FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

THE YAM IS THE POWER THAT BE

•   The right-wing commentariat has gone absolutely bonkers over the college kids with their microaggressions and their safe spaces and whatnot -- especially since the Missouri crisis got a significant number of black people involved. It's like S.W.I.N.E. meets the Black Panthers! Hence, headlines like "The First Amendment is Dying" (National Review), "The Self-Destruction of the American University" (Weekly Standard), "A Generation that Hates Free Speech" (Commentary), etc. NR drama queen David French has a good one: Before inviting his fellow nuts to purge the universities of liberal taint ("Conservatives possess the power of the federal purse... It’s time for a cultural and political war against the intellectual and legal corruption of the university Left"), he tells this cautionary tale of the commie campus and what it did to a friend's kid:

Years ago, I left my law firm — where I worked as a commercial litigator — to defend free speech, religious liberty, and due process on campus, first as president of FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education), then as director of the Center for Academic Freedom at the nonprofit Alliance Defending Freedom. As I left, a friend asked why I’d give up my practice to take on higher-education reform. He was incredulous. His daughter had just been accepted to an elite college, he’d just visited, and he found the school to be everything he imagined — expensive, yes, but beautiful, prestigious, and fun.

In less than a year, he apologized. He understood my career choice. His daughter had come home for the holidays, transformed. The vibrant, joyful Christian girl who’d left for school had returned sullen and depressed. She hated her family’s values, she resented her parents, and she was obviously drinking too much. The school had stripped down her value system — all in the name of “critical thinking” — and replaced it with angry groupthink. Life and hope were replaced with fear and loathing. A social-justice warrior was born.

The kid went to college and rejected her family's values. Obviously they should have sent her to a Christian finishing school instead of an "elite college." Now it'll take a shitload of reprogramming to get her to sing hymns and hate paupers again! [shakes fist] Liberal academia, you have made a powerful enemy! We won't rest until Yale and all those radical hotbeds teach nothing but Reagan, God and Jesus!

•   I'll tell you the real problem with the kids today. Many years ago I lived at 174 Rivington Street in the Lower East Side. You'd think there'd be a plaque there, but no. Instead, according to the New Yorker, there is this:

Like its spiritual hero, Ron Burgundy, of “Anchorman,” this popular new Will Ferrell-themed bar on the Lower East Side is a loud, swinging, bad-taste good time. Fan art hangs on the walls; a nook in the back is decorated with lava lamps, cowbells, and a (jazz) flute. But, like Ferrell’s George W. Bush, the bar can be fuzzy on strategery. Where Ferrell’s characters joyfully mock obnoxiousness, Stay Classy celebrates it, serving sweet cocktails whose jokey names (Smelly Pirate Hooker, Dirty Mike and the Boys) are printed in all caps on a laminated menu...

I weep for this generation.

•   Real quick, for theater fans in New York: The Ivo van Hove production of A View from The Bridge is stateside now. I saw a simulcast of it from London some months back. I'm always nervous when a classic text gets the whoopee treatment from an ambitious director, and when the actors came out barefoot into what looked like an oversized bocce pit, I steeled for the worst. But it turns out turning the dial up one or two notches on the subtext, and even getting a little Grotowksi with it, actually helps this already-weird play a great deal, especially with brave actors like these embodying the furies. I bought it all, including the quasi-choral handling of the climax, and when it was over I felt like I'd been somewhere and I don't mean Red Hook. Recommended.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about Ben Carson's bullshit, why the national press suddenly noticed it, and how rightbloggers are now busily making MediaBias-ade of the situation.

I also reference my prediction a month ago that Carson was just about over, and stand by it -- especially since I saw this in the Weekly Standard:

But we also worried that Carson is “not yet prepared to be president,” and we averred, “he’d have to show an awful lot of growth to be ready a year from now.” What’s more, for Carson to win the general election, “voters would have to conclude that he is so extraordinary a figure that for the first time in American history, they would send a man to the White House who had neither held elective office nor served as a general officer or cabinet officer.” 

We’re less certain now than we were in September that voters couldn’t come to such a conclusion. We’re less certain we couldn’t.

Since this column is by William Kristol, the wrongest man in the world, I am putting more chips on this number.

UPDATE. Got a wonderful campaign email from Carson's 2016 Committee chairman John Philip Sousa IV (yes, really). It starts:

Dear Patriotic American,
I need your help.
Please give me your permission to put your name on the 48 page booklet shown below. It’s really important.
How can that be?
The answer is that when I put your name, and the name of your city and state on this booklet, it dramatically increases the likelihood that the person receiving it will read it.
In other words, by clicking here and putting your name on this 5” x 8” booklet it truly becomes a personal gift from you to an African American who is considering voting for Dr. Ben Carson for president.

Once signed by white people, these pamphlets become irresistible to black folk. And the content is pitched right at 'em. For instance, it includes a "transcript of Ben Carson’s dramatic foray into Harlem." Apparently he held an event last summer at Sylvia's where, The Atlantic reports, he gave attendees a Bill Cosby pull-up-your-pants speech and announced he would "restart the country’s economic engine by lowering the corporate tax rate, closing fiscal gaps, like the U.S. borrowing money from China to send aid to Pakistan, and he would replace the current tax system with a proportional income tax," which must have set the room on fire. Sousa touts this as proof that Carson can deliver African-American votes to a Republican: "The black church was the strength of the civil rights movement under Dr. King, and if it gets behind Ben Carson, you and I are truly going to see a revolution take place." More likely what you'll see is Carson at the convention, endorsing whatever schmuck runs instead of him and possibly increasing his minority margin in some purple states, in exchange for which he'll get some sinecure in the Schmuck Administration from which he can run future scams.

ROOTING FOR INJURIES, PART 329.

One of the creepier developments in the right-blogosphere has been the emergence of a group of white supremacist online losers who think the conservative establishment isn't racist enough; they throw around the word "cuckservative" and get excited when it is repeated even in disgust or derision, because it means attention; naturally they're big fans of Donald Trump. By and large the group has been disowned by the better-known conservative bloggers, who try to steer their readers away from the group, much as Dorian Gray tried to keep people from seeing the picture in his attic.

"Better-known conservative bloggers" and "white supremacist online losers" are not exactly huge constituencies, so any publicity bump for the controversy, however modest, was bound to stir the shit, and under cover of Labor Day Weekend Jonah Goldberg spoke against Trump and by implication his fringier fans -- Stormfront versus stormfart, as it were. Whether Goldberg speaks from conviction or because David Koch held a gun to his head, his nerves are evident. Goldberg doesn't get into the racist stuff, probably because he realizes that, given his own history, he would be laughed off the face of the earth if he tried to claim that particular high ground, so he reminds people that Trump used to be pro-choice, and that he's ill-mannered. Apparently intuiting how little this would mean to anyone,  he embraces martyrdom for the Cause:

...I am tempted to believe that Donald Trump’s biggest fans are not to be relied upon in the conservative cause. I have hope they will come to their senses. But it’s possible they won’t. And if the conservative movement and the Republican party allow themselves to be corrupted by this flim-flammery, then so be it. My job will be harder, my career will suffer, and I’ll be ideologically homeless (though hardly alone). That’s not so scary. Conservatism began in the wilderness and maybe, like the Hebrews, it would return from it stronger and ready to rule...

Oh, sphincter up, Mary, one wants to tell Goldberg -- you're a legacy pledge and your Mom will never let you miss any of your dozen daily meals.

Anyway the white supremacists let up a collective shriek and in their Laboratories of Butch developed a nice new hashtag: #NRORevolt, meant to signal their displeasure with Goldberg and the entire rotten establishment. The tweets, like the one reproduced below, have the belligerent yet wounded tone of a 10-year-old boy telling his G.I. Joe doll to go gut-stab his mother in vengeance for his time-out.

Feel the momentum! The mainstream conservatives are mad, but what can they do? After years of throwing boob bait, they find the boobs fording the moat and don't know how to send them back. Some, like The Weekly Standard's Jim Swift, try to portray these white supremacists as just like liberals:

Like a right-wing bastard child of Occupy Wall Street and Anonymous, #NRORevolt was popular among the nom-de-plume crowd on Twitter (i.e. cowards). Like OWS, it didn’t have much in the way of stated goals, other than outrage/revolt. But hey, when you have former Enron Adviser Paul Krugman agreeing, what else do you need?

That last bit refers to a column in which Krugman calls Trump "exactly the ignorant blowhard he seems to be" and his platform in general "viciously absurd," but allows that the idea of taxing the rich, which Trump happens to share, isn't bad. For the equally tendentious Occupy Wall Street and Anonymous references, Swift doesn't even have that much of a fig leaf. I know partisanship requires a certain willing suspension of disbelief, but does Swift really think anyone attracted to this Aryan Little-Brotherhood is going to be scared off by the taunt that it will make him look like a liberal?

The fleurs du mal are getting more pungent by the day. Here's something from Taki's Magazine -- a guy complaining about the "faux 'anti-PC' bravery of many conservatives" including... Mark Steyn. Wow, you may be thinking, he's calling out Mark Steyn -- this guy must be really hardcore anti-PC! Buddy, you don't know the half of it:

So here’s the bigger point I’m trying to make. My example proves the emptiness of the braggadocio you hear from many conservative pundits about how fearless they are in the face of political correctness: “Mexican immigrants are rapists. Palestinians are a death cult. Black Americans owe whites a ‘debt’ for being enslaved and then freed” (a gem from David Horowitz, an original FOA member). “Women in higher education will lead to the ‘abolition of man.’ White women need to breed more to overcome an invasion of uncivilized darkies. ‘Sodomites’ are waging ‘gayhad’ against straight people. Offended? Get over it, Mr. Sensitive. We’re being brave and audacious and in-your-face! Oh, but just don’t say anything that might be offensive to Jews. That’s crossing the line. Hey, look how quickly we found our sensitivity!”

I should tell you that the author is David Cole, best known for his unorthodox ideas about the Holocaust ("'The best guess is yes, there were gas chambers' he says. 'But there is still a lot of murkiness about the camps...'"). Now he's complaining that Mark Steyn and David Horowitz are too PC. The old curse may have been mistranslated: Maybe our enemies really wish for us to live in hilarious times.

FRIDAY 'ROUND THE HORN.

Maybe I should see them tonight? Everything I've heard is good.

•   I recently noted Ross Douthat's attempt to portray the Donald Trump phenomenon as a boon to reform conservatism (i.e., the latest rightwing nerd jobs program). It appears the longer this thing goes on, the more slide-rule boys rush to offer their services. At the Weekly Standard, after some pro-forma yak about what a boor Trump is, Christopher Caldwell tells that Trump's "economic critique" -- yes, he's talking about Trump's brayings, to which he'd referred a paragraph earlier as "talking about how filthy rich the filthy rich are" -- "fits into a sophisticated attack on the present state of presidential campaign finance." Not sophisticated itself, mind you, but it fits into something sophisticated, just as Trump himself may be fitted into a $5,000 suit. Then, at Slate, Reihan Salam has all kinds of exciting ideas for Trump. Apparently inspired by single-issue candidate Larry Lessig's praise of Trump as a campaign finance reformer, Salam suggests Trump embrace Lessig's program, as this "would add intellectual heft to [Trump's] populism, which would force his media detractors to give him at least some begrudging respect." I don't know what's funnier: the idea of Trump's campaign acquiring "intellectual heft," or that of Trump showing respect for an egghead like Lessig who doesn't have his own private jet and probably eats in a school cafeteria like a schlub. Funniest of all, perhaps, is the idea of these pencil-necks hovering around Trump, telling themselves that if only they can press their policy papers into the paws of the Strongman, the Golden Dawn may be hastened.

•   And what can make Trump talk worse? Peggy Noonan! Today she explains Peggy Noonan through the avatar of that Non-Partisan Nameless Friend:

I’ve written before about an acquaintance—late 60s, northern Georgia, lives on Social Security, voted Obama in ’08, not partisan, watches Fox News, hates Wall Street and “the GOP establishment.” She continues to be so ardent for Mr. Trump that she not only watched his speech in Mobile, Ala., on live TV, she watched while excitedly texting with family members—middle-class, white, independent-minded—who were in the audience cheering. Is that “the Republican base”?

Hope so -- it'll be easy to beat an imaginary constituency. Also, Hispanics love Trump, Noonan's friend "Cesar" from the bodega tells her:

Immigrants, he said, don’t like illegal immigration, and they’re with Mr. Trump on anchor babies. “They are coming in from other countries to give birth to take advantage of the system. We are saying that! When you come to this country, you pledge loyalty to the country that opened the doors to help you..." 

I will throw in here that almost wherever I’ve been this summer, I kept meeting immigrants who are or have grown conservative—more men than women, but women too.

Take Peggy Noonan's word to the bank: Your neighbors from the DR, Trinidad, Sudan, Chile, Vietnam -- they're all raring to vote Republican so long as the party nominates a suitably aggressive TV clown.  Morton Downey Jr. gazes on this from the Hereafter and sighs at what might have been.

•   Stella Morabito, the craziest shrink since Robin of Berkeley, is back to tell us how PC is destroying everything by preventing sensible conservative discourse, like how horrible Caitlyn Jenner is:

A perfect example is how the transgender lobby has saturated the media and pop culture with its talking points through Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner and incessant Hollywood shilling. Suppression is the PC practice of quashing ideas that compete with the PC message, usually through speech codes, shout-downs, or smears... The twin processes of saturation and suppression, if diligently applied, can produce the illusion of a public opinion shift, or a “cascade.”

Fans of Morabito's work will understand that these "cascades" are bad because they make you accept homosexuals:

Consider how the Left’s propaganda machine manufactured an “opinion cascade” on the issue of same-sex marriage, by first using “surprising validator” conservatives like Vice President Dick Cheney, polling pundit Michael Barone, and especially David Blankenhorn, who was one of the most persuasive and powerful supporters of organic marriage until he broke down and published a recantation. Not surprisingly, stealth conservatives—particularly those who work in increasingly politicized professions such as psychiatry, social work, teaching, or the arts—have enormous potential if they come out as surprising validators.

Amazing what how much gay-PC we've accomplished thanks to stealth conservatives like Dick Cheney, eh? (Though personally I think it was the recantation of David Blankenhorn that really turned things around for us.)

Anyway Morabito bids her readers go out and make their own cascades:

So conservatives, engage in those polarized, gridlocked places—like the neighborhood picnic, the local swim club, the farmer’s market, the student union, etc.—and engage one on one. Come out to a neighbor or a classmate.

Oh boy! Is this where we say "I hate faggots" and wait for everyone else to do the same, like Spartacus?

Don’t bother with talking points, because the purpose is not to win the argument but to simply to put a human face on your beliefs. 

Just be who you are and be friendly. In today’s PC-saturated culture, that’s the only way to draw out the lonely like-minded person or to influence a fence-sitter. It’s also the only way to water down PC stereotypes of conservatives. Ultimately, it’s the only way to start those ripple effects that can create cascades of truth.

Wait a minute -- your war against PC is to be nice? I gotta tell ya: 1.) If that's the plan, every other anti-PC conservative I've seen has definitely got the instructions upside-down; and 2.) If your goal is to get people to like you, maybe dispense with the hysterical columns for starters?

P.C. B.S.

I keep hearing from conservatives that political correctness is ruining everything. For example, at National Review, which runs stories about PC at about the rate The Federalist runs stories about Caitlin Jenner, Ian Tuttle extrapolates from an advice column at a site you never heard of that the peecee people "would do much to crack down on the number of Fitzgeralds or Faulkners or Cormac McCarthys" and supplant their brilliance with "the Afro-Cuban lesbian experience," har har; also,

No doubt over the next several years book clubs across America will pore over many a bestseller fitted to Gabbert’s advice, in the process sacrificing better authors — e.g., Homer, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton.

If Ian Tuttle knows where the next Shakespeare is, he should tell his editor, so they can use him to replace Kevin D. Williamson, Dennis Prager, or one of National Review's many other shitty writers. (For perspective: previously Tuttle told his readers "If you’re looking for a genuinely open-minded academic experience, Brooklyn College may not be the place for you" because the school refused to take money from the Koch brothers.)

Anyway, a lot of prominent liberals (including Amanda Marcotte, conservatives' favorite feminist voodoo doll) are saying Laura Kipnis got a bad rap from hypersensitive apparatchiks-in-training at Northwestern, and good for them (the liberals, not the apparatchiks). The other day Edward Schlosser had a long piece at Vox, of all places, complaining about student noodges. You'd think that if PC were as much of a menace as it's been portrayed, conservatives would be happy to at last have bipartisan support in fighting it. Well, here's James Taranto at The Wall Street Journal:

As we read the Schlosser piece, we felt more Schadenfreude than sympathy, and we wondered if that reflected poorly on us. (Spoiler: Nah.)

Instead Taranto complains that liberals like Schlosser are only upset because they're getting it in the neck, and are fundamentally incapable of understanding the pain of censored "outgroup" conservative academics like Glenn Reynolds, Ann Althouse, Harvey Mansfield, William A. Jacobson, et alia. Taranto explains:

Social systems have existed—think of the American South under slavery and Jim Crow—in which a dominant ingroup governed itself in accord with liberal principles while subjecting the outgroup to a combination of oppressive rules and often-cruel whims.

Time for a Poor Wingnuts' Campaign! Back at National Review Charles C.W. Cooke says

Of course Jonathan Chait is turning against political correctness and campus self-indulgence. Of course Vox’s editor, Ezra Klein, is now peddling lefty academics who are willing to stand up to the mob. Of course the good denizens of Jezebel are beginning to wonder aloud whether a feminism that eats the likes of Laura Kipnis is useful. If neo-McCarthyism “becomes a salient part of liberal politics,” Schlosser writes in his conclusion, then “liberals are going to suffer tremendous electoral defeat.” The American Left has started to rebel at the exact moment that its own interests are being hurt? Naturally. This isn’t about standards; it’s about power.

Cooke's essay is called "Is the Tide Turning against PC?" but it's not clear that he wants it turned if it means linking arms with those people. So I guess PC must not be such a big deal after all.

Sympathetic as I am toward Kipnis, I never thought so myself -- if some dumbasses want to play thought policeman in select programs at elite colleges, I figure, let them waste their parents' money and God help them when they graduate. And let those other dumbasses turn their tattered propaganda equity now this way, now that, trying to catch the wind. (Good luck explaining the menace of "social justice warriors" to downsized factory workers!) We who have free souls, it touches us not.

UPDATE. Comments are all glorious, but special thanks to commenter atheist for invoking La Rochefoucauld: "Our hatred of favorites is but a love of favor, and our scorn of those who enjoy it is only a balm to our vexation at being deprived thereof." Conservatives had their way exclusively for several centuries before the Enlightenment, and have been sore ever since they lost the franchise.

UPDATE 2. What causes political correctness on campus? Joseph Bottum at the Weekly Standard:

It’s possible to ascribe the situation to the presidential elections of 2008 and 2012.

Ain't even kidding.

The guidelines for Title IX issued by the Obama administration have shifted power to the outraged, and everyone seems to know it.

Everybody Joseph Bottum talks to at the Club, anyway. But wait, Bottum allows that the roots of PC do go deeper:

The reaction to Bill Clinton’s sex scandals, leading to his impeachment in 1998, may have been the first hint of a new choosing of sides, followed by an abiding anger over the outcome of Bush v. Gore in 2000. But the fate of the Democrats is not quite the same thing as the fate of radicalism, and to find the real springs of what is now washing over the nation’s schools, you have to go back, I think, to the fall of the Iron Curtain, 26 years ago.

Everything Democrat causes everything bad, and the same goes for the Soviet Union! In fact the title of Bottum's column is "I Still Blame the Communists." I expect if you swapped out "political correctness" for "riots in Baltimore," "Ebola," "potrzebie," etc., it wouldn't have to be changed much. Sometimes I think they work from Mad Libs.

FRIDAY ROUND-THE-HORN.

At first I thought, "O God no Joanna Newsom is trying to sneak back get the spray-bottle" but this song is kind of sticking with me.
•   Jonah Goldberg's column today could have been titled, "I'm not lazy and stupid, you're lazy and stupid!" He says Obama is dumb because he won't admit Islam itself is responsible for the nuts who kill in its name. The President's anodyne ecumenical statement is, in Goldberg's view, the same thing as saying "Michael Jordan didn’t play basketball" or  "We didn’t win World War II" in that, durr, that's stoopid too, right? The analogy invites deeper analysis, so step well back as Goldberg executes his logic-fart:

“No religion is responsible for terrorism,” the president proclaimed, “people are responsible for violence and terrorism.”

Now obviously, there’s some truth to this. We judge people more by their actions than by their beliefs. But reasonable people also recognize that our actions often have a causal relationship with our beliefs. This is hardly a controversial — or even debatable — insight. Orthodox Jews don’t avoid bacon because it tastes bad; they do so because they’re keeping kosher. One cannot intelligently discuss why Mother Teresa helped the poor without referring to her faith. And one cannot discuss why the Islamic State burns, rapes, and enslaves people without taking their religious beliefs into account.

See -- Jews have wacky eating habits, Christians are nice, and Muslims are savage rapist-murders; Q.E.Doritos Cool Ranch! While I attribute the lack of retribution I've suffered for my anti-Mohammed cartoons to global respect for my artistry, I think Goldberg is safe because most non-conservatives can't make out what he's trying to say.

•   Speaking of legacy pledges and the next GOP President, Bill Kristol worries that Hillary Clinton is getting better numbers in the reps-the-future-not-the-past category in a CNN/ORC poll than any Republican Presidential candidate. (Scott Walker's numbers are least bad, perhaps because voters relate his social-net-shredding record to the dystopian future of The Handmaid's Tale or Idiocracy.) Kristol thinks he sees a way out:

Perhaps some new set of concerns in 2016 will overwhelm all the past/future talk. Given the state of the world, that’s quite possible. We could easily have a foreign policy election in 2016. And then people might not mind a steady hand, even if one from the past (think Richard Nixon in 1968).

One thing Americans  seem to have learned from the last clusterfuck in which Bill Kristol had a hand is, let's not do that again. In fact Kristol himself was complaining about "American war-weariness" only last year. Yet now he thinks beating the drum for Gulf War III might get one of his ringers elected. I suppose that's because he has more than average faith in the power of yellow journalism and jingo. After all, he is the editor of the Weekly Standard, which is very influential among people who never read anything they can't get for free on the New York-DC shuttle; that's got to count for something.

•   Whether or not I get to see any of the other big films (see my "On to Oscar" posts), at some point this weekend I'm going to stick my fool neck out, as I have in years past, and predict Sunday's winners. So watch this space! (And the easy way to do this is to get on my Twitter feed, where I announce posts sometime and dish out apothegms.)

•   Yeah it's late and who cares, but there are a few wonderful things about this Noah Rothman Hot Air column defending noted asshole Rudolph Giuliani and the asshole thing he said this week. I mean, it's mostly terrible on the level of Twitchy (look at the sickburn takedown of the media by "Florida-based political operative Rick Wilson"!), but in his flailing Rothman does bang into an interesting defense:

What are we to make of this frenzied attack on Giuliani, in which the whole of the political press reacted as though a man who left office 14 years ago had insulted their mothers?... 

Oh, but he was a leading presidential candidate in 2007, don’t you know? And he delivered the keynote address at the GOP’s nominating convention in 2008. And he’s a frequent guest on cable news, so he must be influential (a claim that could only be made by someone who rarely appears on cable news). But observing Giuliani’s diminished stature today when compared to the last decade renders the media’s reaction even less explicable.

I hope someone in Rudy's retinue told him, "It's okay, chief -- Noah Rothman says it doesn't matter 'cause you're a has-been!" Oh but the very, very, very best is the correction at the end:

An earlier version of this post incorrectly identified the chairman of the RNC as Ron Fournier

May your weekend be as serendipitous.

WHO'LL STOP THE DERP?

I expect everyone had a great time at yesterday's Concert for Valor in D.C. -- except Ethan Epstein of the Weekly Standard, who must have feverishly thumb-typed this right from the Mall:

Who would have thought that that Bruce Springsteen, Dave Grohl, and Zac Brown, accomplished musicians all, would be so, well, tone-deaf? But how else to explain their choice of song—Creedence Clearwater's famously anti-war anthem “Fortunate Son”—at the ostensibly pro-military “Concert for Valor” this evening on the National Mall? 

The song, not to put too fine a point on it, is an anti-war screed, taking shots at "the red white and blue." It was a particularly terrible choice given that Fortunate Son is, moreover, an anti-draft song, and this concert was largely organized to honor those who volunteered to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq. 

Think how traumatized those vets must feel every time they hear this hateful song played in an oldies bar or at a ballgame or in a jeans commercial!

On a musical level, “Fortunate Song” is not a bad song—that's one hell of a riff.

I mean, it's okay if what you want is a cool, extremely popular MOR rock song at a big public concert, but why would you want that?

But the “Concert for Valor,” a Veterans Day event sponsored by HBO and Starbucks, in front of the Capitol Building, was not the place for it.

Epstein forgot to mention the big finale, where the rockstars spit on the vets from the stage and called them war pigs.  (I haven't heard any actual veterans complain, but maybe they can provoke Allan West into providing some mouth-foam later.)

There's some harrumph-harrumph Let's Examine The Controversy stuff at the Washington Post and elsewhere, but fuck it: Some ideas, if we're so generous as to call them that, are just too stupid for anything but cold buckets of derision.

UPDATE. Kudos to this guy ("a grassroots activist who distinguished himself as one of the top conservative bloggers in Florida") for crafting the perfect lede for this story:

Perhaps we should expect no less during the Obama administration...

Don't fault him for failing to work in #Benghazi, he was on deadline.

UPDATE 2. Ann Althouse gets in on it, and actually sounds sane for a while, but inevitably --

I couldn't watch the clip at the first link. I can't stand Bruce Springsteen, and much as I dislike the Weekly Standard's bellyaching, it's not as bad as listening to Bruce straining histrionically. I have to concede that it's possible that Bruce thinks — and somehow conveyed — that those who volunteer today are doing so because it's their best option in the limited array of choices they have because they are not rich or well-connected. If that's the message, then it really is a rotten thing to say to our American volunteers.

That's a lovely example of even-handedness as practiced in our current political discourse: Sure, what actually happened was clear, but on the other hand here's an unsupported fantasy about what Springsteen might be thinking, so you see both sides etc.

UPDATE 3. Here, enjoy the nightmare of Breitbart factotum John Nolte arguing about the lyrics to "Fortunate Son." (Sample: "Read lyrics from 'star spangled eyes' to 'military son, son' and understand the context of troop-bashing era, obvious imo.") Everybody retuck your shirts! Coming up next: Is "Louie, Louie" Dirty, and Whether The Flintstones is Indeed a Rip-Off of The Honeymooners.

UPDATE 4. I think this is my favorite: The Washington Times calling "Fortunate Son" "Creedence Clearwater’s Revival’s draft-dodging anthem." No, wait, my favorite is NewsBusters referring to Eminem swearing onstage (I know!) as "liberal celebrities embarrassed families in the audience and those watching at home with heavy-handed profanity." No, wait, I -- oh, hell, they're all winners.

AROUND THE HORN.

Some quick thoughts before everybody heads out for Memorial Day weekend to whatever little slice of heaven (I remain here in the pestilential Capital, watching the frontier):

•  The American Spring folks who decidedly failed to overthrow ObamaHitler last Friday were good for a laugh, but I have to say I feel for them. Granted, when they're united in a reactionary electoral force to keep the country down, as they have been for decades, they're harder to sympathize with. But when I see them in small numbers howling on the Mall, unable to do America much damage and maybe even livening up some tourists' day, my resistance is reduced and I can see that they have genuine complaints. For example, they're pissed about the VA hospitals and a lot of other things that leaders who gave a shit about America might help fix. But they don't send that kind of people to Congress -- they send instead flim-flam men who make things worse, then tell them it was the dad-burned Gummint that made it bad because it can't do nothin' right nohow. And they tell them all would be well if the Kenyan Pretender and his socialist comrades were turned out of office, and encourage them to imagine themselves the heirs of the original Tea Party: Revolutionaries with the right and the means to overthrow. Fox News does its bit, announcing that "a group of self-described revolutionary-style patriots with a million mobilized militia members are heading to downtown Washington, D.C.," as if it were something other than a pathetic delusion. "A million" perhaps share the fantasy, but their suburban inertia will always keep them from exerting themselves to realize it, apart from hanging a confederate flag in the garage or yelling at the teevee -- only this ragtag band actually walked the walk, and they raged for the cameras, crying that they'd been betrayed, but not knowing, as I once observed of the Sarah Palin Army, that they were marked for betrayal all along.

•  I've been asking on Twitter but maybe you guys don't go in for microblogging, so: Can someone tell me what gives with the Right's recent hard-on for the Export-Import Bank? I've seen it on and off for years but in the past few months there's been a buttload of ecrasez-l'infame among the brethren  -- including this typically muddled Jonah Goldberg thumbsucker, which all but screams "did I get the talking points right, Mr. Koch? I added some of my signature farrrrrrRRRt."  My best guess is, 1.) Victory is easy  -- the authorization expires in September, and 2.) the major complaint about the Bank seems to be "crony capitalism" -- which is a major Obama-era propaganda theme among conservatives -- and deauthorizing the Bank is one of the few things they can do that (as they believe) will show the voters that they're not just tools of big business without getting their hands slapped by major donors. What do you think?

•  Conservative "reformers" like Ross Douthat with big plans to attract the masses to the GOP (remember the Party of Sam's Club? Good times!) have a hard row to hoe --  sensible people keep pointing out that Republicans crush the poor because they find the poor easy to crush, and even voters outside the reach of these sensible people are brought to the same conclusion by observation and common sense. In this blog post, Douthat acknowledges such observations "prove the case that the GOP includes a strong ideological tendency that cuts against what some of the reform-conservative essayists want to do." But -- I just love this -- "What they don’t prove, however, is that the current Republican Party could never be a vehicle for such a policy agenda." Don't stop believin'! For example, "The Democratic Party of the late 1970s and early 1980s stood rather firmly for all kinds of ideas (price controls, middle class tax increases) that the Democratic Party of the 1990s deliberately backed away from." In other words, the Democrats got more conservative, so Republicans should be able to get more -- not liberal, certainly, but conservative-with-an-explanation. Electoral gold! Interestingly, Douthat acknowledges that the "internal party debate... swung in [a] more Randian direction in 2009-2012," which leads one to wonder where Douthat thinks it's been swinging in 2013 and 2014. The Party of Rent-a-Center? Or of Singapore?

UPDATE.

•  "They had a dream," starts Noemie Emery at the Weekly Standard (interesting allusion, under the circumstances). "For almost a hundred years now, the famed academic-artistic-and-punditry industrial complex has dreamed of a government run by their kind of people (i.e., nature’s noblemen), whose intelligence, wit, and refined sensibilities would bring us a heaven on earth..." Obama is the first person like this to rule since, it would seem, John Quincy Adams (Emery is unclear on this point), and Obama made Obamacare which everyone hates, so the judgment of history is clear: "They wanted their chance, and they got it. They had it. They blew it. They’re done." Back to electing haberdashers and Nixons! Unfortunately the part where a disgusted electorate threw Obama out in 2012 is missing from the essay. Editing error?

PUT OUT MORE FLAGS.

You've probably seen this:

Republican approval rating falls to lowest point in Gallup poll history 

...just 28 percent of Americans have a favorable impression of the GOP, according to the latest monthly Gallup tracking poll. The number "is the lowest favorable rating measured for either party since Gallup began asking this question in 1992,” the polling company stated. 

The number is 10 points lower than the party scored in the same poll in September.

I'm not given to rah-rah, and I'm old enough to know how fast the wheel of fortune spins. But I hope that whenever my case is so decisively farblondzhet, I never have to go out and paint the pig with lipstick like Ole Perfesser Reynolds does here:

MAYBE THIS IS WHY OBAMA’S ACTING SO PETULANT AND UPSET: Ted Cruz poll shows GOP gained in fight over Obamacare despite shutdown. “Obama’s job approval rating was 45 percent; his disapproval was 52 percent. 67 percent said Obamacare was the ‘major reason’ for the government shutdown.” 

I wonder what Obama’s polls are saying?

So if you squint just right,  Ted Cruz's own poll says Ted Cruz's cause is gaining, against all other evidence. (It also says "by a margin of 42 percent to 36 percent, independent voters blamed Republicans for the shutdown over Obama and the Democrats," but that must be a typo.) That's unskewed, baby! Also from the Perfesser:

UPDATE: Dems Lose Lead In Generic Congressional Ballot.

Hit the link and you find Breitbart acolyte John Nolte celebrating a Rasmussen poll from last week, showing a "generic" Congressional race to be tied 40%-40%; the Democrats lost all of two points from the previous. From the very same Rasmussen page, you can click over to their other poll findings, including "70% Give Congress Poor Rating" ("it's hard to believe it could get any worse") and "Support for Government Shutdown Drops from 53% to 45%" -- and that one was published back on September 30; pretty soon the shutdown approval ratings might be down around Black Plague levels, if they aren't already. (This just in: Ted Cruz's pollster finds public starting to turn around on Plague! It's all in the wording, and this time they called it "ice cream.")

How does he get away with it? That's in the wording, too: Nolte crows that this is "another edition of the polls the media won't cover"; also, "the media want to give Obama a third-term... the media ignore inconvenient polls and try to scare the GOP... the story the media won’t tell" etc. The story may be bullshit, but it sure refutes what the Lame Stream Media are telling you, readers -- so click on through and buy some gold!

Not buying it? Wait till the next wave of WorldWarIIMemorialGate, and LincolnMemorialLawnmowerGate ("We need the names of these officers publicized," cries the Ole Perfesser), and exposure of all the other outrages perpetrated by Obama's stormtroopers, the National Park Service! Jonathan V. Last at the Weekly Standard:

The conduct of the National Park Service over the last week might be the biggest scandal of the Obama administration.

Forget Benghazi, some fascist closed the scenic overlook!

Before the current [Park Service] director, Jonathan Jarvis, was nominated by President Obama, he’d spent 30 years as a civil servant. But he has taken to his political duties with all the fervor of a third-tier hack from the DNC, marrying the disinterested contempt of a meter maid with the zeal of an ambitious party apparatchik.

It’s worth recalling that the Park Service has always been deeply ambivalent about the public which they’re charged with serving...

Last then tells us about one park director's desire to limit traffic on the Mall ("Nobody drives through Disneyland. They’re not allowed. And we’ve got the better theme park") and cries, "Yes, yes. They must protect America’s treasures from the ugly Americans." Conservation is theft! Why, soon they won't even let you piss in the reservoir.

I do think the right's alternative universe should be drive-through, though. It'll be a nice change from having to live with them.

NOT JUST A FLUKE.

The numbers show that females aren’t fooled by the phony “war on women.” In 2008, 57 percent of women voted for Barack Obama; 43 percent voted for McCain. The latest Washington Post-ABC News poll shows a substantial shift: Fewer than half of female registered voters now support Obama—he’s at 49 against Romney’s 43 percent. Polls of registered voters, rather than likely voters, tend to skew Democratic.
In his acceptance speech, Romney urged, “Now is the moment when we can stand up and say, ‘I’m an American. I make my destiny.’ ” Women can say the same. Wasn’t it Democrats who used to argue that biology isn’t destiny?

-- "Desperate Democrats," Kelly Jane Torrance, The Weekly Standard

Tonight on Twitter:

Etc.

You know, you assholes aren't fooling anyone.

P.S. Bill Clinton just kicked your ass.

THE FIX IS IN. David Mamet has a new book, The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture, which Andrew Ferguson at the Weekly Standard says "marks the terminal point of a years-long conversion from left to right that Mamet-watchers (there are quite a few of these) have long suspected but hadn’t quite confirmed." Hadn't quite confirmed? Mamet's "Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal'" appeared in the Village Voice in 2008.

But that essay "was much milder than its title," insists Ferguson. "It was the work of a man in mid-conversion." (Mamet merely said, "I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind," called Thomas Sowell "our greatest contemporary philosopher," etc.) So never mind the high-level notice previously taken of Mamet's political journey; wait'll the libs find out he's really conservative now. Bet they'll be mad!

A hint of how this earth-shattering news might go down is seen in Ferguson's portrayal of Mamet's speech at Stanford, though it occurred "a couple of years ago." The speech contained denunciations of political correctness and "a full-throated defense of capitalism." Nonetheless, instead of ripping up the seats, "the students in Memorial Hall seemed mostly unperturbed," reports Ferguson. "The ripples of dissatisfaction issued from the older members of the crowd." Ripples of dissatisfaction! Also, some of the oldsters -- "the wives were in wraparound skirts and had hair shorter than their husbands’" -- walked out.

Boy, Mamet's in trouble now.

After reading The Secret Knowledge in galleys, the Fox News host and writer Greg Gutfeld invented the David Mamet Attack Countdown Clock, which “monitors the days until a once-glorified liberal artist is dismissed as an untalented buffoon.” Tick tock.

Concurring is Mark Steyn, who quotes himself on the topic; from Steyn's 2008 essay:

In The Village Voice the other week, the playwright David Mamet recently outed himself as a liberal apostate and revealed that he's begun reading conservative types like Milton Friedman and Paul Johnson. If he's wondering what he's in for a year or two down the line, here's how Newsweek's Jonathan Tepperman began his review this week of another literary leftie who wandered off the reservation...

Long story short, the political writer Tepperman gave Martin Amis' political book, The Second Plane, a negative review. There can be no possible explanation for this except payback for Amis' apostasy, just as there will be no other possible explanation for whatever brickbats Mamet may get after his book comes out.

Steyn's "year or two" timeline is a little off -- Mamet has since "'Brain-Dead'" had the star-studded Race on Broadway, which received mixed reviews, the slightly better-received film Redbelt, and some prominent revivals (including one of Boston Marriage which the New York Times recently puffed -- ah, if they only knew!). But we may expect someone to object to The Secret Knowledge, and this will be proof that the David Mamet Attack Countdown Clock has gone off.

Meanwhile Tony Kushner, the most obviously leftist playwright this side of Dario Fo, has just debuted a new play at the Public. This is from the review in (cue sinister music) the Times:

...few of these revelations feel surprising or particularly necessary. “Angels in America” established that Mr. Kushner is a great playwright. In “Guide” he registers mainly as a great conversationalist who keeps talking well after he has made his essential points.

Kushner got even worse at the Voice ("a high-mettled, frolicsome, intellectually challenging mess, certainly self-indulgent, but never drab" -- now there's a pull-quote!) and elsewhere.

What reason can there be for the liberal intelligentsia turning on their fair-haired boy? They must be laying the groundwork for the attack on Mamet; by denouncing Kushner, they're making it look as if their critics review works based on their merits, rather than on the orders of the liberal High Command!

Once you adopt the view that everything on God's green earth is about politics, so much becomes obvious.

UPDATE. Much discussion of Mamet's work in comments. Don't misunderstand: I'm a fan. And I've known since I saw and admired the first New York production, years ago, of Oleanna with Bill Macy and Rebecca Pidgeon that he ain't exactly Dalton Trumbo, as would anyone else who was paying attention. And yet he wasn't blackballed by the nobs then. The first London production of Oleanna was directed by Harold fucking Pinter! The notion that a man of Mamet's attainments suffers, or could suffer, appreciably from liberal persecution is beyond ridiculous.

WON'T SOMEBODY PLEASE THINK OF THE WINGNUTS? Since I wrote about it at the Voice, it's just gotten worse: The entire right wing is in mourning over the recent assassination of their reputations. (I hear some Democratic Congresswoman got shot, too, but they don't have much to say about that.)

The Corner is one long blubber-fest. Brian Bolduc repurposes a Glenn Beck press release "decrying" -- get this -- "political opportunism of all stripes." Yeah, let's get past these sideshows and fight the real enemy: George Soros and Teddy Roosevelt!

Rich Lowry laffs about a gun-sight image from the sports section -- how could those silly liberals take such things seriously? -- then turns grave over a GOP elephant festooned with swastikas on an anti-war poster. (Lowry doesn't tell us how many people were shot at that rally; must have been dozens.)

Michelle Malkin does one of the longer SKREEEEs in her history, a list of liberal hate crimes generously padded with egregious misrepresentations ("The Green War on Children") and trivialities (a mug shot of Josh Medlin, who "threw an ice cream pie at Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol"). It all goes to show that liberal hate (and Mexicans!) created the climate of terror that led to the shooting of Rep. Giffords and, possibly, the Kennedys and Davey Moore.

And of course, that bastard Bill Clinton and his Oklahoma City false flag operation, as hawked by the Ole Perfesser, Byron York and Dick Morris. Not that they're turning a crisis into an opportunity or anything, but this makes a great teachable moment about how liberals use wingnut violence to make wingnuts look bad.

It is something to see the Perfesser, normally glib to the point of apathy, feverishly glomming every bit of propaganda provenance he can get his hands on (including more "blood libel" stuff) as if he needed them immediately for a firebreak. They must have doubled his stipend, or cut his ration. That other tenured radical, Ann Althouse, meanwhile pre-emptively declares that "the accusations backfire," and retreats to her happy place. We all deal with stress in our own way; Althouse's seems the cozier; the Perfesser will have a hard time achieving immortality if he continues to strain himself like this.

I sure hope no one shoots Obama. These poor people have suffered enough!

UPDATE. You must admit, they have nerve:

Glenn Beck told his radio audience this morning that Sarah Palin had e-mailed him about the tragic shootings in Arizona this weekend, writing, “I hate violence. I hate war.”

“Our children will not have peace if politicos just capitalize on this to succeed in portraying anyone as inciting terror and violence,” Palin added.

During his show, Beck also urged Palin to seek extra security for herself and her family.

One of Palin's targets gets shot, but Palin is actually the one in the cross-hairs. In Hell Joe Goebbels is laughing his ass off.

UPDATE 2. In comments, whetstone follows through: "Unfortunately that Corner post doesn't capture the full nerve of Beck's concern for Palin: 'But please look into protection for your family. An attempt on you could bring the republic down.' Goebbels, having gotten the full quote, has now stopped laughing and is now quietly seething with envy."

ARMCHAIR PSYCHOLOGIST, HEAL THYSELF. As we have seen, a rightwing cottage industry has emerged in damning psychological profiles of Barack Obama. Many of its analysts are or claim to be psych professional, but at this level qualifications are not a requirement. Now Jonathan V. Last is here to tell us the President, unlike Presidents before him, is a narcissist.

It’s revealed in lots of little stories. There was the time he bragged about how one of his campaign volunteers, who had tragically died of breast cancer, “insisted she’s going to be buried in an Obama T-shirt.” There was the Nobel acceptance speech where he conceded, “I do not bring with me today a definitive solution to the problems of war” (the emphasis is mine). There was the moment during the 2008 campaign when Obama appeared with a seal that was a mash-up of the Great Seal of the United States and his own campaign logo (with its motto Vero Possumus, “Yes we Can” in Latin). Just a few weeks ago, Obama was giving a speech when the actual presidential seal fell from the rostrum. “That’s all right,” he quipped. “All of you know who I am.” Oh yes, Mr. President, we certainly do.

Despite Last's helpful italics and characterizations, these incidents make neither a definitive case nor a feature-length article, so Last piles on more. As an author Obama once changed the direction of a book he was writing, and thus Simon and Schuster "got burned for a few thousand bucks." When his fame rose he changed his agent, much like that other monster of ambition, Bruce Springsteen. Also he left his job at the University of Chicago sooner than they would have liked.

Worst of all, Last tells us at length, he was deluded enough to think he could be elected President of the United States.

"Yet you don’t have to delve deep into armchair psychology to see how Obama’s vanity has shaped his presidency," says Last, before further wearying the cushions of his own psychology armchair. Obama has bragged on his abilities and used his reputation to political advantage. He used Lincoln's bible at his Inauguration and Lincoln's china at the luncheon. His palaver about the end of the Cold War does not match that of Jonathan V. Last. He doesn't delegate much.

Were Obama a captain of industry rather than a Democratic President, I suspect this would all be presented as evidence of his Randian dynamism, and the article would be a cover feature for Forbes rather than another chunk of boob-bait in the Weekly Standard. But, to indulge in a little armchair psychology of my own, we've reached a stage in the group psychology of the Right where even accepting the Nobel Prize (with becoming modesty, though excerpted here to give a contrary impression) is offered as proof of Obama's unfitness. They have some nerve calling anyone else nuts.

ANNALS OF LIBERTARIANISM, PART 1,929,001. Another culture-war denunciation ("Hollywood Hates Capitalism") of commie movies like Wall Street, Avatar, Aliens, Mission Impossible:2, etc. (No, I'm not kidding.) Followed by an explanation that in real life companies that "break the rules" don't benefit from their crimes -- ask Goldman Sachs! (Which is doing fine, thanks, and advertising itself as the mentor of "10,000 small businesses," which those who are dumb enough to believe the rest of this crap just might also believe).

Newbies may be blinking, astonished, and assuming that this comes from National Review, Forbes, Weekly Standard, StormFront, or something like that. Regular readers will have already guessed it's from libertarian magazine Reason.

Refresh my memory: What's the difference between them and Republicans again?

UPDATE. In comments, some astute answers to my question. Susan of Texas: "Conservatives are authoritarian followers. Libertarians are authoritarian followers who think they are authoritarian leaders." By my life and my love of it, that's good.

SPIN CITY. It's not my way, you know, to just link something and go "read the whole thing." But I'll make an exception for John Cole on how a speculative, decent bill may become anathema, first on the fringe, then in the what-liberal media, and then for opportunistic purposes by wet Democratic legislators:

Somewhere around this time, Randy Scheuenemann and Meg Stapleton would post a bunch of nonsense on Palin’s facebook page, maybe declaring that Americorps is just like Hitler Youth Corps. This would get picked up by the Weekly Standard’s resident Palin fluffer, Matt Continetti, repeated by the increasingly loathesome Michael Goldfarb, and mainstreamed into CNN by Stephen Hayes in one of his typical fact-free appearances. Bill Kristol would pick up the ball and run with it, and before you know it, Fred Hiatt’s fishwrap would have 20 editorials railing against Americorps.

At this time, we would have tea partiers packing guns to town hall events, terrified of a socialist takeover of, well, something, carrying racist signs and chanting “Keep Government out of Americorps!,” and the rest of the MSM can start their coverage. Sensing an opportunity, shitheels like Ben Nelson and Blanche Lincoln and Mary Landrieu sense the bill is in trouble, and would start to pack the goodies into it for their home state...

This would have piqued my interest even if David Broder hadn't gone on about what a great populist Sarah Palin is at precisely the moment when a new WashPo-ABC poll showed that Palin has never been less popular. I still think Palin can adapt and improve her way to the Republican Presidential nomination, and that her trifling with fools -- which may currently disappoint ordinary Americans who, after all, are not that fond of complainers -- may pay off in the long run; that's partly because she knows the nervous "mainstream" types who don't wish to be exposed to big winds whichever way they blow will carry her water in the meantime, no matter what.

It's an unavoidable problem, I fear, of democracy in an age of mass communications and dwindling dollars. To the honorable old question, why oh why can't we have a better press corps? I can only answer: No money in it. The Kremlinology of the press, citizen and otherwise, can be extremely subtle, but the basic state of play is that those with little power are desperate and those with much power are scared.

In the positivist view, this constant tension is supposed to create a better state of affairs, with the bustling marketplace of ideas yielding a better product. Maybe the positive thinkers think that better product is a higher degree of truth. But from what I've seen, it's more like the progress of junk food: from an agreeable, consistent, and convenient substitute for the real thing, to something everyone eats and nobody remembers is junk.

FORCED PERSPECTIVE. Big rightwing scandal of the day: Obama had an airplane moved before he made his speech. This is an unprecedented and treasonous attempt to control Presidential photo opportunities, which are supposed to evolve naturally, like a relationship.

Left Coast Rebel:

A brothel of snot-nosed, wide-eyed bleeding heart pointy-heads straight out of academia that care more for image and photo-op than any institution or sacred American lexicon. This story points exactly to just that. I have a prediction. This will be a big story tomorrow in the free-press only.

I have an educated guess. Left Coast Rebel is loved by his mother only.

Weekly Standard goes for the "I'm not nuts, you're nuts" approach: "And keep in mind, Obama was happy to have his picture taken with Hugo Chavez and Daniel Ortega, but the F-22 -- a plane that Americans can and should be proud of..." Oh Jesus Christ. Maybe Obama should have had the Statue of Liberty, the Harlem Globetrotters, and Mt. Rusmore in the background, too. Or isn't he proud of them?

As for meeting with Chaevz and Ortega, here's Bush meeting with Red Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao -- in April 2009. He's meeting with tyrants even after he's done being President! That means he likes to hug and kiss them.

I don't which would be worse: if they actually believe this shit matters, or if they're just pretending. Maybe we should also consider the possibility that they don't really know what they're doing anymore, and lash out at everything, like young Helen Keller.

UPDATE. Left Coast Rebel offers a rebuttal:

The Left Coast Rebel Has a New Hater, The ACLUBlog

No to h8ers! Remember what the boss said. Of course liberal hate is contagious, and causes our hero to turn colors.

The ACLUBlog mission statement --- "There are some occupations that are stereotypically gay, but mechanical engineering isn't one of them."

Yes, stereotypically gay, just like calling a conservative out as only loved by his mother, or like a wandering Helen Keller. How original, how 'tolerant', how 'liberal.'

Apparently when I thought I was making jokes about internet commentators, I was attacking gay and disabled people. Forgive me, fellow PC killjoys! In fact, the joke about turning colors is probably some kind of racism, too.

Can you imagine if GWB had staged a photo-op at an Air Force Base...

I'm not perfect; maybe LCR's post is a parody too. But how do you tell?

A SIGN OF PROGRESS. Of a sort, anyway. Rightwingers are disowning an Obama-is-Hitler sign! It'll be temporary, of course, as Obama-is-Hitler is one of their steady tropes. But at this critical moment, any outrage multiplier is useful, even if it puts them off their usual game for a few minutes.

Meanwhile the Weekly Standard's John McCormack assures his credulous readers:

Now, Dave Weigel points out that the Obama-as-Hitler posters are produced by the group of many-times Democratic presidential candidate (and absolute nutter) Lyndon LaRouche.

And David Freddoso tells us, "Don't blame conservatives for LaRouche's Obama=Hitler signs."

Almost simultaneously, the Lyndon LaRouche website tells us "Do Not Believe A Word Obama Utters" and praises the Town Brawls: "The anger is real. The hatred for the Obama policy is real." Also: "The fact is: Obama is out to commit genocide. And he's got members of Congress goose-stepping behind him."

This is a wonderful schtick: Obama's opponents consider him a Nazi, but claim his supporters are really the ones calling him a Nazi, and direct us to these "supporters," who call Obama a Nazi.

I had so little hope for health care reform that I suspected Obama's rush to pass it was an intentionally Pyrrhic plan to marginalize his enemies. If I was right, he's certainly getting his money's worth.

MORAL DEGENERATE. I've been reading around the morality conservatives this evening. I'll spare you the details, but they basically say that everything is rotten and it's up to conservatives to admit that capitalism alone hasn't saved us and we need some sort of public education program to give people values, perhaps out of William J. Bennett books, after which they will behave like Reagan Republicans, only this time with feeling.

A prime example is Matthew Continetti, who started out as a student Republican Iraq War fan, and later became aware that conservative Republicans were not entirely what they said they were. Nonetheless he continued to write for the Weekly Standard in defense of timeless conservative principles such as electing Republicans to prevent liberal weenie judges, electing Republicans so we can invade Iran, and just plain electing Republicans.

Now in the Weekly Standard Continetti writes like man who, finding himself out of other options, must appeal to his readers' tender memories of Bible School. He writes that the American people are weak, depraved by Paris Hilton and A-Rod and, yes, some Wall Street tycoons and yes, yes, even President Bush -- which we must take as a grand concession, though Bush is in Dallas where he can do no one, least of all the Party he lately led, any harm.

Reagan, of course, was an unqualified success; he "instituted public policies that spurred the economy, forced the collapse of the Soviet Empire, and reinstilled national pride among Americans." His economic miracle had nothing to do with the financier-rentier culture that has recently come a-cropper. That was all because of Fannie Mae and steroids and Michael Phelps' bong, which somehow have had a more powerful destabilizing effect on us than Keith Hernandez' cocaine habit, Porky's, and the Savings and Loan scandals of the golden age.

Imagining the crowd may be with him, Continetti makes some soothing noises about Obama before announcing that he must be fought tooth and nail -- but not on partisan grounds; only in defense of America's moral regeneration.

And what will be the agency of our regeneration? Why, "responsibility" -- we must create a new Age of it. Michael Phelps must be responsible not only for swimming fast in quadrennial contests, but also for being a "role model," because "role models have responsibilities." The American people, also, must take responsibility, but not the weak, Democrat sort of responsibility to which Obama alluded in his inaugural address, because that "will encourage the individual to turn to government instead." Where, then, will this new sense of responsibility come from?

Where to begin? Start with some exemplars of decency, professionalism, and ability. US Airways pilot Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger III riveted the nation with his dramatic crash-landing into the Hudson River. -Sullenberger's experience and stoicism meant that not a single life was lost during the dramatic and dangerous touch-down. It is no surprise that he has been lionized in the days since. When everything else seems to be crashing all around us, Sullenberger is a rock of common sense and soft-spoken modesty. Imagine--just imagine--if the men and women who represent us in Congress shared his character?

You've tumbled to it by now. The Republicans have totally fucked up, but there is some public figure of indeterminate political affiliation who has done something right, and by God that's what the new conservatism is all about. He's like -- let's see -- he's like the 1980 Olympic hockey team! He's like -- give me a minute -- Lee Iacocca! He's like, he's like, he's like -- the crew of the Challenger! They slipped the surly bonds of earth, and so can we!

Perhaps this, rather than Michael Phelps' drug use, outrages you. But come now, we are liberals, and full of understanding. We can no more chastise Continetti for his behavior than we would chastise a chimpanzee for masturbating in his cage. Why wouldn't he try this ancient scam on the public, and why wouldn't other rightwing moral scolds (like Ross Douthat -- who also, hilariously pleads for "an intellectually healthy American Right that's influenced by Rod Dreher and the Cato Institute") aid and abet him? It's not as if they had any real morals.

THE PERMANENT CAMPAIGN. Michael Goldfarb was interviewed at CJR about his experiences as a McCain campaign blogger. Throughout the course of the thing, it's clear he thinks he did a great job. When a political flak's cause fails as badly as Goldfarb's did, you'd expect he would think up ways he might have done it better, at least to show prospective employers that he isn't committed to losing strategies. But maybe winning this election wasn't as important to him as it might seem.

Goldfarb portrays his disastrous appearance with Rick Sanchez, in which the CNN host had some sport with Goldfarb's inability to say the name Jeremiah Wright out loud, as a "mistake" but also, astonishingly, a moment of glory:

I was summoned to the office of the campaign manager and given a slap on the wrist. We had a clear directive that we were not to discuss the name of Rev. Wright, and I tiptoed right up to it but I wasn’t allowed to cross it. But when I walked back into the communications room I got a round of applause. There was a lot of support among the rank and file; I think it was obvious to anyone that seriously followed the campaign what was going on there. I can’t tell if people were being willfully ignorant or if they generally don’t believe that [Obama] associated with those kinds of people. But that was a mistake from a communications standpoint.

Why were his colleagues so pleased with his mistake? Perhaps because the playbook Goldfarb was following had nothing to do with getting McCain closer to the White House. Here's what I noticed when I looked at Goldfarb's blog in its early days:

...promising on its June 6 launch to "provide quotes and information you won't be able to get anywhere else," the McCain Report has by this writing posted a video of McCain denouncing Obama, a video of ABBA (McCain's a fan), a Weekly Standard denunciation of Obama, a video of Obama headlined "Everybody But Obama" accompanied by a Weekly Standard denunciation of Obama, and, finally, a post devoted to praise — of [Obama primary opponent] Hillary Clinton ("it's clear that John McCain and Hillary Clinton respect each other — and there is a genuine affection for her here at McCain HQ").

Attacks are part of any campaign operation, but even in sunny June, Goldfarb was more interested in getting Obama than in talking up his candidate, who'd secured the nomination three months earlier and might have benefited from some good getting-to-know-you publicity.

At the end of the interview Goldfarb says, "it was something I was good at. I was a cudgel. I pissed off the media. They were furious about it. That was the effect the campaign was looking for." Really? Piss off the media was the strategy? Presumably if they'd gotten Katie Couric to foam at the mouth they could have declared victory and quit early.

This isn't the behavior of people who are trying to win elections. It's the behavior of culture-warring true believers whose real job (as Goldfarb's overtly is, out of election season) is not to build up or bring down a candidate but to defame an opposing political philosophy. When a serious operative would have tried to push the ball forward, Goldfarb was pursuing his own permanent agenda. This is not a moral issue -- if the McCain campaign was dumb enough to keep him on, they deserved what they got -- but a sign of how far off the beam conservatives have strayed.

No wonder that now, as the country waits nervously for Washington to do what it can with the economy, they focus on getting contraceptives out of the stimulus package and who's going to replace Billy Kristol at the Times ("The choice to replace Kristol should indeed be someone who drives liberals 'crazy'"*). They have entered, as Doghouse Riley likes to put it, their ghost dance phase; they chant and spin and pray to the Great Spirit for restoration as the world transforms around them.

*UPDATE. In comments Aziz Poonawalla reminds me that his full quote goes, "The choice to replace Kristol should indeed be someone who drives liberals 'crazy' - but not in the Limbaugh sense, as Ruffini would have it, but rather as Kevin Drum (a liberal) says 'because he makes such compelling and hard-to-refute arguments for conservative ideas.'" I was just grabbing for an example, and would have done better to pick this or one of a hundred others. I regret even the faint implication that Poonawalla is as crazy as they are.

A HOLLYWOOD BOMB. Andrew Breitbart tells The Hill he's starting up a right-wing Hollywood site.

His strategy is to prod conservative Washington to start caring about Hollywood. Breitbart has already signed several big names, including House Minority Leader Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio), incoming Minority Whip Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and Reps. Thaddeus McCotter (R-Mich.), Mary Bono Mack (R-Calif.) and Connie Mack (R-Fla.), to post entries on the site. He has also landed former senator and GOP presidential candidate Fred Thompson, MSNBC correspondent Tucker Carlson and a slew of other conservative thinkers from the National Review, The Weekly Standard and Commentary magazine to contribute.

Breitbart is also eager to include commentary from Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh and other conservatives who have stirred up controversy in the past. “I don’t consider them controversial,” he says.

This Zhdanovite spectacle will offer endless amusement when it opens in January. We have been supplied with a press release, and here are some highlights of the first issue:

Amity Shlaes, author of The Forgotten Man, on how Frank Capra prolonged the Great Depression: "I was at first intrigued to learn Capra had made a film called You Can't Take It With You and hoped it would have conveyed a positive financial message that would get audiences spending to unleash the power of free markets. Alas, it turned out to be a celebration of non-conformists, clearly meant to make viewers comfortable with the alien philosophy of the New Deal. Capra also missed a valuable opportunity to have Mr. Smith, when he went to Washington. denounce Franklin Roosevelt from the floor of the Senate."

Rush Limbaugh on the treasonous legacy of Citizen Kane: "Folks, I am going to go out on a limb here. Every critic, marching in lockstep on orders from the cultural Kremlin, will tell you that Citizen Kane is a great movie. But how many of them have ever run a business? They just don't know what they're talking about. And Orson Welles, who was mincing around in spats and leotards since he was a baby, practically, didn't know either. So he libeled a great fictional businessman -- though everyone knows his model was one of my personal heroes, William Randolph Hearst -- by making him out to be corrupt and lecherous to stir up class envy. My friends, I've spent hours with business leaders like Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump, and I can tell you, no successful leader has a fireplace that big."

A podcast by Fred Thompson on Frost/Nixon: "Now, the Dick Nixon I knew was a mahty man, the sort of feller who'd brush off a David Frost lahk a houn' scratchin' off a flea. I tell you it galled Nixon to have to sit there oan thet TV set an' tolerate those questions from a lib'ral Englishman with big ol' sideburns. But he did it so people would know the truth an' to this day I hain't seen a lick o' evidence that he didn't donate that big ol' check to the St. Jude Hauspital. But that's the kinda man Richard Nixon was."

Jonah Goldberg on The X Files: I Want To Believe: "Now there's still the politically correct angle of the pedophile priest. I don't want to get into the weeds debating the role of the Catholic Church. I can understand why people are angry about priests diddling little boys, though I wonder why no one examines the role of gay rights groups in this abuse, which I hope to address in a future column. But I Want To Believe is really about faith, no matter how much the filmmakers try to get away from it, and I think it's ironic that Hollywood is so adamantly against religion and yet they keep making these movies about people who want to believe. There's a tradition of this in science fiction that I hope to get to in my new book. The head transplant thing also addresses conservative doubts about science and where it goes when it's left unregulated -- though liberals are all for regulation when it comes to banks, you never hear them speaking out against this sort of thing."