I GOT A FEELING... IT'S GONNA BE... ONE OF THOSE SHORTER LILEKS WEEKS! Today's installment:

Movies are so crass. I much prefer the wholesome, intellectual stimulation of a good video game.

(Happy Valentine's Day to Mrs. Lileks, poor woman.)

Maybe I should take a cue from Amblongus, who suggested in comments that conservatives will soon go beyond reviewing movies they haven't seen, and start reviewing movies that don't exist.

Let's preemptively digest the weekly Lileks!

WEDNESDAY: You ever notice that liberals like to say they "support" classical music, whereas I actually appear on stage at young peoples' concerts? You don't see too many grotesquely overweight Michigan filmmakers in tie-died shirts wearing giant NO BLOOD FOR OIL buttons doing that, my friends! In I Died a Thousand Times Jack Palance has a head like a rock.

THURSDAY: Of course Frank Miller agreed to have Batman fight Al Qaeda. You can just imagine Miller in his split-level home; adoring dog at his feet, adorable little girl on his lap; he's studying an old matchbook and thinking, Islamaliberals would take this all away from me; get me the pen; play some Nick Cave! And his little girl stretches to kiss his massive, shiny forehead.

FRIDAY: You know, the people who are all over Bush's case for strangling that butler are the same people who gave Dick Cheney a hard time last weekend. 'Twas ever thus: Play a little buckshot tag with a buddy, and the anti-violence people (who are actually the ones who are really violent, and I'm talking about their facial expressions as described by me) will take you to their secret torture chambers, figuratively speaking. They'll try the same thing on Bushitler McChimphitlerspittleMoveOn; again they'll fail. I found an old matchbook that has a picture of an old building on it.

Wow, that was liberating.

UPDATE. I may have misjudged Jimbo. He has graciously linked to this post, and not even most of the readers drawn from his world to mine are abusive in comments -- at least so far. My. (Pause to observe a vast horde of souls tumbling toward heaven.)

Okay, group hug over. Everybody back on your heads!

UPDATE 2. OK, some of them are abusing my hospitality. Here is a typical exchange:

"Sir, you are an ant waving his antennae fiercely at a lion."

"Oh yeah? Well, fuck you."

I could delete 'em, but that's a punk-ass move, so I'll just get my Islamofascist buddies to go lean on their way of life.

NOTES FROM LOUIE'S SODA SHOP. Logically Leapin' Lileks (gave up permalinks, it seems, until Terri Schiavo and the Pope rise from the dead; update labeled April 8) finds a professor mad as hell about a Brit Muslim chick who won the legal right to wear the body-covering jilbab to school. Lileks notes: "Odd how 'women’s rights' are now defined to mean 'covering up every possible indication one might be a woman,'" which is so wrong that I hardly need explain why to such super-genii as my readers. (Oh, ok, briefly: Brit judge ≠ all feminists everywhere; dress code relaxation ≠ endorsed subjugation of women; etc.)

From Lileks' inspirator:

No expressed desire by a child or young woman to wear traditional clothing such as the jilbab can be taken as arising from free choice -- even if, in any given instance, it is the result of such a choice -- because of the oppressive nature of the subculture.

My first reaction to this was: Does this mean that now you guys will throw that anti-evolution crap out of school? Because I'm pretty sure no child comes to school really wanting to become even more of a dumbass, despite the oppressive nature of his subculture.

Of course, the endocrine storm soon passed and I recognized that this was merely, to borrow the Bowery Boys nomenclature, Routine 12: The Dusky Hordes Advance (see Footballs, Little Green for backgrounder), with a Bullshit Feminist Angle added -- not because the practitioners subscribe to any recognizable feminist priciples, but because the Angle can be used to give (for those crucial seconds before the thinking apparatus can be engaged) the impression that Western feminists don't care about women.

One day I have to classify all these Routines, and publish my taxonomy under the title Leave Us Regurgitate.

DAWN OF THE DEAD. For all their alleged contemporaneity and stoopid-freshness, right-wing bloggers still have an old-fashioned paleocon attitude toward the Liberal Media. All that distinguishes them from, say, William Safire in his Agnew speechwriting period, is style (or lack thereof), and perhaps class (ditto).

Take Professor Glenn Reynolds, for example and please. He continually hammers the point, with a series of "Oh, that liberal media" posts-'n'-quotes, that the NY Times, WashPost, and a host of other malefactors seek to manufacture consensus among those benighted folks who do not yet receive all their news and opinions from the internet. One common schtick: comparing the Times to Pravda, heh indeed.

But one should not infer from this that Reynolds cannot himself assemble a pack-not-a-herd when someone violates the standards of blogbrotherhood.

The other day one Dennis Perrin said something bad about James Lileks. Of course, some of us do that all the time, but Perrin registered his objections via a print publication.

This spurred from the Professor an extra-long post, summoning several of his independent-thinking friends to pile on Perrin.

Reynolds and his guests don't deal with Perrin's ideas much (unless you think calling his article "lame and confused" is a rigorous line of enquiry), preferring to insult Perrin himself. The consensus is that Perrin does not "get" the blogosphere.(One contributor even suggests, with apparent seriousness, that Perrin has been forced to work in print media because he can't make it as a blogger.)

The usually clear John Scalzi says that Perrin errs in attacking Lileks for expressing "his personal opinion on his personal Web site on his personal time." I just can't find anything like this idea in Perrin's article, and was mystified by Scalzi's assertion till I read this further down his column:

Perrin seems to want to shout that Emperor James has no clothes. Problem is, he's shouting this momentous discovery in the middle of a nudist colony. We're quite aware James has no clothes and is spouting off from the top of his head, thanks. As are we all. If you don't like it, you are of course perfectly free to go away and leave us nudists alone.

Once we get past the grisly image of Reynolds, Andrew Sullivan, et alia, as nudists, it becomes clear that Perrin's offense was to judge Lileks' work by the standards of bad old Big Media -- clarity, reason, logical consistency, etc., as opposed to the "spouting" that distinguishes top blogs from underblogs in the Brave New World. Which is to say that nothing distinguishes them at all, except for preferential treatment by well-situated buddies.

"Looks like the Northern Alliance has been activated!" cries the Professor. Well, their thinking may not be clear, but it is certainly unidirectional. And with an army of zombies one can accomplish much.

WHINERS. Conservatives are an odd lot. They run the country, and seem at their pep rallies, at least, to know it, high-fiving and lustily proclaiming, "Tomorrow Belongs to Me." For a winning team, though, they do a surprising amount of whining.

Yesterday's Supreme Court comments make good examples, but I must share with you this whinge from Keith Burgess-Jackson at the library of rejected thesis drafts known as Tech Central Station:

"...instead of engaging conservatives, liberals seek to crush them. It is as if conservatives are unworthy of being taken seriously. It is as if they are less than human."

Given the power disparity between the two groups, it is as if Burgess-Jackson were accusing cockroaches of plotting to send him to the ovens.

B-J has plenty of shoulders to cry on. One such is James Lileks, the cornpone vendor from Minnesota who amuses us with anecdotes about his widdle girl Gnat and lurid fantasies about Michael Moore's painful, fecally-explicit death. So Lileks likes to play rough -- "Fisking" and all that. But get a load of how he reacts when someone takes a swipe at him:

My God, people can be vile. I hate to realize sometimes how naive I can be, how I can still be surprised at someone’s ability to put the screws to their fellow man -- er, person -- for reasons so petty you couldn’t find them with an electron microscope. One silly minor person sets her jaw, decides to show someone what’s what, and the effect cascades through the lives of half a dozen other people.

But you know what they say: everytime a door closes, another one opens. So make sure when you close it, your tormentor’s foot is caught twixt door and frame. And slam it shut. Hard.

I have no idea what the beef is -- and I suppose it would be unkind, in a Lileksian way, to speculate (so unfair that I just now deleted a mean gag relating to it -- oh, by the way, UPDATE) -- but Jesus, what a whiner.

Now, I whine too. Oh boy, do I whine. But I'm one of those evil, dehumanizing liberals -- it's in character for me to whine. (And to listen to NPR, drive a Volvo, and murder unborn babies.) Lileks, on the other hand, is impeccably right-wing, and has a fine house, a nice family, a cushy gig, a loyal dog. One would expect him to look trouble in the eye with the same amused glimmer that graces the orbs of Rumsfield and Cheney when some idiot appears to expect a straight answer from them. Yet here he is, to borrow an apt phrase from one of Mike Tyson's handlers, jumping around like a little bitch.

Is that what success is like? Thank God I'm a failure!

HIS OWN PETARD. Go look, if your breakfast has settled sufficiently, at the loathsome Lileks site, and read the Fark commentary he makes sport of, and read Lileks' crabby-suburban-dad commentary, and tell me, am I crazy -- well, nevermind, I am crazy ; substitute, am I wrong -- or is his argument (such as it is) feeble on its own terms? His target (a Canuck who did some actually reporting, as opposed to lengthy jeremiads interrupted by cute kiddy anecdotes, then went into PR, then took a pay cut to get back into the journalistic game) makes a lot more sense than he does. Lileks' case consists mainly of sneers. "All hail the 10,000 foot view!" he jibes. "From there everything looks so green and lovely. From this Olympian perspective, helping the homeless is more imporant than worrying about property taxes." Taken from the crabgrass POV, any attempt at perspective will of course seem ridiculous -- don't those Grubstreeters understand that I have a cute little girl to ferry around to malls, and that it's hard enough explaining my video games and Simpsons DVDs to her without having a filthy unemployed guy with a garbage bag on his head show up to blow my whole paternal trip?

How did we breed this hellspawn anyway? Are there nuclear reactors near Minneapolis? Or does the wind whistling through the wheat or corn or soybeanstalks or whatever the fuck they raise out there stir madness in their souls?

COMB IT WET OR DRY? We've examined Jim Lileks' problems with haircutters before. Longtime fans will appreciate his latest attempt to find a stylist who satisfies:

Went to get my hair cut. The nasty sullen stylist wasn’t in, hoorah. The lass who cut my hair was new to me, so we had to find some common conversational ground. Settled on dogs. Then I learned she’d been a stylist on a cruise ship, so that opened up a vast rich rolling field of discursive opportunities . . . or so I thought. Turns out it’s a bit like cutting hair in a mall, except sometimes it rocks back and forth a bit. The drive home after your shift is quicker, though.

I am but a simple peasant, and even I know that if you consider your stylist a "lass" there is no way you will leave the chair with cheer unless she reaches under your bib and jerks you off, which clearly did not happen here.

Previously Jimbo sassed the local do-gooders:

The new Westin Hotel and Condo, bitterly opposed by some. Why? Because it’s tall. People who moved out here didn’t want tall buildings.

Can you imagine? Don't they know that relentless building is the engine of our nation's prosperity? But even Jimbo sees stores in his beloved Southdale Mall shutting down -- "the area next to it is the Abercrombie & Fitch, surrounded by heavy black shutters that give off the GO AWAY PARENTS vibe of a teen’s closed bedroom door." And the barberettes aren't doing it for him. Where o where is the succor of Scottsdale? We guess, like all our dreams of uplift, gone with the boom. Now Jimbo finds himself in a mall that is contracting, not expanding. No wonder lileks.com offers so few new posts these days. When you're simultaneously a fan of the go-go boom and a nostalgist, how painful it must be when future is slamming you from the front and the past, once safely secured in old matchbooks and photos of men in hats, looms to remind you that it was not just a showroom of pleasantly retro styles, but a real place where the Dow never reached 10,000 and the money was never easy, and where you may soon be forced to live.

HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE. James Lileks reports from an Alaskan cruise about some damn kids who sang badly ("'Y.M.C.A' – a song about anonymous sex, incidentally") in a fucking karaoke bar. Later he goes to a tavern populated by waxwork dummies.

He leaves out the part where Rod Serling explains what happened to Lileks when he took the pig mask off.

THEY LOST IT AT THE MOVIES. The damned liberals in alliance with a fifth column of damned artists have contrived to keep the sheeple in the dark, says Ed Driscoll. How so? Deep Throat said "Follow the money" in the movie but he never said it in real life.

This is good for many paragraphs, mostly quotes, about the alliance and its conspiracy to deceive the masses. (Driscoll et alia also tell us that All the President's Men failed to inform citizens that Deep Throat was conflicted in real life, but this may be disregarded, as the film shows him smoking cigarettes, which in the post-Bogart era became their traditional way of telling us a character is impure.)

But this is not the end of liberal-artist perfidy:

Even beyond All the President’s Men, a pretty fair chunk of the accepted pop culture of the 1970s was, in retrospect, often invented out of whole cloth and then repackaged as Truth — “truthiness,” as faux journalist Stephen Colbert would say — by the film, television industry, and (actual) journalists of the day.

For instance, did you know the article on which Saturday Night Fever was based was, by Nik Cohn's admission, actually based on Shepherd's Bush mods? Yet South Brooklyn mooks did not rise up in protest on this slur on their way of life, and indeed started putting Travolta posters on their walls. This was the thin end of the wedge, and liberal intellectuals delivered the coup de grace by promoting the career of Tony Danza.

Also Alex Hailey was a plagiarist, casting doubt on Roots' negative portrayal of slavery, by means of which Democrats control the black vote. Driscoll continues:

Given that much of what’s taken as The Official Narrative of the 1970s was built on useful fiction, how much of the decade we just lived will also be remembered inaccurately as well?

Then Driscoll rolls out Jim Lileks to tell us that movies like Spartacus are not true to life. Upper-class Romans didn't really sound like Laurence Olivier. If you're not sure how this deception helps liberals, Driscoll explains via Lileks: "Makes you realize that in 2000 years they’ll make movies about our era, and everyone will be half-naked and sweaty while they commit mortgage fraud." That's long-term planning, comrades! (Well, more half-naked sweatiness certainly would have improved Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.)

Driscoll recommends for further reading an expert in the field, Kathy Shaidle, who lists eight truths liberals kept from her in her youth, among them that the Japanese were the bad guys in World War II and that "Michael Moore is a liar."

These guys make Andrew Beitbart's Big Hollywood look like Sight & Sound.

CONVENTION IN FLAMES, REPORT RIGHTWING COMMENTATORS. Jammie Wearing Fool says of the Clinton die-hard presence at the DNC, "Just imagine if you had massive amounts of Republicans defecting from the GOP and declaring they'd be voting for Barack Obama. You'd have a nonstop deluge of Obamacan stories flooding the media." He cites the New York Post and Politico in defense. Clearly the MSM isn't spiking stories like it used to.

The Ole Perfesser approves JWF's comment, cites the Washington Times, Politico, CNN as further evidence of media blackout.

Meanwhile over at Google News:



Other citizen journalists in Denver see mostly demonstrations, and when things are too quiet on that front, their powerful friends try to liven things up.

Special correspondent Jim Lileks is also in Denver; has found Starbucks, but no Target. Feel the excitement!

UPDATE. I didn't mean that Lileks reported the absence of a Target, but that he didn't report finding one, which he would certainly have done if he had.

INDOCTRINATION. With the right to volunteer for Iraq threatened from within and without, schools still celebrate Earth Day? This will not stand, says James Lileks:

Had a long conversation with (G)Nat today about whether all life on earth will be destroyed soon by pollution. She’s in an Earth Day play... It ends with a hymn to nature that makes the Romantic poets look like strip-mining company CEOs...

If she was worried about this stuff, I’d be steamed. It’s no great accomplishment to fill second graders full of dread and existential catastrophe... I know it’s terribly irresponsible of me, but she’s seven, and I want her to play and laugh without heed.

Then it's a good thing his local school board (back before it was taken over by Feducrats) declined to accept Lileks' proposed 9/11 Day script. One set of lyrics has reached my desk:

Since the film to scare us straight
For a new Film Board must wait
Lift your voice in terror song:
New York will be nuked 'ere long
Martyrs call out from the grave:
Give me a gun, show me the cave
Grit your teeth and raise your thumbs
'Til great Red Alert Day comes
Against the world we'll stand alone
They also serve who piss and moan

Me, I won't be satisfied until evil abortionist judges mandate a yearly Feast of Reason for middle schools. If you don't like it, cheer up; it will probably be the kids' last contact with Reason in any form and, like most school experiences, will leave them averse to it for the rest of their lives.

LILEKS AT THE MOVIES. Or in his Sanctum Jaspertorum, anyway, gazing upon some cultural artifact digital technology has delivered. (You can tell because he's not complaining about tubercular sputum.) He saw There Will Be Blood. Hey, I saw that! But I missed the culture-war angle:

It kept my attention, and I enjoyed watching it, even though I felt myself disengaging from it by degrees in the last hour. Let's just not tell ourselves that it's a mark of great artistic insight to have the character get more insular and nasty as he gets richer, shall we? I'm not saying we should have lots of movies like The Biography of Andrew Carnegie...

Oh, how he would long for the days when Hollywood portrayed tycoons as wonderful, ordinary fellows, if such days existed. Imagine Lileks sent back in time to write about Citizen Kane: "Nice of Mackiewicz to let Harold Ickes write the script for him. See Kane, bloated with ambition and dollars! I'm sure Fatty Arbuckle would have something to say about that. And there's some Spanish-American War revisionism thrown in for good measure. No blood for sugar cane, man! While Hearst was protecting our children from marihuana, Welles was turning Shakespeare over to Negroes," etc.

I expect he reads (G)Nat Atlas Shrugged as a bedtime story.

SHORTER JIM LILEKS MEMORIAL DAY POST: Fucking Australian hippies, I'll show you! I've boycotted Mescan vodka and I'll boycott Green vodka! We shall fight on the benches, we shall fight on Jasperwood's various garden areas, we shall fight in the Lunds and Byerlys and Kowalskis, we shall fight about the bags; we shall never surrender.

UPDATE. According to the Greenhouse Calculator that so incensed Lileks, I should have died a long, long time ago. This fills me with joy, for I consider my entire life a gleeful evasion of what society expects of me, and the Calculator just confirms it. Poor Jimbo has internalized political correctness to such an extent that he must rage at the New Order that dares inform him he has transgressed. Young Republicans, past and present, take note: as the Captain told Babu in Benito Cereno, this is your future.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

For the weekend of the glorious Fourth, the obligatory.
• At The New Criterion James Bowman is mad that obituaries of the recently departed Michael Herr often refer to Herr's Dispatches as "the definitive account of the war in Vietnam." Stuff and nonsense, huffs Bowman; it was instead a definitive liberal media put-up, as was Herr's contribution to Apocalypse Now. Says Bowman:

Neither the book nor the movie tells us anything about the war that the media, echoing the anti-war movement, hadn’t already told us. On the contrary, both existed to confirm our prejudices about the war as senseless, savage, insane, and criminal.

How else would people get a negative impression of war, if not from mendacious liberals? Bowman also laughs at Herr for having a nervous breakdown over the war, which Herr saw close up as a correspondent ("[we] were all 'traumatized' by Vietnam just like poor Mr. Herr..."]. Bowman is "well known for his writing on honor," according to his bio, which mentions no military experience. I'm pretty well accustomed to conservative culture-war gibberish, but it's always something of a surprise to find it in their actual cultural journals; it's as if Film Comment contained nothing but YouTube comments.

• Good old Nancy Nall reminded me about Jim Lileks the other day and I realized I hadn't read him in a while. So I pulled up a 2016 Bleat more or less at random and there he is complaining that the Oxford American had chosen to write about Terry Southern:

But the hangers-on - who had limited talent, if any, and whose purpose was to flatter the guy who Did That One Thing, would somehow believe that they were part of a great creative era because they had gotten high with the writer while he talked about Mick Jagger, who was interested in this project. Mick Jagger, man! He knows Mick! And the people to whom he's telling the story think then his dope must be really good.

There's a deadness at the heart of the period. Endless hours of unlistenable psychedelic music, endless pages of unreadable prose, cheap movies...

This from a guy who apotheosizes old matchbooks. Here's part of a more recent one:

Lest you think all Traders Joe clerk-customer interactions are a model of sparkling wit and bright banter, I had a disconcerting exchange the other day...

Yes, it's another in Lileks' endless series of insufficiently understanding service workers. They're still letting him down! He told that rapscallion about "Halt and Catch Fire" all right. Then on to Brexit:

The idea that a transnational organization is superior in its nature to a government that arose organically from a thousand years of culture and reflects the national will and character is wishful thinking, and there's one big example that comes to mind: the USSR. No, the EU is not the USSR, but given their druthers they'd love the scope of control the USSR had. Over the proper things. For the Good of the Many, of course.

You should see those gulags where they sent people who wouldn't use metric! Well, that visit will do for a few years.

• I have Monday off, so like many of my fellow citizens of this wretched neofeudal society I am being crushed with work to make up for that tiny respite, so that does it for this week's 'round-the-horn. This weekend celebrate your country as you see fit: as something to be seized by the dictatorship of the proletariat, by radical Islam, by the glorious sexual revolution or whatever -- remember, it's our dreams that make us Americans!

JOKE OF THE DAY. James Lileks faults George Carlin for... wait for it -- timing is everything... lack of self-awareness:

I never heard Carlin be as hard on himself as he was on his favorite strawmen. That wasn’t his job, of course, and you can’t fault him for the routines he didn’t do. But the more you confront and accept your own human faults the less outrage you find in the small mishaps of others, and I never got the feeling Carlin spent a lot of time interrogating his own character with the same confident derision he brought to things much greater than himself.

Next week at the Bleat: three Target clerks who didn't get Lileks' BSG references.

SHORTER JAMES "BUZZ" LILEKS: I and Minnesota ain't dumb. Are we, Minnesota?

("My, they do have a grand opinion of themselves," says Lileks of "Poses," who turns out to be "a Santa Monica-based entrepreneur" who won the licensing rights for a New Yorker cartoon board game to be sold at Target. The actual New Yorker staff quoted in the LA Times story think the game's a great idea. To be fair, maybe "have a grand opinion of themselves" refers to some lady with a Democratic bumper sticker on her car, and a hippie.)

DREHER IN THE BUNKER.

I'll certainly have more tomorrow morning in my newsletter (Subscribe! Cheap!™), but I got around the DC protests yesterday (though I bailed on the night watch -- I'm an old man, y'know) and first I'm here to set you straight that the crowd was racially mixed and not just white anarchist punks, and it was very young -- in other words, disenfranchised from jump and not here for your "but my lawnorder" concerns. But one sees what one wants to see, and sure enough here's Rod Dreher quoting James Lileks -- talk about double penetration! -- in one of his many pants-wetting posts about "Weimar Minneapolis" etc. --

I encourage everyone to take a look at Minneapolis Star Tribune columnist James Lileks’s melancholic yet powerful blog take on what some of his fellow citizens have done to the city they share. He took a drive through the riot areas, and took pictures. He posts images of gang graffiti. The Bloods have been here (this is their territory in the city). Also a Mexican gang that is heavily involved in human trafficking — they tagged a wall.

What kind of freak looks at nationwide clashes between young Americans and police and his first words are about the Bloods and Mexicans?

Well, now a new generation is introduced to Ol' 9-11 Jim. As for Dreher, he's doing his usual thing, just at even greater length and in a more screechy, panicked voice -- that noise, far outside my compound! Could it be Antifa? Like, for example, "reader" "mail" from "a liberal(ish) white reader" who "writes to say he has been truly shocked by how all his white liberal friends are acting now, at least on social media." Liberal(ish) White Reader tells Rod, "I know on this issue you’ve had the same response as me, which is sympathy for Black people who are the victims of police brutality," so you know he's legit, right? And he's had "substantial conversations" with "Black people (both college educated, one who still very much lives as part of the Black community, the other who is in a mixed-race marriage and from what I can tell travels in a mostly White social circle)," which... is a weird way to qualify his interlocutors; maybe Dreher's readers would be interested in how much exposure to white people the "Black people" had, in order to know how to judge their responses.

Anyway, Liberal(ish) White Reader says the "Black people" were "hot, and all 5 were more sympathetic to the riots than I was," but never mind them because the white liberals (as opposed to liberal[ish]s) accused him of blindness to the situation because of privilege, which is ridiculous because the white liberals were all limp-wristed caricatures:

The perspectives [the black people] had on it came from growing up scared of the cops, knowing people who’d been manhandled or profiled, and just navigating America and all the systemic racism in it (which I 100% believe is real) as Black people. So it was nuanced and grounded in reality. The White liberals, on the other hand, for them it was purely ideology and performance.

In other words, you have to expect the "Black people" to be this way, but it's obnoxious for whites to sympathize. I've seen this shit for decades: guys like Rod (excuse me, Liberal[ish] White Reader) can at least compartmentalize their feelings about "Black people," but what they really hate is "Black people"-lovers.

Also Dreher's customary "I'm no Trump fan" JustTheTip-Trumper construction is taking on many, many more waste-words:

You see that kind of [graffiti] scrawled on the wall of a building in the city that’s in the process of being burned down by Antifa, and you might think differently about Trump’s obnoxious boast about shooting rioters. I wish he had been more statesmanlike, and laid down a hard line without being so provocative, but it’s hard to look at, and listen to, Antifa without believing that Trump is more right than wrong.

And:

The American media (including me) did not see the Donald Trump election coming, and they’re going to miss the political blowback from these riots. I say that as someone who did not vote for Donald Trump, and who wishes we had almost anybody else in the White House right now in this time of grave national crisis, given that his big mouth is likely to make a bad situation much worse. Nevertheless, the fallout from these riots are going to push so very many middle-class and working-class people to the Right. Count on it. As Douthat writes...

Ugh, I'll spare you. (I would also ask: What "middle-class" and "working-class," anymore?) Lately I've been leaning toward the explanation that Dreher's a con man playing his obviously confused readers with his fancied-up Get Ready Man shtick, but this latest wave suggests to me that he's legitimately unhinged, and suffering mightily as he is inevitably driven by fear and hatred into the arms of Spiro T. Trump.

MAKING UP FOR LOST TIME. I have a whole bunch of reasons for the long silence. Which one do you want?

1. Fuck you.
2. The professional commitments I could handle, but I wasted a lot of time talking to people and dealing with their emotional needs. Pffft! Later for that!
3. I sold my posts to more popular blogs to buy medicine for orphans.
4. I... I don't know. What day is this? This calendar says 2007! No! NO!

To get back to sea level, I will take the lay of the land -- by which I mean Wingerland, a large but mentally-impoverished duchy:

Ace O. Spades has gone back to thinking that calling someone a traitor is more fun than calling him gay. For the moment.

Jeff Goldstein continues to redefine surrealism as what the French call "jokes without punchlines."

Why would ladies pay five grand to take writing lessons from a successful author, asks a NRO rookie hack, when the real question is, why would anyone pay $5000 to be set adrift in the North Atlantic with a bunch of madmen? True, the accomodations look nice, but when, after too many 7&7s, Mac Owens has got you in a headlock, Victor Davis Hanson is grinding his crotch against a broom-handle in emulation of Jim Morrison while bellowing Catullus, and Jonah Goldberg insists on "running some Liberal Fascism chapters by you" (i.e., farting uncontrollably), no cabin can possibly be large enough.

The reekage at InstaB-List is so rank even other wingnuts are noticing. Ann Althouse, we may be sure, is oblivious, being obviously high as a fucking kite approximately 100% of the time. (Her commenters, on the other hand and as evinced by this thread, seem to be surfing on methane fumes. My favorite: "BTW, Ann is not a conservative. Most who characterize her as that display their own liberalism.")

But Professor Althouse is still a piker when it comes to self-unawareness. Yesterday Jim Lileks actually complained about a newspaper writer who, he judged, was making too much of dogs dressed in sweaters. Jim Lileks! And mere paragraphs after he had sternly parsed the music selection at Starbucks!

I leave you with Fred Thompson denouncing Gandhi. Next week, Thompson takes on that faggot Jesus.

GOING UP PAST NINE-ELEVEN. Ole Perfesser Instapundit told such people as listen to him twice to go see this thing by Sarah Hoyt about 9/11. So I figured it would get eventually to where it got to:

On the one hand, part of me wants to laugh at the terrorists. They thought they could break us. They thought they could scare us. They underestimated both the size of our territory and the mettle of my people. 

And part of me thinks of the psychological twisting that has taken place since then: people who blame their own country for the actions of barbarians; people who kowtow to the barbarians and claim to be multiculturalists because that sounds so much better than vile cowards; people who think that a country the size of ours, as wealthy as we are should do nothing to deter attackers because we’d be protected by our halo of purity and goodness...

And I thought as I read it: So, somebody's still doing this -- using 9/11 as a long stick to beat people who didn't have anything to do with it, but whom they never liked. It brought me back to 2001, and the many years thereafter when this was a popular shtick -- the decadent left and the fifth column and all that.

And today: Not so much. Nobody calls himself a warblogger these days; nobody thinks "Democracy! Whiskey! Sexy!" is a foreign policy statement. Even the excitable Jim Lileks is subdued, having abandoned his former dreams of annihilation for mysticism ("Now, as ever, we live between the sharp notes. Gather them all together, and you have the melody of the centuries"), like a former Weatherman who, when it all came down, went up the country and today raises watermelons and gets stoned and talks to Gaia.

In their ratholes and caves, some holdouts still practice the dark craft, but their former sympathizers have ceased to follow, occupying themselves instead with Clint Eastwood's chair and other Western novelties.

And Osama Bin Laden is dead.

Whattaya know: In the long run, freedom works.

UPDATE. Paul Bedard at the Washington Examiner:

9/11 bumped by gay flag, Michelle money plea on Obama site

September 11th turned out to be just another day on the Obama-Biden campaign website: A fundraising memo from first lady Michelle Obama, a pitch for gay rights including a rainbow-colored American flag, and a campaign picture under the headline "Photo of the day--September 11th, 2012."

Oh, there were two tweets to commemorate the 9/11 attacks, but finding them was hard.

By comparison, the Romney-Ryan campaign features two blog entries, one from Mitt Romney and the other from Paul Ryan, and a 9/11 news release. The Romney campaign homepage featured a tweet and Facebook note about 9/11.

Two blog entries, a tweet and a Facebook note! Never forget!

Now Romney's burnishing his foreign policy cred by blaming Obama for the attack on the U.S. embassy in Libya. My sources tell me his next step will be to accuse the President of not wearing big enough flag pins.

It's enough to make a fella miss Quemoy and Matsu.

UPDATE 2. It's redundant at this point to say comments are great, but here's a taste: Big Bad Bald Bastard tells our subjects, "To paraphrase Ving Rhames in Pulp Fiction, 'You've lost your 9/11 privileges";  KC45s examines Lileks' poeticisms and remarks, "Finally, we know who writes Sting's lyrics"; and Fats Durston redoes St. Crispin's Day:

...Then shall their names,Familiar in the mouth as freeper handles--
Jonah the Whale, D'Souza and Douchehat,
Erick son of Erick, Juggs and Ace--...
But we in it shall be remembered--
We few, we fappy few, we band of botherers... 

Nice.

HEY RUBE. Prairie content provider James Lileks says Woody Allen isn't so great with his snobby Manhattan:

Listen, give me Gordon Willis as my cinematographer and Susan Morse as my editor, and I’ll give you an opening montage of Fargo that will make people weep.

"Chapter one. He adored Fargo. He idolized it all out of proportion." No, make that: "He tolerated it all out of proportion. To him, no matter what the season was, this was still a town that existed in sepia-toned postcards that he bought by the carload at nerdfests, and pulsated to the great tunes of Lawrence Welk..."

I would love to see Lileks make the film, but I suspect it would look less like Manhattan and more like Stranger Than Paradise.

UPDATE. You want Manhattan? James Wolcott will give you Manhattan.

TOO CHILDISH-FOOLISH FOR THIS WORLD. The Ole Perfesser plays The Ole Foolosopher, striking what I suppose passes among conservative propagandists for a contemplative attitude. As we have come to expect from such people, the tone is wounded, and the approach entirely self-justifying.

First, after noting that yet another of his stories has turned out to be full of shit, the Perfesser prints a note from some guy telling him how great it is that the Perfesser stooped to correct the item. Then he muses:

Well, a polite email always counts for something, especially in the blogosphere these days. As I note in the FAQs, I don't promise never to link to things that turn out not to be wrong (no blogger could do that) only that I'll try to correct the error if I find out about it. Rein's email is certainly nicer than some I received about the Ware story, though I think I got about as many from Dartmouth alumni complaining -- correctly -- that I shouldn't have called it Dartmouth University in my New York Post column. Well, nobody's perfect.

So not only is the Perfesser a real sport to print the sort of retraction he is constantly demanding of newspaper editors; he's also not responsible for all those other, interesting-if-true tales that he just leaves lying out there -- like dirty hippies beating up a soldier -- for, though they advance an alternative version of reality that exactly conforms with the Perfesser's own, they are innocent mistakes, like getting a name wrong. And those impolite bloggers (not anti-civility, just on the other side) who think otherwise can be dismissed with a hearty "heh."

Incivility bothers the Perfesser a great deal. After hailing James Taranto's Matthew Dowd damage control, the Perfesser presses his knuckles to his brow and ponders:

I've never felt that degree of attraction to, or affection for, Bush -- you never saw the kind of praise for him here that you once saw for him elsewhere. Mostly, I've just felt vaguely sorry for him, and hoped he'd manage to do a decent job under difficult circumstances. On the other hand, I haven't had the same over-the-top response to disappointment with him, either. But I try to keep the political and the personal separate, something that seems increasingly old-fashioned these days.

"I try to keep the political and the personal separate" -- brother, is that rich! Because the whole schtick of these rightwing blog kingpins is about reducing politics to lifestyle choices and personal tics.

There is, for example, Jim Lileks, who has reinvented himself as a 21st Century Babbitt. (In today's episode, he hollers about the damned artists and hoteliers who have ruined his beautiful Roger Smith Hotel, as if the many midtown lodges that draw customers with arty touches were responding to orders from the Third International rather than the demands of the market.) Column after column, Lileks presents conservativism as something that arises less from argument and assessment than from a longing for the Goode Olde Days, when men were men and matchbooks were matchbooks and nobody talked with a filthy mouth, proving that, if Lawrence Welk were plying his trade today, he'd spend most of the show talking about the life-affirming philosophy represented by Champagne Music and the Beatles' spiritual debt to Josef Stalin.

There is Ann Althouse, now in the final, gruesome throes of dementia, for whom all issues are literally all about Ann Althouse, and the most convincing side of any debate is the one that sends her the most mash notes.

And there is the Perfesser. As we sometimes demonstrate here with the Ole Grey Perfesser Test, he is a fairly doctrinaire conservative, with just a little socially-liberal trim added to differentiate him from the currently overstocked pool of Bill O'Reilly impersonators. The Perfesser tumbled early to right-wing market realities: for example, that while Rush Limbaugh's politics was a factor, it was his self-presentation as a callous, self-satisfied douchebag that reminded suburban burghers enough of themselves that they made him a god. But the crafty Perfesser has aimed slightly higher: between newsy bits, he rattles on about high-end coffee-makers and hand dryers and cars, portraying himself very convincingly as exactly the sort of shopaholic dink he wants to draw to his site. They're a demographic bonanza, after all -- moneyed, acquisitive, and fundamentally insecure.

This persona requires another innovation on the Limbaugh formula: while Rush's white dreamers of disenfranchisement relate well to authority, the Perfesser's target auditors are a little more urbane and feckless. So while rightwing politics must stay in the mix -- one cannot dispense entirely with authority, nor with the narrative of liberal betrayal, lest the audience drift away -- it must be a cooler version of rightwing politics, less beefy-faced and sweaty, more accomodating to people who, in the depths of their soullessness, really just don't give a shit about anything except their own personal comfort and primacy.

In answer to that need, the Perfesser and his peers embed their rightwing talking points in a creamy, formless mess that we might call I Can't Believe It's Not Politics. Its apotheosis is -- was, I guess I should say; who takes this shit seriously anymore? -- the "Anti-Idiotarian" concept, which held that old ideas of "Left" and "Right" had lost all relevance, and the real litmus was now whether you agreed with the Perfesser's right-wing ideas, or were an idiot. This is politics with no fuss, no muss -- that feeling of resentment the Perfesser's hehs and indeed have stirred in you are all the sign you need that you're in the right church.

When the heavy lifting involved in reasoning and comparing has been done away with, the politics goes down smooth, so long as the host maintains an entertaining line of patter. And so their readers increasingly perceive politics as something that has to do with Ann and Glenn and Jim and their affection for them. Any other relevance of politics to their lives would be a drag to think about.

Well, they have a right to make a living too, I guess. But let us not pretend that they aren't making the political personal, nor that this is an improvement.