CRAZY JESUS LADY'S CRISIS OF AUTHORITY.

Peggy Noonan has reanimated Robert Taft so that he may opine on the recent shutdown. I gotta tell you, folks, I hardly know what to do with this thing. Back when Noonan created a monologue for Paul Wellstone, for example, in which the recently-deceased Democratic Senator basically told people to vote Republican because Wellstone supporters were assholes -- well, that was so spectacularly evil and vicious that one could almost admire it, especially as it came wrapped in that cloying Crazy Jesus Lady manner that convinced readers (at least those whose ears had been trained by Bob Bartley's Mighty Wurlitzer) that Noonan only meant the best for everyone.

She seems to want to do something similarly sneaky with this latest necro-ventriloquist act, with "Robert Taft" speaking from the other side to convince the Tea Party crowd there's nothing wrong with the Grand Old Party that some wisdom from a long-dead party hack can't fix. It's about as successful as Jeff Goldblum's final transformation in The Fly. I mean, get a load of this:

What is the purpose of a party? 

"A theater critic once said a critic is someone who knows where we want to go but can't drive the car. That can apply here. It is the conservatives of the party, in my view, who've known where we want to go, and often given the best directions. The party is the car. Its institutions, including its most experienced legislators and accomplished political figures, with the support of the people, are the driver. You want to keep the car looking good. It zooms by on a country road, you want people seeing a clean, powerful object. You want to go fast, but you don't want it crashing. You drive safely and try to get to your destination in one piece."

If "Taft" were delivering this at a Kiwanis dinner, when he got to telling them that institutions were driving the car that is the Republican Party, the hosts would be getting nervous -- and around the time "Taft" was giving these instructions to the Tea Party, they'd have cut his mike and dragged him from the dais:

Get smart about this. Don't let the media keep killing your guys in the field. Make it hard for them. Enter primaries soberly. When you have to take out an establishment man, do. But if you don't, stick with him but stiffen his spine.

Jesus Christ, sounds like Spencer Tracy's closing speech from Guess Who's Coming to Dinner as performed by James Lileks. It also conjures a vision of deranged Birchers in tricorners and knee-breeches gang-tackling Mitch McConnell as "Taft" nods sagely; when McConnell escapes they chase him, brandishing a metal pipe to ram up his ass.

But the weirdest, and slightly sad, thing is the spectacle of Noonan selling Washington authority to the kind of people who think Ted Cruz is Presidential timber. She brings up Allen Drury -- Allen Drury, for chrissakes! Couldn't she have at least lightened things up with Art Buchwald? -- as if it'll mean something to them. (If she'd picked None Dare Call It Treason instead, she might have stood more of a chance. Their past is not Bourbon-at-Clyde's, but fluoride-in-water.) She figures the upstarts want power, just like the Brash Young Comers in old movies, and like those characters they will respond to a salutary scolding so long as the scold is an old white man in a suit. At one point she even has "Taft" say, "Stop acting like Little Suzie with her nose pressed against the window watching the fancy people at the party. You've arrived and you know it." That's like telling Castro, "OK, kid, Batista has heard you and he's offering you a nice suite at the Hotel Nacional. Try not to screw up!"

She thinks the Mau Maus can be converted, but she's just catching flak.

Plus there's this, from "Taft"'s Epistle to the Establishment Men:

Deep down, do you patronize those innocents on the farms, in the hinterlands? Or perhaps you understand yourself to be a fat, happy mosquito on the pond scum that is them?

I suppose you could say there is genius in it, as there is absolutely no one else on God's green earth besides Noonan who talks this way or thinks anyone else does.

THE ASSHOLIFICATION OF ASSHOLES.

There's already been enough conservative blubbering over the shutdown-shutdown -- as well as declarations of Good News for (People Who Want to Murder) John McCain -- that I could fill up my Voice columns with it for the rest of the year. But there's something particularly weird about Daniel Henninger's sobfest in the Wall Street Journal, in which he accuses Obama of "Romneyizing the Republicans." At first I thought he meant Obama deviously finagled Romney onto the 2012 GOP ticket, the way Deep Throat suggested Nixon did to the Democrats with McGovern in 1972. No such luck:

As in the presidential campaign against Mitt Romney, the Twitter feeds going out in the name of the president of the United States are virtually wall-to-wall propaganda...

Barack Obama is Romneyizing the Republicans. He's doing to Ted Cruz and the House Republicans what he did to Mitt Romney and the 1%. It may be voter brainwashing, but in the expanded media age in which we all marinate, it works.

Though he uses words like "brainwashing" and "propaganda," Henninger doesn't tell us what things Obama said about Ted Cruz and the House Republicans that were untrue -- and in any event they have been no worse than what Republicans have been saying about Ted Cruz themselves. Henninger complains the way a murderer may complain that the cop has put the cuffs on too tight:

Everyone recalls the 2012 campaign's carpet bombing of "the wealthiest," even after they'd been shelled with a tax increase. Barack Obama has found—actually, it was handed to him—a scapegoat analogous to "the wealthiest" and "the banks" for his campaign to suppress votes for GOP candidates in the 2014 elections. It's "tea party Republicans."

As "'the wealthiest'" (by whom I guess Henninger means the wealthiest) do not attract my sympathy even when they have been "shelled" by a six percent tax increase, and as the "tea party Republicans" were "handed to him" by the fucking Republicans themselves, I am left with the impression that Henninger is mad because the President has fought back against his political enemies, which is considered unsporting in a Democrat.

There's actually one way Henninger's proper-name-to-verb usage makes sense: In the sense of Vietnamization, the process by which Nixon was supposed to transfer responsibility for the war from the Americans who'd been fighting it on their behalf to the ARVN. Conservatives are used to talking about the Tea Party and its affiliated nutcake causes as if they were natural patriotic reactions to the tyrannical reign of the Kenyan Pretender. Phony scandals, birtherism, noisy buffoons in Colonial Williamsburg costumes -- these were all described as natural phenomena. But like the AVRN, they have been kept afloat by the largesse of wealthy patrons. Maybe by "Romneyization" Henninger is signaling that these people have been cut loose by The Movement, and must sink or swim on their own. Wingnut welfare never runs out, of course, but it may be better invested in the future.

UPDATE. Fixed misrendered acronym -- thanks, readers, for letting me know.

HEADLINE OF THE DAY.

Just leaving this here so I can revisit whenever I need a laugh.

UPDATE. More laughs from the Joe Lhota campaign:


The last half is particularly fantastic. Bill de Blasio wants to take New York back to the days of Martin Scorsese, Run-D.M.C., the Ramones, and cheap apartments! Jesus Christ, de Blasio should win in a landslide on style points alone.

I urge my friends in the City to vote de Blasio so everything can go to shit and I can afford to live there again. Then we can go wilding like in the old days! And on weekends, brunch!

UPDATE 2. Shorter Jonah Goldberg: Boo hoo hoo farrrrt boo hoo hoo hoo farrrrrt boo hoo yay, Meatballs is on!

WHITE PEOPLE THE REAL VICTIMS PART 430,882.

Shorter Allahpundit: Look, everybody used to call them redskins -- they used to call themselves redskins too! Don't they still call it the National Association for the Advancement of Redskins? And suddenly everybody's like, "ooooh, don't say redskins," and they go around not saying redskins like some kind of bien-pensants. What is this, Russia?

LIFE IN POST-"MILLION VET MARCH" AMERICA.

Sour rightwing rumblings as the shutdown runs out of gas:

neo-neocon tells us Obama is engaged in a reign of terror: "The level of fear this administration has engendered is—yes, I’ll use the word—unprecedented, at least in this country." Her proof: When running for the state senate, Obama got opponent Alice Palmer knocked off the ballot, a practice described by CNN as "hardball," a game we hear is played in Communist countries like Cuba. (Not sure why neo-neocon is complaining anyway: Fellow nut David Horowitz has Palmer pegged as a dangerous Commie.)

Also neo-neocon cites a New York Times story that quotes "an insurance executive who has participated in many conference calls on the federal exchange. Like many people interviewed for this article, the executive spoke on the condition of anonymity, saying he did not wish to alienate the federal officials with whom he works." To neo-neocon, a source slagging a subject anonymously because they do business with them is double Nixon, which is worth half a Hitler at least. I wonder if she's ever seen a gossip magazine?

At PowerLine, Steven Hayward is making shutdownade. It tastes terrible.

The bullying tactics of forcibly shutting off public spaces like the World War II memorial on the mall has surely inflicted damage on Obama that, had he behaved with minimal restraint, he might have been spared.

Yeah, Obama's really been embarrassed. 

Finally, after House Republicans got into a world of hurt for trying to shut down Obamacare for a year, it was inevitable that someone with nothing to lose -- no House seat, no dignity, nothing -- would pick up the fallen standard. Take it away, Megan McArdle:

But given that they didn’t even announce that they were taking the system down for more fixes this weekend, I’m also guessing that it’s pretty bad. Bad enough that it’s time to start talking about a drop-dead date: At what point do we admit that the system just isn’t working well enough, roll it back and delay the whole thing for a year? 

Yes, I know what I’m suggesting is a major, horrible task. And I’m aware that since I opposed the law in the first place, people will take my suggestion with a huge grain of salt. Fair enough, but hear me out. 

If the exchanges don’t get fixed soon, they could destroy Obamacare...

Wouldn't want that to happen, would we? Maybe in 2016 they'll run Romney again, on the grounds that the architect of Obamacare is just the man to make it work.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about week 2 of the shutdown and the gloom gathering on the right.  Not everyone's down, though: Here's Doug Ross with a listicle called "Top 5 Reasons the GOP Will Win the Shutdown (Unless They Fold With the Winning Hand)." The parenthetical is instructive: The cause cannot fail, it can only be failed -- by RINOs, of which there appear to be more every day.

Oh, and Jeff Godlstein makes a surprise appearance:

Add another, Doug:

No increase in debt limit means O will have to cut spending to 2001 levels. Or else unilaterally declare he can raise the debt ceiling -- openly declaring himself king, supported by Democrats. 

Which should remove a lot of blinders and be one of those "teachable moments". As well as an impeachable offense.

I know the American People sometimes find crazy attractive, but usually it's when Jack Nicholson or someone like that is playing crazy, not when you pull up the curtain on actual schizophrenics.

UPDATE. I'm sorry I didn't see this Hugh Hewitt headline in time to include it in the column:

When The President Reneges, Harry Reid Overreaches, And The Greatest Generation Rallies To The GOP, Then You Can Be Sure The Democrats Aren’t Winning

It's the sort of rallying cry you only get halfway through before someone sticks a bayonet in your gut. Hewitt's associated article is even worse. It begins thus:

Proposed opening question for the first GOP presidential debate in the fall of 2015: "Was the 'shutdown showdown' of October 2013 good or necessary -- either or both -- and why?" 

I don't have any idea how it will be answered by the 10 or so potentially serious candidates who may be on that stage, but the difficulty of predicting the best answer can be found — where else? — in two movies about war.

Follow the allusion and you'll see that the shutdown is like Saving Private Ryan and Atonement because war is hell and so is the shutdown, so stay the course argh blargh. Oh, and this line goes in the Bullshit Hall of Fame:

I may be proven wrong, but I may be proven right.

I understand propagandists are compensated all out of scale with their worth, which must be nice, and that the people who do the work are beyond shame, but don't they have families?

PUT OUT MORE FLAGS.

You've probably seen this:

Republican approval rating falls to lowest point in Gallup poll history 

...just 28 percent of Americans have a favorable impression of the GOP, according to the latest monthly Gallup tracking poll. The number "is the lowest favorable rating measured for either party since Gallup began asking this question in 1992,” the polling company stated. 

The number is 10 points lower than the party scored in the same poll in September.

I'm not given to rah-rah, and I'm old enough to know how fast the wheel of fortune spins. But I hope that whenever my case is so decisively farblondzhet, I never have to go out and paint the pig with lipstick like Ole Perfesser Reynolds does here:

MAYBE THIS IS WHY OBAMA’S ACTING SO PETULANT AND UPSET: Ted Cruz poll shows GOP gained in fight over Obamacare despite shutdown. “Obama’s job approval rating was 45 percent; his disapproval was 52 percent. 67 percent said Obamacare was the ‘major reason’ for the government shutdown.” 

I wonder what Obama’s polls are saying?

So if you squint just right,  Ted Cruz's own poll says Ted Cruz's cause is gaining, against all other evidence. (It also says "by a margin of 42 percent to 36 percent, independent voters blamed Republicans for the shutdown over Obama and the Democrats," but that must be a typo.) That's unskewed, baby! Also from the Perfesser:

UPDATE: Dems Lose Lead In Generic Congressional Ballot.

Hit the link and you find Breitbart acolyte John Nolte celebrating a Rasmussen poll from last week, showing a "generic" Congressional race to be tied 40%-40%; the Democrats lost all of two points from the previous. From the very same Rasmussen page, you can click over to their other poll findings, including "70% Give Congress Poor Rating" ("it's hard to believe it could get any worse") and "Support for Government Shutdown Drops from 53% to 45%" -- and that one was published back on September 30; pretty soon the shutdown approval ratings might be down around Black Plague levels, if they aren't already. (This just in: Ted Cruz's pollster finds public starting to turn around on Plague! It's all in the wording, and this time they called it "ice cream.")

How does he get away with it? That's in the wording, too: Nolte crows that this is "another edition of the polls the media won't cover"; also, "the media want to give Obama a third-term... the media ignore inconvenient polls and try to scare the GOP... the story the media won’t tell" etc. The story may be bullshit, but it sure refutes what the Lame Stream Media are telling you, readers -- so click on through and buy some gold!

Not buying it? Wait till the next wave of WorldWarIIMemorialGate, and LincolnMemorialLawnmowerGate ("We need the names of these officers publicized," cries the Ole Perfesser), and exposure of all the other outrages perpetrated by Obama's stormtroopers, the National Park Service! Jonathan V. Last at the Weekly Standard:

The conduct of the National Park Service over the last week might be the biggest scandal of the Obama administration.

Forget Benghazi, some fascist closed the scenic overlook!

Before the current [Park Service] director, Jonathan Jarvis, was nominated by President Obama, he’d spent 30 years as a civil servant. But he has taken to his political duties with all the fervor of a third-tier hack from the DNC, marrying the disinterested contempt of a meter maid with the zeal of an ambitious party apparatchik.

It’s worth recalling that the Park Service has always been deeply ambivalent about the public which they’re charged with serving...

Last then tells us about one park director's desire to limit traffic on the Mall ("Nobody drives through Disneyland. They’re not allowed. And we’ve got the better theme park") and cries, "Yes, yes. They must protect America’s treasures from the ugly Americans." Conservation is theft! Why, soon they won't even let you piss in the reservoir.

I do think the right's alternative universe should be drive-through, though. It'll be a nice change from having to live with them.

BOTH SIDES DO I-- [drowns in bullshit]

Charles C.W. Cooke at National Review:

Perhaps it is the product of the Manichean way in which partisan fights such as this one encourage people to think. Perhaps it is a morbid fear of being accused of “false equivalence.” Perhaps tempers are just so frayed at this point that none of us can see straight. But whatever it is, few progressives appear willing to acknowledge that, regardless of where the blame lies for its arrival, the White House has not reacted to the shutdown well at all.

Similarly, few conservatives will admit that they're a stupid moron with an ugly face and big butt and their butt smells and they like to kiss their own butt. O tempora O mores! 

My favorite part:

“Reality has a liberal bias,” one of my less original Twitter stalkers told me nervously earlier in the week in the course of manfully pretending that nothing was awry.

Cooke could tell the guy was nervous by the sudden awkward shift in his data transfer speed.

Cooke's overall point seems to be that the world is being a jerk and will one day admit it was wrong and Cooke is right. That's often the subtext when rightbloggers talk about Obama, but lately it seems most of them have it floating right on top.

YOUR MOMENT OF ACE OF SPADES.

Ace of Spades 1 or, some chick did something:

...the sexual revolution was won about 30 years ago. But people with very low ambitions and fairly low intellects continue to do victory laps over it. They keep proclaiming they need to "free people from their restraint" in a culture awash in pornography, sex toys, divorce, affairs, etc. 

It's obviously a way to draw attention to oneself, dressing one's attention-whoring up as some sort of Nobel Crusade to set people free of Sexual Restraint. 

Who, exactly, in this year 2013 AD, is not sexually liberated, except for 70 year old ladies?

Ace of Spades 2....

I joke about reboot because this is very much a prequel, apparently taking place soon after Jack Ryan was recruited by the CIA. 

But... okay, in Hunt for Red October, he was plainly in the field for the first time. I think they stressed that a lot. I think he might have specifically said he'd never killed anyone before...

... or, the question answers itself.

HOMAGE TO ALAN BROMLEY.

I just wanted to let you know that, while the meth labs of the right have been cooking up new forms of idiocy, there is still room for the old favorites -- Joel B. Pollak of Breitbart.com:

I was at a dinner recently where I happened to be seated at a table with new acquaintances of the liberal political persuasion.

Yes, that's right -- the liberal dinner party routine! What did the silly liberals do at this party, Pollak?

We went around the table introducing ourselves. As I said that I work for a "conservative website," a man at the far end of the table made his displeasure known by booing.

Pretty fast start, but if I were directing this thing, I'd have had the liberals assaulting him before he could say a word, intuiting his conservatism by his well-tailored clothes and manly figure.

These were professional, accomplished, senior members of the community. They had never met a conservative before.

Of course they've never met a conservative -- Pollak suggests they work for a living, whereas "wealth producers" pass their days in think tanks, on editorial boards, and at wingnut welfare playpens like Breitbart.com; how would they ever get together?

Attend these puny liberals' reactions to Pollak's wisdom:

Instead, I began to face questions: you really support what Boehner is doing? Yes, I replied. He's doing the right thing by standing up to the president. Gasps...

"They can't stand the fact that a black man is in the White House!" someone interjected.

That's not true, I said. Oh, yes it is, they said...

Hard to believe these liberals are professional and accomplished, as they are apparently also nearly pre-verbal. Also, when Pollak defended Boehner's shutdown, he says, "that stunned them. 'What? You really believe that?...'" They didn't know conservatives are Republicans, either. Well, such is the state of our civics education these days.

Of course whenever someone runs this bit, I am put in mind of Alan Bromley, the Shakespeare of the liberal dinner party whom I discovered in the early days of this blog. He had a pretty good sideline in allegedly verbatim conversations in which he lectured angry Muslims, but his real stock in trade was showing silly liberals drinking their "mediocre Chardonnay" and toasting the assassination of George W. Bush at their silly liberal parties.

If you wonder what happened to Bromley, good news -- he's branched out into the lively arts. Here are some of his lyrics:

They say I can’t be right cause I care about those below so I’ll argue
And fight with those who don’t know
Cause there’s a war going on outside nobody’s safe from
Christians Jews Hindus and Muslims... 

Like to party and drink every Friday nite even tho I still think
We got a battle to fight
I know I’m right despite the critics views unscrunch your feet and put
Yourself in my shoes
We only get a fraction of what’s going on from the news they say I
Can’t be right I think they got it confused
I go and cop more ice I think I’m losing my cool I may be a lot of
Things but I’m nobody’s fool
Good grades like I got it on with teachers in school had to educate
Myself cause they didn’t drop jewels...

As the composer of "Love Juice in All Three Holes," I'd say he's onto something. Next stop: Interpretive dance!

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the shutdown and rightbloggers' extraordinary efforts to shift the blame from the crew of wreckers in the House to Obama. They're extra frothy on this subject, but that's what usually happens with their major campaigns; with neither the law nor the facts on their side, there's nothing left to pound but the table. I do mention why this might work better for them this time than it has in the recent past. But when the fever's on them, there's always a chance they'll screw it up regardless. That's part of what makes them such fun to watch.

DUMBER AND DUMBERER AND DUMBERERER.

The GOP Congressional tantrum continues, and from National Review comes this stop-the-presses item on how the Democrats are really losing this thing:

Scenic Overlooks not Overlooked by Obamaites 

Driving down the George Washington Parkway outside Washington, D.C. today, I noticed that the two scenic overlooks that offer drivers the chance to admire the beauty of the Potomac River below are closed for the government shutdown. These overlooks are just cut-outs from the highway, providing a few parking spaces. That’s it. No little National Park Service kiosk. Nothing. It’s just a parking area that holds maybe 6 cars at a time.

To close them required someone to come and put up barricades, thus costing taxpayers money.

Is there anyone in the Obama administration with common sense? Do they not see how petty and over-reaching this makes them look?

How petty and over-reaching they look, lol. The punchline: This post is bylined "The Editors." ("Come on, Jonah, you drew the short straw!" "No way! People will think I'm stupid farrrrt.")*

Further down David French wasn't so smart as to leave his name off this, but maybe he was hoping to win a prize for the stupidest WWII Memorialgate post. If so, he's got my vote!

I’m hopeful that the manifest injustice and obvious malice of the memorial closings will be a clarifying moment for the American people. It’s not 1995 any longer, and we don’t have to depend on the mainstream media to tell the truth. At the ACLJ, we’re considering litigation, but litigation will be unnecessary if there is a sufficient — and proper — public response.

You hear that, Mr. and Mrs. America? Better turn those poll numbers around or David French will sue!

At PJ Media Zombie is incensed that government furloughs also apply to places like the Cliff House in San Francisco:

The fact that the federal government twisted the arm of a private business to intentionally and unnecessarily inconvenience its customers (and lose money while doing so) proves that the Obama administration will stop at nothing to maximize the drama of its political brinksmanship.

Fuck those deadbeat cancer patients at the NIH, we had a good thing going here!

If this keeps up, the next concession Boehner demands will be a new identity and a cabin in Idaho.

UPDATE. Mild edits for clarity. Also, commenter "calling all toasters" calls my attention to radio shouter Mark Levin's schtick: "If You Lay One Hand On WWII Vets, I'll Bring Half A Million People There." How many half-millions will he bring if we knock over his garden gnome? Jesus, these people love to make threats.

Oh, and if you're in the mood for some "Both Sides Do It" bullshit, unsurprisingly Megan McArdle has you covered:

The ability to understand that the other side is people, with regular people feelings and their very own thoughts and motivations, seems to have been almost completely erased over the last decade or two. My Facebook feed is filled with liberals saying how they just can’t understand why Republicans are so determined to take health insurance away from poor people … as if that could be the only possible motivation to oppose Obamacare.

The punchline: She never tells us what an alternative motivation would be. I see her sitting with a notepad that has "1. Because freedom" and nothing else written on it; the pad is pushed to one side and McArdle is using her pencil to make decorative borders on artisanal cupcake liners.

UPDATE 2. Sorry, had to add this from Crazy Jesus Lady Peggy Noonan:

The political problem: The president is failing to lead.

This she derives from a conversation with -- get this -- James Baker! I'm sure sub rosa his take was, "Fuck the poors, they don't vote for us." Also, much blubbering over how ol' Ronnie and Tip sorted things out back in the day. Of course, if O'Neill had demanded the top tax rate be returned to 91% or the government shuts down, the memories would be less misty and water-colored.

*UPDATE 3. National Review finally put Mona Charen's name on this post. Guess she lost a bet.

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?