LYING LETTERS AND THE LIARS WHO WRITE/RECEIVE THEM. Eugene Volokh is politically astute, yet here pretends not to have heard of Astroturf.

Astroturf describes the mass-mailing of one letter to several editorial outlets in hopes of creating the fake appearance of a groundswell of opinion. This appears to be the case with an item simultaneously printed and portrayed as a personal correspondence by Volokh and K.Lo., den mother of NRO's The Corner.

"I realize that in print media, it's considered a serious faux pas when an author prints the same op-ed in two different outlets at once," sniffs Volokh. "But that may have something to do with the fact that readers generally pay money for print media, and print media generally pay money for op-eds."

The item in question appeared at Volokh's site blockquoted, under the title LONDON CALLING, and with the introduction, "A friend of mine, whose judgment and accuracy I very much trust, writes this from London." Not since the days of Addison and Steele would this be considered by any reasonable reader anything other than a letter from a friend, rather than a propaganda pass-along to be published wherever they'd have it.

Even the normally thick Instapundit seemed to have the same impression, prefacing his reprint with "Eugene Volokh posts an email from the scene."

This is a small thing, but instructive. These guys love a good soundbyte, particularly a "counter-intuitive" one (well, I live in London and everyone I know loves Bush!), and cannot stop to pick and choose. They are, after all, fighting what they believe to be the Big Lie of the Liberal Media, and their whole blogs, if not their lives, are devoted to fashioning a believable counter-narrative -- and I use the word "believable" rather than "true" advisedly: every available thread gets woven into the tapestry, and who cares whether it's the right color or even strong enough to hold? The Great Work must continue! In the blogosphere, it's all, as the saying goes, too good to check.

A BREAK FROM GAY-INDUCED MADNESS TO BE JUST PLAIN MAD. Derbyshire on why he would happier in China than in America. It's not only because they don't like homosexuals there. Derb says he must leave America because he "has Bad Thoughts."

Derb, take it from me: the Bad Thoughts will follow you wherever you go.

MORE DERB GAY HIJINX! 9:53 am: Derbyshire refreshes himself before the fire, compulsively smoothing his ermine robe as an unidentifed councilor soothes him with "what if a guy wants to marry his son?" chatter.

9:53 am (2): Another Derb lackey, identified as a citizen of Magnolia, Alabama, reads to his liege some fresh intelligence on the judicial perpetrators. Apparently they all went to college!

"The main thing to note about these people," says the Alabaman, "is that they were appointed to their posts and are not accountable to voters... Here in Magnolia, of course, we elect ours in partisan races. Doesn't always work well. But if, every once in a while we end up with a Roy Moore..."

Derbyshire sighs, wonders if it isn't time to drag the family down to some Dixie hog-wallow where no winds of libertinism intrude.

HE DOESN'T MEAN TO HURT ME! HE DOESN'T MAKE A FIST! During his several long gurgles on Goodridge, Andrew Sullivan offers this astonishing defense of his beloved President (whom, he may not have noticed, is a mortal enemy of gay marriage):

Yesterday, the president mercifully didn't commit explicitly to that. The official statement read:

Marriage is a sacred institution between a man and a woman. Today's decision of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court violates this important principle. I will work with congressional leaders and others to do what is legally necessary to defend the sanctity of marriage.

I'm not sure what this can mean.

Not sure what this can mean? Sullivan must know about the Defense of Marriage Act, because only a few lines earlier he refers to it ("a drastic attempt to write the permanent disenfranchisement of gay citizens into the founding document of the entire country"). He must also know Bush that has been considering DMA if the courts pulled something like this. His fucking statement echoes the language of the DMA. And yet Sullivan acts as if it's a long shot! "It's not what many of his centrist and moderate supporters want," Sullivan writes as RNC staffers howl with laughter. "And he has far more important things to do. In those vital things, most specifically the war on terror, the last thing he needs is to polarize this country even more." Here it is Karl Rove's turn to double over and slap his knee.

But this is Sullivan's trip, isn't it -- to talk endlessly about his compassionate conservative President, while said President never comes across with any compassion, except in speeches, which Sullivan takes as evidence that his President will not forsake him. Talk about battered spouse syndrome.

DERBYSHIRE ON THE HEATH. 8:29 am: Not only the wild-eyed prose ("These wrecking crews, and their black-robed enforcers, have to be stopped"), but the fact that he finds inspiration in Maggie "All You Skinny People Stop Getting Divorced" Gallagher, convinces me that Derbyshire has flipped.

8:31 am: Derbyshire lists the traitors' enablers. Most are Republicans! This is worse than he thought; mayhap Derb will summon aid from those wonderful salt-of-the-earth conservatives he's always on about.

ENTERING THE LISTS. Politics, as Bukowski famously observed, is like trying to screw a cat in the ass, so let's take a little break from intellectual bestiality to consider normally politics-intensive Matthew Yglesias' post on some critics' idea, digested here by McPaper*, of the top albums of all time.

As MY suggests, these lists are always "a bit off." Consensus has no role in matters of the heart, and judgments on music, especially pop music, are all about love. Now, nearly everyone has a soft spot in his heart for the Beatles, so any pop fan will probably find a spot for them in his top-whatever. So whenever two or more are gathered in the name of rock, the Fab Four are probably the easiest call for the top slot.

If you've ever read the Village Voice's annual Pazz & Jop results, you'll notice the individual critics' ballots are usually a little eccentric, even perverse, but the consensus always comes out more or less normal, albeit cranky. Each of us imagines his own private headphone Valhalla, but group lists are about the commons, where the speakers are pointed out the windows.

This is easier to accept if music has been both a private and public passion for you. I used to go to the Cherry Tavern in the East Village, get a pitcher (usually with friends), and go to the jukebox and play "Revolution #9" from the White Album, sometimes more than once, sometimes until the bartender shut it off. "Whatsamatter?" I would say. "You don't like the Beatles?"

As for my top ten, it goes a little something like this:

1.) Exile on Main Street, The Rolling Stones
2.) Kings of Basement Rock, The Penetrators
3.) Live Rust, Neil Young
4.) Never Mind the Bollocks, The Sex Pistols
5.) A Hard Day's Night, The Beatles
6.) John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, John Lennon
7.) Smiley Smile, The Beach Boys
8.) The Velvet Underground with Nico
9.) The Residents' Commercial Album, The Residents
10.) We're Only In It For the Money, The Mothers of Invention/The Portsmouth Sinfonia (tie)

But then, that's just me. Or you.

* Hope this doesn't get me into any trouble with any major corporations.

DERBWATCH, CONTINUED. The port is spilled, the pipe gone out, poor Tom's a-cold and Derbyshire is raving:

"We construe civil marriage to mean the voluntary union of two persons as spouses, to the exclusion of all others.”

Do you, by God! Then you are construing it in a way it has never been construed before. I see nothing in your "construal" to prevent me from marrying my sister, for example. Is this actually OK in the state of Massachusetts?

Oh dear -- Derbyshire in extremis has fallen back upon the Man-on-Dog defense (not based on any judgment on Sister Derb's looks, but on the expanded definition by Senator Santorum, famed explicator of M-on-D).

This is indeed the last refuge of a dumbass. The expansion of our freedoms has taken us to places of which the Founders never dreamed: the abolition of slaves, the enfrancisement of women, the liberation of "Ulysses" et alia. To point to a line not yet crossed and cry, well, what about that one? is to misunderstand the progress of mankind upon which our very nation is predicated.

Well, he could always go back to China. I understand they have pretty good ballet.

WSJ WRITERS ARE VERY DIFFERENT FROM YOU AND ME. "What planet are these people living on? No normal person in a supermarket checkout line frets over whether the clerk has health insurance." -- James Taranto, Best of the Web.

DERB LETS THE SIDE DOWN. After discharging some of his negative energy by harshing at length on a transgendered opponent, John Derbyshire returns to Goodridge with a couple of conundrums.

"1. If 'gay marriage' is legalized, will prisoners be able to marry their cell mates? If not, why not?"

Well, outside coerced unions, which are invalid anyway, why not indeed?

"2. In many jurisdictions, a marriage can be annulled if it has not been consummated. What, exactly, constitutes 'consummation' of a gay marriage?"

Oh, pussy-bumping, ass-fucking, oral sex, penetration with dildoes and/or other sex toys, etc., etc., one imagines (even if Derb can't).

Really, old stick, can't you do better than that?

WELL, THEY ARE FRENCH. Lileks discovers new enemies of Our Way of Life: the Cirque du Soleil.

Ah, crap: married to pretentious European symbolism, that’s what. When you see a bunch of guys in cardinal-red waistcoats and powdered hair running around the lip of the stage swinging censors, you know Western Civ’s going to take it in the shorts tonight.

I don't envy the guy. All that money, that nice house, that nice family, and all he can do is bitch about the service at department stores, the evil traitors in our midst, and the sub-sub-theme of a Vegas casino attraction.

FIRST RESPONSE. I've been sitting here waiting for John Derbyshire, the proudest hater of homosexuals east of the Pecos, to respond to the Massachusetts ruling. Students of dramatic construction will appreciate his first sally, which is in response to some confused "speculating" by the equally repulsive, but much less amusing, homophobe Stanley Kurtz, as to what legislative measures the ruling might mandate.

Derb, bless him, behaves like a patrician made suddenly livid, but possessing sufficient mannerliness to mask his true feelings with an icy hauteur until he has some priv-acy, whereupon he will kick a footman or something:

Stanley: You observed that: "It’s also possible that only full gay marriage will do, according to the Court, and that the legislature will be ordered to bring it about."

Could you, or some friendly reader, please instruct me as to where, in the Massachusetts State Constitution, there is a clause authorizing the judiciary of that state to "order" the legislature to legislate in a certain way?

"Could you, or some friendly reader, please instruct me as to where..." Oh, that's very good. One can almost feel Derbyshire's barely-suppressed tremors of fury, masked by his long ermine cape against which, expelled by tension, his butt-plug flies, making a small thud like a tennis ball striking a drapery.

ANTI-SEMERICANISM?. Because of his actions in the 70s and 80s, I must consider Natan Sharansky a true hero. Unfortunately, the Sharon government he now serves seems to have demoted him to the less exalted role of propagandist.

Though the subtitle of Sharansky's recent Opinion Journal piece, "The inextricable link between anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism," was probably not written by him, neither is it at variance with the text -- to say the least:

Despite the differences between them, however, anti-Americanism in the Islamic world and anti-Americanism in Europe are in fact linked, and both bear an uncanny resemblance to anti-Semitism. It is, after all, with some reason that the United States is loathed and feared by the despots and fundamentalists of the Islamic world as well as by many Europeans. Like Israel, but in a much more powerful way, America embodies a different--a nonconforming--idea of the good, and refuses to abandon its moral clarity about the objective worth of that idea or of the free habits and institutions to which it has given birth... [astonished italics mine]

There are many mad presumptions at play here. For starters, Sharansky really seems to think that having the same set of opponents is grounds for spiritual brotherhood (which would have been news to Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt).

One might also vigorously question the notion that there can be no reason to oppose the actions of either the U.S. or Israeli governments outside the ancient tribal enmity of anti-Semitism. (Sharansky throughout conflates opposition to Israeli policy with anti-Semitism -- "hatred that takes as its focus the state of Israel" -- but these days this non-sequitir is so pro forma it hardly needs comment.)

Worst of all, it seems never to have entered Sharansky's thoughts that either the U.S. or the Israeli government could be capable of acting against its own moral interests. Is it really anti-Semitism (or whatever the weird hybrid proposed by Sharanksy should be called -- anti-Semericanism? anti-Ameritism?) to oppose Bush's feckless war or Sharon's Palestine-As-Prison Project? Are these not offenses to the ideals of Jefferson and Herzl, and do they not mock the very idealistic catchphrases ("light unto the nations" and "shining city on a hill") that Sharansky cites?

One can see the purpose of this shthick: to more strongly yoke, at a time of some tension between Israel and the U.S., the fortunes of one to the other in the court of public opinion. Sharansky even closes by making much of the disparity between America's might and Israel's ("...the United States has been blessed by providence with the power to match its ideals. The Jewish state, by contrast, is a tiny island in an exceedingly dangerous sea..."), evidentally to more strongly suggest that, as the two universally-hated kids on the block, we should stick together -- meaning that the stronger party will physically defend the weaker, and the weaker will say flattering things about the moral superiority of the stronger.

Who knows how well it will work, but whatever merits it has as spin, it is worthless as analysis.

NOTORIOUS HOMO-HATER REVEALS SECRET BRITNEY OBSESSION! Keep up the hate speech, John -- whenever I need to cite an example of conservative bigotry, you always have a fresh, steaming pile all ready for me. But please keep your strangulated, if-only-we-could-make-her-a-nice-girl crypto-porn out of it. Last thing I need when I'm watching Britney is the mental image of you in a lab coat...

NED FLANDERS' HOLIDAY FILM ROUNDUP. "Don't they care what they show kids?" Oh, go watch your singing vegetable tapes, you fucking doofus.

P.S. I know, Julia, even lefties can love Veggie Tales, but I used all my best right-wing-nut signifiers last week and have to deploy the weak stuff until reenforcements arrive. Say this for me, though: I haven't gotten down to the easy Ann Coulter laughs yet. Forbid it almighty God!

NUKED. The $87 billion Iraq reconstruction bill is the big-ticket item on which people are understandably focused. But the Bush Administration has many other ways to use our money to fuck things up. The energy bill they're about to ram through Congress gives between $16 and $20 billion in tax breaks to "producers of oil, natural gas, clean coal and nuclear energy."

Apparently the production of nuclear reactors is a dying craft, and its impoverished adherents require federal funding to keep this dark art alive. Not to worry, their plutonium rods will outlive us all.

Oh, yeah, the bill also authorizes Wildlife Refuge drilling. And for Corn Belt states, huge ethanol subsidies!

It's a good thing money grows on trees. Now if only we had more trees.

WHY THEY HATE EVERYBODY. "(Sometimes I swear that if a European hits his thumb with a hammer when no one’s around, he shouts GODDAMN JEWS!)" -- James Lileks.

Elsewhere on the page: put-downs of Michael Moore, Ted Rall, Howard Dean, and the French.

See, this is why I don't write about the guy as much as I used to: what would be the point?

YOU TAKE MY MEANING? McDonald's, you may have heard, is mad because Merriam-Webster has put "McJobs" in their dictionary, defining it the way anyone who has ever heard the word automatically and instinctually defines it -- as shitty, dead-end service jobs.

Mickey D's minions have hit the press hard with its complaints ("a slap in the face to the 12 million men and women blah blah blah"), and of course WSJ's OpinionJournal, flagship of scumbag bosses worldwide, has risen to its defense. OJ claims that M-W "misdefines" McJobs, because people do move up from burger flipping to better work. No figures at all are offered in defense of this statement, but plenty of can-do corporate-speak is: "ladder into the American workplace," "Ditto for opportunity," etc.

There is something piquant, and more, about McDonald's and the Journal's attempt to explain to the many, many people who use the word McJobs appropriately that they should be using instead as a positive term -- like McDonald's does in its jobs-for-the-handicapped program! (Turn that frown upside down, fella! You're on a ladder to the American workplace!) Kinda makes you feel like you're committing a hate crime or something if you even say the word, now, doesn't it?

And if we don't respond well to this friendly persuasion, well, both McD and OJ remind us that the term McJobs is a licensed trademark -- hint hint, see lawyer.

Does anyone else see something slightly sinister in this attempt by a corporation and its goons to change the universally accepted meaning of a word? It's one thing to work your company's image, but it seems to me that the way to remove an unflattering connotation from your nomenclature is to improve your own performance in that regard.

Instead, Mickey D (hey, am I allowed to call them that? Is it, like, racist?) goes running around the English-speaking world yelling, " McJobs good! Say it! McJobs good!" I suppose we'll find out soon if they're rich enough to pull it off, and if we're feeble-minded enough to have it pulled off on us.

If so, I expect that in the near future, Maaco or Jiffy Lube will aggressively attempt to change the popular understanding of the term "rim job."

SHORTER INSTAPUNDIT UPDATE: Ted Rall getting published in the Village Voice means all you stinking hippies want Americans to die. Conversely, you can't pin Misha's ravings on me just because he's on my blogroll. My "bad apple" theory of political life applies only to mainstream vehicles like what you hippies read, not to the Rolling Stone of the 21th Century.

(I guess I can't read the New York Times anymore since they started running David Brooks. That would make me a neo-conservative!)

SHORTER INSTAPUNDIT: This'll show Tom Tomorrow! See, warbloggers aren't the whiners with bad wrists -- Tom Tomorrow is!! Heh indeed! P.S. Ted Rall sux.

(editor's note: using the "Shorter" format on this cracker asshole really is like sticking a pin in a balloon.)

NOT THEIR LITTLE GIRL ANY MORE. Betsy Hart at NRO tells us that Jessica Lynch's I'm a Soldier, Too is a load of Howard Dean propaganda. Hart makes other mystifying statements, which Soundbitten admirably deconstructs.

Not mystifying at all is this new animus against Lynch. While more sentimental conservatives, like those at RonaldReagan.com, at least appreciate Lynch's service to her country ("The young soldier may not have engaged in any Sgt. York-style feats of daring -- but she's a hero, nonetheless"), the movement's Kulturkommando think she's nothing but trouble. Some, like Mona Charen, have been denigrating Lynch for months because she's a poster girl for female participation in America's armed forces, which to Charen et alia is just another liberal scheme to destroy America.

Others, like Hart, seem to be responding to a more recent need within their little community. Remember when conservatives were defending Lynch's heroism against "crackpot" debunkers? That was before she was able to speak for herself.

Now that's she has, it's apparently time for the story of the plucky little soldier from Palestine, WV to turn into something a little less flattering.