BOTH ENDS AGAINST THE MIDDLE.

Last week conservatives were mad that the tyrant Obama was rushing us to war; now they're mad that he isn't ("PEACE IN OUR TIME: OBAMA CAVES TO PUTIN, ASSAD, IRAN"). A call appears to have gone out among the brethren for new ideas. I think Bridget Johnson of PJ Media has a winning entry:

Game-Changer: Signs of the al-Qaeda-Assad Alliance

...The Iranians aren’t taking countermeasures against al-Qaeda forces supposedly threatening their brother Assad, yet continue to offer haven to the terror group’s leaders. But then again, Assad isn’t taking countermeasures against the al-Qaeda strongholds, either.

It’s just one omen that has alarmed Syrians about an unholy alliance being overlooked by the West.

Long story short: These guys all love each other (and jihad), and are only play-fighting (albeit realistically) to deceive us and protect Iran.

It's brilliant -- whatever Obama does, as long as he doesn't nuke Syria and/or Iran he's still wrong!

At this point the impeachment proceedings are going to look like a scene from The Crucible.

UPDATE. Mark_Bzzz, in comments: "I think they're overusing the 'game changer' meme. The game has been changed so many times in their minds they don't know if they're playing tiddlywinks or Go Fish." I think it's Calvinball.

I MEANT TO DO THAT.

Megan McArdle contributes to the latest conservative Syria tantrum, calling the President "stumbling" and "tin-eared" (Yeah, I know! Megan McArdle!) and piling up several other insults before coming to her teeth-gritted point that if Obama's ploy works out the way some people think it's going to, it won't count because no fair:

Keep that in mind as the revisionist history begins emerging from some quarters -- i.e., our patiently brilliant president once again demonstrates his mastery of n-dimensional policy chess. This may end up coming out “right,” in the sense that the U.S. will have been delivered a face-saving way to back down from a threat on which Obama never seriously intended to make good, and Syria may give up some of its chemical weapons, forcing the government to rely on unreliable methods such as bullets to slaughter thousands of its own citizens.

But if it does turn out “well,” this will be because the president was lucky, not brilliant...

Human beings tend to judge failure or success by outcome, rather than process. It’s an easy heuristic, but as in so many things, the easy way out is often disastrous.

Hmmm, where I have I heard this argument before? Ah yes --"Jane Galt," January 2007*, talking about Iraq not going the way she expected:

This has not convinced me of the brilliance of the doves, because precisely none of the ones that I argued with predicted that things would go wrong in the way they did. If you get the right result, with the wrong mechanism, do you get credit for being right, or being lucky?

Everyone gets a little peeved at pundits who are spectacularly wrong and proceed blithely as if they hadn't been, but after this, I'm actually grateful that they don't take the time to explain why other people were only right because of luck, or why right is wrong, etc.

(*Sorry for the indirect link -- McArdle has wisely memory-holed [or, as we like to say around here, Sullivaned] her old posts.)

HOW YOU KNOW YOU'RE WINNING.

My old home town is having a Democratic mayoral primary today, and it looks like Bill de Blasio has it in a walk, notwithstanding that he plans to tax the rich to fund pre-K education. The rich don't like this at all, of course, and have engaged their servants at National Review to rouse the people to their side.

The result is what you might expect, only funnier. The pre-K plan is actually "pure resentment-driven, Occupy-style hate," says National Review, unleashed upon a vulnerable minority: "New Yorkers earning $500,000 a year or more."

Sensing perhaps that sympathetic tears are unforthcoming, the Review appeals to the citizens' self-interest, claiming that taxes on the rich are what cause high crime rates, graffiti, squeegee men, and the Crown Heights riots:

The last time a man of Bill de Blasio’s political bent was entrusted with the mayoralty of New York, the city experienced 2,000 murders a year, anti-Jewish riots, economic stagnation, and a general sense of ungovernability.

If only, instead of begging money from Gerald Ford, Abe Beame had just cut Nelson Rockefeller's taxes! That would have fixed things up in no time. Ultimately they produce a passage athwart which some editor should have stood crying "Stop":

The centerpiece of Mr. de Blasio’s campaign agenda is a mugging — a multibillion-dollar forcible wealth transfer from New York taxpayers to the public-sector unions that constitute the backbone of the city’s Democratic machine.

Yes, the affable de Blasio skulks in the alley, sap at the ready, waiting for Mrs. Toffeebottom to return from the opera. Well, didn't Bloomberg warn us his wife and child are black?

From there it actually degenerates, with the editors complaining that de Blasio is from Massachusetts (!), and lives in Park Slope, where there are vegetarians. Oh, and that he doesn't have private-sector experience, a charge which proved decisive, you will remember, in the 2012 Presidential election.

I am a horrible person and I love seeing them so flustered.

UPDATE. Looks like there may be a runoff, but I do prophesy the election lights on de Blasio, after which the forces of capital will pull out all the stops to block him. I'm not a morning person but that New York Times headline, "Lhota Hopes to Capitalize on Elite Dismay Over a Liberal Tilt," really lifted my spirits on the way to work today.

Some of you were rough on Chuckling in comments, but you know de Blasio's not perfect: He went all in for the Atlantic Yards reno, after all. Still, it's important why people vote for candidates, and good to see New Yorkers might at last be growing sick of rich fucks.

UPDATE. On the other hand, as the astute Josh Greenman points out, most Democrats still say Bloomberg has done a good job. They could mean, though, that he's done a good job of running the giant food courts that large swaths of the city have been turned into, which may temper but not slake the citizens' thirst for some stronger liberal initiatives than vice laws now that Big Nanny is on his way out.

AT NATIONAL REVIEW, THE DREAM WILL NEVER DIE.

Shorter John O'Sullivan: Well, at least they still hate fags in Australia!

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about rightbloggers and Obama's Syria push. I'm opposed to bombing Syria -- my bets against American intervention have been good for years and I'm inclined to let them ride. Rightbloggers make bad allies, though, for reasons I lay out in the column -- the nutshell is, they're obviously not against half-assed foreign adventures, and only oppose this one because they see a political opening.  They'll bomb the shit out of Iran first chance they get.

Maybe their ill wind will blow some good in the Congressional vote. But you can't forget what they are. They're a little like Hyman Roth, except you can't respect them.

UPDATE. Ur-neocon Norman Podhoretz dodders out of Hell's vestibule to tell us Obama is trying to make warmongering look bad on purpose because he hates America. Far from being "incompetent and amateurish" as all the other conservatives are saying, Obama is in Podhoretz's estimate "a brilliant success as measured by what he intended all along to accomplish." And what is that? Weakening America abroad!

As a left-wing radical, Mr. Obama believed that the United States had almost always been a retrograde and destructive force in world affairs. Accordingly, the fundamental transformation he wished to achieve here was to reduce the country's power and influence...

Podhoretz knows it doesn't look like that to you, but he knows Obama's kind -- no, not the schvartzes, at least not this time; he means socialists. Like all good one-worlders, Obama's willing to use trickery to destroy the U.S. -- even pretending to be pro-war when in fact he's secretly tickling the "war-weariness of the American people" by, among other things, "using drones instead of troops whenever he was politically forced into military action." (How can we sustain Americans' fighting spirit without American casualties? What's a bloody shirt without blood?)

In fact, though his fellow wingnuts are always talking about how arrogant Obama is, Podhoretz knows that in fact Obama is selfless -- such a zealot, in fact, that he'll willingly sacrifice himself for his cause:

For this fulfillment of his dearest political wishes, Mr. Obama is evidently willing to pay the price of a sullied reputation. In that sense, he is by his own lights sacrificing himself for what he imagines is the good of the nation of which he is the president, and also to the benefit of the world, of which he loves proclaiming himself a citizen.

Norman Podhoretz can't believe how blind you all have been not to see it. Up next: How Obama drags American to socialism while presiding over an unprecedented stock market rally. Oh wait -- they say that all the time! Maybe Podhoretz isn't senile after all -- maybe he's actually a conservative thought leader. But how would anyone tell the difference?

THE LIBERTARIAN RACKET IN A NUTSHELL.

Ole Perfesser Glenn Reynolds likes to call himself a libertarian. Now, his libertarianism is effectively anti-abortion, but that's no contradiction because, as libertarians constantly tell us, libertarians don't have to support a woman's right to choose -- and, considering what a sausage fest the movement is, that's got to be a big part of the attraction for guys who like their Maximum Freedom to come with an exemption for chicks.

(If you're a fan of this sort of thing, do check out the new Reason story assuring wingnuts that "Conservatives are wrong to worry that libertarian policies will lead to libertinism." The author, like all these guys, describes herself as pro-choice, but reports with excitement that "support for unregulated abortion is declining, with a slight majority now describing itself as pro-life, a startling reversal from a decade ago," and it's all because of Freedom. Whether you like abortion rights or think they're murder and must be banned, you're sure to love the new libertarian future!)

In this weird era of wingnuts pretending to be peaceniks, libertarians are reaching out -- but not to the liberals who've sided with them on Syria. This month CPAC will have a regional conference. The last national CPAC conference, you may remember, had a panel on bridging the gap with black people, which worked out terribly. This one will feature a panel which should go a lot better, called "Can Social Conservatives and Libertarians Ever Get Along?" American Conservative Union Chairman Al Cardenas thinks they can: "At a time when President Obama is leading the country off the economic, social, and foreign policy 'cliff,' I am confident that libertarians and social conservatives can find enough common ground to save the United States of America," he says.

Makes sense. As National Review has told us, Rick Santorum and libertarians have a lot in common, and what do liberals stand for that libertarians should approve? Besides abortion rights, which, we have established, have nothing to do with freedom.

How about overturning stop-and-frisk laws? That should be an easy libertarian lay-up, and indeed Reason has several articles critical of the practice and supportive of its overturn in New York -- though, if you make the mistake of looking into the comments, you'll find the punters are mostly anxious to tell each other that it's actually liberals who are for stop-and-frisk because Bloomberg hates soda freedom.

But while their magazine is good on the subject, out in the wide world you don't hear a lot of big-time libertarians complaining about the practice (like Rand Paul -- and he's their director of minority outreach!), though they and other conservatives have been ceaselessly enraged about airport scanners since, oh, about January 20, 2009. In fact you'll find some professed libertarians who support stop-and-frisk.

The reason for the difference is self-evident: Stop-and-frisk is generally not a White People Problem. And if it's not a White People Problem, it's probably not going to do much for the libertarian/social conservative alliance.

Reynolds usually keeps his mouth shut about stop-and-frisk, too, though sometimes he uses it as part of the anti-urban shtick that excites his base. This week he came up with a classic of the genre:

Speaking of urban agony, by the way — if folks on the right were truly Macchiavellian, they’d be joining the critics of stop-and-frisk. The big Blue enclaves are where the crime and racial strife mostly are; letting those get worse would probably benefit folks on the right. Luckily for the hipsters, righties are too principled for that sort of “heightening the contradictions” thing.

You have to admire the density of it: He not only gets in knocks on effete city folks and "hipsters," and  the obligatory Ooga Booga, but he ends by suggesting that conservative support for stop-and-frisk is "principled" rather than reactionary.

When I criticize people like Reynolds as glibertarians or bullshit libertarians or whatever, don't get me wrong -- it's not out of respect for genuine libertarians. It's that the only libertarianism we're ever likely to get is the kind that conservatives have been giving us all along.

UPDATE. @SAHenryKrinkle tips me to FreedomWorks blogger Kemberlee Kaye. The tea party outfit says it's all about the "fight for less government, lower taxes, and more freedom" but Kaye is still pissed that a judge ruled against New York's stop-and-frisk, because that only looks like Freedom to the untrained eye:

The ill-written decision (quite literally the most poorly written, constructed and reasoned federal decision I've ever read) veiled as a Fourth Amendment win, appears to be nothing more than political correctness brokering... Neither is it appropriate to use the Fourth Amendment to push baseless diversity initiatives.

Clearly the Fourth Amendment is spoiled for them if they catch black people using it.

UPDATE 2. At LGM Scott Lemieux gives Reynolds' "Ultimate Conservatarian Post " much more thorough treatment than I did.

In comments, FMguru complains, "I thought we were all in agreement that 'Libertarian' was essentially a tag that down-the-line conservatives adopt when they want to distance themselves from some element of the Republican/conservative coalition." Well, sure, but there are inevitably some hardcore types who actually believe in the stuff; don't forget, once upon a time people painted their faces for Adam Ant. History is full of cults.

Also in comments, nomoremister reminds me that one of the Crazy Jesus Lady's most memorable rants was actually inspired by the indignity of white people having to be scanned just like Muslims.

UPDATE 3. I'd like to thank our libertarian advocate in comments for the many lengthy "args" he has encouraged us all to "grok" ("Did you not catch, that TECH IS GOING TO SOLVE THIS whether you and I like it or not?"). Cool stories, bro, but can you just get to the "Buy Gold" pitch already?

UPDATE 4. Sorry, commenters who were having fun with him, I had to remove several of the transhumanist troll's comments, and blacklist him -- I hadn't noticed, but he's basically a scamster running a "Be Your Own Boss" racket, and was planting his links just as less imaginative spam artists do, but with libertarian palaver to keep it interesting. Should have known -- that's <i>the libertarian racket in a nutshell</I> (curtain). UPDATE 4.2. Oops, I just looked again and Arg Grok's site is not, at least on the surface, a commerce site -- his "GUARANTEED INCOME & CHOOSE YOUR BOSS" pitch made me think it was, not to mention his fevered pitchman manner -- you know: never really listen and always be closing. But his hustle seems to be ideological.  I'm leaving him blocked, nonetheless, because I'm sick of him.

JUVENAL HAS NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT.

So Rod Dreher was reading Dante and it made him repentant over some harsh things he said back when he was "deeply impressed by SPY magazine, and its way of savaging the rich and the famous with extremely clever, lacerating prose" -- which style he claimed to have emulated (though I've been reading him since he was a New York Post movie reviewer and I don't remember him producing a single intentionally funny line):

I wrote some pretty funny stuff for the first half of my career, and I’m not going to say I was inaccurate in all my judgments. But I was thoughtlessly cruel... 

Over the years, I’ve heard from people I hurt with my words... and I’ve regretted what I wrote. Again, it’s not necessarily that I made an incorrect judgment in assessing a politician, a movie, etc., but that I did so inhumanely. I find now that the kind of criticism that I used to admire now strikes me as having the overriding quality of malice. 

To speak in Dantean terms, if I am granted to pass to Paradise through Purgatory, my misuse of the gift of language and writing will be the thing about me that most merits the purifying fire.

Snif. Seems like only yesterday -- in fact, it was yesterday. Here's Dreher today:

Ariel Castro & Other Cretins Who Deserved It

...There are lots of people I feel sorry for in this world. These are four I cannot pity. There is some atavistic part of me that doesn’t object to the rough justice they have received, though in Castro’s case, it is truly regrettable that he did not repent and die a natural death. My pity in that case is a function of my religious belief. I said a prayer for mercy on his soul, but my heart wasn’t really in it, I’m afraid.

So, I guess what Dreher really meant was, he was going to continue to be "thoughtlessly cruel" -- he's just going to stop trying to be funny about it.

It's an interesting type of Christianity: One that allows contempt for one's fellow men as long as it's solemn. Pleasure (except for the sneaky pleasure of moral superiority) is the thing that makes it wrong.

That's okay. Dreher was never made to write satire; he was born to be its subject.

TIME FOR RAND PAUL TO MAKE A SPEECH ON FIRE ISLAND.

Shorter libertarians: Next thing you know, Big Gummint will make us sell wedding cakes to black people!

More libertarian gay rights fun here.

UPDATE. "The homofascist rainbow-shirts are at it again," says Matt Barber about the case at Catholic Online. "They've unsheathed, once more, their anti-Christian long knives." He must be one of those religious libertarians. Barber also finds a black preacher who rejects the civil rights argument: "Don't compare your sin to my skin!" Maybe Reason can make a t-shirt out of that.

WHEN THEY LET UNPROPERTIED WHITE MEN VOTE, HE KNEW IT WAS ALL DOWNHILL FROM THERE.

As I've noted before, whereas once upon a time they felt the need to at least pretend they liked Labor Day, conservatives now openly express contempt for the holiday, the socialistic innovations it celebrates (such as the 40-hour week and paid sick leave), and basically anybody who has managed to win wages enough to decently feed and house a family without employment at a think tank or megachurch.

Still, Kevin D. Williamson at National Review lays it on a bit thick. His "Red Monday" column (subtitled "We don’t need this quasi-Canadian, crypto-Communist holiday") reads like some bright kid tried to forge a P.J. O'Rourke column but couldn't manage the humor part. "Highly paid union men," for example, are hypocrites because they shop on Labor Day while retail workers must punch the clock; I guess Williamson's never heard of RWDSU.  And his big payoff is that "as a terminus of summer, Labor Day is disappointing," because it's still hot outside. I don't think Jerry Seinfeld in his prime could have put that one over. But the really creepy bit is this:

The Canadian typographical workers had been demanding a 58-hour work week and the repeal of anti-union laws. Parliament obliged, and of course the unions’ immediate response was to press for a 54-hour work week, and then a still shorter one, and so on, until everybody was French.

I mean,  at least when they used the slippery slope argument against gay marriage, it led to some juxtapositions that were actually humorous.

They must have some idea how normal people would react to this if they saw it. But, come to think of it, how would that ever happen?

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about rightbloggers' reactions to Miley Cyrus. Usually they turn something serious into something ridiculous, but I think I like them best when they turn something ridiculous into something bugfuck crazy.

UPDATE. Whittle seems to be a fan fave in comments. Kia:

He seems to hate [Kurt] Weill even more than the Nazis did, and for the same reasons. That he totally misses that irony is, of course, only to be expected. But to invoke the music of Kurt Weill--composed during a period of total political and economic collapse-- as the source of the political thuggery that hounded him out of Germany, well, that takes some doing...

AGoodQuestion wonders why Whittle didn't even bring up Bertolt Brecht, whose lyrics he must surely find as "dark, dystopian and depressing" as Weill's music, and went instead for Lost in the Stars, with lyrics by Maxwell Anderson. I'd love to know what Whittle thinks of Weill's collaboration with Ogden Nash and S.J. Perelman. "I'm a Stranger Here Myself" always makes me want to smash the state!

"YOUNG MAN, THAT'S THE FUNNIEST THING YOU'VE SAID ALL NIGHT! SCREW THE IRISH!"

A passage from James Taranto's latest at the Wall Street Journal:

Life Imitates 'South Park'

 "After the TV show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy begins showing, metrosexuality becomes a major fad among both the men and the boys, and they all begin to act effeminate. At the school bus stop, instead of their usual winter clothing, Stan, Cartman, and Kenny wear unmasculine clothing. Kyle, who does not want to conform, is beaten up by a metrosexual gang at school. Mr. Garrison and Mr. Slave, the town's gay couple, are opposed to the fad since they feel that the gay culture should be unique to gays. The women of the town are initially in favor of their husbands' improved hygiene and willingness to communicate, but soon tire of the men becoming increasingly self-absorbed."--Wikipedia.org summary of "South Park Is Gay!," aired Oct. 22, 2003

"Booker OK With Speculation That He's Gay: 'So What Does It Matter if I Am?' "--TalkingPointsMemo.com, Aug. 27, 2013

Haw, see it's funny because... uh... 'cuz fags.

Historically in the world of comedy, there's no laugh too cheap to get -- cf. Albert Brooks,"I tell you one thing, when he said ‘shit,’ I almost died!" But when you don't even bother to construct a joke because you know your audience will go for anything Politically Incorrect, you may have actually created a frontier.

THE CULTURE WAR ON BASIC CABLE.

While you hipsters were debating the cultural significance of Miley Cyrus, at the Washington Times Charles Hurt was drawing kulturkampf from the fetid well of Honey Boo-Boo.

America, if you want to know what the establishment media and the beneficent federal government think of you, tune your television sets in to “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo.”

?

It appears that no one on the program actually works for a living, other than to exploit the child in beauty pageants. Now, of course, they are exploiting the whole family with the show on the “Learning” Channel, an entity that, by the way, was founded by the federal government in 1972 to educate the poor masses. 

As with most government programs, the result is incestuously stupid, lazy and hopeless people who cannot roll themselves off the bed long enough to find a job and buy a better house that doesn’t rattle violently every time a train goes by.

While under the guidance of "the beneficent federal government" the network did supply wholesome educational fare; but after it was privatized, first under the ownership of the Financial News Network and then the Discovery Channel, it became a kingdom of crap. Hurt fails to mention this, probably because it would suggest a vastly different object lesson than he intended.

But Hurt still has the "establishment media" to blame, and in his view Here Comes Honey Boo-Boo is not offered as entertainment to attract viewers and advertisers, but as a shaming spectacle to let the rubes know with what contempt the establishment views them:

Honey Boo Boo and her fat clan is what liberal Northeast and West Coast elites think of most Americans — especially Southerners and rural people. That is because in their vast and cloistered ignorance they have never met any normal Americans nor traveled past the Potomac River. They have never been to a rodeo.

If only we could get TLC execs to a rodeo, maybe they'd change their ways. (TLC did have a rodeo reality show, but that was in 2006; presumably it was driven off the air by the Democratic sweep in Congress.)

But there is hope yet. 

The great thing about America and the genuinely promising thing about the onslaught of modern technology is the stunning degree to which the elite’s long-held monopoly on media and culture is shattered. The barbarians are at the gate and can no longer be kept out. 

Those barbarians, of course, come in the form of “Duck Dynasty.”

Ah, Duck Dynasty -- the current conservative cultural touchstone, and one that is not a product of the establishment media, but transmitted from a barn with "A&E" painted on the side by ham radio operators.  Hurt's exegesis adds nothing much to the now-customary yap about how the Robertsons are everything that's right with America, but he does have a wow finish:

In one episode aired recently, the patriarch observed: “Uptown living, you’ve got to call 911. Where I am, I am 911.” 

Truly, an observation worthy of Alexis de Tocqueville or the Federalist Papers.

This suggests a new direction for the Tea Party; instead of handing out copies of the Constitution, they can hand out DVDs of Duck Dynasty, and maybe other offerings from the same production company, such as Shark Hunters, Sole Survivor, and Auction Hunters,  which I'm sure also have a story to tell about America -- probably the same one Mencken had.

Me, I prefer to celebrate America with a Beverly Hillbillies marathon.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the shooting death of Christopher Lane and the Ooga Booga reaction by rightbloggers. It includes my theory about why the time was right for this outbreak.

SEE YOU IN THE NORTON ANTHOLOGY.

I should mention, now that he's gone ahead and pulled the trigger, that Tbogg has for years been one of my favorite writers -- and I needn't qualify that with "in the blogosphere," which is like calling someone the smartest guy on a National Review cruise. That he is known as a "liberal blogger" is just an accident of history, I think -- he's really a satirist (as his hilarious Filner summer camp chronicles show) who has hunted where, in our low mean time, the ducks pretty consistently wind up: Out on absurdly elevated media perches, defending the indefensible in loud, quacking voices, just begging for his buckshot.

Part of a satirist's racket is wisdom, and Tbogg has supplied enough of that ("no one is going to get a blogging Pulitzer for being the fastest to post what they just saw and heard on the TV"), but I've been most grateful for the laughs -- for the times when he has greeted the sententious argh-blargh of internet hierophants with appropriate seriousness, or got right to the nub on the works of Ayn Rand:

One assumes that it is somewhere around page 600 when Dagny Taggart has sex with Hank Reardon but it ends badly because, while sex is the highest celebration of human values, giving your partner an orgasm because they expect one is just sanctioning your own victimhood.

I speak in the present perfect continuous tense because I can't imagine we've heard the last of him -- though if he slips off like Rimbaud into the quarries and stays silent on this foolish world forever, I can't say I would blame him.

BUT SINCE 9/11 I'M OUTRAGED BY CHAPPAQUIDDICK THE NSA.

From out of the past, Jeff Jarvis on the NSA revelations:

As a Democrat, I am disgusted with President Obama

I haven't paid attention to Jarvis for a while, preferring the 2.0 Twitter version, FakeJeffJarvis ("Other kids dreamed of being an astronaut. I dreamed of having 500+ LinkedIn connections"). I remember him as the right wing's second favorite futurist, and one of their very favorite bullshit liberals; a man who described himself as "a former liberal pacifist transformed by 9/11 into an avid warblogger," and of whom a fan aptly said to Ann Althouse, "I think people on the right are also horrified at just how left the left has become when people like you and Jeff Jarvis and Instapundit are labeled as conservative or hard right..."

Jarvis has been since-9/11-outraged-by-Chappaquidick for a long time. I also recall him after the 2006 Congressional elections, wishing Joe Lieberman's victory would deprive the Democrats of a Senate majority. And in the 2008 campaign there were few standard-issue anti-Obama sentiments Jarvis did not circulate. March 21, 2008: "I may be the only person who’s not become worshipful of Obama’s speech on race and religion and who finds it more disturbing the more I think about it." April 30, 2008: "Now I’m actually angrier about Obama and the Rev. Wright than before." Etc.

After Obama won, Jarvis was momentarily pleased:

I have been impressed with Obama post-election. He has been moving to the center, where I am glad to see him. He has been unafraid to work with strong characters from the Clinton administration, including his rival. He was unafraid to reach out with a peace offering to the left’s boogeyman, Joseph Lieberman.

Thereafter he used Obama as a means of flogging his usual futurist schtick -- "Now that Barack Obama is in the White House, he must continue to use and spread the tools of the internet and transparency that he so brilliantly plied to win the office or else it would make his promises of change empty."

But Jarvis' thinkfluence didn't amount to much, and now in 2013 he's decided to take a bold stand "as a Democrat" against Obama because of the NSA.  This from a guy who used to say when people bitched about the NSA under a President not named Obama, "this isn’t as simple as raising the tattered-from-overuse privacy flag" -- also known as the "privacy buggabuzzword."

When it's important I'm willing to make common cause with some rightwing asshole to push the tide back on civil liberties. But when you line up with Rand Paul you know what you're getting. Jarvis is so full of shit, he's as useless as an ally as he is as an opponent -- maybe even more useless; he discredits any cause by adopting it. I'm beginning to think newspapers would already be utterly dead by now if Jarvis hadn't spent the past ten years predicting it.

THE ETERNAL RETURN.

Selected sections from Megan McArdle on how Fox News Matt Drudge The rise of warblogs Duck Dynasty big money and newspapers will make the liberalmedia less liberalmedia:

Those of us in Washington live in an era of Democratic triumphalism. Most of the Democrats I talk to are convinced that their destiny is almost upon them.

So, that's Matt Yglesias and the black lady on the bus?

People will come to the news assuming that the people making it have an agenda -- and they will seek out outlets that match their own agenda, if they see political news at all.

Boy, when people find out about this Media Bias stuff, there'll be some changes I tell you what,

A more ideological media will be hiring more conservatives, and that will change what a large portion of the country gets as news.

Because conservatives gots all the moneys, I guess. Well, I figured that crony capitalist Obama stuff was bullshit. (Later: "As I say, a more ideological media will probably also be a more conservative media, because there are a lot more conservatives in the donor class, and in the audience, than there are in the media." Ah, the audience! If only all those hardcore American conservatives knew how to find Breitbart.com, this revolution would have already taken place! Too bad they made the URL so difficult to spell. Maybe a button at AOL would help.)

How much does this matter? In his pretty convincing book, "Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind," Tim Groseclose of UCLA argues that it matters a lot. Here’s how he lays out recent research on the question of media effects:

[Long incomprehensible blockquote with statistics] 

The concept of media lambda is a bit technical, so I won’t explain it here; check out Groseclose’s book if you’re interested.

(groans, holds head in hands)

What this summary suggests is that a large number of people, from political professionals to academics who have studied the matter, think that the media’s ideological composition has a substantial effect on elections.

And we're back where we started and, for all I know anymore, where we've always been: A "large number of people" believe it, and everything proceeds from that, with a few lambdas thrown in to confuse the yokels.

I never thought I'd say this, but McArdle's starting to give Goldberg a run for his money.

TODAY IN FILM REVIEWS BY RIGHTWING PROPAGANDISTS:

Shorter Richard A. Epstein of the Hoover Institute: The Butler is bad for race relations in America, and I'll do my bit to reverse its effect by explaining why the Civil Rights Act was a mistake.

See, on the one hand, Title II of the Act desegregated some otherwise intractably segregated areas of American life; but on the other, "the constant use of disparate impact tests in education, housing, and employment led to an overreach by the new civil rights establishment of today."

Previously on Richard A. Epstein Explains Racial Justice: "The Supreme Court should strike the VRA down and let Congress return to the drawing board for something better." Epstein is also the author of Forbidden Grounds: The Case Against Employment Discrimination Laws.

Sadly, I can't find anything by Epstein on Django Unchained.

UPDATE. In comments Fats Durston applies the Epstein method to Schindler's List: "its wrong narrative of the evolution of anti-Semitism serves to strengthen a set of misguided Israeli government programs at a time when it is no longer possible to bless all actions of the Zionist movement." So that's why it won all those Oscars! Well, you know Hollyweird.

Meanwhile in rightwing world,  Jim Hoft is moved to poetry, or some species of it:

HOW AWFUL! Oprah’s “The Butler” Is Chock Full of Racist Lies (Video) 

How absolutely horrible!
Oprah and Hollywood are going ga-ga over The Butler a project that is purposely filled with racist lies from beginning to end.
What horrible people. 

As Eric Bolling pointed out today on The Five that the “real” Butler was born in Virginia.
His mother was never raped by a white man.
His father was never killed by a white man.
That was just included as an extra jab at whitey.

I find it difficult to believe he typed this; it reads as if it were taken down by a psychiatric examiner. 

LIGHTS, CAMERA, CULTURE WAR!

From National Review:

Santorum’s Storytelling
As head of a Christian movie studio, he aims to change the culture... 

In June, [Rick] Santorum became CEO of EchoLight Studios, which produces Christian films. Santorum, who changed his own views on abortion as an adult, believes that if conservatives wish to gain converts, they must look not only to politics but also to the culture. 

“We’re losing this debate not because of politics,” Santorum told attendees last Saturday at the Family Leadership Summit in Ames, Iowa, the second annual gathering of the group by the same name. “Politicians didn’t change the culture — the popular culture changed America"... 

Santorum offers The Passion of the Christ as an example of a well-made movie that was also Christian. Other movies he cites as models of what he hopes to produce at EchoLight are Ben-Hur and The Song of Bernadette. “You used to have all sorts of movies that were very authentic in their Christian message, and it was mainstream Hollywood that made them,” Santorum remarks. “That has disappeared in the last 40 or 50 years.”

Coming soon from Santorum Studios:

The Song of K-Lo. In the 1990s, when all the other children in her small town of Chelsea, N.Y. are doing ecstasy and having sex, Kathryn Jean stays in her room studying the Holy Bible and Commentary.  One day she is visited there by a beautiful lady who glides around the room and tells her to write conservative essays. All the children and even the adults all laugh at her, but Kathryn Jean sticks steadfastly to her task and eventually ascends into an editorial job at National Review. In a touching coda, it is revealed that the beautiful lady was actually Rollerena.

God's Florist. In a dystopian future, America has gone totally gay; straight couples who dare walk hand-in-hand endure vile taunts by bitchy homosexuals, and come home to find their homes redecorated;  by government decree, all children must spend their 16th summer in The Castro; Hooters has been replaced by a new chain called The Meat Rack. The only citizen who will stand up to the pink tide is a brave florist who refuses to provide services to same-sex weddings. His righteous example sparks a revolution, and the gays, encouraged by savage beatings, flee the country, freeing men to triumphantly pat each other's asses without feeling self-conscious about it, and women to procreate and do laundry. Screenplay by Elizabeth Scalia.

The Palin of the Christ. Guilty only of patriotism, Sarah Palin is dragged from the Republican National Convention to the court of the liberal media. When asked, "What is truth?" she replies, "Well if you don't know I sure as heck ain't gonna tell ya, Four Eyes." Palin is made to run a gauntlet of Fox News programs and personal appearances until finally she perishes on Facebook. But political death is not the end, and Palin rises again at CPAC, where she is hailed as a goddess by an army of radio hosts who preach her Gospel to the world. "Well," says the risen Palin, "it just shows to go ya."

UPDATE. Oh my, commenters have outdone themselves with their own Santorum Studios movie pitches. There's Jeffrey_Kramer's Chuck Norris Facts: The Movie! ("So Chuck tips his cowboy hat, leaves, and fucks a sheep so hard he sets it on fire"); DocAmazing's Dennis Praeger Superstar ("about a Jewish kid who becomes popular by Speaking Truth to Power and is eventually betrayed by a ghostwriter who insists on his speaking in full sentences"); Diddler on the Roof ("A big song number is 'Sedition!'") from tigrismus; zencomix's Santorum and Delilah ("Eventually Santorum tells Delilah that he will lose his strength with the loss of his sweater vests"); and JayB's Black like My Friend the Black, "based on a true story Megan McArdle heard from a black person on a bus." But really, they're all winners.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about some bold new plans for the GOP that rightbloggers have been giving big up: kicking CNN and NBC off the Republican Debate party train, Mark Levin's "Liberty Amendments," and the guy from Duck Dynasty as a Congressional candidate.  This is the sort of experimentalism that makes me nostalgic for epistemic closure.

APOCALYPSE NOW.

Orson Scott Card, some of whose ravings were covered here years ago, has recently gotten some attention for his lunatic fantasy that Obama will use black street gangs to keep the presidency in the Obama family by force for years to come. But Card is a well-known sci-fi author; less likely to be noticed, but just as nuts, is longtime conservative author Donald Sensing. After explaining that Obama is running America by fiat, Sensing writes:

Obama can do this not because the Constitution or law authorize it. Most definitely they actually prohibit it. He is getting away with it because there is no one who can stop him and almost no one who wants to stop him. No one, and I mean absolutely no one, in the Democrat party is in the slightest interested in reining in Obama's expansion of executive diktat because they know what few of the rest of us are awakening to: the Democrats are never going to lose that executive authority again. Let me be clear, with a promise to elucidate another day: there is never going to be another Republican president. Ever... 

The president of the United States is now quite literally a dictate-er: he orders what he wishes and implements what he chooses.

Meanwhile a non-discrimination law in San Antonio that would keep the city from doing business with people who discriminate against gay people -- just as the city (and every other city I can think of) would if those people discriminated against blacks -- is portrayed by conservatives as "a disturbing infringement on liberty of conscience."

Try to imagine what a spectacle this presents to normal people: The Loyal Opposition telling them that the President is a dictator, and that non-discrimination laws are the real fascism. Maybe they actually think this is electoral gold. After all, we're all supposed to be libertarians now, right?  And, as we grow weary of repeating, libertarianism is basically conservatism with a brand makeover. At Forbes, Ralph Benko assures us that "Libertarians And Conservatives Must Find Common Ground" to win, and the way he suggests they achieve that is... to turn against gay rights. "Traditional values as vote getter (not just within the party base but with Independents — including ethnics and blue collar workers) violates the meta-narrative of the party elites," he says. "Still, the conclusion that traditional values is a net, and a legitimate, vote getter is almost impossible to avoid."

That'll be news to most people (though maybe Matt Welch will go for it), but conservatives aren't most people, and decreasingly resemble them. Here's Ben Shapiro with his own formula for conservative victory:

Ask anybody who’s ever broken up with a girlfriend, no matter what you say to your girlfriend after you break up with her, she’s going to think you’re a jerk. Right? And the same thing is true with the American people. 

The American people have broken up with conservativism. You’re not going to convince them that conservativism is the way to go by being really nice. The way that you’re going to convince them that conservatism is the way to go is because this is a two-party system, and we can paint the other side as mean and nasty as they are. And they are. They’re mean and nasty and they’re horrible people. I mean, they truly are.

Maybe Shapiro will get a chance to read that from the podium at the 2016 GOP Convention. You know, in my conspiratorial moments, I think these guys are all plants designed to destroy the Republican Party. Crazy, you say? We'll see who's crazy!

UPDATE. I feel compelled to add that another crazy idea of the week, that Fox News has betrayed conservatism and gone pro-gay, has drawn the attention of Rod Dreher.

Ask yourself, Fox viewers: how often do you see religion covered on the network at all, much less the regular inclusion of conservative religious voices in regular news and opinion coverage?

These guys haven't figured out that if you want dolchstoßlegende to work, you can't accuse everyone of stabbing you in the back.