A LITTLE RESPECT. Senator Byrd has died, and the usual assholes remind us that he used to be a Klansman, but neglect to mention that he changed his mind about it and apologized, representing a progress exactly the opposite of that made by the Republican Party, which is really why they hated at him. (UPDATE: Also this. The man had balls.)

Among Byrd's last acts was to hold the feet of the coal industry to the fire in the wake of disaster, rather than apologizing to that industry for such actions, which is the Republican way to do things.

Though there are drawbacks to the reflexive grubbing for bacon that was the hallmark of Byrd's generation of politicians, he at least brought some home to his constituents, rather than transferring it all directly to corporations. Some old ways were indeed the best ways.

UPDATE. You're going to see a lot of this sort of thing today: "Meanwhile, let’s try to refrain from trashing Senator Byrd too much and stay respectful. This isn’t the Democratic Underground, after all. We’re above that. I will, however... [torrent of abuse]." Mourning doesn't become them.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about rightblogger Gay Pride coverage. It offers some rare good news: The wingnuts appear to be keeping quieter during Pride. They're still wrong, and the smarter ones are disingenuous -- this weekend we had Kyle Smith suggesting an "end of the culture wars," which in his world means the rise of "Chris Christie and Scott Brown, libertarian-ish Republicans who are socially liberal but fiscally conservative." (Brown's against gay marriage, and Christie promised to veto gay marriage if it were passed in Jersey. Maybe that's what Smith means by libertarian-ish.) But at least we get fewer of their noxious gases this time of year.

The thing ran long, and one of my saddest cuts was Esther Green's "To My Liberal Relative." Green apparently likes to bug her relatives with rightwing bullshit, and one of them, a gay man, finally sent her a short note asking, "Seriously, can we please just agree to disagree?" Some people would have switched topics to the weather or something, but Green sent back an 858-word harangue, explaining that

It is precisely because you and ____ are gay that Obama scares me. He surrounds himself with people who are true believers in sharia law (Rashid Khalidi, Dalia Mogahed, and Rashad Hussain). Sharia law clearly states that gays are to be stoned.

Later, perhaps hoping that this will have softened her gay relative up, Green tells him that Obama is a Muslim. Bet the Green family is going to be very careful about its Christmas invitations this year.

MINOR OFFENSE. Wingnuts love their child prodigies. (Easy to program, and they have no trouble internalizing the philosophy, having learned all about it in their anal stage of development.)

Richard Brookhiser was 15 when he started at the National Review; Kyle Williams was 13 when he was enlisted by World Net Daily. And anyone recall the name of that little kid who wrote a book about virtue or something six or seven years ago, and was briefly their teen heartthrob?

Their most recent child star, 13-year-old Jonathan Krohn, was a hit at the last CPAC, but he hasn't been getting much ink lately -- at least, not the right kind -- so apparently someone at American Thinker thought it was time to roll out a new conservakid.

Behold:

My name is Sam Besserman, I'm eleven years old, I live in Beverly Hills, California, and ever since I can remember I have been subjected to political bias in school.

It's a dream come true -- only 11, and already he's learned his Conservative Victimization Tables!

The first time I noticed the bias was actually in preschool [italics his - ed.] where the teacher was reading a book about the importance of mothers and the inferiority of fathers. I tried to tell the teacher that dads might be just as important. The teacher responded in a sing-song, "No, listen to me, I'm the teacher."

Goddamn liberal bitches, always infantilizing our pre-schoolers!

The whole thing's like that, all commie thought police and suspiciously big words:

At Beverly Vista, my first teacher was a full-time misandrist and global warming wacko.

Some of you may suspect a hoax -- either because the kid's too young (especially for the Feminazi stuff, which usually doesn't hit conservatives until their first prostatitis episode), or because it sounds like a parody. Don't underestimate these people. I thought Mytheos Holt, who proposed at Big Hollywood that the brethren bring down Obama with parody websites and 4chan, was some kind of joke, but commenters proved him a true specimen.

If Besserman's a fake, the American Thinker commenters certainly haven't caught on. Remember: Just because they're increasingly ridiculous doesn't mean they're not serious.

(Thanks to Nancy Nall for the tip.)

UPDATE. Holy shit, R. Porrofatto found a video! Young Besserman appears on camera, but he doesn't use any big words. (Who'd like to see the outtakes video?) He does report that the bullies all yelled "Global warming is real" at him. Bullies sure have changed since I was a kid; maybe in Bev Hills they all get subscriptions to The Nation for their tenth birthday.

HAPPY PRIDE. It's small, but it's progress:

The adventurous Stanley Cup will make its first appearance in a gay-themed event this weekend.

The Chicago Gay Hockey Association invited the Blackhawks to join Sunday's Gay Pride Parade -- and the team said yes. So did the Chicago Cubs, who will have their own float for the first time.

I don't usually post feel-good items, but I wanted to do what I could to increase the possibility that this news would be seen by some bigot asshole wingnuts.

Like this one:

SODOMY IS SOURCE OF PRIDE, SEXUAL REPRODUCTION IS NOT!...

If Chicago's professional sports teams will be represented, I don't think Ernie Banks and the Blackhawks' Brent Sopel should be the only participants. I think in the spirit of having one's backfield in motion, the Chicago Bears should send a tight end and a wide receiver....

Who says pro athletes aren't role models for our children? If more big name athletes get involved in peddling "Gay Pride" more 10 year old might be inspired to become "Gay Pride" grand marshals. This is critical because some young people think it is alright or even cool to be straight.

I think this is supposed to be funny, despite the rhetorical hoarseness. Remember that line by The Replacements? "Kewpie dolls and urine stalls/Will be laughed at/The way you're laughed at now."

Yeah, this day gets better and better.

UPDATE. In comments, montag: "I think Moses would have gotten a double hernia carrying down all the commandments these guys want."

BATTING 1.000. Matt Lewis gets a statement on Dave Weigel from the American Spectator's R. Emmett Tyrrell:

"I thought he was a liberal. He had no sense of humor. Yet he did his job diligently."

No sense of humor! Good to see that Tyrrell -- a buffoon of long standing who for years invited comparison of himself to H. L. Mencken via an imitative byline photo and a constipated emulation of HLM's prose style, then declared, "I know thee not, old man" -- has not lost his gift of being wrong 100 percent of the time

U WERE DOIN IT RITE.



Whiny ass titty babies.

The problem with covering conservatives is: There's no way to do it without being offensive -- at least in the bar after work, or its email equivalent. Which is apparently a resignation-accepting offense at the Post.

They've run this country for most of the past thirty years. I don't see why we should continue to treat wingnuts like special needs children who have to be shielded from criticism.

FUTURE SCHLOCK. For years most of my own work has been online, and the subject by which most of my readers know me has been the blogosphere. I know as well as the rest of you that online is not only the present, but also The Future, because it is tirelessly presented as such by people like Jeff Jarvis on websites and in well-compensated speeches.

I've always been annoyed by that kind of talk, and most of the time if you ask me why I'll say it's because I'm a miserable old curmudgeon who likes newsprint and daguerreotypes and LPs, and for whom everything has to be old and in black and white. But that isn't wholly true, as this Reason article by up-and-coming libertarian Katherine Mangu-Ward and some interns reminds me.

The article is a kind of guide to online stuff, a popular favorite -- why, I've done that sort of thing myself, pimping mostly small local blogs of diverse agenda.

But the premise here is that these Randian super-genii will instruct you in "kicking your dead tree habit." No, there's no Kindle promo tie-in -- the object of ridicule here is not longform dead tree, but newspapers. The intro is all ha-ha-stupid-foolscap-people:

Newspaper. Personally, I never touch the stuff. But rumor has it there is a certain amount of distress about the impending doom of the news-on-dead-tree industry...

We assumed for the sake of the experiment that The New York Times would be the last to go. Since I refuse to sully my delicate hands with filthy newsprint, Jesse and Robby paged through Wednesday’s edition in search of facts and insights that would need replacing in the event that print news goes kaput.

Though I don't know much about mockery myself, the tone seems a little forced to me -- as if KMW were not trying to summon a new audience of strangers not yet educated to the superiority of the internet, but instead trying to stroke and signal the usual true believers, who are always up for a round of ragging on paper-pushers.

It reminds me of the preemptive gloating of folks like Roger L. Simon, who tells his readers all the time that the MSM is a dinosaur, dying, on the ropes, in extremis, etc. (We're still waiting for the body to fall, but never mind.) For years this has been one of the key tropes of the rightwing online community -- which came out of the rightwing offline community's contempt for the offline equivalent, the impudent snobs of the lying liberal media, usually short-handed as the New York Times.

The Times, it just so happens, is mentioned several times in Mangu-Ward's article, mostly derisively ("New York real estate obsessives have long since left the Times behind... the Times tech reviewer, appropriately enough, senses his own irrelevance...").

Mangu-Ward does give the online edition a left-handed head-pat at the end, though. Clearly the Times and whatever it represents will be part of The Future -- just not so big a part. If years of yap have yet to completely displace the Times, they have opened up some space for an alterna-press which, like alt and indie vendors since time immemorial, not only hopes but asserts that it's The Future, your future. And they mean it, man!

In reality, when the smoke clears you are likely to find that the main effect of such a revolution has been to transfer some power -- not so much to you, though, as to those who have positioned themselves to profit from revolutionary sentiment. Here's who Mangu-Ward recommends for opinion journalism:

As for the Opinion pages, Reason should meet your needs there. But if you must, it could be supplemented with the columns aggregated at RealClearPolitics, or you could enjoy a firehose of opinion at Huffington Post or Daily Kos. Want to come back over and over to a name you trust? Hit up brand name bloggers like Glenn Reynolds, Matt Yglesias, Megan McArdle, and more.

Glenn Reynolds, Matt Yglesias, Megan McArdle! That's some groovy revolution right there.

That's the real reason this stuff bugs me. It's not that I like the Times and newsprint so much. I don't, really. And I like the internet fine. But I've also seen some come-ons in my time, and The Future is one that never gets old.

SHORTER JOSEPH BOTTUM: Higher education is a liberal conspiracy to fuck your daughter.

UPDATE. Bottum's commenters are a joy for the expected reasons -- I particularly like the one who warns the Opus Dei wannabes who read First Things about the scourge of Jesuitism at Georgetown, and the one who thinks the knocked-up heroine did right to keep her baby because now she'll have someone to open jars for her in her old age. But my very favorite is the one who asks:

How do the girls who don't get to college get knocked up?

HE SAID SHE SAID. Moe Lane sniffs sex scandal!

Fun game for your morning: see how far you get into this report before you develop this sudden and burning need to go find a rock, and throw it at Al Gore. I personally made it to page 13.

Of course it's very different when something like this happens to a respected figure like Nikki Haley.

IT'S ARTHUR JENSEN'S WORLD -- WE JUST LIVE IN IT. Grab yer shootin' ahrns, morons -- Rupert Murdoch wants to make them Mescans legal so's they can bundle his papers or sumpin'!

In a model the AP compares to his coalition against gun violence, [NYC Mayor Mike] Bloomberg is rolling out a group of big city mayors and powerful CEOs called the Partnership for a New American Economy. The group will lobby Congress for comprehensive immigration reform at the federal level, arguing they need amnesty for those here illegally in order to run their cities and businesses effectively.

This won't play well with the Tea Party, but Mayor Mike is being joined by big business CEOs, and Republicans hate telling the heads of HP, Boeing, Disney and even News Corp. that they don't know what's good for America. Rupert Murdoch is on board, and he and Bloomberg even went on Fox News to hawk their plan this morning. (Murdoch may be the boss over there, but he's smart enough not to roll out this position on Glenn Beck or Hannity.)

The Castillo Chronicles has already bitten:

Murdoch the traitor who prefers to coddle illegals instead of help Americans take back their country especially since he has the bully pulpit to make a difference.

They can't grasp that while the ringmaster of the Fox News circus is happy to keep them riled up with titrated doses of jingoism, Uncle Rupert is not so much a citizen of the United States or of the (snort) "Anglosphere" as he is a citizen of the world -- as much at home in Red China as in Mexico City, provided his accommodations are suitably luxe.

But they'll forget about it soon enough. Psychologically they'll have to. We now live in a world where Lonesome Rhodes' unmasking would cause only about one or two news-cycles' worth of outrage before everyone began talking about his comeback. And anyway, most of the rubes think not at all about the men behind the cameras and the presses; they remain convinced that the guys and gals on the sets and in the byline photos are making it up as they go along.

UPDATE. Ha ha ha ha ha ha.

THE KIDS FROM GLEE IN THEIR DEGENERATE PHASE. The most productive McArdle Summer Replacement wonders why we should care about American ironing board manufacture gone to China:

Econ 101 aside, though, there's a more compelling moral reason to condemn this kind of tariff that should help break deadlocks like Matt's: Jobs lost at home are usually jobs created elsewhere, typically in poorer countries. If anything, jobs are likely to be gained when an industry moves to China, where more aspects of the manufacturing and assembly process are done by hand. They just won't be created here. If that's your focus, you have to make the case that American jobs are intrinsically better or more valuable than Chinese jobs.

I examined this from every angle, and find no evidence of a joke (which is not Ms. Mangu-Ward's strong suit in any case). She really thinks local (that is to say, American) suckers will just have to tough out a creative destruction phase, in which the Chinese get their jobs at a fraction of their wages, and the suckers get unemployment for a while and then whatever they can scrounge up. Some (okay, many) of them aren't going to make it, but who wants them around anyway -- they're not on Twitter and Foursquare and wouldn't have fun things to say if they were. But many of their kids will probably become New Technocrats. That should be some consolation to their parents in the hobo camps!

And as to them being Americans? There are no nations, there are no peoples; there is only money.

I'm beginning to think Mangu-Ward was raised in a Skinner box.

UPDATE. In comments, Freshly Squeezed Cynic explicates Mangu-Ward's use of Whataboutery; AC in BC suggests, "Surely the Atlantic can find an Indian to write something this stupid at one quarter the cost?"

SHORTER JONAH GOLDBERG: Farrrrrrrrt.

Jesus, the guy keeps topping himself. And he keeps announcing, basically, that he doesn't know what he's saying ("This isn't the best comparison because Petraues is no dictator") -- and yet keeps going.

This passage in particular will live in the annals of dumbassery:

Maybe a better comparison is to the experienced sergeant who may be formally outranked by the new lieutenant, but when the bullets fly, everyone looks to the sergeant for leadership.

Yes, Goldberg is explaining the Petraeus assignment with old WWII movies. Hopefully the General will bring a major offensive, so Goldberg can enact it on YouTube with Army Mens.

Also among my favorites: "Petraeus is a servant to his nation and history at this point" -- as opposed to, I don't know, when he was seven. And the ending! You have to imagine it followed by the stage collapsing and Goldberg climbing up out of the wreckage with a flowerpot on his head, hollering, "Uh-oh, Spaghetti-os!"

You know the drill.

SPEAKING OF WHICH, reader Donald alerts me that Jonah Goldberg is reviving the old Megan McArdle "you never had it so good" routine (i.e., you have iPods, why are you complaining?). I guess he didn't get the memo that they're supposed to shut up about this now that Obama is President.

I eagerly await a counter-post by one of his colleagues explaining that the Obama recession has destroyed capitalism, and Goldberg's 2,000 word walkback.

WHY I AM NOT A LIBERTARIAN, PART 4,229. Normally I don't respond well to baiting (I tend to throw my food dish and plead for dignity) but this National Post column (by our old friend Katherine Mangu-Ward!) that Adam Serwer dished me must be dug:

At first glance, any comparison between the gentle beeping of a Brooklyn mom dialing 311 on her iPhone and the roar of the Taliban pickup truck seems absurd. But it remains true that both want the same thing -- a targeted ban on ice cream.

The article actually compares an Afghan Taliban interdiction against ladies eating ice cream with an anti-Mr. Softee drive in Park Slope.

The Taliban (as reported by that great libertarian journalist Eve Ensler) disapproved of girls who dared eat ice cream. The Brooklyn moms complained of the incessant jingle of ice cream trucks in their neighborhood.

The Taliban killed and/or whipped the girls. The moms called 311. Don't you see the similarities? Mangu-Ward sure does.

This is why the Taliban and the Brooklyn moms can come to the same conclusion about ice cream bans. While they disagree on the parts of the self that need to be checked or limited -- and the Brooklyn moms prefer democracy to determine those limits -- they agree that state intervention to limit highly personal choices will make people better, and even freer.

In addition to the Taliban, the Park Slope mothers are also like "Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx and John Rawls," and Mangu-Ward is like Isaiah Berlin.

Those who lobby for and approve of such restrictions don't see the ever-growing list of banned behaviours as an infringement of liberty. Instead, they are a convenient and practical solution to the problem of what Berlin called "the divided self."

Now, I have myself twitted the anti-ice-cream-truck nannies of Brooklyn for the Voice -- not as neo-Taliban, but as dorks. I did not go the full Mangu-Ward distance there, nor in my other Nanny State items at Runnin' Scared, partly because I have a sense of humor, and partly because I recognize that neighborhood associations are within their rights to agitate against what they consider public nuisances and, in their formalized state, even use legal power to deny a liquor license to a restaurant, limit the number of street fairs on their blocks, etc.

Being an arty-farty and an anti-social, I generally prefer fewer rather than more restrictions on both art and commerce. And I think in the Bloomberg era the City's gotten way too protectionist. But I also live on planet Earth. I do not think every attempt to use legal means to alter the public space is automatically the equivalent of a Taliban death threat, for the same reason I do not think Big Gummint is being unfair to poor little BP: because I am neither a libertarian nor a fucking nut.

WHO'S TODAY'S KING OF THE CRACKPOTS -- THOMAS SOWELL OR JON VOIGHT? Sowell:

When Adolf Hitler was building up the Nazi movement in the 1920s, leading up to his taking power in the 1930s...

Yep, right out of the motherfucking gate.

Just where in the Constitution of the United States does it say that a president has the authority to extract vast sums of money from a private enterprise and distribute it as he sees fit...

Technically, it has not been confiscated by Barack Obama, but that is a distinction without a difference.

With vastly expanded powers of government available at the discretion of politicians and bureaucrats...

Clearly he refers to the Power to Cloud Men's Minds, with which Congress invested Obama in 2009.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt arbitrarily took the United States off the gold standard, he cited a law passed during the First World War to prevent trading with the country's wartime enemies. But there was no war when FDR ended the gold standard's restrictions on the printing of money.

At about the same time, during the worldwide Great Depression, the German Reichstag passed a law "for the relief of the German people"...

You know, even in wingnut writing, there is such a thing as trying to do too much. Equating FDR with Hitler calls for a post of its own, surely. (Sowell also refers to both "czars" and "useful idiots," putting Obama on both wrong sides of the Russian Revolution.) Just feed the talking points to Glenn Beck and have him do a DVD, TS!

Voight:

Dear President Obama:

You will be the first American president that lied to the Jewish people, and the American people as well, when you said that you would defend Israel, the only Democratic state in the Middle East, against all their enemies.

That promise to defend Israel was in the Oath of Office you didn't get to see: The one they had later in the basement, with body shots!

You have done just the opposite. You have propagandized Israel, until they look like they are everyone's enemy - and it has resonated throughout the world.

That was a hell of a thing -- who'd have thought that such hotbeds of philo-Semitism as France, the UK, and especially Turkey could be turned against Israel by one measly Presidency?

The Jewish people have given the world our greatest scientist and philosophers, and the cures for many diseases, and now you play a very dangerous game so you can look like a true martyr to what you see and say are the underdogs.

Yeah, they're scientist and philosophers, and you play with that baby toy See 'n Say like a little baby. (In fairness to Voight, this may be a corruption of his original; we understand the Washington Times no longer has proofreaders, or editors, or a dictionary.)

Your destruction of this country may never be remedied, and we may never recover.

Way to rally the crowd, Joe Buck! "To arms, citizens -- we may get out of here alive yet!"

I give it to Sowell. Voight has been soaking his brain in Hollywood for decades, and so has an excuse. Also, unlike Sowell, Voight has a useful skill.

MORE N00BS. I lost interest in the Kids from The Atlantic Megan McArdle Summer Replacement series, which is no big deal, as they seem to be working Summer Fridays every day of the week.

But go over there yourself and see what you think -- you don't need my help to find the obvious qualities in stories like

• "The Growing Geek iPhone Backlash";
• Katherine Mangu-Ward's pretense of concern that statists are forcing paupers out of the banking system (since the Obama people have messed with overdraft fees, "protecting" indigents from overdraft ass-raping whenever their desperate checkbook juggling goes wrong -- now how are they ever going to learn that poverty doesn't pay? -- the cash-starved banks have been forced to charge everyone for checking, which is socialism);
• Courtney "Is It Time For My" Knapp ripping the lid off that Slovenia-United States soccer match. Was the U.S. victim of a bad call? The story they don't want you to see!

Alternately, if you value your sanity, you can let TBogg substitute Susan of Texas guide you through the work of Fatherhood Expert Tony Woodlief ("Excuse me, I seem to have something caught in my throat. Cough*bullshit*cough. There, that’s better").

LOOK, I HATE TO SAY IT, but the Facebook Fox News Discussions Page...

...doesn't it just prove everything?

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the Joe Barton fiasco and the rightbloggers' insistence on making it worse. They -- ugh, you know what, read the thing; I can't provide a gloss here because that would require a new, more retarded version of I LOVE OIL GUYS MORE THAN U.S. BECAUSE IS LIKE REAGAN JESUS ME IS, IS TOO! and so far even conservatives (hopped up on whatever catecholamine killing one's own soul produces) are too worn out to provide one.

UPDATE. There's nothing for me here, so I will disappear:

If BP cut corners on safety and if the cut corners greatly increased the probability of this disaster, it deserves every legal penalty we can throw at it. But let's not forget that a prostitute can be raped, church-going family men can commit rape, and you're more likely to get away with rape if everyone thinks the victim deserves it.

If she turns up while I'm gone, please let me know.

TRAIL OF TEARS. Jesus Christ, these guys are still crying that BP got hosed by the U.S. Government. Reihan Salam goes the extra distance:

Shakedowns of this kind have a long and undistinguished history... During the westward expansion of the United States, the federal government “negotiated” with sovereign Indian nations in a similar spirit.

Yes, he's actually comparing BP to the fucking Indians. Soon I suppose Tony Hayward will have to watch his yacht races from a reservation.

UPDATE. Also, "the Muslims who were burned alive in Gujarat in 2002." Jesus.

SHORTER CRAZY JESUS LADY: Jimmy Carter Jimmy Carter Jimmy Carter Jimmy Carter Jimmy Carter Jimmy Carter Jimmy Carter Jimmy Carter Jimmy Carter.