A FINE EXAMPLE OF THE GENRE (FART). This is, in so many ways, a perfect Jonah Goldberg post:

• Contains meaningless, undefended observation made in passing just to pump up Goldberg's opinions-per-square-inch ratio ("It's pretty nifty looking and a clever idea, though I'm not sure how useful or reliable it is");
• "Truthfully, I don't fully trust any web numbers from any source about any thing. But for a host of reasons, intuitive and historical, Google's numbers feel about right." Also: "But that's pure guesswork on my part."
• Goldberg pretends post will be controversial with the "suits," maintaining that precious Goldberg street cred;
• "Reader" claims Goldberg is right, which vindicates Goldberg's intellectual processes, ensuring there will be many more like this.

I also must applaud a few other Goldberg efforts today: His why's-ID-for everybody-less-offensive-than-ID-for-one-targeted-race post, and his David-Frum-made-me-look-stupid-with-unfair-debate-tricks, come-tell-me-how-great-I-was post. That man's a national treasure.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the Times Square unexplosion and the rightwing attempt to make something of it. Though I recently left New York after 30+ years' tenure, I remain loyal to and protective of it, and when I see these douchebags trying to play again their old "Have You Forgotten" bullshit -- in the absence of an actual explosion, for which they (nonetheless and of course) blame Obama -- I get a great deal pissed off. I know these people. They despise New York. And they only pretend to care about it when they smell political gain.

Ray Kelly has revealed the primary suspect is a white man and Bloomberg says there's no evidence that it was the work of Al Qaeda, but that doesn't stop these jerks from declaring Obama sharia etc. They begin to remind me of the guy Bukowski was sticking mail with in Post Office who roused his ire one day with his incessant, muttered insults on the job. Finally Bukowski jumped back and threatened the guy to a fight, and found the guy hadn't stopped muttering insults -- he was totally oblivious to anything Bukowski or anyone else said or did.

TALK TO THE INVISIBLE HAND. Joshua Green is pleased that new government regs made it easier for him to figure out the details of home loans offers, which in his previous experience had been difficult to parse ("I remember poring over lenders' estimates for hours trying to spot the junk fees and figure out which deal was best"). He thinks that's a good use of the power of government. At Ace of Spades, DrewM disagrees:

Look, congrats on the new home and all but the government doesn't exist to make it easier for people to understand what they are getting themselves in to when they are buying a house.

In a way this is a refreshing change from the usual "Blargh-har, gummint cain't do nuthin' right, Obamacare will kill you!" argument we get from rightbloggers. And it cleaves to the pure, doctrinaire libertarian argument that if you like any government services beyond national defense and the post office -- oops, forgot, the post office has been removed from the "acceptable" list -- you are a sheeple-looter.

The Obama fascist-socialist agenda is just kicking off and conclusive proof that it is destroying America has yet to emerge. So most of that kind of talk -- I was going to make a link here, but you can just go to Hit & Run and look around -- is speculative. You just know these government schemes will all end in Hitler! It just stands to Reagan!

And if even one of them seems to produce a good effect, there must be some mistake. DrewM advances the Randian argument that helping is futile ("I don't want to rain of Green's parade but being relived of individual adult responsibilities is not a triumph"). And he insists that if the Market did not provide this kind of service, it must not be worth having:

I bet there are banks or lenders out there that would provide this kind of service if requested or because that kind of customer service is a selling point for them. Why should the government take away their competitive advantage by mandating everyone provide the same information? How do we know the bureaucrats mandated the right information be shared? There's no feedback like in a market place, simply commands.

Americans' awareness of their own history has degenerated to the point where many citizens believe the American Revolution was a Tea Party at which the colonists battled socialism, and that the ensuing 200+ years have been a protracted struggle against socialism in its many guises (Indians, Spain, Hitler, Obama).

If they've heard of the FDA, they probably disapprove of it, and believe that without it the Market would have eventually gotten around to limiting the amount of rat shit they get in their canned food, and it would be much better than what we have now because it'd be from the Market. And the same goes for integration, voting rights, clean air and water, etc.

Like a lot of people, I could easily say "I'm libertarian when it comes to..." and then rattle off a bunch of stuff like gun rights, smoking bans, etc. I don't, though -- not because I'm ashamed of my positions, but because I'm ashamed to be associated in any way with libertarians.

THE WRONG CROWD. There was a big demo against Wall Street yesterday in New York. Needless to say, it was not run by Tea Party patriots. The unions called it, and cops say 6,000 showed. (I don't doubt they had that many at the very least -- I've seen them at work before and they can really get the peops out. AFL-CIO claims 31,000.)

I also see that, in a hilarious reversal, the Perfesser and other Tea Party fans are already trying to talk down this large, orderly, and successful protest as an affront to democracy. From his flustered tone, it appears even Perfesser Reynolds' insulated consciousness may have at least faintly sensed the irony in this.

Reynolds loves to gas about how Tea Party protesters are better than lefty protesters because, being rightwing, they have "real jobs"; how frustrating it must be for him to not be able to use it against the union guys, most of whom probably expend more sweat in an average workday than the Perfesser emits in a year of saunas at his health club.

The Perfesser also likes to brag about the few black folks who show up at the TPs. But it looks like this New York union event had, as these things usually do, a much healthier minority turnout than the Tea People ever get. Maybe in the Perfesser's view this is too much of a good thing, so to speak.

So his recourse is to call the protesters "thugs" "goons" because they peaceably confronted some bankers. Way to plump your populist cred, Perfesser! Maybe if a few more demos like this one get attention from the press, he'll go back to his traditional attitude toward protest.

THESE KIDS TODAY. Gunaxin is among my favored junk sites, but I was stunned to see them do Family Circus with naughty captions without even mentioning the Dysfunctional Family Circus. Even worse, at this writing their commenters reveal no awareness of DFC, either.

It makes me wonder: Do they know about Suck.com? Crayon? Ultimate Band List? Has the internet been around long enough that we have to teach youngsters about its early history?

Fuck -- I'd better find some agreeable college, design my own Continuing Ed curriculum in Internet History, and get out in front of what promises to be a great educational boondoggle! I'll be running an Ivy department in no time, and then I can just collect checks and fart out posts like the Perfesser. About time I got a sinecure! I'm a known entity!

BTW did you know SpinnWebe is still online?

CONCERN TROLLS. I subscribe to the Goldberg File 'cause I just can't get enough, and today the boy genius does a major shirt-retuck of triumph over a topic of recent interest:

Well, so much for "epistemic closure." The supposed Right Wing Industrial Complex... marches and thinks in complete lockstep... Just when this argument was about to implode from its own idiocy, a Godzilla-sized foot called "immigration" came stomping down on the delicate dorm-room-philosophical Bambi. Conservatives are split on the issue... Karl Rove, alleged leader of the homunculi within the right-wing colossi, Marco Rubio, the golden boy of the tea-party movement, and Jeb Bush, heir to the Bush dynasty, are just a few of the dissenters from the right-wing mob of unindependent minds.

You'd think the coffeehouses of the Right were ablaze with impassioned discussion of this issue. Hardly. The demurrals of these two candidates for office and one Republican political operative have been extremely watery, and are obviously made not to extend debate, but to cover asses. Take Rubio's allegedly bold stand:

"From what I have read in news reports, I do have concerns about this legislation," Rubio said. "While I don't believe Arizona's policy was based on anything other than trying to get a handle on our broken borders, I think aspects of the law, especially that dealing with 'reasonable suspicion,' are going to put our law enforcement officers in an incredibly difficult position. It could also unreasonably single out people who are here legally, including many American citizens."

He has concerns! Well, that'll touch off a firestorm. More likely it'll keep the Cubans in his home state from thinking he's a total fink.

This state law gives everyone in America a chance to posture over it, and thus is is catnip to prevaricating politicians of every stripe. Rubio, Rove, and Jeb Bush can't do shit about changing it*, but if they purse their brows and talk concernedly about how they're concerned, etc., citizens might get the impression that they're actually human -- and, in the precious seconds this misapprehension lasts, consider voting for them.

National Review's Jim Geraghty took a tack similar to Goldberg's earlier this week, when he suggested that Republicans' "Kindler, Gentler Arguments Against Arizona’s New Law" were actually more useful that those of Democrats because they were nicer ("there’s no accusations of hateful motives, no demonization of the proponents..."). Geraghty is of course in favor of the law -- but, with becoming tact, he acts like he's sorry about it ("I wish the Arizona immigration law wasn’t necessary"). That way you know he's considered every side of the issue before coming down on the one nobody ever doubted that he would take.

I'll be happier to accept their claims of open-mindedness when they they stop driving actual free-thinkers out of their party. As for the claim that Democrats should argue their points as National Review writers prescribe, I think there are fewer of them willing to consider the friendly advice of their mortal enemies than once there were. But maybe Joe Lieberman's still listening!

*UPDATE: Oh shoot, I forgot to add this: It's like Megan McArdle voting for Obama.

YOU'RE JUST LIKE ME, AND I MEAN IT IN A BAD WAY. Linked by Rod Dreher (always a bad sign), Kenneth L. Woodward at Commonweal tells us how the New York Times is just like a religion. It's one of those "I know you are but what am I" Liberal Fascism arguments -- oh yeah, you say the Church is always telling people what to do, but the "the Times exercises a powerful magisterium or teaching authority through its editorial board," ha ha.

The big differences Woodward doesn't mention are 1.) The Times can't damn its readers to an eternity in Hell, and 2.) if the Times had anything like the Church's record in protecting and enabling child molesters, it would have been closed down by the authorities years ago.

This sort of thing reminds me of the crappy "we're not so different, you and I" arguments given by fictional criminals like The Joker. No, asshole, we're not the same; you're a fucking supervillain, and none of your high-school Nietzsche bullshit changes it.

CULTURE WAR IS NOT OVER, IF YOU WANT IT OR NOT. Digging through some of my back numbers this evening, I came across old posts about World magazine, the rightwing Christian pub balls-deep in the culture war, which told readers that Prince was only okay to listen to if your English was so poor that you couldn't make out his sexy lyrics, that "baseball fosters the right mentality for sustaining a war on terrorism," and other gibberish.

These days I keep hearing that the Right is soft-pedaling such cultural issues in favor of a Tea Party anti-socialism pitch. I wondered if World had gotten the message. Thankfully, it appears they have not.

Take Marvin Olasky's Easter column. First he fills in the back story, Anne Rice style: In New York in the 1870s, a famous abortionist lived on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, enjoying "immense dining rooms and parlors furnished in bronze and gold" -- a clear victory for Satan. Then St. Patrick's was built, giving Jesus the upper hand. But then John D. Rockefeller, in an obviously Satanic challenge, built his Center:

At ground level the face-off has also been apparent: A two-ton statue of Atlas, the god in Greek mythology who carries the heavens upon his shoulders, faces the doors of St. Patrick. What holds up the world -- the economic and technological power housed in the skyscraper, or the faith of the cross?

Most people don't contemplate such questions...

But Marvin Olasky does! For years the Easter Parade has been a big deal on Fifth, and despite its Godless nature -- Irving Berlin certainly wasn't writing about Jesus -- Olasky approves; but this year the Parade wasn't all it might be, permanent-things-wise:

This Easter the mixture of refinement and ostentation that defined earlier parades was gone. Many women wore flowery hats, but men on display were less Hello, Dolly! and more Salvador Dali dada: They wore three-foot-high apple blossom branches, or tuxedo coats with shorts, or multi- colored bushy beards accompanied by white dresses.

Bearded men in dresses! What would Bing Crosby say? But it gets worse:

I wondered about the absence of the young: On a perfect-weathered day, sunny and 70, why were 90 percent or more of the strollers over 40?

Were the kids all in McCarren Park worshiping the vaginal tree? Well, on the plus side, Olasky saw a lot of them at Mass in the Hunter College auditorium; but on the down side, many cleaved instead to the latest ally of the abortionist and the Rockefellers: "I saw many other 20-somethings lined up to enter a glass cube: the above-ground part of Apple's flagship store on Fifth Avenue between 58th and 59th."

How will Jesus and Olasky be rescued from despair? By war on Muslims!

Will the Easter battle for the future feature not the cathedral and the statue, but the auditorium and the glass cube?

Maybe, but here's an O. Henry twist to this column: Will those latter two form an alliance against the Kaabah, an ancient granite cube in Mecca that is the center of the Muslim world? The cathedral and the skyscraper won World War II. What can the auditorium and the glass cube do?

And once their combined forces destroy the infidels, the auditorium and the cube can duke it out for supremacy! I'm surprised he didn't work in an NBA Finals theme.

Please remember that however the conservative spin doctors try to spruce up the public face of their movement, these guys are still back there being absolutely mad.

UPDATE. Commenters are especially excited by Olasky's symbology. "Wasn't it an apple that brought about the Fall from Paradise?" asks Halloween Jack. "(The company's symbol, after all, has a bite out of it, and always has; oh, and hey, it used to be rainbow striped, and we all know who's got that symbol these days, eh?)" Wheels within wheels, people!

NOT YOUR REAL FRIENDS. Proud as I am of my raw courage in the face of Islamicist oppression, I have to admit Glenn Greenwald has a very good point. "The various forms of religious-based, intimidation-driven censorship and taboo ideas in the U.S. -- what [Ross] Douthat claims are non-existent except when it involves Muslims -- are too numerous to chronicle," he says, but unlike most people who talk like that, he provides a nice little list of examples (including some productions of Terence McNally's gay Jesus play shut down by violent threats made right here in my lovely new home state).

He also reminds us that Douthat's buddy Jonah Goldberg is a big fan of censorship (which I've noticed also), and that Douthat agrees with him. It's almost as if these people aren't really interested in free speech, and have perhaps some ulterior motive for pretending that they are. Well, I sort of suspected that when they didn't rally to the defense of my farting Mohammed cartoon.

FOR SOME REASON THIS FAKE AD IS BOTHERING ME. As a new resident of America proper, I am cultivating an interest in ephemeral crap. This, apparently, is an 80s-style commercial created for Toy Story 3:



My intention is not to razz the makers, who did a pretty good job, but I sense something is off here and I'm not sure what.

I think it's that the bear isn't given any distinguishing qualities at all, either in copy or in interaction with the kids, other than his implied eagerness to receive affection. See this and this for comparison. In my experience even dolls are supposed to have a USP.

It's bugging me for some reason. What do you think?

THE GLIBERTARIAN ARGUMENT FOR THE ARIZONA IMMIGRANT LAW: "A reader says he’s suprised to see me support the Arizona bill. Well, I really don’t — that is, I don’t know if I’d have voted for it if I were in Arizona. I’m mostly reacting to the fact that — as demonstrated by Linda Greenhouse — the opposition displays that special combination of self-righteous outrage and bone-deep ignorance that really sets me off." -- The Ole Perfesser. Take that, hehindeed, Radley Balko!

Remember: They don't have any principles -- merely a sense of entitlement, resentment when it's challenged, and rage when it's thwarted.

ONE MORNING I SHOT AN ELEPHANT IN MY PAJAMAS. I just shot a rattler this mornin' that was threatening my cat. Ain't no thang around these parts; we all has firearms. Then I ate me that rattler and made mah woman a necklace out of his bones.

What? I have just as much evidence of my feat as our Governor has of killing that coyote. Neither of us had our security detail around.

There are some differences, I admit. I'm not running for reelection, which (along with my natural modesty) is why I'm also not dressing up my story with quotable quotes like "he became mulch."

And I don't have fans like Michelle Malkin to use my alleged accomplishment as proof that politicians she doesn't like are less than men:

This could cost Texas Governor Rick Perry the endorsement of PETA, but to save the life of his dog, it’s worth it...

In a related story, Florida Governor Charlie Crist screamed like a woman and jumped on a chair when he saw a mouse run out from under his tanning bed.

If you find that outburst about Crist weird and unseemly, remember: the sourcing is every bit as good as Perry's and mine.

I advise Mitt Romney, if he wishes to remain politically viable, to announce that he killed a dog -- not by strapping it to the roof of his car, his usual method of canine torment, but with his bare hands -- or with a scalpel, so he can work it into a metaphor about health care.

THIS IS JUST NICE: Some folks in Kuala Lumpur yelling "WAR CRIMINAL" at Tony Blair.



May he never be shut of them. Asshole. Now can we get someone to follow around Andrew Sullivan, too? (h/t Prog Gold)

WHERE I'M CALLING FROM, PART 3. I continue to like this "Texas" I find myself in. I haven't forgotten, however, that it's politically... retrograde. Our Governor calls Obama and health care "socialist" as casually as you or I might call Williamsburg "over," and loves to cheer the folks at home with talk of seceding from the Union. I never thought I'd say this, but I miss David Paterson.

And Perry isn't even the worst of the lot: There was some kind of bizarre Gathering of the Nuts last weekend at Tyler, where the purty roses come from, with Perry, Glenn Fucking Beck, and State Rep Leo Berman, who called Obama "God's punishment on us." No word in local press reports as to whether a cross was burned at the event, though maybe that happens too frequently thereabouts to merit notice.

Perry is a graduate of Texas A&M, and I note with interest this reminiscence from a speech he gave at the 2005 Muster:

We toted my footlocker up to the dorm, and then dad went outside and pulled George [Shriever] under a tree and delivered a message: “Make a man out of him.” It’s too bad dad felt compelled to say that, because my fish hole ended up being next door to George Shriever and Roger Matson. At any hour of the night, George would not knock loudly on the wall, my signal to come running. Sometimes he needed his brass shined or his sink cleaned or his bed made. Often, he just wanted me to sing him to sleep. But whatever George wanted, I did. I was his fish.

Well, I suppose old Yalies sound just as strange talking about their homoerotic rituals, too.

Here in Aggieland there's an alt-paper called the Maroon Weekly; I guess it's the local equivalent of the Voice. Instead of Tom Robbins or Wayne Barrett, though, here's what we had in this week's editorial section:

This past week, Obama took the first major step towards banning guns from all United States citizens...

Yes, you read that correctly. We will be subject to gun laws not created and voted on by our congress.

International laws that were adamantly opposed by the Bush administration, who preferred to use national gun control legislation. International laws that have been developed and promoted by organizations such as the United Nations and individuals such as billionaire businessman George Soros...

This nonsense, straight out of the emails your grandma has been sending you (and proven bullshit), is what the weekly whee-funtime paper thinks the kids will go for. They're probably right. Though there's a big college here, we don't have the traditional pinko collegetown thing going on. Most of the local entertainment district's storefronts are distressed and art-directed to look like Old West saloons and whatnot; the big dance club, Daisy Dukes (!), looks like a grainery. When the kids go out, they dress like they're going to appear in a Ke$ha video. It's like an alternate America where beatniks and hippies never existed, and youth style went straight from Elvis to backwards baseball caps.

I can live with that, though. No place is cool enough for me; my Voice readers may recall that I was constantly complaining about the nanny state New York had become when I lived there. Griping's just one of the privileges of citizenship. Admittedly Texas is part of a larger and more destructive madness that will eventually consume and destroy this once-proud nation, but that probably won't happen till after I'm blessedly dead. Everybody wins -- me, and the howling feral children that will inherit this blackened continent.

In the meantime there's so much that is not political to enjoy. A couple of weekends back I went to visit a friend in San Antonio, which was serendipitously having its annual Fiesta (we took in the River Parade). I just got a taste but it was nice: The Riverwalk is much prettier than the pictures let on; I took a long walk down down South Flores and saw some of the gentrifying shabby-chic; El Mercado was like San Gennaro with Mexicans, and the Norteño, like all the music here, was splendid. Part of the fun of just scratching the surface is knowing there's still so much more left to dig.

MORE TALES OF ORDINARY MADNESS. Yes, it's another post by The Anchoress about how the Democrats have broken the seventh seal and the end times loom.

Maybe she's beginning to bore even herself, though, because she puts some extra spin on it this time:

The only thing I am certain of right now is that what we knew of America before 2008 is not what we will know of America by 2012. I know that nothing is ever going to be what it was, and those on the right who think “if we can just get the right people in office, then everything will go back to normal,” are deluding themselves.

Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, etc. But here's how the crafty Dems and Satan will pull it off: First, they're going to make a Republican Governor of Arizona release the hounds on illegal Mexicans. Then all hell will break loose!

Meanwhile the Democrats and the press (if I am not redundant) understand how well they played the immigration card in 2006 -getting the right all hopped up in May to reap the rewards in November- and so they will be repeating that gambit – manufacturing parades and outrage once again, as they did before. The charges of “racist nazis” will fly; the press will fan the flames, and the situation will become toxic.

I expect that the right -which has done a very good job of ignoring deliberate provocation up to now- will end up losing its composure in this debate, and once that happens, once they let fly with their passions, they will be defeated.

I'm not sure what she means by "losing its composure," but it probably has something to do with Mexicans thrusting their jaws into redneck fists. So, you see, the Satanocrats will attack both Republicans and Mexicans with their passive-aggressive hopping-up of patriots!

Read around her post for extra lunacy: She believes, for example, that as the world falls into darkness the abbeys will become powerful redoubts (but this kind of wishful thinking is common among apocalyptics), and endorses the notion now popular with her fellow wingnuts that by drumming up the youth and minority votes, Obama is pursuing a "divisive strategy." Also there's her interesting idea that 2006 had less to do with exploding Republican scandals than with immigration.

But wackiest of all may be her contention that "I am neither Republican nor conservative. I belong to Christ first, not to a party, not to an ideology." Hell, in the very teeth of the Apocalypse she's spinning for the right, committed to making sure we know the poor Republican white people are (or rather, it is prophesied, will be) the real victims here.

A LIBERTARIAN MUGGED BY LIBERTARIANISM. As Arizona hunts down illegal Mexicans like dogs, it is touching -- in a hilarious way -- to hear Radley Balko wonder aloud at libertarian redoubt Reason that his good, freedom-loving friends the Tea Partiers could be in favor of such ungroovy measures:

There's obviously not going to be pure ideological unity at these events... But it's increasingly looking like the right's favored big government policies are a fairly important part of the agenda of a fairly large portion of the Tea Party crowd.

You're kidding! He'll get over it, I'm sure, as soon as one of his colleagues reminds him the Tea Parties have dozens of black people, or about the socialism of estate taxes.

TODAY ON BIZARRO WORLD: "[Civil rights legend] John Lewis, who spent his life presumably fighting for equality, now seems little better than racists such as David Duke, Jesse Jackson, or Al Sharpton," says... a guy who calls his site Confederate Yankee.

He's a previous winner, too, and was recently seen accusing infiltrators of trying to tar the Tea Parties with Confederate flags, despite his own loyalty to the Fallen Standard ("a Confederate battle flag is supposed to be a sign of bigotry and racism according to the leftist orthodoxy...").

Rightbloggers still complain about "pro-Che colors," though Che worship is hardly a going concern. Yet they give their respectful attention to neo-Confederates -- no doubt because they're a major bloc of the Republican-conservative alliance. They apparently don't expect anyone to notice the contradiction; the question is, do they notice it themselves?

ALAN SILLITOE, 1928-2010.. I've never read his fiction, though I've admired the bracing films made of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, but by chance I recently picked up his autobiography, Life Without Armour, which is so far very good. Though not quite the Angry Young Man they painted him as, Sillitoe had indeed been working-class and done mucky jobs -- "my job was to hump hundredweight sacks of alum and flour to a vat and empty them in, stirring to an even broth with the requisite amount of hot water to make the paste. Overall and boots got caked with the stuff, and I would go home stinking like a pig" -- before he found success as a writer.

I'm more eager to finish the book now, and get to his others. He seems to have been very serious about his craft, and describes some of his writing education, including attentive reading-aloud at home:

The cadences of style became apparent enough to help improve my prose, a revelation which could no doubt have come sooner with a nineteenth-century education in the Latin and Greek classics.

Reading my work aloud was a good way of ensuring that it had the fluidity and clarity of good English...

Clear English could be enriched by idiomatic or personal quirks as long as they fitted in with the narrative and echoed my inner voice, the way things sounded to me even before I had a pen in my hand...

During this long winter it became obvious that I had not been working hard enough on style: every word, every phrase, every sentence -- in every story and on every page of a novel -- had to be broken up and had to be knitted together again so that no loopholes in the prose remained.

I am reminded, writing that out, that work is a constant refrain in the book; when Sillitoe was young, he said, he took care not to get a girl pregnant because "those who did not take such precautions asked for all they got, and a bit more. As Arthur Shelton's father said, 'When you get married, a penny bun costs tuppence!'"

Sillitoe picked his Desert Island Discs last year. Some nice considerations here and here.

UPDATE: If the writerly stuff interests you, you may like the Writers Guild East tweet updates on today's New York City Mayor's Office of Film, Theater and Broadcasting seminar -- though it has more to do with careerism than craft.

TELL US ANOTHER ONE ABOUT "POLITICAL CORRECTNESS" WHILE YOU'RE AT IT. Holy shit: An Obama official makes a joke about a Jewish guy outwitting a guy from the Taliban at a pro-Israel gathering, where it is warmly received, and the rightbloggers rush to portray it as anti-Semitic.

Leading the idiot derby by a nose*: The Anchoress, who pulls one that I haven't seen since high school:

Is it anti-Semitic?

Maybe yes, maybe no.

Presumably, the Taliban member was of Arab descent, which would make him a Semite, as well. If one takes any of the views listed above, then the joke portrays both Arab and Jew negatively, and it is anti-Semitic.

Zing! After many lines of this kind of concise analysis, The Anchoress concedes that the joke may be what any listener whose head is not fogged with politics will know it is. But that doesn't let Obama off the hook: "...for all anyone knows, the White House might have omitted the joke from its transcripts because it was too pro-Jew for their tastes!"

What a miserable, joyless job Joke Patrol must be.

* Not meant as a reference to The Anchoress' Italian-American heritage, so please don't call the Anti-Defamation League.

I CAN'T WAIT UNTIL TOMORROW 'CAUSE I GET MORE HEROIC EVERY DAY. I see the organizer of that Draw Muhammed thing has backed out:

I made a cartoon that went viral and I am not going with it. Many other folks have used my cartoon to start sites, etc. Please go to them as I am a private person who draws stuff,

The associated Facebook page keeper has bailed as well ("This event was not supposed to be about hatred but its opposite").

Am I the only True Son of Liberty to stand for freeeeedom? I figured Mark Steyn would have churned out a graphic novel by now.