NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the Middle East riots and the avalanche of bullshit the brethren brought to it. Enjoy!

WE'LL BUILD A WORLD OF OUR OWN THAT NO ONE ELSE CAN SHARE. Zombie, a site best known for generating wingnut outrage over gay street fairs, does Rightblogger Routine 12:

Memo to non-leftist bloggers, reporters, and culture-shapers: TAKE THE GODDAMN GLOVES OFF.

We need hardly bother with the frankly silly notion that Zombie's fellow crap-and-spittle merchants suffer from reticence, but I'd like to know what brain-fart led to "culture-shapers."  Maybe the author was leaning toward "culture warriors," in honor of the ancient conservative rite of yelling at TV shows, then realized nobody takes that seriously anymore. "Culture-shapers" may have seemed a good modification, suggesting that the brethren can go out under cover of darkness and slip some Spanx on the culture to force it into the shape they prefer.

How to do it? The title of the post is "Narrative Wars: Slap the Honey Boo Boos with Truthaganda." Zombie is talking about "last remaining undecided voters in America," and bases his characterization on the fact that a reality TV show about hillbillies beat out some reality TV shows about rich politicians making promises to America.

That seems like a reasonable preference to me, but Zombie believes those people are dumb -- "If candy canes and wreaths start appearing in store windows and a few notes of muzak 'Jingle Bells' remain audible above the screaming toddlers, then the Honey Boo Boos figure Christmas must be coming up soon" -- and "get their information through a sort of unconscious osmosis of the general national zeitgeist."  So here's his plan:

The goal is to create an enveloping data matrix which gives the Honey Boo Boos a sort of half-aware impression that the narrative we’ve concocted for them is not simply a partisan narrative fighting for their allegiance but rather is simply the way things are. 

To that end, the headlines need to be as unsubtle as possible, but still hewing to reality — reality through our lens. 

I call this approach “truthaganda"...

I'll spare you: It mainly means recreating rightwing talking points like "OBAMA TEAM TWEETS COMMUNIST PROPAGANDA" in oversize red letters. "Even a Honey Boo Boo can get through those headlines," he says; "they’re short enough to survive the three-second attention span."

That someone actually thinks this about his fellow citizens doesn't surprise me, but I am a little surprised that he would say it out loud in a public forum. It suggests to me that Zombie is not actually concerned with influencing those voters. He's like a teenage boy who doesn't have a girlfriend and declares it's because girls prefer jerks, and so he'll be a jerk himself, and then they'll all come running. Having been a teenage boy myself, I recall that such a person is usually not seriously mapping out a seduction strategy, but looking for sympathy from like-minded loners.

And God go with him. Political blogging is fun, sort of, so long as you don't take it too seriously. If you start thinking it has an impact on actual events, that's when you're in trouble.

SHORTER WILLIAM A. JACOBSON: The fact that even Republicans think we're idiots proves that we're winning.

GOING UP PAST NINE-ELEVEN. Ole Perfesser Instapundit told such people as listen to him twice to go see this thing by Sarah Hoyt about 9/11. So I figured it would get eventually to where it got to:

On the one hand, part of me wants to laugh at the terrorists. They thought they could break us. They thought they could scare us. They underestimated both the size of our territory and the mettle of my people. 

And part of me thinks of the psychological twisting that has taken place since then: people who blame their own country for the actions of barbarians; people who kowtow to the barbarians and claim to be multiculturalists because that sounds so much better than vile cowards; people who think that a country the size of ours, as wealthy as we are should do nothing to deter attackers because we’d be protected by our halo of purity and goodness...

And I thought as I read it: So, somebody's still doing this -- using 9/11 as a long stick to beat people who didn't have anything to do with it, but whom they never liked. It brought me back to 2001, and the many years thereafter when this was a popular shtick -- the decadent left and the fifth column and all that.

And today: Not so much. Nobody calls himself a warblogger these days; nobody thinks "Democracy! Whiskey! Sexy!" is a foreign policy statement. Even the excitable Jim Lileks is subdued, having abandoned his former dreams of annihilation for mysticism ("Now, as ever, we live between the sharp notes. Gather them all together, and you have the melody of the centuries"), like a former Weatherman who, when it all came down, went up the country and today raises watermelons and gets stoned and talks to Gaia.

In their ratholes and caves, some holdouts still practice the dark craft, but their former sympathizers have ceased to follow, occupying themselves instead with Clint Eastwood's chair and other Western novelties.

And Osama Bin Laden is dead.

Whattaya know: In the long run, freedom works.

UPDATE. Paul Bedard at the Washington Examiner:

9/11 bumped by gay flag, Michelle money plea on Obama site

September 11th turned out to be just another day on the Obama-Biden campaign website: A fundraising memo from first lady Michelle Obama, a pitch for gay rights including a rainbow-colored American flag, and a campaign picture under the headline "Photo of the day--September 11th, 2012."

Oh, there were two tweets to commemorate the 9/11 attacks, but finding them was hard.

By comparison, the Romney-Ryan campaign features two blog entries, one from Mitt Romney and the other from Paul Ryan, and a 9/11 news release. The Romney campaign homepage featured a tweet and Facebook note about 9/11.

Two blog entries, a tweet and a Facebook note! Never forget!

Now Romney's burnishing his foreign policy cred by blaming Obama for the attack on the U.S. embassy in Libya. My sources tell me his next step will be to accuse the President of not wearing big enough flag pins.

It's enough to make a fella miss Quemoy and Matsu.

UPDATE 2. It's redundant at this point to say comments are great, but here's a taste: Big Bad Bald Bastard tells our subjects, "To paraphrase Ving Rhames in Pulp Fiction, 'You've lost your 9/11 privileges";  KC45s examines Lileks' poeticisms and remarks, "Finally, we know who writes Sting's lyrics"; and Fats Durston redoes St. Crispin's Day:

...Then shall their names,Familiar in the mouth as freeper handles--
Jonah the Whale, D'Souza and Douchehat,
Erick son of Erick, Juggs and Ace--...
But we in it shall be remembered--
We few, we fappy few, we band of botherers... 

Nice.

JESUS. I guess sticking God in the Democratic platform defused that issue, huh?

Also, Some Guy at Wizbang has a post called "Confirmed: Democrats Love Killing Babies, Hate God and Jews" -- and he's not kidding. At first one can hold out faint hope that he is: "If a man who happens to be white talking to an empty chair is a dog-whistle for racism," he says, "it’s pretty obvious from the last few days that Democrats love to kill babies but hate god and Jews." This seems to at least struggle toward some sort of irony, however weak -- but then he comes roaring back:

What percentage of voters approve of taxpayer funding of partial birth abortion on demand? Less than 15%. That’s a horribly extreme position. Yet it’s the centerpiece of the Democratic convention. If Republicans run from this battle they are fools. It’s slam dunk victory. 

It’s time for some major league push back on the media when they call republicans extremest. Big time.

It turns out that what seemed like irony was just a sulky abdication of responsibility for his own loony claims -- if liberals get mad when we call out their godless, baby-killing ways, it serves them right for calling Clint Eastwood's chair racist. (I sense that wouldn't be bothering him if Eastwood's sad routine had become a chair d'coeur rather than a national laughingstock.)
 
It's time for Obama to namecheck the Flying Spaghetti Monster in a press conference and end this. Given the horrible associations Republicans have brought to the Almighty, he'll probably gain a couple of points.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the convention. Enjoy.

THE LIBERTARIAN REACTION TO OBAMA'S SPEECH:

Libertarians are supposed to be socially-liberal beards for conservatives -- you know, "I'm not for gay marriage but my libertarian boyfriend is." When they start talking about Obama like Rush Limbaugh talking about Sandra Fluke, it may be time for the Koch Brothers to consider some new investments. 

UPDATE. You will hear in the days to come many libertarians and conservatives bitching about the Democratic convention's hyperpatriotism -- why look, here's David Harsanyi, who is both, doing so at Reason -- which just goes to show that they don't have a sense of humor. After forty years of star-spangled lawn-order Republicanism, this convention's turnabout was a grand joke. That Obama's warm-up act was Biden, who basically broke the GOP's Neverforget spell with "a noun, a verb, and 9/11," and that the Obamas totally did the Reagan-Mommy thing, only spices the jest. It's not as good as having them all die screaming in a fire, mind, but it's pretty good for a Thursday night. Four stars! 

NOT JUST A FLUKE.

The numbers show that females aren’t fooled by the phony “war on women.” In 2008, 57 percent of women voted for Barack Obama; 43 percent voted for McCain. The latest Washington Post-ABC News poll shows a substantial shift: Fewer than half of female registered voters now support Obama—he’s at 49 against Romney’s 43 percent. Polls of registered voters, rather than likely voters, tend to skew Democratic.
In his acceptance speech, Romney urged, “Now is the moment when we can stand up and say, ‘I’m an American. I make my destiny.’ ” Women can say the same. Wasn’t it Democrats who used to argue that biology isn’t destiny?

-- "Desperate Democrats," Kelly Jane Torrance, The Weekly Standard

Tonight on Twitter:

Etc.

You know, you assholes aren't fooling anyone.

P.S. Bill Clinton just kicked your ass.

TWEETS ERICK ERICKSON HAD TO SCRAP AFTER HE GOT IN TROUBLE: "The podium hides Rahm's light loafers #SanFrancisoDemocrats" "Lily Ledbetter's vagina is Dems #Ashheap of History" "Patrick's sweating like they found his gay porn stash #AlsoBlack" etc.

But I think it's a mistake to try and get Erickson fired over this, as some have proposed. I didn't see the advantage in getting Josh Trevino kicked off the Guardian either. Let the world see who they are and what they represent. If people are more impressed than appalled by them, then the cause is lost anyway.

I DREAMED I SAW J.P. MORGAN LAST NIGHT... What'd you do for Labor Day weekend? Lexington Green of Chicago Boyz did this:

We should have an annual Creators Day as a national holiday. We have a “Labor Day” to celebrate workers paid salaries and wages. That is fine, and there are historical reasons for it.

Among those "reasons": A centuries-long struggle against slavery and feudalism. Surprised he didn't mention it.

But it is not enough. We also need a national day celebrating the people who make those jobs possible and bring them into existence in the first place. Otherwise the day appears to be a glorification of “workers” in opposition to a faceless someone or something that signs the paychecks, some unnamed “other” that is not “the people” but nameless bag of money. That is morally and factually wrong and needs to be rectified.

If you're tempted to dismiss this as a fringe Randroid fantasy, please note that it's Instapundit-approved. Also, that conservatives have been going on like this for years. Their traditional hatred of unions and collective bargaining has metastasized: They now think people who work for a living are just another special interest group, mooching off the libertarian magic of management. They sulk over this, and demand the peons show them respect.

No wonder Romney's leaning on his business credentials. The public at large may or may not believe that a corporate raider can do the trick for America (and that the returns he may produce will somehow go to them, rather than -- as is traditional -- to his investors). But the conservatives who once denounced Romney certainly need a better reason to be excited about him than his renunciation of his own RINO past. His identification with the C-suite gives them that: They can trust that when it comes time to stomp some fingertips clinging to the lowest rung of the middle class ladder, he won't hesitate. In that, at least, he's one of them.

READY FOR HIS CLOSE-UP. Every possible gag has been played on it, so I will only try to imagine what was going on in Clint Eastwood's mind. I like to think he went back in reverie to the 1972 Academy Awards, when he was shoved onstage to cover as MC for a tardy Charlton Heston and, after a Sergio Leone standoff with the cue cards, hissed at the cameras, "This ain't my bag, man."

Eastwood has better acquitted himself at the Oscars since, but he may have been thinking lately that, back in '72 when the hippies were taking over Hollywood (and he was talking like a hippie himself, to his shame), he really had a chance to turn things around, to tell the longhairs where to get off, but he lacked the skills and hell, maybe the guts to do so -- all those people, watching at the same time! No retakes! -- and wilted under the pressure.

Since then, however, he had been elected Mayor of Carmel, and attended many dinners where critics pantheonized him; the world still laid roses at his feet, even though his voice was now just a husk and when he got all action-heroic for the cameras he looked like he was taking a stress test at a cardiac clinic. Part of him knew better, but another part of him -- the Hollywood part -- thought that if they loved him that much, he could do this thing and make them buy it. Never mind the script. He only had to do ten minutes. And hell, it was just television. He'd been a TV star before most of these punks had been born. Now that he was a living god, not only a star but an auteur, he could glide out there like Orson Welles doing Carson and everything would just fall into place. And if it didn't, well, there was always jazz piano.

I mean, I don't care, do you? If he makes Gran Torino: The Early Years I'll still go see it. Politics is bullshit, and it deserved what he gave it.

JUST LOOKING IN. Being of sound mind and body, I have not even tried to watch convention coverage, though in a moment of perversity I sought out the transcript of Chris Christie's speech. First, I was surprised to learn that the delegates applauded his father's use of the communist G.I. Bill to go to college. (Mark Levin was right -- the RINOs have taken over.) Second, I have to commend Christie on the line, "They [the Democrats] believe in teachers' unions . We believe in teachers." That's up there with, "Your enemy is not surrounding your country, your enemy is ruling your country" as an example of fine political dada.

But almost as good was Christie's closing: "Leadership. It takes leadership that you don't get from reading a poll. You see, Mr. President, real leaders do not follow polls. Real leaders change polls." Well, sure; Christie's got a 54% approval rating despite a 9.8 state unemployment rate. Such is the power of incumbency when the opposition is weak -- which is mainly why Obama has a 14 point lead in Christie's own state. The governor probably doesn't know it, but he ended his speech by defining the Republicans' problem. Now we'll see if anyone in Tampa has a solution.

READER, I MARRIED HER.

Not much will be happening on this blog for a week, or at Rightbloggers for two weeks, as Kia and I are on honeymoon. See you after. P.S. Couldn't be happier. photo (cc) Nobuhiro Izumi.

UPDATE. We are now in Barcelona for the hmoon. I seldom go to old Europa anymore since booking agents stopped paying me to yell over "music" at concert venues. We could have gone to Pismo Beach and it would have been fine, because wherever she is, there is Eden, but this ain't bad. Will write more when I have more to tell (and bandwidth to tell it) besides "Roy glowered at the cashier and wished he knew how to challenge prices in Catalan, or at least knew how to say, 'I'm from New York, cabron, or at least I used to be, and furthermore I am sick with a knife.'"

Mainly tho: Thanks for your beautifully expressed best wishes, which we both appreciate vastly. And to my foreign readers who have been bitching about the months-long restrictions on comments: I see what you mean and deliverance, I hope, is at hand.

UPDATE 2. And deliverance comes from an unnamed commenter, who says: "Instead of going to alicublog.blogspot.com, give the address as alicublog.blogspot.com/ncr (ncr is 'no country redirect') This keeps you on the US site, where the commenting works as it should." We've checked and it works. Hurrah and thanks, whoever you are.

RAPE: WHAT A BEAUTIFUL CHOICE. Given the Akin mess, it was inevitable that we'd get columns about the happy rape babies whom evil liberals want to murder. Timothy P. "The P. is for Libertarian" Carney:

Jenni was conceived when her mother was raped by a boyfriend as a teenager. She is a human reminder of an uncomfortable truth denied and minimized by people on all sides of the abortion issue: Rape can result in pregnancy, which means it can create innocent babies...

Her smiling face and growing family -- she has three kids of her own -- is also damning to pro-choice people who argue that abortion is a necessity for a woman impregnated by rape.

The last bit is very clever, as the actual pro-choice argument would be that what's "necessary" is that raped women have the option of abortion; Carney prefers that you think of fantasy feminazis demanding mandatory abortions.

Throughout Carney draws moral equivalence between Todd Akin and pro-choice people:

One consequence of this mindset in Prewitt's opinion: Most states lack laws explicitly denying the rapist-father's potential custody rights. Prewitt attributes this to denial -- both by the likes of Akin and by those who can't conceive of a rape victim wanting to raise her child.

On one hand we have a guy (and his party) who want to force women to bear their rapists' children; on the other hand, we have people who don't. Clearly both should be ashamed. But Carney solomonically allows that once the rape baby emerges, the father should be denied custody. Look, ladies, he's meeting you halfway.

Throughout the column the rapes are downplayed and gotten over quick -- there was some unpleasantness, yes (in one case multiple incestuous rapes over a course of years which netted the perp all of 18 months in prison "due to lack of evidence"), but in the end someone made it into the world and grew up to be a pro-life speaker, and that's what matters, isn't it?

This poor world is full of snares and traps, and when we dodge a bullet (or scalpel, as it were) we must be grateful. But we should also try to make our post-partum lives less of a nightmare, which is the part folks like Carney always seem to miss.

RACE TO THE BOTTOM. Godly Rod Dreher, writing from his months-long Paris vacation, on the Pussy Riot sentence:

These three nasty pieces of work will do their prison time, then be released and emigrate, where they can make a handsome living going into Western venues, conducting orgies in museums, shoving chicken legs up their privates in supermarkets, and parading before Western liberals as free-speech martyrs. The Slag Solzhenitsyns. Now that’s a great name for a feminist punk band. Such decadent times we live in.

Before you start yelling at him, look at what he said in another recent post about how hard the state makes it for him to homeschool his kids (which is total bullshit): "In other words, to protect my ability to educate my children in a conservative way, I’m learning a strange new respect for libertarianism."

Libertarianism! The one thing that could make him worse, and he's managed it!

How is it even possible for one person to be such an asshole? It's like the guy takes lessons.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the whole Biden "put y'all in chains" thing. The whole is overflowing with stupid, so I couldn't get it all in -- here's something
from one of the guys arguing that Obama and Biden hate black people, "Why the Republican Party is a better fit for African Americans," containing a show-stopper about Romney's July NAACP appearance:

The truth sometimes is supposed to hurt and Mitt Romney stuck the needle filled with truth serum deep inside the vein of every single member of the audience when he spoke at the NAACP. 

They should put this on flyers announcing future Romney appearances. Sounds better than The Tingler!

SHORTER JOHN FUND: White Republican Thad McCotter submitted false petitions to get on the ballot three elections running. Say, do you people know the difference between election fraud and voter fraud? No? Ahem, as I was saying, this just goes to show that we have to stop black people from voting without photo I.D.

HOW GOES THE CULTURE WAR? Well, we have Allahpundit yelling at Devo for writing a song that makes Mitt Romney look bad, and Michael Moynihan yelling at "leftist" travel book publishers for saying nice things about dictator-run countries in the travel books they're trying to sell to people who want to go visit those countries. (These days I don't see how conservatives even pretend to understand capitalism.)

And at Power Line, Steven Hayward asks, "WHY IS THERE NO LIBERAL AYN RAND?" He's taking off from Beverly Gage who, slightly less stupidly, asks, "American conservatives have a canon. Why don’t American liberals?" Sure we have a canon -- it's called Western literature. And it beats the snot out of the sad, long-form political pamphlets wingnuts like to name-check. You will learn more about the human condition from the works of novelists, playwrights, and poets than you ever can from a thousand power freaks' blueprints for the mass production of Procrustean beds.

And frankly, I think these alleged smart guys steep themselves in PoliSci because Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky and the rest confuse them and make them feel bad. They know they're smart, yet here are all these famous writers making them feel all this stuff their parents told them is wrong and bad. Much better to follow someone who writes with a slide rule.

Let these freaks thumb their suspenders, go "Well, as Hayek says..." and call themselves edumacated. We that have free souls, it touches us not.

UPDATE. Excellent comments on this, with references to Singapore, Orwell, Jeffrey Sachs, et alia. Both Sides Do It raises a good demurrer:

Political philosophy is almost entirely a liberal project.  In some sense liberal political philosophy fuckin' created Western political culture.  Human rights grew entirely out of liberal institutions consciously advancing specific liberal political conceptions...

That's really the reason those assbutt Republicans can even ask that asinine question in the first place. There is no liberal Ayn Rand because whereas conservatives have the One True Canon, there are multiple liberal traditions and conceptions of the political good. Almost as if liberals cared about advancing the best argument and finding the best conceptions of political organization instead of rationalizing a political order that made you feel superior to other people.  

I would add that when conservatives grab hold of the better class of writers who write about politics and ideology, they tend to dirty them up. Their Orwell reclamation project is a fine example, but there's also Burke who, among other things, denounced the crimes of Warren Hastings -- crimes which your typical rightwing imperialist would not even recognize as crimes, because they happened to have been committed against dark-skinned foreigners. That Burke is not in the same universe as Ayn Rand, or as Burke's current, dimmer fans.

UPDATE 2. I had to add this, from a Facebook post response by one Brian Middleton:

For some reason this made me think of Austen's "Emma," and specifically the scene where Emma is thoughtlessly rude to Miss Bates at the picnic. When Knightley points out to Emma how hurtful she's been, she is deeply ashamed of herself. 

Here's why this is an essentially lefty moment: Miss Bates is completely powerless. She is poor (as Austen characters go), with no stature or influence in their little community. There is no practical downside to insulting her. Yet Knightley points out that her very powerlessness entitles her to more, not less, consideration and respect, and Emma implicitly agrees.  

That is not a thought that any true acolyte of Ayn Rand would ever entertain. And yet we're not talking about Shaw or even Dickens; we're talking about the quintessential chronicler of Tory society, whose works almost entirely ignore the real poor and barely acknowledge the emerging middle class. But she understood the basic, great social principles involved: be kind to those less fortunate than yourself, and don't mistake your superior fortune for superior worth.

I would add that the "basic, great social principles" should not be the exclusive property of any particular ideological group, but since conservatives seem eager to disown them, I don't see why we shouldn't pick them up.

RALLY KILLER. This is by far my favorite blog post at National Review:

And yes, it's that "G. Reynolds."

Poor Matthew Shaffer. In this blog established "to track dramatic political events in North Africa and the greater Arab world," he put up ominous posts about the region for almost two months, including this one from February 10, 2011, in which he predicted, "Even if Mubarak does step down, unless some ingenious plan to hand all power to the military is concocted, he will be deferring to Vice President Omar Suleiman," and this one from February 23, 2011, about Obama's speech on Libya, in which Shaffer wrote, "NRO’s Jim Geraghty summed it up on twitter: 'Ya hear that, Gaddafi? You keep pulling these stunts, and we’ll continue to evaluate all options! So you better think twice!' and 'BOOYAH! Hillary Clinton to Geneva. Bet you didn’t see that coming, huh, Colonel.'"

I wonder what made them give Reynolds the keys so late in the game? Maybe he had a post from Pam Geller he thought needed wider distribution, but was distracted by a flock of nanobots.

I assume they still keep the thing up because Jesus told them to be ready for the Big One in Iran.

(Actually a close second-favorite NR blog post is this one from Bench Memos, in which Roger Clegg rages that all the Wealth Creators have betrayed him with diversity -- at least it is for the moment; as they say on Egypt Watch, the situation is fluid.)

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP about the Paul Ryan gush. I know Charles Pierce is the go-to guy on Ryan's awfulness, but my column is more about the rightbloggers' hard-on for Ryan than on the man himself, so please read it anyway.

Didn't get into it much in the column, but the thing I really don't get is the assumption that Ryan is charismatic. He has mainly been shown to weave a spell in exactly one Congressional District (and at countless conservative dinner parties, where the standards are low). His sad-eyed overemphatic style seems more appropriate to a real estate seminar than national politics. But, as my lack of response to T.G.I. Friday's commercials prove, I'm not the target audience for this sort of thing.