THE CHURCH MILITANT. Self-contradictions are always rife at The Anchoress, but I was struck by this, in a post about how we're too nice to children or some other Catholic topic:

I don’t watch any “reality” TV shows. Buster has tried to get me to watch American Idol because “sometimes there are talented people auditioning,” and that may be -– while I sat with him last week, I did see a few kids who seemed talented –- but for the most part, I felt very uncomfortable with it.

Which seemed odd to me, as for a while The Anchoress was basically a Susan Boyle fan site. She has elsewhere shown a keen interest in the show ("A bit of a travesty, Gina being voted off while Haley remains. I think if the judges had done their jobs, the outcome would be different," "Melinda Doolittle made me cry," etc). She had previously declared American Idol "dead to me" after a 2006 episode, not on moral grounds but because she didn't like the episode and couldn't "wait for this silly show to end." But then came Boyle, Melinda Doolittle, etc.

The obvious rejoinder would be that she doesn't watch it anymore, but she doesn't mention her past fixation and repent. I doubt she sees the need; in the next season she'll probably be swooning over some other Idol, and reading portents into it. What's sufficient is that she's free of the sin of American Idolatry for the moment.

This is followed by an Anchoress post of a familiar sort, about how she sometimes struggles with hating her enemies, but Buster and the Bible pull her clear. A great victory, to be sure, but one that apparently never lasts. She was given to call Obama names like "a fraud on legs" during the campaign. Of late she has said that "President Obama himself has no clue who he is, not as an American man, and not as The American President," and that he's "more than a little cowardly" -- in the latter instance, also attacking others who are filled with "hate," presumably because they used riper language than she to describe opponents as un-American cowards. And in and among these always come the lengthy posts about how Democrats are the real haters.

In the whirlwind of criticism that comprises the non-Jesus portion of her blog, The Anchoress has her hits and her misses, just like any other gunslinger out there. But in the intervals she's always insisting that she serves another, higher authority that prevents her from being the sort of political operative she appears to be in her political postings. To those not similarly dazzled by her faith, it suggests a strong conflict between what she does for a living, even when it involves fun with TV tripe, and the way she likes to see herself, or be seen. It makes her more interesting than the sharks out there, but also, to those of us who were acquainted with the magic acts performed in confessional booths long before they went online, very annoying.

ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER CONSERVATIVE BITCHING ABOUT ANOTHER AWARD SOMEONE ELSE WON. You thought the Nobel was the end of it? Crunchy Rod Dreher howls about the injustice of... Bill Maher winning the Richard Dawkins Award.

That's right: Jesus freak Dreher and his fellow Jesus freak Mark Shea are saying that the atheists picked the wrong atheist to honor. That's like a vegan telling me I didn't tenderize my pork chops well enough to suit his palate. (One of Dreher's commenters even says -- I shit you not -- "he's not even an atheist, he's an agnostic.")

This helps put the Nobel thing into perspective. Conservatives have as little standing to talk about peace as Dreher has to talk about atheism -- all they know is that they don't like it. Engaging them on these subjects is pretty much the definition of wrestling a pig.

CRITICAL METHOD. Michelle Obama allegedly eschewed a recent trip to South Carolina, the land of Joe Wilson and a number of other prominent rightwing buffoons, allegedly citing security concerns. South Carolina is also where her ancestors were kept as slaves. Michelle Malkin says this is an example of Obama "criminalizing dissent."

I'm sometimes asked why I don't talk more about Malkin here. I prefer nuts with interesting personality quirks -- the Goldbergs, McArdles, Noonans, and such like. Malkin is like some dead-eyed shark looking only for the shortest distance between her mouth and her meal. Her absurdities are no less rank than theirs, but if a personality intervenes in her construction of them, I've yet to detect it.

UPDATE. Now she's saying Barack Obama is afraid to go to San Francisco -- having previously written that San Francisco's "Billionaire's Row" is "where [Obama] feels most at home." Make that a mechanical shark, like the one they used in Jaws, except not as well programed.

MONGO ONLY PAWN IN GAME OF LIFE. Jonah Goldberg:

A few months ago, this White House trotted out a tired attack on Rush Limbaugh just to stir the pot and distract media attention. I can't quite figure out what the White House's thinking is in both attacking lefty blogs and giving them anti-Fox red meat, though, I haven't had my coffee yet...

Perhaps it's as simple as the fact that this White House makes more progress selling health-care reform when it's not actually selling health-care reform. Getting everyone to go look at those shiny things over there while they push through a bill may be all this is about.

Way back in the thing Goldberg uses for a brain may stir the thought that by promoting bullshit stories, he and his colleagues have done more to distract attention from actual governmental news than any White House Communications Office has the power to achieve, and that this may not be working out for them as planned. But no amount of coffee, or coffee ice cream, can edge it far enough forward to reach his pontificating apparatus. Maybe if there were an old movie scene to which he could relate it...

CONVERSATION STARTER. The Ole Perfesser:

And the Gay Left and Tea Party Right might even want to talk to each other; they may find they’ve got more in common than they realize...

Let's see what the "Gay Left" will find if they talk to the Augusta, Maine Tea Party Right:

Attendees of the Independence Day Tea Party rally came for many reasons -- to speak out against what they called the "socialistic liberal agenda," to petition against gay marriage and to speak up for individual rights and the Constitution among them.

As Major Strasser might say, they would find the conversation a trifle one-sided. Let's try Texas:

Eric Aguirre, who attended an assembly in College Station, Texas, described how one of the guest speakers, a World War II veteran, spoke about gay marriage.

He said that while he believed that God made you the way you were, he felt there were limits to how marriage is defined. He said God made men, and God made women, and marriage is between each of those sexes. The crowd erupted in applause.

Maybe we can expect some more tolerant-like in the Northeast, from TEA New York:

(Why we oppose) Support of the homosexual agenda

I’ll refer to these two bodies of intelligent created beings as “my gay friends” and “the Agenda.” My gay friends have freely opted for the marvelous divine gift of free will, whereas the Agenda seeks to force its will upon others – not unlike the Grand Inquisitors, or those that would force the Infidel to convert or die...

...we should be objecting very strongly to the gay Agenda, militantly mainstreaming dangerous and unhealthy behavior into our laws and schools.

On the bright side, the author adds, "We appreciate the creative talents of gay artists, stylists and designers." And let's see Mark Noonan on GOP outreach to the Tea Party People:

Our first task is to restore the Constitutional order… after that, the rest will fall our way of its own accord. If we can’t do this, then all our arguments against abortion, against gay marriage, in favor of family and faith are pointless...

To be fair, the Boston Tea Party came out for gay marriage in 2008. And some of the brethren counsel soft-pedaling social issues in the interests of coalition building. But good luck getting any gathering of conservative activists to stay off the "gay agenda" for any length of time.

SHORTER E.J. DIONNE: The attacks on Obama's Nobel Prize are perfectly understandable. It's white male backlash, which is also understandable. What's crazy is attributing any of this to racism.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, in which I attend the follow-through on the story of Obama's disastrous Nobel Prize victory. Apparently the new angle is that the Committee contrived by means of the award to get Obama to abandon Afghanistan, hand the U.S. over to global-warming internationalists, and Lord knows what else. Thus, if henceforth Obama does anything the Right doesn't like, it will be in appeasement of our Oslo overlords. Soon the Scandinavians will replace France, Russia, etc. as right-wing hate-objects, and Jonah Goldberg will be writing about lutefisk-eating surrender nudists.

Tom Maguire stocks up for future outrage should Obama treasonously pick up his Prize: "Should Obama be taking time out of his schedule to deliver a pretty speech just because some Norwegians want a semi-private showing?" Well, the bastard did have the temerity to show up for his own Inauguration, when he could have been yelling at black kids who were wearing their pants too low.

I see Matt Welch is back in the saddle, raging against the Nobel in the New York Post: "Even Kofi Annan's 2001 award could be seen as a thumb in the eye of a Republican foreign policy that has used the United Nations as a pinata." In the reign of President Palin, he can always say he's sorry again.

GETTING THE PRIORITIES STRAIGHT. Robert Stacy McCain on a story about some redneck who put up a sign saying "Obama's plan for health-care: Nigger rig it":

First of all, Patrick Lanzo isn't originally from Paulding County, Ga., and...

...second, his tasteless sign is not a valid commentary on ObamaCare. But among the several other things wrong with this CBS News story, let's start with the dateline.

Thus a story about a self-evident racist -- not a crypto-racist, not an impression-of-racist, but an honest-to-God specimen -- becomes one about poor fact-checking. And how McCain suffers from the unfortunate and inexplicable "presumption that all white people from the South are uniquely racist."

The story to which McCain links notes that "Black and white people who live in the area say the sign is offensive and they want it down," and makes no judgments on or allegations of racism among resident of Carroll County or Paulding County of wherever this is. (It does quote a source from the NAACP, which for him may amount to the same thing.)

Confedrate Yankee on the same subject:

Democrats in the media and in politics have so over-used cries to racism in an attempt to marginalize legitimate opposition that the word has rapidly lost the stigma attached to it...

It's a shame the left has decided to make such reckless use of the word in an attempt to stifle opposition, because when real racism occurs, calling it out with the level of derision it deserves becomes that much more difficult.

Really? I don't find it difficult at all. But in the spirit of the First Amendment I say, let the sign-erector trumpet his ignorance to the world. And let the rightbloggers who think calling Obama a nigger is an indictment of liberalism do the same. Sane men and women will know what to make of it.

MORE NOBELONEY. In comments to the previous post about the Peace Prize, chuckling makes an excellent point:

While I don’t think Obama deserved to win the Nobel Peace Prize... Since the announcement of the prize, just about every comment I've read from the left expresses some variant of that opinion. Within minutes, literally minutes, the phrase became the required disavowel of liberal accomplishment of the day..."

For normal people, jawing over who shoulda or shouldn'ta got awards is a pleasant intellectual exercise. But for the rightbloggers it's a tactic in their ceaseless war to discredit everything except their own prejudices and hare-brained schemes.

Recall what happened when Pinter won the Literature Prize. (Also see the updates here.) Conservative buffoons, most of whom could not demonstrate familiarity with a single Pinter play, howled at the injustice of it. They only knew that Pinter was left-wing, and that his works did not resemble their preferred reading materials (i.e., Joel Osteen and Gor novels), and that was good enough for outrage. They don't discuss literature or politics or prizes or anything else: they purr when they're stroked and spit when they're threatened.

As to Obama, commenters have plenty of other good points. cleter notes that "Obama is responsible for saving the world from the horror of a McCain/Palin administration." They should have put that on the citation. And Doghouse Riley brings it all back home: "Take it up with the fucking Committee. I don't remember them clearing Milton's Friedman's award with me first." This is a medal we're talking about here, not a public office. They can always make one of their own and give it whomever they want. Then they can complain that it isn't as well-known as the Nobel for the same reason Pajamas TV isn't as popular as piano-playing cat videos: Liberal media bias.

NOBELONEY. The lamentations of the wingnuts have been delicious, and this weekend I will sift through many more of them, but I couldn't let this day go by without noting a prize specimen offered at National Review by one James V. Schall, S.J., "a professor of government at Georgetown University":

War is caused by those who fight against those who cause it, we are now taught. I understand the Taliban are angry at this selection because they think it fosters “violence,” against which they naturally fight bravely on, as they tell us. We are overturning all the shibboleths of the past. The new age has arrived. Neville Chamberlain’s “peace in our time” was ahead of its time.

Cabbages... knickers.. it's not got a beak! Back when I studied with them, the Jebbies demanded coherence at a minimum; I see those days are gone, at least among those who froth for wingnut mags. JPII really did a number on them. Ah well, at least I got some benefit from their method before it went from Socratic to surreal.

I question the decision myself, but anything that raises such froth among the gomers must be applauded.

UPDATE. Megan McMegan:

I guess I must hate America, but I actually think it's kind of ludicrous that anyone is even trying to argue that Barack Obama truly deserves this Nobel Peace Prize. Could he have deserved it, after he'd had more than nine months in office? Easily. But he hasn't had time to, y'know, accomplish anything.

Maybe they should have given him a gig at The Atlantic instead.

UPDATE 2. Der Ace of Spades is moved to take his masturbation to an international level:

So... I think there's a damn good shot that a right-leaning party in Norway introduces a bill to reform the Nobel Prize Committee and insure the prize is given for the purposes originally intended, rather than be debased further as some grotesque leftist beauty pageant.

Not predicting it will be adopted -- but predicting it will be proposed.

And that will be pretty embarrassing for President Prissypants -- to be so obviously inappropriate and unacceptable a choice so as to provoke legislative corrective.

And if Princess Leia got to know you, she would really, really like you.

UPDATE. Will address some comments in a separate post.

TOUGH CROWD. Ladies and germs, says the MC, please welcome to the Pajamas Media stage Mr. Dan Miller:

The Obama administration is destroying many things intrinsic to the United States.

[Crowd mills restlessly as Miller details the crimes of Obama. Simpsons reference fails to relieve tension. Is he pulling an Andy Kaufman?]

The loss of national pride and national direction are bad enough, but we are also losing our sense of humor.

[Ah, he's doing Kaufman. Crowd waits for it.]

I can’t seem to recall any time during the past sixty or so years when bitterness and seriousness were so deeply rooted and laughter so restrained. Even the “gallows humor” which prevailed during our wars seems to have been lost.

[Crowd leans expectantly, hoping for examples of "gallows humor"; gets more Obama crimes instead. ]

I’m waiting for some congresscritter, a member of the vast right-wing conspiracy, to offer legislation replacing the eagle with the dodo bird as the country’s national emblem.

[Delayed reaction: was that a joke? A few barks. At least he's trying.]

In his later years, [Bertrand] Russell came to be regarded by many as “a very intelligent old silly.” Still, he has much to offer; he had a grand sense of humor and was able to laugh not only at those with different views but at himself.

["Tell one of his jokes!" someone yells. Laughter in the back.]

True, comedians still exist and some make lots of money. The jokes about Governor Palin during the recent presidential campaign produced laughter, and those about former President Bush and Vice President Cheney did as well. However, they and the laughter they produced were largely grounded in — and promoted — bitterness and the associated hatred. The few jokes directed at President Obama were much the same; there were then and there are now very few, because of the racism charges almost certain to be thrown at those making and laughing at them. Those accused, even wrongly, of racism are generally punished severely. “Code words” are found, and even unspoken and unintended words are heard subliminally and apologies must be forthcoming, even though they are not generally accepted.

[Even Kaufman couldn't have gotten away with this. Is he going to take us out for ice cream?]

Political correctness, from which all suffer to some extent in the United States and in Europe, has played a major role in this. It teaches us not only to avoid giving, but to take offense. More of us are easily offended than at any time I can remember.

At this point Miller is drowned out by hecklers and removed by the hook, but Pajamas Media provides a full transcript of his routine. You will not be surprised to learn that Miller mentions a former law associate who "was nearly always able to break the tension in a negotiation" with jokes, but declines to repeat any of them.

You can't blame Miller much; most of his crowd were out heckling Letterman. Only their complaint was that Letterman is funny, which is not their primary qualification for a comic.

FILM THREAT. I haven't been able to find a Michael Moore statement on Roman Polanski, but apparently he is implicated in the case nonetheless.

Tough times for leftie Hollywood. Nothing’s gone right this week. None of this is their fault, of course. In order to understand that it might not be a good idea to rally around a child rapist, bash religion in a religious country or trash capitalism in a capitalist country you have to live in the real world...

Rightwing bloggers have far better message discipline than this consortium of filmmakers known as "Hollywood." You can get 138 film people to petition on Polanksi's behalf, but the backlash both in Tinseltown and on liberal blogs doesn't seem to register.

Oops, I see Janeane Garofalo has been implicated as well:

I wonder what her position is on raping 13-year-old girls or having threesomes with 15-year-olds is.

Silence is consent! But even if she denounced Polanski through a bullhorn, what good would it do? David Steinberg:

Sorry, Leftism: You Don’t Get to Disown the Polanski List...

You drew a line on Polanski’s case, yes, but which word narrows your pupils: Guevara? Or Malkin?

You can't be on the right side of this issue unless Steinberg's light pen detects more movement in your pupils over a long-dead commie than over Michelle Malkin. These new standards of political correctness are getting awfully stringent, and apparently require an opthamologist's certification.

Rightbloggers would have long ago supplanted the movies as America's largest entertainment industry, were they better able to monetize their efforts. They might try putting AlfonZo Rachel in a buddy comedy with Jackie Chan.

CAPITALISM: A LOVE STORY. I've said my piece about Michael Moore before. He's first a polemicist -- at his worst, a propagandist -- and secondarily an artist. I prefer art to propaganda, and even to polemics, so even when I agree with him I often have problems with what he does.

The same applies to his new movie. He definitely works the gimp string a lot. But there's a line -- sometimes fine, sometimes thick -- between gimping and epiphany. In at least one instance Moore goes memorably the right way, and maybe the rest of the film was needed to get us there.

We get by the usual means discreet pieces of information about the sick, sad system that has led us to our new class hyper-divisions -- a synopsis of the Reagan scam that gave more power to the banks and the politicians who serve them (the beating Chris Dodd takes here is rich, and richly deserved); the crazy legalisms -- such as "dead peasant" policies employers use to earn money off employee deaths -- that our overlords avail to soak us further; and the feudal indignities visited on defaulting, former-middle-class citizens, like the extra money an evicted couple is given to clean out their own foreclosed home.

This is all very interesting, and more within the purview of news (or what would be news if our journalism weren't so rotten) than of classic documentary film. But Moore has some surprises, chief among them the way he uses the Obama victory. He rightly ascribes it to disgust with the late Bush-era bailouts -- and, also rightly, suggests that the persistent influence of big money may yet defeat it.

Most interesting is the way he positions black citizens in the Obama theme. An interview is interrupted by the news that the election is won, and we see black folk leap and cheer -- a common image during that news cycle, but (as I mentioned about the portrayal of Republicans tumbling out of the closet in Republican Gomorrah) newly piquant in a narrative context: The most traditionally despised and debased people in the country suddenly filled with optimism. The payoff comes near the end, when Moore reproduces FDR's 1944 call for a new Bill of Rights-- a late New Deal legacy that presaged Moore's own hopes for the nation. We may be aware without reminding that Roosevelt's vision -- including that of "every family to a decent home.. to adequate medical care... to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age and sickness and accident" -- went unrealized after his death.

Next we see the crowds weeping at FDR's funeral procession -- many of them African-American. Then Moore avails a stealth-shock cut -- it takes a few moments to realize that the helicopters we are next shown are hovering over the flooded homes in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and that the terrified citizens begging for rescue are black.

I'm a terrible cynic, but the sorrow and anger at injustice I felt at what I saw, I am convinced, were not drawn by a gimp-string, nor by a clever concatenation of my own prejudices, but by the craft of a real filmmaker turning bare facts and images into art. It's political, certainly. But sometimes, if rarely, a political gesture is sufficiently inspired to cross the line.

UPDATE. Michael Moore interview here.

AND COULDN'T THEY HAVE DONE SOME TUNES BY THE GOLDWATERS?

This was my fourth U2 show. The last time I went, eight years ago, I wrote a piece for NRO entitled "Shut Up and Sing." It hardly seems possible, but there were more politics this time.

John J. Miller has an inflated notion of his own importance.

And I did leave the stadium wondering a couple of things. Yes, the Iranian democracy protestors are important and deserve our support. But what about the voters in Afghanistan, who will either keep the vote or lose it based on decisions that world leaders (especially just a few miles from FedEx Field) are making right now? If Bono said a single word about them, I didn't hear it. But then public support of that would have been a little more controversial, no? The same with Aun San Suu Kyi. What a brave lady. She also deserves our support. But how about some words for jailed dissidents in Cuba? Unfortunately, as causes go, theirs is not as politically safe.

One more thing: When you're getting all preachy about freedom and democracy around the world, how about a word of thanks for American soldiers, especially the ones who have died trying to spread it?

By "Shut Up and Sing," Miller apparently means "Sing What We Tell You To or Shut Up."

This is the whole culture war in a nutshell: free marketers outraged that the market has rewarded something they don't like, and practicing to be commissars in the totalitarian states of their minds.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP (sigh, back to the grind) about the rightblogger judgment of Obama's U.N. speech and its aftermath. Their traditional routine of portraying Obama as a dangerous naif is difficult to prove, as so much diplomacy is played out behind closed doors, but easily asserted. I notice that Obama's pre-knowledge of Iran's nuclear adventures is now offered as proof of his malfeasance, as he "concealed it from the public." Coming from fans of the shadowy Bush foreign policy, this is doubly rich, and I wonder how they (or anyone else) would like a thoroughly sunlit U.S. intelligence establishment. Maybe it's time for a new Church Committee? It should be easy to convene, with conservatives now on board.

Added yuks from Legal Insurrection, which indulges in a long fantasy of Obama as President in 1943, in which "instead of meeting only with Churchill and Stalin, Obama would have met with Hitler and Hirohito, if Obama were to be 'consistent.' The free and democratic nations which emerged after democracy was imposed on them from outside would be quite different from the Japan and Germany we now know and love." I hope this becomes a series, with cartoon Obama fucking up all of U.S. history -- maybe telling young George Washington to go on and chop down that cherry tree, but spare the oak, so he can get ACORN. Haw! Maybe I could double my income working for their side.

THE MILLENARIANIST MAKEOVER. A new Wizbang jeremiad:

Our country skates on thin ice today wherein that thin line separates our economy and security (domestic and foreign) from very serious trouble. As Kevin noted earlier, some believe Republicans are leaderless while Democrats are out of control. Others believe Democrats are leaderless while Republicans are irrelevant. Whichever is the case, an earthquake is coming. Evidence of it is in the popular culture where apocalyptic stories permeate television and books. (Hell, even bomb shelters are on the rise (pardon the metaphor).) One wonders if anyone in Washington is actually paying attention.

At about the same time, Mary Eberstadt pens an Irving Kristol appreciation, in which she praises his and his aciolytes skills at culture-warring:

That was how he could speak with such authority about "their turbulent sexuality, their drug addiction, their desperate efforts to invent new 'lifestyles,' and their popular music, at once Dionysiac and mournful." I remember those words leaping from the page upon reading them years later. In New York in the 1980s, new wave and punk rock were still reigning but on the way out, hip-hop and techno on the way in, and like everyone else I'd spent plenty of time slumming in clubs and other waystations of the popular culture, imbibing nihilism. Yet here was Irving, a 65-year-old bookworm who probably couldn't have found CBGB's if he were dropped off in front of it on a Friday night (and certainly wouldn't have gone in if he had), managing a decade later in just a few words to speak more truth about the scene than any of its itinerant habitués

Thus Kristol alerted us to the dangers of nightclubs.

As he put it in one 1993 essay that made waves called "My Cold War," what saddened him above all were "the clear signs of rot and decadence germinating within American society--a rot and decadence that was no longer the consequence of liberalism but was the actual agenda of contemporary liberalism. .  .  . It is an ethos that aims simultaneously at political and social collectivism on the one hand, and moral anarchy on the other. It cannot win, but it can make us all losers."

Thus Kristol alerted us to the nightmare of the Clinton years. Also, promiscuous sex and so forth. In other words, the usual Kulturkampf bag of tricks, which aren't selling so well as they once did -- Eberstadt admits that "today, of course, many on the right as well as the left would drive social conservatives from the fold if they could." Well, he got rich off it anyway; R.I.P. and so long, suckers!

It may just be, though, that the millenarianist style is getting a makeover. You don't hear Tea Partiers like the Wizbang crew talking much about how techno and blowjobs are going to kill us all. Their signs and portents are kids singing about Obama and Obama holding a nice smile. They insist that the Common People are as worried about this as they are, as proven by their hunger for "apocalyptic stories" (they can't be talking about Left Behind, can they? Maybe they mean Cougar Town) and bomb shelters as promoted by the Ole Perfesser.

The Get-Ready Man is always with us, but now he has handlers, and they change his wardrobe as times require.

UPDATE: Related: "Is the Left Wing Hoping for Violence?" Or if you prefer, "RELATED: Is the Left-Wing Hoping for Violence?"

UPDATE 2: The Ole Perfesser tells his credulous flock that Iran has plunged us into a new "duck and cover" era. Along with offering the rubes new justification for the shivering panic that is their comfort zone, the Perfesser may believe he is turning The Atomic Cafe to his advantage in a daring culture war raid. This schtick is obviously in its developmental stage, but if he gets any encouragement I expect the Perfesser will next start calling Hillary Clinton Dr. Strangelove, which ought to tickle the many burned-out hippies in the Movement.

THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GAAAAAAAAH! Just finished Max Blumenthal's Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party. It has three big themes, two of which are not wholly convincing, but one of which is dead on.

The overarching story is of the complete infestation of the Republican Party by fundamentalist Christians and, as the subtitle suggests, the disastrous results of those agents' many public downfalls in the 2006 and 2008 elections. Blumenthal could have made a whole book (and twice as long) about the origins of the fundamentalist political movement, starting with the theocrat R.J. Rushdoony and proceeding to those who in one way or another were allied with or influenced by him -- the Birchers, Jerry Falwell, Gary North, Francis Shaeffer, et alia -- until we get to the familiar names still prominent in the Religious Right, and their apotheosis in the Administration of born-again George W. Bush. I had almost forgotten how looney Gary Bauer, Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, Tom DeLay and many others were from the very beginning, and never knew how cunningly they networked to achieve their influence.

The escapades of Ted Haggard, Larry Craig, Jim West, Mark Foley and others are still well known, but having their burlesque routines told with full narrative vigor rather than in disjointed news clips helps recapture that halcyon time when the GOP revealed itself as a dysfunctional therapy camp for repressed homosexuals and, with the concatenation of Sarah Palin's negative campaign revelations (and some things that were not so much revealed -- the stuff about George Otis and Bishop Thomas Muthee gets even wackier than the Palin witch doctor video, if you can believe it), makes a stronger case than I would have expected for Blumenthal's implied thesis that the far-out religious component in modern GOP politics reached -- inevitably, it would seem -- a critical mass that "shattered the party" and loosened its grip on power.

Of course there was that tanking economy, too. Also Katrina, persistent military occupations, etc. Blumenthal doesn't say much about these, but I wonder if citizens might have been more likely to avert their eyes if many of these moral catastrophes weren't playing out against a governmental collapse on a national level.

Also, Blumenthal goes in for some group psychology and deduces that the repressionist nature of hardcore Christian dogma -- evidenced by such grisly artifacts as Dobson's Dare to Discipline, hardhat violence, the wacky theories of the anti-gay movement, and the sad case of Matthew Murray, home-school rebel turned psycho killer -- turns its political operators in sado-masochistic freaks who demand either dominion or debasement depending on what side of the Lord they perceive themselves to be on at any given moment. I sort of see the point, as might anyone who reads Rod Dreher* on a regular basis. But it's a lot to load onto a political history of this scope. The bizarre behaviors of the characters will suggest plenty to any attentive reader about the soundness of their belief system, and for me the canned expert opinions actually reduce its impact. (Blumenthal has a tendency to bring in quotes from Erich Fromm and other such analysts, which suggests that he didn't trust the story, depraved as many of its anecdotes are, to make the case for him. It's sort of like adding passages from Freud to a history of Congress in the Gilded Age.)

The clearest success of Republican Gomorrah is as a full-length portrait of the Christianist wing of the modern Republican Party -- a component which, both the book and recent events suggest, may be all that's left of it. It should prove useful background as the GOP tries to integrate the Tea Party people into its fundamentalist redoubt and bring it back to national size. We certainly ought to keep an eye on Mike Huckabee, whom I now know to be crazier than I ever imagined.

*UPDATE. Dreher has actually read an excerpt from the book and gotten something out of it, though he is enraged by "The Nation's disgustingly prejudicial headline on this story, titled 'The Nightmare of Christianity.' Writers almost never write their own headlines, so it's not fair to blame Max Blumenthal for the words..." The title of the article is also the title of the excerpted chapter from the book, and based on a comment by its subject, Matthew Murray.

UPDATE 2. Lots of interesting Suggestions for Further Reading in comments. For chuckling's and perhaps others' benefit, the three themes I saw were 1.) The fundies took over the the Party, 2.) The fundies wrecked the Party, and 3.) The fundies suffer from a specific clinical syndrome. The first is the one I found most convincing -- it seems intuitive, but I'd never seen the case made so well before -- though on further reflection I'm not sure that a wholly-owned GOP would have countenanced John McCain, even given the dramatic circumstances; Blumenthal speeds through that part. You could as easily deduce that the fundamentalists have great but not full power, and it waxes when times are good for them.

That may just be cautious self-restraint, though if they're as crazy as Blumenthal paints them, it's hard to see how they'd summon any restraint at all. And if they aren't capable of riding the brake, why isn't every national nominee a born-again? It begs the question of who else has power there. People like David Brooks seek to position themselves as part of a temporizing if not temperate force, but we all know that's ridiculous. Probably, as I had long suspected, it's lobbyists and C. Montgomery Burns.

THE CONSERVATIVE REVIVAL PART 45,293. "I think that he rather likes tyrants and dislikes America" -- Michael Ledeen on Obama.

If the viciousness of their discourse alarms you. remember: they're mainly talking to themselves.

A LIVE ONE. Among the pleasures of this gig from which I have been too long misdirected is the work of S.T. Karnick, a culture warrior without portfolio whose run at National Review seems to have ended long ago, leaving him to Big Hollywood and other such catch-alls. But he still keeps up a blog full of gems.

Take his review of the new Melrose Place, wherein he finds moral uplift:

Two-thirds of the way through the episode, things get quite interesting as a couple of the decent characters are presented with serious moral dilemmas involving financial and career temptations. A nurse is offered an urgently needed $5,000 to sleep with a man she has just met, and a young filmmaker is offered $100,000 to keep quiet about witnessing an extramarital affair.

The moral implications of these dilemmas are made so clear and taken so seriously that it doesn't really matter what the characters choose; the viewer will be nonetheless encouraged to think about how they would react in such a situation and thus contemplate their own moral probity. That's a good thing, and it's what popular fiction at its best always does.

You can see Dostoevsky looking down from the clouds, nodding solemnly, with an arm slung over Aaron Spelling's shoulder.

Take a stroll through Karnick's obsessive topiary mazes and you will find his denunciation of Rush Limbaugh's V/O on The Family Guy on moral grounds ("For Limbaugh to lend his support to MacFarlane's project in any way indicates which direction Limbaugh's moral compass is pointing. If Limbaugh sees no wrong in it, you have to wonder just how morally reliable his pronouncements on other topics may be"), and his hopeful prediction of a female chastity revival ("If a girl wants to listen to Liz Phair, let her legs get hairy, and go on pro-abortion marches, she's perfectly free to do so; she'll just have greater difficulty in getting the most sought-after guys to go out with her--but if she wants to keep her clothes on she'll have the same problem anyway").

I usually don't bookmark these people, but Karnick is a prime candidate for my prospective easy-layup file.

UPDATE. Readers point out that the Limbaugh item is actually written by somebody else, one Mike Gray. Forgive me, please -- the continued existence of the site was such a shock I just couldn't fathom that Karnick actually got other people to write for it. That's like bringing new passengers aboard the listing Andrea Doria ("Hey, for another twenty minutes, it's still a boat ride!")

Karnick also employs one Jim Lakely, who has a spectacular jeremiad about people who disprespect the suburbs -- which, in the petrie dish of his imagination, becomes the liberals who disrespect the suburbs, and then Obama who hates the suburbs (though he starts the piece with Obama, in apparent recognition that he is the ultimate rightwing money shot). Followers of conservative persecution mania will find familiar Lakely's claim that criticism of, and even jokes about, suburbia mean that "the left wants to impose their version of 'enlightened' urban life on the rest of us." Overnight the brownshirts will turn your beloved K-Mart into a trendy cafe, and force your children to eat panini and gelato.

These names are new to you now, but you'll see them soon at The Atlantic, either as authors, sources, or fiancees.

DRY HEAVES. If the Mackenzie Philips incest charges weren't enough to induce nausea, did you know there's a culture war angle as well? Mark Steyn:

But don't worry, the "free love" crowd stuck around long enough to leave a lot of sad damaged people in their wake.

George Roche III was unavailable for comment. But we may yet hear from Tony Marino.

Oddly enough, I'm reading Republican Gomorrah right now, which makes me wonder why these people didn't shut up years ago.