STORYTIME. At National Review Jay Nordlinger tells a tale (actually he tells two others as well, but this is by far my favorite):

Have a friend who was in Riverside Park (Manhattan) with his baby daughter. A woman came up to him and said, "Are you a registered Democrat?" He said no. She said, "Well, you can register right now — it will just take a second. I have the necessary paperwork here." He said, "No, actually, that's not it — I am registered. It's just that I'm a registered Republican." He said that the woman gave him a look of hate such as he had seldom seen — sent a shudder down his spine. She walked away, still glaring, bitterly, without a word.

That's nice. I have one just like it:

Whilst strolling through Central Park (New York) I was approached by a man who asked me if I was really going to vote for "You know who," and then he pushed in his nose, pushed out his lower lip, and stuck out his tongue. When I told him I had no idea what he was talking about, he poked my arm and said, "You know -- the N-I-G-E-R!" When I told him to piss off, he let out a fart of a foulness I had never smelled before, and as he shambled away he shook his fist at me and said, "You haven't heard the last of this, or my name isn't Jonah Goldberg, B.A.!"

I have plenty more. Naturally most of them involve cab drivers.

JAY NORDLINGER SENILITY WATCH, JUNE 18. Since his Bloomberg post yesterday:

Thursday, 3:25 pm: Public high schools teach nothing but enviro-communist propaganda these days!

Thursday, 11:06 pm: Remember my earlier post mocking some guy who said "staid and formal hockey mom"? No? Here, let me tell it again.

Thursday, 11:18 pm: Unions are still angry at Thatcher. Good!

Friday, 2:21 pm: Classical musicians are a bunch of communists! You remember when I complained about this before, right? Well, now that Obama has sent back Churchill's bust, I wonder if these communists, the British ones, I mean... Classical musicians are a bunch of communists!

Friday, 3:22 pm: I hate that "serial" music they've been making us listen to. Give me Brahms, I say! The other day, I thought someone was making a joke about it. Turned out they weren't. But if they had, how I would have laughed.

WHAT, AND GIVE UP SHOW BUSINESS? Sometimes I just can't believe what I'm reading. At National Review, David Freddoso gives a long intro to the Republican alternative budget. Its breathless, anticipatory tone --

As we await the details, here is a summary... First, they would end a litany of controversial programs of doubtful value to the public... they appear to be pursuing several market-based solutions they have proposed in the past few years...

-- reminded me of something, at first I couldn't think what, and then I realized: it's like Geraldo Rivera's intro to the opening of Al Capone's vault.

And it ends up the same way:

Update: In fact, we don't know anything more. I was not the only reporter in the room during the delayed press conference who had expected to see some numbers, at least ballpark. Today's press conference did not provide further details.

We'll find out what the Republicans' numbers are sometime next week before they receive a vote.

This caught me off guard. Do some of them actually not know in advance that they're peddling bullshit?

The alterna-budge is a bag of magic Reagan beans. No one on God's green earth believes in them or wants them. Adding numbers to it would be like assigning a horsepower rating to Hot Wheels.

Can't they just get another angry, abused millionaire executive and dance around him? I'm beginning to feel embarrassed for them.

UPDATE. Now Freddoso is sounding hurt and confused. I think National Review ought to toughen up its orientation process. But even the longtime habitues seem dispirited today. Nordlinger is reduced to Gee, Wasn't Reagan Great. I hope Derbyshire will come back from lunch with some ravings about wogs and shirt-lifters.

ROAD TO DUMBASS-KISS.

I know some of my readers who are over the age of 30 may be wondering when conservatives began agitating for the rights of people on the no-fly list? Answer: Very recently! Because back in the day no-fly lists were all the rage among the rageaholics -- in the Bush years, because it was saving us from Terrah, and in the early Obama years because Obama was keeping it from saving us from Terrah. But now that Democrats are craftily using the list against the NRA with their no-fly no-buy bill, conservatives have suddenly (and, I assure you, temporarily) turned into Clarence Darrow.

Let's look at some old National Review items on the no-fly subject for perspective. Here's Greg Polowitz asking, "If [shoe-bomber Faisal] Shahzad Was on the ‘No Fly’ List, How’d He Get on the Plane?" Here's Andrew C. McCarthy lamenting that "a lot of [terrorism-related] information gets exchanged – but a lot doesn’t – and none of it ever makes it to the no-fly list."

Here's Anne Morse complaining that the ACLU was suing because "the 'no-fly list' violates passengers’ right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure," at which she scoffed and said the ACLU was partly to blame for "security procedures that are lax, politically correct, and likely to lead to another 9/11." (Morse also promoted the Arabs-on-planes-make-me-nervous bullshit of Anne Jacobsen, then popular among wingnuts; Jacobsen later went on to promote an even more bizarre terror-in-the-skies scenario.)

Here's Jay Nordlinger fuming at the ACLU's suit because "The administration is trying to protect us from mass murder, and the ACLU is trying to thwart that effort."

And here's Skree Queen Michelle Malkin raging that the list was not complete enough: If we were truthful, she said, "the 'no fly' list would be known around the world by its right and proper name: the 'go fly' list... to this day, TSA still doesn’t check all domestic and international airline-passenger manifests against the no-fly/go-fly list," etc.

So the NR people were once upon a time mainly concerned that the no-fly list wasn't restrictive enough. But when, more recently, it became apparent that the ability of no-fly listees to purchase weapons could be used against them in the court of public gun opinion, they started to get nervous -- as was glaringly apparent from the very title of this 2015 post "The NRA Is Absolutely Right to Fear the ‘Terrorism Watch List,’" by Charles C.W. Cooke, who was then only recently imported by National Review and so did not have the paper trail of no-fly rah-rah that his colleagues had. The magazine's Cato Institute loaners have also been useful in this respect: Here's Michael Tanner, announcing "the no-fly list clearly violates the presumption that a person is innocent until proven guilty," to the chuckles of older readers.

This week NR has promoted an anti-no-fly-list article by an intern, which makes sense, because he's probably not only too young to have any embarrassing published opinions on Bush-era civil-liberties outrages to his credit, but also being indulged in the traditional youthful libertarian phase, the conservative equivalent of Rumspringa.

Better late than never, I guess. And who knows -- maybe associating civil rights they're not so hot about with guns will make conservatives more likely to support them. I know: Let's tell them that married gay people fuck each other with AR-15s!

GOLDBERG RETURNS FOR FURTHER SELF-HUMILIATION. You will recall Jonah Goldberg's attempt to -- well, not so much refute Anne Applebaum's column on conservative anti-elitism as to misrepresent it and then attack the misrepresentation. Even on those terms he did a lousy job.

Yesterday Applebaum responded to Goldberg with extraordinary patience (especially considering that she noticed, as I did, that Goldberg "actually attributes arguments to me that I never made"), explaining in simple words that right-wing bitching about elites conflicts with their meritocratic views, and is particularly ridiculous coming from conservatives who are members of elites themselves.

Goldberg re-stumbles onstage with a bucket on his foot and what he thinks is a winning comeback: What Applebaum doesn't understand about him and his fellow wingnuts is that they use "elite" as code! And he's actually mad that she didn't impute to him the bad faith that he admits of himself:

I’m trying not to let my exasperation get the better of me...

...'cause when I do my face turns red and my pits smell really, really bad.

...so let me explain what I think she is missing. Attacking the Ivy League is a very old, very recognizable shorthand in American political discourse. What Applebaum is doing is reading these statements literally, and painfully so.

I mean, really! I'll bet she doesn't even know about the "uppity" connection! Fart.

Goldberg also isn't done attributing things to Applebaum that she didn't say:

She is also asserting that Ivy League simply means the smartest and the best, as if there was no plausible case that the Ivy League’s reputation is any way overblown or underserved.

I wished as hard as I could, so hard I think I pulled a muscle, that Goldberg would try to make that case immediately, using as an example his skill at walking around with a bucket on his foot. But again God was deaf to my pleas.

As to Applebaum busting him for making shit up, Goldberg huffs, "Applebaum is now moving the goalposts," which in this context means she's getting into the weeds and Goldberg has to noodle it and anyway he has to walk Cosmo and farrrarrrt -- that is, nothing:

What I objected to was the bizarre insinuation that what is motivating Tea Partiers and other conservatives these days is a backlash against elite education, academic achievement, or the rise of the meritocracy as personified by the Obamas. That remains what I dismiss.

This is as fine an example of "You were supposed to hear what I meant to say" as you'll find anywhere.

Goldberg also receives non-help from Jay Nordlinger, who says that Bill Buckley wasn't an elitist despite having every attribute of an elitist because Bill Buckley was always talking about how he hated elitists. Unfortunately he began rambling before he would inform us that George W. Bush may have gone to Yale but he by God cleared brush at his ranch which, by the way, is in Texas.

HOME TAPING COLLECTIVE BARGAINING IS KILLING MUSIC. Aw, Jesus, that asshole Jay Nordlinger is combining his two great loves -- classical music and union-busting:

Okay, it is not so lovely down here that I’ve ceased to stew about Wisconsin. This morning, I thought of something that an insider once told me about the New York Philharmonic. I was inquiring about spiraling costs in the music business — also about why we don’t really have recordings or radio broadcasts anymore. A big part of the answer, of course, is the unions: killing or suppressing music, as they kill or suppress so much else. This insider said, “Don’t think of the Philharmonic as an orchestra. Think of them as Local 802.”

And yet some people want the Rockefellers to pay more for their season tickets! Can't we just fire these communist musicians and bring in the Portsmouth Sinfonia?

CULTURE WAR PORNOCOPIA! Christmas comes early at National Review, with a series of stories on what we might can cultural matters. The themes are largely familiar. Mark Goldblatt is outraged that some kids still wear Che shirts. He informs whomever among them may be within reach of his voice that Guevara killed people and didn't show any contrition or discrimination about it. Sensing perhaps that he is not breaking new ground, Goldblatt throws in a challenge. "Why does an obsessive Nazi-hunter like Simon Wiesenthal get positive press," he asks, "while an obssessive Communist-hunter like Joe McCarthy is vilified?" Maybe because Wiesenthal hunted actual Nazis, while McCarthy was happy to tar citizens ranging from Owen Lattimore to Adlai Stevenson. But, as Goldblatt's subject might agree, when the cause is just contrition and discrimination must go by the board.

Dear, dotty Jay Nordlinger contributes one of his rambling columns about nothing much. He thinks reporters are not hard enough on Obama; hears that "During the campaign, you were a hateful, racist monster if you spoke Barack Obama’s middle name. But now it’s cool," referring maybe to an old Facebook stunt; denounces the free-market malfeasance of George Bush, which he thinks the liberal media is trying to cover up ("You sometimes have to wonder whether reporters are ignorant or malicious or what"); and reports that some people have, for reasons unknown, a low opinion of conservative thinkers. Also, some grammar notes.

Jonah Goldberg offers some Caroline Kennedy gotchas: how is this "Cinderella" more qualified than Sarah Palin for high office? He might have noticed that support for Kennedy is hardly universal among liberals, or even among New York State voters, but that would have deprived him of the chance to refer to the "self-indulgence of elite liberalism" as "bowel-stewing," an adjective Goldberg was born to invent. Predictably, he actually injures his case in referring to Palin as "designed by God for a Hallmark movie of the week" and rising "by dint of her dedication and almost naive fearlessness" -- an unconscious avowal that, as most American voters quickly grasped, Palin's nomination was an exercise in rightwing wish-fulfillment and that she was desperately out of her depth on a national ticket. He also offers some lovely examples of the baroque Goldbergian style ("There were valid criticisms to make. But that is quite a different thing than saying all of the criticism was valid"), as well as a breathtaking lack of awareness that, as one of American conservatism's most famous legacy pledges, he hardly has room to talk.

The jewel of the bunch, though, is Mona Charen's article on pornography, festively titled "'Tis the Season for Porn," which made me hope for a moment it would be a holiday shopper's guide. Charen begins by announcing her own martyrdom, predicting "I will be called names for writing this column," confidently stating that such taunts come from porn's "fanatical devotees," which suggests that more casual users will find nothing risible in her linkage of Zack and Miri Make a Porno to hardcore S&M websites. Her scientific explanation is that "pornography use breeds tolerance and the need for more intensity to get the desired result," which may be read as a convincing argument for increased participation in fetish sex to obviate the need for pornography. Alas, Charen goes another way, holding up Hugh Hefner as a poster boy for the Wages of Skin:

Hugh Hefner, the godfather of mainstream porn, apparently does not have normal sex with his many girlfriends. Despite the presence of up to seven comely young women in his bed at a time, he uses porn for sexual satisfaction. Think about that.

Maybe it owes to my constant, desensitizing exposure to culture-warnography, but I don't consider consider Hef an object of pity. Of course, I'm not as inclined as Charen is to believe a story clearly invented and spread by him to sell more copies of Playboy. As censors in any age could tell you, prudes are porn's best advance men.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the unlikely candidacy of Dr. Ben Carson and the likely coming end of it. It would be nice to say that Carson's campaign will founder because Republicans will come to their senses and realize he can never be elected, but it's more likely that the outrages he keeps emitting will become tiresome even to the hometeam crowd. Unlike the mighty Trump, Carson doesn't seem in control of what he says -- it just seems to leak out, like the stuff your poorly socialized uncle starts muttering after a few drinks, or a Jay Nordlinger column. Plus he doesn't bellow like Trump, which among the brethren is a sign of authority. And at the risk of being The Real Racist ^® I would also guess that when the brethren do fully consent to a black Presidential candidate, that person will be a practiced politician like Mia Love or Tim Scott -- in other words, someone more like Barack Obama and less like Professor Irwin Corey.

UPDATE. This is very funny, from The Hill:

Donald Trump says he was ready to go after Ben Carson for questioning his faith, but decided to hold back after his GOP primary rival apologized. 

“I was all set to go wild, now I can’t go wild,” Trump said on Fox News’s “MediaBuzz” on Sunday. “I’m actually saying, ‘I wish he had hit me.’ No, he’s very smart. I wish he had hit me.”

Trump knows it would be good business to keep Carson around awhile. His schtick might pale faster if he were the only overt lunatic in the field, but with Carson out there, Trump looks like part of a larger nutcake constituency, one he's better equipped than Carson to serve as spokesman. I don't think Trump will be able to prop Carson up much longer, though.

UPDATE 2. I predict this guy will run in 2020.

MY EYES... ZE GOGGLES DO NOTHING!

The election's not till tomorrow,  and one should never count one's chickens etc., but let's start early celebrating the reign of Mayor de Blasio just because it makes wingnuts so mad.

I want to focus a minute on their Big Bill's a Red thing, which they seem at one point to have thought would stop the juggernaut. Wall Street Journal:

Bill de Blasio Should Ask Me About the Sandinistas 

The New York mayoral candidate still fondly recalls a regime that I fled in terror for my life.

Yelling at di Blasio for "fondly recalling" the Sandinistas makes as much sense as yelling at someone for saying he liked The Motorcycle Diaries.

Twenty-five years is a long time, and people change. But on this subject, Mr. de Blasio has made clear that he has not.

Clearly! He's always demanding people call him El Caudillo and brandishing a machete.

Cliff Kincaid at Renew America:

The media whitewash Obama-backed Marxist candidate

...Incredibly, De Blasio says he still supports the Sandinistas and remains influenced by liberation theology, which was manufactured by the old KGB to dupe Christians into supporting Marxism.

Tell it to Pope Francis. National Review's resident pencil-neck Jay Nordlinger:

The man who will probably be our next mayor, Bill de Blasio, is almost a perfect leftist. He and his wife even honeymooned in the Castros’ Cuba. This reminded me of Pierre Trudeau, of whom it has been said, “It tells you everything that he honeymooned in the Soviet Union"...

Here is an uncomfortable question, liable to be damned as McCarthyite by those who don’t want to address it: If the likes of Trudeau and de Blasio were born under Communist dictatorship, what would they do in their adult lives?

Those of us over a certain age will recognize the tropes, including the "So how about that, Mr. Smarty-Pants Communist?" bit at the end that just assumes de Blasio's Communism (he's just like that Trudeau, you know), done with confidence that it'll get the citizens pulling their chins and going, "Say, 'de Blasio' does have sort of a Red sound to it!"  Ditto Deroy Murdock:

... the ad reinforces the fundamental mythology that fuels de Blasio’s campaign: The filthy rich refuse to pay what they should in taxes, and must be shaken down to benefit poorer New Yorkers, whom these dandies have stiffed.

It’s a truly touching narrative — worthy of Charles Dickens or perhaps Karl Marx.

We got rid of the Commies, and it's only a matter of time before we get rid of literature and empathy too. Then the conservative revolution will be complete!

But as de Blasio has racked up the points, even Kincaid has had to catch on that his red-baiting was getting him nowhere -- "But there's more to this story than Marxism, which most people think is a dead ideology that has no relevance today," he sighs -- and switch to the new attack line about di Blasio inviting hoodie-hood boys to bum rush the show and take your daughter to Plato's Retreat.

It looks like that's not working, either.

Quick, there's only a day left -- someone tie de Blasio to Obamacare!

UPDATE. I was kidding about Obamacare, but on Twitter Mike Di Paola informs me that the New York Post's Bob McManus actually went for it in August with "De Blasio's Big ObamaCare Problem." di Blasio had complained about the winnowing of New York's hospitals (e.g. St. Vincent's), and McManus informed him that it was his own fault, and Obama's, because

New federal, state and local laws and regulations — soon to include ObamaCare, with a vengeance — are vaporizing the financial incentives for unneeded and extended hospitalizations, for example. Hospitals are now sharply penalized for such practices. 

The changes have slashed patient populations — and so pushed many financially marginal institutions straight over the edge. (See above, Long Island College Hospital.)

Meanwhile, both the government and insurers have been heavily incentivizing “wellness initiatives” — quit-smoking and diet programs and so on — meant to dramatically cut hospitals out of the picture.

Trying to improve healthcare ruins everything! There are also some ravings about how di Blasio wants hospitals to stay open so he can funnel phoney-baloney jobs to his pals at SEIU, but really, it's just the typographic equivalent of someone throwing whatever rock, mudball, or candy wrapper he can find at a target he can't hit.

PREPARE FOR THE NEXT CULTURE WAR OUTRAGE! John Derbyshire's really feeling his oats today. Regarding the new Tosca at the Met:

I wasn't there myself, so I had to rely on the reviews . . . none of which told me the thing I most wanted to know: Did this trendy new production "play up" the torture scene? In the second act, the evil police chief, scheming to have his way with lovely Tosca, has her brought to his apartment. He arranges that Tosca's boyfriend, a political prisoner, is being tortured in an adjacent room, so that Tosca can hear his groans. Hard to see how a lefty producer could pass up the chance to highlight the "relevance" of that. None of the reviews made a point of it, though, so I don't know if the temptation was yielded to.

This is a set-up. It's impossible to believe that Derbyshire doesn't read the New York Post, which today reveals that "[director Luc] Bondy Bondy downplayed the glamour to evoke the horrors of torture as an interrogation technique." After a suitable pause Derbyshire will race back to the scene to demand an investigation of the National Endowment for the Arts' funding of the Met.

Jay Nordlinger must be on vacation.

CULTURE WAR IS TOO IMPORTANT TO LEAVE TO THE CULTURE WARRIORS.

I've mentioned before that Armond White had a good record as a legit if insane film critic before he joined  National Review. I suspect they hired him because he occasionally says mean things about liberals (either that or there's a reeeaally big Spielberg fan over there that I don't know about), but the readership seems not to be responding well to him. I think that's because White is not sort of doctrinaire doofus they usually go for  -- not like Jay Nordlinger, for example, and his "this is really a lovely scherzo in Beethoven's Ninth, it reminds me of how liberals love Castro" horseshit. White is on a mission, and unlike his colleagues he doesn't appear to have read it from a telegram from the High Command.

For example, while NR's Jesus freaks were all in spasms about The Giver, because it's supposed to be anti-abortion or something, White gave them "The Giver: Pseudo-Rebellion for Conservative Sheep." The comments to that one are lovely (sample: "I'm going to see it tonight. Cal Thomas recommended it and I value his opinion on any subject. This movie reviewer? Never heard of him").

Who knows what they'll make of White's last few efforts: First, he describes 2004 as "the year film culture broke" because it saw "the media’s lynch-mob excommunication of Mel Gibson and his film The Passion of the Christ, soon followed by the Cannes Film Festival’s ordination of Michael Moore’s anti–G. W. Bush documentary Fahrenheit 9/11." So far so compatible, but White works up a rich froth that might have even the regular punters backing away from the podium:

It was moral vandalism, sullying ideas and totems sacred to many. Such a fundamental offense devastated civilized behavior in ways many still have not realized. It drove a wedge between the public and the elites who make movies; the very ground we walked upon as enlightened, cultured people was scorched like Ground Zero at the World Trade Center... 

From 2004 on, even “entertainment” movies were made and received with deleterious political and moral bias.

This is loony and conspiratorial even by culture-warrior standards, but wait, there's more: Later White listed "20 signs of a broken film culture," a list of entartete kunst including some films I'll bet National Review readers like, including The Dark Knight ("used the Batman myth to undermine heroism, overturn social mores, and embrace anarchy"), Knocked Up ("Judd Apatow’s comedy of bad manners attacked maturity and propriety"), and Lincoln ("Spielberg succumbs to Tony Kushner’s limousine-liberal cynicism to valorize Obama-era political chicanery"). Comments to that one so far are also delightful ("How many times are they going to see the comments and realize we don't like him?").

There are all kinds of ways to look at this, but the big point for me is that people who are serious about the arts -- not serious about using the arts as a way to spread the usual dreary propaganda, but about the arts themselves -- are not just capable of surprising readers, but extremely likely to do so. And that's terrific. I hope National Review surprises me and hangs onto White so he can rave away like this on their dime. Who knows, maybe one or two of them will be improved by his example.

THE BARREL HAS NO BOTTOM. It's come to this: the geniuses at National Review are parsing the hell out of Obama's statements that allude to the perfectly plain-to-the-non-brain-damaged fact that a black Democratic Presidential candidate is unusual and may excite negative feelings among certain honkies [cue 'Dueling Banjos'].

Peter Kirsanow marvels that Obama "suggests that certain Americans are intrinsically racist, and those Americans aren't just confined to political opponents." Kirsanow is one of the very, very few people of color I have heard from who is offended by the very notion that white racism exists, which explains why Bush appointed him to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

As for the house honkies, they seem especially enraged by Obama's crack that he "doesn't look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills" -- again, to the mentally complete, an uncontroversial statement. Jay Nordlinger clears his throat, retucks his shirt, says "Um, there's actually only one president on the dollar bill," then retires to the locker room for his wedgie. Yeah, adds Jason Lee Steorts, and what about when Obama said, "Nobody thinks that Bush and McCain have a real answer to the challenges we face"? "Nobody thinks... Well, no; lots of people think Bush and McCain have some 'real' answers to some challenges, and lots of people think Barack Obama's answers to the same challenges are mistaken. There are millions of such people, in fact." Then he retires to the locker room, etc.

After a barrage of this crap, Obama surrenders to custom and sends a spokesperson to tell people it's not about race, and Amy Holmes becomes excited and analogical:

This reminds me of that game one plays with children where you cover your face with your hands and tease, "You can't see me! You can't see me!" They will giggle and shriek, "Yes, I can! You're right there!" Children love this game and will play for hours. Apparently, the Obama campaign believes we will, too.

Sometimes a metaphor is not immediately obvious because it is especially crafty, but much more often it is not obvious because it sucks as a metaphor. Besides, don't kids do rainbow parties instead of this shit anymore?

At this point "The Dollar Bill Statement" has become a full-blown scandal at National Review, and soon we may expect them to predict serious electoral repercussions. "Not content with mere insinuations of racism," says Kirsanow, "the Obama campaign publically signals their belief that we're galactically stupid." Wonder where they got that idea?

People say this campaign is especially exciting, and I have to agree. It's only July and already I fail to see how these people can get any more ridiculous. But I know they'll find a way!

UPDATE. Some Haloscan weirdness; comments appear to have been deleted; feel free to resubmit. I took advantage of the confusion to delete an italic tag and fix a typo.

ANNALS OF THE CULTURE WARS: A VERY SPECIAL JONAH GOLDBERG EDITION.

The Pantload on Downton Abbey:

I do wonder what the left, particularly the British left, thinks of the show. For starters, one of the chief villains is gay.

We can stop right there; you could make a parlor game out of guessing Goldberg's other insights ("the whole point of the show is to sympathize with the landed gentry," "the one fairly radical lefty in the show... remains something of a bore," etc). The thing that defies imagination is: What does he think is going on? Is he trying to using conservative hanky code to find if Abbey's producers would like to provide the entertainment on the next NR Sadcruise? Or is he laying the groundwork for the case that, when the history of early 21st Century conservatism is written, Julian Fellowes will be the Goldwater of the Kulturkampf? (After all, as Goldberg's colleague Jay Nordlinger noticed years ago, Fellowes once complimented America. Maybe he's a mole in the commie arts community, and can be recruited to make movies with Bill Whittle.)

Oh, one more thing, from the aesthetic part of Goldberg's episode review:

Indeed, the whole show felt bizarrely cut up, like they had to put it together at the last minute.

At last he's talking about something he understands. [Farrrt.]

SHORTER JAY NORDLINGER. I have forgotten, in my dotage, that conservatives are supposed to hate Nanny Bloomberg for hating guns, and judge him a superman who can and must immediately apprehend those beastly thieves who mugged an ABT ballerina. In Manhattan! I mean, it's not like it happened in one of those neighborhoods to one of those people.

UPDATED SHORTER: You folks still go for the cab driver bullshit, right? (The Anchoress: Yes!)

THE ETERNAL OOGA-BOOGA. Some time back, during the Donald Trump Presidential boom -- Remember that? Good times! -- I came across some nut who claimed to be a White House "Insider" who'd soured on Obama and was sneaking out to talk shit about him with a blogger.

At that time he was plumping the Trump campaign thus: "At first I thought it was something of a joke, but since then others have confirmed its legit - and considerable money is already being spent in preparation... I think this guy could win. He really could. And I would gladly work for this campaign."

Judging from his political savvy, he must be a very senior official indeed -- which is damning for Obama!

The Insider has resurfaced, and guess what? Now he's working the Ooga Booga angle.

To "lay out the psychological foundation of the son-of-a-bitch," The Insider tells us what a slob Obama is in his "upstairs office at the White House":

The big screen will be on – the volume loud. You can easily hear it from outside the door. The sports channels are the ones most commonly playing, though sometimes the channel will be set to music, or Fox News...

He often sits with one leg draped over one of the chair’s arms and the other leg stuck straight onto the floor. Shorts, sweats, a t-shirt, and like I said, no shoes or just those sandal things that so many of the younger people like to wear these days... And that desk, it’s a mess. Magazines spread out all over it. Stupid shit too. Real low brow reading material the president is into. People. Rolling Stone. Lots of those tabloid things.

Plus Obama has "like these long-fingered woman’s hands. And his wrists, you could wrap your own fingers all the way around those wrists – again, so much like a woman’s hands." Why, the Insider dreams about those hands.

You can see how a wingnut would be easily riled by this -- the woman-handed, shoeless pickaninny reading Rolling Stone and blasting hippity-hop in the House that Reagan Built! But that's just background for the real story: How Obama will use black riots to re-seize power.

Here's the come-on:

[Interviewer]: What do you mean by we – we are preparing for it? And are you actually saying that Barack Obama would push for race riots to somehow win a presidential election? That sounds…far fetched. Even for this administration.

Insider: Does it? How so? You need to take step back and see more of what has been happening in this country. It’s why this thing went from a concern about the party to a serious concern about the country. Why aren’t you seeing that?

After a bunch more Deep Throat bullshit, The Insider finally gives up a little more intel:

So will he stir up the race issue if it means guilting or scaring white voters to keep him in the White House? Hell yes he will. He’s been doing that shit his whole damn life! You wanna say so what to that? You wanna see this country torn apart by race because we have a president who sees it as a viable political tool?

Tell us, O Insider, how this guilt-or-scare will work!

The race card, the racial thing – whatever it’s gonna be called, it is the number one asset this administration believes it has to win in 2012. Their own polling data has shown that to be true over and over again. But how far are they willing to push that? Race. The charges of racism? I believe all the way if they have to. And they are gonna get people stirred up. And if Barack Obama doesn’t win re-election, watch them stand back while the riots break out, and watch them mouth the words “Burn baby burn.”

Oh no -- what a disappointment! Those of you over the age of 12 and with intact memories will recall that conservatives, some with actual names like Jay Nordlinger, were claiming that an Obama loss would lead to riots back in 2008. It's just wingnut SOP.

I was hoping the Insider, being Inside and all, would have smuggled documents out of the Black House that would tell us in which Popeye's Fried Chicken franchises the guns and ammo were being stored. Shoot, for all her passive-aggressive prevarication, even The Anchoress is more forthright about Obama's use of flash mobs to overthrow America.

But let's not give up hope. Maybe the Insider isn't telling all he knows. Maybe he's holding back. I bet he has a wife and kids -- and they know it. What is it, O Insider? Blink out the answer in Morse Code! Where is Valerie Jarrett drilling the troops? Will the Obama rioters try to trick us into flashing our headlights? Tell us, for God's sake -- the hour of Ooga Booga draws nigh!

UPDATE. Comments are all comedy gold, but special attention must be paid to whetstone, who sampled The Insider's dialogue ("Fuck no. Listen. And learn some goddamn history before you ask such a stupid question") and judged: "Wow, Mamet really did go off the deep end."

NO WAY TO GO THROUGH LIFE, SON. Jonah Goldberg says some guy says conservatives are obsessed with Elizabeth Warren.

Meh.

We could stop there; Goldberg isn't likely to make this argument any more convincing. Might be fun to watch him try, though.

But does anyone really believe that George Will(!) was challenged or threatened by Warren’s spiel?

George Will is the Most Interesting Man in The World.

That gets to my point: The reason conservatives responded to Warren’s “declaration” is simply that liberals were relentlessly hyping it. It didn’t become a YouTube sensation among conservatives. It became YouTube sensation among liberals who were inspired by it and then conservatives responded to that.

He's not obsessed, you're obsessed.

It’s an important distinction because to listen to liberals, Warren’s argument strikes fear into the heart of the right because it’s so powerful and super-terrific. It really doesn’t and it really isn’t.

Well that was elegant.

I’m sure Will wrote a column about it not to pay “enormous tribute” to her brilliant insight. Rather, it’s because liberals wouldn’t shut up about it.

Didn't you hear him? HE'S NOT OBSESSED YOU'RE OBSESSED!

In other words, the conservative response to Warren isn’t nearly as interesting as the liberal reaction.

And by "interesting" he means dur hur hur.

The real question is why is liberalism so arid and why are liberals so dejected that when a liberal politician offers a fairly trite exegesis on the social contract, leftwing bloggers stand up and cheer like it’s a St. Crispin’s Day speech?

The real question is why liberals are all jerks. Except he thinks he ought to fancy that up, so he gets a thesaurus, and calls Nordlinger to get the name of an awesome speech by whatshisname, the Hamlet guy, except not Hamlet because everyone knows that's Cuomo's dad.

I like to think Goldberg knows how stupid this is, but enjoys the fact that they have to let him get away with it. He has to have one admirable quality, at least.


UPDATE. Many alicublog commenters disagree that Goldberg has to have one admirable quality. Maybe the ability to appreciate absurdity isn't it -- I think Alanis Morissette would walk away from Goldberg muttering, "This guy doesn't understand irony at all" -- but there has to be something, if only because he's one of my favorite comic characters and I would like him to have the dimensionality of a Tartuffe or a Hank Kingsley. Maybe there's a little boy in Africa he writes letters to. ("Dear Mtumbo, how's it hanging?")

Spaghetti Lee reacts badly to "Meh." I understand; I've written about it before; it's the characteristic vocal tic of a specific type of suburban douchebag who thinks his unqualified, monosyllabic opinion on anything matters because you can't see his house from the road -- the bleat of the burgher who resents every moment the world isn't kissing his ass.  I must admit Goldberg uses it perfectly.

UPDATE 2. Also in comments, Duncan takes offense at my rough handling of Goldberg. I see what he means, but believe he misunderstands me. As I intimated earlier, I view Goldberg as a character and not as a live human being. And in this incarnation he delights me. What look like my gross physical insults to him are only good fun and even in a way (excluding his wretched politics and writing) not unkindly meant. I don't think of Goldberg as fat so much as appetitive; or if he is fat, he is fat like Falstaff, or stately, plump Buck Mulligan, or Junior Samples -- that is, he is outsize, expansive, suitable for State Fair exhibits, one of those giants with whom the world sometimes demands our awestruck attention. His Cheetos are to him as the bow to Orion, and his farts as the wound of Philoctetes, except worse-smelling. I am not insulting him -- I am immortalizing him.

BREAKING THE DETECTOR. Maybe it's the holiday season, but much of what I'm seeing on the internet today activates the flashing "BULLSHIT" sign in my head. This, from Jay Nordlinger at National Review, is three-alarm bullshit:

Some have said, “You just can’t find cards that say ‘Merry Christmas.’ It gets harder and harder.” I know. Kind of like trying to find products not made in China [senile ramblings]...

I gave up on the “Merry Christmas” front too, where cards are concerned. I just get a pretty card that says “Season’s Greetings” or “Whass Happenin’ on the Holidays?” or whatever. Life’s too short to hunt down “Merry Christmas.”

Bull fucking shit. I was just at a drugstore here in Harlem. There were plenty of goddamn Christmas cards. And this is in Manhattan, epicenter of liberal fascism -- in fact, the woman next to me at the card rack was devouring a fetus (as they do in Europe: out of a cone made from a newspaper, with mayonnaise), while on the sidewalk a bum was persecuting Christians with his mind-rays. Still had Christmas cards.

If you can't find Christmas cards in America, get a flashlight and a map and, while you're at it, look for your ass.

HELL HAS NO BOTTOM. As followers of this million-man rugby scrum called the blogsophere will recall, early this week Juan Cole made short work of Jonah Goldberg's ignorant assault upon him; you may read a good summary here. Instead of running so fast the hounds couldn't catch him down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, as tradition demands, Goldberg faulted Cole for "bullying," then took a "victory lap."

Even by the abysmal standards of online discourse, this seemed rather rich. Of course this is Goldberg, who is always blazing new trails of idiocy. But now Jay Nordlinger weighs in on the debate without referring to its contents at all -- merely invoking Cole, and telling tales of his old alma mater involving Palestinians, a fat liberal woman, and his own moral self-regard, as if these had anything to do with -- well, anything.

These guys get paid, right? Why? I know a bunch of unemployed guys who could discuss the political ramifications of last night's ER episode as trenchantly as they do.

Sometimes I really think I've been projected into an alternate universe where the Enlightment never happened.

A CULTURAL DISADVANTAGE. Speaking on Rush Limbaugh's idiotic comments about the Philly QB, Jay Nordlinger makes this interesting statement:

I’m reminded of something that I’ve discovered in recent years. I work in Conservativeland, and I’m used to speaking freely. I’m used to not having to abide by a speech code or any other restriction of political correctness. And then sometimes I leave Conservativeland, and continue to speak freely--and sincerely--and then find that I startle people. They’re not used to hearing it.

Well, that's right, we're not. The Mother of All Dittoheads goes out in front of millions of sports fans and says -- freely, certainly; sincerely, who knows -- that McNab hasn't been "that good from the get-go. I think what we've had here is a little social concern in the NFL. I think the media has been very desirous that a black quarterback do well." And those of us who are not convinced that a pro-Negro conspiracy, aided and abetted by the liberal media, has foisted an unskilled quarterback on the unwilling Eagles, are startled.

Meanwhile another Limbaugh, David, tells the world that liberals are "waging an undeclared war on Christianity." The book's cover is graced by a lion, apparently comparing the plight of American Christians to that of the biblical Daniel. Piquant as I find the thought that Ted Kennedy, the ACLU, and a handful of others have got the Prince of Peace and his millions of adherents on the ropes, I cannot take it seriously for a second -- even after no less keen an observer than Ann Coulter has told me that Limbaugh's book "makes you cry for your country" and "wonder how much longer America can survive liberalism." In fact, I cry with laughter, and wonder how anyone, in a land bejewelled with churches, and led by a President who talks about Jesus all the time, could believe such hooey.

I am equally mystified by the invitation by Ned Flanders (aka Rod Dreher) of the Dallas Morning News (registration required) to weep for conservative journalists. In the "overwhelmingly secular" atmosphere of newsrooms, Flanders tells the huddled, shivering conservative scribes, "you will have to distinguish yourself by the strength of your writing and reporting." Not like those liberal journalists, who merely have to commit sacrileges for their paychecks. (Flanders, by the way, preceded his Dallas stint with plum gigs at the New York Post and the National Review, so I'd say he's wearing his persecution remarkably well.)

You'd think that after all the time I've spent in Conservativeland, merrily mining such profound observations as the abovementioned for this site, that their free-thinking ways have not rubbed off on me. Yet, when I see an underperforming black professional athlete, I don't assume he is employed merely as a token; I remain unconvinced that Christians are about to be holocausted by the Democratic Party; and I marvel that an industry dominated by Fox News can be called unwelcoming of right-wing reporters.

Must be a cultural thing.