NOT WORTHY OF OUR TIME.

Looking in on Rod Dreher just to see if he's still awful. Here's one about (groan) evolution where he says fancy-pants liberals

who love to put the Darwin fish on their cars and rail against fundagelicals who want to teach Creationism in public schools should be honest with themselves and admit that they don’t really want to teach Science and nothing but either.

Because if they were being honest, they'd accept his idea of science, which is that black people are inferior. He demonstrates this via a Steve Sailer link that pulls the cheap parlor trick of never mentioning American blacks (except indirectly, e.g. "Darwin wouldn't be surprised to learn which race had invented rap music") while maintaining Darwin proves races are unequal; for the missing pieces, you just have to look at the rest of Sailer's career. Plus there's the old nudge-wink from Dreher:

One of the things that keeps drawing me to Steve Sailer’s writing is that his beliefs on human biodiversity sometimes lead him to point out inconvenient truths about ideologies informing our common life.

[pushes in nose, pushes out lower lip]

I don’t read him often enough to say for sure...

Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Anyway, Dreher says it's cool, libs, we all ignore reality sometimes:

Unless you believe that plans for building atomic bombs and how to poison a city’s water supply with ricin should be distributed freely on the Internet, then you too believe in the concept of forbidden knowledge.

This is comparable to Jonah Goldberg's schtick of saying you liberals are in favor of censorship just like me because no one wants spread beaver on children's TV. The thing is, while you might entertain these logic games from someone who offers them in good faith, Goldberg and his crew have over the years so convincingly proven themselves first-class enemies of human liberty that there's no need to say anything back except, "Sure, make it Adventure Time for real, what the hell I don't have kids." It's even worse with Dreher, who ably represents centuries of theocratic suppression; the idea that inquisitors like him now stand outside our discourse, hiding pots of flaming pitch behind their backs, and say may I point out your hypocrisy is just too rich to bear.

Fuck 'em. Call me a liberal fascist, but I say Torquemada doesn't deserve a second chance.

HE WHO FEELS IT, KNOWS IT.

There'll be a lot of garbage talked about Pete Seeger's politics today. (At the moment there's a post-mortem hush, and even Ann Althouse is gracious, but the assholes are already crawling out.) There'll probably be some cavilling about the quality of Seeger's ethnomusicology, too, and about appropriation and authenticity and all that shit.

But today I'm thinking of him as a player -- because though he has a fat political legacy on which others can speak eloquently, he was also, I would say foremost, a musician, someone in love with songs and sounds who had the gift to transmit that love to large groups of people. He was a lefty Brahmin who took up hill country music, and that mix could have and maybe should have been ridiculous, like a Puritan trying to swing. But it isn't, in him; Seeger felt the music, and if his diction was a little sharper than was traditional, you could still tell he felt it. His singing was like John Carradine playing Casy in The Grapes of Wrath -- a performance, a bit stagey, but absolutely shot through with the true feeling of a time and a people. And with something timeless, too, that can still speak to us.

"Wimoweh" starts about 1:35 in this clip from Wasn't That a Time, the doc about The Weavers' 1980 reunion. Watch Pete. He's possessed by the sound, as much a raver and a wailer as that other great appropriator, Buddy Holly.



At the time he was 60 years old, and he kept right on going till the end. Music is so much more important than politics, really.

UPDATE. Charlie Pierce understands. Many good lines:

He loved the country and its people and the idea of it that outlasted so many attempts to hijack it for other purposes. Pete Seeger was a great American because he dared to be thought otherwise. That is the only real qualification. It gets more dear as the years go by.

UPDATE 2. Somebody called Howard Husock at National Review:

In other words, Pete Seeger led the way in devising the formula that pushed popular culture leftward: the music (or the movies) had to work as art and must avoid heavy-handedness.

Yes -- the art had to work as art! Ingenious, these communists! No wonder, as Husock complains, "the cultural Right has long, and unsuccessfully, been trying to match his example" -- they don't even know that art and politics are different things. What miserable lives they must have.

UPDATE 3. Donald Douglas goes into comments, calls one of the other commenters a "cum-receptacle"; said another commenter wonders if his employer would like to see that comment; Douglas puts up a post called "@Edroso Commenter Threatens Workplace Harassment Over Pete Seeger Communist Blogging." Later, he comes back and threatens another commenter. I've banned him; he can issue his Cries For Help elsewhere. What is it with these people?

WATCH YOUR BACK, GOLDBERG.

Betsy Woodruff of National Review on how Macklemore won a Grammy because homos:

Far be it from me to assume there’s any rhyme or reason behind who wins Grammys (ha! not doing that).

The very next goddamn sentence:

But it’s hard not to look at this situation and wonder if the Grammys put politics before music.

This breathtaking display of self-unawareness, along with her ridiculous Lena Dunham columns, makes Woodruff the front-runner to replace Jonah Goldberg as the Corporal Agarn of NR's culture war troops.

Anyway I don't know what she's complaining about; one might as easily argue that Daft Punk's big night is a victory for the Singularity.

UPDATE. Hear hear, M. Krebs in comments: "Actually it's hard not to wonder if there's anything the Grammys don't put before music."

Plus, Formerly_Nom_De_Plume:

I won’t be talking about Ryan Lewis at all here because first, I don’t know anything about him 

lost out to someone named Ariana Grande about whom I know nothing 

Someone with a better grasp of hip-hop history than I (read: someone with any grasp of it at all, really) 

(And if this piece already exists, can someone send it to me?)

Her training is complete. Jonah watch his back? More like congratulate himself on a job well done. 

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about all the ways liberals are persecuting conservatives these days, from the progressive Kristallnacht to poor Dinesh D'Souza. I don't know about you, but I never dreamed I had so much power.

UPDATE. Here's a cartoon that didn't make the cut:

I'm not sure why Uncle Sam looks so blasé. Maybe he's thinking, "Well, at least it's not a Puerto Rican." Or maybe witnessing over decades the slow destruction of the American Dream has turned his brain into harmless goo, and death comes as a blessing.

UPDATE. Ole Perfesser Instapundit has not one but two posts denouncing the "LEFTIES" who "WERE ALL OVER TWITTER RIDICULING" Tom Perkins' ridiculous assertion that a progressive Kristallnacht is coming. Apparently a bunch of nuts protested at a Google engineer's house, and someone threw a rock at a Google bus; no casualties, but "could things get worse?" Questions... remain! 

Plus Obama is mean to rich people, "the basic political thuggishness for which Chicago politicians are known," yadda yadda. There's a FEMA coffin with your name on it, sheeple!

For some people, The Paranoid Style in American Politics is a how-to book.

STUPIDEST, WRITTEN, GOLDBERG, AGAIN*.

There are several things that are not good for Jonah Goldberg's arguments -- challenges, logic, a light rain -- but the worst results come when he tries to go off-road, i.e. abandons the simplest right-wing verities and tries to think for himself.

Case in point: The Satan statue that was proposed to make a point about religious imagery on public property in Oklahoma. Maybe what led Goldberg astray was that he noticed people were having lulz over it, and he didn't want to be the scold wagging his finger about Satan; long before he became a Professor of Liberal Fasciology at the Bulk-Order School of Conserviatrics, Goldberg was what passed in Republican circles for a comedy act, and funsies remain part of his Brand.

So Goldberg bravely eases his jalopy off the asphalt and into the sand. He acknowledges the statue is "a stunt — a clever one — exploiting the constitutional injunction against governmental favoritism towards religion" and that

...if you want to argue that erecting a tribute to Lucifer on public property is a bad idea, the Constitution is pretty useless. That’s no knock on the Constitution, mind you. Lots of wonderful things are of little utility in fighting Satan. Puppies, ice cream, the warranty on a Ford Pinto: These are as helpful in fighting Satan as a winning smile is in putting out a house fire.

(Did you catch the thing about the Ford Pinto? Years ago someone taught Goldberg the Rule of Three, and one of these days he's going to get it right.)

Unprotected by Constitutional argh-blargh, Goldberg floors it into the desert.

The Satan statue controversy is of course absurd, but absurdities are often useful in illuminating more substantial issues.

Uh oh.

America is becoming vastly more diverse — ethnically, culturally, religiously, and morally. In a great many ways that’s a good thing. But in this life, no good thing comes without a downside.

Double uh-oh. Here's where Goldberg may have begun to feel his wheels spinning. Being too lazy to rewrite, he had obliged himself to explain what, exactly, is bad about diversity. He couldn't just go "haw, diversity, amirite" like he usually does.

Consider immigration, historically a boon to America. Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam (a liberal in good standing) found that increased immigration hurts “social trust,” causing people to “hunker down” within their own bands of friends or alone in front of the TV.  Everything from trust in political leaders and the political process — both of which are at or near all-time lows, by the way — to voting and carpooling drops precipitously as more strangers move into a community.

By "immigration" I'm guessing he doesn't mean Satanists, and by "strangers" I'm guessing he doesn't mean that nice fratboy on a career track who moved into the condo next door. Since it came out six years ago, Putnam's cohesion study (and the gloat that Putnam's a liberal) has been required screeding for rightwing racists, but practitioners like Daniel Henninger and Rod Dreher can just stand there, go Ooga-Booga for three minutes, and disappear in a puff of smoke -- Goldberg's still got to get back to Satan without being any dumber than he's already been. Alas, there was no intern around to tell him to shut up about diversity:

Conversely, people increasingly look more to government — the police, local politicians, and bureaucrats — to solve problems that once could have been worked out in a neighborly conversation. This reliance on legal authority and entitlements further crowds out the charitable mechanisms and institutions of civil society, inviting yet more government intrusions.

So when we didn't have all these blacks and foreigners we didn't need cops? Here comes the flop sweat and the first, high-lonesome squeals of anxiety farting --

By the way, Putnam explicitly rejects racism as the culprit here.

-- which builds to a crescendo:

Rather, the cause is a breakdown in shared norms, customs, language, and the other often invisible and intangible but no less real sinews that bind a community together.

It was Cheetos, not chitlins,  we all knew where we stood!

Family breakdown, the decline in good blue-collar jobs, the decline of organized religion, etc., are all equally good or better examples of things sapping the strength from social trust and cohesion and encouraging government to pick up the slack...

It's big government, big government's to blame, I didn't mean black people shut up shut up FARRRRRRRRRRT.

From there it's Goldberg crawling out of the overheated wreck and across the blazing sands gasping "Funyuns... Funyuns..." and this pathetic denouement:

The unraveling of the old cultural, moral, and religious consensus has been a boon to individual freedom in myriad ways. But you can say this for the old civilizational confidence: It didn’t lack for arguments against state-sponsored devil worship.

Satan target achieved -- a lack of cultural consensus leads to devil worship, and since the Constitution can't stop it, we should get back to "civilizational confidence," which I guess means figuring out which Oscar-winning movies are conservative and following their example.

* Sorry, but I do get tired writing it all over again sometimes.

THE SPECIAL-NEEDS CHILDREN OF ZHDANOV.

Try and imagine being Jonah Goldberg:

As for the liberal bias thing. I absolutely agree there’s an enormous amount of leftwing bias in Hollywood, including often at the Oscars. But it’s hardly the case that pro-war or pro-American movies never get nominated. Last year, recall, Argo won best picture (to the dismay of some on the left). It beat out Zero Dark Thirty​, which was even more hated by the left but nonetheless received four nominations. The “Hurt Locker,” a more ambivalent war movie but hardly anti-American, won three years before that (it also won best director, a huge snub to her ex-husband, James Cameron, who directed Avatar). ​ ”Saving Private Ryan” was nominated for 11 Oscars and won five including Best Director — not exactly an anti-military or anti-American movie. 

There are certainly movies that benefited from being on the left. “Crash” didn’t deserve Best Picture. “American Beauty” is wildly overrated. But if the academy was really so leftwing in its tastes, it’s hard to see “Braveheart,” “Forrest Gump,” or even “Gladiator” beating out their competition.Warren Beatty certainly didn’t deserve an Oscar for “Reds,” a piece of soporific agitprop about American Communist John Reed. I think you can make a case for Oliver Stone getting the Oscar for “Platoon” without the benefit of politics, but not for “Born on the Fourth of July"...

That is to say, imagine that you are obsessed with politics but too stupid to say anything interesting about it, and so associate your crackpot ideas with things you do understand, barely, though they have nothing to do with politics -- such as one's choice of football teams, music videos, TV shows, and female body type -- and say things like "great novels are, by nature, conservative" with a straight face.

This is really why we have a "culture war." It's not a categorical imperative; it's a make-work program for unskilled wingnut dilettantes.

UPDATE. Goldberg's previous low-water mark as a kulturkampfer.

UPDATE 2. Commenter Ellis Weiner focuses on Goldberg's murky adverbial phrase "to the dismay of some on the left," which he finds

about as full of meaning and import as a teenager's "like." You can use it anywhere and not be entirely wrong. "Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should--to the dismay of some on the left." "I AM your father, Luke--to the dismay of some on the left." "A specter is haunting Europe--to the," etc.

Other commenters come up with their own versions ("Baby, everything is all right, uptight, [and] clean out of sight (to the dismay of some on the left)"). And whetstone reminds us of John Rogers'/Kung Fu Monkey's definitive rebuke to anyone who seeks to anthropomorphize Hollywood as anything but an anteater that eats money instead of ants.

TODAY IN CAREER ADVANCEMENT.

I see the Washington Post has formed some kind of alliance with The Volokh Conspiracy. For those of you unacquainted with these guys, here are some leaves from my notebook on them:

Eugene Volokh has expressed interesting feelings about bringing pain and death upon his fellow man: In 2002 he at least considered the "slippery slope" argument against torture ("Once torture is legitimized in principle to save thousands, it becomes much easier to urge it to save one important person...") before telling us that "abstract arguments about moral high grounds or stooping to the enemy's level do more to weaken the argument against torture than to strengthen it." But by 2005 he was ready to let his freak flag fly:

…I am especially pleased that the killing — and, yes, I am happy to call it a killing, a perfectly proper term for a perfectly proper act — was a slow throttling, and was preceded by a flogging… 

…I like civilization, but some forms of savagery deserve to be met not just with cold, bloodless justice but with the deliberate infliction of pain, with cruel vengeance rather than with supposed humaneness or squeamishness.

In an update he relented, and thereafter devoted himself to more humanitarian causes, like promoting the death penalty.

Perhaps definitely related, Volokh got very pissy when someone suggested Rudy Giuliani was "milking" the 9/11 thing in 2007 (I know, right?). "Imagine a surgeon who, in the wake of some disaster, does what many see as a superb job of saving many patients," sniffed Volokh. "...Would we fault him because 'milking [his] reputation [formed during a deadly disaster] for crass [careerist] gain is, obviously, despicable'?" Considering that this surgeon found on the worst possible day that the super-special operating room he'd built at great expense to the hospital for such occasions was completely useless, I'd say so, and Giuliani's subsequent experiences suggest everyone thought so except Volokh.

And here's Volokh on Obama not wearing a flag pin:

Wearing a flag pin is not supposed to be an explanation or an argument, just as "I love you" is not supposed to be an explanation or an argument... Yet if you used to say this and then you stopped, the symbolic message is pretty powerful. 

The message is clear -- Obama no longer loves America! (Wingnut rejoinder: He never did!) Oh, and yeah, Volokh thinks homosexuals are trying to recruit.

As for his Conspirators: From 2007, here's Ilya Somin discussing "Dating Across Ideological Lines," which sounds like it could be a fun topic until Somin actually outlines his argument -- "I. Why People Overestimate the Undesirability of Cross-Ideological Dating" and "II. Defensible Limits of Political Tolerance in Dating" -- and dishes out passages like

Whether or not such pragmatic considerations are weighty enough to prevent a relationship will vary from case to case. However, it is important to recognize that they should in fact be judged on a case by case basis.

There's a guy who never got enough wedgies as a kid. Also, Somin frets about socialism (which he links, via Hugo Chavez, to Hitler): "The spectre that once haunted Europe and the world may have been defeated and discredited. But we have not yet completed the task of driving a stake through its heart." If only capitalism hadn't taken a header into the loo!

Then we have David Bernstein, a reliable Bush bagman back in the day ("W just represents lots of things that coastal liberals dislike, and they will continue to dislike him regardless of how he governs policy-wise"), though by the beginning of the Obama era he was telling everyone Bush v. Gore? No one I know agreed with that! And you might get a kick out of his argument with Kevin Drum over whether or not he said the term "Likudnik" had become an anti-Semitic slur (spoiler: he did). Bernstein used to wonder a lot  "why Jews tend to despise Republicans," but maybe they were just embarrassed by Republican Jews like Bernstein. (Or by Volokh, who, when Howard Dean said the Democratic Party was comfortable with Jews because Dems believed "there are no bars to heaven for anybody," spent hundreds of words arguing that surely there must be some "traditionalist Christians" in the Party who disagreed. No, baby, we had Andy Cuomo run 'em all out!)

As for Orin Kerr, here's my favorite quote:

Now, I wouldn’t in a million years compare torture and wiretapping with gay rights. Obviously, the subject matter is totally and completely different. But...

These guys are often described as libertarians; I think it's the gay and torture things. Anyway, congrats on the new assignment.

UPDATE. In comments, Jon tells me "I know Orin Kerr sorta well (we're both law professors), and notwithstanding that he hangs out with some really questionable folk at VC, Orin is not a nut." Good news! brandonrg asks why I didn't mention Todd Zywicki. OK, here are two old alicublog posts that touch upon his considerable mendacity.

UPDATE 2. Commenter Vatnisse asks: "Isn't [Conspirator Ilya] Somin the guy that got all pissy and defensive after not scoring all that well on Charles Murray's absurd manliness test?" Why, yes, yes he is ("I would also have achieved a higher score if there were more sports-related questions").

Ann Althouse thinks your humble interlocutor is a "hack" because I lack "the grace to say you know, these guys pretty much are libertarians." Who said they weren't? My disrespect extends to them and to libertarianism, which is just a niche brand of conservatism for people with social anxieties anyway. There's no conflict between their beliefs and those of any other advocate of Maximum Freedom for the Rich.

SHORTER OLE PERFESSER INSTAPUNDIT: I'M NOT NUTS, YOU'RE NUTS!

Behold Glenn Harlan Reynolds' evidentiary standards: At USA Today, he deduces a level of PR damage to the government due to the IRS "scandal" (i.e., the taxmen having the nerve to review Tea Party claims that they weren't political organizations) from the findings of "a tax symposium at Pepperdine Law School." Then he speculates that this directly affects how the American People think about the NSA revelations, which apparently would have been perfectly acceptable to them otherwise. (Of course the large number of commentators who switched from pro-surveillance to anti-surveillance around January 20, 2009 would have had nothing to do with it.) Then:

Spend a little while on Twitter or in Internet comment sections and you'll see a significant number of people who think that the NSA may have been relaying intelligence about the Mitt Romney campaign to Obama operatives, or that Chief Justice John Roberts' sudden about-face in the Obamacare case might have been driven by some sort of NSA-facilitated blackmail.

Unfortunately there's no way to compare this "significant number of people" to the percentage of the population who believe in flying saucers, but I'll bet it's roughly equivalent.

A year ago, these kinds of comments would have been dismissable as paranoid conspiracy theory.

And to normal people they still are. But normal people are not the Perfesser's audience:

But now, while I still don't think they're true, they're no longer obviously crazy. And that's Obama's legacy: a government that makes paranoid conspiracy theories seem possibly sane.

To recap, some people believe crazy shit because Obama has made it believable, and the proof is the crazy shit some people have believed all along. It's a perfect loop of bullshit. Like Salieri with the mediocrities at the end of Amadeus, the Perfesser is absolving the wingnuts.  Did you believe in birtherism? The Whitey Tape? The Hillary Clinton constitutional crisis? That Sarkozy called Obama nuts? That Obama campaign workers beat up Ashley Todd? That Obama apologized for World War II? Wrote a treasonous college thesis? Wanted to make veterans kill themselves? Bill Ayers wrote his book? That he's a Mooslim, or a Muslin? Or a Socialist? And/or a Fascist (indeed, Hitler)? Whatever total nonsense you peddled, it's okay -- because Obama. Now, on to the next wave of hearings over the people the Kenyan Pretender murdered at Benghazi!

IF YOU CELEBRATE MLK DAY BY DENOUNCING AFFIRMATIVE ACTION, YEWWW MIGHT BE A CONSERVATIVE!

On MLK Day -- rightblogger reactions to which we've made a point of following over the years -- it's good to be reminded that Martin Luther King Jr. was, in addition to a great advocate of equality under the law, a committed leftist who supported labor unions, a swift end to the Vietnam War, and several measures against income inequality including a guaranteed basic income for all Americans.

The reason it's good to be reminded of this is that all kinds of crazy fuckers are using the occasion to portray King as a wingnut, mainly because they know denouncing King isn't too hip and they're obliged to interpret the "content of their character" bit to mean that giving black people a break is the worst kind of racism.

At National Review, for example, Roger Clegg and Hans von Spakovsky wish to celebrate the Day with state legislation "outlawing government racial preferences" -- not in the old-fashioned civil-rights sense of Jim Crow laws, but in "the politically correct version that discriminates against whites, and often Asians (particularly in college admissions), by giving preferences to other racial or ethnic groups like blacks and Hispanics." Because if there's one thing that burned Dr. King's butt, it was some black kid getting into college and thus freezing out some deserving honky.

DaTechGuy gives his space over to some pastor who sermonizes:

We all need to be thankful that in the scheme of Providence that men like Pastor Martin Luther King, Jr., President Ronald Regan, and the founder of Prison Fellowship Mr. Charles “Chuck” Colson all utilized their great oratory gifts in a responsible manner.

DaTechGuy post-scripts that if King were alive today "he would be considered a person spouting 'hate speech' by the very people pol that profit off his legacy today" because of his "Orthodox Christianity," which conversion by King I'm not sure I've heard of -- could DaTechGuy be thinking of Rod Dreher?

You can sort of tell where Donald Conkey of the Cherokee (GA) Tribune is going when he refers to "the Negro, as King referred to his people in a day before the term Negro was 'politically incorrect.'" Sure enough, Conkey asserts that King would not be happy with "the directional changes made by his associates shortly after his death. I strongly believe his associates sold out King’s dream to Lyndon Johnston’s Great Society..." If his analysis seems appallingly ignorant of history, please remember he's just trying to defend King from accusations of liberalism. (Also, did you know that "when a white congressman attempted to join [the Congressional Black Caucus] he was refused membership"? That's the real racism right there.)

Representing the libertarian angle, Nick Gillespie writes, "Ending the War on Pot Would Help Complete Martin Luther King's Call for Civil Rights." Glad to see those cowboys have their priorities straight.

Some of the brethren can't be reconstructed. Public nuisance Kathy Shaidle revives some of her Ooga Booga greatest hits and hey, did you know King was an adulterer?  "Happy Martin Luther King Day. Obama Blames Race for His Abysmal Approval Ratings," headlines radio shouter Teri O'Brien. "If it weren’t for his race, this empty suit would still be on a Chicago street corner with his clipboard and bullhorn," says O'Brien. Well, at least she didn't refer to a shoeshine kit, so maybe King was right about the arc of history.

UPDATE. At The Raw Story Scott Kaufman fills in some blanks, and segues into some strange conservative reactions to the epic rants of Seattle Seahawk Richard Sherman. I especially enjoyed that Deadspin included John Podhoretz in "Dumb People Say Stupid, Racist Shit About Richard Sherman."

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the latest rightblogger outreach to women: a bunch of essays about how ugly Lena Dunham is. It's a cinch! The small number of people who know who Lena Dunham is won't we swayed one way of the other, but the ones who don't know who Lena Dunham is will see that conservatives are mad at some woman for making them look at her tits, and that's bound to make an impression.

ANNALS OF THE CULTURE WARS, "LIBERALS LOVE BLACK PEOPLE AND HATE JESUS" EDITION.

Jesus hack Mollie Hemingway:

But the critical reception of [12 Years a Slave] also demonstrates a dramatic change in critics’ appreciation for violence in movies. When my husband and I viewed the movie, I found it almost unbearable to watch. It reminded me of my response to “The Passion of the Christ,” the visceral 2004 film about the suffering and death of Jesus. Both films are very good. Both films are depictions of real people in history. Both films are full not just of violence but violence that must be depicted because it serves the central point. And both films deal profoundly with the effects of human sinfulness...

I wish she'd tell us what she thinks of Pasolini's Salò.

Whereas many claimed they objected to “The Passion of the Christ” on the grounds of the violence it portrayed, many critics also claimed that the violent depiction of slavery was what made “12 Years A Slave” such a great film.

Hemingway thinks the liberal art people only booed The Passion to razz Christians:

...Our society is in general agreement that, apart from homophobia and racism, the only real sin is believing in sin. This creates a climate where a brutal depiction of what Christ suffered is frowned upon.

Similarly, if you liked The Maltese Falcon, you have to love The Adventures of Ford Fairlaine because it's a detective movie, too. If you don't, you're hypocritical and prejudiced against Cursery Rhymes.

Bonus hackery: Hemingway tells us that though the liberal art people stuck up for 12 Years a Slave against Jesus, they are simultaneously against it ("don’t let the bullying from progressive critics or the lame protests from the professionally outraged dissuade you from seeing the film") for some unexplained reason, probably because Mollie Hemingway, a Christian, liked it. Oh, and a moment of what I wanted to believe was intentional comedy:

There was one critic who was favorable toward “Passion” and slammed “Slave.” Yes, it was Armond White.

Alas, Hemingway affects to believe White was kicked out of the NYFCC for siding with Jesus, though in fact he was expelled for bad manners. It took a little training but I guess her hack reflexes are pretty well-trained at this point.

UPDATE. If Hemingway's post isn't snarly enough for you, you can read Ben Shapiro's version ("shows the rampant hypocrisy that is alive and well in Hollywood and in the media").

WHY ARE YOU AFRAID OF ME, BABY-KILLING BITCH?

At National Review, Charles C.W. Cooke explains why buffer zones around abortion clinics are unconstitutional:

Apologists for the measure claim rather anemically that the law is necessary to prevent “harassment,” and they promise that it strikes a reasonable “balance” between respect for free expression and the need to protect visitors from being hassled. McCullen and her lawyers disagree, holding that because the law’s applicability is contingent not on one’s behavior but on one’s speech per se, it is unconstitutional. They are right.

Similarly: What's the deal with restraining orders? What if a guy just wants to talk to his ex -- yeah okay, sometimes things get out of hand, but still, what about the First Amendment?

If anything we need more transparency in the abortion business. A lot of these abortion mills are surrounded with suspicious-looking guards wearing "escort" vests -- they must have something to hide. If I could just follow those murdering sluts right up to the door, I'm sure I can get in there and find out. I'm good with the ladies!

UPDATE. In comments. Formerly_Nom_De_Plume notices one of the crazier quotes from Cooke's column:

...Massachusetts’s law discriminates against citizens not for the manner in which they express themselves but simply for holding a point of view, for praying, or for displaying a protest sign — for exercising one’s right to “walk and talk gently, lovingly, anywhere with anybody,” in the words of [clinic protester] Eleanor McCullen.

"Then," says Nom, "I'm sure Eleanor won't mind if I shadow her as she walks into and out of her church, gently and lovingly talking about how her religion is bullshit. All day every day." For guys like Cooke, the Constitution is just an opportunity for obnoxious thought experiments that never apply to themselves.

SOMETIMES YOU HAVE TO LET THE SUCKERS WIN.

Shorter Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal: After Walgreens, Best Buy, et alia learned some of their customers disapproved of their association with ALEC, they ended that association. What is this, Red China?

Attend the liberal hate crimes Henninger documents:

In December, articles appeared on progressive websites attacking Google, Facebook and Yelp for participating in ALEC's annual conference last year. The Web giants wanted to explore various Internet legal issues with the state legislators. 

And by "explore" he means "let them know how it's gonna go down." But they hadn't counted on someone else sticking their oar in:

A coalition that included the Sierra Club, RootsAction and the Center for Media and Democracy said it outputted 230,000 petition signatures in a "Don't Fund Evil" drive to separate Google from "right-wing extremists" at ALEC, whose sin is "climate denial."

This whole idea of so-called "right-wing extremists" pushing so-called "climate denial" is made up out of a whole cloth of facts.

The Sierra Club's site says Kraft, GE and McDonald's pulled away from ALEC in the past under pressure. To date, none of the Web companies have done so.

 Just like Mao Tse-Tung, these liberals.

...Here's the audio transcript of a radio ad created by ColorOfChange about CVS pharmacies, which supported ALEC: "CVS, when you hear that name, do you think of the law that protected Trayvon Martin's killer? Or laws that suppress the black vote." The ad never ran. But copies of the ad were mailed to CVS, John Deere, HP, Walgreens, Best Buy, BP and a dozen others. All disassociated from ALEC.

This is the Democratic left's modus operandi...

Yeah -- it's called democracy, speaking truth to power! But only of a kind: Since our Elected Representatives are useless, these liberal groups have decided to cut out the middleman and appeal directly to the corporations who own them. It's like serfs bringing their grievances directly to their overlords. Shout-out to the libertarians, this one's for you!

Henninger doesn't approve, though; he calls it "threatening companies that participate in politics with reputational destruction" -- that is, thinking badly of them, and saying so -- which is "the American left's version of Maoist shaming sessions." Why isn't he looking at the big picture, and applauding the fortuitous shift from representative democracy to feudalism? Maybe he's just making it look good; the house can't win every time.

MISS PARKER'S MAGICAL CONCOCTION.

Kathleen Parker, holder of the Roberto Begnini Pulitzer Prize for Commentary, hates feminism enough to engage in weird, lurid public fantasies about its invalidation ("The feminist woman of the left, who burned her bra and insisted that all hear her roar, is today a taupe-ish figure who wonders where things went wrong"), so it was inevitable that she would join the other dumbbells on the marriage-makes-you-rich bandwagon.

Here's my favorite part of her column, from near the end:

Obviously, marriage won’t cure all ills. A single mother could marry tomorrow and she still wouldn’t have a job. But in the War on Poverty, rebuilding a culture that encourages marriage should be part of the arsenal.

Hold on -- marriage won't get you a job? Then how, specifically, does it fight poverty? Does it make you better at picking lotto numbers?

Here is the closest thing to an explanation Parker offers:

...because marriage creates a tiny economy fueled by a magical concoction of love, selflessness and permanent commitment that holds spirits aloft during tough times.

In other words: Misery loves company. Why can't poor people just get a dog instead of a spouse? It would fulfill the "love, selflessness and permanent commitment" part, and cost less to feed.

Oh, right -- anything that might give paupers pleasure would be blocked by Republicans.

I guess all conservatives will get with this program soon enough, even though, in correlation-is-causation terms, marriage is as likely to make you white as it is to make you rich. Poor people who don't want to get married, here's your only hope: When the Republicans come for you, tell them you're gay.

UPDATE. Nancy Derringer, known around these parts as Nancy Nall, was on this last fall:

"That argument is that marriage causes the best outcomes for your children,” [University of Michigan professor Pamela Smock] said. “That if you get people who are poor to marry, it would solve a lot of problems. But things don’t work like that. People who have better economic prospects are more likely to get married. You couldn’t take two poor, unemployable people and marry them and lift them out of poverty."

I thought people knew this, but I guess common sense has gone further out of fashion than I thought.

In comments, JennOfArk: "Apparently Lifetime re-ran Pretty Woman for the umpteenth time this past weekend, and Parker watched it (again) for the umpteenth time...only THIS time, she realized that the movie's plot holds the key to helping every impoverished woman in America improve her lot."

SENEX IRATUS OTD.

Flatus Maximus Victor Davis Hanson saith the sooth on equality, which (you will be unsurprised to hear) he is against.

Millions of Americans have lost the liberty to select their own type of health insurance, purchased on their own volition to best match their own assessments of their particular needs. Obamacare — the federal government’s redistributive effort to equalize health care for all — sought to destroy the liberty of many millions in order to ensure a state-directed sameness in care for all.

Similarly, years before most of you were born, Americans were unilaterally stripped of their freedom to dispose of sewage in their own way. No more just throwing your shit into the river, or on your lawn; fascist protObamas enforced a wearying state-directed sameness of sewer pipes, and thus our liberty was flushed forever!

Also mentioned in the lengthy ululation: "mandated equality," "Sidwell Friends," Obama's "Malibu supporters," "the French Revolution’s grandees, the Soviet nomenklatura, and the EU elite." Plus Hanson compares California to "the Soviet Union and the captive nations of Eastern Europe."

I'm beginning to think the old gasbag is hipper than he looks, and composes these things from cut-up pieces a la Burroughs.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the Chris Christie GWB thing and its interesting side-effect: A Strange New Respect from rightbloggers who find that, RINO or no, he's still no Obama and that's good enough for them.

ANOTHER LIBERTARIAN MARKET FAILURE

Peter Suderman, talking about the GOP's Obamacare strategy, seems disappointed that Republicans have been reluctant to propose sweeping changes to the nation's health care scheme besides Repeal Because Freedom. His Republican sources also complain of it, with (considering the Party's historic obstructionist approach to all things Obama)  breathtakingly transparent insincerity: One of them -- "'We don't have a Republican majority that remembers how to govern and understands how to juggle trade­offs,' one health policy aide complains" -- actually made me laugh out loud.

As you would expect, Suderman gives a favorable hearing to the ideas of libertarian-conservative wonks:

In a 2009 paper, "Yes, Mr. President: A Free Market Can Fix Health Care"...

What'd I tell you?

...[Cato Institute Health Policy Director Michael] Cannon laid out a plan for converting Medicare into a voucher system (he now favors Social Security-style direct payments to enrollees), ending state-based monopolies on both insurance and clinician licensing, capping federal spending on Medicaid through block grants, and eliminating the tax preference for employer-sponsored health care. 

Eliminating that tax preference, which since World War II has allowed employers to purchase health coverage for employees on a tax advantaged basis, would actually result in a substantial tax cut, Cannon argues counter-intuitively.

I'll say it's counterintuitive. So is the rest of it, for those of us who've been trained by decades of experience to hear "ending state-based monopolies," "capping federal spending," etc. as the patter of privatization bunco artists.

If employers cashed out the amount they now pay for health insurance, workers with family coverage would see an average compensation increase of $11,000.

Question for my readers residing in workaday reality: If your boss got a $11,000 windfall, would you expect him to forward it to you?  (These are the same people who'll tell you that if your landlord is absolved of rent control and can charge any rent he likes, he'll lower yours.)

The trick would be to replace that tax preference with the creation of very large health savings accounts-tax-free savings that could be applied toward health purchases. Versions of these accounts exist today, but they are capped at $3,300 for individual coverage and $6,550 for families; Cannon's proposal would dramatically increase the cap, perhaps tripling it, and in the process free thousands in individual income both from taxation and from employer control. The result would be to simultaneously give individuals control of thousands of dollars in compensation now tied up in employer health benefits, while eliminating the government-granted financial advantage of employer-provided coverage. Individuals, and not their employment status, would then dictate health insurance coverage.

And if that worker bee, freed from the necessity of paying into a liberty-restricting group insurance program, finds his car needs a new transmission and his home needs a new boiler, and he doesn't put as much into that savings account as he'd planned, and suddenly gets cancer, it's sad trombone time (though libertarians won't feel sad themselves, because Moochers Have It Coming).

Suderman also talks about last year's government shutdown; he knows it was unpopular and counterproductive, but he doesn't appear to know why. It's simple: The nation may dislike Obamacare, but that doesn't mean they prefer Pay or Die.

THURSDAY MISCELLANY.

How're conservatives reacting to Chris Christie Is An Asshole-gate? James Taranto at the Wall Street Journal:

Worse, the Christie administration's evident abuse of the Port Authority is reminiscent of the Obama administration's abuse of the Internal Revenue Service...

I already checked, guys -- no mention of Benghazi. For that you have to go a few rungs down the ladder to Greta Van Susteren, or to the sub-basement that is Michelle Malkin's alternate-universe Twitter.

Or maybe Breitbart.com -- hang on, this article by Joel B. Pollack is from November. Yet it may be relevant!:

Chris Christie Really Needs Benghazi
Benghazi is Hillary Clinton's most important weakness, no matter whom she faces in the 2016 presidential election. Among Republican contenders, only Chris Christie can claim it as a strength. That's because of his performance during Superstorm Sandy. Whatever his mistakes--i.e. heaping praise on Obama and backing a pork-laden relief bill--his performance was a sharp contrast to Clinton's dereliction of duty during Benghazi.

Has this bullet become any less magic? Then Christie should save himself by demanding a Benghazi investigation at once. It's not like he doesn't have the nerve.*

If you have 11 minutes to spare, this is what Christie's bit about being "misled by a member of my staff" reminds me of:



I guess National Review sent Kevin D. Williamson to Appalachia just so he'd have white welfare cases to harsh on, and thus escape charges of racism. Charges of stupidity will be harder to evade. Williamson admits there are few opportunities for the unfortunate residents of Owsley County, and can't even make the usual specious case that marriage would make the hillbillies rich. So his anti-government-assistance case boils down to 1.) some people have defrauded the system, something you never see investment bankers and other such higher-order beings doing, therefore the system has failed; and 2.) whatever this is supposed to mean:

In effect, welfare has made Appalachia into a big and sparsely populated housing project — too backward to thrive, but just comfortable enough to keep the underclass in place. There is no cure for poverty, because there is no cause of poverty — poverty is the natural condition of the human animal. 

Which Kevin D. Williamson evaded by luck, pluck, and virtue. The rest of you can go fuck yourselves. Liberty!

...The lesson of the Big White Ghetto is the same as the lessons we learned about the urban housing projects in the late 20th century: The best public-policy treatment we have for poverty is dilution. But like the old project towers, the Appalachian draw culture produces concentration, a socio­economic Salton Sea that becomes more toxic every year.

Maybe he means we should evacuate and demolish these poor hill towns, as if they were urban projects, and "dilute" their populations. Maybe send them to Mexico? They better hurry, the authorities may start to get strict about who they let in.

*UPDATE. I should add that I don't think this will negatively affect Christie's Presidential push. That he's an asshole is a large part of his appeal, and there's a whole country full of suckers who, like the folks who hire a hitman, are inclined to believe he'll restrict his viciousness to people they don't like.

UPDATE 2. Ah, here's the libertarian-branded response to Christie from Ed Krayewski at Reason:

The petty, retaliatory nature of the lane closure reminded me of something the Obama White House might do, something like closing down open-air spaces or websites because of a partial government shutdown or even getting Tea Party groups audited.

Refresh my memory: I seem to recall that libertarians were once perceived to be something different from conservatives. Anyone remember how that got started?

UPDATE 3. I'm even more convinced now that Christie will skate, notwithstanding his refusal to accept my Benghazi advice.

Meanwhile we have this from the Daily Caller:

As liberals support Christie during scandal, conservatives abandon him

The evidence: Guys like Erick Erickson who consider Christie a RINO continue to bay for his blood, "Democratic mayors in New Jersey who endorsed Christie’s re-election are also defending Christie," and David Axelrod thinks Christie will skate -- like me, so I guess I'm also part of Christie's liberal love-wave. I assure you it's inadvertent!

UPDATE 4. Meanwhile from the other side of the bullshit rainbow, The Washington Free Beacon:

U.S. Attorney Probing Christie Has Donated Thousands to Democrats

I tell ya, guys, we gotta get our story (as told by rightwing operatives) straight.

FORCED TO DRAW BENEFITS: A CONSERVATIVE'S HEARTBREAKING CONFESSION!

Remember the lady who was mortified Obama gave her free Medicaid, because stigma? We can now top that.

At National Review Jillian Kay Melchior describes how her own experience of unemployment benefits proved to her that "extending [unemployment benefits] contributes to the underlying economic problem." Now I have to say, I was hoping at the start that she'd try to excite her audience by telling us how she used your taxpayers dollars to buy Cadillacs and T-bone steaks. But alas, Melchior had a miserable time on UI. And it's easy to see why -- she doesn't seem cut out for the vagaries of everyday life:

I lost my job in January 2011. It was my first permanent job out of college, and losing it was mentally and financially traumatic. I spent the cab ride home, box in hands, fighting tears, and then worrying that I should have taken the subway instead because taxis are expensive and my income source had just vanished.

I think my first "permanent" job in New York was as a messenger, and while losing it was financially disadvantageous, I wasn't "traumatized" so much as momentarily hassled, then stoked that I didn't have to get up early the next day. And I wasn't even getting unemployment! That would have made it an awesome day. (I haven't collected UI since the early 90s. That's how deep my devotion to the free market goes!)

Anyway, Uncle Sam offered Melchior the dole and she accepted it as Fantine in Les Miz accepted a life of prostitution: "The Internet consensus is that unemployment isn’t welfare," she chokes, "but it felt like it to me." So different from this hell I'm living/So different now from what it seemed!

Melchior found out that the lousy benefits weren't enough to live on -- and yet insists they were "a disincentive to work." How? Because when she got freelance assignments, UI would cut back on her benefits! In other words, if someone else paid her money, the government gave her less money, instead of letting her accept fixed benefits and keep whatever she earned on top of it. Here I sympathize with Melchior and look forward to her next essay, which I expect will endorse Martin Luther King's national minimum income plan. It's only fair!

Plus, humiliating as that was, Melchior was also forced to observe the law when she claimed benefits, which she counts a further humiliation -- "figuring all this out felt shamefully like working the system," much like when employers force her to take sexual harassment seminars and it makes her feel like a rapist.

As you might imagine, it all worked out for Melchior: "In the end, I took the risk and did as much freelance writing as I could manage. It paid off — in fact, it led to a job" -- Yay wingnut welfare! But the experience scarred her, and she wants to spare other broke people the same ordeal: "A safety net can fast become a trap," she tells the folks to whom she would deny money for food and shelter, "and I wonder how many unemployed people who could be somehow engaged in the economy are waiting things out, taking their benefits and avoiding the risk of effort while they wait for something to open up."

Let her wonder; such are the mysteries of the human heart. What I wonder is why Melchior didn't show the courage of her convictions, refuse to take the benefits, and proudly starve in the street.

THE MARRIAGE-MAKES-YOU-RICH ARGUMENT AGAINST THE MINIMUM WAGE.

In yet another anti-minimum-wage* article at National Review, Andrew Biggs:

I don’t believe I’m overstating things much in saying that when the progressive man-on-the-street sees something bad happen to one person – say, low wages – he believes it’s very likely someone else’s fault.

Biggs gets points for admitting liberals can be men-on-the-street, and  not exclusively pointed-headed college professors, union thugs, and homosexual activists, as they are normally portrayed at National Review. But as to that "someone else's fault"... wait for it:

Progressives’ job, in this mindset, is to find that person-at-fault and make him pay. In this case, progressives blame the employers of low-wage workers, who they assume could easily afford to pay more but choose not to. 

Now, progressives could make their emotional impulses consistent with economic reality by placing the blame on, say, liberal social policies that encourage single-parent families...

Turns out it is someone else's fault, but the culprit isn't McDonalds or Wal-Mart -- it's Hugh Hefner! Also "teachers' unions."

The marriage-makes-you-rich argument explained here, here, here, and especially here.

*UPDATE. It should be noted that Biggs doesn't mention abolishing the minimum wage, but that's what the Greg Mankiw article on which he based his own is about ("a good case can be made for eliminating Plan B entirely by repealing the minimum wage"). For the moment they're playing it cagey, lest the "progressive" "man on the street" catch on. There must be more of us than I thought.

ANNALS OF THE CULTURE WARS, PART 432,239.

I hadn't looked at Ben Shapiro's Truth Revolt (which Breitbart.com told us in October would "WILL MAKE MSM 'PAY' FOR LIES, CHANGE 'NATURE OF MEDIA'") before now. Right out of the gate:

Also, there's an item devoted to telling us what Shapiro said on Fox News. Sample:

...[Megyn] Kelly moved on to a another quote from the piece that posits a society where people were paid for doing only what they were passionate about, like painting murals. When Kelly asked who would pay the millennials for painting their murals, Shapiro turned the conversation to the inherently destructive philosophy of Keynes.

Shapiro: This is the whole thing, passing the buck to the next generation that doesn’t exist yet. And John Maynard Keynes was fond of saying that in the long run we’re all dead. This is that philosophy taken to the extreme: In the short run we’re all dead, so we might as well all paint murals. Who’s going to clean the toilets? Who’s going to do the actual work that needs to be done in this country? Maybe this is why some of these folks want open borders.

The Mexicans clean toilets, millenials paint murals, and Shapiro yammers on Fox News. Maybe Shapiro will explain how he would redistribute these responsibilities in Part 2. I'm guessing Shapiro won't wind up wielding a brush of any kind.

Rule of three demands:

Vogue Mag Lowers Standards
‘Girls’ star Lena Dunham to feature on cover despite untraditional body type

No clue whether, before he wrote this, the author saw the recent Acculturated essay called "Why Conservatives Should Cheer On HBO’s Girls" (short vs.: The characters are dissatisfied with their lives and since they're liberals the reason must be liberalism). Despite her untraditional body type, I would bet that since the 2012 election Dunham has gotten enough hate-wanks out of conservative men to float a National Review cruise out of drydock.

UPDATE. In comments, Big_Bad_Bald_Bastard:

Leaving aside the fact that one's body type is a matter of biology, not tradition, a perusal of the large "History of Art" textbook on the shelf reveals more depictions of women who are built like Lena Dunham than like Kate Moss. A quick stroll through the neighborhood finds me encountering more women who are built like Lena Dunham than like Stephanie Seymour. If I didn't know any better, I'd swear that Mr Shapiro has never seen a female body up close.

IDENTITY POLITICS.

John J. Miller, the genius who gave us The 50 Greatest Conservative Rock Songs, today informs us,

Google honors a conservative today: Zora Neale Hurston.

Well, Hurston was against Brown v. Board of Education, so I guess they have something in common at that.

It's nice to see them celebrating a black person who isn't insane. But it's sad that politics is all that can animate them to do so. In one of the supporting documents for Miller's case, John McWhorter writes:

Hurston’s modern fan base doesn’t know quite what to do with all this. “I think we are better off if we think of Zora Neale Hurston as an artist, period—rather than as the artist/politician most black writers have been required to be,” [Alice] Walker writes... Sure -- but if Hurston had been more inclined to sing about what happens to a raisin in the sun, one suspects that Walker would have had no trouble celebrating her as an “artist/politician.”

Really? I guess McWhorter so judges because he figures everyone else must be like him, counting artists like captured checkers for their cause. But we haven't all been made into Zhdanovites yet.

UPDATE. Commenter D. Johnston dipped into the support docs and found "in a nutshell, McWhorter's case is based around the fact that Hurston didn't believe that black people should take credit for things other, unrelated black people did. See? She rejected identity politics!" Supporting a policy is a political decision, emotions and behavior are not. I don't think being self-sufficient is any guarantee of how you'll vote. I've spent my whole life working in the private sector, yet I'm far more liberal than anyone on wingnut welfare.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...Part 2 of my 10 Dumbest Rightblogger Ideas listicle. I know, but it had to be done and I was out of cat pictures.

UPDATE. I was running long, and so much could have been added, particularly from National Review, which seems to have gone in big-time for insane gender-based gibberish lately. There's the outraged report that "[Rachel] Maddow is part of the new matriarchy running NBC News behind the scenes," for example;  Victor Davis Maximus Super Hanson's extremely weird paen to reality-show stars ("A big gut can add gravitas to the moonshiner’s biceps in a way impossible to achieve at the gym"); and David French telling his no doubt receptive readers that liberal males are all pussies "walking on eggshells, dating women and living in cultures that are constantly calling out any kind of behavior subjectively perceived as 'male' or oppressive... liberal men often lack a distinctively masculine purpose." If National Review gets any more butch it'll turn into the Ramrod.

UPDATE 2. In comments, JennOfArk: "Nah. I've seen those guys. If anything, National Review is the Mine Shaft, not the Ramrod."

AND THE WOLF THAT SHALL KEEP IT MAY PROSPER.

(Spoilers throughout.)

By now you've heard about and perhaps experienced the "hyperkinetic" The Wolf of Wall Street. There's plenty of energy there, sure, and plenty of the traditional Scorsese sweeps, swoops, and spins, giving the film a delirious momentum that social critics believe will turn impressionable children or morons into white-collar criminals.

They have a point. The movie doesn't have a crime-doesn't-pay message at all. The crime does pay. What it has to say is much more chilling than that.

The movie at first seems to follow a familiar Scorsese pattern: There's a central character who's tightly bonded to family figures (blood kin or not), and he's doing something extraordinary (usually at least somewhat illegal) that can't go on forever. The formula isn't strict -- in The Departed, for example, the hero is an undercover quasi-cop acting as a mobster, and his "family" ties are mainly professional -- but there's always a sense that the hero is obligated by something bigger than business interests, and that those ties have something to do with his fate.

In The Wolf of Wall Street, the members of Jordan Belfort's crew aren't relatives, but they're family. When Belfort has to pick himself up off Wall Street after the crash of 1987, and decides to build an empire from penny stocks in Long Island, he chooses these guys because they have what, in his vision, it takes to build it: They're basically street hustlers who know that the answer to "sell me this pen" is to make the mark need the pen. He doesn't mention it (though Scorsese underlines it), but they're also stupid, and that's important too.

The money starts to roll in and the family gels. The guys become fiercely loyal to Belfort and to one another -- except when they get too pissed off or fucked up; boys will be boys and, like I said, they're stupid, though increasingly rich. They enact affectionate rituals to strengthen and affirm their bonds, including nicknames, hugs, ass-pats, and declarations of bro, brah, and brother, as well as photogenic orgies.

This kind of behavior is familiar from the goombahs of previous Scorsese movies, but there's a difference in the way the bond is formed here. It isn't brought over from Sicily. It's not a bond of work or shared duty, either, exactly. It's all based on a sales pitch. Belfort builds the bond out of nothing -- a magic nothing, a line of bullshit.

Now, all the guys know about the bullshit; it's part of what makes them giddy about their success. There's an amazing early scene in which the crew, still in their garage days, watch Belfort reel in a sucker via speakerphone while pantomiming a sex act that spells out every stage of what he's doing to the mark. The guys are ecstatic, they can't stay still or shut up, they're like little kids who just learned to swear. They might be excited about making money, but they're bananas for making it like this.

And they'll go to the wall to keep it up. Which is important, because if any of them felt he could do better and went to another firm to try this shit, that'd break the spell real fast. Stratton Oakmont is as insular as the Cosa Nostra -- though occasionally they mob up with folks from the straight world, who will enter their world and even endure some shit to make some money.

As a reward for their loyalty, Belfort offers his family a very, very nice living: money, drugs, glamour, laughs. But --

You know, I was just about to say it's about more than money. But that isn't true. These guys just think it is.

DiCaprio is great in the title role, but great in a specific and deliberately limited way. His opening pitch is pure candy, a promise of excitement to come. He says "I love drugs" as if he's talking about rock-climbing -- he's proud of it and invites you to share this awesome high. In fact all his pitches are as good. They might not be as fresh after a while, but you still feel his excitement.

But you never learn anything about him. You don't learn about his character. What eventually becomes inescapable is that there is no character. And if there were, Belfort wouldn't show it to you because he's pitching all the way. Every second.

I wouldn't have thought this even halfway through the movie, and it didn't completely hit me until after it was over. Because the logic of the narrative, enforced by hundreds of movies that look something like this one, put my focus on the forming of the bonds, which made me think of Belfort as a human being, a leader -- leaders are restrained, opaque, but they have to be, right? Leaders may be distant and square-jawed and steely-eyed, but that doesn't mean they're not human, right? Belfort's guys are like his platoon, his posse, his team. They come up together, I thought, and they by God go down together.

Except they don't. "I ratted them all out," Belfort tells us near the end. In Scorsese terms it's an amazingly tossed-off betrayal. It's not like Henry Hill, down to "$3200 for a lifetime... not even enough to pay for the coffin" and throwing in the towel in Goodfellas. This is an afterthought.

Belfort was ready to rat them from day one. *

Belfort doesn't have a character, but he does have appetites. He likes all kinds of drugs, all kinds of good times, all kinds of sex; explaining his interest in the Duchess of Bay Ridge who becomes his second wife, which is intense enough that he throws his first marriage over for it, he says they share "interests," and this is illustrated by Belfort snorting coke off her tits in a limo. In another scene he acts as if he's literally abject before the Duchess' pussy. Maybe at that moment he is. But he's always got someone else. He's never without options.

One could spin one's wheels wondering why he's like this, what's missing in the guy's life that he's so limited. But who's going to care about that when there's all this sex and wealth and fun going on? Belfort's marks inside and outside Stratton Oakmont sure didn't. And neither did I while I was watching.

That's what the movie's about.

These scenes of excess dazzle, whether you find the behavior cheering or nauseating. But so do some slower scenes, in a queasier way. For example, there's the sitdown Belfort arranges with two FBI agents on his yacht -- shot simple as pie -- that shows how absolutely, self-assuredly devoted to the con he is; it's excruciating, not because you expect him to lose, but because you can't imagine the balls it would take to do this.

And there's one that does get energetic after a while, but the run-up is very patient. Belfort's gotten the word; cut a deal with the SEC, abandon the company, and everything will go easy for him. Halfway through an uncharacteristically mournful speech to a depressed staff, he suddenly tells them he'd be a hypocrite if he left, and that he's decided not to do it; he's going to stay with the company.

Now, throughout the whole trouble part of Belfort's story, you may wonder: Does he miscalculate? Maybe baiting the FBI was a bad idea. Maybe his feelings are running away with him. Maybe he isn't as much in control as he thinks. This decision to stay with Stratton -- isn't that pride taking the hero down, like in all the old stories?

That misses the point. For Belfort there may be reversals, but there's no fall. Why does he do what he does? Does Belfort have the same weakness for power that he has for pussy? As we saw with pussy, there's always an alternative. Though it seems at the time an absolutely insane idea, it turns out the (pretty soft) prison time Belfort gets for his outrageous decision isn't much more than what he could have expected if he'd played ball -- due to the trim to his sentence for ratting out his friends. A winner never quits.

When he reverses field in that meeting, no one knows this. And he does something remarkable before he reverses. (In that pantomime, this would be where he massages the clit.) He tells the room, in a heartbreaking voice, about the firm's first female broker, Kimmie Belzer, about how at the dawn of Stratton she came to him as a single mother and was desperate enough to request an advance on salary, which Belfort of course gave her with extra "because I believed in you." He tears up, she tears up, everyone tears up. And when Belfort announces his turnaround the crowd goes wild, crying, screaming, and, for an unnervingly long time, wordlessly chanting as they beat their chests like tribesmen.

For everyone in the room, this is more than the truth -- it's what they believe in. It's the heroism of daring greatly, reaching for the stars, shooting for the moon. It's about believing in oneself and believing in each other. It's personal achievement and it's leaving no one behind. It's loyalty. It's family. It's, we all like to think, America.

It's bullshit.

When Belfort finishes his prison time, he's on the road as a sales trainer, in Auckland. He's introduced to an audience by a sleazy MC as a "motherfucker," which is supposed to be a compliment. We only see the start of Belfort's pitch. His face is a mask; lighting emphasizes DiCaprio's slit-like eyes and mouth. He comes into the audience and confronts individual members with the "sell me this pen" trick we saw him use on his original crew. The audience, it appears, is largely comprised of South Asian immigrants who watch Belfort anxiously. The dream he's selling has made it all the way to the other side of the world.

This is where we came in.

Every craft aspect is first-rate, including Scorsese's taste in music, especially "Cast My Fate to the Wind." Jonah Hill does the Scorsese motormouth as well as anyone. Margot Robbie is perfectly vacuous as the Duchess, and thus a perfect foil for Belfort. Kudos to Bob Shaw, Chris Shriver, and Ellen Christiansen who give us bad taste without taking easy shots at the era because 1.) that's harder and 2.) taste this bad is timeless. And Thelma Schoonmaker should be on Mount Rushmore.

*(If you've seen the movie, you may be wondering: What about the note he passes Donnie in the sushi restaurant? I think it just wasn't time for Belfort to pull the trigger yet. Early in the movie Belfort tells the crew: first one to talk loses. Short cons are good but long cons keep your options open.)

ONE'S GOOD; TWO'LL GET YOU OFF.

I guess I don't have to tell you about David Brooks' stay-in-school-don't-do-drugs column, and assume most of you are of the same mind about it. However, let us spare a moment for an outlier or two -- like former National Review drone David Freddoso, writing at Conservative Intelligence Briefing. which seems to be some kind of Young Fogey clubroom reeking of chrism and nocturnal emissions. So what'll it be, young gents -- Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, or --

What would Aquinas say about legalizing weed?

No, come back -- well, actually, we can't blame you for running. Freddoso's okay with legal weed, unlike stupid Big Gummint liberals:

You wouldn’t know it from the way some of our politicians talk and legislate, but government doesn’t exist for the sake of making us all the best possible competition for China, or to press us single-mindedly toward whatever it deems to be the moral pinnacle at any particular moment (ahem).

Anyone who's totalitarian enough to want universal health care will be a drag about weed, amiright? Oh, and if any wingnuts out there think this Freddoso fellow is pushing the wrong kind of libertarianism, don't worry:

Brooks’ smaller error, I believe, is his assertion that the states legalizing pot are “encouraging” its use. I’m not necessarily saying they made the right choice, but I don’t think this follows. This isn’t like gay marriage...

Both Brooks and Freddoso to be "encouraged" into lockers immediately.

UPDATE. Oh Jesus, I forgot Kathryn J. Lopez:

I’d probably be less dismayed by the Colorado move if we were falling over modern-day Rembrandts.

Not unrelatedly, I just got done reading Instapundit Glenn Reynolds’ new book, The New School...

Don't bother, guys, the link doesn't make it any clearer. Nice try, K-Lo, but Buñuel remains my favorite Catholic surrealist.

WELL-BEGUN IS HALF DONE.

Bill de Blasio is inaugurated. Watchman, what of the right?

Some sheeple thought the French Revolution got out of hand when they started beheading people, but Goldberg knows the prevention of perceived cruelty to animals is how all these holocausts begin. Now if the MTA goes on strike and he can't find a cab, how's he going to pick up five pounds of pastrami for his midnight snack?

Turns out this tweet is actually from the day before de Blasio basically told the richies the picnic's over. But don't worry, some of the brethren covered the actual installation, like Crazy Dave Horowitz's FrontPageMag:

De Blasio Inaguration Featured Prayer by Pro-Farrakhan Muslim Imam

And The Daily Caller:

New York City is a ‘plantation,’ says de Blasio inauguration preacher

So far this new year is going great.

UPDATE. Kudos also to Ed Krayewski, whose inauguration post at Reason is mainly a ploy to remind people that de Blasio's daughter used to take drugs. I predict the absorption of libertarianism into the wingnut mother ship will be one of the big stories of 2014.

UPDATE 2. Oh how did I miss Our Lady of Kathryn J. Lopez's take on the horsey-carriage story:

No Horse-Drawn Carriages in a City Missing Baby Carriages

...If we’re going to care so much about horses, how about confronting the abysmally high abortion rates in the Empire State...

Nice try, but if you really want to tug heartstrings I'd suggest a "Stop Everything and Watch These Embryos Beg For Life" slideshow at BuzzFeed.

UPDATE 3. Samuel Gonzalez, whose raging hard-on for de Blasio has been noted here before, rips the lid off the real scandal: "Comrade De Blasio tightly restricts reporters at inauguration... This is just the tip of the iceberg of how secretive the de Blasio regime will be." At first I thought Gonzalez meant de Blasio was keeping reporters from physically seeing the inauguration, possibly using mind-rays, and that all the news reports I'd read had been smuggled out of  City Hall as samizdat; but it turns out de Blasio's staff told a bunch of reporters to fuck off, which is what Hitler Stalin did. Can't wait for the first major crime of the year to be reported as de Blasio's legacy.

UPDATE 4. At National Review John Fund closes his inauguration report by yammering about the now-defunct ACORN, whose dead hand he portrays shoving de Blasio into office. But he blames the communist New York voters, too, for having the temerity to show more affection toward their new mayor than toward the old one:

Bill Clinton then rose and tried to strike a little balance. But the crowd was having none of it. When he praised retiring mayor Bloomberg for leaving New York “stronger and healthier” after twelve years in office, there was dead silence. The cheers were saved for de Blasio...

Gasp! They assaulted Bloomberg with silence, rather than showing him the proper deference by calling him "Nanny" as National Review customarily does. I suppose if they'd booed him, it would have been an assault on free speech.

UPDATE 5. Comments are as ever a joy, and don't worry, several of our readers have already made that joke about the baby carriages and Park Slope.