WHOA, NELLIE.

Mark Steyn has something out about how much he hates homosexuals. Oh, wait, sorry, there's a MacGuffin -- gay people are oppressing him, or somebody. For instance:

By contrast, Canada’s GSA is the Gay-Straight Alliance. The GSA is all over the GTA (the Gayer Toronto Area), but in a few remote upcountry redoubts north of Timmins intolerant knuckle-dragging fundamentalist school boards declined to get with the beat. So the Ontario Government has determined to afflict them with the “Accepting Schools Act.” 

“Accepting?” One would regard the very name of this bill as an exquisite parody of the way statist strong-arming masquerades as limp-wristed passivity were it not for the fact that the province’s Catholic schools, reluctant to accept government-mandated GSAs, are proposing instead that they should be called “Respecting Differences” groups. Good grief, this is the best a bigoted theocrat can come up with?

While he's frothing, let's look at the bill. It's long-winded and bureaucratic, but the net effect seems to be to keep kids from being bullied in school, and to require that if someone's getting bullied in school, the school has to talk to the bully's parents, which hardly seems like the thin end of any wedge to me.  The bill does mention gayness as a casus bully, which is what seems to have set Steyn off.

Also the frostbacks apparently have both a Pink Shirt Day in February and a Day of Pink in April for the kids, both about not bullying gay kids. This doesn't seem any more or less objectionable than the 100th Day of School shirt thing, and who knows, the little thugs might learn something from it; doubtless if any of them feel put upon, they will bear with it as we did back in my day, and develop Bad Attitudes. Maybe Steyn is eager to regain his youth, and is doing so vicariously by writing this:

That’s great news! Nothing says “celebrate diversity” like forcing everyone to dress exactly the same, like a bunch of Maoists who threw their workers’ garb in the washer but forgot to take the red flag out... 

What about if you’re the last non-sexualized tween schoolgirl in Ontario? You’re still into ponies and unicorns and have no great interest in the opposite sex except when nice Prince William visits to cut the ribbon at the new Transgendered Studies Department. What if the other girls are beginning to mock you for wanting to see Anne Of Green Gables instead of Anne Does Avonlea? Is there any room for the sexual-developmentally challenged in the GSAs?

In and among these paranoid delusions there's a lot of yap about "soft totalitarian, collectivized, state-enforced, glassy-eyed homogeneity" and such like. But I get the sense Steyn's not serious about that. (Who could be, apart from religious maniacs ululating about Sodom and Steve? And for all his faults Steyn doesn't seem to swing that way.) I'm told he wrote a whole book about how the West is doomed because Mooslems, and another about how America is doomed because debt, but if this is the order of evidence he offers, I'd say he's just looking for some high school drama. Has no one told him about Glee?

THEY EAT THEIR OWN.

Twitchy:

It’s also liberals who would encourage the sort of creepy messaging coordination that [S.E.] Cupp is proposing. Get Republicans to denounce Limbaugh on different networks? What would that accomplish, other than making George Soros proud?... Her remarks have left a bad taste in the mouths of many conservatives, who feel that in issuing a sweeping indictment of Limbaugh as “dangerous,” Cupp is only hurting the conservative cause...

Warren Todd Huston:

S.E. Cupp's unhelpful apostasy... S.E. Cupp is wrong, wrong, wrong.

RedState:

And that’s the point that Cupp misses even as she explains herself. She can disagree with Limbaugh all day. Hell, she can make a career out of it she wants (she may have unintentionally done so already). But if you’re going to rage against the machine, expect some return fire, and don’t be surprised that when you go to the New York Times, they may apply motives to you that don’t exist.

Jeffrey Lord, The American Spectator:

The fact that Ms. Cupp doesn’t get this — even now, almost a full year after this controversy — startles. It means, apparently, one of two things. Either Cupp herself is a moderate on the issue (can a “conservative columnist,” as conservatives mock of elected officials, “grow in office” — i.e., become moderate?), or she is simply unaware of the history.

Either way Cupp vividly illustrates that she — and presumably her Proximus compadres — are advocating nothing newer than yesterday’s moderate Republicanism.

J. Robert Smith, American Thinker:

Picking a fight with Limbaugh, the dean of conservative talkers, particularly in a New York Times interview, is a nice little publicity gambit for a reputed young conservative. The liberal media eats up apostasy on the right... Cupp's elevation to talking head and opinion shaper couldn't have possibly occurred but for contemporary America's obsession with youth -- youth and looks... One suspects that Cupp cares more what's said about her, at least among Manhattan's liberal set.

Hm? Oh, I don't have a point here; I'm just enjoying myself. It's almost as good as the Sparticists vs. the ISO, or the People's Front of Judea vs. The Judean People's Front. It's getting so I hope they lose worse in 2014 -- not for political reasons, but because if they're this much fun now, imagine how much fun they'll be when they're even more aware of their unpopularity.

QUI TRANTULIT SUSTINET.

For years now, Joel Kotkin's been telling us that the Blue States are through, because demographics. Things haven't worked out for him, but he's still at it. In the Wall Street Journal:

In the wake of the 2012 presidential election, some political commentators have written political obituaries of the "red" or conservative-leaning states, envisioning a brave new world dominated by fashionably blue bastions in the Northeast or California. But political fortunes are notoriously fickle, while economic trends tend to be more enduring. 

These trends point to a U.S. economic future dominated by four growth corridors that are generally less dense, more affordable, and markedly more conservative and pro-business: the Great Plains, the Intermountain West, the Third Coast (spanning the Gulf states from Texas to Florida), and the Southeastern industrial belt...

I'm so old I remember when all those Californians who were escaping from high taxes to Southwestern states like Nevada, New Mexico, and Colorado were going to become Republicans, but hey look what happened. When places get more developed they tend to get more liberal.  (Kotkin's got a better bet in those areas where growth will come from gas and fracking jobs. The ensuing poisoned air and water ought to keep Louisiana from going Democratic for generations.)

I don't know how long they can keep telling themselves stories like this before they try to win votes by changing their policies instead of trying to grow new Republicans in shale oil.

UPDATE. vista, in comments: "If this is the case then our future is the growth of the undereducated, working low wage jobs with zero benefits, living in polluted areas with crumbling infrastructure." I believe that's the plan.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP...

... about the "Day of Resistance" for gun nuts. Now please excuse me, I'm watching the Oscars (and doing okay with predix, and live-tweeting).

UPDATE. Oh speaking of Oscars, attend this especially Zhdanovite horseshit from Mark Joseph at National Review called "Lincoln’s Lost Opportunities":

First, there was the team that brought forth this film about the president who founded the Republican party, a team led by the blue-state heroes Steven Spielberg, screenwriter Tony Kushner, author Doris Kearns Goodwin, and Daniel Day-Lewis....

Oh wait, it gets better:

There is another surefire way to keep traditionalist audiences away from a movie, and the makers of Lincoln played that card as well: bad language...
“Sadly, the movie also contains about 40 obscenities and profanities, including four ‘f’ words and more than 10 GDs,” noted MovieGuide, a site that a good number of traditionalists consult before attending movies...

And another thing: What was all that anti-businessman talk in Citizen Kane? No wonder America hates Hollywood!

UPDATE 2. Jesus, Nate Silver knows everything.

UPDATE 3. Post-Oscar whining commences; I assume tomorrow there'll be plenty of rightwing argh-blargh about Michelle Obama's appearance. (Here's an early return from Todd Starnes on Twitter: "Tonight was supposed to be about Hollywood - but Mrs. Obama made it about herself." The concern of a Fox News shouter for the noble traditions of Hollywood is touching.) Meanwhile at National Review, somebody named Gina R. Dalfonzo:

Whatever one thinks of the movies being honored, and however fervently one roots for one’s favorites, there’s a depressing sameness to the annual Oscar ritual these days.

"These days"?

Chris Loesch was tweeting about how conservatives need to quit “belittling” pop culture, and start recognizing “the importance of engaging in and making good art.” He made a very good point. But the engaging would be so much easier if, on occasions like these, Hollywood’s best and brightest would give us something to work with.

The Oscars gets a billion viewers worldwide every year. Why would they give a fuck what conservatives think? See "market, free."

Still -- do read my Voice thing. They beat us if we don't deliver traffic.

UPDATE 4. Also at National Review, Wesley "Make Sure to Include My Middle Initial, I'm a Pompous Ass" Smith:

Can you imagine the Oscars allowing anyone to host the big show who had mocked defenseless minorities? No? Well, think again. This year’s host, Seth McFarlane, created Family Guy, a show which castigated the late Terri Schiavo as a “vegetable”...

I await Smith's denunciations of those who wring humor from the tragedy of people slipping on banana peels.

I CAN'T GO ON OSCAR PREDICTING; I'LL GO ON OSCAR PREDICTING.

This is one of those years where I saw practically nothing up for an Academy Award -- which judging from my past performance as a predictor can either be good or bad for my chances. So attend my belly-flop below.

I will add here, as I have been meaning to since I saw it, that Django Unchained is terrific -- by far Tarantino's best movie. (Mild spoilers.) In Inglourious Basterds I detected a great advance in his filmmaking, but also a lot of his usual annoying tics, such as the use of photogenic violence to resolve situations he couldn't think his characters out of. And that was strange, because if anything offers a good foundation for germane but over-the-top violent scenes, it's Nah-zis. But Tarantino doesn't make the same mistake with slavery: the eruptions of bloodshed make perfect sense, as illustrations of either the oppressive situation or of the hero's wrath. And Django Unchained is much more efficient than Tarantino's other scripts -- the hero's goal is always before us, and each ratchet of the building tension keenly felt; the digressions, such as the lovely snowy romp to "I Got a Name," are pleasurable interludes instead of oh-God-what-now-do-I-have-to-listen-to-David-Carradine. It's a cartoon, sure, but sometimes cartoons are pretty great; when the horrible Stephen bawls over his horrible, fallen master it's lurid, pathetic, and amazing. The only Tarantino thing still around to bug me is characters allowed to live for no discernible reason except to keep the movie going. But who knows; maybe he'll get to that next.

Okay, let's wrap this turkey before I puke:

BEST PICTURE: Lincoln. Nate Silver's method says Argo, but that method (largely based on other awards' histories) doesn't take Academy history sufficiently into account. What other movies have won Best Picture without a Best Director nomination? Driving Miss Daisy, Grand Hotel, and Wings. Even Michael Anderson was nominated for Around the World in 80 Days. The best chance for Argo is suggested by the weak field in which Daisy won; the enlarged Best Picture field would amplify the effect of a lack of consensus. But there's a big, popular, about-our-beloved-President movie in the running that voters can feel good about electing.

BEST DIRECTOR: Steven Spielberg, Lincoln. Him again? Well, the voters seem to let him have it when he does something big and noble and (unlike Munich) uncomplicated.

BEST ACTOR: Daniel Day-Lewis, Lincoln. Is there anyone in there they love as much as him? Denzel Washington by all accounts tore it up in Flight; his is the best outside chance.

BEST ACTRESS: Jennifer Lawrence, Silver Linings Playbook. If the movie is popular enough, this goes to the new girl everyone loves. Plus, bonus, mental illness! And Away from Her taught me that old people in dire straits just make everyone sad.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR. Robert De Niro, Silver Linings Playbook. Here's my sucker bet! (Carpetbagger's too.) They're all previous winners, so the give-him-one-already impulse is moot. Doing this by ESP, I surmise that there is a deep enough well of affection for the movie that voters would like to honor it beyond the Best Actress category. And I am told that in this one, De Niro finally figured out how to do comedy.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Anne Hathaway, Les Miserables. I'm not a total idiot.

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY: Zero Dark Thirty. Shrouded in controversy, is it? Tough titty. This is the movies and movies are magic.

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY: Argo. There was something they loved about it and it apparently wasn't the acting or directing.

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY: Claudio Miranda, Life of Pi. I went down swinging with Roger Deakins and True Grit a few years back. No more! (Also, look at the Bond films' record at the Oscars.)  Life of Pi got a lot of nominations; there must be something they liked about it, and my uneducated guess is they liked the way it looks...

BEST SCORE: Mychael Danna, Life of Pi. ...and the way it sounds. I was going to pick Thomas Newman for Skyfall, on account of his long unrewarded nomination streak, but as the cinematography category shows, outside the top categories these people aren't sentimental.

BEST PRODUCTION DESIGN: Lincoln. As Bluto told Flounder, I've given this a lot of thought, and I just don't think the members will vote for Life of Pi three times.  

BEST SONG: "Skyfall," Skyfall.

BEST COSTUME DESIGN: Anna Karenina. Brutally Honest Oscar Voter is right: They love them puffy dresses.

BEST FILM EDITING. Zero Dark Thirty. It's got action, it's got suspense, Argo already got an award.

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE: Brave. A lot of these voters have little girls. Also, daughters. (Steve Martin did this joke better.)

BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE: Searching for Sugar Man.
BEST DOCUMENTARY SHORT: Mondays at Racine.
BEST ANIMATED SHORT: Paperman.
BEST LIVE ACTION SHORT: Curfew.
BEST FOREIGN-LANGUAGE FILM: Amour.
BEST MAKEUP: Les Miserables.
BEST SOUND MIXING: Les Miserables.
BEST SOUND EDITING: Zero Dark Thirty.
BEST VISUAL EFFECTS: Prometheus.

Good luck to us all.

UPDATE. The links are a bit wonky, but here's a fun Oscar quiz.

WARNING: TRUST THE SHORTER, JAMES TARANTO EDITION

Shorter James Taranto: James Fallows was punked by an internet joke about Fox News being dumb, and admitted it. Ben Shapiro was punked by an internet joke about Chuck Hagel belonging to a fictional pro-Hamas group, and refuses to admit he was punked or even that it was a joke. If you've ever read my bullshit before, you can guess which one I'm siding with here.

UPDATE. Taranato thinks I have a reading comprehension problem. I guess I'm supposed to pay closer attention to his more-in-sorrow-than-anger, both-sides-do-it tone than to his argument, such as it is:

The difference is that whereas the Fox joke [Fallows fell for] could easily be confirmed as a joke merely by checking out the Zombie Rainbow page that was its source, the "Friends of Hamas" joke [Shapiro fell for] came from a reporter for a major newspaper--that is, somebody whose job involves trading on his own reputation for credibility.

Except Shapiro himself disputes this in his bizarre, belligerent response to being caught out, in which he claims his real source says he has other sources for the story besides the reporter ("Our Senate source denies that Friedman is the source of this information. 'I have received this information from three separate sources, none of whom was Friedman,' the source said"). Talk about an uncooperative client!

Taranto spends the rest of his item explaining that, while Mistakes Were Made, Shapiro made a harmless slip that merely led to the uncorrected smearing of Hagel, whereas Fallows thought a joke about Fox News was real, which is why such errors will henceforth be known by people who talk rightwing code to one another as "the Fallows Principle." What am I missing?

THERE'S RICH, AND THEN THERE'S HANSON RICH.

Victor Davis Hanson's crying "Vanitas!" again. Since Obama was elected, you can't deport Mexicans anymore, they're letting women serve in combat, and worst of all, some people of whom Hanson does not approve might not die broke in a rooming-house:

Does it really make all that much difference whether you are a doctor at 70 who religiously put away $1,000 a month for thirty years, compounded at the old interest, and planned to retire on the interest income, or a cashless state employee with a defined benefit pension plan? The one might have over $1 million in his savings account, but the other a bigger and less risky monthly payout. Suddenly the old adult advice to our children — “Save and put your money in the bank to receive interest” — is what? “Spend it now or borrow as much as you can at cheap interest”?

That guy got off easy, idling away his days as a highway patrolman or a garbageman, then being rewarded with a comfortable old age. What kind of message is this sending our youth? (The bit about cheap interest is what the classicists call a non sequitur.)

Also, some of the people Hanson doesn't like have even gotten rich:

There are not just the rich and poor any more, but now the “good rich” (e.g., athletes, rappers, Hollywood stars, Silicon Valley grandees, Democratic senators, liberal philanthropists, etc.) and the “bad rich” (e.g., oil companies, CEOs, doctors, the Koch brothers, etc.). The correct-thinking nomenklatura and the dutiful apparat versus the kulaks and enemies of the people.

Both the "apparat" and the "kulaks" seem pretty flush to me. But the former get their asses kissed by fancy magazines, and the latter by Victor Davis Hanson, so I can see why they'd feel hard done by.

After decades of philosophizing, Hanson has suddenly discovered class warfare. And he wants in -- but he knows the priests at the temple of Mammon frown on that. So he's devised a dispensation for himself: He'll only rag on the undeserving rich. And while others would draw a distinction between those whose wealth is earned and those whose wealth is unearned, Hanson knows what really makes a man worthy of Fortune's smile: the right politics. These days, this is what passes for conservative populism.

CULTURE CLUBBED.

William A. Jacobson of Legal Insurrection:

I previously wrote about how BuzzFeed Politics has combined “the culture” and savvy crafting into a highly effective tool for undermining Republicans with subtle and not-so-subtle mockery. “Look at the goofy cat, look at the goofy celeb, look at the goofy Republican” is more dangerous to us than a 5000-word article in The New York Times Sunday Magazine.

Figures he'd put "the culture" in quotes; culture is clearly something that mystifies and terrifies him so much that he's compelled to describe in it police-blotter what-the-kids-call-it language, like "wilding" or "whirlpooling."

Jacobson's screed is about some Upworthy thing that shows Senator Elizabeth Warren kicking banker ass. You may recall from the recent election that Jacobson had a raging hard-on for Warren, and it appears to have persisted. The idea that something positive about Warren has been published and is drawing good traffic appears to have driven Jacobson around the bend:

Upworthy is the fastest growing website and already receives millions of visits a month despite being less than one year old, and has over 55 thousand Twitter followers. It recently received $4 million in venture capital funding. 

Upworthy is not interested in deep thinking, or you... 

The first thing to note is that when you click on the homepage link to the post, an anti-NRA poll pops up. It’s the equivalent of a push poll, delivering a political message in the form of a poll... How long before Upworthy runs a post about the overwhelming demand that Congress “stand up to the NRA”?...

There is nothing like Upworthy or BuzzFeed on the right. The closest we have come is Twitchy, Michelle Malkin’s brilliant website...

We are losing the fight to the lowest of low information voters, who are pushed toward a liberal agenda by very smart and talented people who understand the power of social media in a way we don’t...

What a way to try and motivate people -- telling them there's a popular website out there that doesn't care about them! That's meant for people who are not them! It's like me getting pissed at a Justin Bieber fan site.

Jacobson and guys like him have been running their schtick for years without evincing any of the kind of skills that normally give writers pleasure -- they don't produce interesting wordplay, fresh insights, journalistic discoveries, or even good jokes. The only time you can feel something like excitement coming from their work is when they're attacking someone and have hope of defeating them.

In short, they're propagandists. They took up the tools of culture to further their cause, probably as a last resort -- not everyone has what it takes to be a ward heeler -- but while some people who do that sort of thing eventually learn some interest in, and even affection for, the act of creating, these guys seem impervious to it. Day after day they take political messages out of the appropriate briefing documents, move the parts around a little so it doesn't look suspicious, and hit "post." They don't do inspiration. If you gave them a block of marble and a chisel and all the time in the world, they'd be looking around for a liberal to kill with the chisel.

The Upworthy guys aren't doing anything amazing, but because it involves the effective use of words and video and some social media widgets, it makes guys like Jacobson crazy. They feel they should have that power, and try to whip it up by telling their fans: Look, someone is doing a "culture" thing! We must do something about that! And they wait, crouched in their holes, for the answer -- without any idea that they might find it in themselves, if only they weren't such miserable, joyless little turds.

POE'S LAW WINS AGAIN.

I have been following online kulturkampf mag Acculturated a while now, but I may have to stop. First there's this new Downton Abbey essay by Ashley E. McGuire -- a servant was sent away for having been knocked up, apparently, and McGuire reacts:

On the one hand, Grantham’s hypocrisy makes me glad for progressive laws that ensure that sexual assault gets prosecuted and that men have to pay, at least financially, when they sire a child. 

On the other hand, it makes me wonder, are things that much better today?

Wut.

Men are expected to sleep around to be manly. But whereas women were once expected to be pure, now women are expected to sleep around (thanks Hanna Rosin!) to be feminists but still somehow be pure to be desirable.

They do?

Like it or not, virginity in a woman is still very much valued.

It is? Oh hold on, McGuire has evidence:

Nothing exemplifies this better than recent examples of women auctioning off their virginity for absurd sums.

Then I looked at the Acculturated TOC and found an essay called, "One Way to Resurrect Manliness: Everyone, Dress Better!"

I'm genuinely flummoxed. I want to keep making fun of them, but I begin to suspect Acculturated is really an epic internet fraud like Christwire. I'm afraid I'll look silly when they rip the mask off and turn out to be a bunch of Vassar students having a laugh. Come to think of it, I've seen few besides the very dumbest conservatives ever linking to them...

Another bad sign: They do podcasts at Ricochet, an obvious parody site.

Does anyone have the inside story?  Thanks in advance.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about rightblogger State of the Union coverage, which got particularly harsh when people began laughing at Marco Rubio. Mockery is one thing that really throws them; they know it engages some sort of normal human emotion, but since it isn't rage, shame, or resentment they have a hard time putting their finger on it.

Among the outtakes was Larry Kudlow's column, in which he referred to Obama's and Rubio's speeches as "dueling State of the Union messages" and said "by far the best line" of the evening was Rubio's "Presidents in both parties -- from John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan -- have known that our free-enterprise economy is the source of our middle-class prosperity" -- a bit of rhetoric I'd put on the level of "the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog," but which Kudlow called "a brilliant summary of pro-growth policies, on the supply-side and in a free-market context." The bar is set low for Republican boy wonders, apparently.

I had a lot of American Spectator contributions in this one, and could have added more. When one of your SOTU rebuttals contains this...

Listening to Obama’s address on Tuesday night, I was reminded of something I read last week from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison. Bonhoeffer was, of course, a German theologian who lived during the Hitler era.

...you might consider beginning all your subscriber messages, "Dear Fellow Dead-Ender."

ANNALS OF THE CULTURE WAR, PERSECUTION MANIA EDITION.

The Ol' Perfesser was pimping something at Forbes called "Down On Downton: Why The Left Is Torching Downton Abbey," and I thought, that's strange, I haven't seen any such thing. I have seen those crazy kids at Acculturated kvelling over Downton Abbey as some sort of conservative thing, as if it were a political candidate and not some stupid TV show. I've also seen Jonah Goldberg claim the show for  the right because "the whole point of the show is to sympathize with the landed gentry" and one of the villains is gay. Since then I've seen similar yak from PJ Lifestyle ("5 Covert Conservative Lessons in Downton Abbey"),  First Things ("Downton Abbey is the perfect anti-Girls" -- their hard-on for Lena Dunham never dies), Gary North ("here we TV have a show which basically is opposed to the idea of confiscatory inheritance taxation" and references to Adam Smith and Edmund Burke), etc.

So I went to Forbes to see Jerry Bowyer lay out the evidence:

That’s arguably why the left is bashing Downton Abbey. The New York Times Art Beat column has reported that British critics are ‘torching’ Downton Abbey. Apparently Downton Abbey is snobbish, culturally necrophiliac (and if you don’t yet know what that word means, I suggest you leave it that way) and its popularity in the United States is due to the rise of the Tea Party movement and conservative opposition to the death tax. Even worse, creator Julian Fellowes is the holder of a Tory Peerage. Definitely not the right sort of people.

Wait a minute -- British critics? I clicked through to Art Beat: They mention the criticisms of Simon Schama and James Fenton, and... that's it. Two English guys.

Having thus established the conspiracy, Bowyer goes on to explain why The Left/two English guys hate the show: "Downton Abbey‘s message is an anti-class warfare one. The fact is that the spirit of the critics is hard left, and maybe that’s why Downton Abbey makes them so angry, because the success of the series shows that this group does not speak for America."

These guys couldn't be projecting any harder if they had halogen lamps up their butts. Plus: Don't they feel ashamed to be watching anything on the communist PBS?

UPDATE. I wonder why Bowyer didn't mention this, from Irin Carmon at Salon: "Why liberals love 'Downton Abbey.'" It's about... why liberals love Downton Abbey. Why, it's as if they have the ability to enjoy things that don't flatter every single one of their prejudices. What savages! But at the Washington Times, Jack Cashill offers an alternate explanation:

Carmon’s liberal friends may have sensed that their own ill-formed ideologies lack the integrity and the grace of the one they are exposed to in some detail on successive Sunday nights each winter. Outwardly, they may continue to reject the world the Crawleys have inherited, but inwardly, they envy it, and once a week at least, through the magic of television, they get to be part of it.

So in this reading, liberals actually love the show, but only because they wish they were conservatives. Well, when you spend years of your life telling people that Bill Ayers wrote Barack Obama's book, you may develop impressive self-convincing skills.

UPDATE 2. In comments, L Bob Rife: "Could someone wake me when the Acculturatniks lay claim to the 'Harlem Shake'?"

ANNALS OF THE CULTURE WAR, CONT.

I am grateful to Will Sommer -- who's doing fun things with the Washington City Paper blog, by the way -- for luring me back to Acculturated, the rightwing kulturkampf factory where I had previously found an essay about how feminists kept us all from living in Downton Abbey and saying "jolly good" or something. Sommer's find is by Mark Judge, nee Mark Gavreau Judge and a recurring minor character in the alicublog buffooniverse, who agrees with Kay Hymowitz's shtick about American men having too much fun, and blames women.

These days the problem isn’t as much pre-adulthood males as it is uncultured people–including women. When I was in high school at Georgetown Prep, a Jesuit school that prided itself on producing men who could both lay down a block and conjugate Latin, we had a term for well-rounded women: “cool chicks.” Yeah, she’s a cool chick. A cool chick would go to a baseball game with you, maybe liked a cool band, and also had a favorite museum and novel. They were cool because they weren’t just one thing–the Lena Dunham hipster, the scholarship-obsessed athlete, the Ally Sheedy Breakfast Club basket case. Do cool chicks exist anymore? Is there a Dianne Keaton of this generation?

Translation: I just can't beat off to the Vanity Fair "Hollywood" annual since Meryl Streep got crow's feet.

But then I found that Judge's essay is only "part of a symposium in which a variety of writers and thinkers weigh in on the question: 'Can men be men again?'" -- a line I'd prefer to believe is a Rusty Warren set-up, but which these brightish youngish things apparently take very seriously. One of these is Ryan Duffy, and his essay is called, not even kidding, "Training Men to be Better: Rewards and Punishments."

Duffy tells us it's important that we get guys to stop liking casual sex because who knows why (with this crowd the reasons don't even have to be mentioned, but I bet birth rates are involved), and like Judge he blames women (I sense a pattern), because they "have been feeding the beast of men’s desire for short-term relationships." But if the stupid bitches will just listen to him and Steve Harvey, we can turn this thing right around:

But should we also look to women to play a role in this process? In his book Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man, Steve Harvey talks about men like animals and the importance of rewards and punishments. Harvey actively acknowledges his suggestions might not work so well with feminists, but makes suggestions likely waiting ninety days before having sex with men to ensure he is truly in it for the right reasons. 

I believe there is some morsel of truth to Harvey’s claims. If we as a society want men to grow up and be real men–whatever that definition is–it’s critical that we go back to the simple rules of behaviorism. People will feel, think, and behave in ways that they are rewarded or punished for. If we truly want men to change, we can hope they will reward and punish themselves, but acknowledge that we (and especially the women dealing with them) must also play a part.

I suppose it is progress, in a way, that instead of relying on embittered mothers or maiden aunts to teach women to treat men like dogs, conservatives are starting to enlist the aid of Magic Negroes. Maybe this is the direction their minority outreach will take: encouraging Ice Cube, for example, to go out on stage with Allen West to do "Black North Korea."

Still, if your strategy relies on convincing people to stop having sex, you've got a hard sell no matter how you jazz up the pitch. Maybe it's time they went really retro and advocated the establishment of red light districts. Of course, they'd probably abandon the project once they realized they have to pay the comfort women at least $9 an hour. Sigh. I guess it's rightwing sitcom reviews until someone gets them all jobs at The Atlantic.

Parting irony, though: Isn't it rich that their plan for whipping male sexuality into shape requires women to behave like a union?

UPDATE. ADHDJ, in comments: "Indeed, it's easy to forget the world pre-January 2009, before titty bars and pool halls were invented."

UPDATE 2. Late as it is, I should like to add chuckling's observations on Judge and his Lena Dunham hangup, which could easily be applied to any of these guys and their Lena Dunham hangup:

Anyway, interesting the dude's definition of cool when applied to a young woman: It's not someone who's smart, well-educated, cultured, ridiculously successful in television, probably crown fucking princess of the New York indie celebrity scene -- no, none of that is cool -- but someone who will fetch him a hot dog at a baseball game. Of course pretending to share the interests of some conservative ass and smiling as he drones on and on about whatever infuriates him at the moment is a more achievable aspiration than being Lena Dunham for most women, but unfortunately it's pretty much nobody's definition of cool.

THANK YOU FOR THE GIFT OF LAUGHTER.

You guys are in for a couple of haaaarrrd years.

UPDATE. I'm sorry, I'm still cracking up:

Rubio's lousy speech was just washing over me (though my ears did perk up when he mentioned his non-millionaire neighborhood -- I was imagining the alley from Top Cat, then I saw this), and then he suddenly turned into one of The Recess Monkeys. The gift of laughter just keeps on giving.

Just one thing kept it from being perfect: Where the hell was the Nuge?

THAT'S ENTERTAINMENT.

I think GOP Congressman Steve Stockman bringing Ted Nugent to the State of the Union is a wonderful idea. I've said before that, unlike the crackpot politicians who have been destroying the Republican Party with their ravings, Nugent is a rock star whose credentials as a nut were established long before he started getting into political gibberish. You can no more blame him or take offense at what comes out of his mouth than you could a hyena. As for Stockman, if has any idea at all besides durr-hurr Motor City Madman, it must be that the Republican political lunatics lack only a certain authenticity, and he hopes Nugent's will rub off on them. It's sort of like when Jon Landau taught Bruce Springsteen about John Ford, only hilarious.

The Dems could have invited Wesley Willis when they had the chance, so they deserve this. If Nugent starts speaking in tongues during the SOTU, that'll be alright with me. These things are excruciatingly dull and I could use the laughs.

Since the Congressional Democrats are far too lame to fight back, it falls to Obama to put the GOP in check; I advise that he punctuate every proposal in his speech with "don't believe me just watch, nigga nigga nigga," and close with, "popped a molly I'm sweatin', woo." That might begin to make up for the drones.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the Obama drone program coverage, and how it makes Obama Hitler -- and for once I sort of agree with the rightbloggers, or would if I believed they meant anything they said; experience has taught me better than that, though, and so I tell the world.

Nonetheless, Chomsky was right: All the Presidents from Truman through Obama deserve war crimes trials. But like Hamlet said, if we were all treated after our just desserts, who'd 'scape whipping?

...THAN SCHMUCK FOR A LIFETIME.

OK, remember when The West Wing was on TV and everyone thought this was liberals' way of having a fake president to console and tide themselves over until Bush was out of office? Well, at least The West Wing had snappy dialogue and good acting. Bill Whittle's Mr. Virtual President has -- well, go look. If you can't bear the video, which rather reminds me of Rupert Pupkin's basement broadcasts, you can read the transcript of Whittle's Inaugural Address, in which he alludes to Louis C.K.'s "Everything's amazing and nobody's happy" bit and then proceeds to give us the upshot  that LCK was too busy being funny and interesting to reveal:

We’re not happy, because everyone knows that the giant mushroom cloud of debt that hangs over this country will eventually destroy our economy and the world’s economy... And we’re not happy because we’re told time and time again by the people here in Washington, that we are not entitled to individual happiness. We’re not happy, because more and more, every day, this magnificent experiment in the power of the individual is being remade into yet another giant collectivist, faceless, mindless, soulless state...

Later he tells us "we’re not allowed to be prosperous anymore," and compares citizens in our welfare state to captive animals. I tell ya, Mr. Virtual President needs some new virtual speechwriters.

Whittle has now been responsible for alt-wingnut movie studio Declaration Entertainment, alt-wingnut fantasy community Ejectia, and this. He should enlist the guys working on that gun nut planned community The Citadel, PopModal ("the conservative alternative to YouTube"), PJ Lifestyle and other such simulacra, pick up Rod "Benedict Option" Dreher while he's at it, and they can all fuck off to some remote land where they can recreate a new paradise far, far, far from us. They can start here.

MARTYR COMPLEX.

Letting gays get married and making insurers pay for contraceptives means we're oppressing Christians. Get a load of R.R. Reno at First Things, who finds these portents that "we’re heading into dhimmitude of sorts":

We’re up against powerful cultural trends that threaten religious liberty. In the recent election Obama won a “values” campaign that felt it could ignore or even attack religious voters (“war on women”).

Offered a choice between Pope Ratzinger and the womenfolk, the whoremongering American electorate chose the latter. But the next part is even better:

In our favor is a parallel trend toward libertarianism and the general view that we ought to let people do pretty much what they want. This is the “don’t tread on me” sentiment that tends to be solicitous toward claims of conscience and against political correctness. This is a dangerous ally, however, since it’s the “different strokes for different folks” sentiment that also supports gay marriage and sexual liberation in general. This libertarian sensibility may support tolerance, but it won’t encourage support for religion. On the contrary, the moralism one finds in all forms of traditional religion will be seen as a threat to our culture of expansive personal freedom.

So the more freedom people have, they less likely they are to choose R.R. and his crew. A weaker vessel would have shrugged, "They no longer cower at the cross and mitre, but sneer and do anal; the jig's up, time to get a job." But not Reno, and not Rod Dreher, here to (as usual) make everything worse; Reno's essay has him predicting that "Christians will have to accept second-class status in the way Christians living in many Muslim countries do, under Islamic law and culture," at which fate Dreher shakes his tiny lambskin fist:

...it’s better to go down fighting than to meekly nod and conform, though it should also be said that only a fool would take every opportunity to be a martyr. These are going to be interesting times, ones that call for more wisdom than passion. It will be a time of testing, and of winnowing. This is not the first time this has happened in the history of the Church, nor will it be the last.

Oh, keep your top on, Mary, you want to say, your Catherine Wheel's a pyrotechnic at Burning Man. But we should encourage Dreher, as his paranoia may turn out to be productive:

You know what book we need? One titled: American Dhimmitude: A Handbook For Resistance. It would be a sober, plainspoken analysis of the cultural conditions of our time, with respect to orthodox Christianity and its decline in postmodernity. It would also offer intelligent, historically well informed commentary about how great Christians of ages past responded to challenges in their own time, when they were the minority culture, and discern lessons for ourselves from their experience.

Think of it -- an new illustrated book of martyrs, only instead of being stoned or broken on the wheel as in olden days, the new saints will have to change sinecures every so often. Can't wait to read the Kathryn J. Lopez chapter -- she served our Lord, and for that she was scourged with the wit of Alex Pareene!

UPDATE. In Dreher's comments, Erin Manning, whom Dreher sometimes employs to add extra crazy to his site, counsels American Christians to make common cause with another oppressed minority:

Right now in the public sphere people who own or use guns or are facing a culture that is increasingly hostile not only to gun ownership and use but to the very idea of weapons, such that some pretty extreme things have happened... 

I bring this up to show how this kind of thing will play out in public schools when it is Christian thought, not gun ownership and/or approval of weapons, that has become doubleplus ungood expression.

Armed Jesus freaks with a persecution complex -- sounds like a recipe for another Waco wienie roast.

WELCOME HOME, BROTHER, WE WILL KILL THE FATTED CALF.

The objection is from Ed Morrissey, author (under a different Administration) of "Is Waterboarding Torture Or Necessity? Yes." That post is a big squish daring Congress to do something about it -- Morrissey's usual schtick concerning Bush-era torture. But when certain government figures advance the human rights agenda, Morrissey stops playing cagey and gets more direct:

Yesterday, Barack Obama signed an order pledging to close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay within in a year, but without offering a solution for the current detainees. That little detail takes on a little more significance after today’s report in the New York Times about the career of a released Gitmo inmate. After getting sprung from Gitmo, Said al-Shihri became a leader of the al-Qaeda network in Yemen... 

The war on terror is no game. These people intend to kill us in large numbers, and unless we take that seriously, they will succeed. It’s not the same as using the exclusionary rule to return a burglar to the streets rather than offend tender sensibilities because someone filled out a warrant incorrectly. Al-Qaeda is not the Gambino crime family, and a law-enforcement approach will not defeat them.

And:

Obama to release photos of abuse

Here we go again. The US will release dozens of pictures depicting prisoner abuse by the American military and intelligence agents after the Obama administration dropped an appeal to block a Freedom of Information Act request by the ACLU. Will these pictures have the same demoralizing effect on both the troops and the CIA?... 

In 2004, the release of the pictures from Abu Ghraib overwhelmed the limited context of the abuse at that prison, which involved a handful of soldiers that had already come under investigation from the Pentagon for their abusive treatment of prisoners. The release of those images created a firestorm of vituperation against the American military around the world, calls for immediate firings and purges, even though the military had already acted to clean up the problem. The damage done to the Army’s reputation in particular has never been undone.

Small wonder the intelligence community has erupted in anger over this...

And:

Khaled el-Masri sued the US for what he claimed was an illegal detention and rendition that cost him five months in an Afghan jail, but the Supreme Court dismissed the case...
Masri may well have had a good case for his lawsuit, under other circumstances. If, as he claims, he has no connection to terrorism and got abducted by the CIA in Macedonia and held for almost half a year of interrogation, he should be due some compensation. Unfortunately, with the kind of war we're fighting, we have to err on the side of our safety -- and we have to learn from our mistakes, too.

So much for his bleeding heart. But, you know: If he's bullshitting now, so what? The policy of drone assassination of U.S. citizens is an outrage, and every voice in the chorus of disapproval is welcome, even the posers'.  Let us take the opportunity presented by opportunism, and welcome and support them. Tomorrow we can get back at each others' throats.

THE CONSERVATIVE COMEBACK, PART 102,833.

As others have observed, National Review editor Kathryn J. Lopez had a nervous breakdown because a pretty lady danced suggestively at halftime at a football game. She also managed to drag Michelle Obama and abortion into it ("It seems quite disappointing that Michelle Obama would feel the need to tweet about how 'proud' she is of Beyoncé... When I saw the first lady’s tweet, I couldn’t help but think of the president talking about abortion in terms of his daughters’ freedom...").

Later Lopez actually came back to amplify:

Yes, a woman embracing her womanhood is a powerful thing. Which is exactly what we tend to suppress in so many other contexts (say, federal policy mandating that we treat women’s fertility as a disease to be medicated)...

Oh, if you think that's creepy --

Sometimes I even sing along to her songs.

K-Lo dancing around as she dusts her Immaculate Mary dolls and croons, "I need a thug that’ll have my back, Do-rag, Nike Airs to match, Ain’t nothin’ wrong with that..." I'd give my soul to take out my brain, hold it under a faucet and wash away the dirty pictures you put there today! Then she goes into a rhapsody over her recent Jesus Bieber crush Christopher West and asks that we "raise our standards. Is it crazy to think we can, even at the Super Bowl?" Maybe the folks behind Conservapedia can organize an alternate Super Bowl where a bunch of nuns sing "Dominique" at halftime.

Rich Lowry comes along to smooth things out, which seems rather chivalrous, at least compared to the way some of her colleagues treat her.

Kathryn, I just wrote a Super Bowl-related column where I touched on the halftime show, but I found it difficult to say anything about it without sounding like a kill-joy and a geezer.

Okay, Rich, maybe for you Sarah Palin can sex up the nun show.

Yeah, America's gonna warm to this movement.

UPDATE. BigHank53 in comments: "We absolutely are in desperate need of a sane, healthy embrace of human sexuality. And you're proposing that we listen to the Catholic Freakin' Church for advice on this? What's next, dating tips from the Green River Strangler?"

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP...

about the Obama skeet-shooting controversy, which may seem dumber than most such controversies if you've forgotten how dumb most such controversies are. Enjoy.

A CLASSIC CASE.

Rob Port at Say Anything gets these TANF usage numbers from his state government:

You and I look at this and think: This is a pretty sad picture. Think about a single parent with kids using her TANF to buy clothing, shelter, school supplies, etc.  Maybe some of the money is spent more frivolously, sure, but that would be hard to manage: In 2004 the maximum monthly TANF benefit paid in North Dakota to a single-parent-headed family of four was $573.  And, in case you think it's gotten better since then, TANF benefit levels have plunged by 22.3% in North Dakota since 1996.

So maybe a couple of times a week the recipients eat at McDonald's or a diner instead of in their hovels. Maybe they get chips, soda, and smokes from the service station. And very rarely they rent a movie.

Here's how Port sees it:

48% Of North Dakota Welfare Spending Is On Fast Food, Eating Out, ATM’s And Movie Rentals

...This categories illustrate some very poor priorities among TANF recipients. Roughly half of the total TANF funds, some $5.6 million, is spent on eating out (both fast food and regular restaurants, movie rentals and ATM withdrawals. If we consider that a significant amount, if not most, of the $2.26 million spent inside gas stations (which is nearly 20% of the total) is probably junk food, you get a grim picture of how these funds are being spent. 

Which is to say, on frivolities and luxuries rather than needs.

I'm beginning to think it's a psychological condition. Maybe some of it's upbringing. Maybe some of us are born without a capacity for empathy and by the grace of God avoid the life of aimless crime into which some sociopaths drift, and instead become... well, the kind of person who thinks people on welfare have it too easy and that junk food is a luxury they don't deserve.

ED KOCH 1924-2013.

I never liked the guy and, though I lived through all three of his terms as Mayor of New York, never voted for him. But I do think that, unlike many politicians, he genuinely sought to serve his constituents; if he bent over for developers, it was because they brought money to the city, not because he had some Ayn Rand idea that the corporate class should rule. You can see this clearly in one of the instances when he didn't bend over: When he bucked Donald Trump -- who generally did very well under Koch's reign -- over his proposed Television City complex in 1987. The New York Times account almost comically misreads the situation:

But the stakes are higher this time than ever before. The decision by NBC to remain in New York or to relocate to New Jersey may hang in the balance... 

The political fortunes of the Mayor, buffeted for almost a year and a half by municipal scandals, could also turn on what NBC decides to do - and on whom the public blames if the network leaves or whom it credits if NBC remains. 

Navigating the political shoals will not be easy for Mr. Koch. The Mayor, who has often been accused of giving away too much of the city's light and air to its master builders, could win praise for turning down a powerful developer who had demanded too much. 

But if NBC does move to New Jersey, thus joining J. C. Penney and the Mobil Corporation in an exodus from Manhattan, Mr. Koch could be criticized for having failed to bend sufficiently to keep a vital part of the communications industry in New York.

You see how that worked out -- last night was the final episode of "30 Rock," not "30 Landmark Square, Stamford."  NBC, like many other corporations, sends some operations out to the sticks from time to time, but New York is big enough to stand it, and certainly too big to respond to economic blackmail. For years no one seemed to remember that, but Koch knew it and let you know he knew it. That was part of his success, and why people stuck with him.

As I've said before, I also admired his habit of saying "the people have spoken" after big trials like Bernhard Goetz's and Larry Davis', which I found appropriately humble and respectful. (He said it after he lost the 1982 Democratic Gubernatorial nomination to Mario Cuomo, too.) Nowadays people only remember his snide version of the saying after he lost the 1989 primary: "The people have spoken and they must be punished." Maybe that was always in the back of his mind when he used the shorter version. But it's something that he waited until the end of his political career to reveal it.

ANNALS OF THE CULTURE WARS ETC. ETC.

Over at PJ Lifestyle (yes, they have such a thing; it's the thin end of the wedge in their drive to take over the internet, and includes funny animal videos you can awwww over without being troubled by the thought that some liberal might be enjoying it too), we have a curious listicle: "The 3 Best Monty Python Sketches (Aren’t Necessarily the Funniest)" by Kathy Shaidle. She names and provides videos of the sketches -- and lengthy, aimless, joke-killing reasons why she likes them -- but first explains how Monty Python are among history's greatest monsters and no I ain't even kidding:

But as an adult, I’ve been forced to accept that these strangers — whose work was one of the only things I believed I could ever truly depend on – all had (giant, stomping, purloined) feet of clay. 

Terry Jones revealed himself to be bitchy Bush-hater. 

John Cleese doled out self-help psychobabble while marrying and divorcing more times than even my mother. (He’s in the midst of an “Alimony Tour” and is auctioning off a career’s worth of props and memorabilia.) 

Worse, Cleese seems stupidly saddened and baffled by the transformation of his beloved London into a lawless polyglot madhouse — a transformation which is entirely the fault of the youthful culture-busting philosophy he and his liberal pals embraced. 

They’d unwittingly (or not) destroyed England in a way the Luftwaffe could have only dreamed of.

There's something perfectly, schizophrenically Kulturkampf about inviting people to watch funny sketches while you tell them how the sketches destroyed Western Civilization. Sorta reminds me of the passion of Nelson Van Alden.

UPDATE. Previous PJ Lifestyle homina-homina here. What a weird little alt-universe it is.

STILL MORE ANNALS OF THE CULTURE WARS.

Kurt Schlichter at Breitbart.com:

If conservatives are going to be in the popular culture – and act to change it – they can’t simply ignore shows like Girls that capture the zeitgeist, even if the zeitgeist makes their skin crawl. Season two is well under way, and conservatives need to participate in the discussion.

And what sort of discussion would that be?

Think of Sex and the City, except Sarah Jessica Parker has doubled her weight, dresses like a potato sack and fancies herself the voice of some undefined generation.

Oh, that kind. I expect there's at least one clubhouse or klavern in every county where that discussion never ends.

But wait, Schlichter wants to directly engage the sheeple:

You can’t talk about Girls at the water cooler with the rest of the office if you haven’t watched it, and if you aren’t part of the discussion you aren’t injecting and modeling the conservative ideas and values that we need to advance. You can['t] criticize and critique if you’re AWOL from pop culture.

So, someone's going to say "Hey, did you see Girls last night?" and you're going to say -- let me take a line from Schlichter's essay -- "The characters seem to live in a minority and Republican-free bubble (though a black Republican (!) shows up as a character this season). There is no reference to religion – that wouldn't occur to them." Or, even better, try one from Jeffrey Lord at The American Spectator:

The America that leftist women have such contempt for... that America is sending its sons and daughters to protect those rights. To die for those rights. 

It is exactly that America that sent Tyrone Woods to fight Ansar al-Sharia in Benghazi so that Lena Dunham can sit at peace in Brooklyn with her tattoo and her sleeveless T-shirt and her wink-wink on-camera prattlings about first-times. So that Amanda Marcotte can play with her race cards at Slate.

And your co-workers will nod thoughtfully and say, "Boy, that Obamacare's pretty socialist, huh?"

You need to make sure the people around you hear those answers, but step one is to be a part of the discussion. And step two is eventually taking over the reins of pop culture ourselves.

This is the "Step 3: Profit!" of all time.

We’ll know we’re winning when we see the conservative equivalent of Girls.

How about just watching PornTube and declaring victory?

Their big problem is neatly encapsulated in this bit:

What can be puzzling is trying to figure out how Dunham actually feels about her characters – does she really understand how deluded and shallow they are, or does she (horrors) consider them as some sort of role models for her co-generationists?

I wonder if they'll ever realize that their real culture war is not with liberals, but with ambiguity.

UPDATE. Right out of the gate, commenter Spaghetti Lee:

We’ll know we’re winning when we see the conservative equivalent of Girls.

"Boys"? 

BIG NIGHT AT THE LYCEUM.

Roger L. Simon gave a speech at some rightwing fish-fry in Washington state and decided to share it on his website. Next time, fellas, try and get Shecky Green:

All right, here are five words that should make you smile: You don’t live in California…. I would imagine that saves many of you ten thousand dollars a year or more right there. There’s something to be happy about. Speaking of which, since I live in L.A. but spend a lot of time in this state, I’ve always been perplexed why everything seems to work better up here… the roads are better, the services are better… but we pay the ridiculous amount of state income tax. I don’t have to tell this crowd — don’t ever go there.

Thank you, now I'll fuck off with my check back to L.A. while you stay up here and get rained on. Do even conservatives go for this "Like you, I hate the major media centers and that's why I spend all my time in them" bullshit anymore?

Most of the speech is about Simon's conversion. Yes, that again. "Hey, Lou, 'dja know I usedta be a liberal?" "Give it a rest, Roger." "No really, I even hung out with the Black Panthers." "We know, Roger." "Lou, you know something else? Richard Pryor never laughed at my jokes." "Alright, rummy, hit the bricks, let's go..."

At one point in the speech Simon is approached by a glamorous Soviet agent!

Later, on subsequent cultural exchanges to the Soviet Union in the eighties, I learned just how true as KGB agents followed us everywhere, including the bathroom. An attempt was even made, at hotel in Yalta, to draft me into Soviet intelligence by a female reporter from Soviet Screen magazine. Not only was I not tempted, I was terrified.

"You know Schwarzenegger, yes? You find out how he become big star with such big accent. Comes the revolution you can be commissar of Hollywood. Also of my ass. You like? I was gymnast."

(Only lately, have I begun to understand what it was they wanted. More of that in a moment).

Simon never follows up on this, at least in the transcript, which is really too bad ("Spielberg? A Red! Jack Nicholson? Red! Brian DePalma? Ooh, a big Red!").

His big finish:

Rather than boycott Hollywood, take it over – at least part of it. But do it well and professionally. Otherwise there’s no point. No one’s interested.

As one who was given by God, or my parents’ DNA or something, the ability to write dialogue and make up stories, I am going to be devoting more of my time to that in the future, putting some of the skills I learned as a liberal to work as a conservative...

And people like me need the support of people like you more than you know. After decades of pervasive liberal culture, we need an audience, financial support, and new means of distribution. That’s a whole infrastructure, if you think about it. And then there’s educational system and the media to think about…. Whoa…. No one ever said it was going to be easy. Thank you.

They left out the part where ushers went through the crowd with tin cups. Coming soon: PJDVD! Not only are the movies conservative, you don't have to rub elbows with the hoi polloi and maybe catch TB to watch 'em!

I like to think of this speech as Simon's "Garageland." The truth is only known by geezer types. (h/t Dan Coyle)

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP....

...a miscellany of rightblogger sad trombones over Benghazi, the Roe v. Wade 40th anniversary, Bobby Jindal, etc.

Not making the cut was this plaint from a contributor to the new improved Dr. Mrs. Ole Perfesser page, pimped by the Perf himself:

Forgive me if this is the wrong place to put this. 

But this is an observation after using Okcupid futility for a few years now. Pretty much every single women on the site is a liberal who doesn't want to date conservatives. (They have a match question for this) 

Even women who are Ayn Rand fans. Even women who are hard core Christians, anti-abortion, anti-sex before marriage, etc, etc, etc 

The few exceptions are "centrists" who don't want to date conservatives. 

What gives? Is it just the web site? Are most women who lean conservative already married? Are women just more prone to be liberal?

Who wants to tell him? Dr. Helen double-dipped on this one and got some of her legendary commenters to weigh in. waxwing01 is my favorite for far, but the night is young.

Oh, but please read my thing too.

THE CONSERVATIVE COMEBACK PART 43,022.

The revanchism continues! The usual suspects are all het up about Hitlery saying, "What difference does it make?" -- which also happens to be the response of normal people when you tell them this whole Benghazi tsimmis is about whether the mob killed four people over a video or over the Siege of Cordoba.

Conservatives seem to sense this isn't going to burn the motherfucker down, so some of the nuttier ones like Rand Paul are expanding their conspiracy theories, which ThinkProgress notices, which in turn outrages Ann Althouse, who sees TP's headline "GOP Senator Pushes Gun-Running Conspiracy Theory During Benghazi Hearing" and complains,

Rand Paul asks a question. It seems histrionic to equate asking a question with pushing a conspiracy theory, and the truth is Hillary Clinton's answer has the ring of... lying. 

The effort on the left to stereotype Rand Paul as a nutcase is so strenuous that it stimulates my root-for-the-underdog instinct. And makes me suspicious. I feel a Rand-Paul-must-be-destroyed conspiracy theory blossoming within.

Maybe she'd prefer the characterization of the impeccably rightwing Jim Hoft of Gateway Pundit: "Rand Paul: Benghazi May Have Been Cover-up for Obama Gun-Running." Or that of WorldNetDaily: "RAND PAUL: OBAMA IN GUNS-TO-JIHADISTS COVER-UP? 'A kind of international Fast and Furious in Benghazi.'" Or of Aaron Klein: "MEDIA IGNORE HILLARY’S BOMBSHELL BENGHAZI CLAIM. Secretary insists she did not know about gun-running at U.S. mission." I wonder if, when unbidden negative thoughts disturb her, Althouse tells herself they've been published at left-wing sites so she can discount them.

Other apparatchiks are working on getting city folk to love Republicans. Edward L. Glaeser at City Journal says "successful cities like New York and Houston surge with ambitious strivers and entrepreneurs, who should instinctively sympathize with the GOP’s faith in private industry" -- which sounds a lot like the "black people like to go to church, why won't they vote for our party, it's full of evangelical preachers?" argument we've been hearing for years. And sure enough, Glaeser seeks to win urbanites with school vouchers, congestion pricing, and knocking down lovely old buildings on the theory that developers will build in their place cheap apartments instead of luxury condos.

At least he acknowledges that the GOP's been punting city votes for years, but he doesn't seem to understand why. Hint: Cities are full of black people, hence Ooga Booga. And the point is moot anyway, as the In Thing for Republicans now is to disenfranchise cities by rigging the electoral vote.

When all else fails they can go back to previous formulae:

It's with love I say it: Don't ever change.

TEARS OF THE CROCODILE.

When you spend your days thinking up ways to entertain the Global Warming is a Hoax crowd, as Henry Payne of National Review's Planet Gore does, you sometimes have to go with thin gruel:

At Monday’s inaugural, President Obama declared global-warming mitigation a second-term priority. On Tuesday, a deadly arctic blast here in the Midwest was a reminder of how frivolous that pursuit is.

Haw haw cold snap Al Gore is fat! But wait, it gets better:

Saving polar bears may be fashionable among rich elites, but Detroit’s jammed shelters this week are evidence that cold weather threatens the poor among us. City shelters reported they were at capacity as the frostbitten homeless took refuge from the bitter cold... 

While Detroit’s needy freeze, millions of federal dollars are going to the politically connected well-to-do. Inside the Detroit Auto Show this week, billionaire Elon Musk — one of America’s richest men — is displaying his latest Tesla electric SUV for the well-to-do, financed by a half-billion dollars in federal loans... 

Washington pols may get good press for protecting polar bears — but the real climate victims are freezing in city shelters.

It's a measure of their devotion to AGW denial that they're actually willing to pretend concern for poor people in public shelters to advance it. Payne's not very convincing, though. Maybe NR should put Kathryn J. Lopez on the job, and tell her to imagine those freezing paupers are aborted fetuses.

CONSERVATISM CANNOT FAIL; IT CAN ONLY BE FAILED.

From Mickey Kaus' lips to the Ole Perfesser's ears:

Does Fox News now have an All-Amnesty lineup? Looks like it. Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly have now fallen in line behind World Citizen Rupert Murdoch’s support of ”sweeping, generous immigration reform,” including a “path to citizenship.” Karl Rove was always on board, of course.

What about Fox News’ viewers? Are they going to go along like sheep? They now have no network that represents their perspective on what seems to be a key issue for Obama’s second term. Is it time for a new Fox? (Wouldn’t it be time for a new Fox anyway? That lineup has been stale for years.) …

The Republican Party isn't conservative enough; Fox News isn't conservative enough. Pretty soon they'll be telling each other what a liberal rag National Review turned into.

Soon enough there'll be no place for them to go for new voters except outer space.

THAT'S RACIST. NO, SERIOUSLY, THAT IS RACIST.

Ta-Nehisi Coates complains of the "half-assed social contract" applied to blacks since Reconstruction ("The black migrants did play by the rules, but they did not enjoy the right to compete"). Jonah Goldberg thinks he has a good one:

Coates doesn’t mention it, but it’s worth noting that many of the mechanisms of this “half-assed social contract” were forged and defended as progressive laws. The Davis-Bacon Act is the most famous example, in that it was designed to benefit white union members at the expense of equally qualified but less expensive black labor... 

Take, for instance, the minimum wage. The founding fathers of progressivism at the University of Wisconsin, but also such figures as Sidney Webb, saw the discriminatory aspects of the minimum wage as among its chief selling points...

So, in a nation where unions offer blacks a rare chance at higher wages, Goldberg portrays such wages as Liberal Fascist Racism; and in a nation where blacks traditionally get lower wages than whites, Goldberg portrays the minimum wage as Liberal Fascist Racism.

While for many years most American politicians were racist to a greater or less extent, Goldberg only notices the racism of those whose legacies have actually been of some help to non-white Americans. (For him Robert Byrd is eternally a Klansman, but William Buckley was a great man who couldn't have meant all those things he said.)  In fact, any successful attempt to improve the lot of non-whites, such as diversity programs, Goldberg unfailingly identifies as the real racism ("If I give extra credit to Joe because he’s black, I’m making things just that much harder for Tom because he’s white"). I've never seen him speak well of a black person who wasn't a National Review author or a member of the Bush Administration. I'm not even sure if he likes Prince.

I used to think Goldberg did this shit because he came up as a fratty chucklehead who saw how much the grown-ups liked it when he acted "politically incorrect," and that he kept it up as part of a conscious attempt to peddle conservatism as the fun American ideology. But now that he is no longer remotely young and not even Goldberg is stupid enough to think conservatism is fun, I've come to the conclusion that he just doesn't like black people. I'm rather embarrassed that it took me this long to figure that out. The moron has outsmarted me at last! Farrrrt.

IT WAS A GOOD DAY.

For "Seneca Falls and Selma and Stonewall"; for the idea that it's not un-American to work together and share the bounty; for saying in the face of originalists, "while these truths may be self-evident, they've never been self-executing"; and of course for the LOL Opposition:

And oh yeah, for all the happy black folks in D.C.

Yeah, it was a good day.

UPDATE. The lulz keep a-comin': National Review's first-string bowtie Roger Kimball:

...The tone that he set: What was it? Reading through the speech (I will be honest: I couldn’t bear to listen to it live, I just couldn’t), I was haunted by an echo. The speech reminded me of something, of someone. Who was it? Woodrow Wilson? Yes, in part. But there was another ghost in the wings... 

Got it: “Peace in our time,” the president said, “requires the constant advance of those principles that our common creed describes: tolerance and opportunity; human dignity and justice.” 

Now, I am as keen on tolerance and opportunity, human dignity and justice as the next gun-toting bitter-ender. But “peace in our time”? Where have we heard that before? Who was the last politician to strut across the world stage proclaiming “peace in our time”? Why, Neville Chamberlain, of course. He stepped off the plane that brought him back from his meeting with Adolf Hitler on September 30, 1938, and the crowd cheered as Chamberlain told them about his meeting with the German führer...

Similarly, Obama used the words "I" and "me" a lot, just like Marshal Petain.

UPDATE 2. Wrote a little something about the speech for 2paragraphs.

UPDATE 3.  Commenters including Ron Thompson point out that Chamberlain actually said "peace for our time." The quote is so commonly misrendered that I would be inclined to give Kimball a break for using the wrong version, and even for not checking out what he probably assumed was a devastating coincidence before using it -- after all, he's only hurting himself.

However, smut clyde, tigrismus, and others inform us that Benjamin Disraeli and John F. Kennedy used "peace in our time," which means by the ancient conservative law of I'm Rubber You're Glue that they are now both retroactively Hitler. I hope Kimball's happy now!

NEW VOICE POST UP...

...about Obama's gun proposals and the predictable rightblogger reaction. I got only a little into the Obama-Hitler stuff, because that's an evergreen at this point, but I do confess I enjoyed "OBAMA'S WHITE SCAPEGOATS...JUST LIKE HITLER DID TO THE JEWS AND OTHER MINORITIES" by some nut, as well as what we might consider the moderate conservative alternative, "Popular Parallels Between Hitler And Obama Are Wrong... But Obama Is Still A Tyrannical Narcissist."

I also enjoyed Gateway Pundit Jim Hoft's "Don’t Tell the Media... NRA More Popular Than Gun-Grabber Obama." One of these days they'll get smart and run the NRA for President.