THE MANSION ON THE HILL. Kathryn J. Lopez gets one of those poetic patriot emails about how America has been plumb took over by folks what hain't got no right:

Imagine the Republic as a “mansion on the hill”.

The mansion was built with the blood of the current owners’ forefathers.

The heirs to the mansion, with no personal investment in the property, became complacent and lazy leaving the mansion for days and weeks at a time only to find increasing disrepair of the building and grounds when they returned from time to time.

The heirs spent more and more time away on hedonistic journeys.

Finally the heirs came home to find mansion occupied by squatters of all types from leftist politicians to pot smoking aging hippies & revolutionary cadres.

A small group of the former residents evicted (some of) the leftists politicians and retreated to discuss what to do next.

Some began to form groups to plan restoration of the property, others to evict remaining squatters, others to plan fumigation — most continued their hedonistic pursuits...

K-Lo sees this as a sign that people are "impatient" with her Republican buddies for not moving faster, and takes in stride the idea that "leftists politicians" come to power by squatting rather than by election, and must be removed (poetically, you understand) by "former residents" who own the house by right.

This is the thinking behind all the claims of Obama's illegitimacy, from plain birtherism to the more high-flown claims that Obama is an "alien" (again in the poetic sense). They worked it with Obama's Inauguration (where's the Bible?) and his appointment of Hillary Clinton to Secretary of State (no emoluments!), and every so often gin up another crisis of legitimacy in which an unremarkable Executive action is portrayed as the Thin End of the Wedge.

The punch line? When issues do come down the pike in which the President's Constitutional authority or lack of same bears discussion -- e.g. Libya -- what we get from conservatives is mostly self-serving bullshit. You really have to throw up your hands when the Cato Institute comes up with howlers like this:

It is probably naive to think that Congress would have blocked this war, but by exercising its atrophied war powers Congress at least might have caused the war to be waged with more wisdom and forethought.

Words to stir the soul! Well, I guess you can't get the yokels to the barricades with an anti-war pitch. So keep telling 'em about the mansion on the hill.

UPDATE. Lots of fun comments ("Ironically, this is also the story of the Playboy Mansion" -- Jay B). Some of you, though, have the impression that K-Lo wrote the email herself, which I hope you didn't get from me. Then again, maybe she was just being modest, and wanted The People to get all the credit.

THE ELEPHANT, THE BLIND MAN SAID, IS VERY LIKE A COMMAND ECONOMY. Rising food prices nationwide, exacerbated by crop shortfalls (including a disastrous wheat failure in Russia), combine with high personnel costs to cut restauranteurs' margins in San Francisco, so the cost of dining out there is going up.

The Lonely Conservative knows how to interpret this: "Everywhere you look, we’re paying the price for central economic planning... If the environmentalists, unions, anarchists and other progressives get their way, we’ll be living in the dark ages." Curse these union thug schoolteachers and their high food prices!

Also, a special note to his readers:

On the bright side, you can sign up for daily deals through Groupon for discounts on eateries and plenty of other establishments in your area. These days you have to save a buck wherever you can.

**Note, if you sign up for Groupon through the link above I will receive a small referral fee. But I do recommend it. We recently purchased lift tickets to a local ski mountain for half price...

Well, it's more dignified than Goldline

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about Donald Trump's Presidential-slash-guerrilla marketing campaign. It'd still be a gift that keeps on giving even without the birtherism, but fortunately our national descent into lunacy assures that we get the amusing add-ons, too. (Bonus track: Trump is telling people Bill Ayers wrote Dreams for My Father. Maybe for an encore he'll tell us he's heard the Michelle Obama Whitey tape.)

GRANTLAND RICE CAN REST EASY. National Review Online now has a sports blog. Here's something by Fred Schwarz:

You won’t see many cricket items in this blog, but yesterday’s India-Pakistan match, which India took by the narrow margin of 29 runs on its home pitch at Mohali (there, don’t I sound like I know what I’m talking about?), had geopolitical ramifications, as these two fierce rivals (in sport and everything else) completed the event peacefully and amicably, with the two nations’ prime ministers watching the action together. Predictably enough, the Obama administration has released a statement praising the match as a diplomatic breakthrough; soon, presumably, we can expect the president (who must be quietly mourning the loss by his beloved Pockystahn) to announce a global sports initiative aimed at building world peace through hitting, kicking, and throwing balls.

These people ruin everything they touch.

LOOK AWAY, LOOK AWAY. The Georgia Legislative Black Caucus is trying a new approach, at least so far as I know:

The Georgia Legislative Black Caucus filed a lawsuit Monday against the state of Georgia seeking to dissolve the city charters of Dunwoody, Sandy Springs, Johns Creek, Milton and Chattahoochee Hills. Further, the lawmakers, joined by civil rights leader the Rev. Joseph Lowery, aim to dash any hopes of a Milton County.

The lawsuit, filed in a North Georgia U.S. District Court Monday, claims that the state circumvented the normal legislative process and set aside its own criteria when creating the “super-majority white ” cities within Fulton and DeKalb counties. The result, it argues, is to dilute minority votes in those areas, violating the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution.

DeKalb's mostly black; Fulton's more mixed -- per Wikipedia:

The demographic make-up of Fulton County has changed considerably in recent decades. The northern portion of the county, a suburban, predominantly white area that is mostly Republican, is among the most affluent areas in the nation] The central and southern portion of the county, which includes the city of Atlanta and its core satellite cities to the south on the other hand, is predominantly African-American, overwhelmingly Democratic, and contains some of the poorest sections in the metropolitan area.

The new cities were all created since 2005, and are very white. At issue is whether the courts, which have ruled on traditional political redistricting under the Voting Rights Act, can also do so on the incorporation of new cities.

Let's see what the brethren have to say about it. Occidental Dissent:

A bunch of African-Americans (niggers) think the new Atlanta suburbs in Fulton and DeKalb counties are “too White” and have filed a frivolous lawsuit against the State of Georgia in federal court to revoke their city charters.

The African-American plaintiffs claim their “voting rights” are being violated, not because Bull Connor or the Klan is stopping them from voting, but solely because they are outnumbered by racially aware, White conservatives who understand the politically incorrect connections between “diversity,” crime, and fiscal irresponsibility in Fulton County...

No one in their right fucking mind wants to live under the incompetence and corruption that comes with an African-American controlled city government. While niggers aren’t exactly zombies, they have overrun Atlanta in much the same way. They also have reinforcements coming from up North.

Up next:

JEW-AMERICAN GOVERNMENT INCITES NEGROES TO ERADICATE WHITES IN GEORGIA

But let's not judge the issue on these fringe figures. Let's look at what mainstream rightblog Jammie Wearing Fool, frequently linked at Memeorandum, has to say about it:

Black Legislatures File Lawsuit To Disband Majority White Cities

No, that headline is not wrong. Now I don't want you folks in New England or the Midwest getting too excited just yet. This sort of thing can only happen in the south because of the most onerous piece of legislation ever passed, which is used until this day to keep whitey in his place, called the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

By the time it filters up to Ole Perfesser Instapundit and the other big-timers, of course, it'll be about "hypocrisy" or some shit.

JUST SO LONG AS YOU SPELL THE NAME RIGHT. I guess the big news is Bill Maher working blue. Here are some of the rave reviews, accent on the rave:

"Bill Maher doubles down — calls Sarah Palin the ‘c’ word," breathlessly reports The Daily Caller. "It’s a liberal favorite and they are nothing if not predictable," says Lori Ziganto. "Foul mouthed name calling from the LEFT," hollers Flap's Blog. "Bill Maher, Turd Merchant extraordinaire," says the self-unaware Underground Conservative, "is all yours, members of the Hate Left. You own him." "Always interesting when people struggling for acceptance and tolerance are so flippant about the trashing of others," says Howard Portnoy of a positive review of the performance. Some of the brethren call for Maher to be beaten up.

Glynnis MacNicol is on the right track for a while: "Sounds like a typical comedy show, which obviously is not to say it's okay, simply that comedy shows are frequently raunchy, offensive, and in bad taste." But then: "It's not like there's a lack of substantial ways in which to criticize (and mock) Palin." It seems she, like the rest of them, believes a comedy act should be like Meet The Press.

I guess they've somehow managed to miss Richard Pryor, or they'd be posting bleeped-out videos of him and complaining about Obama's reverse racism.

THE LIBYA SPEECH. Obama made his case for intervention, and along with Juan Cole's it looks pretty good. But I still respectfully dissent.

Though the differences between this action and the Iraq invasion are obvious, so is at least one similarity: The likelihood that, however much we tout the handoff to our allies, we will remain involved in Libya for years. Bosnia is the more positive example, and Obama hinted that Libya, tucked between two nascent democracies, would go similarly. This is a fond hope, as the region remains volatile, and I fear the new Libyan government will have need of our "intelligence, logistical support, search and rescue assistance, and capabilities to jam regime communications" -- and some other things that went unmentioned this evening -- for a long time to come. And under the circumstance I don't see how we could refuse.

I do see the benefit in our involvement, and appreciate Obama's kinder-gentler model of support for home-brewed revolutions as opposed to the Orwellian "Your enemy is not surrounding your country, your enemy is ruling your country" approach of Bush and the neo-cons. And it's certainly consonant with what Obama laid down in his Cairo speech. It'd be nice to get people on that side of the world thinking of us the way South Americans thought of us in the days of Simon Bolivar, rather than the way they thought of us in the days of Pinochet.

But for all its advantages, this approach still leads back to the same place we've been stuck for nine years -- and, seen a certain way, for much longer than that. I can believe Obama is very different from the imperialist Westerners who've been fucking over small states for generations, and still believe that the best way for him to show his difference is to stay out of their affairs insofar as possible. We don't have a great track record since World War II, and while Obama appears to think that the best way to fix that is to do foreign intervention right this time, I would prefer a cooling-off period. Always leave 'em wanting more.

The thing is on, anyway, and we'll see how it goes. Maybe it will turn out that "the values that we hold so dear" can be transmitted by targeted bombing runs. I hope so. It would certainly be a new thing in my lifetime.

BACK ON THE CHAIN GANG. The passing of Joe Bageant at a relatively young age is a damn shame in any case, but it's sad for more than his fans that his work hasn't gotten the attention it deserves. AlterNet has several of his articles, any of which could be recommended, but I especially like the one about the sex offender in whose Kafkaesque post-release treatment Bageant found a case study of the efficiency and cruelty with which the state squeezes citizens whose rights no one will defend. It's least-of-my-brothers stuff in the manner of Nelson Algren from a self-proclaimed redneck who saw how inhuman our way of life has become, and how good we've gotten at fooling ourselves about it. I don't always agree with his conclusions, but he looked at the world as if he were part of it, a perspective conspicuously absent from the writings of most of the manicured sociopaths who get taken seriously these days.

UPDATE. Speaking of sociopaths, though I can't vouch for the condition of his nails. Sample: "Much like Adorno’s 'Authoritarian Personality' or Hofstadter’s 'Paranoid Style,' Bageantism is a faux-analysis, a make-believe political sociology..." This by way of explaining that Bageant didn't know what real people were like. Self-awareness is not McCain's strong suit. Neither is class.

ROLLING BLACKOUT. This weekend I told you that World Net Daily heard Bill Ayers making a blazingly obvious joke about writing Dreams for my Father and reported, in all seriousness, that it meant "Ayers admits (again) he wrote Obama bio." Though I doubt such people listen to me, I figured word would get around somehow, common sense would prevail, and that would be the end of that.

Guess what's on Memeorandum today?


From super-edumacated Jeff Godlstein to the shortbus commuters Weasel Zippers, nine out of 10 wingnuts agree: It's not a joke unless it's about Michael Moore being fat.

Sadder still is Freedom Eden, who seems to sense that something's amiss but won't say so, and goes for the bank shot in desperation ("Ayers had to know that bringing up the controversy at all was not something that would help Obama"). Tell the truth and shame the devil, FE.

Kudos to John Hawkins for gently telling them what the joke was and whom it was on.

UPDATE. I see at Right Wing Nut House that Goldstein is defending his position the way all great men do --

As someone who knows a thing or two about interpretation...

-- by asserting his credentials. Schoolly G continues:

...I don’t need John Hawkins or Rick Moran to point out Ayers’ tone of sarcasm. What I’m interested in is the rather pointed tone of the sarcasm - it’s too deliberate, and the question seems too staged - and suggesting that, while Ayers wants to joke it all away, he also very much wants credit. It’s who he is. It’s who they all are.

Goldstein should consider a new career as an Investigative Heckler. He can go around to comedy clubs and yell, "I KNOW WHY YOU SAID THAT, YOU'RE NOT FOOLING ANYBODY!"

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the conservative answer to Earth Hour, called Human Achievement Hour, in which the faithful blazed their lights and fired up their appliances to demonstrate opposition to environmentalism.

In a late entry I missed, Peter Karwowski declares victory:

I did notice that common sense is definitely taking hold.

Driving home at about 9:00, I didn't notice any lights dimmed along the stretch of Yonge Street between Richmond Hill and North York. In fact, when I got home at about 9:15, I took a spin around the block and lo and behold, lights were on everywhere. In fact, it seemed that some houses aside from mine had extra lights turned on to celebrate the occasion.

It was heartwarming.

At that point, I got home and turned out the lights. The point has been made.

My own neighbors were wearing jackets or coats outdoors today, which they must have meant as a sign of disbelief in the Global Warming Fraud. I mean, what else could it mean?

RENT SEEKING. Nicole Gelinas is still beating the drum for an end to rent stabilization in New York, but now she has a new angle -- stabilization advocates should give up because anti-stabilization has already won:

If you look at how much government-protected tenants pay, they’re not getting a break. Sixty-two percent of “rent-stabilized” households paid between $800 and $1,750 monthly in 2008. But 56.8% of vacant non-regulated apartments rented in the same range.

Man bites dog: What the pols and the market have done worked.

Former Gov. George Pataki allowed vacant apartments to escape regulation above $2,000, so between 1994 and 2009, nearly 100,000 units have become unregulated — spurring landlords to invest and compete for tenants. Government bureaucrats have been reasonable about allowing landlords to raise the rent on “stabilized” units, and landlords have maintained them better.

New York has what the pols have long said was their goal: a healthy market...

If the rules expired (with some exceptions for the elderly and poor), chances are things would remain much as they are today.

That is, the apartments still cost an arm and a leg to rent -- and you're much less likely to luck into a deal than you used to be -- but every so often your landlord might re-grout your shower tiles. Thanx, free market! You're every bit the miracle we expected.

So why is she even talking? I thought at first she just wanted to gloat at the rent-poor peons (this is a person, after all, who thinks New Yorkers don't pay enough to ride the subway). But it soon became clear she's in it for the class war:

New Yorkers have gotten tired of people who’ve gotten cheap apartments because of connections or luck...

No poll data cited, of course. This is conservative boilerplate on the order of their anti-union propaganda -- it's based the notion that, if someone else is getting a break, citizens ought to feel resentful and punitive, instead of asking why the system can't be fixed so that they could get similar breaks for themselves. Don't ask for more, in other words -- only ask that others get less.

And in case you were tempted to take her seriously:

In “mixed income” buildings, one person can pay $3,000 a month for a one-bedroom while the person down the hall pays $1,200, not because of appreciable differences in income but because of chance. If the market was allowed to do its job, that $1,200 may go up — but that $3,000 would also likely go down.

Does anyone on God's green earth believe that a landlord getting $3,000 a month in New York City is going to lower the rent, ever? Only if the city collapses -- which a few more years of this bullshit might accomplish.

YA GOTTA DUMB IT DOWN FOR THEM, BILL. You may remember the conservative notion that Bill Ayers ghost-wrote Dreams from My Father for Obama. Back in 2009, Ayers joked with a wingnut about the claim ("if you can prove it, we can split the royalties") -- which the wingnut took as an admission of guilt.

Like many such articles of faith, though its media moment in the sun has passed, the brethren still believe, and collect signs and portents they imagine support it. Now there's this joking exchange at the end of a recent Bill Ayers appearance:



From the transcript :

Ayers: I think [Dreams from My Father]... is quite good.

Question: Also, you just mentioned the Pentagon and Tomahawk …

Ayers: Did you know that I wrote it, incidentally?

Question: What's that?

Ayers: I wrote that book.

Several audience members: Yeah, we know that.

Question: You wrote that?

Ayers: Yeah, yeah. And if you help me prove it, I’ll split the royalties with you. Thank you very much.

Laughter and Applause

Guess that joke never gets old. I got that transcript, and the video, from World Net Daily. And guess what their headline for it is?

Ayers admits (again) he wrote Obama bio

It's too bad Ayers didn't think to say that if anyone believed he wrote the book, he had a bridge he'd like to sell them; he'd be a rich man now.

STAND UP AND CHEER. The makers of Atlas Shrugged: The Movie are soliciting video clips of fans saying "I am John Galt" so they can be "part of Atlas Shrugged history," i.e. marketing.

Having seen these entrants, I will say that if they scrapped the story and just strung together 90 minutes of these clips, I believe we could get it into some European festivals.

TEA PARTY POOPERS. At Big Whatever, Phillip Dennis tells those RINOs to shape up or ship out:

“What is it about the November election that Republican leadership doesn’t understand?” That is the first question I ask any Republican elected official who works in Washington. Each response from the numerous conservative Congressmen has been some variation of “they just don’t get it.” The [unnamed] Congressman who I met with said basically what I already knew, “House leadership has no plan to cut spending, repeal ObamaCare and is not conservative"...

I asked a few friends in November if they really believed John Boehner or Mitch McConnell would ever vote to defund or repeal ObamaCare. Each said “not a chance” at that time. So I give a final word of warning to the Republican leadership: The tea party is not your friend nor are you ours!

Meanwhile at National Review:

Tea Partiers Favor Romney

Mitt Romney captures 24 percent of the Tea Party vote, according to a Pew poll released yesterday. Mike Huckabee came in second...

Some revolution.

LANFORD WILSON, 1937-2011. He died yesterday morning. Wilson hadn't brought out a new play in years, but a revival of The Hot l Baltimore is now in previews at Steppenwolf in Chicago, and his most popular plays are still done regularly by resident theaters. They're crowd pleasers, and they come by their pleasing fairly. Wilson had a great gift for what you might call poetic realism if that term didn't sound so high-falutin'; his characters are grounded and believable even when (as often) they're eccentric, but their language is musically, painstakingly tuned. Any of them -- a stoner musician, a mountain man, an accountant, a prostitute -- might suddenly launch into an aria that will have you momentarily forgetting everything else, immersed in the power and beauty of the words.

Back in the late 70s I had some friends at the Circle Rep, and so got to see Fifth of July and Talley's Folly in their first incarnations, sometimes from the tiny lighting booth in the back. The Wilson play that knocked me out, though, was a little-known one-act called Brontosaurus, about a wealthy, worldly New York antique dealer who takes in her teenage nephew, who has become a suburban mystic-ascetic and a living rebuke to everything the dealer believes. I don't know if anyone can match the fire Jeff Daniels and Tanya Berezin brought to it, but someone ought to try.

UPDATE. The playwright Robert Patrick (Kennedy's Children, The Haunted Host) lived and worked with Wilson back in the day, and has a lovely video reminiscence here.

FORTUNATE IN HIS ENEMIES. In case you're wondering why Obama's doing well in polls despite the fact that America is a fucking mess, take a look at this report from Brian Bolduc at National Review's The Corner:

I just spoke with Michael Openshaw, a member of the North Texas Tea Party. Because I couldn’t fit his comments into my story, I thought I’d add them here. Like other tea partiers, Openshaw takes a pass on the constitutional question — “I’d leave that to constitutional lawyers” — but jumps at the chance to reprimand President Obama for his recent behavior: “You launch a war and go off to Rio?”

More interesting, however, were his comments on the prospect of a Tea Party protest of the Libya campaign. “To go out and publicly rally while our service people’s lives are on the line is not something we’re willing to do,” Openshaw says. “We respect them too much — not the so-called commander-in-chief. You will not see us out there waving signs.” For more tea partiers’ reactions to the military effort, see here.

Not everyone will recognize that "launch a war and go off to Rio" as part of the curious propaganda drive to present the President's recent diplomatic mission as a vacation. But the "so-called commander-in-chief" bit will certainly stir in the imaginations of many normal, middle-class Americans an image of a guy wearing a Napoleon hat and a strait-jacket.

Openshaw clearly can't help himself, but if you read The Corner regularly, you know that such news-like dispatches as Bolduc's are not so much journalism as company-newsletter copy -- they usually consist of a NR guy asking a prominent Republican why Obama sux, and the Republican going on about why Obama sux for several paragraphs, with the NR guy occasionally inserting stuff like, "Prominent Republican cautioned his fellow Republicans against over-confidence" and "Prominent Republican pointed to a recent Rasmussen poll..." etc.

That Bolduc or whoever thought Openshaw, an obvious crackpot, would make a good representative of a major conservative constituency goes a long way toward explaining why people are reluctant to turn on Obama.

UPDATE. Much argument in comments as to whether Obama in fact sux. To badly paraphrase an old saying, he's worse than anything except the current alternatives. But that may not be good enough in 2012; the traditional triangulation devices by which Democratic presidents survive may not function so well in a crap economy. Then all the Republican candidate will need is a convincing line of bullshit -- not a sure thing from what I've seen so far, but doable.

This is why I'm not counting out Palin, despite her current trench in the public's affection. If things stay/get bad enough, even her mindless optimism may convince a desperate nation to take a chance on her. Hell, a few years ago they voted for a black guy!

THE FORGOTTEN MAN. Libya is doing strange things to the brethren. Dan Riehl comes out against the neo-cons!

Below is how Kristol, Kagan and Co. began co-opting the Reagan legacy in 1996 for neo-conservatism. Call it human rights, or democracy, in some ways, the foreign policy of the neo-conservative below - one I doubt we can afford going forward - has more in common with today's Left as described by [Stanley] Kurtz, than it does with Reagan's. In a sense, some number of intellectuals from the Left broke with them years ago. Unfortunately, their intellectual tradition seems to have landed them in the very same place all these years later. Sure, the politics are different given the D vs R divide. But that's simply the window dressing. The foundational principle is inherently the same - and progressive - one could argue, its merely expressed differently purely for political purposes.

Guess what word doesn't appear once in the peroration? "Bush." Which makes sense, because when W was the neo-con of the hour, Riehl was writing stuff like this:

It's unfortunate, I don't think I've ever seen such a lack of leadership in Washington as we are seeing today. Senator's and Representatives who proudly stood up to take what now appears to have been only a purely political stand by supporting and voting for a war they evidently never had the courage to see through. But not Bush. Foremost among many, he seems almost alone now, determined to stay the course.

Mistakes? Misjudgments? Certainly, though if one takes history apart, his are no more significant, or costly than so many of nearly all Presidents who have gone before. His crime is not so much what he has done, but what he will not do - turn away from a pledge he made to America post 9-11.

Riehl's got the right idea. While guys like Victor Davis Hanson are tying themselves into knots trying to explain how Obama's bullshit is different from Bush's, Riehl's just making like Bush never existed. And why shouldn't he? His audience is just as eager to forget.

UPDATE. Riehl's Bush defenestration process can be observed in an earlier post:

If we want to invoke 20/20 hindsight as argument, the single greatest threat to America when Reagan entered office was the Soviet Union. When he left office, that huge and dangerous enemy was destroyed - a thing of the past. Whatever his reasoning, and I've never second guessed it before this, Bush can not say the same for al Qaeda. Instead of focusing more exclusively on Afghanistan and the Pakistan border area, he widened the war to Iraq. I supported it then and still do.

In other words, mistakes were made, and Riehl continues to endorse them while admitting they were mistakes. Because why not? It's not like anyone's paying attention, and if one day a Republican is dropping the bombs, Riehl can say he was for it both before and after he was against it.

GOOD NEWS FOR MODERN MAN. I have to thank Kia for turning my attention to "Defiant Chastity" by Andy Nowicki. The essay starts with fulminations against them sexed-up kids:

If many immigrants to the United States are drawn to the economic opportunities and political freedoms promised by this nation whose very existence rests on the premise of “liberty,” they soon find their children under the spell of a very different kind of “American dream”—one with an unsavory hip-hop soundtrack and a pornographic storyline. In this debased cultural environment, boys learn to be groping, grubby, hedonistic “pimps” and “playas,” and girls learn to be angry, agendized *feministas* and brazen whores, if not both.

I'm going to make T-shirts thus emblazoned: "A *feminista* in the faculty lounge, a brazen whore in the bedroom." I bet I could sell a lot at church socials.

Among the sexual dissenters, Nowicki finds "the 'contemporary Christian' scene" an "all-too-brittle and toothless cultural phenomenon... relentlessly and determinedly bland, cleansed of bad words and racy content, the fare favored by this crowd is usually harmless, shorn of all rough edges." And what's good clean fare without harm?

He is more sympathetic to "one subspecies of the burgeoning punk scene called 'straight edge'" -- Sorry, Ian, like many another pioneer you've been erased from history -- "which makes clean living -- no booze, no drugs, no sex -- a kind of mandatory creed." But though the sXe kids "bring a needed sharp and pointed aesthetic... they generally lack a metaphysical orientation for all of their behavioral prescriptions."

Now it's time for Nowicki's big reveal:

Does chastity stand a chance, when such wholesaling bulldozing of traditional notions of restraint is so ubiquitous? Strangely enough, it does, at least among one particular, and rapidly growing, demographic: Mormons.

Yes, laugh, but Napoleon Dynamite and "Killers frontman and songwriter Brendon Flowers" show the LDS has youth appeal. So: Should right-thinking young'ns line up and get right with Joe Smith?

Lest the reader misunderstand: I am not Mormon, and I’m certainly not advocating a mass conversion to the LDS creed as crucial to any kind of moral resurgence among youth. But I certainly think that the example of Mormondom as a vigorous culture with a transcendent vision which advocates a sexual morality greatly at odds with the free-for-all of mainstream culture represents a model worthy of being followed, regardless of one’s personal beliefs.

"A Catholic in the pews, a Mormon in the bedroom." We'll have a Cafe Press store full of these shirts yet.

Oh, coda:

Indeed, if a hearty culture of chastity and temperance is to re-emergence, it will likely have to take the form of what Catholic author Peter Kreeft has provocatively called an “ecumenical jihad,” uniting moral conservatives of all faith traditions, including atheists and agnostics, against the blight of permissiveness which reigns in America and the West generally today.

I'm guessing that in ecumenical jihad, you get the 72 virgins, but you can only take them to the movies and then shake hands goodnight.

This is the sort of thing that would make James Poulos take up laudanum.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about rightblogger reactions to the Libya adventure. Among the artifacts I didn't have time to get to: at Right Wing News, "The Real Reasons Behind Libya Attack: Petrobras, Soros, 3 Women, “New” U.N. Agenda." Oh, it's deep, people -- wheels within wheels!

Just before he flew to Brazil for his “vacation,” Obama had given permission for Brazil and Petrobras to install a first-ever large, underwater oil storage container in the Gulf of Mexico. Obama is in Brazil now attempting to curry favor for us to buy oil from Brazil. Is bombing Libya and interrupting oil drilling operations there going to improve George Soros’ investment in Petrobras? Is this what this is all about?

You may have been turned off by the author's characterization of Obama's diplomatic mission as a "vacation" (in quotes, though!), but ya gotta admit, making war on an oil-producing Arab nation is something no Republican president would do.

UPDATE. The themes I noticed remain viable, I see. "...our commander-in-chief is an effete vacillator who is pushed around by his female subordinates," says Mark Krikorian. And I must say, it's something to have Mark Steyn and Michael Potemra nodding along with the Daily Kos. If only it could last!

FERLIN HUSKY R.I.P. He specialized in the lush and lugubrious type of country music I grew up on. This one's prime to me. If you can resist lyrics like "Memories and martinis are mixed up every evening in a honky tonk on Losers' Avenue," I'm not sure we can be friends. Dallas Frazier and Arthur Leo Owens wrote it, and Husky gave it that fine maudlin sound.



UPDATE. A lot of complaints in comments that country ain't what it used to be. Sure, but as I noticed in Texas, there are a lot of players out there who are damn fine, though they rarely break nationally -- too much roughage, I expect. Someone is trying to introduce Hayes Carll into the national bloodstream (I even saw him on Letterman!) and more power to them. I would recommend "Drunken Poet's Dream" or "She Left Me for Jesus." (I also admire that he arrived at these acoustic sessions obviously hung over.) This man can serve in my beloved Country any time.