ALEC AKBAR. Fred Smith of the Competitive Enterprise Institute at the Washington Times:

Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin recently came under attack from left-wing activists for meeting with representatives of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a nationwide association of conservative state legislators. This is but the latest salvo in a sustained attack on ALEC from the political left. The governor rightly has ignored the attacks, which really are efforts to stifle political speech.

Translation: About 30 people demonstrated on the sidewalk, and they weren't holding BREITBART IS HERE signs, so it's an "attack" -- indeed, a "salvo"! -- rather than Tea Party free speech.

ALEC’s critics paint it as a shadowy organization that pushes ready-made legislation to advance a corporate agenda. In reality... 

In reality, or at least grammatical reality, you would expect the author to address these charges next. But Smith isn't done crying victim:

...the attack on ALEC is part of a much broader attack by those seeking to drive all market voices from the marketplace of ideas. ALEC’s critics say they object to its tactics, but what they really seek to attack is its ideological principles: free markets and limited government.

And apple pie. Don't forget apple pie.

In the course of this short editorial, Smith uses the word "attack" eight times. By the end, he's stepped it up to "thuggery" and "strong-arm tactics." Yet as aficionados of the genre will have guessed, Smith cites in evidence nothing more thuggish than that small sidewalk protest. His other claims are even sillier. Get a load, and I do mean load, of this:

This effort to drive out pro-market voices is far more extensive than the attack on ALEC. Anti-business forces already have succeeded at excluding business experts from governmental policy advisory councils and imposing second-class status on them in academic journals. Any nonprofit political organization that receives business funding comes under constant attack - unless, that is, the funding is aimed at expanding the size and scope of government.

Smith doesn't bother to explain how the big bad lefties are "imposing second-class status" on "business experts" in "academic journals." Maybe some think-tank like ALEC or CEI tried to plant propaganda in some peer-reviewed publications, and they didn't go for it. "Constant attack" we can take to mean that somebody disagreed with them, out loud. Actually that's all any of it means.

I talk here from time to time about the insidiousness of propaganda, and how its practitioners are not just making bogus cases but also corrupting the language by the poisonous example of their obliviousness to meaning. Smith's effort is an especially clear example -- not fancied up by one of those bards of bullshit trained at Reason or the Wall Street Journal, but done straight to the template by someone too busy, uninterested, or incapable of normal human interaction to do anything else.

Smith may be as terrible a writer as he appears, but I wouldn't swear to it, because the sort of thing he's doing doesn't call for good writing -- it calls for its opposite. Good writing is supposed to clarify, and Smith's intention is to obfuscate.

He has a strong motivation to do so. Some folks besides the usual suspects have caught on to ALEC, and are reporting its true mission of muscling government to do the bidding of business (and lying about it). Even worse, this reporting has actually been heeded by audiences, causing businesses and politicians to disassociate themselves from ALEC.

Smith could have told us all that, but doing so would have invited readers to ask what's so unjust about the press accurately reporting what ALEC does, and ALEC affiliates deciding to quit the organization in consequence. They might then figure out that Smith's only real complaint is that his team suffers from it. So Smith just plays victim up and down the block -- which is still ridiculous, as both CEI and ALEC are well-connected and -funded wingnut welfare queens. But victim status, as has been obvious for decades, is the one reliable equity of modern conservative thought, and in the last ditch that's what they go with.

Besides, it's in the Washington Times -- it doesn't have to be too convincing. Sometimes you just gotta go through the motions. Don't cry, it's soft duty and the money's good!

Christ, I'm glad I'm not in that line of work.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about Obama's gay marriage statement and the delusional rightblogger reactions. One of the main reasons I believe in the justice of marriage equality is that the guys who are against it write such incredibly shitty polemics. Clear thinking makes clear writing,  and the obverse is also true.  Get a load of this from The Right Scoop:

They are actually comparing race to sexual preference? Yes, I said preference. Unlike skin color, there is NO evidence to support the idea that babies are born gay. People want to believe it’s innate but it’s just that, a belief. And a well crafted belief to elevate the idea of being gay far above preference into something that can tear at the fabric of the institution of marriage.

I suppose it's elitist of me to say so, but when your opponents argue like this, you can be reasonably certain you've picked the right side.

A FAR GONE CONCLUSION. Well, I asked for a new meme to replace the "Obama plots to lose in 2012 and come back in future gay America" one, and Jeffrey T. Kuhner at the Washington Times has delivered: By endorsing gay marriage, Obama is committing "political suicide" on purpose because he hates this country and, with this "latest onslaught on traditional America," means to kill it once and for all, even if he has to sacrifice himself to do it.  He's our first suicide bomber President!

The ultimate aim of the radical left has been to destroy religion - especially Western Christendom. Once a religion dies, so does the culture and civilization it spawned. America is at a crossroads, enmeshed in a cultural war with homosexual advocates like Mr. Obama who are determined to strike at the very nexus of our civilization.

Give him this much -- Kuhner, "a columnist at The Washington Times and president of the Edmund Burke Institute" (and author of a 2011 WashTimes article that celebrated the dedication of the MLK Memorial by informing us on what a commie bastard King was) is little inclined to play the compassionate-conservative games his comrades go for. At one point he tells us:

The liberal media, such as the New York Times, consistently portray anti-gay-marriage advocates as bigots. This is nonsense. Most Americans are neither intolerant nor bigoted.

Just when you're expecting to hear him defend that claim of toleration with Dick Cheney and the boys at the Log Cabin Club, Kuhner goes with this:

Every major religious faith - Christianity, Islam, Orthodox Judaism - teaches that homosexuality is an abomination. Homosexual behavior, especially sodomy, is unnatural and immoral.

That's a choice not an echo right there.

While I never had much respect for the Washington Times (they used to let John Podhoretz review movies, for God's sake), lately they seem to have entered a particularly degenerate era. I assume they're just keeping up with their readership.

YOU KNOW IT'S BULLSHIT WHEN... Mickey Kaus gets in on it. Remember that Obama/Grover Cleveland conspiracy Aaron Goldstein floated the other day? Twitter correspondent @westwit tipped me to this from Kaus:

Thinking two steps ahead? If Barack Obama loses the 2012 election, do you think he’s going to quit elective politics...? I don’t. I think he’s going to run again, Grover Cleveland style. That casts possible additional (distant) light on today’s endorsement of same-sex marriage: It may or may not help Obama in 2012. But it would much more reliably likely help him in 2016, when public opinion can be expected to have shifted further in favor of this social innovation. It would certainly help him in the Democratic primaries...

And he didn't mention me or Goldstein. I thought Kaus knew how to logroll if nothing else. Well, at least I have the comfort of knowing that within days Kaus' contribution will also be forgotten, as the whole Obama-threw-2012-for-fags thing becomes received wingnut wisdom. Next meme, please.

UPDATE, many days later: I just noticed Kaus updated his post to credit Goldstein and myself. Say what you will, the man's a pro.

JESUS WANTS ME FOR A DUMB SCHEME. I hope you've all been enjoying the latest conservative counterintuition: That Fox News is in the tank for gay marriage. Rod Dreher is right in there, telling us one of his famous stories about how ten years ago a "Fox staffer" told him he "had been told not to touch anything to do with homosexuality" -- in the specific context, that is, of Rod's big scoop on "the role homosexual networks within the seminaries and the Catholic clergy have played in the [child abuse] cover-ups." (This was before Dreher decided that it was not the gay nets per se but the "cultural Left" that caused the altar-boy daisy-chains. Or is that the same thing?) "This was policy handed down from the very top of the network," the apparatchik allegedly told him. Straight from the Gay Fox Kremlin!

Ah, how this takes me back -- specifically, to 2007, when Brother Rod was ecstatic that Foxy "Uncle Rupert" Murdoch had bought Beliefnet:

This is good for Beliefnet, trust me. Murdoch is an Internet visionary, and his deep pockets will only allow this website to diversity and improve its content. I have absolutely no fear at all that Team Rupert will in any way dictate content. Murdoch's core ideology is capitalism -- for better and for worse.

Happy capitalist Uncle Rupert is Jesus' best friend until it's time for the story to change. Outrage, for these people, is a little tin clicker they keep in a box until opportunity demands they take it out, stand on a soapbox, hold it righteously aloft and feverishly fiddle. That the scam sometimes involves a pretense of interest in the truth probably amuses someone Dreher's working for, though I don't think Dreher himself understands what's funny about it.

HEADLINE SAYS, "OBAMA CAN'T SWIM." The first U.S. President to declare his support for gay marriage is getting a predictable reaction from idiots. I think Gerard Vanderleun deserves some sort of prize, though. His first rapid response was that Obama is gay:

As the country's majorities again confirm at the ballot box they are not in favor of gay "marriage," the nation's ostensible leader continues an evolutionary decloseting whose speed is lapped, so to speak, by the platypus. The delay is puzzling to me. Given the fact that Obama is the gayest straight man ever to hold the office of the president, I fail to see what the problem is in his coming out of the closet on a rocket...

Gee whiz. I wonder if Obama will come out or not. He could of course avoid taking a "position" simply giving Andrew Sullivan one hot evening in the Lincoln Bedroom and leaking the photographs to Blueboy.com, but some things are just too revolting to evolve into.

Vanderleun then stuck up an old post in which he pretended to be cool with gay marriage ("can't we take a step back and draw a deep breath, smell the winds of change and admit that Gay Marriage is a done deal?"), while describing himself (quite unnecessarily) as "compulsively heterosexual."

This kind of nutshells the schtick all around: It's not that they're against gay people (notwithstanding that only this morning they were beating their chests over the defeat of gay marriage and civil unions in North Carolina) -- it's all about the flip-flopping, or the attack on religion ("BREAKING: Obama casts faith aside," "Obama Continues Attacks On Christian Church... He just threw MILLIONS of Christian Americans under the bus," etc), or Obama is looking for "gay money" or some shit.

It would be one thing, a very small thing, if you could believe for a nanosecond that all these guys who say they have nothing against gay people would actually be glad marriage equality got a little closer to the goal line so long as Obama could be denied any credit for it.  But they don't care about that; as we saw with the Osama Bin Laden hit, they don't care about anything except winning.

Obama's a politician, but at least he's playing out his string in the right direction. The other guys are more like those deranged spouses who'll shoot up a crowded room just to get a bead on the one who made them feel small.

UPDATE. BTW 2nding this.

UPDATE 2. I mean, come on -- Aaron Goldstein at The American Spectator:

Now I happen to support same sex marriage. But Obama is only supporting it because it is now politically expedient for him to do so.

This isn't Murder in the Cathedral, it's American politics. Lincoln didn't issue the Emancipation Proclamation till halfway through the Civil War. We take what we can get when we can get it.

Also, Goldstein seems to think Obama is planning a Grover Cleveland, or maybe a John Quincy Adams:

But let's say Obama loses in November. He has a ready made excuse for his defeat. Obama can say that the forces of darkness (i.e. opponents of gay marriage) are to blame for his defeat while patting himself on the back for his "courage" in supporting same sex marriage. It also helps to position him for a comeback in 2016 or 2020. Make no mistake. If Obama loses this fall it won't be the last we see of him. By that time with a greater presence of voters born after 1980 chances are there will be more voters in favor of gay marriage which would give Obama an opportunity to claim he was ahead of the curve.

"Claim he was ahead of the curve" is a hell of a thing to say under the circumstances. But you know you've really gone off the edge of the table when you're accusing a sitting U.S. President of supporting gay marriage in an election year so he can win some other election. Maybe next they'll accuse him of angling for U.N. Secretary-General.

UPDATE 3. I might have known: In comments (which are excellent BTW) sxp151 informs me that Niles Gardiner already accused Obama of angling for U.N. Secretary-General:

President Obama seems increasingly uncomfortable in domestic US settings, but highly energised when speaking abroad, especially to audiences that are traditionally anti-American. Which is why, if he loses in 2012, which is now increasingly likely, he might see the position of UN Secretary General as a natural fit.

It bothers me, because I'm just trying to get laughs, and they're trying to take over the world. I should have the advantage.

LOG CABIN BONFIRE. North Carolina has passed its anti-gay-marriage amendment, and conservatives are rejoicing. I'm really not seeing much of the more-in-sorrow-than-anger, we-love-you-we-just-don't-think-you're-as-good-as-us schtick they pull when they're pretending to be new model wingnuts who wouldn't discriminate against a fly. With a few admirable exceptions, they're either full-throatedly shouting approval or ignoring the news, hoping to keep their hands clean for the next gay outreach.

At the PJ Tatler, Bryan Preston seems to have had a bit too much champagne.

In the aftermath of North Carolina’s vote, this NewsObserver photo may reveal what Barack Obama and the Democrats fear the most. [photo of black people cheering news] Black churches overwhelmingly oppose gay marriage.

This is one of their great dreams: That they can get the blacks to kill the gays for them, thus winning control of the board from the Democrat plantation masters. But after another Dixie cup of Freixenet, Preston grows maudlin:

Democrats use black churches and black pastors to spread their party’s message from pulpits every Sunday during election season. No one should be under any illusions that supporting gay marriage could cost Obama the black vote. It won’t.

A loyal supporter busts some amyl under his nose and Preston comes back to life:

November will be about the economy, full stop. But it could cost him enough of the black vote to hurt him in November. It could erode support and enthusiasm for Democrats generally.

See, hatred of homosexuals can turn America Republican all by itself -- we won't even need the blackity-blacks to do it! It's win-win!

That’s what Obama fears, and it’s part of the reason he did not want to be seen opposing Amendment 1 in North Carolina the day voters approved it. So Obama canceled his event in North Carolina today and dances his ludicrous dance on gay marriage. The only real evolution he is undergoing is tactical. His opinions have been set in stone since he was a sarong-wearing college kid doing crossword puzzles in his composite girlfriend’s apartment.

Ha ha ha ha, ludicrous dance in a sarong! [Minces around PJHQ, limp-wristedly flapping his hands]

Polling on gay marriage may be a bit like polling on Obama’s personal approval rating: Useless. People do not want to tell pollsters that they dislike Barack Obama personally, even though they really do, fearing that saying they dislike him will make them appear racist or mean.

Bet you didn't know that Gallup, Harris, and all those guys send Black Panthers to your house to do the questionnaires.Try telling them you don't like Obama!

The truth is, he often comes off as an aloof know-it-all who either doesn’t know what he’s doing, or does know what he’s doing and is being intentionally destructive. He often comes off as dishonest, hypocritical, and a bit of a jerk. He’s a bore who never says anything interesting unless he’s talking basketball. It’s not hard to imagine him singing the old country song “Lord, It’s Hard to be Humble When You’re Perfect In Every Way” and mean it.

Give Preston credit: He's neatly encapsulated the entire conservative case against Obama, except for, you know [pushes in nose, sticks out tongue and bottom lip].

Eventually a wearied Preston gets right down to the nub of his argument:

But people don’t want to say that out loud, since we’re all supposed to pretend that he’s someone we’d like to hang out with whether we agree with his politics or not...

Likewise, people apparently will tell a pollster one thing about their view of gay marriage to appear tolerant or with the times, but when they’re alone in the voting booth, they think about the issue in a more serious way.

There you have it, folks: Americans pretend to like black and gay people, but in reality they're miserable bigots like Bryan Preston. 'Less'n ole Bry thinks he's sumpthin' better than they are...

NOTHING MEANS NOTHING ANYMORE. It's hard to pick among the various idiots who heard about the White House staff's booking procedures for families with pregnant members whose kids may be born in time for their tours, and disseminated it as White House Registers Fetuses Skreee Outrage. But you can at least feel almost sorry for Mollie Hemingway at James Poulos' Hipsterbunker, who apparently hasn't quite gotten the hang of soulless apparatchik behavior:

Update: I posted this, then pulled the post on account of believing it must be some hoax. It must be a hoax, right? Why would any White House need this information, much less one as supportive of abortion as this one? It doesn't make sense to me. In any case, here's a copy of the email used to source the story, courtesy of the Washington Free Beacon. 

But someone must explain this to me, if it's not a hoax. Why would the White House need this information? I mean, I tell my children about the baseball games they attended in utero. And I even let them count it toward their list of stadiums they've visited. But, then again, I'm pro-life.

Then, buried down in the comments section where no normal person will see them:

OK, so the idea appears to be that if your child will be born by the time of a scheduled tour, you register him or her before they're born. 

At least that sort of makes sense. 

Still fascinating that such an abortion-supportive regime would treat unborn children as people.

Yeah, and the Obamanazis' so-called "census" (Where's that in the Constitution, huh?) also asks for your -- get this -- "place of birth." Birth! They admit babies are born! What a bunch of hypocrites!

Doesn't matter. At the GOP convention every speaker will make a joke about the registered fetuses, as well as the fake birth certificate, the Michelle Obama "Whitey" tape, etc., though everyone will grow grave and silent when the multitude honors Andrew Breitbart and pledges to avenge his murder.

I'm beginning to incline toward conspiracy theories now, myself. At present I strongly suspect these guys are all paid off by the DNC.

CULTURE WAR FOR DUMMIES. As a sensible person might have guessed, Jim Downey, the guy who wrote the unused Saturday Night Live sketch about Obama and Bin Laden, denies there was anything political about its absence from last weekend's show. Of course there is always something political going on behind the scenes at a professional entertainment concern, but the politics are usually that of the show's often constitutionally insecure workers (as hundreds of sour SNL reminiscences demonstrate), and not the tedious sort that usually concerns us here. Who knows who's trying to screw whom over there, and on what basis? But it probably isn't foreign policy.

Nonetheless as I mentioned yesterday the exclusion became a Thing among rightbloggers, who seldom sputter more than when the subject is, even just ostensibly, culture, pop or otherwise. E.g.: "Good politically-oriented comedy usually has an element of courage. It's not blind in the left eye with microscopic vision in the right," lectures some guy at Ace Of Spades, quoting Bergson, I think.

National Review even brought in Wall Street Journal comedy legend John Fund, who explained to readers, in his famously winsome style, that the "censored script" was in point of fact and on the merits a laff riot, and called for collective action against the unfair practices at SNL:

I’ve never met Jim Downey, the author of the scrapped script, but I can only hope people who believe in equal-opportunity potshots rise to his defense.

Fund probably thinks it works like the morning news shows: Make a big enough stink that they have to make sure you have equal time, and when they do keep bitching about bias until they're afraid to ever seriously challenge you.

UPDATE. They're still at it. Some guy at Gene Lalor's blog provides a timeline of the conspiracy:

In deference to complaints by arch-racial agitator Rev. Jesse Jackson and in conformity with a concerted effort to compensate for alleged discrimination toward African-Americans in the entertainment industry, Hollywood and television producers caved and today blacks are more than well-represented on the silver and TV screens.

They bent over backwards, upside-down and every whichway to assure blacks that the entertainment industry was not only not racist but that they would slander conservatives in the process in order to prove their how liberal they were.

DailyCaller.com revealed that “SNL” has caved again, this time to advance the Obama 2012 re-election campaign.

Tim Meadows was the thin end of the wedge!

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the rightblogger confusion over the composite characters in Dreams From My Father.  This shit is so stupid that at this point I don't think they even care if anyone else is reading it, let alone convinced by it -- they're just sitting in the back making fart noises, figuratively speaking (though perhaps literally, too).

UPDATE. In keeping with our recent Sunday night tradition of putting something stupid by Ann Althouse in the Voice link post, here's Tbogg on the stupid something. Because who wants to risk staring directly into that mess?

UPDATE 2. Whoops, had to fix the link for Tbogg, because I accidentally stuck in one about the latest serious conservative outrage: Saturday Night Live cut a sketch about Obama because bias. No, I'm not kidding. Everyblogger who's anybody from Gateway Jim Hoft to guest Perfesser Ed Driscoll is bitching about it, and about how (breaking!) SNL isn't funny anymore. This is an important front in the culture war, one that's sure to be the making of Greg Gutfield.

Also too: Attention must be paid to the great comments here, including that of Spaghetti Lee: "How do you murder someone Chicago-style? Drown them in tomato sauce?"

SHORTER BYRON YORK: Romney aide Richard Grenell was not forced out by social conservatives. He wasn't really even an aide. Rather, he is a radical homosexual activist who won the trust of the Romney campaign, then attacked it from within as a gay suicide bomber.

HIP TO BE SQUARE. I mentioned in my most recent Voice column Jonah Goldberg's typically incisive response to the whole alleged issue of Obama being too cool:

I wish the ad had at least one or two really solid clips conveying how despearately Obama wants to seem cool, which is always the great coolness-killer. It would have helped set the tone of the ad much better. What would those clips be? I'm not sure, but then again I'm not making the ad. Michael Moore seems to find a way to find that kind of footage pretty easily, and I have no doubt it can be found in Obama's case.

If only we had a picture of him with poop in his pants, holding a commie flag, everyone'd know what a poopy-pants commie he is! Faart. Yet it appears someone took not only this ridiculous subject but also Goldberg's thinly-veiled bleg seriously. At her internet Sunday school, The Anchoress prowls the aisles with a metal ruler and tells you what's cool and what isn't:

Have you heard the news? Barack Obama is cool!

He’s not just cool, he’s way cool; the coolest thing ever!

Too bad she forgot to link to a citation; I'd love to know what idiot said that.

Never having been “cool” myself (or desperate enough to seek its conferral upon me by people I always found to be rather sad trend-followers)...

While you so-called cool kids were friggin' and frugin' in your discos, The Anch was pretending to be a nun. That's totally Goth!

Coolness does not need anyone to define it, but allow me to try.

How much time we would save if only The Anchoress could occasionally remember the thing she said just before the thing she said.

The quality of “coolness” contains within it an attitude of discrete detachment, which is not the same as aloofness. It suggests an intellect attuned to a different frequency—perhaps to a higher muse—but still comfortable sharing the ground with the rest of us. Its muted confidence is so supreme...

On and on goes Sister Malizia's cool lesson, and just as the boys and girls are about to nod off she pulls out the visuals:

Come to think of it, by these definitions, one could safely opine that the “coolest” leaders currently athwart the world’s stage are still England’s Queen Elizabeth II, who recently crashed a wedding simply to wish a bridal couple well, and His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI, who takes the daily piñata beatings that come his way in stride, and answers with a blessing.

Somehow I don't think this will get the kids to throw in their porkpie hats for mitres and crowns, much as I would enjoy that.

Meanwhile Ole Perfesser Instapundit uses reader mail to explain how uncool Obama really is:

My theory is Obama represents the supremacy (however short-lived) of the beta-male. The only people who think he’s a hep-cat are hipster betas and 60′s radical-nostalgia dopes (also perennial personal-risk-averse betas who never did anything bold on their own). It’s all projection, much like the rest of the way that demographic operates

The thing about the "I don't care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members" attitude is, it's more impressive when Groucho Marx says it than when some guy who writes letters to Instapundit says it.

How hard this all is for them -- because once upon a time, they were cool. Back in the 1980s Reagan was everyone's daddy, John Paul II did a world tour and danced with the kids, and everyone dressed and wanted to be like characters from Dynasty. Fashions fade, though, and you're left with the enduring values behind what made your heroes cool. In their case that's tax breaks for the rich, endless wars, and persecution of homosexuals. We already had a retro revival of that:

I'm not sure the time is right for another. But who knows? Show biz is tricky.

UPDATE. "Weren't these the same guys who insisted that George Bush calling people 'Stretch' and 'Pooty-poot' was a veritable laff riot?" asks Doghouse Riley in comments. mortimer reminds us that Lisa Schiffren wrote "an entire, very wet column" in the Wall Street Journal about how "she and her soccer mom friends" found Bush "'hot' as in virile, sexy and powerful." Not to mention proto-Anchoress Peggy Noonan's swoon over both the President's testicles. Chacun à son ghoul.

WHAT THEY REALLY WANT. 

The conservative vision of the future is the 19th Century, only with sound cannons.

See also.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about rightblogger tsuris over Obama's busy media week, including the Bin Laden ad, the Jimmy Fallon slow jam, and the White House Correspondents Dinner. I left out anything concerning their claims that Obama's dog-eating joke at the nerdprom meant that conservatives scored a great victory, not because they aren't ridiculous, but because I'm just sick to death of Treacher.

SHORTER MICHAEL POTEMRA: Catholics are embracing same-sex marriage; the polls say so. But Catholics also are turning against Obama; Glenn Beck says so. This is good news for Republicans.

UPDATE. In a follow-up, Potemra adds a new proof-point: a Times poll showing that Americans don't think "religiously affiliated institutions should have to cover the full birth-control costs in their insurance plans." But the Administration is not making them, and is in fact going to ridiculous lengths to appease such organizations, the bishops' disingenuousness notwithstanding.

GET YOUR WAR ON, AGAIN. Sonny Bunch reads about the Obama Administration's "creation of an Atrocity Prevention Board, an interagency mechanism that calls for a new means of preventing mass atrocities and genocides," and is moved to sarcasm:

Wow! Such strength! Such fearless vision! I do hope the board shakes their magnificent finger VERY HARD at this:

Then he tells us about a Syrian guy who got buried alive at gunpoint. Or was he shredded in a shredder -- no, my mistake, that was from the Iraq War prep. Still, even if this one happens not to pan out (and the Daily Mail, from which the story is taken, suggests it may not), there are undoubtedly plenty of real horror stories in Syria to make your blood boil. Bunch doesn't wait for those:

But hey, we’re totally going to sanction those bastards into the ground, right? Right?...

I guess not. Welcome to a Brave New World of American Impotence. But hey! At least we’ve got that prevention board manning the walls, keeping the world’s vulnerable populations safe from atrocities!

If you thought this kind of gung-hodaddiness went out with warblogging, it's only because you haven't been listening to Fox News:

“In Syria,” Krauthammer continued, “we have been watching for a year something that isn’t hypothetical. It’s not happening in the future. It’s happening now — 11,000 dead in front of our eyes; the indiscriminate shelling of cities. [Obama] hasn’t lifted a finger. He gives a lot of good speeches... 

“And what did he announce today at the Holocaust Museum?’ Krauthammer said. “He would be establishing an Atrocities Prevention Board. Now imagine that. The Russians are supplying plane-loads of weapons every day. The Iranians are supplying weaponry and financiers and trainers... Well, this really is going to make a difference. I mean, it’s embarrassing.”

 Or reading Commentary, and that reliable action fan Max Boot:

Barring greater action led by the U.S., Assad will remain in power. And I fear that the U.S. may not do anything serious until after the November presidential election. Unfortunately, the way things are going, the killing will still be in full swing then.

Or attending the speeches of potential Republican Vice-Presidential candidates:

Potential Republican vice presidential candidate Marco Rubio said Wednesday that a unilateral "military solution" from the United States may be needed to stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear bomb... 

Rubio, 40, noted how Washington should be prepared to bypass the United Nations when "bad actors" prevent the global body from taking meaningful steps, such as on Syria. 

"The Security Council remains a valuable forum, but not an indispensable one," he said. "We can't walk away from a problem because some members of the Security Council refuse to act."

While agreeing with Obama that "global problems do require international coalitions," Rubio reminded the president that "effective international coalitions don't form themselves," but need to be instigated and led by the US. 

"And that is what this administration doesn't understand."

When you hear them talk about "distractions," just remember that there's no distraction like Americans fighting in a foreign war, and it's the only one they've got left that will work.

SHORTER ENTIRE RIGHT-WING BLOGOSPHERE: Obama is sending his coloreds to kill us!

Ace of Spades cites three (3) crimes in which black people attacked white people, and cries, "No national coverage of this racial hate crime pattern in the media." The population of the United States is 311,591,917.

What was it the Crazy Jesus Lady said the other day about aggregating isolated stories? You can get a lot of propaganda value out of that shtick so long as you're only talking to people who are down with your program [play snippet from Theme from "Deliverance" here] and primed to accept that your tiny sample gives an accurate picture of the world. But what does it say about these guys that this is the picture they want to paint?

Worse, in a way: What does it say about the voters they hope to attract with it? Run this racist horseshit by normal people, and the older ones will marvel that anybody still thinks that way and the younger ones will just marvel. But their target consumer will nod ruefully and sigh over the race-treason he's seen going on all around him ever since they started letting those people on American Bandstand. Now, by God, maybe people will see the truth!

Speaking of neo-Confederates, I see Ole Perfesser Instapundit is trying, via a reader write-in, a familiar variation on this hooey:

Don’t be surprised if, as Obama’s fortunes wane, incidents like those of Mobile are insinuated to be a future consequence of his electoral defeat...

Readers may recall that they tried this in the last ditch in 2008 -- telling people that black people were prepared to riot if Obama lost, presumably on the secret orders of the HNIC himself.

Think it'll work this time?

UPDATE. In comments, Mr. Leonard Pierce performs the standard recommended test for such accusations of media "silence" as Ace has made: Put the relevant names into Google News. CBS, ABC, CNN, AP, UPI, Huffington Post, Gawker...  all these Lame Stream Media outlets covered these crimes up by actually reporting them.

There's also some discussion, launched by DocAmazing, of how in the rightwing imagination "Those People can simultaneously be shiftless and well-organized, lazy and filled with violent energy, uneducable and politically savvy..." The Other is mentioned, but I think it has more to do with the logic and characterization standards of WWE and old comic books.

SHORTER CRAZY JESUS LADY: We are at the mercy of Negroes and champagne-swilling government bureaucrats, and it's all the fault of Casual Fridays.

UPDATE. Give Noonan credit for showing how the game is played:

In isolation, these stories may sound like the usual sins and scandals, but in the aggregate they seem like something more disturbing, more laden with implication, don't they?

Similarly, if we stuck three of her columns onto a psych intake form, we could probably get her committed.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the Obama-eats-dogs thing. Again this week, the bonus bit is by Ann Althouse, who offers this analysis:

Notice how the individual will of the child is missing. The father figure teaches; the child learns how to eat. He receives instruction. He has feelings in that he reports the texture (but not the taste) of the various foods, but we hear absolutely nothing about whether he resisted these impositions or felt any sort of disgust. 

Somehow I get the feeling that when young Ann Althouse refused to eat the carrots on her dinner plate, her parents just sighed and got out the Cap'n Crunch.

And now, Obama, President of the United States, is married to a woman who purports to teach us all how to eat. She's not forcing us to do anything. And despite some recent talk on the subject, the government has never undertaken to require us to eat broccoli. But young Obama wasn't forced to eat dog. He "learned." He was "introduced." (Fido, meet Barack. Barack, meet Fido... meat Fido.) It's instruction, not compulsion.

And maybe you will eat what you're told.

Children.

Similarly, W's youthful consumption of Jack Daniels inspired Laura Bush's sinister literacy drives. Yet we resisted the subtle pressure to join a book club. Never surrender!

UPDATE. Althouse disputes my characterization. For one thing, she says she was too old for Cap'n Crunch. Come now, Professor, you're being modest! Also:

Here I am explaining my cereal preference to 2 guys including a guy who looks like my dad and has a name like some guy in my adopted home town, Guy Madison.

Is this like El Topo and I'm supposed to get high before going to see it? The whole blog, I mean.

WINGNUT WELFARE MAG AND HOLLYWOOD TAX WRITE-OFF MEET CUTE, PART II. Last year I and some few brave souls saw Atlas Shrugged: Part I, the shitty movie made from part of Ayn Rand's shitty novel. The Galtian supermen proclaimed the film a record-breaking smash, though the actual box office returns contradicted this assessment.

But where some saw disaster, others saw a market opportunity; as the sharks circled, the boys from Reason magazine kept faith with their Randroid readership and ballyhooed the film shamelessly. Nick Gillespie interviewed the principals, offering such deathless observations as, "Does it seem somehow in keeping that the critical reception might be mixed but the audience response is huge?" Matt Welch gave the film one of its rare positive reviews under the headline "This Objectivist Gives Atlas Shrugged Part I a Hearty Thumbs Up," which may have referred to the opinion of a Rand fan he quoted rather than his own -- Welch is slippery that way -- though he did offer that "the look and sound [of the film] were mostly (and surprisingly) handsome, Dagny in particular and Hank were good, and there are some pretty awesome capitalism, bitches!-style moments," which despite the plausible deniability must have goosed the punters good and proper. (They couldn't get Kurt Loder to do the same, for which he was probably forgiven; after all, he may want to work somewhere else again one day.)

Now Part II is in the works, and Reason's back to beat the PR drum for it. Brian Doherty draws the short straw and goes "on the set." He starts with a little revisionism about Part I:

Official critical reception wasn’t so great—though normal folk seemed to like it better than the credentialed tastemakers, according to fim review sites such as Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes.

The film, we remind you, cost $20 million and made less than $5 million, so I guess Doherty means that guys who think their jobs in middle management make them "wealth producers" and that Patrick Bateman had the right idea are the new normal.

And hey look -- production news:

In a move that might prove controversial to fans of Part I, this new movie has been entirely recast—not a single actor reprises their role. Director Paul Johansson, meanwhile, has been replaced by John Putch (a TV veteran with many episodes of Scrubs and Cougar Town behind him).

That might be "controversial to fans," but I'm sure the agents of the escapees are pleased. How does co-producer Harmon Kaslow feel about it?

“The message of Atlas is greater than any particular actor, so it’s one of those pieces of literature that doesn’t require in our view the interpretation by a singular actor,” Kaslow says.

Well played, sir. Doherty seems to have seen some scenes, and reports:

The new Rearden, Jason Beghe (most recently of Californication), plays Hank with far more gruff menace than his predecessor, the suave Grant Bowler. Beghe goes with an intensity that draws you in to him rather than projects flashily, and delivers his lines with a deep growl that almost made him feel like a Hollywood take on a Randian crime boss, someone driven to organized crime in a world where just trying to be productive on your own terms had become illegal.

A crime boss in a world where just trying to be productive on your own terms has become illegal -- sounds like Tony Montana. I never fucked anybody over in my life didn't have it coming to them. You got that? All I have in this world is my balls and my word... Does Rearden get coked up and take everyone out with an M16 and a grenade launcher at the end? They may get my $12 again!

And despite the fact that both Rearden and his metal were invented by Rand in the 1950s, while audiences today participate in an economy where more and more people are living not through mass production but by individualized creativity (what some social scientists are calling the “personalized economy”) Rearden and his troubles still feel more of the moment than they do some sort of outmoded industrial age castoff.

Well, of course. I can see kids watching the trailer and thinking, "As a seasonally-employed barista/DJ barely making enough to split a loft with six friends in Scranton, Pennsylvania, Hank Reardon with a face covered in cocaine is relevant to my interests."

But for the real Randroids -- and, face it, who else would pay any attention to this beside them and us? -- Doherty has some juicy come-ons:

Yes, Rand fans, “looters” and “moochers,” both delivered seriously in mainstream movie dialogue... 

... Rearden’s office set, complete with Randian modernist metal sculptures: shining, swirling ribbons and abstract geometries made solid. In fact, there's lots of great metal work everywhere.

If that doesn't have them breaking down the theater doors, I don't know what will. The makers also coyly deny that their intended October release date is a "deliberate attempt to have the movie’s pop culture impact influence the November election." This reminds me of a bit Paul Lynde and Alice Ghostley did on some variety show back in the 60s: the unprepossessing Ghostley, playing an aspiring actress, says she doesn't approve of nudity, but would perform unclothed if it were essential to the script, and Lynde replies, "Who asked ya?"

As I am increasingly wont to ask: Do these guys even know any real people?