MORE FUN WITH KULTURKAMPFERS. Right-wing film scold site Libertas is excited by a New York magazine item that implies Lauren Conrad and Heidi Montag (both of MTV's The Hills) are Republicans: "Smart and conservative… But I repeat myself."

Where have I heard of these two before?

Heidi Montag says she isn’t to blame for the Lauren Conrad sex tape drama.

“I tried to help her get it back for, like, a year,” Montag said on the Late Show With David Letterman Wednesday. “I was like, ‘You gotta get it back, you gotta do something about this.’”

Sex-scandalized Republicans are so 2006. Can't they get Selena Gomez to come out for McCain? With a little luck she just might keep her top on till November.

SI-IGNED, NOISE-MAKER. As I mentioned earlier, our culture warriors are a little off their game lately. I blame the Reverend Wright imbroglio, an all-hands-on-deck affair that exhausted the usual squawkers and left them listless in the face of everyday pornification. Even the usually reliable Kathryn J. Lopez is reduced to pretending to notice eight-month-old pro-choice billboards.

So thank Satan that Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Washington Times is keeping hilarity alive:

Dear Abby's pen is double-edged: One side dispenses her solid, homespun advice; the other, according to critics, promotes a faddish, post-traditional, anything-goes approach to sexual morality.

The Culture and Media Institute, a division of the Media Research Center in Alexandria, analyzed the 365 Dear Abby columns written in 2007 by Jeanne Phillips — daughter of the original writer, Pauline Phillips, who dispensed advice under the pen name Abigail Van Buren from 1956 until her retirement in 2002. They found that 30 percent of the columns dealt with sex and that of those, more than 50 percent rejected traditional morality, the view that sex should be limited to marriage between one man and one woman.

I hear the Institute is working on another study that will blame the Lockhorns comic strip for a decline in marriage rates.

The Times reports that "The institute wants [Dear Abby] columns to carry a disclaimer stating that they should be considered entertainment only." Here is nannyism that I can get behind, if we can carry it to its natural conclusion and apply it to other parts of the papers as well. Horoscopes, sudoku, Billy Kristol columns -- all should have labels which not only warn, but also provide contact information for logic tutors. And let the Federal Government subsidize their instruction. I invite our Presidential candidates to propose such a plan -- call it No Chump Left Behind -- as a remedy for the failures of our education system.

Alternatively we could have the Feds raid the Institute and pull out any minors -- on the evidence of this study, I'm sure they have more than a few on staff -- or (the longest shot by far) have someone with great patience and a soothing voice explain the free market to them.

THE KINDEST, BRAVEST, WARMEST, MOST WONDERFUL HUMAN BEING I'VE EVER KNOWN IN MY LIFE. In the Wall Street Journal, Karl Rove tells us what a great guy John McCain is. At the New Republic, Jonathan Chait tells us how full of shit Rove is to praise McCain after the way Rove's campaign slurred the Senator in 2000.

What interested me in Rove's testimonial, though, is the device with which he explains why he's giving it:

...I heard things about Sen. McCain that were deeply moving and politically troubling. Moving because they told me things about him the American people need to know. And troubling because it is clear that Mr. McCain is one of the most private individuals to run for president in history...

Private people like Mr. McCain are rare in politics for a reason. Candidates who are uncomfortable sharing their interior lives limit their appeal. But if Mr. McCain is to win the election this fall, he has to open up.

The notion that a very successful American politician who has written a popular autobiography has trouble opening up to people is so hilarious that I have to think Rove chose it as an in-joke for the political community.

History is a better topic for McCain than current events. He has lately spoken out on health care, proposing to provide a "$5,000 refundable tax credit"; citizens may choose an insurance provider "by mail or online" to "inform the government of your selection. And the money to help pay for your health care would be sent straight to that insurance provider." This familiar Republican alternative is dressed up with assurances that "modern information technology" will make it work, with "advances in Web technology" allowing doctors "to practice across state lines," though there has so far been no mention of Federal mandates to provide us with x-ray webcams or laptop condenser microphones sufficiently sensitive to detect mitral valve dilation.

On Iraq McCain takes a mistakes-were-made approach, allowing friendly news outlets to use "McCain Blasts Bush Admin. Errors" headlines, while below the fold the candidate lauds the "significant political progress" that excuses our continued occupation.

Every once in a while he takes a stand unpopular among his listeners (though it may be much better received elsewhere), which perhaps helps his "maverick" status. But most of the work currently being done for McCain is done in sideshows -- not only in the Obama campaign, but also in his own.

In short, everything is working for McCain except for the issues. Fortunately for him, no one, least of all the press, is paying much attention to those right now. For him to win, this state of play must persist through the election. Those of us who have lived through a couple of these things have to like his chances. I'm sure Karl Rove does.

THE DEATH OF OUTRAGE. The Miley Cyrus story is not much, and so not much that even Howard Stern has denounced her Vanity Fair photo spread. (The odd bit is that her father Billy Ray is a former Pax TV actor and Jesus testimonialist. Well, to be fair, Israel in 4 B.C. had no mass communication.)

Maybe I don't have much of a story either, as my favorite God-botherers are taking this rather lightly. Rod Dreher, having perhaps exhausted his compassion on Britney Spears and Amy Winehouse, cuts the little tart no slack. "The dear thing is shocked," he says. "She was, she claims, hoodwinked by the evil Annie Leibovitz into appearing semi-nude after her parents left the set (never mind that her publicist, her granny and her manager were still there)..." Then, for laughs, a Brother Theodore routine on nymphets. I guess Dreher has finally decided that the Benedict Option is in full effect, and is preparing for a new Zion where the Cyruses will be unwelcome and the nubiles will dress less provocatively when not screwing fogeys.

James Poulos does offer a wistfully Benedictine closer ("It's going to take a long time to untangle the psychosexual web this culture's woven. Maybe forever") but defends the principle of "marvelous fresh fecundity and youthful radiance" in representational art, which is inevitably reduced in our corrupting times to "the erotic appeal of a giant confection. In an earlier era, this picture would in fact be a painting of a nameless young girl, and it would be a work of art. In this era, it's a brick in a long, high wall." So maybe the real problem is mass production -- in a nobler time, we had to wait for geniuses to laboriously hand-paint our softcore porn, and it was shown in galleries where jacking off was frowned upon. Supply and demand being what it is, the Masters wouldn't have bothered with Miley, who is "not particularly gorgeous," and the Cyruses would have been content with a simple, rustic existence, with Dad appearing in Passion Plays and singing with his daughter in the church choir. I wonder that Poulos chooses to contribute to the degrading march of technology by writing online; doesn't he realize that every new reader he brings to this fetid trough will be degraded beyond redemption? The more the merrier, I say, but he should consider switching to illuminated manuscripts.

Ross Douthat figures the Cyruses have it macked: because "the Cyruses are stage-managing this whole 'controversy,'" they probably have "enough worldliness and self-awareness to navigate Miley's adolescence without letting the celebrity machine grind her down into Britney Redux." He saves his tears for "the weak and the damaged and the dumb" who suffer in the maw of the machine. Well, that's capitalism, comrade -- most of us writers are likewise too weak and damaged and dumb to score a prestigious gig (like an Atlantic blog), and will wear away our souls scribbling unprofitably, maddened by the prospect of fame, pathetic victims of the opinionating machine. Weep for us!

We could easily go downmarket for some real ravings, but when the major thinkers of culture war can't pop a stiffy over a half-dressed teenager, America may be on the verge of losing her moral compass, and alicublog of losing some valuable material. I hope at the next Restoration Weekend Bill Bennett gives them a good talking-to.

THE NEVER-ENDING STORY. Obama put a little more daylight between himself and the Reverend Wright -- divisive, destructive, outrageous, appalling, etc. I guess I should put my own disappointment aside, and focus on the political capital this has won Obama among those citizens sincerely troubled by his connections:

"Too Little, Too Late..."

"No 'Sister Souljah' Moment for Barack Obama..."

"Of course, in reality, Obama's nature and (especially) nurture left him worried that he won't be perceived as 'black enough,' so he has devoted much of his career to working to extract money from whites and spend it on blacks... (Bonus quote: "I'm always being denounced as 'obsessed' about race...")

You may find more measured stories in the old-fashioned news outlets, but all of them end something like this:

Whatever happens to the Reverend Wright story now, one thing is clear: the long relationship between the pastor and the politician is forever changed. And Obama has had to spend yet another day trying to regain the narrative of his campaign.

Update at 11! And so it goes. You can't win the game when they keep changing the rules. Somewhere John Hagee is laughing his ass off.

A METS GAME IS NOT A DINNER PARTY. I went to Shea on Saturday, and heard the heavy boos for the slumping Carlos Delgado. So I can understand his reticence to take a bow after his second homer on Sunday. The New York Post's Joel Sherman affects concern for the relationship of the Mets and their fans:

The Met loyalists turn verbally pessimistic at the first sign of trouble in a nine-inning game. The booing feels like the in thing; hey everyone is doing it, so why not me?... There is no let-bygones-be-bygones here. There is a lack of trust toward the team, a lack of faith that the manager or management knows what they are truly doing, a lack of conviviality toward the roster.

And as one player asked, "Do they think that is helping us?" In other words, it is hard to win, harder yet when you are playing either in anticipation of the boos or to try and ward them off. Both media and fans have become harsher over the years, but there is a quick, energy-sapping maliciousness at Shea that is hard to match anywhere.

This is a little rich. Booing makes it hard to win? Major league ballplayers have earplugs made of 24 karat gold. They haven't heard anything besides "Your contract demands have been accepted" and "My name is Tiffany, can I ride in your limo" since Triple A. On those rare occasions when our displeasure reaches them, their response is Delgado's: a quiet Fuck You.

I have followed the Mets through seasons in which booing was about the only cheap pleasure to be had at Shea. The team has gotten better, but the years of overpayment and underperformance have left us a little jaded, maybe even slightly depraved. Last year's collapse was certainly no fun for anyone, but the fans who paid both keen attention and a good chunk of the players' salaries -- and who later learned that Paul Lo Duca's combativeness in the home stretch may not have revealed the heart of a gamer, but the long-term effects of steroid abuse -- had good cause to be bitter.

Soon the franchise will relocate to a new stadium, where everything will certainly cost more: tickets, beer, hot dogs. I think fans who notice, for example, a decreased willingness among Met infielders to dive for ground balls may be forgiven a little vociferation.

No quarter asked, no quarter given, and Delgado was well within his rights to go Ted Williams on the boo-birds on Sunday. I would be pleased if Delgado hit many more homers and circled the bases each time with two middle fingers held proudly aloft. In fact, maybe the key to 2008 is to keep hate alive. If the Jose Song fails to motivate Reyes to realize his considerable potential, maybe "You suck" will; I would happily trade that stupid song for some timely base hits. Athletes know that the best way to shut a big mouth is with a big win, and if they want to stick it to us ingrates by cruising to a World Championship, that would suit me fine.

SOME GET STONED, SOME GET STRANGE, SOONER OR LATER IT ALL GETS REAL, WALK ON. Jeremiah Wright says, "I said to Barack Obama, last year, 'If you get elected, November the 5th, I'm coming after you, because you'll be representing a government whose policies grind under people.'" Barack Obama says, "[Wright] does not speak for me... He does not speak for the campaign." So reporters and commentators have them twinned as never before.

Obama wore a flag pin the other day, so there is more news than ever about his refusal to wear a flag pin.

The conventional wisdom is that Obama has to do something drastic about all this -- maybe hit Wright with a blackjack, or go around dressed as Captain America. But under this kind of ridiculous hazing, there's really not much he can do. Though he may try and paint the corners now and again, Obama is clearly disinclined toward the grand renunciatory gestures the press has prescribed for him. I suspect he realizes that this course could fatally derail his Presidential run, but would rather fail going forward than in retreat.

We think of these crises as a test for Obama, but as things are currently playing out, they strike me as more of a test of our politics -- that is, of whether we are so fatally addicted to sideshows that we can't have a national election about even the most pressing national issues. Obama's political fortunes, or those of any candidate, are small potatoes compared to that.

RETRO FIT. You have to pity the leftover 80s Republicans. People no longer tolerate the cigars, zoot suits, and swing dancing with which they once attempted to insert themselves into American culture, and the attempted transition to South Park Conservatism never quite took. Many of them now brood in their condos, riffling dog-eared P.J. O'Rourke and Tom Wolfe books and dreaming of what might have been.

Give credit then to libertarians Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie: where we behold only a pathetic scene, they see a market opportunity, and following the Time-Life method of repackaging old crap for new profits seek to re-sell the old crapcom "Dallas" as the Le nozze di Figaro of the Reagan Revolution.

"Dallas" wasn't simply a television show. It was an atmosphere-altering cultural force. Lasting nearly as long as recovering alcoholic Larry Hagman's second liver, it helped define the 1980s as a glorious "decade of greed," ushering in an era in which capitalism became cool, even though weighted with manifold moral quandaries...

After a long hip parade of unironic countercultural icons such as Luke of "Cool Hand Luke" and Randle Patrick McMurphy of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," "Dallas" created a new archetype of the anti-hero we loved to hate and hated to love: an establishment tycoon who's always controlling politicians, cheating on his boozy wife and scheming against his own stubbornly loyal family. But no matter how evil various translators tried to make J.R. and his milieu... viewers in the nearly 100 countries that gobbled up the show, including in the Warsaw Pact nations, came to believe that they, too, deserved cars as big as boats and a swimming pool the size of a small mansion.

I have no trouble believing that the gangster brand of capitalism practiced in much of the old Soviet bloc is inspired by shitty old TV shows. It takes nerve to brag about it, though.

For obvious reasons I prefer to think of these things as diversions rather than as a cultural signposts. Maybe in years to come we'll look back at "The Sopranos" as part of a magical time when we all decided, the hell with it, America's really just a large criminal enterprise so let's get ours while the getting's good. And at "American Idol" as when American popular music began to really, really suck. Maybe that explains our culture in general these days: the cynicism of the audience has caught up with that of the advertisers.

SHORTER DAN RIEHL: Liberals make a big deal about so-called "human rights," yet they refuse to defend a celebrity tax evader.

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.