THANK YOU FOR THE GIFT OF LAUGHTER.

You guys are in for a couple of haaaarrrd years.

UPDATE. I'm sorry, I'm still cracking up:

Rubio's lousy speech was just washing over me (though my ears did perk up when he mentioned his non-millionaire neighborhood -- I was imagining the alley from Top Cat, then I saw this), and then he suddenly turned into one of The Recess Monkeys. The gift of laughter just keeps on giving.

Just one thing kept it from being perfect: Where the hell was the Nuge?

THAT'S ENTERTAINMENT.

I think GOP Congressman Steve Stockman bringing Ted Nugent to the State of the Union is a wonderful idea. I've said before that, unlike the crackpot politicians who have been destroying the Republican Party with their ravings, Nugent is a rock star whose credentials as a nut were established long before he started getting into political gibberish. You can no more blame him or take offense at what comes out of his mouth than you could a hyena. As for Stockman, if has any idea at all besides durr-hurr Motor City Madman, it must be that the Republican political lunatics lack only a certain authenticity, and he hopes Nugent's will rub off on them. It's sort of like when Jon Landau taught Bruce Springsteen about John Ford, only hilarious.

The Dems could have invited Wesley Willis when they had the chance, so they deserve this. If Nugent starts speaking in tongues during the SOTU, that'll be alright with me. These things are excruciatingly dull and I could use the laughs.

Since the Congressional Democrats are far too lame to fight back, it falls to Obama to put the GOP in check; I advise that he punctuate every proposal in his speech with "don't believe me just watch, nigga nigga nigga," and close with, "popped a molly I'm sweatin', woo." That might begin to make up for the drones.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the Obama drone program coverage, and how it makes Obama Hitler -- and for once I sort of agree with the rightbloggers, or would if I believed they meant anything they said; experience has taught me better than that, though, and so I tell the world.

Nonetheless, Chomsky was right: All the Presidents from Truman through Obama deserve war crimes trials. But like Hamlet said, if we were all treated after our just desserts, who'd 'scape whipping?

...THAN SCHMUCK FOR A LIFETIME.

OK, remember when The West Wing was on TV and everyone thought this was liberals' way of having a fake president to console and tide themselves over until Bush was out of office? Well, at least The West Wing had snappy dialogue and good acting. Bill Whittle's Mr. Virtual President has -- well, go look. If you can't bear the video, which rather reminds me of Rupert Pupkin's basement broadcasts, you can read the transcript of Whittle's Inaugural Address, in which he alludes to Louis C.K.'s "Everything's amazing and nobody's happy" bit and then proceeds to give us the upshot  that LCK was too busy being funny and interesting to reveal:

We’re not happy, because everyone knows that the giant mushroom cloud of debt that hangs over this country will eventually destroy our economy and the world’s economy... And we’re not happy because we’re told time and time again by the people here in Washington, that we are not entitled to individual happiness. We’re not happy, because more and more, every day, this magnificent experiment in the power of the individual is being remade into yet another giant collectivist, faceless, mindless, soulless state...

Later he tells us "we’re not allowed to be prosperous anymore," and compares citizens in our welfare state to captive animals. I tell ya, Mr. Virtual President needs some new virtual speechwriters.

Whittle has now been responsible for alt-wingnut movie studio Declaration Entertainment, alt-wingnut fantasy community Ejectia, and this. He should enlist the guys working on that gun nut planned community The Citadel, PopModal ("the conservative alternative to YouTube"), PJ Lifestyle and other such simulacra, pick up Rod "Benedict Option" Dreher while he's at it, and they can all fuck off to some remote land where they can recreate a new paradise far, far, far from us. They can start here.

MARTYR COMPLEX.

Letting gays get married and making insurers pay for contraceptives means we're oppressing Christians. Get a load of R.R. Reno at First Things, who finds these portents that "we’re heading into dhimmitude of sorts":

We’re up against powerful cultural trends that threaten religious liberty. In the recent election Obama won a “values” campaign that felt it could ignore or even attack religious voters (“war on women”).

Offered a choice between Pope Ratzinger and the womenfolk, the whoremongering American electorate chose the latter. But the next part is even better:

In our favor is a parallel trend toward libertarianism and the general view that we ought to let people do pretty much what they want. This is the “don’t tread on me” sentiment that tends to be solicitous toward claims of conscience and against political correctness. This is a dangerous ally, however, since it’s the “different strokes for different folks” sentiment that also supports gay marriage and sexual liberation in general. This libertarian sensibility may support tolerance, but it won’t encourage support for religion. On the contrary, the moralism one finds in all forms of traditional religion will be seen as a threat to our culture of expansive personal freedom.

So the more freedom people have, they less likely they are to choose R.R. and his crew. A weaker vessel would have shrugged, "They no longer cower at the cross and mitre, but sneer and do anal; the jig's up, time to get a job." But not Reno, and not Rod Dreher, here to (as usual) make everything worse; Reno's essay has him predicting that "Christians will have to accept second-class status in the way Christians living in many Muslim countries do, under Islamic law and culture," at which fate Dreher shakes his tiny lambskin fist:

...it’s better to go down fighting than to meekly nod and conform, though it should also be said that only a fool would take every opportunity to be a martyr. These are going to be interesting times, ones that call for more wisdom than passion. It will be a time of testing, and of winnowing. This is not the first time this has happened in the history of the Church, nor will it be the last.

Oh, keep your top on, Mary, you want to say, your Catherine Wheel's a pyrotechnic at Burning Man. But we should encourage Dreher, as his paranoia may turn out to be productive:

You know what book we need? One titled: American Dhimmitude: A Handbook For Resistance. It would be a sober, plainspoken analysis of the cultural conditions of our time, with respect to orthodox Christianity and its decline in postmodernity. It would also offer intelligent, historically well informed commentary about how great Christians of ages past responded to challenges in their own time, when they were the minority culture, and discern lessons for ourselves from their experience.

Think of it -- an new illustrated book of martyrs, only instead of being stoned or broken on the wheel as in olden days, the new saints will have to change sinecures every so often. Can't wait to read the Kathryn J. Lopez chapter -- she served our Lord, and for that she was scourged with the wit of Alex Pareene!

UPDATE. In Dreher's comments, Erin Manning, whom Dreher sometimes employs to add extra crazy to his site, counsels American Christians to make common cause with another oppressed minority:

Right now in the public sphere people who own or use guns or are facing a culture that is increasingly hostile not only to gun ownership and use but to the very idea of weapons, such that some pretty extreme things have happened... 

I bring this up to show how this kind of thing will play out in public schools when it is Christian thought, not gun ownership and/or approval of weapons, that has become doubleplus ungood expression.

Armed Jesus freaks with a persecution complex -- sounds like a recipe for another Waco wienie roast.

WELCOME HOME, BROTHER, WE WILL KILL THE FATTED CALF.

The objection is from Ed Morrissey, author (under a different Administration) of "Is Waterboarding Torture Or Necessity? Yes." That post is a big squish daring Congress to do something about it -- Morrissey's usual schtick concerning Bush-era torture. But when certain government figures advance the human rights agenda, Morrissey stops playing cagey and gets more direct:

Yesterday, Barack Obama signed an order pledging to close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay within in a year, but without offering a solution for the current detainees. That little detail takes on a little more significance after today’s report in the New York Times about the career of a released Gitmo inmate. After getting sprung from Gitmo, Said al-Shihri became a leader of the al-Qaeda network in Yemen... 

The war on terror is no game. These people intend to kill us in large numbers, and unless we take that seriously, they will succeed. It’s not the same as using the exclusionary rule to return a burglar to the streets rather than offend tender sensibilities because someone filled out a warrant incorrectly. Al-Qaeda is not the Gambino crime family, and a law-enforcement approach will not defeat them.

And:

Obama to release photos of abuse

Here we go again. The US will release dozens of pictures depicting prisoner abuse by the American military and intelligence agents after the Obama administration dropped an appeal to block a Freedom of Information Act request by the ACLU. Will these pictures have the same demoralizing effect on both the troops and the CIA?... 

In 2004, the release of the pictures from Abu Ghraib overwhelmed the limited context of the abuse at that prison, which involved a handful of soldiers that had already come under investigation from the Pentagon for their abusive treatment of prisoners. The release of those images created a firestorm of vituperation against the American military around the world, calls for immediate firings and purges, even though the military had already acted to clean up the problem. The damage done to the Army’s reputation in particular has never been undone.

Small wonder the intelligence community has erupted in anger over this...

And:

Khaled el-Masri sued the US for what he claimed was an illegal detention and rendition that cost him five months in an Afghan jail, but the Supreme Court dismissed the case...
Masri may well have had a good case for his lawsuit, under other circumstances. If, as he claims, he has no connection to terrorism and got abducted by the CIA in Macedonia and held for almost half a year of interrogation, he should be due some compensation. Unfortunately, with the kind of war we're fighting, we have to err on the side of our safety -- and we have to learn from our mistakes, too.

So much for his bleeding heart. But, you know: If he's bullshitting now, so what? The policy of drone assassination of U.S. citizens is an outrage, and every voice in the chorus of disapproval is welcome, even the posers'.  Let us take the opportunity presented by opportunism, and welcome and support them. Tomorrow we can get back at each others' throats.

THE CONSERVATIVE COMEBACK, PART 102,833.

As others have observed, National Review editor Kathryn J. Lopez had a nervous breakdown because a pretty lady danced suggestively at halftime at a football game. She also managed to drag Michelle Obama and abortion into it ("It seems quite disappointing that Michelle Obama would feel the need to tweet about how 'proud' she is of Beyoncé... When I saw the first lady’s tweet, I couldn’t help but think of the president talking about abortion in terms of his daughters’ freedom...").

Later Lopez actually came back to amplify:

Yes, a woman embracing her womanhood is a powerful thing. Which is exactly what we tend to suppress in so many other contexts (say, federal policy mandating that we treat women’s fertility as a disease to be medicated)...

Oh, if you think that's creepy --

Sometimes I even sing along to her songs.

K-Lo dancing around as she dusts her Immaculate Mary dolls and croons, "I need a thug that’ll have my back, Do-rag, Nike Airs to match, Ain’t nothin’ wrong with that..." I'd give my soul to take out my brain, hold it under a faucet and wash away the dirty pictures you put there today! Then she goes into a rhapsody over her recent Jesus Bieber crush Christopher West and asks that we "raise our standards. Is it crazy to think we can, even at the Super Bowl?" Maybe the folks behind Conservapedia can organize an alternate Super Bowl where a bunch of nuns sing "Dominique" at halftime.

Rich Lowry comes along to smooth things out, which seems rather chivalrous, at least compared to the way some of her colleagues treat her.

Kathryn, I just wrote a Super Bowl-related column where I touched on the halftime show, but I found it difficult to say anything about it without sounding like a kill-joy and a geezer.

Okay, Rich, maybe for you Sarah Palin can sex up the nun show.

Yeah, America's gonna warm to this movement.

UPDATE. BigHank53 in comments: "We absolutely are in desperate need of a sane, healthy embrace of human sexuality. And you're proposing that we listen to the Catholic Freakin' Church for advice on this? What's next, dating tips from the Green River Strangler?"

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP...

about the Obama skeet-shooting controversy, which may seem dumber than most such controversies if you've forgotten how dumb most such controversies are. Enjoy.

A CLASSIC CASE.

Rob Port at Say Anything gets these TANF usage numbers from his state government:

You and I look at this and think: This is a pretty sad picture. Think about a single parent with kids using her TANF to buy clothing, shelter, school supplies, etc.  Maybe some of the money is spent more frivolously, sure, but that would be hard to manage: In 2004 the maximum monthly TANF benefit paid in North Dakota to a single-parent-headed family of four was $573.  And, in case you think it's gotten better since then, TANF benefit levels have plunged by 22.3% in North Dakota since 1996.

So maybe a couple of times a week the recipients eat at McDonald's or a diner instead of in their hovels. Maybe they get chips, soda, and smokes from the service station. And very rarely they rent a movie.

Here's how Port sees it:

48% Of North Dakota Welfare Spending Is On Fast Food, Eating Out, ATM’s And Movie Rentals

...This categories illustrate some very poor priorities among TANF recipients. Roughly half of the total TANF funds, some $5.6 million, is spent on eating out (both fast food and regular restaurants, movie rentals and ATM withdrawals. If we consider that a significant amount, if not most, of the $2.26 million spent inside gas stations (which is nearly 20% of the total) is probably junk food, you get a grim picture of how these funds are being spent. 

Which is to say, on frivolities and luxuries rather than needs.

I'm beginning to think it's a psychological condition. Maybe some of it's upbringing. Maybe some of us are born without a capacity for empathy and by the grace of God avoid the life of aimless crime into which some sociopaths drift, and instead become... well, the kind of person who thinks people on welfare have it too easy and that junk food is a luxury they don't deserve.

ED KOCH 1924-2013.

I never liked the guy and, though I lived through all three of his terms as Mayor of New York, never voted for him. But I do think that, unlike many politicians, he genuinely sought to serve his constituents; if he bent over for developers, it was because they brought money to the city, not because he had some Ayn Rand idea that the corporate class should rule. You can see this clearly in one of the instances when he didn't bend over: When he bucked Donald Trump -- who generally did very well under Koch's reign -- over his proposed Television City complex in 1987. The New York Times account almost comically misreads the situation:

But the stakes are higher this time than ever before. The decision by NBC to remain in New York or to relocate to New Jersey may hang in the balance... 

The political fortunes of the Mayor, buffeted for almost a year and a half by municipal scandals, could also turn on what NBC decides to do - and on whom the public blames if the network leaves or whom it credits if NBC remains. 

Navigating the political shoals will not be easy for Mr. Koch. The Mayor, who has often been accused of giving away too much of the city's light and air to its master builders, could win praise for turning down a powerful developer who had demanded too much. 

But if NBC does move to New Jersey, thus joining J. C. Penney and the Mobil Corporation in an exodus from Manhattan, Mr. Koch could be criticized for having failed to bend sufficiently to keep a vital part of the communications industry in New York.

You see how that worked out -- last night was the final episode of "30 Rock," not "30 Landmark Square, Stamford."  NBC, like many other corporations, sends some operations out to the sticks from time to time, but New York is big enough to stand it, and certainly too big to respond to economic blackmail. For years no one seemed to remember that, but Koch knew it and let you know he knew it. That was part of his success, and why people stuck with him.

As I've said before, I also admired his habit of saying "the people have spoken" after big trials like Bernhard Goetz's and Larry Davis', which I found appropriately humble and respectful. (He said it after he lost the 1982 Democratic Gubernatorial nomination to Mario Cuomo, too.) Nowadays people only remember his snide version of the saying after he lost the 1989 primary: "The people have spoken and they must be punished." Maybe that was always in the back of his mind when he used the shorter version. But it's something that he waited until the end of his political career to reveal it.

ANNALS OF THE CULTURE WARS ETC. ETC.

Over at PJ Lifestyle (yes, they have such a thing; it's the thin end of the wedge in their drive to take over the internet, and includes funny animal videos you can awwww over without being troubled by the thought that some liberal might be enjoying it too), we have a curious listicle: "The 3 Best Monty Python Sketches (Aren’t Necessarily the Funniest)" by Kathy Shaidle. She names and provides videos of the sketches -- and lengthy, aimless, joke-killing reasons why she likes them -- but first explains how Monty Python are among history's greatest monsters and no I ain't even kidding:

But as an adult, I’ve been forced to accept that these strangers — whose work was one of the only things I believed I could ever truly depend on – all had (giant, stomping, purloined) feet of clay. 

Terry Jones revealed himself to be bitchy Bush-hater. 

John Cleese doled out self-help psychobabble while marrying and divorcing more times than even my mother. (He’s in the midst of an “Alimony Tour” and is auctioning off a career’s worth of props and memorabilia.) 

Worse, Cleese seems stupidly saddened and baffled by the transformation of his beloved London into a lawless polyglot madhouse — a transformation which is entirely the fault of the youthful culture-busting philosophy he and his liberal pals embraced. 

They’d unwittingly (or not) destroyed England in a way the Luftwaffe could have only dreamed of.

There's something perfectly, schizophrenically Kulturkampf about inviting people to watch funny sketches while you tell them how the sketches destroyed Western Civilization. Sorta reminds me of the passion of Nelson Van Alden.

UPDATE. Previous PJ Lifestyle homina-homina here. What a weird little alt-universe it is.

STILL MORE ANNALS OF THE CULTURE WARS.

Kurt Schlichter at Breitbart.com:

If conservatives are going to be in the popular culture – and act to change it – they can’t simply ignore shows like Girls that capture the zeitgeist, even if the zeitgeist makes their skin crawl. Season two is well under way, and conservatives need to participate in the discussion.

And what sort of discussion would that be?

Think of Sex and the City, except Sarah Jessica Parker has doubled her weight, dresses like a potato sack and fancies herself the voice of some undefined generation.

Oh, that kind. I expect there's at least one clubhouse or klavern in every county where that discussion never ends.

But wait, Schlichter wants to directly engage the sheeple:

You can’t talk about Girls at the water cooler with the rest of the office if you haven’t watched it, and if you aren’t part of the discussion you aren’t injecting and modeling the conservative ideas and values that we need to advance. You can['t] criticize and critique if you’re AWOL from pop culture.

So, someone's going to say "Hey, did you see Girls last night?" and you're going to say -- let me take a line from Schlichter's essay -- "The characters seem to live in a minority and Republican-free bubble (though a black Republican (!) shows up as a character this season). There is no reference to religion – that wouldn't occur to them." Or, even better, try one from Jeffrey Lord at The American Spectator:

The America that leftist women have such contempt for... that America is sending its sons and daughters to protect those rights. To die for those rights. 

It is exactly that America that sent Tyrone Woods to fight Ansar al-Sharia in Benghazi so that Lena Dunham can sit at peace in Brooklyn with her tattoo and her sleeveless T-shirt and her wink-wink on-camera prattlings about first-times. So that Amanda Marcotte can play with her race cards at Slate.

And your co-workers will nod thoughtfully and say, "Boy, that Obamacare's pretty socialist, huh?"

You need to make sure the people around you hear those answers, but step one is to be a part of the discussion. And step two is eventually taking over the reins of pop culture ourselves.

This is the "Step 3: Profit!" of all time.

We’ll know we’re winning when we see the conservative equivalent of Girls.

How about just watching PornTube and declaring victory?

Their big problem is neatly encapsulated in this bit:

What can be puzzling is trying to figure out how Dunham actually feels about her characters – does she really understand how deluded and shallow they are, or does she (horrors) consider them as some sort of role models for her co-generationists?

I wonder if they'll ever realize that their real culture war is not with liberals, but with ambiguity.

UPDATE. Right out of the gate, commenter Spaghetti Lee:

We’ll know we’re winning when we see the conservative equivalent of Girls.

"Boys"? 

BIG NIGHT AT THE LYCEUM.

Roger L. Simon gave a speech at some rightwing fish-fry in Washington state and decided to share it on his website. Next time, fellas, try and get Shecky Green:

All right, here are five words that should make you smile: You don’t live in California…. I would imagine that saves many of you ten thousand dollars a year or more right there. There’s something to be happy about. Speaking of which, since I live in L.A. but spend a lot of time in this state, I’ve always been perplexed why everything seems to work better up here… the roads are better, the services are better… but we pay the ridiculous amount of state income tax. I don’t have to tell this crowd — don’t ever go there.

Thank you, now I'll fuck off with my check back to L.A. while you stay up here and get rained on. Do even conservatives go for this "Like you, I hate the major media centers and that's why I spend all my time in them" bullshit anymore?

Most of the speech is about Simon's conversion. Yes, that again. "Hey, Lou, 'dja know I usedta be a liberal?" "Give it a rest, Roger." "No really, I even hung out with the Black Panthers." "We know, Roger." "Lou, you know something else? Richard Pryor never laughed at my jokes." "Alright, rummy, hit the bricks, let's go..."

At one point in the speech Simon is approached by a glamorous Soviet agent!

Later, on subsequent cultural exchanges to the Soviet Union in the eighties, I learned just how true as KGB agents followed us everywhere, including the bathroom. An attempt was even made, at hotel in Yalta, to draft me into Soviet intelligence by a female reporter from Soviet Screen magazine. Not only was I not tempted, I was terrified.

"You know Schwarzenegger, yes? You find out how he become big star with such big accent. Comes the revolution you can be commissar of Hollywood. Also of my ass. You like? I was gymnast."

(Only lately, have I begun to understand what it was they wanted. More of that in a moment).

Simon never follows up on this, at least in the transcript, which is really too bad ("Spielberg? A Red! Jack Nicholson? Red! Brian DePalma? Ooh, a big Red!").

His big finish:

Rather than boycott Hollywood, take it over – at least part of it. But do it well and professionally. Otherwise there’s no point. No one’s interested.

As one who was given by God, or my parents’ DNA or something, the ability to write dialogue and make up stories, I am going to be devoting more of my time to that in the future, putting some of the skills I learned as a liberal to work as a conservative...

And people like me need the support of people like you more than you know. After decades of pervasive liberal culture, we need an audience, financial support, and new means of distribution. That’s a whole infrastructure, if you think about it. And then there’s educational system and the media to think about…. Whoa…. No one ever said it was going to be easy. Thank you.

They left out the part where ushers went through the crowd with tin cups. Coming soon: PJDVD! Not only are the movies conservative, you don't have to rub elbows with the hoi polloi and maybe catch TB to watch 'em!

I like to think of this speech as Simon's "Garageland." The truth is only known by geezer types. (h/t Dan Coyle)

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP....

...a miscellany of rightblogger sad trombones over Benghazi, the Roe v. Wade 40th anniversary, Bobby Jindal, etc.

Not making the cut was this plaint from a contributor to the new improved Dr. Mrs. Ole Perfesser page, pimped by the Perf himself:

Forgive me if this is the wrong place to put this. 

But this is an observation after using Okcupid futility for a few years now. Pretty much every single women on the site is a liberal who doesn't want to date conservatives. (They have a match question for this) 

Even women who are Ayn Rand fans. Even women who are hard core Christians, anti-abortion, anti-sex before marriage, etc, etc, etc 

The few exceptions are "centrists" who don't want to date conservatives. 

What gives? Is it just the web site? Are most women who lean conservative already married? Are women just more prone to be liberal?

Who wants to tell him? Dr. Helen double-dipped on this one and got some of her legendary commenters to weigh in. waxwing01 is my favorite for far, but the night is young.

Oh, but please read my thing too.

THE CONSERVATIVE COMEBACK PART 43,022.

The revanchism continues! The usual suspects are all het up about Hitlery saying, "What difference does it make?" -- which also happens to be the response of normal people when you tell them this whole Benghazi tsimmis is about whether the mob killed four people over a video or over the Siege of Cordoba.

Conservatives seem to sense this isn't going to burn the motherfucker down, so some of the nuttier ones like Rand Paul are expanding their conspiracy theories, which ThinkProgress notices, which in turn outrages Ann Althouse, who sees TP's headline "GOP Senator Pushes Gun-Running Conspiracy Theory During Benghazi Hearing" and complains,

Rand Paul asks a question. It seems histrionic to equate asking a question with pushing a conspiracy theory, and the truth is Hillary Clinton's answer has the ring of... lying. 

The effort on the left to stereotype Rand Paul as a nutcase is so strenuous that it stimulates my root-for-the-underdog instinct. And makes me suspicious. I feel a Rand-Paul-must-be-destroyed conspiracy theory blossoming within.

Maybe she'd prefer the characterization of the impeccably rightwing Jim Hoft of Gateway Pundit: "Rand Paul: Benghazi May Have Been Cover-up for Obama Gun-Running." Or that of WorldNetDaily: "RAND PAUL: OBAMA IN GUNS-TO-JIHADISTS COVER-UP? 'A kind of international Fast and Furious in Benghazi.'" Or of Aaron Klein: "MEDIA IGNORE HILLARY’S BOMBSHELL BENGHAZI CLAIM. Secretary insists she did not know about gun-running at U.S. mission." I wonder if, when unbidden negative thoughts disturb her, Althouse tells herself they've been published at left-wing sites so she can discount them.

Other apparatchiks are working on getting city folk to love Republicans. Edward L. Glaeser at City Journal says "successful cities like New York and Houston surge with ambitious strivers and entrepreneurs, who should instinctively sympathize with the GOP’s faith in private industry" -- which sounds a lot like the "black people like to go to church, why won't they vote for our party, it's full of evangelical preachers?" argument we've been hearing for years. And sure enough, Glaeser seeks to win urbanites with school vouchers, congestion pricing, and knocking down lovely old buildings on the theory that developers will build in their place cheap apartments instead of luxury condos.

At least he acknowledges that the GOP's been punting city votes for years, but he doesn't seem to understand why. Hint: Cities are full of black people, hence Ooga Booga. And the point is moot anyway, as the In Thing for Republicans now is to disenfranchise cities by rigging the electoral vote.

When all else fails they can go back to previous formulae:

It's with love I say it: Don't ever change.

TEARS OF THE CROCODILE.

When you spend your days thinking up ways to entertain the Global Warming is a Hoax crowd, as Henry Payne of National Review's Planet Gore does, you sometimes have to go with thin gruel:

At Monday’s inaugural, President Obama declared global-warming mitigation a second-term priority. On Tuesday, a deadly arctic blast here in the Midwest was a reminder of how frivolous that pursuit is.

Haw haw cold snap Al Gore is fat! But wait, it gets better:

Saving polar bears may be fashionable among rich elites, but Detroit’s jammed shelters this week are evidence that cold weather threatens the poor among us. City shelters reported they were at capacity as the frostbitten homeless took refuge from the bitter cold... 

While Detroit’s needy freeze, millions of federal dollars are going to the politically connected well-to-do. Inside the Detroit Auto Show this week, billionaire Elon Musk — one of America’s richest men — is displaying his latest Tesla electric SUV for the well-to-do, financed by a half-billion dollars in federal loans... 

Washington pols may get good press for protecting polar bears — but the real climate victims are freezing in city shelters.

It's a measure of their devotion to AGW denial that they're actually willing to pretend concern for poor people in public shelters to advance it. Payne's not very convincing, though. Maybe NR should put Kathryn J. Lopez on the job, and tell her to imagine those freezing paupers are aborted fetuses.

CONSERVATISM CANNOT FAIL; IT CAN ONLY BE FAILED.

From Mickey Kaus' lips to the Ole Perfesser's ears:

Does Fox News now have an All-Amnesty lineup? Looks like it. Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly have now fallen in line behind World Citizen Rupert Murdoch’s support of ”sweeping, generous immigration reform,” including a “path to citizenship.” Karl Rove was always on board, of course.

What about Fox News’ viewers? Are they going to go along like sheep? They now have no network that represents their perspective on what seems to be a key issue for Obama’s second term. Is it time for a new Fox? (Wouldn’t it be time for a new Fox anyway? That lineup has been stale for years.) …

The Republican Party isn't conservative enough; Fox News isn't conservative enough. Pretty soon they'll be telling each other what a liberal rag National Review turned into.

Soon enough there'll be no place for them to go for new voters except outer space.

THAT'S RACIST. NO, SERIOUSLY, THAT IS RACIST.

Ta-Nehisi Coates complains of the "half-assed social contract" applied to blacks since Reconstruction ("The black migrants did play by the rules, but they did not enjoy the right to compete"). Jonah Goldberg thinks he has a good one:

Coates doesn’t mention it, but it’s worth noting that many of the mechanisms of this “half-assed social contract” were forged and defended as progressive laws. The Davis-Bacon Act is the most famous example, in that it was designed to benefit white union members at the expense of equally qualified but less expensive black labor... 

Take, for instance, the minimum wage. The founding fathers of progressivism at the University of Wisconsin, but also such figures as Sidney Webb, saw the discriminatory aspects of the minimum wage as among its chief selling points...

So, in a nation where unions offer blacks a rare chance at higher wages, Goldberg portrays such wages as Liberal Fascist Racism; and in a nation where blacks traditionally get lower wages than whites, Goldberg portrays the minimum wage as Liberal Fascist Racism.

While for many years most American politicians were racist to a greater or less extent, Goldberg only notices the racism of those whose legacies have actually been of some help to non-white Americans. (For him Robert Byrd is eternally a Klansman, but William Buckley was a great man who couldn't have meant all those things he said.)  In fact, any successful attempt to improve the lot of non-whites, such as diversity programs, Goldberg unfailingly identifies as the real racism ("If I give extra credit to Joe because he’s black, I’m making things just that much harder for Tom because he’s white"). I've never seen him speak well of a black person who wasn't a National Review author or a member of the Bush Administration. I'm not even sure if he likes Prince.

I used to think Goldberg did this shit because he came up as a fratty chucklehead who saw how much the grown-ups liked it when he acted "politically incorrect," and that he kept it up as part of a conscious attempt to peddle conservatism as the fun American ideology. But now that he is no longer remotely young and not even Goldberg is stupid enough to think conservatism is fun, I've come to the conclusion that he just doesn't like black people. I'm rather embarrassed that it took me this long to figure that out. The moron has outsmarted me at last! Farrrrt.

IT WAS A GOOD DAY.

For "Seneca Falls and Selma and Stonewall"; for the idea that it's not un-American to work together and share the bounty; for saying in the face of originalists, "while these truths may be self-evident, they've never been self-executing"; and of course for the LOL Opposition:

And oh yeah, for all the happy black folks in D.C.

Yeah, it was a good day.

UPDATE. The lulz keep a-comin': National Review's first-string bowtie Roger Kimball:

...The tone that he set: What was it? Reading through the speech (I will be honest: I couldn’t bear to listen to it live, I just couldn’t), I was haunted by an echo. The speech reminded me of something, of someone. Who was it? Woodrow Wilson? Yes, in part. But there was another ghost in the wings... 

Got it: “Peace in our time,” the president said, “requires the constant advance of those principles that our common creed describes: tolerance and opportunity; human dignity and justice.” 

Now, I am as keen on tolerance and opportunity, human dignity and justice as the next gun-toting bitter-ender. But “peace in our time”? Where have we heard that before? Who was the last politician to strut across the world stage proclaiming “peace in our time”? Why, Neville Chamberlain, of course. He stepped off the plane that brought him back from his meeting with Adolf Hitler on September 30, 1938, and the crowd cheered as Chamberlain told them about his meeting with the German führer...

Similarly, Obama used the words "I" and "me" a lot, just like Marshal Petain.

UPDATE 2. Wrote a little something about the speech for 2paragraphs.

UPDATE 3.  Commenters including Ron Thompson point out that Chamberlain actually said "peace for our time." The quote is so commonly misrendered that I would be inclined to give Kimball a break for using the wrong version, and even for not checking out what he probably assumed was a devastating coincidence before using it -- after all, he's only hurting himself.

However, smut clyde, tigrismus, and others inform us that Benjamin Disraeli and John F. Kennedy used "peace in our time," which means by the ancient conservative law of I'm Rubber You're Glue that they are now both retroactively Hitler. I hope Kimball's happy now!

NEW VOICE POST UP...

...about Obama's gun proposals and the predictable rightblogger reaction. I got only a little into the Obama-Hitler stuff, because that's an evergreen at this point, but I do confess I enjoyed "OBAMA'S WHITE SCAPEGOATS...JUST LIKE HITLER DID TO THE JEWS AND OTHER MINORITIES" by some nut, as well as what we might consider the moderate conservative alternative, "Popular Parallels Between Hitler And Obama Are Wrong... But Obama Is Still A Tyrannical Narcissist."

I also enjoyed Gateway Pundit Jim Hoft's "Don’t Tell the Media... NRA More Popular Than Gun-Grabber Obama." One of these days they'll get smart and run the NRA for President.