RAISING THE BAR. At The Hill Byron York has made a whole column's worth of conservative talking-point out of Obama's bit about his friendships with former Weatherman Bill Ayers and Republican Senator Tom Coburn. After paragraphs of meaningless comparison of Ayers with Coburn (with such horror-movie intertitles as "And then, the Coburn Card"), York finally gets to the relevant point of Obama's argument:

Sen. Coburn and I disagree on some things, and yet we’re still friendly. Bill Ayers and I disagree on some things, and yet we’re still friendly. So what’s the problem?

That was a relief -- for about a nanosecond:

That’s not quite good enough. [cue sinister music]

Obama needs to tell us more about his relationship with Ayers. It’s important because voters might well wonder whether that relationship, coupled with Obama’s longtime relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, is the beginning of a pattern...

...a pattern which, unlike most china, dressmaking, and test patterns, currently consists only of two elements, Ayers and Rev. Wright. But York did say the beginning of a pattern! And who knows what other undesirable friends and acquaintances Obama might have? Turn over your Blackberry and old matchbook covers, Senator!

The nonsense has spread all down the conservative lunchtable ("Does Obama Believe Coburn=Ayers?" asks The American Pundit; "Obama Equates Conservative Republican to Terrorist Bomber" says Gateway Pundit, etc).

One would think Obama had proposed Ayers for Secretary of State instead of just hanging out with him. In a few weeks, they'll find security camera footage of Obama shaking hands at a rally with a guy who later drove drunk and killed a rabbi, and then we'll hear about Obama's beginning of the genesis of a theme of a pattern of anti-Semitic violence.

Well, at least people have stopped referring to him as an affirmative action case -- because it's clear no candidate has ever been held to this kind of ridiculous standard.

THEIR LITTLE ROCK AND ROLL. A few people who (lucky them) didn't know much about this blog crap before they read my Voice article have questions. The most common is, "Why would anyone want to read about this?" The next most common concerns those bloggers who, though their history and attitude show that they're extremely unlikely to vote Republican in November, still complain that my "arrogance" and "demonizing" are driving them away from the Democrats. What, they ask, is the point of this charade? Whom does it convince?

When short of time or just too drunk to speak, I hand them the glossary. Pretense of sympathy is one of those rhetorical tropes that even the unsophisticated can work, as seen on playground where kids yell, "Too bad you're such a retard."

The bigger question is, what is concern trolling and its home-field equivalents meant to achieve? Because I have never seen it even begin to change anyone's mind on issues or candidates.

The simple answer is, it's not about the argument, it's about keeping the crowds coming in. Like other kinds of masquerade, it's an easy way to make your blogging sexier.

In all but a few cases, political blogging is meant to reenforce the prejudices of its readers. Simple chest-pounding and foam-finger-waving get tiresome after a while, so bloggers who want to keep their audiences try to mix things up. But most don't have much in the way of mixers in their cabinets, and certainly can't write well enough to cruise on style.

So, as some of our ancestors developed prehensile thumbs, the more advanced bloggers develop more complicated arguments which, while they may lead to the same conclusions as before, take the reader on byways of reason that make the journey more rewarding and might even (if he is really ambitious) enrich the blogger's point of view, too. This is the point where, it may be said, blogging starts to turn into writing.

But if you're not interested in writing, or any more complex achievement than the leading of online pep rallies, there is a shortcut: instead of feeding complexities into your work, you feed them into your online persona.

Instead of merely being the member of the tribe who holds the talking stick, you can become a fascinating person with unexpected depths. It's not that hard. Since you are constructing rather than revealing a personality (you don't have the artistic control for that), you can start throwing quirky, contrarian things about yourself into your posts. Add as many as you like; you don't have to worry too much about making the effect believable or coherent. It's sort of like writing a screenplay for Madonna. Just make sure that, in the end, you make your readers feel good about themselves.

I just found a great example of this in one Rachel Lucas. In a recent tirade, "The Core of What Liberals Just Don't Get," she states:

If most of us do not, in fact, feel good about our country (which is a whole other question again), the source of that lack of good feeling stems almost completely from the results of liberal/progressive thinking and behavior. In other words, it’s people like Obama who make us feel bad about our country.

Okay. I guess we know how she feels... or do we?

This might be another great time to point out that I’m not even a conservative, and I still feel this way.

Following that last link, we hear about the things that exempt her from conservatism. Anyone want to guess... oh, I see you got it right away: pro-choice, pro-legalization of weed, not too religious. (Funny how easy that was; I said "wants national health care" just to mix things up and I got burned.)

But don't worry, she's not going to hassle you about that. Instead, she'll tell you how nice conservatives are, and that "liberals tend to be assholes."

To be fair, she does argue with conservatives sometimes: here's a post in which she chides them for insufficient enthusiasm for John McCain: "You’d rather have Hillary Clinton, a bona fide socialist, liar, all-around bad person, as president. You’d rather have Obama, the senator with the most liberal voting record, as president." Eventually she explains again that she's not a conservative, this time in all capital letters.

You may be asking yourself what the effective difference would be between this non-conservative and a conservative. The answer is marketing. She offers her conservative readers the thrill of apostasy -- someone who doesn't go to church hates Hillary too! -- without ever challenging or discomfiting them. For a few minutes, they can believe that no one would disagree with them if they knew them like Rachel knows them.

And we get what in American political discourse is the optimal result: no one learns anything and everybody's happy.

UPDATE. In comments, Susan of Texas finds the McArdle connection ("We all have multiple potential selves within us, none of which is more 'real' than any other..."), and better Susan than me, because if I said it you know it would be heteronormative, somehow.

PAPAL BULL. During Benedict XVI's American tour, you may tire of watching the pontiff work his small range of expressions and resemblances (when he is enthused and engaged, Dracula; when he is not, Sam Jaffe in The Scarlet Empress). But conservative bloggers -- whether out of allegiance to Opus Dei or just out of collegial feelings for a fellow dogmatist -- are riveted. From The Corner at National Review comes this awestruck Michael Novak reportage from the Pope's D.C. lodgings:

...hanging on the wall, a life size portrait of [Benedict] by the great Russian émigré painter, Igor Babailov.

Archbishop Pietro Sambi, the Apostolic Nuncio, said in advance that the portrait catches the pope’s shyness, strength, and almost physical presence, in stirring colors of light gold against the dark.

An "almost physical presence"? Maybe it's actually a hologram that blinks on and off. Also:

Best of all, the figure of the risen Christ towers above Pope Benedict...

If Benedict is, as Novak says, "life size" in the picture, and Christ towers above him, the whole thing must be the size of a small billboard. Imagine being comfortable with a near-mural starring oneself in one's apartment -- especially one that, "in its style and presentation," Novak reports, "reaches back to the traditions of the great artists of the Renaissance." I imagine this would be a little much for Siegfried and Roy, let alone a simple man of God.

But this ostentation is just funny; some forms of Pope worship are creepier. At the Weekly Standard, Mark Shea compares the relationship between Benedict and Americans to that of St. Paul and the Corinthians -- and no, I didn't mean "American Catholics," because neither does Shea: he means the lot of us, whom he blasts as a "Paris Hilton kind of people" with "a culture that is desperately in need of the clarity, humility, beauty, and love of Christ that [Benedict] preaches with such marvelous grace."

So if you ain't a congregent, you best congregate anyway! And if you aren't so inclined, too bad, because the TV stations are all tuned to the former Inquisitor performing his Stations of the Crass: zipping around in his motorized vitrine, listening to ecclesiastical yammering (where the dazed Sam Jaffe look comes into play), and explaining to Americans (alongside their despised leader) that they aren't entitled to freedom, because it isn't a right at all -- just something God grants. If you're lucky. And he's in a good mood.

No doubt some of us will get lulled by the incessant coverage, and begin to think, well, the man talks about religion and we all know religion is a good thing, and he certainly wears nice dresses. Let me explain something:

Back when I was in the first grade of a Catholic school, the nuns used to slap us and make us kneel on metal rulers as punishment. Then came Vatican II, and corporal punishment ceased. Eventually we could eat meat on Fridays, and even take a swig of the sacramental wine. It was like the Prague Spring. We still had to do catechism drills and go to Mass every First Friday, but the small kindnesses inspired by John XXIII's Council gave us the notion, however faint, that we were not just souls to be processed for redemption, but also human beings. That may be why I was eventually able to escape.

Now consider this: Benedict and his guys want to roll back Vatican II. He didn't come to America to be your best friend: he came to lay down the law on the faithful, and tell them that "Any tendency to treat religion as a private matter must be resisted." He doesn't want the souls trapped in his net to get one little breath of freedom, lest they develop a taste for it.

The simultaneous pomp and boredom of the TV coverage tends to minimize it, but the Pope's message, to put it in the mildest possible terms, is not necessarily consonant with the traditional American idea of liberty. Of course no one will ask any hard questions about it of the Americans who support and choose to stand with Benedict -- the Catholic Church has way more juice than the Trinity United Church of Christ. But it's worth keeping in mind during all the ring-kissing.

MY BLATHER WRIT LARGE. Until the lawsuits commence, my longform blog coverage is up at the Village Voice. Also available in paper form at your local head shop.

UPDATE. I knew there was a good reason for you to see this -- illos by Tom Tomorrow!

UPDATE II. First cavil, from a commenter at MetaFilter: "And the 'large-breasted' blogger attacked by Althouse was Jessica Valenti at Feministing, and she's a perfectly normal-looking person; Althouse and her hurf-durf-breasts fellow bloggers were simply insane. I wish the writer had pointed that out, instead of making Jessica sound somehow freakish." No imputation of freakishness, I assure you, was meant toward Ms. Valenti, whose most prominent attribute is her writing skill, seen regularly here. And I must say, these attacks from our own side will fatally harm our Presidential chances come November!

UPDATE III. Ace O'Spades, after a "yawn" (good media strategy!), is pleased at his 99/1 Stupid-to-Evil Ratio, as well he should be -- it will come in handy at his tribunal in The Hague. He seems to blame James Wolcott, for some reason, and gives Wolcott writing criticism, which is like John Gielgud getting elocution lessons from Moms Mabley.

UPDATE IV. La Althouse says I "put a lot of work into this thing," which is really all I was hoping for, though I'm tired of doing all the work in this relationship, frankly. Commenters are less pleased. "Wow, too bad no one could do this about the oh-so-pretty left blogosphere," grumbles one. But you can, bunky; go get some Prestype and construction paper and build an empire; the common people are with you.

UPDATE V. At Protein Wisdom, Jeff Goldstein stuntman Dan Collins calls me "Pink Ed," says my article "demonstrates perfectly the left’s contention that if you disagree with them, you’re either stupid or evil, or some combination of both." We always strive for perfection, but never dared hope to achieve it in this lifetime. (For grins you might knock around Protein Wisdom and get a load of their idea of polite discussion.)

UPDATE VI. Megan McArdle, freedom-loving, bravely politically-incorrect libertarian that she is, cries sexism. I will charitably assume she doesn't know what a lipstick lesbian is, and is missing the joke. Maybe I should have classified her as a Libertarian Until Graduation -- or changed her "Modus Operandi" to "missing the joke."

UPDATE VI-AND-A-I/II. McUpdate: "Yes, I know the many uses of the phrase 'lipstick lesbian'; indeed, I count several as friends and loved ones." Yet in my mouth it's a horrible slur. Either I poison everything I touch -- the theory endorsed by my family and ex-girlfriends -- or victim status is the new Gold Standard.

UPDATE VII. "One of the dumbest excuses for a politically motivated character assassination piece I’ve ever read," says Little Green Footballs (as commenter AJB notes, copy and paste the link, don't click it -- Johnson likes his redirect tricks). I knew I'd get some pull-quotes out of this thing!

His commenters are, as always, a pleasure: "They called for the EXECUTION of all Republicans some time back." (I missed that -- anybody got a link?) "The only thing impressive about Edroso is his unrelenting stupidity." (And there is only thing in the world worse than being witty, and that is not being witty.) My favorite: "I know you're reading, Roy. Fuck you." Noted! Oh wait... my new favorite: "There are better men and women than Edroso overseas right now who are making sure Edroso can continue to waste his time in comfort..." For it's "Tommy" this, and "Tommy" that, and "Tommy, in the Voice/Which is run by 'omosexuals, and wickedly pro-choice/They're makin' mock of rightwing Tommies, mock of you 'n' me/But they'll laugh with bloody mouths come our big fagtown killin' spree!"

UPDATE VIII. McMegan keeps digging: "The point, aimai, is that 'lipstick' is being used as a perjorative. Lipstick is only something that is worn by women." Christ Jesus. I guess I can no longer refer to men who "skirt" the issue or "dress" themselves, lest I be jailed by the Canadian Human Rights Commission for gendered criticism. Maybe I'll share a cellblock with Mark Steyn, and we can reenact the bathhouse scene from Quadrophenia, only with show tunes.

UPDATE IX. Been away, what'd I miss? I see Prof. Althouse has joined McArdle in denouncing me for sexist vocabulary -- using precisely the same kind of Bizarro logic I mocked in her entry. Boy, these two are about ready for a Freaky Friday remake, aren't they?

And I'm not just saying that because they're chicks: I feel similarly about Jonah Goldberg and Frank J. of IMAO, Goldberg's sometime collaborator, whose contribution is mostly imputations of girlishness ("The Pink Frilly Paper for Sissies"). I'd especially love to see them in an environmental production which locked them in a room together with only a single Wii remote to sustain them. We should have the audience out of there in 20 minutes.

Rising above the rest is Armed Liberal, who thinks that by making fun of opinion journalists, I am harming the Democratic Party's prospects with ordinary people. Yeah, I can hear them in shot-and-a-beer joints all over America: "My daddy was a Claremont Institute fellow! Don't these Democrats have any respect for our think tanks?"

Well, that about wraps it up. Back to our regularly scheduled sexism, elitism, and divisive "humor" soon!

HOT AIR. "Is Global Warming the Left's Version of Rapture?" asks Michael Goldfarb at the Weekly Standard. Unsurprisingly (but here I am revealing my liberal dogmatism), Goldfarb answers in the affirmative:

But hasn't the left embraced global warming as their own version of the Rapture? They do not harbor any doubt, but believe with the fervor of religious conviction that the end of civilization will come as a result of consumerism. And they seem completely unaware that in believing this, they have shed the very skepticism that is supposed to define the secular left.

Even if you accept that opinion journalism is not an exact science, this is a pretty outlandish charge, so Goldfarb offers evidence: James E. Hansen (M.S., Astronomy, Ph.D., Physics, Director, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies) complained that a textbook written by rightwingers gives "the mistaken impression that the scientific evidence of global warming is doubtful and uncertain." This is weak as millenarianism goes, but perhaps elsewhere Dr. Hansen has thundered on the coming End Times:

CO2 will become the dominant climate forcing, if its emissions continue to increase and aerosol effects level off. Business-as-usual scenarios understate the potential for CO2 emission reductions from improved energy efficiency and de-carbonization of fuels. Based on this potential and current CO2 growth trends, we argue that limiting the CO2 forcing increase to 1 Wm2 in the next 50 years is plausible.

Indeed, CO2 emissions from fossil fuel use declined slightly in 1998 and again in 1999 (71), while the global economy grew. However, achieving the level of emissions needed to slow climate change significantly is likely to require policies that encourage technological developments to accelerate energy efficiency and decarbonization trends.

Technological developments to accelerate energy efficiency and decarbonization trends! He might as well be roaming the streets in sackcloth, holding a big cartoon sign.

Maybe we can get a better idea of the state of play from conservative deep-thinkers like Yuval Levin, who at The New Atlantis admits that conservatives "do have a complex relationship with science," which he proceeds to demonstrate. While the scientific innovations of Isaac Newton et alia led to a "rational new political philosophy" in England, it led in France to a "zeal to overthrow tradition and replace it with rational design." This latter tendency led in turn to the Terror, "the gruesome experiment in applied social science called communism," John Dewey, and other leftist horrors, including environmentalism -- for, while Luval generously concedes that "not all environmentalism indulges in such anti-humanism" as you see in preferred rightwing pull-quote sources, "this view of nature calls for human restraint and humility—and for diminished expectations of human power and potential."

The result: liberals turn their human power away from issues such as Iran and North Korea, and toward cults of the "authentic" and "organic" and other manifestations of Gaia, while, presumably, the conservative advocates of scientific enquiry (not much heard from in Luval's essay since the days of Hobbes and Locke) turn theirs toward thwarting liberals through such practitioners as Michael Goldfarb.

I'm not sure what to make of this global warming stuff, but when I see it associated with hysteria (both the psychological and comic varieties), I notice that it mostly comes from the other side.

THE DMOP DRUM CIRCLE RECONVENES. Dr. Mrs. Ole Perfesser is again decrying the degraded status of males in the United States of Gynocracy. Her angle this time:

Are men in this country keeping other men down? Do you ever wonder if part of the anti-male bias in this country has to do with various groups of men keeping other groups of men down?

Sensing that broaching the delicate subject of male complicity will upset the phallodrones, DMOP rushes to reassure:

I am not saying here that women are not responsible for anti-male bias — they are.

Whew! You can sense sphincters releasing all across her readership.

They needn't have clenched: It is men entirely unlike her readers, DMOP shows, who have done the dirty work. Among her examples of anti-male males, she cites unnamed college professors who "come into every faculty meeting harping about the need to give a step-up to the women in the department or they demand that a minority be hired for some position." So it would seem that specifically white males, those lowliest of Epsilons, have to fear the race- and gender-quislings of the faculty lounge. But those working in "the 'justice' system" are less discriminating, and in divorce cases are prone to award custody of children to their mothers.

Having run out of professions of which she and her family have personal experience, DMOP goes straight to class warfare -- rich males are doing the lioness' share of the selling-out:

Bill Gates made his fortune by using the capitalist system — now that he has his billions, this system is only worthy of his contempt. And don’t get me started on what Bill Clinton has done with sexual harassment law that has left men in his wake vulnerable to lawsuits and losing their livelihoods and their reputations.

She fails to mention Clinton's equal culpability in leaving Presidents vulnerable to impeachment proceedings. As always, the real fun is in the comments, where the suffering hordes offer grim fantasies of the future...

The extreme form of this would be men who support genderless marriage... The women impregnate themselves with the sperm donor of their choosing and never even have to interact with those lowly regular men. Gentlemen, you are facilitating emasculation.

...analysis of the treasonous males...

I would add that alpha males often try to keep younger men down… because they do not want the competition. And if an alpha male professor is surrounded by young female assistant professors, women whose careers he has championed, doesn’t this feel a little like having a harem??

...horror stories from the world of the arts...

I’m in the cast of a theatrical production of “Peter Pan” that opens tonight. Wendy’s mother is portrayed as a wonderful, loving, and wise woman. Wendy’s father is a pompous, clueless, whining jackass.

...and, of course, fanatasies of vicarious vengeance:

Unfortunately, even these women will become unhappy because they will never be satisfied marrying a normal man starting out in life because they’re spoiled rotten. They’ll make excuses for their singleness as the fact “their professional success intimidates” men when its nothing of the sort.

DMOP's T-group has made much progress, which is to say, they have someone else to blame besides (though not excluding) bitches. Perhaps next time they'll build a bonfire and assign themselves spirit names. Recovery is distant at best, but at least in the meantime these put-upon souls have their safe space, and for that we should all be grateful.

RED SCARE. At the flagship of the American liberal conspiracy, Bill Kristol opens his column on Obama, entitled "The Mask Slips":

I haven’t read much Karl Marx since the early 1980s, when I taught political philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania...

The temptation to stop there is great, and you might as well succumb; there's no need to parse Kristol's innuendo because it has already been mainstreamed. Senator Joe Lieberman on a Fox News Radio program:

NAPITALIANO: Hey Sen. Lieberman, you know Barack Obama, is he a Marxist as Bill Kristol says might be the case in today’s New York Times? Is he an elitist like your colleague Hillary Clinton says he is?

LIEBERMAN: Well, you know, I must say that’s a good question...

We could stick around for Lieberman's softer summation (he'd "hesitate" to call Obama a Marxist; doesn't say how long), but again, why bother? While Lieberman weakly back-pedals, the smaller Republican operatives put their pedals to the metal ("That [Obama would] fall on the philosophy of Karl Marx should come as no surprise. His wife, his preacher, and his friend Bill Ayers all already believe it...").

Now the accusations of Marxism are being amplified by a guy who calls himself Confederate Yankee. Again, we could just leave it at that even if he weren't already familiar with his lousy writing: No particular restatement of slurs could match the bold stroke of having someone who still mourns the War of Northern Aggression accuse Obama of supporting an alien political philosophy, association with "cranks," "warped views of religion, the Constitution, and America," and being "blind to our better nature as a nation."

Of course you could read them all verbatim, as I have, just to make sure you haven't misunderstood them. You can even read, in hopes of getting a broader perspective of conservative opinion, the more moderate among them, like Stephen Bainbridge, who says that Obama's merely a socialist. In the end you'll be stuck in the same place, that is, in the 1950s, reliving the days when mainstream Democratic candidates could count on being called Communists.

LILEKS AT THE MOVIES. Or in his Sanctum Jaspertorum, anyway, gazing upon some cultural artifact digital technology has delivered. (You can tell because he's not complaining about tubercular sputum.) He saw There Will Be Blood. Hey, I saw that! But I missed the culture-war angle:

It kept my attention, and I enjoyed watching it, even though I felt myself disengaging from it by degrees in the last hour. Let's just not tell ourselves that it's a mark of great artistic insight to have the character get more insular and nasty as he gets richer, shall we? I'm not saying we should have lots of movies like The Biography of Andrew Carnegie...

Oh, how he would long for the days when Hollywood portrayed tycoons as wonderful, ordinary fellows, if such days existed. Imagine Lileks sent back in time to write about Citizen Kane: "Nice of Mackiewicz to let Harold Ickes write the script for him. See Kane, bloated with ambition and dollars! I'm sure Fatty Arbuckle would have something to say about that. And there's some Spanish-American War revisionism thrown in for good measure. No blood for sugar cane, man! While Hearst was protecting our children from marihuana, Welles was turning Shakespeare over to Negroes," etc.

I expect he reads (G)Nat Atlas Shrugged as a bedtime story.

INK-STAINED RETCH. The opening of a museum dedicated to journalism stirs the wrath of our old friend, Zillion-Star General Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters:

There's no museum in the vicinity of the National Mall dedicated to our military.
Tells you a lot about the vanity and priorities of today's governing and informational "elite," doesn't it?

On the Mall a hippie couldn't spit without hitting a bronze servicemember or a military memorial. It's practically a Valle de los Caídos. But there's no reasoning with the General, and thank God, because that gives him a whole column to expound on the lowest form of life on earth:

Let's be honest: Journalists are parasites. Whether war correspondents or metro-desk editor, we live off the deeds and misdeeds of others. They do, we tell. Without the soldiers, cops and firemen (or the politicians, terrorists and criminals), there ain't no stories.

He forgot death-sniffing dogs and Britney Spears. But, again, leave him the floor:

Of course, any biologist will tell you that there are good parasites and bad ones, so we're not condemning the entire profession here. Just noting that journalists piggyback on the courage or failings of others.

Kind of like novelists and playwrights, and all those other inky bastards who engage the world with a lousy pen instead of a manly bayonet. Why, Washington gives a whole library to Shakespeare, who never shouldered a rifle.

The General digs in: once journalism was "something of an outsiders' profession," but "today, big-media journalism is a white-collar, insiders' profession that grows more elitist by the year." Well, it is too bad that "big-media journalism" has grown more elitist, though I doubt big-corporate, big-pharmaceutical, etc. are hiring many kids off the turnip truck anymore. (Astonishingly, some of my friends and I have written for the media without J-school degrees. Perhaps we were the equivalent of mercenaries, though in that case I expect we would have been better paid.)

From "All The President's Men" forward, journalism was the ultimate career for the well-educated, well-connected young voyeur who didn't want any bottom-line responsibility (just a byline, thanks). No need to get dirty, at least not for very long. Just make fun of the young soldiers or cops who get dirty every day.

There is something to this. Just scan the headlines in today's Washington Post: "Police Say Man Has Robbed Six Banks Since January" -- clearly implying that the cops are too stupid to catch him. And: "Iraq Fires Policemen, Soldiers" -- there's a twofer! Couldn't the Post have just referred to them as "downsized" and left them their dignity?

To further prove his point, the General bets you can't "name one decorated hero from Iraq or Afghanistan," while some TV newsmen may be familiar to you by sight. And I'll bet you know who Simon Cowell is, too, you treasonous bastards.

His rage spent, the General pleads for simple justice:

Would it be too much to ask for a little humility on the part of the privileged? Yesterday, at Ft. Bragg, I met a Special Forces sergeant-major whose courage won him the Distinguished Service Cross. He'll never earn what a TV anchor earns.

Insolent civilians may be tempted to mention the earning disparities between TV anchors and schoolteachers, home health care workers, etc. But that kind of talk won't fly with the General. For him, your respect for the Armed Services is not satisfactory until you admit you aren't fit to lace their boots -- unless you're a Republican politician, and even then you dast not cross him or he will unscrew your head and shit down your neck. Now drop and give him twenty, maggots!

CLASS WAR CONTINUES. Conservatives are still beating on Obama for his Pennsylvania voter remarks, and all this weekend work (plus the understandable need to distinguish oneself in a crowded filed) has made them reach a bit for angles. At Commentary Jennifer Rubin offers the last defense of Hillary Clinton you will ever hear from her:

Now conservatives might guffaw over her new-found appreciation for the Second Amendment, but there is something inarguably more down-to-earth ( and if not “normal” than at least “ordinary”) about Hillary Clinton than Obama. It has nothing to do with race or class (liberal bloggers want to remind us he was on scholarship to that tony Hawaii prep school) and everything to do with their life experiences. Clinton is a product of middle class, Midwestern parents and has spent a chunk of her adult life in Arkansas. She may not trust Americans to read a home loan document, but she knows them well enough to never let slip from her lips words of cultural condescension.

"Nothing to do with race or class" would seem to invalidate most of her argument, bringing it down to the notion that Clinton is better than Obama at putting it over on plain folks, surely not the Commentary writer's field of expertise.

Over at Classical Values, we find a clangorous attempt at race-card reversal:

At the University of Chicago students and staff are treated like Royalty and the neighborhood folks are treated like servants.

At my son's graduation there last summer almost all the wait staff were blacks from the neighborhood dressed like servants in the Jim Crow South (I lived there as a youth). It had an offensive feel to it. Just the way Jim Crow felt offensive to me.

That is the environment Obama was used to. His behavior fits in well with the people he associated with. And how do you behave towards servants? Well you certainly don't get into any kind of personal conversations with them.

Comparing white, rural gun enthusiasts to blacks under Jim Crow is hard to top, but the palm as usual goes to Crunchy Rod Dreher, who slags Obama for "condescension" to the common people immediately after one of his "Benedict Option" posts about going off the grid with a nice garden in preparation for Armageddon. Whatever difficulty Obama may have in explaining his remarks to the good people of Pennsylvania, I can guarantee he would have an easier time of it than Dreher would expounding on the need to "batten down the hatches and keep the family and the community's life and culture together during extraordinarily difficult, chaotic times," with "the dying of the bees" and "the strange weather patterns" as two of the Seven Signs. Unless, of course, Peter Kazlouski left some followers behind.

ARRESTED BY REALITY. Police hassled a bunch of people for dancing at the Jefferson Memorial! Only the dancers weren't dirty hippies, they were libertarians! To the barricades leaps conservatarian Peter Suderman, who, while explaining that "I hold both police officers as people and police as an institution in pretty high esteem," wonders

What does an arresting officer in any circumstance like this possibly think he or she is going to accomplish? Give his buddies something to do for the night? Maybe he’s got a paperwork fetish? Just can’t wait to take the paddy wagon for a spin?

The easy answer is, the officers think they are accomplishing their job, in accordance with the "Broken Windows" theory:

Popularized in New York City under the Giuliani administration, “Broken Windows” calls for the police to arrest people for petty violations and to investigate suspicious people in high-crime areas. Theoretically, arrests made for petty violations will provide apprehensions of people who are wanted for crimes that are more serious.

In this case "pretty violations" can be anything -- Public Nuisance is a good one. Failure to Disperse is another. There's no end to what a good officer can come up with, especially when you talk back to him.

I don't know what Suderman thinks of Broken Windows, but he's certainly a fan of Giuliani's "toughness," which reputation was based in no small measure on his willingness to arrest practically anybody. I daresay he finds it less appealing when his buddies are on the wrong end of the nightstick. With any luck he'll remember this when the cops sweep some miscreants who can't afford iPods.

Failing that, for his own sake I hope he has at least absorbed the ancient folk wisdom that you always try to swing with a policeman/And never ring-a-ding a policeman.

UPDATE. Peter Suderman tells me: "I don't find Giuliani all that appealing a candidate; my libertarian instincts are too strong." (We all talk to each other, you know; in fact we post all this crap from the same large, industrially-lit crap farm.) His post led me another way, but I believe him. Of course now it's days later and no one will notice, demonstrating once again the educational method of the blogosphere.

SHORTER ROD DREHER: I am troubled by the radical, anti-white, black power politics of Bill Cosby.

CLASS WILL TELL. A lot of people think Obama's comments on some Pennsylvania voters were gaffish. Mickey Kaus, for example, accuses him of "gruesomely off-key condscension toward downscale Rustbelt voters." "Downscale Rustbelt voters" is Kaus' own formulation, and one that would not play well in any bar full of Yuengling and gimme caps. But let's be fair: Kaus doesn't give a shit about those people, and probably imagines his point about Obama's elitism will be made to them on his behalf by talk radio hosts and local White Pride spokespeople.

After months of hearing that the Obama campaign has no substance, you might think these upscale Rushbelt commentators would welcome Obama's bold, public analysis of how Republicans bamboozle poorer voters. They themselves talk about this sort of thing endlessly in their media control towers; were they serious about what they say, they would be delighted to see the conversation go, so to speak, mainstream and into the streets.

Of course, they aren't taking the opportunity for discussion, but for politicking -- in the precise manner Obama described. This leaves it to more sympathetic voices to engage Obama's point -- and some do, but more tentatively, perhaps shaking a little in their tweeds at the imaginary thunder out of Lancaster and New Castle. But many others punt, conceding the ridiculous Republican point ("Obama was essentially claiming that the reason people are not voting for him is because they are bitter"), and presumably hoping we can all get back to discussing the important things, like which health care plan should be offered for sacrifice to the pharmaceutical lobby, or which excuse should be offered for staying in Iraq through the next decade.

There was a lot of enthusiasm for a "dialogue on race" some weeks ago -- not sincere, of course, but at least they felt they needed to pretend. A real dialogue on class, however, is something they will never countenance. Because no matter what happens in the former case, they know (most of them) that they'll always be white, but even the most firmly esconced at the top of the class structure nurtures some fearful awareness that the great wheel has been known to spin.

I AM A REACTIONARY. One reason I enjoy covering Rod Dreher is that he rekindles my love for America. We are surrounded by conservatives who insist that they love America, and describe it as a horrible place where the unfortunate deserve only the back of the hand of power, which must be maintained by endless wars. After a bellyful of their patriotism I sometimes begin to doubt my own. Maybe they're right, I begin to think: maybe the ugly America they celebrate is the real America, and I have only deluded myself that it was something better.

But when brother Rod denounces the West, as he is increasingly prone to do, my defensive reaction troubles me less. Because while I would agree with him, and his sources, that there are many things wrong with this country, his judgment of general rottenness on our way of life so offends me that I turn into a regular Yankee Doodle Dandy. When he says "[Patrick] Deneen raises the possibility that events -- economic, especially -- will do more to enhance traditionalist conservatism's prospects with the public than anything else," and I realize he is praying for catastrophe to befall us so that we will all come running to Jesus and the Old Ways for protection, I feel the sort of things that liberals of old must have felt when student radicals threatened to burn the motherfucker down: this is still my country, and if we are ridiculous about a number of things, I will certainly side with it against the likes of you.

Dreher does the trick for me better than a gibbering Islamic radical any day. The Islamist in most cases is only amplifying an ancient grudge exacerbated by bad treatment and a lack of video games and pornography that might divert and winnow his rage: Dreher enjoys the privileges and grass-fed beef of a great nation, and still judges it damned, the fucking hippie.

I get a similar, America-loving rush from some of The Anchoress' spasms. She begins a recent post with traditional laments about the liberal media, but soon escalates, with extensive self-quotation, to talk of a "painless coup" that has already made a hellhole of the Land of the Free: not only has it corrupted the noble rustics "Aunt Sally" and "Uncle Jim" into accepting abortion and tits 'n' swears on the TV -- it has actually made "our beautiful churches into bare concrete monstrosities (ready-made for quick-conversion into temples to secular reason)..."

She goes on thereafter about Liberty and Truth and the American President, but my mind yet dazzles that she doesn't just think we've picked the wrong leaders -- she believes some demonic force has possessed us, one that not only dirties popular entertainment and allows wrongful social policy but has actually twisted the minds of her co-religionists to build ugly, idolatrous temples. She doesn't just think the political tug-of-war has lately failed to go her way -- she thinks America is depraved. And when she comes to her prescription...

I don’t have a good feeling. I think we really have to get our free - and by free I mean unencumbered and disenthralled - press back. And soon.

...I get the queasy feeling that she isn't talking about electing McCain, or a slate of Republicans, or even pushing the kind of draconian legislation that usually emanates from the snake-handler wing of that party. She wants to drive out the demons. And who knows how far she would be willing to go to accomplish this sacred task?

Heaven knows I get mad about what's going on in this country, and often treat its leaders, opinion or otherwise, and even its citizens with raw contempt. So I'm thankful that Dreher and The Anchoress are around to set me straight. The American people are often ridiculous and sometimes do horrible things, and I have turned my wrath on a broad array of our native fixers, crackers, dupes, dopes, and scumbags. But they are still my people. I too want more than I could possibly deserve, chafe at well-meant and even reasonable restrictions, and prefer a good time to a Great Awakening. And in the last ditch I'll take my stand with our credit-, pleasure-, and freedom-addicted folk against our would-be saviors.

PRE-EMPTY STRIKES. At Hot Air, Allahpundit sees through Chairman Dean's claim that "Mitt Romney was the candidate I feared the most in the general":

He feared a guy who couldn’t beat McCain in New Hampshire despite the huge financial advantage, months of early campaigning, and proximity to the state he governed? He feared the social con whose faith and very belated conversion to the cause left him suspect in the eyes of much of the Christian base? Whose own most devout supporters felt compelled to beg him in the pages of the New York Times to stop running such a phony campaign?

I understand his rage. Dean is just doing a little pre-season politicking -- because that's what it's all about right now: laying down clouds of stink that operatives hope will linger enough that citizens can catch a whiff of them when they start paying attention. And, with the help of lazy reporters, perhaps they will.

Republicans, of course, have been doing the same kind of thing, claiming that the Democratic contenders are knocking each other out before the main event ("...we will look back on the Clinton-Obama contest, and its looming ugly endgame, as the low point of identity politics, and the beginning of a turning away..."). I doubt it has been much worse this year than it was in pre-seasons past. Those of us who, thanks to some horrible brain chemistry imbalance, are prone to notice this sort of thing are just noticing it more than usual.

Those mostly apolitical souls who are, perhaps optimistically, lately referred to as "voters" are probably not asking yet which candidate best represents their interests. They're probably asking "Four bucks for a gallon of milk?" etc.

I DO LOVE THEE SO THAT I WILL SHORTLY SEND THY SOUL TO HEAVEN. The even-when-you're-right-you're-wrong mode of conservative argument finds a new taker in National Review's Mark Krikorian, who thinks America should bow to our Chinese Olympic overlords and wants to know where Democrats get off spoiling the Party:

But does anyone think we'd be seeing all this commotion over Tibet in Paris and San Francisco if the ChiComs were still in their Maoist stage, sending educated people to work in the countryside and spouting all that revolutionary class struggle baloney? Of course not. It's only because China's in its Pinochet/Franco stage that lefty "world opinion" now has its knickers in a twist about their hip imaginary Tibetan friends, the monks of Shangri-la.

Contrast this unsupported "What If" to the well-documented change in conservative attitude toward China over the years: from rage at "Red China" to Nixonian accommodation to our present state, in which free-world corporations exploit China's ample cheap labor market, and rightwingers applaud because it feeds their ultimate fantasy: capitalism without freedom.

I seldom wonder if they have guilty consciences about it, but I think Krikorian might. What else explains this bit:

If you're a Tibetan trying to free your country from the clutches of the gangster regime in Peking, you'll take your allies wherever you can find them. But the trendiness and superficiality of this "free Tibet" business, from people who couldn't recognize Tibet if they tripped over it in the street, is striking.

Maybe he thinks the monks, despite all evidence, really prefer the slow road of laissez-faire liberation favored by conservatives, who really "get" them, to the noisome protests of hippies. Maybe he agrees with the Chinese that the Dalai Lama is a false leader to his people, something like Al Sharpton -- a peace pimp, or some such. Or maybe something inside Krikorian rebels against the accommodation he feels he must make with the grim demands of capital, and drives him to grotesque fantasies.

RED DAWN. Bad enough he hates white people; Barry Obama's a communist too. Ace O'Spades, fresh from his Time magazine coronation as "The conservative/ libertarian answer to the Daily Kos" (with, in evidence, an Ace quote about how black folk are prone to "virulent anti-Semitism"), tells us that Obama had a "mentor" who was a communist, and Michelle wants more pie. Connect the dots! But how does this pertain to actual policy in an Obama dictatorship?

Barack Obama is very vague about his actual politics and few have bothered asking.

Well, he does have a website -- but you have to know how to read it. For example:

The cost of our debt is one of the fastest growing expenses in the federal budget. This rising debt is a hidden domestic enemy, robbing our cities and states of critical investments in infrastructure like bridges, ports, and levees...

Critical investments! Sounds like a Five-Year Plan in the works to me. Let's dig deeper:

Let's set high standards for our schools and give them the resources they need to succeed. Let's recruit a new army of teachers...

An army of teachers! A barefoot army, no doubt -- and one already trained in the ways of the cadre by the AFT. That's a new Cultural Revolution in vitro, or my name isn't Jonah Goldberg.

Seen from this perspective, Obama's pledge to invade Pakistan looks less like the sort of saber-rattling Americans expect from their Presidential candidates, and more like a coded message to sleeper cells: comes the Revolution, Pakistan will be the first satellite in our Union of American Socialist Republics.

Please let this get around. I mean, he's black, he's pink, and (like all Democrats) he's yellow -- add cyan, and we have our winning electoral strategy -- registration black with 100% coverage!

TRY AND TELL THE YOUNG PEOPLE OF TODAY THAT, AND THEY WON'T BELIEVE YOU! At USA Today, David Frum concedes that the GOP has lost the "Youth Vote." It was once theirs, you know -- Reagan, Alex P. Keaton, cheap cocaine, all that. But then the GOP got lamer (it is poignant to see Frum list Iraq among its "embarrassments") and the kids got "more secular," "more permissive," and "browner and blacker." You see the problem! But Frum has a remedy, little girl guide:

Think Social Security taxes, not income taxes. Today's young voters are paying much more in Social Security taxes than in income taxes — and contributing much more into Social Security than they will ever see out of it...

...we can talk to young blacks and Hispanics as young people, who share economic interests with an entire generation of overtaxed young workers, regardless of race.

All the kids like that rap music. Maybe a new "Black Korea" can be engineered, this time with boomer crackers as the objet d'infame: "Everytime I wanna go make some fuckin bank/I gotta kick a tax to some Mick Jagger manque/bran-eating Gold Bond-dusted motherfuckers/that make a nigga mad enough to cause a little ruckus..." Bitch, I got a iPod!

Present a sunnier face on social issues. We need to make clear that we defend the family not to impose our values on others, but in order to give the next generation of America's children a fair chance in life.

Children who grow up without their fathers are more likely to go to jail...

Whoa, didn't take long for clouds to roll in front of that sunny sun. Finally Frum is reduced to plea-bargaining: "On abortion, too, it is important that Americans understand that the end of Roe v. Wade does not mean a national abortion ban... If California and New York vote to retain abortion rights after Roe, national Republicans won't interfere." There's a winning slogan: Abortion Is Murder! May Not Apply in New York and California!

Re-emphasize the environment. The voting data suggest that young voters might care less about the environment in reality than they think or say they do...

I'm beginning to wonder if Frum's heart is really in this. In fact, his Point Four ("Above all, results matter") rather indicates that it isn't, as he searches for hope in the presumptive ashes of 2008:

If the inexperienced Barack Obama wins — and then discovers that there is more to being president than giving speeches — we could discover that the next generation of young people reacts to the failures of an Obama presidency by rediscovering the enduring Republican principles of limited government, individual rights, strong national defense and pragmatic effective governance.

Maybe. Though, with conservatives -- including Frum -- increasingly prone to compare Obama to JFK in a bad way, maybe the result of disillusionment will be riots, dope, guns, and fucking in the streets. Say! This story has a sunny side after all!

A PROMINENT LIBERTARIAN JOURNALIST ON HER PROFESSION. Megan McArdle returns from wherever, and spectacularly relieves her Youth Brigade of thumb-up-the-ass detail with a three-part self-embarrassment:

It starts with Glenn Greenwald's observation that our media would rather report Barack Obama's bowling performance than the John Yoo memos which essentially declared President Bush above Constitutional law as regards torture and extraordinary renditions. McArdle says of course, silly -- Obama is more famous than John Yoo! "Readers buy more papers with headlines about Jamie Lynn Spears than they do with headlines about Alphonso Jackson or John Yoo," she explains, and as Obama is also a celebrity, there's no market reason (that is, no reason at all) why newspapers shouldn't cover him the way they cover a popstar's relatives, nor why they should cut into this frothy coverage with icky torture news.

Greenwald, making the fatal mistake of assuming McArdle to be educable, tries in a follow-up to explain that Yoo's memos "legalizing government torture, declaring presidential omnipotence, and suspending the Fourth Amendment inside the U.S." are important news, because they "became the official position of the entire Executive Branch of the U.S. Government." McArdle responds that "Mr Greenwald's anger at the establishment power structure seems to be rapidly transmuting into anger at the non-Glenn-Greenwald power structure." While readers are puzzling that one out, she describes her own difficulty in getting her stories printed:

Now, some of my readers are arguing that we journalists have a duty to give the public what they don't particularly want. Okay, well, you really should know how to calculate a bond duration...

So why should the suspension of the Fourth Amendment get more play than selections from McArdle's economic primer? "The public doesn't know because it doesn't care," says McArdle, "not because the journalists don't want to tell them." If this doesn't convince, McArdle also calls Greenwald's assertions "bizarre, even lunatic," compares him to the Ron Paul "rEVOLution," etc.

As word gets around about her dazzling logical display, McArdle returns for an encore:

Almost every journalist in Washington came here wanting to cover the kinds of things Glenn Greenwald wants written about; almost every editor here was one of those reporters, and assumed their current job hoping to break these kinds of stories. They are simply limited by the tastes of their readers.

Apparently Washington is the new Hollywood -- a place where fresh-faced writers go full of big dreams, only to be worn down by the demands of the marketplace, eventually (with some bitterness, perhaps, but also with some consoling paychecks) churning out stories about Bush's flight suit, happy new homeowners, unstoppable economic growth, and other feel-good stories. I would credit McArdle for a fresh insight here, but she seems to think that this is the way things are supposed to work in journalism -- no doubt because, as a libertarian, she must endorse whatever dollars endorse in any situation.

It's a good thing she hasn't got a job better suited to her talents, such as coal-mining: were the canary in her mine to drop dead, she'd probably just complain that she missed its singing and ask for a heartier one to be sent down.

SHORTER ROD DREHER: None of this Crunchy Conservative stuff is meant to supersede hatred of liberals, of course, nor uncomfortable chairs.

(I seldom pause to note, as the Sadlynauts always do, that the ‘Shorter’ concept was created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard, but it bears mentioning.)