WARNING: TRUST THE SHORTER, JAMES TARANTO EDITION

Shorter James Taranto: James Fallows was punked by an internet joke about Fox News being dumb, and admitted it. Ben Shapiro was punked by an internet joke about Chuck Hagel belonging to a fictional pro-Hamas group, and refuses to admit he was punked or even that it was a joke. If you've ever read my bullshit before, you can guess which one I'm siding with here.

UPDATE. Taranato thinks I have a reading comprehension problem. I guess I'm supposed to pay closer attention to his more-in-sorrow-than-anger, both-sides-do-it tone than to his argument, such as it is:

The difference is that whereas the Fox joke [Fallows fell for] could easily be confirmed as a joke merely by checking out the Zombie Rainbow page that was its source, the "Friends of Hamas" joke [Shapiro fell for] came from a reporter for a major newspaper--that is, somebody whose job involves trading on his own reputation for credibility.

Except Shapiro himself disputes this in his bizarre, belligerent response to being caught out, in which he claims his real source says he has other sources for the story besides the reporter ("Our Senate source denies that Friedman is the source of this information. 'I have received this information from three separate sources, none of whom was Friedman,' the source said"). Talk about an uncooperative client!

Taranto spends the rest of his item explaining that, while Mistakes Were Made, Shapiro made a harmless slip that merely led to the uncorrected smearing of Hagel, whereas Fallows thought a joke about Fox News was real, which is why such errors will henceforth be known by people who talk rightwing code to one another as "the Fallows Principle." What am I missing?

NEVER FORGET.

From James Taranto's Bergdahl thing:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WHY ARE YOU MURDERING YOURSELF? James Fallows is appropriately outraged at the police violence at some Occupy sites. Here's how James Taranto plays it at the Wall Street Journal:

Fallows sees the Davis incident as a political boon for Obamaville...

This Occupy moment is not going to end any time soon. That is not just because of the underlying 99%-1% tensions but also because of police response of this sort--and because there have been so many similar videos coming from cities across the country.

Read the Fallows piece, or even Taranto's quote from it, and you'll see immediately how tendentious this interpretation is. But it doesn't stop there:

What Fallows is predicting--perhaps hoping for--

Oh Jesus Christ.

...is what PJMedia.com blogger "Zombie" calls a "Kent State moment." Kent State is the Ohio university where, in 1970, National Guardsmen fired their rifles at a mob of rioting student-protesters, killing four. "Why would these left-leaning pundits and activists hope for fatalities amongst the protesters?" Zombie asks rhetorically:

But that's not what they're hoping for. . . . When a leftist hears the words "Kent State," the immediate association is that fateful day when the media published an iconic photograph of an anti-war martyr that was the final tipping point that convinced the majority of Americans to oppose the war.

But wait. Let's say, heaven forbid, that the Obamavillians get their "Kent State moment"...

So, building from a bogus premise, Taranto gets another wingnut to say that "leftists" want a "Kent State moment," and then attributes the sentiment to the "Obamavillains."

And then he just keeps running with it: "if Fallows and other bien-pensant pundits think the Obamavillians will advance politically by seeking confrontation with the police..." and "If the American public has any sympathy at all for the Obamavillians, there is no surer way of squandering it than to follow Fallows's advice and pursue a strategy of confronting the police."

I know they try to fool their readers, but it's something to see one of them doing it in a major newspaper so badly, so transparently, and with so little hope of success. Do they even believe they have normal readers anymore, or is Taranto just hoping Jonah Goldberg will send him a nice note? And does Murdoch -- oh, hell, we all know what he thinks.

The blogging thing really has been a net loss for journalism; the race to the bottom has run so deep that we now have Wall Street Journal writers publishing stuff that would make Jeff Goldstein think of trying a second draft.

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.

SMART ASS.

James Taranto is laying the contempt on thick in his best Professor of Liberal Fascism manner -- "complete sophistry," "embarrassing philosophical error," "philosophical narcissism," etc, so you know he thinks he's got a Good One. His target, A. Barton Hinkle, made the crucial error of embarrassing Taranto, who had defended the proposition (not that he necessary thinks so himself! Read the fine print!) that the institution of marriage rather than any specific marriages would be harmed by gay marriage.

Hinkle rightly found this to be nonsense: "After all, you would not say a virus 'threatens humanity' if, in fact, no individual human person was ever harmed by the virus."

For his rejoinder, Taranto postulates a virus of his own:

The Hinkle virus is so fast-spreading that it soon infects every person alive, but it is largely benign. It has no effect on men, and only two effects on women: (1) it is passed on to any children they have, and (2) any children they conceive after infection will be born homosexual.

Blink. Blink.

The Hinkle virus would seem to fit its namesake's criterion that it does no harm to any individual human person. We have established as a condition of the experiment--and we trust that in the real world Hinkle agrees--that it is not harmful to a woman to give birth to a homosexual child, nor is it harmful to a child to be born homosexual. And since the virus affects the sexual orientation only of the yet-unborn, it should not disrupt any existing heterosexual relationship.

Yet it should be obvious that the Hinkle virus would threaten humanity by dramatically reducing the incentive to reproduce...

Taranto could as well have said "any children they conceive after infection will be born male" -- nothing wrong with being male, right? -- or "any children they conceive after infection will be born female" -- nothing wrong with being female, right? Which in the long run would have an even more dramatic effect on reproduction, if not on the "incentive to reproduce." We could use this, I suppose, as proof that masculinity presents a threat to mankind without blah blah. Or femininity!

But Taranto's point isn't really that "X may harm humanity without harming particular humans." It's more like You liberals think homosexuality is harmless, but what if everyone turned gay? 

He follows this with reams of universals-vs.-particulars guff to retroactively class it up ("Humanity is not 'simply the sum of the humans in it' any more than A. Barton Hinkle is simply the sum of the cells in him, or those cells are the sum of the atoms in them"), but they don't relate to his virus analogy at all. They're just fancy cover for a dumb joke about gays -- such jokes being among the last pieces of armament the anti-gay-marriage side has left.

Like I said before: This is how you know you're winning.

ARTS & LEGERDEMAIN. The Wall Street Journal's James Taranto remembers this time he got into a heckling match at the Bowery Poetry Club:

Heather and I sat down near the back of the small hall, and things soon took what I feared was a disastrous turn. The mistress of ceremonies, poet Daniela Gioseffi, opened the proceedings with a vulgar rant about Beltway politics -- specifically, her glee over the "fall" of Tom DeLay and Bill Frist, then the Republican congressional leaders. (Rep. DeLay had just been indicted, and Sen. Frist was under investigation for insider trading.)

This would place the action in the fall of 2005. I guess Taranto was saving this for his memoirs but got caught on a deadline.

It was then that I said I came to hear poetry, not politics -- although according to a contemporaneous account I emailed to a friend, I said it in a mutter rather than a shout. Evidently I muttered loudly enough to get Ms. Gioseffi's attention...

I've been to the Bowery Poetry Club, and I know that a mutter can't be heard from the "back of the small room." I also know that the Club has a bar, which may explain the misunderstanding.

Anyway Taranto, to hear Taranto tell it, sure told her. And he deduces that people don't read or listen to poetry anymore because "the world of poetry is so politicized as to exclude from its audience anyone with a distaste for tendentious left-wing ideology." To prove his point, he names other poets who... oh, wait, I can't find them; must be something wrong with my browser.

Slow culture-war day, I guess. But I can understand his point. I got food poisoning in a restaurant a few years ago, and have since then subsisted solely on military-issue MREs. Those damned germ warriors won't catch me twice!

Next week: Taranto recalls a long-ago visit to CBGB and predicts that "gobbing" will doom the commercial chances of punk rock.

OTHER THAN THAT, PERFECT ANALOGY.

James Taranto, comparing Obamacare to the Iraq War:

One of the strongest critiques of the Iraq effort--as this column acknowledged in September, in a different context--is that it took hubris to suppose that the U.S. could simply export democracy to a distant land and expect it to have a quick, benevolent and transformative effect on the entire region. That was frequently characterized as the "neocon" view. If so, isn't ObamaCare the perfect example of "neocon" hubris in domestic policy?

Because it's hubris to think you can implement a national health care system -- just ask most of the civilized world -- whereas invasions are always cash money.

Taranto also addresses the Katrina-Obamacare analogies that have been a key element of current wingnut schtick, and attacks Joan Walsh for saying most of the dead in Katrina were black; in one estimate, they were only 44%, "well short of 'most,'" says Taranto, and in another they were 51%, but Walsh is still wrong because "it was a bare majority." Plus which, three-fifths of 51% is 38%.

Taranto also accuses Walsh of racism against white men. I can see why this would upset him.

A SUCCESSFUL OUTREACH PROGRAM. I thought at first that Eugene Volokh's complaint against Howard Dean's seemingly innocuous pro-Jew statement ("The Democratic Party believes that everybody in this room ought to be comfortable being an American Jew, not just an American; that there are no bars to heaven for anybody...") was just weird:

Now I think I understand the message Dean is trying to convey. Many American Jews (the audience here was the United Jewish Communities' general assembly) are uncomfortable with many traditionalist Christians' expressed views that only Christians can go to heaven...

Yet in fact I take it that many Democrats, who are traditionalist Christians [??? -ed.] , do believe (whether quietly or loudly) in salvation by faith alone. The Democratic Party has, to my knowledge, taken no votes on the subject, and the Party hasn't made this part of any platform...

So how then can Dean assure Jews, or anyone else, that "The Democratic Party believes ... that there are no bars to heaven for anybody"? He can assure people that he believes in this; he can surely declare his own theology even if the Democratic Party shouldn't declare one of its own. He can assure people that the Democratic Party stands for civil equality without regard to religion, or make similar secular commitments (assuming that is indeed the official position of the Democratic Party) [?????? -ed.]. But he can no more make assurances about the Democratic Party's stand on salvation through works than he can about its stand on transsubstantiation or Papal infallibility.

But after a while I came to understand the brilliance of Dean's statement, and Volokh's post helped me to see it. First of all: "traditionalist Christians"? (The Wall Street Journal's James Taranto uses the same term in discussing the address.) This may be a redstate/bluestate thing, but though I know a lot of Christians, I don't know any who identify themselves as "traditionalist." Looking around the web, I find the term used more often to describe other people (like Mel Gibson's dad).

I do find a few self-identifying TCs online. Like this group, which proclaims that "Living in a highly sexualised society takes its toll on us even as Christians" (and pitches itself to "Anyone who is dealing with any form of sexual addiction"). And a commenter at a Newt Gingrich site, who says "Bottom line for me: [Ayn] Rand was a lapsed Jew and anti-Christian, who had multiple affairs... You can imagine that is a major problem for an ordained Traditionalist Christian clergyman, like myself..." At The Conservative Voice we see a friendly review of a book that "explains how traditionalist Christians see the Culture War" -- one "in which a President of the United States, with help from a slick attorney, gets a bill passed through Congress that has federal agents remove children from their traditionalist Christian homes and families to stop the children from learning 'intolerance' that leads to 'hate crimes' and 'terrorism.'" And here's a fellow who proclaims "I think the West would be a much better place if it returned to traditionalist Christianity," and goes on a tirade about "Idealists" and "pseudo-atheists" and says "I think the West needs an Orange Revolution." (Heh.)

I realize there are a lot of Fundamentalists out there. But how many of them identify with this particular bunch? And how many of those are at all open to, much less part of, the Democratic Party?

Conservatives looking for some of that old Christian Coalition magic for 2008 will of course beat any bush in their search. But it would seem that the "traditionalist Christians" Volokh and Taranto seek to pit against the Jew-loving Dean are not as numerous as they might imagine -- and to the extent that they do exist they are, to use the charitable word, fringe.

If you're a Christian, how do you feel about being associated with these people? If you're a Jew, how do you feel about Republicans complaining that the Democratic Chairman has taken an erroneous "stand on salvation through works" on your behalf?

So: At a time in which conservatives are doing their damnedest to proclaim the widespread existence of "liberal anti-semitism," Howard Dean embraces the Jews, and Volokh and Taranto publicly complain on behalf of Christians who, for the most part, are unaware that they should be offended.

I don't think the Democrats have done much smart lately, but I can't see this as anything but a net plus.

ANOTHER DAY IN BIZARRO WORLD. At the Wall Street Journal, James Taranto tells us several ways in which black people are oppressing white people. For example, the Obama campaign sent a survey to the President's constituents, asking "Which constituency groups do you identify yourself with? Check all that apply" -- and there was no box for Whites! "The danger for the country," says Taranto, "is that a racially polarized electorate will produce a hostile, balkanized culture." About three hundred years too late to worry about that, buddy.

Taranto also pulls the you-were-bigots-first argument:

For a century after the Civil War, Southern white supremacists were an important part of the Democratic Party coalition. They were defeated and discredited in the 1960s, and the Democrats, still the party of identity politics, switched their focus to various nonwhite minorities.

Since history is like a game of musical chairs, this wiley Democrat shape-shifting left Republicans no choice but to play the role of Racist Assholes from the 60s onward. And people keep blaming Republicans for it! The white man is truly the white man of liberal fascism.

You know who else isn't to blame? Rightwing Assholes. Andrew Klavan explains that when Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh say "retard" and "slut," it's only because they're righteously indignant over liberal lies. Even this, they might have borne with good grace and perhaps an occasional "faggot" or "feminazi," but the damn liberals provoke them still further with their decorum: "They don’t use words like retard and slut. They don’t raise their voices. You could invite them to dinner without embarrassing yourself." Now what self-respecting sociopathic teenager wouldn't go ballistic over that? And once again, conservatives get blamed for something that isn't their fault.

Meanwhile intellectual titans Glenn Reynolds, Nick Gillespie, and Ross Douthat all say America is like The Hunger Games because there are rich people in Washington, while in giant forced labor camps like Salt Lake City and Dallas everyone lives off hardtack and dreams of a day when the white man's vote is worth something again. Extra credit to Ole Perfesser Reynolds for making this half-hearted attempt to shore up his crap metaphor:

Even in upscale parts of L.A. or New York, you see boarded up storefronts and other signs that the economy isn't what it used to be.

Yeah, someone told me they saw Michael Bloomberg the other day fighting a bum over a dead pigeon.

So, to recap: Liberals destroyed America, then bamboozled citizens into thinking the conservatives did it, leaving conservatives no choice but to act like jerks and write very poorly. Or, as I like to think of it, another day in paradise.

UPDATE. As a bonus, your moment of Goldstein, celebrating a spike in gun sales:

...at a certain point, when you can survive the loss of heat or the shutdown of an electrical grid for two weeks — when you can provide for your family and keep them safe and protected while all those who rely on government run about confused, carping, demanding, frustrated... all attempts to ironize away the concept of self-reliance and rugged individualism in favor of the glories of an overarching and protective federal government, a campaign the left has for years carried forth in the academy, in government, and through popular culture, dissipate like the insubstantial rhetorical mists they’ve always been. 

And once that fog lifts, people may once again choose liberty over tyranny.

I expect some day Jeffy will give us that post-structural version of The Turner Diaries we've been hoping for.  Or maybe his greatest achievement will be the day he sees some tweakers in a hostage situation on the TV news, yells "THIS IS IT!" like Gary Oldman in JFK, and runs stripped to the waist out his front door into a police ambush.

UPDATE 2. Comments are as usual magnificent (come on Foster, you ain't even looking). "Yeah," says Jimcima, "it really sucked when the 99 cent store that used to be between Bulgari and Tiffany down on Rodeo went out of business." zuzu and others wonder when liberals stopped being potty-mouths. (Never, says I! Even now I am working on a cognate of "slut" and "retard," a sort of ultimate weapon of Alinskyite ridicule; "sluttard," my prototype, is too cumbersome for my flow, but maybe I can train the masses to accept it, like they accepted "Thee" for "The.")

Goldstein, as usual, is a great source of inspiration. Fats Durston reacts to "attempts to ironize away the concept of self-reliance and rugged individualism":

God, if I see another movie with Bruce Willis as a caring federal bureaucrat whose agency defeats the villains with targeted food stamp distribution, I swear I am going to make my own indie film where, for once, the climactic scene will be a mano-y-mano fistfight.

Really, I should just front-page the comments and hide the posts.

P.C. B.S.

I keep hearing from conservatives that political correctness is ruining everything. For example, at National Review, which runs stories about PC at about the rate The Federalist runs stories about Caitlin Jenner, Ian Tuttle extrapolates from an advice column at a site you never heard of that the peecee people "would do much to crack down on the number of Fitzgeralds or Faulkners or Cormac McCarthys" and supplant their brilliance with "the Afro-Cuban lesbian experience," har har; also,

No doubt over the next several years book clubs across America will pore over many a bestseller fitted to Gabbert’s advice, in the process sacrificing better authors — e.g., Homer, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton.

If Ian Tuttle knows where the next Shakespeare is, he should tell his editor, so they can use him to replace Kevin D. Williamson, Dennis Prager, or one of National Review's many other shitty writers. (For perspective: previously Tuttle told his readers "If you’re looking for a genuinely open-minded academic experience, Brooklyn College may not be the place for you" because the school refused to take money from the Koch brothers.)

Anyway, a lot of prominent liberals (including Amanda Marcotte, conservatives' favorite feminist voodoo doll) are saying Laura Kipnis got a bad rap from hypersensitive apparatchiks-in-training at Northwestern, and good for them (the liberals, not the apparatchiks). The other day Edward Schlosser had a long piece at Vox, of all places, complaining about student noodges. You'd think that if PC were as much of a menace as it's been portrayed, conservatives would be happy to at last have bipartisan support in fighting it. Well, here's James Taranto at The Wall Street Journal:

As we read the Schlosser piece, we felt more Schadenfreude than sympathy, and we wondered if that reflected poorly on us. (Spoiler: Nah.)

Instead Taranto complains that liberals like Schlosser are only upset because they're getting it in the neck, and are fundamentally incapable of understanding the pain of censored "outgroup" conservative academics like Glenn Reynolds, Ann Althouse, Harvey Mansfield, William A. Jacobson, et alia. Taranto explains:

Social systems have existed—think of the American South under slavery and Jim Crow—in which a dominant ingroup governed itself in accord with liberal principles while subjecting the outgroup to a combination of oppressive rules and often-cruel whims.

Time for a Poor Wingnuts' Campaign! Back at National Review Charles C.W. Cooke says

Of course Jonathan Chait is turning against political correctness and campus self-indulgence. Of course Vox’s editor, Ezra Klein, is now peddling lefty academics who are willing to stand up to the mob. Of course the good denizens of Jezebel are beginning to wonder aloud whether a feminism that eats the likes of Laura Kipnis is useful. If neo-McCarthyism “becomes a salient part of liberal politics,” Schlosser writes in his conclusion, then “liberals are going to suffer tremendous electoral defeat.” The American Left has started to rebel at the exact moment that its own interests are being hurt? Naturally. This isn’t about standards; it’s about power.

Cooke's essay is called "Is the Tide Turning against PC?" but it's not clear that he wants it turned if it means linking arms with those people. So I guess PC must not be such a big deal after all.

Sympathetic as I am toward Kipnis, I never thought so myself -- if some dumbasses want to play thought policeman in select programs at elite colleges, I figure, let them waste their parents' money and God help them when they graduate. And let those other dumbasses turn their tattered propaganda equity now this way, now that, trying to catch the wind. (Good luck explaining the menace of "social justice warriors" to downsized factory workers!) We who have free souls, it touches us not.

UPDATE. Comments are all glorious, but special thanks to commenter atheist for invoking La Rochefoucauld: "Our hatred of favorites is but a love of favor, and our scorn of those who enjoy it is only a balm to our vexation at being deprived thereof." Conservatives had their way exclusively for several centuries before the Enlightenment, and have been sore ever since they lost the franchise.

UPDATE 2. What causes political correctness on campus? Joseph Bottum at the Weekly Standard:

It’s possible to ascribe the situation to the presidential elections of 2008 and 2012.

Ain't even kidding.

The guidelines for Title IX issued by the Obama administration have shifted power to the outraged, and everyone seems to know it.

Everybody Joseph Bottum talks to at the Club, anyway. But wait, Bottum allows that the roots of PC do go deeper:

The reaction to Bill Clinton’s sex scandals, leading to his impeachment in 1998, may have been the first hint of a new choosing of sides, followed by an abiding anger over the outcome of Bush v. Gore in 2000. But the fate of the Democrats is not quite the same thing as the fate of radicalism, and to find the real springs of what is now washing over the nation’s schools, you have to go back, I think, to the fall of the Iron Curtain, 26 years ago.

Everything Democrat causes everything bad, and the same goes for the Soviet Union! In fact the title of Bottum's column is "I Still Blame the Communists." I expect if you swapped out "political correctness" for "riots in Baltimore," "Ebola," "potrzebie," etc., it wouldn't have to be changed much. Sometimes I think they work from Mad Libs.

HOW YOU KNOW YOU'RE WINNING.

Back in December, James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal had an article headlined, "The Sure Thing? Reconsidering a prediction about same-sex marriage." Though a few years earlier he had predicted gay marriage would win the day when the Supreme Court got hold of it, Taranto said, "now we're not so sure." (As he also described a pro-gay-marriage decision not as one that would enfranchise millions of his fellow citizens, but as one that would "declare the traditional definition of marriage unconstitutional," you know where his rooting interest lies.)

In a new column, Taranto returns to the subject and pulls what he probably considers a clever trick play:

The administration does not go so far as to urge the court to strike down all state bans on same-sex marriage. Instead it urges a novel solution that would have the effect of abolishing nonmarital civil unions, until now the compromise of choice between supporters and opponents of same-sex marriage.

You can hear the chortles in CPAC back rooms: Heh indeed, by pushing "gay" "marriage" Obama's killing civil unions! How do you like that, gay people? You should join us at CPAC -- er, on the downlow.

This schtick comes with rhetorical appurtenances. One: You're Denying Our Right to Self-Expression:

As a legal matter, the administration's position seems odd. The effect of banning same-sex marriage in civil-union states is purely expressive: The states are in effect declaring that homosexual relationships are inferior to marriages. That is a value judgment with which many people disagree, but why should the state not be free to express it--especially when the expression has no material effect?

Two: Obama is Applying the "Chicago Way" to His Fellow Travelers and They Will Fall In Line:

The likeliest answer is political: that the administration has concluded (or anticipates that the court, which is to say Justice Kennedy, will conclude) that imposing same-sex marriages nationwide would be disruptive in the way Roe v. Wade was--but the civil-union states are socially liberal enough that they would accept such a ruling.

Three: You're Only Hurting Yourself:

For supporters of same-sex marriage, however, there's a danger that adopting this legal compromise would shut down an avenue of political compromise.

These are not the kind of arguments you hear when you're losing. The struggle will continue, as it still does over the civil rights of black Americans. But the losing side will become increasingly legalistic, hair-splitting, and petty. That's how you know you're winning.

UPDATE. Speaking of which, here's Rick Moran reacting to the news that GOP macher Rob Portman, inspired by his gay son, has turned over on marriage equality:

As more and more Americans realize that they are related to, or work with, or live next to someone who is gay, it is inevitable that acceptance follows. This doesn't mean that opposing gay marriage is bigoted. People of good conscience can disagree (something the left refuses to acknowledge while trying to ram gay marriage down the throats of people by co-opting the legisalture and using the courts to gain their objective).

Translation: Yes, we're getting tolerant, but what about all these homosexuals trying to ram their big, hard gay marriage down my throat? Where's their tolerance?

I expect the brighter bulbs among the rightbloggers will keep quiet or roll more gently with it. Maybe we'll see a pro-equality, anti-drone Republican Party in 2016. Baby steps!

CHANGED MY MIND. I don't feel bad for Andrew Sullivan anymore. The Santorum interval is now apparently over for all good wingers: The Times reports, "Republican Lawmakers Back Senator in Gay Dispute," and records lovely quotes from Sullivan's partner-in-diversity, Tom DeLay ("It is very dangerous to say that whatever you do behind closed doors is your right to privacy... It undermines a lot of moral questions that we have in this country"). Sullivan appears to be down with the program.

Sullivan's prior angst over the Santorum thing has burned out, as seen in these recent and pathetic comments. He is so shit-out-of-luck in his search for companionable conservatives on sexual privacy issues that he commends as "very sane" James Taranto's extremely (and I mean extremely) lukewarm endorsement of gay civil rights. (Sample Taranto quote: "Many religious Americans are horrified by the symbolism of allowing same-sex couples to marry... Simply to sweep aside such concerns, as the advocates of same-sex marriage seek to do, would be arrogant and contrary to the spirit of American pluralism." Taranto also calls Bowers v. Hardwick "a politically wise ruling.")

Andrew Sullivan, who frequently says Democrats are insufficiently attentive to gay rights, is now reduced to running a geiger-counter over OpinionJournal columnists, looking for trace elements of tolerance.

He has also turned his attention to a whole host of other topics, among them the recent Conquest (which makes him giddy), dragons (which make him roar!), and "male hating" feminists -- which makes him what he's always been: a complete tool who, having perfected a good Bircher imitation to curry favor with his radical right audience, affects not to notice when he is rewarded with the back of their hand.

GIVIN' 'EM WHAT THEY WANT.

My column this week mentioned some of the many conservatives who blithely assumed the ghettos would be aflame after the Zimmerman verdict because, well, you know [pushes in nose]. At Mother Jones, Lauren Williams noted some of the pre-eminent racial dead-enders on the case:

Bill O'Reilly recently asked guests on his show whether a not-guilty verdict would cause people to "run out and cause trouble," or worse, "damage the fabric of the nation." The Washington Times ran an online poll Wednesday asking readers, "Will there be riots in Florida if George Zimmerman receives a not-guilty verdict by a jury of his peers?" Seventy-four percent said yes. Sean Hannity had Mark Fuhrman (of O.J. Simpson trial fame) on his show this week and asked him the same question. His response, according to Newshounds, a Fox News watchdog site: "I just think it's kind of pathetic that a court of law cannot be in a vacuum of the legal system without the influence of the public threatening to do great bodily harm to people and property. It's really a pathetic statement for our country." Last October, speculation that African Americans would riot from coast to coast if President Barack Obama lost to Mitt Romney swept conservative news sites.

David Weigel did a few columns on this, the more recent of which features a Drudge front page pretending "America gripped by second night of fury," and links to similar gibberish from the Daily Mail and Jim fucking Hoft. Weigel's column is called "Who's Disappointed About the Lack of Mass Zimmerman Verdict Riots?" and the answer is pretty clear: Conservative specialists in the old Ooga Booga.

At the Wall Street Journal, James Taranto takes off from Weigel's column -- but goes in a, let us say, counterintuitive direction. His over-reactors are nameless "British newspaper" and "conspiracy website," as well as "the Broward County sheriff and the Sanford police" who "put out a public-service ad in which cops, teenagers and James Jones of basketball's Miami Heat urged viewers: 'Raise Your Voice, Not Your Hands.'" See, the local cops tried to preemptively chill people out  -- that's pretty close to Michelle Malkin crying, "Zimmerman verdict: NOT guilty -- Calls for race riots in 3, 2, 1..." Robert Stacy McCain predicting "If #Zimmerman is acquitted, black people will riot," etc.

Also, Taranto finds one of those real-racists on which conservative commentary thrives: "Today New York's Daily News does its best to inflame the situation, front-paging an editorial that likens Zimmerman's killing of Trayvon Martin to half a dozen decades-old cases," which is, yes you guessed it, "an outrageously racist bit of yellow journalism, imputing guilt to Zimmerman because the color of his skin is similar to that of men who committed horrific crimes decades ago. The News editorial reflects the perverse nostalgia for pervasive racism--and for the moral clarity and righteousness that accompanied it--that is common among liberals today..."

Meanwhile elsewhere in Wingnut World: National Review's alleged cop Jack Dunphy tells us about the Fire This Time in L.A.: "...as I write this Monday night there is a group causing a ruckus on Crenshaw Boulevard, disrupting traffic, vandalizing cars, and briefly storming a Walmart... Except for a few torched trash cans, there were no fires and no widespread looting in L.A. Monday night. But that could change if this keeps up.." Briefly storming a Walmart! Helter skelter! By tomorrow Dunphy will report himself pinned down by price-gun fire, but determined to get word out to civilization about the Trayvon Riots.

And after Jamelle Bouie explains to him that "black-on-black crime" -- the traditional means by which conservatives pretend to care more about black lives than black people, when such a distraction is needed --  just means that black people who commit crimes tend to live near other black people, whom they victimize, Dunphy's colleague Patrick Brennan just keeps repeating his mantras: "it’s disproportionately being committed by blacks... African Americans commit dramatically more crime, especially violent crimes and murders, than whites do... still committing crimes at shockingly disproportionate rates... blacks are much more likely to commit more murders than whites... it becomes apparent that black-on-black crime is a special problem... lots of blacks are committing crimes..."

Brennan and the rest of him know their audience and what keeps 'em coming back.

UPDATE. In comments, synykyl: "Given that young black males are by far the most likely victims of gun violence, shouldn't conservatives be calling for a national campaign to arm them? Conservatives aren't racists, and they believe an armed society is a polite society, so why haven't they jumped on this idea?" Well, you see...

EMOTIONAL SHUTDOWN.

Most people probably wonder what these guys are thinking, but from my perspective the shutdown is a natural consequence of a certain habit of mind that conservatives have been cultivating among their Republican homunculi for years.

Though wingnut theology goes back much further, and certain practitioners just naturally think this way and would have done so no matter when they came up, I'd put the origin of this particular wrinkle around the time of the Clinton impeachment.

You have to remember that during the Reagan era, a lot of conservatives thought the party, so to speak, would never end -- that they'd created not only an Administration but an Age, a historic era in which every citizen was taught from birth that nothing couldn't be fixed with a tax cut and the poor had no one to blame but themselves. (You can see it in the way they still invoke His holy name, especially in extremis.)

Then Clinton got in. He was a DLC trimmer and almost as bad as the Reaganauts, and you might say his victories were at least a partial tribute to Reaganism. But Clinton's yak also included some of the old Democratic equities as a point of distinction, and his lines about working hard and playing by the rules must have hit conservatives like a gut-punch -- here they'd been selling America a survival-of-the-fittest gold rush, and Clinton was giving them home and hearth -- and getting away with it!

A saner opposition would have appreciated this turnabout philosophically, as a grifter might laugh ruefully upon discovering someone had managed to grift him. Certainly some of them did. But the true believers simmered and stewed, because for them it was not just a reversal of fortune, but of their whole way of looking at the world. And when they got their chance, they came up with both the 1995 shutdown and the Lewinsky Impeachment -- kamikaze missions of the sort that make no sense unless you actually believe that God is with you, and that the seemingly unconvinced American people will follow once they realize it (which they never do).

In the Obama years these folks have been no less crazy, but much busier. As I've detailed in these pages and at the Voice, they've devoted so much time and energy to developing unflattering caricatures of the POTUS -- he's a socialist! He's a crony capitalist! He's two slurs in one! -- that they can no longer actually see what he's doing, nor why anyone would vote for him, leading to their great confusion in 2012 when their "unskewed polls" turned out to be total bullshit.

In fact they still can't understand why Obama won, and in many cases they can't even admit it -- the Wall Street Journal's James Taranto has made a habit of referring to him as "President Asterisk," on the grounds that the IRS scandal proves he stole the election, and the brethren lap up this soothing alt-history.

In choosing to shut down the government, an expensive and injurious procedure, just to show how much they hate Obamacare, they're looking at two well-known survey findings -- that voters don't like Obamacare, and that they don't want to shut down the government over it -- and deciding one is very meaningful and the other is, well, skewed, based on the fairy tales they've been telling themselves for years.

They offer defenses: For example, James Poulos argues at Forbes the "pro-democracy case" for the shutdown -- that is, it's not Boehner's boys who are holding us hostage, "it’s the government that’s holding us hostage — hostage to one-time votes made in Congress for the usual farrago of not-so-idealistic reasons." The rules require that Republicans win enough votes of their own to repeal the law, as they always promise to do, but  the voters wouldn't go along with the gag, so the only thing a true pro-democrat can do is run the ship of state into a reef.

This doesn't make sense to a normal person; none of their arguments do. But they don't have to. They may as well put Because Reasons in all their column spaces. They're not trying to convince outsiders that their cause is just; they're just adding some stuff that looks like arguments to the furnishings of their Reagan Dream House to better resemble their increasingly vague memories of reality.

HOW HAS THE LEFT OPPRESSED YOU TODAY? asks James Taranto, reacting to conservative columnists who don't like Rick Santorum:

In liberal metropolises like Los Angeles, Washington and New York (homes of [Conor] Friedersdorf, [Jennifer] Rubin and this columnist, respectively), a high proportion of conservatives have internalized the assumptions of feminism. One of those assumptions is that female sexual freedom, an essential component of sexual equality, is an unadulterated good. Santorum's statements to the contrary challenge this deeply held view.

Similarly, black activists/poverty pimps talk about black people's social freedom as if it were an unadulterated good. But intelligent people can disagree!

Furthermore, contemporary feminism is, as we recently argued, a totalitarian ideology, by which we mean one that tolerates no divergence between the personal and the political. If you are not a feminist, you can enjoy a lifestyle of sexual freedom and also take seriously the idea that sexual freedom is bad for society. If you are a feminist, that is a thoughtcrime.

People who have read 1984 but haven't kept up with rightwing theology may wonder how this thoughtcrime is punished. Does Big Feminism run the boardrooms and factory floors, and are offending non-feminists fired from their jobs and forced to live in shanties in Butchtown?

No. In real life, the answer is: They are sometimes made fun of for obvious hypocrisy. It's their Room 101!

It figures that Taranto has confused "laughing at your ridiculous arguments" with totalitarianism. The crazy, misogynistic shit they're forced to defend in these days of Surging Santorum has made them so ridiculous, it must feel like torture.

MAU-MAUING THE FLAK CATCHERS. Always looking for that silver lining, that James Taranto:

If Obama is nominated and loses in November, we can expect a surge in bitterness from liberals and blacks who attribute the result to American and Republican racism... But if Obama is denied the nomination, that bitterness will be directed against alleged Democratic racism.

For more than four decades, blacks have been the most reliably Democratic constituency in American politics. Democrats have encouraged this by portraying both the GOP and America as racist. If blacks came to perceive the Democratic Party as racist, what effect would it have on their partisan loyalty? You can see why so many Democrats do not want to risk finding out.

That's how we lost the black vote to the Republicans in 1984, when "that cracker-ass Walter Mondale" became a curse on black America's lips. How's we get them back, anyone remember? Was it an ad campaign, or did we pay reparations?

Taranto gets extra credit for his last line, which suggests that Democrats are being intimidated into nominating Obama, as a terrified woman might be intimidated into handing her purse to a mugger. Expect this theme to be visualized in a McCain ad this fall: a dark alley... ominous footsteps... and then relief as the Maverick comes into view, perhaps with the rest of the Keating Five dressed as Guardian Angels.

WHY, THIS IS HELL, NOR ARE WE OUT OF IT. Nothing like a little Anchoress to put things in perspective:


Admit it, your first reaction was Wha, or some variant thereof. Why is our favorite Jesus blogger sharing an ungodly interest in alleged male chest hair trends? True, The Anchoress likes frivolities such as American Idol -- even though she acts ashamed of it sometimes. But this is getting into unseemly, Ross-Douthat-on-Jennifer-Aniston territory.

The easy explanation is that Obama's breastplate is smooth, so Th' Anch may take the trend and tease it, so to speak, into something about how America is turning away from hairless socialism and toward carpet-chested AmericaJesusism. Still, it seems a pretty thin reed to --


Ah, I get it now! Obama, Weiner -- a smooth chest is the Mark of The Beast! (Using Selleck was clever, but why not Kelsey Grammer? He makes Mark Hand look like Michael Phelps.)

The text is almost superfluous, but you should see this:

Our social behavior (and our values) seem to be suggest a devolving away from maturity and toward a collective case of arrested development that has all age-groups exhibiting the entertainment sensibilities, critical-thinking skills and moral giddiness of 14 year-olds.

Whereas Obama, Weiner, and chest hair are part of the grown-up discussion. Oh, The Anchoress a little earlier:

To my way of thinking, the saddest part of this [Weiner] story is Barbara Walters devolution; this once-respected newswoman...

See what I mean about perspective? In fairness, she's barely worse than her compatriots -- e.g, James Taranto:

How exactly does that make [Weiner] different from a family-values conservative who turns out to be struggling with homosexual desires?

Long story short: Weiner took down an old statue because it was sexist, ha ha. Also, he said he liked that his wife was smart, which is totally hypocritical because his digital sex talk doesn't resemble the correspondence of Abelard and Heloise. Therefore he, and all feminists, are just like Republicans who hunt cock in toilets while denying gays the right to marry, because penis.

Shorter still, Taranto thinks anodyne, pro-women statements are the equivalent of legislating bigotry. As usual, this bunch's misunderstanding of sexual behaviors is really a misunderstanding of consent.

CONTINUED FALLOUT FROM OBAMA'S LAUGHISM! Many of the brethren in comments to the previous post bring up Ben Shapiro's column, in which he gives Wanda Sykes a hard time for not doing his material, which is all about how Obama doesn't support gay marriage. In another context, Shapiro would consider such an in-your-face attack on a gay marriage opponent an example of gay intolerance. There's no pleasing some people, and thus no reason to try to please them.

I preferred James Taranto's version in which he details Sykes' offenses: among them, that by suggesting Limbaugh be waterboarded, "she makes light of a form of interrogation that some people consider torture," which you have to admit is pretty fucking ballsy of him. Also, "She makes fun of the disabled (Limbaugh's past addiction to painkillers would entitle him to protection under the Americans With Disabilities Act)."

I'm going to assume it's a parody. Taranto is, after all, the same guy who said:

It reminds us of a movie we enjoyed a great deal: "Team America: World Police," in which the creators of "South Park," using puppets rather than cartoon animation, imagined Michael Moore as a suicide bomber and had various other Hollywood morons die horrible yet hilarious deaths.

So I can't imagine he means his "smug look of a man who enjoys seeing his critics dehumanized" crap to be taken seriously.

GOODBYE TIN-FOIL HAT.

I mentioned the other day that some of the brethren think Obama used mind control like some kind of supervillain to get his minions to persecute the Tea Party. Today James Taranto takes this to a whole new level.

First he recounts some recent secret-message fantasies by various press dopes. For example, Kimberley Strassel says Obama "publicly call[ed] out by name political opponents whom he'd like to see harassed." I guess "harrassed" was part of the telepathic rather than the verbal component of the President's public statements, as I don't recall hearing them or seeing them in the transcript -- or maybe Obama's magic powers rendered all but bureaucrats blind and deaf to them.

Then Taranto explains:

Jaded political observers listened to Candidate Obama and heard (depending on their leanings) either a viciously desperate politician or a feisty fighter. Agents of the government heard President Obama, their ultimate boss, urging them to turn their attention toward evildoers. 

As we've repeatedly argued, if that is the extent of Obama's involvement in the scandal, it is much more worrisome than if the persecution of dissidents was carried out under his direct orders. It would mean that the government itself--the permanent institutions of the state, not just the administration currently in office--has turned against the citizenry and the Constitution.

So, if Obama directly told IRS officials to intimidate the TP people, it wouldn't be as bad as if he used mind-rays to make it happen on the zombie hordes. Of course if they had evidence of direct non-magic intervention by Obama, I'm sure they would be happy to have it to put in a bill of impeachment. But they don't, so they have to impeach Washington, if only figuratively, as Obama's magic co-conspirators.

It doesn't say much for their cause that even as the hearings proceed, they're devoting this much effort to the Harry Potter version.

WINGNUT COLLOQUY. Here's the sentence that set him off:

At first their outrage was attracted by an on-air report by ABC News' Brian Ross on the shooter's identity after his name, but no details, had been revealed. Ross said this: "There's a Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colorado, page on the Colorado Tea party site, talking about him joining the Tea Party last year. Now, we don't know if this is the same Jim Holmes, but it's Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colorado."

Then ensued:

To recap: The guy misapprehended the sentence and called me a liar; when his error was pointed out to him,  he pretended not to be able to read.

I stopped talking to him at this point, but I should never have started.  (I even went out of my way to be civil, which you all know is a great effort for me.) My problem was, I tried to figure out how he came to his misunderstanding. Maybe he thought the clause pertained to "attracted" rather than "report" -- but then, why would I have inserted immediately thereafter the very details Ross revealed?

But his responses revealed what I should have known from jump -- that he's just a yelling bot, and has no premises at all. He exists to denounce liberals and trawl the attention of big-name conservatives. He isn't there to listen, except for the sound of his own name.

The internet's full of people like this. They make outrageous statements and when they're called on them pretend not to know what's going on. And a lot of them mistake what they're doing for actual argument. It's like "Firing Line" with dialogue from "Pee-Wee's Playhouse."

And it seems this style is bubbling up to the big-name guys, too. I saw a clip recently of James Taranto on the Lou Dobbs show, and though when I met Taranto years ago he was mild-mannered and easy to talk to, on the show he was bellowing like a Fox News clown. Matt Lewis used to be a relatively sensible conservative writer, and now at The Daily Caller he's writing boob bait like this "guns don't kill people, movies do" thumbsucker.

It's getting to the point where you can't talk to them at all, and that's a real bad point.

UPDATE. Dyer has apologized to me, which is gracious of him. (I wasn't fishing for it, because in my experience people who demand and exult in apologies are assholes, and only mention it to credit him.) He still thinks I misunderstand him, and who knows, maybe I do. Anyway I welcome to opportunity to stop seething at him. Everyone else, however...