RETITLED NOEMIE EMERY: "Republicans are waiting for 'A Dick' for 2012."

No really: Though Emerie suggests Republicans combine Mitt Romney and Rick Perry to get "'Mick,' their dream of a candidate," she's clearly more turned on by the penile Perry:

Mitt is the head and Rick is the heart; Mitt is Al Gore, and Rick is Bill Clinton; Mitt is Clean Gene, and Rick is Robert F. Kennedy; Mitt is Ashley Wilkes, and Rick is Rhett Butler. (Who would be Scarlett O'Hara remains to be seen.)

(I think I see her batting her eyes at Big Rick, though, to signal that she needs to be caucused, and often, and by someone who knows how to do it.)

Rick could scare people -- a valuable trait in a world with Iran and al Qaeda.

The bad guys aren't the only ones who need to be feeling it, either:

If Obama looks like a student, and Romney looks like a substitute teacher, Perry looks like the headmaster who comes in and brings order. Whoever coined the phrase "Wait till your father gets home" had someone like Perry in mind as the father.

America needs an ass-whoopin'! Some to git, some to watch! In the end it's a thrill for all. Perry may be dumb as a box of home-schooled rocks, but for a certain type of voter he's the Midnight Rambler. Well you heard about the Boston -- CHANK! (Goddamn!) Well honey, it's not one of those -- CHANK! (Goddamn!)

I see less chance of synthesis than of a Jekyll-and-Hyde scenario. And given the character of the GOP base I think I know which way they're going to swing.

FANCY TALK. American Thinker seems to encourage the use of academic cred to promote wingnut doctrine -- as seen in the contributions of Robin of Berkeley, a psychotherapist who regularly attributes policies she opposes to the mental illnesses in which her training has made her expert.

Today's AT intellectual is Paul Jacobson, who tells us that Democrats are "The Postmodern Party." He chooses an interesting path to this conclusion. Rather than correlate Democratic beliefs to postmodernist precepts -- say, the Affordable Care Act to the works of Martin Heidegger -- which he perhaps intuits will bore and frustrate his readers, Jacobson skips to the McCarthyite phase and tells us that the postmodern menace is everywhere upon us:

... academic postmodernism has long been reaching out from its lofty eyries via its "educated" acolytes, who have been busy for decades quietly worming their way into American life from top to bottom, including not just politics, but education at all levels, entertainment, journalism, corporations, foundations, even churches -- everything that affects you and me. Postmodernism is much more than a philosophy; it is today's foundational cultural driver.

And here's his proof point:

If you doubt that expansive claim for postmodernist influence, consider the poll results published almost a decade ago by the Barna Research Group, an organization that does polling for Christian organizations. You'd expect evangelical Christians to hold to a cornerstone belief in an absolute (Biblical) standard of good and evil, right? Wrong. Barna's poll showed, astonishingly, that an overwhelming majority of evangelical adults (68%) cleave instead to postmodernist moral relativity.

I anticipated testimonials from Bible-beaters who were right with God until they found some of that Jack Derry-da in the corncrib, whereupon they commenced to fornicatin' and other forms of moral relativism. But the linked Barna report doesn't mention postmodernism; the firm's George Barna suggests such results arise because "people are left with philosophies such as 'if it feels good, do it,' 'everyone else is doing it' or 'as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else, it's permissible.'"

In other words, what scolds of an earlier, simpler time would attribute to rock 'n' roll, pornography, birth control, short skirts on the womenfolk, etc., Jacobson attributes to postmodernism -- the real root cause of sin. Let ignorant preachers flap their scriptures; for bigbrains like Jacobson, the devil is de trop, and Foucault rules in hell. (Jacobson does eventually move on from fundamentalists to Democrats, also blaming postmodernism for "the SEIU thug who bit off the guy's finger," as if political violence didn't happen before eggheads started telling everyone that language is a virus.)

This is far from the first pomo putdown seen at AT. They address other high-flown menaces, too -- in their current rotation you'll also find "Social Darwinism and Barack Obama."

It's become standard procedure for the pointier heads in the rightblogger world to lecture their readers on such obscure ivory tower terrors as The Frankfurt School, whom they portray as the godfathers of Social Security and ACORN. Andrew Breitbart's gotten deep into the act, and devotes a section of his book to it. And of course there's Alinsky, now an all-purpose rightwing swearword.

I can see the appeal. You don't see George F. Will doing much of this stuff; the big-time rightwingers are still shaking their fists at old-school demons like Keynes, and they rarely get schoolier than a solemn reference to Hayek or Chesterton. The new conservative intellectuals have to distinguish themselves from their mentors somehow, other than by their even greater mendacity and worse writing, and a new cast of supervillains is as good a way as any. After all, what does it matter what they call the enemy, so long as everyone knows to hate him?

UPDATE. It's late to notice, but comments are a joy, particularly the artistic ones, like BigHank53's memories of Jonathan Sokol and The Postmodern Lovers, and whetstone's evocation of Meredith Willson --

Are certain words creeping into his conversation?
Words like "gnostic"?
And "interlocutory"?
Well if so my friends,
You've got trouble...

Also Kia does a fine rundown on the real postmodern menace, i.e. posemodernists.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about Obama's proposed tax plan and how awful it would be if taxes were raised on the rich. I regret that Megan McArdle had yet to open her yap on the subject when I wrote this, but there's plenty of pro-rich stupidity on display nonetheless.

UPDATE. As of 3 pm McArdle has yet to weigh in on the subject but, a commenter points out, she has compared Netflix to Medicare, for no good reason except Netflix fucked up, which gives her something new and bad to point to and say to Medicare, "See that guy over there? That's what you look like." So we can't be too disappointed with her.

All the other wingnuts are huffing and puffing as expected. At National Review, Veronique de Rugy:

First of all, let me note that there is something unseemly about the idea that a super-millionaire like Warren Buffett should be setting tax policy, no matter how talented and successful he is as a businessman.

It's almost funny, in a pathetic way, to see a toff like de Rugy pressed to act the populist. Especially when -- disguised in overalls and a newsboy cap, and trying to carry herself like she's seen her gardener do -- she tells the boys and girls how persecuted her rich masters are:

The president spends a lot of time talking about the fairness of the tax code. The question here is, “Do the rich pay their fair share in taxes?” The top 1 percent of income earners pay 38 percent of income taxes and earn 20 percent of income, which is highly progressive...

As long as we're turning fairness apples into fairness oranges, we might also point out that the top 1 percent also control two-thirds of the national net worth, earn 24 percent of America's income, etc. Fairness-wise, I think we should just squeeze them till they poop gold coins.

BLACKMAIL. The Postal Service is having money trouble, and the conservatarian line is that this is due to Big Gummint socialism so the USPS should be privatized:

Congress hasn’t been able to bring itself to allow the USPS to close 3,000 of its 30,000+ retail locations, so it’s hard to imagine that it will allow operations to come to a halt. Therefore, the important question is what sort of relief will Congress ultimately provide?

Let’s start with what it won’t do: consider privatization...

...if the USPS is to operate solely on the revenues that it generates, then it needs the flexibility that comes with private ownership.

Other such people admit that small-market citizens would find their service drastically curtailed by a new, profit-hungry privatized postal service (indeed, USPS is already talking about shutting thousands of POs to save money), but screw them because "there is no good economic reason to subsidize people who decide to live in remote areas"; they propose phasing in a new leaner, meaner mail service that will at first merely "charge double postage for mail to or from designated remote areas and... terminate Saturday mail service to and from those areas," then cut the rope and let the free market rule.

The thing that's most dispiriting about this is, the Postal Service isn't the brainchild of Barack Obama or FDR or Teddy Roosevelt, but of Ben Franklin -- it's explicitly mandated by the Constitution, and one of the services that for centuries was thought indispensable to any government worthy of the name.

But our leaders are so completely drunk on privatization doctrine that even having a goddamn local post office is thought to be too good for us. For years the USPS has been trying to serve the people while simultaneously meeting the business model that the free-marketers thrust upon them, and the inevitable telling of this strain is now being used as proof that, see, government doesn't work -- even in ways the Founders expected it to.

This is a milestone on our journey to a neo-feudal age. They're already taking about doing away with public roads. Soon enough everything will be market-driven, and you'll find indigents begging for water next to privatized reservoirs. And there'll be a little army of idiots in tricorners dancing around, convinced that this is a restoration of the original vision of America. It's a restoration, all right -- yea, even unto the Middle Ages.

UPDATE. Among many brilliant commenters, Alan points out Alison Kilkenny's article about the disastrous effect on USPS of the Postal Accountability Enhancement Act of 2006, which would seem to have been the set-up for the current crisis.

SHORTER TIMOTHY P. CARNEY. There is a "small but growing trend toward free-market populism in Republican rhetoric, if not action" -- or, in plain English, a new line of bullshit. But it's important that I pimp this bullshit, because it will help elect Republicans, who will loot the treasury via favors to contributors, as per usual, while "we free-market populists take whatever drippings we can get," e.g. gigs with the Washington Examiner.

TURNER DIARIES. The rightwing rap on Turner-Weprin in NY-9, as exemplified by John Podhoretz's post on the subject, is that Jews hate Obama because Israel, and in consequence are -- as conservatives have been wishing for decades -- abandoning the Democratic Party:

No one is saying a majority of such Jews are going to pull the lever for a conservative Republican like Rick Perry in 2012. But a more significant minority than usual might, and others, disgusted by Obama’s behavior toward the Jewish state, just may stay home.

You might expect the Hasidim to boycott the schvartze Obama, but Podhoretz says the NY-9 Jewish Turner voters are not necessarily Orthodox -- merely "older, heritage-proud, and were bathed from youth forward in Zionism."

But is it, as Podhoretz suggests, their Zionism that turned them? Maggie Gallagher of the anti-gay National Organization for Marriage thinks not:

NOM has a new poll coming out later today. We’ll have a chance to see how big an impact David Weprin’s “I’m an Orthodox Jew and I support gay marriage” speech had on voters in the district. Nobody appears to know how many Orthodox Jews there are in the district, but we hope to have some data on that, and on how many voters said gay marriage was an issue for them.

But really when 40 Orthodox rabbis tell their people its against Torah law to vote for Weprin, that has to be big.

Democrat Ed Koch’s endorsement of Turner was a huge factor. But so was [anti-gay] Democrat Dov Hikind’s endorsement and [anti-gay] Democrat Sen. Ruben Diaz. Both did robocalls for NOM to voters and so did a very prominent apolitical rabbi, Zachariah Wallerstein. Huge.

The "apolitical" Wallerstein thinks gays cause hurricanes and earthquakes.

If Gallagher's right, the course for Republican outreach in Jewish districts is clear: convince voters that gay marriage threatens the state of Israel. (In Israel itself, that would be a tough sell -- gays have served in the Israeli military for years and most citizens approve gay marriage -- but American Jews are often in the dark about how the folks in the homeland really think on major issues, so the scam could work.) GOP Jews might compare their Democratic opponents to Ernst Rohm, for example, or complain that Boy George stole their look.

If this race shows anything, it's that Republicans won't scruple to inflame ancient prejudices to win, and when times are tough this is more likely to work.

UPDATE. Some readers wonder what else was going on there. The ever-astute Liz Benjamin read some tea leaves and sorted some influences. To my mind: the economy sucks; Turner ran a campaign that soft-pedaled national GOP messages (unlike earlier local GOP candidates); the district liked Weiner but had no overriding cultural loyalty to the Democrats; and the economy sucks. Also gay marriage.

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.