MY NEW VOICE COLUMN is mainly a recap of the Ashley Todd affair. The speed and zeal with which rightbloggers jumped on the fraudulent charges are interesting, in a familiar sort of way, but their willingness to absolve themselves of any responsibility for their own credulousness is fascinating. As it happens, the blogosphere model of bad reporting has become so great a part of our discourse that the Todd story got big play from the beginning, and so did its exposure as a fraud, which intensified the spotlight on the bloggers, who generally behaved as any incompetent player might upon suddenly discovering that a huge audience has seen him end his big dance solo with one foot in a slop-bucket: They manfully played it off as part of the routine. It won't teach them anything, but it might have some effect on the people who read them.

SHORTER ROD DREHER: A friend of mine is having sex and enjoying it! Can't you see this proves that sex cannot be private, it must be regulated by whatever Church I happen to belong to at the moment! Why are you all laughing at me? Oh, yeah, well laugh at this -- AIDS!

HELL HATH NO FURY like a rightblogger scorned. Kathleen Parker has a, er, slight piece on Sarah Palin, whom Parker had previously denigrated to the ire of true believers. They are newly incensed, but we doubt any reaction will top that of Riehl World View:

Note to Kathleen Parker: Before you go off like that again, you might want to change your Buckley School photo (at right) to something other than one that says, "Hey, I'm getting older but I'd still love to meet some young would be journalists out of Harvard who love to f/ck!"

Or perhaps that glasses sliding down the nose Charlie Gibson look is now a little more befitting your stature assuming you've put on a little weight?

Mrrroww! I bet he'd like to carve a "B" on her face.

THEY'VE GOT TO GET THEMSELVES BACK TO THE GARDEN. A few years ago I noted that National Review's Stanley Kurtz really wanted America's safety net destroyed so that family values could be revived. Apparently, now Joel Kotkin hopes for the same result from economic chaos:

Forced into belt-tightening, Americans are likely to strengthen our family and community ties and to center our lives more closely on the places where we live.

This trend toward what I call "the new localism" has been underway for some years, driven by changing demographics, new technologies and rising energy prices. But the economic downturn will probably accelerate it as individuals and corporations look not to the global stage but closer to home, concentrating and congregating on the Main Streets where we choose to live – in the suburbs, in urban neighborhoods or in small towns.

Kotkin also lauds the impoverishment that forces more young adults to live with or seek funds from their parents ("This clustering of families, after decades of dispersion, will spur more localism"). And higher energy prices will make us all locavores! The New Depression will be great for families, if you don't count the scrofula and abandoned babies (but at least their ragged parents won't be able to afford abortions).

Wherever there's a loony New Jerusalem, there always is Crunchy Con Rod Dreher:

I want Kotkin's vision to be true, and I can see economic necessity forcing these kinds of changes on American society. Americans may not become "their better selves" by choice, but because they have no choice.

To be fair, he sees a point in Matt Frost's demurrer before concluding hopefully that "we'll make a transition that looks something like what Kotkin envisions, but it won't be smooth, and there will be a lot of pain."

Isn't there some unsettled stretch in the Mountain States where we can put these people?

UPDATE. Fixed link.

WE COME FROM DIFFERENT WORLDS -- MINE HAS SOAP AND TOOTHPASTE. Garage vandalism story for real:

When Laurie Coleman, wife of U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman, hauled her trash to the alley at 7:30 this morning, a chilling sight greeted her.

Spray-painted in black on the wooden siding of the garage in the couple's Summit Hill neighborhood, in letters nearly a foot high: "U R A CRIMINAL RESIGN OR ELSE! PSALM 2"...

Also vandalized in similar fashion: U.S. Sen Amy Klobuchar and U.S. Reps. Keith Ellison, John Kline, Michele Bachmann and Jim Ramstad. Klobuchar and Ellison are Democrats; Coleman, Kline, Bachmann and Ramstad, Republicans.

(Emphasis added.) Garage vandalism as told by wingnuts:

Norm Coleman's Home Vandalized By Leftists-- 3 Other GOP Homes Marked...

But, don't expect to see the media to condemn the "angry left" for these attacks.

It doesn't work that way.

OK, so Gateway Pundit is the sad, intense member of the gang who always screams "OK BOSS!" a little too loud -- let's check in with the more responsible RedState:

...precisely the sort of thing that would make people scream "theocracy! Christianists!" if the target was a Democratic Jew. Also: note that this is Norm Coleman that we're talking about, he who recently ended running negative campaign ads. Apparently, this sort of thing just encourages a certain subset of Minnesota Democrats.

Anybody think that this attack will get any kind of meaningful, mature response from Al Franken?

Nah, me neither.

(Actually Franken promptly condemned the vandalism, but as long as RedState's making shit up, they must figure, why not go all the way.)

OK, RedState also looks like the type that's always secretly itching to play Night of the Long Knives. So let's look at Fox News, which doesn't restrict itself to Coleman -- it also reports the vandalism against John Kline, Michele Bachmann and Jim Ramstad... hey, where'd the Democratic victims go? Must be an oversight.

They really aren't even on the same planet with us anymore. I expect them to develop conservative math, physics etc soon, and refuse to take part in our godless science.

SHORTER MARK HEMINGWAY: I'm not eating shit, you're eating shit! And BTW you're lowering the tone of the debate!

DEAD-ENDER ETIQUETTE. Barack Obama goes to see his sick grandmother. Gateway Pundit sends his regards:

Obama used his grandmother on the campaign trail this year including comparing her to racist, anti-AmeriKKKan pastor Jeremiah Wright and calling her a "typical white person":

But, Obama will take two days this week to see her in Hawaii.

All class, these people.

UPDATE. Betsy's Page: "Despite his trumpeting her supposed racism before the public in order to excuse his time in Reverend Wright's church, I'm sure she's filled with pride and love to see the grandson she helped raise be on the cusp of being elected president."

If passive-aggression were an Olympic sport, Betsy would be Nadia Comaneci.

UPDATE II. Wow. What a douchebag.

UPDATE III. This guy is also pretty amazing:

Unfortunately, since we're dealing with someone who's running for president, there are some questions that need to be asked. I don't want to ask them, but is something else involved?

Then he links to a Freeper who thinks Obama's just trying to steal some documents.

There are more like this, but there's only so much Republican strategy I can take this close to bedtime.

DUH. Rightwing legal genius Todd Zywicki explains that Sarah Palin's apparent inability to answer simple questions is proof of her superior intellect, whereas Joe Biden sounds smart because he is really stoopid:

Some thoughtful people simply have a tendency to confuse intelligence with the ability to be glib, or more precisely, to bs. And I think that is much of what it comes down to--if Palin doesn't know the answer to a question, she just isn't that good at making something up. Biden, by contrast, is a master bs'er, as his debate performance exhibited. As a general rule, the less informed he was about the answer to a question, the more assertive he was in answering it...

I have to say though, given the choice between someone who gets flustered when she doesn't know the answer to a question versus someone who doesn't know the answer but just makes something up, it is not obvious to me that the latter is smarter or better able to lead the country.

I see that Zywicki is a Professor at George Mason. His students who read this post have a distinct advantage over their classmates: they know they need only answer questions, "Uh, chee, boy, I'll have to get back to ya," to be credited with a first-rate intelligence.

Oh, there's one other requirement: they have to be right-wing.

Zywicki also says that people who don't see Palin's brilliance "have to have an awfully low opinion of the voters of Alaska and the overwhelming majority of Alaskans who approve of her job as governor." With any luck, we'll see in a couple of weeks what Zywicki thinks of the voters of America.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, this one about the trickling-up of slurs that you usually find on the most venomous rightwing blogs into the mainstream Republican campaign. The students have become the masters, as it were. If this were happening four years ago, those guys would be trumpeting their influence on national politics. You can understand why they're not so quick to do it now.

HEART OF DORKNESS. Roger W. Gardner of the dramatically titled Wake Up America takes in the fall foliage in his sleepy New England town. It sounds lovely -- "Clean white wood frame houses, tall slender church steeples rising up into a cloudless blue sky," etc.

But Gardner can't fully enjoy it. Though it is a "great undeniable reality," his mind keeps turning to "a competing reality, that not-so-reassuring reality I left behind me on my computer" No, he doesn't mean World of Warcraft. He means "creeping sharia and pending Socialistic doom." He wonders:

Do these people who I pass on my way to the store look frightened or vulnerable? If I stopped and asked one of them if they were living in fear of al Qaeda right now, what would they answer? If I stopped and asked that man who is raking leaves in his front yard if he's worried about America losing its national sovereignty or the encroachment os Islam into our Judeo/Christian culture, what would he say?

Probably, "You want the state mental hospital; it's just up the road."

Then Gardner sees the portents: "They are the signs of Obama." But even worse -- yes, worse than that! -- he sees another sign;

An innocuous little sign, weather beaten and torn at the edges -- it's been up there for quite a while now. "No room in this town for hate" it reads. And I shudder to myself... We have no room here for hate. And without hate we are vulnerable to those who hate us...

Later Gardner acknowledges, "sometimes I feel so out of place." I marvel that he has yet to move to a survivalist camp. There he might find plenty of cleansing hate, and take in foliage close-up, from his treehouse.

STORYTIME. At National Review Jay Nordlinger tells a tale (actually he tells two others as well, but this is by far my favorite):

Have a friend who was in Riverside Park (Manhattan) with his baby daughter. A woman came up to him and said, "Are you a registered Democrat?" He said no. She said, "Well, you can register right now — it will just take a second. I have the necessary paperwork here." He said, "No, actually, that's not it — I am registered. It's just that I'm a registered Republican." He said that the woman gave him a look of hate such as he had seldom seen — sent a shudder down his spine. She walked away, still glaring, bitterly, without a word.

That's nice. I have one just like it:

Whilst strolling through Central Park (New York) I was approached by a man who asked me if I was really going to vote for "You know who," and then he pushed in his nose, pushed out his lower lip, and stuck out his tongue. When I told him I had no idea what he was talking about, he poked my arm and said, "You know -- the N-I-G-E-R!" When I told him to piss off, he let out a fart of a foulness I had never smelled before, and as he shambled away he shook his fist at me and said, "You haven't heard the last of this, or my name isn't Jonah Goldberg, B.A.!"

I have plenty more. Naturally most of them involve cab drivers.

THE MAN WHO WASN'T THERE. On "Meet the Press," they just showed a clip of John McCain announcing to a rally that he is "not George Bush" -- news the presumably Republican crowd cheered loudly.

Andrea Mitchell talked about a "remarkably negative" Obama ad -- negative because it shows McCain bragging about how often he sided with George Bush.

In 2000 there was a lot of yapping about the limited involvement of Bill Clinton in Al Gore's campaign. (In fact we've had some of that this year about both Clintons' limited involvement in Obama's.) Yet nobody finds it remarkable that the Republican Presidential candidate is running, actively and like hell, from the sitting President from his own party. In fact, they cluck over Obama's bad taste in bringing it up.

Wingnuts who love to play "Name That Party" don't notice this embargo on President Bush's political affiliation. And the Liberal Media are, as usual, useless, both as the liberals they are alleged to be and as media (ditto).

MORE DESERTIONS. A Politico story reveals that people think the Republicans have fucked the country up so badly that even voters who don't like black people are thinking of voting for Barack Obama.

“I wouldn’t want a mixed marriage for my daughter, but I’m voting for Obama,” the wife of a retired Virginia coal miner, Sharon Fleming, told the Los Angeles Times recently.

One Obama volunteer told Politico after canvassing the working-class white Philadelphia neighborhood of Fishtown recently, "I was blown away by the outright racism, but these folks are … undecided. They would call him a [racial epithet] and mention how they don't know what to do because of the economy.”

This is really bad news for McCain, whose election-eve strategy, I expect, is to appear on CMT in front of a Confederate flag with "Dixie" playing in the background. As FiveThirtyEight puts it, "In this economy, racism is officially a luxury. How is John McCain going to win if he can't win those voters?"

Of course conservatives see it differently. In their view, this proves that it's Democrats (and their lying, cheating [racial epithet] friends) who are the real racists:

So refreshing to see the Democrats openly admit they're racist scumbags...

...it's OK for them to be racist, so long as they project their racism upon Republicans with their incessant cries of racism. Naturally, it's fine if 105% of blacks (with ACORN's help, naturally) vote for Obama. We can't call that racist, because we'd be racist for pointing that out.

I know we liberals are supposed to be angry and violent, but after the sword is handed over at Appomattox, let us grasp hands o'er the bloody chasm, because fellows like this are going to have a very difficult Reconstruction.

EXIT STRATEGY. K-Lo effuses:

[Sarah] Palin didn't need Greek columns. People react to her because they believe she represents what the Greeks established.

I'll refrain from the obvious, but I will say this is the best idea I've heard yet for resuscitating Palin's popularity. Look what it did for Tristan Taormino.

UPDATE. Added word to improve setup. For more porn-related Palin laffs, see TBogg. Palin's many inadequacies have distracted us from the peculiar effect her feminine charms have on male wingnuts -- see musical-comedy enthusiast Mark Steyn's post:

Re the pantyhose'n'leeches post, an observant reader corrects me:

Palin doesn't wear pantyhose Mark. That's one of the reasons the old fems don't like her—unlike them, she actually has legs good enough to to bare.

Alas, I wouldn't know. I saw Governor Palin in Laconia*, NH yesterday and — clearly stung by the allegations that her white outfits are racist — she turned up in black pants and a blouse of brownish-beige hue. In my section of the crowd, the moderate, centrist, undecided, independent swing voters expressed a preference for skirt and cleavage.

(*Laconia is best known for its annual Bike Week, by which standards the Governor was extremely overdressed.)

I'm comfortable with all manner of kink, but really, this mix of humiliation and upskirt fantasies just doesn't do it for me. I'm now less interested in attending one of the NRO Cruises.

NOT SUITABLE FOR TREATMENT. Conservatives are in a weird, anxious state. Some of them appear even worse off than that. The Anchoress:

A friend of mine, noting the Buckley endorsement of Obama on the slimmest of notions, said, “there is a strange undertow of events, lately.” Yes. Things are so strange because there is disorientation - and this disorientation is because the supernatural is in play - it’s been in play for a long time, of course, but the painless coup is almost complete and there is almost an anticipatory frenzy on the side of the presumptive victors...

No matter what happens, we are entering a new era, and I believe everyone knows it. With the prayer and fasting, I am “in training” making myself ready for whatever comes, because whatever comes is going to be very different; it will jar us from all of our complacencies.

So, yes, I feel very peaceful right now...

Surely someone over on that side of the asylum wall has taken note of this election-induced lunacy. Let's see what Rod Dreher has to say:

What if McCain manages to win this thing after all?

Seriously, what do you think would happen? I think the left would howl with rage. I'm only being slightly hyperbolic. They will be so angry and disappointed that it will be very, very hard for President McCain to get anything done... To have gotten so close to power, and to have such a good candidate, and in such a favorable Democratic year, and to lose? Really, it's hard to imagine how they'll react.

But imagine he must. Anything's got to be more pleasant than what's happening right in their own front yard.

THE PASSION OF JOE THE PLUMBER. McCain promotes Joe the Plumber to national punchline. So reporters look him up -- that's part of the job, you know -- and report their amusing findings.

Rightwing bloggers will tell you what the real crime is:

They've done more investigations into Joe the Plumber in 24 hours than they've done on Barack Obama in two years . . . .

A reader emails: The harassment of Joe the plumber is the singular biggest mistake of the Obama campaign...

I've been around so long, I remember when Joe Biden was Obama's biggest mistake. And when making fun of McCain's multiple houses was Obama's biggest mistake. And when not picking Hillary was Obama's biggest mistake. And when bitter/clinging/guns was Obama's biggest mistake. And when attacking Rush Limbaugh was Obama's biggest mistake. And when attacking Andy Martin was Obama's biggest mistake, etc.

Given his multiple biggest mistakes, it's amazing the guy's so far ahead he has to warn supporters not to get complacent. Perhaps this, too, is his biggest mistake.

We've around this mulberry bush so many times that the Ole Perfesser forgets to leave out the really embarrassing part:

And reader Donald Gately emails: "Joe the Plumber is the new Linda Tripp, apparently... media elites... out of step with mainstream America..."

Time for Joe to give a press conference at the foot of the Linda Tripp memorial on the Mall, which commemorates the day decent Americans rode Bill Clinton out of town on a rail. Maybe this reference is meant to signal to his readership that this trick doesn't always work. Or maybe he's preparing them for the alternate universe to which they'll all repair when the Dark Time comes.

People are starting to talk again about an October surprise. But at this point I doubt anything can surprise us.

THE "LOST" CAUSE. I've never seen a candidate do worse than McCain did tonight. But let's see what the kids at The Corner thought:

From the beginning they were restive. Kathryn J. Lopez came in early by wishing "He so should have opposed the bailout." (Ramesh Ponnuru explains that it's more expedient to lie about that.) Jonah Goldberg also proposed an alternative response -- as usual, a nonsensical one.

They loved Joe the Plumber. John Hood called him "a new American hero." K-Lo said Joe's her hero. Stephen Spruill was reminded of Swing Vote -- given its grosses, another sign that we are among dead-enders.

They had trouble keeping the ball aloft. "What's the deal with the McCain strategy of repeating the same phrase three times?" said Michael Graham. "Freeze, scalpel, hatchet zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz," said the easily bored Jonah Goldberg, who wanted McCain to talk about gay marriage. Sorry, Jonah, wrong decade.

When McCain said he wasn't Bush, K-Lo was overjoyed, but die-harder Ponurru said, "isn't Obama right?... I prefer more of the Bush program to the Obama program myself."

Poor John Hood complained that Obama was laughing at McCain. Laugh and the world laughs with you... or, probably in this case, vice-versa.

The clearest sign of how out of touch they are is Michael Graham's "YES!!! Finally!!!" when McCain said that Obama's concern for the health of women having abortions is a joke. "It's a huge winning issue that reaches beyond the pro-life base." Maybe if Graham ever wandered outside that highly specific base, he'd rethink that.

But even the brethren had some clue that this battle can only be won in the hypothetical: Stanley Kurtz laid out a long alternate-reality McCain response having to do with ACORN and Bill Ayers. Mark Steyn let slip the deepest wish of the tribe by revealing that, as regarded the charges of negative campaigning by McCain, "if the dissatisfactions with McCain expressed to me at the Palin rally in Laconia, NH today are anything to go by, there's a 60-40 probability that any cries of 'Kill him!' at a GOP event are directed at our guy."

That's tonic for the troops right there. The war-cries and whining go on, but Ponnuru put a fitting amen to it: "I’m going to go back to watching the first season of "Lost." Probably good preparation for next year." Theirs is a Lost Cause, indeed -- and like the more famous one, only redeemable by deep feelings about black people.

REPUBLICAN NADIR WATCH. I just saw David Frum on Rachel Maddow, pleading for a better tone to politics (!), and actually quoting Gandhi: "Be the change you want to see in the world."

This is the same David Frum who defended Ted Haggard on the astonishing grounds that it was morally better to be a hypocrite than a homosexual; who has declared that if a rightwing comedy fails, it is less important that it fails to amuse than that it fails to "create a conservative institution with cultural power"; who didn't care whether we got Bin Laden because, he said, it wasn't as important to bring justice to the perpetrators of mass murder as to fight a "war with the ideas that animated those people," and many other such outrages against both civility and reason. The idea of this ham-handed political thug playing the meek lamb and quoting Gandhi would be infuriating if Frum were not observably swirling down a drain that was created by himself and his colleagues.

NEW VOICE COLUMN up, taking the pulse of rightwing bloggers, who as you will see are reverting to form in more ways than one: not only spreading smears and policing apostates, but also celebrating (out loud!) the golden era before No-Legs Rosenfeld socialized the country.

I notice also that the brethren are now so steeped in Obama rumors that they're getting insular about them, treating them more like prized collectibles than as urgent dispatches to rouse the sheeple. Ace O'Spades bats around an "Obama girlfriend" story: "Fire is being held as those who know the story try to get someone of import to break it," he informs us -- wingnut insider baseball! The subject is a "major, big-time fundraiser" who "for reasons unfathomable, suddenly shut the shop down and decamped to a little Caribbean island." Now why would a rich person do such a thing? "The story has a Fred Baron. Not The Fred Baron. But actually -- an even better Fred Baron." Who's either Fred Baron? David Horowitz' Discover the Networks (the paranoid successor to Follow the Network, now dark) has Baron I as a former president of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America and a bigshot in some Democratic Presidential campaigns. Wow, and Baron II is even better than that? Yes, he's from "the dirty Chicago political machine." And get ready for the big finish:

There's another big twist too, which I can't say anything about. I wouldn't even hint about it, really, even if permitted to, because it's so delicious it makes it nearly fantastical -- in the sense of "No one gets this lucky!" -- and actually would be used to denigrate the rest of it. But there is a chance it gets more interesting than even the Chicago Machine connection.

It's delicious, it's self-refuting, it's even more interesting than the Chicago Machine! This one goes on the top shelf right next to Barry is a Muslim and Barry is Not a Citizen, and the autographed Swift Boat -- fine objects of contemplation for when O'Spades is taking ease and hearkening back to the days when he was badgering bigger bloggers to run his stories.

THE HOOVERVILLE TROLLEY. Jonah Goldberg lays out the new conservative POV on our present economic chaos:

...the tragedy is that this election year does look quite a bit like Hoover vs. Roosevelt (and given that choice, I'll take Hoover)...

Other comrades have taken up the call. Please help them spread this around. Maybe it'll trickle up and John McCain will start denouncing FDR and the Social Security Act.