AND IN CONCLUSION, FARRRT. At last night's GOP Tea Party debate, Michele Bachman attacked Rick Perry for immunizing them Texas gals agin HPV, and then claimed someone told her that the vaccine had made her little girl retarded.

The whole thing is a nightmare, but there's no nightmare that can't be made worse by Jonah Goldberg. His examination of the controversy is so stupid that through most of my reading of it I just lazily picked out examples of egregious mental flatulence, sort of like when kids play that license plate game on long drives:

I can’t make up my mind over this whole controversy. I think I’m torn because both sides are making good and bad arguments. [Farrt, "The book that I am doing my report on has many good things in it, and also many bad things, and now I have 73 words to go in this book report." ]

I think the charge of crony capitalism against Perry is valid generally and looks on target in this case in particular. [Farrrrt, I saw the Wall Street Journal had something about this but was too busy lining up Bon Bons on the sideboard and then pretending to be Pac-Man to read it, so I'll just "generally" accuse Perry of serious charges that "look on target."]

...I think his argument that he did this because he will always “support life” is dangerous hogwash. He mandated government inoculations against STDs because he’s a pro-lifer? It takes some pretty circuitous reasoning to get there [faarRRRrrRRRT, it's not like there's a direct link between HPV and cervical cancer, oops my intern just told me there is, well anyway government is the problem not the solution so how do you know government doesn't cause cancer huh farrrRRRRRrrrt.] and in the process you’ve conceded the case for pretty much every other kind of health-care intervention by the state up to and including Obamacare. [FARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRT VACCINATIONS ARE THE THIN END OF THE OBAMACARE WEDGE, HITLER VACCINATED EVERYBODY I AM PRETTY SURE FARRRRRRRRARARARARAARRRTsquirt] ...

My reverie was only interrupted by stupidities so gross they required a hard reset of my brain -- e.g., Goldberg's prescription regarding the claim of vaccine retardation ("I think Fox or some other news outlet should investigate"), and his closing:

I’ll keep noodling.

When I read that, I suddenly envisioned Goldberg lying belly-down on a conference room table, making flippers of his arms, and wriggling face-forward into a seven-pound gob of pasta salad while singing the theme music from Jaws. (Punchline: After he made it to the end of the table and stuck the belly-flop, Goldberg found he had left the lens cap on the camera. Farrt.)

UPDATE. All honor to commenters, with special thanks to Ray Stantz for his Shorter Jonah Goldberg: "I sense that soon the Party will denounce either Perry or Bachmann, but don't know which, so I am hedging my bets."

THE THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT MONDAY'S GOP TEA PARTY DEBATE are these:

1.) When Wolf Blitzer asked if, when an American who has no insurance gets very sick, "society should let him die," a cheer rose from the audience, and Ron Paul's response was that we should encourage, in some unnamed way, "alternative medicine."

2.) The big news from the debate had to do with government administration of an HPV vaccine, about which Michele Bachman and Rick Santorum gave Rick Perry -- Rick Perry! -- a hard time. None of these worthies will suffer from their opinions on the subject, because the Party has become so crazy that vaccination against a common disease is considered by Republicans to be a violation of their civil liberties.

3.) John Huntsman, Rick Perry, and Mitt Romney all bragged on their ability to create jobs in their home states, but were not asked how as President they would raise jobs across the nation instead of poaching them from one state to another. The sad fact is that under any Republican administration, jobs will be poached from jobholders whom the corporations who own the politicians think are making too much money, and given to the jobless at rates of pay just high enough to make them eligible for credit cards.

4.) Ron Paul said something sensible about our endless occupations of foreign countries, and Rick Santorum and the mouth-breathers in the audience treated him like Paul Krugman.

5.) Perry is a retard, and he may suffer from his imbecilic answers in tonight's debate, but he will probably go on to win the nomination from the retards who decide such things because he has the manner of a ex-jock car salesman who is fucking their wives and making them like it, and has expressed a willingness to kill people.

6.) This county is not merely fucked, it is ass-fucked. Pursue at a minimum dual citizenship.

UPDATE. In the (uniformly brilliant, as has become traditional) comments, Fats Durston is inspired by the candidates' views on public health to compose this colloquy:

"Maw, Maw! The city man with the sticker is here again. He says it'll keep away the Ague what took Dickie-Ray to God."

"Shoot him, Wilburn, then finish your Orange drank afore you get the Grippe."

Commenter Chad proposes a new Republican slogan: "Neither bread nor circuses." Just so. The candidates are in a remarkable position: the economy is in collapse, millions are going broke, and the GOP's shock troops are convinced that what Americans need is less government assistance. How much easier this makes things!

For all the Republican Reagan revival talk going on, none of these candidates need play the Great Communicator now (which, given their skills in that department, is a lucky thing for all concerned). The affirmative roar the Gomers gave when Blitzer asked if the sick man should die, like the one they gave during the last debate when Perry's inmate-killing record was mentioned, suggests that the candidates will need only stand there and look as cruel as possible while the Gomers themselves provide the rhetoric -- that is, the baleful cries of rage and bloodlust. Forget the Gettysburg Address, forget even "Tear down this wall"; the progress of the modern Republican Party is the progress from "You lie!" to "Let him die!"

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about rightbloggers' 9/11 reminiscences. They were downright nostalgic. Among the outtakes:

In a long essay, Roger Kimball informed us that "many illusions were challenged on September 11. One illusion concerns the fantasies of academic multiculturalists, so-called." Kimball named some of these multi-cultis, though he apparently couldn't think of many living ones: "Figures like Edward Said and Susan Sontag, Harold Pinter and Noam Chomsky continue to bay about the iniquity of America, the depredations of capitalism, and so on," said Kimball, but thanks to 9/11 and the great success of our subsequent wars, "the spurious brand of multiculturalism that encourages us to repudiate 'dead white European males' and insists that all cultures are of equal worth may finally be entering a terminal stage."

Kimball cited no evidence for this alleged turn toward monoculturalism, but he did let readers know how deep his contempt of multiculturalism ran: he reproduced a 1910 assessment of the typical native of Afghanistan as "unscrupulous in perjury, treacherous, vain and insatiable, passionate in vindictiveness... by breed and nature a bird of prey," and pronounced it "refreshingly frank." One wonders why America bothers to liberate such people.

Much of the essay's remainder was devoted to snarls against the liberal media et alia, who in Kimball's view "had been waiting for a repeat of Vietnam" in Iraq and Afghanistan, which hope "the Bush administration disobliged by giving them a conflict in which America was in the right and was winning." Though Kimball's reminiscences reach back to the Periclean Age, they stop well short of the present, in which Americans are sharply divided as to the efficacy of those wars. Maybe multiculturalism is making a comeback.

UPDATE. I tried insofar as possible to avoid all the 9/11 X ballyhoo, for a couple of reasons. First of all, with due respect to the very good writers who have tackled the subject, I have not read a blessed thing this month that has illuminated 9/11 -- as history, as event, as a social or political phenomenon or anything else that would make such an account worth reading.

People have said good things about New York magazine's Encyclopedia of 9/11, and it's a nice approach, but I mainly learned from it how information workers, some of whom were kids when the towers fell, have risen to the challenge of writing something linkworthy about 9/11. Irony is dead! No it's not! Well it sort of is and sort of isn't! And this is not to speak of other reminiscences that egregiously stink. ("Without 9/11... I would not have started blogging; I would not now be a journalist." As if the attacks weren't tragic enough!)

Between the people who wrote about it because they or their editors felt they ought to, and the people who wrote about it as a therapeutic exercise (and who seemed to think, as the people on reality TV shows do, that therapy works better if it's done in public), 9/11 X just dumped a more dross onto what was already a mountain of it.

Maybe you've seen something really good, but before you recommend it to me, please ask yourself: Is this just a clever bit of magazine prose for which the MacGuffin is 9/11? Basically if it isn't Voltaire on the Lisbon Earthquake I don't want it.

All honor, though, to alicublog commenters on the less exalted topic of my column and its subjects. Angry Geometer, for example, offers an unexpectedly convincing endorsement of Don Surber's Hibernian hate-on:

I think it's no coincidence that they're the only ethnicity, aside from American Indians and Vikings, that are deemed worthy of sports mascotdom. The reason is because they are terrifying. Besides, we saved their soda bread eating asses in Dubya Dubya Eye Eye, so Bono should shut up if he's not also going to mourn Chappaquiddick, the real Irish 9/11.

On a more meta note, Jeffrey Kramer observes, "Every time we toast the Founders for creating an open, tolerant society dedicated to equal protection under law, we gain five Freedom Points. When we collect fifty Freedom Points we can trade them in for a secret prison camp for torturing Muslims."

LIKE NOBLESSE OBLIGE, BUT WITHOUT THE GENEROSITY. George Will no longer cares whether anyone is listening except other wingnuts, so he celebrates aloud at the Washington Post that the more vicious sort of glibertarians are into "a robust new defense of a 1905 Supreme Court decision that liberals have long reviled," the Lochner decision:

An 1895 New York law limited bakery employees to working 10 hours a day and 60 hours a week. Ostensibly, this was health and safety legislation; actually, it was rent-seeking by large, unionized bakeries and the unions. Corporate bakeries supported the legislation, which burdened their small, family-owned competitors. The bakers union hoped to suppress the small, non-unionized bakeries that depended on flexible work schedules.

Lochner put a stop to that, and to many other worker-protection laws, which is why Will has a boner for it.

Lochnerism suffered many reversals during the New Deal era, which Will mourns, and he hopes we will join him in cheering its revival and the demise of "progressivism’s statism and paternalism."

But the average person reading Will's column probably won't see it that way; he'll probably see "10 hours a day, 60 hours a week," and recognize that it's just the sort of thing bosses love, because it can be used to whip their workers unto the ever-accelerating productivity on which 21st-Century profit margins depend.

Will's readers may also intuit that Lochnerism will be the airy, "freedom"-tinted justification they will hear when they protest being made to work 60 hours or more (or having their hours cut till they can't live on what they pay), or forced to sleep in tents in some remote location, or to buy certain needed items only from the company store, or whatever other outrages America's coming neo-feudal age will force upon them. Because in a depression and an era of eroding entitlements, "freedom of contract" won't mean much more than the freedom to starve.

Lochner cheerleader David Bernstein is already giving such justifications:

Of course, the Supreme Court did invalidate federal laws attempting to adopt national child labor rules, though these cases were decided on federalism grounds, not freedom of contract grounds. One could almost forgive various academics for confusing federalism concerns with liberty of contract concerns...

You can just hear the pedantic sneer: Pish, little man, you're confusing Tweedledeeism with Tweedledumism! But then what do you know of the law? Now run along and work until you collapse into the gears of your machine, secure in the knowledge that legal scholars have vetted your misery.

UPDATE. From comments, gil mann: "I keep waiting for the Washington Post to change the name of that section from 'Opinions' to 'Modest Proposals.'"

SHORTER ELIZABETH SCALIA: It's awfully sinful of this dying suffering atheist writer to want to go out "sitting in a chair in my own garden with a glass of brandy in my hand and Thomas Tallis on the iPod." But maybe if he gets feeble-minded enough we can put a tube down his throat and bring him to Jesus.

UPDATE. In comments Doc Amazing observes: "From Pratchett to Schiavo: the Anchoress's Reign of Terry."

UPDATE 2. It's late, but MR Bill's reflections in comments on some terminally ill people he's known are well worth reading.

DREHERMANIA! I love Nancy Nall but I'm not sure I can ever forgive her for notifying me, in a giddy and openly baiting note, that Rod Dreher is blogging regularly again, this time at The American Conservative. It's like having a huge mosquito you thought you were rid of in October find its way back into your house in February.

Oh, I'm just kidding. When Dreher seemed to be under some kind of interdiction by his masters at the Templeton Foundation, though there were plenty of other nuts to occupy my attention, I found I was missing Dreher's particular blend of Christian viciousness and modish epicureanism, like Seth Pecksniff in a Whole Foods apron. When I found he'd been returning to circulation I was actually pleased.

The new blog may be too much of a good thing, though. He's been posting up a storm. In one item he brags on the weight he's lost since escaping the black-robed Da Vinci Code harriers of Templeton -- well, actually he doesn't mention Templeton, he just reports that

...my wife signed the family up for a YMCA membership so the kids could have swimming lessons and a pool to play in for the summer. She’s been nagging me nagging me for years to exercise for my health, but I’ve never done it. But I’d just bought an iPad2, and decided maybe I could stand the crushing boredom of exercise if I sat on the recumbent elliptical trainer and watched “30 Rock” on Netflix streaming.

Thus nagging- and tech-toy-enabled, Dreher got fit, and the penchant for sudden enthusiasms that has led him to two religious conversions now has him "waking up every morning at 4:30, 5 a.m., and driving out to the Y to exercise for an hour and a half."

And what does Dreher make of this new means of feeding his endorphin addiction?

Philosophically speaking, it seems to me that without really understanding what I was doing, I was living out a conservative principle of taking personal responsibility and making hard but necessary changes to live within my means.

Maybe a third conversion to the Church of Christ, Personal Trainer is in the offing. He can take a pew with the BlogProf.

I may not be able to keep up. Another of his posts actually begins "On his blog, Steve Sailer introduced me this morning to the essays of Paul Graham..." which was enough for me, thanks. As for his maiden life-in-Philly post, I did read it all, but hardly know what to say about it except "gaaaaaaack." It contains passages like this:

I’m pretty sure that most of the people we associate with in our neighborhood would be horrified to know what we really believe in. Nevertheless, it’s a pretty secure place to live in terms of comfort and peaceability. It’s strange, though, to feel so alien in such a nice place.

Believe me, context doesn't redeem it. The upshot is that Dreher's discomfort at living in a liberal enclave where he is nonetheless well-treated is relieved by returning to his favorite Robert Putnam study, which he takes as proof that people are just natchurly meant to stay with their own kind. And here's the punchline:

With the nation in for a long stretch of hard times, I find within myself an urge to be around people like me.

I've envisioned such a scenario before, and hope Dreher attracts enough adherents at TAC to make it so.

UPDATE. Fixed a spelling error -- thanks, M. Krebs -- but you'll have to see comments to find out what it was. Not that it isn't worth your time to visit anyway, especially with Roger Ailes (additional lyrics Mr. Wonderful) fitting new, Dreher-specific words to the Village People's "Y.M.C.A." ("Rod Man, there's a place you can go/ When your wife nags about your flabroll...")

UPDATE 2. While you're here, let me ask: I see my <target="blank"> tags aren't working anymore. Anyone know why?

HAPPY LABOR DAY, from Robert Reich:



In your Labor Day obeisances, please spare a thought for Ronald Reagan, who got this downward spiral going, and for his heirs, who think we haven't spiraled down far enough.

UPDATE. You might also enjoy the tribute at Daily Caller of one Robert Morrison, who's into puns:

Labor unions claim credit for being “the folks who brought you the American weekend.” That’s largely true. But today, organized labor also brings us America the weakened.

V. funny, but weakened how? Morrison explains:

That’s because liberal labor union leaders have too often ignored their members’ values as they’ve pressed for abortion-on-demand and the ending of marriage...

So this Labor Day, I want to pay my tribute to organized labor. That is, the labor organized in millions of homes by millions of married couples. Those mothers’ labors — labor in childbirth, in making homes, in training children — are indispensable.

And the best thing about these home laborers, from a Morrisonian POV? You don't have to pay them. A rightwing model for all labor, going forward.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the claims that Republicans are anti-science and the rightblogger response -- namely, that it's actually science that's anti-Republican, and so much the worse for science.

Some material about the dumbness of Rick Perry is included. I will only add here that when Politico ran its "Is Rick Perry Dumb?" article -- which basically answered itself, "So what? He's put stars in our jaded eyes for sure!" -- the whole conservative world called Politico "left-wing." I know they've done it before, but I still marvel at it; it's such a useless bit of bullshittery, because nobody who actually pays attention to that opportunistic publication could possibly believe it. Maybe they just do it to keep in practice.

MARXIST LUTHER KING, EXPOSED! American conservatism has entered a very weird phase. We've talked here about their recent revival of racist tropes (or as I like to call it, the old Ooga Booga). Obnoxious as it is, it has another extraordinary feature; it represents a sharp departure from normal rightwing practice. Though they have always had obvious racists like Pat Buchanan amongst them, conservatives have also (at least since racism became somewhat uncool) maintained certain "I'm no racist, look at this non-racist thing I do" gambits. You may remember, for example, how they've bragged on the few black people at Tea Party rallies as proof that theirs is an Afro-friendly movement.

A longer-lived staple of conservative anti-racist cred has been their effusions over Martin Luther King, Jr. Yes, back in the old days they hated King ("For years now, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and his associates have been deliberately undermining the foundations of internal order in this country" -- National Review. More here!). But when things got a little hot for them, bigotry-wise, they shifted to declaring King a good conservative; on every MLK Day, in and among their many confused tributes, you'll see many that insist King's vision of a color-blind society is exactly what conservatives have been trying to do all along. Then they grab parasols and handkerchiefs, burst into "When The Saints Go Marchin' In," and dance around. It's a grisly sight.

But that may be changing. Get a load of this editorial by Jeffrey T. Kuhner in the Washington Times, the Moonie wingnut paper:

Undoubtedly, King deserves much praise...

Yet, there was a dark side to King and it should not be ignored. Its effects continue to plague our society. Contrary to popular myth, the Baptist minister was a hypocrite who consistently failed to uphold his professed Christian standards. His rampant adultery...

Boy, nobody tell Kuhner about Jack Kennedy, that doorty Irishman! These ancient accusations are the sort of thing white supremacists like to play with, but which leave most of us who are under 80 cold, so Kuhner moves on to the sort of thing everyone in 2011 is worried about:

Moreover, King was a radical leftist. He promoted socialism, pacifism and the appeasement of totalitarian communism. He opposed the Vietnam War...

At home, he called for heavy public spending, urban renewal and a cradle-to-grave nanny state... racial quotas... affirmative action and billions in welfare assistance... identity politics...

This is the point in the peroration where a less self-possessed demagogue might start yelling about welfare queens and Cadillacs. But we're not there yet, brothers and sisters (and Jeffrey T. Kuhner may not get there with you, though not for lack of trying); instead he goes here:

King’s leftism ultimately betrayed his original civil rights creed.

Because affirmative action, set-asides, etc. Also, "King’s socialism also convinced many blacks to adopt welfare liberalism."

Gotta give Kuhner credit: This bit about civil rights hurting black people is wingnut SOP of long standing, but it takes some stones to suggest that Martin Luther King is the real racist.

But conservatism has gotten crazy enough that you can try something like that, it seems. Any day now we'll see them burning effigies of Alexander Hamilton because he sold us out to the mercantilists (substitute "Jews" in some jurisdictions). Or maybe Lincoln -- I mean, what was that Civil War about? Statism and giving black people a new bunch of so-called "rights"! The boys at Free Republic have been all over that shit for years; they used to be considered fringe, but compared to what's coming, they're Rockefeller Republicans.

PBC (POSTED BEFORE COFFEE)... or Xanax, or holy water, or whatever, Kathryn J. Lopez:



Help me out here: Did I miss where Joe Biden became the right wing's avatar of baby-killing? Last I looked, it was Amanda Marcotte, I think, or maybe Kathleen Sebelius.

K-J'lo also links to an article where she does the anti-China thing, no doubt hoping her dumbass readers won't remember that conservatives long ago made peace with Red China and its long green.

UPDATE. I have the goodest commenters, and JohnEWilliams is no exception; he links to the relevant portion of Biden's address to the Chinese:

But as I was talking to some of your leaders, you share a similar concern here in China. You have no safety net. Your policy has been one which I fully understand — I'm not second-guessing — of one child per family. The result being that you're in a position where one wage earner will be taking care of four retired people. Not sustainable.

The Vice-President is often difficult to decipher, but the grammar-math goes like this: a.) You have a one-child-per-family policy. b.) As a result, your economy will require each wage-earner to fund (via taxes, one supposes) the care of four retirees. c.) This policy is not sustainable.

I don't see any pro-abortion content in this thing at all, unless KatJe-Lop is focused on Biden's "I'm not second-guessing" place-holder. (It's like he coughed "safelegal&rare!" into his fist!)

KJLope probably thinks representatives of our government, when speaking on the home turf of our trade partners, should hold aloft pictures of dismembered fetuses. Maybe when they take the White House, the Republicans can institute a blanket insult policy: If President Perry goes to Britain, for example, he could open his speeches with a story about a National Health patient lying in her own filth. ("Big ole bedsores! I seen 'em myself! And maggots -- I hadda knock one off with mah shootin' ahrn.") And no more kissing oil sheiks.

UPDATE 2. Ha ha commenters, including ChrisV82 -- "Me Chinese, it no joke, me have abortion in your Coke." Boy, does that take me back to the boyhood days of casual racism! Expect Glenn "Hey Coloreds" Beck to cut a comedy record on this theme soon.

Susan of Texas asks, "What does K-Lo do when she discovers that she uses a product made in China--shriek, fling it out the window, and scourge herself?" The amount of bullshit they produce is astonishing, but I'm fascinated these days by the amount of bullshit we've been trained to expect from them. Everyone knows what the deal is with China -- hell, it's a classic punchline. And conservatives ceaselessly demand more power for rapacious business interests, which would accept even more egregious slave labor if they could get away with it.

Yet conservatives will occasionally pretend to give a shit about China. It's flatly absurd, like me giving a temperance lecture; yet when it happens we don't even blink, because we've learned over the years that this is what American conservatives do; pointing out their hypocrisy -- to them or anyone else -- would be as useless as telling a shit-eating dog that his diet is sub-optimal.

It's tragic enough that many of them can't tell the difference anymore. But what about the rest of us?

HE WAS A CRUEL MAN, BUT FAIR. Victor Davis Hanson defends the Dick Cheney biography. I have not read that book, and thus have no opinion of it, but I can still enjoy the wonderful bits in Hanson's defense. First, relating to Cheney's advocacy of waterboarding:

I opposed those techniques, but we still do not have the complete record of the information that came from KSM et al. — though National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair has since said “high value” information came out of it — and by now we have forgotten the sense of impending attack and mayhem that followed after 9/11.

It was the 00's, man -- everyone was doing anti-terror, and experimenting with torture.

From Hanson's list of Cheney's admirable qualities, this is my favorite:

...he retains a natural comfort with the middle classes that comes from his own upbringing in Wyoming.

Though its association here with the monstrous Cheney adds some piquancy, the general notion that someone should be applauded for "comfort with the middle classes" is depressingly common. I'm generally more impressed by how someone relates to poor folks. I supposed that's just my Christian upbringing, which I understand is now referred to as socialism.

Finally, the punchline:

He had a lot of Democratic friends — remember how little acrimony he showed with Lieberman in the 2000 debate...

Now, really, how can you top that?

FRESH BLOOD. A few readers have encouraged me, now that I am the DC area, to pick up the Washington Examiner at the Metro in the mornings, promising a daily bounty of wingnuttery. That it is; I'd come across their stuff before in web searches, but it is something to get the physical paper and see so much mendacity neatly parceled up, like crisp new butcher paper tightly encasing a cluster of turds.

Their tendentious headlines I'd already noticed, but having fed a long while on the New York Post, I'm pretty well used to a news side heavily infiltrated by opinion. (Today's "Yeas and Nays," the Examiner's social/local page, is topped by a quote by Rush Limbaugh.)

The opinion pages are up there with the Post's, too. I think they might be a little loonier, though my assessment may be negatively affected by the unusually large headshots that run with the columns. Columnists aren't the nicest-looking people anyway, but it's truly disturbing to see a four-inch-high head of Ken Klukowsi early in the day, baring its fangs.

Even more disturbing is the waxen image of Cal Thomas that the Examiner runs; he seems to have been subsisting for some years on babies' blood and the wax of devotional candles; his pallor and drooping jowls suggest this diet is insufficient, and mostly serves to sustain the vitality of his lush, black Reagan haircut. Within Thomas' bored, seigneurial gaze I see an ancient hunger, and my hand draws protectively to my neck.

But give the old culture warrior credit: he knows how to bring the anti-barbaric yawp old-school. Take this lede from today's column, and bear in mind that its topic is Marco Rubio:

In my high school days before sex and environmental education and the general dumbing down of the population, memorization of some Shakespeare was expected in Miss Kauffman's 12th-grade English class.

Forget the ambitious young weasel from Florida a moment, Grandpa's talking about the days before filth and eco-fascism drove the Bard out of high school.

Anyway, "taken at the flood" is Rubio, whom Thomas says goes "further than what might be expected of a Republican" because he admits that previous GOP administrations had big-gummint tendencies, which Rubio wants to avoid. Thus, Rubio "takes the 'compassionate conservatism' of George W. Bush to a different level," by providing a "ticket out of dependency for people who can work but have been robbed of their dignity by addiction to a government check" -- the first step in that process being, of course, taking away the check.

There's no reason for Thomas to be so impressed with Rubio specifically --all the young turk Republicans share his twin enthusiasms, namely gutting our entitlements and being considered angels of mercy for doing so. Is he just mesmerized by Rubio's healthy young veins? Perhaps, but think about Thomas' position; he's been at this game forever, and spent his long, exhausting career with Satan spinning talking points as furiously as Erich Brenn spun plates for Ed Sullivan. He's seen them come and go, so to him true-believing sprats like Rubio are nothing special -- mere armament in Old Scratch's war against humanity -- and require no more personal attention or differentiation than any of the infants from whom Thomas must suck life-blood to remain sentient and in service.

And because they're nothing special, Thomas has to talk about them as if they're something special. Thus, Rubio the comer. Next month it'll be Paul Ryan, or some other youngster who will revivify the old cause. If they falter, well, they can always be drained of blood and ichor, stuck in a think tank, and replaced by some other mushbrained sociopath.

Can't close without including this bit from the column:

Rubio points to a path beyond the familiar "either-or" debate; beyond envy of the wealthy and multiple and ineffective programs to liberate the "poor."

It's great to be a conservatve -- you can brag on your compassion while referring to people who live on food stamps as the quote-unquote poor.

UPDATE. In comments, commie atheist wonders how I missed the Ooga Booga angle in Thomas' column:

...people who can work but have been robbed of their dignity by addiction to a government check.

Dignity leads to many other character qualities, which advance the true welfare of an individual, benefiting society. Someone with dignity, self-regard and respect for others is unlikely to take part in a flash mob attack.

How long the acolytes waved Examiner flash mob stories in front of Thomas before his stigmata flowed afresh, I can't say, but clearly he is now educated to the new Afro menace and will alternate between this signifier of urban chaos and Amy Winehouse for a couple of years or until people have forgotten how to read English, whichever comes first.

Scott from World O' Crap remembers the good times: "We held a beauty contest over at World O' Crap, forcing the headshots of the NRO Fundraising Cruise Speakers to compete in a pageant format, and Cal Thomas won in a landslide. His secret, I suspect, was smirking down at the camera, making it seem as though his jowls and drooping eyelids were cascading into the lens, creating that 3D effect the kids are so entranced by these days."

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about rightbloggers and Hurricane Irene. The reflexive Obama-hate they came up with was predictable; the big fun is in oddities like Ira Stoll's defense of price gouging. Go see.

UPDATE. The Washington Times has an editorial called "Irene is Obama’s punishment." It's cleverer than it looks:

Before Hurricane Irene made landfall, environmental extremists were spouting off three certainties about the storm: It is catastrophic; it was caused by global warming; and it is all President Obama’s fault.

On Thursday, climate alarmist Bill McKibben wrote, “Irene’s got a middle name, and it’s Global Warming.” His thesis is that warmer ocean temperatures mean hurricanes will hold more moisture and travel farther north than they have in the past, resulting in more devastation. Combine this with melting Arctic ice, record floods and record droughts, and the “global weirding” model is complete.

If anything is getting weirder, it’s the arguments of the climate-change crowd.

I didn't say less insane than it looks, I said cleverer. The editors quote exactly one source, McKibben, to back up their claim that "hard-core enviros" are unfairly attacking Obama, and I assume McKibben is also their evidence that "liberals say [Obama] hasn’t done enough and Irene is his punishment." (And me with dozens of authenticated rightblogger gibberings! I suspected I worked harder than these guys, but Jesus Christ.)

The clever part is, now the normal WashTimes readers will read the article and go, "Yeah, those enviros sure are crazy," and the subnormal WashTimes readers will look at the headline and go, "Cabbages, knickers, Hurricane Irene is Obama's punishment, I like choc-o-mut ice creams." And it didn't require anything like a fact to accomplish it.

UPDATE 2. Oops, neglected commenter kudos. Today they go to Jason:

Meanwhile, Jim Hoft—a person of such dazzling witlessness that he makes Jonah Goldberg look like Zeno of Elea—is hard at work reclassifying voluntary acts of charity and service as socialistic abominations. In another hundred or so years, one imagines, the flag of the United States will be nothing more than the image of a Patriot strangling an old woman to get to a box of shotgun shells.

PEAK WINGNUT. First: Happy Irene Eve! Here in the DC suburbs, there are some power outages -- which were pre-announced by Pepco, our power provider; it's like they're not even trying; these guys suck worse than Con Ed -- but otherwise it's pretty chill.

For those of my fellow rightblogger watchers who have electricity and the stomach for it, I can recommend Robert Stacy McCain's insane "The Politics of Fear." It's amazing. It starts with some lively We're not the fascists, you're the fascists yak; then, the time-honored routine about how "McCarthyism" was actually right on, but the real McCarthyism is practiced by liberals all the time, and bad. You will read much about how American Beauty and The Sum of All Fears were created, not by "artists," but by leftist social engineers to lull the sheeple into a false sense of security, in which state they were brutalized by terrorists and buggered by homosexuals.

Per McCain, liberals' latest bad-McCarthyism trick is pointing out Republicans who don't believe God made no man outta no monkey, which leads to this lovely passage:

Though tempted to leave that question dangling, to demand that liberals explain why belief in evolution should be a sine qua non of participation in American political life, I will endeavor to provide an answer.

Ever since the French Revolution, the Left has presented itself as the political expression of Scientific Progress...

If you guessed Global Warming as the next talking point, give yourself a no-prize. Really, this thing is a perfect distillation of wingnut first principles -- kind of like someone threw random pages from Liberal Fascism, some Chick Tracts, Andrew Breitbart's multi-volume embargoed suicide note, and corn likker into a blender. The maddening thing is, the normal people who vote Republican would find it utterly confusing, and have no idea that the people they're voting for believe in it.

HEED MY ADVICE, DESPERATE JOBLESS MAN, MY KLOUT SCORE IS 70. Tyler Cowen tells the world:

Claims about North Dakota

If you have a license and no criminal record, you can get a six-figure trucking job almost overnight.

The article is here, hat tip goes to Garett Jones on Twitter. If your response is: “How many of the unemployed could get work in North Dakota?” you have missed the point.

You can find some of the ads here, and more broadly here. My poking around showed that some of them start at 75k a year, though with raises for good performance. It is also required that you have no DUI convictions. The sense of community is strong and the State Capitol is an Art Deco masterpiece. You can get Canadian TV. What more could anyone want?

If you've ever met any actual truckers --as I have -- and heard their stories of sleeping in their trucks, hidden costs that strip their paychecks, etc., you'll know that it ain't that simple:

There’s been a lot of hype about jobs in the trucking industry lately, but it’s time for a reality check. In this economy, exaggerations about a so called “growing field” where there are ample, easy-to-land jobs with lucrative paychecks can cause hardships for people who are desperate for work...

The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects average growth rates for heavy and tractor-trailer truck drivers and below average increases for light or delivery services truck drivers through 2018. And even the industry’s trade group played down claims made by a host of media outlets in recent months that the industry has tons of jobs to fill.

“Today’s shortage is more of a quality than a quantity issue,” said Bob Costello, chief economist with the American Trucking Association. He said he recently talked to one of the association’s member who told him he has 100 jobs to fill, but 800 applications.

Don't tell most of the commenters at Cowen's blog, though. They mostly assume that able-bodied young bucks ain't going to North Dakota to get rich because they're shiftless., e.g.:

I think the point is that, even if North Dakota wouldn’t be a large-scale solution to national unemployment, the overwhelming lack of willingness of the unemployed to move to North Dakota tells us something about the nature of the unemployed in America. To me, it says that they’re not terribly motivated to find work, but I suppose there are other possible interpretations...

“Yes, labor migrates; no, labor does not migrate “easily”.” And my response to anyone who is unemployed and sucking at the government teat is “tough s*!t”. You do what you have to do to support yourself and your family...

(I should mention, though, that the comments include one of those rare instances of Matthew Yglesias being actually funny: "I think I may be missing the point here, so I hope Tyler will explain it to us.")

If we put as much effort into solving problems as we do into constructing alternate realities, imagine what we could accomplish.

UPDATE. Thanks, Vern Morrison, for spelling help. And to commenters, including KC45s -- "None of the ads promise a chimpanzee sidekick. Sorry, that's a deal breaker." I believe you mean an orangutan sidekick, KC45s. (Sub-update: Or not! wjts cites the historical record. I didn't realize helper monkeys had such a rich and varied history.)

Leonard Pierce has done some research on the subject (of the trucking business, not simian sidekicks) and lays out some of the hard facts of which Cowen and the Galtian Supermen are not in possession.

FOUND BLOETRY.



Sadly, No! is often very mean to poor K-J'Lo, but they and she are at their best when Lopez goes into a fugue state and makes with the Yeatsian automatic writing.

UPDATE. What, someone commented on KaJeaLop's post? Let's see:

I was in Charleston, SC for Hugo - on a Navy destroyer that couldn't leave port, no less...

It was a dark and stormy night! Came the dawn...

Therefore and henceforth, this particular dude abandoned his North Easterner attitude regarding hurricanes being just big ol' rain storms.

I tested my generator last night for the first time in a couple years. Got enough juice for the chest freezer, fridge, sump pumps, my network stuff (hub, router, cable modem, wireless access point, etc...), Tivo, TV, and a couple lamps. We'll see about the XBox and/or air conditioner, later.

Good to go.

I like to think our man has thus outfitted an old cabin cruiser under a tarp in his garage, where his wife sends him when he has "spells." He seems very proud of his Boy Scout exercise, and I suppose he has a right, but it's strange to me that a grown man would preen so over his preparedness. It smacks of survivalism, like he lives for these disaster-teases. I bet his cabin cruiser is blocked up with old How to Survive Y2K books.

Which reminds me: Why are so many of our rightwing brethren both survivalists and conspicuous consumers? The survivalism perhaps explains their politics: They wish to prove their manhood in the post-apocalyptic hellscape their policies are designed to bring about. But do they really imagine they'll be able to maintain their suburban lifestyle in that New Dark Age? Maybe they all see themselves as The Boss in Things to Come, clad in furs and lording over the wreckage; others may huddle in lean-tos, but not they... oh, wow, I think I just explained libertarianism.

UPDATE 2. Oh for the love of... conservative chiropractor Melissa Clouthier advises New Yorkers to flee Irene in terror:

You’re probably thinking this is melodramatic. Not so much. Things get primal awfully quickly. When it comes down to it, there will be a grim determination that sets in. You’ll start only seeing men at the grocery store. You’ll see panicked people pleaded with grocers for more water. You’ll wish you had prepared. You’ll feel foolish because you knew what you should do but you didn’t do it...

Civilization is a delicate thing. It goes out the window, and quickly, under trauma. Your best defense is preparing now...

I remember how the citizens of New York reacted to 9/11. They aren't going to act like a bunch of goobers because of a fucking tropical storm -- though the goobers always like to imagine them doing so. If their families really loved them, they'd confiscate their Death Wish DVDs.

UPDATE 3. Har de har har, commenters. "...these folks are fine with voting for policies that will put them in a cardboard box under an overpass, roasting a sparrow on a stick," says Jennifer, "so long as said policies assure that the guy in the next box over has no sparrow." And don't miss Whetstone's poem.

STOP THE PRESSES.


This country sucks.

Honorable mention: The headline on Brian Hughes' article at the Washington Examiner, "Obama still faces daunting challenges as Libya changes," is even better in the paper edition I received outside the Metro station* this morning: "Obama challenged by chaos in Libya." It's time to pull out of that quagmire, which will never be the success our led-from-the-front victories such as Iraq have been.

* Oh, yeah, the quake: Kia and I were downtown. As a former Californian, she was unfazed (she says such a dinky temblor would rate a two-inch squib in the Cali papers). It was my first, and I'm glad the Earth was gentle. All office drones got the rest of the day off, so we had a few drinks at the St. Regis and went down to look at the MLK Memorial:



Not sure I like the hewn-from-the-rock effect -- it's very literal, and puts me in mind of a Ray Harryhausen special effect in which King bursts out of the rock and inches forward, roaring, as the earth shakes. But the quotes along the wall are effective, and King's face is very good; when we first saw it, it looked stern and schoolmasterish, but it softens as the light and angle change.

The other visitors seemed to like it fine. Don't know what they thought about the aesthetics, but they were certainly happy to see it there.

THE ETERNAL OOGA-BOOGA. Some time back, during the Donald Trump Presidential boom -- Remember that? Good times! -- I came across some nut who claimed to be a White House "Insider" who'd soured on Obama and was sneaking out to talk shit about him with a blogger.

At that time he was plumping the Trump campaign thus: "At first I thought it was something of a joke, but since then others have confirmed its legit - and considerable money is already being spent in preparation... I think this guy could win. He really could. And I would gladly work for this campaign."

Judging from his political savvy, he must be a very senior official indeed -- which is damning for Obama!

The Insider has resurfaced, and guess what? Now he's working the Ooga Booga angle.

To "lay out the psychological foundation of the son-of-a-bitch," The Insider tells us what a slob Obama is in his "upstairs office at the White House":

The big screen will be on – the volume loud. You can easily hear it from outside the door. The sports channels are the ones most commonly playing, though sometimes the channel will be set to music, or Fox News...

He often sits with one leg draped over one of the chair’s arms and the other leg stuck straight onto the floor. Shorts, sweats, a t-shirt, and like I said, no shoes or just those sandal things that so many of the younger people like to wear these days... And that desk, it’s a mess. Magazines spread out all over it. Stupid shit too. Real low brow reading material the president is into. People. Rolling Stone. Lots of those tabloid things.

Plus Obama has "like these long-fingered woman’s hands. And his wrists, you could wrap your own fingers all the way around those wrists – again, so much like a woman’s hands." Why, the Insider dreams about those hands.

You can see how a wingnut would be easily riled by this -- the woman-handed, shoeless pickaninny reading Rolling Stone and blasting hippity-hop in the House that Reagan Built! But that's just background for the real story: How Obama will use black riots to re-seize power.

Here's the come-on:

[Interviewer]: What do you mean by we – we are preparing for it? And are you actually saying that Barack Obama would push for race riots to somehow win a presidential election? That sounds…far fetched. Even for this administration.

Insider: Does it? How so? You need to take step back and see more of what has been happening in this country. It’s why this thing went from a concern about the party to a serious concern about the country. Why aren’t you seeing that?

After a bunch more Deep Throat bullshit, The Insider finally gives up a little more intel:

So will he stir up the race issue if it means guilting or scaring white voters to keep him in the White House? Hell yes he will. He’s been doing that shit his whole damn life! You wanna say so what to that? You wanna see this country torn apart by race because we have a president who sees it as a viable political tool?

Tell us, O Insider, how this guilt-or-scare will work!

The race card, the racial thing – whatever it’s gonna be called, it is the number one asset this administration believes it has to win in 2012. Their own polling data has shown that to be true over and over again. But how far are they willing to push that? Race. The charges of racism? I believe all the way if they have to. And they are gonna get people stirred up. And if Barack Obama doesn’t win re-election, watch them stand back while the riots break out, and watch them mouth the words “Burn baby burn.”

Oh no -- what a disappointment! Those of you over the age of 12 and with intact memories will recall that conservatives, some with actual names like Jay Nordlinger, were claiming that an Obama loss would lead to riots back in 2008. It's just wingnut SOP.

I was hoping the Insider, being Inside and all, would have smuggled documents out of the Black House that would tell us in which Popeye's Fried Chicken franchises the guns and ammo were being stored. Shoot, for all her passive-aggressive prevarication, even The Anchoress is more forthright about Obama's use of flash mobs to overthrow America.

But let's not give up hope. Maybe the Insider isn't telling all he knows. Maybe he's holding back. I bet he has a wife and kids -- and they know it. What is it, O Insider? Blink out the answer in Morse Code! Where is Valerie Jarrett drilling the troops? Will the Obama rioters try to trick us into flashing our headlights? Tell us, for God's sake -- the hour of Ooga Booga draws nigh!

UPDATE. Comments are all comedy gold, but special attention must be paid to whetstone, who sampled The Insider's dialogue ("Fuck no. Listen. And learn some goddamn history before you ask such a stupid question") and judged: "Wow, Mamet really did go off the deep end."

LIBYA ENTERS THE POPCORN STAGE. I opposed the Libyan intervention, so once again I'm watching video of happy crowds in a newly-taken capital with mixed feelings. I said my say in March and stick to that; Glenn Greenwald has other relevant demurrers. Here's to our new, hopefully more tractable client state.

Of course if I were a neo-con whose bloodlust only chills when a Democrat runs the show, my feelings would be much more unpleasantly mixed, in the manner of a number of imbeciles who have already embarrassed themselves today.

Leading the pack, as I expected, is Stanley Kurtz:

America put its credibility and prestige on the line in Libya, and we have fortunately escaped the potential disaster of seeing this intervention fail–although our escape as been far too narrow for comfort. Just a month ago, it looked as though the Libya campaign was nearly lost...

Yeah, NATO was in serious danger of being defeated by Muammar Gaddafi and his gunsels. That dream being dead, Kurtz spins:

What happened? We may learn more about that in the days ahead. Preliminary reports suggest that, despite denials, NATO changed its tactics under pressure of the deadline for re-authorization. NATO began offering more aggressive support to the rebels, by attacking Qaddafi’s strictly defensive positions.

I'm no war historian, but I understand that in any campaign tactics tend to evolve with circumstances, some of them political.

In other words, we may have finally won this war only when we recognized that it was a war, and stopped treating it as a strictly humanitarian intervention.

This is good news for Rick Perry.

So Qaddafi has been toppled, but only after a notably weak and unnecessarily prolonged campaign. If this is what it takes for America and its allies to dislodge an unpopular dictator in open terrain, our more dangerous potential adversaries cannot be feeling much fear right now.

Yeah, Bashar Assad just stretched his legs, put his hands behind his head, and sighed, "Easy Street!"

If it were not for the mountains of dead involved, I would just as soon see this finale stretched to October, so it coincides with the 10th anniversary of our invasion of Afghanistan.

UPDATE. This just isn't Kurtz's day:

I’ve been reading Rick Perry’s book, Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America from Washington. You should read it too...

The real controversy comes when Perry suggests that, in an ideal world, even sacred cows like Social Security and Medicare might have been better run by the states....

So what’s the big deal? Aren’t most conservatives and Republicans talking like that nowadays? Absolutely. But Perry’s critique of our entitlement system is very sharp — in a couple senses of that word — and is part of a systematic attack on the welfare state that runs all the way back to Roosevelt’s New Deal...

Almost simultaneously, Perry has been disavowing the Social Security argument in his book, per the Wall Street Journal:

But since jumping into the 2012 GOP nomination race on Saturday, Mr. Perry has tempered his Social Security views. His communications director, Ray Sullivan, said Thursday that he had “never heard” the governor suggest the program was unconstitutional. Not only that, Mr. Sullivan said, but “Fed Up!” is not meant to reflect the governor’s current views on how to fix the program.

Kurtz does try some preemptive spinning:

All this will be loudly excoriated by Democrats. Perry is going to be portrayed as an extremist who wants to kill Social Security and Medicare. In fact, Perry doesn’t call for that.

Back to the Journal:

[Perry] suggested the [Social Security] program’s creation violated the Constitution. The program was put in place, “at the expense of respect for the Constitution and limited government,” he wrote, comparing the program to a “bad disease” that has continued to spread. Instead of “a retirement system that is no longer set up like an illegal Ponzi scheme,” he wrote, he would prefer a system that “will allow individuals to own and control their own retirement.”

You can call this watered-down system "Social Security," just as you can call Coupons for Codgers "Medicare," but you can't get very many people to vote for it. That's why even the most rabid wreckers try to disguise their intentions as soon as they think someone's watching.

SHORTER JONAH GOLDBERG: Obama took "Blame" off the "Blame America First" slogan me and my buddies have used on Democrats for years. That makes him a hypocrite.