SEASON 7, EPISODE 2.

(Mild spoilers.) Roger has left the orgy and it becomes clear that Don is who he pines for. His disappointment at the way Lou Avery, who has taken Don's office, receives his story about being called a kike is bad enough, but his own reaction to the news that Ogilvy picked up the Hershey account that Don blew is positively mournful. His misery trails him all through the episode -- it suffuses his "would it matter?" to Joan -- and into the elevator with Jim Cutler at the end of the day. It is my perhaps paranoid impression that Cutler is not dishing out human kindness when he suggests Joan drop office management and move up to the executive suite; I think he's exploiting a weakness in Roger's relationship with her, and the same office-warrior spirit animates his veiled warning to Roger about not wanting to have an adversary. I thought at first that Cutler was dull, but now I suspect he's just been lying doggo.

I might not have noticed Cutler's cuts had it not been for Joan's very different reasons for doing kindness in the episode. I doubt she's consciously fighting the bigotry behind the various idiotic reactions to the black secretaries in the office -- her line to Bert about firing Dawn for the color of her skin was not outrage but warning. She is sticking up for them, but Joan has neither the time nor the taste for crusades; she's being kind to them because no one else there deserves her kindness. Helping Dawn is justice to Joan, but not the kind toward which the arc of history bends. Joan reminds me in this episode of many people I've known who were monsters to everyone except a few people whom they unaccountably elevated. I think this is what she will become.

Whereas Peggy may just become a monster. Maybe they all will. It wouldn't be the first time a big-time series went that way. They aren't looking very good lately, these characters -- more or less happy, depending, but shits, basically. Maybe that's why Weiner let Dawn and Shirley talk so much. They're a refreshing change of pace.

Is Don an exception? So far he's just managed to tell his daughter a little bit of truth, looking like he just swallowed shit. I wasn't as impressed as some people with their scenes in this episode. The most disappointing thing about Don for years has been how little payoff there is to his self-examination. And he doesn't have much time left.

Which may be why I wonder: Will Pete ever actually listen to a woman he's fucking?

ATTENTION CONSERVATIVES WHO WERE OUTRAGED OVER BRENDAN EICH:

If you thought it was liberal fascism for the Mozilla board to oust its CEO for an anti-gay contribution, now's your chance to show us it was all about principle: The Boy Scouts are revoking a charter over a gay scoutmaster. Go tell 'em they're Hitler!

UPDATE. "Oh Roy," says commenter keta. "You've a better chance of bottling a fart in a whirlwind than getting a conservative to remain consistent on 'principle.'" Yes, and you know, I was originally going to give this one a miss because I like to keep the tu quoque low in the mix. But it's a slow day. Also, I do have a fart in a bottle, harvested during a whirlwind, and its value just keeps going up.

UPDATE 2. Ah, serendipity -- ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© points out that Crooked Timber's John Quiggin just recently addressed the conservative tendency to make up bogus tu quoque arguments -- for instance, that "the left is just as anti-science as the right," a moronic claim that's become part of conservative theology.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the new Obamacare numbers and the brethren's sour reaction to them.

From the outtakes (because you know this stuff is rigorously edited), a further gloss on C. Christopher Agee's rant about the new Census health care questions at Western Journalism: Agee claimed "policy experts and journalists, many of whom are notoriously unsympathetic to conservative sentiments, have expressed outrage over the partisan move." In defense of this point Agee  cited... one guy: "Noah Rothman of the left-leaning Mediaite." Here are some headlines relevant to Rothman's unsympathy to conservative sentiments:

Rothman: The Intolerant Left’s Losing Streak
Rothman: MSNBC’s Most Embarrassing Mockery of Romney’s Russia Warnings
Mediate's Noah Rothman Roasts All Of MSNBC
Noah Rothman: Mainstream Media Unfairly Blame Right for Violence
Noah Rothman: Candy Crowley’s Debate Moderation Exemplifies Why Americans Do Not Trust Their Media

Etc. (I bet Mickey Kaus is reading this right now and thinking, "Yeah, so?")

EXTREMISM IN DEFENSE OF FREEBIES IS NO VICE.

When I wrote last weekend about the Bundy Ranch situation -- in which Sagebrush Rebels threatened U.S. federal officers with violence -- I noticed that though conservatives generally applauded the gunmen, the higher-placed ones tried to be cute about it, praising the revolutionary sentiments which they know animate the tricorns-and-treason segment of their base while briefly admitting that Bundy has broken and is flouting the law.

An interesting angle has been to excuse Bundy as a freedom fighter whose duty is higher than legal niceties. National Review's Kevin D. Williamson, for example, compares Bundy to Gandhi and George Washington. I don't remember Gandhi pulling a gun on his enemies, but I fell asleep in the middle of that long Ben Kingsley movie, so maybe I missed that part. As for Washington, I believe he was fighting tyrants to found a nation, to which he colleagues had pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their scared honor, whereas Bundy just wants something for nothing.

Williamson does attach a cause to Bundy's freeloading, suggesting the response should be "legislation that would oblige the federal government to divest itself of 1 percent of its land and other real estate each year for the foreseeable future through an open auction process." So Bundyism in his view is about taking resources that belong to all Americans and giving them to rich people -- that is, traditional conservatism -- and, in lieu of getting enough votes to do it legally, threatening violence -- that is, next-wave conservatism, otherwise known as fascism.

But the best so far is former Republican Senate candidate Alan Keyes:

At the Bundy ranch: A 'Rosa Parks moment'?

Again, I didn't know Rosa Parks refused to pay her bus fare for 20 years and whipped out a gun when challenged, but I'm sure I don't read the same history books as they do.

A SIMPLE DESULTORY PHILIPPIC (OR HOW I WAS ANITA BRYANT'D INTO SUBMISSION).

These are great days for conservative paranoia. All days are, of course, but in the past after each bitter moan about liberal fascism there has usually been a concomitant mood-swing into delusional grandeur. Lately, however, it's all slave narratives from conservatives crushed under the heel of ObamaHitler. Yesterday we had the PJ Media guys telling us scientists are censoring them in furtherance of a liberal plot, and today I found a wild one in Stella Morabito at The Federalist, one of the right's shinier new meth labs.

In "Cults In Our Midst: Patty Hearst And The Brainwashing Of America," Morabito starts by lengthily recounting the horrible Hearst story: kidnapping, isolation, repeated rape, and "a coarse Maoist style program of indoctrination and re-education" in which she was told "that 'Amerikkka' was a racist and evil society, repeatedly calling her a privileged 'bourgeoise bitch' and her father a 'pig' of the 'corporate fascist state,'" which broke Hearst and turned her into Tania.

Regular readers will have already guessed that Morabito connects the closet-rape-Maoist-Amerikkka-fascist state program to mainstream Democratic values. Ah, but how she does it, that's the thing! Her first move is to link Hearst's brainwashing to that time "the White House launched a 'behavioral insights team' assigned with the task of 'improving policies' through insights into human behavior." I covered that "nudge squad" thing last year -- if that's mind-control, then so is advertising. Norabito seems to anticipate that normal people might feel that way, and so goes for the neckrub-that-becomes-a-headlock rhetorical twist:

We take as a given that political persuasion is part of public life. But likewise we take as a given that deliberate government manipulation of the populace using the techniques of unwitting or coercive persuasion represents a grave threat to our freedoms.

Tomato, to-mah-to. Later Norabito lists Margaret Thaler Singer's "six conditions that create an atmosphere conducive to coercive persuasion":

• Keep the person unaware that there is an agenda to control or change the person and their thoughts
• Control time and physical environment
• Create a sense of powerlessness, fear, and dependency
• Suppress old behavior and attitudes
• Instill new behavior and attitudes
• Put forth a closed system of logic.

And guess where she sees them at work:

The frightening realization is that these techniques work on mass audiences as well. We can see hints in the phenomenon we call “political correctness"...

No, wait, it gets better:

The seismic and manufactured public opinion “shift” on same sex marriage in the past several of years is a glaring example of how coercive persuasion works.

That's right -- America has been brainwashed gay-friendly. And you thought Will & Grace was just a funny TV show!

Label anyone who disagrees as a bigot or a "hater," a non-person. Reward those who agree with public accolades. Before you know it, even well-known old conservative pundits who fear becoming irrelevant sign on to it, and thus contribute to the juggernaut.

I hope she'll follow up by telling us how the same techniques turned a brainwashed nation against racial segregation. I mean, it can't have been anything else, right?

Conservatives are presently inclined to attribute any election they lose to America's majority of "low information voters." But Norabito points in a new direction: Maybe now when they lose, even in opinion polls, they'll tell themselves it's not because voters are stupid, it's because they're brainwashed! The real fun will come when try deprogramming the voters.

UPDATE. In comments, Roger Ailes and satch confess their gay brainwashing started with The Hollywood Squares. "Paul Lynde and Charles Nelson Reilly were not only funny," says satch, "but persuasive, making them early 'Choice Architects.' Damn those subversive game shows!!!"

Similarly, says coozledad, "I was a conservative until Hawkeye Pierce made Frank Burns look like an asshole."

Meanwhile mortimer finds a Morabito essay on Cosmos. Excerpt:

This is propaganda of the crudest sort, reminiscent of how Stalin’s Soviet Union characterized non-communists, or how the Hutus of Rwanda characterized the Tutsis, or, most famously, how the Third Reich characterized Jews.

I'd say, "I'll have to start following Morabito," but I fear she wouldn't accept I meant this in the traditional sense of reading her work as it comes out, and assume that I was tailing her for ObamaHitler.

NOTHING MEANS NOTHING ANYMORE.

At PJ Media, Rand Simberg headlines,

We are all scientists

and uses a cute, familiar routine to demonstrate this ("If you’ve ever gone through a thought process like that in dealing with a life situation, congratulations! You are a scientist"). But Simberg isn't really trying to make his readers appreciate the scientific method: He's mainly running a new angle on the traditional conservative argument that scientists who see a trend toward climate change that should be addressed are all just lying for liberalism.

Simberg says a sentence (!) in a USA Today story about some environmental official who tweeted a climate skeptic message "would seem to imply that only 'scientists' (however the reporter defines it) are allowed to be skeptical about scientific theories" -- though the story implies no such thing. Taking off from this overwrought imputation of censorship, he really starts working the dry ice machine and thunder sheets:

When we are not allowed to discuss issues that involve policy actions that could have devastating effects on the world’s economy because we are not part of an apparently credentialed priesthood, we are not being allowed to even debate science, let alone deny it. We are instead apparently apostates in a new non-theistic, but very powerful religion, complete with believers, heretics, sin and indulgences, who must be silenced.

Many, many climate skeptics publish in the popular press, and in fact one of our two major parties has gone total climate-change denialist, despite the embargo of the liberal-fascist scientists. Yet Simberg concludes:

Which simply shows that sometimes, just as war is too important to be left to the generals, science can be too important to be left to the “scientists.”

Elsewhere in the same venue Frank J. Fleming, an alleged humorist (Jonah Goldberg is a fan, which tells all), headlines

There Are No Such Things as 'Scientists'

The ensuing article is more or less the same as Simberg's except with something resembling jokes. It begins with a similar exercise to Simberg's ("Find a book. Hold it over the floor. Now release it. Write down what you observe. Boom! You’ve just become a scientist") and proceeds  to the conclusion that you can't trust guys who snootily insist they're using empirical data to form rational conclusions about the physical universe:

Now all of this isn’t meant to belittle science, which is a great process by which we discover facts about the world around us; you should probably make use of it yourself. This is, though, meant to belittle scientists, who are just people, and if you’ve ever been around people, you know they’re easily biased and prone to arrogance and error, and thus everything they say should be taken with a grain of salt.

These articles demonstrate how far conservative thought has come on this subject. It's not just promoting the idea that a cadre of whitecoats is trying to destroy America with false, liberal information, perversely ignoring the far greater bribes oil and gas companies can offer them. It further suggests that any time some guy with a sheepskin tries to tell you what's what, you should mistrust him as a matter of course, because he's no more likely than any other snake-oil salesman to be telling the truth. Why should he? They only spend years in school so they can collect Obamabribes and sneer at good folk like you 'n' me. Once upon a time, when they were taking us to the moon and inventing boner pills, scientists could be trusted; but now that most of them have come to conclusions that are injurious to Republican campaign donors' interests, they're just another bunch of moochers.

And they wonder why kids aren't taking STEM classes.

SEASON 7, EPISODE 1.

(Mild spoilers.) Don Draper remains a rock with a few cracks. I thought his breakdown at the Hershey pitch presaged a big change, and maybe it will turn out to have done. But this episode only suggests a change in his tactics: he's still copywriting, albeit sub rosa, which suits his hidden nature; he's still opaque with everyone; the only observable change is he hasn't balled anyone he isn't married to yet, and it's not entirely clear that he won't. I don't think his turndown of the widow on the plane (Neve Campbell, perfectly modish and intriguingly abstracted) was a sign of maturity. (Don can always talk to women.) I just think he couldn't take the distraction. I like that he says "I have to go to work" so often -- for one thing it reminds me of "Batdance"; for another, it makes me interested in his plan, which I'm guessing is bigger than sharing freelance money with Freddie; and for another, it's interesting that Don has always been better off in his work than at the agency -- now that the agency won't have him, maybe he'll do something interesting.

Have I just been mystified by the Don/Megan relationship too long, or are they supposed to be absolutely unsuited to one another?

Pete Campbell gets more interesting all the time. It makes sense that he's dressing like an ambitious casting assistant and talking about vibrations; he's always a little strained about finding his bliss. When's his orgy?

Speaking of which, I think Roger's pleasure chamber is looking a little sepulchral. He said something once about being a curious child. I sense him running out of curiosities. If his daughter's cult conversion doesn't do something profound to him I'll be disappointed.

I hope the Joan arc isn't "men are pigs" all season long.

Isn't it something that Peggy is so miserable, and looks for relief by selling a pitch she doesn't know is Don's? And that her and Don's miseries end the episode?

FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES.

John Hinderaker further explains his support for the Bundy Ranch.

Some have claimed that Harry Reid is behind the BLM’s war against Cliven Bundy, on the theory that he wants the land for a solar project in which his son Rory is involved, along with the Chinese. I don’t believe this is correct. The solar projects are located north of Las Vegas, 30 miles or so from the area where Bundy ranches.

But the connection is nevertheless important in two respects.

Stop to take that in for a moment: Hinderaker says the militiamen's argument is insupportable, but now Hinderaker is going to tell you why the argument nonetheless remains relevant.

First, he says, the government's favored tortoise-protection area is where Bundy wants to graze without paying; "So it is possible that the federal government is driving Bundy off federal lands to make way for mitigation activities that enable the solar energy development to the north. But I don’t think it is necessary to go there." ("Don’t think it is necessary to go there," by the way, is Lawyerly for "I withdraw the question, I just wanted to smear the witness within the hearing of the jury.")

"The second and more important point," per Hinderaker:

...it is obvious that some activities are favored by the Obama administration’s BLM, and others are disfavored. The favored developments include solar and wind projects. No surprise there: the developers of such projects are invariably major Democratic Party donors. Wind and solar energy survive only by virtue of federal subsidies, so influencing people like Barack Obama and Harry Reid is fundamental to the developers’ business plans. Ranchers, on the other hand, ask nothing from the federal government other than the continuation of their historic rights. It is a safe bet that Cliven Bundy is not an Obama or Reid contributor.

So though there's no proof that Obama and Reid illegally rigged it so Bundy would lose his access to the government land, the fact that something happened that Obama and Reid would like is proof of... well, that something happened that Cliven Bundy and John Hinderaker don't like.

The remainder is just old-fashioned ressentiment: "And their way of life is one that, frankly, is on the outs. They don’t develop apps. They don’t ask for food stamps... They aren’t illegal immigrants," etc. In the end, this argument isn't based on the law -- nor even, oddly, on the legitimate idea that the law should be changed -- but on the notion that if some rightwing sovereign-citizen nut dressed as Ronald Reagan feels bad about something, that proves America has gone all to hell.

I'm surprised that allegedly respectable writers (Time's Blog of the Year back in 1964) are embarrassing themselves this way. Maybe they think they'd better be nice to the nuts because they're all they have left.

UPDATE. Comments have gotten pretty good, with one fellow coming in to lay some Hard Truth on everybody -- apparently it's really all about water rights, which Bundy himself hasn't asserted (he's more voluble about not recognizing the authority of the U.S. government). As you might expect, the fellow winds up yelling about Al Sharpton and telling other commenters to "get on yer knees and do what ya do best." These guys really don't like being laughed at.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the Bundy Ranch shenanigans and rightblogger reactions. I'm not sure which is the most fun part: watching the smaller bloggers holler for moar armed insurrection, or watching the top dogs trying not to get too far ahead of the curve lest they lose their shot at a walled garden at the Washington Post after this whole thing blows over.

DOWN BY THE SCHOOLYARD.

When I was seven years old, a couple of kids in my neighborhood asked me who the ugliest girl in my school was. I unchivalrously told them, and they went into the middle of the street in front of my house, drew a big heart, and put the girl's name and mine inside it, and started chanting that I loved her.

So I can understand Jesse Walker's rage. He's probably a little older than I was when I got mad at those boys, but libertarians don't mature as quickly as the rest of us.

CONSERVATIVE MINORITY OUTREACH CONTINUES.

Shorter Aaron Goldstein: I apologize to readers of The American Spectator -- when I celebrated Hank Aaron's baseball career, I didn't realize that he was black.

UNCLEAR ON THE CONCEPT, PART 3,293,003.

Oh brother::

Kirsten Powers: Liberals' mob rule
Kickstarter's attempt to censor film about convicted abortion doctor is another example.

This is the latest entrant in the "Mozilla is liberal fascism" derby. Apparently some folks wanted to use the Kickstarter crowdfunding platform to fund their Kermit Gosnell horror movie; Kickstarter had some trouble with the gruesome marketing copy that was to appear at Kickstarter's website -- not with the movie, though Powers labors to make that hard to notice -- and tried to work something out with them, which the filmmakers, who apparently know a great PR angle when they see one, found unacceptable.

Thus, Powers says Kickstarter was "blocking the movie," because they love abortion. My favorite nonsense phrase in the story is "Kickstarter, like too much of the news media, wants only one version of the late-term abortion story told." That's really a tell: By bitching about liberal bias in the media, these guys have made major press outlets too shit-scared to assert anything without letting a wingnut rave alongside it in the name of "balance." Powers seems to think the same racket -- show up, fall down, start crying, collect settlement -- will work elsewhere. So she talks about this incident as if setting guidelines for service is media bias. The company's not just supposed to provide its offered service, it's supposed to tell the filmmaker's "story," and any limitation on that is censorship.

The connection with the Mozilla bitchfest is obvious, but I also see a relationship with the religious-freedom cases the brethren have been crying about, in which a few bakers and wedding photographers have been sued for not serving gay couples. These guys hear the civil rights, public accommodation arguments against denying someone services based on their sexual orientation, I'm guessing, and think, "Oh, well, so we'll go where you libtards work and make you do what we want."

JACKASSERY.

Hmph, says National Review's John J. Miller:

A subscription offer for Poetry magazine showed up in the mail yesterday. The outside of the envelope carried a big quote: “New editor, new life, new kickassery.” A card on the inside repeated the quote. I’m all for useful and clever neologisms, but would you subscribe to a magazine about poetry that thinks “kickassery” is its great virtue?

John J. Miller is the author of an essay on "the 50 greatest conservative rock songs." Also, here's something else he wrote about poetry:

Yesterday, I offered qualified praise on the selection of W.S. Merwin as poet laureate. Well, I probably should have qualified it even more! At First Things, Joseph Bottum exposes Merwin as a crazed Bush hater...

Since all us liberals are supposed to be bullies now, I ask the politburo to see that Miller is silenced on matters of poesy. C'mon, I know he's not a millionaire CEO but it'll still be fun!

UPDATE. Commenters feel the sprung rhythm of laughter! "Poetry Magazine was been around since 1912," says (the good) Roger Ailes. "As far as I can tell, it hasn't had to resort to beg-a-thons, bamboozle-the-elderly cruises and Koch kissassery to stay in business." There are also some Michael Berube tribute locutions, e.g., "I used to read the humanists, but ever since the Sicilian Vespers I've been outraged by Dante Alighieri," and God help us a Seamus Heaney parody by coozledad:

The tightness and the nilness round that space
when your car stops in the road, the poets inspect
your Bush/ Cheney sticker and, as one bends his face 

towards your window, you catch sight of more
on a hill beyond. Gelignite, ticking
to sell you an arts magazine, or give you an ass kicking 

and everything is pure condescension
until a poet motions and you leave
after Joseph Bottums is mentioned— 

a little nervous, pulse slightly quickened
as always by that quiver in the shorts
ready to fuck that chicken.

Silent upon a freakin' derr, I am.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the Mozilla/Brendan Eich thing. The more I think about it, the more ridiculous it looks -- especially when you consider most of the guys weeping over this displaced millionaire CEO wouldn't piss on a low-wage at-will worker if he were on fire.

UPDATE. Kevin D. Williamson has addressed the issue but, frankly, his post reads as gibberish to me; can any of you make out what he's trying to say? The best I can figure is, he's vaguely admitting that sometimes he's pleased when market and social punishments fall upon individuals, and sometimes he isn't, but that's irrelevant because liberals are fascists and America is turning into a fascist state in which the U.S. Supreme Court "increasingly" resembles an "American version of the Iranian Guardian Council." Maybe you can do better.

TODAY IN CONSERVATIVE VICTIMHOOD.

Back when Paula Deen got fired or whatever it was, I thought it necessary to remind the world (blind and uncaring as ever, alas!) that Deen was not fired-or-whatever by black people and liberals; she was fired by corporations, sociopathic entities that (or is that who?) care only about increasing shareholder value. By doing what they did, these corporations were not being bien pensant nor trying to make themselves more comfortable at cocktail parties with Ellen Degeneres. They were trying to defuse what they perceived as a blow to their public image and a risk to profits.

The same thing is true of the firing-or-whatever of Brendan Eich. Every wingnut in America will tell you he was fired-or-whatever, not by his company, but by gay people and liberals in a homosexualist conspiracy against godly millionaires. They probably think it's easier to put that bullshit over in this case than in the Deen case because the world of Silicon Valley douchebags is more rareified than that of the Food Network. But it isn't, really; as the Pando coverage of the Computer Gods' power-politics games shows, Silicon Valley is as much of a snake pit as any other corporate district,  black turtlenecks notwithstanding. If Mozilla thought Eich was worth the hit, profits-wise, they'd have kept him. So what if they caught some shade from some gay waiter -- or gay relative? Millions of dollars cuts an awful lot of family ties.

As I thought was amply demonstrated yesterday when every conservative in America raced to kiss Charles Koch's ass, it is not the rich who do our bidding.

UPDATE. I see the top pants-pissers are still talking about this as if The Left, and not Mozilla, fired Eich. It's at times like this that I particularly miss Norbizness' The Left Is Attacking The City series.

RETRONUT.

Shorter Charles G. Koch: What's good for Koch Industries is good for the USA.

(You may take this as a reference to the famous General Motors quote, or misquote, but I was thinking of General Bullmoose. Like Ole Perfesser Instapundit I'm a fan of L'il Abner.)

This Wall Street Journal "editorial" has got everything a conservatarian could want from a sugar daddy and his communications department: Much bragging on his own integrity and the accomplishments of his own firm (most of which, as a Crooked Timber commenter spectacularly put it, "can be replaced by 'Koch industries is a very large company'"); an assurance that conservatarianism, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA; invocations of the Founders, and of Alinsky (drink!); and the inevitable, outraged assertion that if anyone speaks roughly of the poor patriotic millionaire, it is "character assassination" of the sort "so many despots have infamously practiced... the antithesis of what is required for a free society," etc.

The only problem with it is, while the copy is bound to wow all the people who worship the Kochs already, normal people will look at it, if they look at it, and think: I wonder how much he paid for that?

UPDATE. At PJ Media Bryan Preston stands up for exalted Kochean standards of discourse by repeating the word "smear" over and over:

...a smear first floated by Austan Goolsbee... the smear is the current regime’s preferred method of kneecapping opponents... Obama himself sets the tone, when he smears opponents of Obamacare... That’s a smear and a lie and he knows it.... there has to be some accountability for all these smears...

It's not shitty writing, it's message discipline! Oh, and in the middle of it Preston mentions that "the Obama administration may have been covering up union shop GM’s deadly ignition switch flaw." He said mother-may-have, so it's not a smear. I was going to say, if lack of self-awareness were money he'd be rich, but in Preston's world I suppose it is money.

UPDATE 2. In comments, whetstone: "Now, to be fair, his daddy renounced the Soviet Union and, furthermore, co-founded the John Birch Society. So it's a family that understands both collectivism and character assassination."

NO ONE GOES THERE ANYMORE, IT'S TOO CROWDED.

Hitting 7 million customers doesn't prove Obamacare is a good program. But at least it has given us the gift of laughter via the reactions of its opponents. I especially like James Taranto's at the Wall Street Journal:

In a way it's the oddest bit of ObamaCare propaganda we've seen so far. "This Is What an #ACASurge Looks Like" was the title of a Saturday post on the White House Blog by senior communications adviser Tara McGuinness.

"The line started forming at 5 a.m. in front of an enrollment center in Miami," McGuinness boasts. "The final deadline to get covered in 2014 is in just two days, and Americans are literally lining up at grassroots events across the country to make sure they're covered. This is what momentum looks like"...

The first thing we thought of when we saw the pictures was the photos we've recently seen on Twitter of Venezuelans waiting in bread lines. Waiting in line to purchase necessities is a characteristic not of a prosperous free society but of command economies under repressive regimes. Closer to home, one doubts even the Transportation Security Administration would be so tone-deaf as to advertise long airport lines as an indication it's doing a great job.

If you can't complain about how no one wants it, complain there are long lines to get it. Plus communism. You can't lose!

Oh, and even better:

It may be that the people who waited in line to buy ObamaCare were doing so primarily to express their allegiance to Obama.

He's got a point. I have a health plan through my job, but I was thinking of buying an Obamacare plan anyway, in order to show my loyalty to WHAT THE HELL WHO EVEN THINKS LIKE THAT.

Has Alex Jones weighed in on this yet? Maybe it was space aliens.

ME-YOW.

You may remember back in 2012 when Ole Perfesser Instapundit called for conservatives to publish women's magazines and thus hypnotize the feckless woman voter. Some of them got excited about a magazine called Verily, which allegedly offers a godly alternative to sexed-up Cosmo with stories like "Are Elite Degrees Wasted on Stay-at-Home Moms?"

Sure, why not, markets in everything, right?  But apparently for conservatism to triumph, it is not enough that Verily do well; it is necessary that evil liberal ladymags do poorly. Jillian Kay Melchior, heretofore best known as authoress of the world's funniest unemployment memoir, does her bit in National Review:

Culture has been replaced by Kulture: Vogue has put Kim Kardashian on the cover of its April issue.

Apparently this is a comedown from the Golden Age of Kate Moss covers.

At its best, fashion is not only an aesthetic choice but a moral one: It’s an expression of values.

I'll spare you. "Though the magazine is distinctly left-leaning" -- an assessment which is never explained -- Vogue, says Melchior, used to "emphasize that kindness, charity, and friendship are as beautiful as any couture dress." But lately they've been embarrassing themselves with features on monsters like Mrs. Bashar al-Assad and Wendy Davis. And now Kimye! Unlike the other monthly fillers-for-fashion-ads, Vogue "degrades its brand" -- you know, like that time Rolling Stone had Britney Spears on the cover -- a cover that had once borne the likeness of Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show! Weep, editorial eagle, weep!

I wonder if this has anything to do with Verily abandoning its print edition. Which I think is a shame; I'd rather see more choices out there than fewer, even in scent-smeared timewasters. But then, I'm more interested in pop culture than in pop culture war.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the Hobby Lobby case and the tropes it has stirred among out rightblogger brethren: That health insurance that includes birth control is a near occasional of sin; that lady judges are stupid; and that, as devoted as they are to socialism and black nationalism, what the Obama Administration really want to do is destroy Christianity. You know: the usual.

UPDATE. In comments, Meanie-meanie tickle a person informs me that my gag -- "not only aborty, but also facient, which sounds like 'fascist,' right?" -- is actually a serious matter for some people. Kirk Kelsen believes birth control is "ABORTIFASCISM" and that the ACA decrees "you must, under the law, dine exclusively at the government buffet serving up abortifacients," which I guess will be their next legal argument if this one fails -- isn't being forced to eat at the same table as abortion cruel and unusual? Bonus feature: An opera review that doesn't mention the music because the libretto is blasphemous.

WE DO IT FOR THE KIDS.

Nick Gillespie, the fighting libertarian priest who can talk to kids, has a new angle from which to spray youth appeal on his Koch-funded causes:

Based on the first volume of a wildly popular young-adult trilogy, Divergent is set in America of the near-future, when all people are irrevocably slotted into one of five “factions” based on temperament and personality type. Those who refuse to go along with the program are marked as divergent—and marked for death! “What Makes You Different, Makes You Dangerous,” reads one of the story’s taglines. 

Which pretty much sums up Rand Paul...

Ha ha ha ha... wait, no, he's not kidding. Divergent is wow and Paul will be wow too, because 1.) "Paul is showing strongly in polls about the GOP presidential nomination in 2016," which is about as attractive a recommendation as "it's one of pedophiles' favorite child-lures," and 2.) The kids are waving the Gadsden Flag and don't know it yet:

Millennials are "unmoored from institutions," gasped Pew Research recently. There’s every reason to believe that large swaths of the country are ready to shake off the politics of exhaustion and move toward a future that is different from the past.

"A future that is different from the past" -- surely that must be the grim, Pay-or-Die dystopia Paul promises! And if that doesn't convince, hang on, Gillespie's talking in blockbuster tongues again:

“I don't want to be just one thing,” explains one of the protagonists in Divergent. “I can't be. I want to be brave, and I want to be selfless, intelligent, and honest and kind.” If anything explains Rand Paul’s rising profile, it’s precisely his ability to be more than just one thing—a social conservative, a civil libertarian, a budget cutter, a decentralizer, and more.

If only Veronica Roth had thought of using "virtuously selfish" instead of that socialistic "selfless"  -- well, who cares: any teen-angst drama will do for a libertarian mash-up in Gillespie's hands; last year he was trying this same shtick with The Hunger Games. Maybe he should collaborate with the guy from American Enterprise Institute who did "Greatest Conservative Rap Songs of All Time." Or maybe just pick some cool band -- how about Fucked Up? "he's the back without the bone/The king sits on a crooked throne..." That's gotta be Obama, right? Plus Damian Abraham was on Red Eye with Greg Gutfield. The future will be ours! 

UPDATE. "'I want to be brave, and I want to be selfless, intelligent, and honest and kind'... Wow. Even in a random string of adjectives describing normal people, Rand Paul goes 0 for 5," says mortimer2000 in comments. The tigrismus version: "In a world where people are sorted based on a personality test, one man fails it."