SHORTER COMMENTARY: Don't worry, subscribers, Rand Paul was just kidding about denying aid to Israel. Ask that more traditional voice of the Tea Party, Rev. John Hagee. It's still totally on for Israel to be the eternal Jewish homeland or the staging ground for the Apocalypse, depending on your preference.

(I know it's Alana Goodman, but this seems written by executive order.)

IN WHICH GALILEO PERSECUTES THE POPE. Long piece at National Review today by Discovery Institute-Intelligent Design-woo woo crackers guy David Klinghoffer about how science is persecuting Christians. Some of Klinghoffer's renderings of the Jesus people's ordeals at the hands of scientist-inquisitors are in conflict with those of other sources -- for example, he says Guillermo Gonzalez "was refused tenure, despite a spectacular research publication record, because of a book he co-authored arguing that life is no cosmic accident," but Wikipedia indicates that a.) no, he wasn't, b.) some critics found Gonzalez's pub record less than spectacular, and c.) the Discovery Institute has been working long and hard at a self-publicity campaign based on Gonzalez's case, in the course of which they have not been entirely scrupulous with the facts.

I feel about this the way I usually do when the sons and daughters of the Inquisition weep that they have been denied their First Amendment rights by schoolteachers. I also see that one of Klinghoffer's implied remedies is to defund the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health so that they can no longer feed a "universal compulsion to conform" with their corrupting research grants. Then, presumably, churches and corporations will take up the slack, and force those atheistic scientists to get working on better boner pills and the greater glory of God, as they should be.

The punchline comes from one of the many crybabies in the comments section:

Looks it's all a matter of who has political power, nothing else. Islam has it in droves and Christianity does not.

There actually are people in America who think Islam runs the country while Christianity cowers in alleys, yet have not been committed to asylums -- which is a good thing, as the Discovery Institute would make a persecution protest out of that, too.

UPDATE. Thanks, Tom M, for spelling help.

CONNECT THE DOTS, PEOPLE! A lot of people are laughing at Glenn Beck's latest teaching exhibition on the Snowball of Marxist-Islamist Death that will turn Western Europe into a caliphate. And it's pretty funny, with such great lines as "I have chalkboards full of questions" and "The entire Mediterranean is on fire!"

But it's a pity these mainstream lunacies steal so much of the spotlight from indie comers like National Review's Michael Walsh, who today tells us:

Anyway, when you look at the course of revolution in the modern era, it’s always the same-old same-old:

• Czar Nicky -- Kerensky -- Lenin
• Kaiser Willie -- Weimar Republic -- Hitler
• Shah Pahlavi -- Mr. Bani Sadr -- Khomeini

I was hoping next he'd go "Ferdinand Marcos -- Corazon Aquino -- NoyNoy Aquino." But then he'd have to explain how Aquino fils is a monster fit to stand with Lenin, Hitler and Khomeini. Instead Walsh gives us this:

Heck, we can even take it one step further:

• Gorbachev — Yeltsin — Putin

All hail the new king of the monsters! The thin end of the wedge: Putin sent his pal to take over the New York Nets*.

The rebellions sweeping across North Africa and into Jordan may in fact be the stuff of the neocon/Bushian fantasy that all peoples everywhere yearn to be free and that the answer to “Islam is the answer” is Jacksonian democracy. But color me skeptical.

Wow, things have sure changed at National Review since a Republican was President! Wonder why that is?

By the way, does the Obama administration’s use of that historically resonant catchphrase bother anyone besides me?

Pace Marx, maybe “farce” isn’t the right word.

I've broken with my usual style and implanted Walsh's links so you may see that he refers to the White House's admission of the protesters' "legitimate grievances," ties that to the use of the same phrase in a 2003 anti-Iraq-war article by Richard Falk at MERIP's Middle East Report (boy, is that a distant echo), and ends with a reference to -- Neville Chamberlain!

We may infer from this that Obama is down with the leftists who treasonously noticed how bogus the "neocon/Bushian fantasy" was before Michael Walsh did, leading to appeasement, leading to Hitler (or maybe Putin, or maybe NoyNoy).

Maybe the guy's bucking for a TV show.

*UPDATE. A commenter asks: "New Jersey Nets?" That ship has sailed, though they may be called the Brooklyn Nets instead. The city fathers and their new commie friend saw to that! Maybe Walsh should add to his taxonomy of tyrants, "LaGuardia -- Giuliani -- Bloomberg."

UPDATE 2. Some commenters are enjoying the game: "Coke -- New Coke -- Coke Zero," "Legwarmers -- Hammer pants -- Jeggings," "Nixon - Kissinger - Pol Pot," etc.

R.I.P. JOHN BARRY. The veteran film composer has died. His resume is extremely varied -- from the pseudo-medieval chants in The Lion in Winter to the witty score for The Wrong Box to the theme from Midnight Cowboy -- but today everyone's talking about his Bond movie scores. I recall, in my days as a young film nerd, having my attention directed past the jangly guitar theme to the moody orchestral stuff. One of my fellow nerds claimed the Thunderball score contained the greatest romantic music of the 20th Century. I wouldn't go that far, but it's remarkable how much feeling Barry could work into a big-budget assignment that required him to be acceptable to the masses, and which might have led other composers to offer something less than their best work, out of panic or contempt. I never get the feeling from Barry that he's faking it, even with cheese like Born Free. That's as much as you can demand from any popular artist and, most of the time, much more than you're likely to get.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the Egypt crisis and the fluctuations in rightblogger reactions to it. For a while they were going in a "Democracy! Whiskey! Sexy!" direction ('member that?), but now they're all very upset that the Bad Muslims are taking over, and blame Obama -- whom they were earlier deriding for not getting behind the groovy revolution fast enough -- for fucking up that great thing we had going with Mubarak. You can't win!

The switcheroo has led to some muddled responses. Ole Perfesser Instapundit, having no truck with consistency anyway, just sort of rambles, blurting out sour nothings like "This is a tough problem, but nothing Obama has done so far has inspired any confidence," and occasionally some good ol' country-lawyer revisioning:

Had we pushed the overthrow of tyrannical Arab regimes post-Iraq (as some unsuccessfully urged) there might have been a wave of truly democratic revolutions, with Iraq explicitly the model, leading to Egypt as the “prize.” We are now seeing, at least potentially, such a wave, but the U.S. has been propping up Mubarak — thanks, Joe! — the Saudis, and other despots since we lost our pro-democracy mojo in 2005 after the Cedar Revolution, for reasons that are still not entirely clear.

"Reasons that are still not entirely clear"! It's something to see Reynolds, who gets all the talking points when they're still wet from the mimeograph, stalling until the labs can cook up some clear reasons why Bush didn't just go swinging through the Middle East like Errol Flynn, dishing out democracy. I'm betting they'll have something to do with tyrants knowing that their best friends the Democrats were about to take over Congress, and nothing at all to do with America's finances.

For straight pinheadedness I direct you to Reliapundit, whose prediction for the fate of Mooslimland includes goodies like these:

El Baradei is probably not a jihadist, but he is most definitely a postmodern leftist who sees the USA and the West as evil - just as Obama's mentor at Columbia --- Edward Said --- did!...

And, he probably thinks he is using the Iranians to promote a postmodernist and socialist and UTOPIANIST world...

YES: the postmodernists think that the USA and Israel and fossil fuels are so very evil that getting rid of them would be worth destroying the present world economy and bringing on a totally global and viciously kinetic final battle to WW4.

Reliapundit also observes that "Iranians invented chess and are patient chess-players - patiently moving pieces in position over years," which probably occurred to him as he was trying to get one of the marbles from his Chinese Checkers out of his left nostril.

UPDATE. It's true, apparently -- there's nothing that can't be made worse by the contributions of Ross Douthat, whose new column tells us this:

The long-term consequences of a more populist and nationalistic Egypt might be better for the United States than the stasis of the Mubarak era, and the terrorism that it helped inspire. But then again they might be worse.

That's pretty much the summary, if you add "Arabs suck," as Douthat describes Nasser and Mubarak in monster-movie terms -- no matter what they did, it came out jihad! (I bet Ataturk was even worse.) Also anti-Americanism: "For many young Egyptians, restless amid political and economic stagnation, it’s been a short leap from hating their dictator to hating his patrons in the United States." The next day, Douthat's paper ran BBC poll results that show Egyptians like the U.S. a lot more since Obama was elected. Douthat, alas, will never improve; his faith in Jesus insulates him from any instructive feelings of humiliation.

YOU DIDN'T WANT THAT AMERICAN DREAM ANYWAY. Ack! Remember when Ann Althouse was pretending not to believe that America once had a middle class that included blue collar workers who were able to support their families on a single income? David Harsanyi (surely you remember him -- big libertarian!) goes her one better -- he sort of acknowledges that such a state of affairs existed, but insists it was horrible compared to the dynamic depression we're in now:

Really, was this country ever about being proud that your children ended up in the same plant you slaved in for 30 years? Even with a promise of a union pension and -- if you're lucky -- an "occasional" promotion, it sounds like a soul-crushing grind you'd want your offspring to escape, tout de suite.

Luckily, in the real world, history tells of a story filled with dynamic movements of people, class climbing, churning innovation, booms and busts, and widespread embrace of risk taking...

...ending in a collapse of the banking system due in large part to "churning innovation" in financial instruments. But that was just the wow finish -- for decades the middle class has self-evidently been squeezed until the entry fee, which had once just been a willingness to (to coin a phrase) work hard and play by the rules, became a college degree, a second income, a willingness to work round the clock and on holidays, and the normalization of the sort of financial manipulations in which, once upon a time, only brokers and con men engaged.

And that's for the lucky ones.

Go ahead, Dave -- go among the unemployed and marginally employed and ask them if they think a steady job is an intolerable oppression that they're fortunate to be rid of. Hell, ask the fully-employed people who're hanging onto solvency by their fingernails if they're enjoying your churningly innovative thrill-ride.

I've always assumed these people were raised in Skinner boxes, but I'm beginning to think they never got out of them.

EGYPT ME, EGYPT YOU. Al Jazeera, whose live feed you can see here (thanks Skinny John!), is reporting that Egyptian cops are beating up reporters. And they're on their way up to the Al Jazeera studios in Cairo. ("I will stay on the air as long as I can... until we are forced off the air.")


It's almost curfew time, so this should be interesting.

UPDATE. I'm so old I remember the Iranian Twitter revolution -- which achieved little concrete political change, though it did lead in an uptick to avatar modification -- so I'm not making any calls on this. I do notice that some conservatives are worried that the uprising, should it take, may not be to America's liking*. But the mainstream play for conservatives is to act enthusiastic about it, as they did with the Orange Revolution and the Cedar Revolution. Remember those? Many medals were given out then for supportive blogging! But the world seems not to have gotten much freer because of them.

UPDATE 2. State media reports Army's been ordered into the streets to put down the protests, says AJ. Just saw a bunch of protestors flip over an armored personnel carrier.

UPDATE 3. *At National Review, Michael Rubin really wants it both ways: "A reader points out that while Biden’s 'Mubarak is not a dictator' comment is risible, the vice president was correct that Mubarak should not step down, because what comes next — a Muslim Brotherhood dictatorship — could be worse." There's a man who knows how to spread his chips!

And would you believe it, the situation reminds Victor Davis Hanson of In the Valley of Elah, Redacted, and Stop Loss. And Michael Moore! It's become a major Hanson tic. He'll be applying these topics to world events at his rest home, assuming perhaps unfairly he's not in one already.

UPDATE 4. "GOOD NEWS," says Atlas Shrugs, "EGYPT ARRESTS MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD LEADERS." Apparently Mubarak is cleverly engineering just who will chase him out of the country and take over. Probably he's working with the most pro-democracy faction. What a patriot!

Good continuing coverage at Mother Jones.

SHORTER RADLEY BALKO. A Tennessee university fired a gay coach. Students protested, and the school agreed not to discriminate against gays in the unlikely event that they ever let one get by them again (the fired teacher didn't get her job back). This proves that the Civil Rights Act is useless and should be repealed.

UPDATE. In comments, Angry Geometer considers Balko's punchline -- "This is just one example. But it's a pretty compelling one" -- and says, "I'd hate to see this dude at the roulette table."

ONE BORN EVERY MINUTE. In and among her abortion ravings, The Anchoress always finds time to check out American Idol (in which she periodically pretends not to be interested). Lately the show's had segments about a singer who's taking care of his brain-damaged fiancee, and another who got knocked up and found out her baby was going to be disabled but had the baby anyway and loves her. The Anchoress reflects:

This is either the most cynical exploitation of human drama for the sake of ratings that we’ve ever seen, or it’s a downright providential celebration of the inherent worth of every human life (and the right to live the life one has, no matter what the challenges) and a far-reaching lesson in the transcendent power of love.

Guess which The Anchoress decides it is? (Bear in mind, this is American Idol she's talking about. After the mom sings, Jennifer Lopez says, "It brought tears to my eyes, and that's the first time that's happened today.")

Gotta tell you that after reading the filth of the utter disregard for humanity contained in the Grand Jury Report against Kermit Gosnell and his abortion clinic, these videos feel like pure gift.

This is mainly what you need to know about The Anchoress: She's always going on about how you can't trust the lamestream media/MSM, but she believes 110% in American Idol.

OSCAR CATCH-UP, PART 1. Black Swan. The Exorcist in tights. Instead of the struggle of God and the Devil, we have the struggle of the White and Black Swans driving our poor little girl unto her indignities. (The Swan fable is even spoken aloud for us at the beginning by the hilariously elevated ballet master with a vestigial sweater around his neck.) The film puts our ballerina Nina through much grisly (though hallucinated) physical trauma that compares nicely with Linda Blair's spinning head and crucificial hate-fuck. And since it's just about artsy people rather than a major religion, the dark forces get to win.

Darren Aronofsky, who likes to show the ugly-real's losing struggle with the seductive-unreal (Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler), goes heavy on the fantasy here. The showmanship is dazzling, but I think he lost his grounding. Fantasies are powerful when they heighten a real-life feeling shared by lots of people. But Nina's need to be perfect is neurotic rather than transcendent; while performers may project enough of their own experiences onto Black Swan to buy it (and that may be why it's so acclaimed), ordinary people will wonder why she didn't go to a doctor when she saw feathers growing out of her skin. I don't think they'd question, say, Lust for Life the same way, because corny as it is, there they can see and feel where the drive comes from.

The acting's fine. Natalie Portman's persistently childlike affect is perfect for Nina; Barbara Hershey's game for Monster Mommy; Mila Kunis and Vincent Cassel are appropriately ludicrous as the life-force and the cock-of-the-walk, respectively. And thanks so much, Winona Ryder, for the unexpected laughs.

The Fighter. The last half-hour threw me (mild spoiler), as I didn't see the turn-around coming. I mean, what suddenly made family love real to all these people, who had previously expressed it only with insults and jealous rages, and motivated them to come together? Christian Bale's so good that I almost believed his pitch to his brother's girlfriend Charlene to come back and make things right, but with everyone else it was like, "Wuh-okay, guess here's what we're doing now." It's really just something you have to buy to get to the feel-good ending.

Maybe David O. Russell thought this hey-ho-let's-go approach had worked so well in the beginning that it should work at the end. And in the rest of the film, it does work. We get thrown into the story so fast that momentum carries us. The brothers' relationship we at first have to take for granted and on faith, but over time we get little glimpses of how growing up together might have been for them: Dicky the crazy cut-up, Micky the quiet, industrious plodder -- and Mom the breeder/empire-builder who decided long ago that Dicky was going to be the ticket out for them all. We get enough information that by the time the relationships break, it doesn't have to be explosive -- it's just right, and thereby dramatic.

In this context the more conventionally-developed romance between Micky and Charlene takes on added weight: You get the feeling that family was just something that happened to Micky, while Charlene is part of his underdeveloped adult life of choices and forward movement. No wonder his family hates her -- and that Micky clings to her like a life-raft.

All the acting is terrific (though at one point I wanted to yell STOP IT, YOU'RE MAKING ME GRIND MY TEETH at Bale), but I give special props to Marky Mark, who also produced the picture. I saw an interview recently in the Hollywood Reporter with filmdom's biggest producers, and Wahlberg was in there. He was very, very focused on the job of making the picture the best and most successful it can be, no matter what. His performance in The Fighter is unshowy, even slightly withdrawn. Wahlberg's a pretty good actor, and he knows what a star needs to get over in a big picture; I get the feeling he took one for the team here. For some reason that really impresses me.

UPDATE. In comments, Jay B. demurs: "I thought Bale was overrated, actually. The clip of Dick and Mickey at the end shows what kind of juice the real guy had -- he was more charming in thirty seconds than Bale can ever be, and funnier too. Bale can act, but, for me, he can't connect. His eyes are empty." Hmm. I thought Bale was going full crackhead, which would make anyone a little opaque, but come to think of it I've never seen him do a lot of relating onscreen -- whenever I see him, all I can think is, "You like Huey Lewis and the News? Their early work was a little too new wave for my taste..." Anyone else?

ANNALS OF LIBERTARIANISM, PART 499,010. David Harsanyi has an article at Reason -- which, surely you know, is the nation's preeminent libertarian magazine -- about abortion. Synopsis: That guy who killed those babies in Philadelphia was just doing what all abortionists do, there are more late-term abortions than you think, "Does life really begin on the say-so of a single person—even the mother?" Nat Hentoff, Ron Paul, "41 percent of pregnancies in New York City were terminated with the destruction of the nascent human being," etc.

Since this is a libertarian magazine, Harsanyi drops little notes here and there to indicate he's not being pro-life exactly (those people are "folks I generally don't hang with," dude), he's just asking questions, such as "How many Americans instinctively turn to the pro-choice camp because pro-life proponents aggravate their secular sensibilities?" If you're inclined to answer, "Dunno -- how many people turn to the pro-life camp because Jesus told them to?" you're obviously beyond Harsanyi's reach. And that's too bad, because he's just trying to be reasonable:

It's unfortunate that abortion is a social issue, because it is science and reason that can turn the debate...

I'm certainly not under the delusion that every problem has an answer. But if the pro-life movement is going to win the hearts and minds of the rest of the nation, it's not going to need more God. It's going to need more reason.

Reexamine your premises, baby-killers -- like those global warming alarmists, you're the ones flying the face of science!

Reaching to clasp hands from the other side of the conservative-libertarian divide, National Review's chief theocon Kathryn J. Lopez talks about "Abortion as a Tea Party Issue":

Has our financial mess brought us to the brink of getting beyond the culture wars?

It’s a question that we might see play out on Capitol Hill in the coming months as the new majority seeks to make the late pro-life congressman Henry Hyde proud, by defunding Planned Parenthood and prohibiting taxpayer funding of abortion.

Lopez brings in an expert to explain that "forced payment for abortions is not just or even primarily about abortion but about experts in Washington instructing us about how we make decisions about sensitive matters." Yeah yeah, to-may-to, to-mah-to, so long as they can save those fetuses. Later on, there'll be another angle they can apply to abortions that, though privately funded, can still be shown to contradict the wishes of the Founding Fathers -- maybe because they were foisted on an unwilling America by activist judges or the "elites" or "ruling class" or whatever.

Remember all that "Tea Party Avoids Divisive Social Issues" stuff? Psych! All they had to do was remove abortion from the category of "social issues." The effect's still the same, though.

SOTU, SO WHAT. Well, that was nice and anodyne. I understand the necessity -- the House is now flooded with Republicans, and Obama doesn't want to give them any handles to grab. And he didn't; the yap about Sputnik sounded silly from him, but it sounds sillier coming from the amateur stand-up comedians of the right. The whole thing was evasive that way -- telling the Republicans that he wants to cut government too, har har, and talking about how "contentious and frustrating and messy as our democracy can sometimes be" and how we're all going to argue but finally come together as if it's a sitcom premise -- Democrats! Republicans! Always a-fussin' and a-feudin', but when Al Qaeda comes to dinner, they join forces!

At least he told them he wasn't going to compromise on universal health care coverage -- though that would be more impressive if the Democrats hadn't already compromised like mad in Congress before the bill was even passed. This Administration is a blessing after the last one, and will probably look like a Golden Age after the one that comes next (if we survive it), but that's grading on a ridiculously steep curve.

Also, I don't see what the point was in electing an anti-American socialist Kenyan if he's gonna talk so fucking much about what a great country this is.

UPDATE. Paul Ryan just ain't cutting it. Nobody gives a shit about his three children and their alleged sufferings under a budget deficit. "Stimulus spending spree" isn't a very cutting charge after the President's gooey-sweet speech. And the "picking winners and losers" stuff isn't going to play well with millions of people who've been losers too long and know just looking at this obvious, lacquer-haired factotum for great wealth that if he's the one to pick, they'll be hurled into an even lower circle of hell.

And oh my Lord, "Share our principles," "the wisdom of the Founders," etc. If this doesn't lead to an offering by the Franklin Mint, it's a waste of time. People voted for Republicans because they were desperate, not because they're in love with their Revolutionary War reenactor schtick. Why didn't he think to give them something tangible -- like a co-branded half-price promotion with Dunkin' Donuts? "Buy a dozen donuts and John Boehner treats you to coffee!" Idiots.

UPDATE 2. Crap, it's late, haven't they got that dizzy queen Michele Bachmann's head screwed on yet?.. Oh Jesus, it's a freakin' forum in which Bachmann is only the nuttiest participant? Why are the other participants all mumbly young dorks talking policy? It almost makes you miss the guys in tricorners and knee-britches waving flintlocks and yelling "WATER THE TREE OF LIBERTY!"

UPDATE 3. Commenters tell me Bachmann's got an actual rebuttal going on, but I don't get CNN and the web outlets aren't working. I'll take commenter dex's word for it: "like coming back from the bar at 2am to watch infomercials in hell."

UPDATE 3.5. National Review's Fartmaster General Jonah Goldberg says, "I was truly surprised by how lackluster and clichéd Obama’s speech was," as if his profession of surprise and use of every liar's favorite word, "truly," will convince anyone he's recording his genuine response. (No doubt he was out back of the shop during the speech, impressing the interns by operating Kinect with his butt.) The rest of his post is about as believable. Despite heavy competition at NatRev, Goldberg's only real challenger is Mona Charen:

“America’s standing has been restored.” Still sniping at George W.? This must be some kind of record for gracelessness.

They keep this awful Reagan-era relic in a closet nine months out of the year for a reason.

UPDATE 4. Ann Althouse:

[Quoting Obama] Many people watching tonight can probably remember a time when finding a good job meant showing up at a nearby factory or a business downtown. You didn’t always need a degree, and your competition was pretty much limited to your neighbors. If you worked hard, chances are you’d have a job for life, with a decent paycheck, good benefits, and the occasional promotion....

When was that true? Who is he talking about? I'm 60 and I don't remember that ever being true.

I can remember vividly the tract-house neighborhood I grew up in, filled with factory workers who supported families and houses and cars on single incomes. And as I got older I saw some of them retire from the companies they started working for as young people, and collect pensions; they didn't have to become greeters for Wal-Mart. Many middle-aged people in America recall such events. Maybe Professor Althouse doesn't remember because then, as now, she was inattentive to what was going on around her. Alternatively, maybe she's just full of shit.

UPDATE 5. Looks like Obama got high viewership and approval numbers for the State of the Union -- which explains the redoubled stridency of conservative attacks on the speech this morning.

Several commenters step up to say they, too, remember single-earner, blue-collar families who managed to achieve the American dream in pre-Reagan days. Clearly these are false memories, as everyone knows that bastard FDR not only prolonged the Depression but also left America broke and powerless after World War II, with most citizens living in hobo camps. Read Amity Shlaes' next book to learn all about it!

WINGNUTS OCCUPY THE OSCARS! (PART I) The Oscar nominations are out, and so are the rightwing Zhdanovites. Roger L. Simon:

“The King’s Speech” – a conservative movie – leads Oscar nominations

“The King’s Speech” – an unabashedly pro-royalty, anti-fascist film – has received the most Oscar nominations (12) for this year’s Academy Awards. Does this mean that the normally liberal Academy has had a political conversation to the Dark Side? No. It shows that good filmmaking can sometimes trump ideology.

I guess he thinks a liberal film, conversely, would be anti-royalty and pro-fascist. (Like what? The Patriot?) Here's the saddest bit:

But it may reveal more than that. Movie business liberalism is only skin deep. It is all very much a show for self-aggrandizement. Deep down, they respond like the rest of us. They just won’t admit it. Unless the movie’s as good as “The King’s Speech.”

So Hollyweird liberals aren't even really liberal -- they're just pretending to be, out of pridefulness; but their sham is exposed by the magic of the movies, as seen through the kaleidoscopic chemical cascades in the brain of Roger L. Simon. Hollywood ending!

I'm surprised to see that other conservatives have also rushed to claim The King's Speech. (Conservative Lesbian, for example, headlines her review "Traditional Values Take Center Stage." She should share her idea of traditional values with the House GOP leadership.)

I saw and reviewed The King's Speech, which I enjoyed despite some risible bits. And I must say, if you wanted to stick politics onto it, you could just as easily take this one the other way.

To begin with, isn't the whole preoccupation with a speech impediment anti-conservative? It's the sort of therapeutic subject liberals allegedly love -- an affliction other people neither share nor understand, leaving the sufferer isolated and moody until he is "healed" and brought into the sunshine of a supportive community. If that doesn't sound like a pitch for one of Michelle Obama's fascist fat camps, I don't know what does.

In the course of the movie we are sensitized to (or, to use the nomenclature, blessed with "awareness" of) the problem. Thus we learn to care about yet another type of victim, just as we learned from other movies and TV shows to care about victims of autism, Tourette's, brain damage, depression, etc. Isn't looking at people as victims what liberalism is supposed to be all about?

Even worse, the film has excited yet another special interest constituency -- stammerers have glommed onto the movie as a fund- and awareness-raising tool. Why, next there'll be a fucking ribbon for it. Then it'll be classified a disability, and the speech-impeded will get their own set-aside information and customer service desks where they can stutter and stammer to their hearts' content without people yelling for them to get on with it.

Admittedly the King overcomes his problem eventually, but look how he does it! He actually goes slinking off for help for his problem! Fancy a Live Free or Die Tea Partier going off to a therapist -- with taxpayer money, yet! Why, a real rough, tough conservative King would just beat up any subjects who dared be unimpressed with him. (Maybe that'd be the Schwarzenegger version: "S-s-s-s-metimes ze v-v-v-v-v-vords f-f-ail-me [Head butt].") His tutor turns out to be an actor -- you know what they are -- who refuses to call him Your Highness and talks to him about his feelings and his childhood. The therapist even encourages him to yell and swear as if he were in a Primal Box. By God, it's a wonder the King didn't wind up gay and soaking in hot tubs at Esalen. They call this conservative? It's just Rain Man with royals.

Plus their beloved Winston Churchill is presented as yet another Timothy Spall grotesque.

Okay, now I'm warmed up for the conservatives who say The Social Network is about the magic of entrepreneurism.

JUST A REMINDER. Happy March for Life day! This is from Kathryn J. Lopez' recent anti-abortion observance:

“Frankly I had thought that at the time [Roe v. Wade] was decided,” Ruth Bader Ginsburg told The New York Times Magazine, “there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.” Now that’s something that should raise alarms: She let the eugenics slip show...

I am showing you Lopez's transparently willful misrepresentation of what Ginsburg was talking about, which has nonetheless become wingnut gospel, to remind you that these people really do think it's murder, and therefore feel justified in doing anything to stop it. Lying's not their limit, either, but except for a couple of rogues, most of them have not yet seen Jesus drop the hanky for Killing Time.

But given the times we live in, how long do you figure that will last? I see RedState is looking for loopholes:

We will not endorse any candidate who will not reject the judicial usurpation of Roe v. Wade... The reason for this is simple: once before, our nation was forced to repudiate the Supreme Court with mass bloodshed. We remain steadfast in our belief that this will not be necessary again, but only if those committed to justice do not waiver or compromise, and send a clear and unmistakable signal to their elected officials of what must be necessary to earn our support.

But if they don't do like Erick Erickson says -- bang bang! all bets are off. Also interesting: The post's attempt to compare Roe to the Dred Scott decision:

And thus the Supreme Court drew a line and declared that those humans on the “person” side were entitled to the right to life, and those on the “non-person” side (as defined by the Court) were not. The combined effect of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton was that a line was drawn at physical location within a woman’s womb.

Amanda Marcotte says it best: "Anyone who calls a woman a 'physical location is a misogynist, full stop." (What, you mean your uterus isn't on foursquare?)

In case you sheeple aren't swayed by the moral crusade, Robert W. Patterson attempts an appeal to your pocketbook with "How Roe v. Wade aborted America's economy." Apparently before you killed them, Jesus had meant for all those unborn victims to create jobs! So this depression isn't Lehman Brothers' fault or even Obama's, it's William J. Brennan's.

Also, says Patterson, abortion "gutted America's exceptional marriage culture, which Adam Smith noted was vital to our economic prospects.... by sanctioning a new 'choice' for an unmarried pregnant woman, the Court also gave the unmarried father the choice to 'op out' of the previously unavoidable consequences of his actions: marriage and child support." Who knew the shotgun wedding industry was that important to America's economy? There's still hope, though, in my Xtranormal video campaign to convince paupers to "get hitched and grow rich." Fund me lavishly, wingnuts, and I will make it happen! (photo via.)

UPDATE. Some disagreement in comments as to whether these people do in point of fact believe what they're saying. "If they did," says zuzu, "they wouldn't be so squeamish about 1) making exceptions for rape and incest; and 2) holding women criminally responsible for murder." Plus, adds BigHank53, if you put a convicted abortion-seeker's "demonstrably fertile ass in jail, somewhere there will be an empty kitchen without her bare feet in it, and the baby Jesus will cry."

There is also much speculation as to what the antis are really motivated by: A desire to subjugate women, or a desire to subjugate poor women, or a desire to subjugate poor people in general -- take your pick, I can believe any of it. There are also references to race suicide loons like Mark Steyn, and BryanD lectures the ladies on their reproductive responsibilities. This thread has everything!

UPDATE 2. Just had to add this -- Kathryn J. Lopez tells us what she did Sunday evening:

Speaking on — I kid you not: “The Virgin Mary, Saint Monica, and Sarah Palin: Embracing a New Feminism” at Georgetown’s beautiful Cardinal O’Connor Conference on Life yesterday...

I think it's cute that she told us she wasn't kidding; I never would have doubted it for a second. I also wonder that she didn't include a martyr-saint in her Palin presentation -- maybe she thinks Palin herself fills the bill; Palin seems to think so -- but it makes sense that she did include the world's biggest nag.

TALL TALES. One of the big reasons why I really miss Norbizness's blog is his "The Left Is Attacking The City" posts, in which he chronicled the most egregious blanket statements made by conservatives about "The Left" -- a creature which, like the Loch Ness Monster, is known mainly by the descriptions of affrighted drunks. (e.g., Michelle Malkin's "How the left is faking an epidemic of hate crime." We are? I don't see it on my calendar.)

Had Norb not departed like Daniel "D-Day" Simpson for whereabouts unknown in 2008, what fun he might have had with National Review's Socialistfinder General Stanley Kurtz. It seems Glenn Beck's attacks on the aged and formerly obscure academic Frances Fox Piven have made her famous enough to receive death threats, and some people have complained about this -- which just shows, Kurtz cackles as sudden flashes of lightning illuminate his secret laboratory, that the The Left has made a "Strategic Blunder":

The hope of silencing Beck in the wake of Tucson has lured the left into a strategic blunder. They’ve decided to turn Piven into a martyr. Yet in doing so the left has tied itself to Piven’s wild writings and over-the-top radicalism... It’s not Beck who’s tarring the left with the Brush of Piven’s radicalism. They’re doing it to themselves.

Actually, comrades, I think where we went wrong was not knowing who the fuck Frances Fox Piven was in the first place. Had we been aware, we might have preemptively denounced her, or at least refrained from trying to defend her from the threats of patriotic mouth-bretahers, before Kurtz made his play. But our ignorance has left us open to attack as unwitting accomplices. Just being of (or in, or around, or in proximity to) The Left makes us responsible for her opinions, in much the same way that Republicans are responsible for the opinions of their fellow party member Ted Bundy.

(When and if Piven is assassinated, I predict the shooter will be non-partisan crazy. You can take that to the bunker!)

UPDATE. In comments, Xecky Gilchrist: "Who's this Piven? I thought we were all worshiping Ward Churchill, still."

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the Obama-Hu Jintao dog-and-pony-show at the White House. I took it light, as the event itself was not super-meaningful, rendering the rightblogger reaction to it a froth upon a froth. Still, it was fun -- I even managed to sneak in my own version of Ann Althouse's White House Flickr stream photoanalysis. (Someone really should put together a book of those. It'd be like Gerald Gardner's Who's In Charge Here?, only for schizophrenics.)

McMORE McMISERABLE McMEGAN. I hate to get back to her so soon, but commenter Josefina directed me to this American Public Media Marketplace program featuring Megan McArdle, where she said this about the U.S.-China economic relations:

McArdle: I think that, you know, as China has gotten more successful and more powerful, you're just naturally going to see both from American businessmen and American politicians more hostility towards China, and indeed more hostility from them to us [? - ed.] and I think the sort of corollary to that is that, you know, "the enemy of my enemy is my friend," and as people worry more about the fate of, you know, competition from businesses outside of the United States, they're going to feel a little friendlier toward the businesses inside the United States, and I think that may be part of what we're seeing.

Ummm… okay. Then:

Host: But let me ask you this though, Megan -- isn't it true that we're sort of in this whole mess together, the Chinese and us, and we can spout off rhetoric and we can have Congress saying this about currency valuations and all that but, fundamentally, they have to love us and we have to love them.

McArdle: Y'know, I think this is one of the hardest concepts to explain in economics, no matter how often I say to people, "Why are you upset that the Chinese want to give us excessively cheap goods?" This is like a free gift from them to us*. And we should be like, thank you, happy birthday!

[chortles all around]

Heidi Moore: We have nowhere to put them!

Host: That's right, we're running out of storage space.

McArdle: That's definitely true in my house!

[Chortle, chortle, chortle]

But people really don't see it that way. They see it as these greedy foreigners conspiring to come and take our jobs. They don't look at the other side, which is that, when the Chinese come in and they're more productive, they enable us to have more goods for less work. Politicians aren't good at explaining it, they're not even necessarily good at understanding it, and that's led to a lot of tension on both sides.

Amazing, American politicians are not good at explaining why Chinese slaves making goods for 10 cents an hour, and bringing those goods at a low tariff to U.S. markets, are good for a job-starved American economy! Those politicians must be pretty dense -- McMegan gets it done with funsies and libertarian charm.

That whole "both sides" thing keeps coming up; Moore says "if we really step back and look, we haven't been good to China, either, and they haven't been good to us…" and then talks about how "we are not always in the right." In other contexts, trying to see both sides in a dispute between the U.S. and an unfriendly foreign power gets you accused of treason. But it's different when you're talking about arrangements by which rich middlemen stand to gain from the diminished bargaining power of American workers.

And they call us rootless cosmopolitans!

UPDATE. Susan of Texas informs in comments that McArdle addresses this issue in her own comments section. The whole thing is priceless, but here are two excerpts:

We'll leave aside the notion that lifting Chinese and Indian workers out of dire poverty is a despicable and disloyal act.

Again the idea that we Americans are just being greedy with our copious jobs, and need to be taught to share! I thought McArdle had off-loaded this particular brand of bullshit to Katherine Mangu-Ward.

The firms that move often feel forced to move because of competition from firms in lower-wage areas where the taxes and regulations aren't so onerous.

Taxes and regulations! Somehow I knew it would come to that. If citizens chafe at being told by libertarians that they deserve to lose their jobs to the Chinese because, unlike us, the plucky Sinos have the moxie to work for a handful of rice and exemption from beatings, maybe they'll go for it if it's restated as the fault of Big Gummint.

*UPDATE 2. Fixed two mis-transcribed prepositions here which made McArdle look even worse than she was.

POLISHING THE TURD. You know the "He's My Friend" number from The Unsinkable Molly Brown? Molly's coarse Leadville pals invade a society party, and declare in a jes'-plain-folks way their affection for one another, and that they'll beat up anyone who messes with them ("If I should yell, 'They got me, Seamus,' he'll come chargin' in!"). The big gag comes near the end, when the music slows down and The Grand Duchess, who drips with jewels, speak-sings in a plummy aristocratic voice her own high-falutin' version of their refrain ("And if anyone dares to presume to display a disparaging frown, they'll have me to reckon with").

Similarly, after weeks of rowdy conservative argh-blargh about how everyone is persecutin' them for Tucson and how Charlie Krauthammer's gonna take 'em to the woodshed, the music grows quiet as Megan McArdle rises from her throne to ahem:

The right has a legitimate grievance here: every time there's some potential act of terrorism, it seems that people feel perfectly free to assume that it must have been a right wing lunatic who committed it. The same people who urged us not to rush to judgement after the Fort Hood shootings didn't see anything wrong with Bloomberg's speculation that the Times Square Bombing--a bombing actually committed by a Muslim terrorist wanna-be--was probably committed by a militia member. And now this.

I am in general impatient with the notion that "discrimination against (fat people, Christians, Catholics, gays, transvestites, etc.) is the last acceptable prejudice." As you can see by the list, there still seem to be a lot of acceptable prejudices left. But this rush to indict conservatives for every incident of mass violence where motives are unknown blah blah blah blah...

The post is 1,455 words long. (Well, I never said it was a show-stopper.) You will see, especially if you read the whole excruciating thing, that the rightwing persecution folk-tale has reached a new stage of development: It's not just about Tucson anymore, but about endless, unfair, blood-libelous attacks on peace-loving Republicans stretching backwards and forward to eternity -- proven, as is customary among her people, by a single casual comment by Michael Bloomberg. (If she'd gone on much longer she would have had to tell the one about how liberals use targets on maps too.)

McArdle's contribution adds no new facts and insights to the topic, but it is delivered with the wrinkle-nosed hauteur she traditionally affects when something excites her moral outrage (usually poor people getting away with something*), which puffs up her prose slightly more than usual. And it does appear under the stately banner of The Atlantic. It is, in other words, a fancy alternative for people who think there must be more to life than Kraft Macaroni & Cheese, and so reach for the Kraft Macaroni & Cheese Deluxe.

When that gets tiresome, there will be other versions to keep their resentment hot: Xtranormal videos, a Declaration Entertainment film, and perhaps a mini-series in the manner of Roots.

* Yes, she's still writing about "jingle mail" in 2011.

A DIFFERENT WORLD. Gallup:

Palin's 38% favorable rating is her lowest (by two percentage points) since she became a well-known political figure after the 2008 Republican national convention, and her 53% unfavorable rating is her worst by a point. Palin has been a central figure in the recent debate over whether political rhetoric -- including hers -- was partly behind the Tucson shootings. Last week, she responded to these allegations by posting a much-publicized video response on the Internet. The recent news has not done much to change Americans' opinions of Palin, though.

National Review:

A TALE OF TWO CITIES. Nicole Gelinas at The Corner:

All New Yorkers start out the Christmas season optimistically festooning their trees with the ornaments that, during the non-Christmas months, took up half the apartment in storage boxes.

When did everyone in New York start having Christmas trees? This December the town looked the same to me as it has at the end of any other year -- full of small, mostly treeless apartments. (Then again, most of my friends are godless; maybe among the Catholics of Bayside, tannenbaums are de rigueur.)*

Having thus established its vital importance, Gelinas gets after the city's tree-collection policies. At year's end, she says, Mr. and Mrs. EveryNewYorker know "the dark day is coming" when "they will have to lug their dry tree down their building hallway and into the elevator to deposit it on the sidewalk..." (Elevator?)

All good New Yorkers know, too, not to be late in this chore. There’s a deadline for Christmas-tree collection — and nobody wants to miss it. Green New Yorkers justify having bought a real tree with the knowledge that the city will recycle the trees, making them into mulch for our parks. If one misses the recycling deadline, though, one faces the shameful private realization that one’s tree will instead decay over eternity in a landfill.

I will add here that this whole idea of Gothamites as slavish environmentalists also contradicts my long experience. Those who do separate cans and bottles, for example, generally do so because the building management (which does not want to get fined for non-compliance) badgers them about it, not from love of Gaia. Neither do the overflowing trash cans and crap-strewn alleys in certain of our jurisdictions suggest eco-fascism.

I assume Gelinas is pitching this to the rubes who love to hear how we're all latte-sipping homosexual eco-freaks who secretly wish we were living in Oatmeal, Nebraska and eating at Sizzler.

Anyway there's been some slowness with Christmas tree trash collection. Here Gelinas really affects to get inside our heads:

Citizens know that they followed the rules, and that the city was supposed to have picked up the trees. They know, too, that the huge snowstorm was nearly a month ago — meaning that it should not be an excuse.

Yet the trees remain, collecting bits of tissue and trash in the cold. New Yorkers are now thinking as they walk past each small, forlorn pile, “Mr. Mayor, if you’re going to leave trees on the sidewalk, at least bring us fresh trees.”

Listen, New York is full of comedy writers -- surely we could come up with better material than that.

More important, people are thinking: Does this mean something? Why hasn’t Bloomberg picked up the trees? Why hasn’t anyone said anything about it? What else is going undone, unnoticed, sliding into chaos? Call it the pine-scent version of broken-windows policing.

You mean like in 2006? (That story is from The Sun; it appears the Christmas Tree Menace is a -- you should pardon the expression -- rightwing evergreen.)

The trees are a challenge, too, for Deputy Mayor Stephen Goldsmith... as the guy in charge of general operations, [Goldsmith] is also already New Yorkers’ face of failure on Sanitation’s abysmal snow-removal response to the December 26 blizzard. So when people see the trees, they think of Goldsmith. (“That’s the guy who didn’t know it was snowing — and now he’s left the trees out to rot.”)

So I'm getting a picture of a city full of craven tree-worshippers fretful that their trees won't be properly mulched, and who reflexively curse "Goldsmith" the way they used to curse Hitler or John V. Lindsay. I guess Gelinas and I live in different New Yorks.

*UPDATE. As commenter chuckling reminds me, a healthy percentage of New York's population is non-Christian. Maybe in the Gelinas version they're all getting Christmas trees in a desperate effort to assimilate.