JINGO JERKOFFS.

A U.S. Navy vessel floated into Iranian waters and was detained by Iran along with its sailors, who were fed and sheltered for 16 hours and released. Wingnuts are furious that they didn't have time to put up yellow ribbons, and also with shame, because Iran didn't just say "go ahead and float around the place, guys -- it's not like we don't have some history." Even worse, we apologized for the incursion, and the Party of Trump doesn't go for that! At National Review David French finds a picture of the sailors sitting on a rug, and reacts as if they were cartoons of defiled American maidens in old jingo propaganda:

This photograph violates international law. Article 13 of the Geneva Convention (III), governing the treatment of prisoners of war, requires Iran to protect prisoners against “insults and public curiosity.” This photograph — including a female sailor apparently forced to wear a headscarf – is a quintessential example of “public curiosity” and would be interpreted as insulting throughout the Muslim world. (And if you don’t think Iran is in a state of armed conflict against the United States, tell that to the families of hundreds of American soldiers who’ve lost their lives to Iranians and Iranian-backed terrorists.)

"I understand you lost your boy in the War against Iran." "Huh?"

The sight of members of the American military, disarmed and under Iranian control, is of enormous propaganda value in Iran’s ongoing war against the United States. To its allies in the Middle East, the photo demonstrates Iran’s strength – how many jihadist countries have had this many American servicemembers under their power? – and it demonstrates American weakness,

Thus does Rouhani build morale for the American invasion! Meanwhile Erick Erickson wants to blow something up to show how fightin' mad he is as a red-blooded, ham-faced American. After all, Reagan blew something up in '88! He did so after one of our ships hit an Iranian mine, which Erikson doesn't mention -- nor does he mention that we were protecting supply lines for our buddy Saddam Hussein at the time. But never mind that -- blowing shit up is patriotic, but Obama won't do it so America is humiliated while Iran is "flexing its muscle in order to show the world that even the United States must at times bow to the Islamic Republic of Iran."

Ed Morrissey of Hot Air is mad that the sailors had to sit on a carpet, like they was Ay-rabs or something. "Iran had no chairs or couches for their 'guests' to use?" he thunders. Also they had to eat Ay-rab food -- not hamburgers and Cokes like real Americans! So much for your Geneva Conventions!

You see the problem. This ain't the U.S.S. Pueblo; the sailors were home in less than a day and seem to have suffered no ill effects. But conservatives have to at least try to gin up outrage over it, because military strength is one of their equities, and if Americans are content to settle these things with an apology and some hummus, it makes Republicans look like blustering idiots.

ONE-STOOP SHOPPING

Announcing a brand-new supermarket of rightwing barf -- The Resurgent, brainchild of onetime CNN commentator and RedState kingpin Erick Erickson. Why'd he start it?

Our desire at The Resurgent is to build a website unafraid of any arc of history imposed by men knowing that history ultimately bends towards our Creator and His is the side of history on which we should stand.

So, for nuts, then, and perhaps also to funnel wingnut welfare to conservative writers -- Erickson belly-aches that "boycott and harassment of advertisers by the left" has made it hard to generate income with these grifts, but he expects to support the thing with weekly sponsorships drawn by the lovely site design ("Try printing this page. Seriously. Just look at the thought we put into the print template. It is gorgeous") and the brilliance of his copy. "I want to control every pixel so if I get blamed for something, I will actually deserve the blame," he says, and he's not kidding: Some of the articles are by Steve Berman, mostly Ted Cruz rah-rah disguised as horse-race journalism ("Sen. Ted Cruz has the left running scared... he was mobbed by adoring fans like he was Mick Jagger crowdsurfing at a Stones concert," etc). But most of the current output is by the boss himself, and indeed the site bears his distinctive, belligerent-in-a-Barcalounger stamp. Let us review his first offerings:

"Republicans and the Lessons of 2014." Mostly pimping ("Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. This is your must read of the day") a National Journal story about how the radicals are taking the GOP over from fuddy-duddies like Paul Ryan, possibly leading to a Trump nomination. Erickson claims not to like Trump, especially since Trump was mean to prospective future Erickson employer Fox News, but he hates the Republican Establishment more, enough that he'd chain the party to a buffoon-led disaster and then scavenge the saving remnants. Bonus quote: "...I can give you names of tons of activists who, for example, would not even consider Rick Perry this go round because he hired Henry Barbour after the Cochran mess."

"The One Thing We Know About The GOP’s Response to Obama on Guns." The Republican Establishment will do nothing to stop Obama's fascist gun takeover. And what does this tell us?

The very reason Barack Obama can get away with what he is doing is the very same reason China is building islands in the South China Sea, Putin is helping Syria, and ISIS is spreading like a virus. The only force willing to block them is impotent, just as the only force willing to stop Obama is impotent.

Apparently the boss wants so much control he won't hire an editor for himself. Charitably, this glurge might mean that Obama is a sissy before Xi Jinping, Putin, and ISIS, but the Republican Establishment is even sissier because they're sissies before sissy Obama. "The only force willing to stop Obama is impotent" is a puzzle, though: Maybe Erickson has some nut, driven by despair over his erectile dysfunction to consider killing Obama, holed up at his klavern.

Speaking of which...

"Our Impotent President." Obummer cried over those kids at Sandy Hook but "never shed a tear over the innocent lives butchered in the Planned Parenthood videos..." All he ever does is hold press conferences -- "the Washington equivalent of viagra" which "only scratches the itch of 'JUST DO SOMETHING,'" and "ignore he really can’t get up to anything more than a pregnant pause these days," ha ha. This is a real Erickson hallmark: While his contemporaries like to tell us Obama is a tyrant, Erickson prefers to demean him with sexual imagery -- see "Barack Obama is Vladimir Putin’s Submissive Gimp," "Barack Obama is a Moral Coward and Fluffer of Totalitarians," etc. If Erickson gets anywhere the 2016 candidate's image-making apparatus, we can expect lots of rape-porn images of Hillary Clinton.

Perhaps related:

"Rubio Slams Christie Pretty Hard." "It slams him pretty hard and I suspect it is going to leave a mark."

There are also video and audio modules, but life's too fucking short. Final analysis: If there's room for one more angry white man in the hearts of wingnuts, Erickson has the inside track

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP....

...about rightblogger reactions to the Planned Parenthood shooting. I stuck in a bit about the Minneapolis BLM shooting, mainly because I can't believe how little coverage that got, but also because it shows how skilled these guys are at obfuscating even the most self-evident products of bigotry into some sort of conspiracy against themselves and their pals. (Among the credit-roll outtakes: Gateway Pundit's headline, "5 Black Lives Matter Protesters Shot AFTER REPEATEDLY Beating White Videographers." Videographers, eh? Love to see some more of their work; where's it playing, the Stormfront Film Festival?)

For the clinic their main tools were misdirection -- pretending that a murder spree at a Planned Parenthood had nothing to do with abortion, or actually happened somewhere else -- and whining that all the talk this event was generating about extremism against abortion providers was hurtful and unfair to people who call women baby-killers. Some of the crazier ones used the opportunity to work on their baby-killer-calling skills. Some Guy at RedState, for example, starts out all reasonable-like -- "What Dear did is evil and wrong in any circumstance" -- and then begins to froth:

I am vehemently in opposition to abortion, safe, legal or otherwise. Abortion is really a double-murder. It physically murders the baby, and it simultaneously spiritually/emotionally murders the mother. It’s not only a murder, it’s also a poison, that rots the souls of those who practice violence and barbarism toward innocent unborn human beings, robbing them of a whole lifetime of potential. 

The abortionists have done this over 50 million times in America, and Cowart calls it “safe and legal.” The only people glad Dear chose an abortion clinic to commit his hateful and evil act seem to be abortionists, because someone else committing murder salves their seared souls and masks their own sin.

Shoot, is it any wonder a sensitive soul would want to go to war with Planned Parenthood -- or, hell, all them evil liberals: "There is a cult of death that hates America," starts Some Other Guy at RedState's column on the subject --

It worships what it sees is the right of man to give and take life when it becomes a threat to its way of life. This cult has been aiming to see the end of America as we know it for a long time, but lately it’s become much worse. 

This cult is not ISIS. It isn’t violent, extremist Islam. It is much closer to home. It is the modern American Left.

Eventually RedState will be all KILL LIBERALS in block letters, gifs of Louie Gohmert stabbing his Jane Fonda doll with a knife, and the occasional Erick Erickson column on how it's not too late for Rick Perry.

But enough of my yakking, please read the column.

I'D RATHER BE RIGHT.

Obama said this about Republicans who are trying to protect America from pathetic refugees:

"Apparently they are scared of widows and orphans coming into the United States of America," Obama said of Republicans. "At first, they were too scared of the press being too tough on them in the debates. Now they are scared of three year old orphans. That doesn’t seem so tough to me."

Also:

"I cannot think of a more potent recruitment tool for ISIL than some of the rhetoric coming out of here in the course of this debate," Obama said... 

"When you start seeing individuals in position of responsibility suggesting Christians are more worthy of protection than Muslims are in a war-torn land that feeds the ISIL narrative."

Naturally I am very pleased to see this, not only because Obama is usually much too nice to these assholes, but also and mainly because it's a refreshingly strong defense of common sense in the normally common-sense-free War on Whatever. When was the last time you heard any other top-tier elected official call bullshit like this?

Nice Guy Democrats like Kevin Drum think it's a bad idea, though, because mindless fear is a "political winner"; presumably we should all get on board with terror-hysteria so as to keep the love of the people. Say, Joe Lieberman's still alive, maybe he can run for President.

I realize that, as circumscribed as he's been, Obama has accomplished some good things for the country. The trouble is, they're mostly half-measures. Take Obamacare. We only have this shaky Rube Goldberg system because the insurers and the AMA had to get paid off or national healthcare would never fly -- Senators and Congressmen have to get their contributions from somewhere, y'know! Single payer has been and remains the choice of the American people, but in the name of prudence and moderation we have instead a system nobody's entirely happy with, and because they're not happy Republicans get to exploit it while scheming to bring back their preferred Pay or Die healthcare system.

This is what you get when you've been thinking half-loaves so long you treat whole loaves as some sort of Bridge Too Far. What would the American people do with a whole loaf? Isn't there a danger that they'll choke?

Now Republicans are yearning so bad for another war that they're willing to use France, home of socialized medicine and the Axis of Weasels, as their casus belli. (Never mind that France has decided to go ahead and take more Syrian refugees.) Should I, in an attempt at comity, acknowledge their imaginary concerns, and then the next set of imaginary concerns, until finally I'm saying well, if the U.N. is willing...? Fuck it.  I didn't go for it in 2003 and I'm not going for it now. Besides, look at Some Guy from RedState reacting to Obama --

It takes a particular level of gall to be on foreign soil and criticize your political opponents. It is even worse when one is on foreign soil and openly treats political opponents with a level of contempt and anger that would be better served directed at terrorists. President Obama went there and after calling the terrorist attacks in Paris a “setback” and getting pissy with the press on Monday, has begun to lash out at GOP Governors...

I know, art of the possible and all that, but I'm not making common cause with this douchebag. Like Christy Mahon said, if it's a poor thing to be lonesome it's worse, maybe, to go mixing with the fools of the earth. I'll just keep on as I have been, and if God is kind I'll be around in a few years to hear Megan McArdle explain that I was just lucky. And who knows? By then maybe a few more citizens will have caught on.

UPDATE. Here's an interesting approach, from "Captain" Ed Morrissey at Hot Air:

Predictably, the President continues to cheap-shot his opposition via straw-men arguments (while overseas) while demanding we believe what has been proven to be a false narrative, rather than come home to deal with the crisis with actual dialogue and some honesty. The person who is serving refugees worst at the moment is Barack Obama.

I can see "Captain" Morrissey dressed as a simple dogface in WWII, leaning down to the orphaned Dondi with a Hershey bar: "Ya gotta understand, kid -- we didn't want to leave you to die, even though we kept saying that we did. But that Obama -- he went to the Philippines, and he was mean to us! When you're starving to death, remember who's really responsible. [Dondi reaches for the candy bar; Morrissey snatches it back] Psych!"

UPDATE 2. SWEET JESUS CHRIST ALMIGHTY ROD DREHER IS ACTUALLY DIGGING DEVIL LYRICS OUT OF EAGLES OF DEATH SONGS:

Evil is not a game. Evil is not to be messed with. If you call up the devil, sometimes, he will come.

Then he gets into it with his commenters about whether "Sympathy for the Devil" also summons evil. If you guessed "No, 'cause Rod likes the Stones," you guessed right: "And the Stones song was inspired by Bulgakov’s novel 'The Master and Margarita'. It’s not literally expressing sympathy for the devil, but rather disclosing his familiar presence throughout the history’s human atrocities..." It's a still life watercolor, of a now-late afternoon... Really, what's the level after self-parody? Escape velocity?

UPDATE 3. Perhaps he was inspired by Kurt Schlichter's widely-mocked WOT slash-fic, in which Republicans bomb everybody and win the day -- but not before "ISIS sleepers in America had struck at shopping malls" and, while those gunless losers in Los Angeles and Chicago got mass-murdered, "the killers in Phoenix and Dallas had been unable to murder more than a half dozen because of armed citizens..." Whatever the inspiration, Erick Erickson popped a gunboner:

After Paris, I Want to Take My Gun to Star Wars

Ain't even kidding.

...But just to be safe, I plan not to go to opening day. My theater will not let me take my gun with me. There are none in my area that would allow it. So I will wait for a late showing after the crowds have died down. People can scoff and claim this means the terrorists have won. Honestly though, thinking about safe and unsafe situations is something we should all do anyway. If the opening of “Dark Knight Rises” could spark a nut a shoot up a theater, I expect opening day of the biggest film premiere in modern history could do just as much, if not more. Besides, I don’t mind spoilers, so I will wait.

Frankly, I assumed Erickson never went out in public areas where walking was required. Can't he just download a script and act the thing out with his action figures?

NEXT WEEK: PINOCHET WAS NO ANGEL BUT AT LEAST HE WASN'T A SOCIALIST.

There's plenty of argh-blargh over Obama mentioning the Crusades and the Inquisition at the National Prayer Breakfast, on the apparent grounds that Christians aren't like that any more, whereas all Muslims are ISIS sleeper agents waiting for the word of the Prophet to leap out of their taxicabs and convenience stores and do jihad. (Also Obama mixed in slavery and Jim Crow, and that was totally the Democrats!)

Most of the brethren are content with ordinary, meretricious bullshit ("Obama uses National Prayer Breakfast to compare Christianity to ISIS," lies Some Guy at RedState); but making everything worse as usual is Jonah Goldberg, who has a long history of defending the viciousness of the Church (particularly toward Galileo, which Goldberg describes as a sort of innocent misunderstanding among friends) and, roused by an Obama news hook, stumbles onstage with his Inquisition Was Not So Bad crib notes:

As for the Inquisition, it needs to be clarified that there was no single “Inquisition,” but many. And most were not particularly nefarious. For centuries, whenever the Catholic Church launched an inquiry or investigation, it mounted an “inquisition,” which means pretty much the same thing.

It's like when your friend says that boring lecture was "torture" -- just a figure of speech! Yet libtards get mad when you subject a Gitmo detainee to the equivalent of a boring speech.

I cannot defend everything done under the various Inquisitions — especially in Spain — because some of it was indefensible. But there’s a very important point to make here that transcends the scoring of easy, albeit deserved, points against Obama’s approach to Islamic extremism (which he will not call Islamic): Christianity, even in its most terrible days, even under the most corrupt popes, even during the most unjustifiable wars, was indisputably a force for the improvement of man.

Hitler has a bad rap but if only you'd seen him with his dogs, etc. The thing you have to remember about this yap is, it's not meant to convince normal people, who will be giving it that Springtime for Hitler stare, but to soothe whatever vestigial sense of shame is left among the true believers. (Goldberg even brings up Martin Luther King to defend Christianity, which for conservatives is definitely like knocking down chairs behind you when you're on the run from the cops.)

Goldberg also says that Inquisition stuff was a long time ago, but take a look at Goldberg himself and all the freaks and monsters with whom he associates; you just know that if the coast were clear, if the effects of the Enlightenment (including the founding of this Republic) were completely dead and faded, they'd be burning and beheading to beat the band.

UPDATE. I am grateful for the reminder from Chauncey DeVega at Alternet that, regarding the Big Long Time Ago objection to speaking ill of the godly, some horrific lynchings of black men were performed within living memory. Klansmen didn't burn giant question marks on people's lawns, y'know, and Bizarro Jesus is often an honored guest at outbreaks of American mayhem.

UPDATE 2. Erick Erickson has spoken:

Barack Obama is not, in any meaningful way, a Christian and I am not sure he needs to continue the charade. With no more elections for him, he might as well come out as the atheist/agnostic that he is.

He's got a point. There's no evidence that Obama beats his children, fucks his cousin, goes out of his way to make other people miserable, seethes with hate at the unfair advantages enjoyed by the poor, or many of the other traditional hallmarks of Christendom. Being a politician, though, he does lie habitually, so maybe he can be redeemed.

PRE-THANKSGIVING AROUND-THE-HORN.

•    Remember a few days back, when Rod Dreher was flipping out that New York magazine interviewed a guy who fucks horses, and blaming this bestiality breakthrough on our tolerance of gay marriage? He's still on about it! He has dragged in the equally awful Damon Linker, who tries to reassure Dreher that "most people will continue to live boring, mundane sex lives, monogamously committed to one human being of the opposite sex at a time." You'd think this vanilla vision of the future would cheer Dreher, but it does not; he rehashes his previous mopes and also complains that "'emerging adult' Catholics are abandoning the faith in droves." Dreher himself abandoned Catholicism years ago, but that was different because 1.) he's Rod Dreher, the center of the universe, and 2.) he quit to join another hardass skygod sect, not to go friggin' and frugin' with the hippies, as he seems to assume the non-Dreher apostates will do. I thought at first Dreher, despite his roots in rural Louisiana, was somehow unaware of the ancient association of Southern hicks with barnyard sex, but now I'm thinking he does know, and has in fact been hired by the local chamber of commerce to get it associated with urban sophisticates instead.

•    Erick Erickson has a full-on soregasm because Ezra Klein doubts Officer Wilson's story about how Demon Mike Brown made him kill him. Why that sissy Klein knows nothing about "the blue collar of existence of a beat cop and what that cop sees," unlike red-blooded, ham-faced lawyer/politician Erick Erickson:

I think liberals like Klein who find Darren Wilson’s statement as simply too incredible to be true need to call their local police force and see if they can tag along in a squad car a few times. I have done it. It is quite an education.

Yeah, like that time the cops Erickson was with those cops who shot a black guy dead, and then were allowed to bag their own guns as evidence, and the prosecutor told the grand jury not to take it all too seriously -- you libtards don't realize this is the real world!

•    If you need some what-a-bunch-of-morons for entertainment, look at the responses to any Progressive Insurance @ItsFlo tweet, such as this one; most of the respondents are wingnuts enraged that the insurer gives all its money to George Soros:

Lewis, who did contribute to liberal causes, stepped down as Progressive chairman in 2000 and died in 2013. But tell that to the salt of the earth, the common clay -- or to John Hawkins of Right Wing News, who was telling his poor readers in 2013 that Lewis was still in charge and "may be the biggest liberal sugar daddy on the block." Actually, considering the difficulty they have understanding health insurance, maybe conservatives should boycott all insurance as socialism. Hell, those pointy-headed actuaries even believe in global warming!

•    A John Podhoretz (ding!) column in the New York Post (ding!) called "Turning on the cops: Forgetting what crime was like" (dingdingdingding!) was bound to be a nightmare, and it is -- all about how you liberals don't remember the crime it was so bad you must worship the Man on the Beat etc. But the bit where Podhoretz tells black folks to cool it over Ferguson is awful even for him:

It might surprise Al Sharpton to hear this, but even among white people, it’s rare to find any American who’s only ever had pleasant interchanges with police officers. 

Every year, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 41 million speeding tickets are written in the United States. The notion that only minorities have infuriating encounters with cops is belied by that astounding factoid. 

After all, is there a soul alive who hasn’t reacted negatively (in his heart, at least) to the cop who comes to the driver-side window and asks that obnoxious and oddly schoolmarmish question: “Do you know why I stopped you?”

I dunno what black people are bitching about -- white people get speeding tickets all the time!

FRIDAY AROUND THE HORN.

Happy Labor Day folks. Take it easy, but take it.

•   Rod Dreher's going on again about how the atheists are persecuting the Christians. (The casus bellow this time is, two years ago Vanderbilt University kicked a Christian student org off-campus because they wouldn't sign a non-discrimination agreement.) This is from Dreher's gloss on some other Jesus freak:

He goes on to say that Christians — the untame ones – need to learn how to deal with the coming scorn with “a disregard which quickly turns the pathetic instruments of stigmatization into jewelry and art.” Why were the martyrs joyful? Because they were confident that from their suffering, new life would emerge. So too should we be...

“Blessed are you when they persecute you and speak all manner of evil against you.” What if we lived as if that were true?

Dreher, as you may know, lives off writing and royalties and is always fucking off to Paris. Some martyr! When they send the lions after Dreher I can see him trying to throw them off the scent with a coq au vin. "But it's free range" will be his last words.

Believe it or not, though, there's someone worse on this subject. Well, we can't be too surprised, it's Erick Erickson in the tertiary stage of whatever's wrong with him:

A lot of Christians have long thought they could sit on the sidelines. Only the icky evangelicals they don’t much care for and the creepily committed Catholics would have to deal with these issues and the people who hate those deeply committed to their faith. They, on the other hand, could sit on the sidelines, roll their eyes, and tell everyone that they didn’t think it was that big a deal. They were, after all, on birth control or watching whatever trendy HBO series is on or having a cocktail or perfectly willing to bake a cake for a gay wedding.

Do conservatives never drink cocktails? Or are my cheap beers now rendered "cocktails" just because I, a filthy liberal, am drinking them? Well, I always suspected P.J. O'Rourke was full of shit.

...You may think you can sit on the sidelines. You may think you can opt-out of the culture war. You may think you can hide behind your trendy naked Leena Dunham t-shirt while you sip trendy drinks talking about trendy shows and writing columns demanding Christians be forced by the state to bake cakes, provide flowers and farms, and offer up photographs of gay weddings. But not only will you one day be called to account to your God...

Yeesh. Here's a serious question: Does this sound like a spiel you'd expect from a movement that was gaining adherents? (Also: Did someone actually show Erickson this shirt? Well, at least his friends have a sense of humor.)

UPDATE. In comments, right out of the gate, (the good) Roger Ailes: "I think Eerick Eerikson could pull off a trendy naked Leena [sic] Dunham tee-shirt. And by pull off, I mean masturbate into."

•    But I thought conservatives loved it when businesses got tax breaks to promote job growth... oh, it's communist TV shows, nevermind. Key phrases from Dennis Saffran's City Journal article: "contemporary progressivism is an upper-middle-class movement that caters to the social libertarianism of coastal elites," "crony capitalism," "corporate welfare," etc. Key missing phrase from his article: "trickle-down."

DEATH CULT.

Some of you may remember my column last Spring about what I characterized as the new conservative position on climate change: roughly, "Hey, everybody dies (literally)". In other words, even if you stupid libtards are right, environmentalism is futile and we should just all prepare for an earlier-than-expected deliverance unto the loving arms of Jesus.

Mind you, my analysis was largely based on extrapolation of the texts. But it turns out RedState kingpin Erick Erickson is willing to say so out loud:

I Simply Do Not Care About Global Warming

We’re all going to die or something according to the latest hysteria from the United Nations now that government bureaucrats have sufficiently added hype and hyperbole to the IPCC report on global warming a/k/a climate change.

Folks, I do not care. Let me assure you that the world is not going to end and we are not going to cause ourselves to go extinct. This report is written by a bunch of people who believe in the evolution of humanity, but somehow think mankind is unable to adapt to changing circumstances. 

The simple fact is that, if they are right and the world is warming, there is nothing we can do short of economic Armageddon to stop it. We’ve already told most of the third world they have to hide under nets or die of malaria because we do not want them using DDT. We should not now tell them they have to turn off their electricity and never improve their existence because of global warming.

The DDT thing is total bullshit, by the way --  scientific management of a dangerous chemical is not politically-correct reckless endangerment, it's the opposite of it. But does Erick Erickson care about your so-called "science"? Erickson then gets to his secondary argument, which is eat it you stupid libtards:

This is all orchestrated left-wing crap that a bunch of private jet setters and twitter liberals can worry themselves over. I have never once met a person who treats global warming as the most significant issue of our time and is a well adjusted, happy person. From Al Gore to the nuts on Twitter who’ll fill up my timeline in outrage over this, they are maladjusted, angry people in need of prayer to a realer God than Gaia. 

Epistemic closure? We didn't know the half of it. Expect a series of these "who gives a shit" items, and not only from Erickson, on banking regulations, race relations, foreign policy, etc. As my archive shows, all these guys have left now is resentment, racism, and rifle worship; it's about time they abandoned argument altogether. At least it'll be an improvement over that "conservative reform" bullshit, in that they'll no longer be pretending.

FIRST THEY CAME FOR THE GAY-BASHERS, AND I DID NOT SPEAK OUT, BECAUSE I WAS NOT A GAY-BASHER....

Columnist Josh Barro:

Fundie queen Mollie Hemingway.

Other mooks on the thread agreed: "After reading that, in my mind's eye were jack-booted thugs, enormous rallies, and broken glass." Later more of them ran to Barro's Twitter to yell, "Seig heil!" and tell him "Keep calling for murdering those who don't agree with you... don't be surprised with dissent Douch," " You can't take it? After calling for death to those who have dissenting views? Punk ass bitch. Wake up," "He's doing like other #LGBT leaders and calling for deaths," etc.

Good thing he didn't call for stamping out racism, too. Then he'd be Hitler and Mussolini.

(During the Battle of Chick-Fil-A, by the way, Hemingway was delighted to hear that she might have gotten a reporter fired for saying mean things about the chicken chain on Facebook. That's how devoted to freedom she is!)

UPDATE. Making everything dumber, Erick Erickson at RedState:

Certainly I’d like to think Barro doesn’t have extermination of the religious at mind, but then King Henry never said to kill Thomas a Becket. He just openly pondered about who would rid him of that turbulent priest.

I suppose he imagines Josh Barro openly-pondering this in an MSNBC green room, and Ezra Klein going, "Uh, so you're saying I guess kill the Christians? Because I could totally do that" while Amanda Marcotte stirs a cauldron of latte and cackles. (Oops, I forgot the armbands!)

UPDATE 2. Comments are already a joy. "First they came for the attitudes," intoned Big_Bad_Bald_Bastard, "but I did nothing, for I was not an intangible mental state." But Shakezula counters: "Attitudes are in my head. And so to stamp out an attitude you'd have to stamp on my head." Boo-yah, liberal fascists!

FRIDAY AROUND-THE-HORN.

•  Sam Stein and Michael Calderone find that "If You Were An Iraq War Critic, You're Probably Not Being Asked To Go On TV," and boy ain't it the truth. But for the most part they're concerned with the dearth of televised People Who Were Sane From The Start who also belong to the officially-sanctioned class of pundits and pols. Really, I don't care if Russ Feingold pipes up or not; I'd like to see Digby or Atrios or Tbogg on the tube, asking a shocked and disdainful Dick Cheney how it came to be that they could see what a clusterfuck this was going in and he couldn't.  But that's obviously out of the question -- wingnut shouters like ham-faced Erick Erickson may get promoted to bigtime TV, but whenever the nets need a nominally-left blogger-type, they call up some golden-boy trimmer. Thus we get "YADDA YADDA JESUS CARVED MERICA OUTTA THE WILDERNESS WITH A BIBLE AN A GUN"  versus "Well you make some good points." Bah. Sometimes I think they keep things vanilla like that just so their credentialed conservatives don't get scared; get this, from Victor Davis Hanson's latest bullshit about how everybody makes mistakes that cost thousands of lives on the other side of the world:

A number of prominent columnists, right and left — from George Will, David Brooks and William F. Buckley to Fareed Zakaria, David Ignatius and Thomas Friedman — supported Saddam's forcible removal.

Fareed Zakaria, David Ignatius and Thomas Friedman! That Overton Window is somewhere over in the next fucking county.

•  Speaking of Ezra Klein, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry's attacks on Vox don't bother me -- number one, who cares, and number two, so what -- but he uses Klein & Co.'s perceived biases as proof that liberals have the real epistemic closure problem. (Plus, "another symbol of growing epistemic closure on the left is The New Republic" which Gobry liked when it was "an idiosyncratic magazine critiquing liberalism," two Andrew Sullivan identity crises ago.) Gobry concedes conservatives had a little problem with E.C. for a couple of minutes, but not now...

A flurry of innovative young writers like Yuval Levin, Reihan Salam, Ross Douthat, Tim Carney, and Avik Roy put out fresh, 21st-century ideas on everything from tax reform to health care to social mobility to poverty to curtailing the power of Big Business. Many of these ideas are now compiled in a seminal new book... it's clear that the GOP is becoming the party of ideas again.

That "seminal new book" is Room to Grow, which I reviewed some weeks back, and which is a rat-bag of old-fashioned drop-the-minimum-wage, school voucher, and marriage promotion clunkers, with some sweet sauce poured over to make it look tastier. Also, how long are we going to keep calling Ross Douthat and his crew "innovative young writers"? It's getting to the point when I imagine even the kids at the Free Beacon are embarrassed when Salam drops some beats.

•  Fans of hot messes will be pleased to hear Rod Dreher is still the hot mess he's always been. In a post called "The Empire Takes Culture War To The World," he quotes a new report:

Seeking to mobilize a global front against anti-gay violence and discrimination, Vice President Joe Biden declared Tuesday that protecting gay rights is a defining mark of a civilized nation and must trump national cultures and social traditions.

Dreher comments on this:

The mark of a civilized nation. Well. Let it be noted that as far as the Obama administration is concerned, traditional Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are vestiges of barbarism.

Well, now that you mention it...

It’s been clear which way this country is going on religious freedom. I hadn’t expected that we would be getting there so quickly. Signs of the times, people, signs of the times.

Oh go take another Paris vacation ya big drama queen. Later:

UPDATE: To clarify, I’m completely on board with the anti-violence stuff. If that’s all this was, I would support it. But we all know it doesn’t stop there, because what Biden defines as “prejudice” is what many, many of us believe is truth.

And in another update Dreher produces proof that Emperor Obama's homo dystopia "goes far beyond opposing violence against LGBT folks. For example, USAID is providing funding for gay-owned start-up companies in other countries."

It's about time for Rod and his comrades to start writing songs of their oppression. Maybe for starters they can just add new lyrics to old ones -- here, to the tune of The Wearin' of the Green:

Oh I met with Maggie Gallagher a-cryin' o'er her books:
"They used to give us cash," she cried, "but now just dirty looks.
It's the most disgraceful pledge drive that NOM has had in years --
They're stiffin' us fine Christians for the Ragging on th' Queers."

THAT'S A JOKE, SON!

As you may have heard, incumbent Senator Thad Cochran won last night's Mississippi primary, and it is supposed he reversed Tea Party nut McDaniel's polling lead by encouraging black Democrats to cross into the GOP primary (as is legal there) and vote for the lesser of two evils -- a practice to which I expect they must be accustomed by now.

There have been some entertaining ravings and rendings of garments over this, but my favorite bit comes from a relatively sober report at Breitbart.com. After covering McDaniel's post-election tantrum, Matthew Boyle got an interesting sidelight from an unexpected source:

In an interview by phone with Breitbart News late Tuesday evening after the McDaniel headquarters cleared out, state Democratic Party chairman Rickey Cole said McDaniel should challenge the election results. “Clearly there was some sloppiness to say the least, and probably some failures to comply with the law,” Cole told Breitbart News. 

“I listened to some of McDaniel’s speech, and in a race this close I’m sure there are irregularities that ought to be looked into,” Cole said. “I’ve been around a lot of close elections in my life. I think the candidate owes it to his supporters to make sure that everything was done on the up and up.”

Some conservatives are already reacting as if this is excellent news for their cause. I guess they've been trolling so long they no longer recognize a troll when they see one. Let the bloody internecine battle begin!

UPDATE. With the grim hysteria of Gary Oldman as Lee Harvey Oswald yelling "This is it!" in JFK,  Jeff Goldstein declares that in the wake of Cochran's victory, "the GOP is over. Done with. Finished. Sleeps with the fishes. And we, the legal conservatives, will have no organized vehicle left by which to claim representation."

Great news, right? Hold the laughter, libtards, because Goldstein has a plan to start a new party: one that's not just made up of bitter-enders such as himself, but also "brings in Reagan Democrats," only this time they'll be lured by the charisma of Jeff Goldstein, and maybe a Reaganesque-Democratisch Republican like, say, Chris Christie -- wait, Goldstein doesn't like Christie, apparently he's not anti-homo enough for him -- so I guess it'll have to be Rick Santorum in a gimme-cap.

Our team of crack cryptographers is still trying to decode Goldstein's closing...

And we’ll be colorblind in our purging of what has become a rather dubious "big tent," to boot.

...but I'm guessing it means "if we get a black guy, you're the real racist."

UPDATE 2. Erick Erickson of Red State: "The Republicans have become the party of lobbyists..." which is like saying Earth has become a planet of oceans and land masses.

UPDATE 3. At National Review, John Fund shows his fellow wingnuts the fatal flyer with which McDaniel was Stabbed in the Black, and then offers a very strange thought experiment:

Imagine if a tea-party candidate in some state had openly appealed to registered Libertarians to help him win a close primary runoff. There would have been howls of outrage that people who didn’t agree with Republican values on social issues and foreign policy were being invited to decide a GOP race.

Really? I would expect yawns. Like most thinking people, I assume libertarians of any-size L vote for Republicans -- they sure ain't voting for Libertarians in any kind of numbers!

But I do remember somebody getting pissed when Libertarians "openly appealed" to libertarians to vote for Libertarians instead of Republicans -- namely, Republicans after the 2013 McAuliffe-Cuccinelli race. Hell, Fund's colleague Charles C.W. Cooke, one of NR's many crypto-libertarians, pleaded before the election for readers not to vote for Libertarian candidate Robert Sarvis, "the supposed 'Libertarian' candidate," whom Cooke unmasked as "a social liberal. He is in favor of gay marriage, is (radically) pro-choice, and supports the legalization of marijuana. In this regard, he stands in stark contrast to the Republican candidate, Ken Cuccinelli..." It's clear who the real libertarian is here!

Oh, you know who else bitched about it? John Fund.

THURSDAY MISCELLANY.

How're conservatives reacting to Chris Christie Is An Asshole-gate? James Taranto at the Wall Street Journal:

Worse, the Christie administration's evident abuse of the Port Authority is reminiscent of the Obama administration's abuse of the Internal Revenue Service...

I already checked, guys -- no mention of Benghazi. For that you have to go a few rungs down the ladder to Greta Van Susteren, or to the sub-basement that is Michelle Malkin's alternate-universe Twitter.

Or maybe Breitbart.com -- hang on, this article by Joel B. Pollack is from November. Yet it may be relevant!:

Chris Christie Really Needs Benghazi
Benghazi is Hillary Clinton's most important weakness, no matter whom she faces in the 2016 presidential election. Among Republican contenders, only Chris Christie can claim it as a strength. That's because of his performance during Superstorm Sandy. Whatever his mistakes--i.e. heaping praise on Obama and backing a pork-laden relief bill--his performance was a sharp contrast to Clinton's dereliction of duty during Benghazi.

Has this bullet become any less magic? Then Christie should save himself by demanding a Benghazi investigation at once. It's not like he doesn't have the nerve.*

If you have 11 minutes to spare, this is what Christie's bit about being "misled by a member of my staff" reminds me of:



I guess National Review sent Kevin D. Williamson to Appalachia just so he'd have white welfare cases to harsh on, and thus escape charges of racism. Charges of stupidity will be harder to evade. Williamson admits there are few opportunities for the unfortunate residents of Owsley County, and can't even make the usual specious case that marriage would make the hillbillies rich. So his anti-government-assistance case boils down to 1.) some people have defrauded the system, something you never see investment bankers and other such higher-order beings doing, therefore the system has failed; and 2.) whatever this is supposed to mean:

In effect, welfare has made Appalachia into a big and sparsely populated housing project — too backward to thrive, but just comfortable enough to keep the underclass in place. There is no cure for poverty, because there is no cause of poverty — poverty is the natural condition of the human animal. 

Which Kevin D. Williamson evaded by luck, pluck, and virtue. The rest of you can go fuck yourselves. Liberty!

...The lesson of the Big White Ghetto is the same as the lessons we learned about the urban housing projects in the late 20th century: The best public-policy treatment we have for poverty is dilution. But like the old project towers, the Appalachian draw culture produces concentration, a socio­economic Salton Sea that becomes more toxic every year.

Maybe he means we should evacuate and demolish these poor hill towns, as if they were urban projects, and "dilute" their populations. Maybe send them to Mexico? They better hurry, the authorities may start to get strict about who they let in.

*UPDATE. I should add that I don't think this will negatively affect Christie's Presidential push. That he's an asshole is a large part of his appeal, and there's a whole country full of suckers who, like the folks who hire a hitman, are inclined to believe he'll restrict his viciousness to people they don't like.

UPDATE 2. Ah, here's the libertarian-branded response to Christie from Ed Krayewski at Reason:

The petty, retaliatory nature of the lane closure reminded me of something the Obama White House might do, something like closing down open-air spaces or websites because of a partial government shutdown or even getting Tea Party groups audited.

Refresh my memory: I seem to recall that libertarians were once perceived to be something different from conservatives. Anyone remember how that got started?

UPDATE 3. I'm even more convinced now that Christie will skate, notwithstanding his refusal to accept my Benghazi advice.

Meanwhile we have this from the Daily Caller:

As liberals support Christie during scandal, conservatives abandon him

The evidence: Guys like Erick Erickson who consider Christie a RINO continue to bay for his blood, "Democratic mayors in New Jersey who endorsed Christie’s re-election are also defending Christie," and David Axelrod thinks Christie will skate -- like me, so I guess I'm also part of Christie's liberal love-wave. I assure you it's inadvertent!

UPDATE 4. Meanwhile from the other side of the bullshit rainbow, The Washington Free Beacon:

U.S. Attorney Probing Christie Has Donated Thousands to Democrats

I tell ya, guys, we gotta get our story (as told by rightwing operatives) straight.

THE LADYPARTS ELECTION. I said yesterday that I didn't know who'd win, and it wasn't because I doubted the oracle of West 43rd Street. It was because, in a weird way perhaps related to my long attention to wingnuts and the strange empathy with them that has engendered, I took one of their points: That a party with a raidable coalition whose champion presided over a weak economy had to be vulnerable.

That was why conservatives were so gloomy and doomy in 2008: They knew Bush had wrecked the party, and all the hobgoblins that emerged from the wreckage -- from Mark Foley to Sarah Palin -- made the opening for Democrats so big that they could even beat them with a black guy.

That was weird, because for years boogiemen were something GOP apparatchiks tied to the other party. I assumed that in 2012, as Obama hadn't improved things much in the here and now -- yeah, I know about all the new jobs, and they're not enough; the fundamental economic weaknesses and inequalities I've been griping about since the Bush years are still there -- the GOP would have room to Willie Horton and Al Sharpton their way into the amygdalae of enough gomers to win.

But a weird thing happened: During the campaign, instead of tying Democrats to weirdos, the Republicans generated a flood of their own. Again! And here conservatives turned out to be a big, fat liability for their cause. As Republican after Republican made crackpot comments about rape, contraception, and abortion, the GOP's rightwing brain trust unfailingly followed up and said, yeah, that's what we believe, that's what we've always believed.

And because the conventional wisdom had always been that autonomous, sexually active women and the men who love them are just a fringe constituency, instead of questioning the wisdom of attacking them, the big brains questioned the wisdom of having Sandra Fluke speak at the Democratic Convention.

I always knew this issue was a winner for the Democrats, but now I'm beginning to think that it affected everything else as well. That is, Romney's crackpot economic and environmental policies might have had more traction with voters if so many of them were not convinced that he represented and was listening to a bunch of lunatics who were totally out of touch with how human beings live. In tough times, you might go for a small-government reformer who says he has a plan to turn things around if you trust him. Americans have bought bigger grifters than Romney; a lot of them haven't even figured that the nice old man who unleashed the markets in the 1980s set them up for the hard times we have now.

Who knows what a Romney campaign might have achieved if he'd decisively cut loose the Erick Erickson contingent and run like a man trying to be governor of Massachusetts? The question was moot before the first GOP caucus vote. That was their problem.

MILE HIGH. The undead Jim Lehrer has made the final selections. Let the blood feast begin!

9:05. Aw, what a nice husband. Tough crowd!

9:06. "Skew toward the wealthy" vs. "Education and training." Well, I'm sold.

9:09. The economy is a tender topic. Someone asked Romney for help. Did he give them a dollar? No, it will take a different path. One with five different parts. Four million jobs with energy! And the best schools in the world! And small business! Mitt Romney hires people. So no, ladies, no dollar for you. Oh, and no abortions.

9:09. The Crypt-Keeper caught that trickle-down thing. Is Marlin Fitzwater still alive? Must be shitting a brick.

9:10. Governor Romney and Barack Obama agree.

9:11. Oh no, are we still doing the note-writing thing? Or was Romney just checking his nails?

9:12. Mitt Romney doesn't have a tax cut. On that scale. And Paul Ryan will be President, again. Now Obama's checking his nails. Bad idea to have a manicurist on site.

9:15. Aha, oil and gas are up -- but on private land! Ha ha, private wins. They'll give us all coal, but they'll wash it first, so it'll be clean, like the lettuce you buy in bags.

9:16. The battle of the tax cuts is very gentlemanly so far. Barack Obama's some socialist, huh?

9:17. Jim is having trouble telling the President to shut up.

9:18. He's having trouble telling Romney, too. No tax cut that adds to the deficit? I thought you were a Republican. Hmmph! But you do have five boys. And they LIE.

9:20. 54% of these people are not taxed at the corporate rate. How do they live? Oh oh, Obama brought up math. Romney will have to bring up geography, maybe recess. I see Obama's still cutting taxes. We'll all be living tax-free, eventually. Now a Clinton shout. Boy, that speech was something, huh? Ah, new "definition of small business." A socialist one. It doesn't include Donald Trump, who is calling in favors now, demanding to be allowed to attend the next debate from a giant desk at the back of the stage, with a gong or buzzer.

9:23. Romney said Obama was right about something. What a gent! But now he's telling us the President wants this guy in St. Louis to go from 35% to 40% in taxes. And that's over 50% if you're in St. Louis and you know Mitt Romney. Jobs! Jobs! Did you all catch that? Balanced budget, yeah sure, but jobs.

9:24. Obama can say "trillions" with a straight face. Oh he's good. Also, he's juuuuust starting to get into the Bush years. If Romney doesn't behave he'll bring out that Bush impersonator who used to be so popular on Leno.

9:25. Romney should have demanded a microphone. A second microphone, because he can afford it. Well, he got to talk more, and give us some more of that high-speed accounting yak that will sweep him to victory... oh wait, food stamps! You hear that, North Carolina? [cameras shows white hands crumpling transcript]

9:28. Romney has math too: Either you raise taxes, cut spending, or you "grow the economy." Surprise! There is an easy solution! He'll cut Obamacare! And Jim Lehrer! I'm kinda warming to him. AND... he's going to combine some agencies. That sounds cool. I'd like to see Defense and the National Endowment for the Arts combined into some kind of Voltron of bombs and urine-soaked crucifixes.

9:30. Obama cut stuff too, like war and ignorance. Hmm, that sounds reasonable. Oh, and Eisenhower. And look, Obama knows he's doing well in this great country of ours. He must be hoping Romney will tell us all we're 47% again.

9:31. I support Simpson Bowles for someone else. Yeah, yeah, I took care of that. Oh yeah, well you created a bunch of debt. People don't understand that I'm a tax-cutter and he's raising taxes, albeit hypothetical, and it's killing people in the future, like in 12 Monkeys.

9:34. Romney doesn't want to go down the path to Spain, unless it goes to Majorca on a private yacht.

9:36. Romney = ExxonMobil and corporate jets. And shipping jobs overseas. Romney smiles, realizing that if he loses he can bathe in the blood of his Vietnamese slaves, so who needs it.

9:38. America was not built on ten-year-old schoolbooks. If the schoolbook lobby is screwed, we're all screwed.

9:39. But that oil and gas tax tax break is an accounting thing. Obama tries to throw him -- end it! Romney's not listening, though, as has been clear throughout, so good for him, why am I listening to this shit? But Obama's cool, he smiles at the Solyndra thing. He knows 95% of us think it's some kind of a new car.

9:40. The basic structure of Social Security is sound, and Obama is sure Romney agrees. (Go ahead, Governor, after this nice grandmother story it won't sound so good.) Now Obama philosophizes that entitlements are actually things we're entitled to. I thought the Return of Reverend Wright tape was supposed to put an end to this sort of thing.

9:43. Yeah, Romney's no dummy. Social Security is sac. Ro. Sanct. Michelle Malkin and Erick Erickson hold hands and jump into the Grand Canyon. Also, Obama's cutting Medicare to pay for this Obamacare which has nothing to do with medicine.

9:45. "If you're 54, 55, you might want to listen." Gasp!

9:47. Obama's trying this Clinton-explainer thing where he tells us how vouchers are a rip-off, but he's not as good at it so he brings in his grandmother again. But he's using the AARP for support -- that's a Soviet organization committed to Early Bird anti-colonialism.

9:48. Did you hear Romney, grandpa? He's not going to kill you!

9:49. If I don't like Medicare, I'd rather destroy it and get my own high-premium plan and take ALL YOU MOTHERFUCKERS DOWN WITH ME.

9:51. Does it seem to you people as if this low-intensity thing is just making viewers sort of zone out? You probably don't realize I've been blogging the 1988 debate for three stanzas. Ha ha, made ya look.

9:52. Can we have an ad of Romney saying "regulation is essential"?

9:54. This guy sure likes regulations.

9:55. Well, see what you did, Romney, now Obama gets to talk about Wall Street as if he's the sheriff instead of the madame at the whorehouse.

9:56. On Dodd-Frank: Everything you want to do to punish big business hurts small business. It's like big business has a gun to small business' head. You make one false move and he'll shoot!

9:58. Well, Romney avoided saying "death panels." And he's onto small business again. This is as close to coherent argument as he's gotten. But then he says Romneycare was good because it was state-level, which is like saying The Avengers would have been better if it had a budget of $20,000 and starred Frank Stallone. (Yeah, I know.)

10:00. Obama seems to have missed this gambit and is praising Romneycare, which will allow Romney to come back if he's smart enough.

10:03. He's not smart enough. He's just praising the shit out of Romneycare. No one could believe  he's against Sociamalized Medicine on principle, so to buy his argument, you have to believe he's going to do something similar but better. He's sure not campaigning as a smash-the-state type. How's that an alternative to a sitting President?

10:06. Which is why Obama is asking what he's going to replace it with.

10:07. "Free people and free enterprise." I see Cletus and Festus at the ole Doctorin' Shack, using their wits and freedom to figure out how to remove a tumor with a whittlin' knife. (Romney's naming big hospitals, but they all take gummint money.)

10:10. I thought Obama was just vamping, but with this "details" schtick he seems to be thinking pretty well on his feet. Romney comes back with Reagan and O'Neill, which has already been played; also, the old Democratic House was full of venal grifters, God bless 'em, who could be bought -- infinitely preferable to the block-everything, scorched-earth lot we have now.

10:12. Okay, I'm gonna use my own bipartisan President -- Abraham Lincoln! Who was a tax-and-spend liberal. Math and science teachers, blah blah... that pained grimace Romney's been working isn't working for me. He seems to be waiting for a wind machine.

10:17. Romney loves teachers -- they're in the Constitution! So too are other unfortunates. And here, with Obama, we have trickle-down socialism. Say, that's good, trickle-down socialism -- why didn't Romney think of that? Call me! My rates are reasonable!

10:19. Obama's filibustering, because he thinks we haven't heard enough about his successful programs yet. But I suspect average Americans are tuning that out; it doesn't matter how other people are faring. Poor Romney, he wants to know why Obama's sacrificing education to the environment. Who cares about the environment if we're not well-educated enough to enjoy it? Better we have a firm scientific foundation for our global warming denialism as we're drowned by molten icecaps.

10:24. "You've been great, Jim." What a suck-up!

10:25. Oh Christ, bi-partisanship? Isn't Romney's speech the same one Bush gave when he came out of Texas? Obama punts and talks about the middle class, which is probably smart, considering everyone now believes if the guys in The Defiant Ones were a Democrat and a Republican instead of black and white, they would have killed one another in the first ten minutes.

10:30. Obama: Detroit! Loopholes! Fight every single day! Vote for more of the same! Romney: I'm concerned about America! Middle-class squeeze! 12 million new jobs! Romneycare not Obamacare! Don't worry, I'll preserve the military-industrial complex!

Can they both lose?

UPDATE. I see by the Internet that media people think Romney won this debate, by which I assume they mean that they are smitten with his boyish charm. I have as low an opinion of my fellow Americans as the next rootless cosmopolitan, but even I can't see them falling for this. That leaves only one alternative: Roseanne Barr for President. Hey, at least I can live with myself!

UPDATE 2. Shots fired! Commenter mds: "That's Rosanne Arnold. As far as I know, she still hasn't released her long-form divorce certificate."

BIBI NETANYAHU, SUPER-GENIUS.

And I thought Colin Powell showing fake pictures of WMDs was a UN low point. In the dystopian future, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Erick Erickson will appear before the General Assembly holding up a stick-figure drawing of a guy in a turban with a word balloon that says "GRRR DETH TO AMERICA." Then, Benny Hill music!

TWEETS ERICK ERICKSON HAD TO SCRAP AFTER HE GOT IN TROUBLE: "The podium hides Rahm's light loafers #SanFrancisoDemocrats" "Lily Ledbetter's vagina is Dems #Ashheap of History" "Patrick's sweating like they found his gay porn stash #AlsoBlack" etc.

But I think it's a mistake to try and get Erickson fired over this, as some have proposed. I didn't see the advantage in getting Josh Trevino kicked off the Guardian either. Let the world see who they are and what they represent. If people are more impressed than appalled by them, then the cause is lost anyway.

THE END OF THE AFFAIR.. It was only when it came that I realized it had long been inevitable. But like all the other poor Gomers who followed her, I thought Sarah Palin was something special. Just a few weeks ago I actually found myself telling a very skeptical  labor lawyer that next summer I expected Palin to ride like a Valkyrie into the convention hall and  relieve the Republicans of whatever false idol they had put in her place.

She certainly kept a game face on to the end. Just weeks ago, when the prominent dopes of the GOP were cautiously essaying their ridiculous war on crony capitalism, Palin jumped in with both feet, and got a lot of the punters to go with. Any time a crackpot idea came down the pike, by the time it was in the public's view (thanks, Liberal Media ) Palin was at the wheel with her pedal to the metal.

But I still should have seen what was up when the more prominent apparatchiks, who are more dazzled by the prospect of re-looting the treasury than by any candidate, started bailing on Palin. Chief RedState buffoon Erick Erickson:

The ["Sarah Palin Cult"] is full of people with little prominence outside a twitter stream, a few nominal soapboxes imagined to be bigger they they are, and possessing a lot of bile and little grace inside an echo chamber of indecision 2012 dementia. About the only thing this cult lacks are thetans...

As Ann Coulter said, “Fish or cut bait.” Governor Palin has teased us long enough. Most of us are tired of it. She has harmed her own entry into the race and now, even if she got in, would only see a modest rise in polling.

Shorter'd: The Republican field has found several fresher, more exciting lunatics, we don't need you. And we of "little prominence" who followed her better get with the program, and pitch in for the big win behind someone normal Americans have not yet learned to hate.

Erickson is nothing if not a wind-sniffer, and would not have put himself out there  if he didn't think the Palin dream was really over -- though, being also a coward, he drenched it in enough don't-get-me-wrong  sauce that he could afterwards say "Oh, no, I didn't mean YOU" to every person involved who might someday be in a position to do him some good, or some harm-- from Palin on down to those campaign operatives whose ship-jumping skills were in order.

And that explicitly did not include those poor sods who carry the hods -- the salt-of-the-earth types who are now left standing at Palin Central, waiting on a train to Galt's Gulch and glory that will never arrive. 

I note this with some sadness, and not only on my own account. Most of Palin's retinue will peel off without many tears to the Perry and Bachmann bandwagons, where their thirst for blood and bullshit may be slaked. But I spare a thought for those who actually believed in Palin -- who thought this venal con woman was the real deal, their mama grizzly, their wingnut messiah -- someone who, though swimming in unearned wealth and privilege, understood their underwater double-wide lives and, though incredibly averse to responsibility, would bravely take up the Old Standard and be the backwoods Boudicca of their redneck resurgence.

She was as close to a new Reagan as the Tea Party people had -- simultaneously  sunny and impenetrable, a great grinning billboard behind which they could safely wreak their bitter vengeance on the hippies, ethnics, and paupers on whom they blamed the modern world. How long will it take for them to move on, and where to? And -- here's a strange thought, coming from someone who expected to see her crowned -- whether they did or not, are there enough of them that anyone will notice? Or was the whole idea that battalions of backwards-looking, flintlock-shouldering patriots marched with her just a scam as well? That would seem the cruelest thing for them to find: that they were doomed all along, and had only seemed close enough to victory to yearn for it because hucksters found profit in telling the world that they were.

TEA STAINED. Jack Davis underperformed but it looks like Kathy Hochul has pulled it out in NY-26 against Jane Corwin. I haven't followed this race as closely as I did the Scozzafava-Hoffman-Owens NY-23 election in 2009, but on balance I'd say sending John Boehner out there to remind folks that the GOP wants to turn Medicare into a voucher program was probably a bad idea. (So was focusing on beating up Davis as a fake Tea Party candidate -- they seem to have pulled him back from the 12 percent he had in late polls to about 9 percent, but that didn't do the trick.)

The rapid response team would have us think otherwise. "Republicans suck in New York. Period. End of Story," growls Erick Erickson. "...it will be a stretch to say that it means that the people of suburban Buffalo are telling the country to reject the GOP’s budget plans," assures Jonathan S. Tobin at Commentary. "The complete irrelevance of NY-26," insists Conn Carroll of the Washington Examiner. Etc.

Really? The Chris Lee scandal that led to the special election can't have been helpful. But since the Republicans first gained this seat in 1857, they've held the 26th for all but 17 years. In 2010 Lee got 73.6 percent of the vote. With the flawed vessel removed, you'll think they could have held onto such an advantage.

The Tea Party dream of bathtub-drown'd gummint was a boon to the GOP in 2010, when they did pretty well in western New York. But the Ryan plan and its fallout suggests that, now that the loons the movement brought to Washington are threatening to actually do something about it, it's costing them in a constituency they shouldn't have to worry about: Registered Republicans.

Think they'll get the message?

UPDATE. A beautiful silver lining from DrewM at Ace O'Spades:

On the upside, the GOP got a look at the Democrats playbook on attacking the Ryan plan. We should be better prepared moving forward. Yeah, we shouldn't have been surprised this time but some lessons have to be learned anew.

He's got a point: There is no evidence that Corwin called her opponent a socialist.

ALL SERIOUS OFFERS ENTERTAINED. The tsimmis at NPR has got conservatives demanding that the subsidized station make some rightwing affirmative action hires. Offering himself for this detail is one Mark Judge, who says he'd "take a job at NPR to balance things out."

This guy has a nose for opportunity, if not the means to follow up. Some years back, under the more right-fashionably pretentious name Mark Gauvreau Judge, he was pushing a swing dancing revival as the answer to sexual promiscuity. When this wore out, he affected to be interested in rock so he could yell at Eminem and Madonna, and made his way through the world peddling similar culture-war bullshit to the Wall Street Journal about the power of exorcism and other tediosities. Eventually the work died up and Judge tried to sell a new movement called "metrocons," which was so lame even other social cons wouldn't go for it.

Now Judge has washed up at the Daily Caller, and clearly wants to be one of the shock troops leading the Long March Through the Institutions. He claims that he "once wanted to freelance for Slate," and scoffs at "bilious media critic" Jack Shafer's contention that liberals tend to flock to such jobs and make better candidates. "But hey," adds Judge, "they hired Dave Weigel, the Journolist libertarian who — shocker! — has turned out to be a liberal" -- which, while a ridiculous mischaracterization of Weigel, does show prospective commissars that Judge can remember and repeat even long-forgotten talking points, which may gain him an advantage when the wimp-asses at NPR eventually surrender to them a wingnut sinecure.

If you think Judge is too much of a buffoon for this work, consider that CNN hired Erick Erickson, who I'm not confident can tell time.

JUST A REMINDER. Happy March for Life day! This is from Kathryn J. Lopez' recent anti-abortion observance:

“Frankly I had thought that at the time [Roe v. Wade] was decided,” Ruth Bader Ginsburg told The New York Times Magazine, “there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.” Now that’s something that should raise alarms: She let the eugenics slip show...

I am showing you Lopez's transparently willful misrepresentation of what Ginsburg was talking about, which has nonetheless become wingnut gospel, to remind you that these people really do think it's murder, and therefore feel justified in doing anything to stop it. Lying's not their limit, either, but except for a couple of rogues, most of them have not yet seen Jesus drop the hanky for Killing Time.

But given the times we live in, how long do you figure that will last? I see RedState is looking for loopholes:

We will not endorse any candidate who will not reject the judicial usurpation of Roe v. Wade... The reason for this is simple: once before, our nation was forced to repudiate the Supreme Court with mass bloodshed. We remain steadfast in our belief that this will not be necessary again, but only if those committed to justice do not waiver or compromise, and send a clear and unmistakable signal to their elected officials of what must be necessary to earn our support.

But if they don't do like Erick Erickson says -- bang bang! all bets are off. Also interesting: The post's attempt to compare Roe to the Dred Scott decision:

And thus the Supreme Court drew a line and declared that those humans on the “person” side were entitled to the right to life, and those on the “non-person” side (as defined by the Court) were not. The combined effect of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton was that a line was drawn at physical location within a woman’s womb.

Amanda Marcotte says it best: "Anyone who calls a woman a 'physical location is a misogynist, full stop." (What, you mean your uterus isn't on foursquare?)

In case you sheeple aren't swayed by the moral crusade, Robert W. Patterson attempts an appeal to your pocketbook with "How Roe v. Wade aborted America's economy." Apparently before you killed them, Jesus had meant for all those unborn victims to create jobs! So this depression isn't Lehman Brothers' fault or even Obama's, it's William J. Brennan's.

Also, says Patterson, abortion "gutted America's exceptional marriage culture, which Adam Smith noted was vital to our economic prospects.... by sanctioning a new 'choice' for an unmarried pregnant woman, the Court also gave the unmarried father the choice to 'op out' of the previously unavoidable consequences of his actions: marriage and child support." Who knew the shotgun wedding industry was that important to America's economy? There's still hope, though, in my Xtranormal video campaign to convince paupers to "get hitched and grow rich." Fund me lavishly, wingnuts, and I will make it happen! (photo via.)

UPDATE. Some disagreement in comments as to whether these people do in point of fact believe what they're saying. "If they did," says zuzu, "they wouldn't be so squeamish about 1) making exceptions for rape and incest; and 2) holding women criminally responsible for murder." Plus, adds BigHank53, if you put a convicted abortion-seeker's "demonstrably fertile ass in jail, somewhere there will be an empty kitchen without her bare feet in it, and the baby Jesus will cry."

There is also much speculation as to what the antis are really motivated by: A desire to subjugate women, or a desire to subjugate poor women, or a desire to subjugate poor people in general -- take your pick, I can believe any of it. There are also references to race suicide loons like Mark Steyn, and BryanD lectures the ladies on their reproductive responsibilities. This thread has everything!

UPDATE 2. Just had to add this -- Kathryn J. Lopez tells us what she did Sunday evening:

Speaking on — I kid you not: “The Virgin Mary, Saint Monica, and Sarah Palin: Embracing a New Feminism” at Georgetown’s beautiful Cardinal O’Connor Conference on Life yesterday...

I think it's cute that she told us she wasn't kidding; I never would have doubted it for a second. I also wonder that she didn't include a martyr-saint in her Palin presentation -- maybe she thinks Palin herself fills the bill; Palin seems to think so -- but it makes sense that she did include the world's biggest nag.