THERE'S RICH, AND THEN THERE'S HANSON RICH.

Victor Davis Hanson's crying "Vanitas!" again. Since Obama was elected, you can't deport Mexicans anymore, they're letting women serve in combat, and worst of all, some people of whom Hanson does not approve might not die broke in a rooming-house:

Does it really make all that much difference whether you are a doctor at 70 who religiously put away $1,000 a month for thirty years, compounded at the old interest, and planned to retire on the interest income, or a cashless state employee with a defined benefit pension plan? The one might have over $1 million in his savings account, but the other a bigger and less risky monthly payout. Suddenly the old adult advice to our children — “Save and put your money in the bank to receive interest” — is what? “Spend it now or borrow as much as you can at cheap interest”?

That guy got off easy, idling away his days as a highway patrolman or a garbageman, then being rewarded with a comfortable old age. What kind of message is this sending our youth? (The bit about cheap interest is what the classicists call a non sequitur.)

Also, some of the people Hanson doesn't like have even gotten rich:

There are not just the rich and poor any more, but now the “good rich” (e.g., athletes, rappers, Hollywood stars, Silicon Valley grandees, Democratic senators, liberal philanthropists, etc.) and the “bad rich” (e.g., oil companies, CEOs, doctors, the Koch brothers, etc.). The correct-thinking nomenklatura and the dutiful apparat versus the kulaks and enemies of the people.

Both the "apparat" and the "kulaks" seem pretty flush to me. But the former get their asses kissed by fancy magazines, and the latter by Victor Davis Hanson, so I can see why they'd feel hard done by.

After decades of philosophizing, Hanson has suddenly discovered class warfare. And he wants in -- but he knows the priests at the temple of Mammon frown on that. So he's devised a dispensation for himself: He'll only rag on the undeserving rich. And while others would draw a distinction between those whose wealth is earned and those whose wealth is unearned, Hanson knows what really makes a man worthy of Fortune's smile: the right politics. These days, this is what passes for conservative populism.

CULTURE CLUBBED.

William A. Jacobson of Legal Insurrection:

I previously wrote about how BuzzFeed Politics has combined “the culture” and savvy crafting into a highly effective tool for undermining Republicans with subtle and not-so-subtle mockery. “Look at the goofy cat, look at the goofy celeb, look at the goofy Republican” is more dangerous to us than a 5000-word article in The New York Times Sunday Magazine.

Figures he'd put "the culture" in quotes; culture is clearly something that mystifies and terrifies him so much that he's compelled to describe in it police-blotter what-the-kids-call-it language, like "wilding" or "whirlpooling."

Jacobson's screed is about some Upworthy thing that shows Senator Elizabeth Warren kicking banker ass. You may recall from the recent election that Jacobson had a raging hard-on for Warren, and it appears to have persisted. The idea that something positive about Warren has been published and is drawing good traffic appears to have driven Jacobson around the bend:

Upworthy is the fastest growing website and already receives millions of visits a month despite being less than one year old, and has over 55 thousand Twitter followers. It recently received $4 million in venture capital funding. 

Upworthy is not interested in deep thinking, or you... 

The first thing to note is that when you click on the homepage link to the post, an anti-NRA poll pops up. It’s the equivalent of a push poll, delivering a political message in the form of a poll... How long before Upworthy runs a post about the overwhelming demand that Congress “stand up to the NRA”?...

There is nothing like Upworthy or BuzzFeed on the right. The closest we have come is Twitchy, Michelle Malkin’s brilliant website...

We are losing the fight to the lowest of low information voters, who are pushed toward a liberal agenda by very smart and talented people who understand the power of social media in a way we don’t...

What a way to try and motivate people -- telling them there's a popular website out there that doesn't care about them! That's meant for people who are not them! It's like me getting pissed at a Justin Bieber fan site.

Jacobson and guys like him have been running their schtick for years without evincing any of the kind of skills that normally give writers pleasure -- they don't produce interesting wordplay, fresh insights, journalistic discoveries, or even good jokes. The only time you can feel something like excitement coming from their work is when they're attacking someone and have hope of defeating them.

In short, they're propagandists. They took up the tools of culture to further their cause, probably as a last resort -- not everyone has what it takes to be a ward heeler -- but while some people who do that sort of thing eventually learn some interest in, and even affection for, the act of creating, these guys seem impervious to it. Day after day they take political messages out of the appropriate briefing documents, move the parts around a little so it doesn't look suspicious, and hit "post." They don't do inspiration. If you gave them a block of marble and a chisel and all the time in the world, they'd be looking around for a liberal to kill with the chisel.

The Upworthy guys aren't doing anything amazing, but because it involves the effective use of words and video and some social media widgets, it makes guys like Jacobson crazy. They feel they should have that power, and try to whip it up by telling their fans: Look, someone is doing a "culture" thing! We must do something about that! And they wait, crouched in their holes, for the answer -- without any idea that they might find it in themselves, if only they weren't such miserable, joyless little turds.

POE'S LAW WINS AGAIN.

I have been following online kulturkampf mag Acculturated a while now, but I may have to stop. First there's this new Downton Abbey essay by Ashley E. McGuire -- a servant was sent away for having been knocked up, apparently, and McGuire reacts:

On the one hand, Grantham’s hypocrisy makes me glad for progressive laws that ensure that sexual assault gets prosecuted and that men have to pay, at least financially, when they sire a child. 

On the other hand, it makes me wonder, are things that much better today?

Wut.

Men are expected to sleep around to be manly. But whereas women were once expected to be pure, now women are expected to sleep around (thanks Hanna Rosin!) to be feminists but still somehow be pure to be desirable.

They do?

Like it or not, virginity in a woman is still very much valued.

It is? Oh hold on, McGuire has evidence:

Nothing exemplifies this better than recent examples of women auctioning off their virginity for absurd sums.

Then I looked at the Acculturated TOC and found an essay called, "One Way to Resurrect Manliness: Everyone, Dress Better!"

I'm genuinely flummoxed. I want to keep making fun of them, but I begin to suspect Acculturated is really an epic internet fraud like Christwire. I'm afraid I'll look silly when they rip the mask off and turn out to be a bunch of Vassar students having a laugh. Come to think of it, I've seen few besides the very dumbest conservatives ever linking to them...

Another bad sign: They do podcasts at Ricochet, an obvious parody site.

Does anyone have the inside story?  Thanks in advance.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about rightblogger State of the Union coverage, which got particularly harsh when people began laughing at Marco Rubio. Mockery is one thing that really throws them; they know it engages some sort of normal human emotion, but since it isn't rage, shame, or resentment they have a hard time putting their finger on it.

Among the outtakes was Larry Kudlow's column, in which he referred to Obama's and Rubio's speeches as "dueling State of the Union messages" and said "by far the best line" of the evening was Rubio's "Presidents in both parties -- from John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan -- have known that our free-enterprise economy is the source of our middle-class prosperity" -- a bit of rhetoric I'd put on the level of "the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog," but which Kudlow called "a brilliant summary of pro-growth policies, on the supply-side and in a free-market context." The bar is set low for Republican boy wonders, apparently.

I had a lot of American Spectator contributions in this one, and could have added more. When one of your SOTU rebuttals contains this...

Listening to Obama’s address on Tuesday night, I was reminded of something I read last week from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison. Bonhoeffer was, of course, a German theologian who lived during the Hitler era.

...you might consider beginning all your subscriber messages, "Dear Fellow Dead-Ender."

ANNALS OF THE CULTURE WAR, PERSECUTION MANIA EDITION.

The Ol' Perfesser was pimping something at Forbes called "Down On Downton: Why The Left Is Torching Downton Abbey," and I thought, that's strange, I haven't seen any such thing. I have seen those crazy kids at Acculturated kvelling over Downton Abbey as some sort of conservative thing, as if it were a political candidate and not some stupid TV show. I've also seen Jonah Goldberg claim the show for  the right because "the whole point of the show is to sympathize with the landed gentry" and one of the villains is gay. Since then I've seen similar yak from PJ Lifestyle ("5 Covert Conservative Lessons in Downton Abbey"),  First Things ("Downton Abbey is the perfect anti-Girls" -- their hard-on for Lena Dunham never dies), Gary North ("here we TV have a show which basically is opposed to the idea of confiscatory inheritance taxation" and references to Adam Smith and Edmund Burke), etc.

So I went to Forbes to see Jerry Bowyer lay out the evidence:

That’s arguably why the left is bashing Downton Abbey. The New York Times Art Beat column has reported that British critics are ‘torching’ Downton Abbey. Apparently Downton Abbey is snobbish, culturally necrophiliac (and if you don’t yet know what that word means, I suggest you leave it that way) and its popularity in the United States is due to the rise of the Tea Party movement and conservative opposition to the death tax. Even worse, creator Julian Fellowes is the holder of a Tory Peerage. Definitely not the right sort of people.

Wait a minute -- British critics? I clicked through to Art Beat: They mention the criticisms of Simon Schama and James Fenton, and... that's it. Two English guys.

Having thus established the conspiracy, Bowyer goes on to explain why The Left/two English guys hate the show: "Downton Abbey‘s message is an anti-class warfare one. The fact is that the spirit of the critics is hard left, and maybe that’s why Downton Abbey makes them so angry, because the success of the series shows that this group does not speak for America."

These guys couldn't be projecting any harder if they had halogen lamps up their butts. Plus: Don't they feel ashamed to be watching anything on the communist PBS?

UPDATE. I wonder why Bowyer didn't mention this, from Irin Carmon at Salon: "Why liberals love 'Downton Abbey.'" It's about... why liberals love Downton Abbey. Why, it's as if they have the ability to enjoy things that don't flatter every single one of their prejudices. What savages! But at the Washington Times, Jack Cashill offers an alternate explanation:

Carmon’s liberal friends may have sensed that their own ill-formed ideologies lack the integrity and the grace of the one they are exposed to in some detail on successive Sunday nights each winter. Outwardly, they may continue to reject the world the Crawleys have inherited, but inwardly, they envy it, and once a week at least, through the magic of television, they get to be part of it.

So in this reading, liberals actually love the show, but only because they wish they were conservatives. Well, when you spend years of your life telling people that Bill Ayers wrote Barack Obama's book, you may develop impressive self-convincing skills.

UPDATE 2. In comments, L Bob Rife: "Could someone wake me when the Acculturatniks lay claim to the 'Harlem Shake'?"

ANNALS OF THE CULTURE WAR, CONT.

I am grateful to Will Sommer -- who's doing fun things with the Washington City Paper blog, by the way -- for luring me back to Acculturated, the rightwing kulturkampf factory where I had previously found an essay about how feminists kept us all from living in Downton Abbey and saying "jolly good" or something. Sommer's find is by Mark Judge, nee Mark Gavreau Judge and a recurring minor character in the alicublog buffooniverse, who agrees with Kay Hymowitz's shtick about American men having too much fun, and blames women.

These days the problem isn’t as much pre-adulthood males as it is uncultured people–including women. When I was in high school at Georgetown Prep, a Jesuit school that prided itself on producing men who could both lay down a block and conjugate Latin, we had a term for well-rounded women: “cool chicks.” Yeah, she’s a cool chick. A cool chick would go to a baseball game with you, maybe liked a cool band, and also had a favorite museum and novel. They were cool because they weren’t just one thing–the Lena Dunham hipster, the scholarship-obsessed athlete, the Ally Sheedy Breakfast Club basket case. Do cool chicks exist anymore? Is there a Dianne Keaton of this generation?

Translation: I just can't beat off to the Vanity Fair "Hollywood" annual since Meryl Streep got crow's feet.

But then I found that Judge's essay is only "part of a symposium in which a variety of writers and thinkers weigh in on the question: 'Can men be men again?'" -- a line I'd prefer to believe is a Rusty Warren set-up, but which these brightish youngish things apparently take very seriously. One of these is Ryan Duffy, and his essay is called, not even kidding, "Training Men to be Better: Rewards and Punishments."

Duffy tells us it's important that we get guys to stop liking casual sex because who knows why (with this crowd the reasons don't even have to be mentioned, but I bet birth rates are involved), and like Judge he blames women (I sense a pattern), because they "have been feeding the beast of men’s desire for short-term relationships." But if the stupid bitches will just listen to him and Steve Harvey, we can turn this thing right around:

But should we also look to women to play a role in this process? In his book Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man, Steve Harvey talks about men like animals and the importance of rewards and punishments. Harvey actively acknowledges his suggestions might not work so well with feminists, but makes suggestions likely waiting ninety days before having sex with men to ensure he is truly in it for the right reasons. 

I believe there is some morsel of truth to Harvey’s claims. If we as a society want men to grow up and be real men–whatever that definition is–it’s critical that we go back to the simple rules of behaviorism. People will feel, think, and behave in ways that they are rewarded or punished for. If we truly want men to change, we can hope they will reward and punish themselves, but acknowledge that we (and especially the women dealing with them) must also play a part.

I suppose it is progress, in a way, that instead of relying on embittered mothers or maiden aunts to teach women to treat men like dogs, conservatives are starting to enlist the aid of Magic Negroes. Maybe this is the direction their minority outreach will take: encouraging Ice Cube, for example, to go out on stage with Allen West to do "Black North Korea."

Still, if your strategy relies on convincing people to stop having sex, you've got a hard sell no matter how you jazz up the pitch. Maybe it's time they went really retro and advocated the establishment of red light districts. Of course, they'd probably abandon the project once they realized they have to pay the comfort women at least $9 an hour. Sigh. I guess it's rightwing sitcom reviews until someone gets them all jobs at The Atlantic.

Parting irony, though: Isn't it rich that their plan for whipping male sexuality into shape requires women to behave like a union?

UPDATE. ADHDJ, in comments: "Indeed, it's easy to forget the world pre-January 2009, before titty bars and pool halls were invented."

UPDATE 2. Late as it is, I should like to add chuckling's observations on Judge and his Lena Dunham hangup, which could easily be applied to any of these guys and their Lena Dunham hangup:

Anyway, interesting the dude's definition of cool when applied to a young woman: It's not someone who's smart, well-educated, cultured, ridiculously successful in television, probably crown fucking princess of the New York indie celebrity scene -- no, none of that is cool -- but someone who will fetch him a hot dog at a baseball game. Of course pretending to share the interests of some conservative ass and smiling as he drones on and on about whatever infuriates him at the moment is a more achievable aspiration than being Lena Dunham for most women, but unfortunately it's pretty much nobody's definition of cool.

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.