in their little community. There is no practical downside to insulting her. Yet Knightley points out that her very powerlessness entitles her to more, not less, consideration and respect, and Emma implicitly agrees.  

That is not a thought that any true acolyte of Ayn Rand would ever entertain. And yet we're not talking about Shaw or even Dickens; we're talking about the quintessential chronicler of Tory society, whose works almost entirely ignore the real poor and barely acknowledge the emerging middle class. But she understood the basic, great social principles involved: be kind to those less fortunate than yourself, and don't mistake your superior fortune for superior worth.

I would add that the "basic, great social principles" should not be the exclusive property of any particular ideological group, but since conservatives seem eager to disown them, I don't see why we shouldn't pick them up.

RALLY KILLER. This is by far my favorite blog post at National Review:

And yes, it's that "G. Reynolds."

Poor Matthew Shaffer. In this blog established "to track dramatic political events in North Africa and the greater Arab world," he put up ominous posts about the region for almost two months, including this one from February 10, 2011, in which he predicted, "Even if Mubarak does step down, unless some ingenious plan to hand all power to the military is concocted, he will be deferring to Vice President Omar Suleiman," and this one from February 23, 2011, about Obama's speech on Libya, in which Shaffer wrote, "NRO’s Jim Geraghty summed it up on twitter: 'Ya hear that, Gaddafi? You keep pulling these stunts, and we’ll continue to evaluate all options! So you better think twice!' and 'BOOYAH! Hillary Clinton to Geneva. Bet you didn’t see that coming, huh, Colonel.'"

I wonder what made them give Reynolds the keys so late in the game? Maybe he had a post from Pam Geller he thought needed wider distribution, but was distracted by a flock of nanobots.

I assume they still keep the thing up because Jesus told them to be ready for the Big One in Iran.

(Actually a close second-favorite NR blog post is this one from Bench Memos, in which Roger Clegg rages that all the Wealth Creators have betrayed him with diversity -- at least it is for the moment; as they say on Egypt Watch, the situation is fluid.)

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP about the Paul Ryan gush. I know Charles Pierce is the go-to guy on Ryan's awfulness, but my column is more about the rightbloggers' hard-on for Ryan than on the man himself, so please read it anyway.

Didn't get into it much in the column, but the thing I really don't get is the assumption that Ryan is charismatic. He has mainly been shown to weave a spell in exactly one Congressional District (and at countless conservative dinner parties, where the standards are low). His sad-eyed overemphatic style seems more appropriate to a real estate seminar than national politics. But, as my lack of response to T.G.I. Friday's commercials prove, I'm not the target audience for this sort of thing.

COUPONS FOR CODGERS FOR VP. I thought it would be Rubio. You'd expect Romney to want to reach out to somebody besides The Base, but I don't see what this gains him -- except maybe Wisconsin, which is no small get. But Florida would have been much better.

It will also be the end of the Dump Rominee movement, but so what? The opprobrium of lunatics was probably a net plus for Romney in the long run. Now there can be no Sister Souljah moment in which Romney explains that he doesn't really want to destroy Medicare.

Romney's advantage in terms of welfare reform was that no one much believes that he believes what he says he believes, so there wasn't much fuss when he pitched a Ryanesque plan back in February. Now he owns it. And though the Ryan Coupons-for-Codgers roadshow excites true believers, it scares normal people. It's the exact opposite of outreach -- it's inreach. Or perhaps reach-around.

Mitt Romney is running against an incumbent in a shitty economy, so anything can happen, but it won't be due to this.

UPDATE. Many great comments. whetstone: "Well, if you think about it, it shouldn't be that surprising. Here, see if this headline makes it make more sense:  BREAKING: CEO BELIEVES THAT CLEAN-CUT YOUNG MAN WITH THE POWERPOINT GRAPHS IS GOING PLACES. Really, the choice of Ryan shouldn't surprise anyone who's ever worked with a consultant, or wondered how Megan McArdle ever found employment."

INTERNET APPRECIATION DAY. Dr. Mrs. Ole Perfesser:

I am at the beach and stopped in at a candy shop in Palm Beach. As I went to pay for some frozen yogurt, I noticed a pack of gum at the counter stating “I Kissed a Republican” with a girl vomiting into the toilet. I picked it up and looked for the equivalent gum with I Kissed a Democrat but didn’t see one. I found both of them at Amazon however. Yeah, I know, it’s supposed to be a “joke” but having only the former gum displayed at the counter is more of an insult to many customers who may be on the right side of the aisle. But for all I know, they sold out of the Democrat ones. I could have made a stink like I did here but I didn’t.

I remember when liberals were characterized as the people who were always being offended about every stupid little perceived inequity. Then we got the internet.

Al Gore played a very deep game.

SNAPPY ANSWERS TO STUPID QUESTIONS. So Obama appeared with Sandra Fluke in Colorado and bragged on co-payless women's preventive care.  Let's see what Mark Levin thinks:

Later that evening on his radio program, syndicated conservative talk show host Mark Levin asked why contraception was suddenly a prominent issue for Obama, particularly with so many other more serious ailments plaguing the U.S. health care system. 

“All I can say is this — if I ever see Obama coming at me with a pair of rubber gloves, I’m running, Mr. Producer,” Levin said. “Because now he is an expert on all these things. Is Obama a gynecologist now? What is he?..."

Yes, Mark Levin, in addition to being a basketball player, stand-up comedian, crooner, and President of the United States, Barack Obama is a gynecologist. Ask the missus.

"...‘Now we all know that contraception is not just for family planning, but a way to reduce the risk of ovarian cancer and other cancers.’ It’s still relatively cheap. But what about those drugs for ovarian cancer? Are those free? No. What about those drugs to deal with breast cancer? Are those free? No. Contraceptives are. What about the drugs for diabetes, for heart disease? Are those free? No.”

He's got a point. In a bipartisan spirit I endorse Mark Levin's call for free cancer, diabetes, and heart disease drugs for all Americans who need them. Let's see if we can't get Joe Lieberman on board, he loves this shit.

"....And the answer ladies and gentlemen is this: They’re harder to politicize. He believes this will help get the women’s vote. That’s how cynical this guy is. That’s how distorted their thinking is. Obama is not about you. Obama is about himself. And a great nation really doesn’t need to spend an enormous amount of time debating free contraceptives, does it?”

It sure doesn't, so feel free to shut the fuck up about it anytime.

This has been snappy answers to stupid questions.

WHY DO THEY HATE AMERICA? PART 2. Roger L. Simon:

Anyone who doubts the enduring power of the mainstream media need look no further than the rise in Romney’s unfavorables in a recent Pew Poll. Yes, this poll is likely skewed, but the percentages are too extreme to escape the conclusion that a large number of Americans do not find Mitt “Mr. Nice Guy.” (I met him and thought he was perfectly okay — but what do I know?) Obama, on the other hand, is still considered a swell fellow. 

All this although the economy has been a disaster throughout his presidency and, for the last year, probably more, he has seemed a petulant prig when confronted with the slightest criticism. Not an attractive trait. 

You would think under those conditions those poll numbers would be reversed and the election polls themselves would show Romney with a gigantic lead, but no. Like a nation of ostriches, huge portions of the American public have swallowed the media/Axelrod line that Mitt Romney is a rich self-interested capitalist out of touch with the masses, whoever they are and whatever that means(it doesn’t matter as long as they vote for Obama), hell-bent on robbing from the poor to give to the rich like a reverse Robin Hood. 

In other words, a large portion of the American public has effectively been brainwashed. And the brainwashers are the Democratic Party and the mainstream media. The former is quite understandable since political parties cling to power by virtually any means when threatened. But for the media it’s another matter. Why do these people persist in their views in a situation where, objectively, almost any corporation or business would have been looking for new leadership long ago? Why are they so destructive to our society and ultimately to themselves? Don’t they have children and grandchildren?

The punch line: I got this via Ole Perfesser Instapundit, who quoted the same passage. On the Right, whining is winning.

(The rest of Simon's tantrum is rich too, if you go for that sort of thing: The journalists who brainwashed America know Obama is bad, he says, but "they can never never admit it" because they're embarrassed; their shame is then "projected out in rage," which is demonstrated by Simon's description of their behavior in the theater of his skull:  "They behave as a shrill gang, banging metal drums like lost characters out of Gunter Grass, 'Romney bad and rich! Romney bad and rich! Romney bad and rich!'... If Obama wins, they will rejoice on election day. But they will shortly be throwing up.")

Speaking of projected rage, further down the Instapage:

MOE LANE: Why Obama Hates Romney On A “Visceral” Level. “It’s not that Mitt Romney was born rich, gave it away, and got rich again that infuriates Barack Obama so. It’s that Mitt Romney had a father who loved him. And that is a thought that fills me with a terrible pity towards Barack H. Obama, Jr.”

Perfesser, it's only August. So far you haven't lost anything except your mind.

(Part 1 here.)

WHERE ARE THEY NOW? Since leaving The Atlantic, first in March to work on a book called, I'm not even kidding, Permission to Suck, then to soak up some gravy from Tina's Brown's Money Pit, Megan McArdle has not been much heard from. Here's her last transmission from the mother ship:

This was her glorious follow-up to a pre-game post in which, pumped with impending Obamacare victory, McArdle harshed on Roe v. Wade ("Those progressives did not seem to think that American Democracy had been destroyed because some unelected justices had overturned duly enacted laws in 1973... Though I am pro-choice, I am not a fan of Roe, which I think was legally dubious and tactically unwise. But democracies are complicated things"), then on the New Deal ("I have been much amused watching people try to simultaneously defend the fruits of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s outrageous court-bullying"), and other objects of passive-aggressive glee-wrath.

We can imagine, after such a display, why she might turn her face from the world. But we would be wrong to ascribe a capability of shame to her -- though she may be convinced, by her agent or loved ones, to keep a low profile until better days emerge, McArdle still gets out once in a while to give the brethren a little touch of Megan in the night.

For instance, she's quoted in a July Michael Dougherty story at The American Conservative about conservatives who supported Obama. While McArdle didn't actually vote for the Kenyan Pretender because, she famously claimed at the time, she forgot to register, she still pleads, or rather whines, for forgiveness:

“Four years ago, I disliked McCain intensely; it seemed like the choice between Obama and someone with policies very like Obama’s except that he would also invade Iran,” says Megan McArdle of the Daily Beast. 

Considering how, as a libertarian, McArdle strongly stands against unjustifiable foreign intervention, that seems reasonable.

“Obviously, Obama has been way worse on civil liberties than I expected,” says McArdle. “I kind of can’t believe I was naïve enough to think that he would actually change anything—or even try to change anything, except for the incredibly stupid symbolic move of Guantanamo prisoners to U.S. soil, which he chickened out on anyway. But I was. Ooops.”

Ditto libertarian ditto torture etc.

“Overall, I wildly underestimated Obama’s arrogance and inexperience"....

At last we're on a topic she knows something about!  McArdle's quotes were later replicated in a Newsweek story by David Frum, so maybe that counted as her quota for the month.

Just last Friday McArdle surfaced again in the comments to, of all places, The Reality-Based Community -- or seems to have done so; we cannot neglect the possibility that some pitch-perfect parodist represented him or herself as McArdle. Without prejudice, then, we note MaybeMegan's remarks to Jonathan Zasloff's defense of Harry Reid's assertion of Mitt Romney's negative tax burden.

First, MaybeMegan does the Sherlock Holmes thing where she rounds up the "legitimate sources who could reasonably be assumed to actually have this information: 1) Mitt Romney 2) Ann Romney 3) Mitt and Ann Romney’s accountant," etc. Her point: A Bain investor could not, as Reid charged, have given Reid the info, because that "would be certainly criminal," and "possibly be in violation of privacy laws," for which crime the putative investor would, MaybeMegan says,  "certainly lose their jobs, licenses, and personal assets in the massive, successful civil suit that Romney would launch against them" as voters, ineluctably drawn to a Presidential candidate who sues the man who exposed his years-long tax evasion, cheered Romney to a dazzling victory.

MaybeMegan adds that Reid "himself not exactly personally impoverished." His cabinets are probably loaded with pink Himalayan salt.

As it happens, there are other commenters at the site, and some of them give MaybeMegan a hard time. MaybeMegan responds with McArdlean grace that Reid's charges "may be 'far from inconceivable,' but it’s also the sort of thing that a lying sack who dislikes Mitt Romney could easily make up..." She then explains that personal tax evasion is impossible and, when that fails to satisfy the crowd, attacks the idea that a Romney lawyer might have leaked the info, because "every one of those lawyers, etc, has very good reason not to leak: it’s at the very least a civil suit and being thrown out of the profession," and then attacks the idea that an IRS agent leaked it, because "an IRS agent that did this would be surprisingly easy to track down, and (IIRC) liable for all sorts of marvelous criminal actions once they had been found..." Whoever this person is, she sure likes talking about punishing people who may have said something about Mitt Romney not paying taxes.

Hereafter I may track McArdle and her possible doppelganger as the Fat Man tracked the Maltese Falcon ("after its long disappearance, the bird turned up again in Sicily. In 1840, it re-appeared in Paris, where by that time, it had acquired a painted coat of black enamel..."). I'd forgotten how much fun she can be!

UPDATE. The first comment, by Alexander von Humbug: "Maybe Megan (not MaybeMegan) tried to become the Doctor's companion, but the TARDIS rejected her for overall dumbshittery and created MaybeMegan in her place. The two McM's are now locked in an eternal, deadly, and incomprehensible battle for an autographed copy of the first edition of Anthem."

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the Battle of Chick-fil-A. It struck me that, no matter how much some prominent conservatives said that it wasn't about gay marriage, they kept talking about it, and about how gay people were trying to take away their rights. It seems there isn't a persecuted minority in the country that isn't trying to do that to them. Maybe they just don't know how to make friends.

I didn't have time to get into all their cries of persecution when somebody was mean to them about this, but I did enjoy Anne Sorock's report at Legal Insurrection, "Chicago Chick-fil-A Kiss-In protesters 'chalk' homeless street preacher." At first I thought she meant some sort of poisonous gypsum cloud of terror, but it turned out that protesters had approached "an elderly African-American homeless man, who was reading his bible aloud" at the protest, some mouthed off to him, and "someone from the group wrote on the sidewalk in front of the homeless man, 'He’s Really Gay Deep Down,' with an arrow pointed to where he was seated." Sorock's commenters got the message: "The Left likes to play the Hitler card. Remember, he was gay, too." "The 'gay' Nazis were some of the most deadly, hard-hearted and barbarous of all." "Here is what you will get if marriage is re-defined as they want … anyone who dissents after that will be subject to a GLBT version of Kristallnacht..." Well, now we know who's keeping The History Channel in business.

UPDATE. Commenters come up with some fine gay Nazi film titles, including Queen Rommel of the Desert (Mark B.), The Pink Panzer (KC45s), and Triumph of the Will and Grace (Spaghetti Lee).

SHORTER MOLLIE HEMINGWAY. I found a reporter whose comments on Facebook about Chik-fil-A made me and my buddies look intolerant, so we got him shut down and maybe fired. That'll show people who the real free speech supporters are.

GORE VIDAL, 1925-2012. I'm busy all day, alas (why do they make me work? Can't they see I'm a national treasure?) but I wanted to quickly note the passing of Gore Vidal before my elegiac tone is marred by exposure to rightwing grave-pissers (well, to more of them, anyway). For me the big thing about Vidal was his ability to write popular fiction (he was madly popular for years, despite constant, bipartisan efforts to marginalize him) in the late 20th Century that came up to the standards of literature without straining for them in the sententious way of many best-seller list-climbers. He clearly wanted fame and attention, and knew he was entitled to them, but he wouldn't toady the muses to get them, nor anyone else.

He wrote with the easy grace and supreme confidence of an aristocrat -- which he sort of was, too, being kin to political royalty. There have of course been many aristos who wrote very well; Vidal had some of their qualities, and you could see them in his work. (Such as the aristocrat's sense of inviolability, which mirrors the imperviousness an artist must develop if he is to survive.) And it was fortified by his less ermined experiences, too, such as serving his country in the Army during World War II (which is more than many of the idiots who liked to call him a traitor could manage) and as a politician, and hacking for Hollywood, which I must say he handled like a champ -- no Barton Fink whining for him; he got some great stories out of it.

I hope to have more later. Meantime, read Burr or Palimpsest or Dark Green, Bright Red or anything by him, and make sure you have a copy around of United States, his collected essays, to remind you of what American writing can be when nothing is holding it back.

UPDATE. Changed "Navy" to "Army" -- thanks, commenter robo, for reminding me that Vidal served on an Army supply ship. I offer my apologies, and also these old alicublog links: A passage from The Best Man of which Peggy Noonan reminded me;  a review of his 2000 novel Washington, D.C.; and a parody of his later novel, The Golden Age, done with love.

UPDATE 2. In comments, Roger Ailes: "Gore Vidal made Michele Bachmann a Republican, but Marcus Bachmann made her a woman!"

HE GAVE ME A BOOK, THE COVER WAS PLAIN/WRITTEN BY A DOCTOR WITH A GERMAN NAME.  Glenn Harlan Reynolds:

In one traditional form of pornography, from the Victorian “A Man With a Maid” to the more recent “Fifty Shades of Grey,” a young woman is initiated — sometimes uncomfortably — into the mysteries of adult sexuality. In the end she is, at some level at least, grateful for the new horizons that’ve opened up to her. 

Well, we still have that. But let’s face it — porn has gotten pretty boring.

If that's your idea of porn, no wonder you're bored.

Nowadays, you can’t really shock with sex. Even gay sex has gone from edgy to ho-hum. 

So try a different adult bookstore. (Why is he being so coy? Jonah Goldberg would have blegged by now.)

No, if you want to make an impression, it takes something really exotic, like . . . traditional middle-class values.

[record scratch]

A spin across the cable dial will reveal some examples — the Duggars are exciting because they have lots of children and raise them themselves; Dave Ramsey says to live within your salary.

What, the Duggars and Dave Ramsey do porn? I knew I should have paid the cable bill.

But for me the strongest case in point is CNBC’s “Princess,” with Jamaican-born financial adviser Gail Vaz-Oxlade.

Each episode revolves around an overindulged young woman in her 20s or early 30s who’s spent herself — and usually her parents, boyfriend and sometimes even siblings — into near-bankruptcy. With friends and family, Vaz-Oxlade stages an intervention, making plain the costs of this behavior, both personal and financial. 

Then the profligate subject is put on a strict budget, and forced to cook, clean, take public transit and show respect for the parents, boyfriend, et al. who’ve been supporting her... you can tell that many viewers enjoy seeing the pampered “princesses” learning to cook, clean and perform other traditional tasks for themselves...

Oh, so it's humiliation fantasies you're into! But I see you've found a vendor, so what are you complaining about?

But this is only news because so many modern young people lack those skills, once taken for granted.

"So many" young people are literally unable to cook or clean? That explains the popularity of Applebee's.

In today’s culture of immediate reward, a work ethic centering on self-discipline and the ability to defer gratification is almost, to use a favorite term of the avant-garde, transgressive. Hmm: With so much of our economy and politics now based on the absence of those characteristics, maybe it really is a bit transgressive.

We're not doing transgression anymore, Perfesser. It's all about the dictatorship of the proletariat now. That and anal.

But those mores just may be making a comeback in these tough times. The fact is, self-discipline and the ability to defer gratification really do help you get ahead, avoid debt and feel more in control of your life... 

At any rate, we can hope that saving money, avoiding debt and treating friends and family with consideration are now edgy enough to become trendy.

Ugh, sorry, folks, turns out there's not much else to it. Once again old-fashioned values have been abandoned by beatniks and goofball-poppers, but now comes the turn of the tide and soon the kids will learn the simple pleasure of good old-fashioned elbow grease of the sort Perfesser Reynolds hasn't applied in a hen's age.

Give him credit, though -- at least he knew that no one, not even readers of the New York Post, would go for a warmed-over Look magazine mores and tempora lament without something racy up front. It's a classic Berkeley love-in come-on: Yes, these stoned co-eds surrender their lissome torsos to their Black Panther boyfriends for our cameras, but don't worry, eventually the only grinding they'll experience will be the garbage disposal's and their own teeth at night.

But the schtick seems to have gotten away from Reynolds. His pleasure is so palpable at the idea of "a young woman... initiated — sometimes uncomfortably — into the mysteries of adult sexuality," and of rich bitches forced to strain and Swiffer, that when he announces it's actually boring we assume he's just trying to tamp down his hard-on before he has to get up from his desk.

Sex magic is powerful stuff, and whenever these guys fool with it it's like the Nazis with the Lost Ark.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the bizarre and maudlin reactions of rightbloggers to the 2012 Olympics. Though they all say they're confident of victory, they seem incapable of enjoying anything these days, even their own award ceremonies. Not that I'm complaining, mind you.
.

HOW TO BECOME AN UNPERSON. Steven Hayward at Power Line, March 2011:

Embedded below, if I have mastered the custom Power Line formatting, is a stunning five-minute video of Berkeley physicist Richard Muller shredding the infamous climate “hockey stick” that is making the rounds widely on the Internet.... 

..in the aftermath of Climategate, Muller is “going big” you might say. Watch this and you’ll see what I mean, especially his summary phrase, “You’re not allowed to do this in science.” Muller is not just tenured, but is late in his career, so feels free to speak out, unlike younger academics who don’t dare cross the Climate McCarthyism of the universities. More importantly, Muller is heading up the new Berkeley Earth Temperature Study, which will review and analyze all of the data on this subject starting from scratch. Unlike the Climategate cabal in Britain and in our NASA, the Berkeley group will share its data with all comers. Keep your eye on this; it will take time–years more than months probably–but may prove to be the thread that unravels the main prop of the climate campaign.

Since then, the science has led Muller not to "unravel the main prop of the climate campaign," as Hayward predicted, but to what Muller himself calls his "total turnaround" on AGW: "Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause."

Steven Hayward at Power Line, this weekend:

But just how much of a “skeptic” was Muller?  Here’s the opening from his 2008 interview with Grist.org... Sounds pretty close to the “consensus” party line to me, and as such today’s Times op-ed does not represent a fundamentally new position for Muller at all.  (I’m wondering whether a Times editor pressured him to use the “total turnaround” language.)  Actually, Muller has always been among the group of folks known as “lukewarmers"...

Soon enough we'll be told that Muller was always a thought-criminal.

OUTRAGEAHOLIC. 

Wherever you are, whatever your condition, thank your lucky stars that you can enjoy at least some part of life without letting politics ruin it and you.

SHORTER CRAZY JESUS LADY: I'm gonna let Kathryn J. Lopez write the column this week. Screw it, it's not like the editors are paying attention.

A RIGHTWING PUNDIT WHO CAN TALK TO KIDS.

A scene in the “21 Jump Street” movie taps into a recent generational change I’ve been noticing among Millenials.

RUN! RUN FOR YOUR too late -- Matt K. Lewis of the Daily Caller is trendspotting.

“He’s trying, he’s actually trying,” Tatum’s character says (pointing at some kid who seems to be minding his own business). “Look at the nerd!” When the nerd takes umbrage at this, Tatum’s character punches him and says: “Turn that gay-ass music off.”

Surprisingly, the crowd sides with the nerd, and one of the cool kids says, “That is really insensitive.”

Was this in the trailer? I seem to remember that with a record scratch and a rad little kid with a fauxhawk yelling "Fish out of water!" Here's Lewis with the thumbsucking:

The premise of this scene illustrates an interesting new phenomenon. Today’s “cool” kids no longer think “trying” makes one a nerd. (Nor do they condone casual gay-bashing.) Times have changed. And since they turned this generational shift into the plot point of a movie (ironically, Jonah Hill’s character becomes the popular kind in this new paradigm), I’m guessing others will notice.

Maybe they will, as soon as they finish snarling over the Muppets boycotting Chik-Fil-A.

Indeed, they have. Speaking at the July 2012 Portland/CreativeMornings, author and literary critic William Deresiewicz...

RUN! RUN FOR YOUR too late, again. I gotta work on my explosive strength.

...observed the same phenomenon. Regarding today’s young people, he notes, “[T]hey’re all incredibly nice. They’re all…polite, well-spoken, pleasant, moderate, earnest.”

At all the college classes I teach and the lectures I give, kids are constantly kissing my ass. They're so nice!

Comparing today’s rock idols to the musicians of yore — who trashed hotel rooms and talked about how many groupies they slept with (think Channing Tatum’s character’s fantasy) — Deresiewicz argues that today’s bands are “all like low-key, self-deprecating, post-ironic, very earnest, very eco-friendly sort of presentation.”

In other words, they suck.

Deresiewicz also observes that “trying” and being entrepreneurial is actually considered “cool” these days. “It’s like every artistic or moral aspiration is now expressed in terms of starting your own business, whether it’s food or music or good works,” he says.

This, of course, is dramatically different from the way things used to be.

Yeah, remember the 1980s and that radical firebrand Alex P. Keaton? You don't? Good, you're just the kind of sucker who'll swallow this bullshit whole without flinching. Who else would? Maybe a couple of culture-war wingnuts who know better will at least pretend the kids were a shaggy librul menace until Jonah Hill taught them to care because it sounds like a promising Romney-era meme, but at the end of the day they'll trudge down to their panic rooms with the Poverty Sucks and Ghostbusters posters on the wall, watch old videos of teen heartthrob Dan Quayle, and weep.

After considering some other idiotic theories, Matt K. Lewis comes up with this:

First, economic incentives work. When blue collar kids could slide through high school and still get a job paying $19 an hour in a factory, school could legitimately be seen as a joke — a waste of time. That trend has obviously come to an end. (It probably ended in the 1970s, but it might have taken a generation or so to become clear.)

WHEN THE FUCK WAS THIS? Every factory job I had in the 70s paid in the single digits. Maybe Lewis' old man owns a factory?

The rest is just as bad, but here are the bad-good bits:

“It’s uncool if you don’t try,” one young co-worker told me.

Intern at Daily Caller = Voice of a generation. There's also a "one young person told me" quote, hundreds of words long, that begins, I shit you not: "I see the entrepreneur spirit in a lot musicians, especially electronic musicians..."

Ultimately, I think technology and the internet are the most important reason for this generational shift...

That's when, bleeding from the eyes, I gave up, but I had a reading robot crawl the page and when it came back, smoke streaming from its apertures, it croaked, "There is a lot to this, and clearly something interesting is afoot" before self-destructing.

I predict the young people of today will outlive us, the poor bastards.

LAND OF HOPE AND GLORY.  Dan Riehl in 2009:

You may recall that on about his first day in office Obama returned a famous bust of Winston Churchill to Britain. That was seen as something of an insult to Britain by many. He gave the British Prime Minister tapes of his own hopey changey speeches, which many saw as egotistical but was also a statement of sorts, saying, you aren't really so special, sport. Perhaps it's the message in his speeches he actually wanted the PM to get? 

In the video below you'll find that for Obama there was no bow to the Queen of England. His wife even broke protocol by reaching out to give her a pat at some point, as I recall... 

This is a man who, unlike most Americans, doesn't view Western Civilization as all that. 

Dan Riehl today:

Get over it, Britain. You're a second rate, semi-degenerate nation still on the way down because you went too far to the left too long ago for anyone to care about. Don't expect us to wring our hands over what you losers did. We're too busy fighting to make sure it doesn't happen here...

Mostly a bunch of feckless wankers if you ask me. Put a Gold Medal on that and aim it at the Queen's arse. 

What a difference a Mitt Romney goodwill tour makes.

HAYSEED. If anybody could put me in conditional sympathy with Nanny Bloomberg, it's Ole Perfesser Glenn Reynolds, talking about Bloomberg's crack about the police going on strike:

I predict that such a strike — not that it’s likely to happen — would lead to less crime, and far less political support for the police. Meanwhile, just to prepare against the eventuality, I think I’ll go buy a gun.

Forget about the dumb idea that pulling out the cops would bring down crime. (Maybe he's never been to a big city.) Is there anything that better typifies Reynolds' politics of faux-redneck resentment than a threat to get back at the Mayor of New York by stocking his McMansion in Bumfuck, Tennessee with another gun? 

THE OLD PLAYBOOK. Oh brother:

In remarks that may prompt accusations of racial insensitivity, one suggested that Mr Romney was better placed to understand the depth of ties between the two countries than Mr Obama, whose father was from Africa.

“We are part of an Anglo-Saxon heritage, and he feels that the special relationship is special,” the adviser said of Mr Romney, adding: “The White House didn’t fully appreciate the shared history we have”.

Then he pushed in his nose and winked.

Romney's advisors say that as President Romney "would seek to reinstate the Churchill bust displayed in the Oval Office by George W. Bush but returned to British diplomats by Mr Obama when he took office in 2009."  They're still going on about that bust, even though it was meant to be returned all along and no one gives a shit except the two million conservatives who blogged about it at the time.  In fact, all of this nonsense is a rehash of one of the more ridiculous rightwing fits of 2009, when the Obamas were alleged to have dissed Queen Elizabeth because something something no curtsey, thereby shattering what had once been a great "Anglosphere" alliance of Christopher Hitchens and anybody else who didn't like wogs.

I understand that this is the time of the campaign cycle where you shore up your base [cue "Theme from Deliverance"], but Romney seems to be overdoing it. When he gets to Tampa Bay he's going to have to lock out all the conservatives, pack the audience with shills (maybe he can get them from the same place he gets Twitter followers), and lead them in a rousing chorus of "We Are the World" to make people forget he spent most of the summer pretending to be Barry Goldwater.

UPDATE. Hm, the Romney campaign says it's an "anonymous and false quote from a foreign newspaper." Whether they're telling the truth or backpedaling, it's a positive thing that they don't want to be identified with it. The new story is that it's all the Obama campaign's fault for believing Romneyites would engage in such behavior ("Relying on Blind Quotation, Race Injected in Presidential Race"). Well, guess we'll all have to wait until we're dead and God tells us what happened.

UPDATE 2. The Telegraph stands by its story.

WINGNUT COLLOQUY. Here's the sentence that set him off:

At first their outrage was attracted by an on-air report by ABC News' Brian Ross on the shooter's identity after his name, but no details, had been revealed. Ross said this: "There's a Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colorado, page on the Colorado Tea party site, talking about him joining the Tea Party last year. Now, we don't know if this is the same Jim Holmes, but it's Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colorado."

Then ensued:

To recap: The guy misapprehended the sentence and called me a liar; when his error was pointed out to him,  he pretended not to be able to read.

I stopped talking to him at this point, but I should never have started.  (I even went out of my way to be civil, which you all know is a great effort for me.) My problem was, I tried to figure out how he came to his misunderstanding. Maybe he thought the clause pertained to "attracted" rather than "report" -- but then, why would I have inserted immediately thereafter the very details Ross revealed?

But his responses revealed what I should have known from jump -- that he's just a yelling bot, and has no premises at all. He exists to denounce liberals and trawl the attention of big-name conservatives. He isn't there to listen, except for the sound of his own name.

The internet's full of people like this. They make outrageous statements and when they're called on them pretend not to know what's going on. And a lot of them mistake what they're doing for actual argument. It's like "Firing Line" with dialogue from "Pee-Wee's Playhouse."

And it seems this style is bubbling up to the big-name guys, too. I saw a clip recently of James Taranto on the Lou Dobbs show, and though when I met Taranto years ago he was mild-mannered and easy to talk to, on the show he was bellowing like a Fox News clown. Matt Lewis used to be a relatively sensible conservative writer, and now at The Daily Caller he's writing boob bait like this "guns don't kill people, movies do" thumbsucker.

It's getting to the point where you can't talk to them at all, and that's a real bad point.

UPDATE. Dyer has apologized to me, which is gracious of him. (I wasn't fishing for it, because in my experience people who demand and exult in apologies are assholes, and only mention it to credit him.) He still thinks I misunderstand him, and who knows, maybe I do. Anyway I welcome to opportunity to stop seething at him. Everyone else, however...

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the rightblogger reaction to the Colorado movie massacre. Basically, it's like this, only worse. In the year since Anders Breivik, they've actually gotten crazier.

DID A LITTLE OBIT of sorts for Alexander Cockburn at the Voice.