POST-TRAUMATIC ATTENTION DEFICIT SYNDROME.

At The American Spectator Jeffrey Lord has one called "Jihad Blows Up the Liberal Utopia" and as you may have guessed, it reflects the growing rightwing consensus on Boston, which appears to boil down to Since you fuckers won't listen to us on any other topic, let us win you back with Terror! 

But as we saw in my recent Voice column, these guys also appear to have lost the self-discipline required to focus exclusively on the war-drum -- as one imagines they would if they were really serious about it -- without breaking into a tom-roll of talking points unrelated to the subject. It's like they want to go back to the Bush Years (now under new management and rehabilitation -- watch this space!), and they want to go now -- so rather than wait for Terror to soften the sheeple's minds, they just yell "Boo!" and then start yelling about deficit spending.

So after starting on-topic with "The Liberal Utopia is a land where gun background checks prevent mass murder" (I didn't say reasonably, I said on-topic), Lord veers, telling us the jihad has also blown up the Liberal Utopia of Social Security, Medicare, War on Poverty, etc.

He reaches what I would say is the nadir here, on the subjects of gun control and the apparent successor to Lena Dunham as the right's favorite female hate-object, Gabby Giffords:

Next up was former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who took to the Op-Ed page of the New York Times to say “I’m furious.” Giffords accused the Senate of being in the “grip of the gun lobby” fearful of political consequences. 

Gifford’s statement was filled with irony. There are people aplenty out there who have also discussed issues other than guns as being a problem in this area of violence in America. Indeed just this last Sunday Boston’s Cardinal Sean O’Malley not only talked about guns but the role of abortion in what O’Malley called a “Culture of Death.” But did Gabby Giffords want to talk about abortion as a contributing factor?

In case you're wondering if you imagined it: yes, he did just ask why a woman who was shot in the head is more interested in gun control than abortion.

If their movement ever acquires a leader, I suggest for starters he or she should pass out some Ritalin.

TRIPPING.

Just looked in on Ed Driscoll's latest, yet another sprawling stream-of-semiconsciousness about how America was destroyed by the beatniks of the Frankfurt School and whatnot, and it's all too convoluted to pull apart but let me at least share with you this wonderful passage:

1968 contrasted the two American space programs: real-life NASA had to compete for attention with the Cinerama visions of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, the top-grossing film of 1968, which smuggled its Nietzschian philosophy into movie theaters via space stations and talking computers, and was a magnificently photographed and scored exercise in liberal fascism.

Perfect as it seems, it's the next line that really makes it:

I don’t use the phrase lightly.

Please don't ever show him Forbidden Planet. They'll have to scrape him off the ceiling with a broom.

UPDATE. Big_Bad_Bald_Bastard wins comments: "The black monolith represents the 90% Democratic African-American voting bloc." But the game ain't over! e.g. GregMc: "My god! It's full of shit!"; Spaghetti Lee: "'Lower the top marginal income tax rate, HAL.' 'I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.'"

UPDATE 2. This reminds me of the great Mad parody "201 Minutes of Space Idiocy," which reminds me of a lovely Film Comment article on Mad movie parodies you should read.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP....

.... about Boston. It runs long, but I had a superabundance of material. For example: The Czech Republic's press release, forced by general ignorance, that told people Chechans were not from the Czech Republic but from Chechnya, might prompt any number of reactions -- but check out this amazing response:

National 'Education' Association: YOU OWN THIS IGNORANCE.

John Birch Society paranoia PLUS War on Terror paranoia -- that's brilliant. Sometimes it's hard to believe they extemporize! 

WHAT, THEY FEEL SHAME?

Yeah, I wouldn't sign it either.

UPDATE. They finally put Kevin Williamson's name on it -- guess he drew the short straw.

ALSO, LET'S STORE GAS OVER BY THE SMOKERS' CORNER.

Cynical old cuss that I am, I never expected Democratic gun legislation to accomplish anything except the further embarrassment of their enemies. Looks like that's how it's playing out. The votes seemed choreographed to deliver maximum attention with minimal effect. They must think it was a good one to lose: Ours is a gun-friendly country, but not a gun-crazy one, and the sight of honkies jubilant at the defeat of a popular and harmless background check law may pay dividends for the Democrats down the road.

If that doesn't do it, we can always count on lunatics like Jack Dunphy to help. At PJ Whatsit he comments on a Ready Houston video that shows office workers fending off a shooter with chairs and coffee pots.  While he commends the can-do spirit, Dunphy is yet unsatisfied -- he wants those desk jockeys armed:

Wouldn’t it be far preferable to bring a gun to the gunfight instead of a chair or a coffee pot? ...If I were to enter an office building under those circumstances and ask some fleeing worker where the gunman was, I would hope to hear an answer like this: "He’s face down in the stairwell. Williams from accounting shot him."

I bet many of you folks are at an office right now. Take a look around.



Sure, arm the workplace. What could go wrong?

UPDATE. Arm the teachers, too.

DUH-BLE STANDARD.

Shorter Ole Perfesser: People expect me to disseminate bullshit indiscriminately -- what's your excuse?

UPDATE. Oh yeah, readers remind me, there's also his charming tweet to Gabby Giffords. Some guys prefer their targets wounded, I guess.

ALSO TOTALLY CONSERVATIVE: THOSE DELICIOUS BALLPARK FRANKS.

You knew it was coming -- from John Boot at PJ Media:

5 Core Conservative Values in the New Jackie Robinson Biopic 42

Among these:

2) There’s no substitute for a strong, loving nuclear family.

Demonstrated thus:

Robinson never knew his own father, who left his mother and her five children when Jackie was still a baby. In 42, when he gets the good news that the Brooklyn Dodgers want to give him a shot at being the first black player in the major leagues (in reality, there were some black players in the early days of baseball back in the 1880s), Jackie phones up his girlfriend Rachel (Nicole Beharie) and asks her to marry him right away. Later in the film, Jackie is seen cuddling his newborn son Jackie Jr. and telling him, “I’m going to be with you till the day I die.” Robinson, who along with Rachel raised two other children as well, was as good as his word, remaining a family man until his too-early death at age 53.

I'd like to see an extended version, in which scenes of Robinson eating prove the conservative value of nutrition.

UPDATE. In comments, Doghouse Riley: "The part about how Robinson -- who called himself an independent, but supported Republican candidates -- left the party after what he witnessed of the '64 convention and became a Democrat? Demonstrates the conservative value of voluntary deportation, I suppose."

DEMOCRACY PROMOTION IN ACTION.

At National Review, Otto J. Reich complains about the Venezuelan elections:

If I were still assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs I would urge the secretary of state to not recognize the results of this election unless and until independent auditors documented that it was accurate. Even then, it was not a free or fair election. All assets of the national government were mobilized to support Maduro and international observers and media report widespread “irregularities” in the process.. the will of the Venezuelan people is being thwarted.

From Wikipedia:

Reich held the post of Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs at the time of the 2002 Venezuelan coup d'état attempt on April 11, 2002 against Hugo Chávez. On the day Pedro Carmona was installed as president, Otto Reich summoned ambassadors from Latin America and the Caribbean to his office to express their support and that of the US administration for the new government.

They should start hiring guys off the street to do this sort of work, just to avoid this sort of embarrassing backstory. Then again, why bother?

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the Rand Paul speech at Howard, and what a great success it was with the real audience, which was not the one in the actual room.

UPDATE. The paragraph breaks went away for a while, but they seem to be back now; please let me know if the formatting goes haywire again.

IS THIS WHAT WE SENT YOU TO COLLEGE FOR?

At PJ Media, Susan L.M. Goldberg explains that Family Guy is the poisoned fruit of feminism. No, really. A section about what a terrible father Peter is begins with this:

Never has a term been so despised in the ivy halls as “The Patriarchy.”

Later:

Whether it’s the military, the doctor, or the monkey in the closet, the men on Family Guy do more to avoid perceived threats than to confront them, even if it means putting their own self-respect on the line. Ironically, while feminism focuses on the disenfranchisement of women, it has often done so by disenfranchising men.

Later still:

Whether playing up to feminist theory or playing into the results of a generation of male bashing, Family Guy’s definition of masculinity is the monster pieced together between books and over Cosmos.

The italicized Cosmos is in the original, so I don't whether Goldberg means the drink or the Carl Sagan TV show. (It's also possible her demoralized copy editor was laying a trap to find out if she can even read.)

Best part is Goldberg's bio:

Susan L.M. Goldberg is a writer with a Master's in Radio, Television & Film...

Wingnuts used to make fun of cultural studies gush -- look at all those liberal brats "studying" Madonna! Now they're not only going to college for it (and worshipping the queen of CultStud crap, Camille Paglia), they're writing a ridiculous amount of horrible cultural studies gush themselves.

They seem to think they're plumbing the Dark Mystery of the Arts to find the pulse of the electorate, but they just remind me of Chris Cooper trying to kiss Kevin Spacey in American Beauty. 

ANNALS OF THE CULTURE WARS.

Brad Todd at the Daily Caller:

Washington’s pundits have been united this spring. They’ve concluded that a single shift in culture on gay marriage has marooned one of America’s political ideologies from the public majorities of tomorrow.

The pundits are right that one political philosophy is being left behind but wrong about which one. It is liberals, not conservatives, who are chained to an ideology built for yesterday’s culture. The proof of this realignment is not on cable news, but...

I have to admit, folks, at this point I was very interested to see what, besides the political events of the day, presaged this conservative ascendancy.

... but on cable television’s hippest drama, “Mad Men,” which this week kicked off its final season to great fanfare.

Blink. Blink.

I thought next he was going to say that Mad Men shows the ruinous legacy of the liberal 60s because they made Don suicidal and Betty fat; alternatively, that it shows how great life was when women and black people were oppressed. Those would have made some sense on a juvenile level at least. But... To boil it down for you, the left is old and gross because Obamacare is sooo LBJ and soaked in "the collective emotional DNA of the post-war era," which the kids don't like because it's analog.

LBJ sold that audience national retirement pensions as easily as the age’s Mad Men built national brands of soap and beer. Similarly, the rest of society’s institutions nationalized as well — the American Legion, the Moose Lodge and the Methodist Church saw their ranks explode as the parents of Baby Boomers equated quality with conformity.

Fifty years later, Budweiser now disguises its products as pseudo-craft brands and the Methodist Church is withering in plain sight. The dominant brands of this age are not purveyors of conformed consumption but enablers of individualization — Apple, Google and Facebook.

And any fool can see that if you like social media and fake microbrews, you're just naturally gonna be right wing.  Haven't you seen Twitchy? Also:

Customers at the decade’s most ubiquitous national food merchant, Starbucks, have developed an entire language to express their half-caf, soy-no-whip, double-shot individual solutions.

It's like the conspicuous consumption of the Reagan era, only much cheaper, which is good because since our economy was destroyed in 2008 fancy coffee is about all we can afford.

So why, in the era of individualization, is the American political left still selling top-down mandatory standardization in everything from health insurance to local electricity generation? When nearly every thriving national brand succeeds by empowering Americans to seek and achieve different results, only the Democratic Party is peddling redistribution and a system that on its best day generates only mushy mediocrity.

Todd, you will not be surprised to learn, is an ad man, and this ripomatic reminds me of those post-Berlin-Wall corporate ads in which former slaves of Sovietism stepped into the sunlight and had a Coke and a smile. Only that's a bit out of style now. It's harder to convince people you represent the future when your suit is caked with dust from the demolition job you've done on the American Dream and your pockets are stuffed with fraudulent securities. Also, if you want to own "choice" as an equity, maybe identifying yourself with the dying anti-gay cause isn't such a hot idea.

I hope next they try to bring back South Park Conservatism and put Steve Crowder in charge. I could use a laugh.

UPDATE. Slightly edited because, like all the greats, I am constantly fiddling with my own work.

UPDATE 2. In comments, Mr. Wonderful asks:

There's got to be a name for this--this confident extrusion of analysis and prediction that seems so astute until it dawns on you, and your dog, that it is objectively, visibly wrong. Is this what they mean by "post-modernist political commentary"? Where they type something like, "Bernie Sanders, whether he knows it or not, is actually a Republican, because he's a member of the Senate, which is one of our oldest and most traditional public institutions"?

PoMoPolComm might work, but being a traditionalist I prefer "bullshit."

CONSERVATIVE MINORITY OUTREACH CONTINUES, CONTINUED.

Rand Paul did even worse than I expected. He literally did talk about Republican efforts on behalf of black citizens a century ago, and then explained the 20th-century switch in electoral trends this way:

You may say, "oh that’s all well and good but that was a long time ago what have you done for me lately?"

Ingrates!

I think what happened during the Great Depression was that African Americans understood that Republicans championed citizenship and voting rights but they became impatient for economic emancipation. 

African Americans languished below white Americans in every measure of economic success and the Depression was especially harsh for those at the lowest rung of poverty.

The Democrats promised equalizing outcomes through unlimited federal assistance while Republicans offered something that seemed less tangible--the promise of equalizing opportunity through free markets.

In other words: The Democrats bribed you to forget all your old friends. No mention of Republican racial politics from the Compromise of 1877 to Nixon's Southern Strategy, nor of the traditional conservative attitude toward integration and equal rights, nor Jesse Helms, nor Strom Thurmond, et alia and ad nauseam. The Civil Rights Act Paul only mentioned defensively, as something from which he'd "never wavered" except for that part about using the power of the state to enforce it.

Layer in a generous helping of self-pity ("and when I think of how political enemies often twist and distort my positions... My hope is that you will hear me out, that you will see me for who I am, not the caricature sometimes presented by political opponents... Republicans are often miscast as uncaring or condemning...") and you've got a perfect speech -- not for the folks at Howard University, but for the commenters at Reason who seem to understand Paul perfectly ("Maybe Paul should have offered up more free shit since that seems to work so well").

So in that sense it was a great success.

CONSERVATIVE MINORITY OUTREACH CONTINUES.

Thanks to Jack Fowler at National Review for steering his readers to this amazing promo:

It reminds me of my first job in high school, cold-calling people from a crummy office in downtown Bridgeport to try and get them to attend a presentation about a Florida real estate development scam called Rotunda. (You can read how Rotunda played out here.) It was run by something called the Cavanaugh Corporation, which claimed as one of its partners Ed McMahon -- whose autographed photo we cold-callers offered as a premium.

Also, I never noticed before how much Allen West looks like Alfred E. Neuman.

If you have to watch one of the crazy videos, this is the one: West on Hollywood! After a few fish-out-of-water gags about coming to Los Angeles -- when someone offers him some sushi, he says "I don't eat bait" -- he gets right down to how liberals won't let you say what you really want to, and conservatives are "so afraid of the Hollywood backlash that they meet in secret," by which I guess he means no one goes to their parties except Roger L. Simon. "Is this the America that some of us fought for?" roars West. "Is this some type of new Soviet-style Politburo being formed? Regardless I find it utterly disgusting to think that many of us who fought for the freedoms of our nation so that now it seems a handful of individuals get to define who can and who cannot speak..." He's also mad that Hollyweird stars are against guns: "I doubt Jim Carrey will be invited to give the start command at any NASCAR race. [Pause for laugh.]"

This scam is brought to you by PJTV, who seem to have gotten the down-on-his-luck West the way William Grefe got Rita Hayworth.

IF I CAN DREAM.

Press release:

U.S. Senator Rand Paul, R-KY, will speak at Howard University on inclusion in the Republican Party at 11 a.m. on Wednesday, April 10.

Imagine if Paul's appearance at Howard meant he was serious about minority outreach, as Colbert I. King at the Washington Post seems to think he is. Imagine if he owned up on behalf of the Republican Party to the Southern Strategy, by which the GOP won and held the South (and not a few Northern votes) by portraying themselves as the party of keeping you-know-who in line, and how that strategy persists to this day -- or rather to yesterday, he might say, because, he might even dare to admit, Republicans are not getting anywhere as a white people's party, and have surrendered to the necessity of treating black Americans as actual constituents rather than as objects of ooga booga, and are interested in hearing what they want.

Imagine how refreshing, not to say cleansing, such a speech might be! Because contrary to what Republicans seem to think, black Americans are hip to politics, and would probably appreciate it if Paul cut the bullshit and were willing to deal.

A beautiful dream. But --

Sen. Paul’s speech will focus on the importance of outreach to younger voters, as well as minority groups. He will also discuss the history of the African-American community’s roots in the Republican Party and current issues, such as school choice and civil liberties.

In other words: We used to be the Party of Lincoln, you people should love vouchers, etc. Kind of like Mitt Romney at the NAACP, but with more crazy eye-gleam.

Maybe he'll surprise me, but it sure looks like the Republicans are still, despite every motivation to do better, moving with all deliberate speed.

UPDATE. Commenter mds reminds me of what I had forgotten, even though I wrote about it at the time: that in 2010 Paul came out against the Civil Rights Act. Which would make him the perfect Republican to extend the olive branch! In fact, I think he should start weeping and announce he has sinned against his brothers -- "Forgive me, moochers!"

Is this thing going to be on TV?

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the slow shift rightbloggers are making, in their hour of defeat, from yelling about gay marriage to yelling about straight marriage. You may not notice it yet, but I predict it'll be a comer; it'll be their chance to do outreach to gay people by giving the scolds, nags, and shrews in their community a place of welcome. Hell, they might even turn Andrew Sullivan back around.

ROGER EBERT, 1942-2013.

Here's my appreciation from 2004 of what Ebert did with his "Great Movies" section, which was the thing that turned me around on him. For years I'd considered him a lightweight, but his very good writing on difficult films made me appreciate that while his style might be glib, he wasn't -- he saw things in the pictures, and talked easily about them in a way all kinds of people could understand. That's a very great gift in a critic. And he kept his gift, and at the job, right to the end.

Also, here's a nice story Ebert told on himself as a green kid:

I had been in Chicago four months and I was sitting under the L tracks with Mike Royko in an eye-opener place. A Blackhawks game was playing on WGN radio. The team scored, and again, and again. This at last was life. 

“The Blackhawks are really hot tonight,” I observed to Royko. 

He studied me. “Where you from, kid? Downstate?” 

“Urbana,” I said. 

“Ever seen a hockey game?” 

“No.” 

“That’s what I thought, you asshole. Those are the game highlights.”

That whole column, like a lot of his columns, is well worth reading.

SMART ASS.

James Taranto is laying the contempt on thick in his best Professor of Liberal Fascism manner -- "complete sophistry," "embarrassing philosophical error," "philosophical narcissism," etc, so you know he thinks he's got a Good One. His target, A. Barton Hinkle, made the crucial error of embarrassing Taranto, who had defended the proposition (not that he necessary thinks so himself! Read the fine print!) that the institution of marriage rather than any specific marriages would be harmed by gay marriage.

Hinkle rightly found this to be nonsense: "After all, you would not say a virus 'threatens humanity' if, in fact, no individual human person was ever harmed by the virus."

For his rejoinder, Taranto postulates a virus of his own:

The Hinkle virus is so fast-spreading that it soon infects every person alive, but it is largely benign. It has no effect on men, and only two effects on women: (1) it is passed on to any children they have, and (2) any children they conceive after infection will be born homosexual.

Blink. Blink.

The Hinkle virus would seem to fit its namesake's criterion that it does no harm to any individual human person. We have established as a condition of the experiment--and we trust that in the real world Hinkle agrees--that it is not harmful to a woman to give birth to a homosexual child, nor is it harmful to a child to be born homosexual. And since the virus affects the sexual orientation only of the yet-unborn, it should not disrupt any existing heterosexual relationship.

Yet it should be obvious that the Hinkle virus would threaten humanity by dramatically reducing the incentive to reproduce...

Taranto could as well have said "any children they conceive after infection will be born male" -- nothing wrong with being male, right? -- or "any children they conceive after infection will be born female" -- nothing wrong with being female, right? Which in the long run would have an even more dramatic effect on reproduction, if not on the "incentive to reproduce." We could use this, I suppose, as proof that masculinity presents a threat to mankind without blah blah. Or femininity!

But Taranto's point isn't really that "X may harm humanity without harming particular humans." It's more like You liberals think homosexuality is harmless, but what if everyone turned gay? 

He follows this with reams of universals-vs.-particulars guff to retroactively class it up ("Humanity is not 'simply the sum of the humans in it' any more than A. Barton Hinkle is simply the sum of the cells in him, or those cells are the sum of the atoms in them"), but they don't relate to his virus analogy at all. They're just fancy cover for a dumb joke about gays -- such jokes being among the last pieces of armament the anti-gay-marriage side has left.

Like I said before: This is how you know you're winning.

WHY NOBODY LIKES THE GOLDBERG FRAUD SQUAD.

Jonah Goldberg has been leading a charge of his fellow creeps against the large numbers of disability beneficiaries in the United States. He's already had some answers, but I think this response of his deserves another:

The most intriguing complaints come from people who are in effect saying that, since they have serious disabilities, it’s outrageous for me to question anyone’s disability claim. I think most people can see the flaw in this thinking. In fact, I’m flummoxed as to why people with real disabilities wouldn’t be the ones clamoring the loudest to stamp out fraud. Maybe disability checks would be more generous if voters thought they were subsidizing fewer cheats?

It would be difficult for Goldberg to see it, considering who he hangs out with, but not everyone is like him. And, in rare good news for the Republic, there are even fewer people like him than there used to be.

Back in sunnier times, when there seemed to be some relationship between the good fortune of Wall Street and the average American's purchasing power, we had an easier time believing that there was something morally superior about making money, and therefore something wicked about being poor. Those old Reagan-era stories about welfare queens and strapping young bucks with T-bone steaks, idiotic as they were, got a lot of people who should have known better to think, yes, maybe we should reform welfare, because even though snatching back some of the scraps we've been throwing the paupers won't enrich us much, it would be better for America and our souls if we at least tried to be mean sons of bitches. For look at the Masters of the Universe! It's not charitable instincts powering their economic miracle, but enlightened self-interest.

Came the collapse, that hooey became harder to swallow. Since it's turned out that the worse we do the more Wall Street rallies, we can't even stand the smell of it.

Conservatives are still telling us about the queens and bucks, though, trying to get us back into pauper-bashing shape. Fox News reports the so-called poor have refrigerators so why are they complaining; well-fed rightbloggers are outraged that welfare recipients spend some of their money on fast food and movie rentals; Jonah Goldberg wants to know which of these cripples are faking it, and his asshole buddy is talking about this guy he knows who pulled himself up by his bootstraps so why can't they, etc.

It isn't going over like it used to because there's this funny thing about Americans: We tend to be nicer to each other when times are rough than when they're easy. We get more sympathetic to other people who are having it hard in life because we know we're only a few paychecks away from it ourselves and, being human, we react with sympathy, rather than like George Costanza to a fire at a children's party.

And this applies in ambiguous circumstances, too -- what Goldberg in his pretense of magnanimity calls the "grayer area." If someone's a bum who spends the change you give him on drugs, he's still a bum; if someone's living off the dole, it's still not much of a living, and it certainly affords far fewer options and rewards than a viable working life. And if some disability pensioners are less disabled than the law might allow, what a sad pass they've come to, that they would go through all that to claim some miserly stipend. That poverty is not pure -- "the poor," Jimmy Breslin has said more than once, "are a pain in the ass" -- doesn't mean it's not poverty.

But maybe you need to have some minimal capacity for empathy to see that. Someone who wonders why the disabled aren't as eager as he is to turn in frauds, and offers them fatter checks in hopes of motivating them, probably doesn't qualify.

UPDATE. Comments are more eloquent than I was; here's a prime cut from D. Johnston:

That, my lazy little friend, is why people with "real" disabilities hate what you're doing - they understand your true intent. There is no part of me that believes you are honestly interested in rooting out fraud. There are sectors of the government far more vulnerable to fraud - the military, for instance - that you don't seem to care about. They believe - as do I - that your objective is to make people think that people on disability are liars so you can spend the next twenty years using them as scapegoats.

MEGAN McARDLE, FIXED.

"...I think Susan Patton is basically right: people should be looking to get married as early as possible. I say this as someone who married late, and since I wouldn't want to have married anyone except my husband, I'm glad I waited. But" it's not like you losers have anything so great to look forward to.

YOUR MOMENT OF GOLDSTEIN.

How's the left oppressing patriots today? With video games!  Here's an NPR story:

Back in 2007, in the first installment of BioShock, Levine created a world based on Ayn Rand's individualist philosophy and let it play out. This time, Levine has turned a game into an Aristotelian tragedy and used the model of great tragic heroes.

I couldn't give a shit about video games, but apparently at some point the Bad Guys in this one are revealed to be racists, which prompts this arrgh-blaargh from The Virginian:

NPR broadcast an article today about a developer of a violent video game in which the bad guys were Christians who revered the Constitution and were blatant racists. Of course with a theme like that it's obviously comparable to one of the great tragedies of literature... 

To NPR this is just like Hamlet or Oedipus. This is an NPR employee's dream of all that's wrong with America; America's founders, the religious heritage, and,of course the racism of everyone who's not part of the NPR family.

Like I said, I don't care about gaming and the NPR story doesn't mention it, but are the Founding Fathers really in BioShock Infinite? Because that would great to use in history classes. It speaks to the kids!

But The Virginian's a piker -- the aargh ain't blaarghy till Jeff Goldstein gets at it:

It’s out in the open now. There’s no longer any real pretense of objectivity. Each time the progressive media “report” favorably on something they characterize like this (fairly or not) — and no switch comes down to sting their hands — they grow ever more emboldened... 

They are the ones they’ve been waiting for, they were told. And it invigorates them. It gives them a sense of purpose and momentum. Because through the heart of every leftist runs the blood of totalitarianism, of confirmation bias, of rank bigotry and a mob’s lust for violence, for punishment, for blood, for inflicting suffering on those who dare oppose their designs...

Gasp! Not confirmation bias!

I don’t care who rolls their fucking eyes at my saying this. Circumstances have taught me that in several years, when the political winds allow them to do so, those very same people on “my” side will be saying the very same things I’m writing on now, pretending there wasn’t a time they rolled their fucking eyes at the True Believers, the embarrassing Hobbits who were preventing them from wooing the moderates.

To paraphrase LBJ's analogy, he's outside the tent, pissing himself.

I eagerly await Bill Whittle's take.

UPDATE. This story seems to have been covered previously by Big Breitbart and by Mytheos Holt, whose culture war training has got him thinking correctly about how to cover a game stoners play when they're bored:

Naturally, the creators denied any intent to specifically attack Rand, arguing instead that their general intent was to criticize extremism of all stripes. And considering that the first game treats Andrew Ryan (who isn’t even the main villain of the original Bioshock) with far more sympathy than it treats the all-but-explicitly communist villain of Bioshock 2, Sofia Lamb, who willingly traumatizes her own daughter and leaves a trail of corpses behind her in her pursuit of a utopian society, one could argue that the series had been comparatively right-leaning up until Infinite.

After much study of the struggle of competing Tendencies in this video game series ("In other words, the Leftist mass movement could come off mildly more sympathetic, though not much"), Holt finally feels he can answer the question, "Was the game created by Marxists/atheists?"  The answer may surprise you!

Coming soon: Which pornographic Tumblrs are consonant with free enterprise? (Trick question! Only pay sites embody the robot Founders' vision.)

UPDATE 2. Commenter Gromet informs us that "Breakout was the last truly God-fearing and patriotic game" because "your job was to destroy a band of rainbow colors." Wait, what about the Hunger Games?

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the gay marriage cases at the Supreme Court and all the hysteria they have engendered among the brethren. The ones where they try to play it cagey are even better than the ones where they aargh-blaargh sanctity of marriage etc, I think -- but you'll all have your own favorites, I'm sure.

REPUBLICAN MINORITY OUTREACH CONTINUES.

What could go wrong?

For those of you who have blissfully forgotten, Herman Cain is the black Donald Trump whose ridiculous Presidential run briefly excited the brethren until he resigned in ignominy, which they tried to blame on liberals.

Next up: Allen West makes a buddy picture with Chris Christie.

PROBLEM SOLVED.

So John Tracinski asks how do we get the youngs to vote GOP, but spends most of his column telling us that the college kids vote for liberals because the liberals brainwash them all with dependency and communism; after several rounds of these old Al Capp routines (only not funny) he cuts to an unexpected solution:

Yet the biggest failure of the right is that it has lost the economy’s technological elite.

Today’s John Galts and Hank Reardens are not in a valley in Colorado. They’re in a valley in California. The Hank Rearden of Silicon Valley, an innovator who started out in a garage and built a company which became the most valuable in the world, was Steve Jobs. But Jobs was—let’s be honest here—kind of a hippie. He had many of the virtues of an Ayn Rand hero, but a very different personal philosophy.

That brings us to what I think is the most important question to take away as the right examines how to reform itself. How does it win Silicon Valley? How does it get the best, most innovative segment of the youth, the ones who are actually plugged in to a vital and growing area of the economy, to see the value of free markets and to want to fight for them? I put it this way because I think that if the right learns how to win over the young innovators and entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley (and its many equivalents across the country), it will go a long way toward learning how to win over the youth vote.

Hmm, a Randian tech genius who believes the rest of the world is merely an appurtenance to his reality -- the answer is obvious: get John McAfee out of jail and back into the game! Hell, it worked with Tom DeLay.

SHORTER MICHAEL WALSH:

Fraud exists, so helping people is stupid.

(Actually, this could be the Shorter for the entire conservative movement.)

LITTLE MRS. CAN'T BE WRONG.

As she did with the Iraq War, Megan McArdle's got to come up with something contrarian to show that the dirty hippies with their annoying habit of being right about things aren't really right, not in the way that counts. So:

In some sense, it doesn't really matter how the Supreme Court rules on the gay marriage case it's hearing today. The culture war is over on this front, and gay marriage has won. Even if it loses at the Supreme Court this term, it will win in the legislatures . . . because it is already winning in popular opinion. Few people much under the age of sixty see a compelling reason that straights should marry and gays should not. For that matter, my Republican grandfather is rumored to have said, at the age of 86, "I think gays should marry! We'll see how much they like it, though."

At this point, it's just a matter of time. In some sense, the sexual revolution is over . . . and the forces of bourgeois repression have won.

The whole thing is so dizzying in its stupidity that it defies analysis, but basically: When gays can get married, then getting married will be so much the norm that you stupid bohemians with your free love will be ostracized like cigarette smokers. And leading the way will be those nice young Republican Presidential candidates:

The 1970s were an open revolt against the idea of the dutiful pair bond, in favor of a life of perpetual infatuation. The elites led the way--and now they're leading it back. Compare Newt Gingrich or John McCain to the new generation of Republican hopefuls. Jindal, Ryan, Christie, Rubio . . . all of them are married to their first wives. Jindal met his wife in high school, Christie in college. By their age, McCain was preparing for his first divorce, and Gingrich was just a few years from his second.

I'm surprised she didn't mention the irony that these GOP worthies whose shining monogamy will triumph in the new age of gay-marriage-enabled neo-Victorianism are all against gay marriage. 

McArdle also returns to that marriage-will-make-you-rich nonsense she was pimping last week, citing it among the forces that will make sexual hedonism de trop.  Of course she would think that -- she's one of those people who actually watch Ross Douthat measure marriage with a slide rule to determine the optimal connubial age in a healthy society, and not only finds it fascinating instead of ridiculous, but thinks it will change the way normal Americans behave. Yes, forget culture, forget the economy, forget the environment, forget the forces with which we interact every day -- once the big-brains emerge from their labs with their new, this-time-for-sure convincing evidence we should all get hitched and commence procreating at age 22.73, everyone will get with the program.

Try to imagine being so anxious, not just to be right, but to prove your enemies wrong. Think of what wonderful things McArdle could have achieved with her obviously bountiful imagination if she hadn't been compelled to waste it all on that.

UPDATE. Comments are as always a joy, but I must single out aimai for the term she has invented for McArdle's habit, when troubled by progressive advances, of weaving dark tales of unintended consequences yet-to-come: "weaponized sour grapes."

ANNALS OF THE CULTURE WARS, SPECIAL BREITBART EDITION.

The kulturkampfers at Breitbart.com just can't quit Lena Dunham, even when another of their hate-objects is in their line of fire:

Tina Fey, like other Hollywood-created stars including Lena Dunham, is showing herself to be a box office bust.

That's Ben Shapiro, who goes on to tell Fey that though she's "very talented... her pokes at Palin did her no good with mainstream America, and her cutesy 'too-smart-for-the-room' routine does her no favors with audiences." No, really: Ben Shapiro's giving Tina Fey career advice.

Dunham Alert also for this Maurice Black column:

Although Girls never fails to find humor in its characters’ haplessness, it also reflects the disturbing reality that more than half of college graduates under 25 are now unemployed or working jobs that don’t require a degree.

The title is "HBO'S 'GIRLS' OFFERS STARK FISCAL LESSONS IN AGE OF OBAMA." According to Black Dunham "unwittingly lends credence to moves by governors such as Pat McCrory in North Carolina or Rick Scott in Florida to shift higher education funding into fields that have better job placement rates." Maybe he's thinking of Laverne & Shirley.

(Black, BTW, is Vice President of the Moving Picture Institute, progenitor of that "youthful pop music video that alerts the hipster set to the perils of artificially low interest rates" we were talking about the other day; given his obvious commitment to agenda-driven entertainments, it must drive him nuts that Dunham isn't aware of what a conservative message she's sending; I imagine him yelling "You're one of us and you don't even know it, Lena!" at his TV while masturbating furiously.)

There are many other Dunham dumps at Breitbart.com, but let's close with one about an older favorite: The communist menace that is Law & Order. Wingnuts have had a hard-on for the show and its treasonously topical story lines for years, and now Warner Todd Huston brings the fist-shaking fury as L&O makes hay of Todd Akinism:

A character sitting in the witness box then says, "It's nearly impossible for a victim of legitimate rape to become pregnant." This is followed by looks of disgust by the two female lead detective characters sitting in the courtroom gallery.

Jesus Christ, people, do I have to spell it out for ya?

To subtly drive home an allusion to a politician like Todd Akin, on the lapel of the character testifying is a prominent U.S. flag pin, just like one a conservative politician might wear. How often do you think characters on Law & Order: SVU have worn flag pins?

Yeah, they may act regular, but that guy who played Lennie Brisco? He was in musicals!

UPDATE. Some extra culture-war nuggets for you: Our old friend Mark "Gavreau" Judge at Acculturated,  musing on gay marriage, gives us the line of the week:

It is important to celebrate tolerance, while keeping watch to make sure that the tolerance itself doesn’t become oppression.

The rest of the column never equals this, though it does tell us that Dan Savage is the real bully. Second place winner: Tevi Troi at Real Clear Politics, in his brow-squeezer "Can Republicans Close the Pop Culture Gap?" --

A move towards hipness must come from the party leaders themselves...

Comrades, the hipness of mere apparatchiks will not suffice -- the party leaders must themselves be hanging and banging. Draft a memo!

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP...

...on the Iraq War 10th Anniversary festivities. Which have been, um, muted. But there's always next time!

WEDDING BALLS.

Now that conservatives have resigned themselves to just talking to one another, I see a couple of the better-known ones pimping that old marriage-makes-you-rich buncombe -- which makes sense, since only a wingnut would buy it.  Ole Perfesser Glenn Reynolds' latest, for USA Today, is pro-marriage done particularly pro-forma:

This past summer, Jason DeParle noted in The New York Times that we are now seeing "two classes divided by 'I do.'" And while people are going on and on about Wall Street and income inequality, it turns out that marriage inequality is one of the biggest things making people less equal, accounting for as much as 40% of the difference in incomes: "It is the privileged Americans who are marrying, and marrying helps them stay privileged."

You might just as well say that marriage turns you white. The Perfesser's not even trying to make that correlation look like a causality. He's not putting anything like the elbow grease into it that nuts like Bradford Wilcox and Charles Murray regularly apply. He's not so much running his con as jogging it, as if it doesn't have to convince anybody who isn't already convinced.

But even worse, as always, is Megan McArdle:

College improves your earning prospects. So does marriage. Education makes you more likely to live longer. So does marriage.

It's like she's reading it off flash cards.

Yet while many economist vocally support initiatives to move more people into college, very few of them vocally favor initiatives to get more people married. Why is that, asks Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry?

I would have said "because they're not con artists like you," but Gobry thinks it's "cosmopolitan perspective" and "bias." McArdle adds to this her own special blend of inappropriate personalization and passive-aggressiveness:

We might not want to make people who fail to marry feel bad, since many of them probably feel pretty bad about it already.

And:

...all economists are, definitionally, very good at college. Not all economists are good at marriage. Saying that more people should go to college will make 0% of your colleagues feel bad. Saying that more people should get married and stay married will make a significant fraction of your colleagues feel bad.

In the Age of Obama II, more of these folks may rush to the consolation of "You're just jealous," but in retrospect it was always a dead cinch McArdle would get there first.

NICE WORK IF YOU CAN GET IT.

Rightwing pennysaver the Washington Examiner will no longer be handed out at Metro stations to all comers every day, but instead become a wingnut weekly in which the street-level reporting and 87 employees are replaced by double portions of "commentary" on why Obama is Hitler.

The product will offer news, analysis and commentary on national politics and policy, and its targeted readership will be roughly 45,000 professionals in government, public affairs, advocacy and academia, Clarity said.

Yeah, the same 45,000 people who ask each other every week if they've read the new Cal Thomas column.

This seems to be the new reality for the conservative world of makework in the Age of Obama II; like the factota at The Umlaut and other feeder streams for thinktank babies, they have begun to abandon the idea that their work might make a difference.

It used to be easier to believe that it did. For decades now, the allegedly liberal media has actually been thick with right-wing voices, from the lofty George Will to the humblest rightblogger. Every newspaper, even the communist flagship New York Times, has its Douthats and/or Brookses, albeit in lower-rent versions. The papers are scared not to have them; otherwise who would they point to when someone screams bias? (Not that it stops the screaming -- conservatives will be screaming about bias until the last newspaper lines the last birdcage, and for years after -- but having them aboard allows the papers' management to feel they've done something reasonable, though I wonder if a few of them don't actually feel bullied.)

It never mattered how brutal or crazy these guys' ideas were, either; they were the serious opposition, and had to be granted perches from which they might be heeded. This enabled and emboldened them. They also seemed to understand that what had gained them their perches was no better credential than that they were different from the "politically correct" milquetoasts the public was used to. So they leaned on that. If liberals maintained, for example, that the least among us deserved protection from want, conservatives cried for them to be given less, ever less, lest the welfare queens and strapping young bucks destroy America. Not only did they get away with it -- they had an effect on the discourse and then on policy.

Things got even worse during the early days of the Iraq War -- happy anniversary, baby! -- when conservatives became so comfortable with their own increasingly loud and bellicose voices that they got a lot of non-conservatives to howl along with them. And this too had an effect on policy.

But since the economy collapsed, things have changed a bit. There's not much market for market worship these days. And when you run a presidential campaign based on how the producers know better than the moochers -- well, you saw how that worked out.

Conservatives aren't going away -- their long spate of affirmative action has firmly ensconced them in the public discourse. But the Examiner, at least, seems to have lost faith.  For a while they could at least tell themselves that by running a by-God newspaper with lots of that local stuff local folk love, they were getting into the hands and winning the hearts and minds of the common people. But now they're going to stop covering school board meetings and city council hearings, and just regurgitate propaganda for like-minded souls. This will achieve nothing in the way of political outreach, but it will achieve what I expect remains important to them: It will keep their jobs. Because someone is still paying them to do it -- just like someone is still paying for The Umlaut and Liberty Island and Bill Whittle videos and Acculturated  and PJ Lifestyle and many such otherwise pointless exercises.

If the Examinoids really believed what they affect to believe, they'd recognize themselves as the moochers they are, apologize to old man Anschutz for wasting his money, and seek honest employment. But they're what we might call cafeteria capitalists; they don't want the hard stuff; they won't sacrifice anything real on the altar of the Dollar. But they'll step right up when the celebrant hands around the bread.

SHITSVILLE U.S.A.

Hey look, another rightwing culture-war magazine. Andrea Castillo at The Umlaut:

In the world of popular culture, the motives of capitalists are routinely portrayed as suspicious if not openly antagonistic to the public good, culminating in the cliché of the evil billionaire or businessman.

Like have you ever seen Citizen Kane? Total Alinskyite smear job. But --

At long last, the free marketeers are fighting back and attempting to reclaim an equal part of the moral high ground, but the challenges that they face are not insignificant.

Sounds promising! So whattaya got?

Fred Smith, of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, hopes to help salvage the reputations of businesspeople by disputing the bad rap with which they’ve been unfairly saddled and proudly pointing to the wealth that they create as a moral good in itself.

If he's not proudly pointing while coated in silver paint, standing on a milk crate in Times Square, and doing the robot, I don't see this catching on with a large audience.

But give Fred a break, look what he's up against:

...the arts have a profound effect on influencing people’s moral dispositions and ultimately their worldviews. The “nefarious executive” trope is so established within the arts that it is doubtful that it will quickly fade silently into the past. If we are to adequately challenge this prevailing “commerce as a questionably-necessary evil” narrative, it makes sense to take stock of how our cultural narratives became so skewed in the first place. 

Ludwig von Mises, similarly assessing the cultural situation of his time, was intrigued by the overwhelming tendency for members of the “creative class” to adopt anti-capitalistic worldviews in their lives and crafts. In The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality, Mises offers one explanation for this trend: artists, especially good ones, face constant frustration in a market that is notoriously fraught with that destructive combination of conspicuous consumption and poor taste.

I began to nod off at "Ludwig von Mises," too, but I must say, as a simple observation of human behavior, this, while incomplete, is not totally divorced from reality -- which may be why Castillo rushes to dispute it:

Despite the handful of type II errors in artistic appreciation that have occurred, in most cases, great artists have found success within their lifetimes, and mass culture expands both the quantity and diversity of commercially-viable forms of expression.

Then, one is tempted to ask, why you crying? If it ain't broke, why fix it? Why not just enjoy the expansive quantity and diversity of all this mass culture which the market has delivered unto you?

Longtime readers will have figured it out already: With culture warriors the "culture" is never as important as the "war." If the market produces wrongthink popular entertainment, the market, otherwise infallible, is wrong, and its protectors must set things right.

And Castillo's got some acts that'll do the job: The Moving Pictures Institute, for example, with "a youthful pop music video that alerts the hipster set to the perils of artificially low interest rates," and Emergent Order, which "made quite a splash with their humorous rap battles starring the modern doppelgängers of larger-than-life economists John Maynard Keynes and F.A. Hayek."

But even when you have steak, you need sizzle to sell it, and here's the promo copy Castillo has filed for this package tour:

The videos that have been produced thus far have been captivating precisely because of the sincerity and accuracy of their messages, a quality that is generally difficult to produce when one is merely clocking in. Contra Mises, it could be that not all artists fall prey to the short-sighted despair that follows a disappointing opening night or release. For some of them, the uncontrolled but orderly beauty of free exchange and association is their muse.

"The sincerity and accuracy of their message," "the uncontrolled but orderly beauty of free exchange and association" -- you think maybe these people are new to show business? Or to the planet?

Look, kids, I'll do this pro bono: Full page ad in Variety: "SUCK ON THIS, MOOCHERS!" Then tell your boys at Emergent Whatever that we need some chicks in thongs and a profane rapping granny. Thereafter, one word: Payola. I know your backers got it -- they just have to start spending it where it counts. By the way: Have you ever thought about why they don't?

UPDATE. Commenters are bearish on Castillo et alia. "Deal: you capitalists get rid of the nefarious executives, we'll get rid of the trope," says whetstone. mortimer informs us that "Emergent Order is a project of the Mercatus Center at (but not supported by) George Mason University, which gets most of its funding from those bankrolling gadflies of right-wing über-libertarianism, the Koch Family, with a little help from the likes of Exxon Mobil. Mercatus is also directed by Kevin Drum's favorite libertarian, Tyler Cowen..." Inbreeding will tell!

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP....

...about this year's sad CPAC.

An outtake I didn't have time to explain to Voice readers, but which you late-show hipsters will understand: Betsy Woodruff at National Review:

Here’s a weird CPAC moment: I’m sitting in a hallway in the Gaylord Convention Center with Cynthia Yockey...

Holy shit, I thought, Cynthia Yockey -- the second craziest lesbian in conservatism next to Robin of Berkeley! I remember Yockey telling readers ""Why Newt’s lesbian sister is a good reason for gays to vote for him." But now listen to her:

“People are courteous,” says Yockey, “but there is no courteous way to say, ‘You don’t deserve to be equal because you’re gay.’ That is intrinsically offensive.”

When you've lost Cynthia Yockey, the time is near when all you'll have left is Bruce Carroll.

HOW YOU KNOW YOU'RE WINNING.

Back in December, James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal had an article headlined, "The Sure Thing? Reconsidering a prediction about same-sex marriage." Though a few years earlier he had predicted gay marriage would win the day when the Supreme Court got hold of it, Taranto said, "now we're not so sure." (As he also described a pro-gay-marriage decision not as one that would enfranchise millions of his fellow citizens, but as one that would "declare the traditional definition of marriage unconstitutional," you know where his rooting interest lies.)

In a new column, Taranto returns to the subject and pulls what he probably considers a clever trick play:

The administration does not go so far as to urge the court to strike down all state bans on same-sex marriage. Instead it urges a novel solution that would have the effect of abolishing nonmarital civil unions, until now the compromise of choice between supporters and opponents of same-sex marriage.

You can hear the chortles in CPAC back rooms: Heh indeed, by pushing "gay" "marriage" Obama's killing civil unions! How do you like that, gay people? You should join us at CPAC -- er, on the downlow.

This schtick comes with rhetorical appurtenances. One: You're Denying Our Right to Self-Expression:

As a legal matter, the administration's position seems odd. The effect of banning same-sex marriage in civil-union states is purely expressive: The states are in effect declaring that homosexual relationships are inferior to marriages. That is a value judgment with which many people disagree, but why should the state not be free to express it--especially when the expression has no material effect?

Two: Obama is Applying the "Chicago Way" to His Fellow Travelers and They Will Fall In Line:

The likeliest answer is political: that the administration has concluded (or anticipates that the court, which is to say Justice Kennedy, will conclude) that imposing same-sex marriages nationwide would be disruptive in the way Roe v. Wade was--but the civil-union states are socially liberal enough that they would accept such a ruling.

Three: You're Only Hurting Yourself:

For supporters of same-sex marriage, however, there's a danger that adopting this legal compromise would shut down an avenue of political compromise.

These are not the kind of arguments you hear when you're losing. The struggle will continue, as it still does over the civil rights of black Americans. But the losing side will become increasingly legalistic, hair-splitting, and petty. That's how you know you're winning.

UPDATE. Speaking of which, here's Rick Moran reacting to the news that GOP macher Rob Portman, inspired by his gay son, has turned over on marriage equality:

As more and more Americans realize that they are related to, or work with, or live next to someone who is gay, it is inevitable that acceptance follows. This doesn't mean that opposing gay marriage is bigoted. People of good conscience can disagree (something the left refuses to acknowledge while trying to ram gay marriage down the throats of people by co-opting the legisalture and using the courts to gain their objective).

Translation: Yes, we're getting tolerant, but what about all these homosexuals trying to ram their big, hard gay marriage down my throat? Where's their tolerance?

I expect the brighter bulbs among the rightbloggers will keep quiet or roll more gently with it. Maybe we'll see a pro-equality, anti-drone Republican Party in 2016. Baby steps!

SHORTER PEGGY NOONAN:

When I think of you godless media criticizing my Church, I think of a severed head -- yours!

UPDATE. Our commenters are carrying the freight to a greater extent than usual. "I normally ascribe Peggy Noonan's incoherence to the fact that she's plastered," says sharculese, "but I'm pretty drunk right now and I'm still not getting this." smut clyde noticed something in the Longer:

words like “gender” and “celibacy” and “pedophile” and phrases like “irrelevant to the modern world.” But when they just prattle on with their indignant words—gender, celibacy, irrelevant—

One of those words in the first list has disappeared from the second! How can this be?

A couple of folks also notice Noonan's surly reference to the Mohammedans, in which she complains of the media-that-is-not-Peggy-Noonan:

They think they’re brave, or outspoken, or something. They don’t have enough insight into themselves to notice they’d never presume to instruct other great faiths. It doesn’t cross their minds that if they were as dismissive about some of those faiths they’d have to hire private security guards.

I thought the whole you-don't-have-the-guts-to-make-fun-of-Mohammed thing had long since passed into wingnut oblivion, along with "Democracy Whiskey Sexy" and "That Andrew Sullivan is one of the good ones," but I guess under stress these guys tend to revert.

LOOKING IN ON OLD FRIENDS.

We've had a lot of fun with Mark "Gavreau" Judge here in recent weeks, so on a whim I dropped by the rightwing culture mag that employs him to see how he was passing his days. Behold:

Can the Hollywood reboot of The Fantastic Four, now in the works, succeed where the original movies failed? It all depends on whether producer Matthew Vaughn and director Josh Trank have the guts to do one thing: To make The Fantastic Four about the family versus communism.

Don't ever change, fella.

FAMILY VALUES.

I rarely go read Sarah Hoyt's stuff; she's a yeller (that is, she uses ALL CAPS for emphasis quite a lot) and seems a little crazy. But I happened upon her latest about how teachers are horrible and we must homeschool to fight the power, and noticed this:

I’ll just say that I once screamed at [her son] Robert for three hours for writing something about half as bad as what I see from college students. He was in third grade. I told him unless he improved he would be an illiterate peasant at the mercy of people who could express themselves better. (More on that later.) He took it to heart and improved.

I'll bet he did. Later:

However, as I’ve learned over the years, my knowledge is often far from complete, and what happens OFFICIALLY is also not what happens in truth. (For instance, if I’d known both the kids were sent to the school psychologist once a week through elementary, to fish for stuff that might be considered “abuse” – probably because Dan and I were troublesome – they would have been out of there so fast that the school’s head would spin. Unfortunately both kids assumed this was “normal” and didn’t tell me till high school. On paper, it never happened.)

They were asking the kids (including the subject of the three-hour tirade) about abuse every week? I don't know whether this is a genuine reminiscence or the script of a Lars von Trier movie. (I also think the hotel maid Hoyt says short-sheeted their beds every night just wanted them to leave.) Oh also:

While they were sending him to Title One, one of the books confiscated for reading in class was one of our signed Pratchetts (can’t remember which now, but might have been The Color of Magic. I remember because instead of telling me – he wasn’t supposed to take those to school – he broke into the teacher’s closet and stole it back. He was never caught.)

And I thought Lileks' family stories were creepy.

DRAMA QUEEN.

Those of you familiar with (or who read our consideration of) Mark Steyn's flair for the dramatic will appreciate this Daily Caller headline:

Steyn declares America ‘doomed’ in wake of Pop Tart gun suspension

The transcript (they have audio but Jesus, who'd submit himself to that? Unless Steyn accompanied himself with some lovely Richard Rodgers melodies) has lots about the boys who stormed Normandy and such like, but this is my favorite bit:

"You’re doomed, America,” Steyn said. “You’re done for. No society can survive this level of stupidity..."

To paraphrase Groundhog Day, this is America he's talking about, right?

A HANDUP NOT A HANDOUT.

John Williams, the hardworking graphic artist... ok, stop right there, graphic artists do work hard; maybe not in the big agencies where they play beer pong for a hour and a half and then make a squiggle, but in John's world the dollars are hard. Anyway, the hardworking graphic artist who did the cover of my lurid novel hasn't been having the best time of it economically, and losing a bread-and-butter freelance gig to the caprices of corporate scumbaggery hasn't made it any better. What say you click this link and send him some scratch?

Thanks in advance for being such angels.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP...

... about the Rand Paul filibuster and the new outbreak of bullshit libertarianism it has engendered among rightbloggers. Among the outtakes was the claim by Bookworm Room that "the mainstream, drive-by media did what it does best: it pretended Paul’s epic filibuster never happened." In evidence BR showed front pages of major newspaper editions with no mention of Paul on them. Yet if you put site:nytimes.com "rand paul" "filibuster" into Google, at this writing you get 70,400 results. And I thought the internet was supposed to change everything.

UPDATE. Ace of Spades features prominently in this column, but did you know that Spades is also a culture critic for Breitbart.com? His latest is about how you only ever hear about shows that middle-aged women like because Obama or something. This'll give you a good idea of his method:

I don't know the politics of Mad Men (though I have heard-tell that it largely about delivering a frisson of satisfaction for liberal women about the dastardly men of the late 50s), but I'm going to guess here that Middle Aged Liberal Women Who Work in the Media are Huge Fans, because dang, if I have not absorbed whole plotlines of the show just by reading Maureen Dowd's column. (Tell a lie, I don't read her column. No one does. But you know what I mean.)

Also:

Men like some TV shows too -- Archer, Justified, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. But no one talks about them in the media. You're not surrounded by constant references. Middle Aged Liberal Women Who Work in the Media don't like them, I guess.

"Justified FX" in Google = 3,300,000 results. I'm guessing "Media" is an imaginary magazine put out by a G.I. Joe doll Spades genitally mutiliated in 12th Grade.

THE OTHER MAN BOOB.

John Hawkins, who delighted us last week with his butchitude, is at it again with another essay. This one's about how bitches get away with everything .

Among the prime sniglets:

Moreover, from a common sense perspective, if you could actually get by with paying women 76 cents on the dollar to do the same work that men do, wouldn’t all women firms dominate every field because of the reduced overhead?

And:

But, here’s a question: Has anyone ever considered passing a “violence against men” act?

At the very end:

Playing the blame game ultimately serves no one but the people who make their living as professional grievance mongers and so, it would be counterproductive for guys to claim that they’re victims of the “matriarchy.”

Come on come on you'resoclose come on...

But...

ACK

...it is time to recognize that men today have gender-related complaints that are every bit as serious and legitimate as women do, if not more so.

Science has debunked a lot of the myths about men, but Hawkins proves at least one of them: We sure do whine when we're sick.

#StandWithThatAssholeRandPaul.

I'm glad someone's standing on the floor of the Senate against domestic droning even if it is Rand Paul.

It's true that many of Paul's supporters are full of shit. When such esteemed civil liberties advocates as Michele Bachmann ("[Obama] is allowing the ACLU to run the CIA") start pretending to give a shit about drones, you know what a put-up job it is.

And Rand Paul is a nut -- not only wrong on the Civil Rights Act but sneaky about it, a Benghazi conspiracy theorist, etc. And he's only a civil libertarian in the uncivil libertarian sense, by which I mean highly selective:

....if someone is attending speeches from someone who is promoting the violent overthrow of our government, that’s really an offense that we should be going after — they should be deported or put in prison.

The new Tom Paine ovah heah. If he ever gets close to high office you can expect him to talk more like this than like Glenn Greenwald, guaranteed.

Still, like I said in an earlier consideration of this phenomenon, wrong is wrong and there's no reason for me to pretend it isn't for partisan advantage. I understand Obama has to -- he's got to deal with the traditional vulnerability of Democrats to charges of being, in the hoary old phrase, weak on defense. And hoary as it is, the charge still has power -- that's what Benghazi-mania is all about: wingnuts holding desperately onto an ancient equity.

But Obama's a politician; that's his lookout, not mine. And while I think he's better than the regular run of postwar U.S. Presidents, "having his back" does not for me extend to countenancing the assassination of U.S. citizens. So I endorse the current news-cycle-grabbing story, and look forward to hauling out the scrapbook when Presidential candidate Paul endorses the invasion of Iran.

A DUNCIAD OF CONFEDERATES.

Found via a link on the Ole Perfesser's page -- looks like Reynolds is getting even deeper in with the survivalist/prepper/posse comitatus crowd -- is Herschel Smith:

In this article I have three objectives. First I want to discuss what would happen to a lone wolf fighter if he tried to be effective without aid and assistance. Next, I want to distinguish between thinking tactically and strategically concerning survival. Finally, I want to describe things that might catalyze the need to invoke such plans, from rogue, illegitimate groups to patriots who will not relinquish their their second amendment rights, regardless of the consequences.

This cowboy makes Reynolds' other rebel buddy Bob Owens look like David Frum.  Here's his poetic description of what renegades who don't play by society's rules will go through during the fraternity-hazing "Lone Wolf" phase:

Within a couple of days of being in the wilderness, your personal stench is merely disgusting. By the end of the first week, the putrid, toxic paste that develops around the groins of men becomes a risk to health and safety and can cause serious diseases. Within another week your feet develop a cocktail of fungal infections, and within another week the skin begins to fall off of them.

Around this time sores develop across your entire body...

Sounds like little boys trying to gross each other out, doesn't it? If you can handle that, citizen, Smith may just let you carry a AR-15 in his beloved corps!  But then you'll have to consider some tough questions:

Should I go buy a relatively inexpensive polymer frame semi-auto handgun and some ammunition in order to be able to assist friends and loved ones in their time of need? We need to think through these issues. Are you a diabetic? Do you have the insulin you need for a protracted period of time? Are there other medications you need?

I'll take out these jackbooted ATF bastards as soon I get my inhaler!

Plus, gibberish about Obamacare, patriots taking out the power grid, etc... Gun nuts are the Manson Family of the 21st Century. They're all "helter-skelter" on the internet, but will probably just end up killing some innocent bystanders and raving away the rest of their lives in prison.

WHEN SLAVE GIRL PRINCESS LEIA ISN'T ENOUGH.

Mark "Gavreau" Judge apparently felt the need to be humiliated, and went about it the way conservatives often do these days, by writing about Lena Dunham and Girls:

Girls creator Lena Dunham is very talented, and she’s only twenty-six, but it has to be said: like so many liberal Hollywood and New York artists, she has a powerful streak of cowardice... The girls in Girls are frustrated because the guys they date are either passive, psychotic, pretentious, degrading, or plain old losers. But what if Dunham had written in a male character who is strong, caring, attractive, highly intelligent, sexually unambiguous, great in bed, and a conservative?... 

How about this: a handsome grad student from Fordham who is Catholic, articulate, a college football star, compassionate, manly, and can debate any liberal to a standstill. Maybe his flaw is that he drinks too much, or that he once bullied a gay kid.

He could be called Gark "Javreau" Mudge! And the dark secret that drives him is that a black kid may have stolen his bicycle.

I understand the celebrity fantasy but, guy, this thing about trying to dare Lena Dunham into fucking your avatar (or at least wearing its promise ring) is just creepy. Also, did it never occur to you to make Gark Javreau Mudge's hamartia two wetsuits and a dildo?

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP...

...on the alleged assault on Bob Woodward, a hilarious concept. If this is how things worked, Ross Douthat, George Will, Jennifer Rubin, and dozens of other such like would be occupying deep landfill right now.

At least this story introduced me to the wonderful #StandWithWoodward Twitter tag, which has given me such gems as "Woodward goes after another #liberal President, the 1st being Nixon. Unlike Nixon, #Obama tries threats & intimidation." History education ain't what it used to be.

MAN BOOB.

John Hawkins breaks it down: Men enjoyed recreational fistfights and gunplay for centuries but, around the time Raiders of the Lost Ark came out, for some unspecified reason they stopped and, no longer being able to relate to action movies, became emasculated.

A few generations before that, women started getting educations and jobs, which was either a retroactive secondary cause of this emasculation or just made it worse. In any case you'll all be sorry.

Conclusion: Civilization is for pussies.

(We have ought to rewrite the old saw for this crew: First time as farce, second and every subsequent time as farce.)

UPDATE. Guess we'll have to quote some Hawkins, because commenters have referred to it. Brace yourselves:

Some of us take martial arts classes or go to the firing range, which is fine as far as it goes, but it’s often like practicing for a game you’ll never play. Chances are, you’ll probably go your whole life without shooting anyone or having to defend yourself from a thug trying to beat you to death on the street.

Substance McGravitas: "OMG I have gone my whole life without shooting anyone! I need a hug. WAIT NO, I need to shoot someone." Michael Søndberg Olson: "Yeah, Hawkins really enjoyed gouging my eye out, and then I made a drive-by of his shack and killed his daughter-wife. And now we're tit-deep in spraying cocks!"