THE STUPIDEST THING EVER WRITTEN UNTIL JONAH GOLDBERG WRITES SOMETHING ELSE.

British PM David Cameron's anti-porn proposals are so stupid he's already begun to back off them, and even Charles C.W. Cooke, an asshole, has come out against them. The best you can say for the program is that is has stirred Jonah Goldberg to one of his classic foot-in-bucket fartfests:

I understand that we are in a very libertarian moment. I myself have become far more sympathetic to libertarianism over the years.

Wait for it...

But I just can’t get as worked up about David Cameron’s porn crackdown as Charlie can.

I think libertarianism is bullshit and even I'm offended by this.

The “who’s to judge?” refrain very often strikes me as camouflage for the more radical claim that judgment is either impossible or simply illegitimate.

This is really about standards. If you depict women having orgasms, soon every woman will want one! What then? Fart.

In other words, hand-waving about, say, the peril to free speech of banning Lady Chatterley’s Lover says little about how to view some dimly lit bukkake compilation (don’t look it up if you think you might not want to know).

Goldberg moves as easily from a right to say "yuk, bukkake, amirite?" to a right to stop other people from watching it as, I expect, he moves from eating leftover meatloaf with his fingers to drinking salsa out of the jar in his midnight (and 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. and 10 p.m. and 11 p.m.) raids on the fridge.

It’s a bit like the death penalty. Opponents always want to argue that the death penalty is 100 percent wrong when the person about to be executed is a somewhat sympathetic figure, or when there is some real or alleged ambiguity about his guilt. But sometimes the evidence of guilt is overwhelming and the convict is a child rapist, mass-murdering demon. Then, suddenly, death-penalty opponents grow quiet as they await a more convenient poster child.

That's why they picked rape-murderer Robert Lee Willie as the model for Dead Man Walking. So mediagenic!

Unless you believe that there should be no legal impediment whatsoever to hardcore porn on, say, Saturday-morning broadcast television, you too believe in censorship. Similarly, if you believe there is some information — any information! — the government should be allowed to keep the press from reporting, you also believe in censorship. Now that we’ve established that in principle...

...Jonah Goldberg gets to be yukmaster general. I wonder if this junior-high debate bullshit works with anyone.

I am not for banning porn (if you could ban it at the local level, I would be more sympathetic to that).

I have followed Goldberg for over a decade and this is as classically Goldbergian a "veer in one direction, then another, then disappear into a cloud of farts" as I have seen.

But I find the desire to help parents shield their kids from it entirely reasonable, humane, and laudable — and, yes, difficult.

Two separate cheats -- "for the children" blubbering, and "no easy choices" chin-stroking -- in the same sentence. This shit is prime.

Then Goldberg says he's "confused" by Cooke's analogy with King Canute -- no surprise there; he probably thought it was something like "Linus the Lion Hearted" that came on TV after he stopped watching cartoons -- and, feebly grasping that it has something to do with fighting the forces of nature, persists:

Regardless, it seems to me that virtually every major challenge of the human condition is ultimately “unstoppable”: Disease, crime, natural disasters, cosmic entropy, karaoke, etc. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to smooth out the rough edges, go for the small improvements where we can, and muddle through from one generation to the next.

No one can prove that oceans of internet porn have done anything worse to humanity than give Goldberg another opportunity to embarrass himself, yet he compares it to disease and crime as something we should do something about, rather than as something normal people just shrug off and learn to live with, like, say, universal health care.

Cooke basically tells him where to get off (politely, though -- a man's gotta eat) and Goldberg actually comes back, this time with buckets on both feet:

...as Charlie is far more knowledgeable about his exotic homeland than I, I’m willing to defer to him when it comes to distrusting the British government.

Translation: I didn't know what the fuck I was just talking about but it doesn't matter, I'm a legacy pledge.

Fortunately, Charlie has elevated the discussion from the particulars to the general, and on that ground I’m less deferential. He alludes to what “the story of government in the West” is but I’m not sure what he’s saying. If he’s saying it’s always preferable to keep the government from making mistakes in the first place, rather than trying to fix them later, I suppose that’s fine (though some things, like gas station burritos, only emerge as mistakes after you try them). If he’s saying that once we acknowledge a principle for Orwellian/Statist/Censorial expansion we start riding the slippery slope to ever greater oppression, I’m afraid I disagree.

This is literally gibberish. But the next line is killer:

The best one can say about this kind of argument is that it is sometimes true and it’s sometimes false.

To match this with our traditional Goldberg signifiers is difficult, but a close equivalent might be Goldberg farting from every pore.

Thereafter Goldberg does his own version of Peter Boyle's "One guy lives in Brooklyn, one guy lives in Sutton Place" speech from Taxi Driver, demonstrates that he can't understand why child pornography is about child exploitation rather than free speech, and actually says this:

Right now, thanks to censorship, it is illegal to put up a giant electronic billboard in front of a school depicting fictional scenes of gang rape or child sex. Given his embrace of free speech absolutism, is that a bad thing?

And (I hope this is graven on his monument):

The internet is no billboard, but I think the principle can make the leap.

Then he brings up "Plato’s Republic... the Jacobins, the Nazis, the Communists" to show that he is too an intellectual, see?

I give it four farts.

DENNIS FARINA, 1944-2013.

Farina had authority as an actor -- which is to say, when he told you he was Ray Barboni from Miami, you believed him:



Not the guy you want for King Lear, maybe, but very good at what he did. R.I.P.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the second week of Zimmerman-Martin follies. Among the outtakes, a special challenge from Ace of Spades:

On Twitter, I challenged Buzz Feed's Ben Smith, who had claimed Obama always spoke 'incredibly' about race, to apprise me as to what specific insights and memorable sentences he recalls from any Obama utterance, whether on race or any other subject. As of this 6 o'clock deadline, he has yet to respond to me.

3-D chess match won!

UPDATE. On the sub-theme of rightblogger sorrow at the scarcity of violent Trayvon rally incidents they could attribute to race war, Breitbart.com is reduced to the level of Lestat in the swamp, feasting on sub-optimal nutrition sources:

PROTESTERS NONE TOO PLEASED TO SEE BREITBART'S BRANDON DARBY COVERING TRAYVON RALLY 

Brandon Darby gets verbally attacked at a July 21,2013 Trayvon rally organized by the New Black Panther Party and Quanell X. The Occupy contingent recognized Darby while he was on assignment for Breitbart News.

The best from the comments: "What I find hilarious is that the white 'protesters' have to explain who the Breitbart reporter is to blacks..." That is hilarious, but not how he thinks.

LIBERTARIANS, THEY'RE LOVIN' IT!

Ah, Megan McArdle is at Bloomberg now. Let's see what she's up to -- oh yeah, that McDonald's how-to-survive-on-our-shitty-pay thing. Guess what, McArdle sides with McDonald's! (Her husband's right, these scripts are getting awfully predictable.)

Moreover, a number of people are claiming that this budget is not merely unkind, but downright Draconian -- “the amounts specified in this budget just aren’t enough to get by, at least not safely,” Irregular Times says. 

This seems overdramatic; $24,000 in after-tax dollars is not princely. But it doesn't put you at significant risk of death or dismemberment. While $800 a month is not a lot to have for clothes, entertainment, groceries and sundries, even taking inflation into account, that was a lot more than the disposable income I had when I first started at The Economist. After student loans, rent and taxes, I had about $300 for everything else, including utilities and MetroCards.

Young career-tracker with a starter job at The Economist, McDonald's employee = pretty much the same thing.

If you are a middle-class professional, and you attempt to imagine replicating your own lifestyle on McDonald's wages, you are bound to feel panic and outrage. But that’s not actually the task facing people who work at McDonald's, or people with a household after-tax income of about $24,000 a year.

Yeah, they're never going to need just the right shoes for a gala reception, so their needs are different.

The McDonald's workforce skews young. The average age of a fast-food worker is almost 30 right now, but that’s because of the recession; in 2000, it was 22. The average McDonald's line worker is not planning to put two kids through college on their salary. Only a minority are trying to support just themselves exclusively on their minimum-wage paycheck; they are living with a spouse or partner who makes at least as much as they do, or with parents or other relatives who make more than minimum wage. Moreover, very few people stay in entry-level minimum-wage jobs for very long (though again, the Great Recession has made this happen more than it used to); those workers eventually get promoted or leave for a more promising job.

Sorry, had to go to the "emphasis added" there; I didn't want you to miss the use of McArdle's  trademarked "the facts support me except for the parts that don't, which I dismiss by naming them" process. Also, funny as I find the idea that shit wages are okay for these people because they can always get their uncle in North Dakota to send them money orders, it's nothing compared to this:

Those who don’t [advance] -- who actually try to support a family on minimum-wage paychecks -- will end up with substantial government support. They’ll get the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the Earned Income Tax Credit and, in many places, they will now be eligible for Medicaid.

For one thing, these are programs McArdle's fellow conservatarians are working hard to get rid of. For another and more to the point, this sort of employer exploitation of public assistance is famously what's keeping the whole crap-job paradigm alive. It like defending a con game by saying, "but if you shut it down, how's the con man going to make any money?"

McArdle can't resist adding that you silly elitists can't understand: "There are millions of people in this country doing it," she says. "Keep in mind that most McDonald's workers don’t live close to New York City or Washington... Survival on such a lean budget is possible because people who do it are not trying to live the atomized life of an upper-middle-class college graduate." Woo, that's telling those of us who have our own bathrooms! We get something similar at the Washington Post from McArdle's fellow conservatarian Timothy B. Lee -- but first let me quote my favorite part:

The budget allocates $0 for heat. This could be realistic in some Southern states...

Okay, thanks. Lee has a pot o' sneers for those decadent coastals who insult our fast food slaves by suggesting they could live any differently:

With a couple of exceptions, these are typical figures for the spending of millions of low-income Americans... Gawker’s Neil Casey calls $600 per month for rent a “laughably small” figure, but Casey should spend more time outside the Northeast Corridor... while working two jobs is tough, it’s not that uncommon. About 7 million Americans, or about 5 percent of the workforce, do it... And the reality is that these low-income Americans have to make the kind of hard choices that critics are deriding as ridiculous... Gawker calls the budget “just-shy-of-condescending,” but budgeting is an important skill that isn’t obvious to every young adult in America. Offering practical advice on how to live on a modest income is more constructive than ridiculing the choices required to do so.

In other words, low-end jobs like these are increasingly long-term propositions, and you're just being insulting by suggesting it's anything but the way things ought to be -- why, it's like asking a harelip for a kiss, or teaching a slave to read!

¡AYYY, NO ES BUENO!

At National Review, Rachel Campos-Duffy is blowing the lid off... Eva Longoria, producer of Devious Maids, which sounds like typically prime-time crap to us, but to Campos-Duffy it's racist. Well, not racist exactly, just hypocritical-liberal-racist because Longoria's tight with those radical Latino groups and shouldn't be getting away with such stuff.

Much has been said about the controversy swirling around Eva Longoria’s decision to be the executive producer of Lifetime Television’s Devious Maids, a prime-time soap about sexy Latina domestic workers who occasionally sleep with their bosses. Less has been reported about Ms. Longoria’s key relationships with her biggest defenders and America’s most powerful Hispanic NGOs, as well as her relationship with the finance chair of the Democratic National Committee, Henry Muñoz. 

The hypocrisy is difficult to swallow. After all, these are the same organizations that battled with Disney over an animated princess’s being insufficiently “Latina” (read, too white) and found sexism and gender insensitivity in their political opponents at every turn, accusing them of launching an all-out “war on women.” Does anyone doubt that the National Council of La Raza and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF) would have crucified Devious Maids creator Marc Cherry if a powerful Democratic Latina donor had not been attached to the project?

Shit, I don't know. But tell me this: Have those sinister Latino groups come out against Iris Chacón for racial recidivism? Because when you're runnin' down La Bomba, hombre, you'll walkin' on the fighting side of me.


Also, has La Raza tried to shut down Telemundo comedy sketches for their undignified portrayals of the gente? I'm guessing not. And The Simpsons' Bumblebee Man is still on TV. Maybe they're all pals of Longoria and the Democrats, and equally in on the hypocri-conspiracy!

Still, Campos-Duffy thinks her idea of what Latino groups might have done is a bombshell, because this non-event is obviously tied to Longoria's activities with Democratic groups -- "the support she is receiving amid this controversy from the DNC and Hispanic NGOs recalls the kind of cronyism, amiguismo, and back scratching of the countries so many Latinos left behind." I understand Ricky Ricardo pulled the same shit, forgetting his roots to hang out with Fred and Ethel Mertz.

Portraying this absence of action as "the campaign to save Eva," Campos-Duffy claims it's "having some unintended consequences. It’s pulling back the curtain and exposing the nexus between money and Democratic politics. Powerful Hispanic community organizations are putting one Latina over the best interests, empowerment, and advancement of all Latinos."

I guess I have to be the one to tell them: Conservatives are so freaking bad at ethnic pandering, they ought to break down and take lessons. They're always screaming about race hustlers and race pimps -- couldn't they just sidle up to one sometime and offer him a wad of cash to teach them how to do it?

RACIST WITH AN EXPLANATION.

"Is Racial Profiling Ever Okay?" Of course it is, says Rod Dreher. When he lived in DC, Rod used to cross the street if he saw "young black men dressed like street thugs" coming at him, but not if they were clothed in "office wear." He bets you would too! Did you know a couple black guys beat up Matt Yglesias? Yet he still defends those people!

If you think it's not about playing the odds in a late-night street encounter, but about day-to-day life where black people get treated like shit on a regular basis even in daylight, Dreher knows all about that -- he too has suffered from racial prejudice:

The time that stands out to me was years ago, when I was applying for a newspaper job that I really wanted, and was told that I was perfect for it. Then the paper stopped returning my calls. Finally, an executive there told me that either the editor-in-chief or the publisher, can’t remember which, decreed that a minority or a woman must be hired for that job. It was humiliating and infuriating to me. All I was to that newsroom executive was a white male.

Also, can you believe it, in the little Louisiana town where he moved to, some of the black people have negative feelings about white people. But they're not all like that: Dreher knows this black lady whose mother "prefers to hire white repairmen because based on experience, she trusts them to do better work. Who am I to argue with this woman’s experience? Who are you? If it was your money at stake, would you profile in this way?"

Dreher is the upscale Internet world equivalent of the sort of Reasonable Racists you're bound to run into if your scope of acquaintances is wide enough. Mention the difficulties of black life in America, and you'll get the exact same routines: I was mugged by black guy so I know. Oh, you were mugged by one too? If you still don't see how dangerous they are, you're blinded by political correctness. Listen, black people racial-profile me all the time, I went to this bar one time and they wouldn't serve me...

They always have an argument, and they always say they want a "dialogue." (So does Dreher, here: "Why is it right in college admissions and hiring to reduce individuals to their race or gender? I’m not asking rhetorically. I really would like to hear what you have to say...") But you, my readers, are pretty well-travelled, and you know what they really want: They want you to tell them they're not bad people for feeling the way they do.

If you won't give it to them they way they prefer, right away, as something they're owed as a fellow white person, then they'll get argumentative. If you say, as Yglesias said about his assault, "that was a single incident on one day out of thousands. The overwhelming preponderance of black men I walk past on the street on a day-to-day basis... aren’t committing any violent crimes," the racist will say something like what Dreher says: "But it is reasonable to assume that if you are going to be a violent crime victim in DC — as most people in Washington are not, and never will be — then your assailant will almost certainly be a young black male." See? You have statistics, he has statistics. Now why don't you be reasonable and admit he's not a bad person?

The one thing that never occurs to these guys is that racism is not like monetarism or socialism or academicism or henotheism or anarcho-syndicalism; it's not a thought system we can sit up arguing about all night and be, other than the hangover, none the worse for wear after; it's cancer. Centuries of experience documented by historians and artists show it, if you need guidance, but a few years living in America ought to wise you up to it pretty quick all by itself.

I like to contend about everything, but you know what? On this subject, there really isn't anything to discuss.

GIVIN' 'EM WHAT THEY WANT.

My column this week mentioned some of the many conservatives who blithely assumed the ghettos would be aflame after the Zimmerman verdict because, well, you know [pushes in nose]. At Mother Jones, Lauren Williams noted some of the pre-eminent racial dead-enders on the case:

Bill O'Reilly recently asked guests on his show whether a not-guilty verdict would cause people to "run out and cause trouble," or worse, "damage the fabric of the nation." The Washington Times ran an online poll Wednesday asking readers, "Will there be riots in Florida if George Zimmerman receives a not-guilty verdict by a jury of his peers?" Seventy-four percent said yes. Sean Hannity had Mark Fuhrman (of O.J. Simpson trial fame) on his show this week and asked him the same question. His response, according to Newshounds, a Fox News watchdog site: "I just think it's kind of pathetic that a court of law cannot be in a vacuum of the legal system without the influence of the public threatening to do great bodily harm to people and property. It's really a pathetic statement for our country." Last October, speculation that African Americans would riot from coast to coast if President Barack Obama lost to Mitt Romney swept conservative news sites.

David Weigel did a few columns on this, the more recent of which features a Drudge front page pretending "America gripped by second night of fury," and links to similar gibberish from the Daily Mail and Jim fucking Hoft. Weigel's column is called "Who's Disappointed About the Lack of Mass Zimmerman Verdict Riots?" and the answer is pretty clear: Conservative specialists in the old Ooga Booga.

At the Wall Street Journal, James Taranto takes off from Weigel's column -- but goes in a, let us say, counterintuitive direction. His over-reactors are nameless "British newspaper" and "conspiracy website," as well as "the Broward County sheriff and the Sanford police" who "put out a public-service ad in which cops, teenagers and James Jones of basketball's Miami Heat urged viewers: 'Raise Your Voice, Not Your Hands.'" See, the local cops tried to preemptively chill people out  -- that's pretty close to Michelle Malkin crying, "Zimmerman verdict: NOT guilty -- Calls for race riots in 3, 2, 1..." Robert Stacy McCain predicting "If #Zimmerman is acquitted, black people will riot," etc.

Also, Taranto finds one of those real-racists on which conservative commentary thrives: "Today New York's Daily News does its best to inflame the situation, front-paging an editorial that likens Zimmerman's killing of Trayvon Martin to half a dozen decades-old cases," which is, yes you guessed it, "an outrageously racist bit of yellow journalism, imputing guilt to Zimmerman because the color of his skin is similar to that of men who committed horrific crimes decades ago. The News editorial reflects the perverse nostalgia for pervasive racism--and for the moral clarity and righteousness that accompanied it--that is common among liberals today..."

Meanwhile elsewhere in Wingnut World: National Review's alleged cop Jack Dunphy tells us about the Fire This Time in L.A.: "...as I write this Monday night there is a group causing a ruckus on Crenshaw Boulevard, disrupting traffic, vandalizing cars, and briefly storming a Walmart... Except for a few torched trash cans, there were no fires and no widespread looting in L.A. Monday night. But that could change if this keeps up.." Briefly storming a Walmart! Helter skelter! By tomorrow Dunphy will report himself pinned down by price-gun fire, but determined to get word out to civilization about the Trayvon Riots.

And after Jamelle Bouie explains to him that "black-on-black crime" -- the traditional means by which conservatives pretend to care more about black lives than black people, when such a distraction is needed --  just means that black people who commit crimes tend to live near other black people, whom they victimize, Dunphy's colleague Patrick Brennan just keeps repeating his mantras: "it’s disproportionately being committed by blacks... African Americans commit dramatically more crime, especially violent crimes and murders, than whites do... still committing crimes at shockingly disproportionate rates... blacks are much more likely to commit more murders than whites... it becomes apparent that black-on-black crime is a special problem... lots of blacks are committing crimes..."

Brennan and the rest of him know their audience and what keeps 'em coming back.

UPDATE. In comments, synykyl: "Given that young black males are by far the most likely victims of gun violence, shouldn't conservatives be calling for a national campaign to arm them? Conservatives aren't racists, and they believe an armed society is a polite society, so why haven't they jumped on this idea?" Well, you see...

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the George Zimmerman decision and the strange jubilation of the rightbloggers. No, it's not strange they'd be pleased -- someone got away with killing an unarmed black kid, what's not for them to like? What's strange is that they don't seem genuinely relieved and happy -- it's like they're still nervous about something. Maybe Judgment Day?

UPDATE. Wow, I knew Daniel Foster of National Review was awful, but not that he was this big of an asshole till now.

AND DAMNED IF HE DOESN'T.

This week Obama met with members of the 1963 Loyola Ramblers basketball team:

Aside from toppling two-time defending champion Cincinnati to win the title, the Ramblers are noted in the annals of sports for having four African-American starters at a time when colleges in the South refused to take the court against a team with even one minority player.

Nice feel-good civil-rights story -- but not for Andrew Malcolm of IBD! Title:

The celebration of racial progress that Obama will hide today

Whatever could that mean?

President Obama is addicted to photo ops, especially sports ones with happy collegiate and pro champions giving him his own monogrammed team jersey of the sort he never got to wear in actual competition. 

The smiling audience and the president basking in the reflected winning glory of athletic champions is a sure-fire, feel-good TV story, especially in summer. Poker aside, there's hardly a national title that Obama hasn't celebrated for photographers at the White House.

Oh, so Malcolm's upset that Obama's hogging the spotlight? Actually, just the opposite:

The man who once promised the most transparent administration in history has decided to celebrate with the aging national champions in the Oval Office by himself. Just him. In private. "Closed press," as they call it, like his CIA intelligence briefings. No public sharing of this good news story with fellow Americans. 

Add that to the lengthy list of Obama disappointments.

The great thing about a column like this (half of which, BTW, is just random insults) is that, if Obama chose last-minute to hold the event in a stadium instead, Malcolm could have just flipped the two sections: Obama secrecy CIA "most transparent" har, but when reflected winning glory addicted to monogrammed jersey ops! Lengthy list of disappointments! It would work just as well.

Conservative column writing has been a version of Mad Libs for a while now, but they seem to have almost eliminated the need to make it look coherent. Soon they'll just ship the punters a bunch of refrigerator magnets (UNDER THE BUS, MOST TRANSPARENT ADMINISTRATION IN HISTORY, BENGHAZI, etc.) and let them mix and match themselves.

STILL NOT GETTING IT.

Rod Dreher does another one of those "we must take the Kultur!" posts.

Still, it’s a dead end—creatively, philosophically, and politically—for conservatives to mimic left-wing storytellers. 

For one thing, conservatives today lack the artistic skill to tell stories as well as the left does. More philosophically, the business of a conservatism with integrity is not to impose an idealistic ideological narrative on reality but rather to try to see the world as it is and respond to its challenges within the limits of what we know about human nature.

It would seem from this that Dreher still thinks liberals have some kind of mysterious formula, transmitted to them by Satan, for turning their nefarious ideas into a magic weapon called Art that moves the masses.

Conservatism has within it the capacity to answer these challenges, but not if conservatives cling to stories that have lost their salience. We don’t need stories that offer prepackaged ideological answers to questions few people are asking.

Okay, now we're getting somewhere...

We need stories like the one told in the comments section of my blog on the American Conservative website by a Texas reader.

Oh shit. I'll spare you, but it's about how the guy's town was ruined by Big Gummint. But some of the policies that doomed the place were "authored by the New Dealers, others by Reaganites" -- so see, ambiguity! That's artistic, right? Throw in some jokes and we have a hit.

Another guy "hopes to start a literary movement dedicated to telling the stories of working-class people of the Rust Belt":

“Someone who is teaching can be the Allen Tate or John Crowe Ransom of this movement. Someone who’s working a factory floor can be the Wendell Berry. I’m not comparing myself to these guys, but someone needs to write about these things in a sustained way.”

Maybe he can place an ad in the New York Review of Books to hire someone to actually write the stuff.

This reminds me of Liberty Island, the Ben Shapiro conservative arts site that has a manifesto but no content anyone would want to read. These people want culture as a means; the end is to effect the horrible political ideas they spend 99 percent of their time talking about. And as to stories, what Dreher won't admit is that they've had those all along: The Welfare Queen, The Dirty Hippie, The Child-Corrupting Homo, The Tax-and-Spend Liberal, et alia. But these stories were not created to reveal the human condition -- they were created to gull rubes into hate-voting for their candidates.

If conservatives don't have the kind of stories that move people the way a great song or play does, it's not because liberals took over the arts; it's because they don't really want them.

FETAL PAINS.

Kathryn J. Lopez:

In the new version, with about 40,000 views, we are told that the Texas Infant Pain Capable Protection Act will take us all “one step closer to theocracy,” marking a “war on women” and a ”a battle for vaginas.” “Owning your uteruses gives them a thrill.” The bill is a “a pain in the uterus.” Never mind the pain of the child. Never mind the pain of pretending there aren’t lives abortion hurts, beyond the dead child. Because apparently we’re comfortable not hearing the cries that should rock our consciences.

She talking about a Schoolhouse Rock parody, the very existence of which she considers "confirmation that absolutely nothing is, in fact, sacred." Someone should make a pro-choice Little Lulu cartoon and really blow her mind.

Meanwhile Megan McArdle does what I have come to recognize as the the typical libertarian abortion thing of acting as straight man to foam-mouthed pro-life conservatives:

Make no mistake: I’m pro-choice... But that doesn’t mean I view abortion as having the same moral weight as a haircut or a nose-piercing -- just another personal choice about what you do with your body.

I'm all for women's lib, but these bra-burning kooks, etc. Enter stage right National Review's Witchfinder General David French, who reads this absolutely the way it was intended:

I think McArdle is largely right. Americans tend to be reluctant to “force” women into diffcult circumstances...

Love those quote marks.

...but are broadly unsympathetic to abortions for convenience — thus the backlash you often see even from pro-choice advocates when people admit, for example, to killing their child to preserve a short-lived pro volleyball career.

Bet you didn't know that most abortions are enjoyed by the Undeserving Pregnant -- sluts who deserve what happened to them and just want their unborns sucked out so they they can get back to hot yoga.

McArdle states that it is “impossible to completely separate the good [abortions] from the bad,” and — legally — she is largely right. Government can’t possibly construct a screening mechanism that separates ”good” (i.e., publicly supported because of the mother’s acknowledged difficulties) abortions from the “bad,” nor would the pro-life movement ever support such a regime. The pro-life answer is to match our honesty about abortion with charity towards mothers in crisis, to ameliorate as best we can the pressures and difficulties that lead to the “bad” abortions.

By "charity towards mothers in crisis" he means steering them into fake "pregnancy centers" of the sort French and his buddies are trying to turn every women's health clinic into, and by "ameliorate as best we can the pressures and difficulties that lead to the 'bad' abortions," he means make all abortions illegal.

Oh, and he complains liberals are defaming him and his Operation Rescue buddies as "absurd caricatures of intolerant fundamentalists." He doesn't think he's got this image problem because of the crazy shit he says; he thinks it's because "America’s pro-abortion radicals are disproportionately clustered in the mainstream media and popular culture." Buddy, people were onto you in the days of the Pharisees.

FREE MINDS, FREE MARKETS, BUT AS TO YOUR WOMB...

One of the things I've noticed about the famously libertarian Ole Perfesser Glenn Reynolds is that, while he claims to be pro-choice,  he seems annoyed that anyone would defend abortion rights and delighted whenever someone tries to restrict them. Among recent examples: "AS I KEEP SAYING, THE GOP NEEDS TO CAMPAIGN TO MAKE AMERICAN ABORTION LAWS 'MORE EUROPEAN'"; a strategy to embarrass male anti-abortion legislators characterized as "#WARONMEN: Female lawmaker seeks to regulate men’s reproductive health"; coy suggestions that Congress tax abortions; durr-hurrs about uncivil pro-abortion signs; and approving citations of attacks on Wendy Davis, including "UPDATE: Reader Robert Crawford writes: “Wendy Davis is the new Cindy Sheehan." The guy's some advocate.

Partly, I suppose, this comes out of his whole men's-rights schtick about how women are oppressing men, which he recently took to such lengths ("When people talk about 'reproductive freedom,' they generally mean women’s reproductive freedom") that he ticked off his usual fellow traveller Ann Althouse, leading to a spat and resulting in a rare long Perfesser post full of paranoid gas ("we give women a pass on sexual behavior that would be considered predatory if it were done by males"), whining ("noting the unfairnesses involved, is not 'victimology' — though given how successful women have been in obtaining power via victimology, no one should be surprised if men start to give it a try"),  and just plain bullshit ("When Rush Limbaugh suggested that Sandra Fluke should at least pay for her own birth control..."). Someone who actually thinks this way is bound to consider abortion some kind of illegitimate special right because men can't have one.

Mainly, though, it's a reminder that for libertarians abortion is an agree-to-disagree thing you shouldn't concern yourself over too much, despite the unprecedented current attacks on it, while you should fight to the death for the non-negotiable right of companies to hire workers for five cents an hour if they can get away with it, and to fill the air and water with pollutants pretty much at will. In other words, it's a maximum-liberty movement for adherents who are overwhelmingly male and don't believe they'll ever be in any financial difficulty, and who think empathy is a river on Gor.

UPDATE. Speaking of bullshit libertarians, here's David French, whom we saw last year raving against gay marriage and, I swear to God, Griswold v. Connecticut ("Think for a moment of the awesome power of the sexual revolution over law and logic. Is there a single legal doctrine that can stand against the quest for personal sexual fulfillment?"). Now he's arguing for a "libertarian military." Whereas maximum sexual freedom is an outrage, military-style libertarianism is dead butch -- liberty means more killing and less building, and isn't that was Hayek and Rand were all about?

In my (admittedly anecdotal) experience, thoughtful military libertarians tend to advocate something we haven’t really tried in our more than decade-long fight against Islamic jihad — the relatively brief application of truly overwhelming destructive force against identified enemies. 

That’s why I wonder if a libertarian military might be more lethal, even on smaller budgets. A trimmed-down bureaucracy, an increased emphasis on the destructive rather than nation-building capabilities of the force under arms, and doctrines designed to inflict maximum (non-nuclear) destruction on enemy forces rather than transforming and democratizing communities — all of this could add up to a more lethal (yet smaller) military.

Normally you have to tell one of these guys about someone buying a Big Mac with food stamps to get his bloodlust roaring like this. I know there are a lot of guys out there who are like, "oh yeah, libertarians, Drew Carey right, free the weed," and God bless them, but when it comes to the professional-grade stuff libertarianism still just a niche brand of conservatism.

French also makes an avatar for the free-markets-free-fire military of Rand Paul, whose idea of a proper army probably involves grey uniforms.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the miserable time rightbloggers had on the Fourth of July. With Obama destroying freedom and all, their hot dogs tasted of wormwood. Well, there's always the next Chick-fil-A event.

Among the outtakes was an "In-De-Pants Day" special offered by some guy on his cartoon book OBAMA SUTRA - An Illustrated Guide to 57 States of Ecstasy! which he says is "perfect for leaving out on your coffee table, or slipping into the bookcase of your least favorite liberal." You've missed the special, alas, but the book's cheap and the author has samples at his website. This is our favorite:

It's a little young for the Alan Scherstuhl treatment but I hope he'll put it in his to-do file.

CARTOON CRITICS.

At Inside Higher Ed, Kevin Kiley says this about a new film:

...a film about diversity, the innate differences between individuals, and the institutions and situations that help foster connections and understanding between those individuals. 

The movie is about the challenge of limited talent and the realization that hard work can only take one so far – and sometimes not even as far as people who are just “born with it.” But it's also about what students in the social and intellectual crucible of college can learn from each other and how those interactions shape worldviews and change lives.

 At National Review, Nancy French complains that Kiley "portrayed the movie as leftwing propaganda," but it can't be, she says, because she liked it, and liked that the main characters advanced without a college education because they were thus "avoiding the rampant liberal indoctrination prevalent in colleges today."

But Jennifer Kabbany at The College Fix says the movie is indeed leftwing propaganda:

We have a problem with the fact that the priorities of the modern college experience have morphed from teaching relevant facts and skills to instead constantly force-feeding notions of diversity and tolerance in the quad, in the classroom, in homework assignments, like something akin to a religious cult. 

Decades ago, college used to prioritize getting a good education and marketable skills. Now it’s about indoctrinating students, telling them they’re ignorant, racist homophobes – all the while refusing to allow intellectual diversity to thrive on campus.

If you haven't figured it out yet, these geniuses are talking about Monsters University, a fucking cartoon.

I'm not even gonna get into the shitstorm over The Lone Ranger, except to say 1.) it has inspired a particularly wonderful Debbie Schlussel column, containing this line: "Lone Ranger Armie Hammer is the great-grandson of legendary anti-American oilman Armand Hammer, who went out of his way to enable Communists and Marxists around the world in his oil trade with our enemies, especially the Soviet Union.. I’m sure he’s smiling from his grave now that his great-grandson carries on his disgusting legacy..."; and 2.) Sonny Bunch of the Free Beacon is so-near-yet-so-far when he says the movie is "Designed in a Lab to Troll Conservatives"; I'll go out on a limb and say The Lone Ranger was designed in a lab to make money, though it certainly can't hurt that imbeciles across the internet are Spelling the Name Right in the name of Freedom and White People.

Oh, one more, from Breitbart:

ALLEN WEST RIPS LADY GAGA OVER NATIONAL ANTHEM CHANGE

She sang "home of the gays." Personally I prefer the version that begins, "While we stand here waiting for the ballgame to start," but whatever. Wait'll West finds out what these homosexuals have been doing with America's beloved show tunes!

UPDATE. Sonny Bunch contends fairly that people who are not conservatives, including good old Glenn Kenny, find The Lone Ranger ridiculous. To the extent Kenny "noticed The Lone Ranger's political sensibilities," though, he portrayed it as part the general incoherence, not as a significant political gesture. I can't judge the film because I haven't seen it, so I admit the possibility that it's really Le Gai Savoir with horses and explosions. But a lifetime of experience teaches me that summer blockbusters are not usually built as means to refute the audience's false consciousness.

OPERATION RESCUE THEIR IMAGE.

There's a lot of boo-hoo today about how the folks protesting the new anti-abortion laws in Texas and North Carolina use bad language and mean jokes. National Review's Kathryn J. Lopez demonstrates how seriously you should take this with her unusual description of the mashed-fetus photos customarily waved at abortion clinic patients:

I’ve had some interesting run-ins over the years with graphic anti-abortion displays, which I don’t think are always the best opening to conversations, in part because so many women have had abortions that you really have to lead with a great reserve of love. But even the graphic-image displays do not tend to be motivated by anger or hatred but love for lives lost and an appropriate zeal to end this atrocity.

I wonder how their targets appreciated these waves of love and appropriate zeal.

I'm not sure whether these people genuinely think their viciousness isn't really vicious because Jesus, or whether they've made a calculation that, with their opponents gaining traction, they have to quickly rehab their image with the public so they can claim the victim card for themselves. Any minute now Betsy Woodruff will interview Randall Terry on the protesters' outrageous behavior.

SHORTER JONAH GOLDBERG:

Though I pride myself on my fratboy sense of humor I have never heard a joke about fetuses before and I think everyone will agree with me they're disgusting farrrrt.

BONUS: Those other networks only show the Zimmerman trial because they hate white people but Fox News is doing it for capitalism alright besides I am a con-no-sewer and I only watch Fox News for the bracing intellectual  FÄÄÄRRRR R R R RRT.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the many opportunities the brethren were given last week to talk about gays (Prop 8, DOMA decisions), blacks (the VRA decision, the Zimmerman trial), and women (Wendy Davis' filibuster) and what they made of them (a massive cock-up). Those new Benghazi hearings can't come a moment too soon!

MORE ADVICE FROM YOUR MORTAL ENEMIES.

Offering assistance in his hour of need to Barack Obama is Daniel Pipes.

I wrote an article in NRO three and a half years ago, at a low moment in Obama’s first term, when his ratings tanked and his party had just lost Edward Kennedy’s senate seat to a Republican, that suggested that Obama could “salvage his tottering administration” by taking “dramatic gesture to change the public perception of him as a lightweight, bumbling ideologue, preferably in an arena where the stakes are high, where he can take charge, and where he can trump expectations.” He could do well and do good, I offered, by taking out the Iranian nuclear infrastructure. 

Well, as the world knows, he did not follow my advice.

And he was convincingly reelected.

But the time has come to crank it out again at a moment when Obama seems close to imploding...

I assume the real purpose of his post is to tell the world, "I still exist and my answer to everything is still 'Kill Arabs.'"

UPDATE. Commenters tell me the punchline should be "Kill Muslims." Quite right, will remember that for the second show.

'SMATTER, BITCH, CAN'T TAKE A COMPLIMENT?

After Wendy Davis' spectacular filibuster in the Texas legislature, Governor Rick Perry heaved some calculated insults at her ("She was the daughter of a single woman, she was a teenage mother herself... It is just unfortunate that she hasn’t learned from her own example that every life must be given a chance to realize its full potential and that every life matters") which Davis took as they were intended. National Review's David French, being a gentleman, rose to defend Rick Perry, in a post called "Governor Perry Appropriately Compliments Wendy Davis; Left Goes Crazy":

Governor Perry’s first statement regarding her life story is a compliment — an appropriate and generous thing to say about a political opponent. 

The next remark is, quite simply, the obvious thing to say. In fact, the Governor is more tempered than he needs to be. It’s not just “unfortunate,” it’s tragic that she has taken the remarkable gifts that she’s been given and the remarkable achievements she’s earned and turned them toward the cause of death.

See, lady? These fellers are just saying what a shame it is a smart gal like you became a genocidal maniac.

By the time this conservative outreach to female voters is over, Republican National Headquarters won't even need a ladies' room.

LAST NIGHT I SAW LESTER MADDOX ON A TV SHOW/WITH SOME SMART-ASS NEW YORK JEW...

Contrary to their protestations, conservatives love class war. Our latest imbecilic example comes from National Review's Charlotte Hays:

Paula Deen isn’t really on trial for using the N-word. She’s on trial for the crime of being Paula Deen, a woman who cooks with lard (yum!), shows up for the Today Show wreathed in tears and garbed in an inappropriately girlish hue of pink, and says unfortunate things such as “I is who I is.”

Think of Paula as the anti-Julia Child. Unlike Julia Child, who also loved butter and cream but had the discipline to take only one bite, thus preserving her well-bred appearance, Paula goes whole hawg for fattening (but tasty) pimento cheese rather than pâté. She must be punished!...

Later: "If they couldn’t get her on those delicious globs of butter, any weapon will do."

Hays is right for half a sentence, anyway: Paula Deen isn't really on trial. She was fired, not by the International Left or the PC Police, but by a major corporation that didn't want to deal with the controversy her case engendered. That's capitalism, comrade!

Maybe what Hays means by "trial" is that people have been making fun of Deen, which Hays may consider Alinskyite, the usual conservative complaint when some wingnut makes an ass of him or herself. But these days, every time celebrities get their tit caught in a wringer, they get heckled mercilessly. I didn't see Hays blubbering in National Review that Lindsay Lohan was "on trial" for being a former child star.

I can see sympathizing with Deen if you actually believe she's just a simple belle who don't know what-all she was sayin' and is caught up by forces she doesn't understand, or if you think the case has been overblown, as Bob Somersby does. But neither Hays nor the other less scrupulous conservatives who've taken up the cause ("The Far Left shows blatant hypocrisy in crucifying Paula Deen," "The Lynching of Paula Deen," etc) are doing that.

I expect they're misrepresenting the event so badly because they think there's some culture-war capital to wring out of it.  Deen is, from all I can tell, a female cooking show equivalent of Larry the Cable Guy, marketed to people as a lovable Southern artifact like NASCAR and Moon Pies. Now that she's become a laughingstock, these guys are in a rush to attribute her downfall to Political Correctness, so they can rile up  the dwindling number of people who think that the liberals with whom Deen signed a million-dollar TV contract have put her "on trial" for having quaint cornbread ways, and will do the same to them.

Also, Hays' commenters seem obsessed with the idea that black people can say "nigger" and they can't (or, rather, can't without some pointy-head getting all pissy with them).  I assume the people who'll buy this guff are probably delighted that the Voting Rights Act got gut-shot in the Supreme Court. But that's obviously because I'm the real bigot.

UPDATE. I see the Center for American Progress and the ACLU have cut ties with Deen -- oh, wait, it's actually Caesar's Palace and Walmart. When did they become part of the liberal conspiracy?

TODAY IN CONSERVATIVE JOURNALISM.

The Washington Free Beacon's coverage of today's Voting Rights Act decision at the Supreme Court is pretty amazing. Here's the lede:

Conservative activists and black leaders celebrated the Supreme Court’s Tuesday decision to update the Voting Rights Act (VRA) as a recognition of the progress that the nation has made in race relations.

If that phrase "black leaders" caught you up short, relax, they mean Ward Connerly and Tim Scott, not -- well, just about every other black leader in America. Alongside this, the Beacon runs an AP photo of Ryan P. Haygood, director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, speaking outside the Supreme Court; Haygood is actually a passionate supporter of the Act, but who's going to look that up? Most of the Beacon's regular readership probably went, "A guy from the NAACP likes this decision? Boy, is he in for a shock. [swills corn likker]"

To represent liberal reaction, reporter Bill McMorris quoted from Scott Lemieux's brilliant essay at the American Prospect and the epic dissent of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Ha, just kidding!

Liberals slammed the decision. One Minnesota state representative tweeted that conservative Justice Clarence Thomas was an “Uncle Thomas” for joining the majority.

And oh yeah Obama, who gets a few lines before we are told, "supporters of the ruling said Obama is living in the past, pointing out that blacks across the country had higher voter participation than whites in 2012" (but not for long!) and this:

Constitutional law professor Horace Cooper, who is black...

That's just great. Here are some of Cooper's other credentials.

... said Obama had no one to blame but Attorney General Eric Holder and the Department of Justice for the decision.

“His efforts to stop voter ID laws across the nation and his plans for quota for representation on everything from congressional seats to non-partisan elected boards are the reasons this took place,” Cooper said. “Holder ill-served this administration, was wrong on law and policy, and he should resign.”

Thanks, Obama! Meanwhile, out in the world, it took Texas about 90 seconds after the ruling to move to put in voter ID laws from which the VRA can no longer protect citizens. These will require prospective black voters to spell chrysanthemum.

Somewhere a Tea Party group imminently expecting tax exempt status is preparing a suit to get SCOTUS to give Paula Deen her job back.

UPDATE. Thanks to commenter Gromet for pointing out another of Horace Cooper's credentials: convicted Jack Abramoff flunky. "I'm going to guess his position teaching Constitutional Law was not tenure-track," says Gromet.

A FAN'S NOTES.

Now that the world is probably past caring, I'd like to put my two cents in on the closing episode of Mad Men Season 6. This is currently the only show with which I have a traditional fan-type relationship anymore -- that is, I watch it without caring if it's good.

And for the most part I've come to the conclusion that it isn't, much. Daniel Mendelsohn's overheated critique back in 2011 had some fair points, the most convincing being that a lot of what happens in the show, especially the ooh-ahh bits, often seems cooked up and ridiculous. (Whatever Bob Benson turns out to be or mean in the end, for example, I don't see how his leg action with Pete Campbell can possibly add up to anything but another tawdry stunt to make viewers gasp. Which, I admit, I did.)

And the most cooked-up, ridiculous thing about Mad Men has been the double life of Don Draper/Dick Whitman*. That it happened, and how it happened, is absurd, as is the maintenance of the fiction, with the insanely convenient assistance of the real Draper's widow and despite the fact that people keep finding out about it, on at least one occasion from Draper himself. If Mad magazine were still doing classic parodies, that would be a huge part of this one, along with Draper's enough-already death imagery ("So how should we sell Cool Whip, Don? I'm thinking fridge-as-morgue").

You can see why Matt Weiner wanted it, though; instead of having Draper merely tortured by ambition and an inability to connect -- features that a successful ad man could have even without the spooky backstory -- he can be extra tortured by Living a Lie in a more literal sense. It adds moody, Gothic shadows to what is essentially just another grey flannel suit story, and sometimes peril to spice up the drama.

Because I'm a fan I have gone with it -- and in this season, as Draper's behavior became more outrageously self-destructive and other characters were either outright turning on him or revealing that they could do without him, I expected that he would push someone too far and get the ass-kicking he'd been asking for, probably via the explosion of his secret in a way that couldn't be papered over. How surprised and impressed I was, then, that Draper did it to himself, and that he seemed at least willing to keep pulling that string till it all unraveled.

And this is one of the great things about being a fan: Sometimes your team pulls it off. Everything that is not absurd and cheap about the character and the show is in that speech. I don't like to get into the minutiae-meanings that Mad Men Monday Morning QBs pick over every week, but Draper telling the guys from Hershey, just before he goes into the soliloquy, "I have to say this because I don’t know if I’ll ever see you again," is a magnificent thing. The speech he's about to tell them exposes not only details of Draper's real past, but also the sorrow and longing that are his creative wellspring, such as it is -- the place where those cheap, pretty stories he's been so good at selling come from. It's the Cup of Loneliness. Telling the story -- right after telling the bullshit version of the story -- isn't just Draper unmasking himself, it's Draper unmasking everything he's been doing for every client in his career. And though the specific and obvious outrage of the blown pitch is bad enough to get him fired, it feels to me as if his real firing offense  is admitting that his business is as much of a fraud as he is. To preface this as Draper did with a statement that is equally winsome and vicious -- like he had to tell them this horrible thing before they left him forever -- is something more like art than must-watch TV.

Oh, and Jon Hamm was totally up for it. Bravo. He walked the line.

Also: The characters I'd been feeling sorry for because Draper had been fucking them over don't seem so worthy of my affection anymore. (Particularly Ted Chaough. What a passive aggressive cunt.) But there I go, being a fan again. It's just as well it's over for a while. Now maybe I should read a book.

*UPDATE. I originally had this as "Dick Whitten"; thanks, TribalistMeathead, for the catch. I tend to slide Dick Whitman into Dick Whittington, the poor boy who becomes Lord Mayor of London Town, and I guess I got caught halfway through.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about how, as the seasons change, so must the news cycles, as the rightbloggers' all-scandal programming is interrupted by events relating to women, minorities, and other things conservatives just don't handle very well.

WHEELS WITHIN WHEELS.

I see the brethren are hot on the case of Michael Hastings' murder by Obama, the FBI, and possibly the Illuminati.

What I want to know is: Why are they not connecting the dots on James Gandolfini's so-called "massive heart attack"? Did they not notice that the Obamacare Quislings of the American Medical Association just declared obesity a disease?

51-year-old celebrities don't usually have heart attacks, do they? Could it be that the very existence of a happy, healthy celebrity of size made a mockery of their obesity-disease claims, and presented a threat to their health fascist takeover plans that they just couldn't tolerate?

Also, didn't Andrew Breitbart die of a "heart attack"? I rest my case.

Connect the dots! With Gandolfini out of the way, they're now free to criminalize high-fat Red State vittles, authorize Federal fitness Nazi inspectors to caliper our daughters, and send Rush Limbaugh to a concentration fat camp. Why, it'll be even worse than the Healthy Choices Act.

WAKE UP SHEEPLE!

IN PLAIN SIGHT.

James Taranto, who thinks the American gynarchs are waging "war on men," catalogues the unkind comments women have made about him (e.g., "woman-hating troll"). While butchly insisting these barbs don't bother him, Taranto laments that the ladies are brutal in ways he and his fellow oppressed males would never be:

All this viciousness was in the service of denying that there is, as we wrote in yesterday's article, a "war on men." Well, imagine if a prominent feminist journalist wrote about the "war on women" and dozens of conservative male writers responded by subjecting her to similar verbal abuse. Would that not be prima facie evidence that she was on to something?

Taranto seems not to have heard of that key figure in the "war on women," Sandra Fluke -- pretty prominent and a journalist as well as a law student. It wouldn't be hard to get up to speed: I wrote a couple of columns about some of his colleagues' reactions to Fluke (for example, "Rush Calls Some Slut a Slut and Everyone Gets Sand in Their Collective V@g!n@"), but if Taranto doesn't want to endure my prose, he can just put "Sandra Fluke" and "whore" into Google.

You know, I'm just kidding. I'm sure Taranto has heard of Sandra Fluke. I'm even fairly confident that he knows where the power actually resides in male-female social relationships. He's just very good at pretending not to.

UPDATE. In comments, Jay B: "Uh, yeah. It's almost like Amanda Marcotte doesn't exist. Or Jessica Valenti. Or Joan Walsh. Or Naomi Klein. Or any woman writer at The Nation. Imagine though if those people existed, I'm sure conservatives would be gallant." Amanda particularly seems to attract the psycho freaks of the right, probably because she pretty clearly doesn't give a shit, an attitude known to infuriate bullies.

UPDATE 2. Removed reference to "screenwriter" among Fluke's achievements -- I had conflated her with Lena Dunham, for obvious reasons.

THE BIG DEATH SCENE.

A bad week for deaths, already -- Michael Hastings, Kim Thompson, Chet Flippo. And James Gandolfini. Gandolfini was a journeyman who got noticed by the Times (thanks @johnmcquaid) apartment-surfing in 1988 ("Mr. Gandolfini, 26 years old, has never had his name on a lease, never paid more than $400 a month in rent... 'Moving, to me, is no big deal,' said Mr. Gandolfini, whose calling is the theater but whose living comes mostly from bartending and construction...") and built a career before and after The Sopranos. Tony Soprano was his world-class achievement.

As @Mobute observed, "It's not his fault impotent suburban WASPs fetishized a sociopath and made the Tony thing kinda creepy." Much of the show's, and the character's, popularity was based on all that funny Bada-Bing bullshit. And Gandolfini's great gift for showing Tony's monstrously childlike glee at what he could get away with was part of the pleasure that drew us into the show. But his other appetites and his sufferings were equally childlike and monstrous, and as the bodies piled up and the walls closed in Tony became less likable. But still we watched him.

I talked about this a bit during the last Sopranos season -- how the endgame that revolted some people then made perfect sense from an artistic and a moral point of view. Gandolfini's contribution to this was very important. Chase didn't give him the sentimental glimmers that post-Code Hollywood gangsters got -- and Gandolfini, bless him, didn't try to stick them in. When Tony found something pleasing in a woman, or a sushi restaurant, or a big score, it eventually soured in his mouth, but he didn't stop to think about it -- he just went on looking for something else to devour, encouraged by custom, crap psychotherapy, an absurd caricature of family feeling, and the dream we are accustomed to call American.  Tony took every excuse not to notice that he had to change or die, and Gandolfini was given the task of showing us how a man could live that way. That he was a gangster made that life superficially exciting, but at bottom Tony was a small-town success who might intuit enough to despise, Babbitt-like, the cheap glow of his short horizons, but never found the courage to climb over them.

Gandolfini didn't sentimentalize this in the least. Over the course of the show Tony's life became a painful thing to watch. But we stuck with him. When Tony looked for an easy exit, we hoped he would find it. Like enabling relatives we ceased to wish for his redemption and came to wish only for his deliverance. Maybe Olivier or Gielgud could have sustained that over six seasons, and maybe they couldn't; Gandolfini did. It was a great piece of work.

THE GULLS CAN'T HELP IT.

It seems as if the Republican shitstorms have had an effect; their distorted portrayal of the IRS mess, and their pretense of civil libertarianism over the NSA revelations, have pulled down Obama's approval ratings. Good work! So, geniuses, what's the follow-up?

House passes late-term abortion ban
The House voted Tuesday to impose a nationwide ban on abortions after 22 weeks of pregnancy over Democratic objections that the bill represents a dramatic attempt by Republicans to restrict abortion rights... 

With limited exceptions, the legislation would ban the abortion of a fetus younger than 20 weeks old, or at 22 weeks of pregnancy under a different measuring system. The ban would be backed by possible fines against doctors, as well as prison sentence of as many as five years.

What can you say about a movement that, having expertly wielded the dark chords of the Mighty Wurlitzer to get the audience to hiss Obama, suddenly segues into America's least favorite Gospel number accompanied by the Crazy Cletus Fetus Brigade? And sends its fine young men like Yuval Levin of National Review out on stage with a bucket on one foot to say stuff like this:

The front page of today’s New York Times carries a story about the late-term-abortion ban being considered in the House. The headline in the print edition is “Unfazed by 2012, G.O.P. Is Seeking Abortion Limits.” As if the people struggling to save the lives of innocent children whose only crime is that they are unwanted by their mothers or would disrupt somebody’s plans should be “fazed” into inaction by the 2012 election...

It's like they're trying to get people to imagine pregnant women chained to cots in a forced birthing center festooned with crosses and pictures of Todd Akin.

I think for some of them it's a perverse sort of strategy, based on a certainty that citizens will swoon for this sort of thing -- no pale pastels! But for most of them, I think it's just a tic. Or maybe that's too mild. Maybe it's a form of epilepsy.

However buttoned-down the operation can be, however smoothly things are running, every so often the brethren simply have to ululate and handle snakes in public. You may have forgotten that, because the Romney campaign was such a mess. After the tenth or twelfth time the Democrats dollied in on a Republican face that had been blackened by an exploding cigar, you came to assume that the Dems had gotten super-great at politics. They've certainly improved from when I was a young man, but they have mostly been fortunate that their opponents started having such frequent and spectacular seizures.

This is a natural consequence of the conservative anomie that has in recent months been frequently and hilariously discussed. Over the past five or six years, nearly all their crazy ideas have been discredited or at least called into question. People have tumbled to the fact that, unless carefully watched, the dynamo of capitalism will inevitably overheat and blow up your economy; that ginning up wars in the Middle East doesn't make the country safer; that you don't need fundamentalists to win elections if you have women and minorities; etc.

In fact, the recent conservative successes I mentioned are based on a total reversal of their position on surveillance from the last time they held power. Victory in any guise is gratifying, and so this must be to them -- but it comes with a price: it abstracts them still further from their true authoritarian and xenophobic nature. Why, the strain must be even greater than pretending to give a shit about Mexicans. And that's why they run amok.

What they need is someone forceful and charismatic to hold them in line and make them behave -- but it can't be one of the old-timers 'cause they're all RINO squares. So far I see Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz...

It'll be an interesting couple of years.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP...

...following up on the NSA stuff. The brethren aren't trying so hard now to affect shock at breaches of the Fourth Amendment: They just insist that NSA is, like everything else coming out of the White House these days, a Scandal, and stir the shit.

One of my finds for which I had no room was the only libertarian on earth who isn't making a big thing of this: John Stossel --

...many libertarians are furious at this latest intrusion of "Big Brother." 

So what's wrong with me? I just can't get that worked up about it...

So it's invasive, probably illegal and maybe useless. I ought to be very angry. But I'm not. Why? 

I need to keep thinking about this issue, but for now, two reasons: 

1. Terrorists do want to murder us. If the NSA is halfway competent, Big Data should help detect plots.
2. My electronic privacy has already been utterly shredded by Google, Amazon, YouTube and so on... 

I'm angrier about other things Big Government does in the name of keeping me safe: forcing me to wear safety gear, limiting where I may go, stripping me at airports, forcing me to pay $2,300 for more military than we need.

There's a reason why Stossel's on TV and Nick Gillespie isn't, and it ain't photogeneity. At least he realizes, down deep,  that libertarianism is mostly about money and pique.

A FAN'S NUTS.

Let's see what those scamps at kulturkampf site Acculturated are up to. R.J. Moeller:

Our post-modern, secularized, relativistic culture does not quite know what to do with “true believers.” Not, at least, when it comes to deeper questions of mankind’s existence and our relationship to the Divine. We’re strong-to-quite-strong when it comes to dealing with stuff like vapid celebrity Tweets, the YAC (yards after catch) racked up by our favorite fantasy football player, or the “controversy” of an under-performing new movie on its opening weekend. We’re lousy with politicians and pundits who tell us what we want to hear. 

But give us a prominent man or woman with strong, articulated, uncompromising values in the public square–especially if these values are of the traditional, Judeo-Christian variety–and people freak out. 

Enter: Timothy Richard Tebow.

Yes, it's a paen to the world's most famous backup quarterback. Moeller wonders aloud why people are always talking about Tebow's religiosity, and blames a corrupt press ("I dare you to read a single article or column on Tim Tebow that doesn’t make multiple references to his evangelical faith or [lamely] attempt to weave religious-sounding puns into the text of the piece") rather than Tebow's propensity to spontaneously take a knee, make anti-abortion ads for Focus on the Family, and otherwise inform the world at large that he's down with the King.

Also:

As a young religious American who grows increasingly weary of the “Get-Out-of-Jail Free” card that is offered to anyone in our popular culture who espouses spiritual beliefs in literally anything other than Christianity, I am glad that Tim Tebow exists and continues to fight the good fight.

I'm having a hard time thinking of any actors or rock stars who make a big deal of their Zoroastrianism or whatever, at least not since Madonna was playing at Kabbalah in, when was that, 1988? But I don't follow the NFL closely, so maybe that's what he's talking about. Are there Orthodox Jewish players who daven on the field, or Muslims who call a timeout to pray to Mecca? Because then maybe I'd start paying attention again.

I will post here Moeller's closing only because I know many of you refuse to click the links and I don't want you to be deprived:

But I won’t be devastated if I wake up one morning and find a headline about Tebow having a child out of wedlock or about him being rounded-up by police after an all-night Jack Daniels-fueled bender. 

Why? Because my hope is in Him, not Tim. And from every discernible indicator he’s ever given the public, so is Tim’s.

That's just magnificently bad, plus it inspires a wonderful vision of Tebow staggering unshaven and disheveled out of a police station and, as he genuflects for the cameras, blowing a titanic whiskey fart.

FANTASY CAMP.

Ramesh Ponnuru, National Review:

At Media Matters, Accuracy Doesn’t

In criticizing an NR editorial, Hannah Groch-Begley of Media Matters can’t get through her first sentence without getting something wrong. “The National Review editorial board used the murder conviction of Kermit Gosnell to push for an abortion ban it acknowledges to be unconstitutional that would outlaw all abortions after 20 weeks, even in cases when the health of the mother is at risk.” The editorial “acknowledges” no such thing, stating instead that the ban would conflict with Supreme Court decisions that themselves lack constitutional merit. (“The Court should welcome the opportunity to revisit its rulings on the subject, which have been by any measure extreme, to say nothing of their fundamental lack of constitutional merit.”)

Groch-Begley's error, it seems, is calling something unconstitutional because the Supreme Court of the United States found it unconstitutional. I've been reading Marbury v. Madison wrong all these years, apparently, and SCOTUS' judgement on constitutional matters is less meaningful than that of the National Review editorial board.

The rest of the post is bullshit, too. I'm not going to bother to break it down here -- go look; the key phrases are "rarity is of course a matter of perspective" and "she repeats the spin that the Gosnell case resulted from excessive restrictions on abortion. That may be what her side of this debate would like to believe..."

In any case, "At Media Matters, Accuracy Doesn’t" is about the last title Ponnuru should be using -- unless the idea is to convince regular readers that some enemy of the people lied without obliging them to look at the facts, which, come to think of it, never mind.

UPDATE. In comments, trex is very good on Ponnuru's prevarication regarding the Gosnell grand jury report.

WHEN ALL YOU HAVE IS AN OBAMAHAMMER...

Aiming to build opposition, foes liken immigration to 'Obamacare' 

Pointing to its hundreds of pages of legislative minutiae, opponents of the immigration reform effort are painting the bipartisan Senate bill as the policy sibling of the Affordable Care Act, hoping that conservative distaste for the law dubbed “Obamacare” will bleed into President Barack Obama’s next attempt at legacy legislation. 

See Exhibit A: A new op-ed from bill opponent Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, titled “My view: The 'Gang of Eight' bill is an immigration version of Obamacare.”

For years to come, wingnuts will scare their children by telling them the Obamacare is coming to get them.

TODAY'S BIZARRO JESUS SPOKESPERSON.

At National Review, Wesley J. Smith clips a story out of the paper about how a smart mom foiled a child predator:

So the mother pretended to be her daughter. She played dumb in text messages, saying she was turning 12. When she was pressed to send provocative photographs of herself, she went to the Sunday newspaper, cut out a Target advertisement featuring a young girl in a bra, lopped off the head and sent along the rest of the picture. The charade worked. Bradley was arrested Friday night on eight counts of displaying obscene images to a minor and eight counts of unlawful use of a two-way communication device. He is being held at the Pinellas County Jail, with bail set at $120,000.

Cool story, bro, but why are you telling us? Smith explains:

Now, think about this story in the context of the Obama administration’s decision to allow “women of all ages” — in the parlance of the radical reproductive-rights crowd — to obtain the morning-after pill without supervision. It will be yet another way in which parents could be kept in the dark about what is happening to their own children, perhaps even when they are victims of sexual predation. Truly sickening.

Yeah, now when a minor is abused mom won't be tipped off by her pregnancy. Even worse, the girl will lose the possibility of at least getting the blessing of a rape baby out of it.

The bit about "the Obama administration’s decision to allow" when the Administration is actually complying with a court ruling is just more evidence of what happens to your brain and pen when your career is devoted to pious fraud.

THE TORTURER'S APPRENTICE.

Max Boot, a bloodthirsty imperialist who thinks the Moro Massacre was terrific, has not been able to get with the recent conservative pretense of civil libertarianism as to the Snowden leaks, and denounces Snowden in no uncertain terms as a traitor -- you know, the way all these guys used to do to anyone who revealed state secrets, back when the state was not in the care of the Kenyan Pretender.

Maybe because Boot didn't put any Obama-bad gibberish into his piece to show his heart was in the right place, his commenters at Commentary are overwhelmingly negative, and some even call Boot a liberal. Samples:

Just like the Benghazi whistle-blowers, this guy is a hero for exposing an unconstitutional NSA program. Let's hope that many more Patriots that work inside the IRS, EPA, DOJ, NSA, FBI, etc step forward and bring this tyrannical administration down! 

You lefties are ridiculous. This guy is a hero. No media outlet would listen to him. 

Obama et al. are destroying our world with their world domination. 

The civil liberties of all Americans are being sacrificed for political correctness. 

Mr. Boot confuses America with American Government, the latter being rabidly anti-American. 

You'll get little traction serving as a mouthpiece for Obama the louse, Maxie, my boy. 

Greenwald is a lefty and he's active. That's the end of that story. But I agree that giving another lefty, Dear Leader Obama, as much power as PRISM seems to have is a big mistake. Can anyone guarantee he didn't use that all computing power to beat Romney? 

"Let us not let our dislike of Obama and his administration blind us to the damage these men have done to our national security."
No, MR. I would say Let us not let our dislike of Obama and his administration blind us to the damage Obama and his administration have done to our national security. (This one's my personal favorite - Ed.) 

He is no hero if like Germany's Fuhrer, you equate Barack Hussein Obama with the United States of America. Boot clearly does equate Obama with America. Shameful! 

Here, a parable. In Chile, in 1973, a man on a white horse came riding up to the Presidential Palace, killed the Marxist living there (Salvador Allende, who was Chile's Barack Obama!) and moved in. For the next 18 years, Augusto Pinochet murdered, imprisoned, sent into exile, tortured, persecuted and in general "did away with" the Left in his country. What emerged was a democratic republic that today is the freest and least corrupt nation in Latin America. That's where we're heading---if we're lucky.

This whole thing's beginning to remind me of Lenny Bruce's "Comic at the Palladium" bit, in which an American comic, bombing terribly in a swell London venue, in desperation yells "Screw the Irish! They really gave ya a bum rap, the IRA, huh?" and the audience starts rioting. "Wait a minute," yells the comic, "that was just a joke!" "Not around here! Screw the Irish!" responds a spectator as the seats are ripped up. Similarly, these guys are so desperate at this point that they'll try anything, and it's starting to look like the yahoos they've spent years whipping into a  paranoid-delusional frenzy aren't so easy to control anymore.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the NSA revelations and the rightbloggers' quick change into civil libertarians. As with other conservative masquerades, the proof of the pudding will be in the legislating.

There are several amusing (well, he said self-deprecatingly, to me...) individual cases in the column, but I didn't add any by Jim Hoft because once you get started with that guy you just can't stop mocking. It's not just the clash between his former, fuck-rights-save-the-homeland ravings (2007: "No FISA- No Security... The Left blogosphere believes that allowing terrorists to communicate openly is the right thing to do") and his deep, new concern for the Fourth Amendment, nor even his credulousness toward the crazy ("NSA Whistleblower: Obama Took Down General Petraeus By Using Illegal Surveillance"); here he is claiming we were "warned" about Obama's tyranny by... Maxine Waters. Previously he had called Waters a "socialist" and described her as one of the "Rats Leaving [the] Sinking Ship" of the Obama movement -- in 2011.  The inside of his head must be like a constant light show.