NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about recent developments in climate change, and the rightblogger response -- which seems to lean more heavily toward "get used to it, we're never going to do anything anyway" than I remember. Maybe I was blocking it out.

UPDATE. In comments, I think hellslittlestangel speaks for us all when he says "the only thing that will stop climate change is a good guy with a gun."

THIS IS ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW.

The guys who continue to worship the most senile President in history want you to think Hillary Clinton is too old and feeble to serve.

TODAY IN CAREER ADVANCEMENT.

Wingnut-watchers may remember A.J. Delgado, author of a book of culture-war mad libs. Turns out she's been picked up by National Review. Among her maiden efforts: A long essay that's ostensibly a review of a new film loosely based on Jim Jones and Jonestown (Ti West's The Sacrament), but mainly about how the People's Temple was a traditional communist cell -- you know, sort of like the American Spring loonies are traditional Republicans -- and people who call it a cult are just covering up for Marxism and Marxists like Jerry Brown and Harvey Milk, who must be exposed.

It was with some trepidation that I attended a screening: Would West eschew any mention of Jones’s leftism, as others addressing the subject had before him? Would West blast organized religion as the culprit, rather than Marxism itself?

 That's what Mr. and Mrs. Moviegoer will want to know! Delgado has mixed impressions:

But the big question is: Does the film represent the truth — i.e., Jones’s leftism? The answer is yes, somewhat. While not overtly highlighting Jones’s ideology or that of The People’s Temple, West certainly does not omit it. In a gripping, seminal scene where Sam interviews [Jones stand-in] Father, the ideology is in full view, for anyone willing to listen closely. Father bemoans issues at the top of any leftist’s top-gripes list: “poverty, violence, greed, and racism.” (A majority of Jonestown’s inhabitants were African American — another angle West truthfully represents.)

When Father mentions heroes who have been shot down for “trying to help others,” those heroes are: Malcolm X, MLK, JFK, and RFK. Not all leftists but not all exactly right-wing idols, either.

So, we know he's a commie because he's against poverty, violence, greed, and racism, is surrounded by black people, and admires Martin Luther King.  But Delgado is concerned that Father also uses a cross and hymns, which might give filmgoers the false impression that Christianity can be used to confuse people, and "reaches out" to West, who politely explains to her that it's a movie. Delgado for some reason finds herself vindicated:

Father quotes Scripture in the film but, if one notices, only to the extent that it can be distorted for his social-justice arguments. Jones did the same, quoting Jesus Christ and Scripture only as red meat for his socialist sermons.

Whereas real Christians only use Jesus to denigrate homosexuals. I predict this young lady will go far.

SEASON 7, EPISODE 5.

(Mild spoilers.) Ginsburg has never been a real character, so I guess they felt they could dump some excess metaphorical freight on him and push him out to sea.  Nothing about his scenes rang true on any level -- even the great Elisabeth Moss didn't seem to know what kind of relationship she was supposed to have with him -- and it left me wondering: Why was he ever here? Maybe just to signify the infusion of nervy Jews on Madison Avenue (why not someone more like George Lois, then*? That would have livened things up), or merely to be wasted, so his psychotic break could be a harbinger of some end-of-60s bad craziness to come.

Unlike some watchers, I wasn't worried about Laurel Canyon in this regard. The SoCal sybaritism Megan's gotten into is as vapid as any of other supposed fun scenes, from Greenwich Village to poolside L.A., that Mad Men likes to sneer at from time to time, as if to say, see, they think they're better but they're not; besides, to tell the truth if Tex and the gang came helter-skeltering in I don't think I'd feel much loss. And I don't think Don would either. I have never, never understood that relationship except on the most banal Freudian level, and it never made less sense than when Megan was pushing him into a three-way and Don was looking at the two chicks with astonishment, as if they were Cosgrove tap-dancing on speed. By the next day maybe Megan thought so too. But why is that a big deal for her? Come to think of it, why is she here, either?

The most interesting person in the episode was Lou. I didn't realize Allan Havey, who plays Lou, had a comedy career, but it figures: Actors like to play villains, and the more ee-vil the better, but they don't generally like to play pricks and schmucks; Lou is both, and Havey applies a comic's malignant brio to him. His fit over the mockery his stupid cartoon engendered -- a hundred times better than Underdog! -- had some good sour stomach acid in it, which was a relief because the rest of the creative staff has been floating off into the ether for a while now. Jesus, fellas, back in the day they did some work in addition to getting stoned, you know.  

As much as we've been warned not to root for Don anymore, and as unbelievable as his pitch was, it was fun to see him throw elbows in the Commander pitch. But it's a guilty pleasure. They're the only kind, I fear, Don has to offer us anymore.

Oh, I wish I could remember the person on Twitter who noted that when Ginsburg said "What am I, Cassandra?" he might actually have been talking about this guy.

* OK, so Lois is Greek; that's close enough, right?

UPDATE. I forgot about the Francis family thread, which I liked very much. Betty, to my surprise, actually seemed stronger after she cracked; I wonder whether she was surprised too. Sally is becoming wonderfully horrible, and I admire her feeling for her brother, which is about the least narcissistic relationship in the whole show. Speaking of which, their discussion of running away reminded me of the episode's title, and of what I suppose is Don's equivalent -- pressing Harry to leave Megan's party with him for a bar, where he also shakes some useful agency intelligence out of the poor schlub by telling him, "I hope you know how much I appreciate this." Now that's narcissism.

FREE SPEECH FOR ME...

You know, I have to admit they surprised me: I thought at least some conservative would step up and give lip service to the rights of the Harvard Black Mass celebrants to exercise their freedom of worship in the setting of their choice, and thus show, after weeks of blubbering over Brendan Eich and Donald Sterling, that they really, really are in favor of expansive Constitutional rights for people other than themselves and affiliated racists and gay-haters.

These people are full of shit.

My favorite is Da Tech Guy, who last month bewailed the violation of Eich's Constitutional right to be CEO of Mozilla without the support of his board of directors ("the removal of Mr. Eich was done without threats of violence, but rest assured those days are not far away... If I was a young ambitious lawyer looking for a big payday and publicity I’d find a few Christians in companies like this willing to sue for the creation of a 'hostile work environment'"), but is now delighted that the Black Mass was chased off-campus by Catholics. Best part:

A postscript: As we drove to my car at Alewife Station [Mary Ann Harold] related that as she sat down in the then empty church she saw an apparition of the head of Satan appear over and to the left of the altar over the church. The head was disfigured and was screaming in pain and anger. 

Given the results of the night, that was completely understandable.

 Maybe these are the victories they will celebrate now that they can't win elections. (If you hear of any contrarian conservatives sticking up for the Satanists, please let me know in comments.)

UPDATE. Professor Bainbridge steps up.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about all the liberal fascism going on around here, from the martyrs Brendan Eich and Donald Sterling to Condi Rice to some guy in New Hampshire who apparently wanted to set his own rules at a school board meeting. They're all victims!

Among the outtakes: When a Rutgers professor applauded Rice's decision to bail, the Washington Examiner's Charles Hoskinson knocked the prof for appearing on "Russian government-supported propaganda channel Russia Today" and added, "judging from her willingness to appear on RT, Kumar's frequent criticism of U.S. media methods does not extend to those of government-sponsored propaganda outlets." Among the Americans appearing very, very frequently on Russia Today: The libertarian writers of Reason magazine.

UPDATE. I also neglected to include in my roundup Charles C.W. Cooke's "The New Fascism," because life is short and I hadn't seen it yet. It is everything aficionados of his work would expect. Short version: Rich people make market decisions that punish Jesus freaks, so liberals are fascists. He is especially pissed that a couple of guys who are against gay rights were denied a show on, get this, HGTV. (I wonder if anyone will tell him.) Later Cooke tried to explain himself to people who can do basic logic:

“But you like the market,” they have argued. “And this just the market working. HGTV did what it thought best for its bottom line.” 

I do like the market, yes. I like HGTV, too. But my criticism isn’t aimed at HGTV or the market, both of which are merely tools. It’s aimed the culture that informs them.

And so young Cooke turns Culture Warrior, which has the expected effect on the quality of his work: The rest of his entry is basically variations on "sputter, sputter."

I want television to be run by private companies that are responsive to public opinion. But does this mean I have to like that public opinion? Hardly... if it did, I would be required to be fine with the public’s apparently being so intolerant of the private views of its entertainers that anyone who steps out of line must be quickly removed from their sight.

I always assumed Cooke was new to America, but I'm beginning to wonder if he's ever spent a day here, or ever watched TV or talked about it (or anything else) with people who were not graduate students.

UPDATE 2. Also, here's something I left out of the If-I-don't-win-a-Hugo-it's-liberal-fascism section: A rant by John C. Wright at the Intercollegiate Review, full of references to Orwell and sententia like "the lamps of the intellect were put out one by one, first in society at large, then in literature..." as if Obama's America were identical to Nazi Germany.

As funny as Wright's Auschwitz cosplay is, his attempt to explain how people refusing to praise your stupid tits-and-lizards books = tyranny is even better:

Custom is encouraged by countless social cues and expressions of peer pressure. It is subjective, informal, covert, feminine, and indirect.

Custom is feminine? Bet he came up with that one when someone called him out for cutting the line to have his picture taken with Power Girl.

No one will arrest you if you don’t tip the waitress, but your friends will look at you askance and recoil as if you exude a mephitic odor. 

Sounds like he follows Dr. Mrs. Ole Perfesser's method of social criticism. As for the mephitic odor reaction, well, there's more than one possible explanation for that.

OLD WHINE IN NEW BOTTLES.

I guess you've heard about the latest wingnut-welfare-funded propaganda project, the Heritage Foundation's Daily Signal, and they swear this time it'll be real news:

The site aims to rectify the conservative perception that mainstream news slants to the left. “We plan to do political and policy news,” says [publisher Geoffrey] Lysaught, “not with a conservative bent, but just true, straight-down-the-middle journalism"... 

The past few years have seen a profusion of conservative media outlets... “You often sense there’s an element of preaching to the choir,” says Katrina Trinko, a well-regarded political reporter lured away from National Review to manage the Signal’s news team. “What appealed to me was that our goal is not just to reach that audience. Obviously, we hope conservatives will come. But we hope anyone interested in information and public debate will see us as a trusted news source.”

"Katrina Trinko... to manage the Signal’s news team" is the key phrase here. Trinko has shown up in these pages twice before: Once for suggesting that, instead of passing a higher minimum wage, America should encourage fast-food chains to put out tip jars, and once for explaining that it was unfair to compare Republicans with Randroids because Republicans actually want a safety net run by the Church.

Trinko has also written several articles for our favorite culture-war stakewaster Acculturated, with titles like "What We Lose In Our Child-free Culture." And she has helped make National Review Online what it is; her biggest scoop there was that Elizabeth Warren had plagiarized some book, which showed great ambition and a nose for news even if it turned out not to be true. Most of her other NRO work was stuff like "RNC Makes Two Hires for Outreach to Black Media" and "After Eighty-Three Years of Marriage, Husband and Wife Die Three Days Apart -- though she did get on the homosexuals-are-oppressing-us bandwagon early with "The Gay Marriage Double Standard" last September.

So yeah, she's just the person for the job. And the job is more of the same, with better graphics.

MAMA WEER ALL CRAZEE NOW.

I don't need to devote a long post to this insane Daniel Henninger column in the Wall Street Journal, about how all the liberalfascism in America -- from CEOs getting canned for bigotry by liberalfascists disguised as businessmen, to college students denying famous wingnuts their Constitutional right to speak at their graduations whether they're wanted or not -- was caused by "an agreement signed last May between the federal government and the University of Montana to resolve a Title IX dispute..." For one thing, it's a fair cop -- surely you all remember the street dancing and republican baptisms that accompanied the signing of this agreement, because it signaled that Obama had "let the dogs out," in Henninger's words, for liberals to destroy conservatives' free speech. For another, Steve M. of No More Mister Nice Blog wrote it for me.

I will add one thing, though. Here's Henninger's kicker:

If it's possible for the left to have its John Birch moment, we're in it.

I speak a smattering of wingnut, and suppose Henninger is referring to the pride old-time conservatives take at  Buckley's rebuke of the John Birch Society back in the day. They sure showed those extremists 50 years ago, didn't they? Not like Obama! But it seems to me that conservatives have reconciled with the Birchers since then. After all, what did the Birchers believe? That a moderate U.S. President was a communist tool who was helping the U.N. and meddling scientists destroy America. Swap out the keywords "Eisenhower," "One-Worlders," and "fluoridation" for "Obama," "gun-grabbers," and "global warming,"  and it's clear that what used to be noxious Bircherism is now mainstream Republican thought.

Since I like to think the best of my fellow man, I'll assume Henninger brought the Birchers up on a bet, or out of chutzpah -- it would be too depressing to imagine he actually believes this shit.

UPDATE. In comments, Jeffrey_Kramer:

So: the decision by a Republican judge in Montana about what steps a university there had to take in order to compensate for a pattern of neglecting serious charges of sexual harassment and assault, was, in reality, a coded signal by the Obama administration that Brandeis students now had an official mandate to protest the appearance of Condoleezza Rice, thus fulfilling the maximalist dreams of liberal fascists everywhere.

The DaVinci Code was Euclid compared to this crap.

SEASON 7, EPISODE 4.

(Mild spoilers.) More than anything about this episode, I've been thinking about Lloyd, the IBM reseller. The episode is called The Monolith, and some smart critics have pointed out that the title's reference to the mainframe Lloyd brings to SC&P, along with some inferences to "the dawn of time" and apes, cement the connection with 2001: A Space Odyssey. But I think there's more to it than that. Lloyd is an interesting amalgam of everything having to do with early computer culture and its philosophical underpinnings. Lloyd might possibly, in the 1970s to come, grow out his hair and evolve into a Silicon Valley type, though I judged him more likely to make his nut fast, get out of the game, and do real estate. But I was taken by his incongruous Texas accent. (IBM, where Lloyd had worked, was and is in Armonk, New York.) This is an evident callback to NASA, and to the best-and-brightest hubris of 60s American technology. Lloyd's conversation to Don seals it:

Lloyd: The IBM 360 can count more stars in a day than we can in a lifetime.
Don: What man laid on his back counting stars and thought about a number?
Lloyd: (big grin) He probably thought about going to the moon.

Lloyd is slow-talking and buttoned-down, but he has some idea of the metaphorical significance of computers; he tells Don almost right after he meets him that people are afraid of them because they have "infinite quantities of information" and "human existence is finite." As you may have guessed, Lloyd is so incongruous a character that he barely seems real, and I got the impression he was invented in Matt Weiner's Retro-Zeitgeist Archetype Lab to provoke reactions from Don. And he does. Don is at first attracted to Lloyd, and even dreams about selling him advertising, because Lloyd's excitement about his futuristic profession is attractive to him -- in no small part because Lloyd is butch about it, the way Don is butch about what passes for creativity on Madison Avenue; they're both putting brave movie-star faces on the pathologies of their time.

But late in the episode, when Don has been frustrated and hurt (in part because he's been told by Bert that his idea of pitching Lloyd's company is a vain fantasy) and gotten drunk, he tells Lloyd that he talks like a friend but he's not one. As I said, Lloyd is barely a character, and Don in his cups  has dramatic leave to ignore Lloyd and react instead to what he represents: The promise of technocratic certainty that died with the Vietnam War,  which death was pre-memorialized by 2001. It's understandable Don would be mad about that. In the past few seasons we have seen Don emotionally deconstructed, but he has not really noticed what's happened to him; just last week we saw him sign back up with SC&P when everything in his bardo is telling him to move on. Now that the cost of his doubling-down as a seller of bullshit -- humiliation as a tag-writer for Peggy -- is becoming evident, Don takes it out on his typewriter and his liver, but deep inside he knows what the problem is: His devotion to the bright and shining lie. That's why he turns on Lloyd, who's as chained to that lie as he is. The question is whether he can confront actual people, and the actual lie, the same way.

Roger's commune adventure was a nice counter to Don's: While Don is dealing with late 20th Century futurism, Roger is dealing with late 20th Century recidivism. It was generous to let Roger come as close as he did to understanding Margaret, and cruel (but appropriately cruel) to have him lose it over her infidelity and abandonment of her child -- faults he has laughably little business condemning. As I watched him walk off covered with mud, I realized Roger has been nothing but miserable all season. Maybe Don won't be the first to fall.

Lou and Peggy deserve each other.

UPDATE. Commenter hob raises an interesting demurrer on Lloyd:

I don't at all agree that Lloyd "barely seems real", but that's because of my personal experience: he reminds me strongly of a couple of former eccentric bosses who went into the computer industry in the '60s when no one quite knew what that industry was yet. Both of them looked and acted like a cross between middle management and a car dealer— they had this kind of low-key mania, they were always selling the idea of how exciting these magic machines were, but it really was a personal passion. And like this guy, they came out of larger organizations where they thought of themselves as more imaginative than the people around them, even if other people wouldn't exactly consider them wild-eyed bohemians; so it made sense to me that meeting someone like Don, who's clearly a big cheese but has some sort of creative job and is kind of hanging out on the margins, would make Lloyd want to open up and hold forth.

Fascinating. It suggests that the evangelism of Jobs, Gates et alia was not as big a stylistic departure as I thought.

LET A HUNDRED FLOWERS BLOOM.

Remember when those Obama Joker posters were supposed to be A Thing, and not just something Grandpa wears to the Bundy Ranch? No? How about that one billboard in Wyoming? No? How about the Bush "Miss Me Yet?" posters? Oh, you do remember them? Embarrassing, weren't they?

Well, never mind those, because here's a real culture war coup:

Parody Obama Movie Posters Arrive in L.A. for President’s Visit
‘Saving Barack Obama: A Steven Spielberg Ploy’

The idea apparently is that Obama and Spielberg hate the Jews, and the Real Grown Ups across the internet are ecstatic. Let those communists have Hollywood, Broadway and the museums -- we have a couple of posters in Los Angeles, which will be rechristened Breitbartberg comes Der Tag.

Speaking of Breitbart:

The artwork is part of a larger campaign by street artists who are filling cities with political messages in opposition to the current administration. In February of this year, posters declaring President Obama to be “subpar” covered the streets of Santa Monica, California. The appearance of the posters coincided with the PGA Tour and poked fun at the president’s multiple golf outings.

Surely this will move the sheeple! Benghazi will be avenged!

For some reason I'm put in mind of Hitler's watercolors.

WHAT IS MY JACKBOOT DOING ON MY NECK?

Jonah Goldberg in 2003:

What makes McCarthyism so hard to discuss is that McCarthy behaved like a jerk, but he was also right... 

Senator Joe McCarthy was a lout, generally speaking. But he was on the right side of history and, in a broad sense, of morality as well. If, in some sort of parallel-universe exercise, the same number of (now proven) Soviet-Communist spies, collaborators, sympathizers, and the like were somehow switched to Nazis, and McCarthy went after them with the same vehemence as he went after Reds, Joe McCarthy might well have universities and foundations named after him today... 

When they denounce McCarythism, they are working on the clear assumption that McCarthyism victimized only innocent people. That is a lie. And it also a lie that the USA Patriot Act is being used solely to punish innocent people. 

Ah, those were the days, when conservatives thought defending unpopular ideas was objectively pro-commie and objectively pro-Saddam. Things have changed. This week in USA Today, Goldberg tells us that when college students let it be known that they don't want rightwing political figures to speak at their own graduation, it's a liberal fascist "thought-crime crackdown."

Like the older column, Goldberg's new one is a wretched mess -- he denounces "the so-called 'Red Scare' of the World War I era," which is basically denouncing "the so-called atrocity I am asserting," and compares the Red Scare prosecutions of and assaults on alleged communists to Harry Reid calling the Koch Brothers un-American. (I'm sure Convict No. 9653 would have traded places with the Kochs any day of the week.)

But while autopsying Goldberg's prose is fun, let's not miss the point: while the conservative schtick-of-the-moment about liberals oppressing them is hilarious in several ways, it is useful to remember that these people are natural bullies. As in Goldberg's case, they demonstrated this in their writing back when their tide was high -- and they demonstrate it still on people over whom they still have control, namely the poor, whom they punish sadistically every chance they get. I'd say their bullshit about being oppressed is the result of guilty consciences, if I thought they had consciences.

UPDATE. Comments are glorious. To this particularly Goldberg blubberburst over liberalfascist oppression of racist billionaires --

I have no sympathy for disgraced L.A. Clippers owner Donald Sterling's views about race, but there's something troubling about how so many people are comfortable with vilifying a man for something he said in private, possibly even during couples' counseling.

-- mortimer2000 has a nice rejoinder:

There's a Ms. Lewinsky calling on the "safe" line, Mr. Goldberg.

Picking up the same theme (the launch of Goldberg's career on his mother's Clinton espionage, if you didn't click the link), smut clyde highlights Goldberg's reference to "vilifying a man for something he said in private" and adds, "Yep, if Jonah wants to maintain this new-found moral principle, it could make for an awkward Mothers' Day conversation."

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about Benghazi Round Which One Is It I Lost Track. Nonetheless it's fascinating to see them work variations on the theme, in a sort of late-Bowery-Boys sort of way.

UPDATE. In comments, AGoodQuestion responds to Roger L. Simon's pep talk to the troops ("Every one of us has to stay the course on Benghazi until this gets sorted out... Remember, even OJ didn't get away with it in the end"): "So the plan is to keep bitching about Benghazi until Obama slips up and steals back some of his sports memorabilia?" I think he's got it!

UPDATE 2. I've got a great idea for the Benghazi guys -- collectively sponsor a NASCAR vehicle, like Reddit Dogecoin enthusiasts did at Talladega. Then, if their car wins, the guy can go to the mike and dedicate his victory to those four brave men Obama and Hillary murdered. Hell, why not have Soros and the Kochs buy up all the sponsorships and make every victory an occasion for political speech? This country's finished anyways.

GAS CHAMBER.

The Oklahoma execution debacle was horrible -- maybe even worse than Jonah Goldberg's mouthfarts on the subject. But it's close. First Goldberg basically said he was okay with torturing Clayton Lockett to death because Lockett's horrific crime merited such treatment. I don't know why he decided to come back and make it worse -- laziness, I suppose; he already had done the research -- but yeesh:

Many of these convicts no doubt deserve worse in the cosmic sense, but it’s not the place of the state to deliver worse. I am strongly for the death penalty but I have no desire to go down the path to medieval forms of execution where we are expected to take pleasure in someone’s final extravagantly choreographed agonies. Moreover, as a political matter, embracing that kind of thing will ultimately undermine the death penalty itself.

If we torture more of these guys to death, we may lose the voters! Oh, and get a load of this:

Of course there’s considerable hypocrisy at work when death penalty opponents do everything they can to block more humane and efficient means of execution — i.e. the old drug cocktail — and then complain that the remaining or new techniques are unconstitutional. You can make the case that the Lockett fiasco was a forced error by opponents of the death penalty.

See what you stupid libtards did? You made us go to the black market for our killin' drugs. What did you want us to do, wait?

But, I should say, I respect many opponents of the death penalty (even if I recoil at some of their tactics).

Goldberg has transformed the pee-dance into a rhetorical form.

Which brings us to the ridiculous claim that the botched execution was cruel and unusual punishment because it was “torture.” I see that Andy beat me to the punch in noting that, as a legal matter, you can’t torture someone by accident.

Holy shit, just when you think nothing could be worse, Goldberg enlists National Review's foremost torture enthusiast, Andrew McCarthy, and his legalistic determination as to how guilty people should feel about this disaster (unsurprisingly, not at all).

Onward:

But let me put it another way: Lockett wasn’t sentenced to a botched execution. He was sentenced to be executed. Think of it this way: Last night a Pensacola jail blew up because of a gas leak. At least two people died. We don’t know yet whether they were inmates. But, let’s assume they were. Moreover let’s assume they were being held for petty crimes. Their deaths would not amount to “cruel and unusual punishment” even though most reasonable people would agree that stealing a candy bar or urinating in public shouldn’t be crimes punishable by death. That’s because the explosion was an accident.

And this is just like the accident that happened while Oklahoma was trying to kill a guy.

Goldberg ends by yelling at Will McAvoy, which is just perfect.

UPDATE. Regarding Goldberg's objection to death penalty opponents' "tactics," mds comments, "Like what? Picketing courthouses while holding up photos of grisly executions? Loudly berating anyone who goes in, even for a traffic violation, as being complicit in murder? Yeah, I could see how a principled conservative might find such behavior offensive."

IF I DON'T WIN AN AWARD IT'S BECAUSE YOU'RE ALL PREJUMADICED.

Shorter Ole Perfesser Instapundit Glenn Reynolds: Some writers said mean things about another writer, which can only be explained by liberal fascism.

I wonder if he or this Correia guy know that when John Lennon gave back his MBE "as a protest against Britain’s involvement in the Nigeria-Biafra thing, against our support of America in Vietnam and against ‘Cold Turkey’ slipping down the charts," he was joking.

What a bunch of whiners. They're like the unpopular kid in high school who thinks girls don't like him because they only like jerks, so he'll just be a jerk then and see how they like it.  

P.S., here's some background on this from someone who is not nuts, but I bet some of my readers have lots more to add. 

UPDATE. I should have mentioned for the benefit of non-devotees of the genre that this is all based on a Hugo Award publicity stunt by some authors of the conservative persuasion. (And to that I have no objection -- swindle, comrades! What bugs me is the promulgation of this "we're being oppressed by liberals who won't vote for us" bullshit by the Perfesser and others as a serious free-speech issue.)

But that's okay -- among my readers are many sci-fi fans, and this milkshake brings all the nerds to the yard. (I say that with love, folks.)

On the fact-based tip, Spaghetti Lee notes that "[Orson Scott] Card won [a Hugo] twice in a row, in fact, and [Robert] Heinlein 4 times. And David Brin. And Vernor Vinge. And Dan Simmons. Anyone who thinks that conservatives or libertarians are being shut out has either done no research or is a petulant idiot, or both."

Others just have a laugh at the wounded-dork routine. "I have to give my fellow Zhdanovites on the left credit for this brilliant scheme," says whetstone. "Instead of merely disappearing Correia from the Hugos altogether, you nominate him... and then don't let him win!!!... Just think about how much longer various repressive regimes would have survived if they'd just strung along dissidents by short-listing them instead of disappearing them."

Satch breaks it down:

All this just goes to show how conservative whiners have managed to civilize public discourse... at least for conservatives. We should all be thankful that when conservatives are "lynched" or "martyred", they are no longer required to actually die. Being shipped off in cattle cars to re-education camps, which used to be the same as eye-rolling mockery, has been downgraded from literal to figurative. And soul-crushing injustice has been smoothed out to now mean "Being Nominated For, But Not Winning, A Hugo Award". I, for one, think that we are doing conservatives no favors by subjecting them to the soft bigotry of watered-down metaphors.

THE LEFT IS ATTACKING THE CITY: A REVIVAL.

I see conservatives are already blaming The Left for ousting racist billionaire Clippers Owner DonaldSterling:

So the norm should be that people who make ill advised and embarrassing comments in private should "fall"? What a lovely state the left is building.

I said this when a corporation fired Paula Deen and when a board of directors fired Brendan Eich, but let's try again to make it nice and sparkling clear for the hard-of-thinking:

I'm reminded of what Menachim Begin said when Lebanese Christians massacred Palestinians and Sharon and the IDF were accused of taking part: "The goyim kill the goyim, and then run to hang the Jews."

All of the principals in these dramas, protagonists and antagonists, are rich fucks, and their decisions have much more to do with perceived shareholder value than with the U.S. Constitution. The rich fucks fucked the rich fucks, and then ran to hang The Left.

I see some of you rightwing guys are sore about it. Well, go ahead, be sore, life's tough all over. But don't insult my intelligence by saying it's because you care deeply about civil rights, or you'd have been weeping over the scoutmaster whose troop got dumped because he's gay, too, and I sure didn't see that happening.  You're just sore about these guys because the charge on their warrants was bigotry, and instead of the rich fucks laughing and saying, oh come on, how could anyone take such a thing seriously, can't you charge 'em with moral turpitude or something -- instead the rich fucks in charge said yes indeed, it was indeed serious, and pitched them out.

I don't care about the alleged victims one way or the other. They're rich and can afford to buy their own sympathy, or contempt if that's what they go for. Their speech will always be free, indeed worth more than mine because they can put a million bucks behind every word. But I must say I get a kick out of your discomfort. Like the song says, it's a different world from where you come from; you can't entirely count on being white and straight to spare you now, and you're shitting your pants. As someone who comes from the poor side of the white-straight family, and could never count on those breaks, I get a kick out of that. (I also get a kick out of professional hairsplitters trying explain why one rich-fuck prosecution is more righteous than another, or at least more suitable to their carefully cultivated contrarian brand equity. Coming up with new, lawyerly explanations of the moral meanings in rich-fuck battles royale must be exhausting.)

I'm an old man and resigned that the tumbrels may never get here, but at least I get to see you squirm a bit, and that's some consolation. I don't even mind you screaming that it's my fault. I'm used to it, and anyway we both know the truth.

(Title inspired by this.)

UPDATE. Inevitably, in libertarian land: Statists are the real racists!

THE SMILER WITH THE KNIFE.

There's been some interesting commentary on Sarah Palin's grisly joke about waterboarding as baptism for terrorists (and, in Tbogg's case, on the godly folk who find sacrilege more worrisome than torture). However...

Sarah Palin on Baptism, Waterboarding . . . and ‘Torture’ 

Patrick, Sarah Palin’s comparison of waterboarding to baptism, even in jest, was bad judgment. If I were Gov. Palin, I’d lose all the baptism jokes, since they manage to provoke devout Christians and authentic Muslim moderates as much as they do jihadists. But I think it is a mistake so off-handedly to agree with the Left’s political and hypocritical claim that waterboarding, as applied by the CIA to three high-value al Qaeda detainees under careful (albeit controversial) guidelines, amounted to “torture.”

...it's always a good time to reflect on what a horrible monster Andrew C. McCarthy is.

Waterboarding the way the CIA executed was highly uncomfortable, but it did not cause severe pain, it was of short duration, and it did not cause fear of imminent death (the detainees were told that they were not going to be killed).

If you can't trust your torturer, who can you trust?

People who want a categorical ban on such tactics constantly avoid addressing the ticking-bomb scenario and similar questions that bring the logic of their position into stark relief: forced to choose, they would prefer the occurrence of a preventable atrocity and the loss of perhaps thousands of lives to interrogation that harms a hair on the head of a culpable terrorist.

Remember the early '00s, when everybody was Jack Bauer on 24? McCarthy's still back there. When he's not dreaming of don't-call-it-torture, and of the fun he could have offering terrified prisoners waterboarding in exchange for years off their sentences (though to be fair, he was against the "court-ordered torture-murder of Terri Schiavo"), he's denouncing the condition of the poor in this country -- because it's too good  ("flat-screen TVs, iPods, X-boxes and the scores of other extravagances that the 'poor' in America manage to score without government mandates"), and telling us how Don Imus making fun of Rush Limbaugh presages an Obamafascist state, etc. He was a cryptobirther, too.

This will give you some idea of how awful McCarthy is -- he attempts to enlist Rod Dreher in his defense, and I feel outraged for Rod Dreher.

SEASON 7, EPISODE 3.

(Mild spoilers.) Roger's significance is outsize here. The woman who interrupts Don's meeting with Dave Wooster to give him her hotel room location only exists, I'm sure, as a narrative red herring, to set up the shock cut when the hotel room door opens and Roger's on the other side. One moment Don's about to move on -- just as Lane told his father he'd done a few seasons back -- and then boom, he's bursting in on his surrogate father and telling him, "I would never do that to you."

Some people have asked, in titles even, "Why did Don agree to return to SC&P?" One thing: Don has never worked anywhere else. Earlier this season they rubbed that in our faces: when Don said he'd almost worked at Y&R twice, Wooster pointed out that, nonetheless, he'd never actually done it. But Roger is also part of the reason. That Roger showed up late for their big meeting at the agency, apparently unclear on what he and Don had agreed on the night before, flashed me straight back to how a similar Roger brown-to-blackout first got Don in the door at the agency years earlier. Through Don's whole career Roger has been his guru as well as his partner in crime, and from the way Roger's been acting lately I'm sure he's sincere when he says he misses Don. But as I realized a year or so back when Roger was weeping over that shoe shine kit -- the sort of scene that's Screenwriting 101 for a reason -- Roger isn't even a surrogate father to Don; he's more of an aging Skimpole, and I fear Don hasn't figured that out yet.

So: Why did Don agree to return to SC&P? At the moment, it looks like he didn't have the guts to leave. ("Guts" in the broadest sense: Clearly it'll take effort and pain to make anything out of the shit-moat the partners have put him behind, but a trapped man will put up with a lot to make his prison glorious. Don tells Megan he's going to "make it right" by going back, and clearly saving their relationship isn't what he means by that.)

I wish I had a gif of Peggy and Don in this episode: "I can't say that we missed you." "Thank you, Peggy." Elisabeth Moss and Jon Hamm ate the worm. Take a good hard look at how far we've come from The Suitcase. Let alone from "It will shock you how much it never happened." The road to this scene is a series all by itself.

Why is Betty on Bobby's field trip the parallel stream? Because Don was an abused child and Betty is showing us how that's done in the generation that followed, among people who no longer live in whorehouses. At least that's what I got from January Jones' monolithic-minimalistic performance. Jones' vanishing voice and sour-apple-on-stupid-vanilla expressions are so epic, I'm beginning to suspect she's a drag queen.

Dawn and Shirley are turning into Solange and Claire.

UPDATE. In comments, JennOfArk says the Betty-Bobby plot

seems to build on a theme that started way back in the beginning, Betty-as-child. Remember the neighbor kid with the crush? Betty has been portrayed all along as this cossetted creature whose growth has been stunted by a life that expects nothing from her except that she look pretty.

That would explain her specific abuse, which is to treat her child as if he has adult responsibilities to her that trump her parental responsibilities to him.

I must also mention: Don going to the movies reminds me that though we see him sometimes relaxing with movies and even literature (including, preposterously, Dante), and reacting to art he doesn't like (The Beatles, Jean-Claude van Itallie), these experiences never seem to reach him or inform anything he does. His advertising copy is just good advertising copy, and that includes his open letter. What we've heard of his journal entries is pap. It's interesting that the great "creative" mind of the Mad Men universe is a perfect philistine.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the fallout from Cliven Bundy's speech on The Negro and his condition. The rightblogger reaction was varied and hilarious, but I explain how in the end this is good news for John McCain.

One thing I didn't have room for was the conversion of Ed Morrissey of Hot Air. Once the Bundy tape came out, Morrisey decided that "the federal government may own too much land, but that’s an issue for the states to fight in court, not ranchers with guns."

Yet less than a week earlier, Morrissey was arguing that Harry Reid was a "demagogue" because Reid said threatening force against the United States, as Bundy had, was terrorism.

"Primarily, no act of violence took place, although some of the protesters were armed," said Morrissey. "In the end, this was a non-violent action, although still dangerous for those involved." By this definition, any armed robbery in which nobody actually gets shot should be downgraded from a felony. Morrissey did generously allow that "one could make the argument that the armed faction at the Bundy ranch was a show of force that coerced the BLM into retreat, and that would meet that definition... in a strictly literal sense."

Remember when conservatives were law-and-order types? No? Well, it was a long time ago, before The Negro became President.

SELDOM IS HEARD A DISCOURAGING WORD.

A lot of liberals are laughing because Cliven Bundy, the cowboy at war with the U.S. government and secessionist poster boy of the Right, made some of those insane comments about black people that have become a conservative specialty ("I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro... They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves...").

Don't laugh too soon. Insane comments about black people became a conservative specialty for a reason.

At Raw Story the headline on Arturo Garcia's story says "Conservatives begin backing away after Cliven Bundy’s remarks disparaging 'the Negro,'" but Garcia himself merely asserts that "Republican politicians began backtracking on their support" -- which is wise, because conservatives as such are mostly keeping quiet about it.

A couple have taken the opportunity to embarrass themselves; Dana Loesch, for example, is all over the place, softening Bundy's comments ("big government has negatively affected not just the black family, but all families regardless of ethnicity"), then implying Bundy was misquoted ("it’s justified to have a healthy suspicion of the New York Times"), then trying to change the subject ("what exactly does that have to do with the BLM?"). But mostly the brethren seem to hope we can get past this unfortunate business, and back to the war on the U.S. government, which they think is a winning position.

For conservatives -- and we're talking about the not-totally-insane contingent that acknowledges the existence of racism -- the subject is kind of an eat-your-vegetables thing. The ooga-booga stuff is so much more fun, and keeps the troops energized. Normally I don't like to drag rightblogger commenters into these things because of the high noise-to-signal ratio in their portrayal of conservative consensus, but it is depressingly expected that when National Review's Michael Potemra criticizes a racist rant  (of the passive-aggressive, what's-wrong-with-racism, "humans like to be among their own kind" variety -- you know, Rod Dreher stuff), nearly all of his commenters defend the racist (e.g., "an article saying what is essentially common sense and well known to be true by pretty much everyone is somehow considered out of bounds in our Orwellian culture"). These are the bitter-enders to which most of the top-shelf conservative writers aim their pep talks, and most of them know better than to get on their wrong side.

UPDATE. In what I expect will become a model for the genre, National Review's Kevin D. Williamson points out that sometimes liberators such as Gandhi have foolish ideas -- which is common sense, except that he seems to think Bundy is such a liberator. He also compares the Bundy standoff to John Brown at Harpers Ferry, which under the current circumstances is especially funny. Why Williamson isn't at the Ranch with a musket if he really believes all this -- wait, I think I answered my own question.

UPDATE 2. I was wondering when the libertarians would come stumbling in. Jonathan Chait having noticed that Where Secessionists Go, Racist Trouble Follows, Reason's J.D. Tuccille first assures everyone he's no racist, then:

[Bundy's comments are] contemptible stuff. It was also contemptible when progressives merged pseudo-scientific racist notions with their ideology...

Yes, Tuccille goes straight for "Woodrow Wilson was a liberal fascist, your argument is invalid." Also, Robert Byrd was a Klansman, just like all statists! After the history lecture, Tuccille goes for Routine 12, aka Blame the Media:

"Why do all these people with strong antipathy toward the federal government turn out to be racists?" asks Chait. Maybe it's because the cameras and journalists focus on one loudmouth on horseback, even as representatives of nine state governments meet in Salt Lake City at the Legislative Summit on the Transfer of Public Lands.

Maybe it was because the summitteers didn't threaten federal agents with guns, which has long been a sure-fire way to get in the papers. Come to think of it, why didn't the rest of Bundy's live-free-or-kill squad announce "Screw it, Salt Lake City is where the action is" days ago? Could it be that the promise of separatist violence is a big part of the draw?

UPDATE 3. Bryan Preston, I think you have a little spittle in the corner of your mouth:

Wanting people to be free, independent and self-reliant, and hoping for a government that fosters those values, equals racism now? Today it does, tomorrow it won’t, as soon as some prog hero talks good about working their way up from nothing without even having to resort to fake claiming to be a minority to further their academic career, or falsifying a wartime military career.

Libtards are all born rich and spend their days lying and draft-dodging. Say, maybe I've had George W. Bush wrong all this time!

Bundy’s remarks will have fewer real-world consequences than many uttered by Margaret Sanger, yet today she’s a progressive hero...

Again with the liberal fascism history lectures. Someone invent a time machine so these guys can feel superior somewhere besides the holodeck.

BIG SCIENCE IS TRYING TO KILL ME WITH BIG SCIENCE!

Jamelle Bouie's essay on "conservative tribalism" -- the tendency of right-wingers to adopt (some) positions just to be on the other side of positions liberals have taken --  rings pretty true. I think the problem goes deeper than he knows, though. Dropping a position you used to hold just to get on the right or left of the opposition is an understandable political maneuver.  But when you see conservatives reacting to, for example, Michelle Obama's drink-more-water campaign by exposing the lie that water is good for you, you know things have gotten weird.

Here's a more recent example from the Rasputin of ressentiment, Ole Perfesser Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit: Reynolds quotes a New York Times story about how judgments on what foods are good for you have changed over time, as one would expect in a era of active research ("trying to tweeze feeble effects from a tangle of variables, many of them unknown, inevitably leads to a tug of war of contradictory reports"). Many of us would appreciate the reminder of the need for perspective and factor it into our dietary decisions. Here's Reynolds' reaction:

Yet all the nutritional commands — like the command to avoid sunlight — have been issued in the Voice Of Authority, with doubters and skeptics condemned as disrespecters of science. There’s even the suggestion that the war on tobacco caused people who quit smoking to gain weight, with more cancers resulting from obesity than from cigarettes. If that proves out, will the anti-smoking folks be targeted like the tobacco companies were?

Kind of tempts you to tell him liberals "command" everyone to avoid running their lawn mowers over live power lines, doesn't it? Actually there's no point: He's not going to live out the freedom-from-science dream. That's for his readers to do, poor bastards.