SHORTER RALPH PETERS: Watch me blast the Saudis in a thousand-word column, using the word "oil" only once and the word "Bush" not at all! Yeee-haw! Top that, Rich Lowry!

BOO FUCKING HOO. Dr. Mrs. Ole Perfesser encourages readers to open their hearts to oppressed Republicans. She even reenacts the last scene from Bent with an "R" instead of a pink triangle.

What prompts this gesture of righteous solidarity? What indignities have been visited upon Republicans? Are they forced to pay a jizya, crowded into ghettos, forbidden to intermarry?

No, sometimes people say mean things about them.

Really, that's it. No Kristallnacht, no rubber hose, no cars being rocked back and forth by angry mobs. People sometimes write uncivil posts.

It's not like conservatives ever do that.

A windier alternate version of this nonsense by Mark Bauerlein can be read at the Chronicle of Higher Education. This one's yet another complaint about the treatment of conservatives in academia and intellectual professions generally. Bauerlein at least semi-admits that "conservative ideas aren't disengaged from power, or conservative intellectuals from paychecks." But what does all this power and influence mean if conservatives cannot have love -- from the right-brain of the academy?

If a set of ideas and writings are missing in the classroom but present in the marketplace or government, we tend to explain them by their instrumental value. They owe their clout to their usefulness to business or politics, the reasoning goes, not to intellectual substance. If the university doesn't put those works and ideas on the syllabus, they aren't subject to the free analysis and contemplation that respectable works and ideas merit. When they crop up off campus, then, they seem to have no independent validity, no import separate from the interests they satisfy...

Count the names Hayek, Russell Kirk, Irving Kristol, etc., on syllabi in courses on "Culture & Society." Tally how often, in left-of-center periodicals, those names are linked to moneyed interests. The framing is complete. Heralds of conservatism start and finish in the messy realm of politics and finance, never rising into the temple of reflection.

We treat them like shopkeepers, though they have the souls of poets! Perhaps they should try wearing berets and playing acoustic guitar.

I've said it again and again and again but I'll repeat it: if those mean children at Brown and Columbia and Penn State won't play with them, why can't conservatives built their own New Academe? Let Bob Jones and Liberty University be their Yale and Harvard!

Really, it's almost as if they didn't believe in the Marketplace of Ideas.

UPDATE: Ace O'Spades -- dean of the "we're not technically allowed to kill liberals... so that leaves us with that faggy defeat-them-in-their-minds thing" school of interpartisan relations -- agrees with Dr. Helen that liberals are mean.

DOUBLE STANDARD. As pointed out by TBogg et alia, World Net Daily complains that soy products make you gay -- yet at the same time appears to support a ban on high-school girls in their underwear.

How the hell am I suppose to overcome my tofu-related lack of het resolve without 16-year-old Kit Kat Klub dancers? Jesus Christ, there goes the whole reason to see high-school musicals.

KID: Dad, you want tickets to the spring musical?

DAD: Is it that time already! What are they doing? Sweet Charity? L'il Abner? Let My People Come?

KID: No -- Dialogues of the Carmelites.

DAD: ...oh.

Damned political correctness! Well, there's always women's gymnastics.

Bonus laff line: "WND also has obtained photographs from the production..."

UPDATE. Also very funny: the school board member who says, "If you want to talk about the Nazi era there are ways to do it without lingerie." Is it any wonder our kids don't take an interest in world history?

UPDATE 12/13. World Net Daily has taken down the pictures of high school girls in their underwear -- and replaced them with a picture of Liza Minnelli! Apparently the gay menace ain't limited to soy milk!

If you missed them, the Cabaret production photos showed drama school types trying to be all bad-ass and fetishique. To the left is a screen grab*: I think he's supposed to be spanking her, but maybe he's just brushing some cat hair off her butt.

I'm not sure Bob Fosse understood Cabaret, so I can only imagine what these kids' dark reimagining was like. A joy, I expect. I only hope they replace it with Marat/Sade.

UPDATE REDUX. I took the photo down -- these kids have enough trouble. Besides, we should concentrate on the real pressing issue of our times -- the War on Christmas.

UPDATE: CONSERVATIVES STILL LOVE THE TASTE OF DICTATOR ASS. At the New York Post, John O'Sullivan Is Risen From the Grave to praise fellow corpse Augusto Pinochet. His argument, like all the other such like I've seen, is that Pinochet wasn't a communist and he made the trains run on time -- not like that Castro that liberals love so much.

The Castro thing is annoying -- in my whole life of skulking around liberal safehouses, I have never once seen a poster or t-shirt featuring El Commandante -- and Jonah Goldberg does his level best to make it more so:

Do people really think that liberals have been sober-eyed moral realists about Castro from, say, Herbert Matthews' fawning coverage through, say, Oliver Stone's recent love-letter to Castro? I mean what am I missing? I don't have time to run through the soundbites of various scholar-statesmen from the Democratic leadership like Pat Leahy or various members of the Congressional Black Caucus. But come on! Hasn't some blogger compiled a good list of pro-Castroisms from the left? If not, someone should get on the stick.

A couple of things. First, Goldberg confuses journalism with political advocacy -- all the time, come to think of it, but especially here. Herbert Matthews was a reporter who covered Castro's original insurrection. Of course he loved Castro -- Castro was his Big Story. He might as well have been Paul Bunyan or Mike Fink come to life. As for Stone, I have seen Commandante, and it certainly isn't a "love letter," it's a shrewd piece of investigative journalism. No American has had that kind of access to Castro since -- well, since Herbert Matthews. How many Americans does Goldberg think Commandante recruited to Cuban Marxism?

Second, I don't think I've ever heard "What am I missing?" used that way before. Normally it's something you say when you have reviewed and noted the evidence, see that they support your POV, and don't understand why others don't see it the same way. Goldberg, on the other hand, frankly admits he doesn't know what he's talking about ("I don't have time to run through the soundbites... Hasn't some blogger compiled a good list...") and makes the expression into a demand that other people do the work of educating him.

Isn't it just about perfect that Goldberg would misinterpret a common figure of speech in favor of his own ignorance?

UPDATE. The Ole Perfesser finally mentions the death of PinochetwhowasbetterthanCastro -- his bulletin from Right-Wing Message Central having been delayed by server error, no doubt.

UPDATE II. The OpinionJournal rimjob concludes, "Like Spain's Franco, Pinochet was an authoritarian who resisted the Communists and created the foundation of what would become a democratic transition. What remains is a Chile that has the healthiest economy in Latin America, a free press and a competitive political system that has allowed Socialists to come to power."

What! The Socialists are in power! Quick, install another dictator -- lest economic opportunities be squandered!

I guess there are two reasons why not: one, they aren't making Socialists like they used to, and two, the OJ writers know that, unlike Nixon and Kissinger, Bush would probably fuck this one up bad.

MENINGITIS. What is Meninism? Leninism with a bad cold. Ha ha. Dr. Mrs. Ole Perfesser finds a funnier description:

MENINISM is the catchcry of a movement of males who will storm the streets and burn their ties, rallying against the "all men are bastards" image that has an entire sex pigeonholed as violent, heartless and untrustworthy.

This is according to a new study saying there is a competing interest to the feminist struggle for equality; men and boys are now the target of negative stereotypes.

The research shows almost 70 per cent of social commentary on the male gender is unfavourable – portraying men as violent, sexually abusive, unable to be trusted with children, "deadbeat dads" and commitment-phobic.

That explains the way women look at me! I thought it was my filthy, ragged clothing, and the little boob-squeezing gesture I make when I see some nice ones.

One would expect this explanation to relieve the minds of Dr. Mrs.'s commenters, but, as is their wont, they take it as an opportunity to complain about chicks. The consensus is that men are better off without them:

...men wont burn their ties, we will work slow, we will stop doing the mucky jobs, like taking the trash, etc.. will not get married...

...as Cadmus noted, we'll just refuse to get married, buy flowers, remember birthdays, ask single women out for a date, etc. In cases where we are financially secure enough, we'll dump a snotty woman for someone who is prettier, younger, and sexier...

...[Naomi] Wolf totally fails to see the real problem; women like her and other feminists have declared that women shall have sex on their terms and only when they want it [!! - ed.]. Society has bought into this totally. Any man who desires sex more frequently than his mate is now a disgusting pervert. And when his mate does acquiesce, conditions are often attached. This situation has become so ubiquitous, comedians can't even joke about it anymore.

Actually I think that material was squeezed out by Clinton, Michael Jackson, and Viagra jokes.

It just gets weirder and weirder. Try to imagine a readership represented by this:

...Generally speaking I agree that men will continue to withdraw from women and from most social interactions...

We won't burn anything. We'll just go to a pub, watch some sports, and have a few drinks with our buddies. Instead of going out on a date.

...This means that women, when they commit violence, tend to do it by betraying people who trust them. From personal experience [!!! -- ed.], fully internalizing this concept dramatically reduces a man's willingness to get married or otherwise deeply trust a woman...

...I'm in a good relationship now, but should anything happen that would result in it ending, I wouldn't be in a big hurry to begin dating again. I hated it when I went through it before. It was like competing for prizes that no one in their right mind should really want to win...

Paint a pretty bleak picture of the female gender, don't they? And the damned thing is, none of it is their own fault!

Ah, well, that just means more women for me. I shall wash my clothes and get a pair of these so the ladies will think I'm exercising.

DER FUHRER WAS KIND! DER FUHRER WAS GOOD! MANY TIMES HE WOULD SAY TO ME, "FRANZ -- OWWW!" Remember when conservatives argued that Saddam Hussein was so bad he had to be toppled by U.S. military invasion? Today another tyrant has passed, and the same people are blubbering over his coffin.

After overthrowing the elected government of Chile*, Augusto Pinochet spent years killing, torturing, and locking up thousands of his fellow citizens. And, oh yeah, he probably sponsored assassination on American soil.

But conservatives love that he was pro-capitalism, which excuses any number of dead, mangled bodies.

There is one, faint sign among their obsequies that, at some unconscious level, they may recognize the absurdity of their position: they're trying to offload it onto liberals. The boys at National Review says that when Castro dies, liberals will mourn just as we do, I bet I bet. This sort of equivalence is easier to get away with when the event used for comparison hasn't happened yet, though others like Terrestrial Musings, the Classical Values guy, Blogs for Bush etc. opt for a more general liberals-love-Castro slander.

I imagine the more religious among them expect to meet Pinochet in the afterlife. My, what a reunion that will be.

*UPDATE. I meant Chile, I just wrote Argentina.

THE GENERAL SORTS THE SUDAN. General Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters is mad -- quit nodding, I wasn't finished; I mean Peters is mad at the carnage in Darfur. Like all the General's rages, this is righteous anger, aimed at those most responsible: liberals and Europeans.

"One begins to suspect," Peters says, "that all too many on the left enjoy pitying Darfur as they wait in line for their lattes" -- not like the General, whose violent, blinding headaches of true empathy cannot be relieved by latte, but only by human gore, Jack Daniels, and the destabilization of the entire world:

The killing will never stop until we stop pretending that every dictator or junta seizing power is entitled to claim sovereignty over the millions who never had a voice in choosing their government. After the oppression of women, the sovereignty con is the world's greatest human-rights abuse. And for all of its damnable incompetence, the Bush administration understood that one great truth.

If this sounds familiar, it is not only because you once heard a bum screaming it in Tompkins Square Park, but because it was the lunacy du jour in the run-up to the Iraq War, when people like Lee Harris were talking about "the end of classical sovereignty," whereby nobody gets to call themselves a State unless we say they're a State.

Those were the days! We were going to finally realize that long-delayed Pax Americana, all without raising anyone's taxes -- that was the Romans' mistake, after all, and we certainly are smarter than the Romans.

This is why the General is blames libs and latte-sippers everywhere for the dead/raped/tortured Africans, rather than the Bush Administration, which has some actual military means but has chosen to blow it all on destabilizing nations such as Iraq. In fact, Peters wonders why lefties haven't "formed a new Lincoln Brigade to take on Sudan's Muslims fanatics." I would seriously consider joining such a Brigade if the General will consent to lead it. The training sessions alone -- sequestered in our offshore quonset huts, watching the general snap the neck of a Thai prostitute, endless showings of Zulu -- would be worth the price of the ticket, I imagine. And once we landed in-country, we could always sell our allegiance to the highest-paying warlords, and thus give Sudan a real taste of American democracy.

SEND ME NO FLOWERS. At The Corner, John J. Miller offers a rather unfortunate reminiscence of the late Jeanne Kirkpatrick:

The last time I saw her, however, was just a few months ago. I was writing a story the presidential election in Nicaragua—the one that Daniel Ortega recently won. We were at a D.C. event for Eduardo Montealegre, the guy who came in second (and who would have trounded Ortega in a run-off). From my article:

"It's ridiculous for Ortega to be on the ballot," says Kirkpatrick. "He hasn't changed. The Nicaraguan people shouldn't even permit him to hope that he'll be president."

She was really quite animated -- she fought the Commies to the very end.

And democracy, too, when it didn't suit her. You don't suppose Ortega's victory killed her? Or Pelosi's? Maybe it was the fall from grace of her old friend Jonas Savimbi. Or the defenestration of John Bolton...

This is rather like a eulogy of Salieri that recalls him vowing to outshine Mozart. Brrr. I'm glad I don't have friends like that.

IF YOU DON'T LIKE THIS COUNTRY, GO BACK TO RUSSIA WHERE YOU DIDN'T COME FROM! For years, the Ole Perfesser has been telling us complainers, oh yeah, you think America is bad -- well Saddam ran a guy through a shredder! And such like.

Old habits die hard -- and usually just get worse. Today, after another typical, lazy-ass, lifted rundown of Putin's assassinations, the Perfesser drops this Value-Add: "[It's] Safer to attack Bush -- which is why more people do that."

If your impulse is to counter, "Really? I thought we attacked Bush because he's our actual fucking President and allegedly responsive to the will of the People," your common sense is commendable, but you are missing the more amusing psychological justifications that may be offered in the Perfesser's defense.

The simplest would be that the Perfesser first learned the pleasures of lawyerly argument as a lad, on playgrounds where, confronted with his own malfeasances, he would distract inquisitors with more serious allegations against other children; child is father to the man.

I favor a more forward-looking approach. As we know the Perfesser yearns for godlike immortality; it may be that he expects to outlive the United States, and sometimes forgets that some of us plebes yet identify ourselves as its citizens.

ALSO, ISG IS SON OF A PIG-DOG! I haven't read the ISG report yet, but while I imagine it consists largely of bipartisan mush, I am favorably disposed toward it on sentimental grounds, because it has incurred the wrath of the world's leading nitwits. They've even managed to make the New York Post more idiotic than usual, and I thought only a nerve-gas attack on the newsroom could accomplish that.

Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters' column-length retch ends with this chunk of comedy gold:

The difference is that Pilate just wanted to wash his hands of an annoyance, while [James] Baker would wash his hands in the blood of our troops.

That's almost as good as Peters' previous comparison of Howard Dean to Adolf Hitler. May the men in the little white suits never catch up with ol' Blood 'n' Guts!

The Post has pulled out all the stops , even reverting to the Der Sturmer trick -- unused at Rupert's Rag since the "Axis of Weasels" days -- of visually portraying their opponents as animals. Also, they allow John Podhoretz yet another, awful column about the ISG.

Last time out, Podhoretz criticized the Group because they were, like, rilly old ("Baker, Hamilton and their crew of old Washington hands [and I mean old, like Metheuselah-level old]... Its members also reached a consensus view that Depends is a really fine brand of adult diaper, and that they love reruns of 'Murder, She Wrote'"). Now he compares them to Paris Hilton -- not because the Group is in any way Paris Hiltonian (and, to my great disappointment, Podhoretz doesn't attempt even a throwaway simile, e.g. "Like Paris Hilton, the ISG has a little dog and is known for promiscuity"), but because Paris Hilton is supposed to be No Good, and though no actual reader -- indeed, no one who knows how to read -- will laugh at tropes like, "As Paris would say, that analysis is hot," Post editors/informants will see that Podhoretz stuck to the formula -- belittle the ISG in terms that even mentally-retarded readers can comprehend -- and permit him to remain at his sinecure.

Again, it's all probably mush, but isn't it grand that now even mush can drive these people crazy?

MORE BOLD THINKING FROM THE RIGHT. David Bernstein advances a new foreign policy idea:

State Department folk are undoubtedly scratching their heads over what to do about the looney anti-American leader of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez. Here's a suggestion, only partly tongue-in-cheek: Chavez claims that his brand of populist socialism is superior to Yankee capitalism. Well, let the people vote with their feet. Venezuela has a population of approximately 25 million. How about letting any Venezuelan who can pass a basic English test and get ahold of, say, twenty thousand dollars, emigrate to the U.S.? As more and more productive Venezuelans move to the U.S., and Chavez ceases to benefit from the spike in oil prices (which can only work in the long term so long as oil prices climb), Venezuela will inevitably sink into economic straits of Chavez's model, Cuba, and become about as much of a strategic threat to the U.S. as Cuba currently is. And the U.S. will gain a few million productive and grateful citizens, happy to escape Venezuela before it becomes another Cuba. And wouldn't it be fun to watch Venezuelans line up for English classes for the chance to emigrate to The Great Imperalist Enemy?

Oh, what fun. But why didn't we do that with Iraq? In fact, as long as we're being generous with visas, let's do it now. Half the terrified populace can earn their twenty Gs by selling out the other half to the militias, or by selling some leftover statuary from the Iraq National Museum on eBay, or by selling the oil rights under their hovels.

The cringing skills these new Iraqi-American citizens will have developed should serve them well in corporate life.

A LOSS OF FAITH. Claudia Rossett says, "...the upside of John Bolton resigning as ambassador to the UN is that the UN does not deserve to be dignified by ambassadors of the stature of John Bolton." Some of the brethren at National Review Online seem to agree, and are agitating for Rick Santorum to take the gig. But Rossett wants to take it a step further:

I’m reminded here of an episode from the historical novels of Robert Graves about the life of the Roman Emperor, Claudius, who tried to reform the empire. Toward the end, as Graves interprets it, Claudius concludes that despite his best efforts, Rome cannot be redeemed. Is too far gone in autocratic decay. Claudius figures that before things have any chance of getting better, they must get even worse. So, he lets the throne pass to Nero. Rome burns.

Maybe that was also their secret plan for Iraq. When you look at it that way, the "Mission Accomplished" banner makes sense.

Another alternative of US-Out-Of-The-UN types might be to make a case to the American People for getting the US out of the UN. I wonder why these guys never suggest such an approach? It's a hard sell, sure, but I thought people like Rossett specialized in hard truths. Rather than prescribing a sneaky program of wreckage, why not insist on principles?

It may be that, on the eve of the Democratic Congressional takeover, a Victor Davis Hansonian despair has taken hold of them. For years their default argument was that the citizens understood reality better than any pointy-head could, and that's why they kept electing Republicans. But their recent losses appear to have shaken their faith in the voters and, more surprisingly, in the political process itself.

For example, Stanley Kurtz, in trying to work his way out from under Josh Marshall's understandable impression that Kurtz was blaming the failures in Iraq on a feckless American People, talks about the Iraqi project as if it were doomed from the start by the very existence of an opposition, however weak:

Marshall says the Democrats in congress were a minority, and politically powerless. Yet in a country divided by razor-thin political margins, a party in power has to weigh its actions in light of the opposition’s political plans. We’re always just an election away from a transfer of power, as we’ve seen.

So they couldn't get their way despite control of the White House and both houses of Congress and a self-proclaimed mandate. Makes you wonder why they bother trying to elect candidates in the first place. Sport, perhaps, or maybe just the graft.

Entertaining as their malaise may be, be prepared, because it can't last forever. Some champion will eventually ride out of the wilderness and reinvigorate them. I understand Sam Brownback has formed an exploratory committee.

SERVICE ADVISORY. Posting will be light for a few days. I'm burning off a few vacation days and have become responsibility averse.

SHORTER "CRUNCHY" ROD DREHER: God healed my lust for Betty Blue, proving fags are damned.

And if you really want to choke on Jesus-infused psychopathology, check this out: Dreher now not only believes that the Iraq war is wrong because we Americans are too sexed up to preach to the infidel, he agrees with another nut that we are also wrong to approve of the "postwar project... to end discrimination" -- and yeah, that means what you think it means:

I am haunted -- the word isn't too strong -- by what I saw among the Arab Muslims, as they grappled with the new media world that was going to wipe out, or at least dramatically alter, their traditional culture... those of us here who lament how corrosive the nihilistic American popular culture is should consider how it must look to Muslim men and women overseas, who quite rightly see us as a threat to the things they hold dearest.

Read it and weep, but don't hold your breath waiting for the Perfesser and all the other right-wingers to declare Dreher "Not anti-war, just on the other side." That kind of treatment is reserved for dirty hippies and Democrats. Jesus freaks who basically say. well, Islamic fundamentalists are right, our culture is totally corrupt, and they have a right to hate us -- they get a pass because they walk with the Lord, and because if the GOP can come up a more effective line of religious bullshit they might vote Republican next time.

Keep this in mind next time someone tells you that liberals -- meaning, it would seem, people who believe in a full reading of the Bill of Rights -- should suck up to Fundamentalists.

PROPS. Sometimes Jacob Sullum strikes me as John Stossel for people who can read and write, but his quick analysis today of the Baker-Hamilton Report is too good to ignore:

Here's an Iraq update for those of us (including me) who stopped paying close attention because the whole thing was too damned depressing:

1. Most Americans, including some prominent supporters of the war, now agree it was a mistake to invade.

2. We can't just leave, because (even more) chaos would ensue.

3. We have to leave, because otherwise the Iraqis will never take responsibility for their own security and make the difficult political compromises necessary for stability.

In light of these facts, the wise elder statesmen in the Iraq Study Group have come up with the perfect solution: pretend to leave...

Way to cut to the chase, guy. Even better is the tag: "Update: It looks like Bush is not falling for it. Who told?"

ATTABOY, ATATURK. When I saw the title on this Crunchy Con post -- "Jape on Christians and Turkey" -- I thought, ooh, I love japes, -- japes, quips, and bagatelles! And the subject was promising.

Alas, it was just Rod Dreher quoting with approval some guy named Jape. And what he said, regarding Christians in Turkey, was less than cheering:

Moll ends with an American missionary in Turkey who comments breezily that “we are relatively free and we are tolerated now.”

If this is the sum and substance of western missionary zeal these days -- to be free and tolerated -- (and I fear that all to often it is), then Christians have good reason to question the compromises with Liberalism they are wont to make.

My nostrils twitched especially at that last part, so I went back to the source and found that, yes, Jape is indeed one of those guys who says "the structures of secular politics and economics tend to have a corrosive and colonizing effect on what passes these days for 'strong faith'" like it's a bad thing.

Also, he complains that, when Turkey tried to pass a law against adultery, the godless EU pressured them not to.

I am sympathetic to persecuted Christians -- which in my admittedly old-fashioned lexicon means Christians harrassed and assaulted for their faith -- but I notice that, like all other conservative types these days, conservative Christians have broadened their definition of persecution to include being disagreed with, and not being allowed to practice their own variants of sharia in host countries that, were they less "liberal," even in Jape's perjorative sense, would have marched them into the sea.

The whole Benedict Turkey trip, for all the feel-good man-of-peace rhetoric, is really just one powerful mobster cooking up a big takeover with another. I hope the ghost of Ataturk is knocking over their water glasses at least.

WORDS WITH "K" IN THEM ARE FUNNY. I lack ambition, I guess. I tend to hide my light under a bushel. I don't ask to be put on blogrolls, or for links. Certainly not like the pros do:

UPDATE: Sullivan responds to this post without linking to it. Great. I guess you want to make it hard for your readers to see what I actually said. He prefers to link to the Instapundit post that links to this. What's that all about? How many times is he going to print my name over there and talk about me without linking to me? It's really unfair! It flaunts unfairness!...

And you, Andrew Sullivan, refuse to engage with the serious argument I am making here. If you linked to the posts you talk about and cut way down, your readers would have a fair chance to see what I am saying. I have obviously agreed with your basic definition but called you on your overuse of it and the air of hostility toward religious people you're giving off. Why don't you deal with my argument fairly, including links to me, and why don't you treat me as an individual instead of lamely and inaccurately merging me with Glenn Reynolds? Glenn and I have taken different positions on this, and I'm the main blogger writing about the subject, so why are you linking to him linking to me?

and

Why does Andrew Sullivan keep talking about me without linking to me?

See the update on this post. It's getting ridiculous. I consider it a gross breach of blogging ethics.

Emphasis added 'cause I think it's funny.

Maybe I'm misreading this. Maybe it's all actually some sort of elaborate joke. Her whole blog, I mean.

UPDATE. Why did I bother? A commenter mentions that Altmouse is back! What a hoot!

COME, LET US TREASON TOGETHER. I seem to remember days when The West Wing was derided as a liberal fantasy. At least that fantasy was relatively benign; apparently some conservatives are dreaming of something a little more rough.

Behold Orson Scott Card's new novel, Empire, summarized thus by Publisher's Weekly:

When the president and vice-president are killed by domestic terrorists (of unknown political identity), a radical leftist army calling itself the Progressive Restoration takes over New York City and declares itself the rightful government of the United States. Other blue states officially recognize the legitimacy of the group, thus starting a second civil war. Card's heroic red-state protagonists, Maj. Reuben "Rube" Malek and Capt. Bartholomew "Cole" Coleman, draw on their Special Ops training to take down the extremist leftists and restore peace to the nation...

You can read the first five chapters here. I did, with great, great pleasure. The heroic Army Man action figures speak a dialect that's half Ralph Peters and half Sgt. Rock:

"You look pissed off," said Malich.

"Yeah," said Cole. "The terrorists are crazy and scary, but what really pisses me off is knowing that this will make a whole bunch of European intellectuals very happy."

"They won't be so happy when they see where it leads. They've already forgotten Sarajevo and the killing fields of Flanders."

"I bet they're already 'advising' Americans that this is where our military 'aggression' inevitably leads, so we should take this as a sign that we need to change our policies and retreat from the world."

"And maybe we will," said Malich. "A lot of Americans would love to slam the doors shut and let the rest of the world go hang."

"And if we did," said Cole, "who would save Europe then? How long before they find out that negotiations only work if the other guy is scared of the consequences of not negotiating? Everybody hates America till they need us to liberate them."

"You're forgetting that nobody cares what Europeans think except a handful of American intellectuals who are every bit as anti-American as the French," said Malich.

Sound kind of like bloggers, don't they? Also worth mentioning: Army Man #1's wife is a brilliant liberal, but "unlike the ersatz Left of the university, Cessy was a genuine old-fashioned liberal, a Democrat of the tradition that reached its peak with Truman and blew its last trumpet with Moynihan." We are let to know that she bakes cookies.

Pretense of Moral Superiority Disclosure: I would never judge a book by its cover story, five chapters is not enough for summary judgement, Card may have something up his sleeve, and I was not kidding when I said reading the excerpt gave me great pleasure. Hell, this could be my Novel of the Year. I mean, what's the competition?

But we can legitimately have fun with Mr. Card, who, again according to Publisher's Weekly, ends the novel with "an afterword decrying his own politically-motivated exclusion from various conventions and campuses, the 'national media elite' and the divisive excesses of both the right and the left." Like Cessy, Card considers himself a political moderate, though (as we have shown here) he is the sort of moderate who believes that Democrats are evil wimps and that homosexuality should be punished with jail time. Again reserving judgement, it would seem Card's fantasy of treacherously-used liberals finally brought to heel by Red State wolverines reflects this highly unusual definition of political moderation.

Even better, Card has been taken up by the Ole Perfesser, who perfesses to share the author's moderate views and hopes "that both the people and the press will make some conscious efforts to moderate the tone, and make that approach less effective." That's pretty funny coming from Mr. "Not Anti-War -- Just On The Other Side." But my favorite part is this:

I've noted before that one of the great American accomplishments was to get over the Civil War without the kind of lingering bitterness that often marks -- and reignites -- such conflicts elsewhere.

It is amazing that the Perfesser made it through Yale without hearing anything about Reconstruction, the Ku Klux Klan, the Civil Rights Movement, etc. Or maybe he sent nanobots into his brain to scrub this knowledge away. This blind spot gains an added layer of piquancy when you realize that Card's fantasy reeks a bit of Afro-6, Trespass, and other speculations of black power ascendant from the 60s and 70s. Once they feared Panthers, now they fear Donkeys. You may adjust your hilarity meters accordingly.

UPDATE. Didn't know but should have that Bradrocket got there firstest with the mostest.

UPDATE II. Nitpicker has some more recent-vintage OSC that helps clarify his moderate views.

NOW THAT YOU MENTION IT... Back in March, Professor Althouse said of South Park, "Thank God somebody's willing to mock religion!"

Now she's pissed because Andrew Sullivan showed pictures of Mormon underwear.

This weekend I saw For Your Consideration, which has many beauties, though it should have been trimmed of more of its improvisational excesses, which dissipate its satiric force. A pleasure as always was Jennifer Coolidge, who as usual plays dumb with great brio ("Someone's killed their children and made them into cookies, and I want to see that!" and, especially, "What is the theme?").

Hey... wait a minute...

DISPLACIA. The right-wing world feasts -- or, rather, eats crumbs and calls it a feast -- on the idea that the MSM gives all the credit for good economic news to the newly-elected Democrats. If it were so, of course, it would only be fair, as Democrats (and their closely-aligned subspecies, liberals) also get the blame for everything.

Victor Davis Beauregard Methusaleh Hanson has one thing to say about the Litvinenko assassination:

So don’t expect the world’s liberal conscious to weigh in much on the latest poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko... it is much easier for a European or Middle East journalist to concentrate on the purported misdemeanors of a Donald Rumsfeld than the known felonies of a Vladimir Putin.

Yeah, most of the MSM coverage has been pretty pro-assassination (and pro-abortion, if you use your secret decoder ring) -- and such key European anti-war figures as Tony Blair have been slow to follow Hanson over the ridge.

Hanson describes a World Gone Mad, and mutters things like "Or is it a deeper malaise that modern liberal internationalism is neither liberal nor international" (maybe it has something to do with the liberal "conscious"). It would appear from the Hansonian point of view that the American government of the past six years has had no effect on world affairs. The world has been guided to its current, terrible state by an international liberal cabal.

They're never to blame for anything, are they?