NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the latest Obamacare outrage -- that some people had their old policies cancelled, an event that could not have been foreseen unless you had been paying attention to the news when the ACA was passed three and a half years ago or at any time since. I'm thinking they have these things on a rotation schedule -- next week, I'm told, Routine 12 will be that your new Obamacare plan will have fewer providers than the one you have now. The week after that, it'll be that the laminate will wear off your plan ID card more easily than your old one. Eventually, it'll be "Benghazi" and "skree." 

VOX POPULI.

Our guest today is Greta Frost, who says she's angry that President Obama took away her health care plan that she was very happy with. Greta, can you tell us what happened?

Thank you, Dana. Well, I work as a cashier at a diner and we were all getting along quite fine without a health plan until Darla, one of the waitresses, got a goiter and the hospital costs got so much she had to move to a shipping container over by the rail yard and now the only kind of bath she can get is in the sink in our Ladies' Room. So I went shopping for a group plan, but since so many of the workers at the diner are young and believe all that Obamacare nonsense they didn't want to go in on it, so I put together an application with some ladies here in Durham who like to get together and watch Modern Family every week.

We got a policy from a company called ClarioCare, which was a division of Shepard's Heating and Cooling, and while $310 a month sounds like a lot of money, it was much better than what the others were charging, and I found that it suited my needs. Naturally there were some things they couldn't cover, like my hysterectomy. And I understand that, they're a business, they have to make money same as we all do.

But they were there for me in other ways. For example, last year I cut my finger pretty bad on a slicer at work, and they shipped me next-day air a big box of Band-Aids, or I should say Curad strips. When I wrote back and told them that the Curad strips didn't stick very well to my skin, they wrote right back to apologize and explained that all their Curad strips had got soaked in Hurricane Sandy, and they sent another big box of Curad strips and a tub of Elmer's Glue-All. So I felt like they were really looking out for me.

Well, last week I got this letter from ClarioCare and I was fit to be tied because it said thanks to Obama, not only were they going to get rid of my policy, but they were getting out of the insurance business altogether to concentrate on heating and cooling and also real estate, and they sent me a free invitation to a seminar about that as a parting gift. I appreciated the gesture but what I did not appreciate was Obama taking away this insurance plan that I was very happy with. If I cut myself again, or, God forbid, get cancer, who's going to send me Curad strips? So I haven't even been to that Obamacare website which I hear doesn't work anyway, and I'm not going to call them on the phone or send in any forms. Instead I'm going around to all the talk shows that the nice people from that Foundation want to put me on, and tell people my story, and I'm sure once they've heard it, they'll agree that the answer to all our health care problems in this country is health savings accounts and tort reform.

SO CLOSE.

Wall Street Journal:

The great American jobs machine is faltering, and it is time for Washington to pay attention. Participation in the workforce is falling, the pace of job creation is anemic, and long-term unemployment remains stubbornly high. Many newly created jobs pay less than those that disappeared during the Great Recession, so real wages are stagnating, and median household income is no higher than it was a quarter of a century ago.

I can't tell you how long I've waited for these fuckers to acknowledge this!

...Part of the problem is the weakness of the current economic recovery. During the Great Recession, the labor-force participation rate declined. But even after the downturn ended in mid-2009, the rate continued to decline. It has fallen more since the recovery began than it did between December 2007 and June 2009. The aging of the U.S. workforce explains only a fraction of this worrisome development. Something else is going on.

Preach it, brother! Things haven't just been getting shittier since the recession; they've been getting shittier for decades as the employment scene has shifted from jobs ordinary people could make a living at to jobs you need two of, or a college education to obtain.  This scarcity and the attendant pressures on people's lives are transforming the country into a neo-feudal state. I'm just glad the Journal is catching up...

In the early 1960s, labor-force participation among men ages 25 to 64 began a slow steady decline from 95% to about 84% today, a trend masked by the surge of women into the labor force. But women's participation in the labor force peaked in 2000 and has since declined by two percentage points. Unless men re-enter the job market, prospects for the resumption of vigorous growth in the U.S. labor force are dim.

Blink. Blink.

So... they think the money itself isn't what's important; what's important is that more of the people earning what little there is of it should have penises.

Oh, well; maybe a few more generations of this shit will... actually, no.

UPDATE. I wonder if Kay Hymowitz has caught up with this. She's one of our preeminent anti-feminist scolds, but back in 2007 she was telling us how great the creative destruction of manufacturing jobs had been for America, and decried "the mechanical repetition endured by the men and women who bolted thingamajigs to widgets on the assembly line." Ah, here she is in 2011, telling us "today’s labor market prizes female strengths more than male strengths" and "younger women... have shown they can easily be men’s equals, and possibly even their superiors, in the knowledge economy." But is she as happy as she had been four years earlier that foreign slaves have taken over the widgets and thingamajigs from Americans, allowing women to rise? Recall that, in the interval, Obama was elected and Men's Rights nuts became an important Republican constituency, and take a guess:

Beginning in the middle of 20th century, not coincidentally the same historical moment that great numbers of women were moving into the workforce and becoming economically independent, the universal assumption that men were essential to family life started to erode. Divorce and single motherhood began to rise; even today, though divorce rates have declined, 40% of American children are now born to single mothers... 

This existential theory, stressing the loss of men’s primary social role, is impossible to prove with any certainty.

Heh.

But there is some evidence that unmarried men are less motivated in the workplace.

The bitches-ruin-everything racket must be some sweet, easy money.

UPDATE 2. In comments, my guests wonder what economy the Journal editors are looking at. "On planet WSJ," says Derelict, "those high-paying jobs are hanging on the lowest branches, just waiting to fall into the outstretched scrotums of anyone who can piss high enough up the wall." Haystack nicely encapsulates their argument: "In order for there to be more jobs, more men have to find jobs." And Chris V82 asks, plaintively, "So tell me, exactly, what I have to do with my penis to get a new job. Do you want me to cum on your face? I'll do it, as long as I get some extra vacation days."

Also, Dr. Hunky Jimpjorps alerts us that at Instapundit, the Ole Perfesser "heh-indeeds that this is just another sign that men have Gone Galt! in the face of feminism and shills his wife's book." Since crackpot conservative themes often get a trial run on the Perfesser's pages, it looks like the New Thing for the Right Wing is glibertarianism plus Men's Rights advocacy. If you don't think these two groups would get along, you haven't been paying attention.

THIS HERE'S A ZOO AND THE KEEPER AIN'T YOU/AND I'M SICK OF IT, I'M SICK OF YOU.

The Wall Street Journal is really pissed Bill de Blasio is cruising into the New York mayoralty:

Occupy City Hall

...The Occupy movement that in 2011 pitched street camps in the U.S. from Wall Street to San Francisco posited a tale of two Americas and class resentment unseen for many decades. The movement faded, but if the opinion polls are right, New York voters are about to elect the Occupy movement to run America's largest city.

As with Obama, no election is legitimate if the Democrat wins or is expected to.

The Big Apple is on the verge of electing a man whose explicit agenda is the repudiation of the conservative reforms achieved by a generation of city leaders from both parties, which transformed New York from a terrifying urban joke into the nation's municipal crown jewel.

Thereafter, we get a reading from The Gospel According to Rudy and scary puppets labeled "Living Wage" and "Rent Control."

But not once does Journal address the question of why New Yorkers are prepared to vote for de Blasio -- except for this pathetic specimen:

Bill de Blasio, the Democratic nominee, is leading Republican Joe Lhota by more than 40 points. Conventional wisdom holds that this is happening mainly because New Yorkers are "tired" of Mayor Mike Bloomberg. Losing access to 16-ounce cups of soda is insufficient reason for what is likely to happen to New York.

I've been in exile a couple of years but I can say this with confidence: The soda thing isn't why the citizens are turning toward de Blasio. (For one thing, de Blasio supports the soda ban.)

If New Yorkers are tired of Bloomberg, it may be because between him and Giuliani they've had nearly twenty years of crackdown government and they're sick of it. It doesn't help that Bloomberg acts as if he's just as sick of them. Last week, for example, he altered the terms of the Met Museum's lease so that they can charge a flat fee (if you can call $25 flat), which may end the possibility of cheap admission to one of the world's great museums in one of the world's great cities -- where many residents can't afford it (and Joe Lhota doesn't seem to care about that either).

The Journal also complains that de Blasio "has held no real job," but after three terms of a guy who's a massive business success and treats his constituents like kitchen help, that's not much of a knock.

Polls show that citizens are divided over stop and frisk, but the Journal might take a hint from the fact that a clear majority of them are willing to throw it over and even risk a return to the horrors of CBGB and Mean Streets if it means an end to a corporate governance model that's always warning it can continue to provide good services only by selling out the city's patrimony. If they can also get a thumb in the eye of the suck-up press that enables it, so much the better.

I'm two hundred miles away but if de Blasio wins I'm gonna party.

UPDATE. Oh, as if I needed another reason to celebrate, Ron Radosh at PJ Media:

Whether you call it the new Popular Front uniting unabashed Marxists, revolutionary activists, and liberal Democrats, as [Sol] Stern does, or a “new New Left,” as [Tom] Hayden does, it threatens the well-being of our entire country. We may not live in New York City, but we cannot ignore what is happening there.

Yeah, when you watch TV shows set in New York, you won't be able to relax -- you'll be thinking, "The whole thing is run by commies!" Plus when you go there on business, you'll have to worry about squeegee men nationalizing your wallet.

UPDATE 2. Har, hellslittlestangel in comments, "The Journal doesn't give Giuliani enough credit. Thanks to his reforms, murder rates are at their lowest since the 1960s in the entire country." And tigrismus on the Journal's gripe that de Blasio "has held no real job": "The Journal author wrote this in rivets." Hey, be nice: There's a good chance whichever factotum wrote that editorial does cardio kick-boxing on his lunch breaks.

Also amusing: Wingnuts hung up on the fact that de Blasio expressed admiration for the Sandinistas, for God's sake, instead of the Contras as a true Reaganite would. "Bill de Blasio remains a fan of burning synagogues and persecuting Jews," babbles Daniel Greenfield  at FrontPageMag. "So it seems a fair question: Is Bill de Blasio still a Sandinista at heart?" asks Matthew Hennessey at City Journal. Must be tough having to go out at Halloween dressed as Daniel Ortega and find nobody's scared of you or even knows why they're supposed to be.

Try something else, fellas -- hey, did you know his wife is black? It may come to that, or to the shctick Paul Mirengoff thought was killer at Power Line back in August:

Public Advocate Bill Di Blasio is running because he doesn’t think there’s anyone sufficiently Progressive in the field. He rides his bicycle through the hip Brooklyn brownstone belt trolling for voters and needs no prompting to tell you that he’s Italian and his wife is African-American.

Yeah, why would anyone in New York go for a guy who rides a bike in Brooklyn? That's like eating pastrami without mayonnaise.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the dysfunctional Obamacare website, which rightbloggers assure us can never be fixed. Of course, the same people also think they're going to win back the nation with Twitter, so I don't know how much tech cred to give them.

GROWING UP IN PUBLIC.

The Lou Reed story is sort of like one of those horrible satires where someone who has no business being a rock star gets made into one. Like Dylan, when Reed sang he was mostly hitting the penumbrae of blue notes. But when Dylan sang ballads, he was at least dry and efficient; Reed was so shaky he sounded like a put-on. Or he would have, were it not that the songs he was singing -- Sunday Morning, Here She Comes Now, Pale Blue Eyes -- were so good they didn't need beautiful voices, though it helped if you knew that the guy warbling them was their creator.

Reed made sure you knew, and this is another way his story differs from Expresso Bongo or The Idolmaker: More than most, Reed made his own way. Oh, he had a lot of help -- managers and producers and, my God, Andy Warhol. But the biggest contributor to Reed's success was popular culture, and his own ability as an artist and a vendor of his own art to work it to his advantage. People talk about how out-of-place the Velvets were in their time, but really they were only slightly ahead -- leading edge, as it were. Reed, a former song-plugger, saw a quake island emerging from the roiling 60s scene on which he could plant his flag. A lot of people wanted to be dark and transgressive in those days, but not too many thought of doing it with a band that played in discotheques. I believe if Reed had taken the cultural temperature of his time and found it unpropitious for what he was doing, he wouldn't have gone back to doing The Ostrich; he might have become a novelist and played in the garage on weekends. Or maybe the other way around.

But once he saw his opening he grabbed it, and every advantage that came after. He basically dared the rock world to ignore him, and of course they couldn't. This more than the East Village adventuring is what I think helped make Reed the New York stand-in he turned into; he got so good at the staring contest he was able to get RCA to put out Metal Machine Music. On Red Seal, yet!

We all know the big hits and funny stories ("I have a New York code of ethics...in other words, watch your mouth"), and as one who labored in the feedback mills of the old Lower East Side I'll always hold the clangorous Velvets in my heart. But now that he's dead I'm thinking of the modest, affecting songs Reed produced as a mature artist, things like My Friend George and What's Good -- just solid, beautiful things, like pop songs except much better. And especially the songs that are strange, but not the ones that could have been expected to provoke outrage or vicarious thrills and are all most people know about him -- I mean Coney Island Baby strange, where all the daring was in the willingness to reach deep into experience and risk embarrassment by being poetic about it. You aren't going to play anything like that or My House or The Kids if you care at all whether people are going to laugh at you. You do it knowing they're the ones who should be scared.

That's the kind of tough guy Lou Reed was, and what's really sad about his death, along with everything that's always sad about death, is that we now have one less of them, because we need all we can get.

UPDATE. In Neil Gaiman's 1989 interview with him, Reed's in a relaxed mood, and cops to "the Lou Reed persona" as "something I use to keep a distance." That should be obvious, but I don't remember him ever saying it out loud before that.

Now, it's not like Reed stopped playing Lou Reed and beating up interviewers: Get a load of the shit he gives this poor guy from Spin in 2010 ("I don't want to get into this stupid subject with you. You brought it up. You shouldn't have. We had a good conversation, and now we're done...").

Time has put the Lou Reed persona into perspective. It's a cliche that the most sensitive people put up the hardest fronts. People tend to assume putting up a front is a tragic reaction formation, and there's something to that. But if you learn to fight back out of fear, that doesn't mean you have to give up all your moves when you become enlightened -- so long as you know what you're doing.

From the beginning in his work, Reed exposed his feelings, some of which were obviously very raw. (In the Gaiman interview, he says, "Periodically I do something older and I suddenly realize 'God -- listen to what this [song] is about. I can't believe that I said this in public.'")  It's one thing to do that from, say, an academic sinecure in a cozy collegetown, and another to do it in New York, where if you show anything like weakness (and many morons do think feelings, and honesty about them, are weak) you can expect some emotional criminal will take a jimmy to it and see what he can get.

The act you adopt to cope with that kind of scene can fuck you up -- look at Mike Tyson. But I think Reed at least eventually had a good relationship with his persona, that is, he had more control of it than it had of him. He must have, to let himself be used as a signifier for ooh-scary-gritty-New-York in that stupid Honda commercial where he says "Don't settle for walkin,'" and then go out on the street without hiding his face in shame. He could do it because he was carrying the act lightly but with confidence, the way a toreador flaunts his cape; such a thin little thing, yet you can wield it with great power to keep fools in line and occasionally pick up some easy money from Madison Avenue.

I mention all this because if you know someone from New York, you may know the act. New Yorkers aren't really hard people, at least not the way you think or the way they want you to think. But they are busy with things to do, and need their space.

PANDERING.

Matt Lewis at The Daily Caller:

This summer, I interviewed Dr. Helen Smith about her book Men on Strike...

I know, off to a bad start already. But wait, as the kids say, it gets better:

Her premise is simple: More and more American men are making the conscious decision to avoid the drama and heartache that comes with relationships. It’s just not worth it, they say. 

The Japanese word for this is “Mendokusai.” How do I know? It turns out this same phenomenon is taking place amongst young people of both sexes in Japan. Not only are many forgoing marriage, they are also skipping... sex. It’s just not worth it, they say.

Number one, there's a huge gap between "I don't want a relationship" and "I don't want to have sex." Number two, the Japan study to which he refers is mostly bogus. But when you're dealing with American conservatives, facts are the least of it. Lewis laments:

Could there be a connection between what Dr. Helen is documenting here and what’s happening in Japan? Japanese culture and American culture are, of course, a world apart, but technology has made that world smaller. And, in fact, technology might just be the common denominator... 

Interestingly, in her book, Dr. Helen also argues that online porn is replacing the need for American women.

Oh well then: A reference to technology, and an assertion by Dr. Mrs. Ole Perfesser. What more do you need? The angst extrudes -- Erstwhile sex scold Rod Dreher:

How can an entire country lose the will to reproduce itself, which is to say, the will to live?

Glenn Beck's The Blaze:

WILL THIS NATION’S ‘CELIBACY SYNDROME’ CAUSE IT TO ‘PERISH INTO EXTINCTION’?

At Legal Insurrection, neo-neocon:

When nearly all is permitted (sexually, that is), the prospect of sex loses its forbidden fruit aspect and becomes more ho-hum.

Speak for yourself, honey. But let's not miss the big picture here: Conservatives are beginning to reverse their usual pattern, and are complaining about other people not having sex instead of other people having it. It's kind of a breakthrough!

Alas, there are holdouts. From the Patriot Action Network:

The latest 'trend' that has been called for this is that young men and woman are not having meaningless sex, premarital sex or leading the value of sex being the key to their lives... 

The news is saying this is a bad thing...but in the big picture, is that the truth? 

What isn't being reported, is the transformation that is happening with the young... Many are becoming Christians.

Eventually someone from the central office is going to have to come around and hip this guy to the new realities. I predict conservatives will shift over time from nagging paupers to get married to nagging them to have sex. It'll give them something positive to offer voters. I mean, it's not like they can offer them clean air or water.

UPDATE. Comments are always the best part of alicublog but in this case our gloss squad have outdone themselves. Some are understandable bemused by professional slut-shamer Rod Dreher turning into a sex cheerleader. "When Crunchy Rod is asking us to fornicate, the End Times are upon us," observes DocAmazing. But philadelphialawyer rightly points out that Dreher and his colleagues at The American Conservative are addicted to gloomy "the death of" stories -- and that their prescriptions are, for people who profess a concern for our humanity, weirdly inhuman:

For example, folks should have children not because they want to, not because they enjoy children, or because they think they would be good parents, or because society is accommodating to child raising, but because society, particularly Western society, oh screw it, let's just tell it like it is, because the Great White Race needs them to... 

In other words, people should make highly personal decisions which directly impact their life for the good of the collective... And yet they will turn around and accuse "the left" of suborning the individual to the mass, of being purely utilitarian, of running roughshod over individual conscience, and so on.

Or as Spaghetti Lee puts it, "Fuck like your country depends on it!" Meanwhile trex delineates Matt Lewis' logic model:

I like to call this fallacy "The Transitive Property of Cryptids" or "The Six Degrees of Loch Ness Monster:" 

1. Dr. Helen says men are avoiding relationships.
2. Kids in Japan are avoiding sex.
3. Technology exists in both cultures
4. Women use technology look at porn
5. People look for other forbidden things with technology
6. Loch Ness Monster

WATERLOO, COULDN'T ESCAPE IF I WANTED TO.

J. Christian Adams at PJ Media:

Ted Cruz Won

Tell us about it, Mr. Adams.

Deal-making and compromise have pushed the country toward fiscal catastrophe. Only Cruz and his supporters stood fast, and Americans noticed.

I'll say they have! The debacle even seems to have more kindly disposed the people toward the ACA. But how is this good for Ted Cruz?

Second, now is the time to wreck Obamacare. Some in the GOP think they can win a couple of elections over the next few years and unravel the program once the GOP gains the White House. This ignores the shrinking attention span of the body politic. It also ignores the fact that many in the GOP are part of the problem. 

So, you can't count on the ADD American People, the Democrats, or the Republicans: What's left?

What about support to delay Obamacare’s implementation? That’s a ploy to save Obamacare. 

Pay attention who is calling for a delay. Partisans like Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV), John Stewart, Wolf Blitzer and Robert Gibbs know a delay today means preservation tomorrow. That’s why they support it. It is the modern Rope-a-Dope. Muhammad Ali famously employed his Rope-a-Dope to delay the fight, wear down, and eventually knock out his opponents. Focusing on Obamacare’s delay, and not its destruction, is an effort to preserve Obamacare.

They're just late to the party: The Tea Party Republicans already tried to save Obamacare by delaying it a year weeks ago. They couldn't do it, yet Obamacare miraculously persisted. Some people think that's because it's a federal law, passed by Congress and signed by the President, but to Christian it's clearly a form of witchcraft.

Some in the GOP were annoyed by Ted Cruz leading the fight to defund Obamacare. They claimed that if Cruz didn’t muddy up the debate, the failures of Obamacare would have been cleanly on display during the program’s rollout. Right. 

The failures have only gotten worse now that the shutdown is over. 

So have at it. Let’s see if they’re right. 

The failures of Obamacare couldn’t be worse. Obamacare has become a punch line, a joke, a catastrophic catastrophe, squared. So have at it. Prove that a shutdown-less environment could lead to killing off the program. Go win the narrative you said you could win.

This actually sounds, in a whining way, like an admission of total defeat -- that even if the world understands Obamacare to be a failure because the website doesn't work, it will still go on making America socialist or whatever. In closing Christian grows still more cryptic:

But we may learn that the Cruz-led fight focused the nation on the failures of Obamacare in a way that no pundit or consultant will be able to match. If the Cruz-less narrative fails to win the field and end Obamacare, then Cruz wins yet again.

So, the nation gets a health care program, and Ted Cruz gets to tell people he tried to stop it. Another such victory... but let that wait until Obama or somebody proposes a national minimum income. Then we can do this all over again.

UPDATE. In comments, Spaghetti Lee:

This is like Reverse Wingnut Zeno's Paradox or something. 

The trend in this instance may be traced to Jonah Goldberg's post-collapse invocation of the "it just doesn't matter" scene from Meatballs. Goldberg seems unaware that the happy denouement of that film was created by screenwriters, not fate.

TODAY YOUR LOVE, TOMORROW THE WORLD.

What the...

Jay Z’s American Fascism

Remember those stories about how NWA was going to turn your kids into foul-mouthed murderers? David P. Goldman has revived the formula for PJ Media -- with an extra shout-out to liberal fascism!

Who would have believed that a performing genre (it is a stretch to call it “music”) dominated by convicted and confessed criminals, brutally misogynistic, preaching and practicing violence, would come to dominate American popular culture?

Someone who's ever seen Jimmy Cagney shove a grapefruit in Mae Clark's face, that's who.

Violence is not only a legitimate form of expression: it is the only manly form of expression, as in his rap “D.O.A.”...

One should not conclude from this that Obama favors criminal violence, but rather that the popular response to Jay Z’s evocation of felonious rage is so great that Obama finds it convenient to exploit it.

Jay Z appeals to the same kind of rage that Hitler and Mussolini exploited during the interwar years. Never in the postwar period has the United States had youth unemployment in the 25% range for over half a decade...

Despite some demurrers -- inserted, no doubt, to keep the men in the white suits off his tail -- Goldman's clear implication is that Jay Z is Obama's Ernst Rohm, enforcing the Kenyan Tyrant's big takeover with an Ooga Booga Army of brownshirts.

Religion can't compete, because the kids aren't going to church anymore, says Goldman. His best advice to fellow conservatives is to heed the example of the Orthodox Jews' stubborn resistance to modernity:

It is an extended war of attrition to recreate a conservative majority from the grass roots up, in the face of a truly evil effort to exploit the rage and frustration of young Americans. It will last the rest of our lifetimes and more.

Maybe Goldman can give this as a speech at the 2016 GOP Convention. I bet it achieves some real movement at the polls!

For a competing but equally valid conspiracy theory, check out Michael T. Snyder on how Jay Z's mobbed up with the Illuminati. Obama isn't mentioned, but Hillary is -- it's a long game!

UPDATE. Famous rapper Jay B has one of the many normal-person reactions in comments: "Jesus Christ, I guess the last 35 fucking years of conservative race panic over 'rap' flew past this guy, seeing how he's just now heard about this new fangled rhyming ghetto thing. He takes on literally the only rap artist that my mom knows about and who seems to rap with about the same amount of rage as the average mall walker and still, even after all this time, tries the ol' 'if you can call it music' bullshit. It's like this was beamed in from 1988. Someone should sneak him a copy of It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold us Back, he might never go outside again."

THE GULL CAN'T HELP IT.

Midway through Charles C.W. Cooke's latest jet of froth (short version: People hate the Tea Party only because liberals are mean) comes this gem:

When the history of this period in American life comes to be written, historians will almost certainly come to see the hysteria prompted by the rise of the Tea Party as akin to the “Red Scare” of the 1950s — except, that is, that there were actual Communist traitors in America.

This reminds me of the bit in Costa-Gavras' Z in which a fascist general, under prosecution for the murder of a leftist politician, is asked by a reporter if he feels himself to be a new Dreyfus. "Dreyfus was guilty!" cries the general.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...closing out our shutdown coverage with the rightbloggers' post-mortem. Among the painful lessons learned: It most certainly wasn't anything they did.

Didn't have room to include the resurrection of an oldie but goodie from Investors Business Daily:

Obama Following Alinsky Script In Shutdown Showdown

Among the President's Alinskyisms, per IDB, was ridicule, which in the conservative script is never merited by ridiculous behavior, nor found funny because it is funny, but only employed by leftists as a communistic technique and approved by fellow travelers:

During a Maryland speech last month, Obama cited New Hampshire state Rep. Bill O'Brien's remark that ObamaCare is "a law as destructive to personal and individual liberty as the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850." 

"Think about that. Affordable health care is worse than a law that lets slave owners get their runaway slaves back," Obama quipped. "I mean, these are quotes. I'm not making this stuff up." 

That calculated stink bomb was met by a chorus of gasps and boos from the largely black audience.

Those people even laugh at "quips" differently than whites/conservatives!  Clearly the answer is more tricorners and knee-breeches.

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.