JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT IT COULDN'T GET ANY STUPIDER...

No, really:

Government watchdog Judicial Watch has filed a Freedom of Information Act request to get to the bottom of the National Park Service’s actions at the World War II Memorial in Washington this week. The NPS has barricaded the memorial and on Tuesday tried to prevent veterans from visiting the memorial, which has no amenities and is normally open to the public at all times.... 

The National Park service has closed facilities that are either unmanned or take no federal funding, and says that the Obama administration ordered the shutdown. Anna Eberly, managing director of the Claude Moore Colonial Farm in Virginia, told Tatler that the NPS is renting the barricades that it is using to enforce the closures, an increase in the service’s operating costs at a time that the government is partially shut down.

This will be the scandal that finally brings the Kenyan pretender down! We can call it... Ban-geezer!

I'm not sure letting them re-secede will be good enough. Someone tell them there's no Obamacare on the moon.

UPDATE. IQ points in freefall at Breitbart.com:

Even better, from Mike Flynn:

Fortunately, in this case, Rep. Steve King temporarily distracted the Park Police officers and the WWII veterans tore down the barricades. Once again, America's "greatest generation" has answered to call to lead.

Are they armed? Maybe they can roll on down the Mall and get the drop on some more big-gummint interference, like the Department of Veterans Affairs.

UPDATE 2. Reince Priebus or whatever his name is has a solution: Privatize it!

RNC Offers To Pay To Keep WWII Memorial Open

...“The Obama administration has decided they want to make the government shutdown as painful as possible, even taking the unnecessary step of keeping the Greatest Generation away from a monument built in their honor,” [Priebus] said standing a few feet away from the barricaded memorial entrance. 

“That’s not right, and it’s not fair," he added. "So the RNC has put aside enough money to hire five security personnel to keep this memorial open to veterans and visitors. Ideally, I’d hope to hire furloughed employees for this job."

Priebus also put in a bid to have the Martin Luther King Memorial taken away and broken up for driveway gravel. Hey, as long as he can pay for it, right?

EMOTIONAL SHUTDOWN.

Most people probably wonder what these guys are thinking, but from my perspective the shutdown is a natural consequence of a certain habit of mind that conservatives have been cultivating among their Republican homunculi for years.

Though wingnut theology goes back much further, and certain practitioners just naturally think this way and would have done so no matter when they came up, I'd put the origin of this particular wrinkle around the time of the Clinton impeachment.

You have to remember that during the Reagan era, a lot of conservatives thought the party, so to speak, would never end -- that they'd created not only an Administration but an Age, a historic era in which every citizen was taught from birth that nothing couldn't be fixed with a tax cut and the poor had no one to blame but themselves. (You can see it in the way they still invoke His holy name, especially in extremis.)

Then Clinton got in. He was a DLC trimmer and almost as bad as the Reaganauts, and you might say his victories were at least a partial tribute to Reaganism. But Clinton's yak also included some of the old Democratic equities as a point of distinction, and his lines about working hard and playing by the rules must have hit conservatives like a gut-punch -- here they'd been selling America a survival-of-the-fittest gold rush, and Clinton was giving them home and hearth -- and getting away with it!

A saner opposition would have appreciated this turnabout philosophically, as a grifter might laugh ruefully upon discovering someone had managed to grift him. Certainly some of them did. But the true believers simmered and stewed, because for them it was not just a reversal of fortune, but of their whole way of looking at the world. And when they got their chance, they came up with both the 1995 shutdown and the Lewinsky Impeachment -- kamikaze missions of the sort that make no sense unless you actually believe that God is with you, and that the seemingly unconvinced American people will follow once they realize it (which they never do).

In the Obama years these folks have been no less crazy, but much busier. As I've detailed in these pages and at the Voice, they've devoted so much time and energy to developing unflattering caricatures of the POTUS -- he's a socialist! He's a crony capitalist! He's two slurs in one! -- that they can no longer actually see what he's doing, nor why anyone would vote for him, leading to their great confusion in 2012 when their "unskewed polls" turned out to be total bullshit.

In fact they still can't understand why Obama won, and in many cases they can't even admit it -- the Wall Street Journal's James Taranto has made a habit of referring to him as "President Asterisk," on the grounds that the IRS scandal proves he stole the election, and the brethren lap up this soothing alt-history.

In choosing to shut down the government, an expensive and injurious procedure, just to show how much they hate Obamacare, they're looking at two well-known survey findings -- that voters don't like Obamacare, and that they don't want to shut down the government over it -- and deciding one is very meaningful and the other is, well, skewed, based on the fairy tales they've been telling themselves for years.

They offer defenses: For example, James Poulos argues at Forbes the "pro-democracy case" for the shutdown -- that is, it's not Boehner's boys who are holding us hostage, "it’s the government that’s holding us hostage — hostage to one-time votes made in Congress for the usual farrago of not-so-idealistic reasons." The rules require that Republicans win enough votes of their own to repeal the law, as they always promise to do, but  the voters wouldn't go along with the gag, so the only thing a true pro-democrat can do is run the ship of state into a reef.

This doesn't make sense to a normal person; none of their arguments do. But they don't have to. They may as well put Because Reasons in all their column spaces. They're not trying to convince outsiders that their cause is just; they're just adding some stuff that looks like arguments to the furnishings of their Reagan Dream House to better resemble their increasingly vague memories of reality.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about government-shutdown-mania, and quite a mania it is, too. They don't seem to see the downside, to the country or to themselves. Now, maybe there's some way in which this is supposed to work out politically that I'm just too thick to see -- for example, if the Republicans were rowdy drinking buddies, say, kicking up a ruckus like this in a bar, and I were close enough to the door, it might seem charming. Where once George W. was popular because Americans thought they'd like to have a beer with him, maybe the Republican Congress are supposed to be the guys Americans would like to see throw a chair through a plate-glass window and fight off a bunch of cops. Well, have you got a better explanation?

UPDATE. I'm as surprised as you are but Bill Keller actually said something:

What’s happening here ain’t exactly clear. But I have a notion: The Republicans are finally having their ’60s. Half a century after the American left experienced its days of rage, its repudiation of the political establishment, conservatives are having their own political catharsis. Ted Cruz is their spotlight-seeking Abbie Hoffman. (The Texas senator’s faux filibuster last week reminded me of Hoffman’s vow to “levitate” the Pentagon using psychic energy.) The Tea Party is their manifesto-brandishing Students for a Democratic Society. Threatening to blow up America’s credit rating is their version of civil disobedience. And Obamacare is their Vietnam.

I've been talking for years about how conservatives have adopted the old Sixties slogan "the personal is the political" as their own, and in their weird exhilaration over this latest maneuver I detect more than a little "if it feels good, do it." Maybe more people are noticing this.

UPDATE 2. Digby also notices.

Many of the mainstream pundits who eye-rolled and tut-tutted bloggers and activists for failing to understand the ways of the world are now commonly recycling ideas we were discussing half a decade ago.

And Digby is still on Blogspot instead of in the Times. No wonder we're fucked.

PEAK PANTLOAD?

Jonah Goldberg is outraged that Virginia non-Republican candidate Terry McAuliffe is "lying about being a libertarian on economic issues." Gasp! Did McAuliffe call himself a libertarian? Cite Hayek or Ayn Rand? No, nothing like that. Attend Goldberg:

I haven’t been following the Virginia gubernatorial race too closely...

Every Goldberg argument is an argumentum ad ignorantiam, one way or the other.

...but I managed to catch the last few minutes of the debate last night. Chuck Todd asked the candidates whether they think the Redskins should keep their name. Terry McAuliffe responded: “I don’t think the governor ought to be telling private businesses what they should do about their business.”

“Even if it’s offensive to people?” Todd interjected.

“I don’t think the governor should be telling private businesses . . .” McAuliffe repeated. Todd interrupted. Asking what his personal opinion was. McAuliffe stuck to his bogus answer: “As governor, I’m not going to tell Dan Snyder or anybody else what they should [do] with their business, and I want to congratulate the Redskins, because I went down to the training practice here in Richmond and it is spectacular.”

OK, I'm assuming Goldberg thinks keeping the name Redskins is freedom plus ha ha ugh how woo-woo-woo. So what's Goldberg's objection to McAuliffe joining him in support?

Now, in what way is this remotely true? Don’t get me wrong, I think McAuliffe’s answer is basically right. And for all I know he won’t pressure the Redskins to change their name.

Goldberg literally just answered his own question, but forget it, he's on a roll:

But is that because he’s the sort of guy who doesn’t tell businesses what they should do? Or is it because he’s the sort of guy who says what audiences want to hear about their beloved football franchise? If the question was about businesses that refuse to comply with Obamacare’s requirement to pay for birth control, would he still be the sort of guy who doesn’t think politicians should be telling businesses what to do? Is he for no environmental regulations? Against all zoning? Is he now against civil-rights laws that tell business who. they must serve, hire, etc.?

It's one of liberalism's cherished stereotypes about conservatives that they believe any law they don't like is proof of Big Gummint tyranny, and here's Goldberg actually living out our dream. Oh, and there's also a great Moment Goldberg Realizes He's Said Something He Ought To Wriggle Out Of in the classic tradition:

I support some of those laws and I’m dead-set against others, but I’m not the issue here...

Farrt. The whole thing is that bad, and worse -- in fact, it's bad even by Goldberg standards. It's as if whatever small sliver of self-awareness he once possessed was squeezed out of him at the last National Review cruise, possibly by Allen West showing him how to kill a man with a dinner roll. For example, he's mad about a section on McAuliffe's website about women's healthcare, specifically the phrase “I strongly believe that women should be able to make their own healthcare decisions without interference from Washington or Richmond.” Healthcare! huffs Goldberg. I'll show you healthcare:

“Healthcare decisions” means exactly one thing here: “reproductive rights.” And reproductive rights, as far as I can tell, means birth control and abortion. Now there are serious and legitimate debates about those issues. But they aren’t debates about women’s “healthcare decisions."

Breast implants, now that's a healthcare decision! I fear soon we'll see Goldberg stumbling around the ancestral manse like Oswald in Ghosts, murmuring to Lucianne, "Mother, give me the SunnyD."

THE ODD COUPLE.

I've been saying for years that libertarianism is just a way of niche-marketing conservatism, and the boys at the boutique brand are coming closer to admitting it: Rand daddy Nick Gillespie tells us "Ted Cruz Might Just Have Won the Future for the GOP" and for a "limited-government coalition" of freaks and geeks. While Rand Paul comes to the voters with libertarian cred -- that is, he "wears turtlenecks, sports weird hair, and talks about letting states decide their own laws on drugs and marriage"--

Cruz is rocking a retrograde, wet-look haircut and is unambiguously and unambivalently conservative on any social issue, including the phantom menace of Sharia law (“an enormous problem” in America, according to Cruz).

That's putting it mildly. Have a look and you'll see that Cruz is straight-up wingnut on everything, pretty much -- against gay marriage and open borders, for the death penalty, as strong a supporter of Big Oil as Texas has ever sent to the Senate, etc. (In some areas, like foreign policy, his conservatism overlaps libertarianism -- as does the conservatism of, say, Sarah Palin these days; so long as Obama is CiC, conservatives are provisional doves.)

There isn't really any difference between the two creeds except on social issues, and Cruz is totally retrograde there.  So why should libertarians support him? Because together they can win, imagines Gillespie:

As [Rand] Paul brings in fresh new blood to a broad, limited-government coalition, Cruz is locking down the tired old blood that realizes the John Boehners, Mitch McConnells, John McCains, and Lindsey Grahams of the world really don’t give a rat’s ass about them.

There you have it. The so-called social-libertarian stuff isn't such a big deal to them, as libertarians themselves are starting to admit; so long as corporations are allowed to run rampant (and for the little people, barbers don't need licenses!), they can brush all that gay/black/women stuff into a states-rights discussion, where they'll patiently Randsplain that civil liberties don't have to be the same thing in Alabama as they are in California, because that's why we have the Articles of Confederation.

It'll be like always, in other words, except the guys at Reason will be working for Republicans out in the open. Well, more out in the open.

RACE TO THE BOTTOM.

This guy Kevin Helliker is still doing triathlons at an advanced age and putting in good time. He thinks kids today don't have the stuff because they aren't fast enough to catch him. That's ridiculous, of course -- there are lots of fast, highly-trained young athletes out there who can kick his ass -- but good for him, I thought as I started reading his Wall Street Journal story; I'm an old crank too, and I hope his piss-and-vinegar attitude brings him as much comfort as it brings me pleasure.

Then Helliker went from crank to nut:

Now, a generational battle is raging in endurance athletics. Old-timers are suggesting that performance-related apathy among young amateur athletes helps explain why America hasn't won an Olympic marathon medal since 2004... 

No wonder Putin laughs at us: It's like the first half of Rocky IV all over again.

Some observers see larger and scarier implications in the declining competitiveness of young endurance athletes. "This is emblematic of the state of America's competitiveness, and should be of concern to us all," Toni Reavis, a veteran running commentator, wrote in a blog post this week entitled "Dumbing Down, Slowing Down." 

But instead of fighting back, the young increasingly are thumbing their nose at the very concept of racing.

Not that! Next they'll be thumbing their nose at game shows and fairground attractions.

Among some, it simply isn't cool, an idea hilariously illustrated in a 2007 YouTube Video called the Hipster Olympics. In those Games, contestants do anything to avoid crossing the finish line—drink beer, lounge in the grass, surf the Web. 

Yet something remotely akin to that is happening...

Yes, since some mass-attendance endurance events don't emphasize winning as much as they did during the days of the Space Race and the Cold War, America's runners are just sort of jogging diffidently anymore as they take selfies and talk in fruity voices about artisanal pickles. And the impact goes beyond sports:

Likening to communism events that promote "hand-holding over competition," [some jock] said, "How well is that everybody-gets-a-trophy mentality working in our schools?"

I had all kinds of reactions to this, mostly incoherent swears, but the best gloss on it is actually contained in the first cluster of comments to the article: A guy points out that America actually still performs brilliantly in athletic competitions (duh), and someone comes in and says,

But Kevin isn't saying that US runners are no longer competitive at the elite level. He's saying that the competitiveness doesn't extend down through the ranks of newbie runners. More people are running, but most of the newcomers take it much less seriously than they did a generation ago. That's incontrovertible.

Like a sane person who lives on the planet Earth, the original poster says, so what? And another person says that sane response "demonstrates the thesis of the story above. Hedonism outranks competitiveness and turns a race into a party."

Imagine what the Founding Fathers would think of us reducing the dignity of a footrace.

So if you're not a serious runner, but you'd like to improve yourself a bit and train for and participate in, say, your local marathon, and you make it all the way through the twenty-six point two fucking miles but you didn't leave it all on the track like the original Marathoner, you're part of what's wrong with America today, slacker punk.

You know where this is coming from: The same well of desperation that recently gave us the claim that leftist teachers are strangling the competitive spirit of young males by making them play the feminizing game of freeze tag. As it becomes clearer to these idiots that a large number and possibly a majority of Americans have figured out that the economy is fucked, and anyone offering a thumbs-up, can-do, elbow-grease solution that, oh by the way, involves cutting entitlements is obviously a grifter who wants to steal what's left of your savings, the grifters are getting pissed. So they drop the smiley-sunshine pitch and hector us that we don't have the stuff, that they're wasting their time talking to the likes of you, and stalk off to find some fresh suckers.

And they're running out of those.

BIRTH PAINS.

William Jacobson of Legal Insurrection complains that evil RINOs Tucker Carlson and Charles Krauthammer (!) were making fun of Ted Cruz's Canadian heritage:

Tonight on Special Report with Bret Baier both Tucker Carlson and Charles Krauthammer were excoriating Cruz over the issue of Obamacare defunding. That’s fine. 

If you think he’s wrong or foolish or whatever, make the case. 

But as part of their arguments each brought up that Cruz was born in Canada. Carlson mentioning that there were questions as to whether Cruz could be president and Krauthammer joking that Cruz could be Prime Minister of Canada. 

What did that have to do with anything? The topic was defunding Obamacare and Senate strategy. 

...You can make the case against Cruz’s tactics, if you want, without going where you went.

Jacobson seems to find the subject of birth status and eligibility far beneath the dignity of our political discourse. Well, he does now, anyway --here's Jacobson, April 26, 2011:

The conventional wisdom is that Donald Trump is doing damage to Republicans by raising the birth certificate issue. I think it’s way too early to tell, but it is just as likely that Trump is doing major damage to Obama. 

Obama may be winning in some circles, but the polling indicates that increasing percentages of Americans — including substantial percentages of independents — do not believe Obama was born in the U.S. or are unsure. I’ll have more on the polling tomorrow, but you never hear about the numbers for independents, you only hear about the numbers for Republicans.

Hint, go out to dinner with four independent voters; then try to guess which one of them thinks Obama was born elsewhere. Because if the polls are accurate, one of them does. 

Worse than that, the release or not of the original birth certificate now has become a test of wills. The dispute has morphed from “where was he born” to “why doesn’t he just release the damn thing, we have to do it.” It has become a metaphor for the overall image of Obama as viewing himself as above the rest of us, as reflected in his now-famous line about people in small towns clinging to their guns and religion...

You may also see Jacobson's later post announcing that the White House had released -- or, as Jacobson had it, "purported to release" -- Obama's long-form birth certificate, which Jacobson claimed made the media look foolish and vindicated him.

I was going to call this post "Christ, What an Asshole" but really, I could call any of them that.

ALSO, CHOC-O-MUT ICE CREAMS IS CONSERVATIVE 2. (FART.) THIS IS CENTRAL TO MY POINT.

The key line from Jonah Goldberg's latest is:

[Breaking Bad] is the best show currently on television, and perhaps even the best ever. Moreover, it deserves special respect from conservatives.

Thereafter ensues an extended mouthfart to this effect:

• Breaking Bad includes many wise observations about human behavior.
• Conservatives r grate.
• Therefore Breaking Bad is conservative.

Actually maybe this is the key line:

And that is why great novels are, by nature, conservative.

I'm not surprised that there's a market for telling conservatives that everything good is conservative, but sometimes I'm amazed that Goldberg has been doing it so long and still sucks at it.

UPDATE. In comments, lots of conservative classic fanfic in Goldberg's honor, e.g. from J. Neo Marvin: "Stately, plump Jonah Goldberg came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of Cheetos in which two Star Wars figurines lay crossed..." Much farting, too.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about Starbucks' new guns-in-the-store policy (basically: you can still bring them, but Starbucks wishes you wouldn't) and how the brethren inevitably find it a violation of their right to menace people in fast food restaurants.

UPDATE. Commenter mortimer2000 looks forward to future expressions of "the oppressed minority victimhood of white gun nuts," including the documentary Red Dots on the Prize.

Also a comment at the Voice (yes, they do get a few, despite their ridiculously unwieldy comment technology) reminded me that I hadn't checked Jeff Godlstein on the subject. Here is his reaction:

I hope for [Schultz's] sake — and for the sake of his “anti-gun customers” who are so offended at the sight of others’ weapons that they will protest what is a Constitutionally-protected right — that no nutjob decides to take Joe Biden up on his advice, buy her/himself a shotgun, and go Grande Caramel Macchiato hunting in all these newly-declared gun free zones. The irony would be too tragic to stomach.

For me, the clumsily-masked desire to see people who don't completely agree with him slaughtered isn't the saddest aspect of this; it's the fist-squeezing someday-you'll-be-sorry pre-teen rage, and the fact that Godlstein has retained it into middle age and found, apparently, thousands of other emotionally stunted readers to share it with. I wonder what the overlap is between Godlstein readers and Men's Rights crybabies.

WE PLAY ALL THE HITS.

Shorter Jonah Goldberg: Now that it's painfully clear that nobody cares, let's have a Benghazi Bullshit clips show!

In other words: Since "Nobama and Hitlery murdered Christopher Stevens for Saul Alinsky" isn't catching on with normal people, it'll be repurposed as a mantra for conservative basement services until 2016, by which time it might be retro enough that people will find it cool.

UPDATE. May I quote me? From those days of Republican Hope and Change, when they thought Obama might be impeached over Benghazi:

"It was the cover-up, as history records, that eventually brought about Nixon's resignation in disgrace," said WorldNetDaily's Bob Unruh. "Now, Congress is investigating an alleged cover-up of the terrorist attack Sept. 11, 2012..." Unruh cited some prominent conservatives, including Mike Huckabee and Ted Nugent, who predicted Obama's impeachment. Plus in a separate column Unruh revealed WorldNetDaily's exclusive poll showed 44 percent of Americans wanted Obama impeached -- and that was back in March! The numbers must be off the chart by now...

"The last time something of this magnitude happened, a U.S. president stepped down," said Susan Brown of Right Wing News." "Is Benghazi Becoming a Watergate, or Iran-Contra, or Both?" asked Victor Davis Hanson at National Review. "May be the biggest federal cover-up since Watergate," said his colleague Deroy Murdock. And in case the association didn't sufficiently excite, there was the all-purpose slogan: "Nobody died in Watergate."

Where are the snowjobs of yesteryear?

UPDATE 2. With Goldberg it never rains but it pours -- or, since it's him, I guess we could say it never farts but it sharts. He has a new Goldberg File column out (no link, I get the wretched things by email), in which he gets philosophical and explains how (I swear to God) Curly in City Slickers was wrong that you should find one thing in life that matters because life requires "balance." He makes several lunges at apposite metaphors for this, finally collapsing into the following:

As you get older you change the mix in your portfolio, in the same way people near retirement move more heavily into bonds and away from stocks.

There's a man from whom you want to take life lessons. But why did he even bother?

Now I could swear there was a real point I was building up to... Oh, right, politics isn't everything and everything isn't political.

This he demonstrates by telling us liberals suck:

The true danger of progressivism is that it is "one thingism" hiding in the camouflage of diversity talk. Every institution is free to do its thing, so long as its thing is defined in progressive terms and guided by the State. Diversity means lots of people with different skin colors and dangly bits, who all think the same way... For conservatives, diversity actually means different people, individually and in communities, pursuing different things. 

I don't know why he didn't just say "My name is Ima Liberal, I'm a big four-eyed lame-o and I wear the same stupid sweater every day." I guess prominent conservative intellectuals just can't use that kind of shortcut. Farrrt.

GEN McME.

I see there's a little crop of inter-sub-generational warfare growing, with "Why Generation Y Yuppies Are Unhappy" answered by "Fuck You. I'm Gen Y, and I Don't Feel Special or Entitled, Just Poor." I'm sure there are other respondents out there, but they may as well forget it because Megan McArdle has, as is her wont, already stunk the whole thing up:

Let’s take a hypothetical woman who graduated from college in 1994. Call her, oh, I don’t know, “Megan McArdle.”

Oh holy jumping Jesus.

Megan basically hit the demographic and educational lottery: She graduated from an Ivy League school with no debt. Unfortunately, she had a degree in English, so her first job paid only $19,000. Double unfortunately, she was laid off. She went to work for a startup, where she was laid off when it folded...

As the drunk said to Stony Stevenson in Between Time and Timbuktu, that's the saddest story I ever heard. Long story short, McArdle's tale of whooaaa is meant to convince... well, nobody; she compares complainers to children, and throughout her chronicle (which might make a nice ebook entitled "Down and Out at the Koch Institute") never misses a chance to tell the kids, in her own sorry-notsorry way, you think you have it rough? It's just a way to fill column inches, and for some people the best way to fill column inches is to offer oneself as an example of grit and determination, a Horatio Alger of the Thermomix set, for the littlebrains to emulate.

Is the job market unusually bad right now for millennials? It sure is, and believe me, millennials have nothing but the deepest sympathy from me and our hypothetical. Life seems scary, and y’all don’t deserve this. 

But here’s the funny thing: When I was moving out of my parents' home and into the 435 square feet of paradise where I spent my last years in New York, I was seriously panicking...

My mother took me for a 32nd birthday drink, which I had a hard time enjoying, given that I was freaking out.

Down at a stinking blind tiger, no doubt, and out of a growler. And not one of those artisanal ones neither! Then up six flights of stairs to the cold-water flat they shared with the Delaneys...

Be sure and catch up with the earlier column to which she refers, containing advice to the people she would later hector, including:

Let this [economic catastrophe] open you up to things you’d never have considered. I had no plans to be a journalist; I stumbled into it. And if I’d had better-paying options, I might not have dared to take that job at the Economist, because financially, it was a huge struggle: My disposable monthly income, after loans, rent and taxes, was in the low hundreds. But I love journalism more than any other possible career I could imagine. It may end up being a good thing that the Great Recession shocked you out of “normal” and into “scramble” mode...

As if you needed any more proof that The Up Side of Down is going to be the biggest inspirational best-seller since The Five People You Meet at a Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein Shooting Match. When life gives you lemons, make Avocado Wasabi Ice Cream!

My sympathies are with people who have to live with this shit economy. I'm sure I don't have to convince you good people but here's a little something from USA Today anyway:

U.S. workers were more productive from April through June than previously estimated, while labor costs were unchanged. 

Productivity grew at an annual rate of 2.3% in the April-June quarter, up from an initial estimate of 0.9% growth, the Labor Department said Thursday. Unit labor costs were flat in the second quarter, less than the 1.4% rise the government had initially estimated. 

Keep working, slaves, or we'll have to cut the budget on our corporate image campaign.

The combination of stronger productivity and less of an increase in wages should provide assurances to the Federal Reserve that inflation is not a threat.

Oh yeah, about that:

Fed downgrades its outlook for US economy... 

The Fed predicted Wednesday that the economy will grow just 2 percent to 2.3 percent this year, down from its previous forecast in June of 2.3 percent to 2.6 percent growth.

Add to that the traditional "job creators" not actually creating jobs and you'll see that, whether you're Y or X or Boomer or Whatever, you're fucked and you have a right to complain. And like all your rights, it's something the McArdles of the world want to take away from you.

UPDATE. Post mildly edited for clarity. Comments are understandably hot on this one, mainly concerning the absurdity of McArdle's self-presentation as a struggling youth. We should keep in mind that even privileged people have real troubles, and sometimes may share them out of a yearning for fellow-feeling -- to show that down deep they're the same as you. McArdle, unfortunately, shares them only to show that she's better than you, because she knows some readers will believe it and buy her book so they too can learn how to do "scramble" mode well enough to achieve Meganhood. Look, if Donald Trump can get away with this shit, why not her?

MEET WHIPLASH WILLIE.

All longtime readers need to hear is the title...

7 Examples of Discrimination Against Christians in America

...and that the author of it is nonsense volume dealer John Hawkins (who also wrote "I Agree With the People Who Yelled 'Yes,' We Should Let Him Die at the [GOP] Debate"), to know we have hot stuff.

To boil it down:

When the government tells the Christian Service Center it has to give up on Christ or quit using USDA food to help the poor, that’s religious discrimination.

I want 1,000 pounds of government cheese so I can use it to lure paupers to my Satan is Lord multimedia show. What! You dare dispute my right to that cheese? Well, you're in luck -- Satanists don't have much of a lobby.

Billy Graham Evangelistic Association: Obama’s IRS Was “Targeting and Attempting to Intimidate Us"

Because why would anyone suspect a TV preacher of trying to cheat?

A court has said that a pair of Christians were ‘allowed’ to read the Bible aloud outside the Department of Motor Vehicles in Hemet, California... Yes, there were actually Americans arrested for reading the Bible on public property.

The yahoos in question were reading the Bible to people in line at the DMV -- which in any civilized jurisdiction should be a "Stand Your Ground" offense. Alas, they were let off.

Colorado Baker Faces Year In Jail For Refusing To Make Cake For Gay Wedding

Forced to accept the business of homosexuals! Why, next Big Gummint will make them serve Negroes!

Airforce Veteran Faces A Court Martial For Opposing Gay Marriage

The Air Force disputes his account, and the airman is in fact only charged with lying about his superiors. Stories about how the Obamamilitary is trying to throw Christians out of the service have become a staple of wingnut propaganda.

Government Forces Churches To Get Permits For Baptisms... the Park Service recently began a new policy requiring churches that wished to hold baptisms in public waters to apply for a special permit at least 48 hours in advance of the baptism...

...and then rescinded the policy. Some persecution.

Florida Professor Demands Student Stomp On Jesus

Oh Christ, that thing again. As with the airman's story, Hawkins' account is far less than complete -- you'd never know the complaining Christer got in trouble for threatening the teacher, not for failing to stomp on Jesus (which he was not required to do). But like the airman, this kid apparently saw an opportunity to engage in some ratfucking for Jesus, and a bunch of rightwing politicians saw a chance to benefit from his bullshit, too.

Hawkins and the rest of these guys are not the new breed of Christian martyr. They're the new breed of ambulance chaser -- telling every Christian who slipped on a banana peel not to get up, they'll make a mint in the Court of Public Opinion, now what was the name of that heathen who hit you?

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP...

...on two subjects. First I follow-up on the Syria story, in which rightbloggers go from "Give peace a chance" to Obama weakling skree. The second is on that batshit crazy Michelle Obama water thing, for which I think I see another motivation besides general Obama hatred -- though I may be giving them too much credit.

REPUBLICO AD ABSURDUM.

Michelle Obama is encouraging people to drink more water.

Wait for it...

Regardless of the wisdom of public-health campaigns launched by the first lady in general, this one is silly in its own right: There isn’t good scientific evidence that people should drink more water. The first lady’s claim that one more glass of water per day will “make a real difference” for “your energy” and “how you feel” is homeopathy, not public health. (Who’s the party of science, again?)

That's Patrick Brennan, who apparently picked the short straw at National Review.

Next up: Michelle Obama tells us to breathe deep, and National Review warns of the "unintended consequences" of hyperventilation.

UPDATE. In comments, tinheart: "'h2Obama? No thanks! Give me a cool class of Chromium (Cr). Ted Cruz 2016!'"

Several commenters suggest the First Lady start other common-sense drives, such as Don't Stick a Fork in a Light Socket and Don't Whack Yourself in the Crotch, so conservatives will stick forks in light sockets and whack themselves in the crotch. No, no, it would only end up hurting the little people --  Brennan would write about it, but in the end it'd be those poor saps in the tricorner harts and knee breeches who'd be contusing and electrocuting themselves. I realize my lack of ruthlessness goes to the heart of the liberal dilemma.

But then, this may be happening regardless: Commenter D Johnston tells me Brennan's commenters are actually talking about how you can hurt yourself by drinking too much water -- a ridiculously remote possibility that these doofuses now treat as a clear and present danger ("without clear guidelines this is actually a dangerous suggestion") because Moochelle. I can imagine them fainting in the hot sun, their last coherent thought "can't let the socialists overhydrate me," a LIVE FREE AND DRY banner clutched in their blistered hands.

BOTH ENDS AGAINST THE MIDDLE.

Last week conservatives were mad that the tyrant Obama was rushing us to war; now they're mad that he isn't ("PEACE IN OUR TIME: OBAMA CAVES TO PUTIN, ASSAD, IRAN"). A call appears to have gone out among the brethren for new ideas. I think Bridget Johnson of PJ Media has a winning entry:

Game-Changer: Signs of the al-Qaeda-Assad Alliance

...The Iranians aren’t taking countermeasures against al-Qaeda forces supposedly threatening their brother Assad, yet continue to offer haven to the terror group’s leaders. But then again, Assad isn’t taking countermeasures against the al-Qaeda strongholds, either.

It’s just one omen that has alarmed Syrians about an unholy alliance being overlooked by the West.

Long story short: These guys all love each other (and jihad), and are only play-fighting (albeit realistically) to deceive us and protect Iran.

It's brilliant -- whatever Obama does, as long as he doesn't nuke Syria and/or Iran he's still wrong!

At this point the impeachment proceedings are going to look like a scene from The Crucible.

UPDATE. Mark_Bzzz, in comments: "I think they're overusing the 'game changer' meme. The game has been changed so many times in their minds they don't know if they're playing tiddlywinks or Go Fish." I think it's Calvinball.

I MEANT TO DO THAT.

Megan McArdle contributes to the latest conservative Syria tantrum, calling the President "stumbling" and "tin-eared" (Yeah, I know! Megan McArdle!) and piling up several other insults before coming to her teeth-gritted point that if Obama's ploy works out the way some people think it's going to, it won't count because no fair:

Keep that in mind as the revisionist history begins emerging from some quarters -- i.e., our patiently brilliant president once again demonstrates his mastery of n-dimensional policy chess. This may end up coming out “right,” in the sense that the U.S. will have been delivered a face-saving way to back down from a threat on which Obama never seriously intended to make good, and Syria may give up some of its chemical weapons, forcing the government to rely on unreliable methods such as bullets to slaughter thousands of its own citizens.

But if it does turn out “well,” this will be because the president was lucky, not brilliant...

Human beings tend to judge failure or success by outcome, rather than process. It’s an easy heuristic, but as in so many things, the easy way out is often disastrous.

Hmmm, where I have I heard this argument before? Ah yes --"Jane Galt," January 2007*, talking about Iraq not going the way she expected:

This has not convinced me of the brilliance of the doves, because precisely none of the ones that I argued with predicted that things would go wrong in the way they did. If you get the right result, with the wrong mechanism, do you get credit for being right, or being lucky?

Everyone gets a little peeved at pundits who are spectacularly wrong and proceed blithely as if they hadn't been, but after this, I'm actually grateful that they don't take the time to explain why other people were only right because of luck, or why right is wrong, etc.

(*Sorry for the indirect link -- McArdle has wisely memory-holed [or, as we like to say around here, Sullivaned] her old posts.)

HOW YOU KNOW YOU'RE WINNING.

My old home town is having a Democratic mayoral primary today, and it looks like Bill de Blasio has it in a walk, notwithstanding that he plans to tax the rich to fund pre-K education. The rich don't like this at all, of course, and have engaged their servants at National Review to rouse the people to their side.

The result is what you might expect, only funnier. The pre-K plan is actually "pure resentment-driven, Occupy-style hate," says National Review, unleashed upon a vulnerable minority: "New Yorkers earning $500,000 a year or more."

Sensing perhaps that sympathetic tears are unforthcoming, the Review appeals to the citizens' self-interest, claiming that taxes on the rich are what cause high crime rates, graffiti, squeegee men, and the Crown Heights riots:

The last time a man of Bill de Blasio’s political bent was entrusted with the mayoralty of New York, the city experienced 2,000 murders a year, anti-Jewish riots, economic stagnation, and a general sense of ungovernability.

If only, instead of begging money from Gerald Ford, Abe Beame had just cut Nelson Rockefeller's taxes! That would have fixed things up in no time. Ultimately they produce a passage athwart which some editor should have stood crying "Stop":

The centerpiece of Mr. de Blasio’s campaign agenda is a mugging — a multibillion-dollar forcible wealth transfer from New York taxpayers to the public-sector unions that constitute the backbone of the city’s Democratic machine.

Yes, the affable de Blasio skulks in the alley, sap at the ready, waiting for Mrs. Toffeebottom to return from the opera. Well, didn't Bloomberg warn us his wife and child are black?

From there it actually degenerates, with the editors complaining that de Blasio is from Massachusetts (!), and lives in Park Slope, where there are vegetarians. Oh, and that he doesn't have private-sector experience, a charge which proved decisive, you will remember, in the 2012 Presidential election.

I am a horrible person and I love seeing them so flustered.

UPDATE. Looks like there may be a runoff, but I do prophesy the election lights on de Blasio, after which the forces of capital will pull out all the stops to block him. I'm not a morning person but that New York Times headline, "Lhota Hopes to Capitalize on Elite Dismay Over a Liberal Tilt," really lifted my spirits on the way to work today.

Some of you were rough on Chuckling in comments, but you know de Blasio's not perfect: He went all in for the Atlantic Yards reno, after all. Still, it's important why people vote for candidates, and good to see New Yorkers might at last be growing sick of rich fucks.

UPDATE. On the other hand, as the astute Josh Greenman points out, most Democrats still say Bloomberg has done a good job. They could mean, though, that he's done a good job of running the giant food courts that large swaths of the city have been turned into, which may temper but not slake the citizens' thirst for some stronger liberal initiatives than vice laws now that Big Nanny is on his way out.

AT NATIONAL REVIEW, THE DREAM WILL NEVER DIE.

Shorter John O'Sullivan: Well, at least they still hate fags in Australia!

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about rightbloggers and Obama's Syria push. I'm opposed to bombing Syria -- my bets against American intervention have been good for years and I'm inclined to let them ride. Rightbloggers make bad allies, though, for reasons I lay out in the column -- the nutshell is, they're obviously not against half-assed foreign adventures, and only oppose this one because they see a political opening.  They'll bomb the shit out of Iran first chance they get.

Maybe their ill wind will blow some good in the Congressional vote. But you can't forget what they are. They're a little like Hyman Roth, except you can't respect them.

UPDATE. Ur-neocon Norman Podhoretz dodders out of Hell's vestibule to tell us Obama is trying to make warmongering look bad on purpose because he hates America. Far from being "incompetent and amateurish" as all the other conservatives are saying, Obama is in Podhoretz's estimate "a brilliant success as measured by what he intended all along to accomplish." And what is that? Weakening America abroad!

As a left-wing radical, Mr. Obama believed that the United States had almost always been a retrograde and destructive force in world affairs. Accordingly, the fundamental transformation he wished to achieve here was to reduce the country's power and influence...

Podhoretz knows it doesn't look like that to you, but he knows Obama's kind -- no, not the schvartzes, at least not this time; he means socialists. Like all good one-worlders, Obama's willing to use trickery to destroy the U.S. -- even pretending to be pro-war when in fact he's secretly tickling the "war-weariness of the American people" by, among other things, "using drones instead of troops whenever he was politically forced into military action." (How can we sustain Americans' fighting spirit without American casualties? What's a bloody shirt without blood?)

In fact, though his fellow wingnuts are always talking about how arrogant Obama is, Podhoretz knows that in fact Obama is selfless -- such a zealot, in fact, that he'll willingly sacrifice himself for his cause:

For this fulfillment of his dearest political wishes, Mr. Obama is evidently willing to pay the price of a sullied reputation. In that sense, he is by his own lights sacrificing himself for what he imagines is the good of the nation of which he is the president, and also to the benefit of the world, of which he loves proclaiming himself a citizen.

Norman Podhoretz can't believe how blind you all have been not to see it. Up next: How Obama drags American to socialism while presiding over an unprecedented stock market rally. Oh wait -- they say that all the time! Maybe Podhoretz isn't senile after all -- maybe he's actually a conservative thought leader. But how would anyone tell the difference?

THE LIBERTARIAN RACKET IN A NUTSHELL.

Ole Perfesser Glenn Reynolds likes to call himself a libertarian. Now, his libertarianism is effectively anti-abortion, but that's no contradiction because, as libertarians constantly tell us, libertarians don't have to support a woman's right to choose -- and, considering what a sausage fest the movement is, that's got to be a big part of the attraction for guys who like their Maximum Freedom to come with an exemption for chicks.

(If you're a fan of this sort of thing, do check out the new Reason story assuring wingnuts that "Conservatives are wrong to worry that libertarian policies will lead to libertinism." The author, like all these guys, describes herself as pro-choice, but reports with excitement that "support for unregulated abortion is declining, with a slight majority now describing itself as pro-life, a startling reversal from a decade ago," and it's all because of Freedom. Whether you like abortion rights or think they're murder and must be banned, you're sure to love the new libertarian future!)

In this weird era of wingnuts pretending to be peaceniks, libertarians are reaching out -- but not to the liberals who've sided with them on Syria. This month CPAC will have a regional conference. The last national CPAC conference, you may remember, had a panel on bridging the gap with black people, which worked out terribly. This one will feature a panel which should go a lot better, called "Can Social Conservatives and Libertarians Ever Get Along?" American Conservative Union Chairman Al Cardenas thinks they can: "At a time when President Obama is leading the country off the economic, social, and foreign policy 'cliff,' I am confident that libertarians and social conservatives can find enough common ground to save the United States of America," he says.

Makes sense. As National Review has told us, Rick Santorum and libertarians have a lot in common, and what do liberals stand for that libertarians should approve? Besides abortion rights, which, we have established, have nothing to do with freedom.

How about overturning stop-and-frisk laws? That should be an easy libertarian lay-up, and indeed Reason has several articles critical of the practice and supportive of its overturn in New York -- though, if you make the mistake of looking into the comments, you'll find the punters are mostly anxious to tell each other that it's actually liberals who are for stop-and-frisk because Bloomberg hates soda freedom.

But while their magazine is good on the subject, out in the wide world you don't hear a lot of big-time libertarians complaining about the practice (like Rand Paul -- and he's their director of minority outreach!), though they and other conservatives have been ceaselessly enraged about airport scanners since, oh, about January 20, 2009. In fact you'll find some professed libertarians who support stop-and-frisk.

The reason for the difference is self-evident: Stop-and-frisk is generally not a White People Problem. And if it's not a White People Problem, it's probably not going to do much for the libertarian/social conservative alliance.

Reynolds usually keeps his mouth shut about stop-and-frisk, too, though sometimes he uses it as part of the anti-urban shtick that excites his base. This week he came up with a classic of the genre:

Speaking of urban agony, by the way — if folks on the right were truly Macchiavellian, they’d be joining the critics of stop-and-frisk. The big Blue enclaves are where the crime and racial strife mostly are; letting those get worse would probably benefit folks on the right. Luckily for the hipsters, righties are too principled for that sort of “heightening the contradictions” thing.

You have to admire the density of it: He not only gets in knocks on effete city folks and "hipsters," and  the obligatory Ooga Booga, but he ends by suggesting that conservative support for stop-and-frisk is "principled" rather than reactionary.

When I criticize people like Reynolds as glibertarians or bullshit libertarians or whatever, don't get me wrong -- it's not out of respect for genuine libertarians. It's that the only libertarianism we're ever likely to get is the kind that conservatives have been giving us all along.

UPDATE. @SAHenryKrinkle tips me to FreedomWorks blogger Kemberlee Kaye. The tea party outfit says it's all about the "fight for less government, lower taxes, and more freedom" but Kaye is still pissed that a judge ruled against New York's stop-and-frisk, because that only looks like Freedom to the untrained eye:

The ill-written decision (quite literally the most poorly written, constructed and reasoned federal decision I've ever read) veiled as a Fourth Amendment win, appears to be nothing more than political correctness brokering... Neither is it appropriate to use the Fourth Amendment to push baseless diversity initiatives.

Clearly the Fourth Amendment is spoiled for them if they catch black people using it.

UPDATE 2. At LGM Scott Lemieux gives Reynolds' "Ultimate Conservatarian Post " much more thorough treatment than I did.

In comments, FMguru complains, "I thought we were all in agreement that 'Libertarian' was essentially a tag that down-the-line conservatives adopt when they want to distance themselves from some element of the Republican/conservative coalition." Well, sure, but there are inevitably some hardcore types who actually believe in the stuff; don't forget, once upon a time people painted their faces for Adam Ant. History is full of cults.

Also in comments, nomoremister reminds me that one of the Crazy Jesus Lady's most memorable rants was actually inspired by the indignity of white people having to be scanned just like Muslims.

UPDATE 3. I'd like to thank our libertarian advocate in comments for the many lengthy "args" he has encouraged us all to "grok" ("Did you not catch, that TECH IS GOING TO SOLVE THIS whether you and I like it or not?"). Cool stories, bro, but can you just get to the "Buy Gold" pitch already?

UPDATE 4. Sorry, commenters who were having fun with him, I had to remove several of the transhumanist troll's comments, and blacklist him -- I hadn't noticed, but he's basically a scamster running a "Be Your Own Boss" racket, and was planting his links just as less imaginative spam artists do, but with libertarian palaver to keep it interesting. Should have known -- that's <i>the libertarian racket in a nutshell</I> (curtain). UPDATE 4.2. Oops, I just looked again and Arg Grok's site is not, at least on the surface, a commerce site -- his "GUARANTEED INCOME & CHOOSE YOUR BOSS" pitch made me think it was, not to mention his fevered pitchman manner -- you know: never really listen and always be closing. But his hustle seems to be ideological.  I'm leaving him blocked, nonetheless, because I'm sick of him.

JUVENAL HAS NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT.

So Rod Dreher was reading Dante and it made him repentant over some harsh things he said back when he was "deeply impressed by SPY magazine, and its way of savaging the rich and the famous with extremely clever, lacerating prose" -- which style he claimed to have emulated (though I've been reading him since he was a New York Post movie reviewer and I don't remember him producing a single intentionally funny line):

I wrote some pretty funny stuff for the first half of my career, and I’m not going to say I was inaccurate in all my judgments. But I was thoughtlessly cruel... 

Over the years, I’ve heard from people I hurt with my words... and I’ve regretted what I wrote. Again, it’s not necessarily that I made an incorrect judgment in assessing a politician, a movie, etc., but that I did so inhumanely. I find now that the kind of criticism that I used to admire now strikes me as having the overriding quality of malice. 

To speak in Dantean terms, if I am granted to pass to Paradise through Purgatory, my misuse of the gift of language and writing will be the thing about me that most merits the purifying fire.

Snif. Seems like only yesterday -- in fact, it was yesterday. Here's Dreher today:

Ariel Castro & Other Cretins Who Deserved It

...There are lots of people I feel sorry for in this world. These are four I cannot pity. There is some atavistic part of me that doesn’t object to the rough justice they have received, though in Castro’s case, it is truly regrettable that he did not repent and die a natural death. My pity in that case is a function of my religious belief. I said a prayer for mercy on his soul, but my heart wasn’t really in it, I’m afraid.

So, I guess what Dreher really meant was, he was going to continue to be "thoughtlessly cruel" -- he's just going to stop trying to be funny about it.

It's an interesting type of Christianity: One that allows contempt for one's fellow men as long as it's solemn. Pleasure (except for the sneaky pleasure of moral superiority) is the thing that makes it wrong.

That's okay. Dreher was never made to write satire; he was born to be its subject.

TIME FOR RAND PAUL TO MAKE A SPEECH ON FIRE ISLAND.

Shorter libertarians: Next thing you know, Big Gummint will make us sell wedding cakes to black people!

More libertarian gay rights fun here.

UPDATE. "The homofascist rainbow-shirts are at it again," says Matt Barber about the case at Catholic Online. "They've unsheathed, once more, their anti-Christian long knives." He must be one of those religious libertarians. Barber also finds a black preacher who rejects the civil rights argument: "Don't compare your sin to my skin!" Maybe Reason can make a t-shirt out of that.

WHEN THEY LET UNPROPERTIED WHITE MEN VOTE, HE KNEW IT WAS ALL DOWNHILL FROM THERE.

As I've noted before, whereas once upon a time they felt the need to at least pretend they liked Labor Day, conservatives now openly express contempt for the holiday, the socialistic innovations it celebrates (such as the 40-hour week and paid sick leave), and basically anybody who has managed to win wages enough to decently feed and house a family without employment at a think tank or megachurch.

Still, Kevin D. Williamson at National Review lays it on a bit thick. His "Red Monday" column (subtitled "We don’t need this quasi-Canadian, crypto-Communist holiday") reads like some bright kid tried to forge a P.J. O'Rourke column but couldn't manage the humor part. "Highly paid union men," for example, are hypocrites because they shop on Labor Day while retail workers must punch the clock; I guess Williamson's never heard of RWDSU.  And his big payoff is that "as a terminus of summer, Labor Day is disappointing," because it's still hot outside. I don't think Jerry Seinfeld in his prime could have put that one over. But the really creepy bit is this:

The Canadian typographical workers had been demanding a 58-hour work week and the repeal of anti-union laws. Parliament obliged, and of course the unions’ immediate response was to press for a 54-hour work week, and then a still shorter one, and so on, until everybody was French.

I mean,  at least when they used the slippery slope argument against gay marriage, it led to some juxtapositions that were actually humorous.

They must have some idea how normal people would react to this if they saw it. But, come to think of it, how would that ever happen?

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about rightbloggers' reactions to Miley Cyrus. Usually they turn something serious into something ridiculous, but I think I like them best when they turn something ridiculous into something bugfuck crazy.

UPDATE. Whittle seems to be a fan fave in comments. Kia:

He seems to hate [Kurt] Weill even more than the Nazis did, and for the same reasons. That he totally misses that irony is, of course, only to be expected. But to invoke the music of Kurt Weill--composed during a period of total political and economic collapse-- as the source of the political thuggery that hounded him out of Germany, well, that takes some doing...

AGoodQuestion wonders why Whittle didn't even bring up Bertolt Brecht, whose lyrics he must surely find as "dark, dystopian and depressing" as Weill's music, and went instead for Lost in the Stars, with lyrics by Maxwell Anderson. I'd love to know what Whittle thinks of Weill's collaboration with Ogden Nash and S.J. Perelman. "I'm a Stranger Here Myself" always makes me want to smash the state!

"YOUNG MAN, THAT'S THE FUNNIEST THING YOU'VE SAID ALL NIGHT! SCREW THE IRISH!"

A passage from James Taranto's latest at the Wall Street Journal:

Life Imitates 'South Park'

 "After the TV show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy begins showing, metrosexuality becomes a major fad among both the men and the boys, and they all begin to act effeminate. At the school bus stop, instead of their usual winter clothing, Stan, Cartman, and Kenny wear unmasculine clothing. Kyle, who does not want to conform, is beaten up by a metrosexual gang at school. Mr. Garrison and Mr. Slave, the town's gay couple, are opposed to the fad since they feel that the gay culture should be unique to gays. The women of the town are initially in favor of their husbands' improved hygiene and willingness to communicate, but soon tire of the men becoming increasingly self-absorbed."--Wikipedia.org summary of "South Park Is Gay!," aired Oct. 22, 2003

"Booker OK With Speculation That He's Gay: 'So What Does It Matter if I Am?' "--TalkingPointsMemo.com, Aug. 27, 2013

Haw, see it's funny because... uh... 'cuz fags.

Historically in the world of comedy, there's no laugh too cheap to get -- cf. Albert Brooks,"I tell you one thing, when he said ‘shit,’ I almost died!" But when you don't even bother to construct a joke because you know your audience will go for anything Politically Incorrect, you may have actually created a frontier.

THE CULTURE WAR ON BASIC CABLE.

While you hipsters were debating the cultural significance of Miley Cyrus, at the Washington Times Charles Hurt was drawing kulturkampf from the fetid well of Honey Boo-Boo.

America, if you want to know what the establishment media and the beneficent federal government think of you, tune your television sets in to “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo.”

?

It appears that no one on the program actually works for a living, other than to exploit the child in beauty pageants. Now, of course, they are exploiting the whole family with the show on the “Learning” Channel, an entity that, by the way, was founded by the federal government in 1972 to educate the poor masses. 

As with most government programs, the result is incestuously stupid, lazy and hopeless people who cannot roll themselves off the bed long enough to find a job and buy a better house that doesn’t rattle violently every time a train goes by.

While under the guidance of "the beneficent federal government" the network did supply wholesome educational fare; but after it was privatized, first under the ownership of the Financial News Network and then the Discovery Channel, it became a kingdom of crap. Hurt fails to mention this, probably because it would suggest a vastly different object lesson than he intended.

But Hurt still has the "establishment media" to blame, and in his view Here Comes Honey Boo-Boo is not offered as entertainment to attract viewers and advertisers, but as a shaming spectacle to let the rubes know with what contempt the establishment views them:

Honey Boo Boo and her fat clan is what liberal Northeast and West Coast elites think of most Americans — especially Southerners and rural people. That is because in their vast and cloistered ignorance they have never met any normal Americans nor traveled past the Potomac River. They have never been to a rodeo.

If only we could get TLC execs to a rodeo, maybe they'd change their ways. (TLC did have a rodeo reality show, but that was in 2006; presumably it was driven off the air by the Democratic sweep in Congress.)

But there is hope yet. 

The great thing about America and the genuinely promising thing about the onslaught of modern technology is the stunning degree to which the elite’s long-held monopoly on media and culture is shattered. The barbarians are at the gate and can no longer be kept out. 

Those barbarians, of course, come in the form of “Duck Dynasty.”

Ah, Duck Dynasty -- the current conservative cultural touchstone, and one that is not a product of the establishment media, but transmitted from a barn with "A&E" painted on the side by ham radio operators.  Hurt's exegesis adds nothing much to the now-customary yap about how the Robertsons are everything that's right with America, but he does have a wow finish:

In one episode aired recently, the patriarch observed: “Uptown living, you’ve got to call 911. Where I am, I am 911.” 

Truly, an observation worthy of Alexis de Tocqueville or the Federalist Papers.

This suggests a new direction for the Tea Party; instead of handing out copies of the Constitution, they can hand out DVDs of Duck Dynasty, and maybe other offerings from the same production company, such as Shark Hunters, Sole Survivor, and Auction Hunters,  which I'm sure also have a story to tell about America -- probably the same one Mencken had.

Me, I prefer to celebrate America with a Beverly Hillbillies marathon.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the shooting death of Christopher Lane and the Ooga Booga reaction by rightbloggers. It includes my theory about why the time was right for this outbreak.

SEE YOU IN THE NORTON ANTHOLOGY.

I should mention, now that he's gone ahead and pulled the trigger, that Tbogg has for years been one of my favorite writers -- and I needn't qualify that with "in the blogosphere," which is like calling someone the smartest guy on a National Review cruise. That he is known as a "liberal blogger" is just an accident of history, I think -- he's really a satirist (as his hilarious Filner summer camp chronicles show) who has hunted where, in our low mean time, the ducks pretty consistently wind up: Out on absurdly elevated media perches, defending the indefensible in loud, quacking voices, just begging for his buckshot.

Part of a satirist's racket is wisdom, and Tbogg has supplied enough of that ("no one is going to get a blogging Pulitzer for being the fastest to post what they just saw and heard on the TV"), but I've been most grateful for the laughs -- for the times when he has greeted the sententious argh-blargh of internet hierophants with appropriate seriousness, or got right to the nub on the works of Ayn Rand:

One assumes that it is somewhere around page 600 when Dagny Taggart has sex with Hank Reardon but it ends badly because, while sex is the highest celebration of human values, giving your partner an orgasm because they expect one is just sanctioning your own victimhood.

I speak in the present perfect continuous tense because I can't imagine we've heard the last of him -- though if he slips off like Rimbaud into the quarries and stays silent on this foolish world forever, I can't say I would blame him.

BUT SINCE 9/11 I'M OUTRAGED BY CHAPPAQUIDDICK THE NSA.

From out of the past, Jeff Jarvis on the NSA revelations:

As a Democrat, I am disgusted with President Obama

I haven't paid attention to Jarvis for a while, preferring the 2.0 Twitter version, FakeJeffJarvis ("Other kids dreamed of being an astronaut. I dreamed of having 500+ LinkedIn connections"). I remember him as the right wing's second favorite futurist, and one of their very favorite bullshit liberals; a man who described himself as "a former liberal pacifist transformed by 9/11 into an avid warblogger," and of whom a fan aptly said to Ann Althouse, "I think people on the right are also horrified at just how left the left has become when people like you and Jeff Jarvis and Instapundit are labeled as conservative or hard right..."

Jarvis has been since-9/11-outraged-by-Chappaquidick for a long time. I also recall him after the 2006 Congressional elections, wishing Joe Lieberman's victory would deprive the Democrats of a Senate majority. And in the 2008 campaign there were few standard-issue anti-Obama sentiments Jarvis did not circulate. March 21, 2008: "I may be the only person who’s not become worshipful of Obama’s speech on race and religion and who finds it more disturbing the more I think about it." April 30, 2008: "Now I’m actually angrier about Obama and the Rev. Wright than before." Etc.

After Obama won, Jarvis was momentarily pleased:

I have been impressed with Obama post-election. He has been moving to the center, where I am glad to see him. He has been unafraid to work with strong characters from the Clinton administration, including his rival. He was unafraid to reach out with a peace offering to the left’s boogeyman, Joseph Lieberman.

Thereafter he used Obama as a means of flogging his usual futurist schtick -- "Now that Barack Obama is in the White House, he must continue to use and spread the tools of the internet and transparency that he so brilliantly plied to win the office or else it would make his promises of change empty."

But Jarvis' thinkfluence didn't amount to much, and now in 2013 he's decided to take a bold stand "as a Democrat" against Obama because of the NSA.  This from a guy who used to say when people bitched about the NSA under a President not named Obama, "this isn’t as simple as raising the tattered-from-overuse privacy flag" -- also known as the "privacy buggabuzzword."

When it's important I'm willing to make common cause with some rightwing asshole to push the tide back on civil liberties. But when you line up with Rand Paul you know what you're getting. Jarvis is so full of shit, he's as useless as an ally as he is as an opponent -- maybe even more useless; he discredits any cause by adopting it. I'm beginning to think newspapers would already be utterly dead by now if Jarvis hadn't spent the past ten years predicting it.

THE ETERNAL RETURN.

Selected sections from Megan McArdle on how Fox News Matt Drudge The rise of warblogs Duck Dynasty big money and newspapers will make the liberalmedia less liberalmedia:

Those of us in Washington live in an era of Democratic triumphalism. Most of the Democrats I talk to are convinced that their destiny is almost upon them.

So, that's Matt Yglesias and the black lady on the bus?

People will come to the news assuming that the people making it have an agenda -- and they will seek out outlets that match their own agenda, if they see political news at all.

Boy, when people find out about this Media Bias stuff, there'll be some changes I tell you what,

A more ideological media will be hiring more conservatives, and that will change what a large portion of the country gets as news.

Because conservatives gots all the moneys, I guess. Well, I figured that crony capitalist Obama stuff was bullshit. (Later: "As I say, a more ideological media will probably also be a more conservative media, because there are a lot more conservatives in the donor class, and in the audience, than there are in the media." Ah, the audience! If only all those hardcore American conservatives knew how to find Breitbart.com, this revolution would have already taken place! Too bad they made the URL so difficult to spell. Maybe a button at AOL would help.)

How much does this matter? In his pretty convincing book, "Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind," Tim Groseclose of UCLA argues that it matters a lot. Here’s how he lays out recent research on the question of media effects:

[Long incomprehensible blockquote with statistics] 

The concept of media lambda is a bit technical, so I won’t explain it here; check out Groseclose’s book if you’re interested.

(groans, holds head in hands)

What this summary suggests is that a large number of people, from political professionals to academics who have studied the matter, think that the media’s ideological composition has a substantial effect on elections.

And we're back where we started and, for all I know anymore, where we've always been: A "large number of people" believe it, and everything proceeds from that, with a few lambdas thrown in to confuse the yokels.

I never thought I'd say this, but McArdle's starting to give Goldberg a run for his money.

TODAY IN FILM REVIEWS BY RIGHTWING PROPAGANDISTS:

Shorter Richard A. Epstein of the Hoover Institute: The Butler is bad for race relations in America, and I'll do my bit to reverse its effect by explaining why the Civil Rights Act was a mistake.

See, on the one hand, Title II of the Act desegregated some otherwise intractably segregated areas of American life; but on the other, "the constant use of disparate impact tests in education, housing, and employment led to an overreach by the new civil rights establishment of today."

Previously on Richard A. Epstein Explains Racial Justice: "The Supreme Court should strike the VRA down and let Congress return to the drawing board for something better." Epstein is also the author of Forbidden Grounds: The Case Against Employment Discrimination Laws.

Sadly, I can't find anything by Epstein on Django Unchained.

UPDATE. In comments Fats Durston applies the Epstein method to Schindler's List: "its wrong narrative of the evolution of anti-Semitism serves to strengthen a set of misguided Israeli government programs at a time when it is no longer possible to bless all actions of the Zionist movement." So that's why it won all those Oscars! Well, you know Hollyweird.

Meanwhile in rightwing world,  Jim Hoft is moved to poetry, or some species of it:

HOW AWFUL! Oprah’s “The Butler” Is Chock Full of Racist Lies (Video) 

How absolutely horrible!
Oprah and Hollywood are going ga-ga over The Butler a project that is purposely filled with racist lies from beginning to end.
What horrible people. 

As Eric Bolling pointed out today on The Five that the “real” Butler was born in Virginia.
His mother was never raped by a white man.
His father was never killed by a white man.
That was just included as an extra jab at whitey.

I find it difficult to believe he typed this; it reads as if it were taken down by a psychiatric examiner. 

LIGHTS, CAMERA, CULTURE WAR!

From National Review:

Santorum’s Storytelling
As head of a Christian movie studio, he aims to change the culture... 

In June, [Rick] Santorum became CEO of EchoLight Studios, which produces Christian films. Santorum, who changed his own views on abortion as an adult, believes that if conservatives wish to gain converts, they must look not only to politics but also to the culture. 

“We’re losing this debate not because of politics,” Santorum told attendees last Saturday at the Family Leadership Summit in Ames, Iowa, the second annual gathering of the group by the same name. “Politicians didn’t change the culture — the popular culture changed America"... 

Santorum offers The Passion of the Christ as an example of a well-made movie that was also Christian. Other movies he cites as models of what he hopes to produce at EchoLight are Ben-Hur and The Song of Bernadette. “You used to have all sorts of movies that were very authentic in their Christian message, and it was mainstream Hollywood that made them,” Santorum remarks. “That has disappeared in the last 40 or 50 years.”

Coming soon from Santorum Studios:

The Song of K-Lo. In the 1990s, when all the other children in her small town of Chelsea, N.Y. are doing ecstasy and having sex, Kathryn Jean stays in her room studying the Holy Bible and Commentary.  One day she is visited there by a beautiful lady who glides around the room and tells her to write conservative essays. All the children and even the adults all laugh at her, but Kathryn Jean sticks steadfastly to her task and eventually ascends into an editorial job at National Review. In a touching coda, it is revealed that the beautiful lady was actually Rollerena.

God's Florist. In a dystopian future, America has gone totally gay; straight couples who dare walk hand-in-hand endure vile taunts by bitchy homosexuals, and come home to find their homes redecorated;  by government decree, all children must spend their 16th summer in The Castro; Hooters has been replaced by a new chain called The Meat Rack. The only citizen who will stand up to the pink tide is a brave florist who refuses to provide services to same-sex weddings. His righteous example sparks a revolution, and the gays, encouraged by savage beatings, flee the country, freeing men to triumphantly pat each other's asses without feeling self-conscious about it, and women to procreate and do laundry. Screenplay by Elizabeth Scalia.

The Palin of the Christ. Guilty only of patriotism, Sarah Palin is dragged from the Republican National Convention to the court of the liberal media. When asked, "What is truth?" she replies, "Well if you don't know I sure as heck ain't gonna tell ya, Four Eyes." Palin is made to run a gauntlet of Fox News programs and personal appearances until finally she perishes on Facebook. But political death is not the end, and Palin rises again at CPAC, where she is hailed as a goddess by an army of radio hosts who preach her Gospel to the world. "Well," says the risen Palin, "it just shows to go ya."

UPDATE. Oh my, commenters have outdone themselves with their own Santorum Studios movie pitches. There's Jeffrey_Kramer's Chuck Norris Facts: The Movie! ("So Chuck tips his cowboy hat, leaves, and fucks a sheep so hard he sets it on fire"); DocAmazing's Dennis Praeger Superstar ("about a Jewish kid who becomes popular by Speaking Truth to Power and is eventually betrayed by a ghostwriter who insists on his speaking in full sentences"); Diddler on the Roof ("A big song number is 'Sedition!'") from tigrismus; zencomix's Santorum and Delilah ("Eventually Santorum tells Delilah that he will lose his strength with the loss of his sweater vests"); and JayB's Black like My Friend the Black, "based on a true story Megan McArdle heard from a black person on a bus." But really, they're all winners.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about some bold new plans for the GOP that rightbloggers have been giving big up: kicking CNN and NBC off the Republican Debate party train, Mark Levin's "Liberty Amendments," and the guy from Duck Dynasty as a Congressional candidate.  This is the sort of experimentalism that makes me nostalgic for epistemic closure.