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.

BECOMING AN UNPERSON. Back in the days when warbloggers were praising veteran New York Times reporter John F. Burns for his clear-eyed Iraq coverage ("GIVE BURNS A PULITZER," quoth Andrew Sullivan), Roger L. Simon did his part: "...those of you who haven't read the Burns interview (Editor & Publisher, 9/15/03), hurry and do so," Simon breathlessly breathed in September 2003. "It makes you believe in the possibilities of journalism again."

But Burns, alas for this lot, has been expressing reservations about our postwar conduct of the Iraq adventure, and Good Solider Simon has taken up the new official line on him:

On my last day of a great New York vacation I am even able to laugh at the fusty local paper the NYT which is still, incredibly after the election, living in 1972. (If you're going to be nostalgic, at least give us Paris in the Twenties.) This morning they are sporting an orange "Apocalypse Now"-style photo of what could be the Mekong River (wink, wink -- we know it's the Euphrates) with the same writer, John F. Burns, flogging the same story he has for two years now, to wit Iraq could be the next Vietnam. (I know - you're shocked). And it's not even a Sunday. This kind of none-news usually fits better with bagel and cream cheese. Burns, once justifiably regarded as one of our better war correspondents, seems to be suffering from "Burns out," feeding his audience what they want to hear.

Everything about this loathsome passage smacks of the Soviet -- from the I laugh at anti-imperialist stooge Burns! opening, to the characterization of the story as "non(e)-news" (i.e., a story that is off-message and hence memory-hole fodder), to the assertion that Burns is "feeding his audience what they want to hear" -- a tawdry, cautionary end for someone who once filled Hat Boy with wonder at the possibilities of journalism (something Simon has visibly gotten over).

PLUMB CRAZY. The other day Joe The Plumber said, in so many words, that the media should not be allowed to cover wars, and was mocked for it. This calls for some first class spin. So The Plumber's handler, Roger L. Simon, reached out to JD Johannes, the normally reliable operative at Outside the Wire, who had expressed some annoyance at The Plumber's statement. "Evidently I've stirred a few things up," Johannes began his apology, and graciously updated his post.

Johannes says, "Roger gave me the back story," which was that The Plumber was mad, as any regular Joe would be if he were, like The Plumber, shipped off to Israel and put in proximity to people who made their living covering foreign wars. "An observer who is unfamiliar with the media battlespace would probably throw up his arms and say screw this, none of you should be here." You good people may not imagine you would react similarly when introduced to professionals in a field with which you were unfamiliar, but that just proves you're traitors. The Ole Perfesser pimps: "It seems that Joe’s remarks on war embeds were generally misunderstood," adding parenthetically, "Had said 'misreported' originally, but that wasn’t really right," a grudging acknowledgment that his client had been condemned out of his own mouth, and as if that had ever stopped the Perfesser before.

Later Simon and The Plumber made a YouTube for their many followers who can't read. The Plumber explained, "I came over here to talk to average Joes," and said that he was only talking about "the bad media, who seem to be agenda-driven," then explained who that was: "If you're gonna cover the war, cover it, don't sit there and just keep on talking 'the death toll, the death toll,' you know, 'Israel won't let us in there to cover it...'" So if you're one of those reporters who are interested in how many people died in a battle, or are inclined to let readers and viewers know that a country has blacked out your coverage, Joe isn't apologizing to you. "Let's hope you can be more objective than Reuters and AP when they publish those Hezbollah-doctored photos in the past," adds Simon, in case his auditors have forgotten why they were listening to a plumber talk about the war in Gaza. (The Ole Perfesser agrees: Rick Sanchez is arrogant!)

In case the pretense of reasonableness has not swayed some of the punters, Bill Whittle charges in with the shouters' edition. First he reiterates to the hometown crowd that The Plumber was not talking about two-fisted characters such as themselves: "I cannot imagine for an instant that Joe was referring to common citizens like J.D., Mike Yon, and Mike Totten who -- like me and like Joe himself for that matter -- are simply regular people called to try and fight back against the tide of bias and outright deception we see in the media." To underline the point, he catalogues the crimes of professional journalists. For instance, "TV crews don flak jackets and Kevlar helmets for a news segment, only to remove them the instant the cameras ceased rolling," in contrast to The Plumber, who as a regular-people foreign correspondent wears the same jeans-and-t-shirt costume with which he earlier presented himself as a regular-people political correspondent on TV shows during the last campaign. He's like Bruce Springsteen or John Mellencamp that way, only rightwing and without any actual talent.

Whittle's post is full of beauties, but this is my favorite and, I would suggest, the most emblematic:

Like Lincoln’s plain manner of speaking, Joe’s commentary is still unvarnished; it still “has the bark on” as the phrase was applied to Lincoln. And if anyone reading this immediately jumps to the conclusion that I am comparing Joe Wurzelbacher to Abraham Lincoln, you have a perfect example of the dynamic I am talking about.

It's hard to know what other conclusion one is meant to jump, walk, or sidle up to. If I told you, "Like St. Francis, I am kind to animals," you would be within your rights to say I was comparing myself with St. Francis. But with Whittle, we are outside the realm of simple logic. He knows placing The Plumber alongside The Railsplitter will make the necessary impression on his yahoo readership, and they will so dimly perceive the trick that's being worked on them that, when he follows by denying the trick and attributing all devious intent to his enemies, they'll join him in reviling them for it. That's the method behind this whole Joe The Plumber thing -- and, really, behind everything they do.

YEAR-END TOP TEN THINGS NO ONE GIVES A SHIT ABOUT.

Who doesn't love year-end listicles? If you're done with mine, you can take in Roger L. Simon on PJ Media's "The Most Underreported Domestic News Stories of 2013":

As in the title of Bernie Slade’s 1978 Broadway hit Same Time, Next Year, the great underreported, or really unreported, story from 2013 is the same one it was in 2012 and for three years or more before that. But unlike in Slade’s sexy comedy, nobody’s having any fun, at least not now.

OK, take two: This time speak for yourself and get to the point. Try it again -- Roger L. Simon on "The Most Underreported Domestic News Stories of 2013":

...In a world where every phone call, email, text message, Tweet, Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook post, YouTube, Vimeo, LinkedIn link, Google + post, blog post, semaphore, morse code, Braille, and probably burp has been recorded digitally for posterity and beyond, nobody knows what Barack Obama even got in freshman English.

Blink. Blink.

...Obama’s unseen college and graduate school records (Occidental, Columbia, Harvard Law) are only one part of the Mystery of the Shrouded POTUS – another is the Khalidi tape, its possibly anti-Israel contents locked in a vault at the L.A. Times – but those academic records are certainly a significant part.

Paragraph after paragraph of this, including "Yes, I realize a few pols have done well in school. Clinton and Jindal were Rhodes scholars, so we can assume good grades (although one wonders if Bill, ahem, cheated)." The very best part:

Does this matter? I don’t know – and that’s the point.

We'll assume this moment of apparent clarity was an accident.

Oh, there's more: Here's Roger Kimball's entry in "The Most Underreported Domestic News Stories of 2013":

One of the most underreported domestic stories of 2013 was the eclipse of tolerance as a prime liberal virtue and its enrollment in the index of unpermissible reactionary vices.

And the rest is about Duck Dynasty.

Now, it might seem odd to say this story was “underreported"...

Snnrk. Hundreds of words later:

This is a story that is underreported because we are a long way from facing up to its implications. There are several reasons for this. For one thing, our society oscillates between a breathtaking latitudinarianism about...

Get the hook! The next act is Ed Driscoll -- "MSM LIES" kinda covers it. Then J. Christian Adams tells us "the most significant underreported story of 2013 is the left’s launch of the Democracy Initiative," which Mother Jones, exempt for the moment from MSM LIES, describes as a bunch of unions and non-profits working together to "build a national, coordinated campaign" to pimp causes they support, something that has never happened before and certainly not on the right with the Koch Brothers in the Library with a candlestick. The next...

You know what? Let's go look at BuzzFeed. It's still holiday season, and who needs the aggravation? (h/t Jesse Taylor)

LATEST TOPBLOG INTRAMURAL: Volleys amongst Calpundit, Armed Liberal, and InstaPundit as to whether we are engaged in a "war of civilizations."

This is ridiculous. We are engaged in a series of battles against a loose federation of absurdly overmatched nuts, whose ability to strike at us is totally dependent on funds from rich benefactors about whom we do next to nothing. It ain't the Crusades. We overran Iraq in a matter of weeks; wherever Wolfowitz' dart hits next, it won't be too much different -- though whether we gain a really useful geopolitical advantage from any of these adventures is a matter of real debate. This is not looking like an epochal struggle on any level. Expensive, risky, tragic, yes, but not a war of civilizations.

And I must say that the Roger Simon post that kicked this all off isn't worth the pixels expended in reply. It's basically a hit piece on the Democratic presidential candidates ("sleaziest collection of low-down opportunists that I have ever seen," "pathetic," "yutz," etc) of the sort seen every day at other dispensaries of partisan invective, all the way down to the absurd implication that Kerry, Clark et alia don't realize that Saddam is/was a Very Bad Man. The only revelation is that Simon considers himself "an old radical-liberal." Well, so was David Horowitz, I suppose.

It's politicking, pure and simple -- sloganeering toward the end of electing candidates. A serious discussion of what we should do next may be going on somewhere, but not 'round these parts.

DEFINING FASCISM DOWN. Roger L. Simon reacts to the news that Obama's Convention acceptance speech may be moved to a larger venue:

I’m not going to indulge in the obvious comparisons. But I am disturbed by this development. 76,000 people blindly screaming “Yes, we can!” in a giant stadium is not an image I relish seeing in a free society.

First some semantic notes. "I'm not going to indulge in the obvious comparisons" is a lousy preamble to an indulgence in comparisons. If he's going to obfuscate his intentions like that, he should start with a phrase like "Far be it from me" or "I'm not one"; the extra verbiage promotes deniability and helps confuse readers. You'd think a professional writer would know this. Also, the assumption that whenever liberals raise their voices the result is a "scream" is much overused and perhaps losing effectiveness; "shriek" is a little fresher, at least, and better supports the imputation of effeminacy. ("Bellow," "holler," and "roar" are more suitable to the Nuremberg analogy, but perhaps more butch than Simon would like. Someone at the central office should send him a backgrounder on Ernst Röhm.)

As to content, I've pointed out before that these guys have started using fascism as a synonym for popularity, especially now that nobody likes them. This suggests that they don't expect anyone outside of a hardcore cadre to read their stuff. Especially with an election coming up, I wonder that they don't try harder to reach beyond their base.

Adding to the humor, Simon posted this on July 4, when normal people are least likely to imagine themselves shadowed by fascism's heel. I hope you're all enjoying the blessings of liberty this weekend, and preparing to make more of them.

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.)

MAKES A PERFECT GAG GIFT.

Look what you can get for as little as $1,699:

Join Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit and one of America’s foremost Second Amendment Scholars, Dana Loesch, author of Hands off My Gun as well as Steve Green, Ed Morrissey, Mark (Rip) Rippetoe, Roger Simon, Helen Smith and Kevin Williamson for a weekend dedicated to the Second Amendment. 

In addition to scintillating seminars we will exercise our 2nd Amendment rights at a luxurious hunting and shooting retreat. Rough Creek Lodge not only has world-class hunting and shooting opportunities, but a wide range of other activities available to our guests. 

Because of a very low speaker to guest ratio (1:9), guests will have the opportunity to schmooze, eat, drink, ride ATVs, go zip lining, shoot model rockets, use the golf driving range, hunt and shoot with our speakers.

A weekend at a richie resort with the worst people in the world! Not sure why they're booking so far in advance, though -- by December the Obama apocalypse may have come, and all the deposits will have been made in worthless government fiat scrip. (There is, believe it or not, no provision to pay your way in gold or bitcoin.) Know what else seems wrong? Check out the "free activities":

Zipline And Rock Climbing
Watch A Movie
Catch And Release Fishing

"Catch And Release Fishing"? What is this, some eco-Nazi love-in? Real men and their ladies' auxiliary catch those suckers and stare them down as they thrash out their last breaths! Also:

Petting Corral

Come on, now. There's also a shitty blog ("I couldn’t wait to leave NYC when I graduated law school. In California I met my first real gun owners"), but maybe you just want to wait for the police reports.

AN END TO TOKENISM. The Ole Perfesser and Co. say the New York Times is liberal, dying, will be sorry come November etc.

Let's get the decks cleared once and for all: have the Times stop sending Zev Chafets to do magazine cover stories on Rush Limbaugh and Mike Huckabee; fire David Brooks and William Kristol; and stop giving op-eds to Max Boot, Ross Douthat, James Dobson, Edward Luttwak, Fred Kagan, Paul Bremer, Tunku Varadarajan, Doug Feith, Bruce Barlett, Ann Althouse, The Ole Perfesser, et alia.

In return, the Wall Street Journal can lose Thomas Frank.

If that doesn't seem like a fair trade to you, please be informed that fairness has nothing to do with it.

UPDATE. In a hyperventilation worthy of L. Kudlow in his frosted nose era, The Anchoress says when the Times politely suggested that John McCain's op-ed writers try another draft, they denied McCain's right to "free speech." Requiring a periodical to publish something it doesn't want to publish sounds more like the Canadian way than ours, but if The Anchoress really believes this, I have a couple thousand words on what a dunce she is that, I'm sure she'll agree, the First Amendment requires she post at her blog.

UPDATE II. Tbogg points out the bitter tears of Roger L. Simon. Apparently the Times published a few of Simon's items once upon a time. Then -- without warning -- they rejected one! Simon's conclusion: "The Times is no more 'fair and balanced' than Fox News... Bias is as American as apple pie."

One little reversal, and the whole (media) world is against them. What keeps them from ever growing up, do you suppose? My guess is that wingnuts give off a kind of reverse ethylene, and when they become clustered (as in thinkthanks, National Review cruises, etc), the concentration inhibits ripening.

UPDATE III. Fixed gas. Thanks, Marc!

PRE-EMPTIVE SHRIEK.

The conservative impeachment crusade is metastasizing thus -- Rich Lowry at National Review:

Does Obama WANT to Get Impeached? 

...The White House may consider the unilateral amnesty a winning move on several different levels: it gets its policy goal; it satisfies an important part of its base; and if there is any serious move toward impeachment, it rallies the entirety of the Democratic base in a way we haven’t seen since 2008 and — assuming the politics of impeachment are bad for Republicans — drives the middle away from the GOP. An administration that is fast entering its dotage could consider this one of the few potential positive game-changers that it has direct control over — the Constitution and the rule of law be damned.

Daily Caller:

Rep. Scalise Calls Out Obama: ‘First White House In History Trying To Start Narrative Of Impeachment’

Glenn Beck:

“Who wants [impeachment]? The president does,” Beck argued. “Because then he’ll be able to say, ‘I demand justice.’ The birther thing is over, the Black thing is over. So now he needs to be able to call for justice.”

Etc. etc. etc.

As I have chronicled, conservatives have been plotting Obama's impeachment since 2009, and it's only getting worse: Try Googling "impeach" and "Benghazi" and see what you get. But now they're peddling the story that it's Obama who's trying to get impeached, based on the fact that Democrats are fundraising off the threat of a new Republican Senate railroading the President.

It reminds me of what happened in the endgame of the Obama birth certificate fiasco -- remember the afterbirthers, and how they tried to tell the world that Obama had set them up by pretending to be from Kenya? For example, John Hinderaker of Power Line, May 2012:

We know for sure that Barack Obama was born in Honolulu, because it was announced in a local newspaper. But we also now know that for sixteen years, his literary agent circulated a bio that said he was born in Kenya. That statement must have come from Obama himself; or, at a bare minimum, it certainly was known to him. So: why? Why would Obama put it out that he was born in Kenya if he was actually born in Hawaii? 

Over at PJ Media, CEO Roger Simon, a mystery writer by trade, put his mind to the puzzle and came up with an intriguing theory...

I'll spare you -- the upshot, in this case as in all of them, was that their extensive birther self-embarrassments weren't really their fault. Something similar's happening here, except it's isn't just salve for their blistered egos this time: They're hoping citizens who are balking at voting in an impeachment tribunal this November may be convinced that Republicans would never do anything like that, it's just something the wily Democrats are making up.

I'd like to think the Republicans' record of running the federal government like a demolition derby would keep people from believing them, but they're champeen hustlers and Americans can be suckers for a hard sell. We'll see.

UPDATE: In comments, Shakezula: "Remember, the Republican battle cry is LOOK WHAT YOU MADE ME DO!!"

Also, Neddy Merrill reminds us that less than a year before he started blaming Obama for impeaching himself, Glenn Beck was calling for his impeachment. Rich Lowry was hinting at the same thing just the other day -- for dealing with Obama's "constitutional deformation" of the Presidency, he said, "the Constitution equips [Congress] with its own tools to fight such battles, especially the power of the purse and impeachment." But Lowry took pains to preserve his plausible deniability with slippery language; since Beck's audience is mostly Alzheimer's sufferers and aphasics who don't remember what their Leader said from one day to the other, he didn't need to.

Shameless or shady, it's doesn't matter: Thus have the brethren promoted this bullshit into the mainstream. Probably in the middle of impeachment itself, they'll be sitting in the press box shaking their heads and going, "Wow, Obama's taking this thing further than I thought he would!"

UPDATE 2. Ha ha ha ha.

THE SELF-CORRECTING BLOGOSPHERE. At Memeorandum:



Also at Memeorandum:



Quick, Perfesser, more photos of black people!

UPDATE. There's something almost magical about this coincidence: at Reason David Boaz suggests (albeit gently) that maybe America wasn't more free, in the way libertarians like to think about it, back when it was full of slaves. The Perfesser reads Boaz' piece, and is much more concerned with the tragic loss of American liberties under Jimmy Carter.

Also funny: the Hit & Run commenters to the story. I especially liked the guy who says the Donner Party was "perfectly libertarian" because "they were free to make a bad decision, made it, and suffered the consequences." I couldn't have put it better myself!

UPDATE 2. Roger L. Simon: Democrats are the Real Racists, Etc. That one never gets young! He's also against "hyphenated racial groups," as John Wayne was.

Lest we think Simon prefers the simpler, unhyphenated names such people were called in olden days, he lets us know he was once a civil rights worker. You know, like John Lewis -- except unlike Lewis, Simon deserves our respect for it.

RACIAL HUMOR. Schwarzenegger gets caught saying that "They have the, you know, part of the black blood in them and part of the Latino blood in them that together makes it" -- "it" being teh hotness. Roger L. Simon flips out -- on Arnold's behalf. The "brouhaha" over the remarks, says Simon, "breaks all records for stupidity or political correctness."

Simon's real test comes next week, when Schwarzenegger explains why Jews get especially smart when you breed them with Norwegians.

JUST EXPERIMENTING. This latest in a long line of self-proclaimed liberal apostates inspired me. I decided to take the plunge and, at approximately 12:10 pm today, became a conservative.

I didn't tell anyone I was a conservative, of course. I preferred "centrist," or "true liberal," etc. Not that I identified myself this way either. Liberals are famously intolerant, and I had enough trouble keeping friends and jobs as it is. Look how such brave dissenters as Michael Totten and Roger Simon had been silenced, deprived of a public forum by the Red Hand! And then of course you had to explain yourself endlessly -- who had time for that?

So I kept it under wraps. When drawn into a political discussion, I used the Jonah Goldberg Variation: "Anyway it's late and I have to go to the grocery store and I don't have time right now, it'll be in the book I'm writing." I did start dropping "heh" and "indeed" into ordinary conversation, but I think I got away with it.

I was treated civilly, yet I seethed, knowing that all my friends would turn into extras from Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Donald Sutherland version) if I let slip that freedom was on the march!

Part of me wanted to reach out to them -- after all, what real difference is there between Rush Limbaugh and, say, Bobby Kennedy? But there was obviously no hope of reconciliation. What a bunch of jerks, with their impertinent graphics! My walls were covered, or would be once I took my new conservatism home, with simple, tastefully portraits of Whittaker Chambers and Zell Miller! What was the point in even arguing with them if they were never going to admit that I'm right? Didn't they realize that Jesse Jackson is no better than al-Sadr? And I meant that in a totally centrist, classically-liberal way. No, I didn't leave them, they left me.

So I brooded in my cubicle. On the bright side, I was offered three book contracts and a nationally-syndicated radio show. But I soon tired of that life, and so at approximately 3:35 pm I became a Royalist.

Isn't it true that all our national goals would be better realized with a strong leader at the helm? If we decry the political intrigues, deal-brokering, and pork-barrelling of our time, wouldn't it be better to eliminate all incentive to corruption by placing all power in the hands of a single, infallible Royal Family? If disunity is a plague on America, wouldn't a venerated Head of State, of noble blood, unite us all? And if new mothers named their sons after this monarch -- particularly if he had a suitably exalted, old-fashioned name, like, for example, Roy -- would that not strongly affirm the traditional values which made Western Civilization great?

But I can hear your arguments -- or would, if I were actually arguing with you. The same tired catalogue of complaints. Your time is over -- your tedious town halls, your shopworn electioneering, your whining about "civil liberties" and "trial by jury." Quit hanging onto the past, you stupid hippies!

UPDATE. I have just decided to become a Lipstick Libertarian. You know, porn, pot, endless foreign wars I'm too old to fight. I'm convinced this one will take.

UPDATE. It was just like being a conservative, and the publishers tell me that Brian Anderson has it covered for this season. Nevermind. I'm going back to believing whatever it was I believed.

NERDS. Jim Geraghty wants to know why "lefty bloggers" are not attacking the Motion Picture Academy for failing to give Fahrenheit 911 an Oscar nomination. "I just find it interesting that web personalities who one would think would be big Michael Moore fans are collectively shrugging their shoulders over this," he says. The Ole Perfesser indeeds, and Roger Simon takes the idiocy to breathtaking levels by suggesting that Million Dollar Baby, Sideways et alia got the top slots instead because "Most people in Hollywood now see, although maybe they won't admit it, that democracy in Iraq is extremely important."

Others have offered reason-based responses, but let me just add that only nerds with wads of toilet tissue in their underwear think the universe ebbs and flows according to their political tastes.

Jesus Christ. Imagine needing the comfort of popular approbation so badly that you would voluntarily comb through movie award nominations in search of comforting zeitgeist pellets! Yet these guys do it all the time. They sit around figuring out which movies are conservative. Hell, they'll even tell you what sorts of paintings and unread-gift-books are conservatively correct.

As their mania accelerates, I expect they will start identifying conservative desklamps, picture-frames, hubcaps, and brands of dental floss. Maybe they should start a tab at National Review Online called "What's Right, What's Blight!" I will offer the first squib:

TALL COFFEE CUP LIDS VS. FLAT COFFEE CUP LIDS: Time was, sober, utilitarian flatties dominated the conservative crowd's coffee cups. But since Rod Dreher boldly busted out the cup-crown for his morning soy lattes, righteous righties 'get' that these hubristic waves of plastic cresting their java perfectly match our Administration's national-greatness rhetoric. So skim those tired toppers right onto the ashheap of history, and re-educate your coffee cart guy to start stocking America's Coffee Cup Lid!

UPDATE. James Wolcott has mo' and, as usual, better.

UNRELIABLE NARRATOR. Today's episode of "My Liberal Friends" comes from Roger L. Simon:

The people had come together through our children -- we were all parents from the same school -- and the kids played in the next room while we ate, drank and talked. Naturally, the subject of the election came up and I decided -- maybe it was the vodka -- to let it rip and say I was voting for Bush. One woman shrieked at the top of her lungs. The others just looked at me in incredulity.

I don't think it's bragging to say I knew more than these people about politics. (I have to -- I am the one putting out opinions in public.) But that didn't stop me from shrieking back at the woman. Others joined in and it became for a few moments a battle of who could yell the loudest. But after a bit it quieted down and they stared at me curiously.

Maybe it was the vodka, though it sounds more like 'shrooms. One also wonders if the dining room furniture was padded.

The Simon report is of course of a piece with other such narratives, and includes the obligatory narrator's assurance that his opponents are all stupid ("Their view of the world was heavily influenced by the Six O'Clock News, a Dan Rather vision of reality" -- why, they've probably never even heard of Mark Steyn!). Still, we might give Simon's more credence than others. It happened in Hollyweird, after all.

HOW TO TELL KERRY'S AHEAD: You see this sort of thing (a Roger L. "The L is for Conservative" Simon joint):

Today's news that some Kerry operatives plan on launching a "preemptive strike," charging the other side with voter intimidation even when it doesn't exist, is scarcely amazing. [Where do they think they are? Afghanistan?-ed.>] But it is indicative of a larger mindset. Not surprisingly, now that I've gotten into the blogging game and a few people read this site, I've begun to meet more of the genus operativus politicus. They have their own cynical slang and refer to the two parties as "the dumb party" (repubs) and "the evil party" (dems). Amazingly, I have heard this shorthand from both sides...

The words "preemptive strike" here are connected to a broken link -- but seems to refer to this article with this image in support.

The jpg allegedly shows a page from the Dems' Colorado Election Day Manual, stating that "If no signs of intimidation techniques have emerged yet, launch a 'pre-emptive strike' (particularly well-suited to states in which these techniques have been tried in the past)." The Dems' methods include issuing press releases "reviewing Republican tactics used in the past in your area or state" and "quoting party/minority/civil rights leadership as denouncing tactics that discourage people from voting."

So the Democrats are trying to pre-empt voting fraud and campaign fraud, employing unobjectionable tactics toward preventing illegal activities of which Republicans, let's face it, have shown themselves capable in recent years.

Drudge headlines this "DNC Election Manual: Charge Voter Intimidation, Even If None Exists." Maybe Simon just read that far.

And from this bogus Drudge item Simon launches a true anecdotal howler. I swear to you folks, in all my years of hanging out with Democrats, I have never heard anyone refer to our common faction as the Evil Party, or speak of our close, personal relationship with the Dark Lord, even at the baby-killing parties and marriage-desanctifying events where we regularly meet to quaff a few goblets of Christian blood. In fact, mostly I have heard grumbling about how pliantly our leaders let the Republicans roll them over, year after wimp-ass year.

Only, just maybe, not this year.

Which is why, after a string of Democratic defeats and chants of "flip-flop" and general Mallard-Fillmoresque characterizations of Democrats as hapless losers, we are now portrayed as thugees silently slitting the throats of our enemies under cover of darkness.

Compliment accepted.

SIMONIZING. Having told the world that any one of us would have tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib given the chance ("Who is that nitwit, most of us have been asking? Well, that nitwit is us"), Roger L. "I'm for gay rights" Simon opens the floor, and the usual grunting, roaring, and chest-beating ensues. Simon only deigns to interrupt when a poster named Tano points out, undeniably, that a lot of prominent conservatives have been quite okay with this inhuman behavior. This incenses his host, who chides:

...I don't respond to you for a simple reason. I have no interest in the terms liberal and conservative. They are junk terms to me, factually meaningless... Now some people call me a neocon, yet I vehemently favor gay marriage and stem cell research. It's all boring BS to me. I'm just interested in the facts of a situation. So the minutes a post begins with conservatives this or liberals that, I just skip it...

The perfidious labeller having been dismissed, a less chideworthy Simonite leaps into the fray:

I'm pretty tired of those Iraqis who only know how to whine, criticize, and complain, but never lift a finger to help. It's their future as well as ours that our troops are dying for. But whenever "their" people were maltreated or killed, they condemned the Americans, and rejoiced when the Americans were burnt and quartered. We grieve for our dead and wounded too, but we don't jump up and down when an Iraqi was killed... Don't Iraqis have responsibilities too?

An odd reaction, it would seem: chastising the Iraqis for getting all hot and bothered about an occupying army torturing their fellow citizens. But, brothers and sister, let us not paint this a "conservative" response, for in Simon's world, who's to say what's liberal and conservative? Or whether torture is anathema or just something we all might easily engage in, were we not busy with Hollywood screenplays? Let us cast aside meaningless labels, when all good men are agreed that Kerry was a pussy to serve in Vietnam and so must be kept from the Presidency.

I thought liberals were the ones that were all into moral relativism and shit. Ooops, but there I go again, using those tired old labels.

HIS WAR. At first glance I was ready to give Roger L. Simon credit for coming out strongly in favor of war with Iran. At a time when even the most bellicose warbloggers concentrate on spinning the Iraq debacle ("All is well!"), how refreshing to see one of them pushing for a second front.

Alas, upon closer inspection Simon's petition is for something more modest:

And I'm not talking about all out war. I'm talking about keeping the issue on the front burner, forcing those in authority to take a militant stand against the mullahs [of Iran].

In other words, let's get all the bloggers to make a lot of noise about the Iranian threat, and the result may be a "militant stand." (As opposed to what -- our current entante cordiale?)

We also learn from Simon that partisan bickering is bad, and that everything is the Democrats' fault. He can say that, you see, because he's a Democrat, for some reason that no one remembers.

Do you know, I sometimes get the most frightful feeling that maintaining one of these weblogs is rather a waste of time.

KELLY'S HEROES. Funny, when you read Instapundit these days on Britain, it would seem that all the Scepter'd Isle is livid with outrage at the BBC over the Kelly affair. Here's a ripe example of his coverage:

...The Beeb, which just can't seem to avoid sexing up weapons stories... ANOTHER UPDATE: Roger Simon is comparing the BBC to Nixon and to The New York Times...

He also observes that "The Guardian is all over this one." The Guardian, which actually originates in Blighty, is indeed all over the BBC story, and here's a fairly typical excerpt:

[Defense Minister Geoff] Hoon also acknowledged that the BBC report had led to a major political crisis for Prime Minister Tony Blair and that his government was under tremendous pressure to disprove the BBC's allegations that Blair had exaggerated the risks of Iraq's weapons before the war...

The BBC's allegations -- and the high-profile inquiry being led by Lord Hutton, a senior appeals judge -- pose the worst crisis for Blair in his six years in power, with the latest polls showing that many Britons question his credibility.

Regular IP readers who have heretofore assumed that Blair was as big a hero in Anglia as in Crawford, TX might want to wipe their exploded heads off their monitors now. The BBC may well be having credibility issues, but they're nothing compared to those of the Prime Minister. (Unless of course you believe that, as promulgators of the international liberal media conspiracy, the Beeb is actually more powerful than Blair...)

All goes to show, you can get a bogus idea of international events from even the more widely-puffed weblogs. Come to think of it, drop the "international."

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.