THE PARTY OF PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY. Newt Gingrich says he's sorry he unleashed the hounds of hell on Mitt Romney's Bain Capital predations. But he has an explanation:

“I agree with you,” Gingrich said. “It’s an impossible theme to talk about with Obama in the background. Obama just makes it impossible to talk rationally in that area because he is so deeply into class warfare that automatically you get an echo effect. … I agree with you entirely.”

In a couple of months I expect Gingrich to reveal he cheated on his wife and blame it on Kenyan anti-colonialism.

UPDATE. Gingrich returns with an incoherent backtrack on his backtrack: "This issue at hand is neither about Bain Capital, private equity firms, nor about capitalism... Instead of accepting the responsibility to answer questions about his business background, the Romney campaign is throwing up a smokescreen about an attack on capitalism."  Were voters supposed to look at "When Mitt Romney Came to Town" and think, "Well, I'm all for asset stripping and throwing people out of work, but this guy went too far"?

PUTTIN' DOWN ROOTS. Nancy Nall informs me that Rod Dreher, whose recent retreat from the Big City and return to the country and the Old Ways in which he was brungded up was lovingly documented by David Brooks ("they decided to accept the limitations of small-town life in exchange for the privilege of being a part of a community"), is already dissatisfied with the quality of his broadband service in his new/old hometown of Fritters, Louisiana (he lives in the "historic downtown").

Before you say, “Oh, shut up, you and your First World problems,” I will point out that given the line of work I’m in — media — I have to have reliable broadband access to do my job efficiently. I’m already developing some work-arounds, and I can go to the coffee shop or to my mom and dad’s house (out in the country!) if I need to have fast Internet.

Ain't he able-bodied? Cain't he till the soil? Does he really go down to the General Store and ask where a feller who's In Media can git hisself some wi-fi?

This is such a small town that I don’t know that AT&T has any real economic incentive to upgrade its equipment to provide first-class broadband to people here. Is this something the town, or parish government, would have an interest in subsidizing, as an economic development initiative?...

[Insert Big Gummint lazy good fer nuthin' poors joke here]

You don’t realize how much our modern way of economic life depends on reliable high-speed Internet service, until you don’t have it. Towns and places that don’t have it are going to get left behind, economically.

Well, guess that's it, Rod will have to up sticks again. Where do you good people imagine he will land next?

LIBERALS HAVE NAMES LIKE "CARL," AND CONSERVATIVES HAVE NAMES LIKE "LENNY." I think I've figured out the appeal of PJ Lifestyle, the Pajamas Media style section from which I got that bizarre "Hell on Wheels" review last week. It seems to be part of an alternate universe PJM is building, in which conservatives who have renounced the world -- you know, like this guy -- can feel at home. It goes Andrew Breitbart's Big Hollywood one better -- instead of just interpreting movies and TV shows according to doctrine, its writers apply their Procrustean standards to other leisure and cultural activities as well.

Take Kathy Shaidle's "George Carlin Wasn’t Funny: The Top Five Most Overrated Comedians." Understand first that Shaidle is one of those culture warriors who thinks we're all living in a politically correct pogrom; she wrote in 2010 that since the 1980s, "political correctness has gotten worse, not better. Yes, some of us joke about it, but we do so in whispers around the office coffeemaker, lest we risk our jobs."

Yet, brave soul that she is, she's willing to take on the PC shibboleths of our time, as she announces in her opening:

Yeah, I’m a heretic. I also fell asleep during Star Wars.

Bruce Springsteen? Pompous blowhard.

The Godfather? Long stretches of beige nothingness.

And The Who are better than The Beatles.

(Hell, I prefer The Monkees to The Beatles…)

But here’s the first “pop culture” contrarianism I’m a teensy bit afraid to confess in public:

George Carlin never made me laugh.

Now, if you've been around the internet at all, you know that contrarianism is actually a great way to get attention. Does everyone love "Mad Men"? Write about how it stinks and watch the clicks and quotes roll in!

Shaidle's got as much right to get in on this racket as anyone. But when you read her article, you find that her idea of contrarianism is very narrow -- that is, what she mainly finds unfunny about these allegedly funny people is liberalism.

When Louis CK talks about Tracy Morgan's gay jokes (in an interview!), Shaidle complains that he "sounds like the kind of person a comedian (like Louis CK) is supposed to be making fun of." Then she answers CK with a long Mark Steyn quote, and asks, "isn’t Steyn’s take patently superior? But Mark Steyn votes the wrong way, so no GQ 'Man of the Year' virtual tongue-baths for him."

On and on it goes: The Smothers Brothers were really fired by DEMOCRAT Senator John Pastore and one of them was mean to Penn Jillette -- that's how not-funny they are! Lenny Bruce isn't funny mainly because she says so -- and not that she needs back-up, but professional funnyman Nick Gillespie thinks so too, and Rush Limbaugh is funnier than Jon Stewart, so there. And Carlin's not funny because "like so many old hippies, he just wouldn’t go away." Plus:

And if Carlin was so brave, why didn’t he rail against two other words you REALLY can’t say on the radio and [most of] TV: “n*****” and “f****t”? Because fighting for the right to say them would shock his liberal fans...

Apparently the "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television" bit isn't funny, but this shit is a riot. (Oh, and I think the words she means here are "nigger" and "faggot." The PC speech police must have put in those stars against her contrarian will. Fight the power, sister!)

In the real world, where normal people might conceivably wander in and read your stuff, articles like this would be incomprehensible. But normal people seldom get to these articles, because they're not the target market -- which would seem to be the people of the Conservative Exodus. Even deranged separatists need something to read at the compound.

UPDATE. But I gotta say, I got a kick out of the one about how Twilight is okay even though it has vampires because it's pro-life. "Will these women follow Bella’s example and protect their unborn child?" asks author Rhonda Robinson. "Perhaps. If this film is as persuasive as its opponents fear." I wonder where the big fights between the Hollyweird lieberals who want to get rich off the Twilight franchise and the Hollyweird lieberals who fear its pro-life message take place. The New Republic, maybe?

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about rightbloggers starting, with an auspicious and a dropping eye, to adjust to life after the carnival and Make Mine Mitt. It's starting to look like 2008 again, when the party bosses foisted that traitor John McCain on them. Well, they still get to run against a black guy.

Excised from the final draft was Tom Maguire, who didn't enjoy Ron Paul's attack on Newt Gingrich for his lack of military service as much as I did.  Maguire pointed out that when Paul served he had not been stationed in a hot zone, and therefore was "not likely to be shot at," whereas when Gingrich had a chance to serve in Vietnam "in 1965, it was not yet clear to the public at large that the Johnson Administration had no strategy for winning the war." As Gingrich is an esteemed historian, he presumably foresaw both America's defeat and his own importance to the nation's future, and wisely kept himself safe home. What a patriot!

Oh, and there's that asshole Rod Dreher, who claims to both believe and endorse Rick Santorum's claim that if his own son came out gay he would not beat him with a tire iron until he straightened out:

I found out that in my small, very conservative and churchgoing Southern town, there’s a lot of affection for Ginger Snap, a local black drag queen. Ginger Snap has her own float in the community Christmas parade. I guarantee that if you polled the people along the parade route, both white and black, nine out of 10 would say that homosexuality is wrong and that same-sex marriage shouldn’t be allowed. But they will also watch Ginger Snap roll by on her float and wave.

No civil rights for you, but we shore enjoy you wearin' a purty dress on a parade float! I wonder how many of them hit on Ginger Snap when they're drunk.

BOO FUCKING HOO. Yes, it's hilarious that John freaking Yoo is calling Obama's quasi-recess appointments an "Abuse of Executive Power... even with my broad view of executive power." Even if one didn't know the backstory of the Republicans' relentless obstructionism, that is rich.

But I kind of prefer the Ole Perfesser's comment:

A lawyer-reader emails: “If Richard Cordray were Sarah Palin, someone would file a qui tam action against him when he gets his first paycheck, and someone in Ohio would file a grievance with the Ohio Supreme Court’s Attorney Disciplinary Counsel seeking sanctions for Cordray’s clearly unconstitutional actions.” Well, not so much if Richard Cordray were Sarah Palin, as if Republicans acted like Democrats. Maybe they should give it a try — the Dems seem to enjoy it. And they did manage to prevent a Palin candidacy through sheer harassment.

He's talking about the people who impeached Bill Clinton for a blowjob. And "prevent a Palin candidacy through sheer harassment" -- look, no one's more disappointed than me that she's not running, but, why man, she did make love to this "harassment"; the resulting ressentiment was the source of all her power over the yokels. And when she bowed out it wasn't because she'd been chased off -- imagine DFHs chasing off America's Sweetheart!  -- but because through tedious drumming she wore out her welcome as even an opera buffo version of a statesman, and retreated to take the short-end money as a celebrity spokesmodel.

Know what I like best about this? That it's not one of the Perfesser's rawr-we-will-crush-you posts, but instead one of those in which he claims victim status because a mean liberal fought back. Those used to piss me off, too, but now for some reason I can't get enough of them.

NOT SINCE "THE DUKES OF HAZZARD"... Pajamas Media TV critic S.T. Karnick:

To be sure, in some ways ["Hell on Wheels"] pays obeisance to modern political and cultural clichés about the nation’s past. Predictably, the United States in 1865 is shown as dirty and corrupt, and life for many is depicted as short, brutal, ugly, dirty, and meaningless. The railroad encampment is a cesspool rife with drunkenness, violence, and sexual license. Although no longer slaves, all the blacks we see are impoverished manual laborers.

So: a documentary, then?

Fortunately, Hell on Wheels producers Joe and Tony Gayton don’t leave it at that. Instead, they convey numerous story elements that contradict the cynical contemporary view of the nation’s history in very interesting and important ways. In the very first episode, for example, common views of the history of American race relations and the origins of the War Between the States are subverted. A northerner is cruel to the former slaves who are working on the railroad, whereas the protagonist, a southerner and former slaveholder, is sympathetic to them and treats them fairly. Later we find out that even though he fought for the Confederacy, the Southerner had already freed his own slaves and suffered privation in order to pay them wages for their services.

Ah -- so,  more of a Freaky Friday sort of thing.

Similarly, Sherman’s March and the Union’s conduct of the war in general are depicted as vicious and unconscionable, whereas the Southern cause is characterized as a matter of honor, which the characters — who would know, of course — clearly accept as true...

Ex-slaves in the North, by contrast, are shown as living under awful conditions that make a mockery of the Emancipation Proclamation... Ferguson foreshadows the argument that the black educator and political leader Booker T. Washington would make near the end of the century: that blacks shouldn’t wait around for political solutions requiring equal treatment from whites, but could only ensure their own betterment through hard work, competition, and entrepreneurship...

Having obliterated the southern half of the nation, the government’s activities in the postwar era seem largely confined to displacing Indians, killing Indians, and seeking out corrupt ways of amassing wealth for the politically connected few...

Readers, I haven't seen this show. Is it really the glowing tribute to the Lost Cause Karnick portrays? Because if so, I think America might be ready for my contrarian take on "Uncle Tom's Cabin," with Ian McShane as a tortured, foul-mouthed Simon Legree.

Even outside of the Southron stuff, the review is full if wonders, e.g.:

The real villain here is clearly government. As Cole’s entreaty indicates, the white people in the railroad encampment want nothing but for the Indians to leave them alone, and vice versa, but the government is intent on forcing them into separate worlds.

Also, in the machinations of the Republican-enabled railroad barons of the Gilded Age Karnick finds "strong parallels to modern-day congressional Democrats."

Well, you go to culture war with the culture warriors you've got, I guess. (h/t Dan Coyle)

UPDATE. "I have no idea about the show's historic accuracy," says Tod Westlake, a fan of the show, in comments, "but it's defintely entertaining. I believe this might have something to do with a literary technique known as 'irony.' I had to look it up, myself." On this head, DocAmazing recommends "Kung Fu," the old TV show about how rural Westerners loved Asians once they got to know/had their bullies beaten up by them. Me, I'm wondering if I had Once Upon a Time in the West all wrong. Maybe Frank and the weaselly railroad builder were the heroes. I mean, what did Harmonica produce?

ANNALS OF COMMUNITARIAN CONSERVATISM, CONT. You may recall that last weekend David Brooks told his readers how Rod Dreher had moved back to his old homestead because small-town folks are so nice, and invited them to check out Dreher's "communitarian conservatism" (i.e., the scam formerly known as Crunchy Conservatism) at his blog at The American Conservative.

I wonder how those who took Brooks' invitation enjoyed this heartwarming recent post in which Dreher commiserates with an understandably anonymous doctor about what leeches the poor are:

["Dr. Smith"] said that many of the patients he sees “are people who are poor because they just don’t want to work. They’ve never had a job and they never will have a job. They’re fine with that.” 

He said that the general public has no idea how much money is wasted on medical fraud and abuse by members of the underclass, and on treating people who have no intention of being anything other than dependents on the state, and who will demand treatment “if they as much as stub their toe” because they don’t have to pay for it...

The observable common behavior [of the poor] is so strange, irresponsible, and wholly dysfunctional that it’s hard to relate it to any norms we recognize as healthy, or even sane. But one is not permitted to say things like this out loud, or one will be accused of heartlessness, and worse.

Yet here's Dreher saying it out loud; what a brave fellow! Be nice to him, now, he just lost his sister.

It's been a while since I read the Bible. Was this Jesus guy Dreher claims to worship as big an asshole as he is?

UPDATE. Some commenters observe that Dreher, like his intellectual forebears, distinguishes between the "deserving poor" and the "undeserving poor." Slocum observes, "The Christian conservative thing to do would be to throw some money down on the ground and get a good ole bumfight going. That's how we see who deserves what."

Commenter g asks, "If you 'as much as stub your toe' and get treatment, the doctor gets the payment, not the patient. What motivation would the patient have to get treatment if he doesn't need it? Aren't most perpetrators of Medicaid fraud the medical professionals, not the patients?"

Medicare and Medicaid frauds do indeed enrich unscrupulous doctors, pharmacists, and health care professionals -- like these charming HMO execs I wrote about elsewhere, who are charged with shunting their sicker, less profitable customers off to hospices, from which they allegedly received kickbacks.

The Obama Administration has been working hard to cut medical fraud. But that's not the solution Christians would prefer; rather than crack down on the industrious capitalists who cheat the system, they'd prefer to throw poor people whom they suspect of malingering out of hospitals. They seem to believe that, like hippies, the poors fuck up the system out of sheer malevolence, not from any rational cause.

UPDATE 2. You know, I really shouldn't blame Dreherism on Christians. Many evangelicals support government services to the poor, and there's no reason to assume that all Jesus people share Dreher's way of looking at things. It's easy to be misled by the very visible public perches occupied by retributive Christians, and thus perpetuate the feedback loop that associates ordinary followers of Christ with religious hucksters.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP about the Santorum Surge and how evanescent I expect it to be. To give you some idea why, here's a quote from James Lileks -- yes, that James Lileks -- on Santorum: "Santorum's remarks are not a recipe for electoral success in the 21st century." And he said it in 2003. If that's what Lileks thought in 2003, by now Richard Viguerie must be going, "Christ, not that Jesus freak bullshit again."

On the other hand, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin have said nice things about him, so Santorum may expect significant support from the has-been grifter wing of the party.

THE ENEMY OF THE GOOD. I got into a little beef with Glenn Greenwald about his column comparing Ron Paul's civil libertarianism with that of President Obama. I think I was a little unfair about it. There are after all plenty of good reasons to be pissed about Obama, the latest being that horrible bill that he just signed, despite his alleged "reservations." From the bill:

(c) Disposition Under Law of War- The disposition of a person under the law of war as described in subsection (a) may include the following:

(1) Detention under the law of war without trial until the end of the hostilities authorized by the Authorization for Use of Military Force.

As the "War on Terror" is basically a war without end, the ACLU is right to call it "indefinite detention." You'd think that would be good grounds for a veto. But we didn't get one.

So once again our MOR Democratic President disappoints. I must say that, while I've been expecting less than what was advertised since the campaigning Senator Obama went for the bailouts in 2008, he's gone even further than I expected.

Greenwald, though, chooses to use Ron Paul as a cudgel to beat Obama. This is the sort of dreamy, libertarian-with-an-explanation thing that makes me especially cynical and Realpolitiky.

Greenwald carefully stresses that he doesn't support Paul, but when you read his description of Obama --

He has slaughtered civilians — Muslim children by the dozens — not once or twice, but continuously in numerous nations with drones, cluster bombs and other forms of attack. He has sought to overturn a global ban on cluster bombs. He has institutionalized the power of Presidents — in secret and with no checks — to target American citizens for assassination-by-CIA, far from any battlefield. He has waged an unprecedented war against whistleblowers, the protection of which was once a liberal shibboleth...

And then read him on Paul --

The parallel reality — the undeniable fact — is that all of these listed heinous views and actions from Barack Obama have been vehemently opposed and condemned by Ron Paul: and among the major GOP candidates, only by Ron Paul.

Then you have to ask: If he feels that way, how can he not support Ron Paul? Obama as described by Greenwald is a tyrannical monster, and Paul's the only guy with any meaningful support willing to oppose his tyranny. From this perspective it would seem practically a war crime not to start up a government in exile and oppose Generalissimo Obama by any means necessary.

Greenwald says there are "all sorts of legitimate reasons for progressives to oppose Ron Paul’s candidacy on the whole." But he doesn't lay them out in the column, though he does mention the newsletters we've all heard so much about -- which issue has become the go-to knock on Paul, so much so that it's practically a diversion now; it makes it look like Paul is a serious candidate sadly undone by the unfortunate revelation of a peccadillo, rather than the avatar of a disastrous idea of government.

Paul, as he is advertised, wouldn't just put an end to the national security state. He'd put an end to the welfare state.  No Social Security, no Medicare, no minimum wage, no FDA, etc. Even successful Big-Gummint projects like the Clean Air Act would be subject to new, corporation-friendly amendments.

Tyranny-wise, we'd be cutting out the middleman: Instead of having a government that sometimes enables and sometimes blocks the wishes of special interests, we'd let the special interests rumble for domination over all of us, with nothing but free-market pixie dust for protection.

Maybe you think it'd be worth it, because then the military-industrial complex would also be dismantled, and though we'd be fucked, at least the foreign babies would be spared. After all, in the enlightened, proto-libertarian Gilded Age, we didn't have any such foreign adventures -- well, okay, the Spanish-American War, and the Philippine Insurrection, and a bunch of little invasions that inexplicably took place without socialist inspiration. And yeah, okay, there were massacres. But at least it was fairer then, because sometimes U.S. troops opened fire on Americans too. Freedom!

Fuck that shit. I'm voting for Black Hitler in 2012.

UPDATE. In comments, Greenwald says -- very graciously, I would add -- that he did lay out the  problems with Paul in his italicized "honest line of reasoning" that a hypothetical pro-Obama liberal would take. I am tempted to say that I didn't credit this because Greenwald had put it in the mouth of a fictional character with whom he doesn't agree, and so I did not consider it his own point of view; but to be honest, my eyes were too filled with blood to read carefully after I saw my own point of view characterized thus: "Yes, I’m willing to continue to have Muslim children slaughtered by covert drones and cluster bombs, and America’s minorities imprisoned by the hundreds of thousands for no good reason..." Jesus, Glenn, why not add "Mwah hah hah" and "Pathetic humans! Who can save you now?" while you're at it?

BIG-TENT REVIVAL MEETING. I see that David Brooks has caught up with Rod Dreher. His column focuses on Dreher's rather sweet accounts of his sister's last days, the generosity of the people in his Louisiana hometown, and his decision to move back there from the Big City.

Even people who've read Dreher's nonsense over the years might find that story moving, and those regular readers of Brooks who are unacquainted with Dreher may take Brooks at his word that Dreher

is part of a communitarian conservative tradition that goes back to thinkers like Russell Kirk and Robert Nisbet. Forty years ago, Kirk led one of the two great poles of conservatism. It existed in creative tension with the other great pole, Milton Friedman’s free-market philosophy.

In recent decades, the communitarian conservatism has become less popular while the market conservatism dominates. But that doesn’t make Kirk’s insights into small towns, traditions and community any less true, as Rod Dreher so powerfully rediscovered.

And this may lead them to follow Dreher, expecting a warm, back-to-the-land, Wendell Berry sort of vibe which will restore conservatism to its rightful place in the public imagination.

Eventually they'll get to know the real Dreher -- the one who thinks a bride who shows a tattoo on her wedding day is a slut; who thinks gays, once given marriage rights, will mob and storm the churches and attack Christians (which, he explains, is why he keeps a gun in the house); who reacts to the Catholic Church's sex abuse scandals with articles like "How the cultural Left paved way for pedophilia"; who thinks Islamic extremists really have a point about how Godless we Westerners are ("I probably have, re: fundamental morals, more in common with the first 500 people I'd meet in Cairo, Damascus or Tehran than the first 500 people I'd meet in Park City, UT, during festival time"); who fills his idle moments yelling about dirty things he found on the internet; etc.

In other words, they'll find out that Dreher is a garden-variety Jesus freak with a mean streak. Some of them will be disappointed, because they wanted to believe that there really was someone out there who conformed to their homey vision of artisanal conservatism (though they wouldn't actually go out there and cultivate it themselves -- picture David Brooks sauntering into the general store in Bumfuck, asking where a man could get a manicure 'round these here parts).

But some, I imagine, will be pleased, because Jesus freaks with mean streaks are really what they think "communitarian conservatives" are. And, you know, I think they're right.  Talk all you want about Russell Kirk, but what really filled the communitarian-conservative slot Brooks is talking about was R.J. Rushdoony and Jerry Falwell. I'm not surprised that Brooks finds it necessary to push Mr. Crunchy Con as the new face of that movement. He's mild-mannered, and he likes to grow tomatoes and play with his internet toys -- he'll pour you a nice glass of Bordeaux while his wife christens your kids in the bathtub.  Who knows, it might work. People long ago learned to laugh at the ole-time string-tie preacher; only a few of us yet know how comical the new Dreher edition is.

THE JON SWIFT MEMORIAL ROUNDUP IS POSTED -- Battochio did his usual bangup job, and the contributors are all stellar. It's a good way to remind oneself that not everything written for the internet is purposefully designed to sap your will to live.

YOUR LIBERTARIAN IDEAS ARE INTRIGUING TO ME AND I WOULD LIKE TO SUBSCRIBE TO YOUR RACIST NEWSLETTER. Dave Weigel has a few posts up wondering aloud why gays and/or liberals aren't mad at Ron Paul for the homo-hate in his crazy newsletters. I doubt that Weigel has actually missed Digby, who sees Paul with penetrating clarity for what he really is, and others like her. But Weigel's not talking about people who have actual views on libertarianism. He means sentimental sorts like Dan Savage, with his live-and-let-die attitude toward Paul ("Ron may not like gay people, and may not want to hang out with us or use our toilets, but he's content to leave us the fuck alone"), and the self-identified liberals who tell pollsters they feel kindly toward Paul. He means the folks who might be down for a little rEVOLution, if only on weekends. The guy seems loose, and says he didn't mean it; why get into all that old stuff?

Paul has benefited from his novelty factor. Everyone else in the 2012 Republican Presidential field is selling schmaltz that seemed tasty enough in earlier iterations but has since attained a reek. Perry is George W. Bush minus 20 IQ points. Romney is the Nixonian organization man who, like Tricky Dick, has added a little nastiness to his affect to become a more electable New Romney. Gingrich is Gingrich, a straight-up nostalgia act. Santorum and Bachmann are tussling for the Christian Coalition dead-enders like it was 1988.

Paul seems fresh in this context because he's an overt libertarian. Republicans often dabble in libertarianism -- whenever they feel like they're coming over too hidebound, they flash it to relax the crowd -- but at the Presidential level, they usually have to confine themselves to the economic, Milton Friedman, trickle-down variant of libertarianism, because to get into social issues would piss off the Christians. But that worked very well for a long time, especially after Reagan linked the idea of rapacious capitalism with maximum freedom, and the huge trade imbalances he engendered meant everyone got cheap foreign goods.

(And libertarians were okay with that. Go to reason.com sometime, put "crony capitalism" in the search field, and see how few of the references come from before the Obama Administration.)

This variant isn't so useful since their crackpot ideas collapsed the economy; now Gingrich's feed-the-corporations economic plan has the same sad mothball smell his candidacy does. But they still can't get too deep into the libertarian social agenda, due to all those senior citizens whose prejudices are all that bind them to the party. And forget the other libertarian tropes. No one would believe them talking gold bug nonsense; Herman Cain, the conservative black hope till he imploded, was a Federal Reserve Bank chairman.  And without their support for endless wars, what would be left to make them look butch?

Then there's Ron Paul. Not only does he go the whole nine yards on free minds-free markets -- he also denounces our foreign adventures economic and martial. He hates the Fed. He'll let you have raw milk. Freedom!

And he has a kinda-sorta gay rights record that both bigots and Dan Savage can be comfortable with -- he'd leave it to the states, just like abortion and racial integration. This is where his libertarianism really comes in handy -- you can believe that he personally endorsed at the vile things published under his name in those newsletters, and still believe, if motivated to do so, that his hatred of the State (but not the states) is so strong that it would actually protect gays, blacks, women, and everyone else even from his own ill will.

This is easier to believe if you forget that Paul is a Republican, operating comfortably within that party's framework for decades, and if you forget, or never knew, that libertarians are comfortable in that party for a reason. The right-wing fringe groups that attached to the GOP after World War II had their disagreements -- as with the National Review people and Ayn Rand -- but they also found plenty of common ground. It is almost charming to read Walter Olson on R.J. Rushdoony and his Reconstructionist loons, and how they -- unaccountably, to Olson -- "gained prominence in libertarian causes, ranging from hard-money economics to the defense of home schooling." Read Max Blumenthal on the subject and you'll see that the relationship of libertarians, Christian fundamentalists, Birchers, and other radicals was less contentious than synthetic. Think of Steve Forbes and Richard Viguerie -- for that matter, think of Rudy Giuliani and Pat Robertson.

These guys can always work together, because they all came out of the same Big Bang of hatred for the New Deal and its legacy: Big Government and the coalition that sustains it -- blacks, gays, unionized workers, women, et alia. Each conservative tribe has its own relationship to that legacy -- some of them (the more intelligent ones, generally) are deeply cynical, and some are as sincere as any schizophrenic street preacher. But all of them deeply hate that a bunch of minorities have coalesced to get something that they think belongs by right to them and people like them, and many of them have learned that it would be more effective (and, these days, more popular) to strike at the state that enables that coalition than at the minorities themselves.

What mania, particularly, animated Paul's newsletter stories of criminal-natured blacks and AIDS-drama-queen gays doesn't matter to me. I know that he's a Republican Libertarian and, having been born earlier than yesterday, that is enough for me.

DISAPPOINTED. Oh please oh please oh please let it be true:

All along, the Tea Party voters have yet to unite behind a single candidate. They still aren’t united, but in Iowa, there is evidence that Rick Santorum may be surging ahead.

It would be fun, wouldn't it? Alas, there are a few things wrong with this assessment, not the least being that it was made by Dick Morris.

Most likely now, Romney will win Iowa and go on to win New Hampshire. But then, a kind of buyer’s remorse may set in as Republicans contemplate a nominee who backs Romneycare and once supported abortion choice. His past apostasies, combined with his religion, may give Newt an opportunity to come back in South Carolina. Then the two of them will slug it out down the road. But they may have company in the person of Rick Santorum.

The titans Romney and Gingrich battle to a draw and, with a leg-up from Jesus, little Rick Santorum takes the convention! Sadly, the battle is a trifle one-sided; the Gingrich campaign seems to be devoting energies better spent on, say, getting the candidate onto actual ballots to the development of weapons-grade bad analogies -- first they compared Gingrich's failure to qualify for the Virginia primary to Pearl Harbor, and now this:

Surely, in the most successful country in history, we can do what is necessary, we can be in the spirit of General Washington and the Americans who fought for freedom, we can go out, get the vote out, make the argument, stand up for freedom, and I believe we can have as big an impact in helping America remain free in our generation as they did in theirs.

Yes, Newt Gingrich is comparing the limping last leg of his comeback tour to Washington crossing the Delaware. When his defeat is inescapable,  I hope he's man enough to come out in a Confederate uniform and compare the failed Gingrich Campaign to the Lost Cause, and wave his fans off to a rousing rendition of "Dixie"; failing that, he could come out in shades and a corncob pipe like Douglas MacArthur and promise "I shall return," or topple to the floor crying "Et tu, Brute? Then fall Gingrich!" or "Mother of Mercy! Is this the end of Gingrich?" or "OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW."

When the dust settles I'm afraid it'll be Romney with a briefcase and a fountain pen, trying gosh-darned hard to get America to switch insurance companies. Tsk. I knew this election would be bad for America, but I didn't think it'd run out of entertainment value before 2012 even began.

SHORTER MARK KRIKORIAN: What good are wetbacks if we can't use them against faggots?

UPDATE: You think I'm kidding?

That’s part of the reason why California, the state with the largest share of immigrants in its population, has “the first state law mandating lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender history and social science curricula.” It’s not that immigrants demanded this nonsense; they probably don’t even like it very much. But their large-scale presence solidifies the position of the Left, making this kind of thing possible, and they aren’t turned off by it enough to rebel against it.

What you or I might see as a welcome trend toward greater liberty for all people, Krikorian sees as a fifth column of objectively pro-gay Messicans. You wonder why we can't have a serious discussion of illegal immigration? It's because for years the podium has been hogged by clowns.

UPDATE 2: "Don't tell me you haven't heard of Reconquistadora de la Rosa," Jay B. tells Krikorian in comments. "Gays in the WeHo/Castro set have been working for years with their maids, gardeners and central valley migrant workers to cement a Pink-Brown alliance. The deal goes, or so I've heard, that in exchange for the barest of benefits, illegal Chicanos will vote straight queer ticket. Eventually, the theory says, gay leadership will cede a 90% gay state back to Mexico in exchange for a permanent free state in Puerto Vallarta."

Several other commenters take Krikorian's post as further evidence that conservatives don't believe in democracy. Sure they do, the way Arnold Rothstein believed in the 1919 Cincinnati Reds.

UPDATE 3: Those who get out of the boat will also be treated to Krikorian's reminder that many Democrats were on the wrong side in the Civil War, which prompts this comment from the Good Roger Ailes: "Ultimately, the Democratic coalition of slaveholders and blacks proved to be unsustainable."

THE CONSERVATIVE COMEBACK PART 4,789. Well, Gingrich is falling like a rock and none of them can tolerate Ron Paul. Time for a RedState brain trust including Moe Lane, Lori Ziganto, and Aaron Gardner to burst into the room with Plan 17. Whattaya got for us, Einsteins?

If this website has a purpose – if any conservative website or publication has a purpose – it must begin with electing conservatives to significant public offices. We have the chance to nominate a conservative for president and win the White House in 2012. We can fumble that chance away by settling for a nominee we can’t trust to pursue conservative policies in office, or we can make a stand for the best, most conservative potential president in the field.

I knew it! The Santorum moment has arrived! Or maybe a Bachmann revival...

That’s Rick Perry, and we enthusiastically endorse him to be the 45th President of the United States.

Whut.

They have to be kidding. Rick Perry, whom America perceives as a mentally challenged rodeo clown? The guy prominent conservatives pretend not to recognize on the street? That Rick Perry?

Perry is the most reliable conservative in the race. He has made his share of missteps over 25 years in public life, as have all the candidates, but when you think seriously about which of the major candidates would govern in the most consistently conservative fashion, the answer is obvious.

Fellas, there's probably a robot somewhere that would govern in the most consistently conservative fashion -- it wouldn't be hard to program; just get it to yell "More tax breaks for the wealthy!" and "I hates me a faggot!" at intervals, and to fart loudly when France or higher education is mentioned -- but it doesn't mean anything unless you can get people to vote for it.

The one knock on Perry is that his poor debate performances and periodic campaign trail gaffes will open him to the same vulnerabilities in office as President Bush: an inability to respond to criticism or explain his own policies.

The same vulnerabilities? Perry makes George W. Bush look like Pericles. Nobody, but nobody, is praying, "Oh Lord, send us someone just like George W. Bush, only stupider." Just the other day -- at a stage in the campaign when you'd expect him to work extra hard not to make any more dumb mistakes -- Perry misread Kim Jong Il as Kim Jong the Second. That's like something out of a Cheech and Chong movie. Most observers, having seen how much of an understatement "inability to respond to criticism or explain his own policies" is, have moved on to wondering if Perry can tie a shoelace without coaching.

Second, debating skill takes on outsize importance in the primaries, when candidates have to stand out on a stage crowded with 7 or 8 people who all agree with each other 80-90% of the time. All Rick Perry needs to do is step onstage and everyone will know how he’s different from Barack Obama.

Oh, it's no use. They think life is like an Adam Sandler movie, where everyone winds up preferring the moron-with-a-heart-of-gold to the stuffed shirt.

Third, the main job of the president is making decisions, not talking, and Alex Kaufmann makes a great point regarding how guys like Perry get things done:

Stick around, you have to see what they brought in the pinch-hitter to do:

Until yesterday, I wasn’t completely sure why I liked Rick Perry so much. I have a list of reasons, but none of them really got to the root of why I like him.

Yesterday the reason finally dawned on me. I watched this wonderful 11-minute video from Ben Howe entitled “The Rick Perry I Know”…

… and I had a revelation: Rick Perry is just like my Dad...

When it all gets too much for me, and I expect it often will, I'll just try to recall the image this gave me of Rick Perry in the deep woods, addressing a group of Boy Scouts around a campfire: "Guys, I know you haven't had anything to eat for a couple of days, but we're gonna make it out of these woods because I got me an idea. Now you remember when I asked y'all what direction the sun comes up in, and I got an equal amount of votes for 'West,' 'South,' and 'Mommy'? Well, I didn't know what to do with that, so I prayed on it and the Lord tole me that when we wake up in the morning hallucinating from hunger, we're gonna see Ronald Reagan big as life, and he's gonna lead us on outta here, and we shouldn't get scared if they place he leads us to looks like a ravine or a mess o' barb wire. Now try and get some sleep, and remember, bears ain't like dogs, when they sniff at you it don't mean they wanna play."

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the Ron Paul surge and the rightblogger rush to stop it. For years Paul has been their little rock-and-roll, their token free thinker -- but whenever he gets close to winning some high-profile contest, they suddenly remember he's crazy, i.e., likely when in office to cut military appropriations.

Well, we knew all that Tea Party stuff was bullshit months ago. On to Mittmentum!

DON'T TAKE THAT TONE WITH ME. Ohdear, The Anchoress again:

Just ran out for a Chai Tea Latte (and to get away from the noise of the non-stop leaf-blowers, around here) and heard this on the radio:

“Mitt Romney is in New York (blah blah) to attend three fund-raisers where he’ll get to meet some supporters (blah blah) paying $2,500 a plate (blah blah) and others on Park Avenue.”

On paper, it looks like the most innocent news report ever generated, doesn’t it?

Over the airways, with the newsreader’s emphasis, what came through was

“Mitt Romney is in New York (blah blah) to attend three fund-raisers! Where he’ll get to meet some supporters (blah blah) paying $2,500 a plate! (Blah blah) and others on Park Avenue!“

Message: Moneygrubbing! The One Percenters! The Evil Rich on Park Avenue!

Somehow this same news station manages not to overemphasize or breath exclamation points when the President comes into town to do a number of fundraisers costing thousands of dollars a plate, in ritzy neighborhoods...

Even assuming that this cheapjack mystic actually heard what she says she heard, those of us who actually live in this world will assume that the harried newsreader was probably just trying to make the copy sound like something other than blah blah.

But more to the point: Imagine thinking like this. Imagine hearing 1010-WINS or some damn thing and being offended by the political implications of somebody's tone of voice. It's one thing to be bothered enough to write about something stupid somebody said, but why would you report to your readers on the ideological bias of someone's "breath exclamation points"?

I write a lot here about the spectacular self-pity and eagerness to take offense of modern conservatives, but at this moment in their history I think they're verging into something new. There's always been in their discourse a kind of petulance that seemed to me beyond politics, and in a post like this it asserts itself and overtakes politics almost completely. You see revealed the habit of mind that prefigures all their crackpot ideas about justice, governance, and everything else -- that of the perpetually aggrieved fusspot, the one who thinks everyone's trying to put something over on her -- which is why, whenever she takes an absurd number of helpings from the food sample table, or brings 20 items to the 10-items-or-less line, or stiffs the waiter at the coffee shop, or occupies two spaces at the parking lot, she feels not only justified but righteous. She thinks she's anti-socialist, but she's really just anti-social. And the pinched, miserable blaming blather that pours off the stage of the Republican Presidential debates is not oratory nor statesmanship nor even politics, but the echo of her voice.

SHORTER MEGAN McARDLE: I know this person who actually became poor and I don't feel a bit sorry for her, because then I would be dehumanizing her by denying her agency -- just as you would be doing if you felt sorry for other poor people and tried to give them advantages they wouldn't know what to do with, like jobs at a living wage.

UPDATE. Some commenters get out of the boat ("I almost left behind Lance and that puppy," shudders dex) and have the same awestruck, silent-upon-a-peak-in-Darien reaction I had to McArdle's show-stopper, "It's all too common for well-meaning middle-class people to think that if the poor just had the same stuff we do, they wouldn't be poor any more..." Not wishing to imply racism, which of course would be the worst crime one could commit against a conservative, I will suppose her insight is based on the continued uncouth behavior after their ascension to great wealth of the Beverly Hillbillies.

UPDATE 2. "The weird feeling that I get from the post is that Megan seems to think that she's being genuinely empathetic there," says Halloween Jack. "It's like an alien who is trying to explain to a mob of panicked and furious humans that the title of How To Serve Man works both ways." Well, I wouldn't go that far; McArdle probably thinks the sort of empathy normal humans feel is bathetic and gross, like the totally over-the-top wailing of mothers over their dead children that she saw in a movie once. Still, I guess even libertarians need something in their lives to take the place of empathy, and contorted rationalizations like I'm not condescending, you're condescending are it. Call them shoulder pads for the soul.

MOOCHERS AND LOOTERS.

Are there no think tanks? Are there no Koch Brothers?

Well, I'm sure the guys at Reason would never -- oh wait.

This Yuletide I'm giving my charitable donations to bums hanging around liquor stores. At least I don't have to pay attention to what they emit.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, on Newt Gingrich's rise and the anxieties it's producing on the right. I don't mean to be optimistic, but it says something that a disgraced former Republican Speaker of the House is doing so well at this stage of the game. I don't recall the Democrats seriously considering Dan Rostenkowski for President in 2008.

I didn't mention Gingrich's obscene comments about turning children into janitors because Susan of Texas covered that once and for all herself.

My only regret is that I didn't catch up with Cynthia Yockey's "Why Newt’s lesbian sister is a good reason for gays to vote for him as the Republican presidential nominee" in time to include it:

Newt’s stance on gay equality and marriage equality is toxic, anti-gay, anti-American and anti-Constitution...

It is bizarre, however, that she pledges to vote instead for Obama, who also opposes gay equality and empowers his Department of Justice to use scorched earth tactics to fight lawsuits filed by Republicans and conservatives in favor of gay equality. After all, she could choose Fred Karger.

Oh, sorry, you were wondering why this makes Gingrich the logical choice for LGBT voters?

If Newt is the nominee, or, gulp, is elected president, the dialog between him and his lesbian sister will shine a very bright and cleansing light on the falsehood that opposition to gay equality supports family values in any way and will reveal that the true goal of this fraud is to gain control of the reproductive lives of as many followers as possible for purely selfish reasons.

Of course, with the United States in flaming ruins, there won't be much opportunity to act on this insight.