GOLDBERG GETS RESULTS! (OR: THE WAR ON POETRY!)

My throwaway statement in the update to yesterday's post seems prescient now. To recap: In 2010 Nancy Pelosi said something about the Affordable Care Act: That citizens who'd been keeping jobs (first, second, or third) just so they could keep health insurance that went with it would, thanks to the ACA, have a chance to drop it and try to become "an artist or a photographer or a writer."

Pelosi also said Obamacare left citizens free to "start a business and be entrepreneurial and take risk," but none of the brethren heard that -- their brains were too inflamed by visions of dirty bohemians spending their taxpayer dollars on Gauloises, Moleskins, and beret cleaner. Look up "Nancy Pelosi" and "musicians" on Google and mind the bullshit avalanche that tumbles forth.

But the recent CBO report concerning Obamacare's effect on job-lock brought the Pelosi art attack back -- and Jonah Goldberg offered an improvement. "[Pelosi's] been mocked for years now," claimed Goldberg, "for her repeated claims that Obamacare is an entrepreneurial bill because it would let Americans quit their jobs to, among other things, 'write poetry.'" He then made a bunch of horrible jokes about it ("spending $1.2 trillion just so we could liberate the Job-Locked Poets!") and reiterated the riff in another column ("When Nancy Pelosi says that Obamacare is entrepreneurial because it will let people quit their jobs to become poets, you can see the campus utopianism coming through").

Other wingnut outlets carried the news that Obama fucked Pelosi to make poets, and I imagined David French's otherwise incomprehensible spasm about Wendy Sherman and poetry yesterday was an unconsciously sympathetic response to a gathering meme. Today in The Hill:

Democrats pushing poetry over jobs?

...Some lawmakers, such as Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), say that the law allows workers to alleviate themselves from “job-lock”... 

[Republican South Carolina Rep. Trey] Gowdy honed in on the remarks, saying they are part of a larger effort to smooth over flaws with the healthcare reform law and its rollout during an election year. 

“What the liberals and the Democrats want you to believe is, ‘Well, but you’ll have time to write poetry,’ ” Gowdy said. “Well, that’s great until you try and buy your grandkid a birthday present or you try and pay the heating bill.”

Made it up to Congress already! I expect some apparatchik will soon present an argument that poetry itself is anti-American. Some of it don't even rhyme!

UPDATE. AEI scholar Stan Veuger at The National Interest says this "pivot to leisure" is just spin to distract America from the Obamacare sharknado: "You declare employment 'job lock,'" he writes, "and claim that workers faced with massive new work disincentives" -- big, scary disincentives! -- "are 'choosing' to spend more time cooking, composing lyrical poetry, and becoming entrepreneurs, as Professor Jonathan Gruber of MIT, a prominent Obama advisor on these issues, did in the LA Times a few days ago." Hmm, now they're blaming the poetry on Gruber; I'd like to see a source for that.

At Forbes, Kyle Smith sneers that the CBO report proves "The Obama Administration Doesn't Care Whether You Work Or Not," and by caving in to people who would "leave the workforce willingly in order to 'pursue their dreams,'" Obama is abandoning them to this dark future:

...the psychic devastation and desolation that come with losing one’s connection to the economic networks that mean much to us — socially and even spiritually. Work doesn’t just give us a paycheck, it gives us meaning and purpose.

Think of losing the spiritually meaningful moments of chat about Game of Thrones with your cubicle neighbor! And if that doesn't scare you, think of what else you'll lose -- to poetry!

Each person who decides she’d rather translate ancient Babylonian poetry than hold an entry-level office job is foregoing not only the drab cubicle but also the corner office that might have been hers 25 years of diligence later.

Yes, Smith actually brings up job security to Forbes readers -- who know at least as well as everyone else that it hasn't existed for years. He might have offered the more realistic goal of holding a drab cubicle until the company is sold out from under you and you go to work for Walmart -- but at least then you'd be uncontaminated by poetry!

UPDATE 2. Charlie Pierce: "Trey Gowdy, who gets a base salary of $174,000, will work a total of 113 days in formal session this year, in which he will do very little. I happen to know several poets, and I can say with authority that every one of them works harder than does Trey Gowdy, that Philistine meathead, largely because most of them are working two or more jobs, none of which provide benefits."

UPDATE 3. Late in the day, but there is some fine versifying by world-be Obamacare welfare Fairie Queenes in comments. These range from limericks ("There once was a fellow named Gowdy...") to loftier parodies ("My intern goes after what my eyes cannot reach/With the twirl of my tongue I encompass cheetos and volumes of cheetos...").

THE BOY WHO CRIED OBAMAHITLER.

At the New York Post, Kyle Smith is enraged that some young woman who used to play violin (oooh arty farty!) is now "senior policy advisor at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy," and part of something Smith calls the "Nudge Squad" because its mandate is to gently encourage better behavioral choices based on the ideas in Cass Susstein's book Nudge.

Smith is pissed for a couple of reasons. For one thing, this initiative proceeds from the same thinking that got Bloomberg to make fast food joints post calories, which doesn't appear to change patrons' eating habits, at least not in the short term we've had to observe its effect. Fair enough, though letting people know something about what's in the food they eat is a pretty benign intervention, and seems to work well enough with packaged food labeling, unless you think citizens have no business knowing whether their dessert topping is mostly chemicals or if an energy bar will send them into anaphylactic shock.

But what really seems to bug Smith is something he mainly expresses with old rightwing memes and overwrought innuendo: that the Nudge Squad is oppressive. For instance:

This person was a senior at Yale as of 2007, but now she gets to tell you how to live your life. Sorry: encourage you to make choices that will make you happier... 

Remember when FDR, more or less admitting he was clueless about economics, promised, and delivered, an era of “bold, persistent experimentation”? Obama means it literally. We’re all being targeted for “behavioral interventions.” But only after randomized, controlled trials. Which don’t sound scary. At all. (Just don’t say that in a German accent.)... 

...[Susstein] was boasting in a Harvard working paper that [the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs'] central responsibilities, as defined by Obama’s Executive Order 13563, amounted to “a kind of mini-constitution for the regulatory state.” That sounds a bit immodest. And aren’t constitutions, even cute mini- ones, supposed to come up for a vote?

Similarly, shouldn't people walking around with stapleguns have a concealed-carry permit? Inevitably:

The new paternalism of Obama appointees is very much in tune with the boss. In a neverending series of campaign speeches, he’s taken to saying things like, “That means whatever executive authority I have to help the middle class, I’ll use it.” And, “We’re going to do everything we can, wherever we can, with or without Congress.”

It's all part of the seamless garment of ObamaHitler. By the way, Smith refers to the recruitment e-mail of the Nudge Squad, properly known as the Behavioral Insights Team, but does not link to it. Here it is, and here are some of the previous interventions the Team uses as models:

Increasing college enrollment and retention: Providing streamlined personal assistance on the FAFSA form (e.g., pre-populating forms using tax return data and following up with a personal call) to low or moderate income individuals resulted in a 29% greater likelihood of their attending college for two consecutive years... 

Improving academic performance: Students taught to view their intelligence as a “muscle” that can grow with hard work and perseverance (as compared to a “fixed trait”, such as eye-color) experienced academic boosts of 1/2 a letter grade, with the largest effects often seen for low-performing students, students of color, or females in STEM-related courses.

Why, that's just how the Third Reich started.

Conservatives are always wondering aloud why they couldn't win in 2012 against a sitting president with a shit economy, and I keep explaining that it's because people think they're nuts. I used to assume they couldn't hear me because I don't have large BUY GOLD ads on my website, but I'm beginning to think no one can reach them.

Smith had a small but perfectly legitimate grievance -- that the government might be wasting money on an unproven social-science boondoggle -- but he knew that, as a Post columnist, he couldn't hold his barking readership's attention unless he laid on the totalitarian imagery good and thick. The result pleases people who agree with him that politically-correct race-pimping arugula-muching Liberal Fascists have turned America into a Union of Soviet Socialist Community Organizers, but when they try it on normal people it sends them backing nervously out the door. Even a dim person would have figured this out by now; I begin to think they're not serious about winning.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about rightblogger Gay Pride coverage. It offers some rare good news: The wingnuts appear to be keeping quieter during Pride. They're still wrong, and the smarter ones are disingenuous -- this weekend we had Kyle Smith suggesting an "end of the culture wars," which in his world means the rise of "Chris Christie and Scott Brown, libertarian-ish Republicans who are socially liberal but fiscally conservative." (Brown's against gay marriage, and Christie promised to veto gay marriage if it were passed in Jersey. Maybe that's what Smith means by libertarian-ish.) But at least we get fewer of their noxious gases this time of year.

The thing ran long, and one of my saddest cuts was Esther Green's "To My Liberal Relative." Green apparently likes to bug her relatives with rightwing bullshit, and one of them, a gay man, finally sent her a short note asking, "Seriously, can we please just agree to disagree?" Some people would have switched topics to the weather or something, but Green sent back an 858-word harangue, explaining that

It is precisely because you and ____ are gay that Obama scares me. He surrounds himself with people who are true believers in sharia law (Rashid Khalidi, Dalia Mogahed, and Rashad Hussain). Sharia law clearly states that gays are to be stoned.

Later, perhaps hoping that this will have softened her gay relative up, Green tells him that Obama is a Muslim. Bet the Green family is going to be very careful about its Christmas invitations this year.

THE NEW MICHAEL MOORE. The latest target of the Kulture Kops is Will Ferrell, who is having a very successful run on Broadway in a one-man George Bush show. At the New York Post Kyle Smith says, "Is it too much to ask for Hollywood's leading comic actor not to use the deaths of our troops in combat for a giggle?"

What Smith means by this bizarre accusation is: there's a moment in the show where Ferrell, as Bush, asks for a moment of silence for the troops, which is interrupted by the ringing of a telephone, previously announced to be a non-working prop. "Bush" later says he was afraid God was calling him. "The problem is," Smith says, "during what turned out to be merely a pause to set up the punchline, I actually was thinking about our war dead, and so were a lot of others." No audience interviews, unfortunately, are included to confirm this.

Smith judges that "Here, Hollywood is letting its mask slip." On Broadway, yet. Maybe Smith originally blamed this treason on the Hollywood/Broadway/Off-Broadway/Off-Off-Broadway/TV/musician/mime/sidewalk sketch artist conspiracy, but it was cut for space.

Smith demands Ferrell excise the bit, thereby flexing the muscle of the New York Post arts section, and Macsmind makes a meme of it:

Which is why, as the leader of a South Florida Veterans organization we will create boycotts of any endeavor that Will Ferrell participates in from here on out. Mock the President all you want. Mock Christ if you dare, but spit on the graves of our fallen comrades and will we kick your lanky ass. Since doing it physically is illegal, we will do it monetarily.

At this very moment, Talladega Nights II is being reimagined as a vehicle for Johnny Knoxville.

Even worse, the show includes an alleged photograph of the former President's penis, which enrages Freedom Eden: "They're obviously giving New York libs exactly what they want," she says. Well, yes, that would be the target market. Studies show that rightwing bloggers tend to eschew Broadway satires of George Bush, so there was no need to accommodate their tender sensibilities. I thought conservatives were supposed to understand the free market.

Nonetheless Say Anything avails the customary what-if: "Can you imagine a comedian’s effort to mock Barack Obama’s penis getting any sort of attention from a publication like the New York Times?" Doubtless it would get attention of some kind -- but say, what a great idea for an alternative entertainment for the rightblogger market! They could do it at Branson.

Theatre critic Wizbang says, "What a farse [sic]." Also, "It's so bad I really believe he'd portray Hitler in a better light." The critic does not say whether he or she has actually been to the show, but as we know they don't have to see these things to have strong opinions about them.

"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of Manhattan people," chortles Don Surber over at the general store before moseying over to the flat-footin'; also, them city folks lives all on top o' one another, and they cain't skin a muskrat nohow.

Please, nobody tell them that the new show with Angela Lansbury in it was written by a homosexual.

THE REAL END OF COMPASSIONATE CONSERVATISM. If you're wondering what Phil Gramm was thinking with that "nation of whiners" crack, let me suggest that it may just be part of a new charm offensive from the right, at least if these bits from the weekend's New York Post are any indication.

"The baby boomers... have once again spoken. What they have said is, 'Waaaaaahhh,'" says Monica Hesse, who reads a Pew study showing boomers "worry that their income won't keep up with rising costs of living" and "that things don't look too good for their kids." They sound like most Americans of whatever age, but Hesse responds, "Oh, the drama! Oh, the anguish!" A separate study "found that boomers have never been happy," so there's no need to pay any attention to them now -- only Hesse does, and at column length, because "the rest of us are doomed to study them, analyze them, wave shiny objects around for them," though by what coercive mechanism she doesn't say. "BUCK UP ALREADY!" she shouts, or she may have to write another column about them, instead of one about "The Google Ogle Defense" ("'Orgy' might be a popular [Google] search term not because it's a popular practice, but because it's not. How do all those limbs fit together, anyway?"), or "Things that are 'awk-ward,' according to a group of University of Maryland students hanging out on the campus quad," or other topics of national importance. Trend reporting seems like an easy gig, even when the economy's in the toilet and some fossils are bitching about it.

Younger people get it -- at least the ones in Iraq, reports movie reviewer Kyle Smith, who pimps LiveLeak, "a destination spot for short war films that are awesome or disgusting, depending on your viewpoint." Smith's own viewpoint is clear: "LiveLeak is doing a much better job presenting the facts than, say, the latest foamy-mouthed drivel about corporate masters of war from the formerly popular actor John Cusack." The lead featured item at LikeLeak at this writing is "Man Shows Unique Ability To Put Hands Into Cauldron Of Hot Fat," but Smith seems to be talking about stuff like this:

...a clip of gunship attacks set to the metal song by Dope called "Die Mothe - - - - er Die." The video wasn't gruesome, though, since the enemy was well off in the distance and disappearing tidily under puffs of white smoke. One of the troops is overheard saying, "This was great. I need a cigarette. This was like sex." And a few more shocked grad students get some fuel for their eroticization-of-violence papers...

Actually it sounds like "Jackass," except instead of injuring themselves Johnny Knoxville and Wee Man kill other people from a distance. Smith believes "the primary message fired-up young men are likely to take from [these films] is that fighting for your country is a lot cooler than the mainstream media make it out to be. " One wonders why the Army hasn't dispatched teams of movie-makers to Iraq to do fan-film versions of Halloween and Saw, casting the natives as terrified teenagers, and release them with titles like Be Kind Re-enlist.

The gem of the bunch is of course by Umpty-Star General Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters. The General's been on a roll lately, and his opening here is a classic: "We all have irritants that make us want to reach for the revolver." Don't I know it! But what gets the General in a killin' mood is bumper stickers -- "One per car is OK, but anything more is public masturbation"; get it, maggot? -- people who call dissent patriotic, and Barack Obama. The dissent fans misquote Jefferson, who was of course against dissent, as shown by his accommodating attitude toward the Alien and Sedition Acts; as for the "last refuge of a scoundrel" thing, though the General admires Samuel Johnson ("I've got a huge two-volume replica edition [of Johnson's Dictionary] -- it's so heavy you could bench-press it"; real he-man writin'!), he reckons the Great Cham was just blowing smoke. "I'd rephrase the line," announces the General, "to read: 'Attacks on patriotism are the last refuge of the coward.'" Get some REMFs on it most ricky-tick, and then fetch the General a copy of the Constitution and a blue pencil!

But you know what really chafes the General around the chaps? Obama and that "Hope" bull-hockey. "Hope is the opposite of audacity," says the General. "It's passive, an excuse for inaction. Medicating ourselves with fuzzy hopes, instead of rolling up our sleeves and fixing things, has wasted countless lives and entire cultures..."

So, to sum up: Don't hope, don't complain, and enjoy your free war videos. It's the new conservative message! They must really be counting on those Diebold voting machines.