ANNALS OF THE CULTURE WAR, TV PARTY EDITION.

William F. Gavin at National Review on Mad Men:

...the show has degenerated into absurdity, loss of focus, and meandering plot lines. The main character has become eccentric, distant, increasingly mean-spirited, and disoriented. 

Gee, come to think of it, this sounds just like the Obama administration, doesn’t it?

At dinner tonight, Gavin told friends, "This soup is thin and bitter -- like Obama!" Leaving the restaurant, he buttoned his jacket and remarked, "The night's gotten cold, like Obama's relationship with the press. Or maybe like the corpses of the babies slaughtered by Planned Parenthood." But no one was left to hear him.

Elsewhere in the same venue, Greg Pollowitz:

Somebody Should Get Fired Over SNL's Benghazi Skit

It’s gotten to the point where I’m amazed when SNL is actually funny or relevant as political satire, but Saturday’s cold open wasn’t just a dud as a joke, but completely offensive to the four Americans who lost their lives in Benghazi.

I imagine Pollowitz drunk at some bar, yelling "This jukebox is full of lies!" Like I often say: Do they even know any normal people?

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the Benghazi hearings and the inevitable rightblogger judgement that Obama and Hillary Clinton are guilty of murder and/or treason. Imagine how pissed they'll be if Obama isn't impeached! Actually we already have some idea.

CULTURE WAR: A NEW LOW.

Some guy at the American Enterprise Institute has started a "Greatest Conservative Rap Songs of All Time" list.  His first choice, a Justin Bieber joint, is intolerably stupid but, as always, the whole Zhdanovite idea is the stupidest thing, as shown by his mission statement:

The songs I discuss express support not just for pro-family social values, but also for small government and peace through strength.

If this list doesn't include "Mind of a Lunatic" I call bullshit.

UPDATE. I got another nominee:



What? Admittedly his flow's a little sticky. But hell, you might say conservatives invented rap.

AS USUAL, UNCLEAR ON THE CONCEPT OF CONSENT.

Shorter Charles C.W. Cooke: If Michelle Knight had voluntarily aborted, she'd be just as guilty as Ariel Castro.

UPDATE. I'm not even kidding:

Yet abortion is legal in Ohio, as everywhere else in the United States. This means that if you kill an unborn child in Ohio with the mother’s permission, it’s okay; if you do it without her permission, it’s murder. The unborn child, therefore, is only a life if the mother says it is a life. That makes no logical sense at all.

She's just a bourgeois rentier, is what, and Charles C.W. Cooke wants to nationalize her uterus. I have to hand it to him, though; if you'd told me someone would be insane enough to find an anti-abortion angle in the Cleveland horror story, I'd have predicted it would be Kathryn J. Lopez. Cooke's a real up-and-comer at National Review, and will no doubt loyally join K-Lo and Goldberg in the bunker when the suckers finally wise up and submit their publication to market forces.

THANK YOU, MARK SANFORD.

I already knew Mark Sanford's reelection was hilarious, but though I'm sure Elizabeth Colbert Busch is a nice person and would have represented South Carolina... well, would have been a better Congressional rep than Sanford, I warmed a little to the victor after reading this outburst at National Review by one Hilary Towers, "a psychologist and mother of five":

It is time for conservatives to publicly recognize the widespread phenomenon of spousal abandonment, and the system of “family law” that supports it, for what they both are — a national scandal. 

Among other things, this election result is a searing reminder that we have, as a nation, lost touch with what “redemption” really means — with the true power of God’s grace, which is the power to transform behavior. And behavior, after all, is a reflection of the heart. How much longer can conservative stewards of family values turn a blind eye to the very narcissistic lifestyle choices of our leaders that we are fighting so hard to weaken (and ultimately transform) in society at large?

To put it in some context, those sections of National Review's The Corner not currently given over to Benghazi broodings are mostly devoted to Kathryn J. Lopez's wailings over abortion, and those of affiliated God-botherers like Wesley J. Smith, the title of whose offering "Hollywood Biggies Love Late Term Abortionists" tells you pretty much what you need to know about the tone of the place these days.

In other words, conservatives are still stuck in their post-electoral tantrum, and in this chaos the moral scolds of the movement, who were remarkably easy to silence and shunt to the side when any prospect of victory was visible, have been left free to seize the mic and ululate. Their connection with the world the rest of us inhabit has always been tenuous, but now that they have no reason to compromise with reality they have gone practically Dominionist. So if for nothing else, I owe Sanford some thanks for inspiring the anguish I expect Towers' ravings represents among the fundies. This will make it that much harder for them to pretend to be sane whenever they appear before normal Americans.

Sanford's victory also hasn't done any favors to the logical processes of Jonah Goldberg, who spent the writing period between his third and fourth breakfasts trying to split the difference:

Let me say upfront: I would rather we lived in a society where adultery had a higher social cost. That’s not to say people shouldn’t be forgiving or that there should be no such thing as second chances. But ideally, I’d like it if things were less loosey-goosey. Cheat on your wife, and maybe you don’t get to run for public office anymore.

This prose version of flop sweat goes on for quite some time before Goldberg gets to the nub:

What was on the ballot [in South Carolina] was a choice between a woman who tried to dodge the fact she was a liberal running to advance the liberal agenda of the Democratic party and a conservative whose marriage fell apart because he fell in love with somebody else. I’m not condoning Sanford’s behavior — at all — but...

But there can be no crime bigger than liberalism, and if you people who think "values" is more than a slogan we use to con suckers would just get with the program, Goldberg could stop trying to reach you and devote his pie-hole to greater helpings of pie, as God and Lucianne intended.

[Sanford's] formidable wife didn’t run to the stage to gaze admiringly and forgivingly at her disgraced husband to lessen the political damage. She kicked him to the curb and moved on with her life. Every marriage is different and we can’t peer inside any but our own, but I admired Jenny Sanford’s response.

Of course, one could argue that Huma, Hillary, and Silda were more “pro-marriage” in that they stayed by their husbands. And that just gets us back to how the culture has changed. It’s a fascinating thing.

"Fascinating thing" is Goldberg code for "holy shit, I just obliterated my own point fart, fart..."

Speaking very broadly as there are exceptions all over the place, it seems like liberal political couples work harder to save their marriage after a sex scandal. Again, that’s just an impression. I haven’t tabulated all the cases.

"FaaarrrrRRRRRRrrrrrrRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRrrrrrrt..."

Or do they place less stock in the value of fidelity (it’s just sex, who cares?). It seems to me there are a lot of ways to dissect that. For now, suffice it to say the times have changed.

"...[spectacular, 4th-of-July cannonade of farts and sharts] Not to worry, I'm a legacy pledge nobody expects this to make sense fart, farrrrRRRRRRtt AND IN CONCLUSION JFK was disgusting and Colbert Busch loved JFK, I bet, please don't nobody check fart fart fart, AND IN DOUBLE SECRET fart CONCLUSION..."

It’s absolutely true that conservatives need to wrestle with the question of what we should expect from our politicians. But I’m not sure liberals have anything worth listening to on the subject.

Let's put it this way: That's not an egg he just laid. I hate to replay my greatest hits, but this is the stupidest thing ever written, and will remain so until Goldberg writes something else.

RAY HARRYHAUSEN, 1920-2013.

Fuck CGI.

NEXT TIME: THE GREEN GOBLIN IS SOLYNDRA!

PJ Media kulturkampfer John Boot has made these pages before, denouncing Bruce Springsteen for advocating "violent revolution, class-and-politics-based bloodshed, and the murder of bankers and perhaps other capitalists," and explicating "5 Core Conservative Values in the New Jackie Robinson Biopic 42." Now he gives us 850 words on the latest Hollywood threat to our way of life. Weatherman thriller The Company You Keep?  No:

Iron Man 3 Treats Islamist Terror Like a Joke

Not even kidding.

Iron Man, though, is a smart franchise and initially, despite its comic-book soul, took an admirably unsympathetic view to Islamist terror...

But then the kulaks got to them!

Yet Iron Man 3 is a huge step backward that openly mocks the War on Terror via the villain the Mandarin (Ben Kingsley).

Shane Black could have made the villain Allah Ishkabibble, an Al Qaeda kingpin working with Hillary Clinton on Benghazi, but he chose treason.

Spoiler alert: Read no farther if you don’t want a central plot twist ruined. But what happens in the second half of the movie is critical to understanding the spinelessness of Hollywood and its revolting willingness to reduce the War on Terror to a cheap laugh.

BuzzFeed oughta hire this guy. I will omit the spoiler, though you might find this bit spoilt in its own way:

Millions of fans too young to remember 9/11 will line up to see Iron Man 3, but it’s not just to them that Hollywood’s leading filmmakers have a duty. Reducing the alarmingly durable threat of Islamist fundamentalism to potty humor is an insult not just to Daniel Pearl’s family but to the millions of Americans who continue to wage the War on Terror. It’s as if, a decade after Hitler, a movie portrayed a Hitler-like villain as a harmless oaf who was no threat to anyone.

Nobody tell him about Achmed The Dead Terrorist. Glimmer-of-self-awareness bonus: Boot asks himself --

Am I asking too much of a comic book movie?

Doesn't last long, though. With this bunch it never does.

UPDATE. Responding to Boot's peculiar notion that it's counterproductive to make fun of the enemy in wartime, commenters point out that Hitler was a figure of fun in Der Fuehrer's Face, Plane Daffy, You Natzy Spy, To Be or Not To Be, All Through the Night, The Great Dictator, "Hitler Has Only Got One Ball," et alia. Of course it's possible Boot is familiar with all these entertainments, but unable to grasp the concept of "fun."

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about Jason Collins being gay and rightbloggers being unable to appreciate it. Sad for them, really. I mean, in a hilarious way.

I couldn't really work it in, but I also got a kick out of the whole Niall Ferguson thing, especially when Jonah Goldberg came waddling in to explain why Keynes' homosexuality was, too, valid grounds for discounting his economics:

So Keynes believed that Puritan values inclined people to embrace an economic theory (capitalism), but the Ferguson episode teaches us that it is now beyond outrageous to suggest that Keynes’s rejection of Puritan values inclined him to embrace a slightly different economic theory (Keynesianism)? Got it.

If you wonder where Goldberg gets the idea that gayness is synonymous with "rejection of Puritan values," go look at his recent farts on the subject; gays used to be society-wreckers who "wanted to smash the bourgeois prisons of monogamy, capitalistic enterprise and patriotic values and bask in the warm sun of bohemian 'free love,'" Goldberg has written, but in the 21st Century "the sweeping embrace of bourgeois lifestyles by the gay community has been stunning." Thus in Goldberg's mind Keynes was like some guy at the Anvil doing amyl and fucking a boatload of guys. And how can you take someone like that seriously?

And Goldberg thinks that Ferguson's apology is the result of a Soviet show-trial instead of a genuine reaction to shame -- which makes sense, since shame is something Goldberg's work and signature on same prove he's incapable of feeling.

NEXT WEEK: THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE -- IF ONLY THE GOVERNMENT HADN'T INTERVENED.

If you love conservatives telling you that works of art they like are conservative, you'll love Nick Gillespie, chief advance man for that conservative niche brand called libertarianism, giving the treatment to The Great Gatsby:

Ultimately, Gatsby is the great American novel of the ways in which free markets (even, and perhaps especially, black markets) overturn established order and recreate the world through what Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction.”

We're livin' in that orgastic future that year by year recedes before us, baby, and lovin' it! Gillespie also seems to think Meyer Wolfsheim is the hero of the book, and that The Sound and the Fury is "dated."

Sometimes all you need to become a philistine is a philosophy.

AND HOW COULD I EVER REFUSE/I FEEL LIKE I WIN WHEN I LOSE.

The latest Obama ragegasm from Peggy Noonan is as horrible as you'd expect, but one section deserves special mention, concerning "two things that have weakened the Obama presidency and haven't been noted":

In the days after the 2012 election the Democrats bragged about their technological genius and how it turned the election. They told the world about what they'd done—the data mining, the social networking, that allowed them to zero in on Mrs. Humperdink in Ward 5 and get her to the polls. It was quite impressive and changed national politics forever. But I suspect their bragging hurt their president. In 2008 Mr. Obama won by 9.5 million votes. Four years later, with all the whizbang and money, he won by less than five million. When people talk about 2012 they don't say the president won because the American people endorsed his wonderful leadership, they say he won because his team outcomputerized the laggard Republicans. 

This has left him and his people looking more like cold technocrats who know how to campaign than leaders who know how to govern. And it has diminished claims of a popular mandate. The president's position would be stronger now if more people believed he had one.

They try all sorts of things to deny that they got beat in an election by a sitting President with a 7.8% unemployment rate, but this is the first time I've seen one of them try and tell me that Joe Blow of Middletown has been retroactively demoralized by the cold technocracy of the 2012 Democratic campaign. Wait till someone tells him about Karl Rove!

Noonan's other weakening point -- about how Obama thinks he can't make deals with Republicans just because they keep saying they don't want to make them but he should know better -- is merely the sort of bald-faced denial of reality that we've learned to expect from her. But the one about how Obama doesn't have a mandate because he's too good at politics is something special; it's so self-refuting it's almost a Zen riddle.

ARTY FARTY.

Shorter Jonah Goldberg: I bet those stupid liberal TV-show-makers thought they were making the Soviet Union look good, but I saw it and I still hate communism  farrrrt.

Longtime fans will be pleased to hear Goldberg's traditional empirical method is unchanged:

I gather the show’s creators think they are being subversive or at the very least very clever by getting viewers to root for the "bad guys." Those quotation marks are essentially Hollywood’s, not my own.

Maybe that was in the press packet. And:

Getting back to the slipperiness of popular culture, I have to wonder if the producers realize how much the show undercuts the Left, at least the Hollywood Left.

Leftists in Hollywood were always much more serious about communism than Leftists in New York and Washington, which inevitably led to the Socialist Workers Party purge of 1984. And:

Avoiding spoilers as much as possible, one character, an African-American Communist spy recruited from the civil-rights movement, should have the Left furious. If you take the character seriously (which I don’t necessarily recommend) he demonstrates not only the murderous commitments of the hard Communist Left, but he basically vindicates J. Edgar Hoover’s most extreme rhetoric about the civil-rights movement!

Expect this to be rolled up in conservative minority outreach: "Oh yeah, what about that guy on that show?"

AGAINST REASON.

Thanks Aaron M. Dellutri for directing me to this remarkable The American Conservative post by Eve Tushnet -- whose work I've noticed before -- suggesting we teach too much "critical thinking" in schools:

Critical thinking has so thoroughly colonized our idea of education that we tend to think it’s the only kind of thinking. Tests try to measure it, and ritzy private schools all claim to teach it. Critical thinking–analysis, not mere acceptance–is a skill we can all learn. And we’ve learned it too well. We’ve learned only critical thinking skills, and not the equally challenging skills of prudent acceptance: We don’t even realize that we need to learn when to say yes, and to what.

This sounds like a good line to try on that philosophy major chick you're trying to bang.

We teach students to find the undefended premises of an argument, or the contradictions in a claim. This is really easy.

Easy? Teachers, do you agree?

Every single argument has a premise for which it doesn’t and can’t argue, and every even mildly interesting worldview is built on conflict and internal tension. Not every contradiction is a reason to reject a worldview!

If some liberal were coming at her with a line like this, I imagine the words MORAL RELATIVISM would come flaming out of Tushnet's skull. But she's appealing to our higher unreasoning:

...What we don’t teach, and don’t even consider as something worth teaching, is the art of acceptance. The art of accepting somebody else’s thoughts, words, insights, and dwelling in them until they become your own as well. We don’t teach how to tell when you’re sure enough, when you really should take the leap of faith, when you should say, “Yes, my understanding is totally inadequate, but I believe"...

...And so we wait, and we keep our options endlessly open, hoping that some lightning-strike revelation will take the decision out of our hands. “When I met your mother I just knew...” “And as he journeyed, he came near Damascus, and suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven...”

Lovely moments, surely, but how would you teach students to recognize them? "Tommy, look at Susie. Pretend she's the one for you, forever. Go!" "Well, Susie's nice and all but..." [Buzzer sounds, "F" dispensed.]

There's actually no place in education for such a thing, unless it's 1.) a cult leader's brainwashing session, or 2.) a school for religious instruction (but I repeat myself), which I suspect is the godly Tushnet's real model. Or, perhaps, a very bad classroom in which students are never challenged to go beyond what they already know, and are in fact given permission to stew in their own prejudices until they become a more transcendentally stupid version of themselves. You know -- the kind of place that folks who are always yapping about teacher "indoctrination" think a school should be.

We've been running with that old "reality-based community" thing for a while, but it never gets old because over time these people never get better at pretending that their real battle is not with liberalism but with Western Civilization.

UPDATE. Commenter Mortimer tells us this sort of thinking is popular even outside the meth labs of the right blogosphere -- from the Texas Republican Party 2012 platform (I don't know how I missed this):

We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs.

Sara Robinson has a nice essay on critical thinking and schools at AlterNet, in which she also sticks up for teaching "the arts, crafts and humanities" -- something else Tushnet opposes ("we fetishize self-expression and novel or counterintuitive approaches to problems..."). They're so often wrong about everything important that it's hard to believe that isn't their goal.

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT.

I don't usually do this, but my old colleague Steven Thrasher's story at Gawker, "Haaay to the Chief: The Military-Industrial Complex Conquers the Homos," is such gutsy journalism I'm sure many people will not even recognize it as such. Sample:

When SF Pride's electoral college of former grand marshalls selected Private Manning last week, it was time for these Professional Homosexuals to step in. Lisa Williams, SF Pride Board President, wrote that "even the hint of support" for Bradley Manning "will not be tolerated by the leadership of San Francisco Pride." Get it? Don’t even hint about it! 

The Professional Homosexual went on, completely without irony, to denounce her own organization's electoral college as "a system whereby a less-than-handful of people may decide who represents the LGBT community's highest aspirations as grand marshals for SF Pride," completely ignoring that she was one of a different handful vetoing their choice. According to her SF Pride bio, Williams is president of "One Source Public Affairs, a boutique consulting firm that specializes in the management of state, local and national political campaigns and strategic programs for non-profit organizations"...

As Jack Nicholson once said after doing a take with Brando on The Missouri Breaks: scorches the earth, doesn't he?

UPDATE. Some lively discussion of and dissension on Steven's story in comments. The main rap seems to be that he's just naively disappointed by the transformation of what used to be called the gay liberation movement into a political power brokerage that sometimes makes regrettable choices. (Longtime commenter Halloween Jack even calls the story "revisionist bullshit.") We can argue over what tradeoffs are worth making, certainly. I'd say the important thing is that Steven noticed the phenomenon at all -- especially the flow of military contractor money into big gay orgs. Too many people seem to miss that, in politics as in life, a lot of what looks like moral imperative is just arbitrage.

A CONSPIRACY SO VAST.

The President had some good gags at the White House Correspondents Dinner, one of the better (and better-reported) ones being, "These days, I look in the mirror and I have to admit, I'm not the strapping young Muslim socialist I used to be."

You all heard that one, right? You did? Well you're lying, because FrontPageMag's Robert Spencer has proven that the Lame Stream Media is covering it up:

Warner Todd Huston reported at Breitbart Monday that “in some of its reports on Saturday night’s White House Correspondents Dinner (WHCD), the Associated Press failed to include one of President Obama’s own gags.”

Obama said: “These days I look in the mirror and have to admit, I’m not the strapping young Muslim Socialist that I used to be.” But, noted Huston, “in one version of the night’s story (as seen at Huffington Post, Time Magazine, Breitbart Wires, the Ottawa Citizen, and The Columbian to name a few), the AP’s Bradley Klapper forgot one part of the President’s joke,” reporting his words as “I’m not the strapping young Socialist that I used to be,”

Why? Did they think it had too much of a ring of truth?

Why did some editors at AP or at the publications that picked up the AP story think it necessary to run interference for Obama on this point?

The rest of the column is about how Obama is too a big Muslim.

You may be wondering what Spencer and his fellow idiots are trying to accomplish. My guess is, they're thinking about future generations. No one living at the present moment and aware of the news could possibly believe AP is purposely blocking Obama's famous joke. But down the road apiece, when the shattered remnants of the White People's Party are living in survivalist treehouses in the Dakotas, they're tell their children how Obama even admitted he was a Muslim and the media covered it up, and produce some dog-eared Wayback Machine files as proof. After all, they're big on heritage.

UPDATE. Speaking of the WHCD, Conan O'Brien apparently made a joke about Duck Dynasty and National Review's Greg Pollowitz spends hundreds of words ferociously insisting it wasn't funny. When I read that stupid thing about the reality show being a conservative touchstone, I thought it was just one guy's foolishness, but apparently it's a thing: Rod Dreher has gotten in on it, as have S.E. Cupp and those crazy kulturkampfers at Acculturated.

I kind of take the point, though -- if you're the sort of person who chooses what crap TV shows to watch based on ideology, <foxworthy>yew might be a conservative!</foxworthy>.

LIBERTARIAN OUTREACH ON GAY RIGHTS.

Hey, an NBA player says he's gay, great. This is something liberals and libertarians can agree on, right? Not if libertarians can help it! Matt Welch at Reason:

The Importance of Allowing People to Say That You Can’t Be a Gay Basketball Player and a Christian

He's talking about ESPN's Chris Broussard, who for the crime of criticizing the gay basketball player was beaten to death. Okay, not murdered, just beaten. Okay, not beaten, just criticized by people on Twitter, which is still censorship (because anything short of responding to Broussard's mouth-fart with "Intelligent people can disagree" and a pat on the back would be).

Broussard is predictably getting beaten to a rhetoric pulp on Twitter. And while I think today is a wonderful, watershed day for people (especially the artist formerly known as Ron Artest) to live as open and free as they wanna be, I agree with the New York Post editorial Robert George here: "Chris Broussard spoke what more than a few players feel. If such comments aren't expressed, a real conversation can't be had."

Actually America had this conversation for years. Thesis: "DIE FAGGOT!" Antithesis: (cries of pain). Fascist that I am, I don't see any point in reviving it.

And sometimes engaging with the I'm not ready to go that far just yet crowd brings out the best in activists. See, for example, Martin Luther King's "Letter From a Birmingham Jail."

MLK was glad people were opposing him -- in fact, he'd have been disappointed if people suddenly gave up and let him have what he wanted. Where'd be the fun in that? And getting assassinated was just an inevitable part of the process.

There is only one possible explanation for Welch's bizarre post: As I've been saying for years, libertarianism is just a hipper line extension of conservatism, the rightwing version of Budweiser Black Crown. So if liberals like something you'd imagine libertarians would approve, Reasonoids still have to maintain the anti-liberal brand positioning by bitching about it in a way the mouth-breathers can approve. The cleverer ones will do it by explaining how gay rights is statist, but with the kind of funding they have, there's really no need for a libertarian to be clever. Q.E.D.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the rightbloggers who think the Boston bombings are a good reason to stop the immigration bill, or immigration in general. The whole thing reminds me of the Palmer Raids as performed by a clown troupe.

GEORGE JONES, 1931-2013.

Just heard. I'll have something more to say later, maybe. His music was my good companion through some bad times; next to Sinatra in the When No One Cares era, maybe, nothing suits a sorrow binge like George Jones. (He's good when you're not sad, too, I later found out.) And while I normally don't give a damn what happens to famous people, his apparent ascent into happiness late in life was very cheering to me.

For now it's enough to say that along with everything else, George Jones was one hell of a singer.



UPDATE. He could be funny, too. Used to cover this one in a country band I was in:



UPDATE 2. In comments TomParmenter supplies "Rock  It," a number Jones did in his "Thumper Jones" secret rockabilly identity. But does anyone have tape of him singing as Donald Duck?

UPDATE 3. Just wanted to add:

• In high school a friend of mine saw him at the Westbury Music Fair and told me Jones was using the name "Tammy" in place of female pronouns, which got some gasps from the crowd. I thought maybe Jones had just been having an episode, but then I saw him on TV singing "If drinkin' don't kill me, Tammy's memory will" on some awards show. I can understand trading in on one's legend -- he did have a funny number called "No-Show Jones," and joked about his drinking -- but think about what it would take to declare yourself like that, to keep telling people that you'd had that one big love and it didn't work out. Jones was in show biz, but I think the feelings the songs talk about weren't an act.

• The "Ragged But Right" clip shows a younger, lighter Jones; his vocal instrument is pure and strong and he doesn't mess with it much. And that kind of material ("White Lightnin'," "Love Bug," etc.) doesn't call for messing with. The later Jones most people know, though, is the one singing those heartbreak songs, and by then he'd learned a few tricks. I think of "A Good Year for the Roses," where he moves between a low, confidential delivery ("After three full years of marriage it's the first time that you haven't made the bed") and those amazing, keening high notes ("As you turn and walk a-way..."). I say "tricks," but they don't sound tricky -- because, as difficult as most singers would find that kind of transition, Jones made it seem very natural, like that's just how it had to be sung. And that's part of what gives me goosebumps whenever I hear it. He goes from a wounded murmur to something like a howl of pain, and back again; the thing he's talking about isn't just sadness, it's torment; the inconsolable sorrow of lost love. The reason you can bear it, and maybe the reason he could, is that he made it into art.

THE NEW HISTORY'S GREATEST MONSTER.

Dame Noonington's hate-on for Obama has engorged to the point where she's comparing him unfavorably to Jimmy Carter. If we invade Syria, expect Noonan to pen a column from the POV of Bashar al-Assad, who will have mellowed becomingly with age, and whose personal happiness she will posit as the real reason that emotional cripple in the White House is after him.

REALITY TV VS. REALITY.

You stupid hippies think you own this country? Well, PJ Media's David Vicker has news for you! Duck Dynasty is popular!

Each week millions think they’re tuning in to watch the crazy and entertaining antics of a bunch of hirsuit, rich rednecks... What viewers are really watching are the Bitter Clingers candidate Obama so famously disparaged at a San Francisco campaign event back in 2008, and the Makers that President Obama denigrated in his “You didn’t build that speech” of 2012. If anyone in America clings to God, guns and religion, and did build that, it’s the Robertson clan...

..in a reliably Republican redoubt in rural Louisiana. Good for them, but what does that have to do with America in general? Well, to hear Vicker tell it, it's aspirational:

If annual sales, endorsement deals, and TV ratings are any indicator, the brand of Americanism these swamp rats are peddling is white lightning in a bottle. Down on our luck, out of hope, and sick-and-tired-of-change Americans can’t get enough of Duck Dynasty’s message, or its messengers. They take us back to the ideals that really work in this country.

The paterfamilias of this duck-call dynasty is worth about $10 million, in a parish where the estimated median household income in 2009 was $32,777. (Percentage of residents living in poverty in West Monroe, Louisiana in 2009: 25.3%.) And apparently the Robertsons are looking for a raise from their TV show.

Again, good for them; anything the traffic will allow, as the old song says. TV's currently full of Duck Dynasts and Real Housewives and such like; they're the modern equivalents of the swells and toffs whose adventures impoverished Americans have enjoyed following since the screwball comedies of the Great Depression. But nothing in our history suggests these entertainments mean the American People didn't mean what they said when they elected a President last November who was less than duck-dynastic.

Fantasies like Vicker's remind me of hippies who thought the country was really with them because Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate were big at the box office, despite the electoral returns.  Counterculture's a fun game to play when you're losing, but if culture, counter or otherwise, is meaningful to you, then its effect on electoral results -- actual or mitigating -- will not be so important. Decades later, Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate are still worth watching, though. Can we expect the same of Duck Dynasty? If so, then politics is the least of our problems.

KILL US ALL, LET GOD SORT US OUT.

A lot of what the brethren have written about Boston has been deranged, but leave it to PJ Media/NewYork Post blowhard Michael Walsh to raise the bar. In this emission, his point is that with last week's lockdown the "pusillanimous toads... Gov. Deval Patrick and Mayor Mumbles Menino" had the city "cowering in fear" when they should have sent all Boston's able-bodied citizens out to shoot up the suspect and whatever got between him and them, or something equally butch.

There's plenty that's stupid and offensive in this, but connoisseurs will appreciate this bit about the 2004 Beslan school massacre, which Peters offers as a preferable model:

Note that, when the Russian military finally stormed the school, they were accompanied by armed residents of the village, desperate to save their children. In typical ham-handed Russian fashion, the former Soviets managed to kill almost as many people as they saved — but the point is they fought back.

Much better than last Friday's result, which was casualty-free as well as successsful, but without honor.

Sometimes I wonder if Walsh is just one of Col. Ralph Peters' secret identities.