THE DREAM IS OVER. Jonah Goldberg on the Tea Party, 2010:

But how, then, to explain the relative right-wing quiescence on Bush's watch and fiscal Puritanism on Obama's? No doubt partisanship plays a role. But partisanship only explains so much given that the tea partiers are clearly sincere about limited government and often quite fond of Republican-bashing. So here's an alternative explanation: Conservatives don't want to be fooled again....

Restoration and destruction are hardly synonymous terms or desires. And maybe that’s a better label for the tea parties: a political restoration movement, one that reflects our Constitution and the precepts of limited government...

Meanwhile, maybe [Brink] Lindsey is right that the language of conservatism needs to be reinvigorated with libertarianism, but it seems to me that’s exactly what the Tea Partiers he so disdains are busy doing...

Today Goldberg catches flak for dissing Ron Paul, responds:

But I never got the sense that, generally speaking, the tea partiers were definitive Ron Paul followers or fans. Among other things, I think the [Tea Party] folks I’ve met were generally more in favor of the military, the war on terror, and mainstream conservative foreign policy than anything that could be described as Paul-ism...

That Don't-Tread-On-Me stuff was fine for the midterms, but in the run-up to 2012 I guess the Tea Party is about electing Republicans and endless wars. Reset your bullshit detector accordingly.

A TRIP DOWN MEMORY LANE. My long-term readers may wonder what has become of some of my former favorite figures of fun in whose grills I am less up than once I was. Sometimes I wonder the same thing.

When I heard the Catholic Church has decided that the 60s made their priests fuck little boys, I was put in mind of that early adopter of the POV, Rod Dreher. He's brought me great joy over the years. For several months, though, Dreher hasn't been blogging much, apparently on the orders of his employers at the Templeton Foundation. He is still authorized to spread the Good News in major media, as with this Washington Post op-ed, in which he tells again how he removed his family from Catholicism and the "loosey-goosey moral teaching in Roman parishes" to the Orthodox Church, with its "seriousness about sin... the long liturgies, the frequent prayers, the intense fasts... Men love a challenge, and that’s exactly what Orthodoxy gives them."

This sounds like something from an artisanal tour of the World's Finest Religions, which suggests to me that Dreher is still the Crunchy connoisseur, judging morals by mouth-feel -- as does his slam on the "dreary parish life" found "often among the ethnically-oriented older parishes that see themselves as little more than the tribe at prayer." The locals don't know what they've got, it seems, and that's why they need professional converts like Dreher to curate the icons and bring in celebrity guest cantors.

So I wandered out to see what's been doing with Old Crunchy. I see he is on Twitter, addressing the sacred ("Progressives tear down taboos around sex, and are shocked when men turn into beasts") and the mundane ("I've been off sugar & starch for a month now -- never felt better").

He appears also to have become embroiled in a controversy over pseudonymous postings at an Orthodox site, which activity, it is suggested, runs afoul of his Templeton strictures. If there's anything to this -- and I'm not about to take the word of religious maniacs on anything -- I am in sympathy with Dreher here, not only because he's already been savaged on this account by the likes of Robert Stacy McCain and Dan Riehl, who hate him for his deviation from traditional wingnut doctrine. Dreher's inability to stop talking is to me his most charming feature, though (perhaps because) it leads him into buffoonery. And if his problem is that he couldn't refrain from blogging even after his masters cautioned him, that just endears him to me all the more.

While I was on this memory trip I looked in on James Lileks, another onetime alicublog mainstay. Along with his column and his Bleats, Lileks now contributes to Ricochet, a clearinghouse for high-toned wingnuttery. Lileks' dispatches there are what you would expect: Snarls at liberals, including those reportedly within the Muslim Brotherhood -- "does he believe," Lileks says of James Clapper, "these liberals won’t make common cause with the 'conservative' wing the moment they got their hands on all the levers?" And he's got a point -- isn't that what liberals do in the U.S. Congress?

So he remains politically engaged, but in short bursts. Back at the Bleat, from what I can see, he mostly leaves off national news and contents himself by explaining how "the rot" pervades his day-to-day life, often evinced by the insufficient helpfulness of clerks and laborers. Here's a recent example: A deliveryman wouldn't drag some fabric rolls into a store for some nice ladies.

“What a jerk,” one of them said. “I understand he can’t help for legal reasons, probably, but he was just so unpleasant.”

Stop and think about that: can’t help for legal reasons. The modern assumption: if you do anything outside the tightly defined parameters of your job, and something happens – say, you swing around an enormous roll of fabric and knock over a dressmaker’s dummy, and it’s scuffed – there will be LAW INVOLVED, or at least something in your file that recounts the regrettable consequences of your decision to cast heed to the breeze and help two women drag the stuff from the curb to the store. He couldn’t even take the items off the pallet.

I was waiting for the more specific Big Gummint corollary -- something about labor unions or OSHA, or how customer service has declined since FDR tried to pack the Supreme Court -- but then Lileks mutters:

Or he just didn’t want to. He didn’t have to and he didn’t want to.

Maybe that just makes it worse. This Bleat also contains Part III of Lileks' war with insolent bicycle shop employees: "Nothing like a bike shop to remind you how the economy would look if capitalism was abolished and pot legalized."

Now for the button, thanks to commenter Halloween Jack: A return visit to Annie Jacobsen, not a member of our regular cast past or present but a guest star, who in 2004 freaked out over Arabs on a plane, who turned out to be not terrorists as Jacobsen feared, but musicians. For this misapprehension and the notoriety it brought her, Jacobsen was rewarded with gigs at Pajamas Media and the Los Angeles Times.

Jacobsen is now promulgating a new terror-in-the-skies story, this one having to do with the Roswell UFO incident. Per Time:

What really crashed near Roswell, New Mexico in 1947, was not an alien ship, nor was it a weather balloon as previously speculated by many, according to Jacobsen. In fact, she says, it was a Soviet spy plane. And it was controlled by disfigured adolescents, two of whom survived the crash.

So those photogenic corpses weren't aliens after all -- they were Commies! Even better: They were mutants created by Nazi doctor Josef Mengele on Stalin's orders to look like aliens and thus throw America into turmoil. Son of a gun -- Jonah Goldberg was right!

NOBODY SAW ANYTHING. The people who pretend they never realized that David Mamet was a conservative are the same people who pretend they never realized that Arnold Schwarzenegger was a douchebag.

Best take, No More Mister Nice Blog's: "Arnold Turned Right-Wingers French."

To celebrate, here's Ahnuld's promo for Milton Friedman's "Free to Choose." H/t Halting Arkansas Liberals With Truth, which doesn't seem to realize how funny it is, and also has the transcript. Schwarzenegger's acting teacher must have told him, "when you talk about capitalism, think about tits."



UPDATE. It is also useful to remember that when conservatives fell in love with Arnoldism back in '03, they suddenly fell out of love with all those California constitutional oddities that help make the state hard to govern.

UPDATE 2. In comments, kia: "It's shocking. But I'm sure it was a lapse in judgment, and certainly a protracted one. I'm disposed to be forgiving, though I myself can't imagine being far enough out of my head to envision that strutting, swaggering dimwitted old plug-ugly as an object of desire."

I admire and am even slightly shamed by kia's Imitation of Christ. Schwarzenegger has escaped my sympathy because he is such a horrible bully, and I can't imagine him giving anyone else a break under similar or indeed any circumstances.

Still, the better angels of our natures deserve a hearing. I was more sympathetic toward Mark Sandford because I hadn't seen him preening for 30+ years. But these are celebrities; who really knows how they are off the screen and in the home, or behind their own closed eyes? Affairs of the heart are subtler than politics, and more interesting.

UPDATE 3. On yet another hand, there's no harm in enjoying this from the L.A. Times:

Parenting: How to talk to kids about Arnold Schwarzenegger's infidelity

I tried and failed to find similar stories about other celebrity cock-ups in their archives -- e.g. "How to explain to kids why the lady with the tatoos has no clothes on" -- but I understand Schwarzenegger is a bigger deal out there than elsewhere.

1. Talk about monogamy and sex: If you believe that monogamy is the key (or at least one key) to a happy relationship, now is the time to talk about what monogamy means, and the importance of honoring the commitments we make to our boyfriend, girlfriend or spouse.

If, however, yours is an open relationship, emphasize the importance of timely disclosure; if polyamorous, explain to the kids that all members of the triad must share housekeeping duties.

BURDEN OF 3-DREAMS. Cave of Forgotten Dreams is for sure a Werner Herzog joint and has much in common with other loopy Herzog non-fiction films from Fata Morgana to Bells from the Deep. But it is also a major 3-D event -- the showing I attended on a drizzly Monday evening was packed -- made in association with Arte France, the French Ministry of Culture, and the History Channel, and documents a world-class cultural treasure: The prehistoric paintings, mostly of animals, in the Chauvet Cave.

I doubt there was any official interference with Herzog's vision, or that he would tolerate any such interference. But the enormity of the subject and the exceptional circumstances of its filming have a definite impact on the movie. To an admirable extent, and in clever ways, Herzog works this into his plan; his narration refers frequently to the importance and rarity of access to the cave, and he often uses this to buy extra attention (as with his references to the difficulty of getting a camera positioned to record a stalactite decorated with a sexual image).

But there is no getting around the fact that the paintings themselves are the stars; they're incredible, not only because they remain in such good condition, but because they're so beautiful. If the film had been made by competent hacks it would still be worth attending just to see them. They're like Chagall, but infinitely simpler and more eloquent. Made when Neanderthals still roamed the earth, they have no trace of mannerism; they are what the painting of centuries built upon, and what the moderns tried to recapture; they are, no exaggeration, the very essence of art. It feels like a privilege just to look at a holographic representation of them.

What can even a master like Herzog do with this? Philosophize, with his camera or his words. This he does pretty well, in the manner we've come to expect. Herzog interviews a number of people associated with Chauvet, and it struck me as I watched that anyone he interviews, whatever the circumstance, inevitably becomes a Herzog character, much as anyone in a Bresson film becomes a Bresson character, natural in a slightly awkward way. Herzog follows a "Master Perfumer" who sniffs rocks for evidence of cave breezes; later we see the perfumer inside the cave, gaping and stretching to take advantage now that he has been put so close to the prize. Even the academics Herzog questions seem at least as interesting as what they have to tell us.

Herzog talks quite a bit about the mystery of the paintings, their creation, circumstances, preservation, and possible meanings. Sometimes it sticks and sometimes it doesn't. The subject is bigger than God's Angry Man, or even Timothy Treadwell, and tends to dwarf Herzog's observations. He gets a chance in the end to add a gloss by visiting a bizarre nature preserve enabled by the warm runoff waters of a nuclear power plant near the cave; there, albino alligators flourish. Herzog puts us eye level with these alligators -- inscrutable freaks, like the smoking monkey in Echoes of a Somber Empire -- and invites us to imagine them confronting the Chauvet paintings, and one another as "doppelganger mirrors." It's ludicrous and poetic, a pleasantly puzzling exhibit on our way out of the cave. But in the main: Come for the auteur, stay for the awesome.

HEAL THYSELF. December 2010: Psychotherapist and American Thinker columnist Robin of Berkeley says, "Just this week, I've been dealing with people undermining me whom I thought I could trust... With the sabotage going on in my life, last night I couldn't sleep a wink. I lay in bed disturbed, thinking of these people who want to harm me." These people remind her of America's "Enemies Within."

April 2011: Robin of Berkeley, who had been avoiding Facebook because "incessant Facebooking was turning many minds to mush (not to mention inciting riots and insurrection)," finally takes the plunge and (it appears) inadvertently turns on the Find Friends feature. This shows her people she isn't speaking to anymore ("We had an email fight about Obama, and I never heard from her again"), which gives her the "horrifying thought" that "at this very moment, dozens of people were learning that I was now on Facebook... the idea of all these humans flooding my life was more than I could bear."

Earlier this month: Robin of Berkeley tells us, "I've had contact with sociopaths, malignant narcissists, and felons. And yet I've rarely beheld anyone as slippery as Obama." The President reminds her of a doctor she once knew whose five children, she claims, all tried to kill themselves; "in some horrifyingly sadistic way, he seemed to enjoy his children's collapse."

There's a new Robin of Berkeley column. Here's the opening:

I'm pretty certain that a neighbor, Bill, stole something from me.

Her friend Kim assures her Bill isn't that kind (i.e., she "lashed out at me"). But Robin of Berkeley knows better. "Like Kim, I was fooled by Bill too at first," she tells us. "But then I noticed cracks in his shiny facade; I started realizing that while his outside looked good, there was nothing inside but trouble."

Robin of Berkeley doesn't tell us whether she ever found out for sure who stole the strawberries, but Bill reminds her of a doctor she met who also "seemed like a decent fellow" but has since, aha, been "arrested for sexual misconduct with male patients."

But did his colleagues miss some of the telltale signs that something was amiss? I can't say for sure, but my best guess would be yes.

Because in these situations, there are usually indicators that something isn't right, that someone isn't who he appears to be.

It's like those times when the police arrest a man who committed a heinous crime. When the neighbors are interviewed, they often comment that they had a sense that something was wrong, but couldn't put their finger on it: "There was just something about the man that I didn't trust."

It's a sixth sense, a gut reaction. It may take the form of queasiness when we're around the person or a sensation of being creeped out.

You see? Kim doesn't believe that Bill stole the strawberries. And Robin of Berkeley can't prove it. But her gut tells Robin of Berkeley she's right. And you know who Bill and the patient-abusing doctor remind her of? Barack Obama!

I can hardly wait to hear what happens next.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the activity in the GOP Presidential race last week, and how it's all good news for the next President of the United States, Herman Cain. One can see why that old operative Hugh Hewitt is feverishly trying to get Cain, as well as Ron Paul and Gary Johnson, out of future debates -- though guys like Hewitt were big fans of the Tea Party when it offered a brand refreshment that got the voters buying Republican again, they're not really into decentralization of power:

The seriousness of the fiscal crisis requires the GOP and its candidates to act seriously, and allowing marginal candidates to eat up time and distract from the enormous problems facing the country is not serious...

...Chairman Preibus should intervene to avoid more such non-events which trivialize the times in which we live by mistaking enthusiasm for seriousness.

Time to hand to reins back to the Very Serious People! The punters don't seem to be going for it, though, and now the VSPs find their stacked deck getting reshuffled. Tampa 2012 may look like an operatic production of Family Feud.

THE FIX IS IN. David Mamet has a new book, The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture, which Andrew Ferguson at the Weekly Standard says "marks the terminal point of a years-long conversion from left to right that Mamet-watchers (there are quite a few of these) have long suspected but hadn’t quite confirmed." Hadn't quite confirmed? Mamet's "Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal'" appeared in the Village Voice in 2008.

But that essay "was much milder than its title," insists Ferguson. "It was the work of a man in mid-conversion." (Mamet merely said, "I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind," called Thomas Sowell "our greatest contemporary philosopher," etc.) So never mind the high-level notice previously taken of Mamet's political journey; wait'll the libs find out he's really conservative now. Bet they'll be mad!

A hint of how this earth-shattering news might go down is seen in Ferguson's portrayal of Mamet's speech at Stanford, though it occurred "a couple of years ago." The speech contained denunciations of political correctness and "a full-throated defense of capitalism." Nonetheless, instead of ripping up the seats, "the students in Memorial Hall seemed mostly unperturbed," reports Ferguson. "The ripples of dissatisfaction issued from the older members of the crowd." Ripples of dissatisfaction! Also, some of the oldsters -- "the wives were in wraparound skirts and had hair shorter than their husbands’" -- walked out.

Boy, Mamet's in trouble now.

After reading The Secret Knowledge in galleys, the Fox News host and writer Greg Gutfeld invented the David Mamet Attack Countdown Clock, which “monitors the days until a once-glorified liberal artist is dismissed as an untalented buffoon.” Tick tock.

Concurring is Mark Steyn, who quotes himself on the topic; from Steyn's 2008 essay:

In The Village Voice the other week, the playwright David Mamet recently outed himself as a liberal apostate and revealed that he's begun reading conservative types like Milton Friedman and Paul Johnson. If he's wondering what he's in for a year or two down the line, here's how Newsweek's Jonathan Tepperman began his review this week of another literary leftie who wandered off the reservation...

Long story short, the political writer Tepperman gave Martin Amis' political book, The Second Plane, a negative review. There can be no possible explanation for this except payback for Amis' apostasy, just as there will be no other possible explanation for whatever brickbats Mamet may get after his book comes out.

Steyn's "year or two" timeline is a little off -- Mamet has since "'Brain-Dead'" had the star-studded Race on Broadway, which received mixed reviews, the slightly better-received film Redbelt, and some prominent revivals (including one of Boston Marriage which the New York Times recently puffed -- ah, if they only knew!). But we may expect someone to object to The Secret Knowledge, and this will be proof that the David Mamet Attack Countdown Clock has gone off.

Meanwhile Tony Kushner, the most obviously leftist playwright this side of Dario Fo, has just debuted a new play at the Public. This is from the review in (cue sinister music) the Times:

...few of these revelations feel surprising or particularly necessary. “Angels in America” established that Mr. Kushner is a great playwright. In “Guide” he registers mainly as a great conversationalist who keeps talking well after he has made his essential points.

Kushner got even worse at the Voice ("a high-mettled, frolicsome, intellectually challenging mess, certainly self-indulgent, but never drab" -- now there's a pull-quote!) and elsewhere.

What reason can there be for the liberal intelligentsia turning on their fair-haired boy? They must be laying the groundwork for the attack on Mamet; by denouncing Kushner, they're making it look as if their critics review works based on their merits, rather than on the orders of the liberal High Command!

Once you adopt the view that everything on God's green earth is about politics, so much becomes obvious.

UPDATE. Much discussion of Mamet's work in comments. Don't misunderstand: I'm a fan. And I've known since I saw and admired the first New York production, years ago, of Oleanna with Bill Macy and Rebecca Pidgeon that he ain't exactly Dalton Trumbo, as would anyone else who was paying attention. And yet he wasn't blackballed by the nobs then. The first London production of Oleanna was directed by Harold fucking Pinter! The notion that a man of Mamet's attainments suffers, or could suffer, appreciably from liberal persecution is beyond ridiculous.

SHORTER DENNIS PRAGER: This guy whose sister died on 9/11 pleads, in her name, for America to reach out and build better relations with Arab nations. I blame this reprehensible attitude on liberalism.

WELL, THAT WAS A LOT OF WORK just to scrub my last post! I don't see why they made the rest of you suffer as well. I mean, they told me I was endangering my loved ones with my meddlesome japes, but I never thought they'd take it this far.

I didn't keep a copy and the cache isn't showing up in Google, so I guess I'll just have to wait and see if the Google/Blogger guys actually restore the posts that disappeared during their fuck-up. If they don't, just remember: Conservatives bad, rap and graffiti good.

I must say, the outage had a much greater impact on my life than any bunch of crybaby millionaires threatening to go live in the desert until we kiss their asses. Maybe henceforth they should call it "Going Google."

UPDATE. Speaking of which, I have tried in the past to move this blog to WordPress, but their CMS won't accept my entire archive. I've tried to talk to them about it, but their customer service sucks dog dick. Why, it's almost as if they don't want my non-paying business! (*I take it back; see Update 2.)

*UPDATE 2. I have to apologize to WordPress; my issue seems to have been fixed. Now I gotta think about using it for real.

Oh, and Blogger came up too -- the deleted post is back, just below this one. And to all my friends who worried, whether seriously or in jest, that their brilliant comments had been memory-holed, you can see them here.

UPDATE 3. Ann Althouse's blog has been restored, but emptied of posts; at her alternate address she suggests conspiracy:

You know, I'm beginning to suspect that there's some behind-the-scenes campaign to report my blog as abusive. People who hate/fear the Althouse blog could make a loud noise to Google.

Back in 2004, 98% of Google employees gave money to Democrats.

Donald Douglas concurs -- though his own rightwing site, which is also on Blogger, is still up. Maybe the Google liberal hit-squad thought they'd just take out the ringleader and her followers would scatter and run.

I hope her full site is back soon. I could use the material.

UPDATE 4. Matthew Hoy tracks down a Google rep who was rude to Althouse. "Nitecruzr—whoever he is—has all the makings of a little thug," he writes, and links to a profile for nitecruzr@gmail.com, who represents himself as a computer enthusiast who likes Heinlein and Tom Clancy. Or is that just a front?

DEATH WISH, PART INFINITY. Heather Mac Donald was so pissed last month about the graffiti show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in L.A. that she wrote over 9000 words against it, distributed between a news article and something she described as a review but which did not address the actual art. Her schtick was mainly catching fatuous artists and dealers being fatuous, and museum personnel preventing her from tagging the exhibit ("'You can’t write on the wall,' another guard told me"); her point was that graffiti is destructive and illegal and linked to gang activity, and thus should not be celebrated in a museum.

At the press preview, guest curator Aaron Rose announced pompously: “This is history. This moment will go down in history as one of the most important moments in the 21st century.” Rose is probably wrong about that. But Art in the Streets will be remembered as a moment when Los Angeles’s constant and heroic battle against graffiti vandalism took a hard blow to the head.

There's also a lot of Broken Windows stuff about how graffiti causes crime, much in the way that marriage causes prosperity.

Though the exhibit seems to have drawn some graffiti to the museum's own neighborhood, it is hard to imagine that the city's criminal element will read about the show in Artforum and be inspired to redouble their tagging efforts. And Mac Donald admits that New York has massively rolled back graffiti despite affectionate, nostalgic tributes to the form that one now sees even in the local tabloids. Hell, we've had museum shows about graffiti, too, which were not followed by crime waves; I saw the 2005 "East Village USA" show at the New Museum, which had a graffiti component, and that didn't spur an uptick in urban hieroglyphics. Not everybody who likes Wild Style goes out defacing property as a result.

I mention this in relation to the complaints about Common performing at the White House. The McGuffin has been some of Common's lyrics, but I get the feeling the real wellspring of their outrage is that the Obamas know some rappers. This has been a popular schtick among the brethren going back to the 2008 campaign, and the inspiration for some of their iconography.

How about that: In 2011 we still have people flipping out about rap stars and old graffiti as if they have anything to do with anything. It makes about as much sense as complaining about punk rockers and slam dancing.

When Soundscan revealed just how massive hip-hop was with different kinds of people -- including both white and black consumers -- you'd think that game would have ended; many, many Americans enjoy this brand of entertainment, and if you think that's an indictment of our age, you're really obliged to go beyond the issue of rap's ghetto-crime-drug background and think about why those fantasies are popular with people of all races who hold down jobs and have families.

Similarly, if you think graffiti is such a menace that museums should avoid it lest they unleash an 80s urban hellscape revival, you ought to ask yourself why you think merely looking at graffiti with pleasure is so dangerous -- do you really believe it's like a virus that corrupts our morality with bright colors and balloon lettering? Or that citizens will leave the show thinking, "You know, I really feel like bombing a train, let's go steal some paint"?

To even consider the racial implications of the thing is just too depressing, so I'll just go with the slightly-less-depressing observation that conservatives seem to think that Escape from New York is still in theaters, Ice-T is still on the charts, and the word "culture" exists only as a prefix to the word "war."

UPDATE. Blogger's recent crisis broke the comments link -- you can see the original comments here.

HERE'S A LITTLE SOMETHING I did for Jonathan Russell's excellent Drunk & Unemployed site. I do like to get off the political topics sometimes, and onto the verities.

YOU KNOW WHO ELSE EXPEDITED PRESIDENTIAL APPOINTMENTS? It always pays to scan Instapundit, even with the B team in session. Ed Driscoll yells, "ALL HAIL AMERICAN CAESAR!" and following his link we hear:

As you will recall, the beginning of the end of liberty in Rome commenced with Augustus Caesar who compromised the authority of the Senate through the force of arms and basically the Senate became a facade. America is poised with this proposed bill, to morph immediately from a Republic into an empire with the privileged eunuchs of the Senate as window dressing and a dictator – the first American Caesar – at the country’s helm.

And leading the progressive charge is Chuck Schumer (D-NY). No big surprise there. Schumer is an elitist Marxist and a first class progressive who hates America almost as much as he loves power.

What in hell? Go look at the bill he's talking about; it appears to allow the President to appoint such exalted officials as the Assistant Secretary of Agriculture for Congressional Relations with less than usual interference from Congress. (My scan was not thorough, but I didn't notice Supreme Court Justices or Secretaries of State among the expedited appointments.) Not perhaps the best idea, but at a time in which Republicans block appointments regularly and, it seems, capriciously, understandable.

Yet the Caesar comparison has really caught on among the brethren: "Senate Seeks to Create Caesar?" "Senate Seeks to Create Caesar – S. 67," "Hail Caesar?" "Senate Seeks to Create Caesar," etc.

Oh well, at least they stopped calling Obama Hitler for a minute. And I must approve this new avatar of liberal fascism, on grounds of novelty at least, and hope they can take it further. Maybe when Obama steps up for Planned Parenthood, they can start calling him Caligula. He had something to do with sex, right? There was that movie with Malcolm McDowell.

These guys are very, very late to the Caesarism party.

UPDATE. Some of the belligerati show the usual obsession with "Obama’s string of Czars. Czars that he was supposed to downsize or get rid of. Czars, which in my personal viewpoint, were and still are illegal under the Constitution. But progressives never go away, they just shift..." I don't remember hearing stuff like this in the day of William Simon, Energy Czar under Tyrannus Nixon. But then, the Bircher element had not yet been mainstreamed.

UPDATE 2. The comments are extra terrific on this post -- thanks especially to all those who remember how the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire really worked, and to Angry Geometer, who reminds me that the weak Obama-Caesar imagery making the rounds totally misses the easy layup:

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the longer-term rightblogger reaction to the death of Osama Bin Laden. It's as you expect, but don't run away, there's still comedy gold in there. Also it's weird to see all the memes (politicizing the event, water burial bad, Islamic rites bad, where are the pics, etc) stacked up together, even if you just stick with the ones that have gained traction.

I will say that since Jason Mattera took over, Human Events seems to have gone absolutely batshit. Or am I misremembering how bad it was before?

ARTHUR LAURENTS, 1917-2011. He was both talented and lucky. He was writing plays back when daring themes could more easily get mounted on Broadway, had a bumpy but ultimately fortunate passage through the blacklist, and hooked up with geniuses to create West Side Story and Gypsy. From those two masterpieces we mainly remember the tunes and performances, but the stories and dialogue on which they hung are very important, and that was Laurents.

Tonight I particularly think of the book of West Side Story. It was stylized, as were the other elements, to distill the coarseness of street-talk into something more poetic and cleaner for the stage, but in so pleasing a way that no one could reasonably complain about it. The "womb to tomb, sperm to worm" yap is frankly ridiculous and was probably at least ten years out of date when it was written. But it sings; it has the feel if not the particulars of vernacular speech. Thus it remains listenable even in our much cruder age. (When Lou Reed updated it, he brought it closer to the speech patterns of our time, but did not improve upon its rhythm nor its pathos.)

And beyond the language, Laurents had the balls to retell the R&J story in a setting that few people even wanted to acknowledge, and to do it full-on, without stinting on the romantic gush. If you want to consider how tough that was, think of more coddled, contemporary attempts like O or the Ethan Hawke Hamlet. They had the advantage of doing something everyone would consider artistic and excuse when it failed, and in a constricted style that at least looked cool; Laurents and his comrades were flying blind onto a Broadway where the big hit was The Music Man. He and they risked fatal ridicule with their lushly-scored, dance-heavy gang-war slum musical. That they succeeded should tell us all something about reaching beyond the shoddy expectations of our own low, mean era.

DEBATE NIGHT. I only saw the last half, and by it I am put in mind of Yeats' Purgatory: "And she must animate that dead night not once but many times! Oh God," etc. What I saw was a travesty of a mockery of a sham. I should forebear to judge -- maybe Part 1 was like Plato's Symposium -- but the last 45 minutes were just sad. This being early innings, the Fox interlocutors had no fix to throw, and so grilled the candidates mercilessly on their Republican orthodoxy, leading either to abject surrender (like Pawlenty begging forgiveness for once supporting cap-and-trade) or bizarre, defensive self-promotion (Gary Johnson has been to the mountaintop! And if he won't get there with you, it's because you haven't passed the physical!).

As usual, Chris Wallace came hard at Ron Paul, who wonderfully endorsed getting gummint out of the heroin business. My admiration of Paul grows apace, and if I really had the courage of my convictions, I would back him to the bitter end, which would be about a year after he was elected President.

Republican crackpots and the Luntz instapoll love Herman Cain. Yes, Herman Cain! But don't relax yet, somebody will actually run for President in 2012 on the Republican line and, since we may all be living in our cars by then, he or she could win. My call, as usual, would be Sarah Palin. But it won't be any of these guys even if we go full Weimar.

WELL, SOMEONE'S HAVING FUN:

Prankster is pranking the Jane Corwin campaign in NY-26. The Atlantic finds a pixel trail leading to the Scott Walker prank-call guy, Ian Murphy, who is challenging Corwin on the Green Party line. I can't say whether I endorse him, but I will say that he has the right temperament for the job.

A SAD CASE. While most of her fellow wingnuts focus on how Obama proved his hatred of America by killing Bin Laden, alleged psychotherapy professional Robin of Berkeley still has the birth certificate in her teeth. Its taste lifts her to allegory!

Imagine this scenario: You're divorcing your spouse, but he or she refuses to release personal financial records. You both hire attorneys. In fact, your ex spends a substantial amount of money on legal fees to avoid the release of records. Your spouse enlists the help of officials and governors all over the country to keep the information well hidden.

And one day, years later, your ex releases the sought after documents. You scratch your head in wonderment. Why did this person hide them in the first place?

You consider the possibilities: maybe it's a power trip -- your former mate trying to yank your chain and control you. Perhaps your ex is being passive aggressive and punishing you. Or maybe your former spouse is trying to make you look bad and stupid. And it's also a possibility that even though your ex released paperwork, the documents aren't the real deal.

Since the explosive revelation that Obama's birth certificate is in fact a birth certificate, the investment of American citizens in the birther nonsense has shrunk to a tiny rump. So it's really as if the documents in question revealed that the plaintiff is not in fact married to the defendant, and that she has been wasting the court's time and will be escorted kicking and screaming from chambers by the bailiff.

Maybe Robin sees it all slipping away, as her fantasies about Obama have escalated:

Personally, I've thought long and hard about whether I've ever known anyone like him before. I've had contact with sociopaths, malignant narcissists, and felons. And yet I've rarely beheld anyone as slippery as Obama.

When I think of Obama, my mind drifts to a physician I once knew, a smooth-talking pillar of the community. And yet the most disturbing things were happening behind closed doors.

Each one of his five children, one by one, tried to commit suicide. Even as the children descended into madness, the doctor was cool as a cucumber. In some horrifyingly sadistic way, he seemed to enjoy his children's collapse.

In some ways, Obama reminds me of this physician because both are masters of disguise. While presenting pristine public images, they keep their real selves behind lock and key.

Well, he and the Missus are forcing Sasha and Malia to eat vegetables; surely there's a child abuse case to be made. Beadle, apprehend the Kenyan Pretender; Mrs. Robin of Berkeley Hussein Soetoro demands it!

THEY TRY, OH HOW THEY TRY. Ace O. Spades:

7 Minutes Vs. 16 Hours: How The Media Reports Delay

George Bush was relentlessly mocked for waiting seven minutes (actually waiting for his security detail to ready the exit and for his vehicle to be readied) before leaving the school he was visiting. He calmly finished reading My Pet Goat for the kids before going to his now-ready helicopter.

On the other hand, after Obama was told (most likely for the fifteenth time) that the CIA was really, really, really quite confident that Osama bin Ladin was at that compound in Abbottabad, he decided he needed to sleep on it.

Sixteen hours later (hours during which Osama might have fled-- bear in mind, his courier's name had just been outed by WikiLeaks), he made up his mind.

How does the media report this?

They report that, in stark contrast to his predecessor, Obama killed Bin Laden.

Further down, Mr. Spades shows why they're really paying him the big bucks:

If everyone including Jimmy Carter would have ordered this, then I'm afraid I don't see why President Made a Poopie should be so praised for doing what everyone else would have done. That is, why praise him for being ordinary?

Similarly, why do people cheer the achievements of pro athletes? If Mr. Spades had spent his younger days honing his athletic skills instead of lecturing his playmates on the evils of the Frankfurt School, he too might have been World Series MVP. Yet people act as if it's some big deal.

In a few days I expect Mr. Spades will be running fan fiction about President John Bolton giving the order to kill Bin Laden in a totally awesome way that transforms it from a boring administrative detail into something really heroic. It'll be like how Han Solo says "I know" to Princess Leia before they freeze him in carbonite -- the perfect reading, which you didn't realize until you saw a President you despise do it the wrong way.

IT'S NOT AN ANIMAL, IT'S AN ABORTION. I challenged Wonkette and their puckish redistrubution of the world's worst political videos a few weeks back. But this music video featuring Miley Cyrus -- whose honor I defended a few years back -- is beyond challenge, and perhaps even beyond the ability of mortal man to ken. It may be the worst cover of all time, not because of the pathetically unimaginative handling of the source material, but because it takes a song that cleverly inverted the idea of youth culture and almost mathematically re-inverts it so that it becomes the very thing it was meant to mock.

There are many good tunes that Cyrus and her hired guns could have defiled as badly, but if they had, the songs themselves would have emerged from the smoking ruins more or less intact. This performance actually destroys the song. I don't think I can even listen to the original anymore without remembering this version and vomiting. Were he alive and confronted with it, Lester Bangs would have spontaneously exploded into flying gobs of Romilar-soaked viscera. It makes me wish not only for my own death, but that of the planet, and that it could be hurled into the sun so no trace of this atrocity would remain to defile the universe. (h/t wwtdd.)



UPDATE. In comments, many say they've seen worse, and some offer proof. I have to admit, the Stone Roses Complete Stone Roses* version of "Love Will Tear Us Apart" offered by hells littlest angel is pretty weird:



It has the same obstinate deafness to the beauty of the original as the Cyrus cover. (The YouTube comments are lovely though: "WTF IS THIS COCKSWEAT ??") Now this Celine Dion/Anastacia version of "You Shook Me All Night Long" contributed by fish I didn't mind so much:



In fact, I think Celine Dion being a Bad Girl is just adorable. (I don't know this Anastacia person. Why is she dressed like Chewbacca's girlfriend?) I guess I'm more affected by the Cyrus version because it's Kurt Cobain, who meant a lot to me. Maybe if I had the same feeling for AC/DC and Joy Division these videos would disturb me more. As it is they just seem like strange choices rather than a genocidal campaign against art.

Oh, years ago I saw some TV profile of Raquel Welch featuring bits of her touring act. I wish a video were available of Rocky's version of "Born in the U.S.A." from that tour. Dancing butchly and bellowing, she was obviously trying to impersonate Springsteen, but looked and sounded more like Mammy Yokum.

All of the team's suggestions for Miley Cyrus' follow-up number are excellent.

*UPDATE 2. GeoX informs me that the Complete Stone Roses is not the Stone Roses at all, but a tribute band. With its own videos!

UPDATE 3. There are times when I wonder if I should have approached political writing seriously in my youth, but then I read Matthew Yglesias...

But even though I absolutely love Nirvana I’ve come to think that these particular kind of values that Cobain stood for were hideously wrongheaded. After all, Cobain literally killed himself. He wasn’t so much keeping it real and being authentic as he was a severely depressed heroin addict who really needed some help in life. A brilliant artist? Yes. But a horrible model of how to think about life. He ought to be thrilled that the songs he wrote continue to mean something to people and to be played.

...and thank God I didn't. It's probably just as well I didn't go to Harvard, either. Christ, what a Wally.

BONUS OUTTAKE. Since I had just about finished the Voice column I was working on when the OBL announcement required me to write another, I have posted the thing here. It's about the Obama birth certificate, Trump, the nerdprom and so on. Seems a world away from where we are now, but that will change, and who knows, these ridiculous things may again attain relevance. Some of the faithful are keeping hope alive and waiting for a signal to swing down from their survivalist treehouses and reenter the fray.