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.

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?

WATCH YOUR BACK, GOLDBERG.

Betsy Woodruff of National Review on how Macklemore won a Grammy because homos:

Far be it from me to assume there’s any rhyme or reason behind who wins Grammys (ha! not doing that).

The very next goddamn sentence:

But it’s hard not to look at this situation and wonder if the Grammys put politics before music.

This breathtaking display of self-unawareness, along with her ridiculous Lena Dunham columns, makes Woodruff the front-runner to replace Jonah Goldberg as the Corporal Agarn of NR's culture war troops.

Anyway I don't know what she's complaining about; one might as easily argue that Daft Punk's big night is a victory for the Singularity.

UPDATE. Hear hear, M. Krebs in comments: "Actually it's hard not to wonder if there's anything the Grammys don't put before music."

Plus, Formerly_Nom_De_Plume:

I won’t be talking about Ryan Lewis at all here because first, I don’t know anything about him 

lost out to someone named Ariana Grande about whom I know nothing 

Someone with a better grasp of hip-hop history than I (read: someone with any grasp of it at all, really) 

(And if this piece already exists, can someone send it to me?)

Her training is complete. Jonah watch his back? More like congratulate himself on a job well done. 

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the latest rightblogger outreach to women: a bunch of essays about how ugly Lena Dunham is. It's a cinch! The small number of people who know who Lena Dunham is won't we swayed one way of the other, but the ones who don't know who Lena Dunham is will see that conservatives are mad at some woman for making them look at her tits, and that's bound to make an impression.

ANNALS OF THE CULTURE WARS, PART 432,239.

I hadn't looked at Ben Shapiro's Truth Revolt (which Breitbart.com told us in October would "WILL MAKE MSM 'PAY' FOR LIES, CHANGE 'NATURE OF MEDIA'") before now. Right out of the gate:

Also, there's an item devoted to telling us what Shapiro said on Fox News. Sample:

...[Megyn] Kelly moved on to a another quote from the piece that posits a society where people were paid for doing only what they were passionate about, like painting murals. When Kelly asked who would pay the millennials for painting their murals, Shapiro turned the conversation to the inherently destructive philosophy of Keynes.

Shapiro: This is the whole thing, passing the buck to the next generation that doesn’t exist yet. And John Maynard Keynes was fond of saying that in the long run we’re all dead. This is that philosophy taken to the extreme: In the short run we’re all dead, so we might as well all paint murals. Who’s going to clean the toilets? Who’s going to do the actual work that needs to be done in this country? Maybe this is why some of these folks want open borders.

The Mexicans clean toilets, millenials paint murals, and Shapiro yammers on Fox News. Maybe Shapiro will explain how he would redistribute these responsibilities in Part 2. I'm guessing Shapiro won't wind up wielding a brush of any kind.

Rule of three demands:

Vogue Mag Lowers Standards
‘Girls’ star Lena Dunham to feature on cover despite untraditional body type

No clue whether, before he wrote this, the author saw the recent Acculturated essay called "Why Conservatives Should Cheer On HBO’s Girls" (short vs.: The characters are dissatisfied with their lives and since they're liberals the reason must be liberalism). Despite her untraditional body type, I would bet that since the 2012 election Dunham has gotten enough hate-wanks out of conservative men to float a National Review cruise out of drydock.

UPDATE. In comments, Big_Bad_Bald_Bastard:

Leaving aside the fact that one's body type is a matter of biology, not tradition, a perusal of the large "History of Art" textbook on the shelf reveals more depictions of women who are built like Lena Dunham than like Kate Moss. A quick stroll through the neighborhood finds me encountering more women who are built like Lena Dunham than like Stephanie Seymour. If I didn't know any better, I'd swear that Mr Shapiro has never seen a female body up close.

WRECKERS.

IFrom his previous ridiculous columns I reckoned Charles C.W. Cooke of National Review was wrapped a little too tight, but holy Jesus, I'm still stunned by his ragegasm over an OFA tweet promoting Obamacare because it contained a picture of a guy in pajamas who wasn't Don Draperly enough to suit him.

First, Cooke tells us this is part of a pattern of inappropriate stereotypes (that is, stereotypes not calculated to appeal to Charles C.W. Cooke) foisted on him by the Obama studios:

First, we had Julia, the creepy, eyeless, vision-of-horror from Brave New World whose life was run from cradle to grave by the federal government. Then, we had Adriana, the painfully neutral and carefully ambi-racial stock-model-from-everywhere whose face became so synonymous with HealthCare.gov’s hilarious launch that she had to be replaced with a graphic plugging an 800 number.

"Julia" was a series of silhouettes used as a graphic element, and only creepy if you come from a primitive culture which has no experience of representational art. As for Adriana -- I never knew her name before, but am not surprised Cooke did; apparently enough wingnuts had Special Feelings for her that the poor model had to flee for her life -- I can see why Cooke was pained by her "carefully ambi-racial" features; he probably hears the tyrant Obama crying THIS IS YOUR FUTURE every time her pulls her picture out from under his pillow.

And now, courtesy of Organizing for Action, we have Pajama Boy, a metrosexual hipster in a plaid onesie who wants you to spend your precious Christmas days talking to him about the president’s vision for health insurance. 

Unlike your average Jehovah’s Witness, Pajama Boy has evidently managed not only to get into the warmth of your house to do his proselytizing, but to make himself a cup of hot chocolate and to get into his bedtime clothes to boot. That is to say, Pajama Boy is staying over — priggish facial expression and all — and he won’t leave until you’ve relented.

This soft-invasion fantasy is no more than you'd expect from the folks who gave you "shoving it down our throats." Indeed, the queerfear is palpable -- Cooke says this advertising model, or something he represents, brings to mind a "Queer Students Assocation," and would go for "a 'dialogue' about the evils of 'heteronormativity.'" Cooke also marks the model as a "vaguely androgynous, student-glasses-wearing, Williamsburg hipster," which means maybe he only looks gay, which is still bad enough. Also, "part Chris Hayes, part Rachel Maddow, part Lena Dunham," etc.

Cooke does not threaten to beat the model's homo ass, for he is an internet, rather than a real, tough guy, so instead he expresses satisfaction that "Twitter rather predictably exploded with derision," and that others information workers of his political persuasion endorse his sentiments (Cooke's work is one of the few places where you will read "of 'Iowahawk' fame" and know it is meant seriously). His final movement is essentially a luxuriation in the difficulties of Obamacare -- you know the style from countless wingnut thesaurus-reading contests exulting over the "train wreck," "debacle," "smoldering ruin," etc.-- except Cooke's signifiers tend toward this: "All the women were sluts; all the men were idiots; all the girls were playing extremely violent sports."

He does stick in stuff about Oscar Wilde and Evelyn Waugh and his preference for "adults' clothes," though, so you'll know he, unlike his various real and imaginary nemeses, is a serious adult.

This is where the Obamacare argument is right now. No one really expects it to go away; it will either get better or it won't. Cooke and his crew hope for the latter, indeed are actively working on preventing it from getting better, which is why most of their essays on the subject are just concatenations of slurs -- they don't have anything else, certainly not a health care solution other than the traditional Pay or Die. They don't have anything to explain or defend, and so can expend such creativity as they have on polishing their act. Which wouldn't be so bad if they had a better one.

IN PLAIN SIGHT.

James Taranto, who thinks the American gynarchs are waging "war on men," catalogues the unkind comments women have made about him (e.g., "woman-hating troll"). While butchly insisting these barbs don't bother him, Taranto laments that the ladies are brutal in ways he and his fellow oppressed males would never be:

All this viciousness was in the service of denying that there is, as we wrote in yesterday's article, a "war on men." Well, imagine if a prominent feminist journalist wrote about the "war on women" and dozens of conservative male writers responded by subjecting her to similar verbal abuse. Would that not be prima facie evidence that she was on to something?

Taranto seems not to have heard of that key figure in the "war on women," Sandra Fluke -- pretty prominent and a journalist as well as a law student. It wouldn't be hard to get up to speed: I wrote a couple of columns about some of his colleagues' reactions to Fluke (for example, "Rush Calls Some Slut a Slut and Everyone Gets Sand in Their Collective V@g!n@"), but if Taranto doesn't want to endure my prose, he can just put "Sandra Fluke" and "whore" into Google.

You know, I'm just kidding. I'm sure Taranto has heard of Sandra Fluke. I'm even fairly confident that he knows where the power actually resides in male-female social relationships. He's just very good at pretending not to.

UPDATE. In comments, Jay B: "Uh, yeah. It's almost like Amanda Marcotte doesn't exist. Or Jessica Valenti. Or Joan Walsh. Or Naomi Klein. Or any woman writer at The Nation. Imagine though if those people existed, I'm sure conservatives would be gallant." Amanda particularly seems to attract the psycho freaks of the right, probably because she pretty clearly doesn't give a shit, an attitude known to infuriate bullies.

UPDATE 2. Removed reference to "screenwriter" among Fluke's achievements -- I had conflated her with Lena Dunham, for obvious reasons.

GET THE RAINCOAT OUT OF YOUR LAP, IT'S NOT THAT KIND OF SHOW.

Emily Esfahani Smith, whose ridiculous writing at Acculturated on how everything was better when people were repressed has been treated here, has been writing for The Atlantic too, which makes a pathetic sort of sense. Her latest contains a theater review:

The scene represents a normal sexual encounter between two students. There's moaning. There's orgasming. And yet, it falls flat. While the play wants to promote the idea that this kind of sex is hot and fun, in this scene, it is boring and banal. Erotic sex ideally involves mystery and an electric connection—longing—between two people. But the exhibitionism of Speak About It kills this mystery and longing—it leaves little to the imagination.

Speak About It, by the way, is a "variety of skits and monologues dealing with sexual consent, assault and misconduct, and bystander intervention" developed by students at Bowdoin and now used at other colleges. So it's basically a sexual hygiene play, and while it sounds it's no match for the one in Love and Death, I doubt electric connections and mystery were intended as part of the offering.

The rest is gabble about Allan Bloom, "the hookup culture," and oh Jesus kill me now Lena Dunham, who apparently still haunts these people's dreams.

The economy sucks but apparently there are a lot of jobs for rightwing scolds who tell readers they don't really know how to have sex and then offer them The Closing of the American Mind instead of the butterfly flick.

POST-TRAUMATIC ATTENTION DEFICIT SYNDROME.

At The American Spectator Jeffrey Lord has one called "Jihad Blows Up the Liberal Utopia" and as you may have guessed, it reflects the growing rightwing consensus on Boston, which appears to boil down to Since you fuckers won't listen to us on any other topic, let us win you back with Terror! 

But as we saw in my recent Voice column, these guys also appear to have lost the self-discipline required to focus exclusively on the war-drum -- as one imagines they would if they were really serious about it -- without breaking into a tom-roll of talking points unrelated to the subject. It's like they want to go back to the Bush Years (now under new management and rehabilitation -- watch this space!), and they want to go now -- so rather than wait for Terror to soften the sheeple's minds, they just yell "Boo!" and then start yelling about deficit spending.

So after starting on-topic with "The Liberal Utopia is a land where gun background checks prevent mass murder" (I didn't say reasonably, I said on-topic), Lord veers, telling us the jihad has also blown up the Liberal Utopia of Social Security, Medicare, War on Poverty, etc.

He reaches what I would say is the nadir here, on the subjects of gun control and the apparent successor to Lena Dunham as the right's favorite female hate-object, Gabby Giffords:

Next up was former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who took to the Op-Ed page of the New York Times to say “I’m furious.” Giffords accused the Senate of being in the “grip of the gun lobby” fearful of political consequences. 

Gifford’s statement was filled with irony. There are people aplenty out there who have also discussed issues other than guns as being a problem in this area of violence in America. Indeed just this last Sunday Boston’s Cardinal Sean O’Malley not only talked about guns but the role of abortion in what O’Malley called a “Culture of Death.” But did Gabby Giffords want to talk about abortion as a contributing factor?

In case you're wondering if you imagined it: yes, he did just ask why a woman who was shot in the head is more interested in gun control than abortion.

If their movement ever acquires a leader, I suggest for starters he or she should pass out some Ritalin.

ANNALS OF THE CULTURE WARS, SPECIAL BREITBART EDITION.

The kulturkampfers at Breitbart.com just can't quit Lena Dunham, even when another of their hate-objects is in their line of fire:

Tina Fey, like other Hollywood-created stars including Lena Dunham, is showing herself to be a box office bust.

That's Ben Shapiro, who goes on to tell Fey that though she's "very talented... her pokes at Palin did her no good with mainstream America, and her cutesy 'too-smart-for-the-room' routine does her no favors with audiences." No, really: Ben Shapiro's giving Tina Fey career advice.

Dunham Alert also for this Maurice Black column:

Although Girls never fails to find humor in its characters’ haplessness, it also reflects the disturbing reality that more than half of college graduates under 25 are now unemployed or working jobs that don’t require a degree.

The title is "HBO'S 'GIRLS' OFFERS STARK FISCAL LESSONS IN AGE OF OBAMA." According to Black Dunham "unwittingly lends credence to moves by governors such as Pat McCrory in North Carolina or Rick Scott in Florida to shift higher education funding into fields that have better job placement rates." Maybe he's thinking of Laverne & Shirley.

(Black, BTW, is Vice President of the Moving Picture Institute, progenitor of that "youthful pop music video that alerts the hipster set to the perils of artificially low interest rates" we were talking about the other day; given his obvious commitment to agenda-driven entertainments, it must drive him nuts that Dunham isn't aware of what a conservative message she's sending; I imagine him yelling "You're one of us and you don't even know it, Lena!" at his TV while masturbating furiously.)

There are many other Dunham dumps at Breitbart.com, but let's close with one about an older favorite: The communist menace that is Law & Order. Wingnuts have had a hard-on for the show and its treasonously topical story lines for years, and now Warner Todd Huston brings the fist-shaking fury as L&O makes hay of Todd Akinism:

A character sitting in the witness box then says, "It's nearly impossible for a victim of legitimate rape to become pregnant." This is followed by looks of disgust by the two female lead detective characters sitting in the courtroom gallery.

Jesus Christ, people, do I have to spell it out for ya?

To subtly drive home an allusion to a politician like Todd Akin, on the lapel of the character testifying is a prominent U.S. flag pin, just like one a conservative politician might wear. How often do you think characters on Law & Order: SVU have worn flag pins?

Yeah, they may act regular, but that guy who played Lennie Brisco? He was in musicals!

UPDATE. Some extra culture-war nuggets for you: Our old friend Mark "Gavreau" Judge at Acculturated,  musing on gay marriage, gives us the line of the week:

It is important to celebrate tolerance, while keeping watch to make sure that the tolerance itself doesn’t become oppression.

The rest of the column never equals this, though it does tell us that Dan Savage is the real bully. Second place winner: Tevi Troi at Real Clear Politics, in his brow-squeezer "Can Republicans Close the Pop Culture Gap?" --

A move towards hipness must come from the party leaders themselves...

Comrades, the hipness of mere apparatchiks will not suffice -- the party leaders must themselves be hanging and banging. Draft a memo!

WHEN SLAVE GIRL PRINCESS LEIA ISN'T ENOUGH.

Mark "Gavreau" Judge apparently felt the need to be humiliated, and went about it the way conservatives often do these days, by writing about Lena Dunham and Girls:

Girls creator Lena Dunham is very talented, and she’s only twenty-six, but it has to be said: like so many liberal Hollywood and New York artists, she has a powerful streak of cowardice... The girls in Girls are frustrated because the guys they date are either passive, psychotic, pretentious, degrading, or plain old losers. But what if Dunham had written in a male character who is strong, caring, attractive, highly intelligent, sexually unambiguous, great in bed, and a conservative?... 

How about this: a handsome grad student from Fordham who is Catholic, articulate, a college football star, compassionate, manly, and can debate any liberal to a standstill. Maybe his flaw is that he drinks too much, or that he once bullied a gay kid.

He could be called Gark "Javreau" Mudge! And the dark secret that drives him is that a black kid may have stolen his bicycle.

I understand the celebrity fantasy but, guy, this thing about trying to dare Lena Dunham into fucking your avatar (or at least wearing its promise ring) is just creepy. Also, did it never occur to you to make Gark Javreau Mudge's hamartia two wetsuits and a dildo?

ANNALS OF THE CULTURE WAR, PERSECUTION MANIA EDITION.

The Ol' Perfesser was pimping something at Forbes called "Down On Downton: Why The Left Is Torching Downton Abbey," and I thought, that's strange, I haven't seen any such thing. I have seen those crazy kids at Acculturated kvelling over Downton Abbey as some sort of conservative thing, as if it were a political candidate and not some stupid TV show. I've also seen Jonah Goldberg claim the show for  the right because "the whole point of the show is to sympathize with the landed gentry" and one of the villains is gay. Since then I've seen similar yak from PJ Lifestyle ("5 Covert Conservative Lessons in Downton Abbey"),  First Things ("Downton Abbey is the perfect anti-Girls" -- their hard-on for Lena Dunham never dies), Gary North ("here we TV have a show which basically is opposed to the idea of confiscatory inheritance taxation" and references to Adam Smith and Edmund Burke), etc.

So I went to Forbes to see Jerry Bowyer lay out the evidence:

That’s arguably why the left is bashing Downton Abbey. The New York Times Art Beat column has reported that British critics are ‘torching’ Downton Abbey. Apparently Downton Abbey is snobbish, culturally necrophiliac (and if you don’t yet know what that word means, I suggest you leave it that way) and its popularity in the United States is due to the rise of the Tea Party movement and conservative opposition to the death tax. Even worse, creator Julian Fellowes is the holder of a Tory Peerage. Definitely not the right sort of people.

Wait a minute -- British critics? I clicked through to Art Beat: They mention the criticisms of Simon Schama and James Fenton, and... that's it. Two English guys.

Having thus established the conspiracy, Bowyer goes on to explain why The Left/two English guys hate the show: "Downton Abbey‘s message is an anti-class warfare one. The fact is that the spirit of the critics is hard left, and maybe that’s why Downton Abbey makes them so angry, because the success of the series shows that this group does not speak for America."

These guys couldn't be projecting any harder if they had halogen lamps up their butts. Plus: Don't they feel ashamed to be watching anything on the communist PBS?

UPDATE. I wonder why Bowyer didn't mention this, from Irin Carmon at Salon: "Why liberals love 'Downton Abbey.'" It's about... why liberals love Downton Abbey. Why, it's as if they have the ability to enjoy things that don't flatter every single one of their prejudices. What savages! But at the Washington Times, Jack Cashill offers an alternate explanation:

Carmon’s liberal friends may have sensed that their own ill-formed ideologies lack the integrity and the grace of the one they are exposed to in some detail on successive Sunday nights each winter. Outwardly, they may continue to reject the world the Crawleys have inherited, but inwardly, they envy it, and once a week at least, through the magic of television, they get to be part of it.

So in this reading, liberals actually love the show, but only because they wish they were conservatives. Well, when you spend years of your life telling people that Bill Ayers wrote Barack Obama's book, you may develop impressive self-convincing skills.

UPDATE 2. In comments, L Bob Rife: "Could someone wake me when the Acculturatniks lay claim to the 'Harlem Shake'?"

ANNALS OF THE CULTURE WAR, CONT.

I am grateful to Will Sommer -- who's doing fun things with the Washington City Paper blog, by the way -- for luring me back to Acculturated, the rightwing kulturkampf factory where I had previously found an essay about how feminists kept us all from living in Downton Abbey and saying "jolly good" or something. Sommer's find is by Mark Judge, nee Mark Gavreau Judge and a recurring minor character in the alicublog buffooniverse, who agrees with Kay Hymowitz's shtick about American men having too much fun, and blames women.

These days the problem isn’t as much pre-adulthood males as it is uncultured people–including women. When I was in high school at Georgetown Prep, a Jesuit school that prided itself on producing men who could both lay down a block and conjugate Latin, we had a term for well-rounded women: “cool chicks.” Yeah, she’s a cool chick. A cool chick would go to a baseball game with you, maybe liked a cool band, and also had a favorite museum and novel. They were cool because they weren’t just one thing–the Lena Dunham hipster, the scholarship-obsessed athlete, the Ally Sheedy Breakfast Club basket case. Do cool chicks exist anymore? Is there a Dianne Keaton of this generation?

Translation: I just can't beat off to the Vanity Fair "Hollywood" annual since Meryl Streep got crow's feet.

But then I found that Judge's essay is only "part of a symposium in which a variety of writers and thinkers weigh in on the question: 'Can men be men again?'" -- a line I'd prefer to believe is a Rusty Warren set-up, but which these brightish youngish things apparently take very seriously. One of these is Ryan Duffy, and his essay is called, not even kidding, "Training Men to be Better: Rewards and Punishments."

Duffy tells us it's important that we get guys to stop liking casual sex because who knows why (with this crowd the reasons don't even have to be mentioned, but I bet birth rates are involved), and like Judge he blames women (I sense a pattern), because they "have been feeding the beast of men’s desire for short-term relationships." But if the stupid bitches will just listen to him and Steve Harvey, we can turn this thing right around:

But should we also look to women to play a role in this process? In his book Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man, Steve Harvey talks about men like animals and the importance of rewards and punishments. Harvey actively acknowledges his suggestions might not work so well with feminists, but makes suggestions likely waiting ninety days before having sex with men to ensure he is truly in it for the right reasons. 

I believe there is some morsel of truth to Harvey’s claims. If we as a society want men to grow up and be real men–whatever that definition is–it’s critical that we go back to the simple rules of behaviorism. People will feel, think, and behave in ways that they are rewarded or punished for. If we truly want men to change, we can hope they will reward and punish themselves, but acknowledge that we (and especially the women dealing with them) must also play a part.

I suppose it is progress, in a way, that instead of relying on embittered mothers or maiden aunts to teach women to treat men like dogs, conservatives are starting to enlist the aid of Magic Negroes. Maybe this is the direction their minority outreach will take: encouraging Ice Cube, for example, to go out on stage with Allen West to do "Black North Korea."

Still, if your strategy relies on convincing people to stop having sex, you've got a hard sell no matter how you jazz up the pitch. Maybe it's time they went really retro and advocated the establishment of red light districts. Of course, they'd probably abandon the project once they realized they have to pay the comfort women at least $9 an hour. Sigh. I guess it's rightwing sitcom reviews until someone gets them all jobs at The Atlantic.

Parting irony, though: Isn't it rich that their plan for whipping male sexuality into shape requires women to behave like a union?

UPDATE. ADHDJ, in comments: "Indeed, it's easy to forget the world pre-January 2009, before titty bars and pool halls were invented."

UPDATE 2. Late as it is, I should like to add chuckling's observations on Judge and his Lena Dunham hangup, which could easily be applied to any of these guys and their Lena Dunham hangup:

Anyway, interesting the dude's definition of cool when applied to a young woman: It's not someone who's smart, well-educated, cultured, ridiculously successful in television, probably crown fucking princess of the New York indie celebrity scene -- no, none of that is cool -- but someone who will fetch him a hot dog at a baseball game. Of course pretending to share the interests of some conservative ass and smiling as he drones on and on about whatever infuriates him at the moment is a more achievable aspiration than being Lena Dunham for most women, but unfortunately it's pretty much nobody's definition of cool.

STILL MORE ANNALS OF THE CULTURE WARS.

Kurt Schlichter at Breitbart.com:

If conservatives are going to be in the popular culture – and act to change it – they can’t simply ignore shows like Girls that capture the zeitgeist, even if the zeitgeist makes their skin crawl. Season two is well under way, and conservatives need to participate in the discussion.

And what sort of discussion would that be?

Think of Sex and the City, except Sarah Jessica Parker has doubled her weight, dresses like a potato sack and fancies herself the voice of some undefined generation.

Oh, that kind. I expect there's at least one clubhouse or klavern in every county where that discussion never ends.

But wait, Schlichter wants to directly engage the sheeple:

You can’t talk about Girls at the water cooler with the rest of the office if you haven’t watched it, and if you aren’t part of the discussion you aren’t injecting and modeling the conservative ideas and values that we need to advance. You can['t] criticize and critique if you’re AWOL from pop culture.

So, someone's going to say "Hey, did you see Girls last night?" and you're going to say -- let me take a line from Schlichter's essay -- "The characters seem to live in a minority and Republican-free bubble (though a black Republican (!) shows up as a character this season). There is no reference to religion – that wouldn't occur to them." Or, even better, try one from Jeffrey Lord at The American Spectator:

The America that leftist women have such contempt for... that America is sending its sons and daughters to protect those rights. To die for those rights. 

It is exactly that America that sent Tyrone Woods to fight Ansar al-Sharia in Benghazi so that Lena Dunham can sit at peace in Brooklyn with her tattoo and her sleeveless T-shirt and her wink-wink on-camera prattlings about first-times. So that Amanda Marcotte can play with her race cards at Slate.

And your co-workers will nod thoughtfully and say, "Boy, that Obamacare's pretty socialist, huh?"

You need to make sure the people around you hear those answers, but step one is to be a part of the discussion. And step two is eventually taking over the reins of pop culture ourselves.

This is the "Step 3: Profit!" of all time.

We’ll know we’re winning when we see the conservative equivalent of Girls.

How about just watching PornTube and declaring victory?

Their big problem is neatly encapsulated in this bit:

What can be puzzling is trying to figure out how Dunham actually feels about her characters – does she really understand how deluded and shallow they are, or does she (horrors) consider them as some sort of role models for her co-generationists?

I wonder if they'll ever realize that their real culture war is not with liberals, but with ambiguity.

UPDATE. Right out of the gate, commenter Spaghetti Lee:

We’ll know we’re winning when we see the conservative equivalent of Girls.

"Boys"? 

NO SEX PLEASE, WE'RE WINGNUTS. Culture scold Lisa Schiffren at National Review is still going on about "the generally smutty, unpleasantly manipulative political ad featuring Lena Dunham," which apparently had way more hot action in it than I noticed:

In addition to the smarmy, smutty tone, the ad was an ugly, desperate attempt to manipulate young women... it was a new cultural low. Lower, even than attempting to bribe women with free contraception — or cell phones.

Obamaphones -- the one thing worse than sex! No wait, she's still bitching about sex:

...it forced normal parents, trying as hard as we can to instill reasonable morality, virtue, and common sense into our teenagers, to confront the ugliness of the hook-up culture which they have to work pretty hard to avoid. Who wants to be reminded that teenage girls now come of age in a culture in which it is common to strategize about how and where to have sex...

I missed the part where Dunham talked about how she was going to suck Obama's cock. Is that in the director's cut?

The punch line: Schiffren's promoting a GOP ad that shows two women talking, and the one who represents a disappointed Obama supporter says things like "I supported him for four years," "I miss the way he used to make me feel," etc. No political issues are mentioned at all.

In other words, it's as fanciful (to be polite) as the Dunham ad, and it personalizes politics even more than the Dunham ad. But you can say this for it: They never allude to sex, which apparently makes it dignified.

I should be grateful, having seen what they're like when they do.

UPDATE. Ha, zuzu in comments: "Virgin in the front, martyr in the rear."

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the Lena Dunham ad. It seems such a slight topic, yet how much rightblogger lunacy I found therein! This election must not be about much of anything.

As a bonus for you Late-Night Real People, here's the Photo of the Day, which I found at Legal Insurrection, where they're trying to make people think the Obama campaign dumped a bunch of nails in the parking lot of a Tea Party rally in Wisconsin. (Jim Hoft, not being too bright, just flat out says, "A truck affixed with Obama stickers drove through the parking lot outside of a tea party rally in Racine, Wisconsin on Saturday and dumped nails." Mongo only pawn in game of life!) The LI description is lovely:

A man caught the license plates of a van covered with Obama stickers leaving the scene, but police reportedly refused to take the information because there was no evidence of the van actually being connected to the incident. 

The Tea Party attendees picked up as many of the nails as they could, although many of their tires had been punctured, and left the pile for all to see.

But the photo is magnificent:

The foam cup plainly says "evidence" yet the police refused to act! Clearly ObamaHitler has corrupted all authority.

Oh, go read the Dunham thing, it's a pisser, too.

THEY'LL DO IT EVERY TIME. I enjoyed Tbogg's roundup of conservatives enraged at Lena Dunham's ad (and was surprised to see that, even after eight weeks of strangling a sex doll with Elizabeth Warren's picture taped to its head, Professor Jacobson had enough jam left to contribute). But it was missing a crucial element -- the element of overt Ooga Booga -- which RedState has been kind enough to provide:

There seems to be no low to which President Obama will sink in his desperate attempt to win reelection. One has to wonder, is there any point at which the main stream media and the public get some self-respect and toss out this loser? First he asked for your wedding gifts, then your yard sales and now he has asked for your daughters.

One pictures the brethren holed up in a shack under assault by the forces of Barack Obama, ready to dash out the brains of Lillian Gish ere she be breached.

NICE PANTS NERD. The election's tight, so the racket is to yell "we're winning" in a loud voice till the votes are counted. (And if you have a little lung power left over, bitch about the liberal media.) We that have free souls, it touches us not, and we take our pleasures where we can. I'm enjoying the brethren's reaction to Obama's Rolling Stone interview -- especially the Ayn Rand bit:

[Obama:] Ayn Rand is one of those things that a lot of us, when we were 17 or 18 and feeling misunderstood, we'd pick up. Then, as we get older, we realize that a world in which we're only thinking about ourselves and not thinking about anybody else, in which we're considering the entire project of developing ourselves as more important than our relationships to other people and making sure that everybody else has opportunity – that that's a pretty narrow vision. It's not one that, I think, describes what's best in America. Unfortunately, it does seem as if sometimes that vision of a "you're on your own" society has consumed a big chunk of the Republican Party.

Yeah, you can guess. Let's start with Katrina Trinko, National Review's current delegate from the Youth of Today:

Sure, there’s a few libertarians who would love to abolish the safety net and slash government programs. But that’s not the party platform, or what Romney is setting out to do. Not to mention that plenty of conservatives would rather establish a safety net more concentrated, not in individuals’, but in other types of community: church, clubs, extended family.

You know, like in the Middle Ages.

What if Obama had faced Ron Paul or Rick Santorum? If this is your rhetoric against Mitt Romney, what the heck do you have left for those who hold positions even further right?

AKA the "hey, you should see the nutjobs we wanted to nominate" argument.

One last question: isn’t this an extraordinarily lame cover outfit/pose for the cover? 

For perspective, this appears on the same page as Kathryn J. Lopez telling Lena Dunham Republicans aren't "super uncool," she's super uncool, infinity. Man. They all still dream of being backup posers in a heavy-rotation video starring Alex P. Keaton and Der Ahnold, don't they?

Of course at libertarian stroke book Reason Brian Doherty is furious adjusting his spectacles:

Obama Thinks Ayn Rand is For Teens (For Predictably Childish Reasons)

Correction --  furious adjusting his spectacles with one hand, furiously retucking his shirt with the other.

There is nothing "narrow" about Rand's vision except in that it created moral boundaries in which most of the functions of Obama's government would be seen as illegitimate, because they use threats and violence against non-aggressors to achieve social goals.

New to America, are you, Brian?

Nathaniel Branden, Rand's ideological lieutenant in the 1960s, sums up well the problem with most people trying to blithely critique Rand as Obama does. It can be found quoted on page 542 of my book Radicals for Capitalism...

Page 542! So that's why I never saw anyone reading it on the beach this summer.

Hilarious as this is, it's not a patch on what the non-heavily-Koch-funded libertarians are dishing.  The Objective Standard argues with Obama's interpretation:

Rand utterly rejected the notion that one should live an isolated life. She recognized that a crucial way we “develop ourselves” and pursue our rational self-interest is by building strong relationships with other people, whether in business, friendship, romance, or any other kind of life-serving relationship. Rand wrote hundreds of pages about the virtues and benefits of collaborating with others to mutual advantage.

Makes you feel all warm and fuzzy, don't it? It's like the Garden of Eden, except that Adam, having rationally decided that the weakling Eve is just slowing him down, kills her, wears her skin for warmth, and then demands that God produce another, worthier partner for him because this is what the genius of the marketplace demands, whereupon God decides the whole thing was a horrible mistake and obliterates the universe. Ah, what might have been.

But listen, it's not all deep analysis. Look at what I found at Objectivism for Intellectuals:

Just because they stim instead of laughing doesn't mean they don't have a sense of humor.