THE OVERCLASS STRIKES BACK. George F.ucking Will today:

After 1962, when New York City signed the nation's first collective bargaining contract with teachers, teachers began changing from members of a respected profession into just another muscular faction fighting for more government money.

August 1, 2007: "Firefighters, Scientists And Teachers Top List As 'Most Prestigious Occupations,' According To Latest Harris Poll."

Will, forever the callow young lord whose noblesse oblige turns to viciousness when the servants ask for a raise, probably never knew what normal people still (thank God) remember: disrespect for the nobler enterprises of society is one of the real signs of social collapse.

ASK AN EXPERT. People are stockpiling rice -- perhaps on the advice of the Wall Street Journal -- in sufficient quantities that Costco and Sam's Club are limiting purchases. I sure hope this panic over staple foods among heartland citizens is unjustified. But I lack the economics training to read the situation. So let's see what the top libertarian thinkers say about it. That always makes me feel better. ChicagoBoyz:

Back about 15 years ago I attended a seminar put on by Honeywell. The presenter arrived with several loaves of bread and brought the receipt from the store for them. This initiated a discussion of the whys and hows of choice, and marketing. Some people want more expensive bread because of the ingredients, some want a healthier fortified bread for the nutrition, and some people just want the cheapest thing they can find, any quality perceptions or realities be damned. I don’t remember what the point of the seminar was, but I always remembered the bread demo. I recently ran into this gentleman at a convention and he was happy that I recalled him as “the bread guy."

That's nice. The price of wheat has increased a gazillion percent in the past year, so I can see why the author is feeling nostalgic for 1993. (He also tells us about a really cheap can of shaving cream folks can buy. I don't see why -- you don't need shaving cream to slash your wrists.)

Commenters -- and the author, in a follow up ("The media is full of stories of doom and gloom about how food is skyrocketing in price, so let’s take the opposite tack...") -- talk about all the cheap foodstuffs (mac & cheese, ramen noodles, etc) with which complainers over food prices may shut their pie holes instead of pie, which would be too expensive.

I hope the Boyz get a gig with the McCain campaign, and disseminate this message of hope all over our great land. America: Home of the Mayonnaise Sandwich!

(Maybe I'm reaching, but they asked for it.)

BURN THE HONKY TONK DOWN. I predicted they'd go after Obama for Richard Pryor. They're getting closer. After a detour -- Malcolm X? Blogger, please! -- Human Events' Evan Gahr goes after "Obama's Other Jeremiah Wrights," namely Ludacris and Jay-Z. After tittilating Human Events readers with some expurgated lyrics, Gahr says:

Obama thus far has equivocated on rappers. He has criticized their language, but adamantly refused to denounce the whole sordid genre as the unique cultural problem that it is.

Suppose we apply this root-and-branch approach to country music. From the old murder ballads through the works of modern-era superstars, we can see a normative attitude toward drink, drugs, and violence against women. Many country songs promote alcoholism, loyalty to anti-social homies, and brawling. Even the female stars are getting in on the act, a sure sign of social breakdown.

Yet John McCain has failed to denounce country music. Maybe Gahr can persuade him to appear in an appropriate venue -- Gilley's, perhaps -- for a Sister Souljah moment. I would advise him to bring plenty of chicken wire.

FOR DUMMIES. Julie Nixon Eisenhower made large contributions to the Obama campaign, and National Review Online's Lisa Shiffren draws what I'm sure she thinks are the inevitable conclusions:

Perhaps we humans are psychologically limited in our options, to following in the footsteps of, or rejecting and rebelling against our various patrimonies. Or, given the linked picture, perhaps the fact that she looks like a carbon copy of her mother — a bit mad, but with a little more iron about the jaw — suggests that she is not her father's daughter after all. The picture is more shocking than the deed. Trisha Nixon Cox, (the blond, putatively less ambitious, "pretty one") still looks like the girl America knew, and, recognizably, has given her campaign donations to John McCain...

Many NRO scribes betray a stunted view of life and human nature, but Schiffren's actually seems heavily informed by fairy tales about princesses and wicked stepsisters. (She also characterizes Hillary Clinton's marriage as a "deal with the devil.") I know there are other adults who think this way, but Schiffren's the first I've seen who could write complete sentences.

SNAKE OIL. Let's suppose you're an educated man, a Perfesser even, who sometimes likes to wax anti-intellectual -- whether out of self-disgust, philosophical confusion, or just for funsies, we'll leave for another hypothetical. These bagatelles attract hordes of winger yahoos, delighted that a college man is saying, or quoting, the sort of things they normal hear only on Fox News and from that guy who lives under the bridge.

This makes you a few dollars and a big name. And the elusiveness of your style -- usually just a link and a simple interjection -- prevents you from looking like too much of a yahoo yourself to casual observers or Perfessorial colleagues.

By and large, you've got it made. But like all sinecures, yours presents opportunities for comic dilemmas. Sometimes, despite the grand claims made for blogging, you have to go to long-form political blather in the MSM -- you are not yet as well-known or well-compensated as Katie Couric, or even Heather Nauert, so your pool of prospective suckers must be expanded if you and your family are to afford the robot bunker of your dreams.

So, good news, you have an assignment from New York Post, where the suckers are plentiful. Bad news: it's Earth Day Week, and the topic is global warming. As your rare substantive comments on the subject reveal, you are not totally insane about it. But your yahoo followers are; so, over and over and over you have portrayed global warming as a fraud and a joke. Now you have to appear outside your comfort zone, minus the protective cover of your usual fortune-cookie style, and try to avoid looking like a sell-out to your usual dopes and a lunatic to big-paper readers.

The result is comedy gold from the first paragraph, which sort of contains its quintessence:

I HAVEN'T been able to get very excited about the big global-warming debate - but I am excited about some solutions to global warming. These are just as worthwhile even if you don't believe that human-created climate change is a big problem, or even a reality.

The charitable explanation for this would be that the Perfesser so loves science that he would like to see it tackle non-existent problems just for grins, much as a young WWE enthusiast might like to know whether The Undertaker could beat up Batman. Alas, the Perfesser's quick reference to the "religious wars" between the "Church of Green" and the "Church of Carbon" -- suggesting that the scientific community is just being as silly as those lovable scamps in the PR firms of the oil and gas industries -- does little to win our charity.

The Perfesser comes out loud and proud against "hair-shirt" scientists with their demands of "impossible sacrifice," but picks an unfortunate example of the more realistic view:

Just ask people in China - now the world's No. 1 carbon emitter - how interested they are in returning to the economic conditions they suffered a few decades ago when their carbon emissions were lower.

Just ask people in China how they feel about Tibet, while you're at it. You'll probably get a similar answer -- that is to say, muffled screams. They're giving us a nice, protest-free Olympics, what more do you want?

Meanwhile, "many scientific champions of global-warming theory" are proclaimed to be on the Perfesser's side because they're against "impoverishing the world" to appease Gaia. Plus which "some environmentalists" are for nuclear power. It's a coalition of unnamed, innumerable exceptions! The problem, non-existent as it is, is half solved.

All that's needed for a big finish is the 21st Century version of the last refuge of a scoundrel: technology. If the solar power cited by the Perfesser sets his homeboys to grumbling, "nanotech" ought to shut them up, as it is new, highly speculative, and not yet associated with hippies. Plus it can be explained in consumerist terms -- "Imagine how much more efficient a family car could be if you cut the weight in half" -- offering further proof that the Perfesser offers hope and cool cars, while all the stupid scientists (or "some" of them, or "many" of them, depending) want to do is make us and our friends in Red China go to their Church, eat flavorless health food, and generally bum out.

It may be said that the Perfesser's dilemma is solved, too: neither his customary blog readers nor his new MSM ones will find much fault with his column, because they'll never be able to figure out what he's saying. He who heh's last heh's best!

UPDATE. Commenter Craig points out that the "not totally insane" global warming post mentioned above wasn't written by the Perfesser, but by his guest-blogger Megan McArdle, so the credit for marginal sanity goes in that instance to her. This is a better example of Reynolds' grudging global warning acceptance.

GO FOR IT, DERB! I usually rejoice in John Derbyshire's unfiltered Asperger's rants on race, and today's celebration of Enoch "Rivers of Blood" Powell started promisingly enough, with a declaration that "Powellite sentiments" -- segregation and expulsion of dark people, in case you didn't know -- "were brow-beaten out of the public square" via a "campaign of propaganda, brainwashing, and intimidation."

When he got to "[Powell's] first trip ever to the United States," I looked forward to ravings about the British statesman's clear-eyed appraisal of the intractability of Negro anger, and how right he was, as the United States has become a place where African-Americans cannot be avoided, even at most country clubs. Alas, Derbyshire changes the subject to Vietnam.

What a disappointment! It's not like he needed to blaze a trail; rehabilitation of Powell's racially "contrarian" views has been going on among legacy-hungry conservatives for some time. I suspect even Derbyshire is feeling the heel of political correctness on his neck. Let us hope he wrenches free of it and, his ardor engorged by the spirit of resistance, unleashes a stemwinder on what he really thinks.

Till then, it's pretty sweet to see even Derb's watered-down racial obsessiveness share a page with Andy McCarthy's lament that Obama consorts with extremists. Spasms of self-awareness sometimes trammel (though unconsciously) individual National Review writers, but the magazine's institutional memory seems not to register with them at all.

SERVICE ADVISORY. Going soon for my annual trip to Medical Disneyland. (Explanation here.) Will try to keep in touch. If I don't make it back, a final thought: don't mourn, organizize. (Also: Thimk.)

BARELY LEGAL. I've been rough on Rod Dreher for siding with Islamic fundamentalists against the pornography that made this nation great, but maybe I merely misunderstand him. Maybe he's really just a cultural adventurer, curious about and tolerant of strangeways around the globe. For instance:

In our culture, it is abnormal for 14 year olds to marry. The fundamentalist LDSers have a communal structure built to accomodate married 14 year olds (well, "married"). I happen to think it's terrible to force a 14 year old to "marry" a 50 year old man who has five other "wives." I would put a stop to it. But shouldn't we at least ask ourselves on what ground we stand to criminalize the practice, when many of us are perfectly willing to extend marriage rights to same-sex couples.

If you're surprised Dreher, who doesn't even want high-school girls to engage in inter-gender wrestling, is relatively cool with Church of Lolita-Day Sex, you shouldn't be. The cultists have a skygod and the sort of "Benedict Option" separatism that gets Dreher mistily reminiscing about David Koresh. With God all things are normative!

I think this presents an opportunity to advocates of gay marriage: simply declare homosexuality a faith and gay marriage one of its sacraments. Not only might they finally get Dreher's respect (and that of a wider, momentarily-confused redneck populace), they would be eligible for government grants.

They would obtain other rights, too, it appears:

On January 10, 2004, the church suffered major upheaval when Dan Barlow, the mayor of Colorado City, and about 20 men were excommunicated from the church and stripped of their wives and children (who would be reassigned to other men), and the right to live in the town.

If I'd known when I was younger that there were churches that followed the ways of Gor I might have rethought this whole atheism thing. Well, too late for me now: I'm too strong in my lack of faith and values to endorse such religious practices, except on a fantasy role-playing level.

RAISING THE FLAG. TBogg's right; the whole Green Iwo Jima uproar is worse than ridiculous. Or, as he puts it:

You really have to wonder what is wrong with these people that their rage richters are constantly cranked up to 11. These are the kind of people you read about whose crushed lifeless bodies are found underneath capsized vending machines all because they went DefCon 1 when their Zagnut refused to fall.

I see him his Canned Heat album cover and raise him this failed start-up. Jock was meant to be a thinking man's sports mag; its debut issue had articles by Woody Allen and William F. Buckley Jr., it was edited by Mickey Herskowitz, and its graphics consultant was Helmut Krone. As nobility of failures goes, that ain't bad.

Contrary to what you might think if you only know the hypercrazy media environment in which we now live, Jock was not taken down by "outraged" veterans; like Gablinger's Diet Beer it suffered from storming a niche that hadn't been chiseled yet.

That the people who dig so deep to find offense are the same ones who constantly bitch that "political correctness" limits free speech would qualify as a irony if irony still existed.

A QUICK ONE WHILE SHE'S AWRY. Two days after accusing me of "snide sexism and heteronormative stereotypes," Megan McArdle (of, we never tire of adding, The Atlantic Monthly) writes

I don't know that I agree with Mark Kleiman that Barack Obama's masculinity won't be an issue in the coming election. On the one hand he's tall, but he's kind of, well, scrawny looking. But also, the political space I think he's trying to occupy--building understanding and reconciliation between hostile voter grops--is generally seen as a woman's role...

I don't have a joke here. I'm only bringing it up to provoke her into another 2,000 word defense of double standards. I love when she does those. They're like brain teasers with no solutions.

IN THIS VERSION, SALLY BOWLES CAUSES THE HOLOCAUST. Talk show host Dori Monson denounces a Nicaraguan art installation in which a dog was starved. His conclusion:

You want an example of the slippery slope of an art world where anything goes? This is just an extension of the moral depravity of artists like Robert Mapplethorpe with his bullwhip in the anus... of Andrew Serrano with "Piss Christ"... when you have acceptance of works like those, it is not a tremendous moral leap to starving a dog.

Well said, comrade! When nothing is true, everything is permitted! I feel empowered to graduate from my occasionally obscene writings to a killing spree. Who's with me? (If you feel unqualified because you only swear recreationally, in the manner of the Wizard of Oz I'll give you some hokey-looking certificate, and then we can go hit the homeless encampments.)

As I've noticed before, these people really don't understand the idea of consent.

UPDATE. When Matthew Yglesias made the Obama-Jay-Z connection, I thought: oh no, soon they'll be demanding Obama identify and explain the 99 problems of which a bitch is not one! Sure enough, here comes the thin end of the wedge: Stop The ACLU brings up the Jay-Z thing, then suggest that Obama gave Hillary the finger, something he clearly learned from his gangsta rap homies. And since, as we have seen, engagement in obscenity leads to a reckless disregard for life itself, it's only a matter of time before Clinton makes a citizen's arrest, claiming there's a guy in Allentown who swears the man who shot him looked just like Obama.

UPDATE II. Well, that got around. RedState commenter: "It might not have been intentional, but if it was, it makes me like him more. Although I'd still use it to trash him in the general election." Laugh about it, shout about it, when you've got to choose/Either way you look at it you lose.

UPDATE III. As some commenters point out, this dovetails nicely with the Yale miscarriage artist whose possibly hypothetical stunt incurred the wrath of seriously underqualified art critics all along the reactionary fringe. My favorite, from a commenter at a well-known libertarian site: "And we come to the crux of what I hate about art." Well, yeah: as we have discussed before, the instinctual reaction of propagandists to anything more complex than a Morning Memo will always be High Boorishness.

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!