HOW'RE YOU GONNA KEEP 'EM DOWN ON THE FARM AFTER THEY'VE SEEN THE FARM?

Some guy at Ace of Spades is excited about Atlas Van Lines' map of what states have more mover-outers and what states have more mover-inners:

Frankly, I'm surprised that CA and MI are treading water on that chart but then again it is only one source and does not indicate what type of people are moving in and out (i.e. producers or takers).

The idea (or "narrative," as these dinks like to put it) is that big bad blue states are bleeding "producer" population, and soon will be overtaken by Workers' Paradises like North Dakota. Similarly, Some Other Guy at RedState headlines his story about another mover's poll (United Van Lines'), "Unchanged: Americans Are Still Fleeing High-Tax, Forced-Unionism States With Good Reason," followed by lots of hurp-durp about lousy blue states boy won't they be sorry.

Well, it's always instructive to do what rightblogger readers are unlikely to do, and click the links. At the United Van Lines site:

I'll be durned -- Americans are flocking to Washington, D.C., even though such geniuses as Ole Perfesser Instapundit, Nick Gillespie and David Brooks were just telling us it's the moocher capital of the evil Hunger Games empire.

And the United Van Lines item the RedState link takes you to is sub-headed, "Washington D.C. the Most Popular Destination During the Election Year." Guess America's really Obama-depraved after all!

Don't worry -- it looks like there'll be plenty of room in DickCheneyland for them all to Go Galt in.

I LOST IT AT THE MOVIES.

Roger L. Simon, the Citizen Kane of Pajamas Media (if the Inquirer had quickly turned into a pennysaver), saw some Chinese people at a high-end outlet mall in Cabezon, California.  The Man Who Was Moses Wine is on the case:

A large number, possibly a majority, of the shoppers there are the privileged scions of the Communist Party. Their parents and grandparents are the ones who played along and did their best not to make waves, even cooperated, throughout the mass murders of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.

Now, they and their kids are reaping the harvest of their modern state capitalist system that still flies under the banner of communism, a false flag operation if ever there was one. Ironies abound, and those same ironies provide a snapshot of what constitutes “leftism” in our own culture.

Ironies indeed, except Simon seems not to have asked himself why the Chinese have all that money. Hint: They got a lot of it from us, and not all in the days of Comrade Obama, neither.

Anyway Simon is not really concerned with foreigners but with the domestic terrorists called liberals:

Leftism has devolved into a kind of scam run not only on others but also on the self. Leftists are brilliant at convincing themselves of their own altruism and then broadcasting it to the public, thus providing cover for the most conventionally greedy and selfish behaviors. We see that in our society all the time: the quondam Marxists of Hollywood, the media, and the academy blathering on about economic equality while living lives the Medici could not have dreamed of.

Son of a buck -- there's money in this? You bastards have been holding out on me! I've been writing for the Village Voice for years -- surely I have carloads of Moscow gold coming!

Relatively unbridled capitalism has always been the best way out of this, the best way to true social mobility, but our nomenklatura doesn’t want to admit this because it might threaten them and their perquisites. It would blow their cover.

I dunno -- the Crash of '08 gave pretty good cover all by itself to the idea of "unbridled capitalism" as a panacea.

I suspect those Chinese shoppers knew this better than anyone, having lived through a similar experience ratcheted up to the nth degree. Although I was too polite to do it, I wanted to question them. I would have loved to know what they say to each other in the privacy of their own homes, not that they would be likely to tell me.

Unfairly deprived of my communist lottery winnings as I have been, I would have paid cash money to see Simon grilling the "Chinese shoppers." You, chop chop! You mamasan and papasan, they wash the brains, yes? In my country this call irony! Obama, him big commie, yes? 

But there was something to learn from watching them. I felt like a detective and it made me think of Roman Polanski and Robert Towne’s Chinatown.

A detective who doesn't want to ask questions to which he doesn't already have the answers. But he's still got the fedora, and the hangdog grace of a lone wolf:

I also thought of myself, of the way I was when I was a leftist. Yes, I drove a Porsche then (a used one). And had a house in the Hollywood Hills. And ate at gourmet restaurants. And there were plenty like me. I was part of a class. I felt safe and protected for many years, though finally I just left it. I couldn’t stand the hypocrisy anymore. Or maybe I just lost the ability to convince myself of my own altruism.

You might imagine Simon is eating off a hot plate in a rooming house with his integrity to keep him warm. But he's still a player, in fact more of one than before: His last film, A Better Life, was well-reviewed by the pinkos he disdains as lying nomenklatura. But keep that under your hat -- if a fella's gonna keep his place in modern conservatism, he's got to hold onto his victim status.

Whatever the case, when it comes to the truth about leftism, it’s about the cover it gives. Or, as Bob Towne put it: “It’s Chinatown.”

Actually it's Hollywood; like modern conservatism, a land of dreams. Except people are buying what Hollywood sells.

OOGA TO THE OOGITY-BOOGA.

neo-neocon started out with a fairly standard rightwing plaint about the big bad liberals:

It’s not just the heady victory of the moment that’s motivating them, it’s their conviction that it’s clear sailing from here on that empowers the left to openly up the ante and signal their next steps in establishing and capitalizing on their hegemony. No need to hide anymore when there’s nothing the right can do about it.

Then suddenly sproinnggg! out of nowhere:

In some ways the anti-white-man rhetoric that has become standard and acceptable lately is the worst sign of all. If the term “hate speech” has a meaning, it most definitely would apply to a great deal of what has been said recently about that despised group. Those who are first to shriek “racism” and “sexism” when criticism is launched against a group defined as oppressed (blacks, women) are turning the tables and dissing white men with impunity. It is both hypocritical and vile, and especially offensive when cloaked in the sanctimony of those on the left who believe they occupy the moral high ground (that would be everyone on the left).

Huh? neo-neocon doesn't explain what the hell she's talking about, so I had to trace back through a link to Victor Davis Hanson she'd left, perhaps inadvertently, as a clue to find out where she caught the fever.

Near as I can tell, this is it: That guy who criticized the Constitution in the New York Times called the Founding Fathers "a group of white propertied men" who "thought it was fine to own slaves." (I like the Constitution fine myself but yeah, obviously they were what he said they were.) Well, Hanson takes exception, but instead of arguing a case he just links the Constitution critic's sentiments to Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, for reason unshared with his readers:

I can see Seidman’s vision now: Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi decides that semi-automatic handguns, not cheap Hollywood violence or sick video games, empower the insane to kill, and, presto, their 'considered judgment' and favored 'particular course of action' trump the archaic and evil wisdom of 'white propertied men.'

And that's about it, unless there's a coded reference or an acrostic or something in there that I missed.

Hanson's fit is weird enough, but the way neo-neocon got "everyone on the left" and "dissing white men with impunity" out of it -- that's just surreal. And then there's Ole Perfessor Glenn Reynolds' endorsement of it:

The Obama presidency has certainly been clarifying. Which is probably why gun sales are up.

To recap, some nut thought a professor's smack talk about the Founders owning slaves had something to do with Reid and Pelosi; this stimulated another nut to rage about the left's alleged insults to whitey; and this stimulated a third nut to cite Obama and cheer the rise in gun purchases. It's like a game of Telephone in an insane asylum.

Earlier today I was mildly disappointed that Commentary's new "What Is the Future of Conservatism in the Wake of the 2012 Election? A Symposium" was subscriber-only. But now I feel like I just read it for free.

UPDATE. "The white man has been oppressed ever since Django was unchained," explains Halloween Jack in comments. wjts and others point out that Hanson is once again complaining that someone stole equipment from his property and, once again, suggests the theft has something darkly to do with Obama. Soon these guys will be communicating entirely by dog-whistle: "Someone made off with my entrenching tool last night..." "OOGA BOOGA DEFEND WHITEY!"

HOW THE NUTTY HAVE FALLEN.

One of the original Tea Party spielers, Patrick Michael Leahy, was telling Americans in the week before the 2012 Presidential election that

in key swing states, the vaunted Obama ground game is being out-worked and out-organized by a loosely knit coalition of volunteer grassroots activists (both local and out-of-state), traditional conservative organizations like Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks, and the local and national Republican establishment...

With so many grassroots activists going door-to-door in swing states around the country, it's not surprising that optimism among conservatives for a Romney victory on November 6 are high.

Proving that professional bullshit artists are always in demand, here's Leahy today, claiming that the Tea Party's as powerful as ever and anyone who says different is double Alinsky Sociamalist:

Consider, for instance, the spontaneous outpouring of public support for Chick-Fil-et in August, and September's National Empty Chair Day phenomenon. Those strong sentiments have not suddenly disappeared. They remain fixed in the hearts and minds of millions of tea party activists around the country as we enter 2013.

Tell me, is there a degree below Pyrrhic victory? If not maybe we should name it after Leahy.

Even better is the follow-up. "There's polling evidence to consider as well," says Leahy. And that polling evidence shows the Tea Party rushing to join the Know-Nothings and the Anti-Masonic Party on history's D-list. But Leahy tastes the lemonade: "The 21% of the 128 million Americans who voted in 2012 and support the tea party," he offers, "still comprise a very large segment of the population --more than 26 million activists." 30% disapprove, true, but they're not activists -- merely moochers, too busy spending their government assistance checks to go hollering in tricorners, which is the key to victory.

Since this equity is clearly pissed out, we should start placing bets on the new niche brand they'll bring out in the next few elections. Five bucks says it'll involve a new kind of patriotism.

ANNALS OF THE CULTURE WARS, CONT.

John Daly, published by media scold Bernard Goldberg, wants "Conservatives To Use Pop-Culture Messaging." The awkward wording is no mistake; Daly doesn't know what culture is; he seems to think of it as some kind of weapon that'll work for him if only he can wrestle it away from his opponent.

If you doubt me, here's his pitch:

Imagine a series of television commercials, in the format of public service announcements, featuring actor Vince Vaughn. I’m using Vaughn as an example because he’s one of the few, outed fiscal conservatives in Hollywood. He’s also an immediately identifiable celebrity who audiences have an affection for. In his trademark comedic, dapper style, Vaughn throws out some metaphorical explanation of how screwed up our nation’s spending problem is, and how that problem affects each and every one of us. The presentation should be simple, but it should also get across a point that people can relate to – much like the Apple vs Microsoft commercials from a few years ago, or the “this is your brain on drugs” campaign from the 1980s. The series could expand to cover over-regulation, over-taxation, and more. They should be aired not on cable news networks, but during some of the popular, prime-time reality shows.

Better still is his follow-up after the client gives him that "Springtime for Hitler" stare:

It’s the clueless, unprincipled vote that conservatives can no longer afford to concede to the Democratic party when it comes to elections. These people are sway-able, and they’re prime for a wake-up call. Dumbing down the conservative message through the pop-culture world may just be the way of doing it.

Dumb ideas aimed at people you don't respect: A winning formula. Especially if --

...if wealthy, conservative donors truly want to make a difference in public perception and support, they might want to consider backing such a shift rather than just the politicians themselves.

-- the goal is not so much to change minds as to cadge change.

MORE ANNALS OF THE CULTURE WARS.

While you're ringing in the new year with champagne and revelry, conservatives are hard at work in  their basement warrens, fashioning a new cultural offensive to lure the proles back in.

Some go the old-fashioned route, declaring victory because all the top movies are rightwing. At TownHall, John Hanlon reviews conservative film victories of 2012.  Lincoln, for example, "showed the Republican president as the grand leader that he was -- fighting against unscrupulous Democrats who wanted slavery to continue, despite the injustice inherent in the practice." Just like today! Also, in The Avengers "two of its story’s main protagonists represent deeply-held conservative beliefs" -- that is, Captain America "believes in old-fashioned values and longs for a simpler time," and Iron Man Tony Stark "isn’t afraid of his own money and doesn’t begrudge himself the luxuries that he has earned through his hard work and dedication," whereas Loki wants a high capital gains tax and free healthcare for all.

With that,  The Dark Knight Rises' "inherent criticism of the Occupy Wall Street movement," and The Hunger Games "Orwellian and disturbing version of an all-powerful government that will be hard to forget," the cineplexes are telling truths the MSM dare not utter. The next step is to have early voting in movie theaters, maybe by getting ushers to collect ballots like they used to collect donations for the Will Rogers Institute.

Crisap at Conservative New Ager goes further, proclaiming Les Miserables "a movie for conservatives." Sure, its impoverished heroes band together to support the 1832 Paris Uprising, but that doesn't make them communards: Jean Valjean, for example, is a "successful businessman who not only created a whole industry in a town, bringing it out of poverty and into an economic renaissance, but who also out of Christian charity... creates hospitals and schools for the poor.  In a day and age when lesser writers like Dickens would just recycle the terrible image of the robber baron, Hugo gave us a noble businessman as an example of what others should be."  He's pretty much Mitt Romney with a rich tenor voice. "And dare we forget," adds Crisap, "that much of the second half of the story is taken up by an uprising by Republican revolutionaries, seeking a return to law and not the capricious whims of a king." See, they're Republicans, just like Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, proving that "if a modern day liberal went back to see him, Hugo would try to slap the stupid out of the Occupy trash." With Zola standing nearby yelling "Lemme at him," no doubt.

Meanwhile at Pajamaland, Bill Whittle answers a viewer question, "What aspect of the culture, movies music books etc., do you think holds the best hope for conservatism?" with this:

I think it's video games. I think it's video games. I think things like Call of Duty and Medal of Honor and so on which basically glorify our military, glorifies 'em for the reasons they should be glorified, . I've been playing video games since high school, junior high, where we played a Star Trek game on a printer... these first-person shooters get better and better and better, and nowadays you get into these first-person shooters and it gives you pretty immersive idea of what it is our guys actually have to go through, minus the actual terror and blood and all that other stuff. And the ability to respawn is a nice thing, I'm sure a lot of guys out in the field like that respawn idea a lot...

For two weeks the NRA's been telling us video games inspire people to shoot up schools, and now here's Whittle telling us they actually make people honor the military and vote Republican. Maybe he's trying to make some kind of point about sublimation.

JON SWIFT ROUNDUP'S POSTED.

Batocchio, bless him, has done the usual bang-up job with the annual Jon Swift Memorial Roundup of top blog posts by your favorite fellow travelers. I found it a great opportunity to revisit writers I never get to read because I'm too busy reading idiots. I've looked at a bunch of the recent entrants and they're excellent. (I especially recommend Lance Mannion's essay on Asperger's; I used to think that I had it, but now I'm quite sure that I'm just an asshole.)  Pick a link, any link, they're all winners.

IF AT FIRST YOU DON'T SUCCEED, CRY, CRY AGAIN.

Victor Davis Hanson's on his plinth again, crying "Vanitas!" while the dry ice swirls:

Obama once had mused that he wished to be the mirror image of Ronald Reagan — successfully coaxing America to the left as the folksy Reagan had to the right. Instead, 2012 taught us that a calculating Obama is more a canny Richard Nixon, who likewise used any means necessary to be reelected on the premise that his rival would be even worse. But we know what eventually happened to the triumphant, pre-Watergate Nixon after November 1972; what will be the second-term wages of Obama’s winning ugly?

Impeachment? Sure, why not -- it's not like they can beat him in elections.

But what would be the MacGuffin? This week at WorldNetDaily:

As many news sites and pundits break down the biggest stories of 2012, one story too big to miss has been resurrected by the website TeaParty.org, a story at least one national pundit believes could send Barack Obama to prison. 

The tea-party site posted a Glenn Beck video from October in which the TV and radio host insisted a case for treason could be built against President Obama for his role in the attack of Sept. 11, 2012, in which armed Libyans captured and killed U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three others at an American diplomatic mission in Benghazi...

A two-month-old Glenn Beck rant. But wait -- WND has more! In another article they say Obama could be impeached for invading Syria -- and Charlie Rangel's on board! Actually Rangel has made common cause with Republican Congressman Walter Jones to warn the President off an intervention, which WND interprets as "NEW IMPEACHMENT THREAT, WITH DEMOCRAT 'INVOLVED.'"

Playing Lafayette to their Founding Fathers is Lyndon LaRouche. Now it's a coalition!

Much as I'd enjoy it, I don't think they're serious. At Forbes Larry Bell tips their hand:

Before I carry this any farther, let me be clear that I believe any chances that President Obama will be impeached range somewhere between nil and none. That ain’t going to happen to the historic first American black president…THE ONE…most particularly when his party controls the Senate and his fast and furious friend is his attorney general. But just for argument’s sake, let’s imagine that these conditions were different, and on top of that, he had ill winds of the liberal media blowing in his face rather than friendly breezes at his back. And what if he wasn’t “cool”…instead, being someone like Nixon, who was the un-coolest guy in almost any crowd?...

So this impeachment thing is going to be like everything else in wingnut world these days: Another excuse to piss and moan about how unfair it all is. Pretty soon they'll be telling us that Obama should have been assassinated by now, but that damned liberal Secret Service keeps protecting him.

GALT 2.0.

We got another Go-Galt guy, this one named Will Spencer, who tells us that "clearly, 'Going Galt' does not mean the same thing to all people. Going Galt is a very individual expression." That's for sure -- we've seen folks Go Galt by leaving lousy tips, by alerting local merchants that they planned to "buy nothing – other than vacations out of the country – until the president exits," by quitting smoking, etc. Or at least talking about doing it.

I had despaired they'd ever get serious about it. Spencer, though, has an impressively meticulous list of tactics, which he has divided into four sections.

It takes awhile to pick up speed. Under "Earn Less Taxable Income," Spencer lists actions I assumed entrepreneurs/hustlers would already have been doing, Galt or no Galt -- "Relocate to a state which charges lower or no income taxes," "Contribute the maximum allowable amount to an IRA," etc. Under "Reduce Expenses and Pay Less Sales Tax," his tips would not be out of place in The Dollar Stretcher -- "Repair and reuse when possible instead of buying replacements," "Buy over the Internet when possible, to avoid sales taxes," etc.

So far so Horatio Alger. Then we get to section three, "Prepare for the Collapse." "Stockpile water, food, and ammunition to prepare for coming shortages" and "Fortify your home to protect your family against looters" are among Spencer's suggestions. A little crazy, but still within the normal conservative spectrum -- after all, even the big-time rightbloggers love to play at disaster preparedness.

But the tide turns in section four, "Civil Disobedience":

This is where things get serious. This isn’t just trying to escape from a corrupt society and let it collapse; many of these steps involve making active decisions and taking risks that could negatively affect your personal liberty. Nonetheless, many people feel that the hope of living in a truly free world is worth the risk.

Tremble, tyrants, at what Will Spencer has in store for you:

• Comply with government orders as slowly as possible. 

• Fill out government forms incompletely and illegibly.

• Pay all taxes and fines at the last possible legal moment.

• Make it difficult for the government to enforce all unconstitutional or immoral laws.

• As a juror, exercise your right to nullify unconstitutional or immoral laws.

• Take multiple copies of all printed government forms to increase their costs.

• Take a job with the government, and then don’t do it.

• Boycott government propaganda outlets such as PBS and NPR.

• Get your money invested offshore while it is still safe and legal to do so.

So next time some guy at the DMV fills in his license application with scribbles, then winks at you; or sneakily takes a whole stack of change of address forms from the post office; or takes a government job and, unlike any other civil servant you've ever seen, goofs off -- then you'll know the revolution is afoot. This time for sure!

UPDATE. Comments  are choice, as usual. Spaghetti Lee nominates further Civil Disobedience tips like "Address all government forms with pseudonyms 'Mike Hunt' and 'Dick Hertz'" and "Inform all government officials that you are rubber and they are glue." hells littlest angel suggests the Galt-goers "get sushi and not pay." And Jeffrey_Kramer has written a stirring Go Galt anthem:

I dreamed I saw John Galt last night
A-watchin' my TV
Says I, “So when's this strike of yours?”
“I'm on it now,” says he. 

I said “And how will sitting here
Bring down this tyranny?”
Said John, “I slay the MSM
By watching Hannity! 

“O John,” I said, “Our tax will rise,
How will you make a stink?”
“I'll write out all my forms,” John said
“With funny-looking ink.” 

“But will you pay this evil tax,
This higher marginal rate?”
“I'll pay it,” John said with a grin,
“But maybe minutes late.” 

“But John, what if the Kenyan sends
us all to FEMA camps?”
“I'll slow the trains of death,” said John
“By using two-cent stamps.” 

Then I woke up, but still I knew --
I'd take it to the bank --
Whatever came, John would be there
To cry and piss and wank.

GOD AND SINNERS RECONCILED.

Most of you have seen it, but if you haven't, this is the real thing:



All honor to Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol -- the recent replay of which was sadly truncated to remove the theatrical framing device. (Did NBC think revealing it to be a stage production starring trouper Quincy Magoo would limit its appeal? Maybe they worried somebody would find the fun over Magoo's blindness offensive.) And there are things to like in many other versions.

But this production with Alastair Sim is in a ripe melodramatic style that I imagine Dickens would have appreciated. It is decidedly not modern. Michael Holdern's Marley's Ghost is eerie as much for his Delsarte presentation as for his predicament -- moaning, keening, "Lon Chaney big." (He even presses the back of his wrist to his forehead and he's not kidding.)  The lower- and middle-class characters are perfect expressions of type, individuated only by the ingenuity of the actors, who have this sort of thing down cold.  And Sim is for me the only Scrooge. His style is big, too, but so is his insight: That Scrooge is at bottom a terribly frightened man whose unsociability and hardness were formed as defenses against pain. He spends half the film in abject terror and dejection. In some versions Scrooge seems to be educated by his Spirits, with some shocks thrown in to underline the lesson, but Sim is emotionally flayed by his, and the Scrooge that's revealed is wonderfully child-like ("I'm as light as a feather! I'm as giddy as a schoolboy!"); in fact, he's sort of a jokester. (The little fright he gives Mrs. Dilber by ruffling his hair on the staircase is one of many sublime moments.) This is redemption through repentance, and appropriate for the feast of Christ.

If that's not your style, there's always Kurtzman. Or have both -- what the hell, we embrace multitudes. Merry Christmas!

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP

-- reviewing 2012 rightblogger highlights. Your typical holiday special: Some familiar bits, some new material, and a happy ending. Enjoy!

UPDATE. While looking cartoons to break up the column I came across this:

I don't remember being able to bring loaded guns aboard commercial airliners even before 9/11. This gun-grabber conspiracy goes deeper than I thought.

YOUR GUESS IS AS GOOD AS MINE.

It is something to see Ole Perfesser Instapundit go for plausible deniability:

I DIDN’T SEE THE PRESS CONFERENCE, but reader Theo X. Rojo writes: “I’m very proud of my membership in the NRA as a ‘Life Member.’ I thought Mr. LaPierre hit it out of the park today.”

Maybe before he can endorse it, he has to watch Kindergarden Cop and see how it all works out.

The weirdest bit, though, is this:

UPDATE: Jeffrey Goldberg: “Reporters on my Twitter feed seem to hate the NRA more than anything else, ever.” I think there’s a race/class angle to that.

Race/class angle? Does he think most journalists are black? Not bloody likely. Or does he think his opponents have been mongrelized?

If you're wondering why our moderate Republican President is doing so well in the polls, look no further.

ANNALS OF THE CULTURE WARS. Culture warriors are having a hard time churning up some actual culture of their own. Take a look at Liberty Island, an arty online pub with Ben Shapiro on the masthead. Back in August Ole Perfesser Instapundit pimped its "call for submissions." Yet four months later the project remains rather thin on content -- among the few contributions is a short story by Shapiro himself, of which we will not speak. This week the Perfesser pimped a new "call for submissions" for the thing. The fundraising ain't going so hot either.

They're probably better off claiming long-dead artists; hell, look how it worked with Orwell. At Pajamas Media, one R.J. Moeller instructs us on the proper way to read Dostoyevsky. I'll give you a hint -- it has something to do with American politics!

In the course of a number of his books – The Devils (aka The Possessed) and The Brothers Karamazov for example – he foretold of the coming socioeconomic and geopolitical nightmares that awaited 20th century societies who would adopt progressivism, nihilism, and socialism as their guiding principles... 

Dostoevsky held that the inherent weakness of the Utopian visions of socialism was a rejection of God and the institution of the family. He saw that for the Left, their politics became their religion. The members of the progressive-Left were demanding standards of Judeo-Christian morality be replaced with new (arbitrary) standards handed down from central councils and planning committees...

But this is my favorite part:

From Walter E. Williams’ August 8th column "Liberals, Progressives, and Socialists":

Well, as long as it keeps them from writing any fiction themselves, I suppose we'll all be happy.

FIGHTING WORDS. Before approving the protest of Erik Loomis' treatment, I went back to my Gabby Giffords rightbloggers column to see if I'd accused Sarah Palin of inciting murder. To my relief, I found I had not.

Maybe it means little more than that the liquor store closed early that night, but I flatter myself that in the main, though I am silly and snarky and snide, and sometimes come dangerously close to willful misapprehension of my targets (and by dangerously close, I mean I do it all the time, waving my Satirist's Immunity card), at least you can say for me that I don't gin up fake outrage over transparently bogus offenses and try to get people fired for them, as have the people who've come after Loomis for saying after Newtown he'd like to see the NRA President's head on a stick. (Hell, I didn't even agree with the drive to fire Rush Limbaugh.)

But enough about what a swell guy I am. There are real differences between the factions which, for want of better terms, I will describe as Us and Them. Though it is meaningful that we are right and they are wrong about nearly everything, how we go about defending our righteous beliefs is at least as meaningful. I suspect there are practical political benefits to not demanding apologies and retaliation like a butthurt asshole, but the main reason for not demanding apologies and retaliation like a butthurt asshole is that demanding apologies and retaliation like a butthurt asshole makes you a butthurt asshole.

FROM THEIR WARM, STICKY HANDS. I trawl other blogs' comments sections but rarely, and almost never to approve. Others are less selective. Ole Perfesser Glenn Reynolds, who has reached the throw-the-gun-at-the-pursuer stage in the current gun control debate but can't bear to part with his weapon, holds this Althouse comment up for commendation:

In the olden days, when leftists wished to argue against gun owners, they claimed that guns were phallic symbols and that the excessive love of guns demonstrated latent homosexuality. Keep oiling and loading that pisstool, big boy. We know what you’re really doing….Can we not now claim that excessive fear of gun ownership indicates a streak of homophobia. They don’t want to ban guns. We know what they really want to ban.

To which the Perfesser adds:

Well, phallophobia, anyway. Which seems about right.

Looks like these guys are taking that "man card" thing a mite serious. Don't worry, fellas; as a person of the "gun" myself, I will defend to the death your right to bear that thang.

UPDATE. The Althouse post to which the comment is attached is ridiculous, too, but it does raise the fascinating possibility that Justice Scalia and Matt K. Lewis are only kidding which, if I could only believe it, would greatly elevate my faith in humanity.

NEW ON THE BLOGROLL. My old friend Joe Mackin had this idea: Write about stuff -- yeah I know, like everyone else -- but limit yourself to two grafs at a time. Thus, 2 Paragraphs. It's much better than it should be, and still better in daily doses. (Here's a prime example.)

My old boss Tony Ortega has left the Voice but continues harrying the derps of Scientology at his own scoop shack, The Underground Bunker. Tony asks the hard questions, like "How'd you like to spend New Year's Eve with Scientologists?" (Short answer: You wouldn't.)  Tony is a realer sort of journalist, and his forthcoming book on everyone's favorite nut-cult should be prime.

GO AHEAD, TRY IT THAT WAY. I'm always eager to learn what it is we liberals are really up to when we pretend to be interested in, say, preventing schoolroom shoot-'em-ups. Daniel Greenfield, "Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and a contributing editor at Family Security Matters," explains our philosophy in "Gun Control, Thought Control, and People Control":

The individual cannot be held accountable for shooting someone if there are guns for sale. Individuals have no role to play because they are not moral actors, only members of a mob responding to stimuli... 

You wouldn't blame a dog for overeating; you blame the owners for overfeeding him. Nor do you blame a dog for biting a neighbor. You might punish him, but the punishment is training, not a recognition of authentic responsibility on the part of the canine. And the way that you think of a dog, is the way that the left thinks of you. When you misbehave, the left looks around for your owner.

That's from John Rawls, right?

Individual behavior is a symptom of a social problem. Identify the social problem and you fix the behavior. The individual is nothing, the crowd is everything. Control the mass and you control the individual.

Or maybe it's from James Q. "Broken Windows" Wilson. It's hard to tell; Greenfield seems to think any attempt to change circumstances to influence behavior is a form of mass hypnosis. (I wonder if a woman ever had him over to her apartment, turned down the lights and put on some soft music. That must have really freaked him out.)

Of course I'm being unfair. Though most of the article consists of enraged, outlandish metaphors -- "You train monkeys to fetch bananas for you. That is how the enlightened elites of the left see the workers whose taxes they harvest," "The Nazis believed that they were the master race because they were genetically superior. Liberals believe that they are the master race..." etc. -- Greenfield does have one real-life example to buttress his argument:

That is how the left approached this election. Instead of appealing to individual interests, they went after identity groups. They targeted low information voters and used behavioral science to find ways to manipulate people. The right treated voters like human beings. The left treated them like lab monkeys. And the lab monkey approach is triumphantly toted by progressives as proof that the left is more intelligent than the right. And what better proof of intelligence can there be than treating half the country like buttons of unthinking responses that you can push to get them to do what you want.

Greenfield's argument is perfect in its way. Have anti-pollution laws made our air and water less foul? Proof of liberal contempt for the individualism of the polluter! Do blacks rise to heretofore unrealized positions of respect and even prominence in society? Liberal mind control techniques at work!

So if the kind of gun control people are calling for now (and which, by the way, is Greenfield's ostensible theme) were actually tried and shown to reduce gun violence in this country,  that would make it even more of an outrage.

This is the sort of conservatism I look forward to seeing more of: One where they gibber and spit over our successes.

UPDATE. In another post, Greenfield asks:

And yet would Thomas Jefferson, the abiding figurehead of the Democratic Party, who famously wrote, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants", really have shuddered at the idea of peasants with assault rifles, or would he have grinned at the playing field being leveled some more?

I think he would have swum to England to tell King George he'd made a terrible mistake.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the brethren's reaction to Newtown and how guns don't kill people, [fill in the blank] kills people.

CULTURE COPS, OUTREACH DIVISION. Ole Perfesser Glenn Reynolds offers his services as culture-war consultant to the GOP:

Which is why I think that rich people wanting to support the Republican Party might want to direct their money somewhere besides TV ads that copy, poorly, what Lee Atwater did decades ago. 

My suggestion: Buy some women’s magazines. No, really. Or at least some women’s Web sites... 

...those magazines and Web sites see themselves, pretty consciously, as a propaganda arm of the Democratic Party. So while nine out of 10 articles may be the usual stuff on sex, diet and shopping, the 10th will always be either soft p.r. for the Democrats or soft — or sometimes not-so-soft — hits on Republicans.

Two things: 1.) What is it with Republicans and women? I guess the New York Post editorial board figures their readership in 90% misogynist, so they didn't have to worry about alienating female voters by implying they're idiots. 2.) The magic of the free market -- which suggests that gal mags prosper by feeding their readers what they know they'll like, rather than indoctrinating them against their will -- always seems to disappear from the conservative theology whenever they strap on the Goebbels revolver.

For $150 million, you could buy or start a lot of women’s Web sites. And I’d hardly change a thing in the formula. The nine articles on sex, shopping and exercise could stay the same. The 10th would just be the reverse of what’s there now.

Go ahead, guys, try it that way. But I know them -- they'll never let well enough alone, and soon you'll have this:

UPDATE. This is officially confirmed as a bad idea: Jonah Goldberg approves!

WELL, YOU TRIED, PART II. Ace of Spades, whom we discovered trying to engage the "culture" yesterday, is still at it: He read an interview in the Washington Post with the Pajamas Media nut Roger Simon about Simon's new play, which tells the story of, get this, Walter Duranty. The interview is conducted by Jennifer Rubin, whom Ace normally derides as a RINO wet, but all is forgiven because Ace has his beret on and is trying to look at the arts  -- let's see, how did he put it -- "simply because they're interesting, without any direct or indirect implication on our politics." Which means of course --

[Simon] says it's neither conservative nor liberal, and I believe him, but there is hardly any question that no liberal would explore the question of what happens when a large group of people begin subverting the truth for political purposes. Well, they wouldn't explore this going on in a liberal institution. I'm sure they'd explore it in, say, the conservative movement. 

And that's part of the problem right there, isn't? Liberals style themselves truth-tellers and truth-seekers, but as we're seeing yesterday and today, they embargo truths that aren't helpful to the Great Patriotic Cause of Progressivism/Marxism.

-- it's still more argh blargh liberalz blocked mah big hit play.

Ace's attempt to break into the liberal arts by sitting sullenly in the corner of a Modern Drama class and drawing superheroes in his notebook is extremely disappointing to me. I don't know why, but I keep hoping against hope that he'll live up to his putative expectations of himself, and he never does.

I guess I'm just tired of all the rightwing gabble about "culture" being such stupid bullshit. In the Ace post previously treated, he referred to an old Rod Dreher whither-culture bleat that, expectedly, is worse than useless -- Dreher too seems to intuit that if you can't drop politics long enough to actually engage your imagination, you're not going to make any art, but he also seems to believe the acceptable alternative is endless pseudo-philosophical gassing along the lines of "conservatives have names like Lenny and liberals have names like Carl." (And if you are foolish enough to follow Dreher's links, I warn you, you will be punished by Dreher and Will Wilkinson talking about country music. You'll need about a half-hour of Uncle Dave Macon to wash that out of your head.)

I have a theory about why this is all coming up now. These guys recently lost something they'd been living on for years -- the illusion that they are America, all by themselves, with no bleeding-hearts allowed. It's an illusion we liberals learned to give up on long ago, of course. But it may be hard for conservatives to learn that most voters are okay with the man they're convinced is a Maoist Black Power Chicago thug -- or at least that voters like him better than them. In their dejection they wander the streets, and finally enter the libraries and music shops, pick up the books and instruments there, and, peering at them like curious apes, wonder: Maybe pretty thing faggots like am powerful? Maybe if Ace use them him feel good?

I think they're less interested in art than in art therapy.

WELL, YOU TRIED. Hey guess what -- Ace of Spades is getting into the conservative-culture thing!

A film is usually about something a little bit more complicated and a little more human than a seven-word bumper-sticker sentiment. A good film always is, a good novel always is. This sort of reductivist approach just isn't interesting or worthy. At least not to me. 

Don't we do some things just for fun? Or read some things simply because they're interesting, without any direct or indirect implication on our politics?

This is so promising -- not profound, just unusually thoughtful for Ace -- that I began to think he was serious. I'm such a naïf! Some paragraphs later:

I suppose I'm suggesting a sort of Invisible Hand in imagination or intellectual inquiry -- a free market in ideas should wind up producing the best ideas, and if it doesn't, the market is rigged to guarantee bad results. 

I think the market is so currently rigged -- first, by a venal monopoly which uses its market position in one market (the media, culture, the academy) to leverage a dominant position in another (the political realm)...

Back to the bitch-bunker, boys! George Clooney can rest easy.

MISTER, I MET A MAN ONCE. At National Review, David French tells us how Big Gummint done in his ole buddy Rob (not his real name) in Tennessee, who "supported himself and made his child-support payments on time" until the Obama Recession of '09:

In early 2009, Rob was laid off from his latest job and immediately began receiving unemployment benefits... He looked for work, but he looked less and less diligently with each passing week. Benefits were extended — then extended again. While unemployed, he lived a far more sedate lifestyle and quickly began gaining weight — eating foods purchased with government assistance — and as he gained weight, his health deteriorated. His joints ached, his blood pressure rose, and he became extremely anxious. 

Knowing friends on disability — and realizing that the benefits were roughly equal to the pay he received at his last job — he applied, claiming that his muscular-skeletal problems combined with his anxiety prevented him from working. Within months, he was approved, and he stopped any effort to look for work, knowing that if he found a job his benefits would cease. His sedate lifestyle continued, his health deteriorated even further, and — soon enough — he was truly "disabled" by any objective medical measure.

In other words, we safety-netted Rob into chronic illness and long-term dependency.

In the old America, Rob might have starved, but he'd have starved proudly and wouldn't be having no fat-people problems. And if Rob should get the diabeetus, I bet Big Gummint'll give him medicine for it, thus denying him a dignified early death.

As a liberal, I'd say Rob's sad case calls for federal Bowflex subsidies.

THUMBS DOWN. I hate to get on Glenn Greenwald's bad side but his claim that he isn't really reviewing-without-having-seen Zero Dark Thirty, when his hostile non-review contains phrases like this --

That this film would depict CIA interrogation programs as crucial in capturing America's most hated public enemy, and uncritically herald CIA officials as dramatic heroes, is anything but surprising.

--and--

...the film's glorifying claims about torture are demonstrably, factually false.

--and--

What this film does, then, is uncritically presents as fact the highly self-serving, and factually false, claims by the CIA...

-- is extremely disingenuous. Greenwald's points about some of the journalism surrounding the film are valid, but his characterizations of the film itself are ridiculous. Zero Dark Thirty isn't a shadowy political figure whose hidden movements you track by eyewitness reports. It's a fucking movie. Have your editor buy you a ticket.

This is still more proof -- as if more were needed -- that you shouldn't bring your political obsessions to the temple of art. It is both more personally edifying and more pleasing to the Muses to approach a work of art as a work of art, however obnoxious it may be to you on other grounds, than to approach it as a political phenomenon. Because when you do the latter, you get into company you really don't want to be keeping.

If the thing you've actually seen, heard, or read is a piece of shit, then fire away.

I would explain further, yet again, why this is so, but I'm busy and I assume adults already know this.

UPDATE. Lotta pushback in comments. Like I said, what people are saying about the movie may be stupid, but the movie itself will make or not make its own case. Right now the whole thing's reminding me that once upon a time the big issue with Citizen Kane was supposed to be whether or not Welles had been fair to William Randolph Hearst.

CLOSET CASE. Ace of Spades:

Conservatives who live in liberal areas, or move in liberal circles, on the other hand, tend to either be pretty quiet about politics or, if trying to suss someone else out, employ shibboleths to see if the other party is a member of the tribe. 

I don't have a go-to shibboleth for this purpose. I suppose that something noncomittal and sneaky, like "Are you a fan of David Mamet?," might work. Hey, you might just mean his movies and plays. Alternatively, you might mean his recent political conversion to conservatism. A member of the tribe might pick up on that last bit and say something like, "I've become a bigger fan lately."

Maybe they should just go with a hanky code.

(There's a whole Vince Vaughn section at the link, for those of you who like it rough.)

THE TRUTH REVEALED! You heard that Obama has to take the Second Inaugural Oath on January 20, but it's Sunday this year so he's doing a private oath then and a public oath on Monday, right? OK then --  Alana Goodman, Commentary:

Politico reports that Obama’s second inaugural oath for the “most transparent administration in history” might be administered privately, without any media present... 

...Obama hasn’t exactly followed through on his vow to run a more transparent administration. It’s about time the press finally started calling him out on it. Maybe now that he’s won reelection the media will actually do its job and report critically on his presidency. At the very least this is a sign he’s not going to get the kid-gloves treatment he had during the election season.

Would you be surprised to learn Goodman's not the only nutcake making a thing out of this?

Andrew Malcolm, IBD: "So Obama, who promised once to have the most open administration in history, will take the presidential oath in private on Sunday, Jan. 20."

Michael Fletcher, Bearing Drift: "Conspiracy or not, it’s quite odd that the 'most transparent administration in history (TM)' doesn’t want the country to see the second term begin."

Rick Moran, American Thinker: "Maybe Obama wants it private because he wants to be sworn in using the Koran. Perhaps he's changed the oath, taking out 'faithfully' ('execute the office') and that last bit about preserving the Constitution... "

Dammit, Moran stole my joke! But thanks to my connections in the Administration I can at least show you the planned staging for the event:

It's just a rough; in the actual performance, Obama will trample the Constitution Gangnam Style.  And if you really want to see it, of course, they'll be showing it later on BET.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the GOP's new attitudes toward John Boehner and Jim DeMint. Boehner, formerly their enforcer, is now a horrible RINO tyrant, and DeMint, (soon to be) formerly a U.S. Senator, is now more powerful and relevant than ever as a think tank hack. It's all part of the New Way.

A fun sidelight is the brethren's excitement that Nikki Haley might name black conservative Tim Scott to replace DeMint. Matthew Vadum at FrontPageMag makes the case:

Unlike President Obama, Scott has an inspiring life story that happens to be true. Unlike Obama he was not a “red diaper baby” surrounded by Marxists from his first breath. Scott was actually born poor and unlike the president embraced the American Dream, running a business and achieving upward mobility before entering politics.

In the quest for power, racism can be tabled but slander and bullshit never sleep. At least Vadum doesn't mind he's black; check out the commenters at American Renaissance -- they get really mad at Republicans when they're not supplying them with white candidates.

UPDATE. My favorite part of the whole thing is the Reasonoids telling us what a libertarian DeMint secretly is, but they have been outdone by Timothy P. Carney at the Washington Examiner, who headlines, I swear to God, "Jim DeMint was the libertarian hero of the Senate."

For libertarians, Christian conservative pro-lifer Jim DeMint was the best thing to come through the Senate in decades. DeMint, quitting early to run the conservative Heritage Foundation, embodied an underappreciated fact of life in Washington: The politicians who most consistently defend economic liberty are the cultural conservatives.

Other prime quotes: "the big-government side in today's abortion battles is the 'pro-choicers'"; "DeMint opposes gay marriage, but again, the U.S. Senate hasn't had much to say on the issue"; and "Traditional morality and limited government aren't enemies. They're friends." Your chucklehead buddy who thinks he's kind of a libertarian because he wants to free the weed and misses the Drew Carey Show is going to be disappointed to hear that it was really all about tax breaks for the wealthy.

A LITTLE GOOD NEWS. At Zero Hedge we hear from Brandon Martin, who believes the Republicans and the Democrats are colluding to make America socialist; that there is a secret "Liberty Movement" majority afoot which would have swept the polls in 2012 if only Ron Paul had run (then why didn't he, one wonders), but because he didn't they contented themselves instead with ousting RINOs like Allen West; etc. Key passage:

Second, if you subscribe to the well documented idea that elections, at least at the federal level, are entirely staged (which I do)...

At PJ Media one Vik Rubenfeld weighs the traditional reasons conservatives give for Obama's victory (including "dependency on big government handouts on the part of some pro-Obama voters" and "mainstream media bias") and, while he finds much merit in these, cottons to this one:

For decades, adults have been told, and more importantly our children are now taught, that America owes penance due to a past history of racism. It is inevitable that this would play a key part in the reelection of the nation’s first black president.

Rubenfeld concludes that "some percentage of pro-Obama voters decided that putting racism in America’s past would be a deciding factor in their vote," referring perhaps to the voter survey that took place in his mind when he saw a white girl reading a Toni Morrison book.

Over at the Wall Street Journal we get the high-class version of this from James Taranto, who tells us once again about "the increasingly open hostility toward whites from mainstream left-liberals." (Does that mean that if race riots come back, I get to loot? Sweet.)

At Glenn Beck's The Blaze, we get a Kulturkampf kvetch from one Richard Mgrdechian, who tells us "HOW SHORT-SIGHTED LEADERSHIP HAS SABOTAGED CONSERVATIVE POP CULTURE," whatever that is. In 2012 "Republicans once again missed the boat on popular culture," he says. His solution (besides the customary hundreds of words about the need to "leverage the power of popular culture"):

The way I do this is through music. You might have heard of the band I manage – it’s called Madison Rising. We’re somewhat of an anomaly in the music industry, being a pro-American rock band and all.

That's just one example. There's also... well, that's the only example he gives, actually. Did he mention he manages a band called Madison Rising?

Meanwhile Joel Kotkin asks, What's the Matter with Connecticut? Don't you blue states realize it was in your economic best interest to vote for Mitt Romney and the Republicans, who were "the ones most likely to fall on their swords to maintain lower rates for the the mass affluent class in the bluest states and metros"? Yet you voted for Obama! You guys'll be sorry! (Kotkin has been lecturing on the imminent death of the blue states for years; he's basically the guy who expects you to fail and, when you succeed, concludes that you must secretly be miserable about it.)

The bad news is these lunatics live among us. The good news is that Republicans ain't getting their thumbs out of their asses anytime soon.

STILL ON MOOCHER PATROL. Remember when Virginia wanted to test its welfare recipients for drugs, then found out it would be an outrageous money-loser for the state and backed off? Well, another election has come and gone and Republican members are reviving the idea, because they've found a way to lose less money on it:

"We got hung up last year on the cost, and it seems that we determined the costs aren't as great as we were told last year," said Del. Dickie Bell, R-Staunton, the bill's sponsor. "There are new methods of screening and testing used other places, and some are practical and could be applied here"...

The [original] legislation failed... after the state estimated it would cost $1.5 million to administer the tests, compared with the estimated $229,000 that would be saved by stripping benefits from those who test positive...

Republicans believe a statewide testing system is necessary to prevent taxpayer money from going to drug users.

"You're going to have some abuse no matter what you do, but you can curtail it to where it's minimal," said Del. Riley Ingram, R-Hopewell.

You don't learn till way far into the Washington Examiner story that "before Florida's [similar] law was suspended by the courts, officials found that only 2 percent of welfare recipients tested positive for drugs." Heritage Foundation wonks have been pushing the alternate line that drug testing keeps people out of the welfare system, which they describe as a savings, however speculative.

But saving money is the least of it; what they really want to do is grind their heels a little harder in the faces of the indigent. Their main argument is that welfare is not part of our common obligations to one another, but the property of Them That Gots, to be grudgingly dispensed with ever-more-onerous conditions to those creatures whose subhumanity is proven by their bad luck.

Whether they're commanding the poor to pee in a cup or demanding that the childless procreate to fulfill the will of Heaven, always remember that these people are not animated by a desire to realize a common good, but by the need to assert their superiority against all evidence.

GOIN' UP THE COUNTRY. I am indebted to Travis Gettys for pointing this out to me, and wondering how I missed it: a wingnut separatist housing project!

Patriots understand that an epic storm is coming to America.

Economic collapse is imminent. Disruptions of Just-in-Time supply lines will lead America into chaos. Violence along racial, ethnic, religious and economic class lines will bring forth famine, disease and a fundamental reset of life in America. 

A group of Patriots have decided to build a community off the most likely lines of peril, a bastion of Jefferson's Rightful Liberty where we may remain safe, warm, healthy and comfortable while American society suffers the inevitable destruction that must accompany the decades of degenerating morality of our Countrymen... 

The Citadel will have between 3,500 and 5,000 households within the walls, with a single gate permitting access. The Citadel is not to be a closed society, instead a refuge for genuine Patriots who wish to live without neighbors who are Liberals and Establishment political ideologues, open for tourists who will be welcomed into our town to visit our planned Firearms Museum, shop in our Town Center, stay in a B&B or hotel while vacationing and exploring the wonderful skiing, hunting and fishing opportunities in the area, and many other attractions we will offer.

 Takers (excuse me, makers) will have their choice of "a house, townhome or condo," located in the "mountains of Idaho." If you get involved now, you can help them design their coat of arms.

Cost? Aside from the blood of patriots, not mentioned. Nor have they claimed to own the land on which to build the project yet. The Citadel is being launched in part by proceeds from assault weapon sales, and by membership fees ("Your credit card will be billed monthly by PayPal"), but we're sure if you're interested they'll tell you how much gold bullion a place in the promised land will cost.

Also, how hardcore is this: The scheme wasn't inspired by the recent election. The site has a blog which suggests that they've been at it since September at least. Among the authors' musings:

The post below discusses the very real liklihood of refugee children who will come to our gates. Of course we will give as many sanctuary as possible. What of their adults? Perhaps Liberals who did not prepare and only in the Hell of civil war truly understand that their values are stupid? Do we accept their children and tell the parents to walk back toward Hell? I have no intention of sharing my bread with a stupid Liberal who is dying because of his/her stupidity. But his kid may be a different story...

'specially if she's good breeding stock for future patriot families. Now, what will social life be like at the Citadel?

We'll have some great pubs with local brews, walking and bicycle paths, a firing range you don't have to drive a half hour or more to get to. Maybe a hill with a rope tow for sliding down on inner tubes in the winter time. Militia training will also have a unifying social aspect to it.

Sounds kinda like a cross between Schlitterbahn and a jihad training camp.

Also, the proprietors will be outfitting only the exterior of the development, "so that each Citadel resident can control each and every detail of their home," raising the fascinating possibility of a Bauhaus survivalist compound. And while they "are NOT attempting to replace existing government or existing laws," their version of co-op board rules, The Patriot Agreement, is rather grand, described as a "plan to survive" that will "improve our chances of survival and minimize our need to involve 'outside authority' in our affairs." And their lobby security is a militia.

There's plenty more: One of the Citadel's founding fathers appears to be someone called Kerodin,  who is involved in a beef with a guy at Sipsey Street Irregulars, another lunatic group, and others. Internecine quarrels seem to be an indispensable part of such enterprises, and so far even survivalist board posters can't be counted on to support the project. In short, it's kind of like Bill Whittle's Wingnut Sky World, but with a much higher chance of a hostage situation. Clusterfuck fans and federal law enforcement agents, this is one to watch!

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the news that the U.S. birth rate is way down and how rightbloggers have reacted to it. Short version: This is Obama's fault, and Republicans will cure it with morality lectures.

HERE COMES A REGULAR. Having been interested in conservatives who appear to have been driven mad by the election, I haven't spent enough time on conservatives who were quite mad beforehand. So I went and looked at The Anchoress. Here's what she thinks happened November 6:

Faced with a challenger whose most daring political strategy was to cultivate vagueness in his relentless pursuit of all things beige, and an incumbent gleefully willing to launch a daily barrage of splattering, oozing color bombs heedless of what or whom they hit–or whether their tints were environmentally toxic or even true–the voters chose “sound and fury” over “nothing.”

I think by "color bombs" she means Obama attacked beige Romney with his toxic coloredness. Actually I don't know what the fuck she's saying. Nor did I have much luck with this:

For many, and for me, the election signaled the crossing of a Rubicon of sorts: twin-towering notions of Exceptionalism and Indispensability toppled for less conspicuous walk-ups of Isolationism and Nanny Statism; the running out of a clock, all illusions lain aside.

My best guess is: Once America was butch and ruled, but now it's self-involved and doesn't want to engage the world at all, sort of like Ferdinand the Bull. Also, twin-toweredly, 9/11 Changed Everything, slightly used and yours for 90% off. (She said something similar shortly after the election, too -- that "for young adults and the generations coming up the backbone of conservative theory—rugged individualism, privacy, minimal government—is a complete non-sequitur"; now we were no longer right with Reagan, and so must reap the whirlwind.)

We begin, I think, by giving simple thanks to God for the election—without conditions or sly assumptions that we know anything or are somehow colluding with Providence. 

Here I was on firmer ground. From experience I knew that whenever our Mean Fake Nun puts on the wimple of piety, as surely as Gomorrah follows Sodom there will follow some viciousness. Sure enough, in the very next line --

That sounds counterintuitive, I know, but whenever I think a circumstance precludes gratitude, I remember the story of two sisters offering prayerful thanks for the fleas that infested their barracks in a Nazi concentration camp...

One of the benefits of well-drawn villains is that they spur us to examine ourselves for their flaws; when I am mindful enough, and I catch myself being passive-aggressive, I take the example of The Anchoress to warn me off it. Next I'll try taping a picture of Jonah Goldberg to my fridge.

A PLEASANT SURPRISE. Here's a further development on the "Alinsky! I'll show you Alinsky" theme, taken up by conservatives who realize they have an image problem and will accept any crazy explanation for it except their own actions. It's from J.R. Dunn at American Thinker. He thinks conservatives don't know how to do "the dark arts of image manipulation" (Bob Haldeman chuckles in Hell) and don't fight back when mocked by liberals. Also, traitors like Peggy Noonan and David Brooks sell them out, etc. That's all SOP, but this bit is, so far as I have noticed, an innovation:

...the third major class of response, that of embracing the stereotype, of taking it on as a kind of costume, and even pushing it farther than the left themselves. I knew a noted spokesman for one of the major conservative media organizations who used to appear at public lectures with two heavy-set young men standing at either side of the lectern wearing camo fatigues and sunglasses, thus turning himself from conservative spokesman into Benito Mussolini. This same kind of behavior can be found at all levels of the movement from comment threads all the way to the top. Rush indulges in it all too often. Ann Coulter has made a career of it. While definitely a crowd-pleaser, it is, in the end, self-defeating. These stereotypes were constructed by the left for a reason -- to manipulate the public at large, ignorant of political subtleties and unfamiliar with doctrine, into certain visceral reactions to conservatives and their ideas. They were created to destroy conservatives. Why play along with them?

Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh are playing into liberals' hands by feeding conservatives red meat on a daily basis and making millions of dollars off it. I like to imagine Coulter and Limbaugh reading this, becoming guilt-wracked, and returning to the sober, Cambridge Union Society mode of discourse they used to do, back when it was all about the music.

Mainly I want to know who the Mussolini guy was. I'm guessing Michael Fumento.

Oh, give Dunn credit for offering the brethren practical Alinksy-fu lessons:

Calling Sandra Fluke a "slut" merely generated sympathy for her. Turning her into a clown uncertain what to do with a condom if one was handed to her would have shut the whole campaign down in short order. (How about the Facebook "Sandra Fluke Condom Support Group"?)

The next four years are going to be awesome.

ANOTHER DAY IN BIZARRO WORLD. At the Wall Street Journal, James Taranto tells us several ways in which black people are oppressing white people. For example, the Obama campaign sent a survey to the President's constituents, asking "Which constituency groups do you identify yourself with? Check all that apply" -- and there was no box for Whites! "The danger for the country," says Taranto, "is that a racially polarized electorate will produce a hostile, balkanized culture." About three hundred years too late to worry about that, buddy.

Taranto also pulls the you-were-bigots-first argument:

For a century after the Civil War, Southern white supremacists were an important part of the Democratic Party coalition. They were defeated and discredited in the 1960s, and the Democrats, still the party of identity politics, switched their focus to various nonwhite minorities.

Since history is like a game of musical chairs, this wiley Democrat shape-shifting left Republicans no choice but to play the role of Racist Assholes from the 60s onward. And people keep blaming Republicans for it! The white man is truly the white man of liberal fascism.

You know who else isn't to blame? Rightwing Assholes. Andrew Klavan explains that when Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh say "retard" and "slut," it's only because they're righteously indignant over liberal lies. Even this, they might have borne with good grace and perhaps an occasional "faggot" or "feminazi," but the damn liberals provoke them still further with their decorum: "They don’t use words like retard and slut. They don’t raise their voices. You could invite them to dinner without embarrassing yourself." Now what self-respecting sociopathic teenager wouldn't go ballistic over that? And once again, conservatives get blamed for something that isn't their fault.

Meanwhile intellectual titans Glenn Reynolds, Nick Gillespie, and Ross Douthat all say America is like The Hunger Games because there are rich people in Washington, while in giant forced labor camps like Salt Lake City and Dallas everyone lives off hardtack and dreams of a day when the white man's vote is worth something again. Extra credit to Ole Perfesser Reynolds for making this half-hearted attempt to shore up his crap metaphor:

Even in upscale parts of L.A. or New York, you see boarded up storefronts and other signs that the economy isn't what it used to be.

Yeah, someone told me they saw Michael Bloomberg the other day fighting a bum over a dead pigeon.

So, to recap: Liberals destroyed America, then bamboozled citizens into thinking the conservatives did it, leaving conservatives no choice but to act like jerks and write very poorly. Or, as I like to think of it, another day in paradise.

UPDATE. As a bonus, your moment of Goldstein, celebrating a spike in gun sales:

...at a certain point, when you can survive the loss of heat or the shutdown of an electrical grid for two weeks — when you can provide for your family and keep them safe and protected while all those who rely on government run about confused, carping, demanding, frustrated... all attempts to ironize away the concept of self-reliance and rugged individualism in favor of the glories of an overarching and protective federal government, a campaign the left has for years carried forth in the academy, in government, and through popular culture, dissipate like the insubstantial rhetorical mists they’ve always been. 

And once that fog lifts, people may once again choose liberty over tyranny.

I expect some day Jeffy will give us that post-structural version of The Turner Diaries we've been hoping for.  Or maybe his greatest achievement will be the day he sees some tweakers in a hostage situation on the TV news, yells "THIS IS IT!" like Gary Oldman in JFK, and runs stripped to the waist out his front door into a police ambush.

UPDATE 2. Comments are as usual magnificent (come on Foster, you ain't even looking). "Yeah," says Jimcima, "it really sucked when the 99 cent store that used to be between Bulgari and Tiffany down on Rodeo went out of business." zuzu and others wonder when liberals stopped being potty-mouths. (Never, says I! Even now I am working on a cognate of "slut" and "retard," a sort of ultimate weapon of Alinskyite ridicule; "sluttard," my prototype, is too cumbersome for my flow, but maybe I can train the masses to accept it, like they accepted "Thee" for "The.")

Goldstein, as usual, is a great source of inspiration. Fats Durston reacts to "attempts to ironize away the concept of self-reliance and rugged individualism":

God, if I see another movie with Bruce Willis as a caring federal bureaucrat whose agency defeats the villains with targeted food stamp distribution, I swear I am going to make my own indie film where, for once, the climactic scene will be a mano-y-mano fistfight.

Really, I should just front-page the comments and hide the posts.

DA, DA. WE LAUGH! At American Thinker, Thomas Lifson:

Two of the most interesting stars in the world of conservative broadcasting have newly published books timed for the for the Christmas season.  Michael Savage and Greg Gutfeld...

Yeah, I know, fellas, but wait:

...Michael Savage and Greg Gutfeld are both masters of ridicule, a tool extensively deployed by the left but too little by the right, especially its more respectable regions. The left, after all, was instructed by Saul Alinsky in Rule Number 5: Ridicule is man's most potent weapon. It's hard to counterattack ridicule, and it infuriates the opposition, which then reacts to your advantage."

Once again we're on the Bizarro Alinsky planet, where conservatives tell us that liberals only make fun of conservatives because Alinsky told them to -- which stands to reason, since why else would anyone tease demigods like Jonah Goldberg and Ben Shapiro? Why, it would be like teasing Margaret Dumont! -- and pledge to fight back against this traitorous mockery by cooking up some Alinsky #5 of their own.

But it's an uphill battle, friends. Lifson quotes some Gutfield humor, and in the ensuing uncomfortable silence tells us that "the mix of irony and insight is what makes Gutfeld dangerous to the left. His juxtapositions of liberals' rhetoric with their behavior make them appear ridiculous." If that doesn't have you busting a gut, consider this: "The liberal media, however, is not anxious to increase [Gutfield's] visibility beyond Fox, because he is capable of reaching impressionable young minds that might be questioning the indoctrination they have received in the nation's educational system. " Now it's funny, right?

I'll spare you the Michael Savage encomium, though I must mention that Lifson considers him "the greatest storyteller in modern broadcasting" but quotes none of his allegedly brilliant work -- though he does tell us that Savage tried to get a PhD from Berkeley, "only to discover that because he was not a woman or a favored minority, an academic career would be denied to him," which should be proof enough of his brilliance.

The creepy thing -- well, the creepiest; there are several levels of ick here -- is that Lifson seems to want to tell us what he likes about a couple of artists, but the only attributes he can convincingly describe are their politics and their grievances. I don't know what possibility is more chilling: That he might think that's what art is about, or that he might think that's what everything is about.

BRINGING A KNIFE TO A CULTURE WAR. Conservatives of the what-went-wrong school are still working the culture angle. While some are predicting they'll win hearts and minds with Steve Crowder, others are still more confident; Sonny Bunch at the Wall Street Journal points to conservative gains in the crucial field of pop culture studies, offering Paul A. Cantor's schoolly The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture in evidence.

Once upon a time, the book tells Bunch, statist TV producers gave us propaganda like "Have Gun Will Travel," in which Richard Boone "sets himself up as superior to the community he is helping, imposing his own solution on it and often expressing open contempt for the people who run it." (Sounds a little like John Wayne talking about High Noon.) Now look how Lockean "Deadwood" is, how "Martin Scorsese's 'The Aviator' provides as clean a rejection of crony capitalism as exists in entertainment." Plus, did you ever hear of Edgar G. Ulmer? No? Then this book is for you!

Bunch's conclusion:

...the author's castigation of "elites who want to keep the American people in line" and who thus "fear the explosive energy of popular culture" underscores how much has changed since Mr. Cantor first mounted his defense of pop culture in "Gilligan Unbound." We live in a world in which "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" is routinely taught in colleges and critical groupthink holds that "television shows are the new novels." The elites, if they haven't quite lost, are certainly on the ropes.

It's finally happened: The right's Bizarro Alinsky fetish had led it on a parallel long march through the institutions. Only instead of taking over the history and literature departments, they want to teach bored graduate students how  to "read" crap sitcoms and prestige cable shows. That'll show those elites with their long, boring books!

Either that or it's just a recruitment device: Hey kids, are the usual wingnut welfare sinecures too demanding for you? Enlist in the Pop Culture Corps! Beats workin'.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the miserable rightblogger Thanksgiving. Couldn't have happened to a nicer bunch of guys.

Among the outtakes: National Review's sour holiday symposium, named, believe it or not, "Gratitude, Even in November 2012." Among the authors' reflections: "This year’s unsettling election results disturb the souls of most with whom I keep company"; "'Happy Thanksgiving — not that it is very happy,' I grumbled earlier today on my morning coffee run to the only other person I know to be a registered Republican in my Northwest Washington neighborhood," and other such bitchery. Special credit to Michael Novak, who writes, "experience shows that Providence, in failing to grant our prayers, normally has wiser things in mind. In a way, our present loss may be a reprieve for the Party of Liberty, such that it does not have to inherit the damage that is surely coming down on this nation during the next four years... Sometimes nations need chastisement before they get the point." It's always clarifying when one of these assholes prays for God to smite America so that they'll do what he wants.