HOW BULLSHIT WORKS, PART 9,230,933. Rolling Stone interviewed Merle Haggard, who was exceedingly gracious about President Obama:

...It was also nice to meet Obama and find him very different from the media makeout. It's really almost criminal what they do with our President. There seems to be no shame or anything. They call him all kinds of names all day long, saying he's doing certain things that he's not. It's just a big old political game that I don't want to be part of. There are people spending their lives putting him down. I'm sure some of it's true and some of it's not. I was very surprised to find the man very humble and he had a nice handshake. His wife was very cordial to the guests and especially me. They made a special effort to make me feel welcome. It was not at all the way the media described him to be.

What's the biggest lie out there about Obama?

He's not conceited. He's very humble about being the President of the United States, especially in comparison to some presidents we've had who come across like they don't need anybody's help. I think he knows he's in over his head. Anybody with any sense who takes that job and thinks they can handle it must be an idiot.

Guess how Ole Perfesser Instapundit and Andrew Malcolm spun it?

Merle Haggard, who likes Obama, compliments him by saying, 'I think he knows he's in over his head'

I used to think no little boy or girl ever wanted to be a propagandist when he or she grew up, but I'm beginning to think some people are just born to the job.

TRUE GRIT. My memory of the 1969 original is faint, but you can see some of its playing style in this old trailer. John Wayne is kind of doing Wallace Beery, and everyone else is taking an old-fashioned comedy-Western approach.

The Coens' version is, as you might expect, in the modern Deadwood manner: Formal but lethal. Their Old West is a cruel if mannerly place where even grandma will steal the blanket from you, and justice is something you only get if you're more fiercely devoted to it than most men are to their lives.

Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) is that devoted. She wants the man who killed her father brought to justice, and wants it badly enough that she will push, cajole, and (in her ornery way) seduce two hard men to abet her. That doesn't mean they wouldn't have done it anyway (one of them was already on the case when she got there, the other is up for it if the funds are right), but her interests are significantly different from theirs.

While finances are of course imperative, the Ranger La Boeuf (Matt Damon) and the Marshall Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges) are really on the hunt for honor: La Boeuf because he is, by God, a Texas Ranger, and will have his man; Cogburn because he is, by God, Cogburn, and likewise. Tracking's their job. From this comes the grand joke of their constant bickering: Though they seem to have much in common, each is so implacably devoted to his own code that they'll argue out of personal pride, and even over whether a Ranger really will drink muddy water from a hoofprint ("Oh, I believed it the first 25 times I heard it…").

But Mattie alone is devoted to justice. She expects, for example, that they will bury a felled outlaw because Cogburn promised the man as he lay dying that he would. But Cogburn brushes it off: "Ground's too hard." When she insists that the killer be brought to justice on her terms, Cogburn tells her -- rather kindly, for him -- that in this world you can't have every little thing.

Mattie never accepts that. She is singular in both manner and mission, and her steady, urgent voiceover isolates her further. The Coens start the show with a Bible quote, and I surmise (for where else?) that the Bible is where Mattie gets her determination. No one in the picture will accommodate her vision, but she insists upon it, wins her chance at it through unearthly determination, and in the end (rather, near the end) gets it.

[Here, I warn, are some very severe spoilers.]

Once she's fought her way onto the trail, Mattie is left mostly an observer of the grisly action, until suddenly she finally gets her chance to administer justice by her own hand. In doing so she is propelled, or more literally repelled, into a pit of snakes and an amazing coda that I believe the Coens made the whole movie to achieve.

Once Mattie is snakebit, things change rapidly. Cogburn's kindness toward her turns to heroism, and he rides her on her cherished horse Blackie toward salvation. The whole picture looks great (the wonderful Roger Deakins is DP) but on that ride the visuals turn to magic. The Indian territory that had been familiar becomes ghostly, the dead trees rising like phantom snakes; the horse sweats, falters, and is sacrificed; Cogburn goes beyond his duty, and what we would imagine his capacity, to carry Mattie within sight of an ember of civilization.

The Coens, gently evoking John Ford, will not show Cogburn entering that promised land.

We go suddenly forward to when Mattie is about 40, missing an arm from that long-ago adventure. (She is shown erect, impeccable in dress and bearing, her sleeve sewn carefully up.) She has come some distance to see Cogburn, who had sent her a letter (perhaps the only one he ever sent and, she notes, badly spelled), bottom-billed in a Wild West show. At the fairgrounds Mattie is told Cogburn died shortly before. She responds with, under the circumstances, monumentally correct behavior, then harshly insults a man who did her the dishonor of not rising in her presence. And she does Cogburn the honor of removing his body to her ancestral burying place.

Over his grave, she recalls in voiceover La Boeuf, who showed some interest in her all those years ago and from whom she never heard after her amputation; he must be over 60, she recalls, probably closer to 70, and, her still-level voice declares, "time must have taken some of the starch out of his cowlick." She has never married.

Well, I warned you there were spoilers. But I had to indulge them because, though I enjoyed the movie, my memory could dispense with everything from it but the ending. The Coens give fair play to all their characters, but the fate of Mattie -- a girl who never wavered in her resolve, and lived with its hard consequence -- is a glorious movie unto itself.

I need hardly comment upon the acting, which has been elsewhere justly celebrated, except to say that young Miss Steinfeld may or may not be good at it, but she is earnest and comfortable in the company of great actors, and that's no small thing. I must add that Elizabeth Marvel, whose acting I have had the great privilege of seeing onstage, is sublime as the older Mattie, and that it is a shame she has not had more attention for her brief but searing performance.

ADDENDUM. I have written about the Coens' work before here, here, here, and here.

UPDATE. Glenn Kenny has some smart things to say in comments, and an astute review of True Grit here.

GOLDBERG FOR THE DEFENSE. I sympathize with BigHank53, who commented on my analysis of Jonah Goldberg's Big Gay Column, "Christ, it's a Jonah Goldberg essay. Looking for an actual argument in there is like taking the back of the TV off during The Lone Ranger so you can grab yourself a miniature horse." Yes, it's all futile, but heaven hath pleased it so, to punish me with this and this with me, etc.

Thus harried, I must also note this from Goldberg's follow-up at The Corner, regarding his own fudgy pronouncement on gay marriage ("Personally, I have always felt that gay marriage was an inevitability, for good or ill [most likely both]. I do not think that the arguments against gay marriage are all grounded in bigotry, and I find some of the arguments persuasive, fart fart"):

The first is the complaint that I rely on the crutch of “inevitability.” As a couple readers put it, National Review writers, of all people, shouldn’t be talking about “inevitability.” We’re the ones who stand athwart inevitability yelling, “Stop.”

I like the point and I think it’s a fair one to some extent. But all I can say in my defense is that I think I’m right about the inevitability of gay marriage or at least very strong civil unions (which would ultimately lead to gay marriage, anyway). I don’t take this position because I’m dodging, or caving, or playing games of some kind. I just happen to think it’s true (barring some scientific developments down the road). Moreover, as I suggest in my column today, I don’t consider inevitability to be synonymous with conservative defeat and liberal victory, because what we mean by such things can be a lot more complicated than what the daily chatter reduces them too.

Did I just have a tiny stroke, or is Goldberg saying that he thinks it's so because he thinks it's so?

Also, what "scientific developments" might stand in the way of gay marriage? Could he be talking about the "gay gene" concept that has been knocking around for years? (I guess then conservatives would start advocating increased medical research funding and abortion. Wow, he's right, this could be complicated!) Or maybe he has advance word on a paper from the Discovery Institute proving homosexuals caused the Ice Age.

IT'S AN ILL WIND THAT BLOWS NO ONE SOME GOOD. Charlotte Hays at National Review:

The blizzard is definitely a force for conservatism...

You wouldn't think this would be anything to brag on, but wait, she's going somewhere with this:

... and not only because it has had the global-warming crowd scrambling for explanations. The blizzard reveals something basic: Liberals in government want to tell us what to eat, counsel us about how and when to die, and in general attempt to engineer our lives. But when reality knocks, they can’t do the basic stuff such as clearing the streets so that newborns don’t die in bloody apartment-building lobbies. Mayor Bloomberg may be receiving an unfair amount of criticism for his lackluster performance in coping with Mother Nature, given the almost unprecedented nature of the storm, but the unplowed city streets provide a metaphor for the nanny state: It can order us to do anything, but it can’t take care of the basic obligations of government.

The hundreds who died in the Blizzard of 1888 at least had the comfort of knowing that they had not been killed by socialism.

Not bad, so far as this sort of thing goes, but it needs some laugh lines from Jonah Goldberg.

DUMBASS, DON'T TELL. 11 months ago, Jonah Goldberg said, "conservatives shouldn’t take Obama’s bait on repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell... I’m not saying he doesn’t believe it should be repealed. But no one seems to think Obama will do anything to achieve this supposed goal." That ship has sailed, so now Goldberg's back to tell us how the repeal of DADT is good news for conservatives.

Goldberg starts, as conservatives tend to do when talking about gay people, with sex:

Two decades ago, the gay left wanted to smash the bourgeois prisons of monogamy, capitalistic enterprise and patriotic values and bask in the warm sun of bohemian "free love."

Two decades ago would be 1990, at which time I was living in the bohemian Ground Zero of the East Village and perceived very little monogamy-smashing among gays or straights. Maybe he means the 70s, bathhouses, and such like. (I still don't know how this relates to "capitalistic enterprise and patriotic values.")

In this, they were simply picking up the torch from the straight left of the 1960s and 1970s, who had sought to throw off the sexual hang-ups of their parents' generation along with their gray flannel suits.

Gay people had to learn about free love from heterosexuals? But I thought they were supposed to be corrupting us!

As a sexual lifestyle experiment, that failed pretty miserably, the greatest proof being that the affluent and educated children (and grandchildren) of the baby boomers have reembraced bourgeois notions of marriage as an essential part of life. Sadly, it's the have-nots who are now struggling as marriage is increasingly seen as an unaffordable luxury. The irony is that such bourgeois values — monogamy, hard work, etc. — are the best guarantors of success and happiness.

Goldberg can't claim that America, exhausted by the Great Orgy of 1990, has fallen in love with marriage all over again -- in part because marriage rates among young people have actually dropped. So he falls back on the standard rightwing idea that getting hitched makes you wealthy, leaving us to wonder why the poor haven't caught on to this money-making secret and how a bunch of rich people having weddings constitutes a conservative social revival. Maybe getting married is the new Going Galt?

Getting back to the homosexuals, Goldberg explains how they lost their taste for free love:

Of course, AIDS played an obvious and tragic role in focusing attention on the downside of promiscuity. But even so, the sweeping embrace of bourgeois lifestyles by the gay community has been stunning.

To put it another way: Yeah, there was this virulent, sexually-trasmitted plague, but still and all, you gotta wonder why gay couples are nesting in front of the TV.

Nowhere is this more evident — and perhaps exaggerated — than in popular culture. Watch ABC's "Modern Family." The sitcom is supposed to be "subversive" in part because it features a gay couple with an adopted daughter from Asia...

I'll spare you the detailed explanation, but the upshot is, Americans like gays on the TV, which means something conservative, because everything does. Finally we get to DADT:

Or look at the decision to let gays openly serve in the military through the eyes of a principled hater of all things military. From that perspective, gays have just been co-opted by the Man. Meanwhile, the folks who used "don't ask, don't tell" as an excuse to keep the military from recruiting on campuses just saw their argument go up in flames.

For years gay people have been fighting for the right to serve openly in the military and conservatives have been fighting against them. This month Democrats finally got a handful of Republicans to go along with DADT repeal. But Goldberg has found in his imagination a "principled hater of all things military" who doesn't approve. Plus ROTC! It's a wonder Mitch McConnell and Jim DeMint didn't get in on the big win in the Senate.

Finally, on to the next frontier:

Personally, I have always felt that gay marriage was an inevitability, for good or ill (most likely both). I do not think that the arguments against gay marriage are all grounded in bigotry, and I find some of the arguments persuasive.

Remember this ringing endorsement when marriage equality hits 50 states and Goldberg is telling us that gay is the new Tea Party.

UPDATE. See also Zandar.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, announcing the The 10 Best Rightblogger Rants of 2010. But really, they're all winners.

A CHRISTMAS FUGACITY. Here I take a short Xmas break to call your attention to alphaDictionary's "The 100 Most Beautiful Words in English" (h/t Jay Rosen).

I didn't know some of these words, though of course in a few months I'll claim to have used them all in ordinary speech since I was nine. But the really nice thing about the list is that it includes many words we all know -- and yes, "umbrella" is a beautiful word, come to think of it.

There's a humbling aspect, too. I thought "mondegreen" was pretty exotic, but look at the Twitter results. Gasp! Am I like the rest, after all?

What did they miss? I'm very fond of cachexia, tremulous, termagant, and -- probably a good one to use here -- catachrestic. How about you?

UPDATE. Thanks to all contributors in comments, especially those who helped me fall in love all over again with homey old words like flange, kaput, and gonorrhea.

SERVICE ADVISORY. I have to do human-type stuff for Christmas, so I'll be off the grid a day or two. I hope you all enjoy this preposterous holiday in your own way. If you get a moment, can you tell me if there's any holiday TV special in history that's worse than the Family Ties Christmas Carol?

UPDATE. Oh...



Story here.

UPDATE 2. Commenter Matt T: "Man, I like Ellison a lot but I've decided to stop reading stories about what kind of raw cob he is." I understand. One of my favorite reading experiences this year was Harlan Ellison’s The City on the Edge of Forever, The Original Teleplay That Became The Classic Star Trek Episode, in which the great man tells us what a bunch of shits nearly everyone else involved with the episode was. I don't have it in front of me, but I recall a lot of "fasten your seat belts" and "we're going down the rabbit hole, people" type of admonitions.

UPDATE 3. New worst Christmas Special: Poliwood on How the Boomers Killed the Spirit of the Season. Lionel Chetwynd tells us how Boomers promote "cynical, cold views of the human condition" via subversive entertainments like Elf; also, "I just can't imagine George Soros bending his head and saying 'O God, thank you.'" And no musical numbers! Who greenlighted this thing?

SPITTING THE DIFFERENCE. So what had happened was:

• Net neutrality was advocated by, among others, Tim Berners-Lee, Steve Wozniak, OK Go, and the Obama Administration.
• Conservatives portray net neutrality as a power grab by Big Gummint on the pretext of fighting an "imaginary problem."
• The besieged FCC passes a compromise measure which many people find unsatisfactory, including key net neutrality supporters.
• Conservative opponents insist that even the compromise measure, "passed on a partisan 3-2 vote," is a power grab by Big Gummint, which message is picked up by the troops.

How Net Neutrality Lite will play out, I don't know (Dan Costa thinks it will be fine). But the way this has gone down is a good reminder that in the short term, compromises please almost nobody.

I don't recall much excitement about enthusiasm for* Don't Ask Don't Tell when Clinton came up with it as a compromise on what used to be called the Controversy over Gays in the Military. Yet here we are.

*UPDATE. Edited for clarity.

A CHRISTMAS MIRACLE. Nina Totenberg says her "forgive the expression – a Christmas party" comment was a joke and not an assault on Christmas, which you might have guessed. I learned this via Ole Perfesser Instapundit! His title spins it a little, but what the hell, I'll take my sugar plums where I can find them. Let us beat our War of Christmas swords into soccer balls.

BREAKING THE DETECTOR. Maybe it's the holiday season, but much of what I'm seeing on the internet today activates the flashing "BULLSHIT" sign in my head. This, from Jay Nordlinger at National Review, is three-alarm bullshit:

Some have said, “You just can’t find cards that say ‘Merry Christmas.’ It gets harder and harder.” I know. Kind of like trying to find products not made in China [senile ramblings]...

I gave up on the “Merry Christmas” front too, where cards are concerned. I just get a pretty card that says “Season’s Greetings” or “Whass Happenin’ on the Holidays?” or whatever. Life’s too short to hunt down “Merry Christmas.”

Bull fucking shit. I was just at a drugstore here in Harlem. There were plenty of goddamn Christmas cards. And this is in Manhattan, epicenter of liberal fascism -- in fact, the woman next to me at the card rack was devouring a fetus (as they do in Europe: out of a cone made from a newspaper, with mayonnaise), while on the sidewalk a bum was persecuting Christians with his mind-rays. Still had Christmas cards.

If you can't find Christmas cards in America, get a flashlight and a map and, while you're at it, look for your ass.

JUST A REMINDER: EVIL NETWORK IZ EVIL. Miss Heather of New York Shitty:

224,629 page views and counting. Impressive. Where’s my cut of the revenue you undoubtedly gained as a result of this, my hard work, Fox News?

Adam Klasfeld of Courthouse News:

Last Friday, Fox News ripped off my exclusive coverage of the trial of Army Capt. Bryant Williams, who was convicted of bribing and accepting kickbacks from military contractors in Iraq. The network passed my reportage off as its own through at least 13 affiliates from coast to coast.

To be more specific, one or more anonymous employees of a Fox affiliate lifted large portions of my coverage for their own story, sometimes using my exact phrasing and often reporting information that they could only have learned from me, without attribution or a byline.

Amazing what people can get away with when they're rich and draped in American flags.

READER MAILBAG. In my recent Voice column on DADT repeal, I got a little kick out of W. James Antle III, who likes neither gays in the military nor women in the military. Antle responds:

Roy Edroso, the Village Voice's tour guide to the conservative blogosphere, finds it odd that I think there were any problems associated with integrating women into the military. I guess he's never heard of fraternization, pregnancies, or sexual harassment, none of which were much in evidence in the days of the Women's Auxillary Corps.

I have, but I've never heard of our fighting men and women failing to Take The Hill because they were too distracted by baby-making, fornication, and unwanted advances. Oh, wait, is that what happened in Vietnam?

But here's what I find odd: that progressives instinctively like the idea of women killing and dying in war.

I've got a few kinks, but I assure you this is not one of them. Besides, if that were a "progressive" thing, wouldn't liberal Hollyweird have churned out dozens of bloody female war epics for our pornographic delectation by now?

(Oh please oh please oh please bring up G.I. Jane; this post needs more laughs.)

UPDATE. Mission Accomplished!

NUMBERS RACKET. The new Census numbers are here, and there are few surprises, though I have to admit it is a shock to see that California gained population (though not House seats) -- to hear conservatives speak of it, one would have expected most of its citizens to have emigrated to Galt's Gulch, in desperate search of bootstraps. But this is unfair -- all states except Michigan grew in population. I guess those 10 years of socialism weren't such a turn-off, after all.

In other news, statist strongholds like New York and Pennsylvania continued their long losing streaks in Congressional apportionment, while Texas picked up four seats, which is meaningless as they're going to secede. Washington state was the only House seat gainer among traditional communist strongholds.

We'll have to wait for more information to see whether the new citizens of the gainer states migrated from simple hamlets and villages to godless cities, or vice-versa. One thing's clear, though -- with 307.8 million residents on board, America will make a hell of a splash when it goes down.

UPDATE. Business Insider points out that most of Texas' growth comes from Hispanics or, as they're called down there, Messicans. This casts doubt of the reliability of these new residents as Republicans. On the other hand, whoever the present Texas voters are, they voted pretty Republican iast November. And anyway by the time the young ones have grown up, however full of Democratic notions from Austin and El Paso they may be, Texas will have reclaimed its nationhood and shipped all its Messicans off to Cali.

UPDATE 2. Commenter mds says the Permanent Reapportionment Act of 1929 has made the House of Representatives less representative than it might be. I notice that some conservatives have said they think the Act has outlived its usefulness, too. But given the current result, don't expect them to throw it on the raft of Constitutional changes they've been yelling for.

LITTLE THINGS MEAN A LOT. Nina Totenberg said on some TV talk show, "I was at – forgive the expression – a Christmas party at the Department of Justice and" etc, and The War on Christmas is again aflame, with every conservative and his brother denouncing Totenberg and allied forces ("NPR Liberals Are Now Openly Apologizing – Forgive the Expression – for Using the Word 'Christmas' On the Air [Video]").

Meanwhile GOP Presidential prospect Haley Barbour had some kind words for the Citizens Councils of the Old South (which he recalls as working against the Klan, though the record of such Councils is a little more mixed). Some conservatives wonder why people are making a big deal out of it. "If you pick out a sentence or a paragraph out of a fairly long article and harp on it, you can manipulate it," says Barbour's spokesman.

I think, among our many differences, we even have different ideas about what's trivial.

UPDATE 12/23: Totenberg responds.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP about the rightblogger response to DADT repeal. A lot of them are actually getting out of the way, which should be heartening, but I do find the downside to that, too. I'm so negative.

LIBERTARIANISM IN A NUTSHELL. Ronald Bailey at Reason:

Brendan O'Neill, the editor of spiked, writes a furious and fascinating book review asserting that some neo-Malthsuian progressives are valorizing homosexuality as eco-friendly. Why? Because gays and lesbians are less likely to have children and children despoil Mother Earth.

Evidence offered: An old Anthony Burgess novel, a self-evident joke by George Monbiot, and... Paul Ehrlich. Seriously.

Pop over to his source, and you find that innocuous statements like "in an overpopulated world, it would be a good thing if there were more homosexuality," and the existence of "Cats Not Brats" t-shirts, are taken as threats by some shadowy legion of homosexual supremacists. (Similarly, I suppose, those ladies' t-shirts that say "BITCH" are signaling devices for gynocrat terrorists.)

Bailey sums up:

O'Neill is not objecting to gay sex nor to choosing to have no children, but against polticizing those lifestyles as being morally superior on ecological grounds. The implied concern is that asserted moral superiority could be translated into coercive public policy.

Yeah, that's what we should be worried about: Coercive pro-gay policies.

It's like when they defend banks against their would-be regulators and the rich from paying more in taxes -- In fact, it's what libertarianism is all about: Bravely defending the powerful from persecuted minorities.

UPDATE. Thanks to commenter Jeffrey Kramer for doing the hard work:

If you're playing buzzword bingo, O'Neill's piece has the "chattering class" of the "liberal elite" (aka "elite elements," aka "our moral betters" aka "the supposedly liberal and tolerant") which breakfasts on "muesli" while "feverishly" contemplating overpopulation, encouraged by Psychology Today, which is "the bible" of the "medical elite" and also by "the upper echelons" of the gay movement, who are "their self-styled" representatives, while drawing back in horror at "the baby-making masses" and employing "trendy-sounding" arguments from ecology to help establish a "morality police."

Oh, well, when you put it that way...

THE CAPTAIN SIGNS OFF. RIP Don Van Vliet.



Blues, rock, punk -- whatever he did, was his.

UPDATE. I recall an appearance by the Captain on Letterman around the time Ice Cream for Crow was released. The Captain revealed that he lived in a trailer in the desert. "Do you like living in the desert?" asked Letterman. "No," said the Captain. Letterman asked why he stayed then. "I love the tension," he said. "The discipline." (See it here.) A very advanced mind.

You may also enjoy the Captain's 1983 blindfold test by Vanity Fair. (On PIL's "Swan Lake": "Go back to Germany! That beat that loud - that's the thing that makes the money." On Guitar Slim's "The Things That I Used To Do": "That would be a nice thing to dance to with a girl close in, and feel through her Dyna-Match wool hair as thick as Ticonderoga pencils.")

SO MUCH FOR THAT COMMUNIST FRONT GROUP, THE LEAGUE OF WOMEN VOTERS. Har:

CNN and Tea Party Express to host 2012 debate

CNN said Friday that it is joining forces with the Tea Party Express — a political action committee that played a key role in the 2010 midterm elections — to co-host a Republican presidential debate...

“Undecided voters turn to CNN to educate themselves during election cycles, so it is a natural fit for CNN to provide a platform for the diverse perspectives within the Republican Party, including those of the tea party movement,” CNN political director Sam Feist said in a statement. In it, he called Tea Party Express “a fascinating, diverse, grass-roots force that already has drastically changed the country’s political landscape.”

Feist added in an interview with POLITICO that CNN “reached out to other tea party groups” and would make an effort to include them in the debate.

This'll be a pip. For one thing, it will be the first debate where the "questions" are longer than the answers, as the former will no doubt consist of readings from speeches, letters to the editor, and old John Birch Society tracts, and the answers will all be "yes, sir."

Second, we'll get to see much more of Ron Paul, until Sarah Palin goes Manchurian Candidate on his ass. If we can't stop the country going down the drain, let's at least enjoy the patterns in the swirling.

CUI BONO. Kevin Drum, one of the more moderate voices out there, is disgustipated:

Democrats have some things they want to do, but in addition to satisfying their own interest groups they have to settle for third or fourth best policies because Republicans have simply decided they don't care about anything except tax cuts for the rich, hating gay people, and bennies for favored industries. In the middle of a massive recession they opposed a stimulus bill. In the aftermath of a financial crisis they opposed a financial reform bill. In the face of skyrocketing healthcare costs they demagogued modest cuts in Medicare spending. They spent months negotiating a spending bill — transparently, openly, via the ordinary committee process — and then killed it just because it would annoy Harry Reid. Global warming is a hoax, gay recruits will destroy the military, and creationism is an appropriate topic for high school biology classes...

On the other hand, as our leaders pass an enhanced tax relief bill that deprives the Treasury hundreds of billions of dollars, Republicans cut about eight billion dollars in earmarks, on which achievement they are able to brag about their seriousness. So it's not as if someone doesn't benefit from the situation.