FETAL PAINS.

Kathryn J. Lopez:

In the new version, with about 40,000 views, we are told that the Texas Infant Pain Capable Protection Act will take us all “one step closer to theocracy,” marking a “war on women” and a ”a battle for vaginas.” “Owning your uteruses gives them a thrill.” The bill is a “a pain in the uterus.” Never mind the pain of the child. Never mind the pain of pretending there aren’t lives abortion hurts, beyond the dead child. Because apparently we’re comfortable not hearing the cries that should rock our consciences.

She talking about a Schoolhouse Rock parody, the very existence of which she considers "confirmation that absolutely nothing is, in fact, sacred." Someone should make a pro-choice Little Lulu cartoon and really blow her mind.

Meanwhile Megan McArdle does what I have come to recognize as the the typical libertarian abortion thing of acting as straight man to foam-mouthed pro-life conservatives:

Make no mistake: I’m pro-choice... But that doesn’t mean I view abortion as having the same moral weight as a haircut or a nose-piercing -- just another personal choice about what you do with your body.

I'm all for women's lib, but these bra-burning kooks, etc. Enter stage right National Review's Witchfinder General David French, who reads this absolutely the way it was intended:

I think McArdle is largely right. Americans tend to be reluctant to “force” women into diffcult circumstances...

Love those quote marks.

...but are broadly unsympathetic to abortions for convenience — thus the backlash you often see even from pro-choice advocates when people admit, for example, to killing their child to preserve a short-lived pro volleyball career.

Bet you didn't know that most abortions are enjoyed by the Undeserving Pregnant -- sluts who deserve what happened to them and just want their unborns sucked out so they they can get back to hot yoga.

McArdle states that it is “impossible to completely separate the good [abortions] from the bad,” and — legally — she is largely right. Government can’t possibly construct a screening mechanism that separates ”good” (i.e., publicly supported because of the mother’s acknowledged difficulties) abortions from the “bad,” nor would the pro-life movement ever support such a regime. The pro-life answer is to match our honesty about abortion with charity towards mothers in crisis, to ameliorate as best we can the pressures and difficulties that lead to the “bad” abortions.

By "charity towards mothers in crisis" he means steering them into fake "pregnancy centers" of the sort French and his buddies are trying to turn every women's health clinic into, and by "ameliorate as best we can the pressures and difficulties that lead to the 'bad' abortions," he means make all abortions illegal.

Oh, and he complains liberals are defaming him and his Operation Rescue buddies as "absurd caricatures of intolerant fundamentalists." He doesn't think he's got this image problem because of the crazy shit he says; he thinks it's because "America’s pro-abortion radicals are disproportionately clustered in the mainstream media and popular culture." Buddy, people were onto you in the days of the Pharisees.

FREE MINDS, FREE MARKETS, BUT AS TO YOUR WOMB...

One of the things I've noticed about the famously libertarian Ole Perfesser Glenn Reynolds is that, while he claims to be pro-choice,  he seems annoyed that anyone would defend abortion rights and delighted whenever someone tries to restrict them. Among recent examples: "AS I KEEP SAYING, THE GOP NEEDS TO CAMPAIGN TO MAKE AMERICAN ABORTION LAWS 'MORE EUROPEAN'"; a strategy to embarrass male anti-abortion legislators characterized as "#WARONMEN: Female lawmaker seeks to regulate men’s reproductive health"; coy suggestions that Congress tax abortions; durr-hurrs about uncivil pro-abortion signs; and approving citations of attacks on Wendy Davis, including "UPDATE: Reader Robert Crawford writes: “Wendy Davis is the new Cindy Sheehan." The guy's some advocate.

Partly, I suppose, this comes out of his whole men's-rights schtick about how women are oppressing men, which he recently took to such lengths ("When people talk about 'reproductive freedom,' they generally mean women’s reproductive freedom") that he ticked off his usual fellow traveller Ann Althouse, leading to a spat and resulting in a rare long Perfesser post full of paranoid gas ("we give women a pass on sexual behavior that would be considered predatory if it were done by males"), whining ("noting the unfairnesses involved, is not 'victimology' — though given how successful women have been in obtaining power via victimology, no one should be surprised if men start to give it a try"),  and just plain bullshit ("When Rush Limbaugh suggested that Sandra Fluke should at least pay for her own birth control..."). Someone who actually thinks this way is bound to consider abortion some kind of illegitimate special right because men can't have one.

Mainly, though, it's a reminder that for libertarians abortion is an agree-to-disagree thing you shouldn't concern yourself over too much, despite the unprecedented current attacks on it, while you should fight to the death for the non-negotiable right of companies to hire workers for five cents an hour if they can get away with it, and to fill the air and water with pollutants pretty much at will. In other words, it's a maximum-liberty movement for adherents who are overwhelmingly male and don't believe they'll ever be in any financial difficulty, and who think empathy is a river on Gor.

UPDATE. Speaking of bullshit libertarians, here's David French, whom we saw last year raving against gay marriage and, I swear to God, Griswold v. Connecticut ("Think for a moment of the awesome power of the sexual revolution over law and logic. Is there a single legal doctrine that can stand against the quest for personal sexual fulfillment?"). Now he's arguing for a "libertarian military." Whereas maximum sexual freedom is an outrage, military-style libertarianism is dead butch -- liberty means more killing and less building, and isn't that was Hayek and Rand were all about?

In my (admittedly anecdotal) experience, thoughtful military libertarians tend to advocate something we haven’t really tried in our more than decade-long fight against Islamic jihad — the relatively brief application of truly overwhelming destructive force against identified enemies. 

That’s why I wonder if a libertarian military might be more lethal, even on smaller budgets. A trimmed-down bureaucracy, an increased emphasis on the destructive rather than nation-building capabilities of the force under arms, and doctrines designed to inflict maximum (non-nuclear) destruction on enemy forces rather than transforming and democratizing communities — all of this could add up to a more lethal (yet smaller) military.

Normally you have to tell one of these guys about someone buying a Big Mac with food stamps to get his bloodlust roaring like this. I know there are a lot of guys out there who are like, "oh yeah, libertarians, Drew Carey right, free the weed," and God bless them, but when it comes to the professional-grade stuff libertarianism still just a niche brand of conservatism.

French also makes an avatar for the free-markets-free-fire military of Rand Paul, whose idea of a proper army probably involves grey uniforms.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the miserable time rightbloggers had on the Fourth of July. With Obama destroying freedom and all, their hot dogs tasted of wormwood. Well, there's always the next Chick-fil-A event.

Among the outtakes was an "In-De-Pants Day" special offered by some guy on his cartoon book OBAMA SUTRA - An Illustrated Guide to 57 States of Ecstasy! which he says is "perfect for leaving out on your coffee table, or slipping into the bookcase of your least favorite liberal." You've missed the special, alas, but the book's cheap and the author has samples at his website. This is our favorite:

It's a little young for the Alan Scherstuhl treatment but I hope he'll put it in his to-do file.

CARTOON CRITICS.

At Inside Higher Ed, Kevin Kiley says this about a new film:

...a film about diversity, the innate differences between individuals, and the institutions and situations that help foster connections and understanding between those individuals. 

The movie is about the challenge of limited talent and the realization that hard work can only take one so far – and sometimes not even as far as people who are just “born with it.” But it's also about what students in the social and intellectual crucible of college can learn from each other and how those interactions shape worldviews and change lives.

 At National Review, Nancy French complains that Kiley "portrayed the movie as leftwing propaganda," but it can't be, she says, because she liked it, and liked that the main characters advanced without a college education because they were thus "avoiding the rampant liberal indoctrination prevalent in colleges today."

But Jennifer Kabbany at The College Fix says the movie is indeed leftwing propaganda:

We have a problem with the fact that the priorities of the modern college experience have morphed from teaching relevant facts and skills to instead constantly force-feeding notions of diversity and tolerance in the quad, in the classroom, in homework assignments, like something akin to a religious cult. 

Decades ago, college used to prioritize getting a good education and marketable skills. Now it’s about indoctrinating students, telling them they’re ignorant, racist homophobes – all the while refusing to allow intellectual diversity to thrive on campus.

If you haven't figured it out yet, these geniuses are talking about Monsters University, a fucking cartoon.

I'm not even gonna get into the shitstorm over The Lone Ranger, except to say 1.) it has inspired a particularly wonderful Debbie Schlussel column, containing this line: "Lone Ranger Armie Hammer is the great-grandson of legendary anti-American oilman Armand Hammer, who went out of his way to enable Communists and Marxists around the world in his oil trade with our enemies, especially the Soviet Union.. I’m sure he’s smiling from his grave now that his great-grandson carries on his disgusting legacy..."; and 2.) Sonny Bunch of the Free Beacon is so-near-yet-so-far when he says the movie is "Designed in a Lab to Troll Conservatives"; I'll go out on a limb and say The Lone Ranger was designed in a lab to make money, though it certainly can't hurt that imbeciles across the internet are Spelling the Name Right in the name of Freedom and White People.

Oh, one more, from Breitbart:

ALLEN WEST RIPS LADY GAGA OVER NATIONAL ANTHEM CHANGE

She sang "home of the gays." Personally I prefer the version that begins, "While we stand here waiting for the ballgame to start," but whatever. Wait'll West finds out what these homosexuals have been doing with America's beloved show tunes!

UPDATE. Sonny Bunch contends fairly that people who are not conservatives, including good old Glenn Kenny, find The Lone Ranger ridiculous. To the extent Kenny "noticed The Lone Ranger's political sensibilities," though, he portrayed it as part the general incoherence, not as a significant political gesture. I can't judge the film because I haven't seen it, so I admit the possibility that it's really Le Gai Savoir with horses and explosions. But a lifetime of experience teaches me that summer blockbusters are not usually built as means to refute the audience's false consciousness.

OPERATION RESCUE THEIR IMAGE.

There's a lot of boo-hoo today about how the folks protesting the new anti-abortion laws in Texas and North Carolina use bad language and mean jokes. National Review's Kathryn J. Lopez demonstrates how seriously you should take this with her unusual description of the mashed-fetus photos customarily waved at abortion clinic patients:

I’ve had some interesting run-ins over the years with graphic anti-abortion displays, which I don’t think are always the best opening to conversations, in part because so many women have had abortions that you really have to lead with a great reserve of love. But even the graphic-image displays do not tend to be motivated by anger or hatred but love for lives lost and an appropriate zeal to end this atrocity.

I wonder how their targets appreciated these waves of love and appropriate zeal.

I'm not sure whether these people genuinely think their viciousness isn't really vicious because Jesus, or whether they've made a calculation that, with their opponents gaining traction, they have to quickly rehab their image with the public so they can claim the victim card for themselves. Any minute now Betsy Woodruff will interview Randall Terry on the protesters' outrageous behavior.

SHORTER JONAH GOLDBERG:

Though I pride myself on my fratboy sense of humor I have never heard a joke about fetuses before and I think everyone will agree with me they're disgusting farrrrt.

BONUS: Those other networks only show the Zimmerman trial because they hate white people but Fox News is doing it for capitalism alright besides I am a con-no-sewer and I only watch Fox News for the bracing intellectual  FÄÄÄRRRR R R R RRT.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the many opportunities the brethren were given last week to talk about gays (Prop 8, DOMA decisions), blacks (the VRA decision, the Zimmerman trial), and women (Wendy Davis' filibuster) and what they made of them (a massive cock-up). Those new Benghazi hearings can't come a moment too soon!

MORE ADVICE FROM YOUR MORTAL ENEMIES.

Offering assistance in his hour of need to Barack Obama is Daniel Pipes.

I wrote an article in NRO three and a half years ago, at a low moment in Obama’s first term, when his ratings tanked and his party had just lost Edward Kennedy’s senate seat to a Republican, that suggested that Obama could “salvage his tottering administration” by taking “dramatic gesture to change the public perception of him as a lightweight, bumbling ideologue, preferably in an arena where the stakes are high, where he can take charge, and where he can trump expectations.” He could do well and do good, I offered, by taking out the Iranian nuclear infrastructure. 

Well, as the world knows, he did not follow my advice.

And he was convincingly reelected.

But the time has come to crank it out again at a moment when Obama seems close to imploding...

I assume the real purpose of his post is to tell the world, "I still exist and my answer to everything is still 'Kill Arabs.'"

UPDATE. Commenters tell me the punchline should be "Kill Muslims." Quite right, will remember that for the second show.

'SMATTER, BITCH, CAN'T TAKE A COMPLIMENT?

After Wendy Davis' spectacular filibuster in the Texas legislature, Governor Rick Perry heaved some calculated insults at her ("She was the daughter of a single woman, she was a teenage mother herself... It is just unfortunate that she hasn’t learned from her own example that every life must be given a chance to realize its full potential and that every life matters") which Davis took as they were intended. National Review's David French, being a gentleman, rose to defend Rick Perry, in a post called "Governor Perry Appropriately Compliments Wendy Davis; Left Goes Crazy":

Governor Perry’s first statement regarding her life story is a compliment — an appropriate and generous thing to say about a political opponent. 

The next remark is, quite simply, the obvious thing to say. In fact, the Governor is more tempered than he needs to be. It’s not just “unfortunate,” it’s tragic that she has taken the remarkable gifts that she’s been given and the remarkable achievements she’s earned and turned them toward the cause of death.

See, lady? These fellers are just saying what a shame it is a smart gal like you became a genocidal maniac.

By the time this conservative outreach to female voters is over, Republican National Headquarters won't even need a ladies' room.

LAST NIGHT I SAW LESTER MADDOX ON A TV SHOW/WITH SOME SMART-ASS NEW YORK JEW...

Contrary to their protestations, conservatives love class war. Our latest imbecilic example comes from National Review's Charlotte Hays:

Paula Deen isn’t really on trial for using the N-word. She’s on trial for the crime of being Paula Deen, a woman who cooks with lard (yum!), shows up for the Today Show wreathed in tears and garbed in an inappropriately girlish hue of pink, and says unfortunate things such as “I is who I is.”

Think of Paula as the anti-Julia Child. Unlike Julia Child, who also loved butter and cream but had the discipline to take only one bite, thus preserving her well-bred appearance, Paula goes whole hawg for fattening (but tasty) pimento cheese rather than pâté. She must be punished!...

Later: "If they couldn’t get her on those delicious globs of butter, any weapon will do."

Hays is right for half a sentence, anyway: Paula Deen isn't really on trial. She was fired, not by the International Left or the PC Police, but by a major corporation that didn't want to deal with the controversy her case engendered. That's capitalism, comrade!

Maybe what Hays means by "trial" is that people have been making fun of Deen, which Hays may consider Alinskyite, the usual conservative complaint when some wingnut makes an ass of him or herself. But these days, every time celebrities get their tit caught in a wringer, they get heckled mercilessly. I didn't see Hays blubbering in National Review that Lindsay Lohan was "on trial" for being a former child star.

I can see sympathizing with Deen if you actually believe she's just a simple belle who don't know what-all she was sayin' and is caught up by forces she doesn't understand, or if you think the case has been overblown, as Bob Somersby does. But neither Hays nor the other less scrupulous conservatives who've taken up the cause ("The Far Left shows blatant hypocrisy in crucifying Paula Deen," "The Lynching of Paula Deen," etc) are doing that.

I expect they're misrepresenting the event so badly because they think there's some culture-war capital to wring out of it.  Deen is, from all I can tell, a female cooking show equivalent of Larry the Cable Guy, marketed to people as a lovable Southern artifact like NASCAR and Moon Pies. Now that she's become a laughingstock, these guys are in a rush to attribute her downfall to Political Correctness, so they can rile up  the dwindling number of people who think that the liberals with whom Deen signed a million-dollar TV contract have put her "on trial" for having quaint cornbread ways, and will do the same to them.

Also, Hays' commenters seem obsessed with the idea that black people can say "nigger" and they can't (or, rather, can't without some pointy-head getting all pissy with them).  I assume the people who'll buy this guff are probably delighted that the Voting Rights Act got gut-shot in the Supreme Court. But that's obviously because I'm the real bigot.

UPDATE. I see the Center for American Progress and the ACLU have cut ties with Deen -- oh, wait, it's actually Caesar's Palace and Walmart. When did they become part of the liberal conspiracy?

TODAY IN CONSERVATIVE JOURNALISM.

The Washington Free Beacon's coverage of today's Voting Rights Act decision at the Supreme Court is pretty amazing. Here's the lede:

Conservative activists and black leaders celebrated the Supreme Court’s Tuesday decision to update the Voting Rights Act (VRA) as a recognition of the progress that the nation has made in race relations.

If that phrase "black leaders" caught you up short, relax, they mean Ward Connerly and Tim Scott, not -- well, just about every other black leader in America. Alongside this, the Beacon runs an AP photo of Ryan P. Haygood, director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, speaking outside the Supreme Court; Haygood is actually a passionate supporter of the Act, but who's going to look that up? Most of the Beacon's regular readership probably went, "A guy from the NAACP likes this decision? Boy, is he in for a shock. [swills corn likker]"

To represent liberal reaction, reporter Bill McMorris quoted from Scott Lemieux's brilliant essay at the American Prospect and the epic dissent of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Ha, just kidding!

Liberals slammed the decision. One Minnesota state representative tweeted that conservative Justice Clarence Thomas was an “Uncle Thomas” for joining the majority.

And oh yeah Obama, who gets a few lines before we are told, "supporters of the ruling said Obama is living in the past, pointing out that blacks across the country had higher voter participation than whites in 2012" (but not for long!) and this:

Constitutional law professor Horace Cooper, who is black...

That's just great. Here are some of Cooper's other credentials.

... said Obama had no one to blame but Attorney General Eric Holder and the Department of Justice for the decision.

“His efforts to stop voter ID laws across the nation and his plans for quota for representation on everything from congressional seats to non-partisan elected boards are the reasons this took place,” Cooper said. “Holder ill-served this administration, was wrong on law and policy, and he should resign.”

Thanks, Obama! Meanwhile, out in the world, it took Texas about 90 seconds after the ruling to move to put in voter ID laws from which the VRA can no longer protect citizens. These will require prospective black voters to spell chrysanthemum.

Somewhere a Tea Party group imminently expecting tax exempt status is preparing a suit to get SCOTUS to give Paula Deen her job back.

UPDATE. Thanks to commenter Gromet for pointing out another of Horace Cooper's credentials: convicted Jack Abramoff flunky. "I'm going to guess his position teaching Constitutional Law was not tenure-track," says Gromet.

A FAN'S NOTES.

Now that the world is probably past caring, I'd like to put my two cents in on the closing episode of Mad Men Season 6. This is currently the only show with which I have a traditional fan-type relationship anymore -- that is, I watch it without caring if it's good.

And for the most part I've come to the conclusion that it isn't, much. Daniel Mendelsohn's overheated critique back in 2011 had some fair points, the most convincing being that a lot of what happens in the show, especially the ooh-ahh bits, often seems cooked up and ridiculous. (Whatever Bob Benson turns out to be or mean in the end, for example, I don't see how his leg action with Pete Campbell can possibly add up to anything but another tawdry stunt to make viewers gasp. Which, I admit, I did.)

And the most cooked-up, ridiculous thing about Mad Men has been the double life of Don Draper/Dick Whitman*. That it happened, and how it happened, is absurd, as is the maintenance of the fiction, with the insanely convenient assistance of the real Draper's widow and despite the fact that people keep finding out about it, on at least one occasion from Draper himself. If Mad magazine were still doing classic parodies, that would be a huge part of this one, along with Draper's enough-already death imagery ("So how should we sell Cool Whip, Don? I'm thinking fridge-as-morgue").

You can see why Matt Weiner wanted it, though; instead of having Draper merely tortured by ambition and an inability to connect -- features that a successful ad man could have even without the spooky backstory -- he can be extra tortured by Living a Lie in a more literal sense. It adds moody, Gothic shadows to what is essentially just another grey flannel suit story, and sometimes peril to spice up the drama.

Because I'm a fan I have gone with it -- and in this season, as Draper's behavior became more outrageously self-destructive and other characters were either outright turning on him or revealing that they could do without him, I expected that he would push someone too far and get the ass-kicking he'd been asking for, probably via the explosion of his secret in a way that couldn't be papered over. How surprised and impressed I was, then, that Draper did it to himself, and that he seemed at least willing to keep pulling that string till it all unraveled.

And this is one of the great things about being a fan: Sometimes your team pulls it off. Everything that is not absurd and cheap about the character and the show is in that speech. I don't like to get into the minutiae-meanings that Mad Men Monday Morning QBs pick over every week, but Draper telling the guys from Hershey, just before he goes into the soliloquy, "I have to say this because I don’t know if I’ll ever see you again," is a magnificent thing. The speech he's about to tell them exposes not only details of Draper's real past, but also the sorrow and longing that are his creative wellspring, such as it is -- the place where those cheap, pretty stories he's been so good at selling come from. It's the Cup of Loneliness. Telling the story -- right after telling the bullshit version of the story -- isn't just Draper unmasking himself, it's Draper unmasking everything he's been doing for every client in his career. And though the specific and obvious outrage of the blown pitch is bad enough to get him fired, it feels to me as if his real firing offense  is admitting that his business is as much of a fraud as he is. To preface this as Draper did with a statement that is equally winsome and vicious -- like he had to tell them this horrible thing before they left him forever -- is something more like art than must-watch TV.

Oh, and Jon Hamm was totally up for it. Bravo. He walked the line.

Also: The characters I'd been feeling sorry for because Draper had been fucking them over don't seem so worthy of my affection anymore. (Particularly Ted Chaough. What a passive aggressive cunt.) But there I go, being a fan again. It's just as well it's over for a while. Now maybe I should read a book.

*UPDATE. I originally had this as "Dick Whitten"; thanks, TribalistMeathead, for the catch. I tend to slide Dick Whitman into Dick Whittington, the poor boy who becomes Lord Mayor of London Town, and I guess I got caught halfway through.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about how, as the seasons change, so must the news cycles, as the rightbloggers' all-scandal programming is interrupted by events relating to women, minorities, and other things conservatives just don't handle very well.

WHEELS WITHIN WHEELS.

I see the brethren are hot on the case of Michael Hastings' murder by Obama, the FBI, and possibly the Illuminati.

What I want to know is: Why are they not connecting the dots on James Gandolfini's so-called "massive heart attack"? Did they not notice that the Obamacare Quislings of the American Medical Association just declared obesity a disease?

51-year-old celebrities don't usually have heart attacks, do they? Could it be that the very existence of a happy, healthy celebrity of size made a mockery of their obesity-disease claims, and presented a threat to their health fascist takeover plans that they just couldn't tolerate?

Also, didn't Andrew Breitbart die of a "heart attack"? I rest my case.

Connect the dots! With Gandolfini out of the way, they're now free to criminalize high-fat Red State vittles, authorize Federal fitness Nazi inspectors to caliper our daughters, and send Rush Limbaugh to a concentration fat camp. Why, it'll be even worse than the Healthy Choices Act.

WAKE UP SHEEPLE!

IN PLAIN SIGHT.

James Taranto, who thinks the American gynarchs are waging "war on men," catalogues the unkind comments women have made about him (e.g., "woman-hating troll"). While butchly insisting these barbs don't bother him, Taranto laments that the ladies are brutal in ways he and his fellow oppressed males would never be:

All this viciousness was in the service of denying that there is, as we wrote in yesterday's article, a "war on men." Well, imagine if a prominent feminist journalist wrote about the "war on women" and dozens of conservative male writers responded by subjecting her to similar verbal abuse. Would that not be prima facie evidence that she was on to something?

Taranto seems not to have heard of that key figure in the "war on women," Sandra Fluke -- pretty prominent and a journalist as well as a law student. It wouldn't be hard to get up to speed: I wrote a couple of columns about some of his colleagues' reactions to Fluke (for example, "Rush Calls Some Slut a Slut and Everyone Gets Sand in Their Collective V@g!n@"), but if Taranto doesn't want to endure my prose, he can just put "Sandra Fluke" and "whore" into Google.

You know, I'm just kidding. I'm sure Taranto has heard of Sandra Fluke. I'm even fairly confident that he knows where the power actually resides in male-female social relationships. He's just very good at pretending not to.

UPDATE. In comments, Jay B: "Uh, yeah. It's almost like Amanda Marcotte doesn't exist. Or Jessica Valenti. Or Joan Walsh. Or Naomi Klein. Or any woman writer at The Nation. Imagine though if those people existed, I'm sure conservatives would be gallant." Amanda particularly seems to attract the psycho freaks of the right, probably because she pretty clearly doesn't give a shit, an attitude known to infuriate bullies.

UPDATE 2. Removed reference to "screenwriter" among Fluke's achievements -- I had conflated her with Lena Dunham, for obvious reasons.

THE BIG DEATH SCENE.

A bad week for deaths, already -- Michael Hastings, Kim Thompson, Chet Flippo. And James Gandolfini. Gandolfini was a journeyman who got noticed by the Times (thanks @johnmcquaid) apartment-surfing in 1988 ("Mr. Gandolfini, 26 years old, has never had his name on a lease, never paid more than $400 a month in rent... 'Moving, to me, is no big deal,' said Mr. Gandolfini, whose calling is the theater but whose living comes mostly from bartending and construction...") and built a career before and after The Sopranos. Tony Soprano was his world-class achievement.

As @Mobute observed, "It's not his fault impotent suburban WASPs fetishized a sociopath and made the Tony thing kinda creepy." Much of the show's, and the character's, popularity was based on all that funny Bada-Bing bullshit. And Gandolfini's great gift for showing Tony's monstrously childlike glee at what he could get away with was part of the pleasure that drew us into the show. But his other appetites and his sufferings were equally childlike and monstrous, and as the bodies piled up and the walls closed in Tony became less likable. But still we watched him.

I talked about this a bit during the last Sopranos season -- how the endgame that revolted some people then made perfect sense from an artistic and a moral point of view. Gandolfini's contribution to this was very important. Chase didn't give him the sentimental glimmers that post-Code Hollywood gangsters got -- and Gandolfini, bless him, didn't try to stick them in. When Tony found something pleasing in a woman, or a sushi restaurant, or a big score, it eventually soured in his mouth, but he didn't stop to think about it -- he just went on looking for something else to devour, encouraged by custom, crap psychotherapy, an absurd caricature of family feeling, and the dream we are accustomed to call American.  Tony took every excuse not to notice that he had to change or die, and Gandolfini was given the task of showing us how a man could live that way. That he was a gangster made that life superficially exciting, but at bottom Tony was a small-town success who might intuit enough to despise, Babbitt-like, the cheap glow of his short horizons, but never found the courage to climb over them.

Gandolfini didn't sentimentalize this in the least. Over the course of the show Tony's life became a painful thing to watch. But we stuck with him. When Tony looked for an easy exit, we hoped he would find it. Like enabling relatives we ceased to wish for his redemption and came to wish only for his deliverance. Maybe Olivier or Gielgud could have sustained that over six seasons, and maybe they couldn't; Gandolfini did. It was a great piece of work.

THE GULLS CAN'T HELP IT.

It seems as if the Republican shitstorms have had an effect; their distorted portrayal of the IRS mess, and their pretense of civil libertarianism over the NSA revelations, have pulled down Obama's approval ratings. Good work! So, geniuses, what's the follow-up?

House passes late-term abortion ban
The House voted Tuesday to impose a nationwide ban on abortions after 22 weeks of pregnancy over Democratic objections that the bill represents a dramatic attempt by Republicans to restrict abortion rights... 

With limited exceptions, the legislation would ban the abortion of a fetus younger than 20 weeks old, or at 22 weeks of pregnancy under a different measuring system. The ban would be backed by possible fines against doctors, as well as prison sentence of as many as five years.

What can you say about a movement that, having expertly wielded the dark chords of the Mighty Wurlitzer to get the audience to hiss Obama, suddenly segues into America's least favorite Gospel number accompanied by the Crazy Cletus Fetus Brigade? And sends its fine young men like Yuval Levin of National Review out on stage with a bucket on one foot to say stuff like this:

The front page of today’s New York Times carries a story about the late-term-abortion ban being considered in the House. The headline in the print edition is “Unfazed by 2012, G.O.P. Is Seeking Abortion Limits.” As if the people struggling to save the lives of innocent children whose only crime is that they are unwanted by their mothers or would disrupt somebody’s plans should be “fazed” into inaction by the 2012 election...

It's like they're trying to get people to imagine pregnant women chained to cots in a forced birthing center festooned with crosses and pictures of Todd Akin.

I think for some of them it's a perverse sort of strategy, based on a certainty that citizens will swoon for this sort of thing -- no pale pastels! But for most of them, I think it's just a tic. Or maybe that's too mild. Maybe it's a form of epilepsy.

However buttoned-down the operation can be, however smoothly things are running, every so often the brethren simply have to ululate and handle snakes in public. You may have forgotten that, because the Romney campaign was such a mess. After the tenth or twelfth time the Democrats dollied in on a Republican face that had been blackened by an exploding cigar, you came to assume that the Dems had gotten super-great at politics. They've certainly improved from when I was a young man, but they have mostly been fortunate that their opponents started having such frequent and spectacular seizures.

This is a natural consequence of the conservative anomie that has in recent months been frequently and hilariously discussed. Over the past five or six years, nearly all their crazy ideas have been discredited or at least called into question. People have tumbled to the fact that, unless carefully watched, the dynamo of capitalism will inevitably overheat and blow up your economy; that ginning up wars in the Middle East doesn't make the country safer; that you don't need fundamentalists to win elections if you have women and minorities; etc.

In fact, the recent conservative successes I mentioned are based on a total reversal of their position on surveillance from the last time they held power. Victory in any guise is gratifying, and so this must be to them -- but it comes with a price: it abstracts them still further from their true authoritarian and xenophobic nature. Why, the strain must be even greater than pretending to give a shit about Mexicans. And that's why they run amok.

What they need is someone forceful and charismatic to hold them in line and make them behave -- but it can't be one of the old-timers 'cause they're all RINO squares. So far I see Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz...

It'll be an interesting couple of years.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP...

...following up on the NSA stuff. The brethren aren't trying so hard now to affect shock at breaches of the Fourth Amendment: They just insist that NSA is, like everything else coming out of the White House these days, a Scandal, and stir the shit.

One of my finds for which I had no room was the only libertarian on earth who isn't making a big thing of this: John Stossel --

...many libertarians are furious at this latest intrusion of "Big Brother." 

So what's wrong with me? I just can't get that worked up about it...

So it's invasive, probably illegal and maybe useless. I ought to be very angry. But I'm not. Why? 

I need to keep thinking about this issue, but for now, two reasons: 

1. Terrorists do want to murder us. If the NSA is halfway competent, Big Data should help detect plots.
2. My electronic privacy has already been utterly shredded by Google, Amazon, YouTube and so on... 

I'm angrier about other things Big Government does in the name of keeping me safe: forcing me to wear safety gear, limiting where I may go, stripping me at airports, forcing me to pay $2,300 for more military than we need.

There's a reason why Stossel's on TV and Nick Gillespie isn't, and it ain't photogeneity. At least he realizes, down deep,  that libertarianism is mostly about money and pique.

A FAN'S NUTS.

Let's see what those scamps at kulturkampf site Acculturated are up to. R.J. Moeller:

Our post-modern, secularized, relativistic culture does not quite know what to do with “true believers.” Not, at least, when it comes to deeper questions of mankind’s existence and our relationship to the Divine. We’re strong-to-quite-strong when it comes to dealing with stuff like vapid celebrity Tweets, the YAC (yards after catch) racked up by our favorite fantasy football player, or the “controversy” of an under-performing new movie on its opening weekend. We’re lousy with politicians and pundits who tell us what we want to hear. 

But give us a prominent man or woman with strong, articulated, uncompromising values in the public square–especially if these values are of the traditional, Judeo-Christian variety–and people freak out. 

Enter: Timothy Richard Tebow.

Yes, it's a paen to the world's most famous backup quarterback. Moeller wonders aloud why people are always talking about Tebow's religiosity, and blames a corrupt press ("I dare you to read a single article or column on Tim Tebow that doesn’t make multiple references to his evangelical faith or [lamely] attempt to weave religious-sounding puns into the text of the piece") rather than Tebow's propensity to spontaneously take a knee, make anti-abortion ads for Focus on the Family, and otherwise inform the world at large that he's down with the King.

Also:

As a young religious American who grows increasingly weary of the “Get-Out-of-Jail Free” card that is offered to anyone in our popular culture who espouses spiritual beliefs in literally anything other than Christianity, I am glad that Tim Tebow exists and continues to fight the good fight.

I'm having a hard time thinking of any actors or rock stars who make a big deal of their Zoroastrianism or whatever, at least not since Madonna was playing at Kabbalah in, when was that, 1988? But I don't follow the NFL closely, so maybe that's what he's talking about. Are there Orthodox Jewish players who daven on the field, or Muslims who call a timeout to pray to Mecca? Because then maybe I'd start paying attention again.

I will post here Moeller's closing only because I know many of you refuse to click the links and I don't want you to be deprived:

But I won’t be devastated if I wake up one morning and find a headline about Tebow having a child out of wedlock or about him being rounded-up by police after an all-night Jack Daniels-fueled bender. 

Why? Because my hope is in Him, not Tim. And from every discernible indicator he’s ever given the public, so is Tim’s.

That's just magnificently bad, plus it inspires a wonderful vision of Tebow staggering unshaven and disheveled out of a police station and, as he genuflects for the cameras, blowing a titanic whiskey fart.

FANTASY CAMP.

Ramesh Ponnuru, National Review:

At Media Matters, Accuracy Doesn’t

In criticizing an NR editorial, Hannah Groch-Begley of Media Matters can’t get through her first sentence without getting something wrong. “The National Review editorial board used the murder conviction of Kermit Gosnell to push for an abortion ban it acknowledges to be unconstitutional that would outlaw all abortions after 20 weeks, even in cases when the health of the mother is at risk.” The editorial “acknowledges” no such thing, stating instead that the ban would conflict with Supreme Court decisions that themselves lack constitutional merit. (“The Court should welcome the opportunity to revisit its rulings on the subject, which have been by any measure extreme, to say nothing of their fundamental lack of constitutional merit.”)

Groch-Begley's error, it seems, is calling something unconstitutional because the Supreme Court of the United States found it unconstitutional. I've been reading Marbury v. Madison wrong all these years, apparently, and SCOTUS' judgement on constitutional matters is less meaningful than that of the National Review editorial board.

The rest of the post is bullshit, too. I'm not going to bother to break it down here -- go look; the key phrases are "rarity is of course a matter of perspective" and "she repeats the spin that the Gosnell case resulted from excessive restrictions on abortion. That may be what her side of this debate would like to believe..."

In any case, "At Media Matters, Accuracy Doesn’t" is about the last title Ponnuru should be using -- unless the idea is to convince regular readers that some enemy of the people lied without obliging them to look at the facts, which, come to think of it, never mind.

UPDATE. In comments, trex is very good on Ponnuru's prevarication regarding the Gosnell grand jury report.