WHERE ARE THEY NOW? Since leaving The Atlantic, first in March to work on a book called, I'm not even kidding, Permission to Suck, then to soak up some gravy from Tina's Brown's Money Pit, Megan McArdle has not been much heard from. Here's her last transmission from the mother ship:

This was her glorious follow-up to a pre-game post in which, pumped with impending Obamacare victory, McArdle harshed on Roe v. Wade ("Those progressives did not seem to think that American Democracy had been destroyed because some unelected justices had overturned duly enacted laws in 1973... Though I am pro-choice, I am not a fan of Roe, which I think was legally dubious and tactically unwise. But democracies are complicated things"), then on the New Deal ("I have been much amused watching people try to simultaneously defend the fruits of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s outrageous court-bullying"), and other objects of passive-aggressive glee-wrath.

We can imagine, after such a display, why she might turn her face from the world. But we would be wrong to ascribe a capability of shame to her -- though she may be convinced, by her agent or loved ones, to keep a low profile until better days emerge, McArdle still gets out once in a while to give the brethren a little touch of Megan in the night.

For instance, she's quoted in a July Michael Dougherty story at The American Conservative about conservatives who supported Obama. While McArdle didn't actually vote for the Kenyan Pretender because, she famously claimed at the time, she forgot to register, she still pleads, or rather whines, for forgiveness:

“Four years ago, I disliked McCain intensely; it seemed like the choice between Obama and someone with policies very like Obama’s except that he would also invade Iran,” says Megan McArdle of the Daily Beast. 

Considering how, as a libertarian, McArdle strongly stands against unjustifiable foreign intervention, that seems reasonable.

“Obviously, Obama has been way worse on civil liberties than I expected,” says McArdle. “I kind of can’t believe I was naïve enough to think that he would actually change anything—or even try to change anything, except for the incredibly stupid symbolic move of Guantanamo prisoners to U.S. soil, which he chickened out on anyway. But I was. Ooops.”

Ditto libertarian ditto torture etc.

“Overall, I wildly underestimated Obama’s arrogance and inexperience"....

At last we're on a topic she knows something about!  McArdle's quotes were later replicated in a Newsweek story by David Frum, so maybe that counted as her quota for the month.

Just last Friday McArdle surfaced again in the comments to, of all places, The Reality-Based Community -- or seems to have done so; we cannot neglect the possibility that some pitch-perfect parodist represented him or herself as McArdle. Without prejudice, then, we note MaybeMegan's remarks to Jonathan Zasloff's defense of Harry Reid's assertion of Mitt Romney's negative tax burden.

First, MaybeMegan does the Sherlock Holmes thing where she rounds up the "legitimate sources who could reasonably be assumed to actually have this information: 1) Mitt Romney 2) Ann Romney 3) Mitt and Ann Romney’s accountant," etc. Her point: A Bain investor could not, as Reid charged, have given Reid the info, because that "would be certainly criminal," and "possibly be in violation of privacy laws," for which crime the putative investor would, MaybeMegan says,  "certainly lose their jobs, licenses, and personal assets in the massive, successful civil suit that Romney would launch against them" as voters, ineluctably drawn to a Presidential candidate who sues the man who exposed his years-long tax evasion, cheered Romney to a dazzling victory.

MaybeMegan adds that Reid "himself not exactly personally impoverished." His cabinets are probably loaded with pink Himalayan salt.

As it happens, there are other commenters at the site, and some of them give MaybeMegan a hard time. MaybeMegan responds with McArdlean grace that Reid's charges "may be 'far from inconceivable,' but it’s also the sort of thing that a lying sack who dislikes Mitt Romney could easily make up..." She then explains that personal tax evasion is impossible and, when that fails to satisfy the crowd, attacks the idea that a Romney lawyer might have leaked the info, because "every one of those lawyers, etc, has very good reason not to leak: it’s at the very least a civil suit and being thrown out of the profession," and then attacks the idea that an IRS agent leaked it, because "an IRS agent that did this would be surprisingly easy to track down, and (IIRC) liable for all sorts of marvelous criminal actions once they had been found..." Whoever this person is, she sure likes talking about punishing people who may have said something about Mitt Romney not paying taxes.

Hereafter I may track McArdle and her possible doppelganger as the Fat Man tracked the Maltese Falcon ("after its long disappearance, the bird turned up again in Sicily. In 1840, it re-appeared in Paris, where by that time, it had acquired a painted coat of black enamel..."). I'd forgotten how much fun she can be!

UPDATE. The first comment, by Alexander von Humbug: "Maybe Megan (not MaybeMegan) tried to become the Doctor's companion, but the TARDIS rejected her for overall dumbshittery and created MaybeMegan in her place. The two McM's are now locked in an eternal, deadly, and incomprehensible battle for an autographed copy of the first edition of Anthem."

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the Battle of Chick-fil-A. It struck me that, no matter how much some prominent conservatives said that it wasn't about gay marriage, they kept talking about it, and about how gay people were trying to take away their rights. It seems there isn't a persecuted minority in the country that isn't trying to do that to them. Maybe they just don't know how to make friends.

I didn't have time to get into all their cries of persecution when somebody was mean to them about this, but I did enjoy Anne Sorock's report at Legal Insurrection, "Chicago Chick-fil-A Kiss-In protesters 'chalk' homeless street preacher." At first I thought she meant some sort of poisonous gypsum cloud of terror, but it turned out that protesters had approached "an elderly African-American homeless man, who was reading his bible aloud" at the protest, some mouthed off to him, and "someone from the group wrote on the sidewalk in front of the homeless man, 'He’s Really Gay Deep Down,' with an arrow pointed to where he was seated." Sorock's commenters got the message: "The Left likes to play the Hitler card. Remember, he was gay, too." "The 'gay' Nazis were some of the most deadly, hard-hearted and barbarous of all." "Here is what you will get if marriage is re-defined as they want … anyone who dissents after that will be subject to a GLBT version of Kristallnacht..." Well, now we know who's keeping The History Channel in business.

UPDATE. Commenters come up with some fine gay Nazi film titles, including Queen Rommel of the Desert (Mark B.), The Pink Panzer (KC45s), and Triumph of the Will and Grace (Spaghetti Lee).

SHORTER MOLLIE HEMINGWAY. I found a reporter whose comments on Facebook about Chik-fil-A made me and my buddies look intolerant, so we got him shut down and maybe fired. That'll show people who the real free speech supporters are.

GORE VIDAL, 1925-2012. I'm busy all day, alas (why do they make me work? Can't they see I'm a national treasure?) but I wanted to quickly note the passing of Gore Vidal before my elegiac tone is marred by exposure to rightwing grave-pissers (well, to more of them, anyway). For me the big thing about Vidal was his ability to write popular fiction (he was madly popular for years, despite constant, bipartisan efforts to marginalize him) in the late 20th Century that came up to the standards of literature without straining for them in the sententious way of many best-seller list-climbers. He clearly wanted fame and attention, and knew he was entitled to them, but he wouldn't toady the muses to get them, nor anyone else.

He wrote with the easy grace and supreme confidence of an aristocrat -- which he sort of was, too, being kin to political royalty. There have of course been many aristos who wrote very well; Vidal had some of their qualities, and you could see them in his work. (Such as the aristocrat's sense of inviolability, which mirrors the imperviousness an artist must develop if he is to survive.) And it was fortified by his less ermined experiences, too, such as serving his country in the Army during World War II (which is more than many of the idiots who liked to call him a traitor could manage) and as a politician, and hacking for Hollywood, which I must say he handled like a champ -- no Barton Fink whining for him; he got some great stories out of it.

I hope to have more later. Meantime, read Burr or Palimpsest or Dark Green, Bright Red or anything by him, and make sure you have a copy around of United States, his collected essays, to remind you of what American writing can be when nothing is holding it back.

UPDATE. Changed "Navy" to "Army" -- thanks, commenter robo, for reminding me that Vidal served on an Army supply ship. I offer my apologies, and also these old alicublog links: A passage from The Best Man of which Peggy Noonan reminded me;  a review of his 2000 novel Washington, D.C.; and a parody of his later novel, The Golden Age, done with love.

UPDATE 2. In comments, Roger Ailes: "Gore Vidal made Michele Bachmann a Republican, but Marcus Bachmann made her a woman!"

HE GAVE ME A BOOK, THE COVER WAS PLAIN/WRITTEN BY A DOCTOR WITH A GERMAN NAME.  Glenn Harlan Reynolds:

In one traditional form of pornography, from the Victorian “A Man With a Maid” to the more recent “Fifty Shades of Grey,” a young woman is initiated — sometimes uncomfortably — into the mysteries of adult sexuality. In the end she is, at some level at least, grateful for the new horizons that’ve opened up to her. 

Well, we still have that. But let’s face it — porn has gotten pretty boring.

If that's your idea of porn, no wonder you're bored.

Nowadays, you can’t really shock with sex. Even gay sex has gone from edgy to ho-hum. 

So try a different adult bookstore. (Why is he being so coy? Jonah Goldberg would have blegged by now.)

No, if you want to make an impression, it takes something really exotic, like . . . traditional middle-class values.

[record scratch]

A spin across the cable dial will reveal some examples — the Duggars are exciting because they have lots of children and raise them themselves; Dave Ramsey says to live within your salary.

What, the Duggars and Dave Ramsey do porn? I knew I should have paid the cable bill.

But for me the strongest case in point is CNBC’s “Princess,” with Jamaican-born financial adviser Gail Vaz-Oxlade.

Each episode revolves around an overindulged young woman in her 20s or early 30s who’s spent herself — and usually her parents, boyfriend and sometimes even siblings — into near-bankruptcy. With friends and family, Vaz-Oxlade stages an intervention, making plain the costs of this behavior, both personal and financial. 

Then the profligate subject is put on a strict budget, and forced to cook, clean, take public transit and show respect for the parents, boyfriend, et al. who’ve been supporting her... you can tell that many viewers enjoy seeing the pampered “princesses” learning to cook, clean and perform other traditional tasks for themselves...

Oh, so it's humiliation fantasies you're into! But I see you've found a vendor, so what are you complaining about?

But this is only news because so many modern young people lack those skills, once taken for granted.

"So many" young people are literally unable to cook or clean? That explains the popularity of Applebee's.

In today’s culture of immediate reward, a work ethic centering on self-discipline and the ability to defer gratification is almost, to use a favorite term of the avant-garde, transgressive. Hmm: With so much of our economy and politics now based on the absence of those characteristics, maybe it really is a bit transgressive.

We're not doing transgression anymore, Perfesser. It's all about the dictatorship of the proletariat now. That and anal.

But those mores just may be making a comeback in these tough times. The fact is, self-discipline and the ability to defer gratification really do help you get ahead, avoid debt and feel more in control of your life... 

At any rate, we can hope that saving money, avoiding debt and treating friends and family with consideration are now edgy enough to become trendy.

Ugh, sorry, folks, turns out there's not much else to it. Once again old-fashioned values have been abandoned by beatniks and goofball-poppers, but now comes the turn of the tide and soon the kids will learn the simple pleasure of good old-fashioned elbow grease of the sort Perfesser Reynolds hasn't applied in a hen's age.

Give him credit, though -- at least he knew that no one, not even readers of the New York Post, would go for a warmed-over Look magazine mores and tempora lament without something racy up front. It's a classic Berkeley love-in come-on: Yes, these stoned co-eds surrender their lissome torsos to their Black Panther boyfriends for our cameras, but don't worry, eventually the only grinding they'll experience will be the garbage disposal's and their own teeth at night.

But the schtick seems to have gotten away from Reynolds. His pleasure is so palpable at the idea of "a young woman... initiated — sometimes uncomfortably — into the mysteries of adult sexuality," and of rich bitches forced to strain and Swiffer, that when he announces it's actually boring we assume he's just trying to tamp down his hard-on before he has to get up from his desk.

Sex magic is powerful stuff, and whenever these guys fool with it it's like the Nazis with the Lost Ark.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the bizarre and maudlin reactions of rightbloggers to the 2012 Olympics. Though they all say they're confident of victory, they seem incapable of enjoying anything these days, even their own award ceremonies. Not that I'm complaining, mind you.
.

HOW TO BECOME AN UNPERSON. Steven Hayward at Power Line, March 2011:

Embedded below, if I have mastered the custom Power Line formatting, is a stunning five-minute video of Berkeley physicist Richard Muller shredding the infamous climate “hockey stick” that is making the rounds widely on the Internet.... 

..in the aftermath of Climategate, Muller is “going big” you might say. Watch this and you’ll see what I mean, especially his summary phrase, “You’re not allowed to do this in science.” Muller is not just tenured, but is late in his career, so feels free to speak out, unlike younger academics who don’t dare cross the Climate McCarthyism of the universities. More importantly, Muller is heading up the new Berkeley Earth Temperature Study, which will review and analyze all of the data on this subject starting from scratch. Unlike the Climategate cabal in Britain and in our NASA, the Berkeley group will share its data with all comers. Keep your eye on this; it will take time–years more than months probably–but may prove to be the thread that unravels the main prop of the climate campaign.

Since then, the science has led Muller not to "unravel the main prop of the climate campaign," as Hayward predicted, but to what Muller himself calls his "total turnaround" on AGW: "Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause."

Steven Hayward at Power Line, this weekend:

But just how much of a “skeptic” was Muller?  Here’s the opening from his 2008 interview with Grist.org... Sounds pretty close to the “consensus” party line to me, and as such today’s Times op-ed does not represent a fundamentally new position for Muller at all.  (I’m wondering whether a Times editor pressured him to use the “total turnaround” language.)  Actually, Muller has always been among the group of folks known as “lukewarmers"...

Soon enough we'll be told that Muller was always a thought-criminal.

OUTRAGEAHOLIC. 

Wherever you are, whatever your condition, thank your lucky stars that you can enjoy at least some part of life without letting politics ruin it and you.

SHORTER CRAZY JESUS LADY: I'm gonna let Kathryn J. Lopez write the column this week. Screw it, it's not like the editors are paying attention.

A RIGHTWING PUNDIT WHO CAN TALK TO KIDS.

A scene in the “21 Jump Street” movie taps into a recent generational change I’ve been noticing among Millenials.

RUN! RUN FOR YOUR too late -- Matt K. Lewis of the Daily Caller is trendspotting.

“He’s trying, he’s actually trying,” Tatum’s character says (pointing at some kid who seems to be minding his own business). “Look at the nerd!” When the nerd takes umbrage at this, Tatum’s character punches him and says: “Turn that gay-ass music off.”

Surprisingly, the crowd sides with the nerd, and one of the cool kids says, “That is really insensitive.”

Was this in the trailer? I seem to remember that with a record scratch and a rad little kid with a fauxhawk yelling "Fish out of water!" Here's Lewis with the thumbsucking:

The premise of this scene illustrates an interesting new phenomenon. Today’s “cool” kids no longer think “trying” makes one a nerd. (Nor do they condone casual gay-bashing.) Times have changed. And since they turned this generational shift into the plot point of a movie (ironically, Jonah Hill’s character becomes the popular kind in this new paradigm), I’m guessing others will notice.

Maybe they will, as soon as they finish snarling over the Muppets boycotting Chik-Fil-A.

Indeed, they have. Speaking at the July 2012 Portland/CreativeMornings, author and literary critic William Deresiewicz...

RUN! RUN FOR YOUR too late, again. I gotta work on my explosive strength.

...observed the same phenomenon. Regarding today’s young people, he notes, “[T]hey’re all incredibly nice. They’re all…polite, well-spoken, pleasant, moderate, earnest.”

At all the college classes I teach and the lectures I give, kids are constantly kissing my ass. They're so nice!

Comparing today’s rock idols to the musicians of yore — who trashed hotel rooms and talked about how many groupies they slept with (think Channing Tatum’s character’s fantasy) — Deresiewicz argues that today’s bands are “all like low-key, self-deprecating, post-ironic, very earnest, very eco-friendly sort of presentation.”

In other words, they suck.

Deresiewicz also observes that “trying” and being entrepreneurial is actually considered “cool” these days. “It’s like every artistic or moral aspiration is now expressed in terms of starting your own business, whether it’s food or music or good works,” he says.

This, of course, is dramatically different from the way things used to be.

Yeah, remember the 1980s and that radical firebrand Alex P. Keaton? You don't? Good, you're just the kind of sucker who'll swallow this bullshit whole without flinching. Who else would? Maybe a couple of culture-war wingnuts who know better will at least pretend the kids were a shaggy librul menace until Jonah Hill taught them to care because it sounds like a promising Romney-era meme, but at the end of the day they'll trudge down to their panic rooms with the Poverty Sucks and Ghostbusters posters on the wall, watch old videos of teen heartthrob Dan Quayle, and weep.

After considering some other idiotic theories, Matt K. Lewis comes up with this:

First, economic incentives work. When blue collar kids could slide through high school and still get a job paying $19 an hour in a factory, school could legitimately be seen as a joke — a waste of time. That trend has obviously come to an end. (It probably ended in the 1970s, but it might have taken a generation or so to become clear.)

WHEN THE FUCK WAS THIS? Every factory job I had in the 70s paid in the single digits. Maybe Lewis' old man owns a factory?

The rest is just as bad, but here are the bad-good bits:

“It’s uncool if you don’t try,” one young co-worker told me.

Intern at Daily Caller = Voice of a generation. There's also a "one young person told me" quote, hundreds of words long, that begins, I shit you not: "I see the entrepreneur spirit in a lot musicians, especially electronic musicians..."

Ultimately, I think technology and the internet are the most important reason for this generational shift...

That's when, bleeding from the eyes, I gave up, but I had a reading robot crawl the page and when it came back, smoke streaming from its apertures, it croaked, "There is a lot to this, and clearly something interesting is afoot" before self-destructing.

I predict the young people of today will outlive us, the poor bastards.

LAND OF HOPE AND GLORY.  Dan Riehl in 2009:

You may recall that on about his first day in office Obama returned a famous bust of Winston Churchill to Britain. That was seen as something of an insult to Britain by many. He gave the British Prime Minister tapes of his own hopey changey speeches, which many saw as egotistical but was also a statement of sorts, saying, you aren't really so special, sport. Perhaps it's the message in his speeches he actually wanted the PM to get? 

In the video below you'll find that for Obama there was no bow to the Queen of England. His wife even broke protocol by reaching out to give her a pat at some point, as I recall... 

This is a man who, unlike most Americans, doesn't view Western Civilization as all that. 

Dan Riehl today:

Get over it, Britain. You're a second rate, semi-degenerate nation still on the way down because you went too far to the left too long ago for anyone to care about. Don't expect us to wring our hands over what you losers did. We're too busy fighting to make sure it doesn't happen here...

Mostly a bunch of feckless wankers if you ask me. Put a Gold Medal on that and aim it at the Queen's arse. 

What a difference a Mitt Romney goodwill tour makes.

HAYSEED. If anybody could put me in conditional sympathy with Nanny Bloomberg, it's Ole Perfesser Glenn Reynolds, talking about Bloomberg's crack about the police going on strike:

I predict that such a strike — not that it’s likely to happen — would lead to less crime, and far less political support for the police. Meanwhile, just to prepare against the eventuality, I think I’ll go buy a gun.

Forget about the dumb idea that pulling out the cops would bring down crime. (Maybe he's never been to a big city.) Is there anything that better typifies Reynolds' politics of faux-redneck resentment than a threat to get back at the Mayor of New York by stocking his McMansion in Bumfuck, Tennessee with another gun? 

THE OLD PLAYBOOK. Oh brother:

In remarks that may prompt accusations of racial insensitivity, one suggested that Mr Romney was better placed to understand the depth of ties between the two countries than Mr Obama, whose father was from Africa.

“We are part of an Anglo-Saxon heritage, and he feels that the special relationship is special,” the adviser said of Mr Romney, adding: “The White House didn’t fully appreciate the shared history we have”.

Then he pushed in his nose and winked.

Romney's advisors say that as President Romney "would seek to reinstate the Churchill bust displayed in the Oval Office by George W. Bush but returned to British diplomats by Mr Obama when he took office in 2009."  They're still going on about that bust, even though it was meant to be returned all along and no one gives a shit except the two million conservatives who blogged about it at the time.  In fact, all of this nonsense is a rehash of one of the more ridiculous rightwing fits of 2009, when the Obamas were alleged to have dissed Queen Elizabeth because something something no curtsey, thereby shattering what had once been a great "Anglosphere" alliance of Christopher Hitchens and anybody else who didn't like wogs.

I understand that this is the time of the campaign cycle where you shore up your base [cue "Theme from Deliverance"], but Romney seems to be overdoing it. When he gets to Tampa Bay he's going to have to lock out all the conservatives, pack the audience with shills (maybe he can get them from the same place he gets Twitter followers), and lead them in a rousing chorus of "We Are the World" to make people forget he spent most of the summer pretending to be Barry Goldwater.

UPDATE. Hm, the Romney campaign says it's an "anonymous and false quote from a foreign newspaper." Whether they're telling the truth or backpedaling, it's a positive thing that they don't want to be identified with it. The new story is that it's all the Obama campaign's fault for believing Romneyites would engage in such behavior ("Relying on Blind Quotation, Race Injected in Presidential Race"). Well, guess we'll all have to wait until we're dead and God tells us what happened.

UPDATE 2. The Telegraph stands by its story.

WINGNUT COLLOQUY. Here's the sentence that set him off:

At first their outrage was attracted by an on-air report by ABC News' Brian Ross on the shooter's identity after his name, but no details, had been revealed. Ross said this: "There's a Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colorado, page on the Colorado Tea party site, talking about him joining the Tea Party last year. Now, we don't know if this is the same Jim Holmes, but it's Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colorado."

Then ensued:

To recap: The guy misapprehended the sentence and called me a liar; when his error was pointed out to him,  he pretended not to be able to read.

I stopped talking to him at this point, but I should never have started.  (I even went out of my way to be civil, which you all know is a great effort for me.) My problem was, I tried to figure out how he came to his misunderstanding. Maybe he thought the clause pertained to "attracted" rather than "report" -- but then, why would I have inserted immediately thereafter the very details Ross revealed?

But his responses revealed what I should have known from jump -- that he's just a yelling bot, and has no premises at all. He exists to denounce liberals and trawl the attention of big-name conservatives. He isn't there to listen, except for the sound of his own name.

The internet's full of people like this. They make outrageous statements and when they're called on them pretend not to know what's going on. And a lot of them mistake what they're doing for actual argument. It's like "Firing Line" with dialogue from "Pee-Wee's Playhouse."

And it seems this style is bubbling up to the big-name guys, too. I saw a clip recently of James Taranto on the Lou Dobbs show, and though when I met Taranto years ago he was mild-mannered and easy to talk to, on the show he was bellowing like a Fox News clown. Matt Lewis used to be a relatively sensible conservative writer, and now at The Daily Caller he's writing boob bait like this "guns don't kill people, movies do" thumbsucker.

It's getting to the point where you can't talk to them at all, and that's a real bad point.

UPDATE. Dyer has apologized to me, which is gracious of him. (I wasn't fishing for it, because in my experience people who demand and exult in apologies are assholes, and only mention it to credit him.) He still thinks I misunderstand him, and who knows, maybe I do. Anyway I welcome to opportunity to stop seething at him. Everyone else, however...

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the rightblogger reaction to the Colorado movie massacre. Basically, it's like this, only worse. In the year since Anders Breivik, they've actually gotten crazier.

DID A LITTLE OBIT of sorts for Alexander Cockburn at the Voice.

I GIVE IT FOUR FARTS. I just found this thing on the internet, a promo from something called Young America's Foundation -- which sounds like a cheap knock-off of Young Americans for Freedom, but turns out to be partners with YAF, as well as longtime custodial service at the Reagan Ranch. It promotes a DVD doc called The Conservatives, which from the trailer looks like the dystopian opening sequence of Atlas Shrugged Part I followed by scenes from corporate image advertising, accompanied by rightwing pundits telling you how great capitalism is. Perfect for your next Romney G&T/servant-horsewhipping fundraiser!

The trailer's not much, but I just love the splash page image:

It reminds me of the posters for Mystery Men, except repulsive. (Superheroes from left to right:  Li'l Reagan, Braygirl, Drunky Fart, The Wad, The Black Stossel, Screechy, and The Yacht Broker.) As with all wingnut welfare projects, the necessity to attract audiences has been obviated, so no one at YAF/YAF cares what the world thinks, but didn't the pundits get a look at the ad before it went up? I should think Mark Levin would at least have demanded they airbrush into his portrait a Nehru jacket and Mr. Bigglesworth.

As to Goldberg, I can't tell whether they simply couldn't get a better picture, or whether he has purposefully opted to transition his public image from Cheeky Conservative Bad-Boy to Professor of Liberal Fascism. The smart-guy glasses, the Van Dyke, the slightly askew forelock, the capture in mid-hector -- maybe he thinks all this makes him look intellectual. But I am put more in mind of a midwestern high school principal in the big city for a convention, back at the hotel after several drinks at the T.G.I. Friday's down the street, attempting to intimidate a desk clerk into removing in-room snack charges from his bill. "Now listen to me, Renaldo, I am not some bumpkin who doesn't know what's going on. See this card? Read what it says. Read it. It says I am a Marriott Elite Membership Member. Now whenever I stay at a Marriott, I show them this card and my Cheetos are comped. Always, Renaldo. You call the main office. Go ahead, I'll wait. I'll wait right here. Because you know what they'll say? They'll say, 'Mister Goldberg gets his Cheetos comped because Mister Goldberg is an Elite Membership Member.' And this is in fact central to my point that I am not paying twenty-one dollars for seven little tiny bags of Cheetos that were open when I got there and not even Crunchy. Farrrt. Now I suppose you'll accuse me of incivil-ilitism. Well, allow me to remind you that you started it, and that he who smelt it dealt it. Q.E.D. I rest my case, right here on this couch. Ooof. Go ahead, I'll wait. Call the head office, Renaldo. Call Mr. Marriott. Three dollars for a bag of Cheetos. Fuck. [snores]"

LITTLE HELP. Jay Brida, whom some of you know as one of the geniuses of the comments boxes here at alicublog, has a problem: A loved one who's cancer-free. Why is that a problem? Because getting cancer-free in the Land of the Fee leaves you with a metastasizing mountain of debt. Now Jay's fundraising to defray Ana's absurdly high medical bills. This week he even held a benefit event for the cause, which must have been painful for him because he hates people. Jay raised some bucks, but that's just a patch on what's needed. Whattaya say? I kicked in and you know I'm a skinflint. Go thou and do likewise.

CULTURE WAR HIGH COMMAND, LACKING CANNON FODDER, ENLISTS MENTALLY DEFICIENT VILLAGERS, ARMS THEM WITH SHARPENED STICKS WHICH THEY POINT THE WRONG WAY. Via Chuck Gilligan, who got it from Paul Krugman, I bring you this Gary Silverman FT item in which Suzy Welch, former editor in chief of the Harvard Business Review and wife of GE blowhard Jack Welch, tells a no doubt dumbfounded TV audience the difference between Romney singing "America the Beautiful*" and Obama singing "Let's Stay Together":

In an appearance on CNN with her husband, Mrs Welch suggested that Mr Obama’s personal style and choice of musical material define him as a member of a “different America”...

“It’s the difference between the songs that they’re singing,” Mrs Welch said. “Mitt Romney didn’t exactly do a beautiful job on that song, but think about what he’s singing, OK? I mean it’s that patriotic song and he goes all the way through it. Then you’ve got the very cool Barack Obama singing Al Green. That is the two different Americas. Isn’t it?”

I still think this thing can go either way because the economy sucks, but when you listen to these guys make their case, it really sounds like they only expect to carry Fritters, Alabama; whatever counties have an active neo-Nazi movement; and Utah.

*UPDATE. Originally had the Romney song as "God Bless America" until some guy in comments gave me a hard time. Speaking of comments, here's Ben: "Al Green, being in his late sixties, now leaves much of the day-to-day work of destroying America to John Legend."

THE RIGHT HAND DOESN'T KNOW WHAT THE RIGHT HAND IS DOING. Warner Todd Huston at Breitbart's Big Hollywood on Monday:

SPIN ALERT: The House Did NOT Vote to Repeal Obamacare 33 Times

Last week, the Old Media reminded the public that the July 11 vote was the "33rd time the Republicans voted to repeal Obamacare." Only there is a little problem with that claim. It isn't true...

The Old Media wanted America to think the Republicans were just being petty and partisan. They were playing advocates for Obamacare again, not reporting the facts.

Interesting! But Huston should have first alerted his Breitbart colleague Ben Shapiro:

I know, no one's playing attention, but they should still try and keep up appearances.