DA, DA, WE LAUGH! I finally saw one of those "Obamafeld" things the Ole Perfesser is pushing. At least the Obama/Seinfeld concept is a new one, and I thought it was promising. But they don't do anything with it except Be Wacky -- you know, a Pizza Nazi throws pizza at Ben Nelson, Joe Biden's a drunk, Scott Brown is dreamy, etc.

I don't think the makers have ever actually seen a Seinfeld episode. It has the same off-the-mark, trying-too-hard feel as their attempted viralizing of catchphrases like "stuck on stupid" and their attempts to convince the world that everyone's Goin' Galt. It's like they don't have an actual sense of humor, but were still determined to create some comedy because the Central Committee ordered it.

You know, I want to like these things. First of all, I prefer jokes that are funny to those that are not. Second, I get tired of having to haul out Evelyn Waugh, yet again, as an example of a Tory who had some artistic and humorous sensibilities. Any kind of person can hear the muses and everyone has a sense of humor.

I think it's because they're eager to play populist but have forgotten what people are actually like. They have a list of talking points -- People love humor! And irreverence! And pop culture! -- and make sure to check off all the boxes when they create some cultural ordnance. But it doesn't seem like they do much actually laughing, as opposed to heh-indeeding.

And they sure flip out when someone makes fun of them -- which is something else they bizarrely think will endear people to them.

This is probably not advice I'd be offering if I didn't think they were too deranged to take it, but if they just relaxed a little it would not only improve their efforts, but also their electoral prospects and maybe even their lives.

SHORTER ROSS DOUTHAT. Liberal Hollyweird, just like that hack Mark Twain, cannot comprehend the Shakespearean tragedy that is the Iraq War. Were I a playwright rather than a pundit, Bush would be Hamlet, and Claudius his father, Saddam Hussein.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the schoolbook mishegas in Texas (my new home!). Many of the brethren approve of the proposed changes, but some seem a little guilty about it -- they're happy to see von Hayek in there, but don't say much about the weird, specific deletions of Anne Hutchinson, Thomas Jefferson, Colin Powell, et alia -- tip-offs that the new program is not just about showing a little pride in capitalism ('scuse, "the free market" -- that's planned to be changed, too), but an attempt to make history lessons less inclusive rather than more.

And more Jesusy. "If God were good enough for our founders and Creator-language important enough to be in pivotal documents like the Declaration of Independence," thunders World Net Daily, "then why can't our kids be educated about that Creator from at least their original documents?" But the original documents may not be emphatic enough, so the author is working to give them some modern conservative context:

Maintaining a balanced curricula in our public schools is the reason my wife, Gena, and I joined the board of "The National Council of Bible Curriculum in Public Schools," whose state certified Bible course (elective) has been implemented in 532 public school districts (2,035 high schools) in 38 states.

He counsels readers to "consider petitioning your state's education board, school district and local school to adopt 'The National Council of Bible Curriculum in Public Schools' curriculum about the influence of the Bible in history, civilization, law, literature and the founding of America." Highly recommended: the module about how that turn-the-other-cheek stuff was just rhetoric.

Jeremy Binckes has a great backgrounder on the conservative curricula reviewers here.

SERVICE ADVISORY. After a brief lull, you have reason to expect a great spike in production here at alicublog.

The spike will be because I'll soon be leaving the Village Voice. Amazingly, there is no related scandal or dispute; I'm only leaving the Voice because I'm leaving New York. I will be relocating to a small town in Texas to live with my girlfriend.

Yeah, I was surprised too. But beneath this gruff exterior, I am actually a terrible romantic, and once I decided I wanted to live with her, living without her was out of the question.

I felt that way for a long time about New York. This would be my cue to lament the decline of the place, as I have frequently done at the Voice blog, but I can't. God forbid I should become one of those sullen expatriates who tells everyone New York is over because he left.

No. New York remains the capital of everywhere. I went Friday evening to the Whitney to take in the Biennial, and even though most of the art was crap (though not Robert Williams, nor George Condo and Nina Berman and Stephanie Sinclair and Hanna Liden and a few others), it was still a good time, with the Black Monks of Mississippi singing in the basement and the sort of people who would find this sort of thing interesting swirling around me, and pizza at Totonno's afterward. You don't get this sort of thing where I'm going, or anywhere else.

More to the point, New York has been my home. It hasn't always been an easy place to live, but if I was ever bored it was my own fault. Here I've been chased by cops in the Tompkins Square riot, and heard Allen Ginsburg read poetry there some days after ("Look, I'm wearing a tie -- am I a yuppie?"); fretted with my Williamsburg neighbors as the ruins of the Twin Towers smoked on the horizon; walked over the Williamsburg Bridge during a blackout; spilled a giant thug's beer in a basement after-hours, apologetically bought him a new one, and been rewarded with fat lines of coke; read poetry at St. Mark's Church; played CBGB so many times I forgot it was a shrine; been advised by Jimmy Breslin on how to talk to cops, handed a flyer by Jean-Michel Basquiat, advised on my music career by Lieber and Stoller, given a tour of Terry Teachout's art collection, yelled at by Hilly Kristal and several members of the NYPD. And at the Voice I held a desk next to Tom Robbins. Everywhere I met remarkable people, because this is one of the places they like to be, and saw and did remarkable things, because here they happen all the time.

So, no. Not for me the route of that rootless anti-cosmopolitan Rod Dreher, telling people how mean the urban teens were to him before fucking off to Dallas. I was blessed to live here, and I'll always be grateful and proud. And if this poor woman ever figures out what a horrible mistake she's made, you may see me back in the Big Town, living under a bridge.

I've been to Texas a number of times but I barely know what I'm in for. I know it's pretty there, and they have some good people. And that it's the only place in the country that gives New York serious competition for the most self-regarding jurisdiction on earth (heard on the radio: "Thunderstorms and Tyler roses always make me think of you"), which I can appreciate. I expect I'll learn to two-step and handle a gun, and if I wear a hat I'll tip it to the ladies.

As for work, I'll be freelancing to start, so if you have any leads let me know. Also I expect to stop suffering and write that symphony, or something like that.

I thank the Voice for the platform and for more kindnesses than anyone has a right to expect, especially from journalists. (I expect to do some more work for them and I'll let you know when I do.)

Meanwhile, if you want me, you can find me here.

LA VIE BULLSHIT. Ann Althouse does one of those piquant posts (so clever, she is) where she affects to challenge Rush Limbaugh, who criticizes Nancy Pelosi for offering health care to artists and other parasites. It has nothing to do with anything (Pelosi is talking about employed people, not starry wannabees), but the boobs Althouse has cultivated for years react with the expected Ah hates me a art-faggitt! ("The only thing at which [art] succeeds is polishing the egos of the elite") responses.

My favorite among those:

I write, and I hope to be published and I hope to make decent money... but I'd love to do a thousand other creative things I'm not very good at, if I could afford to do them. The writer's life... an artists life... who wouldn't find long days of unfettered creativity delightful?

Oh, deary, you have no idea.

UPDATE. Further down it gets even better:

Even thick-skulled Hollywood types have been able to weasel in on the fun and turn it to their advantage. In order to be considered a person of brilliance and great compassion they simply suck up to some bullshit Lib cause. Nothing says "I'm a deep-thinking artiste" like getting the rubber stamp of approval from some shit-for-brains organization like Greenpeace or PETA. Blasting coke up your nose while smacking around strippers and driving 140 miles per hour is totally cool as long as you wear the right ribbon on your lapel.

Where does one get jobs like that? Oh right -- via the free market! I'm still unsure about Greenpeace's and PETA's roles in it, though; perhaps commenters can enlighten me. I could go for a gig like that, and I'm willing to wear ribbons.

UPDATE 2: Dan Riehl gets in on it: "We owe, not only our modern living standards, but our political freedom to capitalism... If the world were to run off to create mostly bad art, who is it that will be running the engine to subsidize it?" Yeah, you airy-fairies, some of us man up and blog, like Adam Smith intended. Hit my "Make a Donation" button and help keep capitalism alive!

This whole thing is giving me a retro thrill. I really thought even the denser types had stopped reacting to the Damned Artist of the Day as if he were their own no-good son who needs to cut out all the nonsense and go work at the plant like his daddy. Now the laughter is back, and every day is Footloose!

FUNDAMENTALLY UNSOUND. Some conservatives are enraged that that Politico did a story about evangelical disapproval of the Tea Parties -- mostly, though not exclusively, because the Party people don't engage social issues, which is an observable strategy of some TP organizers and seems calculated to broaden their appeal, like getting pictures of the dozens of black people who have attended the events.

As they're trying to bring new recruits into their anti-Obama juggernaut (they're always claiming that it's "non-partisan"), you wouldn't think the TP people would take so hard a story noticing one of their points of difference from traditional GOP feeder streams. If they just wanted another Moral Majority, they could always reanimate the old one, and maybe call it the Jesus Party and hand out loaves and fishes instead of teabags.

But the Ole Perfesser says Politico's Ben Smith "was used," and is part of the ominous "they" who are "afraid of this movement" and thus "trying to divide it." (Smith has gotten that kind of treatment from the other side as well, and I doubt he minds.) Gateway Pundit yells that Smith quoted an Obama supporter, but doesn't mention the quotes from Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council et alia. Evidently the differentiation of their movement is something they prefer to keep quiet.

Robert Stacy McCain, in a refreshing approach, takes the story for granted and yells at Christians who are not sufficiently attuned to the "moral argument for economic freedom."

This is all familiar from other recent dustups between conservatives and the fundies, whose coalition isn't what it used to be. I understand the dilemma -- they still want those godly votes, but don't want to run any more Terry Schiavo operations lest they scare the ungodly. But good luck keeping other people from noticing.

THE QUINTESSENCE OF DREHERISM. Rod Dreher repeats a story about "How rock killed the Soviet Union." He applauds when "Vitya pulled the new Zeppelin LP out of what at the time was a mind-blowing sleeve and put it on, and 'Whole Lotta Love' rose up with a beckoning howl. Corks formed of cloying Soviet music flew out of our ears..."

Then Dreher does the old needle-scratch:

But any force that powerful must be just as capable of being used for evil as for good. I recall reading Allan Bloom's "The Closing of the American Mind"...

I'll spare you; he used to think Bloom was an old fuddy-duddy. (And he was, though his fans are much worse.) But:

Now, I see that I was wrong, but I don't say that in an ideological sense. It's not that I've turned on rock and roll -- most of my music collection is rock -- but that I see that Bloom was onto something, that rock is a far more ambiguous a phenomenon than I could possibly have grasped at 21. To the extent that rock music hastened the demise of the despicable Soviet regime, hooray. But the same energies called forth from the human spirit by rock music, and its descendants, have affected our own institutions, traditions and self-understanding.

This is sort of a classic Dreher argument. Rock is a powerful force -- like gelignite or opposable thumbs -- but it can be used for good or for ill. To determine which is which, see Rod Dreher's music collection.

The ass-shaking music Dreher likes is good. (Like Thriller. That's okay.) The "barbarism" of George Michael's "I Want Your Sex," on the other hand, is bad, as Dreher discovered in college after a Christian gave him a hard time about it: "He did make me reflect on how the lyrics of so many songs I dearly loved expressed sentiments I found at the time distasteful, and, as I matured, would come to find gross."

But what about "Whole Lotta Love," which blew the corks out of the Russians' ears? You gotta admit that's pretty raunchy. Maybe Dreher can work up a project at Templeton that will extract the song's tyranny-defying power while leaving out the sexually suggestive parts -- which would include the bass, drums, guitar, and vocals.

George Michael, by the way, appears to be very popular in the former Soviet Union.

It's a good thing that no one told Dreher when he was young that he looked ridiculous when he was dancing, or, when he was a child, that playing with a ball was infantile. Or maybe they did; maybe that explains him.

A RINGER. I'm pretty sure this item at Big Government by one "Mytheos Holt" is a parody that got past the irony-deficient staff there. Holt posits that "the current youth ethos embodied by internet subculture is fundamentally conservative in character, even if its denizens have not yet caught on to that fact," and believes this will become apparently as die Kinder start attacking liberals with.... parody websites and 4chan.

...even if you accept the framing of such sites as hotbeds of craziness and rabid disorder, there is a method to their madness. As for what that madness is, once you get past the persistent ironic glorifications of perversity and take a look at how the people who frequent these sites actually behave, and more importantly, who they target, it becomes abundantly clear that not only are the values of such sites fundamentally conservative, but that their communications strategies, even if toned down for a mainstream audience, are nothing less than the perfect weapons for disassembling the Obama Presidency...

While one can disapprove of the tactics used against these institutions/individuals (some of which make the much vilified “enhanced interrogation techniques” look positively benign by comparison), it is worth noting that ultimately, the power of internet goons lies in their ability to enforce social norms against the most flagrantly vile members of society through private sanction – something which conservatives from Russell Kirk and Irving Kristol to Tom Coburn and Dick Cheney have endorsed.

A blazing tell: He refers with approval to the fanciful South Park Conservative craze. From the comments, he seems to have put it over. Unmask, young Holt, and take credit! You needn't keep the game up merely to encourage them to embarrass themselves; nothing can stop them from keeping it up.

UPDATE. Commenters include people who've been following Holt's career awhile and will attest that he does indeed believe crap like this. Damn! I thought I'd found a great parodist, and ended up with merely another in an endless series of raving lunatics.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the struggle to identify the Pentagon shooter John Patrick Bedell with one ideological faction or another. This sort of thing reminds me of a graffiti thread from a library bathroom in my college days that began "Adam and Eve Were Black" and went back and forth on this theme until someone thundered in bold marker BIG SHIT WHAT COLOR THEY WERE.

Such disputes, alas, are not as easily resolved online. There Bedell is associated with the left for several reasons, including the natural cheerlessness of liberals, which apparently drives us to kill. The need to operate a keyboard isn't the barrier to entry we once thought it was.

WHAT WE DO IS SECRET. Nick Gillespie on the libertarian content of punk rock in... San Francisco, taking off from a new book which "focuses on the Bay Area scene that ultimately gave rise to Green Day and other acts." A pretty damning indictment all around.

In the beginning, or near the beginning anyway, were groups such as the Dead Kennedys, whose scandalous name was of a piece with a wicked sense of humor that produced underground hits such as "California Uber Alles" (an attack on liberal Gov. Jerry Brown as a crypto-fascist who forced kids to "meditate in school") and "Holiday in Cambodia" (which taunted left-wing poverty tourists). "We weren't trying to tell people what to do," explains member East Bay Ray. "Our thing was to try to get people to think." (Sadly, this last directive seems to have escaped the defunct band's lead singer, Jello Biafra, whose recent interview in The Daily Beast is chock full of banal observations about politics and contemporary America.)

Jello changed, man. He's forgotten where he came from when he wrote songs like "Liberal Fascist Punks, Fuck Off."

(Here's an interesting article on Jerry Brown by Reason's Jesse Walker.)

IT'S YOUR MEANS I QUESTION. The Southern Poverty Law Center has complained of the rise of right-wing hate groups, and the response is as you might imagine. One of these days I may get to find out more about these hundreds of groups. But Robert Stacy McCain encouraged me to look at one.

This a non-profit organization founded by Robert Schultz, a hyper-litigious critic of the Internal Revenue Service.

"We the People" appears to be generally libertarian in orientation...

McCain then asks a spokesperson for We the People if they're "some kind of violent militia-type outfit." They say no. There you go, says McCain:

How many peaceful citizens like Lesha Martin are lumped together to create the "grim and alarming portrait . . . of extremist organizations" presented by the SPLC?

The Ole Perfesser hehindeeds: "THE GREAT HATE HYPE: Are Libertarians Dangerous? Yeah. They want to not boss you around! Tremble in fear!!!!!"

We the People has an interesting site, where they declare themselves dedicated to "building the critical mass needed to invoke the en masse program of citizen resistance, vigilance and action needed to restore our Constitution." To find out more, Read All About It in the Articles of Freedom, to which they direct you; it was drawn up by citizen-delegates chosen in a "Constitutionally-correct" fashion, and among other things declares:

We have a fiat currency, in violation of the money clauses of Article I...

We have a fraudulently ratified 16th Amendment in violation of Article V, a direct, un-apportioned tax on labor in violation of the tax clauses of Article I, and a judicial system that refuses to consider the evidence, in violation of Article III...

We have a President who apparently is not a natural born citizen, a violation of Article II...

...We demand that Government immediately re-establish Constitutional Rule of Law, lest the People be forced to do so themselves; and we hereby serve notice that in the Defense of Freedom and Liberty there shall be NO COMPROMISE to which we shall ever yield...

...Any infringement on the Liberty and Freedom of the People as enumerated in the Constitution is an act of WAR against the people and the People and their Militias have the Right and Duty to repel it...

...this Body appeals to the People to secure their sovereignty by any and all means necessary. This body recognizes that if or when force is brought to bear on the People, it is the Right of the People to meet that force with equal force; be it from a foreign body, or the misuse of domestic power...

Recommended Civic Actions by the People... To live our lives as free individuals, not ceding any authority to the federal
government which we have not expressly granted to it in our Constitution; and to disobey, when appropriate, any unconstitutional laws; and use every means at our disposal to challenge usurpations through the courts, political action, and any other means deemed necessary.

The 18th-Century getup little disguises their intent. The government is corrupt and ruled by a Kenyan; therefore, we can react to it as if it were Britain and We the People were the Continental Army.

Sounds like they want to do more than "not boss me around."

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the conservative vogue for attacking Teddy Roosevelt. It should be noted that this is an existing theme, but was recently given a boost by Glenn Beck, whose denunciation of Roosevelt the brethren felt compelled to defend. Soon they'll just have Reagan, Gerald Ford, and maybe, in gatherings where no Southerners are present, Lincoln.

HONORS ARE EASY. The study purporting to show that Liberals R Smarter is disputed by PZ Myers and that's good enough for me. (Myers is also referred by a blind link from -- and has chunks of his writing taken without attribution by -- No Sheeples Here, who probably doesn't want his readers to know he's relying on liberals to dispute liberal superiority.)

In general I take these things no more seriously than I take Charles Murray's insistences that black people are stupid -- or similar claims that conservatives R smarter, or happier, and such like.

This may in part be due to my utter ignorance of the cognitive sciences, but it also has to do with my experience of actual human beings, whom I have found fascinatingly varied in their abilities whatever their respective races, ideologies, etc.

Sometimes I talk as if I think conservatives are stupid or crazy or both, but I know from experience they aren't all like that. Many of the ones I write about seem to be, but maybe they're just putting it on for the public -- I notice that such behavior often gets them a lot of traffic.

And that might not even say anything about their readers, either; I don't think people who go to horror movies are necessarily monsters or serial killers.

A FULL DAY. The Corner has been full of gems today. On the matter of the health care summit, its authors go passive-aggressive, either declaring that they don't care about it (Ramesh Ponnuru even going so far as to say he'd read a book instead!) to rustling up "reader" emails that declared Paul Ryan the big "winner."

Yuval Levin says Obama looked bad because "he doesn’t seem like the President of the United States -- more like a slightly cranky committee chairman or a patronizing professor who thinks that saying something is 'a legitimate argument' is a way to avoid having an argument." Maybe some of the 0.013 percent of the electorate who watched will agree with Levin; more likely the younger of them will be mystified by the spectacle of a President able to maintain, in complete sentences, a discussion with experts.

Levin later responds to Obama, who mischievously asked if the health care benefits government employees received, and which he proposes to give to all Americans, are "socialism": "Well sure they aren’t, but isn’t treating all Americans as though they were employees of the federal government a bit like socialism?" Now your boss has a new excuse when you ask for Martin Luther King Day off.

But this circus is just meant to distract you from the real crime, says Andy McCarthy -- that is, the Cruel, Inhuman And Degrading Interrogations Prohibition Act, which seeks to make some forms of torture expressly illegal -- or, as McCarthy puts it, "Democrats are saying they would prefer to see tens of thousands of Americans die than to see a KSM subjected to sleep-deprivation or to have his 'phobias exploited.'" (The Act was later pulled, in a great victory for Andy McCarthy and children who like to pull the wings off flies and wish to be assured of government jobs when they grow up.)

Ponnuru, tired of reading, emerges to provide an object lesson in Republican health care strategy:

Mickey Kaus argues that passing Obamacare is the only way the Democrats can disprove the Republican charges against it. "For months, both GOP and Fox hosts have been talking about socialized medicine and death panels and vicious Medicare cuts and the government coming between you and your doctor, etc. If Democrats pass the bill and none of this happens, Republican opponents will be more than defeated. They'll be discredited." Maybe. But if taxes and premiums rise and people don't see benefits from this big expensive comprehensive bill, maybe not. . . . Do Democrats really believe not only that this legislation is going to have positive effects but that its transition rules have been so well-designed that its short-term effects will quickly be seen as positive?

Translation: OK, we won't be able to get away with that bullshit anymore, but maybe the plan will take time to work. Then we can get started on our next line of bullshit!

And there's Jay Nordlinger, strewing aperçus like rose petals ("Calvin and Hobbes, Bloom County, The Far Side — where do they go? [That was merely rhetorical.]") He devotes a few paragraphs to the japes of panhandlers he and others have encountered:

I also mention, in my column, the most charming thing I ever heard a panhandler say: “Would you like to contribute to the United Negro Pizza Fund?” I did. That man was in Washington, D.C., I believe. A reader writes to say that he knew such a man in Albany, N.Y. — a man who used that line regularly. “I wonder who is training beggars to use that clever approach.”

Finally, a different reader writes, “You’ve reminded me of a sign I saw in San Francisco. The man said he wanted money for ‘alcoholism research.’” That’s the spirit! (No pun intended.)

Next week, he'll tell us that he saw some Mexicans on the subway singing "Guantanamero," and marvel that they had strayed so far from their homeland.

Inevitably, there is Goldberg. Challenged by a Ron Paul fan who imagines Goldberg has insulted him, he dances around, saying the Paulites don't really have anything ("If/when the Fed does get audited, it will be a lot like the search for WMDs in Iraq"), but "I'm with where Ron Paul where it matters" -- that is, he thinks his stupid Fed audit should be done even though it's useless. That's how Goldberg makes friends when he doesn't have a spare bag of Cheetos. And along the way he gives us one of the better Goldbergisms:

I also think it's funny how so many people (on the left and right) love to dismiss stuff from the MSM when it contradicts their ideological positions, but cling to it as God's proof they're right when it seems to confirm their position.

It's like he missed the entire internet, not to mention his own career.

DON'T HATE THE PLAYER, HATE THE GAME. Maggie Gallagher has seen the Tiger Woods show trial confession, and admits "we cannot help but wonder how much of it is sincere and how much of it is image management." Nonetheless she imagines an alternate scenario, in which Woods said something like:

"Yes, I'm sorry. I'm sorry that I misled you and the American public into imagining that I was some kind of role model. Elin and I will be divorcing and I wish her well and will support our children. But right now both my image and my marriage need to be brought in line with reality. I'm not a role model. I'm just a man who's really really good at hitting golf balls into holes. I look forward to returning to the golf course to win back the title of greatest golfer in the world. In the future, I won't comment on my private life. I will let my golfing do the talking from here on out."

And it would work. As Pig Woods, Tiger can be rich, famous, successful and lie with and to models and Perkins waitresses to his heart's content -- and nobody will care.

It's as if Woods didn't lose significant market value, or lose a boatload of endorsement deals over his peccadilloes. And it was only going to get worse: As a celebrity endorsement expert said, "When celebrities do things that negatively affect a corporate deal, the legal terms typically end up more in the corporation’s favor the next time."

Tiger Woods is not just a man -- he's an industry. And industries don't get to say, fuck it, who needs those extra millions, we're going to do as we please. A lot of salaries are riding on good image management.

But in the culture wars, it's always yesterday: The days of Charles Barkley and Dennis Rodman, when general weariness with moral uplift briefly opened a market niche for bad boy sports stars. The market has adjusted meanwhile, and only a very small amount of "edge" is permitted to major players. If you don't believe it, scan gossipy sports sites like With Leather, and see how few hell-yeah-I'm-a-horndog sportsmen they're able to find; most of the scandalicious bits have to do with sports stars who got caught despite themselves -- like Tiger Woods. You're more likely to find a baller profusely apologizing for his nude photos than one bragging on them.

And that's because of something culture warriors never worry about: money. The pros are making ridiculous money. If it enables their fantasy fulfillment, as Woods said in his press conference ("[I felt] that I deserved to enjoy all the temptations around me... thanks to money and fame, I didn't have to go far to find them"), dollars demand that they keep that well under wraps lest a whiff of scandal discourage some major advertiser.

If Woods thought he would get caught, or was trying to get caught, as his behavior suggests, his handlers would consider that a psychological rather than a moral issue. And judging from the Soviet nature of his self-denunciation, it appears the "therapy" recommended to him is taking hold.

"He really wants to be the Tiger we once thought we knew and loved," says Gallagher. "And you have to love a guy -- at least a little -- for that." If Gallagher thinks what animates Woods' fans' purchases of anything with his name on it is "love," she's got more problems than I ever imagined.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about CPAC and the Ron Paul straw poll victory. The brethren seem mostly dismissive of the result, though they continue to talk up CPAC as a meaningful event. The smarter play is to dismiss Paul but claim, as Patrick Ruffini does, that Paul's victory shows the new vigor of the conservative movement:

In terms of grassroots organization, Paul supporters are some of the best -- if not the best -- that we have. The iconography of the tea party movement is heavily libertarian (think the Gadsden Flag) and that's no coincidence. If you broke down the organizers and even those in attendance, you'd find more than your fair share of Ron Paul supporters...

In terms of organizing, conservatives can learn a lot from libertarians. Online, the moneybomb concept originally pioneered during the Ron Paul campaign has started to work for more conventional Republicans like Scott Brown.

In other words, hate the messenger, but love the marketing; get some of that flavor on mainstream stiffs, and victory is assured. He compares the Paulites to the Christian fundamentalists the Republicans got on board years ago, and who have only lately begun to suspect that they've been played. It remains to be seen how long it would take for the Paul people to catch on if Mitt Romney started wearing rEVOLution t-shirts.

BUCKLEY, WAKE UP, THEY HAVE GONE MAD. People have been talking about the return of the John Birch Society at CPAC, and about Ron Paul's victory in the CPAC straw poll, but I was more interested in Glenn Beck's assertion that Herbert Hoover was a liberal who single-handedly caused the depression through his outrageous government spending.

That Beck was not struck dead by a lightning bolt proves there is no God.

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION. Randy Haddock:

What’s Olbermann’s evidence that Tea Parties are overwhelmingly racist? Apparently, that there are no “people of color” at these rallies. That is so blatantly false as to induce uncontrollable laughter.

I'm all about uncontrollable laughter, so I watched his video clip, which offers in evidence no fewer than 21 black people at Tea Party rallies. Total Tea Party attendance, as we have been tirelessly reminded, numbers somewhere around 50 kabillion.

The correct answer to diversity concerns about popular movements is, of course, "so what?" Yet even the explicitly racist British BNP feels compelled to recruit people of color these days. They aren't making right-wingers like they used to, except in one respect: However feeble their effort, they insist on getting top marks for it.

LOW CHURCH. Mike Potemra's opening is a thing of beauty all by itself:

The question has been raised, Was it appropriate for a Catholic TV network to provide a platform for a torture advocate? In my view, the answer is yes.

You can stop there. But I can't! 'Cause this baby has everything. It has the Appeal to Widespread Belief:

Furthermore, if the polls are to be trusted, he speaks not only for the majority of Americans but for the majority of American Catholics.

Mirabile dictu, the cafeteria is now open! Then, the argument, popular in these precincts since Larry Craig's arrest, that hypocrisy in the defense of hypocrisy is no vice:

I think torture is a great evil, and that the resort to it in the past decade is a black spot on America’s record. But I am not in a stone-throwing mood against people like Marc, because I realize that the accusation that someone is not living to up to his or her religious creed is one of the lowest and least helpful arguments imaginable.

I should have just stayed in the Church; Catholicism seems to have gotten very easy. Now they love the sinner and the sin. It's as if Jesus followed up "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone" with "Right -- carry on being taken in adultery."

But though the Church is greatly changed, some old habits of mind die hard:

Say it’s 1942, and the Nazis, having conquered England and the U.S. eastern seaboard, have developed an H-bomb and plan to use it against St. Louis to bring the rest of the U.S. into submission. American forces in St. Louis have in custody a Nazi agent with knowledge of the specifics that would enable them to foil the attack and turn the tide of the war. The Nazi agent is being uncooperative. I concede that it would be morally wrong to torture him – but I also admit that I would more than likely sacrifice that principle.

I would bet that Potemra is not unacquainted with the fantasy of criminals forcing him at peril of his family's lives to have sex with Megan Fox.

In the last ditch, Potemra goes for that hoary chestnut, the Argument From a Liberal Was Mean to Me. He describes attending a "meeting at a liberal Catholic parish here in New York" about torture, where he starts comparing it to abortion. This is met with "eye-rolling, dark mutterings, and dirty looks." "I’m not so naïve as to have thought there would be no pro-choicers there," says Potemra, "but I think I know now what it feels like to have someone read you out of a moral community, even when you’re acting in good faith."

Actually I should have taken holy orders. When my outraged parishioners inevitably caught me in flagrante, I could have answered that they were all being pretty judgmental for a bunch of sinners who probably cheated on their income tax.

Though I can't be sure that this sort of thing works anywhere but on rightwing websites.

KILLING JOKE. This post by Jonah Goldberg got me thinking more seriously about his case than usual. He starts out okay:

A bunch of people have sent me this story (via Drudge) revealing that the University of Alabama shooter was a leftwinger. A few, at times contradictory, reactions: First: So what? It's hard to figure out how her political attitudes figure into her motives for murdering these people.

Then, in what appears to be an attempt at logical jiu-jitsu:

But one of the things I take away from this is that there are a lot of crazy people in academia. There's something about the tolerant atmosphere of campus life, plus the way really, really, odd or dysfunctional people can get by, that makes them havens for the maladjusted. Obviously, the vast, vast majority of these oddballs are harmless and decent people. But the few dangerous ones don't stick out as much as they might elsewhere.

Someone protests that he's dissing academics. You might imagine he'd fart his way out of it, as in his dogs-rule posts, but instead he thrashes:

I think the reader is misreading me. I didn't say that all or most academics are crazy, merely that academia tolerates weirdness in ways most other sphere don't (government bureaucracies come close). I've had this conversation with a lot of professional academics, and I've never met one who really disagrees with me. Walk through through the stacks in a college library sometime, some of those carrels are homes to some truly Tolkienesque creatures.

It becomes increasingly obvious that Goldberg was writing a joke post, based on the cultural assumptions of which such things are made (by me too) -- but he didn't know it was a joke. And it strikes me that he probably feels the same way about the silly dogs-vs.-cats stuff, and everything else he writes.

Suddenly I'm beginning to see what Liberal Fascism was really about.

(The Steven Hayward post Goldberg finds "more persuasive" is totally insane, btw.)