MAD MAILBAG: EPISODE ONE. Busy again, so I invented a new category that allows me to recycle other people's work and make it look like I did something. Hehndeed!

As a break from the tedious forensic work of isolating the central fallacies in wingnut columns, we go straight for the cheap laffs with Mad Mailbag -- celebrating comment-box crackpots and their prose-poetic descriptions of the alternative universes in which they dwell.


Today's winner comes from Winds of Change, in a response to Armed Liberal's MLK day complaint that liberals don't get King right.

As a quick scan of sites like Roger L. Simon's and (pre-hejira) Michael Totten's shows, the usual fan base for pro-war sorta-usedtobe-whatever-liberal guys like AL consists of conservatives delighted to hear smack spoken by an insider against the hated liberals.

But some in the crowd are not convinced that the former fellow-traveller has truly repented; and when the audience has thinned out, they step to the podium and, as the speaker is packing up his papers, lean over and whisper in his ear:

Armed Liberal said in post #6: "While I think that the Left has foolishly abandoned both the moral center and style of discourse used by Dr. King, I'd bet that it would resonate still in the right voice. I'm looking for that voice..."

Armed Liberal, I hope that you never find it. Because three are some people who are responsive to that voice. They are Christian, conservative and the backbone of the pro-life cause.

The Left, which the voice that you are looking for would serve, is committed to "choice". When all the oily rhetoric about "choice", "quality of life" and so on comes to a practical point, it is the point of a hypodermic needle piercing the heart of a viable human foetus, to inject it with potassium chloride, to kill it. A voice for the Left is a voice that facilitates the slaughter of helpless human beings.

I think that what you want is a Saruman the White, using the finest words to get people to agree to the worst actions.

I hope you never find him.

With friends like these, who needs glassy-eyed stalkers?

P.S. I also propose a codicil to Godwin's Law: any political argument availing wizards, wookies, elves, necromancers, or persons named Something The Something is prima facie bullshit.

LATE MLK TRIBUTE. There were a couple like this. The McGuffin in this case is that King shouldn't have a holiday to his unworthy self -- it should be called "Civil Rights Day" and encompass the contributions of "leaders of past civil rights struggles." This would of course make it easier in future generations to presume that the contributions of, say, Everett Dirksen and King were about equal.

For the time being such like remain transparently looney, but give it a few years.

The author does add this fillip:

...Labor Day, the brainchild of United Brotherhood of Carpenters founder Peter J. McGuire. Talk about not being fair to everyone else who makes it happen -- when do we celebrate Entrepreneur Day and Management Day?

Years ago, when kids asked their parents, "If there's a Mother's Day and a Father's Day, why isn't there a Children's Day?" there was a well-known stock response. If you don't what it was, I'd be wasting your time by telling you.

GRAHAM, CRACKER. As noted below, conservative outlets downplayed MLK yesterday. But this morning I did finally pick up an overt reference in The Corner's Iowa coverage:

WHAT SHARPTON'S WATCHING INSTEAD? [Tim Graham]
PBS is celebrating MLK Day with what must be the 37th MLK documentary on PBS -- "Citizen King," hyped today by Cursor.org and other lefties as providing that missing late MLK, the one that opposed Vietnam with all the ferocity of a Howard Dean.

Posted at 10:07 PM

Yes, while the good Americans at NRO were making fun of Democratic Presidential candidates, evildoers were indulging their dark obsession with this King fellow.

"Citizen King" was very good, by the way, and I would especially recommend it to people who are confused about, or willfully ignorant of, the great man's accomplishments.

FADE FROM BLACK. National Review Online has posted no Martin Luther King observance today. This is a switch. In recent years, NRO writers have celebrated the great man's birth by explaining how he was really a conservative, or wishing aloud that they could still call people of King's race colored. Idiotic as these observances were, they still acknowledged the occasion.

But this year, nothing's doing, unless this thing by Jay Nordlinger is meant as a tribute:

DEPT. OF "I WISH I HAD SAID THAT": "George W. Bush has several black Americans in high-ranking positions, but often they're not considered black, because they are, of course, Republican. So here's my thought: Michael Jackson could have saved himself a fortune on cosmetic surgery just by becoming a Republican -- then, in the eyes of the world, he would have stopped being black."

But then, Nordlinger is capable of this kind of shit the rest of the year too. So it would seem that NRO is passing the holiday in silence.

One would like to think it is embarrassed silence, an acknowledgement that they have nothing worthwhile to say about the subject. I fear it is probably a different sort of resignation that has quieted them: with affirmative action dug in for a few more years at least, the President factoring no black votes into his electorial plans, and the most regular and readable black contributor to NRO a cursed pro-gay libertarian, the NROniks have probably just given up on black folk entirely.

OpinionJournal doesn't mention MLK Day either. Last year, a few days before King's birthday, they posted an article about Republicans and race -- basically praising Bush for speaking against Trent Lott, saying it gave him "racial capital that's much too precious to squander," and warning that "white Americans cannot continue to deliver nationwide elections to Republicans."

Maybe they've changed their minds, too.

UPDATE. Pandagon has some good Right-on-King notes, too.

UPDATE II. Here's something to contemplate on MLK Day. Did you know people made postcards of lynchings? I sure didn't, and I grew up in a culture of victimization that discouraged the pulling up of one's own bootstraps, gave Toni Morrison the Nobel Prize, and continues to stigmatize frat boys who think the term "colored people" is a real scream.

UPDATE III. At NRO's The Corner, Denmother Lopez finally drops some MLK love, sort of: a statement, posted without comment, from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Money quote: "Racial progress is a train that left the station decades ago..." Spin connoisseurs will note the cliche denoting finality ("left the station") used to describe "progress," which is by its nature ongoing. Think one can't have it both ways? One can with the right speechwriters.