THE SO-CALLED NETWORK.

It was hard not to feel the irony while I was reading excerpts from your recent speech at Georgetown University, in which you defended — on free speech grounds — Facebook’s practice of posting demonstrably false ads from political candidates. I admire your deep belief in free speech. I get a lot of use out of the First Amendment. Most important, it’s a bedrock of our democracy and it needs to be kept strong. 

But this can’t possibly be the outcome you and I want, to have crazy lies pumped into the water supply that corrupt the most important decisions we make together. Lies that have a very real and incredibly dangerous effect on our elections and our lives and our children’s lives. 

-- "Aaron Sorkin: An Open Letter to Mark Zuckerberg," the New York Fucking Times 

[ADAM ORKIN, nearly out of breath, his hair roguishly disordered, his trenchcoat wet, bursts through the door of the office of MARK ZUCKERBERG, who is seated at his desk studying a model of the Great Pyramid of Giza. ZUCKERBERG looks up as if he'd been expecting this moment, and dreading it, yet also curiously resigned to it.]

ZUCKERBERG: Ah, Adam Orkin. I've been expecting this moment, and dreading it. Yet I'm also curiously resigned to it.

ORKIN: I just wanted to get one good long last look at you before racing to the offices of the Daily Sojourner to tell the world how a great talent and the promise of a better tomorrow were both thrown in the trash just so you could make a buck.

ZUCKERBERG: Would that be my story, Mr. Orkin? Or the story of mankind?

[ZUCKERBERG rises.]

Consider the pharaoh Khufu, often Hellenized as Cheops. Despite his wealth and splendor, he was just one among an endless parade of crowned heads now receding into the darkness of history, just as the 45 men who have served as our president -- even your precious Jed Bartlet -- will vanish.

[ZUCKERBERG gestures toward the model pyramid.]

Yet we know Khufu because he left us the Great Pyramid of Giza. Since they laid the capstone on Lincoln Cathedral in the 13th Century it is no longer the tallest structure in the world, yet it still fascinates, because it represents the whole labor of a great nation turned to the will of a genius.

ORKIN: Is that why it fascinates, Zuckerberg? Or is it fascinating only because of the waste, the pettiness, the sheer asininity of killing thousands of your countrymen just so you can have a swell tombstone? Is it a Great Pyramid or a Great Pyramid Scam? Well, maybe that pile of rocks will last another ten thousand years, but it won't light up the soul of man like this!

[ORKIN throws a damp, rolled-up parchment U.S. Declaration of Independence onto ZUCKERBERG's desk. ZUCKERBERG stares at it. SHERYL SANDBERG, her long black hair sexily disordered, storms into the office with security guards, who lay hands on ORKIN.]

SANDBERG: Looks like we're here in the nick of time, Mr. Zuckerberg. Just say the word and we'll throw Adam Orkin into the alley with the trash where he belongs.

[ZUCKERBERG silently unrolls the parchment, reads. SANDBERG is evilly enraged.]

Don't be a fool, Mark! Ultimate power is within your grasp at last. Don't let this journalist and his fancy words stand in your way!

ZUCKERBERG: [Reads quietly] "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." My father used to read this to me at bedtime when I was a boy. [Scowling at SANDBERG] My mother, Doctor Zuckerberg, thought he was crazy. [To ORKIN]  You made me remember, Mr. Sorkin. And you made me ashamed.

[ZUCKERBERG wheels on a sour-faced SANDBERG]

Ms. Sandberg, there’ll be no more lying to customers of The Facebook!

[ZUCKERBERG and ORKIN go in for a bro-hug as the music swells.] 

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the Giffords shooting. The fallout has in some ways been what I'd expected: as with Pentagon shooter John Patrick Bedell, conservatives have been quick to label Jared Loughner a liberal even though his actual politics as expressed in his ravings could best be described as aphasic.

The thing that took me aback was the vehemence of some of the more prominent rightbloggers on the subject. Ole Perfesser Instapundit, for example, did several posts with more manic intensity than he usually betrays -- including a couple of bizarre references to "blood libel." The Southron, apparently, is the Jew of Liberal Fascism.

This is taking conservative victim status to new heights. But why? I think they may be suffering flashbacks to Oklahoma City -- to which, I notice, they increasingly refer as a scam by Bill Clinton, or in the words of Tea Party Nation's Judson Phillips a "tactic" which "worked then, backing conservatives off and possibly helping to ensure a second Clinton term," rather than as an act of mass murder. Their rapid-response muscles have been so assiduously trained for so long, it seems, that they're constantly on hair-trigger, and every event, however horrible or moving, they immediately perceive as a political opportunity before anything else; I imagine they were working out their spin for this before the bodies hit the floor.

Favorite outtake: HillBuzz, who's also obsessed with this, discovering that the assassin's Facebook and MySpace pages were no longer available, and demanding to know, "What is the Left hiding on these pages?" Wait'll he finds Loughner's Facebook manifesto, ghost-written by Aaron Sorkin! Then Hillary will surely consent to lead the Army of God.

UPDATE. The Perfesser's charm offensive continues: "FLASHBACK: Sarah Palin hanged in effigy during 2008 campaign." That might mean something if she were the one who got shot. But people like her seldom are.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Funeral today tomorrow. Words of wisdom from the deceased. 

•   When Obama said he was going to do all those gun orders, Charles C.W. Cooke did a long, weirdly wound-up post called "President Obama Has Let His Emotion Get the Better of His Judgment":

Has Obama lost his mind? This is a man, remember, who is supposed to be admirably dispassionate; a man who is supposed to understand how the game is played; a man who is supposed to reflexively refuse to be taken in by the emotion of the moment. And yet he’s going to use a good deal of his last year’s political capital in order to tweak a few minor rules around the edges? Why?

Also, "Which is to say that Obama’s behavior is not at all rational," "Even if he wins this round, he will have done precisely nothing of merit," "Were I a gun control advocate I’d be livid with him. Livid," "Obama has let his emotion get the better of him here. He and his fellow travelers will likely pay a price," etc. Lots of italics, there, Chuck. Today we see what he was so hysterical about: A CNN poll finds that, while they disapprove of Obama using executive orders to do it, the American people approve of his gun control measures 67%-32%. Even 51% of Republicans and most gun owners support the measures. The respondents are also skeptical that the measures will work, which makes sense -- but what a pity CNN didn't also ask why they were skeptical, and list "because the Republicans will do everything they can to fuck it up" among the possible choices. (Extra credit, BTW, to Breitbart.com, which headlines its poll coverage "CNN POLL: MAJORITY OPPOSE USE OF EXECUTIVE ACTIONS FOR GUN CONTROL" and adds this kicker: "The majority of respondents to the CNN/ORC poll were not gun owners. Only 40 percent said there is even a gun in their house." So how can true patriots even take them serious! Show us a poll taken by gun owners instead, preferably not while they're on the way to the emergency room.)

•   So many examples, but I might as well take one of the more egregious, from The Federalist:

Hillary Clinton Should Stop Excusing Juanita Broaddrick’s Sexual Assault
Juanita Broaddrick recently opened up on Twitter over her sexual assault by Bill Clinton and Hillary's dismissal of her suffering.

Look on the bright side: At least there's one woman in America conservatives believe was raped. Favorite kicker and author bio on the subject, from Newsday:

I’ve often wondered how she and Juanita Broaddrick and Eileen Wellstone and Sandra Allen James and Christy Zercher, among others, have felt watching Bill Clinton go on to become a revered national and international statesman. 

If Trump can give them a second hearing in the court of public opinion, maybe his candidacy is worth something after all. 

William F. B. O’Reilly is a Republican consultant.

I guess it could be true -- the guy pushed through NAFTA, after all, so in my book he's capable of anything.

•   How about a quick run through the gibberish pits of the culture war? Ross Douthat did something for National Review that defies analysis....

And then there’s pop culture itself. In the original Back to the Future, Marty McFly invaded his father’s sleep dressed as “Darth Vader from the planet Vulcan.” Thirty years later, the biggest blockbuster of 2015 was about . . . Darth Vader’s grandchildren. It is directed by a filmmaker who’s coming off rebooting . . . Star Trek. And the wider cinematic landscape is defined by . . . the recycling of comic-book properties developed between the 1940s and the 1970s. Even fashion shows a similar repetition, as Kurt Anderson pointed out in Vanity Fair several years ago...

Yeah whatever beardo, fast forward:

...we’re dealing with issues (from an aggressive Russia to, yes, Libyan-linked terrorist groups) that Marty and “Doc” Brown would recognize immediately. (Though in fairness, we do make movies about colonizing Mars, and the special effects are excellent.) 

The word for this kind of civilizational situation is “decadence.”

Well, at least it's highfalutin' and incoherent. Most of the current cultwar crop is quotidian propagandist yak: Operatives like John C. Goodman and Steven Hayward, for example, instructing their minions to see The Big Short as an indictment not of unregulated greedheads wrecking the economy, but of poor people getting mortgages. Connoisseurs of longform cultwar can take in Kyle Smith, who at Commentary tells us that Hollyweird often changes the details of supposedly "true stories" -- not to make them more dramatic, as you may have thought, but to please their Stalinist masters! Keep fucking that culture war chicken, comrades.

•   Speaking of culture warriors, Virginia Postrel says David O. Russell's Joy is better than The Social Network (a movie from five years ago) because it's nicer to capitalism:

The respect extends to products and customers. “Joy” acknowledges the wealth-creating value of incremental improvements even in the most mundane items.

Book my seats now!

...Most of all, however, “Joy” makes its protagonist an untragic hero. She gets tough and she gets rich, but she winds up neither lonely nor mean. 

Mildred Pierce was originally like that, but FDR made them change it to promote socialism.

Audiences embraced Sorkin’s compelling but dark fable of the friendless tycoon as if it were a much sunnier story. The real-world triumph of Facebook overpowered the fictional desolation of "The Social Network." 

“Watching this movie makes you want to run from the theatre, grab your laptop and build your own empire,” wrote one moviegoer. If Hollywood won’t give people an inspiring movie about big-time entrepreneurship, audiences will imagine their own version.

Hollywood's always trying to tell us that ambition may isolate us from other people, but that's just because they're communists; what regular people really see in The Social Network is wealth production -- because why else would anyone see a movie except to celebrate an economic theory? The whole thing's full of howlers, but here's my favorite part:

Hollywood regularly produces positive movies about small businesses, often in the hospitality industry. “Chef,” “The 100-Foot Walk,” and “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” come to mind.

But really, what's the point of these recommendations when audiences will imagine their own versions? Helps her meet her word count, I guess.