IN WHAT SHOULD BE THE NADIR...

...of the current wingnut skreefest over Obamacare, the legal expert who told Bush he could torture prisoners says Obama's insurance fix is unconstitutional. Can't someone just give Yoo a "screams of pain" relaxation tape and send him away, preferably to Den Haag?

That should be the low point, but this is the kind of situation in which the brethren are actually expected to earn their wingnut welfare with a higher order of bullshit, on the double! So they're more energized and, if such a thing can be imagined, less scrupulous. Here's today's brow-slapper from Megan McArdle:

Some of the left-wing commentators I’ve seen seem to be under the impression that health insurers make fabulous profits...

Whereas one quick look at tar-paper shacks that house these humble businesses will show they're merely scraping by.

And this just in -- Roger L. Simon demands Obama resign over Obamacare: The headline begins, I swear to God, "Was Benghazi Not Enough?" My question is: If incompetence is a reason to resign, why is Simon still running PJ Media?

CONSERVATIVE MINORITY OUTREACH CONTINUES.

Thanks to Jack Fowler at National Review for steering his readers to this amazing promo:

It reminds me of my first job in high school, cold-calling people from a crummy office in downtown Bridgeport to try and get them to attend a presentation about a Florida real estate development scam called Rotunda. (You can read how Rotunda played out here.) It was run by something called the Cavanaugh Corporation, which claimed as one of its partners Ed McMahon -- whose autographed photo we cold-callers offered as a premium.

Also, I never noticed before how much Allen West looks like Alfred E. Neuman.

If you have to watch one of the crazy videos, this is the one: West on Hollywood! After a few fish-out-of-water gags about coming to Los Angeles -- when someone offers him some sushi, he says "I don't eat bait" -- he gets right down to how liberals won't let you say what you really want to, and conservatives are "so afraid of the Hollywood backlash that they meet in secret," by which I guess he means no one goes to their parties except Roger L. Simon. "Is this the America that some of us fought for?" roars West. "Is this some type of new Soviet-style Politburo being formed? Regardless I find it utterly disgusting to think that many of us who fought for the freedoms of our nation so that now it seems a handful of individuals get to define who can and who cannot speak..." He's also mad that Hollyweird stars are against guns: "I doubt Jim Carrey will be invited to give the start command at any NASCAR race. [Pause for laugh.]"

This scam is brought to you by PJTV, who seem to have gotten the down-on-his-luck West the way William Grefe got Rita Hayworth.

BIG NIGHT AT THE LYCEUM.

Roger L. Simon gave a speech at some rightwing fish-fry in Washington state and decided to share it on his website. Next time, fellas, try and get Shecky Green:

All right, here are five words that should make you smile: You don’t live in California…. I would imagine that saves many of you ten thousand dollars a year or more right there. There’s something to be happy about. Speaking of which, since I live in L.A. but spend a lot of time in this state, I’ve always been perplexed why everything seems to work better up here… the roads are better, the services are better… but we pay the ridiculous amount of state income tax. I don’t have to tell this crowd — don’t ever go there.

Thank you, now I'll fuck off with my check back to L.A. while you stay up here and get rained on. Do even conservatives go for this "Like you, I hate the major media centers and that's why I spend all my time in them" bullshit anymore?

Most of the speech is about Simon's conversion. Yes, that again. "Hey, Lou, 'dja know I usedta be a liberal?" "Give it a rest, Roger." "No really, I even hung out with the Black Panthers." "We know, Roger." "Lou, you know something else? Richard Pryor never laughed at my jokes." "Alright, rummy, hit the bricks, let's go..."

At one point in the speech Simon is approached by a glamorous Soviet agent!

Later, on subsequent cultural exchanges to the Soviet Union in the eighties, I learned just how true as KGB agents followed us everywhere, including the bathroom. An attempt was even made, at hotel in Yalta, to draft me into Soviet intelligence by a female reporter from Soviet Screen magazine. Not only was I not tempted, I was terrified.

"You know Schwarzenegger, yes? You find out how he become big star with such big accent. Comes the revolution you can be commissar of Hollywood. Also of my ass. You like? I was gymnast."

(Only lately, have I begun to understand what it was they wanted. More of that in a moment).

Simon never follows up on this, at least in the transcript, which is really too bad ("Spielberg? A Red! Jack Nicholson? Red! Brian DePalma? Ooh, a big Red!").

His big finish:

Rather than boycott Hollywood, take it over – at least part of it. But do it well and professionally. Otherwise there’s no point. No one’s interested.

As one who was given by God, or my parents’ DNA or something, the ability to write dialogue and make up stories, I am going to be devoting more of my time to that in the future, putting some of the skills I learned as a liberal to work as a conservative...

And people like me need the support of people like you more than you know. After decades of pervasive liberal culture, we need an audience, financial support, and new means of distribution. That’s a whole infrastructure, if you think about it. And then there’s educational system and the media to think about…. Whoa…. No one ever said it was going to be easy. Thank you.

They left out the part where ushers went through the crowd with tin cups. Coming soon: PJDVD! Not only are the movies conservative, you don't have to rub elbows with the hoi polloi and maybe catch TB to watch 'em!

I like to think of this speech as Simon's "Garageland." The truth is only known by geezer types. (h/t Dan Coyle)

I LOST IT AT THE MOVIES.

Roger L. Simon, the Citizen Kane of Pajamas Media (if the Inquirer had quickly turned into a pennysaver), saw some Chinese people at a high-end outlet mall in Cabezon, California.  The Man Who Was Moses Wine is on the case:

A large number, possibly a majority, of the shoppers there are the privileged scions of the Communist Party. Their parents and grandparents are the ones who played along and did their best not to make waves, even cooperated, throughout the mass murders of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.

Now, they and their kids are reaping the harvest of their modern state capitalist system that still flies under the banner of communism, a false flag operation if ever there was one. Ironies abound, and those same ironies provide a snapshot of what constitutes “leftism” in our own culture.

Ironies indeed, except Simon seems not to have asked himself why the Chinese have all that money. Hint: They got a lot of it from us, and not all in the days of Comrade Obama, neither.

Anyway Simon is not really concerned with foreigners but with the domestic terrorists called liberals:

Leftism has devolved into a kind of scam run not only on others but also on the self. Leftists are brilliant at convincing themselves of their own altruism and then broadcasting it to the public, thus providing cover for the most conventionally greedy and selfish behaviors. We see that in our society all the time: the quondam Marxists of Hollywood, the media, and the academy blathering on about economic equality while living lives the Medici could not have dreamed of.

Son of a buck -- there's money in this? You bastards have been holding out on me! I've been writing for the Village Voice for years -- surely I have carloads of Moscow gold coming!

Relatively unbridled capitalism has always been the best way out of this, the best way to true social mobility, but our nomenklatura doesn’t want to admit this because it might threaten them and their perquisites. It would blow their cover.

I dunno -- the Crash of '08 gave pretty good cover all by itself to the idea of "unbridled capitalism" as a panacea.

I suspect those Chinese shoppers knew this better than anyone, having lived through a similar experience ratcheted up to the nth degree. Although I was too polite to do it, I wanted to question them. I would have loved to know what they say to each other in the privacy of their own homes, not that they would be likely to tell me.

Unfairly deprived of my communist lottery winnings as I have been, I would have paid cash money to see Simon grilling the "Chinese shoppers." You, chop chop! You mamasan and papasan, they wash the brains, yes? In my country this call irony! Obama, him big commie, yes? 

But there was something to learn from watching them. I felt like a detective and it made me think of Roman Polanski and Robert Towne’s Chinatown.

A detective who doesn't want to ask questions to which he doesn't already have the answers. But he's still got the fedora, and the hangdog grace of a lone wolf:

I also thought of myself, of the way I was when I was a leftist. Yes, I drove a Porsche then (a used one). And had a house in the Hollywood Hills. And ate at gourmet restaurants. And there were plenty like me. I was part of a class. I felt safe and protected for many years, though finally I just left it. I couldn’t stand the hypocrisy anymore. Or maybe I just lost the ability to convince myself of my own altruism.

You might imagine Simon is eating off a hot plate in a rooming house with his integrity to keep him warm. But he's still a player, in fact more of one than before: His last film, A Better Life, was well-reviewed by the pinkos he disdains as lying nomenklatura. But keep that under your hat -- if a fella's gonna keep his place in modern conservatism, he's got to hold onto his victim status.

Whatever the case, when it comes to the truth about leftism, it’s about the cover it gives. Or, as Bob Towne put it: “It’s Chinatown.”

Actually it's Hollywood; like modern conservatism, a land of dreams. Except people are buying what Hollywood sells.

WELL, YOU TRIED, PART II. Ace of Spades, whom we discovered trying to engage the "culture" yesterday, is still at it: He read an interview in the Washington Post with the Pajamas Media nut Roger Simon about Simon's new play, which tells the story of, get this, Walter Duranty. The interview is conducted by Jennifer Rubin, whom Ace normally derides as a RINO wet, but all is forgiven because Ace has his beret on and is trying to look at the arts  -- let's see, how did he put it -- "simply because they're interesting, without any direct or indirect implication on our politics." Which means of course --

[Simon] says it's neither conservative nor liberal, and I believe him, but there is hardly any question that no liberal would explore the question of what happens when a large group of people begin subverting the truth for political purposes. Well, they wouldn't explore this going on in a liberal institution. I'm sure they'd explore it in, say, the conservative movement. 

And that's part of the problem right there, isn't? Liberals style themselves truth-tellers and truth-seekers, but as we're seeing yesterday and today, they embargo truths that aren't helpful to the Great Patriotic Cause of Progressivism/Marxism.

-- it's still more argh blargh liberalz blocked mah big hit play.

Ace's attempt to break into the liberal arts by sitting sullenly in the corner of a Modern Drama class and drawing superheroes in his notebook is extremely disappointing to me. I don't know why, but I keep hoping against hope that he'll live up to his putative expectations of himself, and he never does.

I guess I'm just tired of all the rightwing gabble about "culture" being such stupid bullshit. In the Ace post previously treated, he referred to an old Rod Dreher whither-culture bleat that, expectedly, is worse than useless -- Dreher too seems to intuit that if you can't drop politics long enough to actually engage your imagination, you're not going to make any art, but he also seems to believe the acceptable alternative is endless pseudo-philosophical gassing along the lines of "conservatives have names like Lenny and liberals have names like Carl." (And if you are foolish enough to follow Dreher's links, I warn you, you will be punished by Dreher and Will Wilkinson talking about country music. You'll need about a half-hour of Uncle Dave Macon to wash that out of your head.)

I have a theory about why this is all coming up now. These guys recently lost something they'd been living on for years -- the illusion that they are America, all by themselves, with no bleeding-hearts allowed. It's an illusion we liberals learned to give up on long ago, of course. But it may be hard for conservatives to learn that most voters are okay with the man they're convinced is a Maoist Black Power Chicago thug -- or at least that voters like him better than them. In their dejection they wander the streets, and finally enter the libraries and music shops, pick up the books and instruments there, and, peering at them like curious apes, wonder: Maybe pretty thing faggots like am powerful? Maybe if Ace use them him feel good?

I think they're less interested in art than in art therapy.

OK, JUST A PEEK. Let's see what Hindrocket of Time's Blog of the Year 2004 is on about today:

IS OBAMA INTRODUCING NATIONAL SOCIALISM TO THE UNITED STATES?

In the immortal words of Curly, "Ngggnnyahh!"

Hinderaker, which I guess is what Hindrocket's calling himself these days, compares Obama to Lenin and Mussolini because 1.) They all had posters that showed them looking serious ("It is ironic that Mussolini looks downright modest compared to The One"); and 2.) wingnut email-from-Grandma fodder like "the Obama family costs U.S. taxpayers something like twenty times what the British Royal Family costs its subjects," which is so lame Doug Mataconis has debunked it.

I still think Romney has a good chance to win, so I don't see why these guys have descended so precipitously into madness -- oh wait, maybe that's the reason: They're anticipating the crushing disappointment of National Romneycare ("Better Than Obamacare, Because Not So Much Abortion!"), and for these guys that's like waiting for Cthulhu to eat them.

If that's not enough crazy for you, you can read Roger L. Simon's "We Live Under a Media Coup d’État." Apparently it all started with Adolph Ochs, or Woodward and Bernstein; whatever, now the Rule of Katie Couric is so oppressive that "this year the Republican Party allowed the coup plotters to control the debates, even those that determined their own nominee."  Maybe Simon and his like-minded souls will start a resistance movement, and call it "Bathrobe Media" or something. But will it sell?

WHY DO THEY HATE AMERICA? PART 2. Roger L. Simon:

Anyone who doubts the enduring power of the mainstream media need look no further than the rise in Romney’s unfavorables in a recent Pew Poll. Yes, this poll is likely skewed, but the percentages are too extreme to escape the conclusion that a large number of Americans do not find Mitt “Mr. Nice Guy.” (I met him and thought he was perfectly okay — but what do I know?) Obama, on the other hand, is still considered a swell fellow. 

All this although the economy has been a disaster throughout his presidency and, for the last year, probably more, he has seemed a petulant prig when confronted with the slightest criticism. Not an attractive trait. 

You would think under those conditions those poll numbers would be reversed and the election polls themselves would show Romney with a gigantic lead, but no. Like a nation of ostriches, huge portions of the American public have swallowed the media/Axelrod line that Mitt Romney is a rich self-interested capitalist out of touch with the masses, whoever they are and whatever that means(it doesn’t matter as long as they vote for Obama), hell-bent on robbing from the poor to give to the rich like a reverse Robin Hood. 

In other words, a large portion of the American public has effectively been brainwashed. And the brainwashers are the Democratic Party and the mainstream media. The former is quite understandable since political parties cling to power by virtually any means when threatened. But for the media it’s another matter. Why do these people persist in their views in a situation where, objectively, almost any corporation or business would have been looking for new leadership long ago? Why are they so destructive to our society and ultimately to themselves? Don’t they have children and grandchildren?

The punch line: I got this via Ole Perfesser Instapundit, who quoted the same passage. On the Right, whining is winning.

(The rest of Simon's tantrum is rich too, if you go for that sort of thing: The journalists who brainwashed America know Obama is bad, he says, but "they can never never admit it" because they're embarrassed; their shame is then "projected out in rage," which is demonstrated by Simon's description of their behavior in the theater of his skull:  "They behave as a shrill gang, banging metal drums like lost characters out of Gunter Grass, 'Romney bad and rich! Romney bad and rich! Romney bad and rich!'... If Obama wins, they will rejoice on election day. But they will shortly be throwing up.")

Speaking of projected rage, further down the Instapage:

MOE LANE: Why Obama Hates Romney On A “Visceral” Level. “It’s not that Mitt Romney was born rich, gave it away, and got rich again that infuriates Barack Obama so. It’s that Mitt Romney had a father who loved him. And that is a thought that fills me with a terrible pity towards Barack H. Obama, Jr.”

Perfesser, it's only August. So far you haven't lost anything except your mind.

(Part 1 here.)

SHORTER ROGER L. SIMON: Home? I have no home. Hunted, despised, Living like an animal! The jungle is my home. But I will show the world that I can be its master! I will perfect my own race of people. A race of conservative filmmakers which will conquer the world! Ha ha ha ha ha ha!

YOU KIDS GET ON MY LAWN! I see that Michael Gerson has a column about how Obama is the guy who really started the culture war. To Gerson, culture war is working out a way for non-observant employees of Catholic organizations to get birth control while Republicans try to keep it away from everyone, no matter who they work for.

But those of us who've been watching the war for decades know it's not about who Alinskied who, but really about wish fulfillment. Case in point -- Roger L. Simon:

Are Liberals the New Squares?

They've been working this angle since "South Park Conservatism," and it never gets over. And this one isn't going to break the streak:

I mean – do you think Deborah Wasserman-Schultz is hip? This is one of the meanest things I’ve ever put in print or online, but that’s the girl who was standing in the corner at the sixth grade cotillion and you said, “Oh, no. Do I have to dance with her?”

I can see a Simon reader asking "what's a cotillion?" and, after Simon's patient and dreamily nostalgic explanation, asking "Who's Deborah Wasserman-Schultz?"

But give Simon credit --  he seems to have figured out that selling Mitt Romney and Grover Norquist as hipsters is a losing proposition, so he comes up with ringers:

Of course, most can’t countenance this. They continue to believe that government spending is cool, that it is a good thing (how square is that?), but out of the corner of their ears they are beginning to hear a different song: 

Libertarians are the cool guys.

Alas, he never explains this; I like to imagine he was thinking this shot of the Potsie and Fonzie of Freedom would render all argument moot:

The libs don't know, but the Heartland Institute understands.

Surely no actually youngperson will go for this, so you have to wonder who Simon's audience is. The answer: Conservatives of a certain age who remember when the girls thought Alex P. Keaton was dreamy, Nancy Reagan had taste, and Poverty Sucked -- that is, when they were cool. They can't even pretend anymore, but they can sure sit around the klavern and tell each other how not cool the new jacks are. Which is kind of sad, because cool is something that it's only cool to obsess over when you're a kid. 


(I do hope Simon stays on this track, though, and tells us next week he's seen Girls and thinks Mamet's kid looks pretty now that she's stopped dressing like a tomboy.)

JESUS SWEPT. I see the brethren are claiming victory in the war on contraception. Let's use Kathryn J. Lopez as an example:

And when asked, “What about for religiously affiliated employers, such as a hospital or university? Do you think their health insurance plans for all employees should have to cover the full cost of birth control for their female employees, or should they be allowed to opt out of covering that based on religious or moral objections?” 57 percent responded “Allowed to opt out.” 

That is most definitely news. 

Americans, according to the New York Times’s own polling, support the positon of the Catholic bishops on the HHS mandate.

Except religious employers already have been allowed to opt out -- because the insurers will be paying for the birth control, not them. This may be what the poll respondents think the Times is talking about. The questions might have been more specific

What certainly isn't demonstrated by this response is that respondents buy the bishops' line, which is that if anyone pays for their employees' birth control, Christ and George Washington will be crucified one on top of one another (front to back, so it looks dirty).

You'd expect rightbloggers to grab the more self-flattering interpretation, but K-Lo, wrapped pretty tight even under the best of circumstances, may be taking it a little far:

Proponents of the HHS mandate would like everyone to believe that high gas prices explain all the drop in support for Obama. But considering the president has taken a lead in defense of his coercive mandate, it’s mistaken to pretend his war on religious liberty isn’t part of his public-opinion wounds.

That's the America I remember from English dystopian fiction -- forget the economy, stupid, it's the war on religious liberty! Lopez seems to expect a holy-roller revolution to come charging over the hill, crying "Freedom of religion, not freedom of worship!" Just another reason to hope the Republicans nominate Santorum -- if they did, Lopez would probably bust out in stigmata, and start pimping a JESUS 4 VP campaign.

UPDATE. Also feelin' the surge: Old Perfesser Instapundit, who smells victory in a bunch of readers who tell him they've cancelled HBO over Game Change. No, I'm not kidding. This is the break PJTV has been waiting for! Quick, get Roger L. Simon to slap together that movie version of The Inferior Five the world has been waiting for. Jonah Goldberg was born to play Herman Cramer.

UPDATE 2. Commenter/comics dork John E. Williams is on the case:

I see there's a role for Dana Loesch. Think of the merchandising opportunities! 

UPDATE 3. They're still at it -- here's James Taranto's women-reject-contraceptives-and-Obama variation. They really seem to believe this, which may explain why their compatriots in the legislatures are pulling increasingly crazy anti-birth-control shit --

Arizona legislators have advanced an unprecedented bill that would require women who wish to have their contraception covered by their health insurance plans to prove to their employers that they are taking it to treat medical conditions. The bill also makes it easier for Arizona employers to fire a woman for using birth control to prevent pregnancy despite the employer's moral objection.

If they think this approach is such a winner, Santorum should abandon his recent quietism on the issue and begin all his campaign appearances with a pledge to overturn Griswold v. Connecticut. That should turn the tide in his favor soon enough, and give those of us who aren't insane time to get our passports renewed.

R.I.P. KEN RUSSELL. I can't leave his death unmentioned. A lot of people couldn't stand him -- John Simon, perhaps most prominently; on the subject of Russell, Simon was like an evangelist on Satan; after viewing a stage production Russell mounted of Madame Butterfly, which apparently ended with a sea of neon American corporate logos blotting out the Japanese landscape, Simon ended his review, "Russell should be forcibly restrained."

Well, it's been years since Russell's heyday, and we've had since then many lurid spectacles, but nothing like his. Compare Baz Luhrmann 's Moulin Rouge with, oh, I don't know, Lisztomania. While Jim Broadbent singing "Like a Virgin" is, I grant you, in admirably bad taste, it's nothing compared to Richard Wagner as Frankenstein Hitler, Rick Wakeman as Thor, or Roger Daltrey as someone who could possibly compose a symphony.

I think the difference is that Russell was a more serious filmmaker, in the way we used to understand filmmakers to be serious. Luhrmann's film, for all its frenzy, is a depressingly calculated gesture -- sure, Belle Epoque, American Pop, that's like chocolate-covered caviar, they'll eat it up. When Russell tickled the crowd, it wasn't because he was pandering -- he actually seemed to think Ann Margret straddling a phallic pillow while covered in baked beans made a great statement, and if it was only the stoners who swooned, well, so much the better for the stoners. It just happened that Russell's rise coincided with a baroque period in popular film, and so there was nothing to stop him -- certainly he wasn't going to stop himself. I can see how the idea occurred to John Simon.

If you want to see him in a slightly lower gear, try the early biographies he made for British television of Dante Rossetti, Isadora Duncan, et alia. I understand some of his late films are interesting, but I'm not familiar with those; maybe some of my readers can speak up for them.

FEAR OF A GAY PLANET. Just thought I'd follow up on those rightbloggers who, I noticed in my Voice column, had previously remained tight-lipped about the New York gay marriage vote. RedState finally hosted Some Guy to try a Big Gummint spin. "Gay-rights activists are surely pleased with the new law," allowed Some Guy, "but they should ask themselves what they really want from this issue and whether the government can ever deliver." True, these activists seem pretty damned pleased about it now, but they may not have heard Some Guy's tightly reasoned argument.

Anyone can hold a marriage ceremony anywhere. Anyone can wear a ring. Anyone can cohabitate and raise children. The laws surrounding the transfer of wealth apply to less than 1% of taxpayers. Anybody can already visit Vermont for some syrup and a gay marriage. Very few lives will change in a practical way with the NY’s new law. Why the gay-rights obsession with government sanctioned marriage? Acceptance is the real gay-rights goal.

Those homosexuals whose ears lifted at this and who cried "O no, they're on to us!" will surely be affected by Some Guy's follow-up:

Gay-rights activists are sure to be sorely disappointed to learn that nobody’s opinion of gay marriage will change simply because NY now allows them to fill out a standard form. Gay marriage is a symbolic blast of hot air.

Hear that, faggots? Our fingers are in our ears, we're not listening, la la la.

Traditionalists will not change their beliefs. Life will go on, apart from a handful of politicians like Pres. Obama who in 2008 said “I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman. Now, for me as a Christian — for me as a Christian — it is also a sacred union.”

Bwa ha ha! Where's your Obama now, gaysocialists? Finally Some Guy turns his rhetoric to whatever non-gay readers RedState might have:

Those who oppose gay marriage can only blame themselves for entrusting their institution with the government. The government twists in the political winds, and can only be relied on to disappoint. Most people now know that entrusting their retirement and healthcare to the government was a mistake. Entrusting marriage to the government is a similar roll of the dice.

The government should not endorse gay marriage; the government should get out of the marriage business altogether. Most of all, nobody should look to the government for validation of his life or defense of his religion. The governments of the US are corrupt, capricious, and are the biggest threat to the nation’s survival. Why should anyone expect such bodies to arbitrate morals?

This is lovely, as it conflates homo-hatred with libertarianism: Big Gummint can't protect us from universal health care, how can it protect us from the gay menace? Best to take down Moloch and have gay-free churches like grandpappy intended. But keep your Big Gummint hands of our Big Gummint subsidies!

Speaking of BG, Andrew Breitbart's Big Government finally ran a related story: "NYC ‘Pride’ Parade Turns Into Celebration of Gay Marriage." This was entirely cribbed from an AP story, but the commenters provided some pleasure. "They have until January of 2013 to live it up," muttered one cowboy, "then the Nation comes back to being the United States of America, with an American President, a Nation which includes New York State." So much for the federalist laboratories of democracy! From another, whom I am not entirely sure isn't kidding:

It's time to stop the perversion of the language. 'Gay Pride is an oxymoron, if homosexuals are proud, let them keep the word and not co-opt and redefine another word. I'm taking the word 'gay' back. 'Gay apparel' is a colorful Christmas sweater or blouse, not a leisure suit with a change pocket.

Not bad, but I prefer the Homer Simpson version:



Many other top rightbloggers remain silent on the issue. Michelle Malkin can't be arsed, nor can Gateway Pundit, Roger L. Simon, Jeff Godlstein, Ed Driscoll, Dean Esmay, and even the mean fake nun The Anchoress, among many other top-tier lunatics. If I didn't know them better I'd say they might be embarrassed, but I do, and assume they're merely waiting for the day when they can either claim credit for gay marriage or lead torch-bearing mobs against homosexuals, depending on the breaks.

For shits and giggles (mostly shits) let's close with one of those low-end vendors who had nothing to lose and so were happy to extemporize on the subject, Francis W. Porretto. After explaining the biological basis of No Gay Marriage in his inimitable, Looka-me-I'm-Chesterton-after-a-brain-injury style -- "Women, therefore, are vulnerable before the male sex drive. They have their own sex drive, of course, and are legally 'protected' against rape in all civilized nations" -- Porretto delivers the saddest-ever defense of het marriage in an age of abundant divorce:

Most spouses remain faithful to one another while the marriage lasts.

Eventually he gets around to yelling at gay people, more in concern-trollery than in anger: While declaring that the "great majority" of same-sexers "are just as decent as the great majority of heterosexuals" ("for the sake of argument," that is, not really), Porretto asks:

• Given that the correlations among same-sex marriage, declining fertility rates, and single-parent families are so strong, and that the obvious path forward is to research the matter for its causal interstices, why are homosexuals so determined to prevent even the discussion thereof?
  
  
• If there is a causal link, such that the legalization of same-sex marriage does lead to various social pathologies and accelerating social decline, what benefits do homosexuals expect to reap from it that are:
  
  • Currently unavailable to them; and:
    
  • Great enough to justify inflicting that much damage on American society?

Or, to put it another way, when did you stop beating your same-sex so-called "wife," and Western Civilization? Look at it this way: He's just saying what rightbloggers are all thinking, but are too career-minded to say out loud.

UPDATE. Thank you commenter Keith: "Gay Panic no longer holds any water since they've been screeching about it for more than a decade and the worst thing to happen is that it's become socially exceptable for men to use hair gel."

THE REDEEMED CAPTIVE. Last week, while he was hard on Weiner Watch, I asked Lee Stranahan on Twitter what he meant when he said he was a liberal. After all, these days when he's not parsing penis pictures he mainly works on Breitbart's Pigford/Shirley Sherrod jihad. He got pissy:



But now, because of Weinergate he is, as they say, outraged at Chappaquiddick:



I teased him about that, got this response:


Before someone starts yelling about Marching in Lockstep and Thought Police, let me say that I'm in no position to enforce anyone's orthodoxy, and am somewhat unorthodox myself. But Stranahan's behavior would baffle any neutral observer. He's in favor of all those liberal things, but because Anthony Weiner got caught sexting, Stranahan doesn't want to be a liberal anymore (except for purposes of market differentiation)? Also, he works with Breitbart, who repeatedly describes liberalism as a near equivalent to Satanism; does Stranahan think that after he's helped Breitbart take down some more liberals with penis pics, Breitbart will help him get Single Payer?

But there's really no point in asking these questions. This kind of redemption narrative works fairly reliably. Take a walk down memory lane to see this 2003 summoning of the pro-Bush liberals (scroll down to July 22) -- Michael Totten, Roger L. Simon, Gerard Van Der Leun [!], et alia. With a few exceptions, none of these guys are even pretending anymore. And I will tell you right now that the chances that we'll see Stranahan working to take down opponents of gay marriage the way he's worked to take down Weiner are very, very thin.

I guess there's a call for this sort of thing. Some people think it's great that David Brock was a big wingnut before his conversion, and some even trust Andrew Sullivan's mood-swing toward the left. Maybe such people see converts as living testimony to the power of their cause. But this is America, and these are operatives; maybe they're not responding so much to the tug of conscience as to a market opportunity.

DRAMA QUEEN. Lionel Chetwynd, a rightwing Hollywood martyr known mainly these days for his videos with Roger L. Simon, has written an indignant Letter of Resignation from some group you never heard of (the Steering Committee of The Caucus for Producers, Writers & Directors) to protest the anti-conservative bigotry of some guy you never heard of (Vin Di Bona), which he learned about from Ben Shapiro's book about how Sesame Street is trying to turn our children into socialists.

Whatever normal people may think of this slap-fight, Chetwynd takes it very, very seriously:

Shame on all of them. Their sickness is an infection that belongs in Europe of the 1930s.

It's like a beer-hall putsch, only with cocaine.

This is a time of inflamed political confrontation, evoking Bleeding Kansas of the 1850’s or even the Civil War itself.

In this reading, Chetwynd is Topsy and Obama is Simon Legree.

I realize, now, the enormous special obstacles put in my path by my supposed colleagues, obstacles that over the years made earning a living or a quiet pursuit of my trade so unusually onerous, were not a matter of political difference; they were a declaration of my unworthiness to be one of them. The rejection was not of my ideas, but of my person.

Now that I can believe.

Next up: How the failure of Hollyweird liberals to cast Kelsey Grammer as Batman is Birkenau all over again. (h/t Dan Coyle)

TEAM PLAYERS. "Lionel and I censored ourselves in the interest of the greater good, " laughs Roger L. Simon of himself and PJTV colleague Lionel Chetwynd, "because we did a show about Atlas Shrugged, which we're gonna do today, but we didn't want to hurt the film because we're good team players so we decided to hold off." But now that the movie has "tanked," they're free to tell us it stinks.

Their fellow conservatives denounce this politicization of the critical process. Accuracy in Media finds it "noteworthy" that these critics "would ignore this particular movie while reviewing scores of others arguably less relevant to today’s current events." The New York Post's Lou Lumenick quotes a commentator who finds their failure to file "even more deplorable than that taken by the distributing company to withhold an invitation to its opening for reasons of editorial politics, operating policy or anything else." "Too bad the movie's already been out for two weeks," scoffs Ray Gustini of The Atlantic Wire.

Oh, whoops, sorry, they're talking about the New York Times. But I don't know why they're so upset that the Times hasn't reviewed the film. Haven't bloggers rendered the Lamestream Media irrelevant?

R.I.P. KENNETH MARS. Attention must be paid.



He was lovely in Young Frankenstein, nastily impersonated the critic John Simon in What's Up, Doc?, and did a lot of TV, most of which I missed (though I have misty memories of him on He & She). But to me he will forever be Franz Liebkind.

In a way he had the most difficult job in the movie -- making an unrepentant Nazi funny -- but like all the other major players in The Producers, by going absolutely balls-out with his performance he achieved escape velocity. Roger Ebert recalls that one time Mel Brooks, chided by a woman for having created this "vulgar" film, answered, "Lady, it rose below vulgarity." That's what Mars did, too, turning the previously scary idea of the Hitler holdout dwelling amongst us into a ripe vaudeville joke: all tantrums, cowardice, sentimentality, and (best of all) absurd dignity ("Gentlemen, it iss magic time").

And timing. Never, ever forget timing. And lazzi. Check the nose wipe during the Churchill rant.

This is not to claim that the movie or Mars' performance did anything uplifting, but to note that they were in the very, very best of bad taste. And, in the words of the ad campaign for another old movie, boy, do we need it now.

WINGNUTS OCCUPY THE OSCARS! (PART I) The Oscar nominations are out, and so are the rightwing Zhdanovites. Roger L. Simon:

“The King’s Speech” – a conservative movie – leads Oscar nominations

“The King’s Speech” – an unabashedly pro-royalty, anti-fascist film – has received the most Oscar nominations (12) for this year’s Academy Awards. Does this mean that the normally liberal Academy has had a political conversation to the Dark Side? No. It shows that good filmmaking can sometimes trump ideology.

I guess he thinks a liberal film, conversely, would be anti-royalty and pro-fascist. (Like what? The Patriot?) Here's the saddest bit:

But it may reveal more than that. Movie business liberalism is only skin deep. It is all very much a show for self-aggrandizement. Deep down, they respond like the rest of us. They just won’t admit it. Unless the movie’s as good as “The King’s Speech.”

So Hollyweird liberals aren't even really liberal -- they're just pretending to be, out of pridefulness; but their sham is exposed by the magic of the movies, as seen through the kaleidoscopic chemical cascades in the brain of Roger L. Simon. Hollywood ending!

I'm surprised to see that other conservatives have also rushed to claim The King's Speech. (Conservative Lesbian, for example, headlines her review "Traditional Values Take Center Stage." She should share her idea of traditional values with the House GOP leadership.)

I saw and reviewed The King's Speech, which I enjoyed despite some risible bits. And I must say, if you wanted to stick politics onto it, you could just as easily take this one the other way.

To begin with, isn't the whole preoccupation with a speech impediment anti-conservative? It's the sort of therapeutic subject liberals allegedly love -- an affliction other people neither share nor understand, leaving the sufferer isolated and moody until he is "healed" and brought into the sunshine of a supportive community. If that doesn't sound like a pitch for one of Michelle Obama's fascist fat camps, I don't know what does.

In the course of the movie we are sensitized to (or, to use the nomenclature, blessed with "awareness" of) the problem. Thus we learn to care about yet another type of victim, just as we learned from other movies and TV shows to care about victims of autism, Tourette's, brain damage, depression, etc. Isn't looking at people as victims what liberalism is supposed to be all about?

Even worse, the film has excited yet another special interest constituency -- stammerers have glommed onto the movie as a fund- and awareness-raising tool. Why, next there'll be a fucking ribbon for it. Then it'll be classified a disability, and the speech-impeded will get their own set-aside information and customer service desks where they can stutter and stammer to their hearts' content without people yelling for them to get on with it.

Admittedly the King overcomes his problem eventually, but look how he does it! He actually goes slinking off for help for his problem! Fancy a Live Free or Die Tea Partier going off to a therapist -- with taxpayer money, yet! Why, a real rough, tough conservative King would just beat up any subjects who dared be unimpressed with him. (Maybe that'd be the Schwarzenegger version: "S-s-s-s-metimes ze v-v-v-v-v-vords f-f-ail-me [Head butt].") His tutor turns out to be an actor -- you know what they are -- who refuses to call him Your Highness and talks to him about his feelings and his childhood. The therapist even encourages him to yell and swear as if he were in a Primal Box. By God, it's a wonder the King didn't wind up gay and soaking in hot tubs at Esalen. They call this conservative? It's just Rain Man with royals.

Plus their beloved Winston Churchill is presented as yet another Timothy Spall grotesque.

Okay, now I'm warmed up for the conservatives who say The Social Network is about the magic of entrepreneurism.

THE MAGIC OF THE MOVIES. "America has had a big change! We've had a big election -- how will it effect Hollywood? Will there be a big change?" You people owe me big time for actually watching Roger L. Simon and Lionel Chetwynd discussing this in a PJTV video so I could transmit their message in a less unpleasant format.

Simon suggests that, in the wake of the election, conservative screenwriter Chetwynd should now be running a movie studio. This appears to be a joke, but Chetwynd responds, "Though there's a logic. In a logical world -- one would think that, you know, they famously once said that even the Supreme Court reads the polls, that the people in Hollywood who do control Hollywood and control half of our destinies and the films we see would look at what's going on in this country and would say, you know what, maybe it's time to perhaps spread our net towards the right of center and those people…"

…instead of producing Communist propaganda like Faster, Saw 3-D, and Megamind.

Chetwynd then attacks Danny Boyle, who made a quick crack at an opening about the Tea Party, as "an Irishman" who only knows "four blocks of Manhattan and a couple restaurants in West L.A., making statements about America, completely secure that the audience would embrace him, and in fact Variety reported it approvingly as far as I can tell. They don't change!" Expect Boyle's treatment of his own comment to be produced by a consortium of Hollyweird types and rejected by the American people.

Then there's a a loving remembrance of Sam Goldwyn and those guys, who are compared favorably by Chetwynd to traitors like Steven Spielberg, who "belong to the great artistique community in the clouds," which is why nobody goes to Spielberg movies. But Simon reasons that even the Spielbergs will be affected by what he considers the "potentially revolutionary election for the entertainment industry," which will motivate filmmakers to finally get The Joe McCarthy Nobody Knew on the Silver Screen.

Chetwynd is willing to be somewhat optimistic, only because he sees a lot of "hedge fund money" (apparently a new development) coming in from "politically committed" backers for alternative entertainments, and these worthies will steal the lunch of modern moguls who "disdain what the American electorate has done" and are as bad as the pictures of Janeane Garofalo, Keith Olbermann, and Bill Maher they then show to reignite viewers' righteous indignation.

Simon wants us to know that cultural revolutions take time, but he and Chetwynd assure us they'll be keeping track. Subscription button at right!

If you haven't had enough of this sort of thing, their colleague Bill Whittle is still offering Declaration Entertainment, where the scripts are developed by You, the Citizen Producer! So far they've given us only videos performed by Whittle himself, like What We Believe, Part 5: Gun Rights ("The philosophical substrata for gun ownership is something most gun owners understand in their bones," he says, "they don't need to be told anything I'm about to tell you," which you have to admit is a hell of a come-on), but like the guys said, these things take time.

OBLIVIOUS. Politico ran a surprisingly sarcastic -- dare one say, even satirical -- post called "Obama, the one-term president." After an intro echoing the usual bullshit about Obama's mishandling of the mosque situation ("I am not saying Obama is not smart... I am just saying he does not understand what savvy first-term presidents need to understand..."), Roger "Not the Insane One" Simon's article goes on to say that Obama was, like Lincoln and Eisenhower before him, a fool to put principle before popular prejudice:

You can go back to the mid-1800s and find a lot of legislators saying that Abraham Lincoln should stop lecturing people about ending slavery and listen to them about keeping it.

And there were plenty of lawmakers who said President Dwight D. Eisenhower was “disconnected from the mainstream of America” when he ordered the 101st Airborne Division to go down to Little Rock, Ark., to make sure some black kids could go to school with white kids.

Both decisions may have been “off-message,” which is about the worst sin you can commit in Washington.

...what’s the point of doing the right thing if your party is going to lose seats because of it?

Maybe Obama is disconnected. After all, as a former professor of constitutional law, he actually knows what the Constitution says.

His opponents have no such fetters. They know what they want the Constitution to say: yes to guns, no to gay marriage and never to mosques close to hallowed ground, though churches and synagogues are OK.

What’s so wrong with that? I’ll bet they poll great.

Ole Perfesser Instapundit linked to it. Guess what he thinks/wants his yahoo readers to think it's about?

UPDATE: Reader Troy Lovell writes: “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I have been wondering for quite a while about that. The only evidence for Obama being smart is that everybody says so. But don’t smart people usually reveal themselves by knowing lots of stuff or making smart decisions?..."


It’s the Peter Principle on steroids, I think.

He's not the only one. Scared Monkeys even goes so far as to quote part of the punchline ("when it comes to doing what is right versus doing what is expedient, you do what is expedient so that you can get reelected and do what is right in the second term"), and his takeaway is still "Is Barack Obama a one term President? That is the questions asked and answered at the Politico … the answer is YES!"

Dave Weigel says, "Sometimes, it becomes clear that people are linking to what you write without actually reading it." While it's possible that these people don't read what they're yelling about, I think it's more likely that they're purposefully misrepresenting it. Oafs feeding the fires of bigotry don't scruple over the fuel.

FUTURE SCHLOCK. For years most of my own work has been online, and the subject by which most of my readers know me has been the blogosphere. I know as well as the rest of you that online is not only the present, but also The Future, because it is tirelessly presented as such by people like Jeff Jarvis on websites and in well-compensated speeches.

I've always been annoyed by that kind of talk, and most of the time if you ask me why I'll say it's because I'm a miserable old curmudgeon who likes newsprint and daguerreotypes and LPs, and for whom everything has to be old and in black and white. But that isn't wholly true, as this Reason article by up-and-coming libertarian Katherine Mangu-Ward and some interns reminds me.

The article is a kind of guide to online stuff, a popular favorite -- why, I've done that sort of thing myself, pimping mostly small local blogs of diverse agenda.

But the premise here is that these Randian super-genii will instruct you in "kicking your dead tree habit." No, there's no Kindle promo tie-in -- the object of ridicule here is not longform dead tree, but newspapers. The intro is all ha-ha-stupid-foolscap-people:

Newspaper. Personally, I never touch the stuff. But rumor has it there is a certain amount of distress about the impending doom of the news-on-dead-tree industry...

We assumed for the sake of the experiment that The New York Times would be the last to go. Since I refuse to sully my delicate hands with filthy newsprint, Jesse and Robby paged through Wednesday’s edition in search of facts and insights that would need replacing in the event that print news goes kaput.

Though I don't know much about mockery myself, the tone seems a little forced to me -- as if KMW were not trying to summon a new audience of strangers not yet educated to the superiority of the internet, but instead trying to stroke and signal the usual true believers, who are always up for a round of ragging on paper-pushers.

It reminds me of the preemptive gloating of folks like Roger L. Simon, who tells his readers all the time that the MSM is a dinosaur, dying, on the ropes, in extremis, etc. (We're still waiting for the body to fall, but never mind.) For years this has been one of the key tropes of the rightwing online community -- which came out of the rightwing offline community's contempt for the offline equivalent, the impudent snobs of the lying liberal media, usually short-handed as the New York Times.

The Times, it just so happens, is mentioned several times in Mangu-Ward's article, mostly derisively ("New York real estate obsessives have long since left the Times behind... the Times tech reviewer, appropriately enough, senses his own irrelevance...").

Mangu-Ward does give the online edition a left-handed head-pat at the end, though. Clearly the Times and whatever it represents will be part of The Future -- just not so big a part. If years of yap have yet to completely displace the Times, they have opened up some space for an alterna-press which, like alt and indie vendors since time immemorial, not only hopes but asserts that it's The Future, your future. And they mean it, man!

In reality, when the smoke clears you are likely to find that the main effect of such a revolution has been to transfer some power -- not so much to you, though, as to those who have positioned themselves to profit from revolutionary sentiment. Here's who Mangu-Ward recommends for opinion journalism:

As for the Opinion pages, Reason should meet your needs there. But if you must, it could be supplemented with the columns aggregated at RealClearPolitics, or you could enjoy a firehose of opinion at Huffington Post or Daily Kos. Want to come back over and over to a name you trust? Hit up brand name bloggers like Glenn Reynolds, Matt Yglesias, Megan McArdle, and more.

Glenn Reynolds, Matt Yglesias, Megan McArdle! That's some groovy revolution right there.

That's the real reason this stuff bugs me. It's not that I like the Times and newsprint so much. I don't, really. And I like the internet fine. But I've also seen some come-ons in my time, and The Future is one that never gets old.