ANNALS OF THE CULTURE WARS.

Brad Todd at the Daily Caller:

Washington’s pundits have been united this spring. They’ve concluded that a single shift in culture on gay marriage has marooned one of America’s political ideologies from the public majorities of tomorrow.

The pundits are right that one political philosophy is being left behind but wrong about which one. It is liberals, not conservatives, who are chained to an ideology built for yesterday’s culture. The proof of this realignment is not on cable news, but...

I have to admit, folks, at this point I was very interested to see what, besides the political events of the day, presaged this conservative ascendancy.

... but on cable television’s hippest drama, “Mad Men,” which this week kicked off its final season to great fanfare.

Blink. Blink.

I thought next he was going to say that Mad Men shows the ruinous legacy of the liberal 60s because they made Don suicidal and Betty fat; alternatively, that it shows how great life was when women and black people were oppressed. Those would have made some sense on a juvenile level at least. But... To boil it down for you, the left is old and gross because Obamacare is sooo LBJ and soaked in "the collective emotional DNA of the post-war era," which the kids don't like because it's analog.

LBJ sold that audience national retirement pensions as easily as the age’s Mad Men built national brands of soap and beer. Similarly, the rest of society’s institutions nationalized as well — the American Legion, the Moose Lodge and the Methodist Church saw their ranks explode as the parents of Baby Boomers equated quality with conformity.

Fifty years later, Budweiser now disguises its products as pseudo-craft brands and the Methodist Church is withering in plain sight. The dominant brands of this age are not purveyors of conformed consumption but enablers of individualization — Apple, Google and Facebook.

And any fool can see that if you like social media and fake microbrews, you're just naturally gonna be right wing.  Haven't you seen Twitchy? Also:

Customers at the decade’s most ubiquitous national food merchant, Starbucks, have developed an entire language to express their half-caf, soy-no-whip, double-shot individual solutions.

It's like the conspicuous consumption of the Reagan era, only much cheaper, which is good because since our economy was destroyed in 2008 fancy coffee is about all we can afford.

So why, in the era of individualization, is the American political left still selling top-down mandatory standardization in everything from health insurance to local electricity generation? When nearly every thriving national brand succeeds by empowering Americans to seek and achieve different results, only the Democratic Party is peddling redistribution and a system that on its best day generates only mushy mediocrity.

Todd, you will not be surprised to learn, is an ad man, and this ripomatic reminds me of those post-Berlin-Wall corporate ads in which former slaves of Sovietism stepped into the sunlight and had a Coke and a smile. Only that's a bit out of style now. It's harder to convince people you represent the future when your suit is caked with dust from the demolition job you've done on the American Dream and your pockets are stuffed with fraudulent securities. Also, if you want to own "choice" as an equity, maybe identifying yourself with the dying anti-gay cause isn't such a hot idea.

I hope next they try to bring back South Park Conservatism and put Steve Crowder in charge. I could use a laugh.

UPDATE. Slightly edited because, like all the greats, I am constantly fiddling with my own work.

UPDATE 2. In comments, Mr. Wonderful asks:

There's got to be a name for this--this confident extrusion of analysis and prediction that seems so astute until it dawns on you, and your dog, that it is objectively, visibly wrong. Is this what they mean by "post-modernist political commentary"? Where they type something like, "Bernie Sanders, whether he knows it or not, is actually a Republican, because he's a member of the Senate, which is one of our oldest and most traditional public institutions"?

PoMoPolComm might work, but being a traditionalist I prefer "bullshit."

CONSERVATIVE MINORITY OUTREACH CONTINUES, CONTINUED.

Rand Paul did even worse than I expected. He literally did talk about Republican efforts on behalf of black citizens a century ago, and then explained the 20th-century switch in electoral trends this way:

You may say, "oh that’s all well and good but that was a long time ago what have you done for me lately?"

Ingrates!

I think what happened during the Great Depression was that African Americans understood that Republicans championed citizenship and voting rights but they became impatient for economic emancipation. 

African Americans languished below white Americans in every measure of economic success and the Depression was especially harsh for those at the lowest rung of poverty.

The Democrats promised equalizing outcomes through unlimited federal assistance while Republicans offered something that seemed less tangible--the promise of equalizing opportunity through free markets.

In other words: The Democrats bribed you to forget all your old friends. No mention of Republican racial politics from the Compromise of 1877 to Nixon's Southern Strategy, nor of the traditional conservative attitude toward integration and equal rights, nor Jesse Helms, nor Strom Thurmond, et alia and ad nauseam. The Civil Rights Act Paul only mentioned defensively, as something from which he'd "never wavered" except for that part about using the power of the state to enforce it.

Layer in a generous helping of self-pity ("and when I think of how political enemies often twist and distort my positions... My hope is that you will hear me out, that you will see me for who I am, not the caricature sometimes presented by political opponents... Republicans are often miscast as uncaring or condemning...") and you've got a perfect speech -- not for the folks at Howard University, but for the commenters at Reason who seem to understand Paul perfectly ("Maybe Paul should have offered up more free shit since that seems to work so well").

So in that sense it was a great success.

CONSERVATIVE MINORITY OUTREACH CONTINUES.

Thanks to Jack Fowler at National Review for steering his readers to this amazing promo:

It reminds me of my first job in high school, cold-calling people from a crummy office in downtown Bridgeport to try and get them to attend a presentation about a Florida real estate development scam called Rotunda. (You can read how Rotunda played out here.) It was run by something called the Cavanaugh Corporation, which claimed as one of its partners Ed McMahon -- whose autographed photo we cold-callers offered as a premium.

Also, I never noticed before how much Allen West looks like Alfred E. Neuman.

If you have to watch one of the crazy videos, this is the one: West on Hollywood! After a few fish-out-of-water gags about coming to Los Angeles -- when someone offers him some sushi, he says "I don't eat bait" -- he gets right down to how liberals won't let you say what you really want to, and conservatives are "so afraid of the Hollywood backlash that they meet in secret," by which I guess he means no one goes to their parties except Roger L. Simon. "Is this the America that some of us fought for?" roars West. "Is this some type of new Soviet-style Politburo being formed? Regardless I find it utterly disgusting to think that many of us who fought for the freedoms of our nation so that now it seems a handful of individuals get to define who can and who cannot speak..." He's also mad that Hollyweird stars are against guns: "I doubt Jim Carrey will be invited to give the start command at any NASCAR race. [Pause for laugh.]"

This scam is brought to you by PJTV, who seem to have gotten the down-on-his-luck West the way William Grefe got Rita Hayworth.

IF I CAN DREAM.

Press release:

U.S. Senator Rand Paul, R-KY, will speak at Howard University on inclusion in the Republican Party at 11 a.m. on Wednesday, April 10.

Imagine if Paul's appearance at Howard meant he was serious about minority outreach, as Colbert I. King at the Washington Post seems to think he is. Imagine if he owned up on behalf of the Republican Party to the Southern Strategy, by which the GOP won and held the South (and not a few Northern votes) by portraying themselves as the party of keeping you-know-who in line, and how that strategy persists to this day -- or rather to yesterday, he might say, because, he might even dare to admit, Republicans are not getting anywhere as a white people's party, and have surrendered to the necessity of treating black Americans as actual constituents rather than as objects of ooga booga, and are interested in hearing what they want.

Imagine how refreshing, not to say cleansing, such a speech might be! Because contrary to what Republicans seem to think, black Americans are hip to politics, and would probably appreciate it if Paul cut the bullshit and were willing to deal.

A beautiful dream. But --

Sen. Paul’s speech will focus on the importance of outreach to younger voters, as well as minority groups. He will also discuss the history of the African-American community’s roots in the Republican Party and current issues, such as school choice and civil liberties.

In other words: We used to be the Party of Lincoln, you people should love vouchers, etc. Kind of like Mitt Romney at the NAACP, but with more crazy eye-gleam.

Maybe he'll surprise me, but it sure looks like the Republicans are still, despite every motivation to do better, moving with all deliberate speed.

UPDATE. Commenter mds reminds me of what I had forgotten, even though I wrote about it at the time: that in 2010 Paul came out against the Civil Rights Act. Which would make him the perfect Republican to extend the olive branch! In fact, I think he should start weeping and announce he has sinned against his brothers -- "Forgive me, moochers!"

Is this thing going to be on TV?

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the slow shift rightbloggers are making, in their hour of defeat, from yelling about gay marriage to yelling about straight marriage. You may not notice it yet, but I predict it'll be a comer; it'll be their chance to do outreach to gay people by giving the scolds, nags, and shrews in their community a place of welcome. Hell, they might even turn Andrew Sullivan back around.

ROGER EBERT, 1942-2013.

Here's my appreciation from 2004 of what Ebert did with his "Great Movies" section, which was the thing that turned me around on him. For years I'd considered him a lightweight, but his very good writing on difficult films made me appreciate that while his style might be glib, he wasn't -- he saw things in the pictures, and talked easily about them in a way all kinds of people could understand. That's a very great gift in a critic. And he kept his gift, and at the job, right to the end.

Also, here's a nice story Ebert told on himself as a green kid:

I had been in Chicago four months and I was sitting under the L tracks with Mike Royko in an eye-opener place. A Blackhawks game was playing on WGN radio. The team scored, and again, and again. This at last was life. 

“The Blackhawks are really hot tonight,” I observed to Royko. 

He studied me. “Where you from, kid? Downstate?” 

“Urbana,” I said. 

“Ever seen a hockey game?” 

“No.” 

“That’s what I thought, you asshole. Those are the game highlights.”

That whole column, like a lot of his columns, is well worth reading.

SMART ASS.

James Taranto is laying the contempt on thick in his best Professor of Liberal Fascism manner -- "complete sophistry," "embarrassing philosophical error," "philosophical narcissism," etc, so you know he thinks he's got a Good One. His target, A. Barton Hinkle, made the crucial error of embarrassing Taranto, who had defended the proposition (not that he necessary thinks so himself! Read the fine print!) that the institution of marriage rather than any specific marriages would be harmed by gay marriage.

Hinkle rightly found this to be nonsense: "After all, you would not say a virus 'threatens humanity' if, in fact, no individual human person was ever harmed by the virus."

For his rejoinder, Taranto postulates a virus of his own:

The Hinkle virus is so fast-spreading that it soon infects every person alive, but it is largely benign. It has no effect on men, and only two effects on women: (1) it is passed on to any children they have, and (2) any children they conceive after infection will be born homosexual.

Blink. Blink.

The Hinkle virus would seem to fit its namesake's criterion that it does no harm to any individual human person. We have established as a condition of the experiment--and we trust that in the real world Hinkle agrees--that it is not harmful to a woman to give birth to a homosexual child, nor is it harmful to a child to be born homosexual. And since the virus affects the sexual orientation only of the yet-unborn, it should not disrupt any existing heterosexual relationship.

Yet it should be obvious that the Hinkle virus would threaten humanity by dramatically reducing the incentive to reproduce...

Taranto could as well have said "any children they conceive after infection will be born male" -- nothing wrong with being male, right? -- or "any children they conceive after infection will be born female" -- nothing wrong with being female, right? Which in the long run would have an even more dramatic effect on reproduction, if not on the "incentive to reproduce." We could use this, I suppose, as proof that masculinity presents a threat to mankind without blah blah. Or femininity!

But Taranto's point isn't really that "X may harm humanity without harming particular humans." It's more like You liberals think homosexuality is harmless, but what if everyone turned gay? 

He follows this with reams of universals-vs.-particulars guff to retroactively class it up ("Humanity is not 'simply the sum of the humans in it' any more than A. Barton Hinkle is simply the sum of the cells in him, or those cells are the sum of the atoms in them"), but they don't relate to his virus analogy at all. They're just fancy cover for a dumb joke about gays -- such jokes being among the last pieces of armament the anti-gay-marriage side has left.

Like I said before: This is how you know you're winning.

WHY NOBODY LIKES THE GOLDBERG FRAUD SQUAD.

Jonah Goldberg has been leading a charge of his fellow creeps against the large numbers of disability beneficiaries in the United States. He's already had some answers, but I think this response of his deserves another:

The most intriguing complaints come from people who are in effect saying that, since they have serious disabilities, it’s outrageous for me to question anyone’s disability claim. I think most people can see the flaw in this thinking. In fact, I’m flummoxed as to why people with real disabilities wouldn’t be the ones clamoring the loudest to stamp out fraud. Maybe disability checks would be more generous if voters thought they were subsidizing fewer cheats?

It would be difficult for Goldberg to see it, considering who he hangs out with, but not everyone is like him. And, in rare good news for the Republic, there are even fewer people like him than there used to be.

Back in sunnier times, when there seemed to be some relationship between the good fortune of Wall Street and the average American's purchasing power, we had an easier time believing that there was something morally superior about making money, and therefore something wicked about being poor. Those old Reagan-era stories about welfare queens and strapping young bucks with T-bone steaks, idiotic as they were, got a lot of people who should have known better to think, yes, maybe we should reform welfare, because even though snatching back some of the scraps we've been throwing the paupers won't enrich us much, it would be better for America and our souls if we at least tried to be mean sons of bitches. For look at the Masters of the Universe! It's not charitable instincts powering their economic miracle, but enlightened self-interest.

Came the collapse, that hooey became harder to swallow. Since it's turned out that the worse we do the more Wall Street rallies, we can't even stand the smell of it.

Conservatives are still telling us about the queens and bucks, though, trying to get us back into pauper-bashing shape. Fox News reports the so-called poor have refrigerators so why are they complaining; well-fed rightbloggers are outraged that welfare recipients spend some of their money on fast food and movie rentals; Jonah Goldberg wants to know which of these cripples are faking it, and his asshole buddy is talking about this guy he knows who pulled himself up by his bootstraps so why can't they, etc.

It isn't going over like it used to because there's this funny thing about Americans: We tend to be nicer to each other when times are rough than when they're easy. We get more sympathetic to other people who are having it hard in life because we know we're only a few paychecks away from it ourselves and, being human, we react with sympathy, rather than like George Costanza to a fire at a children's party.

And this applies in ambiguous circumstances, too -- what Goldberg in his pretense of magnanimity calls the "grayer area." If someone's a bum who spends the change you give him on drugs, he's still a bum; if someone's living off the dole, it's still not much of a living, and it certainly affords far fewer options and rewards than a viable working life. And if some disability pensioners are less disabled than the law might allow, what a sad pass they've come to, that they would go through all that to claim some miserly stipend. That poverty is not pure -- "the poor," Jimmy Breslin has said more than once, "are a pain in the ass" -- doesn't mean it's not poverty.

But maybe you need to have some minimal capacity for empathy to see that. Someone who wonders why the disabled aren't as eager as he is to turn in frauds, and offers them fatter checks in hopes of motivating them, probably doesn't qualify.

UPDATE. Comments are more eloquent than I was; here's a prime cut from D. Johnston:

That, my lazy little friend, is why people with "real" disabilities hate what you're doing - they understand your true intent. There is no part of me that believes you are honestly interested in rooting out fraud. There are sectors of the government far more vulnerable to fraud - the military, for instance - that you don't seem to care about. They believe - as do I - that your objective is to make people think that people on disability are liars so you can spend the next twenty years using them as scapegoats.

MEGAN McARDLE, FIXED.

"...I think Susan Patton is basically right: people should be looking to get married as early as possible. I say this as someone who married late, and since I wouldn't want to have married anyone except my husband, I'm glad I waited. But" it's not like you losers have anything so great to look forward to.

YOUR MOMENT OF GOLDSTEIN.

How's the left oppressing patriots today? With video games!  Here's an NPR story:

Back in 2007, in the first installment of BioShock, Levine created a world based on Ayn Rand's individualist philosophy and let it play out. This time, Levine has turned a game into an Aristotelian tragedy and used the model of great tragic heroes.

I couldn't give a shit about video games, but apparently at some point the Bad Guys in this one are revealed to be racists, which prompts this arrgh-blaargh from The Virginian:

NPR broadcast an article today about a developer of a violent video game in which the bad guys were Christians who revered the Constitution and were blatant racists. Of course with a theme like that it's obviously comparable to one of the great tragedies of literature... 

To NPR this is just like Hamlet or Oedipus. This is an NPR employee's dream of all that's wrong with America; America's founders, the religious heritage, and,of course the racism of everyone who's not part of the NPR family.

Like I said, I don't care about gaming and the NPR story doesn't mention it, but are the Founding Fathers really in BioShock Infinite? Because that would great to use in history classes. It speaks to the kids!

But The Virginian's a piker -- the aargh ain't blaarghy till Jeff Goldstein gets at it:

It’s out in the open now. There’s no longer any real pretense of objectivity. Each time the progressive media “report” favorably on something they characterize like this (fairly or not) — and no switch comes down to sting their hands — they grow ever more emboldened... 

They are the ones they’ve been waiting for, they were told. And it invigorates them. It gives them a sense of purpose and momentum. Because through the heart of every leftist runs the blood of totalitarianism, of confirmation bias, of rank bigotry and a mob’s lust for violence, for punishment, for blood, for inflicting suffering on those who dare oppose their designs...

Gasp! Not confirmation bias!

I don’t care who rolls their fucking eyes at my saying this. Circumstances have taught me that in several years, when the political winds allow them to do so, those very same people on “my” side will be saying the very same things I’m writing on now, pretending there wasn’t a time they rolled their fucking eyes at the True Believers, the embarrassing Hobbits who were preventing them from wooing the moderates.

To paraphrase LBJ's analogy, he's outside the tent, pissing himself.

I eagerly await Bill Whittle's take.

UPDATE. This story seems to have been covered previously by Big Breitbart and by Mytheos Holt, whose culture war training has got him thinking correctly about how to cover a game stoners play when they're bored:

Naturally, the creators denied any intent to specifically attack Rand, arguing instead that their general intent was to criticize extremism of all stripes. And considering that the first game treats Andrew Ryan (who isn’t even the main villain of the original Bioshock) with far more sympathy than it treats the all-but-explicitly communist villain of Bioshock 2, Sofia Lamb, who willingly traumatizes her own daughter and leaves a trail of corpses behind her in her pursuit of a utopian society, one could argue that the series had been comparatively right-leaning up until Infinite.

After much study of the struggle of competing Tendencies in this video game series ("In other words, the Leftist mass movement could come off mildly more sympathetic, though not much"), Holt finally feels he can answer the question, "Was the game created by Marxists/atheists?"  The answer may surprise you!

Coming soon: Which pornographic Tumblrs are consonant with free enterprise? (Trick question! Only pay sites embody the robot Founders' vision.)

UPDATE 2. Commenter Gromet informs us that "Breakout was the last truly God-fearing and patriotic game" because "your job was to destroy a band of rainbow colors." Wait, what about the Hunger Games?

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the gay marriage cases at the Supreme Court and all the hysteria they have engendered among the brethren. The ones where they try to play it cagey are even better than the ones where they aargh-blaargh sanctity of marriage etc, I think -- but you'll all have your own favorites, I'm sure.

REPUBLICAN MINORITY OUTREACH CONTINUES.

What could go wrong?

For those of you who have blissfully forgotten, Herman Cain is the black Donald Trump whose ridiculous Presidential run briefly excited the brethren until he resigned in ignominy, which they tried to blame on liberals.

Next up: Allen West makes a buddy picture with Chris Christie.

PROBLEM SOLVED.

So John Tracinski asks how do we get the youngs to vote GOP, but spends most of his column telling us that the college kids vote for liberals because the liberals brainwash them all with dependency and communism; after several rounds of these old Al Capp routines (only not funny) he cuts to an unexpected solution:

Yet the biggest failure of the right is that it has lost the economy’s technological elite.

Today’s John Galts and Hank Reardens are not in a valley in Colorado. They’re in a valley in California. The Hank Rearden of Silicon Valley, an innovator who started out in a garage and built a company which became the most valuable in the world, was Steve Jobs. But Jobs was—let’s be honest here—kind of a hippie. He had many of the virtues of an Ayn Rand hero, but a very different personal philosophy.

That brings us to what I think is the most important question to take away as the right examines how to reform itself. How does it win Silicon Valley? How does it get the best, most innovative segment of the youth, the ones who are actually plugged in to a vital and growing area of the economy, to see the value of free markets and to want to fight for them? I put it this way because I think that if the right learns how to win over the young innovators and entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley (and its many equivalents across the country), it will go a long way toward learning how to win over the youth vote.

Hmm, a Randian tech genius who believes the rest of the world is merely an appurtenance to his reality -- the answer is obvious: get John McAfee out of jail and back into the game! Hell, it worked with Tom DeLay.

SHORTER MICHAEL WALSH:

Fraud exists, so helping people is stupid.

(Actually, this could be the Shorter for the entire conservative movement.)

LITTLE MRS. CAN'T BE WRONG.

As she did with the Iraq War, Megan McArdle's got to come up with something contrarian to show that the dirty hippies with their annoying habit of being right about things aren't really right, not in the way that counts. So:

In some sense, it doesn't really matter how the Supreme Court rules on the gay marriage case it's hearing today. The culture war is over on this front, and gay marriage has won. Even if it loses at the Supreme Court this term, it will win in the legislatures . . . because it is already winning in popular opinion. Few people much under the age of sixty see a compelling reason that straights should marry and gays should not. For that matter, my Republican grandfather is rumored to have said, at the age of 86, "I think gays should marry! We'll see how much they like it, though."

At this point, it's just a matter of time. In some sense, the sexual revolution is over . . . and the forces of bourgeois repression have won.

The whole thing is so dizzying in its stupidity that it defies analysis, but basically: When gays can get married, then getting married will be so much the norm that you stupid bohemians with your free love will be ostracized like cigarette smokers. And leading the way will be those nice young Republican Presidential candidates:

The 1970s were an open revolt against the idea of the dutiful pair bond, in favor of a life of perpetual infatuation. The elites led the way--and now they're leading it back. Compare Newt Gingrich or John McCain to the new generation of Republican hopefuls. Jindal, Ryan, Christie, Rubio . . . all of them are married to their first wives. Jindal met his wife in high school, Christie in college. By their age, McCain was preparing for his first divorce, and Gingrich was just a few years from his second.

I'm surprised she didn't mention the irony that these GOP worthies whose shining monogamy will triumph in the new age of gay-marriage-enabled neo-Victorianism are all against gay marriage. 

McArdle also returns to that marriage-will-make-you-rich nonsense she was pimping last week, citing it among the forces that will make sexual hedonism de trop.  Of course she would think that -- she's one of those people who actually watch Ross Douthat measure marriage with a slide rule to determine the optimal connubial age in a healthy society, and not only finds it fascinating instead of ridiculous, but thinks it will change the way normal Americans behave. Yes, forget culture, forget the economy, forget the environment, forget the forces with which we interact every day -- once the big-brains emerge from their labs with their new, this-time-for-sure convincing evidence we should all get hitched and commence procreating at age 22.73, everyone will get with the program.

Try to imagine being so anxious, not just to be right, but to prove your enemies wrong. Think of what wonderful things McArdle could have achieved with her obviously bountiful imagination if she hadn't been compelled to waste it all on that.

UPDATE. Comments are as always a joy, but I must single out aimai for the term she has invented for McArdle's habit, when troubled by progressive advances, of weaving dark tales of unintended consequences yet-to-come: "weaponized sour grapes."

ANNALS OF THE CULTURE WARS, SPECIAL BREITBART EDITION.

The kulturkampfers at Breitbart.com just can't quit Lena Dunham, even when another of their hate-objects is in their line of fire:

Tina Fey, like other Hollywood-created stars including Lena Dunham, is showing herself to be a box office bust.

That's Ben Shapiro, who goes on to tell Fey that though she's "very talented... her pokes at Palin did her no good with mainstream America, and her cutesy 'too-smart-for-the-room' routine does her no favors with audiences." No, really: Ben Shapiro's giving Tina Fey career advice.

Dunham Alert also for this Maurice Black column:

Although Girls never fails to find humor in its characters’ haplessness, it also reflects the disturbing reality that more than half of college graduates under 25 are now unemployed or working jobs that don’t require a degree.

The title is "HBO'S 'GIRLS' OFFERS STARK FISCAL LESSONS IN AGE OF OBAMA." According to Black Dunham "unwittingly lends credence to moves by governors such as Pat McCrory in North Carolina or Rick Scott in Florida to shift higher education funding into fields that have better job placement rates." Maybe he's thinking of Laverne & Shirley.

(Black, BTW, is Vice President of the Moving Picture Institute, progenitor of that "youthful pop music video that alerts the hipster set to the perils of artificially low interest rates" we were talking about the other day; given his obvious commitment to agenda-driven entertainments, it must drive him nuts that Dunham isn't aware of what a conservative message she's sending; I imagine him yelling "You're one of us and you don't even know it, Lena!" at his TV while masturbating furiously.)

There are many other Dunham dumps at Breitbart.com, but let's close with one about an older favorite: The communist menace that is Law & Order. Wingnuts have had a hard-on for the show and its treasonously topical story lines for years, and now Warner Todd Huston brings the fist-shaking fury as L&O makes hay of Todd Akinism:

A character sitting in the witness box then says, "It's nearly impossible for a victim of legitimate rape to become pregnant." This is followed by looks of disgust by the two female lead detective characters sitting in the courtroom gallery.

Jesus Christ, people, do I have to spell it out for ya?

To subtly drive home an allusion to a politician like Todd Akin, on the lapel of the character testifying is a prominent U.S. flag pin, just like one a conservative politician might wear. How often do you think characters on Law & Order: SVU have worn flag pins?

Yeah, they may act regular, but that guy who played Lennie Brisco? He was in musicals!

UPDATE. Some extra culture-war nuggets for you: Our old friend Mark "Gavreau" Judge at Acculturated,  musing on gay marriage, gives us the line of the week:

It is important to celebrate tolerance, while keeping watch to make sure that the tolerance itself doesn’t become oppression.

The rest of the column never equals this, though it does tell us that Dan Savage is the real bully. Second place winner: Tevi Troi at Real Clear Politics, in his brow-squeezer "Can Republicans Close the Pop Culture Gap?" --

A move towards hipness must come from the party leaders themselves...

Comrades, the hipness of mere apparatchiks will not suffice -- the party leaders must themselves be hanging and banging. Draft a memo!

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP...

...on the Iraq War 10th Anniversary festivities. Which have been, um, muted. But there's always next time!

WEDDING BALLS.

Now that conservatives have resigned themselves to just talking to one another, I see a couple of the better-known ones pimping that old marriage-makes-you-rich buncombe -- which makes sense, since only a wingnut would buy it.  Ole Perfesser Glenn Reynolds' latest, for USA Today, is pro-marriage done particularly pro-forma:

This past summer, Jason DeParle noted in The New York Times that we are now seeing "two classes divided by 'I do.'" And while people are going on and on about Wall Street and income inequality, it turns out that marriage inequality is one of the biggest things making people less equal, accounting for as much as 40% of the difference in incomes: "It is the privileged Americans who are marrying, and marrying helps them stay privileged."

You might just as well say that marriage turns you white. The Perfesser's not even trying to make that correlation look like a causality. He's not putting anything like the elbow grease into it that nuts like Bradford Wilcox and Charles Murray regularly apply. He's not so much running his con as jogging it, as if it doesn't have to convince anybody who isn't already convinced.

But even worse, as always, is Megan McArdle:

College improves your earning prospects. So does marriage. Education makes you more likely to live longer. So does marriage.

It's like she's reading it off flash cards.

Yet while many economist vocally support initiatives to move more people into college, very few of them vocally favor initiatives to get more people married. Why is that, asks Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry?

I would have said "because they're not con artists like you," but Gobry thinks it's "cosmopolitan perspective" and "bias." McArdle adds to this her own special blend of inappropriate personalization and passive-aggressiveness:

We might not want to make people who fail to marry feel bad, since many of them probably feel pretty bad about it already.

And:

...all economists are, definitionally, very good at college. Not all economists are good at marriage. Saying that more people should go to college will make 0% of your colleagues feel bad. Saying that more people should get married and stay married will make a significant fraction of your colleagues feel bad.

In the Age of Obama II, more of these folks may rush to the consolation of "You're just jealous," but in retrospect it was always a dead cinch McArdle would get there first.

NICE WORK IF YOU CAN GET IT.

Rightwing pennysaver the Washington Examiner will no longer be handed out at Metro stations to all comers every day, but instead become a wingnut weekly in which the street-level reporting and 87 employees are replaced by double portions of "commentary" on why Obama is Hitler.

The product will offer news, analysis and commentary on national politics and policy, and its targeted readership will be roughly 45,000 professionals in government, public affairs, advocacy and academia, Clarity said.

Yeah, the same 45,000 people who ask each other every week if they've read the new Cal Thomas column.

This seems to be the new reality for the conservative world of makework in the Age of Obama II; like the factota at The Umlaut and other feeder streams for thinktank babies, they have begun to abandon the idea that their work might make a difference.

It used to be easier to believe that it did. For decades now, the allegedly liberal media has actually been thick with right-wing voices, from the lofty George Will to the humblest rightblogger. Every newspaper, even the communist flagship New York Times, has its Douthats and/or Brookses, albeit in lower-rent versions. The papers are scared not to have them; otherwise who would they point to when someone screams bias? (Not that it stops the screaming -- conservatives will be screaming about bias until the last newspaper lines the last birdcage, and for years after -- but having them aboard allows the papers' management to feel they've done something reasonable, though I wonder if a few of them don't actually feel bullied.)

It never mattered how brutal or crazy these guys' ideas were, either; they were the serious opposition, and had to be granted perches from which they might be heeded. This enabled and emboldened them. They also seemed to understand that what had gained them their perches was no better credential than that they were different from the "politically correct" milquetoasts the public was used to. So they leaned on that. If liberals maintained, for example, that the least among us deserved protection from want, conservatives cried for them to be given less, ever less, lest the welfare queens and strapping young bucks destroy America. Not only did they get away with it -- they had an effect on the discourse and then on policy.

Things got even worse during the early days of the Iraq War -- happy anniversary, baby! -- when conservatives became so comfortable with their own increasingly loud and bellicose voices that they got a lot of non-conservatives to howl along with them. And this too had an effect on policy.

But since the economy collapsed, things have changed a bit. There's not much market for market worship these days. And when you run a presidential campaign based on how the producers know better than the moochers -- well, you saw how that worked out.

Conservatives aren't going away -- their long spate of affirmative action has firmly ensconced them in the public discourse. But the Examiner, at least, seems to have lost faith.  For a while they could at least tell themselves that by running a by-God newspaper with lots of that local stuff local folk love, they were getting into the hands and winning the hearts and minds of the common people. But now they're going to stop covering school board meetings and city council hearings, and just regurgitate propaganda for like-minded souls. This will achieve nothing in the way of political outreach, but it will achieve what I expect remains important to them: It will keep their jobs. Because someone is still paying them to do it -- just like someone is still paying for The Umlaut and Liberty Island and Bill Whittle videos and Acculturated  and PJ Lifestyle and many such otherwise pointless exercises.

If the Examinoids really believed what they affect to believe, they'd recognize themselves as the moochers they are, apologize to old man Anschutz for wasting his money, and seek honest employment. But they're what we might call cafeteria capitalists; they don't want the hard stuff; they won't sacrifice anything real on the altar of the Dollar. But they'll step right up when the celebrant hands around the bread.

SHITSVILLE U.S.A.

Hey look, another rightwing culture-war magazine. Andrea Castillo at The Umlaut:

In the world of popular culture, the motives of capitalists are routinely portrayed as suspicious if not openly antagonistic to the public good, culminating in the cliché of the evil billionaire or businessman.

Like have you ever seen Citizen Kane? Total Alinskyite smear job. But --

At long last, the free marketeers are fighting back and attempting to reclaim an equal part of the moral high ground, but the challenges that they face are not insignificant.

Sounds promising! So whattaya got?

Fred Smith, of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, hopes to help salvage the reputations of businesspeople by disputing the bad rap with which they’ve been unfairly saddled and proudly pointing to the wealth that they create as a moral good in itself.

If he's not proudly pointing while coated in silver paint, standing on a milk crate in Times Square, and doing the robot, I don't see this catching on with a large audience.

But give Fred a break, look what he's up against:

...the arts have a profound effect on influencing people’s moral dispositions and ultimately their worldviews. The “nefarious executive” trope is so established within the arts that it is doubtful that it will quickly fade silently into the past. If we are to adequately challenge this prevailing “commerce as a questionably-necessary evil” narrative, it makes sense to take stock of how our cultural narratives became so skewed in the first place. 

Ludwig von Mises, similarly assessing the cultural situation of his time, was intrigued by the overwhelming tendency for members of the “creative class” to adopt anti-capitalistic worldviews in their lives and crafts. In The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality, Mises offers one explanation for this trend: artists, especially good ones, face constant frustration in a market that is notoriously fraught with that destructive combination of conspicuous consumption and poor taste.

I began to nod off at "Ludwig von Mises," too, but I must say, as a simple observation of human behavior, this, while incomplete, is not totally divorced from reality -- which may be why Castillo rushes to dispute it:

Despite the handful of type II errors in artistic appreciation that have occurred, in most cases, great artists have found success within their lifetimes, and mass culture expands both the quantity and diversity of commercially-viable forms of expression.

Then, one is tempted to ask, why you crying? If it ain't broke, why fix it? Why not just enjoy the expansive quantity and diversity of all this mass culture which the market has delivered unto you?

Longtime readers will have figured it out already: With culture warriors the "culture" is never as important as the "war." If the market produces wrongthink popular entertainment, the market, otherwise infallible, is wrong, and its protectors must set things right.

And Castillo's got some acts that'll do the job: The Moving Pictures Institute, for example, with "a youthful pop music video that alerts the hipster set to the perils of artificially low interest rates," and Emergent Order, which "made quite a splash with their humorous rap battles starring the modern doppelgängers of larger-than-life economists John Maynard Keynes and F.A. Hayek."

But even when you have steak, you need sizzle to sell it, and here's the promo copy Castillo has filed for this package tour:

The videos that have been produced thus far have been captivating precisely because of the sincerity and accuracy of their messages, a quality that is generally difficult to produce when one is merely clocking in. Contra Mises, it could be that not all artists fall prey to the short-sighted despair that follows a disappointing opening night or release. For some of them, the uncontrolled but orderly beauty of free exchange and association is their muse.

"The sincerity and accuracy of their message," "the uncontrolled but orderly beauty of free exchange and association" -- you think maybe these people are new to show business? Or to the planet?

Look, kids, I'll do this pro bono: Full page ad in Variety: "SUCK ON THIS, MOOCHERS!" Then tell your boys at Emergent Whatever that we need some chicks in thongs and a profane rapping granny. Thereafter, one word: Payola. I know your backers got it -- they just have to start spending it where it counts. By the way: Have you ever thought about why they don't?

UPDATE. Commenters are bearish on Castillo et alia. "Deal: you capitalists get rid of the nefarious executives, we'll get rid of the trope," says whetstone. mortimer informs us that "Emergent Order is a project of the Mercatus Center at (but not supported by) George Mason University, which gets most of its funding from those bankrolling gadflies of right-wing über-libertarianism, the Koch Family, with a little help from the likes of Exxon Mobil. Mercatus is also directed by Kevin Drum's favorite libertarian, Tyler Cowen..." Inbreeding will tell!