FRIDAY ROUND-THE-HORN.

•   The imbecility of the Sony/North Korea thing could not achieve full ripeness without a contribution from Jonah Goldberg. He talks about the 1940s, when Jack Kirby and Joe Simon, the creators of Captain America, were getting menaced by New York Nazis, and Fiorello La Guardia phoned them to pledge his support. Alas, New York's current mayor has disappointed Goldberg:

New York mayor Bill de Blasio didn’t call the management of Landmark Theaters in New York, where Sony Pictures was slated to premiere The Interview, and say, “The city of New York will see that no harm will come to you.” He didn’t say much of anything at all.

1.) I wonder if Goldberg called de Blasio's office to confirm this. 2.) I can imagine Landmark receiving such a call and saying, "Thanks a lot, Mayor! Wait'll I tell the management of Sony Pictures that you'll ring the theater with cops if they release the picture -- that ought to change their minds about cyberterrorist threats!" 3.) Doesn't Goldberg know that La Guardia smashed pinball machines, and was therefore a Liberal Fascist? Farrrrrt.

•   Oh Jesus, Goldberg just sent out his G-file email on the same subject. It's not on the internet yet, so allow me to treat you to a key passage:

The collective U.S. response to North Korea’s assault on Sony has been disgusting and dispiriting. I don’t think we should bomb North Korea over this... but the correct response is to flip Kim Jong-un the bird. What form that bird-flipping would take is open to debate.

Open to debate?

I’d like it if the TV networks all ran The Interview at the same time.

 Yeah, let's have a debate about what the nets run. Didn't this guy write a book called Liberal Fascism?

I’d like Barack Obama to call the leaders of the House and Senate to a private screening of The Interview at the White House, just like Woodrow Wilson did with Birth of a Nation.

Wilson, the biggest Liberal Fascist of them all! Goldberg is becoming a National Greatness Conservative, I guess. Wait, it gets betterworse:

Obama’s conduct in this episode has been better than others, but not very good. This is the kind of moment great politicians seize.

"What? Hollywood's making a sequel to Arthur? I'm still president, Mommy, let's nationalize Warner Brothers."

It’s the kind of moment they pray will fall into their lap. First of all, short of C.H.U.D.s, there’s really no better enemy than the North Korean regime. The Left can’t really shout racism about hating on the Norks...

I never thought I'd say this, but I thought this sort of who-would-win-in-a-fight-between-Axl-Rose-and-a-blade-of-grass gibberish was beneath Goldberg. But then, ours is an age of new lows.

•   Michael Coren at Breitbart.com:

AS OBAMA WAVERS, CANADA’S HARPER IS THE TRUE LEADER OF NORTH AMERICAN VALUES

"North American values?" This is weaker than that "Anglosphere" shit.

The Conservative leader has been in office for more than eight years now and his response to the terror attacks was entirely typical. Firm, resolute, controlled, slightly boring but utterly uncompromising.

Boring and uncompromising -- aw, but ain't that North America?

While opposition leaders and liberal newspapers were reluctant to even describe the crimes as terrorism, Harper used the word repeatedly and spoke of the need to combat this darkness internationally as well as domestically. Indeed, along with Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbot, Harper has led the world in candour concerning Islamist aspirations and the need to affirm western values.

Apparently Harper says "terror" and "Islamicism" a lot, which is why a Mountie can just roll up in ISIS territory drinking a Brador and no one can touch him. Also he's "the first leader to officially boycott Hamas," and thinks "Canada should not have to pay fines and be punished for their environmental policies," and is shutting down Canada's socialized medicine program -- kidding about that last one, guys, but though Coren doesn't approve of everything Harper does, "it’s liberals and socialist who most despise him," and after all isn't trolling what North American Values are all about?

FUCK KIM JONG UN, AND FUCK YOU.

David Atkins is right: It wasn't "Hollywood" or America who pulled The Interview due to North Korean pressure, it was Sony, a multinational corporation that, like any other, values shareholder interest waaaaaay more than free speech.  Of course conservatives see it differently, and affect to believe the capitulation has something to do with campus speech codes or some shit. At National Review, Charles C. W. Cooke:

Sadly, one cannot help but see in this response some faint echoes of another, disheartening development: to wit, our present tendency to accommodate the thin-skinned and the intolerant and to permit their professed discomfort to interfere with our public debate.

Oh, cannot one?

In our schools, in the media, and in all of our political arenas, we have of late become accustomed to kowtowing to hecklers, to fleeing from anything controversial, and to treating the outrage du jour as if it were representative of anything more substantial than rank self-indulgence and the desire to silence dissent.

Speak for yourself, limey. In the same venue, Michael Auslin:

The truth is, we’ve been heading this way for a long time, starting with our response to Islamist assaults on those whom they believe blaspheme Mohammed. Now, we’re moving to another level.

Who the fuck is "we"? I've been blaspheming that fuck Mohammed for years. I have no trouble telling Kim Jon Un to get stuffed either. (I don't have time to draw a cartoon of him right now, but if I did I would make him look fat and ugly. Pay tribute to my heroism, America!)

Capitalism doth make cowards of us all, but conservatives prefer to blame liberals because we're "politically correct" (i.e., polite to people with fewer privileges than ourselves). When a corporate board thought they'd rather not have Brendan Eich and his anti-gay cooties representing their company, liberals got the blame. When a TV network wanted some of the racist stank to wear off Paula Deen before they put her before the public again, ditto. When the NBA pushed out Donald Sterling, ditto; NFL Rice Peterson ditto. It's not just or even mainly because they're wired to pin every bad thing that happens to liberalism; it's also because they believe that the market is God and money His grace, and can't stand to see it proven otherwise.

You know what else? Every one of these fuckers who brings up The Great Dictator would, given the chance, have joined the red-baiters who kicked Chaplin out of America.

UPDATE. In comments, D Johnston: "I'm thinking that December -- the month we remember how Saint Bill O'Reilly saved Christmas -- is perhaps not the best time for conservatives to complain about a 'tendency to accommodate the thin-skinned.'"

JESUS HATES YOU.

I don't mean to write so much about torture but Jesus, conservatives sure are covering themselves in glory with this, huh? At National Review, Deroy Murdock -- once considered a libertarian, if you can believe it, despite his history of torture advocacy -- did a yay-torture column that had so much 9/11 in it that Rudolph Giuliani filed a trademark infringement suit. (Murdock also uses the mildest descriptions of what happened -- e.g. "blowing cigarette or cigar smoke into a detainee’s face" -- rather than the killing and broken bones stuff, and omits the torture of innocents altogether, so I can't even give him Cheney points for bare-faced evil -- like most of his fellow torture fans, he wants readers to wish it into the cornfield and denounce liberals for thinking bad thoughts about Anthony.)

Speaking of Jesus, from D.C. McAllister at The Federalist here's what may be a new low:

Yes, Christians Can Support Torture
Majorities of Christians support the use of torture in some instances. And they’re not bad Christians for doing so.

I'm not even kidding. McAllister smacks down some wussy "pastor" who claims it isn't Christian to chain people to the ceiling, keep them awake for days on end, and rape them with syringes:

He states in a “PS” that he originally wrote, “You cannot be a Christian and support torture.” He took out “a” probably because he received a lot of backlash, and rightly so. So he qualified it: “You cannot be Christian and support torture. . . . Can you support torture and go to heaven? Maybe. Can you support torture and be Christlike? No.”

Zahnd can try to disingenuously snake his way out of his own wording, but it’s obvious he’s calling people’s Christianity into question, and that’s what he meant when he initially wrote the post. But even with the qualifier, he is judging 79 percent of evangelicals in America and 78 percent of Catholics (along with 68 percent of all Americans, according to a recent poll)—who say torture can be justified.

How dy'ya like that, Mr. Pastor? The overwhelming majority of Americans say "Give us Barabbas!"

I expect next we'll see Jesus paraphernalia that shows the Prince of Peace giving the Abu Ghraib thumbs-up.

SCRAPING BOTTOM.

At New York, Jonathan Chait offers this assessment of Dick Cheney defending torture on TV:

The host, Bret Baier, asked Cheney about Bush’s reported discomfort when told of a detainee’s having been chained to a dungeon ceiling, clothed only in a diaper, and forced to urinate and defecate on himself. “What are we supposed to do? Kiss him on both cheeks and say ‘Please, please, tell us what you know’?” Cheney said... 

Here, finally, was the brutal moral logic of Cheneyism on bright display. The insistence by his fellow partisans on averting their eyes from the horrible truth at least grows out of a human reaction. Cheney does not even understand why somebody would look away. His soul is a cold, black void.

OK, take a second and try to imagine how the lowest sort of hack might respond to this. You probably envision sputterings about 9/11, and Jonathan S. Tobin of Commentary does supply those. But his real achievement -- one I confess I couldn't have predicted -- is to reduce the issue to one of style, and to claim Cheney's opponents are not disgusted by his defense of practices denounced by civilization for centuries, but by Cheney's balls. Here is a man who, when confronted with shackled, raped, broken-legged innocents, looks them in the eye and says "sucks to be you," and liberals are too lame to appreciate it:

The discussion about torture reminds us of the qualities that always annoyed his opponents most about Cheney. It’s not just that he does things they hate, it’s his air of defiance in which he doesn’t even accept the premise of the questions posed to him that makes them think he is evil... 

Chait’s argument rests on the notion that even if you thought torture might be necessary, the decent thing to do is to act shocked or horrified by the ill treatment of even the bad guys of al-Qaeda. Cheney won’t play that game...

Try to imagine defending a sullen, unrepentant murderer thus: Ooh, you're just mad at Dick because he's not all [high feminine voice] "I'm so sorry I gut-ripped that old man with a letter opener." Well, he won't play that game! The defense rests! 

Whatever they're paying Tobin, it's not enough.

WHERE THEY'RE COMING FROM.

To those of you who worry that mainstream attention to the con artist Charles C. Johnson will damage the reputation and efficacy of journalism, I have to say you're waaaaaay late, and submit in evidence this Ole Perfesser Instapundit post from today in its entirety:

WHAT’S SAD IS THAT IN THE OBAMA ERA IT’S ENTIRELY PLAUSIBLE: Matt Drudge says spending bill passed because NSA has ‘dirt’ on John Boehner.  

Matt Drudge of the influential Drudge Report news aggregation site expressed discontent over a federal spending bill that passed with votes from both Republicans and Democrats in the House.

The $1.1 trillion spending bill that runs through September 2015 is now up for a vote in the Democratically-led Senate. Many conservatives, including Drudge, are upset that the bill funds both Obamacare and President Obama’s immigration executive orders.   

“Obama got EVERYTHING,” Drudge tweeted Friday. “NSA dirt on Boehner must be incredible. Chicago wins.” 

I’ve seen similar speculation about John Roberts in the ObamaCare case. Sad what this country has become under the Obama Machine.

This isn't just some nut, The Perfesser is king of the rightbloggers and a regular contributor to mainstream journalism outfits, and here you see him not only promoting a ridiculous conspiracy theory out of Matt Drudge, but limning it with his own bullshit.

The damage to journalism has not only been long-lived, but deliberate. The point was always to obviate any distinction between the verifiable or even believable and boob bait.

It's a different kind of problem from the bias, if that's the word for it, found in the mainstream media. The Rolling Stone/UVA story got caught by the Washington Post's Erik Wemple and others, the whole world came to know about it, and much soul-searching was seen over it in the journalism community. Even if they were insincere, they at least had to pretend. Conservative crap-merchants, however, don't soul-search. They'll dish anything, and their audiences, convinced that everything the MSM says is a lie, takes the absence of these stories from the big papers and nets as proof that their heroes are telling the truth the Lamestream won't dare to print.

This has provided a fertile environment for hucksters to throw shit, and for a loyal audience to not even care if it sticks. Johnson's just a logical mutation of that. While most of these guys just duck out of the way of the debunkings and negative attention their stories receive, Johnson welcomes the attention and makes himself the story. He's standing on the shoulders of midgets; good thing for him there's such a lot of them.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

The new National Anthem.

•   I have treated this week's torture revelations as comedy, which is how I treat most of the buffoonery within my jurisdiction. Also as usual, the comedy is of a grim sort because the stupidity and venality of my subjects has far-reaching effects on real people, whether it's the snake-oil salesmen who want to rid us of national health care for our own good, or the psychopaths who have rushed to defend the gruesome torture of individuals who (it cannot be said often enough, or by these psychos at all) were often innocent and were in any case human beings. I feel bad for the victims, but also -- and I hope you will excuse my unchecked privilege in saying so  -- I feel just plain bad. When I was boy, back in the days of the vo-de-ville and horseless carriages, they told me ours wasn't the kind of country that did that. It's been a long time since I believed it -- hell, even a trimmer like Peter Beinart doesn't believe it -- but I have to admit it shook me a bit to see nearly every conservative in America run to proclaim hell yeah, we torture, what's wrong with torture? At least they trouble to lie about racism -- the tribute virtue pays to vice and all that -- but they're proud of torture. The days when children saw their country in Sands of Iwo Jima is over, and the day when they see it in Starship Troopers is upon us. Better hang onto yourself; in this country morality isn't even valued as a loss leader anymore.

•  Oh holy jumping Jesus, Jonah Goldberg is writing about torture. After several grafs of what-is-torture from someone who probably would start naming names if you took away his appetizer, Goldberg offers this rhetorical masterpiece:

One of the great problems with the word “torture” is that it tolerates no ambiguity. It is a taboo word, like racism or incest. Once you call something torture, the conversation is supposed to end. It’s a line no one may cross.

Like incest! Sure, I'm fucking my daughter, but let's talk shades of gray. For one thing, she's really sexy.

The problem is that the issue isn’t nearly so binary. Even John McCain — a vocal opponent of any kind of torture — has conceded that in some hypothetical nuclear ticking-time-bomb scenario, torture might be a necessary evil. His threshold might be very high, but the principle is there nonetheless.

This is similar to Goldberg's stock everyone-believes-in-censorship argument: If you were starving and shit was the last thing on earth and you would eat it, that means you believe in eating shit, hurr hurr fart. I would love to see McCain's reaction to Goldberg personally laying out this argument -- or saying this:

When John McCain was brutally tortured — far, far more severely than anything we’ve done to the 9/11 plotters —

Well, mostly, anyway.

— it was done to elicit false confessions and other statements for purposes of propaganda. When we tortured Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, it was to get actionable intelligence on ongoing plots. It seems to me that’s an important moral distinction.

Under torture, KSM gave up the names of two guys who had nothing to do with anything; the CIA hauled them in and jailed them till they eventually figured out they had nothing to do with anything. Mission accomplished and morality established! (None of this is to speak of how torture, non-binary or not, squares with whatever religious bullshit Goldberg pretends to believe in.) Listening to Goldberg defend the indefensible is not as much fun as listening to him defend the technically defensible so badly that it looks indefensible, but we take our yuks where we can.

THE LIBERTARIAN MOMENT, CONTINUED.

At libertarian flagship Reason, Scott Shackford:

In this politicized fight between the contents of hundreds of thousands of pages of reports and reviews, the actual debate centers on disagreement over two issues: How honest or dishonest the CIA represented what it was doing in communication with those charged with oversight; and whether enhanced interrogation or torture actually succeeded in accomplishing what the CIA claims it did. Strip out the torture and terrorism and you've got any other troubled government program. Was the Department of Health and Human Services honest with those charged with oversight about the state of Obamacare health insurance exchanges prior to their launch, and has it succeeded in providing affordable health insurance? It's the same argument.

"Strip out the torture and terrorism" and statist meat inspections are also tyranny.  Similarly, strip out the so-called racism and Eric Garner's death is about cigarette taxes. I used to think these people were raised in Skinner boxes, but now I think they spend their whole lives in them.

UPDATE. Speaking of Garner, Steven Hayward at Power Line takes the tax thing all the way:

LIBERALISM CAUSED ERIC GARNER’S DEATH

Has anyone argued yet that liberalism caused torture because, I dunno, moral relativism or Saul Alinsky or some shit?

WRONG FROM THE START.

One of the guys stepping up to defend America's recently revealed torture is Max Boot.  Like his fellow pain freak Andrew C. McCarthy, he puts quotes around "torture," because apparently the reported horrors of our Black Sites are not a big deal to him. He implicates Dianne Feinstein and John F. Kennedy, which is okay by me, or would be if he were trying to drag them down with him -- but Boot thinks the real crime is complaining about the torture, not furthering it.  He actually says, "It’s easy to denounce such brutal measures from the safety of an armchair" as if that were worse than approving them from the same armchair. He concludes:

Whatever the case, of one thing I am positive: that the release of the Senate report will only aid our enemies who will have more fodder for their propaganda mills. It is hard to see how it will serve the interests of the United States, because even if you believe the interrogations in question were war crimes, the reality remains that they were long discontinued. Feinstein’s report merely rakes up history and for no good purpose beyond predictable congressional grandstanding.

If your conscience does not respond to this, let me remind you what Boot is.

In 2003 Boot cheered the coming Iraq clusterfuck. "Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets," he said. He had no doubt of the mission's success: "With American seriousness and credibility thus restored, we will enjoy fruitful cooperation from the region's many opportunists, who will show a newfound eagerness to be helpful in our larger task of rolling up the international terror network that threatens us."

That same year he bade America take the fight to North Korea and Iran, quoting Kipling: "Taking on all of them is a big commitment, but as Kipling warned America, 'Ye dare not stoop to less.'" We'll beat those fuzzy-wuzzies in no time!

In 2005, apparently still excited by the bloodbaths, Boot reached back into history to approve the infamous Moro Massacre in the Philippines and its architect, Leonard Wood: "His scorched-earth policy sparked controversy but achieved results."

The course of action Boot endorsed has since been proven a disaster, but he has continued to yap and snarl. In 2011 he wept over America's withdrawal from Iraq -- "The issue of immunity could have been finessed," he insisted, "if administration lawyers from the Departments of State and Defense had not insisted that Iraq’s parliament would have to vote to grant our troops protections from Iraqi laws." It should be no surprise that Boot sees the wishes of elected representatives as a useless nuisance. Boot didn't want us to get out of Afghanistan either -- why, what would Kipling think?

Boot still bays for blood in Syria, Iran, and elsewhere. In 2013 he condemned Edward Snowden, whom he said "needs to see a psychiatrist or a minister rather than to be granted access to the front pages of the world to blow some of the U.S. government’s most important intelligence-gathering activities."

In short, Boot is the last person we should be listening to -- but then, he always was. It's worth asking why this moral leper still has a place in our discourse.

AND STILL NO BENEFITS OR PAID SICK DAYS.

While some of those few citizens who did not know that America tortures people basically for the hell of it got an earful from the Senate report -- you can read the Republican response, which basically complains that Democrats are unfairly making torture look bad -- House Republicans held a witch trial at which Congressmen stepped up to hurl carefully crafted and vetted insults at Jonathan Gruber, a freelance employee who had the poor taste to articulate said Congressmen's main political operating principle. Contract employees, beware and follow the dress code, these fuckers are strict!

Conservatives did their best to hoopla this travesty, many claiming that the Democrats released the torture report just to upstage it and thus vitiate its potentially devastating effects (don't laugh, some of them think Gruber's comments will actually convince the Supreme Court to kill Obamacare). But my favorite angle so far is that of National Review Jim Geraghty:

Americans, you got really upset about Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” comment. It’s understandable; you figured that the candidate was saying something nice about the voters as a whole when in public, and writing off a lot of voters as hopeless and hapless when behind closed doors. 

That is exactly what Jonathan Gruber did. Over and over again.

Difference left unmentioned: Romney was the Republican candidate for President of the United States, and Gruber was a fucking temp. Next week, a janitor at the Capitol will sneeze on the statue of Father Junipero Serra and, when this obvious anti-clericalist's voting record reveals him to be a Democrat, all hell will once again break loose.

THE "LIBERTARIAN MOMENT" RETURNS, IN A CAMEO ROLE.

Dana Milbank at the Washington Post on Chris Hughes, the internet doofus who has lately been mulching The New Republic:

...Hughes lashed out in a group email to staff because [New Republic] senior editor (and former Post reporter) Alec MacGillis had dared to propose writing a piece about Apple avoiding taxes just after Apple’s Tim Cook had come out of the closet. Hughes shot back that “Apple has acted squarely within the law” and that MacGillis’s argument would be “tone deaf.” MacGillis quickly backed off, but Hughes did not, writing twice more to defend Apple’s tax strategy and to call Cook “incredibly heroic” for coming out.

As you might expect, the g-factor causes a frother at rightwing Jesus site First Things to explode in straight rage:

Capital is cloaking itself in the rainbow flag... One must choose one’s loyalties. In this case and in many others, the Democratic Party and its organs have chosen the sexual desires of the rich over the economic aspirations of working Americans... Gay rights have allowed oligarchy to put on progressive drag...(et hetero)

Come let us Reason together, says National Review's Ramesh Ponnuru to the frother: Ponnuru's not asking him to like Those People, but he does ask him to focus on the greater good:

Even if the generalization is true — and it may well be — this comment seems a bit off. It’s not at all obvious to me that Apple would be doing any great favors for “working Americans” by paying more taxes than legally required. I can well see how social conservatives might be nostalgic for an older form of liberalism that placed less emphasis on sexual liberation than today’s. Nostalgia should not, however, lead conservatives to parrot that liberalism’s view of the economy.

In other words: Fag-bashing may be fun, but give Hughes a break -- he was after all defending a corporate oligarch, and isn't that really what the new libertarianism-injected conservatism is really all about?

Like I've been saying all along, libertarianism is just a niche brand of conservatism, and you see it more clearly when the parent brand asserts it.

UPDATE. In comments, hellslittlestangel encapsulates nicely: "While it's true that Jesus said, 'Hate your neighbor,' let's not forget that he also helped the money-changers get a tax-exemption for working out of a temple." But Rugosa is puzzled: "'Sexual desires of the rich'? Does that mean that having lots of money causes the gay? So maybe we should tax the wealthy into heterosexuality."

AND IN CONCLUSION, DERP DERP DERP DERP DERP.

At PJ Media, Spencer Klavan (before we go on, thank me: This link is to the single-page version -- the default is "page 1 of 10") :

Why Conservatives Should Make More Dumb Jokes

South Park Republicanism will never die. To sum up: As Aristophanes knew, fart jokes make people like/vote for you. But liberals stole the fart jokes! Judd Apatow was cool because he made Katherine Heigl have a baby, but IRL he "moans about Citizens United" so his fart jokes are invalid. Conservative need to take back the fart jokes!

Finally, the punch line:

We need a little more of that fun-loving, free-wheeling irreverence that the Left is pretending to monopolize. We need more folks like Greg Gutfeld and Ann Coulter...

Stop, yer killing me.

I KNOW WHO LET'S BLAME!

Shorter Jim Geraghty, National Review: It's 2014 and race is still a problem in America. This is clearly the fault of the black guy in the White House.

UPDATE. Speaking of which, here's Victor Davis Miles Gloriosus Hanson on America's recent wave of police-and-race demonstrations, which he seems to think have more to do with Michael Brown than with Eric Garner -- well, it's all the same to Hanson; that Trayvon Martin was a thug, too, and anyway what the protesters really want is a lawless Negrocracy in which cops cower before the dusky hordes:

Some of the public may think that the lessons of Michael Brown — and Trayvon Martin — are that it is unwise to commit a crime and then assault an officer, or confront a stranger in the rain and slug him in the head and get into a tussle, given that such targets may be armed and may respond with deadly force. But I think critics would privately respond that in Al Sharpton’s America both cases instead advise to take the beating and do not dare use a firearm for self-protection from assault on the chance the attacker is unarmed. In retrospect, Zimmerman might have preferred to have been “whoop-assed,” or Wilson preferred being slugged than to become lifelong targeted pariahs...

Will some law enforcement officials now surmise that it is wiser to ignore some crimes in the inner city on the practicable logic that the denouement for the officer will likely be negative — either by stopping the assailant through force or not stopping the assault and thus being assaulted?

You white liberals will be sorry when the oogaboogas steal your latte money! Beyond this Afro-6 vision, there's the usual black-on-black-blahblah ("That 5,000 to 6,000 African-Americans are murdered each year, the vast majority by other blacks... is not so important as the single death of Michael Brown"), and how come there's no riots when black people (who are not cops) kill white people, etc. Also, Hanson invokes Al Sharpton three times; maybe he thinks it's like Beetlejuice and it'll free him from this mixed-race netherworld before they remake Clash of the Titans with Morgan Freeman and spoil all hope of escape.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

(How'd I miss The Dirtbombs all these years? Thanks Sherri!)

•   MRA promoter The Ole Perfesser has steered his readers to this Andrew Klavan video explaining #GamerGate to older conservatives. Klavan gives viewers a little background: "For decades left-wingers have dominated the arts, using movies, television, novels, and critical articles (!!- Ed.) to sell idiot notions like 'America is oppressive,'  'capitalism is evil,' 'gender difference is bigotry,' and 'God is dead'..." The upshot is that wingnuts own gaming and from this cultural redoubt can counter the lies of "left-wing game journalists" with the help of "honest journalists such as Milo Yiannopoulos, of Breitbart.com" (Yeah I know but that's an actual quote) to promote conservative ideas such as Eat Me, Bitch. No mention at all of the appalling harassment visited upon uncooperative females by these knight-like dorks, but lots of tit jokes.  Klavan's approach hasn't changed much since this 2009 Democrats are Like Rapists video, but at least his references move with the times: He refers throughout to "Hashtag-Gamergate," and if the geezers in his audience can figure out what it means they should be stalking Anita Sarkeesian in no time.

•   Speaking of hashtags, thanks, Simon Maloy, for reminding me of this:

Now that gas prices are plummeting, looking at those old #250Gas tweets is fun -- and so is reading Megan McArdle's unusually brief, tight-lipped post on the drop; as you might expect from an acolyte of the oil-dependent Koch Brothers she sounds nervous about it: "Texas, North Dakota and other places in the U.S. will suffer as oil prices decline and some of the high-paid jobs in oil production go away," she writes. Well, that's capitalism, comrade; I wonder if those absurd boomtown prices North Dakota oil workers are paying for their apartments will go down in response. I'm guessing not, 'cause that's capitalism, too, these days. You can also read Joseph Curl at the Washington Times: "Cheap gas prices? Obama’ll fix that" -- 'cause he'll eventually kill the good times with regulations to fix the so-called "environment," just you wait. Sigh, some people are never satisfied.

•   You can always count on Jonah Goldberg:

Reasonable people can disagree on whether racism was involved in the tragic death of Eric Garner. My own suspicion is that this misfortune could have transpired just as easily with a white man resisting arrest and/or a black cop choking him... 

But you know what reasonable people can’t dispute? New York’s cigarette taxes are partly to blame for Eric Garner’s death.

Racism? In America? Meh, Jonah doesn't see it; when he goes "WHAT IT IS" to the black guy at the deli, he doesn't get any static, man. But that cigarette taxes killed Garner -- that's indisputable!

Everyone agrees: No one should die for selling bootleg cigarettes. But if you pass and enforce a law against such things, you increase the chances things might go wrong. That’s a fact, whether it sounds callous to delicate ears or not

Just like how stop signs cause rear-end collisions! Goldberg also compares taxing cigarettes to the drug war, though for some reason he doesn't cite thousands of other cigarette-tax-enforcement deaths, or any, that would support this analogy. Here's my favorite part of this mess:

When you pass a law, you authorize law enforcement to enforce it. That’s actually why they’re called 'law enforcement.' Google it.

This mind-blanking stupidity is wonderful enough, but the supercilious tone is just so Goldberg.

•   Goldberg's traditional reign as the permanent author of the stupidest thing ever written is being challenged by the Cato Institute's David Boaz:

The violent death of Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunisia set off the Arab Spring. Could the killing of Eric Garner lead to a springtime of police reform – and regulatory reform -- in the United States? 

Bouazizi was a street vendor, selling fruits and vegetables from a cart...

Yes, Garner's problem was that he just wanted to run his little cig biz, just like Bouazizi, but the statists wouldn't let him, so he set himself on fire was choked to death by a white cop. Unlike Goldberg (who probably couldn't help himself) Boaz studiously ignores the subject of race:

Eric Garner's death has also set off protests, not just in New York but in Boston, Chicago, Washington, and other places. Many protesters held signs reading "I can't breathe" and "This stops now." They should add "I'm minding my business. Just leave me alone."

Maybe Boaz should make this plea directly to the protesters: "You people are diluting the free-market message of Garner! Here's a script, I'll be at this steakhouse over here." I imagine years hence, after the neo-feudal conversion of America is complete, conservatives will toast Eric Garner's role in normalizing the no-benefits workplace.

AND THEN LET'S REPEAL THAT STATIST CIVIL RIGHTS ACTS.

Mad about the Eric Garner verdict? Think it's another case of cops killing a black man with impunity? Ole Perfesser Glenn Reynolds wants to set you straight. The Perfesser says it has nothing to do with race -- in fact, he wonders what all these black people are upset about:

Listening to NPR on the way back from the UT Studio — I taped a segment on this for The Independents on Fox Business tonight — they kept stressing that it was a WHITE officer who had killed a BLACK MAN. You could pretty much hear the capitals in their voices. They’d never stress race that way in other circumstances. And it’s not clear that excessive force by police is especially a racial problem. In Alabama, we had the shooting of a unarmed white 18-year old by a black cop; in Utah, we had the Dillan Taylor shooting, also unarmed, also not prosecuted. Racializing the issue makes it more divisive and less likely to be addressed.

I'll see the Perfesser's two cases and raise him four unarmed black guys and that was in one month -- and there's plenty more where that came from.

Of course, if you've been living in the United States of America for a while and paying attention, you probably don't need the explanation.

The Perfesser also has a solution:

If police can’t be accountable for their use of force, then we shouldn’t have police. Fire ‘em all and privatize.

Because privatization worked so well with prisons. Jesus, these people are so reliably wrong that when they finally object to a cop killing a black guy, it's for crackpot reasons.

UPDATE. Reynolds is just one of the conservatives who are outraged by Garner not because of this "black lives matter" thing you hippies think is important, but because free enterprise:

Whereas many conservatives said Wilson was simply doing his job, some on Wednesday said Pantaleo was enforcing a punitive big government policy. And while Brown was nothing more than a "thug," Garner was the victim of the dreaded nanny state. 

"A man is killed for selling *unlicensed* drugs by a cop who walks even though it's all on video: Putting the 'police' in pink police state," tweeted New York Times columnist Ross Douthat on Wednesday. 

Douthat was one of several conservative media personalities to seize on New York's law against selling single, untaxed cigarettes.

Whereas if they'd killed him for walking in the middle of the street, well, no big whoop.

UPDATE 2. CNN:

Rand Paul blames Eric Garner's death on high NYC cigarette tax

The still-alive white guy selling you smokes out of the trunk of his car is laughing his ass off.

UPDATE 3. In comments, Kevin Berger reminds us that Ferguson is already sort of a libertarian privatizer's paradise, as it makes its poorest citizens fund the city with user fees masquerading as criminal justice. New York, on the other hand, is in the usage of Robert Tracinski a "nanny state" that taxes regular people, which is why he and every other asshole is rushing to declare that the first dead black guy they ever troubled over is really all about taxes and race has nothing to do with it, except insofar as liberals are (I swear to God he said this) "hoping for a new series of contentious, racially charged killings."

It's the new wingnut fad, alright, and here's proof: Look at the change in that ancient authoritarian John Podhoretz. When de Blasio was elected, Podhoretz was telling us that the ooga-booga barricades had broken down and it would be Crown Heights Riots every day from now on -- why, just last week he was telling New York Post readers that we were "Turning on the cops: Forgetting what crime was like," and blubbering over the end of stop-and-frisk. Now he's telling us that we don't need Broken Windows policing anymore! Man, they're good at message discipline -- what a pity that their message sucks.

UPDATE 4. OFFS:

Yeah -- Al Capone, Pablo Escobar, and Eric Garner; I can see the connection. Hey, I wonder what tax Rumain Brisbon was resisting?

MINE, BY THE RIGHT OF THE WHITE ELECTION.

Conservatives are making big promises about the downfall of their enemies (i.e., all rational people) and their own coming Reich; see, for example Victor Davis Maximus Super Hanson's "Liberalism in Ruins" -- boy, if I had a nickel for every time I heard that one! Byron York is no exception. Now that the HNIC is leaving the White House, he says, blacks will stop voting Democratic, as will those other pesky interest groups to whom his Nubian charm appealed:

First the coalition: Obama's powerful appeal to minorities, women, and young people propelled his decisive wins in 2008 and 2012. But those voters didn't show up at the polls in 2010 and 2014. 

Some Democrats are confident the coalition will be back in 2016, when interest in a presidential race is far greater than during midterms. But will it return in the strength it showed in '08 and '12? Or will Democratic voting return to pre-Obama patterns?

So, this is a great time for the GOP to appeal to and pick up these stray black, Latino and female voters and shore up their legitimacy as a national party, right?

Don't be silly. York has no advice on that, because even Washington Examiner readers wouldn't understand why he was bothering. But white people -- that's another story:

"Given its sheer size, the working-class white population in the U.S. is of keen importance to politicians and strategists on both sides of the aisle," Gallup wrote recently, noting "the complex set of attitudes and life positions which … have pushed this group further from the Democratic president over the past six years." 

If Democrats don't find a way to connect with those "attitudes and life positions" of working-class whites in coming years, they'll have a big problem...

In the end, no single group will mean defeat for the Democrat and victory for the Republican in 2016. But President Obama's troubling legacy — a weakened coalition and growing ranks of alienated white voters — could mean a serious post-presidential hangover for Democrats.

"No single group" is a nice evasive harrumph-harrumph, but the message of York's column is clearly that women, youth, and minority votes can only be lost -- like some kind of gas that escapes, evaporates, and is seen no more -- whereas white votes are something you can win by appealing to their "complex set of attitudes and life positions." Normally, based on his previous writings and conservative history, I would assume York considers these to be the usual hatred of minorities, contempt for the poor etc., but his column suggests he's at least dimly aware that the most effective thing conservatives can communicate to white people is that they are to be taken more seriously than anyone else.

HOW BULLSHIT WORKS, PART 391,267,346,583.

Don Surber -- an asshole whose greatest claim to fame is being fired for calling the late Michael Brown an animal -- is pushing what seems to be the current conservative line: That black people were manipulated against their wills into protesting the Wilson decision in Ferguson, and that the ensuing riots were committed by Katie Couric and Dan Rather. Excerpt:

The looters won, thanks to President Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder and Governor Jay Nixon -- Democrats all -- who ignored the truth and the facts of the case to fan the flames of violence, across the country. People have begun calling these the Obama Riots. Expect more.

"Calling these the Obama Riots"? Who's calling them that? Pro that he is, Surber provides a link -- to Breitbart.com, which is telling readers to call them that ("CALL FERGUSON DEMONSTRATIONS WHAT THEY ARE: 'OBAMA RIOTS'"). Give Breitbart credit, though -- they didn't descend to actually pretending this was a common usage, perhaps because they knew some lower species of propagandist would do it for them.

UPDATE. In comments, Giant Monster Gamera: "Obama Phones, Obama Care, Obama Riots, Obama Nation... Haven't these people heard that any publicity is good publicity?"

UPDATE 2. New troll policy, guys, starting now: our troll's remarks will be deleted, as will all replies to them. Let him take his sick need for negative attention somewhere else, and let someone else give it to him.

SUNDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

•    I hadn't looked in on National Review's "Postmodern Conservative" blog and its author Carl Eric Scott for some time (and with good reason!), so I opened up Scott's recent post on the University of Virginia's sexual assault issues and holy moley: First he advises that the school make the kids rape-proof by having them read books like Elizabeth Kantor’s The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After, and then --

And as long as we’re open to having our colleges mandate or “nudge” education on such matters, what we should really push is social dancing. I’m flat-out serious about this recommendation. Dance instructors are inexpensive, don’t have to be tenured or admitted to the bar, and don’t have to teach a sexual-ethics curriculum that we’d have to get the typical faculty of 90-98% non-conservative members to agree to. They really would provide a habituation that shapes sexual and social inclinations in ways more positive than not, and which could culminate in youth-culture patterns that diminish the hold of the worst Greek houses and the general expectations of hook-ups and binge-drinking.

Because no one ever drank too much or had sex, forced or otherwise, after doing the Lindy Hop and the Big Apple.  I don't know why he didn't also prescribe snoods and Wildroot Cream Oil, which in our forefathers' day eased sexual tension with soothing lanolin.

•    Some of the St. Louis Rams came on the field with their hands up today in a Ferguson solidarity gesture, and Michelle Malkin's rage aggregator Twitchy is on it, with these representative reactions from conservative thinkers: "Uggghhh," "idiots," "dumb," etc.  Weep, Buckley, weep. (From the way the game's going, though, you'd think it was the Raiders who came out with their hands up.)

•    Wow, the Rams thing has riled a big nest of enraged dummies. I must be confused: From the way Hot Air's Jazz Shaw talks about it --

Even if we weren’t talking about the Ferguson shooting, I have no interest in seeing a player come out waving a banner declaring their pro-abortion or pro-life position. That family in the stands didn’t lay out $300 or more for tickets, overpriced hot dogs and giant foam fingers to hear you pontificate on the merits of a flat tax.

-- it sounds like the Rams players did a big production number, with signs and speeches and whatnot; I had heard they just came out with their hands up. Guess the MSM is lying to me!

Rick Moran is deeply concerned:

What this very public display of ignorance may do to the team chemsitry of the Rams is another question.

Right after they came out with their hands up, the Rams beat the Raiders 52 to 0. We should all have such chemistry problems.

Moran naturally wants the players punished, but despairs of the League taking action because "the NFL's very public outreach to minority communities will force them to take a neutral stance in the matter." Always coddling black people, those guys! Why, if the white guys on the team came out wearing Klan robes in support of Officer Wilson, you'd never hear the end of it. Moran closes:

It will be interesting to watch the introductions to tonight's NFL game between Miami and the New York Jets. The five Rams players may have started a trend that the NFL may have to address whether they want to or not.

I understand the Jets will do a 20-minute ballet number based on the life and death of Patrick Dorismond, with one of those inflatable rats unions put up at picket lines representing Rudolph Giuliani. Hey, maybe I'll start watching these games again!

AND HOW WAS YOUR THANKSGIVING?

Some of us spent Thanksgiving feasting with friends and counted our blessings. Others...

You'll agree this is one badass RedState political blogger, at least on the holodeck. Wait'll you hear what he'd tell Mike Brown's parents!

Anyway hope you're getting some slack this holiday weekend -- I personally have resolved to take it easy and not subject myself to this:

Bill Whittle questioning The Ole Pefesser about robot sex is the last thing I want to -- oh okay, a few minutes:

If you count a vibrator as a sex robot, then about half the women in America are having sex with robots already. And that doesn't seem to creep people out.

Call me when one of them spends a million dollars to make her Hitachi look like Benedict Cumberbatch. Later Reynolds says the first mass market sexbots in Japan will probably look more like anime characters because some guys dig that -- "they don't have to look quite human." I think Hasbro already filled this gap.

PRE-THANKSGIVING AROUND-THE-HORN.

•    Remember a few days back, when Rod Dreher was flipping out that New York magazine interviewed a guy who fucks horses, and blaming this bestiality breakthrough on our tolerance of gay marriage? He's still on about it! He has dragged in the equally awful Damon Linker, who tries to reassure Dreher that "most people will continue to live boring, mundane sex lives, monogamously committed to one human being of the opposite sex at a time." You'd think this vanilla vision of the future would cheer Dreher, but it does not; he rehashes his previous mopes and also complains that "'emerging adult' Catholics are abandoning the faith in droves." Dreher himself abandoned Catholicism years ago, but that was different because 1.) he's Rod Dreher, the center of the universe, and 2.) he quit to join another hardass skygod sect, not to go friggin' and frugin' with the hippies, as he seems to assume the non-Dreher apostates will do. I thought at first Dreher, despite his roots in rural Louisiana, was somehow unaware of the ancient association of Southern hicks with barnyard sex, but now I'm thinking he does know, and has in fact been hired by the local chamber of commerce to get it associated with urban sophisticates instead.

•    Erick Erickson has a full-on soregasm because Ezra Klein doubts Officer Wilson's story about how Demon Mike Brown made him kill him. Why that sissy Klein knows nothing about "the blue collar of existence of a beat cop and what that cop sees," unlike red-blooded, ham-faced lawyer/politician Erick Erickson:

I think liberals like Klein who find Darren Wilson’s statement as simply too incredible to be true need to call their local police force and see if they can tag along in a squad car a few times. I have done it. It is quite an education.

Yeah, like that time the cops Erickson was with those cops who shot a black guy dead, and then were allowed to bag their own guns as evidence, and the prosecutor told the grand jury not to take it all too seriously -- you libtards don't realize this is the real world!

•    If you need some what-a-bunch-of-morons for entertainment, look at the responses to any Progressive Insurance @ItsFlo tweet, such as this one; most of the respondents are wingnuts enraged that the insurer gives all its money to George Soros:

Lewis, who did contribute to liberal causes, stepped down as Progressive chairman in 2000 and died in 2013. But tell that to the salt of the earth, the common clay -- or to John Hawkins of Right Wing News, who was telling his poor readers in 2013 that Lewis was still in charge and "may be the biggest liberal sugar daddy on the block." Actually, considering the difficulty they have understanding health insurance, maybe conservatives should boycott all insurance as socialism. Hell, those pointy-headed actuaries even believe in global warming!

•    A John Podhoretz (ding!) column in the New York Post (ding!) called "Turning on the cops: Forgetting what crime was like" (dingdingdingding!) was bound to be a nightmare, and it is -- all about how you liberals don't remember the crime it was so bad you must worship the Man on the Beat etc. But the bit where Podhoretz tells black folks to cool it over Ferguson is awful even for him:

It might surprise Al Sharpton to hear this, but even among white people, it’s rare to find any American who’s only ever had pleasant interchanges with police officers. 

Every year, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 41 million speeding tickets are written in the United States. The notion that only minorities have infuriating encounters with cops is belied by that astounding factoid. 

After all, is there a soul alive who hasn’t reacted negatively (in his heart, at least) to the cop who comes to the driver-side window and asks that obnoxious and oddly schoolmarmish question: “Do you know why I stopped you?”

I dunno what black people are bitching about -- white people get speeding tickets all the time!

REPUBLICAN OUTREACH TO MINORITIES CONTINUES.

Some online conservatives, who haven't had proper media training,  express their feelings thus:

The better-trained ones mostly settle on the notion that the simple-minded black folk of Ferguson would not be angry but for the Liberal Media, who have riled them to violence so they can Smash the State. Radio shouter Mark Levin:

Ferguson burns and violence has been unleashed thanks to the reckless liberal media, the lawless administration (especially Eric Holder) exploiting the shooting to smear police departments across the nation, phony civil rights demagogues, race-baiting politicians, and radical hate groups.

Missing from this list is "a white cop getting away with killing an unarmed black kid." To Levin, of course Brown got what was coming -- fired upon, he raced away from and then back toward the source of the gunfire, which makes perfect sense. Levin demands that we now  turn our attention to the real victims:

What we are witnessing now is the left's war on the civil society. It's time to speak out in defense of law enforcement and others trying to protect the community and uphold the rule law.

Well, so much for that GOP Libertarian Moment, huh? I expect a lot of conservatives who made meek objections to "militarized police" last summer will now return to their previous tut-tutting over obstreperous people of color.

Breitbart.com's Ben Shapiro also condemns "the media’s attempted racial assassination of Officer Darren Wilson." But even though Wilson got off, Shapiro remains so terrified of black people that he perceives President Obama's after-verdict speech, universally acknowledged as milquetoast, as having "fueled the flames for future racial conflagrations... Obama doesn't want to prevent crime," etc. And the column is topped by the most ooga-booga picture of Obama Breitbart.com could find. I expect if Obama sneezed Shapiro would consider it biological warfare against Caucasians.

It's almost worse when they make a feeble pretense of caring. "I am trying to see this through the eyes of those I disagree with," claims Jonah Goldberg, by which he means allowing as how it's too bad Michael Brown's family lost their boy before starting this rhetorical pee-dance:

Beyond that, I think critics who see Robert McCulloch as too pro-police have a point. Or at least I can see where they are coming from. His statement tonight was very powerful and very persuasive, but not what you would expect from a prosecutor in other circumstances. If McCulloch wanted an indictment, I think he could have gotten one (prosecutors and ham sandwiches and all that). Whether he should have gotten one is open to debate. I certainly think you could make the case that the country would be better off in the long run if there was an open and transparent public trial. On the other hand, we don’t have trials of innocent men simply for appearances’ sake. Having a trial just for show is too close to a show trial as far as I’m concerned.

That's it. Goldberg's prose reminds me of how, when you toss a coin on a hard surface, it rattles side-to-side with increasing speed before coming to a dead stop. (Later Goldberg makes fun of a guy who felt sorry for the kids who mugged him. Must've been a relief for him to drop the brief pretense of empathy.)

I should also mention National Review's Andrew C. McCarthy, who thinks Republican Administrations can torture suspects if they like and who insists that you can impeach Obama for spitting on the sidewalk, suddenly arguing for prosecutorial restraint now that it appears a rare instance of it got Wilson off.

But really, it's no better or worse than what they usually come up with when a white guy gets away with killing a black guy. And there's no reason why it would change, so long as there's a political upside to it.

UPDATE. Good for some grim laughs: The comments thread on a riot post at Reason, flagship publication of conservatives who identify as libertarians. The consensus at present is that it's all Al Sharpton's fault ("This is certainly one of those issues that reasonable people can agree upon....that is, it's being pumped up by the race baiters and media and others who make a buck off tragedy").

UPDATE 2. Speaking of which, a Republican Senator appears in Time, blames Ferguson on the War on Poverty, and peddles the traditional marriage-makes-you-rich bullshit...

The link between poverty, lack of education, and children outside of marriage is staggering and cuts across all racial groups. Statistics uniformly show that waiting to have children in marriage and obtaining an education are an invaluable part of escaping poverty. 

...as well as bootstrap philosophy...

While a hand-up can be part of the plan, if the plan doesn’t include the self-discovery of education, work, and the self-esteem that comes with work, the cycle of poverty will continue.

But in an exciting twist, he mixes this ancient bunk with promises to end the drug war -- aw yeah, you caught on, it's Rand Paul, trying to maintain his libertarian USP in the GOP while talking traditional culture-scold rot. Well, what the hell, it's all just marketing anyway -- you might even say it's Uber for social conservatism!

PEOPLE YAKETY-YAK A STREAK AND WASTE YOUR TIME OF DAY...

Well, I see New York magazine interviewed a guy who fucks horses. I like to think the whole thing was designed as a practical joke on Rod Dreher, known for his eruptions over such evanescent prurientia as 2 Girls 1 Cup (remember that?); if so, mission accomplished!

I’m not linking to it, because it is sick, sick stuff. It’s incredibly graphic, and I had decided not to write about it. But...

Yeah, we can guess, preacher man. Or can we? Let's see where Brother Rod takes it:

What’s significant is not that this deranged behavior happens. It has no doubt always been with us. What’s significant is that this interview appears in a mainstream magazine... 

New York has won a slew of National Magazine Awards, including being named 2013′s Magazine of the Year. This isn’t an Al Goldstein rag. This isn’t even the Village Voice.

Yeah, the Voice published Roy Edroso and homos, but New York is a recent award winner! Its pages are glossy! Also, Robert George agrees with Dreher, and don't you pointy-heads discount George because he's writing on Facebook -- discount him because he's a weirdo who favors the anatomical-doll school of Adam and Stevery ("In coitus, but not in other forms of sexual contact, a man and a woman’s bodies coordinate by way of their sexual organs... they are biologically united, and do not merely rub together..."). George shares Dreher's disgust, and demands action:

I mention it, reluctantly, only to show that anyone who thought we had already reached the bottom of the slippery slope is mistaken. The descent into Gomorrah continues. I believe it can be reversed, but not simply stopped. “This far and no farther,” is not an option.

Hear hear, says Dreher, because we wouldn't have horse-fucking in glossy magazines if you non-reproductive bit-rubbers hadn't gotten the slope all slippery:

Ideas have consequences. If your idea is that all consensual sex is good, or at least beyond judgment, and that sexual desire is its own justification, then you have met your consequence in New York‘s anonymous zoophile.

 "Dogs and cats, living together" was not a JOKE, people! Soon everybody, human and animal, will be friggin' and frugin' and sticking their bits wherever they can, unless we reverse the flow! THANKS OBAMA!

UPDATE: Isn't it obvious now that the famous pervert Woody Allen was trying to normalize this kind of behavior?

UPDATE 2. A winning comment right out of the gate by Glock H. Palin, Esq.: "Sure, rural people do it, and have been doing it since before this was a country, but those godless heather urban types write about it. Is there no end to their depravity?!" Oh Glock, you don't know the half of it -- one of Dreher's commenters actually cites Ike Snopes and the cow from The Hamlet ("the whole passage pretty much turned me off Faulkner forever. Yes, I know Faulkner is considered 'literature'...") and betrays no awareness that farmers fucking livestock was not invented by Faulkner, but is part of the great American agrarian tradition.

GREETINGS FROM OCCUPIED DC!

The atmosphere is tense here in Washington as the Tyrant ObamaHitler has sent his brownshirts into the streets in a show of force...

Yeah, it's a bunch of bullshit, but at least we have the pleasure of watching wingnuts try to make hay of it. My favorite in the Ray of Hope category so far is this post from Andrew Johnson at National Review:

Univision announced earlier this week that it would delay its broadcast of the Latin Grammys to air President Obama’s announcement to use executive action to grant legal status to immigrants in the country illegally. While some saw it as a politically calculated move by the administration to reach a largely Hispanic audience, some viewers weren’t too happy to see the president rather than their favorite celebrities.

Then Johnson showed dozens -- excuse me, a dozen (well, almost) -- tweets from fans who were disgruntled that the show had been delayed, and who will no doubt be surprised to find themselves on a GOP mailing list and being asked to contribute to a Stop Tyrant Obama and His Messicans drive.

UPDATE. I should have realized -- no one out-crazys Ophelia WorldNetDaily!

Oh God this is so great:

Ted Cruz said it best in a Wall Street Journal piece following Barack Hussein Obama’s State of the Union Address earlier this year: “Dictatorships are often characterized by an abundance of laws. When a president can pick and choose which laws to follow and which to ignore, he is no longer a president"... 

I would go one further than Cruz: Obama has never been my president. I have steadfastly refused to acknowledge him as such. He is undeserving of the honorific. To this day, I am unconvinced he is even eligible for office... 

But that’s a can of worms few want to reopen – besides Donald Trump and me... 

I hereby join Ted Cruz in declaring Obama is no longer president.

Alan Keyes is going "And I thought I would be the winner in any crazy competition! I better step up my game!" and driving nails into his own skull.

UPDATE 2. Robert Tracinski (best known as a rhapsodist for the softer side of Ayn Rand) at The Federalist:

The ironic thing is that the media and Hollywood types have always convinced themselves, as George Lucas did, that their villains were metaphors for George W. Bush or a cautionary tale about the evils of the right. But here we are, the Old Republic is being dissolved, and it’s their hero who is doing it. They find themselves on the side of the Empire. (Or the Alliance. Yes, I’m looking at you, Joss Whedon.)

I think they should stop using words at all, and just make videos of themselves playing with their nerd dolls: "Don't worry Princess Leia, here comes G.I. Ted Cruz to save you, psshew, psshew," etc.

UPDATE 3. OK, one more: J. Christian Adams at PJ Media:

Take some comfort in this: executives acting lawlessly is a transgression as old as human history. Charles I similarly ignored the law when he went so far as to dissolve a Parliament with which he disagreed. When he started running out of money to conduct his wars with France and Spain, he violated Magna Carta by imposing a forced loan on the monarchs without the consent of Parliament.

And then they cut his head off! Get it? Well, maybe one of those nuts who seem to drop by the White House with a gun every couple of days will "take some comfort" from that story.

RHETORIC LEVEL ADVISORY: SEVERE.

Well, now that Obama is fixin' to give the Founding Fathers a Dirty Sanchez by handing driver's licenses to Messicans, let's see how the brethren are talking it down. Clash Daily:

HOW CONVENIENT: Obama to Grant Amnesty on Mexican Revolution Day 

Coincidence? I don’t think so. This is all part of “fundamentally transforming” America...

At dawn the car horns will play "La Cucaracha," and over the ridge they'll come -- thousands of low-riders led by Salma Hayek and George Lopez. And Rick Perry will be powerless to act! Here's a passage from an Instigator News essay with the something-for-everyone title, "Pavlov, Orwell, Alinsky, Hitler, and Obama: A Synthesis of Evil":

I offer here just a few points from an early platform of Hitler’s Nazi Party, courtesy of The History Place. With the exceptions regarding Germany’s nationalism and disdain for immigrants, they’re almost identical to the policies we’ve seen proposed and/or enacted by the Obama administration.

The Messican piece is Obama's way of making Nazism his own, see -- he's a great cover artist as well as history's greatest monster!

OK, that's fun, but come on, these are bottom feeders; surely no one legitimate is saying such stupid--

-- Huh. Well, guy's an American Spectator writer, that's still pretty fringe. The really big boys know it's ix-nay on the itler-Hay until this impeachment thing gets a little traction. Thus, Rich Lowry at Politico:

Barack Obama, American Caudillo

See? It even sounds Messican!

The last 400 years of Anglo-American political history...

He ain't just a traitor to America, he's a traitor to Anglo-America!

...can be read as a successful effort to establish and maintain a system tethering the executive to the law. What President Obama is contemplating will undermine that achievement, both through his own lawlessness and the precedent he will create for subsequent presidents to operate by extra-legal fiat.

Well, excluding presidents who already figured out how to get some bright fella to write them a Get-Out-of-Den-Haag-Free card, anyway.

The rest of them are just using regular Republican slurs, like "tyrant" and "emperor," but with a few twists to wring extra juice out of them. Take for example Damon Linker's essay, "On immigration, Obama is flirting with tyranny," in which, after getting the accusations of destroying democracy out of the way, Linker explains that this Messican thing is even worse than Bush's possibly illegal torture, because when it comes to torture "such judgments can only be fairly rendered once the state of emergency has come to an end," but everybody knows there's no rush about these illegals, they'll just keep on skulking between landscaping gigs and food banks forever. Also:

Compared with torture, rendition, and the extrajudicial use of surveillance and even deadly force against American citizens, Obama's efforts to help illegal immigrants can seem benign and even trivial. But that's precisely the point. No matter how you feel about Bush's actions, up until now, executive transgressions of the law have been made in the name of protecting the common good from a grave threat in a time of emergency.

I have to admit, I like to think I know these guys, but telling readers to try and be reasonable about the Black Sites while calling Obama a tyrant is one I completely did not see coming.

UPDATE. Shit, how'd I miss this -- Burt Prelutsky at Bernard Goldberg's site, on previous casus bellow Jonathan Gruber:

All in all, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that it has to be more than mere coincidence that “Gruber” sounds like “goober” and that Adolf Hitler’s birth name happened to have been Schicklgruber.

CONNECT THE DOTS SHEEPLE

MIKE NICHOLS, 1931-2014.

When I heard he was dead, I recalled that I'd seen his production of Streamers at Lincoln Center years ago; only later did I notice that he'd also directed the original Broadway production of The Gin Game, which I'd also seen (with E.G. Marshall in for Hume Cronyn, but Jessica Tandy still playing). 10 years ago (!) I made a mean gag about Nichols being "a one-man major entertainment institution for ninety years," because that's really how it seemed; he was always around, even when you didn't notice until someone gave him an award for it.

Those two New York productions were brilliant, but like most of you I know Nichols best from his movies. As Bruce Weber mentioned in the Times today, he was sort of an anti-auteur; you couldn't really pick out obsessions and motifs from his work like you could with Kubrick or Scorsese. He was more like George Cukor, a hard worker who knew that when inspiration failed elbow grease would do. And like Cukor he served the material. He served Edward Albee as well with Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf as he did Charles Webb with The Graduate; if the latter is fussier, it's just that Webb's deadpan angst needed more active intervention than Albee's masterpiece.

Maybe some clue to Nichols' true feelings, in lieu of auteur signifiers and whatnot, resides in two of his crazier, more misanthropic efforts: the eco-downer The Day of the Dolphin, and Wolf, a jaundiced (one might say hepatitic) midlife fantasy, redolent of Tom Wolfe but much more fun if no more convincing. If so, it's just as well he turned the generosity of his talent to other authors. For me his sweet spot is Carnal Knowledge -- and I wish there were a YouTube of the scene where Jonathan thinks he's going to date-swap and gets a double whammy instead; it's not as flashy as the available showstopper clips, but it has the advantage of being perfect. But it's also worth remembering that he started out as a comedy sketch artist -- just like Adam Sandler, and how's that for a flattering comparison -- and worth watching those old Nichols and May bits not just for the laughs, which are still there, but also to see him and Elaine May learning on their feet how the game works.