FILE YOUR NOMINATIONS!

The Stupidest Reaction to the Capture of a Benghazi Suspect Contest is sure to be heated, but let me nominate Patterico:

Guy Arrested for Benghazi Attack Has Been Hanging Out in Plain Sight for Ages 

Obama done caught him a terrorist. Yay! Except . . . what took so long?... 

Hm. He sounds easy to find. If you care... 

Doesn’t sound like Obama cared.

What's this remind me of -- oh yeah: "In six games!"



Got any nominees of your own? All serious candidates considered. I warn you, though, you can forget about low-hanging fruit -- so don't comb the gutters for small-time operators peddling fringe Benghazi truther bullshit like... um... um... popular radio blowhard Joe Walsh ("Timing of Benghazi Arrest Suspicious")... Ah, prairie shit -- everybody!

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the brethren's hard-on for Iraq now that it's collapsing again -- this time without our help, which may be why they're so concerned. Oh, who am I kidding -- it's about Obama and the Democrats being weak on defense, etc. Guess we'll find out whether the American people still think we'll be greeted as liberators.

UPDATE. The Voice column mentions a lot of war-whoopers from early days who are again telling us again what to do in Iraq instead of requesting fresh blankets from their jailers in Den Haag. Well, today in the New York Daily News I see a let's-do-it-again column from... Fred Kagan. This AEI hack told us back in 2005 that "Iraq is Not Vietnam"; now that Iraq seems to be passing from the Quagmire stage to the Ignoble Retreat stage, Kagan is trying to reverse the judgment of history in his favor:

And so, the current impending defeat is much worse than the one we accepted so blithely in 1975. This war won't end with U.S. personnel escaping from the embassy roof (although that might happen as well). There is, in fact, no end in sight for this war now, especially if we allow Iraq to go down. A policy of retreat and abandonment remains as it has always been the fastest road to endless war.

Whereas doubling down in Iraq is the scenic route to endless war. Jesus Christ. Why couldn't we have given these guys the Inglourious Basterds treatment so people would know better than to trust them again?

FRIDAY AROUND-THE-HORN.

(updated as my goddamn job permits)

• Always forward-looking, Reihan Salam gets out front among the "third-time's-the-charm" Iraq War fans with "We Should Never Have Left Iraq." Never mind that our contract signed by George W. Bush with fucking Iraq was that we'd leave by 2011 -- which Salam does his considerable best to obfuscate:

So why did the U.S. leave Iraq at the end of 2011? Part of it is that many within the Obama administration simply didn’t believe that U.S. forces would make much of a difference to Iraq’s political future. 

That loud noise was your bullshit detector exploding. It's not like he doesn't know the Status of Forces Agreement exists, because just last year he told Vice's Eddy Moretti:

REIHAN SALAM: I think that in my ideal world-- and I'm way,way out of the political mainstream on this issue. I personally think I would have wanted to have a larger American presence in Iraq even now. So one thing is that we didn't wind up negotiating a status of forces agreement that would have kept a substantial number of US military personnel in Iraq.  Now, this is a crazy view, right? Because everyone is like, we want to wash our hands of Iraq, period.

Yeah, that's what everyone was like, Reihan. Anyway, Salam's best argument is that Brent Scowcroft didn't want to go to war in Iraq, but once we did he wanted us to stay there and finish the job:

Though Scowcroft was confident that the U.S. could succeed in destroying Saddam’s regime, he was also confident that military action would be expensive and bloody, and that it “very likely would have to be followed by a large-scale, long-term military occupation.” As we all know, Scowcroft’s warning went unheeded by the Bush White House. 

Scowcroft offered another warning in America and the World, a widely ignored book published in 2008 that collected a series of exchanges between Scowcroft and his fellow foreign policy wise man Zbigniew Brzezinski.

Boy, how'd we all miss that gripping read?

Recognizing that Iraq remained riven by communal conflict, Scowcroft argued that the country would continue to need a U.S. military presence for at least a few more years.

Number 1: TEN YEARS. WE'VE BEEN THERE OVER TEN FUCKING YEARS. Number 2: He's Brent Scowcroft. What the fuck's he going to say? "Yeah, we fucked up, guess we're just going to have to leave those poor people to drown in suck." Scowcroft has to play the Wise Man (character requirements: Grey eminence, nice suits; must have both One Hand and The Other Hand) because that's what he's paid to play. Whereas those of us who told these idiots what a clusterfuck they were in for back in the day got called traitors by Andrew Sullivan.

Being right about these things has its quiet advantages but I gotta admit, I'd love to know what it's like to keep being wrong all the time and still get paid.

• Remember Michael Totten, one of the more passive-aggressive warbloggers of yore? Well, he ain't changed a bit:

Arab governments complain when we intervene and they complain when we don't intervene. Basically, they complain no matter what. So asking what they want is pointless. It takes a while to notice this trend over time, but there it is.

No one likes us/I don't know why/We may not be perfect/But heaven knows we try...

“We’ll kill you if you mess with us, but otherwise go die” is not even close to my preferred foreign policy, but it’s what President Barack Obama prefers (phrased much more nicely, of course) and it’s what the overwhelming majority of Americans prefer, including most liberals as well as conservatives.

Translation: The liberals are always to blame, especially for refusing to support, as I demanded they do, this occupation which I am belatedly rejecting.

Still, it’s only a matter of time before we get sucked in kicking and screaming one way or another. Because the Middle East isn’t Las Vegas. What happens there doesn’t stay there.

Prediction: Some months hence, Totten will demand we re-re-invade Iraq to clean up the mess Barack Obama made. And, shortly thereafter, protest babes!

• If you're looking for new and exciting ways to spin the third-time's-the-charm Iraq re-re-invasion strategy, National Review's Jim Geraghty would like to show you the thisclose maneuver. It's like a cross between the Ticking Time Bomb Scenario and the Butterfly Effect:

...what if the Iraqi government is just short of being capable of pushing back ISIS? Is it worth withholding our assistance to make the point that they need to be independent? How much can fear of future scapegoating limit our options in the here and now?

Just get them over the hump, then you can leave! Then some other exotically-named menace will threaten, then we go back; then we return, then some other exotically-named menace -- it's the military equivalent of shuttle diplomacy.

Bonus dick move from Geraghty:

If we really are going to adopt a philosophy of “we could help you, but we suspect you’ll grow dependent upon us and blame us for problems down the road,” could we please apply that to domestic spending programs as well?

Haw! Stupid libs want to feed paupers when there are Iraqi citizens to re-re-liberate! Doesn't the Constitution apply to them, too?

THE RETURN OF THE REAGAN DEMOCRATS.

National Journal's Ron Fournier is today's Mr. Bi-Partisan, and this month went among The People way out in non-Philadelphia Pennsylvania in search of fellow bi-partisans. He ate at their diner. He shot the breeze in their barber shop. He heard their disappointment with their leaders. They clearly saw -- or rather Fournier, filled with their wisdom, clearly saw -- that the unseating of a powerful Republican, Eric Cantor, is a warning to both parties. There's a "populist" breeze a-blowin', and here's what it sounds like:

"This country's doomed," Guy said. Kercher nodded her head and told me that she's close to losing her house to a mortgage company and can't get help from Washington. For years, their county salaries haven't kept pace with the cost of living. "The rich get richer. The poor get benefits. The middle class pays for it all," Kercher said.

Ah, the middle class -- they've always been America's salvation, at least in newsweeklies, and now Fournier say they're bringing us "a peaceful populist revolt -- a bottom-up, tech-fueled assault on 20th-century political institutions." You know it's not the nasty sort of revolution because it's tech-fueled, meaning those few Americans who conditionally qualify as middle class can still afford laptops. Plus it's bi-partisan.

And what's the bi-partisan middle-class populist revolt agenda? Fournier brings in Doug Sosnik, who wrote a book called Applebee's America so you know he's clued-in and tech-fueled, to supply bullets for the revolutionary arsenal:

• A pullback from the rest of the world, with more of an inward focus.
  
• A desire to go after big banks and other large financial institutions.
  
• Elimination of corporate welfare.
  
• Reducing special deals for the rich.
  
• Pushing back on the violation of the public's privacy by the government and big business.

Sounds reasonable -- oh, wait, we forgot the most important revolutionary bullet:

• Reducing the size of government.

Because if you want to rein in the rich, corporations, the financial industry, etc., the first step is to scale back the government -- the SEC, the CFPB, the Justice Department and all that, they just get in the way; flying squads of billionaires, battening on the bathtub-drowned Small Government, will take care of all that for you.

Or maybe they're just loot the treasury on behalf of their buddies and destroy whatever effectiveness our government still has, as usual. But to paraphrase an old showbiz proverb, if you haven't seen it, it's revolutionary to you. Now if only we can get Joe Lieberman to run for President...

HIM AGAIN, THIS AGAIN.

We can dispense quickly with W. Bradford Wilcox's Washington Post thing, "One way to end violence against women? Stop taking lovers and get married." (They've since changed the title, perhaps because it reminded readers of an old Will Ferrell and Rachel Dratch routine.) We have seen Wilcox before, telling people marriage makes you rich, and now he's telling them that marriage also protects women from abusers. Sample:

For women, part of the story is about what social scientists call a “selection effect,” namely, women in healthy, safe relationships are more likely to select into marriage, and women in unhealthy, unsafe relationships often lack the power to demand marriage or the desire to marry. Of course, women in high conflict marriages are more likely to select into divorce. 

...What’s more: women who are married are more likely to live in safer neighborhoods, to have a partner who is watching out for their physical safety, and—for obvious reasons—to spend less time in settings that increase their risk of rape, robbery, and assaults.

Let me introduce another term used by social scientists: correlation, which is different from causation.  This is like saying a brand-new Jaguar prevents rape because women who can afford a brand-new Jaguar tend to live in safer neighborhoods.

You can and do, however, get these wonderful results by giving people money. Wilcox would have you believe that wedding vows are talismanic and cause wealth, but sane people know it's not so; if you pass out marriage certificates in the slums, it won't turn them into luxury condos.

 I suspect that as one of the "conservative reform" crew Wilcox expects to have a sub-cabinet office dedicated to that purpose come Der Tag, funded with sweet, faith-based-initiative cash. As long as they see that at the end of the rainbow, they'll keep this nonsense up.

UPDATE. Mona Chalabi at Nate Silver's Nerd Farm:

One of the charts used in the article (seen at left) comes from a Department of Justice study published in 2012. I got in touch with the study’s author, Shannon Catalano, a statistician at the Bureau of Justice Statistics, who said her chart was presented without sufficient context.

Well, add statisticians to climate scientists as members of the Scientists' Conspiracy to destroy America -- which will be thwarted by Republican Lysenkoism!

UPDATE 2. Comments are terrific, of course. whetstone has a list of complaints with Wilcox, including: "Our data on domestic violence prior to the 1970s-1980s isn't very good. All the societal changes conservatives are shitting their pants over were basically done at that point... It's worth noting that we have good data now because FEMINISTS IDENTIFIED THESE PROBLEMS AND THEN WE STARTED MEASURING IT. So it's particularly infuriating when these statistics are used as a cudgel against feminism."

THE SEDUCTION OF THE IDIOTS.

Remember when Amity Shlaes told her fellow conservatives to make rightwing comics to re-educate the littlebrains? The Comintern seems to be responding: The two comics creators she hired to turn her anti-FDR book into graphic nonfiction, Chuck Dixon and Paul Rivoche, have been given a platform at the Wall Street Journal to tell us our favorite comics heroes were turned into a bunch of anti-American bums by liberalism, and that it's time for conservatives to "take back comics":

In the 900th issue of Action Comics, Superman decides to go before the United Nations and renounce his U.S. citizenship. " 'Truth, justice and the American way'—it's not enough any more," he despairs. That issue, published in April 2011, is perhaps the most dramatic example of modern comics' descent into political correctness, moral ambiguity and leftist ideology. 

We are comic-book artists and comics are our passion. But more important they've inspired and shaped many millions of young Americans. Our fear is that today's young comic-book readers are being ill-served by a medium that often presents heroes as morally compromised or no different from the criminals they battle. With the rise of moral relativism, "truth, justice and the American way" have lost their meaning.

Comics are apparently a public good (unlike, say, water) which must be kept pure so "young comic-book readers" hear only what a mid-20th-Century censor would approve. No, literally:

In the 1950s, the great publishers, including DC and what later become Marvel, created the Comics Code Authority, a guild regulator that issued rules such as: "Crimes shall never be presented in such a way as to create sympathy for the criminal." The idea behind the CCA, which had a stamp of approval on the cover of all comics, was to protect the industry's main audience—kids—from story lines that might glorify violent crime, drug use or other illicit behavior. 

Actually the idea was to protect publishers from the moral panic engendered by Fred Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent.  Thanks to the CCA, "there were still good guys and bad guys," sigh Dixon and Rivoche, but "the 1990s brought a change" -- though the change actually came in 1960s, starting with R. Crumb and Zap, and giving rise to a comic artist community that wanted to stretch the medium  beyond kiddie comics, not just in the underground but also in their own workplaces -- and by the 90s they had the power to do so. Whatever you think of the result, that change has clearly meant more choice in what buyers can find in the market -- but Dixon and Rivoche portray it as censorship and "political correctness," and themselves as victims:

The industry weakened and eventually threw out the CCA, and editors began to resist hiring conservative artists.

[Cite please.]

One of us, Chuck, expressed the opinion that a frank story line about AIDS was not right for comics marketed to children. His editors rejected the idea and asked him to apologize to colleagues for even expressing it. Soon enough, Chuck got less work.

And that's why everyone has AIDS today -- because the comics commissars blacklisted Dixon and Rivoche and turned the means of production over to loyal Party members like Frank Miller and Alison Bechdel, who Seduce the Innocent to this day. George F. Will may think being raped is the coveted victim-status of our time, but among his conservative colleagues the fashionable victim card is always that liberals refuse to do things their way, which they inevitably portray as censorship.

I can't blame them too much -- they have a book to sell and, as I have observed before, comics is a hard dollar. I'm mainly surprised that conservatives are still peddling the purification of culture. Their traditional appeals to racism and sexism I can understand, but do even Mississippians want the swears and sideboobs driven from their TVs?

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the Bergdahl affair and the self-evident bad faith and bullshit the brethren have brought to it. I can't even be outraged, really; once you know their formula, and them, you kind of expect they'd perform a similar routine if presented with  ham sandwich or a basket of puppies.

UPDATE. Commenters note that some of the factoids repeated as gospel by the brethren are being challenged, let us say, by events and expert witnesses: For example, the insistence that the five trained Talibani were super-villains whom Obama only let go because he wants them to grow stronger and destroy America has been contradicted by a Gitmo prosecutor ("When I saw the names of the five individuals, when they were reported last weekend, my first reaction was, ‘Who are they?’... I think [the Administration] struck a pretty good deal"), as well as by a former CENTCOM chief, among others. I wouldn't say this proves that there was nothing wrong with the deal -- I don't want to get into the game of refuting one set of unbuttressed assertions with another -- but it does remind those of us still in possession of common sense that a house built on bullshit may not survive a brisk summer rain.

UPDATE 2. I would say this Marc A. Thiessen headline marks the all-time low --

Is Obama considering surrendering to the Taliban?

-- but experience has taught us that as far as these guys are concerned, the barrel has no bottom.

FRIDAY AROUND-THE-HORN.

•  Matthew Continetti was for years a reliable defender of the great and powerful Bush. Then he realized that gravy train wouldn't run forever, and so devoted himself to defending even greater Americans such as Sarah Palin, and to other variants of rightwing aargh-blaargh. Lately he's switched his specialty to  long hit pieces on Obama. In the latest installment, Obama goes to Italy and has dinner with local luminaries at the ambassador's residence. Continetti wants us to know this is an outrage, so he tells us the residence has an art collection that "includes Roman sarcophagi and centuries-old imperial busts" -- whereas Bush's Ambassador to Italy lived in a youth hostel -- and Obama and his guests dined on "the finest foods and most delicate wines," whereas Bush ate hardtack and salt beef. "The dinner conversation, according to Politico’s Carrie Budoff Brown and Jennifer Epstein," Continetti went on, "touched on architecture, on art, on science, and on urban planning," whereas Bush... well, we hardly have to go on. The whole thing is full of easy layups like that, along with some more bizarre bits, like the backhanded slur on the Obamas' daughters ("'With his daughters around less,' Politico reports -- without saying exactly where Sasha and Malia, neither of whom is in college, have gone..."). Throughout you can almost see Continetti mincing around and flapping his hands; look at these foofy liberals with their wine and their architecture! But for me the key section is this:

I like to imagine the conversations at these parties...

God that Bibi is so unreasonable, who are your favorite authors, it’s time for a real conversation about race, is Homeland like real life, this is the sushi place to go to in Los Angeles, you are a real role model for young men not only in this country but all around the world...

And so on; eventually Continetti criticizes "the phoniness, the small talk, above all the endless putting on airs" of a conversation he just made up. It's like a transcript of teenage girls dishing on that stuck-up bitch in homeroom, but it's actually one of Conservatism's Great Minds writing what he probably thinks is social criticism, or at least a good way to pay the bills until he figures out who to suck up to next.

•  "This has to hurt: A plurality of respondents in a new Fox News poll 'believe the administration of former President George W. Bush was more competent [than] the Obama administration,' the Hill reports," says James Taranto. It would be more impressive if the sentence did not contain the words "Fox News poll," which people who can remember two years back know is a important qualifier. More interesting to me, though, is the brethren's weird relationship with Bush: Except for a brief outbreak of "Miss me yet?" signs, they've been acting like they don't know the guy for five years.  My first thought was that the recent wave of rightwing "reform" programs, which are suspiciously reminiscent of Bush's compassionate-conservative con, are part of the reason. But the Bergdahl bullshit figures too: As I pointed out earlier, these guys are feeling confident again that all they have to do is blow a bugle and America will again mistake them for Sgt. Rock -- just like back in Nineeleven days! They may bring the baseball and bullhorn back for 2016 -- in fact, if all goes well, they might even finally let W. attend their convention.

•  Speaking of Bergdahl, here's some ripe spew from Some Guy at RedState:

Other than the obscenity of a man who was introduced into politics by a brace of convicted domestic terrorists spouting words he seems to have learned while watching Blackhawk Down and rooting for the Mohamed Farrah Aidid clansmen --

You almost have to admire it -- it's like he managed to connect his bile duct to his fingers without  engaging his brain.

-- “we don’t leave anybody behind” — the statement isn’t even vaguely true.

In trading five senior Taliban field leaders for a US deserter, Barack Obama passed on an opportunity to retrieve four other Taliban captives, three of whom are American citizens... 

If Obama had really cared about “leave no one behind” he would have driven a harder bargain and brought three other Americans home with the feckless Bergdahl.

And that would have given us three more excuses to impeach him!

•  Sometime I wonder if Rod Dreher even knows what he's saying anymore. Andrew Sullivan got all huffy about that mass grave of infants recently discovered at a Catholic facility for unwed mothers, so Dreher, who was Catholic about eight religions back, raves about how important it is for his former Church to prosecute sexual sin. At one point:

Given that most religions and cultures have purity codes governing sexuality, it’s terribly unjust to single out Catholicism for special contempt. Why do purity codes exist? Leaving aside religious revelation, it doesn’t take a degree in cultural anthropology to understand why any society would have the need to regulate sexuality, for the survival of the group. In a resource-poor society, one without advanced medicine, strong rules governing sexual behavior may be harsh but necessary. Andrew has written at length, and with gratitude, about how he once thought he was given a death sentence with his HIV diagnosis, but medical advances have made it likely that he will live a normal life. If he did not live in a technologically advanced, wealthy society, and if he did not have health insurance that pays for his expensive treatment, the sexually transmitted disease he carries would likely have killed him by now. In the not too distant past, no small number of people died of sexually transmitted diseases, and a shocking number of women died in childbirth. Sex had real life-or-death consequences, and that’s before one gets to the issue of maintaining a livable social order.

Uh... whuh... so, sex is a sin because Sullivan has HIV which you get from sex and, though he's doing alright now, in another era and/or income bracket he would have died from it? Or maybe "Sullivan has HIV" is all he means. I don't know. Is this what they mean by speaking in tongues?

•  Finally, can you guys tell me which it is: Was Noah Rothman unaware that the interpretive dance at Normandy was France's doing, not Obama's, or was Rothman just hoping to lead his readers to believe otherwise?

NEVER FORGET.

From James Taranto's Bergdahl thing:

There are some intriguing similarities between young Bergdahl and the young [John] Kerry...

No, it's not just a casual slur. Taranto proceeds to connect the 2004 swift-boating of decorated naval officer Kerry with the transformation of Bergdahl into the Manchurian Candidate by wingnut propagandists. Only in Taranto's view, that's a good thing. He actually compares Bergdahl's youthful despair ("the horror that is america is disgusting") with Kerry's reports to Congress on Vietnam atrocities, and even duplicates the swift-boat team's bizarre characterization of same ("[Kerry] stood before the television audiences and claimed that the 500,000 men and women in Vietnam, and in combat, were all villains -- there were no heroes") as if it were still convincing to anyone besides diehards this far beyond its sell-by date.

Then Taranto issues some clouds of gas to suggest that, despite centuries of tradition, the top brass secretly disapproved the Kenyan Usurper's scheme to reclaim the soldier because, allegedly,  the rescue efforts cost them men. (I never realized before this Saving Private Ryan was bullshit.) Not that these losses are confirmed, nor need they be; if "the Pentagon has been pushing back against claims, noted here yesterday, that the Army did take casualties as a result of the early search for Bergdahl," says Taranto, well, they have to do that, but never mind:

Today's Times features an even more detailed debunking, under the headline "Can Bowe Bergdahl Be Tied to 6 Lost Lives? Facts Are Murky." Murky they may be, but the Pentagon's defensiveness on this point belies the administration's suggestion that the military is heedless of costs when it seeks to rescue captured servicemen.

Don't try to find a coherent argument in that paragraph; as they used to say in Vietnam, it don't mean a thing.

And anyway, it doesn't matter what the generals say, or even what common sense says -- what's important is what some soldiers who served with him say about Bergdahl, and if they didn't like him, then rescuing him was a bad idea. True, the soldiers themselves didn't say he should have been left behind to die, but that sort of analysis is above their pay grade -- Taranto can handle that.

If the writing and reasoning is more slovenly than usual for Taranto, it's easy to see why: Like most conservatives who haven't yet gone full Rand Paul, he expects all he has to do is put up some gush about "the centrality of honor to military culture" and blow Taps, and everyone will accept that he speaks for George Washington and all the grunts and dogfaces since Valley Forge. It remains to be seen whether, after years of deadly foreign misadventure promoted by their propaganda,  many people still believe them.

IF YOU'RE PISSED THAT A BURGER-FLIPPER GOT A RAISE, YEWWW MIGHT BE A WINGNUT.

Aargh blaargh from "professional comedian and writer" Stephen Kruiser over Seattle raising its minimum wage to $15:

Hippie infestation... 

Apparently unaware that it doesn’t have the weather advantages that other places pricing themselves out of existence do (Los Angeles, anyone?), Seattle seems to be ready to set a record for how many businesses it can ruin. 

The earnest idiots who whip up this minimum wage frenzy... "...BECAUSE FAIRNESS.” No discussion of the fact that an entry level, part time job isn’t supposed to be your adult income wage for life. 

What they don’t discuss is just how stifling this progressive feel good, math-hating nonsense is to current and aspiring small business owners. 

Because they want to drive as many people as they can into financial hell.

Seriously, what is he bitching about? He believes in the market, right? So this foolish decision will cause businesses to abandon commie Seattle for the red-state hinterland, and capitalism wins!  I can see those bright folks currently working at Seattle-based businesses like Amazon, Starbucks, Safeco,  Nordstrom, Cray, Corbis, et alia, not to mention the venture capitalists and internet jockeys, and the hipster entrepreneurs of Sub Pop and Babeland, deciding they've had enough of this command economy and running off to Fritters, Alabama or North Dakota to enjoy all the freedom and fracking.

Maybe this'll be the tipping point for that great blue-red inversion of economic energy Joel Kotkin,  Rick Perry, and other great minds are always predicting.

Of course it'll take a while:

As Steve Allen first said and I like to repeat, how ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen the farm?

UPDATE. Some commenters are wondering what kind of capitalist announces his desire to keep workers' wages down. I doubt Kruiser really qualifies as a capitalist, though maybe he employs a maid. Neither do the wingnut-welfare cases at libertarian flagship Reason qualify, which explains this headline: "Seattle Prepares for Robot Revolution by Setting $15 Minimum Wage." At first I thought they meant that granting peons an almost-living wage would speed the rise of robot workers, though bosses need no such provocation and in fact already employ robots as soon as they can get them. You aren't going to slow them down by pretending to be happy with shit wages.

Then I realized it was a revenge fantasy.

Interesting too that they found a cleaning lady who allegedly had a "401k, health insurance, paid holiday, and vacation" only to see it see it ruined by the high-minimum-wage commissars. Maybe the poor woman should get out of that line of work and start driving a cab.

ACTING OUT.

Conservatives have had such a hard-on for Lena Dunham over the years that I've gotten not one but two Voice columns out of it. I'll never want for material, it seems; at National Review, Quin Hillyer ejaculates this under a big picture of Dunham:

If girls act like Lena Dunham’s character on Girls, they are sluts.

Hillyer's not just hard for Dunham, though, or even for women. This is one of those yeah I'm politically incorrect so what you pussies articles conservatives sometimes put up to feel butch. But it seems like it's been a while since we've seen one; it certainly seems as if Hillyer's had his sackful stored up a long, long time, and does not have complete control of his apparatus. For example:

And yes, I did say “aliens.” That is the precise, and precisely accurate, word for illegal immigrants. We won’t let the language be denuded any further just because somebody’s feelings got hurt. We long ago lost the word “gay.” The Left is now expropriating the word “marriage.” Several years ago, somebody tried to take away the perfectly wonderful “niggardly.” Well, I’m sorry, but they can’t have “alien,” too. And if Barack Obama happens to be miserly, then, well, he is niggardly, too.

 At National Review, no one suggests to your date it's maybe time to go home, apparently.

It's like he's reading slurs off fast-moving cue cards. Why is he straining so hard? Here's a hint:

Meanwhile, back to marriage: Many on the left say not only that the state should legally recognize just about any commitment somebody might decide to solemnize, but also that the state should penalize a private decision not to bake a cake or create a bouquet for a particular commitment ceremony. Now that should be grounds for civil disobedience. Hundreds or thousands of people should stand in solidarity with the baker. 

Except Hillyer can't get hundreds or thousands of people to do this, not because we live under Liberal Fascism, but because even relatively apolitical people would look at his rant and recognize he's not making a point about liberty, but just being an asshole. The politically incorrect bit can be fun once in a while, but it gets old fast -- and these guys have been at it for decades. (When was the last time you pulled down the P.J. O'Rourke and had a laugh about how bad the poor smell?) I think Hillyer must know the squares won't get it, and so sprays his spoor as a signaling device for such Republican Party Reptiles as are still around. There may not be as many of them as there once were, but at least they get his jokes.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the latest conservative "reform" craze. C'mon guys, I had to read all those manifestos, the least you can do is look at the column.

UPDATE. Comments are busy, considering this was a longish, wonkish column. Well, that's the sort of bright boys and girls this lantern attracts! Regarding the Yglesias-Ayn Rand anti-licensing alliance, Derelict says, "Personally, I'm looking forward to eliminating the onerous licensing requirements for airline pilots. I've spent many hours on Microsoft Flight Sim, so handling that New York-Frankfort Airbus A-380 flight should be a no-brainer." "Sure, there will be a few crashes in the transition period," adds montag2, "but consumers will quickly get the hang of which flights have competent pilots and push the industry in the right directions." Freedom!

Several commenters are creeped out by the reformers' weird family-values theories -- e.g., that if you make it hard for paupers to afford non-family alternatives like day-care, they'll rely on relatives to watch the kids and thus become more tight-knit. "They want to return to the days when entire families did piecework in their homes," marvels Shakezulu. "That way the family can be together while it works." It's the reasoning behind their policies on entitlements, too.

AROUND THE HORN.

•  I've always enjoyed Armond White's totally insane film criticism, and now that he's at National Review he's gotten even better, leaning more heavily on his culture-warrior malarkey. Since his targets are mostly crap like Maleficent ("All that’s certain is Jolie and Disney’s intention to overturn fundamental moral precepts"), who gives a shit? It's even funnier when White celebrates the "affectionate, often ribald humanity" of... Adam Sandler (who is also the target of the "Lamestream" and its "barely veiled political invective" -- why, do you know, they even call him "tasteless or corny"! Yeah, Adam Sandler!). But in one way it's sad: Once upon a time National Review hired critics like John Simon. Simon was temperamentally conservative (that is, an asshole) and at least as funny in his disapproval as White, but  also interesting when he liked something -- because, for one thing, that happened so rarely, and, for another, he was an astute observer whose tastes were as broad as his standards were high. He could identify and explain the true art in films that wouldn't seem to his tastes -- not only Bergman and Wertmuller, but also, for example, John Avildsen's Joe. Sociopolitical analysis didn't play a big role in his criticism because he focused on the art. It's a shame that no one could expect such a thing of National Review nowadays.

•  Ramesh Ponnuru on Hillary Clinton's age: "Age was a legitimate issue to consider when McCain ran for president. (I wrote an article urging him to allay concerns about his age by pledging to serve one term and picking a reassuring running mate. His campaign let me know my advice was considered, but he went a different way.)" As I am a Christian I want to believe "let me know my advice was considered" is a joke on Ponnuru's part. If so, nice one! There, that's my bipartisanship quota for the month. (Ponnuru's plan for McCain 2008 was sweet reason itself compared to Noah Millman's Palin-resigns-upon-McCain's-death idea. I wonder if the McCain campaign called him back.)

UPDATES.

•  No week is complete without a Jonah Goldberg mouthfart. This one's on the UCSB killings:

And, yes, guns need to be part of that equation. But blanket efforts to ban guns seem like an analogous effort to ban dangerous speech or art.

"Seem like an analogous effort" is the mush-mouth tipoff that Goldberg is lost in the clouds (actually, "blanket efforts to ban guns" is similarly meaningless), but what makes it even dumber is that for years Goldberg's been telling readers that he's in favor of censorship. I guess defending guns after a massacre is such a key part of the National Review mission that he doesn't mind breaking character for it.

•  Oh Christ, Patheos' "Postmodern Conservative" things has been transferred to National Review, and its greatest horror so far is a 2,000-word essay by Carl Eric Scott ("I’m a Gen-X academic arguably too interested in rock") called, I swear to God, "Carl’s Rock Songbook No. 95, Woods, 'Moving to the Left.'" Get a load:

[On some stupid Millenials survey] You don’t need a weathervane to know that those sociological findings predict a leftist direction for politics. 

Conservative columnists Jonah Goldberg and Ross Douthat noted that the report’s results were not exactly comforting to progressives either, as they showed that the habits of trust and involvement vital to any genuinely democratic movement are also in marked decline. When you listen to contemporary rock music, you hear frustrated recognition of this by the millennials themselves. For example, while Mikal Cronin’s “Apathy” provides poetic affirmation of the report’s finding about declining religious identification – old men, sing the song about Jesus, it deadpans at one point – its main message is the repeated refrain I don’t want apathy. Perceptive Millennials fear that many of their peers have fallen into a politically apathetic pattern, and that they could be drawn into the same.

Look what's happening out in the street/ Got to revolution, got to revolution!

...Woods has not been a noticeably political band, but as they’ve always cultivated a hippie-esque sound and image, and as they prominently display a peace symbol on their new album, we can assume their political sympathies are at least somewhat leftist... 

The other possibility is that Earl himself isn’t a good leftist at heart but, as the leader of an artsy Brooklyn rock band, finds the typical bohemian expectation of and faith in leftist social change wearisome.

Another possibility is fuck you.

SEASON 7, EPISODE 7.

(Mild spoilers) (And yes, I'm later than usual on this episode, but I am writing for the ages, not for a prestige online journal mining the glass-teat afterglow.) This one went by in a rush, and no wonder: It was about the silliest Mad Men episode yet. I mean, forget the ending (for now, we'll get to it) -- this is an episode in which Peggy, transformed into an unbitch by reconciling with father figure Don, not only wins the Big Account but gets a phone number from a nice handsome day-laborer, whom I'm sure bitch-Peggy would have found beneath her. She's even nice to Julio.

Also, upon review Cutler's "You're just a bully and a drunk -- a football player in a suit" is the sort of thing that would have cracked me up on SCTV's The Days of The Week.

On the other hand, two phone calls from Don to the non-Peggy women in his life are bracing and sensible. The lesser of these is the kiss-off with Megan, because that was always a ridiculous relationship, but it was an appropriately low-key way to end it. Better still is his call to Sally, because he's doing what he always does, trying to play sky-God Daddy -- "Don't be so cynical. You want your little brothers to talk that way?" -- and Sally is so clearly over it. She dropped that receiver with authority.

Now to Cooper's exit. I never liked that character or his zen bullshit. I know one of the reasons Weiner wanted Robert Morse for this show was his pedigree as the original J. Pierrepont Finch in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, but before this episode I don't believe they ever really lined that equity up with the actual show. What was Bert Cooper? He was supposed to be old Madison Avenue, but he seemed mostly a dispenser of cracker-barrel wisdom dressed in a fine manner and complex sentences. Maybe he was supposed to be a mix of Leo Burnett's "sodbusting corniness" and the mandarin sleekness of old ad grandees. But he never registered with me as anything but someone everyone had to respect because he'd been around.

This episode attempted to change that, and entirely after Cooper's death. First of all, the climactic partners meeting is really like something out of How to Succeed, or The Solid Gold Cadillac or a dozen other old Broadway business farces. Once we are hustled past the fact that there's no actual contract to vote on, the whole scene's a riot -- with Joan and Pete perched in a corner, dollar signs in their eyes, Don Draper talking Ted Chaough off the ledge, and Cutler's curtain-closing button -- "It's a lot of money" -- worthy of Moss Hart. We're a long way from the existential dread of Don Draper.

So it was easier then to accept Bert appearing in a fantasy sequence, crooning "The Best Things in Life are Free." I'm sure Weiner was thinking of "Brotherhood of Man," the finale of How to Succeed, but that would have been too much of a muchness. As it was the Tin Pan Alley tune was much more to the point. Earlier, when Roger called Don about Cooper's death, he lamented that "the last thing I said to him was the lines to some old song." That was "Let's Have Another Cup of Coffee," a similarly breezy Depression-era number. I took the symmetry to mean that Cooper was meant to be the embodiment of the blithe bullshit on which advertising is based -- the smile and shoeshine that rings cash registers. Advertising is real and rough business, but the giants of it usually had some sense of its fun and absurdity, too, which informs the popular perception of the craft. Don, on the other hand, is deadly serious about it; recall his speech about love and nylons and no tomorrow. Both Cooper and Don are acquainted with hard times, but Cooper has always chosen to float above where Don has wallowed. That's why Cooper's dancing in the afterlife.

For the show's purposes, the important thing -- at least it may be important; we have another delayed-half-season season to go -- is that Don sees him.

COMRADES! IS NEEDED CONSERVATIVE COMICS TO BRING TRUTH TO MASSES!

In the latest culture war eruption, the horrible Amity Shlaes wants conservatives to start producing propaganda comics, but first she has to explain to her apparently geriatric shut-in audience "the oddly named genre of the 'graphic novel'":

Counterintuitive as it may sound, these graphic novels not only feature nonfiction but also lend themselves enviably to difficult nonfiction topics. Take Persepolis, a mauve-and-grey depiction of a girl’s life in the Iranian Revolution... Maus, another graphic novel...

Also, sometimes they even animate these drawings! What a world we live in.

What’s more, these long cartoon books have much the same capacity as films to entice the reader to delve deeper. As Bill Bennett, one who gets the medium, noted recently: “After reading the comic of The Iliad, then I read the children’s edition of The Iliad, and then I read The Iliad.”

I don't know what's funnier: The idea that the noted blowhard Bill Bennett "gets" graphic novels, or that he worked his way to The Iliad via comics.

What was and is troubling, therefore, is that the many of the more serious graphic novels are like Marx’s Capital — reinforcement weapons for progressive, or even outright Marxist, messages.

Shlaes mournfully catalogues some of these wrongthink funnies ("other graphic novels lionize redistributionists and revolutionaries"). The saddest bit, for me, is her description of "a hilarious but anti-capital comic"; I imagine the poor woman tittering and then shuddering, a la Justin Green's Binky Brown: But my thoughts -- no! -- impure thoughts -- no!

"But where are the conservative mangas and graphic novels?" asks Shlaes. Get this:

One explanation for the missing graphic novels is the political bent of the artists themselves. A number of these talents — some of the best, in fact — study and draw together in White River Junction, Vermont, not too far from the home of President Coolidge. A few years ago I traveled up to this cartoon heaven to find someone to draw my own print book, Forgotten Man, or even to help illustrate a bio of the local president, Coolidge. The artists had to work to live, clearly. But this kind of work, they let me know, and in the politest way, they would not take. I left impressed: At least they lived by their convictions.

Rather than wait for the Invisible Hand to starve the Vermont commie-artists into acquiescence, Shlaes  found someone else to do a comic of her book, and advises her comrades to follow suit. First she flatters them, though -- which makes sense, because the target audience, wingnuts with money, is probably thinking they spend enough keeping the thinktanks running and Jonah Goldberg farting out columns, so why should they pay for comics too?

Shlaes assures them she understands: "conservatives themselves have expressed no demand for graphic novels: After all, they have plenty of lively content of their own." When you've got the films of Dinesh D'Souza and books like God Less America to amuse you, comics may seem a useless luxury. Also, "giving in to the graphic style is perceived as dumbing down, and offends conservatives’ inner librarian." So you guys are too smart, too intellectual to do this "visual art" thing. But you should bite the bullet, pull out the wallet, and find some art-drones to do your funnies anyway:

But this attitude, high-minded though it be, is itself a bit of a manga. After all, almost nobody reads books these days. Not radio hosts, not newspaper editors, not union officials, not politicians, and certainly not children. By turning their collective nose up at graphic books, conservatives surrender education ground to the more artful progressives. In the case of economics, conservatives leave fans of markets, not to mention fans of balanced history, unequipped to rebut when the progressive cartoon books come along.

The dummies don't read, and they're being exploited by "artful progressives" -- so we must hire somebody to counteract them. After all, "these long cartoon books have much the same capacity as films to entice the reader to delve deeper" -- so even if they have no intellectual value in and of themselves, they may lead the sheeple on to Hayek and Ramesh Ponnuru.

This is how things look to someone who has no idea what art is for, and who thinks people only respond to it because they're stupid.

JAY-Z DELENDA EST.

From "The Real Fat Cats" by Victor Davis Hanson, December 13, 2012:

Who exactly were the rich who, as the president said, were not “paying their fair share”? The rapper Jay-Z (net worth: nearly $500 million)? The actor Johnny Depp (2011 income: $50 million)? Neither seems to have heard the president’s earlier warning that “at a certain point you’ve made enough money.”

From "Conservative Populism" by Victor Davis Hanson, December 18, 2012:

The truth is that everyone from the college president who gets his taxes paid by his university to Jay-Z is a beneficiary of Republican advocacies that he damns.

From "The New Affirmative Action" by Victor Davis Hanson, March 14, 2013:

Will the children of multimillionaire Tiger Woods — or of Jay-Z and Beyoncé — qualify for special consideration on the theory that their racial pedigrees or statistical underrepresentation in some fields will make their lives more challenging than the lives of poor white children in rural Pennsylvania or second-generation Arab-Americans in Dearborn, Mich.?

From "The War against the Young" by Victor Davis Hanson, April 9, 2013:

The administration seems aware of the potential paradoxes in this reverse “What’s the matter with Kansas?” syndrome of young people voting against their economic interests. Thus follows the constant courting of the hip and cool Beyoncé, Jay-Z, Lena Dunham, Occupy Wall Streeters, and others who blend pop culture, sex, youth, energy, and fad...

From "Our Postmodern Angst," by Victor Davis Hanson, August 13, 2013:

Today, obesity, not malnutrition, is America’s epidemic. Our youth’s education is hindered by too many cell phones, not access to too few books. Misogynistic and obscene lyrics may have enriched Jay-Z, but they reflect the sort of values that lead millions to remain in poverty, rather than becoming disciplined cadres organizing for social justice.

From "An American Satyricon," by Victor Davis Hanson, August 27, 2013:

Civil rights once meant an existential struggle between the oppressed and villains like Bull Connor with his dogs and fire hoses. Now Oprah is miffed over being treating rudely while eyeing a $38,000 purse in Switzerland... near-billionaire rapper Jay-Z warns that the have-nots may riot...

From "Miley Cyrus and Ugly Sex" by Victor Davis Hanson, September 3, 2013:

Where is the elemental inspiration, the existential need to tap popular anguish and turn it into revolutionary artistic expression?
If multimillionaire rapper Jay-Z performs at the White House, where is to be found the font of resistance? In short — resistance to what?

From "Medieval Liberals" by Victor Davis Hanson, October 8, 2013:

As recompense, [the Medieval Liberal] is not just liberal, but liberally hip and cool... in his 50s he listens to Jay-Z and Beyoncé as well as Springsteen and the Dead.

From "Progressive Insurance" by Victor Davis Hanson, April 15, 2014:

Certainly racial venom is not a career ender for the fully insured. Jay-Z, a frequent White House guest, is not shy about wearing a Five-Percent Nation medallion, which reflects an ideology that considers whites inferior devils...

From "The End of Affirmative Action" by Victor Davis Hanson, May 1, 2014:

Class divisions are mostly ignored in admissions and hiring criteria, but in today’s diverse society, they often pose greater obstacles than race. The children of one-percenters such as Beyoncé and Jay-Z will have doors opened to them that are not open to those in Pennsylvania who, according to President Obama, “cling to guns or religion.”

From "Egalitarian Grandees" by Victor Davis Hanson, May 27, 2014:

Being liberal in the abstract also provides psychological penance for enjoying the good life in the concrete. A Johnny Depp or a Jay-Z is cool and therefore free to enjoy compensation based entirely on what the free market will bear.

I feel bad for the kids, who have this instead of Biggie and Tupac.

UPDATE. In comments (always worth visiting! No trip to alicublog is complete without the comments!) D Johnston observes, "Everything [VDH] writes about politics is just a random assortment of talking points, creaky old bugaboos and Mark Steyn-brand simulated humor, all tied together with the pseudo-scholarly pablum of a bright but seriously self-obsessed high school senior." Johnston does us the further favor of identifying the paragraph subjects in Hanson's latest column: "Para 1 - Elizabeth Warren, Al Gore; Para 2 - Michelle Obama; Para 3 - 'Silicon Valley to Chevy Chase'; Para 4 - Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz; Para 5 - The Steyer brothers and 'the media'..."

You get the idea. The basic Hanson is that rich liberals are hypocrites because all liberals are supposed to live in rags and filth like their best friends The Poor -- I think that was in Herodotus -- and because they made their money in the arts and sciences they are morally inferior to people who made their money buying property with oil under it (whom Hanson takes care to associate with hard-bitten sons of toil, usually by adjacent description).

Also, Hanson's most recent column actually contains a reference to Pajama Boy. Is this what they mean when they call Hanson a classicist?

HOW BULLSHIT WORKS, PART 32,456,798.

Sometimes one little thing just shows how they do so perfectly that I have to call it out. At Right Wing News and other wingnut outlets, Walter Williams goes on and on about how terrible it is that schoolteachers are indoctrinating your children to believe that white people are treated differently than black people in this country. Can you imagine! Here's one of Williams' laugh lines:

But the propaganda and lunacy go even deeper. Jacqueline Battalora, professor of sociology and criminal justice at Saint Xavier University, informed conference participants that “white people did not exist before 1681. Again, white people did not exist on planet earth until 1681″ (http://tinyurl.com/lkoqj9b). That’s truly incredible. If Professor Battalora is correct, how are we to identify William Shakespeare (1564), Sir Isaac Newton (1642), John Locke (1632), Leonardo da Vinci (1452) and especially dear Plato (428 B.C.)? Were these men people of color, or did they not exist?

Har de har har. Now here's what Battalora was talking about, from her book: When American colonists devised their early anti-miscegnation law, which law was "neither derived from the statutory laws of antiquity nor from the common law of England but was a creation of colonial North America," they took a while to refine their phrasing, starting with "free borne" women who should not marry "slaves" but proceeding finally to a new distinction:

The Maryland law of 1681 includes the first appearance of the term "white" used to designate a distinct group of humanity in law, and served as a corrective to the antimiscegnation law of 1664 that had the unintended effect of encouraging slaveholders to promote the very marriages the law expressly intended to discourage (Arch. Md. 7: 203-205). The law provides that freeborn English or "white" women who enter into marriage with a slave of African descent do so "to the satisfaction of their lascivious and lustful desires" and to the "disgrace not only of the English but also of many other Christian nations" (Ibid. at 204). This language reveals important perceptions and reflects persuasive efforts to shape a human group now being referred to as "white."

Whatever you think of Battalora's scholarship, it's obvious that she didn't mean that darker and lighter people did not exist before that law -- she was talking about a specific and real legal event. I don't know whether Williams knew this or not, but it probably wouldn't matter if he did -- indeed, other conservatives express similar incredulity even when they demonstrate awareness of what Battalora is talking about. The mere idea that the category "white" might not be God-given is risible to them.

Don't let it get around, but I really do try to get what these guys are saying and, at least going in, admit the possibility that they have some kind of argument. But so often -- I'm tempted to say increasingly , though it may just be that I'm noticing it more -- conservatives are so obviously just making propaganda out of whatever sticks and mud they find lying around that I find myself tuning out and assuming they're full of shit from the get-go.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about Elliot Rodger, the crazed misogynist killer in Santa Barbara, and the rightbloggers who don't see what's so sexist about his feverish rants. My only regret is that Dr. Mrs. Ole Perfesser hasn't said anything about it yet. Well, I can always update.

UPDATE. FMguru informs me in comments Dr. Mrs. Ole Perfesser has weighed in, and I swear to Christ this is her headline:

The Elliot Rodger Case: If Pick-Up Artists Are Guilty, Then So Are the Feminists

DMOP hears that women are getting plenty of mental health care but men aren't. What might the cause of that be? Is it that men often don't like to admit they need help, as the feminazi National Institute of Mental Health suggests? Or are all those "you must have a vagina to enter" signs at psych wards keeping them out? For Dr. Mrs. it's not a tough call: "Perhaps it is the feminists and their supporters who block funding and education going to boys’ and men’s issues that are to blame," she says. Don't worry if the feminized shrinks don't want your money, fellas, DMOP's man clinic is always open.

AROUND THE HORN.

Some quick thoughts before everybody heads out for Memorial Day weekend to whatever little slice of heaven (I remain here in the pestilential Capital, watching the frontier):

•  The American Spring folks who decidedly failed to overthrow ObamaHitler last Friday were good for a laugh, but I have to say I feel for them. Granted, when they're united in a reactionary electoral force to keep the country down, as they have been for decades, they're harder to sympathize with. But when I see them in small numbers howling on the Mall, unable to do America much damage and maybe even livening up some tourists' day, my resistance is reduced and I can see that they have genuine complaints. For example, they're pissed about the VA hospitals and a lot of other things that leaders who gave a shit about America might help fix. But they don't send that kind of people to Congress -- they send instead flim-flam men who make things worse, then tell them it was the dad-burned Gummint that made it bad because it can't do nothin' right nohow. And they tell them all would be well if the Kenyan Pretender and his socialist comrades were turned out of office, and encourage them to imagine themselves the heirs of the original Tea Party: Revolutionaries with the right and the means to overthrow. Fox News does its bit, announcing that "a group of self-described revolutionary-style patriots with a million mobilized militia members are heading to downtown Washington, D.C.," as if it were something other than a pathetic delusion. "A million" perhaps share the fantasy, but their suburban inertia will always keep them from exerting themselves to realize it, apart from hanging a confederate flag in the garage or yelling at the teevee -- only this ragtag band actually walked the walk, and they raged for the cameras, crying that they'd been betrayed, but not knowing, as I once observed of the Sarah Palin Army, that they were marked for betrayal all along.

•  I've been asking on Twitter but maybe you guys don't go in for microblogging, so: Can someone tell me what gives with the Right's recent hard-on for the Export-Import Bank? I've seen it on and off for years but in the past few months there's been a buttload of ecrasez-l'infame among the brethren  -- including this typically muddled Jonah Goldberg thumbsucker, which all but screams "did I get the talking points right, Mr. Koch? I added some of my signature farrrrrrRRRt."  My best guess is, 1.) Victory is easy  -- the authorization expires in September, and 2.) the major complaint about the Bank seems to be "crony capitalism" -- which is a major Obama-era propaganda theme among conservatives -- and deauthorizing the Bank is one of the few things they can do that (as they believe) will show the voters that they're not just tools of big business without getting their hands slapped by major donors. What do you think?

•  Conservative "reformers" like Ross Douthat with big plans to attract the masses to the GOP (remember the Party of Sam's Club? Good times!) have a hard row to hoe --  sensible people keep pointing out that Republicans crush the poor because they find the poor easy to crush, and even voters outside the reach of these sensible people are brought to the same conclusion by observation and common sense. In this blog post, Douthat acknowledges such observations "prove the case that the GOP includes a strong ideological tendency that cuts against what some of the reform-conservative essayists want to do." But -- I just love this -- "What they don’t prove, however, is that the current Republican Party could never be a vehicle for such a policy agenda." Don't stop believin'! For example, "The Democratic Party of the late 1970s and early 1980s stood rather firmly for all kinds of ideas (price controls, middle class tax increases) that the Democratic Party of the 1990s deliberately backed away from." In other words, the Democrats got more conservative, so Republicans should be able to get more -- not liberal, certainly, but conservative-with-an-explanation. Electoral gold! Interestingly, Douthat acknowledges that the "internal party debate... swung in [a] more Randian direction in 2009-2012," which leads one to wonder where Douthat thinks it's been swinging in 2013 and 2014. The Party of Rent-a-Center? Or of Singapore?

UPDATE.

•  "They had a dream," starts Noemie Emery at the Weekly Standard (interesting allusion, under the circumstances). "For almost a hundred years now, the famed academic-artistic-and-punditry industrial complex has dreamed of a government run by their kind of people (i.e., nature’s noblemen), whose intelligence, wit, and refined sensibilities would bring us a heaven on earth..." Obama is the first person like this to rule since, it would seem, John Quincy Adams (Emery is unclear on this point), and Obama made Obamacare which everyone hates, so the judgment of history is clear: "They wanted their chance, and they got it. They had it. They blew it. They’re done." Back to electing haberdashers and Nixons! Unfortunately the part where a disgusted electorate threw Obama out in 2012 is missing from the essay. Editing error?

NATIONAL REVIEW TALKS TO THE LAY-DEEZ.

At National Review, Jim Geraghty has one called "Jill Abramson, and Why Most Women Should Cut Themselves Some Slack." By "Cut Themselves Some Slack," he means don't worry your pretty little heads about any economic injustice you may have hysterically imagined you've experienced. Part of his argument:

As I was saying, employers are people (“Corporations are people, my friend!“) and there will be good ones and bad ones. The bad ones tend to have karma bite them in one way or the other — most often by watching their best, or perhaps most motivated and talented employees leave to work elsewhere.

Either that or they'll grow fat and rich on the exploitation of their workers, though Geraghty won't notice because the free market is dreamy and the exploited are generally the working poor, who are gross.

I’d argue very few Americans really benefit from buying into Democrats’ (and the New York Times’s! ) preferred simplistic, demagogic narrative that America’s workplaces are a Kafkaesque, dystopian landscape of nasty male bosses conspiring to pay their female employees less. This viewpoint may in fact hold women back. If you perceive your boss as a sexist, conniving shyster who’s out to rip you off, then it’s going to be hard to show up every morning and do your best work. And whatever your circumstances, you’ll probably benefit, directly or indirectly, from doing your best work.

You're only hurting yourselves; c'mon, smile, baby! Then he tells the ladies that men have it rough, too, but you don't see us guys complaining, and (I swear to Christ) that you girls should try it sometime:

I am speaking broadly, and generalizing when I make this next statement: Men do worry about this sort of thing, but they don’t talk about it. They’re generally less likely to obsess about it, and/or publicly beat themselves up about it. There are not nearly as many bestsellers about the struggles of working fathers, magazine covers asking “Can Men Have It All?”, daddy blogs with passionate arguments and comments sections aflame, etc. 

It's like Geraghty never saw an MRA rant or Dr. Mrs. Ole Perfesser.

...the guys’ approach certainly is an one that involves less angst, self-doubt, and self-flagellation for failing to live up to some preconceived notion of how all of those roles should be fulfilled.

Also, a woman who thinks more like a man would understand why I want to have my cock sucked every morning.

For lagniappe with the emphasis on the yap, National Review also offers James Lileks chasing the not-all-men meme off his lawn.

Actually, pointing out that you’re not one of [the rapists and abusers] would indicate that you’re not the problem, and hence are part of the solution.

Let me ease your pain, ladies, with old matchbooks and accounts of my trips to Target! Eventually the lack of strawgirl response convinces Jimbo he's not being listened to:

I suppose this is useful information for men who want to have tendentious arguments about male perfidy with the sort of person who might want to put a “trigger warning” on Winnie the Pooh because a reader might have a honey allergy, but most men don’t. In fact, most –

Oh, never mind. Why state the obvious?

I didn't want to talk to you bitches anyway!

Have a nice electoral map, guys.