THE RIGHT ARE VERY DIFFERENT FROM YOU AND ME. "...my appetite for fisking has abated; it feels like angry break-up sex, and I don’t quite see the point much anymore." -- Jim Lileks. In the words of Curly: Nggggyaahhh. I wonder if the angry, fisky sex Lileks recalls was with this girl, and if that's what he meant by "end hard"? Time to check The Smoking Gun for old police reports.

WONKETTE HAS BEEN HACKED. Just a heads-up. Apparently someone's trying to show us just how unsexy and unfunny real nerds can be. As if we needed reminding!

UPDATE. The unfun and unsexy continues. You can always judge a man by his 70's rant. If it's all breakdown-of-society stuff, with no appreciation for the rampant drug abuse and unprotected anal sex, then it's time to move on to the next party.

THESE THINGS JUST WRITE THEMSELVES. Jonah Goldberg:

Kayne West's Jesus schtick is intended to buy some controversy. He's posing as Jesus for Rolling Stone. I really hope the religious right doesn't take the bait...

Jonah Goldberg, who I guess is not religious, forty minutes later:

A reader makes a good suggestion. If a rock or rap star wants to make waves in an interesting and novel way rather than this clichéd Jesus rip-off, they could always dress up like Muhammed. I don't support it, but that at least would take some guts.

Hey, that's a funny idea. Maybe Goldberg should do it. Oh, wait, his family couldn't afford the lost income etc.

Three minutes later, Tim Graham:

There is a media-bias connection to the Kanye West outrage.

Linked story cites Matt Lauer's outrage in 1997 over a National Review cover showing Clintons as buck-toothed Mistah Magloo Asians. Lauer's outrage makes it hypocritical for Rolling Stone (of which Matt Lauer was once editor-in-chief, right before Howell Raines and Michael Moore) to show a black man wearing a crown of thorns, is the point I'm guessing Graham wants to make. Or maybe there's another explanation -- like psilocybin:

Rolling Stone’s theology is interesting: they’re tongue-in-cheek about Jesus and genuflect under the ashes of dope fiend Hunter S. Thompson.

Graham's also pissed that West says he gets turned on by porn instead of by Canadian elections like normal people.

Meanwhile the publicity for Kanye West spreads like cooties in a junior-high locker room. Advantage: blogosphere! Or hiphoposphere! Or bullshitosphere! Or something, anyway, other than common sense.

UPDATE. It hadda happen! The Ole Perfesser does his bit for the Kanye media blitz; takes time to "yawn," link to Goldberg. What's Roc-A-Fella paying these people?

I'M A STUPID MORON WITH AN UGLY FACE AND A BIG BUTT AND MY BUTT SMELLS AND I LIKE TO SMELL MY OWN BUTT. Jonah Goldberg offers a list of books from a liberal POV "that I personally found interesting or useful." What makes such books interesting or useful to him?

There are certain things you need to look for when measuring the honesty of liberals writing about certain periods. For the Progressive era, they need to admit that civil liberties often mattered very little to the champions of "reform." When it comes to the New Deal, they need to acknowledge that on the specific terms used to justify the New Deal — i.e. ending the Great Depression — the New Deal was a failure (the best recent conservative book on this point is Jim Powell's FDR's Folly). Moreover, they need to acknowledge FDR's numerous shortcomings in terms of personal honesty and intellectual heft. I'm not saying that you have to think FDR was a lying dullard, or that the New Deal was a bad thing, to be an honest historian of the period, but you have to deal with those allegations thoughtfully.

As for the 1960s, you have to admit that at least some of the rebellion was little better than a pose; that fear of Vietnam and not high-minded pacifism was a major motive for the protest movement; and that some of the participants in the 1960s were either damaged people or became damaged because of their participation.

Similarly, I find conservative books most honest when they acknowledge Reagan's numerous shortcomings in terms of personal honesty and intellectual heft, and his failure on the specific terms of the Reagan Revolution -- i.e., to get the government off our backs (though if you think Reagan's purpose was to allow corporations to raid the Treasury, you would be honest in calling Reagan a success).

Also, you would need to admit that at least some of the Gingrich Revolution was little better than a pose; that enthusiasm for a new scam for disentangling suckers from their loot, and not high-minded government reform, was a major motive for the Contract with America; and that some of the participants in the Revolution were either damaged people or became damaged because of their participation.

Such books exist, but the conservatives who write them are usually called liberals.

SHORTER BYRON YORK: The stories conservatives told about Clinton in the 90s were fake but accurate.

THE RIGHT TO GO TO A SCHOOL THAT LOOKS GOOD ON MY RESUME WITHOUT HAVING TO HEAR ANYTHING MY DAD THINKS IS RED. I see an UCLA alumni group is posting a hit list of leftist professors, and offering students money to monitor said professors' activities. Even the usual idiots are a little embarrassed by their co-religionists' project, though they still maintain that lefty bias among college professors is a very serious problem.

I have said it before, and before that, and before that even, but I will repeat it here: what prevents these aggrieved students from transferring to Liberty University, where Jerry Falwell will see to it that they never hear another leftwing prof again? Or to Hillsdale, or Wheaton, or the Claremont Colleges, or any of these schools? You don't even need vouchers! Let the free market rule!

If these people loved education as much as they loved to bitch and moan, this country would be in great shape.

NERD CENTRAL STATION. Oh Christ, the Perfesser turns a book review into a dating seminar for his buds. General consensus: Bitches won't give manly mens a break! Here's my favorite chump:

As a 48-year-old never married single man still in decent shape, successful and now retired, and having weathered the "feminist" cultural storm still raging since my teens, I can tell you that even your having read Norah Vincent's book, you STILL have no idea of the anger, the hatred, the vengeance and the pain so many otherwise attractive and available women are afflicted with. It is an epidemic of conflict and self-distortion that begins and ends with an impenetrable sense of entitlement, based on a false sense of victimhood, and for which not just any man but every man must pay forever for the restoration that's never good enough.

The "feminist" demand runs from fathers to brothers to sons and husbands, to their friends and acquaintances and chance encounters; it is endless. "I am woman, hear me roar" has produced a psychological wasteland that would put Sherman's march to shame and into which any man who travels does so at his peril....

That's why God made Astrolube, buddy.

Reynolds gets his missus in on it, leading to a discussion so stupefying that I found myself making a little Dada exercise out of scrolling down the page and reading lines at random, which vastly improved the experience. My favorite so far:

And if your 'drift' is that I'm greg kuperberg, I'm not. I already told you that I'm a female attorney.

Runners-up:

Rather than thinking like prostitutes, I believe these women you describe are thinking like anti-prostitutes.

and

Since her death, I've made it a point to look for another Filipina.

Perfesser Reynolds' last linkee sees that thread differently: "When we last checked, there were 108 venting males on her site. Don't women want men expressing their feelings? Could it be that women only want their men expressing some of their feelings, if so many had to wait so long for this one lone chance to let fly?" I wonder if he's single, or involved in a committed relationship with the mummified hitchhiker in his smokehouse?

Suddenly all those jokes about keyboard kommandos and Mom's basement have become horribly, horribly real.

MAD MAILBAG: EPISODE ONE. Busy again, so I invented a new category that allows me to recycle other people's work and make it look like I did something. Hehndeed!

As a break from the tedious forensic work of isolating the central fallacies in wingnut columns, we go straight for the cheap laffs with Mad Mailbag -- celebrating comment-box crackpots and their prose-poetic descriptions of the alternative universes in which they dwell.


Today's winner comes from Winds of Change, in a response to Armed Liberal's MLK day complaint that liberals don't get King right.

As a quick scan of sites like Roger L. Simon's and (pre-hejira) Michael Totten's shows, the usual fan base for pro-war sorta-usedtobe-whatever-liberal guys like AL consists of conservatives delighted to hear smack spoken by an insider against the hated liberals.

But some in the crowd are not convinced that the former fellow-traveller has truly repented; and when the audience has thinned out, they step to the podium and, as the speaker is packing up his papers, lean over and whisper in his ear:

Armed Liberal said in post #6: "While I think that the Left has foolishly abandoned both the moral center and style of discourse used by Dr. King, I'd bet that it would resonate still in the right voice. I'm looking for that voice..."

Armed Liberal, I hope that you never find it. Because three are some people who are responsive to that voice. They are Christian, conservative and the backbone of the pro-life cause.

The Left, which the voice that you are looking for would serve, is committed to "choice". When all the oily rhetoric about "choice", "quality of life" and so on comes to a practical point, it is the point of a hypodermic needle piercing the heart of a viable human foetus, to inject it with potassium chloride, to kill it. A voice for the Left is a voice that facilitates the slaughter of helpless human beings.

I think that what you want is a Saruman the White, using the finest words to get people to agree to the worst actions.

I hope you never find him.

With friends like these, who needs glassy-eyed stalkers?

P.S. I also propose a codicil to Godwin's Law: any political argument availing wizards, wookies, elves, necromancers, or persons named Something The Something is prima facie bullshit.

LATRINE DUTY. It's not all major essays and heavy thinking here at alicublog. Sometimes basic maintenance has to be performed. I am here to tell you, first --

First [Hillary Clinton's] husband decides somehow that he is an African-American by claiming to be the "first black President" because he comes from a broken family.

-- that Captain Ed is full of shit: Clinton never seriously portrayed himself thus; it came from Toni Morrison.

Second, they haven't begun to dismount that Brokeback Mountain hobby-horse yet -- but they have moved from the anger stage to bargaining, experimenting with a manly, non-gay way to appreciate the film --

To come down from the mountain, and settle down into gay domesticity is not an option for them, because it would rob them of their dignity as men... and it would transform them into gay men -- a queer kind of quasi-male our society is willing to tolerate, and even to chuckle over and smile at, the way people chuckle over and smile at the funny sissies on Will and Grace. But neither of the cowboys could allow such an insult to their pride and dignity, and thus their only escape was to return to the isolation of the mountain, where, by themselves, they could achieve what even the most gay tolerant society could not give them -- a sense of manliness...

Butch it up as much as you like, girlfriend -- it's still hot man-on-man action to me!

UPDATE. Clinton joked, people choked! See comments.

THESE "LIBERAL FRIENDS" OF MINE! I keep asking but no one can tell me...

Most of my friends are liberals. This series is the conversation I wish that I could have with them. I wish they would let me finish my train of thought before interrupting. I wish that they would consider my arguments, rather than try to bury them in rhetorical put-downs.

...how do guys like Arnold Kling acquire, let alone keep, these "liberal friends" when they express such obvious contempt for them?

I mean, what would the conversations be like?

KLING: See the Colts game?
LIB FRIEND: Damn, I knew they'd fuck it up. They've been riding for a fall.
KLING: Oh, well, you would say that.
LIB FRIEND: Whattaya mean?
KLING: (pulling out charts) As this graph indicates, you have a tendency to claim prescience after the fact.
LIB FRIEND: After the fact? I wrote you an e-mail two days before the game that said the same thing.
KLING: I wish you'd stop interrupting me.
LIB FRIEND: I'm sorry. What were you going to say?
KLING: That your childish behavior is attributable to a deep-rooted psychological malady.
LIB FRIEND: Yuh don't say. (knocks him down)
KLING: You also have a propensity for violence.
(Cue theme for the "The Odd Couple," blackout)

I don't see how anyone with any self-respect would put up with that kind of treatment. Many there's an escort service in D.C. that handles it. Didn't I read about it at Wonkette?

Or maybe it's just bullshit. Yeah, let's go with that.

I'LL NEVER FORGET WHATSHISNAME. If you though "Bring Back Birdie" was a bomb, wait 'til you get a load of "Bring Back Reagan," now playing at OpinionJournal:

When Rep. John Shadegg jumped into the race for House majority leader last week, he called himself a "Reaganite" who would bring back the Gipper's vision of limited government...

It's telling that now, five years into the second Bush presidency, conservatives are still looking for the next Ronald Reagan to champion their ideas in Washington. Even as Reagan and the current President Bush have similar presidential records--fighting wars of ideas around the globe and running federal deficits at home--Reaganism is the party's philosophy, with its belief in small government, low taxes, forceful conservatism, a strong military and the view that this country is a shining example for all the world.

Several of this article's ideas are humorous -- for example, the notion that "wars of ideas" has been redefined since St. Ronnie's time to include carpet bombing, prolonged and unwanted occupation, and the secret detention of American citizens -- but only one is interesting: that conservative apparatchiks still count on invocations of Reagan to sanctify their latest predations.

Does that shit work anymore? Reagan is widely admired, true -- but so is Bill Clinton. This poll has the Glimmer Twins at one and two -- ahead of Lincoln! -- with younger voters prefering Bubba.

Clearly these findings have little to do with historical reality, and much to do with aspiration and self-identification. People who grew up in the 1980s tend to overvalue Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark; likewise, those who grew up with Reagan, when approached by the opinion collector, think not of the evil GE shill sticking a hose into the Treasury and throwing the other end to his corporate buddies, but of their carefree youth. Same with Bubba Blowjob.

So as they prepare the Republican makeover, professional bullshit artists will naturally avail heavy quantities of Spirit of Reagan. They may be right. Not to get too deep into it, but our country is sunk into a peculiar, new state that we might call psuedo-romanticism, best symbolized by the gestural, yellow-sticker support our citizens reflexively give to a war in which few of them believe. We are awash in bunting, but bankrupt of ideals. Ask your neighbor which American value he prizes above all others, and he'll probably hesitate (or name the dollar menu at McDonald's). What do we stand for? Greater earning power than you get in Kenya? All-you-can-eat shrimp? Supposedly preserving freedom for others at the expense of our own?

St. Ronnie may be a great icon for such a time. Or it may be that he's outworn his welcome. Seeing for the millionth time his wizened, hard-smiling visage in OpinionJournal, I was reminded of the Joker in Batman. As our values become more formless and free-floating, the shock of the new must be constantly applied to keep this rumbling corpse of a Republic tottering forward.

If Reagan turns out to be as welcome at the Republican relaunch as any other senile grandfather, things will get weird. What other corpses and near-corpses are available? Nixon? Ford? Bush I?

In that case, prediction: the lighting rise to power of Kurt Busch!

PLUS ÇA CHANGE.

Should the United Nations be reformed? Or dissolved altogether?

That became the question of the evening at the first night of the Liberty Film Festival as the audience was treated to the LA premiere of "Broken Promises: The United Nations at 60"...

However, while the documentary dismantles the UN's credibility, it calls not for abolishment, but reform. And as you can probably guess, that's not what most of the audience at a conservative film festival have in mind -- and they didn't even wait until the end of the film to make that clear.

When one of the film's interviewees declared that "we can't fight these problems [terrorism, etc.] on our own," one audience member piped in with "The Marines can!" which was met with applause.

After the film, in a rather unusual move, radio talk show host Tammy Bruce was given the podium before the filmmakers. While praising the film as a good first step, Bruce challenged the idea of reform, declaring the UN to be part of the problem.

Not one to shy away from verbal excess (what radio host ever is?), she compared reforming the U.N. to trying to reform the Nazis, declared that un-reformable "Jew-hatred" is at the heart of the U.N., and said the U.N. "keeps righteous nations like Israel and the U.S. from being able to do what they need to do."

-- "Dateline Hollywood: Compromising Art or the Art of Compromise?" Ryan Zempel, Townhall

In the early 1960s, when Judelevicius wrote Gyvasis Sekspyras, Soviet critical views of Shakespeare were still officially regulated by the strain of ideology proclaimed at the First Soviet Writers' Congress of 1934 and synthesized in 1936 by A. Smirnov, whose Shakespeare: A Marxist Interpretation had neatly bound up the dramatist's entire oeuvre within the confines of socialist realism in a way that both limited the range of permissible readings and outlined an austere program for Soviet literary criticism in general. In a 1965 article entitled "Literature and the Arts in Captive Lithuania, " Jonas Grinius outlined this "totalitarian encirclement" as it affected Lithuanian writers. Foremost among the requirements of works of both academic and imaginative works produced in the Soviet era, Grinius explained, was that of historical optimism. Other prerequisites included the demand that all literary material be interpreted according to the dialectical and historical materialism preached by the Communist Party, always concerning itself with some aspect of the class struggle and depicting evil characters with the supposed traits of the bourgeoisie. Rimvydas Silbajoris has specified an even more basic limitation on the Soviet Lithuanian literary critic: he must not interpret using aesthetic criteria, but exclusively through the lens of sociology; and he must assert "the supremacy of a single ideology over the multifaceted and ideologically self-determined inner world of the artist."

--Patrick Chura, "Hamlet" and the Failure of Soviet Authority in Lithuania

SHORTER PERFESSER REYNOLDS: After we completely fuck up this planet, me and my buddies will just get in our rocket ships and leave it all behind.

THE LOW POINT:

"When Mrs. Alito walked out of the room, I thought of Mary Jo Kopechne."

When they open the Hack Hall of Fame, Roger L. Simon gets in on the first ballot.

GOLDBERG: THE EARLY YEARS. Jonah Goldberg talks today about his school days and all the feminists he -- well, let him tell it:

Moreover, many of the dedicated feminists I knew and befriended (and, yes, dated) sincerely believed in the cause...

The mind reels! Here's a little number we at The alicublog Comedy Hour like to call "Young Goldberg and His Feminist Date":

IMA LIBERAL: Jonah, my eyes are up here.

JONAH: (cracking that adorable, crooked grin) I was looking at your hands. You have nice hands -- really nice hands! (laughs, sprays cracker crumbs)

IMA LIBERAL: Ghod. So, what movie did you want to go see?

JONAH: Are you sure you want to go to a movie? Because I'm gonna pay for your ticket, and you'll be forced to sit right next to me in a dark room. Isn't that a signifier for the patriarchy or something?

IMA LIBERAL: Ha ha. No, Jonah, that would be fine.

JONAH: I bet you think you're speaking for all women when you say that. That's pretty arrogant, don't you think?

IMA LIBERAL: Okay, Jonah, you made your point.

JONAH: Oooh, the thought police are trying to silence me because I'm not being politically correct!

IMA LIBERAL: What is that weird voice you're doing?

JONAH: Bluto! Hey, what did the feminist say to the lesbian! Nice hands! Ha ha ha ha -- oh shoot, I'm out of chips! (suddenly "black," waves chips bag) Yo, go git me some mo' chips, bitch!

IMA LIBERAL: What the fuck is wrong with you?

JONAH: Relax, I'm joking. Jeez! Can't a guy tell a joke? You feminists are really touchy! You must be having your period. (pointing at her) Woody Allen used that in "Annie Hall" so if you get mad it's hypocritical!

IMA LIBERAL: Listen, Jonah, this is too weird. I'll see you. (leaves)

JONAH: (to the audience) The part of "Ima Liberal" was very thinly drawn, which shows that liberals like Edroso don't respect women as much as I, who only wanted to take her to a movie and, maybe, if things worked out, hold her "hand." (Snorts, farts, and throws confetti like Rip Taylor.)

GET R-READY! THE WOR-RLD IS COMIN' TO AN END! This New Criterion review of the journal N+1 starts okay, and the author, Stefan Beck, even manages to be funny ("If 'boredom is a moment of danger,' I just fell out a fifth-story window into an abandoned mineshaft full of quicksand"). What the hell, N+1 deserves a few knocks.

But at the end Beck reveals a tendency, shared by all the more hardcore kulturkampfers that nest at the New Criterion, to grab a sandwich board and play the Get-Ready Man:

...it seems inevitable that n+1 will recede from view... It will fail less because of its obnoxious hype machine than because, as the world’s troubles become more dire and more immediate, nobody’s going to turn to the Kunkels for the answers. A civilization declining within and attacked from without can’t afford to ponder its fate in the same glib, nugatory way that it ponders “trends in network comedy.” So nobody will turn to n+1. They’ll just wonder, one hopes, why they ever made such idols of Progress and Thought—without a moment’s attention to where they were going or what, if anything, they were thinking.

Years ago, when David Letterman was funny, he had as a guest on his show G. Gordon Liddy. Liddy obviously cared little for his host, and throughout the interview fixed him with icy stares and gnomic responses suggesting that he was far too wise and advanced to be trifling with fools like this. Letterman reacted with nervous laughter and defensive mutterings of "ooooh-kaaay" until the very end. After he asked Liddy what he thought his own legacy would be, and Liddy replied, "My legacy will be what everyone's will be -- a diet for the worms," Letterman turned to the camera and said, with a big grin and in his best announcer's voice, "There you have it, ladies and gentlemen: G. Gordon Liddy says, tomorrow we'll all be dust."

I credit folks like Beck for taking art more seriously than the usual Zhdanovite clowns, but Jesus Christ, guy, if you feel that way about things, why bother writing about such ephemera, unsuited as both the object and the analysis are to the New Sparta our times demand? Why not go make munitions, or hang yourself?

FAMOUS RIGHTWING BLOGGER SENDS THIS ONE OUT TO THE LADIES:

...Ladies like to play games. One of those games apparently is playing hard to get on the phone. Now, to be sure, men like playing games as well and since men are not oftentimes as verbal as ladies like them to be, games don't even have to be played to (inadvertently) mess with a lady's mind. But the traditional male compulsion to remain relatively Stoical and silent along with the fear that the ladies are wrapping us around their lovely fingers with "will she call me/will she not?" phone games compel us to be relatively shy in the conversation department...

Want to have a few of us break out of our shells? Then stop playing games!...

This is my plea: Help us help you...

Send that boy a blow-up doll.

Oh, and get this:

If this post doesn't excite the hate mailers, nothing will.

UPDATE: Okay, so not much hatemail. But I probably should clarify a few things . . .

Admiringly squibbed by credentialed wingnuts, yet still in the "hotpants and harangues" stage of his socio-sexual development. I hope the fame compensates for the anguish of these, his teenage years.

JEFF GOLDSTEIN DEFAMES HIS COUNTRYMEN. Despite conservative tubthumping for our super-wonderful, jacked-up economy (Here comes another millionaire! Feel your per-capita income going up!), consumer confidence is lagging. Jeff Goldstein offers this analysis:

Yet still -- with unemployment below 5% and the DOW threatening 11000 -- many economists at odds with Bush’s economic philosophy insist that Americans are somehow worse off, that their jobs are a inauthentic, that their situations really are far more dire than they themselves are able to understand.

Which is why for years now, I suspect, the health of the economy has not polled well among the American public, many of whom continue to recognize that though they are doing just fine, others must necessarily be suffering greatly—because this is the dour economic news they receive day in and day out from people like Krugman...

...The result is, Americans -- a compassionate people -- are often concerned about this phantom suffering of others in the abstract, and will react less confidently to the current state of the economy based on how they believe others are suffering under it, even while they themselves note (often with some degree of secret shame) that they seem to be doing just fine.

I have a pretty low opinion of my fellow citizens' intelligence, but I never would have imagined them easy marks for the hypnotic powers of Paul Krugman. Especially with everyone else drowning out Krugman's incantations with cries of "strong economy."

Also, I have lived amongst Americans for a long time, and I have never known one to minimize his financial status -- in fact, I have heard more than one claim to be "doing great!" when he was in fact two paychecks from a barrel overcoat. Americans are proud of their treasures, however many credit cards and mortgages are paying for them. When your average American buys a new car, for instance, he rides it slowly, almost insolently past his neighbors; he blathers on to strangers about it; the only person he hides it from is the collection agent.

Is Mr. Average American really so whipped by firewalled Times columnists that he feels "secret shame" at his big house, car, and alarm system? Why, Goldstein makes him sound more like some kinda goddamn grape-boycottin', guilt-trippin' liberal than a real American! I advise him to apologize forthwith if he wants to keep his place. Remember what happened to Andrew Sullivan!

JUST LOOKING IN. I'm awful busy this morning, but if it's laughs you want, you can go here and watch Ross Douthat condemn abortion by comparing zygotes to bums. No, really:

If I shoot a mother of four, it's a much greater tragedy than if I shoot a friendless bum, and you'd probably want to give me a much stiffer prison sentence. But it doesn't mean the mom should have the right to life and the bum - or the fetus, the embryo, or the zygote - shouldn't.

The rest of it's pretty funny too.

Stray thought: Given all we've been told about how Jesus made Chronicles of Narnia a hit, does its replacement at #1 by Hostel mean that America has decided it prefers serial killers to Christ?

LONGER MALLARD FILLMORE:


... so why would I go watch fags?

(Remember when conservatives were at least pretending to like gay people? Why were they doing that, I wonder? Just to see how much bullshit they could get away with? Anyway, ol' Mallard demonstrates that things are getting back to normal; next week, Chantel will jack his car, and Mr. Noseworthy will ask Mallard if he's ever been to Harlem, and Mallard will be all like, "Are you kidding? I can't stand my own black skin!")

UPDATE. Some interesting subtextual analysis in comments. I would add that, in this series, Mallard exhibits the loathing of public events and contact with fellow human beings typical of suburban conservatarian dweebs.

There really is No Such Thing as Society when you smell bad and can't fit in a theatre seat.