WHERE I'M CALLING FROM.



Last weekend we took in the Grit 'n' Groove Festival in Luckenbach. Among the entertainers: Hayes Carll, Slaid Cleaves, James McMurtry, and our host for the evening, Ray Wylie Hubbard, who sorta struck me as the David Peel of Austin.

The only one I wasn't crazy about was Chris Robinson, yeah that one. Nice voice, but it was like Linda Rondstadt singing "Party Girl." (The crowd was much more polite toward him than we would have been back in the Old Country. I don't know whether that was because Hubbard is friendly with him, or because Texans are courtly, or because Robinson is actually good and I don't appreciate it because I, like all New Yorkers, am an asshole.)

Had bratwurst and Shiner Bock, and plenty of it. Tonight, Junior Brown at Gruen Hall. Looking forward, but I'm kinda sorry to be missing the Chilifest.

Aw hell, this Texas ain't half bad.

AS I WAS SAYING. Maybe I was too hard in the previous post on bloggers with pretenses to journalism. Take the recent death of the Polish President in a plane crash at Smolensk, for example. Many rightbloggers are soberly compiling the facts as --

I THINK IT LOOKS VERY MUCH LIKE PUTIN IS EXPANDING RUSSIA'S GLOBAL POWER WITH NO FEAR OF OBAMA.

IT LOOKS LIKE OBAMA IS PUTIN'S BITCH.

AHMADINEJAD AND MAHMOUD ABBAS MUST BE GETTING JEALOUS.

Never mind.

DEFINING JOURNALISM DOWN. Cleaning the mailbox (amazing how clogged it can get even when I'm not working my ass off) and found a note from Mr. Miller of Blogoland about a TechCrunch story from last week entitled, "52 Percent Of Bloggers Consider Themselves Journalists" -- this number representing a four-percent increase from the year before. (Note: I'll only add his remarks on the subject if he permits me, as they were part of a private conversation.)

At first I wondered: Why would anyone want to be considered a journalist if he could possibly avoid it? Everyone hates journalists. They certain don't trust them.

I considered that, for many of these fools, the title might still be a step up. Then a better explanation came to me.

First, a general answer: These days an unprecedented number of people in several fields want cred for something they can't or won't actually do. To some extent 'twas ever thus -- administrators who do not practice nor know anything about the sort of work they supervise, for example, have existed since before the dawn of management theory. But management theory sure increased their number.

And technology has done the same in other fields. How many more musicians, for example, do we have now than before who can't actually play an instrument? I don't mean as in, "You don't play no guitar, boy!" I mean they just program machines to do it for them.

Now, a lot of them get great results, so it's not a bad thing in and of itself. But it also gives a lot of less-capable people the idea that, with the right equipment, they can do just like the big boys do. too.

Similarly, because they have the electronic wherewithal to publish as news sites do, a lot of bloggers consider themselves "journalists" even though they've never covered an event, nor engaged any information (whether first-, second-, or third-hand) with anything like journalistic rigor.

That may explain why they think they're entitled to be called journalists, but it still doesn't explain why they would want to own it, given journalists' low status.

The Citizen Journalists it has been my curse to contemplate most are the rightbloggers, so I mediated on them for an answer, and came to this:

They want to be journalists not so much to elevate their own reputations as to lower that of journalism.

I've talked a lot here about the seemingly contradictory self-image of rightbloggers: on the one hand, all-powerful and poised at any moment to destroy the MSM with the awesome force of their Citizen Journalism; one the other, helpless victims of media malfeasance.

Clearly the big papers and networks are losing money, but it isn't like Joe Wingnut's House o' Slander is getting rich off that. People can still tell the difference between the Daily Bugle and some guy yelling about Nobama socialism.

But they have reason to hope that this situation won't last. As more papers fold or diminish, it may be that people will notice that the journalistic conventions to which they were once used are going away, as the old ice-wagons and Fuller Brush Men did, and mentally abandon their expectation of them, as clearly no one has the money to keep that coming anymore.

To help speed this transition along, we have bloggers increasingly delivering in breathless tones the BREAKING news that something that didn't happen happened, or vice-versa. This, their confidence announces, is the new journalism -- braying and blarghing, 24/7. It only remains for the punters to admit it.

It's possible that these guys actually don't understand that what they're doing is substantially different from what, say, reporters at the Washington Post do. I doubt they miss that fact -- but they may at least intuit that, if they keep yelling loud enough, maybe other people will.

SHORTER JACOB HORNBERGER: Oh, you littlebrains are bitching about slavery, are you? OK, OK, slavery was bad. Now 1880 -- when poor Americans could actually starve, and striking workers could actually be gunned down, as Our Hayek intended (but there were, ahem, NO SLAVES, haters) -- that's what libertarianism is all about!

(Were the Randroids not so notoriously bad at PR, I would expect them to engage the Ole Perfesser to take pictures of black people at their cell meetings.)

UPDATE. Comments by the Reason bigbrains are lovely. Every once in a while a woman drops in to say, "1880? Not so great for me," and you can almost hear the ferocious shirt-retucking as the brethren wait for her to leave so they can get back to "Boaz is just another beltway hack" etc.

I applaud the parodist who adds, "Blacks didn't have income tax in 1880. Their money was not debased. They knew who their fathers were." Assuming, perhaps unfairly, that he's a parodist.

THE HORROR, THE HORROR, THE SEQUEL. Thank you, internet. Just when I was starting to miss New York, you snapped me out of it:



That awful Jay-Z thing, which makes "New York, New York" sound like Michael Hordern reading "Sailing to Byzantium." Conspicuous consumption. Having it all. The boredom of the privileged masquerading as dramatic conflict. Liza Minnelli. It's like ipecac for homesickness, and if that doesn't get it out of my system, there's always the unsettling feeling that, at any minute, one of their faces might cave in.

They really should have taken my advice.

UPDATE. Oh Christ no.

I WAS SO EAGER TO AVOID WORK THAT I CLEANED MY BLOGROLL. Fixed some long-wrong links and dropped moribund ones (Margaret, your late entry spared you the axe; Kia, I'll wait but not forever; Joshua, Twitter updates? Really?), despite the delightful fact that Joshua Trevino's old site is now this (NSFW, I've just been warned -- boy, only three weeks out of work and already I've become thoroughly unsocialized).

Trevino/Tacitus is replaced by Rightwing Film Geek under "Wrong But Readable." (RWFG doesn't talk about his politics much, so he probably should be under "Sui Generis" instead, but conservatives are so out of their minds these days that I have to reach to pad this section.) RWFG knows his stuff, and explicates in a way that both experts and novices can appreciate. It's worth sitting through an occasional lecture on how Vera Drake isn't really anti-abortion (no doubt, but so what?) and such like just to watch him work.

I am going to slowly and stealthily add Texas links. First is Juanita Jean. Found by accident. Hers is a charming approach.

Jesus, you never know what a mess things are until you start to clean. If anyone's interested in redesigning this site for nothing or nearly so, email me.

THESE ARE THE JOKES, FOLKS: "RECORD HEAT IN NEW YORK CITY. It’s obviously proof of global cooling. Hey, if cold weather can be proof of global warming..." -- The Ole Perfesser. Yeah, that's bringing down the house of cards that is AGW, alright.

UPDATE. Another QOTD, from Ace O. Spades: "There's an old saying that success is like a fart, only your own don't stink. So it is with political extremism, especially as practiced by paranoiacs like Charles Johnson. He lectures others on civility and moderation while sticking his face in his ass and burbling over how sweet his own farts smell." Ace really missed his calling as a copywriter for greeting cards. Bonus points for the CJ Iz a Fag follow-up.

NEVER FORGET 4/7! First those seamen were rescued from pirates, which was an Obama Administration failure. Then the crotch-bomber failed to crotch-bomb a plane, which was another Obama Administration failure.

But that was nothing. Now a diplomat -- with an Ay-rab name! (or as Founding Bloggers like to call such people, "a man with striking similarities to the profile of a potential terrorist") -- smoked a cigarette in an airborne restroom and made a snotty comment! And we had to turn him loose!

Aargh! Blaargh! Aargh and Blaargh again! "All of that talk about making our enemies like us and forgiving us in the post-Bush era isn’t really working out for us, is it?" thunders Erick Erickson. Later he notes grimly that "speculation has moved" to what actually happened. But we will never, ever forget 4/7. (Hey, 4 goes twice into eight! 2-4-8 -- there's got to be some numerological significance to this.) (UPDATE: It was last night, not this morning -- numerology crisis averted!)

Etc. My favorite (so far -- these guys can always top themselves) is from The American Pundit, who's all like "'Diplomatic immunity!' 'BOOM!' 'Revoked!'" across the entire diplomatic corps:

We tried to have sex with a child, but we had to release him and he still leaves free because of his diplomatic immunity.

Don't ever change, American Pundit, and especially don't ever change that typo.

FROM OUR "WHERE ARE THEY NOW?" FILE -- LIKE FATHER LIKE SON EDITION. We first noticed Kieran Michael Lalor back in 2005, when he complained of being brainwashed by the liberal scum of Pace University, escaped to the Marines, and then returned to Pace to be brainwashed (and to complain of it) some more. Later we found he'd been nominated by the GOP to run against Congressman John Hall (late of Orleans) in New York's 19th District. That ended badly for Lalor.

We wondered what he'd been up to, and went looking around. Wikipedia says he "works a security position at New York Medical College in Valhalla, New York." I note with interest that the Eternal Vigilance Society, of which Lalor was Director and Michelle Malkin a fan, has shut down its website. (The price of eternal vigilance is apparently a monthly internet fee no one wanted to pay.)

I also found that Lalor's dad Gene is politically active, too. He has written for the American Thinker and American Conservative Daily, where he's been going like a house afire lately. As this excerpt from one of his recent essays shows, he shares with his son a keen interest in military matters:

Ok, you’re a normal, healthy male with normal, healthy appetites and volunteer to become one of the few and the proud. You sign up for the United States Marine Corps–not “corpse,” Mr. President. You’re assigned to Camp Lejeune to endure the rigors of boot camp and find yourself bunking next to a Megan Fox lookalike recruit.

Healthy or not, that wouldn’t be a healthy environment for any jarhead, least of all an impressionable 19 year old expecting to survive boot camp.

That’s a variation on the scenario Marine Corps’ commandant General James Conway wants to avoid if and when Bill Clinton’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, (DADT), policy regarding gays in the military is repealed. The difference would be that the normal healthy male would effectively become the Megan to the homosexual(s) in the next bunk(s).

He also says that DADT opponents don't address "the questions of what to do about heads and shower rooms or where the gays would hang their purses." With any luck, the Lalors will become the new Buckleys, and years from now conservatives will bemoan the departure of their intellectual rigor from the movement.

THE SELF-CORRECTING BLOGOSPHERE. At Memeorandum:



Also at Memeorandum:



Quick, Perfesser, more photos of black people!

UPDATE. There's something almost magical about this coincidence: at Reason David Boaz suggests (albeit gently) that maybe America wasn't more free, in the way libertarians like to think about it, back when it was full of slaves. The Perfesser reads Boaz' piece, and is much more concerned with the tragic loss of American liberties under Jimmy Carter.

Also funny: the Hit & Run commenters to the story. I especially liked the guy who says the Donner Party was "perfectly libertarian" because "they were free to make a bad decision, made it, and suffered the consequences." I couldn't have put it better myself!

UPDATE 2. Roger L. Simon: Democrats are the Real Racists, Etc. That one never gets young! He's also against "hyphenated racial groups," as John Wayne was.

Lest we think Simon prefers the simpler, unhyphenated names such people were called in olden days, he lets us know he was once a civil rights worker. You know, like John Lewis -- except unlike Lewis, Simon deserves our respect for it.

BREAKFAST TREAT. You good people, following my lame site day in, day out, deserve some candy for your trouble. Here's that asshole Rod Dreher flipping out over phalluses outside a church.

It's in the Netherlands, and it's done by artists, so as you may imagine, Dreher says it's the dildo-bearers who are stuck in the past, not the Catholic Church (one of Dreher's former faiths, though I can't recall whether it was his second or third). He also claims to have a Dutch friend -- perhaps his hashish connection -- who declares, "That's how it is for Dutch artists. We can't think of anything creative to say, we just throw in sex." So if Texas doesn't work out, I know where to head next.

He also finds a picture of one of his dick-wielding nemeses and decides, "He looks to be a Baby Boomer. Will we never be rid of that generation and its tired, flaccid obsessions?" He brings in a guest Jesusoid to assure us that the Younger Generation will soon overthrow sex. So what's he bitching about, then?

NO COMMENT. Some guy has been arrested for allegedly threatening to kill Senator Patty Murray over her health care vote. I'm sure conservatives are as tired of the raised temperature of the discourse as I am, and their response will be muted and supportive of Senator Murray's right to stay alive... oh wait, here's Bungalow Bill with a quick post:

The news media will go nuts tonight analyzing if the person arrested for threatening Senator Patty Murray’s (D-WA) life is a tea partier...

You just know Keith Olbermann is ready to call whoever this person is a dirty tea bagger, even without a trial to know of the person is guilty. This will be the direction of the media. Like Rush said, they could have cared less without all the threats made against Bush 43. They will make an example out of this person all in hopes of discrediting the growing tea party movement.

Here's Murray's opponent out of the Tea Party, Clint Didier, recently:

When I get to DC, there's gonna be hell to pay. When they flirt with my kids' future, their individual liberty and their freedom, there will be hell to pay... you see, when somebody gets into a fight, it's that person who's willing to die, that's gonna come out the winner. If I have any strength left in me, I will fight and die for our future, our children, and this country.

Let the "No, you raised the temperature of the discourse" fistfight commence!

UPDATE. Logistics Monster: "Waiting…waiting…waiting…any minute now the left and the media will dig something up attempting to link Charles Wilson to the Tea Parties." Wow, maybe I should call him -- sounds like he has inside information.

UPDATE 2. Oops, somebody just called the guy a "teabagger." This is officially the Left's fault! Chest bumps at Breitbart HQ!

UPDATE 3. Whoa, the guy's really crazy. And not particularly bright!

UPDATE 4. It's my default position that we should avoid making too much of these lone nuts (except for comedy purposes. Then anything goes!). I do wish circumstances made it easier for me to stick to it, though.

Gotta love this from Jammie Wearing Fool:

Naturally the usual suspects in the leftwing blogosphere are giddy and breaking out their usual juvenile "teabagger" comments. We have no knowledge that Wilson had any affiliation with tea parties, nor do we know if he's a Republican or Democrat.

A Democrat who's murderously angry about health care reform... say, I was just reading about this -- maybe he's a Tea Partier after all!

CRAIG FERGUSON DOES THE BONZO DOG BAND. I only kind of miss network TV, but if it were as full of Ernie Kovacs as this, I'd go back to watching it and never ever stop. (h/t Tuesdae.)



TECH UPDATE -- Comments seem hosed on Safari today for some reason. Not sure why except JS-Kit sux. Try Ffox.

THE CRITICS RAVE. I don't usually go in for this kind of puffery, but I have to make an exception for David Weigel, now writing at the Washington Post. His coverage of movement conservatism at the Independent and elsewhere has been extremely useful to me. He's also very funny on Twitter. (Or he was before success changed him.)

Best testimonial yet: Jonah Goldberg's extended mouth-fart --

Reading my email in response to this entirely neutral post on the Washington Post's announcement of Dave Weigel as their "conservatives in the mist" correspondent/blogger, I guess I should make it clear where I come down on this. Basically, while I guess I can think of a few folks I'd rather see with that gig than Weigel, I can think of a hell of a lot of people who would be worse...

Obviously, I'm skeptical about the whole enterprise and in particular what the Post hopes to get from him...

Translation: I know there's something I don't like about honest coverage of myself and my friends, but I can't think of a way to say it that doesn't make me look like a wanker. Oops, I've been wanking the whole time!

(For fans of this sort of thing, here's a classic Goldberg vacuous assertion - colleague rebuttal -- fart bomb escape trifecta from yesterday.)

SOMETHING I MISS ABOUT THE NORTHEAST. This gladdened my heart:



This is wrong-right on a few levels. First, to repurpose Herb Brooks' 1980 speech to the U.S. Olympic hockey team -- made as they were about to upset the Soviet Union team -- for the millionaires of Major League Baseball is not just a stretch, it's a sprain. Second, allowing 5-year-old Joshua Sacco to recreate his cute little YouTube trick from the field of Fenway Park was probably not the best parenting move; I imagine Sacco a dozen years from now, ego irreversibly swollen and ruptured by its premature exposure to the limelight, showing this on a broken-down iPad in Southie dives to cadge drinks. Not to mention the mild swear near the end.

But then: if anything in life compares to the relationship of the U.S. to the old Soviet Union, it's Sox-Yankees. Now, we have rivalries down here, too, and the Aggies-UT one (Saw 'Em Off) is legendary. But it's a polite rivalry. You see folks in College Station walking around in UT shirts unmolested, and the Longhorns emblem in car windows that remain unsmashed. This, as the old folks at home know, is not how they roll around the NE. They will kill you for that shit. There is neither friendliness nor courtliness in the Mets-Phillies or Sox-Yankees rivalries, and barely any sense of perspective. (Also check out this lovely story by one of my former colleagues, a Sox loyalist, about how she made a Yankees fan cry.)

Seen through that prism, pimping out a poor little boy (from Tennessee, as it happens) to whoop up the Fenway faithful's murderous hatred of the Yanks makes perfect sense. God knows there are forms of tribalism in Texas, too, some of them quite ugly, but nothing so wonderfully ludicrous as this -- at least, not that I've found yet. But it's only been a few weeks. Maybe you guys know different.

Oh, and icing: The Yankees lost. W00t, FUCK YOU DOUCHEBAG YANKEE FANS! My Mets are 1-0, and I'm ready for another heartbreaking September choke and the ensuing violence.

I ain't switching to the Astros. Fuck them. Clemens played for them.

SHORTER MARK HEMINGWAY: Sure, he's no Mark Steyn, but what the hell, I'll say nice things about Nelson Mandela if I can use him against Obama. Hey, folks -- Unlike Mandela, Obama consorts with criminals!

FREAKS. National Review's John J. Miller on a family vacation:

I took the family to Luray Caverns on Friday, in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. I haven't visited enough caves to say how this one compares to others, but it did make this top-ten list and I recommend it highly. It's also a private business that sells tickets and souvenirs, not a public park that consumes taxpayer dollars. Luray Caverns may not be a model for balancing tourism and conservation at every natural wonder in the country, but it's probably a better one than most people realize. Americans can perform a lot of wonders on their own.

It's not really their politics, specifically, that makes these people so awful, but the fact that they think it's every goddamn thing in life.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP about the recent rightwing claims that the alleged misbehavior by Tea Partiers against black Congressmen has been debunked -- in part by the fact that nobody taped it.

I don't think it's impossible or out of the question that Representative John Lewis is mistaken about his experience, nor would I insist that everyone take him at his word. But it's interesting, to say the least, that rightbloggers are inclined to denounce him as a "lying bastard" rather than letting this roll off their backs, as they might have done in simpler times.

I think this is less suggestive of racism than of a general uptick in conservative belligerence, whereby any attack will draw a violent response, whether such a response is politically advisable or not. They seem to believe anger is good for their cause, and see no reason to moderate it, ever, even when it makes them look a little crazed. It's a tonic for the troops, no doubt, but I wonder what it does for the camp followers.

GREAT ITEM BY LANCE MANNION in answer to that stupid shit David Brooks, who sought to turn the presumed disappointment of an accomplished woman into an indictment of modern life as lived by anyone but his own manicured self.

Meryl Streep and her husband have been married for thirty-two years, Bridges and his wife for thirty-three. Maybe Brooks didn’t watch the Oscars so he didn’t hear Michelle Pfieffer gush about what a great family man Bridges is or hear Bridges himself make part of his acceptance speech a valentine to his wife...

Meanwhile, what about Sandra Bullock?

The answer to that is Tom Hanks.

Or Paul Newman.

Neither of whom managed personal happiness through a happy and stable first marriage.

Things didn’t work out for Bullock with Jesse James but that doesn’t mean that tomorrow she won’t meet someone who is not a sleezeball with whom she will live as happily ever after as anyone ever does with anyone.

Though I generally spend my time here beating on fools for being plain wrong, I must spare a thought from time to time for the possibility that guys like Brooks have been raised in veal pens or Skinner boxes and simply don't know what life is like.

The sad thing is, such writers are so plentiful and their poisonous work so pervasive that we need people like Lance to remind us of simple reality.

THE NEW THING IS TO CARE PASSIONATELY, AND BE RIGHT WING. Remember the palmy days of South Park Republicanism and South Park Conservatism and all that? The Right hasn't had a comparably ridiculous youth fad for a while, but good news! Their labs have turned out a beta version of something called Jason Mattera.

Mattera is best known for delivering a comedy routine at CPAC and then working his victim status when people had the gall to criticize it. He has also written a book called Obama Zombies: How the Liberal Machine Brainwashed My Generation, and has been making the rounds of the Bizarro World press to promote it.

Things have changed since the days when South Park Cons declared the culture war over and won for their side. Now Mattera tells Right Wing News "our generation is made up of a bunch of circus animals, spoiled brats who aren't thinking for themselves -- and they're prime targets to be labotomized by liberalism." But there is hope! Mattera explains how even these sub-humans may be educated unto conservatism:

Young people don't get social justice. Young people don't get redistribution of wealth. Talk about redistribution of grade point averages and they will sure get that. Show them how fair it would be if we gave part of that A or that B+ they worked their tails off to get to help some person who has that C, get that up to a B -- and it's all in the name of fairness as Obama would say. It's all in the name of making everyone happy. If you want to talk about Cap and Tax, tell them how their iPod and their internet use...

They're sure to go for that. Also, try telling them that Big Government is like Jughead eating burgers that Archie paid for.

Mattera also calls "John" Stewart "a moron," perhaps because he doesn't know Stewart is supposed to be funny.