YOU ALREADY HAVE ZERO PRIVACY.

If you look up "Ed Morrissey" (of Hot Air) and "surveillance" on Google, here are the first two hits you get. First, from Morrissey today on the NSA/PRISM news:

Contra the training materials, this is very much something to worry about — especially for the Obama administration... 

...This means that the NSA and FBI have access to communications of the legislative and judicial branches — at least those that go through public servers, no? Maybe Congress would like to invite Eric Holder up for another session really soon. They’d better send it by carrier pigeon...

And Morrissey from January 2009:

Hmmm. This should really enrage the Left. The FISA court will make public a ruling that validates George Bush’s warrantless surveillance on international communications, including those with one terminus in the United States... 

In the end, though, the biggest beneficiary should be George Bush. He has been unfairly castigated as some sort of fascist for using the power he already had available to track terrorist communications and keep this nation safe. Plenty of people owe him a big apology — and the New York Times and Eric Lichtblau are first in line.

FISA's word was good enough for Morrissey once upon a time. What turned him around, I wonder?

In another recent item Morrissey puts on the doe-eyes and the peace button and says, "Perhaps this will move this issue out of the partisan sphere and into a common ground in which we can all work to define exactly how far we’re willing to go in trading privacy for security." Pfffft. Morrissey, Michelle Malkin, Glenn Reynolds, Jonah Goldberg, and all those guys who were wondering what our problem was when we complained about this shit years ago will do everything they can for civil liberties now short of calling for the end of any of the legislation that makes this panopticon possible. Laura Ingraham says maybe she was hasty about the Patriot Act -- live and learn, right? -- but I expect she'll get with the Jim Sensenbrenner position, which is that the Act cannot fail, it can only be failed by unscrupulous liberals pretending to be interested in national security.

All honor and credit to Glenn Greenwald for unearthing this outrage, but frankly I assumed they were doing this already. Scott McNealy -- well, I was going to say warned, but actually he was just notifying us years ago, and since then the journalists have just been catching up. I'd like to roll it all back, and in the past I've been guardedly optimistic about left and right coming together on these issues. But since the brethren started really pushing fake scandals, I can't see anything going on in their heads except some animal drive to stir shit sufficiently that when they put another of their mooks up there to say "so much promise, to no great purpose" -- and then tell us how Kathleen Sebelius tried to kill a widdle girl -- people might buy it, and then they can start looting the treasury and taking axes to the safety net. Again.

I despair of fixing some things, but I'd like to keep them from making more of a shithole of the place than it already is.

UPDATE. Here's another good one. The Anchoress, today:

“He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.” ― George Orwell, 1984 

Just some stuff to think about as we digest all of this breaking news about what the government knows and when it knows it, how it gets it and where it stores it. And how ubiquitous is the case (tracking credit cards, too?).

Also, dark references to The Lives of Others and Teddy Kennedy. Compare and contrast: The Anchoress, August 2006, defending what the Wall Street Journal called "policies many American liberals oppose," including "monitoring some communications outside the context of a law known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act," torture and ethnic profiling:

Oh, wait…we’re not seeing attacks every 18 months, anymore - are we? In fact…it looks like President Bush’s terrible policies helped foil this latest attempt, despite the best efforts by the NY Times and others to cripple necessary programs... 

I keep remembering Harry Reid crowing, “we killed the Patriot Act.” 

There is a time to be a child, to speak like a child, think like a child, reason like a child. Then there is a time to put childish things away. If you want to disagree with policies meant to keep you safe, do it. If you want to hate a man or even a movement, do it…but do it with something that goes beyond adolescent spouting off, backed up by nothing more than “feelings,” “caring,” and hysterical, dramatic angst. Sometimes I read the drivel some of you folks write me, and I want to take you by the shoulders and shake you and say, “grow up. Grow UP!“

Looks like Thee Anch has grown right up to the Obama-is-the-Stasi stage of development. I can probably fill this week's whole column with this shit.

UPDATE 2. Here's a cowboy who thinks "GOP should lead fight against the Patriot Act," and invites us to "Imagine this scenario: three Republicans senators -- obviously, the mostly likely candidates being Ted Cruz, Mike Lee and Rand Paul -- craft a bill that would repeal, or far more likely roll back certain provisions of the Patriot Act..." Sorry, if I'm going to stretch my fantasy muscles that far, I'd rather focus on Dita Von Teese.

UPDATE 3. In comments, mortimer is already doing some research for me. Thanks, citizen journamalist!

A NEW LOW.

I didn't realize that before the era of ObamaHitler, there were organ transplants enough for everyone. I guess it's true that socialism creates scarcities!

Seriously, this is the biggest load of shit yet. To the extent that any of them can get beyond Sebelius-murders-little-girl, they affect disbelief that somebody makes medical decisions about organ transplants. I don't know how they think these things should be resolved -- maybe they think we should put all the available organs in a circle and have people compete for them, as in a game of Spoons.

YOU'RE ALL WORTHLESS AND WEAK!

That report on why the GOP is fucked with the Youngs came out, and Commentary got Bethany Mandel to spin it. I gotta admit, she found a twist I couldn't have imagined.

She focuses on this bit from the report:

Despite those poor marks for Obama and the Democrats on the economy, Democrats held a 16-point advantage over the Republican Party among young voters on handling of the economy and jobs (chosen as the top issue by 37% of respondents). For those respondents who said they approved of the job Obama had been doing as president, the number one word they used? “Trying.” He was trying. Young voters were disappointed in Obama’s performance, but gave him credit for attempting to improve the situation.

I look at that and I think: Well, yeah; after the economy was blown to shit in 2008 by the rapacious capitalism that had been championed by the Republican Party since Reagan, Obama does pretty much look like a guy with a mop trying to clean up after Hurricane Sandy, and you can't help but feel for him.

Here's Mandel's take:

Millennials seem particularly susceptible to this “participation trophy” mindset, which is one indication of the extension of certain markers of childhood well into adulthood. Yet parents are far from blameless. A recent piece in Psychology Today, entitled “A Nation of Wimps,” describes just how devastating the trendy brand of parenting known as “helicopter parenting” can be for the offspring of the most well-intentioned of parents...

Honest to God -- she thinks the kids like Obama because they're afraid if they admit he's a loser wimp, they'll have to admit they're loser wimps, too, and it was all because Daddy didn't beat and belittle them enough when they were pre-teens.

The solution, of course, would be to have some tough guy ride into the 2016 Republican Convention and tell them they're worthless and weak. I hope conservatives are taking good notes, because I would love to see them try that.

The general contempt for voters they're allegedly trying to win is pretty great, too. Next they should make Todd Akin special counselor on women's affairs. Yessir, conservative reform is looking good.

ARTS NIGHT.

Saw Coriolanus (now closed) at the Shakespeare Theatre Company here in D.C. I'd seen this play twice before -- back in the 70s at the Public, with Clarence Williams III in the lead, and at Theatre for a New Audience in 2005 with Christian Camargo, on which occasion I wrote about the play and the production. (You know the story: Big tough soldier saves Rome, Rome shits on him, soldier joins Rome's enemies and threatens to destroy Rome, his mother talks him out of it and his new comrades, understandably pissed, kill him.)

The play isn't wearing well on me --though it was a rattling good production, if a little heavy on the grrr-we're-guards type of ridiculous pseudo-toughness you get when actors play war; also the final dumb-show was imbecilic, a cycle-of-violence thing out of some pacifist pageant.

The character doesn't have the depth and shadings of Shakespeare's other tragic heroes, so the critical mind usually wanders away from him and toward the play's sour view of democracy and politics, which is not even cynical, just superstitious, reflexively hostile and grim. The other kinds of human relations the play notices are either sketchy or monstrous. Menenius and Coriolanus are supposed to be practically family, but Menenius does all the work and when the fit is on him Coriolanus gives him up easily; the love-hate blood-brotherhood of Aufidius and Coriolanus is just creepy.

The relationship that usually gets all the attention is the hero's to his mother Volumnia, a sort of paragon of martial motherhood who brags that she instilled Coriolanus' blood-thirst, and we believe her because she's formidable with her family, a terror to her enemies, and galvanic to Coriolanus. (His wife Virgilia was more wan and disposable in this production than I'd seen her before.) Diane D’Aquila was wonderful in the role; patrician but ferociously energetic, the sort of person you'd expect Coriolanus to look up to.

But a funny thing happened to that relationship because of a choice Patrick Page made as Coriolanus. Page was great, by the way -- certainly not a fake soldier, but someone whom you could imagine  both in the phalanx and at the head of an army. He let on that he enjoyed the highly focused warrior life, was apparently juiced by it -- not necessarily pleased, though, and certainly not happy. But early in the play, after he has done some balls-out crazy heroism, he asked his general to free a citizen whom the army has interned, because the man had done him some kindess. Coriolanus was asked the man's name -- in the script he responds with this: "By Jupiter! forgot./I am weary; yea, my memory is tired./Have we no wine here?"

The normal reading is that he is tired, and maybe, if you can work it in, that little people don't really matter to this mighty warrior after all. But Page had a half-minute freak-out; he stopped talking; his eyes went out of focus; he punched himself several times in the head, trying to remember. His comrades, half-embarrassed, hustled him off to get his wounds dressed.

My God, I thought; he has PTSD. And through the rest of the play I saw that as an explanation for a lot of what Coriolanus did. And it really worked as an explanation, too: His joylessness, restlessness, high discomfort with crowds and intimacy -- it fell into place. It sounds like something out of a classroom bull session, so maybe we needn't call it PTSD; maybe we can just say that the thing that gnawed Coriolanus seemed understandable, and had a relationship to something I'd seen in the world. In any case Page was playing it and making it work.

It did sap some life out of the famous final meeting between Coriolanus and Volumnia, not because D'Aquila fell down on the job -- she sure didn't -- but because her ability to pull Coriolanus out of his madness, which is frankly always a hard sell, had been somewhat explained away by his condition. Of course he was going to crack if she went on long enough. It didn't matter what she did. In fact, nothing other people did mattered much to him; he was on his course, not to take Rome, nor to gain revenge, but to die and put an end to his own suffering. Maybe that wasn't Shakespeare's idea, but it was something to see, and tragic.

UPDATE. In comments Derek makes some good counter-points, this among them:

I dunno. Assigning PTSD to Coriolanus seems to me as meaningful as assigning ADD or Manic Depression or Minor Depressive Episode (Recurring) to Hamlet. They're two archetypal characters in extreme situations, both of them animated more by Shakespeare's language and imagination than by ineluctable human decision.

I may have been unclear. Certainly if you use some clinical diagnosis, or even a homey character judgement -- like Hamlet as "the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind") -- as an explanation for the play, or even a character within the play, you're being reductive and probably evading the hard work of analysis. But it's something else, I think, when the actor brings something that knocks over your preconceptions. Now, actors have to work hard to make these supermen comprehensible to audiences -- more than Shakespeare did, certainly -- and you can't tether them too much to convention; it could be that Page and/or his director, David Muse, were excited by this idea of Coriolanus and let it throw the play out of balance. Or maybe it was my old-fashioned idea of Coriolanus' and Volumnia's relationship that was out of balance. I don't know; maybe I'll have a better idea next time I see the play. But Page's conceit certainly woke me up.

Oh, and I haven't seen the Ralph Fiennes film of it but now I really want to, thanks for the recommendations.

NEXT WEEK: MLK VS. AFFIRMATIVE ACTION.

I see some of the brethren are pimping a Jeff Jacoby column asserting not only that welfare recipients are all frauds and bums, but also that if FDR were around today, boy, he'd be against welfare too:

Is this any way to help the poor? FDR didn’t think so. In his annual message to Congress in 1935, President Roosevelt warned that “continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber.” The father of the New Deal knew that “to dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit. It is inimical to the dictates of a sound policy. It is in violation of the traditions of America.” 

It is a mark of how far we have declined that a political figure who dared to say such a thing today would be denounced as heartless, a hater of the poor, even a racist — as Newt Gingrich found out when he tried to make an issue of soaring food stamp rates during the presidential campaign.

Newt Gingrich, the FDR of his time!

By the way, nine years later FDR proposed a Second Bill of Rights, the theme of which was not to throw all the bums off welfare, but to guarantee every American, among other things, "the right to a useful and remunerative job.. the right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation... the right of every family to a decent home; the right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health..." Maybe Jacoby heard about this, but couldn't believe it was true -- not his Newt Roosevelt!

I don't usually pay attention to Jacoby but I have to admit, anyone who can combine a Nooningtonian personalization/distortion of history and the viciousness toward the poor of a Rob Port belongs in the asshole hall of fame. (BTW, the title refers to this.)

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the "conservative reform" conversations that were taking place in the royal box while the groundlings were yelling BENGHAZI LIES and IMPEACH. Speaking of which, the libertarians who figure prominently in these discussions -- as avatars of conservatism with the gloves off, so to speak -- also bring us this, at Reason:

Should Obama Be Impeached?
We’ve had too few impeachments in American history, not too many... 

I'm not convinced that any of President Obama's recent scandal eruptions constitute an "impeachable moment." But...

Already it's gold.

...surely something's gone wrong with our constitutional culture when opinion leaders treat the very invocation of the "I-word" as akin to screaming obscenities in a church.

Similarly, why do people talk about "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants" as if it's something we can't just do right here right now? It ain't freedom till we do some waterin'! This is the kind of apocalyptic mentality you drum up when you want something x-treme to happen before anyone thinks too much about it.

SCAMDAL.

Conservatives are all rushing forward with their dollies, showing where Big Gummint gave them bad touch. Among my favorites is Stanley Kurtz.  Kurtz says he knew all along that Obama was evil, but no one would listen to him. (Can't think why not.)

"Obama’s first presidential campaign launched a series of novel and troubling assaults on its critics," Kurtz tells us; "the first incident to spur warnings" was the Obama campaign’s efforts to get an opposition campaign ad off the air. "Rather than simply answering the ad," says Kurtz, "the Obama campaign threatened economic boycotts, federal investigations of the group’s officers and anonymous donors, and criminal prosecutions."

Which is to say that the Obama people pointed out to the DOJ that the group sponsoring the attack ad, the American Issues Project, was electioneering while claiming 501(c)(4) status. In other words, it's the same terrible abuse of powers the brethren have been bitching about in the IRS "scandal" -- except Obama wasn't President yet, merely a citizen exercising his right as such to complain about tax fraud, and exercising it good and hard. The Obama people also filed a complaint with the FEC, and reminded stations that might run the ad of FCC regulations of which they might run afoul. It was hardball, but no foul, not in the big leagues Obama was playing in.

Although the ad ran locally, Fox News and CNN were apparently discouraged by these threats from accepting the ad.

Apparently! Later, Kurtz tells us how the assassins came after him: "The Obama campaign pressured WGN Radio in Chicago to bar my scheduled appearance on the Milt Rosenberg show..." Kurtz still appeared, but the call-in show received some impertinent calls -- excuse me, was "deluged with calls from Obama supporters acting on instructions from his campaign" who "demanded that I be kept off the air" (a little late for that, I should think).

And what was the game-changing truthbomb that Kurtz and other were prevented from bringing before the public with this ad and Kurtz's other media appearances, about which he and his comrades have been bitching for over four years?

It boils down the Obama-Ayers relationship to this: 

First, Ayers was in the Weather Underground. In 1971, the militant anti-government group set off a bomb in a restroom of the U-S Capitol. Ayers has never apologized.
Second, Obama and Ayers know each other from Chicago. They served together on two charity boards in the 1990s. 

The punch line from the ad is this: "Why would Barack Obama be friends with someone who bombed the Capitol and is proud of it? Do you know enough to elect Barack Obama?"

Yes, the Bill Ayers schtick, which has made a laughingstock of everyone who has touched it. It was bandied about through the 2008 campaign by internet crackpots, some of whom claimed that Ayers ghost-wrote Obama's Dreams From My Father. (They became quite hot about it, giving Ayers himself several opportunities to fuck with their heads.) The American Issues Project, Wikipedia informs me, "spent close to $3 million for the Ayers ads... provided by Harold Simmons, who previously gave $3 million to fund Swift Boat Veterans for Truth," which will give you some idea why Obama thought he ought to hit back fast and hard before the bullshit could coalesce as it did with John Kerry.

In the days since 2008, Obama the alleged terrorist pal of Ayers has, as President, droned the shit out of America's enemies to an extent that even liberals such as myself find unseemly, killed Bin Laden, kept Gitmo open, and in general behaved as about the opposite of a 60's comsymp radical the Ayers smear was meant to paint him as. But why would that matter to Kurtz? He is unreachable by any evidence that wasn't cooked up in the meth labs of the right. When Obama signed a conservative spending bill in 2011, Kurtz explained that Obama was still a socialist, but one who "moves incrementally toward radical left goals, but never owns up to his ideology." Obama could come out for a flat tax -- about the only capitulation to Republicanism he hasn't made, come to think of it -- and Kurtz would still be telling us he's a commie.

In short, Kurtz and all these people are full of shit -- so full that I expect they've all been fitted with relief valves to keep it from shooting out their noses. So let the Serious People who have been tut-tutting about the various scamdals and how bad they sound and how we must be fair-minded and explore all the evidence, etc., treat their charges seriously; apparently they have time to waste. I don't especially trust Obama, but as for these guys, I've caught their act and I don't want an encore.

THE HE-MAN WOMAN-HATERS' BOOK CLUB.

Dr. Mrs. Ole Perfesser, aka Helen Smith, has spent years coddling sad males on the internet who blame all their troubles on bitchez; she has also spent years on the internet telling us how she's a-fixin' to Go Galt in the most peculiar ways -- by refusing to tip waiters, for example, or by refusing to hire you riff-raff, etc.

Now she's brought these two great ideas together in a book, Men on Strike, about how women can't find husbands because all the menfolk are "consciously and unconsciously" on strike -- relaxing in their Galtgulch Barcoloungers, watching the game and beating off. And it serves you bitches right, because feminazis.

So far it's a big hit with exactly the crowd you'd expect. At Legal Insurrection, Leslie Eastman is pleased to learn that you can get with the Movement without expending any conscious effort whatsoever:

A few years ago, I rejected donating to a breast cancer charity in favor of one focused on prostate cancer. 

I recognized that there was a vast disparity between the funding amounts and promotion levels for the two cancers — despite the nearly equal number of deaths from each of these illnesses. Knowing men would never organize to complain, I decided to “rebel against the matriarchy” for them. 

Little did I realize I was engaging in “men’s rights” activism, as outlined in Dr. Helen Smith’s new book...

Are you the kind of person who contributes to one charity to spite another? DMOP's your gal!

Let's see, what else -- someone called Wintery Knight wants clergymen to read the book because even "conservative pastors who claim to be pro-marriage" are nonetheless "working against social conservatism even as they praise it, because they have completely discounted how feminism and socialism have impacted men in every area." I guess he hasn't thought this through; why would men leave their soiled sheets and fleshlights to hear preachers who sound like Rush Limbaugh when they can get the same thing at home via radio with having to do any faggy warshin'-up?

The Angry Dad gets right to the nub:

A reader sent this infographic about how single black women cannot find a suitable black man because they are all unemployed, fat, high-school dropouts, gay, prefering non-black women, or already have kids with another woman. And they don't even count the criminals and drug users! (Correction: They did count criminals.)

Gotta give him credit for updating, right?

These figures sound impressive, but the truth is more nearly the opposite. The typical black girl is a sex maniac at age 14, has had a couple of abortions by age 17, a couple of kids by age 20, and is morbidly obese by age 25. Furthermore, they have a tradition of unstable matriachal families, and they are undermined by bad welfare incentives for illegitimacy.

The perfect Dr. Mrs. reader! She should hire him to act the text out at bookstores -- or better yet, on the legitimate stage: This is just the hybrid we've been needing to reenergize the American theater: Dostoyevsky's Underground Man and Byron de la Beckwith.

There are others, but I'll wait until David Brooks picks up on it.

YOUR MORAL BETTERS SPEAK!

John Fund:

‘Why Are Liberals So Rude to the Right?’

...All too often the difference between left and right in what should be “polite circles” is quite sharply drawn. Conservatives think liberals have bad ideas and liberals think conservative are bad people. “It’s cool to be rude if you’re a liberal,” Leften Right concludes. Just ask Al Franken, a supposed comedian who became a U.S. senator after a career of ad hominem attacks on his adversaries. He received no pushback for entitling one of his books “Rush Limbaugh Is A Big Fat Idiot.” Rush at least apologized for his nasty crack about pro-choice activist Sandra Fluke being a “slut.”...

Meanwhile over at Instapundit:

Your civility lessons do not impress me, douchebags.

NO VOICE COLUMN THIS WEEK...

...I'm actually treating the holiday as a holiday, just to see if it makes me more American or at least better rested.

Meanwhile if you want something to larf at, here's John Boot at PJ Lifestyle:

Into Nonsense: 4 Ways The New Star Trek Shills for Surrender in the War on Terror

Wait'll Jim Lileks hears about this!

Let’s get to the issue none of the liberal writers will touch: What does this movie tell us about Hollywood and the War on Terror?

It looks like the wingnut equivalent of @slatepitches -- but Boot's not kidding:

On a mission to hunt down the murderous Harrison (Cumberbatch), Spock (Zachary Quinto) tells the hotheaded Kirk (Chris Pine) that assassinating the terrorist — whose lethal acts Kirk and others have eyewitnessed — would be obviously wrong. Director J.J. Abrams and his team of hack screenwriters (Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, Damon Lindelof) are striking a stance on the demise of Osama Bin Laden so extreme that no one to the right of Michael Moore would dare utter it. But because the message is concealed in a noisy blockbuster, the filmmakers are hoping they can get away with it.

That's how Hollyweird always Shills for Surrender -- like in The Searchers, where half-breed Jeffrey Hunter brainwashes John Wayne into sparing Comanche bitch Natalie Wood.  And they thought Vistavision would hide their treason!

Have a good Memorial Day, and spare a thought for the fallen -- FDR approved.

GIVE ME LIBERTY A TAX DEDUCTION OR GIVE ME DEATH FUCK IT, I'M OUTTA HERE.

The brethren are really pushing the idea that they deserve a do-over on the 2012 election because IRS. Superhack John Fund calls the IRS investigations of Tea Party groups "The Real Voter Suppression of 2012":

But it now turns out there may have suppression of the vote after all. “It looks like a lot of tea-party groups were less active or never got off the ground because of the IRS actions,” Wisconsin governor Scott Walker told me. “Sure seems like people were discouraged by it....

At least two donors told me...

At least!

...they didn’t contribute to True the Vote, a group formed to combat voter fraud, because after three years of waiting the group still didn’t have its status granted at the time of the 2012 election. (While many of the targeted tea-party groups were seeking to become 501(c)(4)s, donations to which are not tax-deductible, True the Vote sought to become a 501(c)(3).)

I desperately wanted to save America from the ravishments of the Kenyan Pretender, but I was afraid I wouldn't get a tax deduction on my substantial intended donation to yahoos in colonial lederhosen, so I figured let him go ahead and ravish her.

It won’t be easy to discover whether the “voter suppression” engaged in by the IRS was malicious and political.

Boy, and here I thought I was going to have to supply my own bullshit-quotes.

But we have to make every effort to find out before the American people start losing confidence in the integrity of our elections.

I'm beginning to think the strategy now is really just to create a saving-remnant narrative to help wingnuts keep the faith over the next few years, because no normal person is gonna believe that the 2012 Presidential election --which was not close and largely turned on the votes of black people unlikely to be sympathetic to the tax deduction concerns of rich conservatives -- actually hung on whether tricornered crackpots had enough money to pretend they were a grassroots movement.

UPDATE. Commenter D. Johnston:

Wait, 501(c)(3)? By what standard could these goobers claim that that status? According to IRS standards, an organization has to be dedicated exclusively to (if I may quote) "Religious, Educational, Charitable, Scientific, Literary, Testing for Public Safety, to Foster National or International Amateur Sports Competition, or Prevention of Cruelty to Children or Animals." What were they claiming, that they were "educating" the public on how the black guy in office is a Marxist? Preventing the cruelty of an adequate standard of health care to children?

I can see a "religious" angle, in the sense that these guys proceed on faith unsupported by reason.

GOODBYE TIN-FOIL HAT.

I mentioned the other day that some of the brethren think Obama used mind control like some kind of supervillain to get his minions to persecute the Tea Party. Today James Taranto takes this to a whole new level.

First he recounts some recent secret-message fantasies by various press dopes. For example, Kimberley Strassel says Obama "publicly call[ed] out by name political opponents whom he'd like to see harassed." I guess "harrassed" was part of the telepathic rather than the verbal component of the President's public statements, as I don't recall hearing them or seeing them in the transcript -- or maybe Obama's magic powers rendered all but bureaucrats blind and deaf to them.

Then Taranto explains:

Jaded political observers listened to Candidate Obama and heard (depending on their leanings) either a viciously desperate politician or a feisty fighter. Agents of the government heard President Obama, their ultimate boss, urging them to turn their attention toward evildoers. 

As we've repeatedly argued, if that is the extent of Obama's involvement in the scandal, it is much more worrisome than if the persecution of dissidents was carried out under his direct orders. It would mean that the government itself--the permanent institutions of the state, not just the administration currently in office--has turned against the citizenry and the Constitution.

So, if Obama directly told IRS officials to intimidate the TP people, it wouldn't be as bad as if he used mind-rays to make it happen on the zombie hordes. Of course if they had evidence of direct non-magic intervention by Obama, I'm sure they would be happy to have it to put in a bill of impeachment. But they don't, so they have to impeach Washington, if only figuratively, as Obama's magic co-conspirators.

It doesn't say much for their cause that even as the hearings proceed, they're devoting this much effort to the Harry Potter version.

RISEN V. ROSEN.

With all the talk about reporter James Rosen's persecution, particularly in rightblogger world, you might find yourself mixing the name up with that of reporter James Risen, also persecuted -- in fact his persecution stretches from the Bush through the Obama Administrations. You may be wondering why, while some liberal outfits have been trumpeting Risen's case, conservatives haven't been doing the same. The reason is simple: If they did, someone might look up what they were writing about Risen back in the day.

Here are some examples from National Review:

If you’re one of those who think that everyone in the Bush administration reflexively lies about everything, then James Risen is a patriot who has exposed the worst abuse of presidential power since Watergate. If you’re more inclined to give the President the benefit of the doubt when it comes to covert operations designed to prevent terrorist attacks, then James Risen’s reporting did an untold amount of damage to what was for all we know an effective way to monitor communications between terrorists abroad and their cells in the United States.

From the sound and fury of the last few days from politicians and pundits, you would think this is a development as scandalous as Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy’s authorization to wiretap Martin Luther King Jr. But the legality of the acts can be demonstrated with a look through the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). For example, check out section 1802, “Electronic Surveillance Authorization Without Court Order.” It is most instructive. There you will learn that “Notwithstanding any other law, the President, through the Attorney General, may authorize electronic surveillance without a court order under this subchapter to acquire foreign intelligence information for periods of up to one year” (emphasis mine)...

James Risen has been part of several intelligence breaches that have hurt the security of the United States. He was the New York Times reporter who broke the story on the NSA’s eavesdropping program and its ability to track terrorist finances. Risen is now involved in the trial of ex-CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling... The Department of Justice is appealing an earlier ruling that Risen would not be forced to testify in depth regarding his sources; hopefully, the appeal will be successful...

That last one, by Stephen Spruill and headlined "The New York Times and Espionage (Again)," is from 2011.

If you want some extra fun, go read Andrew C. McCarthy from 2005: "So sure, let's talk until we're blue in the face about the abstruse legalities of warrantless wiretapping... But the exhaustion of these questions, in the self-conscious pomp of serious discussion, mustn't obscure what is really going on here. This, plain and simple, is a political game of 'Gotcha!' Played with our national security — played with the lives of the innocent..."

I don't like the White House spying on reporters, either, and I've known for quite some time that on civil liberties this White House is no good. But I am also aware that these guys are as full of shit on freedom of the press as they are on everything else, and during the current festival of fake outrage that strikes me as a useful piece of intelligence to keep in mind.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP...

...in which I advise the brethren to stop pushing the AP, IRS, and Benghazi "scandals" and start working on the stories that'll really get impeachment fever spreading!

UPDATE. I have to say, I'm enjoying the new preemptive rightblogger explanation for when they fail to find a signed note from Obama that says "Audit my enemies": that the President manipulated his staff into crime by "referent power," aka mind control. Maybe they should demand X-rays to see if he's human.

GET THE RAINCOAT OUT OF YOUR LAP, IT'S NOT THAT KIND OF SHOW.

Emily Esfahani Smith, whose ridiculous writing at Acculturated on how everything was better when people were repressed has been treated here, has been writing for The Atlantic too, which makes a pathetic sort of sense. Her latest contains a theater review:

The scene represents a normal sexual encounter between two students. There's moaning. There's orgasming. And yet, it falls flat. While the play wants to promote the idea that this kind of sex is hot and fun, in this scene, it is boring and banal. Erotic sex ideally involves mystery and an electric connection—longing—between two people. But the exhibitionism of Speak About It kills this mystery and longing—it leaves little to the imagination.

Speak About It, by the way, is a "variety of skits and monologues dealing with sexual consent, assault and misconduct, and bystander intervention" developed by students at Bowdoin and now used at other colleges. So it's basically a sexual hygiene play, and while it sounds it's no match for the one in Love and Death, I doubt electric connections and mystery were intended as part of the offering.

The rest is gabble about Allan Bloom, "the hookup culture," and oh Jesus kill me now Lena Dunham, who apparently still haunts these people's dreams.

The economy sucks but apparently there are a lot of jobs for rightwing scolds who tell readers they don't really know how to have sex and then offer them The Closing of the American Mind instead of the butterfly flick.

THEY SEE ME TROLLIN', THEY HATIN'.

By the way, that guy at the American Enterprise Institute is still doing his "Greatest Conservative Rap Songs of All Time" thing. Second installment is "Keep Ya Head Up," because Tupac "attacks contemporary feminist beliefs, decries single-parent families, and calls on men, particularly those in his own African-American community, to step up and take responsibility." Also, "he expresses his hope that a return to traditional values will mean that 'things are gonna get easier' and 'things’ll get brighter.'" Ooh-ooh chile, that's some good rightwing rap. Third installment is "Role Model," because Eminem calls Hillary Clinton a bitch.

I don't know whether AEI's in on the joke or not, but if he's actually getting paid for this, that's so banksta.

UPDATE. Commenter mortimer informs me that the guy has done a new one. I agree with mortimer that the passage he quotes can't be improved upon:

Near the end of the song, all this culminates in a warning to wannabe revolutionaries everywhere: “Dr. Dre be the name / Still running the game.” And this extends, of course, to those who believe that a Marxist utopia can be established through democratically endorsed redistribution of wealth. As Dr. Young explains in “Forgot About Dre,” a song from his next album: “If it was up to me / You motherf****** would stop coming up to me / With your hands out lookin’ up to me / Like you want something free.”

But the best is the guy's exegesis on the Brazilian "Rap das Armas." Looking for joints repping "principled defense of Second Amendment rights," he can't get with popular American numbers like "Cop Killer," as they show a "thirst for wanton machismo," so he picks up this foreign one, which he says "finds its ultimate justification in self-defense against totalitarian government" as it "describes a neighborhood ready to resist." As always, gun nuts find the prospect of fighting the totalitarian police appealing unless black Americans are doing it, in which case it's just pathology.

I feel a Poe's Law warrant coming on.

UPDATE 2. The rightwing rap craze continues! Meet Florida GOP Rep. Trey Radel:

The first [song that represents my views on Washington] that I would have to refer to would be 'Fight the Power,' by Public Enemy. This is a song that... if you really get down to it, reflects the conservative message of having a heavy handed federal government... Chuck D of Public Enemy and I may disagree on certain philosophies of government, but I think at the end of the day— and this is where I take my love of hip hop music— where there have been issues and problems with either heavy handed law enforcement... or heavy handed government itself.

Amanda teases him mercilessly. At least Radel's bullshit makes some kind of real-world sense, though: He's a politician trying to put himself over as a Regular Bro, and acquaintance with one of the 10 or 12 hiphop records all white people know is a definite bro signifier. And his bro-babble shows in its most common and primitive state the childish impulse to claim all the things you like in life -- cool tunes, great movies, choc-a-mut ice creams -- for some stupid ideology.

The Zhdanovism is depressing, though at present I think these guys have as much hope of colonizing rap as Jonah Goldberg has of winning a decathlon.

THE CONSERVATIVE CRACK-UP, CONT.

At National Review Kevin Williamson commends himself on grabbing and throwing a woman's phone during a theater performance because she insisted on looking at messages or something. Williamson was ejected for his tantrum.

While I am torn on the merits (I am against unseemly behavior at the theater, which seems to apply to both parties here), I note that Williamson has said before that he believes in bringing back the stocks for "crimes that undercut shared community life and encourage the further atomization of our society." From his new post I would imagine that he sees the woman's behavior as such a crime and his own behavior as blameless, atomization-wise. And I'm sure his attack is nothing compared to the punishment fantasies his imagination summoned after the incident ("two parties of women of a certain age, the sad sort with too much makeup and too-high heels..." Yeah, he's given it some thought).

I note also that Williamson fantasizes general applause for his actions:

In a civilized world, I would have received a commendation of some sort. To the theater-going public of New York — nay, the the world – I say: “You’re welcome."

Radicals always think The People are with them, despite all evidence.

BTW Williamson is also the guy who said Gabby Giffords' emotional but non-assaultive response to the Congressional gun vote was a "childish display."

WHERE THEY'RE COMING FROM.

It's a springtime for scandal in D.C., and most of the brethren are luxuriating in it. But there's a weird nervousness to their energy, and I think I see where it's coming from. DaTechGuy:

As a criminal investigation begins we’ve seen some the “I” word, Impeachment thrown about.

Now a lot of that is on twitter, but that’s no big deal, a lot of words are thrown about on twitter, but some of it has been thrown around in the press.

The funny thing is a lot of the people doing so are of the left,

This is not an accident, the left understand that talk of impeachment now would be a disaster, not to the president, but to those building the case against him.

He then tells us a story from Tip O'Neill's autobiography about how, back in Nixontime, Rep. Robert Drinan's early impeachment bill was briefly an impediment to the later successful impeachment drive, and comments:

I’ll wager not too may members of the Tea Party have read O’Neill’s book, nor GOP members of congress but I’ll wager plenty of people on the left have. They understand that if the GOP moves early, before democrats are on board, it becomes a party issue so they are going to do their best to force our hand before the facts are in evidence.

I don't know what's crazier -- that he thinks The Left is trying to protect Obama by talking about impeaching him (are Rep. Jason Chaffetz and all the other wingnuts talking about it double agents, then?), or that he thinks we all read Tip O'Neill's autobiography. (I guess nobody told him we only read Alinsky and porn.)

Over at National Review, the excitable Charles C.W. Cooke has an article celebrating the traditional conservative distrust of government, but goes a great deal further than the usual arghblargh. He calls the Founders' writings on the subject "codified paranoia" and seems to mean it positively ("and America is better off for it"); in fact, his article is called "In Praise of Paranoia." He affects to believe the recent IRS fuckup is "government tyranny" and says, "the IRS has done America a considerable favor... Next time an authoritarian [!!] explains how, say, a national gun registry will be just swell — and labels its naysayers as neurotic — his opponents will have a new and useful shorthand: 'IRS scandal.'" (For this analogy with the Tea Party scam to be perfect, actually, the people trying to get guns would have be intending to murder someone with them, and the tyranny would be that some of them would be delayed by the government in doing so.)

Later, chatting about his essay with friends, Cooke adds:

Odd as it might sound, having a sizeable portion of the population reflexively take the view that the government would hurt them if it could is, I think, a good thing. There are no black helicopters and there may never be any black helicopters. But isn’t it positive that people are worried about them?

Cooke has said some pretty crazy things on this head before, but now reveals himself quite literally committed to irrationality. I don't think he's the only one. For years they've cherished this dream, and now something shimmering in the distance convinces them that it's come true. They've been waiting for Amok Time so long that they can't even hold back enough to make it look good.

ANNALS OF THE CULTURE WAR, TV PARTY EDITION.

William F. Gavin at National Review on Mad Men:

...the show has degenerated into absurdity, loss of focus, and meandering plot lines. The main character has become eccentric, distant, increasingly mean-spirited, and disoriented. 

Gee, come to think of it, this sounds just like the Obama administration, doesn’t it?

At dinner tonight, Gavin told friends, "This soup is thin and bitter -- like Obama!" Leaving the restaurant, he buttoned his jacket and remarked, "The night's gotten cold, like Obama's relationship with the press. Or maybe like the corpses of the babies slaughtered by Planned Parenthood." But no one was left to hear him.

Elsewhere in the same venue, Greg Pollowitz:

Somebody Should Get Fired Over SNL's Benghazi Skit

It’s gotten to the point where I’m amazed when SNL is actually funny or relevant as political satire, but Saturday’s cold open wasn’t just a dud as a joke, but completely offensive to the four Americans who lost their lives in Benghazi.

I imagine Pollowitz drunk at some bar, yelling "This jukebox is full of lies!" Like I often say: Do they even know any normal people?

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the Benghazi hearings and the inevitable rightblogger judgement that Obama and Hillary Clinton are guilty of murder and/or treason. Imagine how pissed they'll be if Obama isn't impeached! Actually we already have some idea.

CULTURE WAR: A NEW LOW.

Some guy at the American Enterprise Institute has started a "Greatest Conservative Rap Songs of All Time" list.  His first choice, a Justin Bieber joint, is intolerably stupid but, as always, the whole Zhdanovite idea is the stupidest thing, as shown by his mission statement:

The songs I discuss express support not just for pro-family social values, but also for small government and peace through strength.

If this list doesn't include "Mind of a Lunatic" I call bullshit.

UPDATE. I got another nominee:



What? Admittedly his flow's a little sticky. But hell, you might say conservatives invented rap.

AS USUAL, UNCLEAR ON THE CONCEPT OF CONSENT.

Shorter Charles C.W. Cooke: If Michelle Knight had voluntarily aborted, she'd be just as guilty as Ariel Castro.

UPDATE. I'm not even kidding:

Yet abortion is legal in Ohio, as everywhere else in the United States. This means that if you kill an unborn child in Ohio with the mother’s permission, it’s okay; if you do it without her permission, it’s murder. The unborn child, therefore, is only a life if the mother says it is a life. That makes no logical sense at all.

She's just a bourgeois rentier, is what, and Charles C.W. Cooke wants to nationalize her uterus. I have to hand it to him, though; if you'd told me someone would be insane enough to find an anti-abortion angle in the Cleveland horror story, I'd have predicted it would be Kathryn J. Lopez. Cooke's a real up-and-comer at National Review, and will no doubt loyally join K-Lo and Goldberg in the bunker when the suckers finally wise up and submit their publication to market forces.

THANK YOU, MARK SANFORD.

I already knew Mark Sanford's reelection was hilarious, but though I'm sure Elizabeth Colbert Busch is a nice person and would have represented South Carolina... well, would have been a better Congressional rep than Sanford, I warmed a little to the victor after reading this outburst at National Review by one Hilary Towers, "a psychologist and mother of five":

It is time for conservatives to publicly recognize the widespread phenomenon of spousal abandonment, and the system of “family law” that supports it, for what they both are — a national scandal. 

Among other things, this election result is a searing reminder that we have, as a nation, lost touch with what “redemption” really means — with the true power of God’s grace, which is the power to transform behavior. And behavior, after all, is a reflection of the heart. How much longer can conservative stewards of family values turn a blind eye to the very narcissistic lifestyle choices of our leaders that we are fighting so hard to weaken (and ultimately transform) in society at large?

To put it in some context, those sections of National Review's The Corner not currently given over to Benghazi broodings are mostly devoted to Kathryn J. Lopez's wailings over abortion, and those of affiliated God-botherers like Wesley J. Smith, the title of whose offering "Hollywood Biggies Love Late Term Abortionists" tells you pretty much what you need to know about the tone of the place these days.

In other words, conservatives are still stuck in their post-electoral tantrum, and in this chaos the moral scolds of the movement, who were remarkably easy to silence and shunt to the side when any prospect of victory was visible, have been left free to seize the mic and ululate. Their connection with the world the rest of us inhabit has always been tenuous, but now that they have no reason to compromise with reality they have gone practically Dominionist. So if for nothing else, I owe Sanford some thanks for inspiring the anguish I expect Towers' ravings represents among the fundies. This will make it that much harder for them to pretend to be sane whenever they appear before normal Americans.

Sanford's victory also hasn't done any favors to the logical processes of Jonah Goldberg, who spent the writing period between his third and fourth breakfasts trying to split the difference:

Let me say upfront: I would rather we lived in a society where adultery had a higher social cost. That’s not to say people shouldn’t be forgiving or that there should be no such thing as second chances. But ideally, I’d like it if things were less loosey-goosey. Cheat on your wife, and maybe you don’t get to run for public office anymore.

This prose version of flop sweat goes on for quite some time before Goldberg gets to the nub:

What was on the ballot [in South Carolina] was a choice between a woman who tried to dodge the fact she was a liberal running to advance the liberal agenda of the Democratic party and a conservative whose marriage fell apart because he fell in love with somebody else. I’m not condoning Sanford’s behavior — at all — but...

But there can be no crime bigger than liberalism, and if you people who think "values" is more than a slogan we use to con suckers would just get with the program, Goldberg could stop trying to reach you and devote his pie-hole to greater helpings of pie, as God and Lucianne intended.

[Sanford's] formidable wife didn’t run to the stage to gaze admiringly and forgivingly at her disgraced husband to lessen the political damage. She kicked him to the curb and moved on with her life. Every marriage is different and we can’t peer inside any but our own, but I admired Jenny Sanford’s response.

Of course, one could argue that Huma, Hillary, and Silda were more “pro-marriage” in that they stayed by their husbands. And that just gets us back to how the culture has changed. It’s a fascinating thing.

"Fascinating thing" is Goldberg code for "holy shit, I just obliterated my own point fart, fart..."

Speaking very broadly as there are exceptions all over the place, it seems like liberal political couples work harder to save their marriage after a sex scandal. Again, that’s just an impression. I haven’t tabulated all the cases.

"FaaarrrrRRRRRRrrrrrrRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRrrrrrrt..."

Or do they place less stock in the value of fidelity (it’s just sex, who cares?). It seems to me there are a lot of ways to dissect that. For now, suffice it to say the times have changed.

"...[spectacular, 4th-of-July cannonade of farts and sharts] Not to worry, I'm a legacy pledge nobody expects this to make sense fart, farrrrRRRRRRtt AND IN CONCLUSION JFK was disgusting and Colbert Busch loved JFK, I bet, please don't nobody check fart fart fart, AND IN DOUBLE SECRET fart CONCLUSION..."

It’s absolutely true that conservatives need to wrestle with the question of what we should expect from our politicians. But I’m not sure liberals have anything worth listening to on the subject.

Let's put it this way: That's not an egg he just laid. I hate to replay my greatest hits, but this is the stupidest thing ever written, and will remain so until Goldberg writes something else.

RAY HARRYHAUSEN, 1920-2013.

Fuck CGI.

NEXT TIME: THE GREEN GOBLIN IS SOLYNDRA!

PJ Media kulturkampfer John Boot has made these pages before, denouncing Bruce Springsteen for advocating "violent revolution, class-and-politics-based bloodshed, and the murder of bankers and perhaps other capitalists," and explicating "5 Core Conservative Values in the New Jackie Robinson Biopic 42." Now he gives us 850 words on the latest Hollywood threat to our way of life. Weatherman thriller The Company You Keep?  No:

Iron Man 3 Treats Islamist Terror Like a Joke

Not even kidding.

Iron Man, though, is a smart franchise and initially, despite its comic-book soul, took an admirably unsympathetic view to Islamist terror...

But then the kulaks got to them!

Yet Iron Man 3 is a huge step backward that openly mocks the War on Terror via the villain the Mandarin (Ben Kingsley).

Shane Black could have made the villain Allah Ishkabibble, an Al Qaeda kingpin working with Hillary Clinton on Benghazi, but he chose treason.

Spoiler alert: Read no farther if you don’t want a central plot twist ruined. But what happens in the second half of the movie is critical to understanding the spinelessness of Hollywood and its revolting willingness to reduce the War on Terror to a cheap laugh.

BuzzFeed oughta hire this guy. I will omit the spoiler, though you might find this bit spoilt in its own way:

Millions of fans too young to remember 9/11 will line up to see Iron Man 3, but it’s not just to them that Hollywood’s leading filmmakers have a duty. Reducing the alarmingly durable threat of Islamist fundamentalism to potty humor is an insult not just to Daniel Pearl’s family but to the millions of Americans who continue to wage the War on Terror. It’s as if, a decade after Hitler, a movie portrayed a Hitler-like villain as a harmless oaf who was no threat to anyone.

Nobody tell him about Achmed The Dead Terrorist. Glimmer-of-self-awareness bonus: Boot asks himself --

Am I asking too much of a comic book movie?

Doesn't last long, though. With this bunch it never does.

UPDATE. Responding to Boot's peculiar notion that it's counterproductive to make fun of the enemy in wartime, commenters point out that Hitler was a figure of fun in Der Fuehrer's Face, Plane Daffy, You Natzy Spy, To Be or Not To Be, All Through the Night, The Great Dictator, "Hitler Has Only Got One Ball," et alia. Of course it's possible Boot is familiar with all these entertainments, but unable to grasp the concept of "fun."

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about Jason Collins being gay and rightbloggers being unable to appreciate it. Sad for them, really. I mean, in a hilarious way.

I couldn't really work it in, but I also got a kick out of the whole Niall Ferguson thing, especially when Jonah Goldberg came waddling in to explain why Keynes' homosexuality was, too, valid grounds for discounting his economics:

So Keynes believed that Puritan values inclined people to embrace an economic theory (capitalism), but the Ferguson episode teaches us that it is now beyond outrageous to suggest that Keynes’s rejection of Puritan values inclined him to embrace a slightly different economic theory (Keynesianism)? Got it.

If you wonder where Goldberg gets the idea that gayness is synonymous with "rejection of Puritan values," go look at his recent farts on the subject; gays used to be society-wreckers who "wanted to smash the bourgeois prisons of monogamy, capitalistic enterprise and patriotic values and bask in the warm sun of bohemian 'free love,'" Goldberg has written, but in the 21st Century "the sweeping embrace of bourgeois lifestyles by the gay community has been stunning." Thus in Goldberg's mind Keynes was like some guy at the Anvil doing amyl and fucking a boatload of guys. And how can you take someone like that seriously?

And Goldberg thinks that Ferguson's apology is the result of a Soviet show-trial instead of a genuine reaction to shame -- which makes sense, since shame is something Goldberg's work and signature on same prove he's incapable of feeling.

NEXT WEEK: THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE -- IF ONLY THE GOVERNMENT HADN'T INTERVENED.

If you love conservatives telling you that works of art they like are conservative, you'll love Nick Gillespie, chief advance man for that conservative niche brand called libertarianism, giving the treatment to The Great Gatsby:

Ultimately, Gatsby is the great American novel of the ways in which free markets (even, and perhaps especially, black markets) overturn established order and recreate the world through what Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction.”

We're livin' in that orgastic future that year by year recedes before us, baby, and lovin' it! Gillespie also seems to think Meyer Wolfsheim is the hero of the book, and that The Sound and the Fury is "dated."

Sometimes all you need to become a philistine is a philosophy.

AND HOW COULD I EVER REFUSE/I FEEL LIKE I WIN WHEN I LOSE.

The latest Obama ragegasm from Peggy Noonan is as horrible as you'd expect, but one section deserves special mention, concerning "two things that have weakened the Obama presidency and haven't been noted":

In the days after the 2012 election the Democrats bragged about their technological genius and how it turned the election. They told the world about what they'd done—the data mining, the social networking, that allowed them to zero in on Mrs. Humperdink in Ward 5 and get her to the polls. It was quite impressive and changed national politics forever. But I suspect their bragging hurt their president. In 2008 Mr. Obama won by 9.5 million votes. Four years later, with all the whizbang and money, he won by less than five million. When people talk about 2012 they don't say the president won because the American people endorsed his wonderful leadership, they say he won because his team outcomputerized the laggard Republicans. 

This has left him and his people looking more like cold technocrats who know how to campaign than leaders who know how to govern. And it has diminished claims of a popular mandate. The president's position would be stronger now if more people believed he had one.

They try all sorts of things to deny that they got beat in an election by a sitting President with a 7.8% unemployment rate, but this is the first time I've seen one of them try and tell me that Joe Blow of Middletown has been retroactively demoralized by the cold technocracy of the 2012 Democratic campaign. Wait till someone tells him about Karl Rove!

Noonan's other weakening point -- about how Obama thinks he can't make deals with Republicans just because they keep saying they don't want to make them but he should know better -- is merely the sort of bald-faced denial of reality that we've learned to expect from her. But the one about how Obama doesn't have a mandate because he's too good at politics is something special; it's so self-refuting it's almost a Zen riddle.

ARTY FARTY.

Shorter Jonah Goldberg: I bet those stupid liberal TV-show-makers thought they were making the Soviet Union look good, but I saw it and I still hate communism  farrrrt.

Longtime fans will be pleased to hear Goldberg's traditional empirical method is unchanged:

I gather the show’s creators think they are being subversive or at the very least very clever by getting viewers to root for the "bad guys." Those quotation marks are essentially Hollywood’s, not my own.

Maybe that was in the press packet. And:

Getting back to the slipperiness of popular culture, I have to wonder if the producers realize how much the show undercuts the Left, at least the Hollywood Left.

Leftists in Hollywood were always much more serious about communism than Leftists in New York and Washington, which inevitably led to the Socialist Workers Party purge of 1984. And:

Avoiding spoilers as much as possible, one character, an African-American Communist spy recruited from the civil-rights movement, should have the Left furious. If you take the character seriously (which I don’t necessarily recommend) he demonstrates not only the murderous commitments of the hard Communist Left, but he basically vindicates J. Edgar Hoover’s most extreme rhetoric about the civil-rights movement!

Expect this to be rolled up in conservative minority outreach: "Oh yeah, what about that guy on that show?"

AGAINST REASON.

Thanks Aaron M. Dellutri for directing me to this remarkable The American Conservative post by Eve Tushnet -- whose work I've noticed before -- suggesting we teach too much "critical thinking" in schools:

Critical thinking has so thoroughly colonized our idea of education that we tend to think it’s the only kind of thinking. Tests try to measure it, and ritzy private schools all claim to teach it. Critical thinking–analysis, not mere acceptance–is a skill we can all learn. And we’ve learned it too well. We’ve learned only critical thinking skills, and not the equally challenging skills of prudent acceptance: We don’t even realize that we need to learn when to say yes, and to what.

This sounds like a good line to try on that philosophy major chick you're trying to bang.

We teach students to find the undefended premises of an argument, or the contradictions in a claim. This is really easy.

Easy? Teachers, do you agree?

Every single argument has a premise for which it doesn’t and can’t argue, and every even mildly interesting worldview is built on conflict and internal tension. Not every contradiction is a reason to reject a worldview!

If some liberal were coming at her with a line like this, I imagine the words MORAL RELATIVISM would come flaming out of Tushnet's skull. But she's appealing to our higher unreasoning:

...What we don’t teach, and don’t even consider as something worth teaching, is the art of acceptance. The art of accepting somebody else’s thoughts, words, insights, and dwelling in them until they become your own as well. We don’t teach how to tell when you’re sure enough, when you really should take the leap of faith, when you should say, “Yes, my understanding is totally inadequate, but I believe"...

...And so we wait, and we keep our options endlessly open, hoping that some lightning-strike revelation will take the decision out of our hands. “When I met your mother I just knew...” “And as he journeyed, he came near Damascus, and suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven...”

Lovely moments, surely, but how would you teach students to recognize them? "Tommy, look at Susie. Pretend she's the one for you, forever. Go!" "Well, Susie's nice and all but..." [Buzzer sounds, "F" dispensed.]

There's actually no place in education for such a thing, unless it's 1.) a cult leader's brainwashing session, or 2.) a school for religious instruction (but I repeat myself), which I suspect is the godly Tushnet's real model. Or, perhaps, a very bad classroom in which students are never challenged to go beyond what they already know, and are in fact given permission to stew in their own prejudices until they become a more transcendentally stupid version of themselves. You know -- the kind of place that folks who are always yapping about teacher "indoctrination" think a school should be.

We've been running with that old "reality-based community" thing for a while, but it never gets old because over time these people never get better at pretending that their real battle is not with liberalism but with Western Civilization.

UPDATE. Commenter Mortimer tells us this sort of thinking is popular even outside the meth labs of the right blogosphere -- from the Texas Republican Party 2012 platform (I don't know how I missed this):

We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs.

Sara Robinson has a nice essay on critical thinking and schools at AlterNet, in which she also sticks up for teaching "the arts, crafts and humanities" -- something else Tushnet opposes ("we fetishize self-expression and novel or counterintuitive approaches to problems..."). They're so often wrong about everything important that it's hard to believe that isn't their goal.

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT.

I don't usually do this, but my old colleague Steven Thrasher's story at Gawker, "Haaay to the Chief: The Military-Industrial Complex Conquers the Homos," is such gutsy journalism I'm sure many people will not even recognize it as such. Sample:

When SF Pride's electoral college of former grand marshalls selected Private Manning last week, it was time for these Professional Homosexuals to step in. Lisa Williams, SF Pride Board President, wrote that "even the hint of support" for Bradley Manning "will not be tolerated by the leadership of San Francisco Pride." Get it? Don’t even hint about it! 

The Professional Homosexual went on, completely without irony, to denounce her own organization's electoral college as "a system whereby a less-than-handful of people may decide who represents the LGBT community's highest aspirations as grand marshals for SF Pride," completely ignoring that she was one of a different handful vetoing their choice. According to her SF Pride bio, Williams is president of "One Source Public Affairs, a boutique consulting firm that specializes in the management of state, local and national political campaigns and strategic programs for non-profit organizations"...

As Jack Nicholson once said after doing a take with Brando on The Missouri Breaks: scorches the earth, doesn't he?

UPDATE. Some lively discussion of and dissension on Steven's story in comments. The main rap seems to be that he's just naively disappointed by the transformation of what used to be called the gay liberation movement into a political power brokerage that sometimes makes regrettable choices. (Longtime commenter Halloween Jack even calls the story "revisionist bullshit.") We can argue over what tradeoffs are worth making, certainly. I'd say the important thing is that Steven noticed the phenomenon at all -- especially the flow of military contractor money into big gay orgs. Too many people seem to miss that, in politics as in life, a lot of what looks like moral imperative is just arbitrage.

A CONSPIRACY SO VAST.

The President had some good gags at the White House Correspondents Dinner, one of the better (and better-reported) ones being, "These days, I look in the mirror and I have to admit, I'm not the strapping young Muslim socialist I used to be."

You all heard that one, right? You did? Well you're lying, because FrontPageMag's Robert Spencer has proven that the Lame Stream Media is covering it up:

Warner Todd Huston reported at Breitbart Monday that “in some of its reports on Saturday night’s White House Correspondents Dinner (WHCD), the Associated Press failed to include one of President Obama’s own gags.”

Obama said: “These days I look in the mirror and have to admit, I’m not the strapping young Muslim Socialist that I used to be.” But, noted Huston, “in one version of the night’s story (as seen at Huffington Post, Time Magazine, Breitbart Wires, the Ottawa Citizen, and The Columbian to name a few), the AP’s Bradley Klapper forgot one part of the President’s joke,” reporting his words as “I’m not the strapping young Socialist that I used to be,”

Why? Did they think it had too much of a ring of truth?

Why did some editors at AP or at the publications that picked up the AP story think it necessary to run interference for Obama on this point?

The rest of the column is about how Obama is too a big Muslim.

You may be wondering what Spencer and his fellow idiots are trying to accomplish. My guess is, they're thinking about future generations. No one living at the present moment and aware of the news could possibly believe AP is purposely blocking Obama's famous joke. But down the road apiece, when the shattered remnants of the White People's Party are living in survivalist treehouses in the Dakotas, they're tell their children how Obama even admitted he was a Muslim and the media covered it up, and produce some dog-eared Wayback Machine files as proof. After all, they're big on heritage.

UPDATE. Speaking of the WHCD, Conan O'Brien apparently made a joke about Duck Dynasty and National Review's Greg Pollowitz spends hundreds of words ferociously insisting it wasn't funny. When I read that stupid thing about the reality show being a conservative touchstone, I thought it was just one guy's foolishness, but apparently it's a thing: Rod Dreher has gotten in on it, as have S.E. Cupp and those crazy kulturkampfers at Acculturated.

I kind of take the point, though -- if you're the sort of person who chooses what crap TV shows to watch based on ideology, <foxworthy>yew might be a conservative!</foxworthy>.

LIBERTARIAN OUTREACH ON GAY RIGHTS.

Hey, an NBA player says he's gay, great. This is something liberals and libertarians can agree on, right? Not if libertarians can help it! Matt Welch at Reason:

The Importance of Allowing People to Say That You Can’t Be a Gay Basketball Player and a Christian

He's talking about ESPN's Chris Broussard, who for the crime of criticizing the gay basketball player was beaten to death. Okay, not murdered, just beaten. Okay, not beaten, just criticized by people on Twitter, which is still censorship (because anything short of responding to Broussard's mouth-fart with "Intelligent people can disagree" and a pat on the back would be).

Broussard is predictably getting beaten to a rhetoric pulp on Twitter. And while I think today is a wonderful, watershed day for people (especially the artist formerly known as Ron Artest) to live as open and free as they wanna be, I agree with the New York Post editorial Robert George here: "Chris Broussard spoke what more than a few players feel. If such comments aren't expressed, a real conversation can't be had."

Actually America had this conversation for years. Thesis: "DIE FAGGOT!" Antithesis: (cries of pain). Fascist that I am, I don't see any point in reviving it.

And sometimes engaging with the I'm not ready to go that far just yet crowd brings out the best in activists. See, for example, Martin Luther King's "Letter From a Birmingham Jail."

MLK was glad people were opposing him -- in fact, he'd have been disappointed if people suddenly gave up and let him have what he wanted. Where'd be the fun in that? And getting assassinated was just an inevitable part of the process.

There is only one possible explanation for Welch's bizarre post: As I've been saying for years, libertarianism is just a hipper line extension of conservatism, the rightwing version of Budweiser Black Crown. So if liberals like something you'd imagine libertarians would approve, Reasonoids still have to maintain the anti-liberal brand positioning by bitching about it in a way the mouth-breathers can approve. The cleverer ones will do it by explaining how gay rights is statist, but with the kind of funding they have, there's really no need for a libertarian to be clever. Q.E.D.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the rightbloggers who think the Boston bombings are a good reason to stop the immigration bill, or immigration in general. The whole thing reminds me of the Palmer Raids as performed by a clown troupe.

GEORGE JONES, 1931-2013.

Just heard. I'll have something more to say later, maybe. His music was my good companion through some bad times; next to Sinatra in the When No One Cares era, maybe, nothing suits a sorrow binge like George Jones. (He's good when you're not sad, too, I later found out.) And while I normally don't give a damn what happens to famous people, his apparent ascent into happiness late in life was very cheering to me.

For now it's enough to say that along with everything else, George Jones was one hell of a singer.



UPDATE. He could be funny, too. Used to cover this one in a country band I was in:



UPDATE 2. In comments TomParmenter supplies "Rock  It," a number Jones did in his "Thumper Jones" secret rockabilly identity. But does anyone have tape of him singing as Donald Duck?

UPDATE 3. Just wanted to add:

• In high school a friend of mine saw him at the Westbury Music Fair and told me Jones was using the name "Tammy" in place of female pronouns, which got some gasps from the crowd. I thought maybe Jones had just been having an episode, but then I saw him on TV singing "If drinkin' don't kill me, Tammy's memory will" on some awards show. I can understand trading in on one's legend -- he did have a funny number called "No-Show Jones," and joked about his drinking -- but think about what it would take to declare yourself like that, to keep telling people that you'd had that one big love and it didn't work out. Jones was in show biz, but I think the feelings the songs talk about weren't an act.

• The "Ragged But Right" clip shows a younger, lighter Jones; his vocal instrument is pure and strong and he doesn't mess with it much. And that kind of material ("White Lightnin'," "Love Bug," etc.) doesn't call for messing with. The later Jones most people know, though, is the one singing those heartbreak songs, and by then he'd learned a few tricks. I think of "A Good Year for the Roses," where he moves between a low, confidential delivery ("After three full years of marriage it's the first time that you haven't made the bed") and those amazing, keening high notes ("As you turn and walk a-way..."). I say "tricks," but they don't sound tricky -- because, as difficult as most singers would find that kind of transition, Jones made it seem very natural, like that's just how it had to be sung. And that's part of what gives me goosebumps whenever I hear it. He goes from a wounded murmur to something like a howl of pain, and back again; the thing he's talking about isn't just sadness, it's torment; the inconsolable sorrow of lost love. The reason you can bear it, and maybe the reason he could, is that he made it into art.

THE NEW HISTORY'S GREATEST MONSTER.

Dame Noonington's hate-on for Obama has engorged to the point where she's comparing him unfavorably to Jimmy Carter. If we invade Syria, expect Noonan to pen a column from the POV of Bashar al-Assad, who will have mellowed becomingly with age, and whose personal happiness she will posit as the real reason that emotional cripple in the White House is after him.

REALITY TV VS. REALITY.

You stupid hippies think you own this country? Well, PJ Media's David Vicker has news for you! Duck Dynasty is popular!

Each week millions think they’re tuning in to watch the crazy and entertaining antics of a bunch of hirsuit, rich rednecks... What viewers are really watching are the Bitter Clingers candidate Obama so famously disparaged at a San Francisco campaign event back in 2008, and the Makers that President Obama denigrated in his “You didn’t build that speech” of 2012. If anyone in America clings to God, guns and religion, and did build that, it’s the Robertson clan...

..in a reliably Republican redoubt in rural Louisiana. Good for them, but what does that have to do with America in general? Well, to hear Vicker tell it, it's aspirational:

If annual sales, endorsement deals, and TV ratings are any indicator, the brand of Americanism these swamp rats are peddling is white lightning in a bottle. Down on our luck, out of hope, and sick-and-tired-of-change Americans can’t get enough of Duck Dynasty’s message, or its messengers. They take us back to the ideals that really work in this country.

The paterfamilias of this duck-call dynasty is worth about $10 million, in a parish where the estimated median household income in 2009 was $32,777. (Percentage of residents living in poverty in West Monroe, Louisiana in 2009: 25.3%.) And apparently the Robertsons are looking for a raise from their TV show.

Again, good for them; anything the traffic will allow, as the old song says. TV's currently full of Duck Dynasts and Real Housewives and such like; they're the modern equivalents of the swells and toffs whose adventures impoverished Americans have enjoyed following since the screwball comedies of the Great Depression. But nothing in our history suggests these entertainments mean the American People didn't mean what they said when they elected a President last November who was less than duck-dynastic.

Fantasies like Vicker's remind me of hippies who thought the country was really with them because Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate were big at the box office, despite the electoral returns.  Counterculture's a fun game to play when you're losing, but if culture, counter or otherwise, is meaningful to you, then its effect on electoral results -- actual or mitigating -- will not be so important. Decades later, Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate are still worth watching, though. Can we expect the same of Duck Dynasty? If so, then politics is the least of our problems.

KILL US ALL, LET GOD SORT US OUT.

A lot of what the brethren have written about Boston has been deranged, but leave it to PJ Media/NewYork Post blowhard Michael Walsh to raise the bar. In this emission, his point is that with last week's lockdown the "pusillanimous toads... Gov. Deval Patrick and Mayor Mumbles Menino" had the city "cowering in fear" when they should have sent all Boston's able-bodied citizens out to shoot up the suspect and whatever got between him and them, or something equally butch.

There's plenty that's stupid and offensive in this, but connoisseurs will appreciate this bit about the 2004 Beslan school massacre, which Peters offers as a preferable model:

Note that, when the Russian military finally stormed the school, they were accompanied by armed residents of the village, desperate to save their children. In typical ham-handed Russian fashion, the former Soviets managed to kill almost as many people as they saved — but the point is they fought back.

Much better than last Friday's result, which was casualty-free as well as successsful, but without honor.

Sometimes I wonder if Walsh is just one of Col. Ralph Peters' secret identities.