IGNORANCE IS BLISS. John Podhoretz asks: what good are film critics who actually know something about movies? I'm not kidding, that's his point:

Film criticism requires nothing but an interesting sensibility. The more self-consciously educated one is in the field -- by which I mean the more obscure the storehouse of cinematic knowledge a critic has -- the less likely it is that one will have anything interesting to say to an ordinary person who isn't all that interested in the condition of Finnish cinema.

He gets Rod Dreher to bite, too, and pretend that the breezier style of Anthony Lane (writing about Star Trek!) relative to that of the learned J. Hoberman proves his point.

It's a big wide world and raw talent will always find a way, but there are few practitioners of anything who would argue that training and education are drawbacks in their fields. Would Dreher and Podhoretz say so about their own current occupations? (Each refers to his own woeful career detour into criticism, and as someone who has read their reviews I am not surprised to learn they now disdain the craft, as they showed little interest in it when they were practicing.) Dreher will go on and on about the sad state of informed religion reporting, and Podhoretz can spool out conservative movement history. I doubt they'd tolerate someone wandering into their kitchens and saying, "Let me have a go -- I don't know much about it but I've got an interesting sensibility." (In fact, why should people bother with all the heavy theologians Dreher likes to quote, when Andrew Greeley and Dan Brown make easier reading?)

If they wouldn't indulge it themselves, why do they apply it to criticism? Partly it's an excuse to play populist -- lacking an opportunity to talk NASCAR and brewskis, they assure the imaginary common folk in their audiences that they don't get all that guff about mise en scene and deep focus neither. But I think they disdain criticism mainly because they think it doesn't count. As we have tirelessly (or tiresomely, depending on your POV) discussed here, anything having to do with the arts is for many conservatives some baffling voodoo that liberals like, so it must be insubstantial and easy to do; but they can't get much of a toe-hold in it, which must be due to some fancy-pants professor's trick. Still they feel they should try to take it over, because it represents, in their infertile imaginations, a source of cultural power. Maybe they think if they deride criticism, its existence will cease to trouble them.

PADDING THE MATERIAL. That Ben Shapiro thing made me go to Big Hollywood, dammit. And now I'm stuffed with low-hanging fruit.

A fellow named Stage Right complains that not enough Tony nominees were big movie stars, and suggests altering the rules so that more of them can be included, thus increasing the event's appeal. It's not a brilliant idea, but blessedly free of the culture-war gibberish that characterizes the site.

Until:

I know that none of this seems to follow a “Right versus Left” storyline that many of you may be used to here at Big Hollywood, but hang in there with me for a few more thoughts. The fact is, the left on Broadway (meaning the vast majority of actors, designers and staffers in the production offices) relish the fact that they give a big “up yours” to the Hollywood types who dare to come to Broadway. In this context, the Hollywood actors are “rich” and the New York theatre people are the poor, starving artists giving up riches for their craft. They want to see the Hollywood star fail. It’s classic class warfare, just like it is played out in the political world of America.

So the Broadway liberal elitists have declared class war on... Hollywood. Like Stalin vs. Trotsky! It's a wonder these two commie camps were able to settle their differences long enough to foist Obama on America.

Like I said: Very forgiving standards.

CONTINUED FALLOUT FROM OBAMA'S LAUGHISM! Many of the brethren in comments to the previous post bring up Ben Shapiro's column, in which he gives Wanda Sykes a hard time for not doing his material, which is all about how Obama doesn't support gay marriage. In another context, Shapiro would consider such an in-your-face attack on a gay marriage opponent an example of gay intolerance. There's no pleasing some people, and thus no reason to try to please them.

I preferred James Taranto's version in which he details Sykes' offenses: among them, that by suggesting Limbaugh be waterboarded, "she makes light of a form of interrogation that some people consider torture," which you have to admit is pretty fucking ballsy of him. Also, "She makes fun of the disabled (Limbaugh's past addiction to painkillers would entitle him to protection under the Americans With Disabilities Act)."

I'm going to assume it's a parody. Taranto is, after all, the same guy who said:

It reminds us of a movie we enjoyed a great deal: "Team America: World Police," in which the creators of "South Park," using puppets rather than cartoon animation, imagined Michael Moore as a suicide bomber and had various other Hollywood morons die horrible yet hilarious deaths.

So I can't imagine he means his "smug look of a man who enjoys seeing his critics dehumanized" crap to be taken seriously.

I GUESS THAT "SOUTH PARK REPUBLICANS" THING IS REALLY DEAD AFTER ALL. At the Voice today, a column on the White House Correspondents' Dinner and resulting mishegas. The Dinner doesn't usually interest me except for comedy purposes. This weekend's event, however, got rightwingers to talk about how Not Funny it all is now that treason occupies the White House. And as you may imagine, conservatives insisting something is Not Funny is as hilarious as any other figure of unearned and unjustified authority insisting something is Not Funny. But don't worry: soon they'll go back to telling us that conservatives are all about punk rock and South Park. Which will, of course, be even funnier. Conservatism, it turns out, is like The Aristocrats: a joke that gets more obscenely hilarious as it goes on.

DAWN OF A DUD. How goes it in the culture-war think tanks of the Right? S.T. Karnick considers at Big Hollywood several edu-macated theses on the popularity of zombie movies. But this is all padding, and Karnick eventually sweeps it aside for his own theory:

No, none of these explanations gets to the essence and explains the enduring appeal of this cultural phenomenon over the past four decades.

I think the causality is the other way around. Both the zombie appeal and the swine flu fears are caused by two things: the news media’s increasing use of scare tactics in trying to lure audiences, and the socialists’ continuous use of fearmongering to press for political power.

Should readers wonder at the notion that Shaun of the Dead and such like are meant to stir citizens' deep, secret fears of the philosophy of Charles Fourier and Eugene Debs, he explains he's talking about fear of Alar in apples, nuclear war, the "housing 'crisis,'" and global warming, which are all equally ways in which "the socialists and their media satraps continually raise fears of everything conceivable." This is "sufficient to account for the dominant sense of unease and constant fear one can see among much of the contemporary American public." Clearly the man has never read a week's worth of the New York Post.

If you're still not clear on what this has to do with zombie movies, here's Karnick's kicker:

The irony is that for the public to give in to this scam would be the one sure way for the zombies to win.

To recap, Karnick starts with an alleged attempt to understand why people like zombie movies, and ends with him characterizing his political opponents as -- well, not zombies, since his opponents, following his logic, cause zombies; maybe he means the mysterious zombie pathogen. Maybe he means people are afraid they'll be bitten by Al Gore and begin to believe in global warming.

Or maybe he doesn't mean anything at all except that zombies are a bad thing and he is thus excited to associate them with socialists (that is, liberal Democrats), and Big Hollywood has very forgiving publication standards.

To make matters worse, he drags Mencken into it:

In their neverending quest to wrest more power by creating what H. L. Mencken correctly characterized as an endless series of hobgoblins requiring a socialist elite’s powers to destroy, the socialists and their media satraps continually raise fears of everything conceivable...

Naturally he doesn't link; this is from Mencken's In Defense of Women, and the passage from which it comes doesn't mention socialists at all, and is explicitly about the starting and conduct of modern wars, which Mencken attributes to modern civilization "especially under democracy." But I don't think Karnick was purposely misleading his readers; he clearly lost the thread back when he was asking, "How many words do you want?" Culture warriors don't have to think too hard about metaphors; free association is what they're all about.

IRONY-POOR BLOOD. American Power responds to my mockery, and others', of ridiculous rightblogger posts about race by saying that we're the real racists. My title, "Black Comedy," is apparently some sort of slur, perhaps one that suggests people of color are a sub-genre of comedy and satire. And Tbogg's Sambo picture really ticks him off. Nobody ever show this guy Blazing Saddles, or he'll be calling for hate crimes legislation.

"Note too," AmPow thunders, "yesterday's leftist bigotry in Matthew Yglesias' slur against heterosexuals as 'breeders.'" I didn't know Matt was gay! I'll have to stop sending him pictures of Megan Fox, then.

"The truth is that leftists don't care about the advancement of minorities," says AmPow, "they care about the advancement of their own power." I'm afraid he misreads us -- or maybe just me; you guys might be attracting job offers from high Administration officials with your aperçus and japes, but my phone never rings. I'm only in it for the laughs, and I thank American Power for keeping them coming.

BEN & JERRY'S OPPRESSED MY RIGHT TO HAMBURGER ICE CREAM, AND OTHER TALES OF MODERN CONSERVATISM. At RedState, Dan McLaughlin demonstrates that conservatives don't approve of all the blessings of the free market. Take, for example, a billboard company that refused to host a sign saying Obama is pro-abortion. The company made the Christers change it to "pro-abortion-choice," which would seem a caution to avoid arguable slander -- like saying Roosevelt caused men to die by sending them into World War II, rather than saying he was pro-death. Not the way everyone would play it, but that's capitalism, comrade: their boards, their choice.

McLaughlin is incensed, but though his rage draws him into the subject, he seems to realize that he isn't going to get far with a column about how unfair it was that a company exercised content restrictions on its own properties. How then to express his anger without also seeming to attack freedom?

His solution is ingenious: ignore the company that refused to raise their billboard, and instead yell at liberals as if it were their fault:

You may remember the flap over the Secret Service limitations on where protestors could set up near George W. Bush, and the wailing about “free speech zones” being an unconscionable restriction, etc. I have yet to hear anybody (1) complain about the Secret Service’s policy since Obama took over or (2) explain how the policy changed, as I suspect it has not. Like so many routine government activities, it’s only objectionable when it’s Bush...

The same people calling for displaying graphic photos of interrogation of detainees or who want soldiers’ coffins on the front page of the newspaper without the consent of their families are the ones who are horrified by the idea that any image should be displayed of abortion, the ones who even recoil at showing pictures of live unborn children in the debate.

Or maybe he's saying that abortionist hippies now run the American billboard industry. It's hard to tell.

Bonus points to McLaughlin for reviving the old illegal-vs.-immoral argument in a new and breathtakingly clumsy way:

A digression: when Sarah Palin talked recently about the choice to keep her youngest child, liberals argued that this was a concession - isn’t it wonderful, some of them argued, to live in a country that allows such choices? Um, no. Using cocaine and driving drunk are illegal, but we still speak of not doing them as being moral choices. If a teenager from a bad neighborhood refuses to join a gang, we can celebrate the positive moral choice without saying, “isn’t it great to live in a country where teenagers get to choose whether or not to join violent, drug-dealing street gangs?” No, it’s a tragedy.

When it comes to abortion, "choice" is just a crime for which we haven't figured out how to arrest you yet. Yessir, conservatives are going to pick up a ton of support from women in the next election. Keep rebuilding, Trike Force!

DOES ANYBODY REMEMBER LAUGHTER? Legal Insurrection explains how his obsession with Presidential mustard tells you all you need to know about Obama and liberals. He also uses the phrase "thou shall not mock Obama's mustard." Joining the fray is RedState Moe, who explains that people who make fun of him automatically lose, because -- well, just because.

This is a great example of what makes these guys fascinating. They're so humor-averse that when someone mocks them, they never, ever think about joking back -- they either sputter in outrage or launch windy explanations of why it is in fact you who are ridiculous, and then retuck their shirts. It's like they all grew up thinking Frank Burns was the hero of "M*A*S*H."

BLACK COMEDY. RedState is reaching out to black people. Don't believe it? Here's the proof:

Dear American Blacks:

Unfortunately they're doing it at RedState, so very few African-Americans will read it. Which may be just as well...

Sometimes — no, actually always — the true friend is the one who tells you what you don’t want to hear. The one who does not indulge you, the one who will neither promise you nor give you candy and other bennies. Instead he tells you to sit down and eat your green beans and spinach — and if you want that nice car, then quit whining, get an education, earn a good job, and earn that nice car.

...because they sound less like their friends and more like their parole officer.

The subject is a D.C. school voucher program which Democrats have opposed. This they portray as a fulfillment of said Democrats' desire to keep black people down. Having proved this by assertion, they continue to talk turkey to their imaginary black friends:

I ask you to consider, why is it that you hate Republicans so much?

Apparently they expect their friends of color to forget about decades of Southern Strategy and concentrate on what appears to be a Terry Southern Strategy, though in their case the satire is probably unintentional.

Republicans do not know how to approach you. Democrats and the Democrat-dominated press have misled you and stoked up your wrath to the point that you will not listen to us.

So I propose this: how about listening? How about listening to what Republicans have to say, instead of what the Democrats say we say? How about listening to what we have to say before booing us out of the building?

Black people have apparently been very unfair to them, yet RedState continues to reach out:

We received not one ounce of gratitude from you, but we did it anyway. And we will continue to do what is right for America, for whites, for blacks, for Latinos, for Republicans, for Democrats, for today, and for the future.

Join us. Consider it, anyway.

There. Now they can say they tried. Let it be on their heads.

Unsurprisingly, the commenters seem in the main to be white people, full of explanations for black recalcitrance ("Blacks have had generations to figure out that they are to come to heel when the Democrat master blows his whistle").

But there is one "Unrepentant African-American nationalist, Unapologetic African-American conservative" who suggests that "the segment of the Black community that preaches and practices most the conservative ideas of self-reliance, entrepreneurship, economic opportunity, and strong families and morals is what is termed the 'militant' segment of the community." He endorses "the positive self-help message and practices of Louis Farrakhan."

This excites the brethren, and if they were at all serious about this we might expect them to bring their case directly to the Nation of Islam and with them make common cause. Then they could engineer a hybrid of the Million Man March and a Tea Party. It would be even better if, as Black Panthers used to do before Reagan made them stop, they carried guns.

What a pity it is that they're not serious; our politics would be so much more interesting.

ANOTHER BLOGGER ETHICS PANEL. Amity Shlaes, author of a book about the wretched failure of the New Deal, starts her new Bloomberg column by complaining of leftblogger incivility aimed at such blameless targets as Michele Bachmann and Eric Cantor. I have to admit, I was excited to see this. I have toiled lo these many years documenting the abuses of the rightwing blogosphere, and would have liked to compare notes with someone from the other side.

Alas, Shlaes only leads with three examples, and then moves on to her real theme, which is how bad the Obama is and FDR was. But she drags the bad-blogger schtick through the whole thing ("So here’s a new motto: more leadership, less bloggership"), to suggest it is evidence that the present Administration "isn’t comfortable yet at the summit of political power," and hence must order Josh Marshall, Matthew Yglesias, and Allison Kilkenny "out on a mission of distraction, trying to prove that everyone else is too far to the right."

It's noteworthy that, at this late date, people like Shlaes think bloggers are only making fun of them because the Obama Administration directed them to do so. We've been razzing them since before there was an Obama Administration. But Shlaes has made a good living for years as a conservative operative, and has only rarely acknowledged the less-credentialed voices out there -- as in this 2005 column of hers, in which she discourses on DNC Chairman Howard Dean: "Howard the Hound goes for blood, and his party values him for his following among bloggers." That's not very civil, but then she didn't feel she needed to be: her column goes on to explain how Blue Dog Democrats are going to destroy Howard the Hound's liberal dreams -- "rescue the party," in her terms -- and send him and his wretched bloggers into deserved obscurity.

Clearly things haven't worked out for Shlaes, and now in the ruins she senses that Howard the Hound and his bloggers have pulled a fast one on her. So she rails against the coalition that, she imagines, hectors her and her buddies to this day. Though she has disappointed me, I'd be a churl not to thank her for placing my kind near the center of the groovy socialist revolution. It's as close to power as we are likely to get.

ARLEN SPECTER WRAP-UP over at the Voice. The rightbloggers still think it's a great thing for their cause. A big part of the reason is that they're accustomed to see everything as a great thing for their cause. But though I am tempted to dismiss this, like many of their puzzling sentiments, as a brain chemical issue, I sense a plan forming: they're really thinking realignment -- Goldwater '64, perhaps, or Jeb Davis '61; they consider the Republican Party too liberal, and are content to reduce it to a rightwing rump in preparation for a a big takeover. Everything depends of Obama washing out completely, and as we've seen they're full of faith that he will.

Of course counting on happy accidents hasn't been working too well for them lately, but the great thing about fatalism is that it is eventually always rewarded, if rewarded is the right word, one way or the other.

ADWEAK.


00:03: Obama's voice through a pitch shifter and several layers of Kleenex.

00:10: Obama's gnarled, left-handed treason-signing technique.

00:14: Examples of Obama treason from treasonous MSM sources.

00:22: First bald white guy harshing on Obama while Obama looks around like duh-hey?

00:27: Spooky monochrome footage of Arab Democrat jihadists.

00:35: Another bald white guy.

00:48: Blowdried quiff.

00:57: Closeups of WORDS! On a PAGE! Out of which crawl MUSLIMS!

01:07: Obama BOWS!

01:08: Obama laughs with fellow traitors.

01:09: Biden laughs at Silas Lynch's Obama's joke.

01:10: Obama fist-bumps Hugo Chavez.

01:11: Obama listens with his hand over his mouth (which no real American does except when he burps in the presence of ladies) to some guy who is probably a traitor...

01:13: ...and in consequence a flag is burned.

01:12: A thing blows up.

01:13: Scary man in mask with rocket launcher.

01:14: Something on fire.

01:15: "Do you feel safer?" Hell no. Someone call Janet Napolitano.

WHERE IS YOUR GOD NOW? Crunchy Rod Dreher was on a roll. First he was excited by redistributionist proposals, so long as they are pro-family. Then he was excited by the swine flu, which may hasten the End Times for which he clearly pines.

But then his fellow Xtians let him down:

Here's a shocker: a new Pew poll finds that Christians support torture more than non-believers do. What's more, Evangelicals are more pro-torture than white mainline Protestants and white non-Hispanic Catholics -- but that Catholics and Evangelicals are more pro-torture than average Americans.

And get this: the more often you go to church, the more pro-torture you're likely to be!

What on earth are these Christians hearing at church?!

The entire history of his cult from the Crusades onwards seems to have escaped his notice. Clearly Brother Rod must go amongst the brethren with some artisinal Christianity, and focus their inchoate hatred on homosexuals instead of detainees.

I thank God every day for Brother Rod. In the darkest hours he has helped keep the thorns under my pot crackling.

TEA INFUSION. That's strange. I don't seem to remember insisting, when Bush was at the height of his popularity, that he was a goner and that the people would soon overthrow him. Maybe that's what we did wrong.

Despite President Barack Obama's early personal popularity...

That's Arthur C. Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute, writing for the Wall Street Journal another of those ah-yes-everything-is-going-according-to-plan pieces conservatives go in for these days.

...we can see the beginnings of this schism in the "tea parties" that have sprung up around the country.

I also don't recall thinking that the enormous anti-war protests of 2003 or the giant demo at the 2004 Republican Convention were going to sweep Bush out of office, either.

It's interesting to consider that those protests were in response to things that were actually happening, as opposed to the speculative destruction for which tea-partiers preemptively blame Obama. Despite their laughable protestations of bi-partisanship, my own experience, along with casual observation of their own behaviors and common sense, shows that the tea people are mainly committed right-wingers whose main target is the Democratic Administration. Obama's budget hasn't even been signed and they're raging like they were already living in Hoovervilles. We may speculate on the weird brew of prejudices that animates them, but it clearly has nothing to do with actual events.

Brooks is happy to play dumb, though, and claims their anger is a form of "ethical populism" in favor of raw capitalism -- AEI's stock in trade! -- that policy wonks such as himself "have a constructive role" in shaping:

As policymakers offer a redistributionist future to a fearful nation and a new culture war simmers, we must respond with tangible, enterprise-oriented policy alternatives. For example, it is not enough to point out that nationalized health care will make going to the doctor about as much fun as a trip to the department of motor vehicles. We need to offer specific, market-based reform solutions.

He's clearly got the pulse of the nation: the rubes fear a less enjoyable trip to the doctor's office than what they currently enjoy, and he's going to focus their anger with position papers.

What's he doing is what they're all doing with every scrap of evidence or anti-evidence: retro-fitting them with a thesis that explains what the protesters are really angry about, which in every case exactly resembles whatever their policy shops have been churning out for years. They're like a rightwing version of ANSWER. Of course those same theses were extant when Bush was steering the economy onto the rocks, but never mind: it is important that, when the Great Rebellion comes, these guff merchants have lined up early enough to be at the front of the parade, waving their essays in triumph.

Yeah, it's all a fantasy in any case, but what else have they got?

MEANWHILE IN THE GALTERNATE UNIVERSE. Going Galt hasn't been the bust-out success he's been hoping for, so the Ole Perfesser has lowered the bar:

READER MICHAEL RONAYNE SUGGESTS “GOING GALT” WITH YOUR NEXT CAR:

Has anyone considered the opportunities for Going Galt with our car purchases? All we have to do is not buy any General Motors or Chrysler products? And just not new cars, let the old clunkers sit on the car dealer’s lots as well; the used parts business is a very locative revenue stream for the car industry. Don’t buy any socialist American cars. Don’t support the looter socialist state!

What percent of the population would have to support us for this to be effective?

Given that most people will be understandably skeptical about these cars on simple practical grounds, I’d say two or three...

Given their lousy balance sheets, I'd say GM and Chrysler customers went Galt a few years ago. But if people continue to not-buy their shitty cars, the movement can claim a retroactive victory. At this rate the Perfesser will soon be crediting galloping Galtism with the destruction of pets.com.

Dr. Mrs. Ole Perfesser does her part, predicting businesses overburdened by Obama will "decrease hiring and expansion, and/or 'go John Galt.'" This is a confusing construction, but I think she means that an economic slowdown will prove she has hordes of powerful minions. Again, given the current recession, this is a game she had won before the league drew up the schedule. But we've all used that ruse, haven't we? Me, I keep saying that Obama's victory in November and high standing in recent polls mean America wants him to succeed. Craftily, I also count the black voters.

Cosmic Conservative has some other surefire ideas: "Take advantage of any 'incentive' program which forces the government to spend money. Need new windows? Make sure you get government subsidized windows." Also: "When nationalized health care is instituted, push it to its limit. Visit the doctor for any conceivable allowable reason." And "Apply for any government hand out that you can conceivably qualify for." Then the nanny state will take notice! They may even cut the budget for those ad campaigns they sometimes run to make sure you're getting your food stamps.

I could go on all night, but I will leave you with a wonderful product from Free Market Underdog -- the children's book "An Island Called Liberty," which they describe as a "cross between Dr. Seuss and Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged." Here's a sample page:



Kids are going to hate Compassionate Flo! She wears too much socialipstick. As you may imagine, her regulatory fervor crushes liberty in its cradle, and children are taught a valuable lesson about progressive taxation and industrial policy. I have lost the URL, but the excised pages are even better. One, from the original happy ending, goes:

Then the De-Regulators all got on the phone
And they De-Regulated each Savings and Loan
They returned every one to its free-market state
And the Big Wealth Producers said, "This is all great!
The doors are wide open! The money keeps flowing!
Here's our I.O.U. for all the assets we're owing!"
Then they took bags of cash to their mansions afar.
Thus the suckers got suckered -- 'cause that's what they are.

AFRICAN-AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM. Now Byron York is saying that Obama's popularity has a suspiciously "dark" component, if you know what I mean. His commenters hear the dog whistle: "When your personal financial support consists solely of a government provided check, the economy is never bad, it's simply irrelevant." "The only conclusion one can reach is that blacks don't have a grasp of any of the issues." "Now that we have a (6.25%) black president, we will suffer under OJ Syndrome." "The majority of blacks pay no income tax. Why wouldn't they favor Obama's tax and spend policies?"

I never thought I'd say this, but the National Review crowd could take a tip from the tea partiers on this. Every so often the tea people put up a "Look, we have some black people!" post. It's transparent, but it shows some cognizance of the fact that normal Americans aren't really looking for a white people's party. Hell, the last election should have taught York that much.

Dave Weigel does a fine job of tearing up York's bullshit. And in the same paper similar-looking papers in D.C.!

LIFE'S LITTLE PLEASURES. Now is a good to remind ourselves that things can go horribly wrong. I've seen good times, I've seen bad, and the latter tend to be more prevalent and more lasting. So I suggest we savor every drop of the Arlen Specter thing. It's true, as The Poor Man and Glenn Greenwald have pointed out, that Specter isn't much of a get, and will likely take a 2010 nomination that should go to a more progressive candidate.

Well, Obama isn't much of a progressive, either. I don't care. In these few years I have left, I just want to capture some enjoyable memories of wingnut anguish that may bring some comfort to my charity hospital bed.

Recall, if you will, the days when conservatives told anyone who would listen that Democratic liberals were only hurting themselves by giving the wetter members of their coalition a hard time.

"They have now morphed into Taliban Democrats," said Cal Thomas in 2006, "because they are willing to 'kill' one of their own, if he does not conform to the narrow and rigid agenda of the party's kook fringe... Taliban Democrats have effectively issued a political 'fatwah' that warns all Democrats not to deviate from their narrow line, or else face the end of their careers through a political jihad." James Pinkerton talked about liberals' long heritage of finding "heretics" and "infidels," and of resorting to "ideological cleansing."

Thus also sprach many putative liberals, like our old warblogger friend Armed Liberal, who complained in 2004 that an authentic liberal like Jeff Jarvis (!) "gets piled on for being 'inadequately liberal'. And that's a pisser. First, and foremost, it once again wraps up the smug 'I know better than you' that the Democratic Party has become associated with -- and which lots of people, including me, find amazingly offensive." He predicted that the Taliban Democrats "are going to lose a lot of political power."

Those seem like distant times, but Joel Kotkin was talking about the impending "Democratic Party civil war" last month. The Taliban Democrats theme was not a finding based on observation, but one of the magic charms conservatives and bullshit liberals rubbed in their pockets to remind themselves that their opposition was hopelessly divided.

Conservatives have hated Specter forever, but in victory contented themselves with loud grumbling. This year, in their defeat and disarray, they plumped a challenge by Club for Growth president Pat Toomey, who decried Specter's "betrayal" on the stimulus bill. Suddenly, far fewer of them were talking about "ideological cleansing" as a bad thing.

"Specter must be sent out to pasture," cried Conservative Wahoo. "We can finally be rid of the two-faced, backstabbing, ear-marking political opportunist who shamelessly clings to power," said Mike Netherland. "Specter has been a cancer that has continuously sold out the Republican Party countless times," said the ever-classy B.S. Report.

When the NRSC chairman John Coryn spoke up for Specter, the American Spectator warned, "the Republican base has gotten smaller and the remaining conservatives may have had their fill of Specter." Their commenters rose to prove it: "GOP still backing Specter -- sounds about right. Things humming along without interruption while Hussein Obama is busting America," "This is the kind of thinking that got the GOP thrown out in '06," etc.

The Bear Creek Ledger roared, "No wonder no Republican wants to donate to the NRSC! What a bunch of tools." My favorite bit of outrage came from Matt Lewis, who said at TownHall that Coryn's pronouncement "clearly demonstrates the NRSC is not in the business of electing conservatives, but rather, Republicans."

In this Jacobin environment, Specter did what he had to do. For me, the great legacy of this moment comes not from the shock of the Republican operatives who were caught flat-footed, but from the joy of the wingnut dead-enders who think this is great news for their movement ("Only by ridding itself of the lowly likes of Specter will Republicans reemerge as the party that can rebuild the country by upholding the principles that made it great"). Like I said, Specter's not my favorite, but I'll always be grateful to him for what he accomplished today.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, mainly a miscellany but loosely tied to the latest iteration of the "liberal bloggers are uncivil" theme. I'm afraid I can find no new and intriguing thesis for this periodic pearl-clutching act; they pull it in both good times and bad, seemingly at random. Bloggers on the left, of course, complain about rightbloggers' stupidity and ham-handedness all the time -- why, it's my very stock-in-trade! --but I find that, for the most part, our team doesn't usually get so ostentatiously ruffled about swear words as theirs does. (I still recall with pleasure the conservative drive to measure the obscenity production of liberal blogs -- and the great larks we had twitting them with it.) It doesn't bug me so much anymore to be called an asshole, especially by assholes. But I do get riled when they call Obama a fascist, so who knows; maybe that's my version of a swear word. If I were in a hectoring mood, I might draw a parallel out of this, but it's too nice a day for that, so let's just enjoy the sunshine and teh stupid.

ROTTING FROM THE HEAD. A perfect wingnut storm, straight from the Old Perfesser and his imaginary friends:

ANOTHER UPDATE: A New York reader emails:

Govt demanding shareholders be kept in the dark . . .was a hot topic at a *parents* meeting at my daughter’s school tonight. Moms who are, well, moms, were talking about how the crowd in Washington “is a bunch of damn socialists”. It ain’t just the finance crowd.

Interesting. There seem to be a lot of upset moms out there.

And cab drivers! I suspect this scene was actually enacted by Dr. Helen and bunch of dolls.

It goes on:

MORE: Reader Fernando Colina writes:

Upset moms are a formidable force. Salvador Allende’s government was essentially brought down by a bunch of upset mums banging pots and pans every night in the streets of Santiago. Obama may want to take notice.

Kissinger and Nixon had something to do with it too. But as is the trend in wingnut-land, the tea partiers get all the credit.

Accusations of socialism, threats of an Allende-style assassination... the Perfesser really seems to be losing his robot cool.

BACK TO SCHOOLDAYS. Kathryn J. Lopez is pimping the hell out of a very old list of 30 books William "Book of Virtues" Bennett once promoted as a mandatory reading list for American high school students. (Some of the Cornerites plead for the inclusion of science fiction. Christ Jesus, what dorks.)

I don't know what fit came over the poor woman, but as a former amateur pedagogue, as well as a former high school student, I have something to say about this. First, I approve of the general idea (and of the listmakers' prejudice for Shakespeare's tragedies over his comedies, as the comedies are much too hard). Most students will neither apprehend nor enjoy the books, but I think they should get some of them down, as they do (or once did) times tables and key historical dates, as an introduction, however awkward, to the world of ideas.

Even if they are frog-marched through Crime and Punishment, they will at least retain some vague memory of it into adulthood, and with any luck it will resonate when they brush up against even informal discussions of right, wrong, justice, religion, free will, alienation, etc. It might prompt a shock of recognition that they have not been entirely left out of the conversation that the smart people are having. Also, just getting through big books, even if they test badly on them, may be a point of pride for them, and give them the salutary notion that they are not dummies after all.

If this sounds harsh -- if you think students should be inculcated with the joy of reading, rather than frog-marched through big books -- please take a moment to gather your memories of high school, and not just your own experience but also those of your classmates, as you perceived them. Then, consider: at which are schools better -- at instruction, or at enlightenment? If your mind was awakened in high school, congratulations, but chances are it would have awakened in any case, whether you had school or not. But you were less likely to have learned on your own polynomial equations, how to write a paper, historical analysis, or other such building blocks of intellectual life. I didn't want to learn these things, but I was taught them nonetheless, and I'm grateful for the experience.

In fact, the frog-march approach has an even more serious advantage when it comes to literature.

This approach would make sure that these books are not apprehended, as Bennett's Book of Virtues sought to have simpler works apprehended, as "a reliable moral reference point that will help anchor our children and ourselves in our culture, our history, and our traditions." This is not to say that I have anything against that culture, history, or traditions. But, for one thing, I doubt Bennett and myself have quite the same idea of them as I do -- or, for that matter, as the authors of these great works did. Works of literature are more elusive than any political operative's talking points.

Can you imagine Bennett's lesson plan for Moby-Dick? It would probably have something about Ahab's sin of pride. Okay, let the kids run with that; they won't have time, certainly, to think much about it as they slog through the endless pages and references to whaling arcana. Let them get the story, details, and characters straight, and then let them be haunted through life by it. Maybe they will spend years wondering, as I have wondered, about the sky-hawk that goes down with the Pequod, held by the hammer of Tashtego, "his whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab." Later they can come to stuff like this, which is fun for grown-ups but would in their first reading only interfere.

Remember, a whole generation of American progressives was educated with "The boy stood on the burning deck" and stuff like that. They were no less propagandized than we are, and their teachers were no better or worse than ours. But their rote education gave them room to think and dream.