SAVINGS AND LOAN SCANDAL II -- THIS TIME IT'S PERSONAL! More good economic news! Another mortgage lender goes down -- and an Administration factotum blames the whistleblower:

The director of the Office of Thrift Supervision, John Reich, blamed IndyMac's failure on comments made in late June by Sen. Charles Schumer (D., N.Y.), who sent a letter to the regulator raising concerns about the bank's solvency. In the following 11 days, spooked depositors withdrew a total of $1.3 billion. Mr. Reich said Sen. Schumer gave the bank a "heart attack."

"Would the institution have failed without the deposit run?" Mr. Reich asked reporters. "We'll never know the answer to that question."

Mr. Schumer quickly fired back.

"If OTS had done its job as regulator and not let IndyMac's poor and loose lending practices continue, we wouldn't be where we are today," Sen. Schumer said. "Instead of pointing false fingers of blame, OTS should start doing its job to prevent future IndyMacs."

Speaking of factota, the usual suspects rush to support Reich's spin. If only Charles Keating or Herbert Hoover had such a blogosphere to work with! True, it's a hard sell, but, like anything else for Republicans these days, worth a try.

UPDATE. The Ole Perfesser seems to have caught the memo, but not the enthusiasm: "Problems with the bank aren't Schumer's fault, of course, but publicity-seeking is a well-known Schumer flaw, and subjects like this call for a degree of discretion that he seems not to have demonstrated." Maybe he was pulled off-message by Schumer's evident willingness to fight back. I'm not overly fond of my senior Senator, but it's nice to see him show a bit of spine. Maybe he and his colleagues should try it more often.

UPDATE II. An L.A. Times blog says the accusation against Schumer is "an important angle in the IndyMac failure that may get lost in ominous headlines tonight and tomorrow." I don't see how, with the Wall Street Journal giving it prominent play and the rightbloggers shopping it aggressively.

OFF LINE. Instaputz deftly sketches the progress of the Atlantic Monthly from Julia Ward Howe and Nathaniel Hawthorne to Megan McArdle reporting on her iPhone campout ("I imagine this is what it feels like to be a refugee"). Worse is yet to come, though, when the Apple Store people ask McArdle for her papers:

While I was buying the iPhone, they pulled me aside for a credit review. Since I have good credit, this was shocking--and humiliating. For a middle class American, telling your two friends in the store that the AT&T folks are having second thoughts about giving you credit feels a little like confessing that you're a criminal.

McArdle shows some sympathy toward some people with bad credit -- she's known journalists and folks just out of grad school, apparently, who have had such problems -- but she ends with this:

Of course there are irresponsible profligates who borrow money they've no intention of repaying...

The worst part is that the profligates are immune to the shame (or seem to be). It's the decent people, the ones who were overtaken by events, who cringe when the store clerks motion them aside.

This puts me in mind of characters from Nelson Algren, Charles Bukowski, and The Life of Oharu; also, of real people who passed in despair from caring anymore whether they were playing by rules that, experience seemed to show, never gave them a chance to succeed on even the simplest terms, and who stood in line not for iPhones but for food and shelter.

It may seem in bad taste to mention such people in a blogosphere largely devoted to middle-class problems. Still, it's worth considering that they exist, and in greater numbers than a romp through these precincts would suggest. If your frame of reference consists entirely of the relatively fortunate, then you may naturally consider all credit problems to be the result of wickedness or, at best, poor choices to which you owe no sympathy. From a libertarian perspective, certainly, there's no reason to feel any differently. Which is one good reason why, even in a country that loves liberty, libertarianism hasn't caught on, and won't until citizens outside the citadels of privilege wholly lose their acquaintance with misfortune. And though most of our public discourse since the Age of Reagan suggests otherwise, that is not even close to happening.

SAY ANYTHING. From last week, but new to me -- a pamphlet by Hugh Hewitt called "A Letter to a Young Obama Supporter." Three-quarters of it flatters the YOS:

Because of your passion for the planet and your interconnectedness, you have already profoundly shaped the debate over climate change. Now you are poised to perhaps decide the 2008 presidential election. You are very engaged in the election, and leaning — by a large majority it seems-towards Barack Obama. Yet as with so many other things, your generation is very open to new information and arguments, and not at all self-conscious or stubborn when it comes to changing your mind when new perspectives arrive. So it seems that many of you will be keeping an open mind until you actually check a box or pull a lever.

Yes, Hewitt is getting you cozy, nubile voter. He also says that he knows other "well-informed young people with great parents and promising futures" just like you, and is "thrilled that so many young activists are interested in the campaign"; it's "a sign of political renewal and a rebuke to the cynics." As for the YOS' intended, he is "unconnected to the bitter political struggles of the last 15 years," "a brilliant, almost hypnotic speaker" (Wait -- did his hand just touch your thigh?), whose "success is a testament to the country’s long, uphill struggle to deliver on the promise of the Declaration of Independence’s radical statement that all men are created equal."

Now the gear shift:

It is entirely possible to be proud of the country for nominating Senator Obama, even as you work hard to defeat him...

It starts to dawn on the youngster that this isn't the sort of encounter it had seemed just moments earlier.

Indeed, he lacks even the barest minimum of life experiences needed for the job. Though his intentions will be good, his failure in the Oval Office is a near certainty because he is simply not ready - cannot be ready-to be president, and the failures that will certainly follow his taking the oath of office could - indeed, almost certainly would– devastate the country.

Hewitt closes with some bold-face questions -- "Is Barack Obama anywhere near ready to be President of the United States in a time of war and economic uncertainty?... What if he’s not and he wins anyway?" -- which we may suppose represents his technique for closing the deal.

All in all, not a bad effort from the author of If It's Not Close, They Can't Cheat: Crushing the Democrats in Every Election and Why Your Life Depends on It. But I still prefer the original.

HOW BULLSHIT WORKS, PART 56,309. Rightbloggers have discovered a Photoshop forgery of an Iranian missle launch, done by that Government to make itself look more powerful, presumably:



The bloggers' outrage, as it was when Adnan Hajj's altered war photos were exposed in 2006, is split between the offending parties and the shadowy "MSM," some outlets of which incuriously published the fake. Stop the ACLU is mad that the Main Stream Media isn't giving bloggers credit for discovering the fraud; Blackfive saw a more sinister MSM desire to "tailor anything to fit their narrative" -- in this case that America's enemies are 33% stronger than they really are.

Much less covered in those precincts (The American Thinker was a rare exception) was another bit of "fauxtography" from Fox News last week:

Below is a screenshot of Fox & Friends featuring the photo it used of Steinberg, with the original photo on its left. Comparing the two photos, it appears that the following changes have been made: Steinberg's teeth have been yellowed, his nose and chin widened, and his ears made to protrude further.

Fox News hadn't said much about this one before Bill O'Reilly recently retorted that the New York Times had once published some unflattering cartoons of him. Of course the doctored picture of Steinberg (and another, of Steven Reddicliffe) weren't drawn caricatures, but portraits offered as true representations of their subjects' appearance.

Experience, not to say common sense, teaches that we should always be alert to the possibility that war photojournalism may misrepresent the true situation, whatever its source. With some sources, though, you can't even trust the file photos.

NO CAPISCE. Crooks and Liars wonderfully covers the wingnut drive to make Obama's call for foreign language education into a class "snobbery" issue. Amazing how they all suffer the same delusions at once, and so near the event: you'd think they were on some sort of mailing list.

Since Crooks and Liars is more about analysis than pathology, it did not include in its roundup the ravings of The Anchoress on the subject. Like her colleagues, she tumbles from a gross mischaracterization ("telling Americans how much better people in other nations are!") to incoherent rage ("Americans did not need to speak French to save that nation... twice. Americans did not need to speak German to save the lives of our vanquished German enemy," etc). But she also adds this delightful bit:

I'm all for people, especially when they're young, learning other languages. I'm doing a Rosetta Stone in Italian right now, myself.

Obama endorses an activity in which The Anchoress is currently engaged, and The Anchoress rails at his effrontery in endorsing it. We should not be too surprised. Very few top rightwing bloggers actually live in trailers, wear clothes from the bins of the 99 cent store, and subsist on hamhocks and Crisco; in fact they are as likely as not to display elevated tastes, as seen in the Ole Perfesser's frequent consumer reports on high-end products. Nonetheless, they're quick to set aside their top-shelf cocktails, artisanal cheeses, and boutique coffees to declaim on the snobbery of Democrats. What a racket! It almost makes me wish I'd thought of it first and had no conscience.

UPDATE. In commments JohnEWilliams points out a beautiful related story from Rumproast: "Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild calls Obama an 'elitist' on CNN." Sometimes I think they do this kind of thing as an inside joke.

RUN THROUGH THE JUNGLE. At first I thought Infinity-Star General Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters was going somewhere else with the title "INTELLECTUALS LIE, THE POWERLESS DIE" -- you know, toward a Treason of the Clerks sort of thing, in which the evil intellectuals of a particular nation sell out their particular people to a particular evil. The giant face of Mugabe that appeared with the article in the New York Post suggested that the General had tracked down some Zimbabwean professors who had enabled the dictator by teaching Women's Studies or something.

Turns out the General is just on a rampage against writers in general. Doesn't matter whether it's Paul Begala or Christopher Hitchens -- in the General's view, no fancy-pants scribble-boy is worth the sweat off a rifleman's ass:

THE greatest lie intellectuals tell us is that "the pen is mightier than the sword." That's what cowards claim when they want to preen as heroes...

While intellectuals wrestled with compound sentences, Darfur degenerated from selective oppression to savage anarchy...

Regiments of professors and pundits have bemoaned China's gobbling of Tibet for half a century...

Only when better men acted did the surviving victims of one of the world's worst dictatorships glimpse freedom...

There was a good reason the assassins of 9/11 attacked the targets they did, rather than steering those planes into Columbia University or Harvard Yard: They knew that the potency of the intellectual is illusory, that it dissolves at the first shot...

Later, "No elegant phrase has ever stopped a bullet," "a sword will cut off the writer's head," etc.

Really, that's pretty much it. Politics doesn't enter into it; anyone not a soldier is an ineffectual, puking pussy. This represents a new and promising frontier for the General. As we have seen, he has in the past been content to attribute unmanliness to Democrats and liberals, as part of a propagandist's job-o-work. Now it looks as if he has gone freelance, and answers only to the law of the jungle. Before long he'll spend his columns explaining how easy it would be for him to kill us all with the end of a rolled-up newspaper or a bottlecap, and his signature line will be "The horror, the horror."

ALLLIES. Iraq says, we hate to be inhospitable, but get out. The U.S. says, fuck you; John McCain seconds.

The Charleston (S.C.) Post and Courier editorializes: "The growing confidence of the Iraqi leadership is a clear sign that progress is being made and an end is in sight." The Wall Street Journal appreciates Maliki's "confidence" and is charmed to see him "playing hardball" like a big boy, but eventually has to firmly remind him that the grownups are talking: "Despite Iraq's impressive security gains, Iran can still do plenty of mischief through its 'special group' surrogates," it says, and counsels (or maybe we should say "notifies Iraq of") "a significant long-term U.S. presence."

Ed Morrissey will grudgingly allow for timetables, so long as they are not the treasonous Democratic kind ("Democrats wanted timetables for withdrawal in order to surrender in Iraq"). If he wants a Republican timetable, I'd suggest this one.

HYSTERIC WATCH. Victor Davis Hanson:

At first I thought the standard Obama warnings about crowd fainting when he started speaking were just peculiar, as was the bit about oceans receding and the planet healing. Then I noticed he has plans to move his speechmaking at the convention to a large outdoor arena, to allow the 'people' the right to hear him en masse. Now he negotiates to address Berliners in Kennedy/Reagan style (but weren't they already presidents?) in front of the Brandenburg Gate? Next? No doubt the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem.

At National Review, at the moment, you can see Obama compared to both Hitler and Jesus. Surely this must be some kind of first.

EMAIL DOWN due to some NetSol nonsense. Try me at royedroso074@gmail.com meanwhile.

THE PERSONAL IS THE POLITICAL. These days, when a conservative buffoon likes something, he will rush to tell you that the thing he likes is itself conservative -- even if it's something apparently non-political in nature, like a rock song, chase movie, TV show, or music video.

They don't limit this bizarre ideological narcissism to the popular arts, either. I've heard 'em say that their favorite wine varieties and football teams are conservative. But this one from a National Review correspondent may be my all-time favorite so far: it's about how men crying at It's a Wonderful Life is conservative.

The author's explanation for this breathtaking assertion does not convince, but I'm just surprised that he bothered to explain it at all. Soon they'll just start using "conservative" as a synonym for "good," e.g., "he makes a really conservative pot of chili," "I got a conservative deal on this muffler," "It's all conservative," etc. No one else will know what they're talking about, but so what? That's pretty much the case now.

HOW THE MIGHTY HAVE FALLEN. Obama suggests national service for the young. At National Review Jim Geraghty talks about the "Obama Youth," etc.

I'm wondering about the President using federal funding to coerce schools into requiring community service for middle and high school students. Community service is (often) a noble act, but Obama appears to be very close to echoing John Kerry's Orwellian call for mandatory volunteerism. Notice it's always those who are old who are calling for mandatory time and energy commitments of the young.

Later, Geraghty offers a veiled comparison of Obama to Hitler. This reminded me of something, so I went online and found an excerpt from William F. Buckley's Gratitude: Reflections on What We Owe to Our Country, in which the founder of National Review argues for something very similar, powered by incentives and "sanctions":

It is feared by many opponents of national service that the use of state power in whatever form, even in a voluntary program, is nevertheless an effort, even if half-hearted, in that direction: an effort to change the human personality, and for that reason to be resisted categorically... Milton Friedman, my hero, was quoted as finding in national service an "uncanny resemblance" to the Hitler Youth Corps.

This last occasions only the reply that by that token, all youth programs, including the Boy Scouts, can be likened in the sense that they have something in common, to the Hitler Youth program, plus the second comment, that because Hitler had an idea, it does not follow that that idea was bad. (Albert Speer is said to have reflected, soon before his death, that it was a "pity that Adolf Hitler disliked Picasso.")

...Some libertarians will never agree with the Founding Fathers that a responsibility of the polity is to encourage virtue directly, through such disciplines as service in the militia, reverence for religious values, and jury service -- the kind of thing Prime Minister Gladstone had in mind when he proposed "to establish a new franchise, which I should call -- till a better phrase be discovered -- the service franchise." Opponents of national service must establish, to make their case, that national service, unlike the state militia, or jury service, or military conscription in times of emergency, is distinctively hostile to a free society.

Funny, just a few weeks ago they were blubbering over the sainted Buckley. Now he's a liberal fascist.

I'm not keen on either Buckley's and Obama's proposals myself, but I'm less worried about them these days, thanks in large part to the influence of the Boy Who Cried Hitler. I suspect most normal people would react similarly.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP. Jesse Helms this time. The impulse to speak well of the dead is fine, but I was stuck by the brethren's defensiveness about Helms' civil rights record, especially in view of their late and much celebrated reassessment of Strom Thurmond and Trent Lott in 2002. We might just say that those were different times -- that is, Thurmond and Lott were after an election, and Helms is before one.

UPDATE. Fixd tiepo, thanx boney.

UGLY BEAUTY. Before attending Die Soldaten at the Armory Saturday night, I hadn't been to an opera in years. I usually plead budget, but I could always get rush or standing room tickets at the Met. Frankly, lacking much background in the form, I've chosen to cultivate a lazy indifference instead of a taste for it, to my discredit.

Die Soldaten got through to me, though, perhaps by brute force. For one thing, there's the 110-piece Bochumer Symphoniker blasting away at the obviously difficult 12-tone Zimmermann score. Then there's the grim story -- girl forsakes lover to make an advantageous marriage within the warrior caste; madness, rape, murder, desolation result -- with its class tensions and sexual panic starting at red alert and proceeding to full-on Sturm und Drang. And there's the Robert-Wilson-Meets-Pirates-of-the-Caribbean staging in the Armory's gigantic Drill Hall, with the actors spilling from an extra-wide stage down a 220-foot runway, along which the entire audience is sometimes slowly locomoted on railroad tracks.

It's all a bit much -- at one point the music is supposed to suggest thunder, and I was a little confused: hadn't the percussion-heavy score been thundering all along? And the everything's-awful modernism is pretty relentless: look, here's a ceramic bog -- I wonder how it looks on the side of the stage where the chorus is taking a piss! But the excess is mesmerizing, and often makes brilliant theatre: a rape scene in which assailant and victim are multiplied by supernumeraries who enact it in a savage ballet along the length of the runway; a bathhouse suggested by garishly-lighted holes; the slow march at the end of Marie's father into the distant floodlights, and of Marie the other way toward the frigid mountains of exile.

And all the singing and acting is great. If the music purposefully evokes ugliness, craft and commitment make it beautiful. In a scene featuring Marie, her sister, and the Baroness, their voices made me think of exotic birds trilling in a jungle above the roars and grunts of the other beasts. As Marie, Claudia Barainsky makes a physically specific progress from schoolgirl to climber to outcast; as her lover, Claudio Otelli nurtures his desperation into a sort of semi-catatonia that looks harmless to his intended victims and terrifying to us. And that band -- excuse me, orchestra -- is really tight.

Muscially I'm pretty unsophisticated, and an evening of serialist opera wouldn't normally be on my to-do list, but for me this production made great sense of the unaccustomed sounds. I don't know how much Die Soldaten educated me, or if I'll be better able to appeciate La Bohème or Schönberg or anything else because of it, but I'm certainly more inclined to pay attention.

UPDATE. A dissenting opinion from the Washington Post. "The vocal level was that of a respectable regional production" -- wicked burn! Clearly I have a ways to go before I know classical music well enough to be snobby about it; having fond memories of the days when I was that much of a n00b about everything, I will cherish every moment.

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.

START THE WEEKEND OFF RIGHT! Crunchy Rod Dreher:

The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg, writing from the magazine's Aspen Ideas Festival, chaired a panel yesterday in which experts put the chances of a nuclear attack on US soil, probably on Washington or New York, in the next 10 years as fifty-fifty....

Do you ever think about it? I mean, really think about it? If Joe Cirincione et alia really do believe that chances are as high as 50 percent that terrorists will set off a suitcase nuke in DC or NYC, then why do they still live there?

Because it keeps us far away from pants-wetting little shits like you.

KEEPING IN TOUCH. Sometimes, if it's been a while since I've heard from them, I look up my old wingnuts. Whatever happened, I wondered this morning, to Kieran Michael Lalor? We first encountered this Iraq War vet, director of the Eternal Vigilance Society ("With the keyboard as our sword, Eternal Vigilance Society will work tirelessly to defeat those candidates..."), and yeller at protestors in November 2005, when he was complaining in the New York Post that Pace Law School was teaching him treason. We found this very funny, as Lalor had previously attended Pace Law School, complained in the Washington Times they were teaching him treason, gone off to war, then come back to Pace Law School to be taught more treason and to complain about it again.

Such wonderful memories. So I looked around and found that Lalor had not been letting the grass grow under his boots. He's been doing wingnut welfare make-work gigs, including contributions to The American Thinker, which holding tank for fledgling wingers we've noticed before. In March Lalor announced at the Thinker that "Democrat control must end for the sake of the nation's security," and that he had founded yet another group to that purpose: Iraq Vets for Congress. This coalition of Previously-Enlisted Congressmen and would-be PEC boldly stands for "Portraying our Troops Fairly and in a Positive Light," and "Advocating for Veterans and Their Families," though they understandably fail to mention Jim Webb's GI Bill.

And, surprise! Lalor's not just the founder, he's also a client. From an understandably elated Daily Kos:

Some great news. Local Republicans in NY's 19th District have now tapped wingnut Keiran Michael Lalor to take on John Hall in November, with the likelihood of a sweeping win by Hall...

I'll say. Any District that elected a former Orleans guitarist and anti-nuclear activist to Congress is not likely to dump him for a guy whose campaign strategy is to denounce Volkswagens, Susan Sarandon, Bonnie Raitt, and Pete Seeger and show off his thousand-mile stare. But who knows? I'll be watching the race with interest henceforth. And maybe later I'll go look up Melinda Ledden Sidak.

NOW THEY GOT WORRY. Barack Obama is black, his opposition is relentless, and McCain could easily win this election. Still, it's pleasing when the wingers panic. From National Review, ladies and gentlemen, here to do his rendition of "Stranded in the Jungle," please welcome Victor David JoHanson:

It is not hard to see why and how the middle classes, the poor, and the union members would like to see larger government programs and greater taxes on the wealthy, but why are so many in the upper-upper middle classes so vehemently pro-Obama?

Oboy, rightwing intramural class war! Let's go to the Trans-Lux and hiss Bill Gates!

After talking to and observing lots of Bay Area affluent and staunch Obama supporters, I think the key to reconciling the apparent paradoxes is done in the following ways...

I can well imagine VDJoH's journalistic approach: "talking to" = VDJoH asking, "Are you crazy? Can't you see that that man is a ni?" and receiving an unsatisfactory response; "observing" = glowering at the stylish jeans of rich hippies.

Many enjoying the good life worry that their own privilege in some sort of way comes at the expense of someone else, or they fret that their present lifestyle in ecological terms is hardly sustainable. That concern does not translate into much concrete action. SUVs (Mercedes rather than Yukons) are no rarer in Palo Alto than in Fresno, while such progressives are just as likely, or more so, to abandon the public schools...

How dare they share VDJoH's privileges while rejecting his politics? Yessir, there's no class war like Republican class war.

Somehow an Obama sticker, sign on the lawn, or a lapel button has become the equivalent of a crucifix around the neck of a prosperous 16th-century burgher: easy fides of inner good and a valuable totem in reconciling the apparent irreconcilable.

And it's even better when they get so mad that they diss Christianity, too.

NatRev has run out of room, so let's sneak over to VDJoH's dressing room for some of the good stuff:

I spent some time speaking in San Francisco recently. In crude and exaggerated terms, it reminds me of H.G. Wells Eloi and Morlocks... smartly dressed yuppies, wealthy gays... What is missing are school children, middle class couples with strollers, and any sense the city has a vibrant foundation of working-class, successful families of all races and backgrounds...

So no one picks up the garbage? But the city looks so nice. Maybe when the wealthy gays come home from the clubs, they sweep. In contrast, VDJoH's hometown has a lot of farms, owned by such as VDJoH, and a lot of Mexicans, so we can guess how they git-r-done.

All in all, I got a strange creepy feeling that whatever was going on, it was unsustainable –- sort of like an encapsulated Europe within an American city.

And these doomed, encapsulated Europeans are funding Obama! With such quasi-foreign influences in play, the citizens of Hansonland will have their work cut out for them, rejecting Obamamania in favor of a continued Bush boom. Assuming, of course, they see it the same way as he.

INTRO TO GOLDBERG. National Review lists Jonah Goldberg as an "editor," but he doesn't seem to know what people with that title normally do. This post is a fine example of his argumentative style: aggressively desultory, like a Tasmanian Devil with its head stuck in a pail.

The idea that "science won't allow" absolute categories between animals and humans is pretty silly in its plain meaning. And I don't think you should show it as much deference as you do.

Follow the links back and you'll find that the real issue is animal rights, and whether they intersect meaningfully with human rights. Students of Goldberg will understand why he's grabbing such a uselessly narrow handle on the point: this is his version of "What's this on your shirt? Psych," a goofy opening gambit meant to confuse the enemy. Luckily for Goldberg, on the internet there's no one to grab his finger and pull it back till he cries.

Science has all sorts of absolute categories distinguishing between animals and humans. Vertebrates vs. Invertebrates, reptiles vs. mammals, phylum, kingdom, and all of that stuff amount to absolute categories of one kind or another. What Sullivan is really getting at, it seems to me, is that there are some areas where there are more similarities between some animals and humans that are less absolute than many think. That sounds right to me...

Sensing that even National Review readers won't put up with much of this semantic horseshit, Goldberg generously concedes the point -- or as they might say in Chocoholics Anonymous, the point as he perceives it to be. In respect for your delicate sensibilities, I have omitted a Goldberg parenthesis suggesting the horrifying possibility that he will write another book. Onward:

The idea that these things are on a "continuum" isn't all that profound by my lights. Aristotle and that crowd would have bought into that, I would think. The question is, so what? I mean ice and fire are on the same continuum of temperature, but they are very different things.

To recap, (1.) things can be the same in some ways and different in others, and (2.) fart, burp.

But what about animal rights? Goldberg's getting there, but he has to talk it through. You know, kind of like a batter has to step out of the box, adjust his gloves, etc. Except in the big leagues, a batter don't usually wind up in the press box with his bat up his ass:

Anyway, I should say that while I really dislike the language and logic of animal rights, I have no problem with conferring special status on gorillas or lots of other animals. My guess is 95% of Americans agree with me on that.

Again, generous of him, but I don't know why we were bothering before with the disciplines of biology and philosophy when Goldberg could just refer these questions to the will of the imaginary people.

Come to think of it, why does he even need them, when he has himself?

It should be a serious crime to shoot, say, a bald eagle. It should be a routine chore to kill a rat. Killing a dolphin is different from shooting a deer. Whether or not science will "allow" us to draw these distinctions is largely irrelevant because we will rightly draw them anyway and, besides, science has little to tell us about such things.

Stupid science! It's always telling Goldberg things that aren't true, like that his love of his wife is nothing more than "mere electrochemical signals." So why should he let neuroscientists tell him anything when he can just dish out some morality? But then Goldberg experiences another spasm of generosity, and concedes a little somethin-somethin to the whitecoats:

But, again, it's worth pointing out that "science" records all sorts of important differences between dolphins and deer, eagles and rats. Dolphins live in the ocean, deer don't. That's an absolute difference, I think.

I could go on, but life is short. Those who wish to examine the rest of Goldberg's thicket of unsupported assertions ("This is scientifically true, morally true, aesthetically true and politically true"), appeals to emotion ("reduce the relative worth of a staggeringly beautiful creature like a tiger by saying it's just as 'valuable' as a snail darter*"), and, of course, sudden reversals ("*Obviously, some ugly, brainless, species are valuable because of their role in the ecosystem") and the rhetorical schtick Goldberg pioneered, "central to my point" ("But this is just another example of how some species are more important than others"), go with God. Some of us come back from such journeys half-mad.

FRIENDLY ADVICE TO MY MORTAL ENEMIES. Tigerhawk, a gamer to the end, is trying to gin up outrage with a little movie about Obama's pals Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn. Pessimist that I am, I can't see this having much electoral impact, if that's what he's going for. I seem to recall Jim Hunt trying to make hay of Senator Jesse Helms' ties to Salvadoran death squad macher Roberto d'Aubuisson, and that didn't work out so well. 1968 is in the punters' minds as far away and irrelevant as El Salvador. Helms' operatives did better calling Hunt "SISSY, PRISSY, GIRLISH AND EFFEMINATE." If you're going to go with the classics, go with classics that work!

P.S. Current rightwing laughlines like "question their patriotism" may not be understood by the wider population. You guys may enjoy applying phrases like "under the bus" to "the 'fist-jab'" and such like, but ordinary folks who do not begin their days, as we do, scanning the trades may not get the reference. (They don't understand my inside jokes, either, but I am working mainly to the hipsters at the late show.) Stick with tested tropes like "flip-flop," "San Francisco Democrats," "I have in my hand a list of 206 known communists," etc.

MORE UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES. I see (and he sees) that Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism is gaining some traction. Jeffrey Lord at the American Spectator:

SO LET'S SUM UP what America would look like in an age of Obama.

To start there would be no more driving SUVs. No more Rush. For God's sake absolutely no driving your SUV while listening to Rush. No more eating whatever you want. Definitely no keeping your home as warm or as cool as you prefer. No capital gains cuts because they are unfair. Your guns will be banned. And if you have a different opinion on global warming? All those lofty supporters of rights for terrorists are going to strip every oil executive in America of theirs in a heartbeat, live and in living color...

What do we have when the sole purpose of the government as run by the chilling principles of Obamaland is to "use the political process" to remove freedoms large and small one by one by one?

Someone needs to speak it plainly.

The word is fascism.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the banning of SUVs, Rush Limbaugh, private thermostats, guns, etc, not to mention "a Nuremberg-style trial for oil executives," are extremely unlikely unless the power of the Supreme Court is severely curtailed. I guess that's something to worry about, as in recent years there has been a lot of talk about judicial overreach and proposals to term-limit its Justices and allow Congress to overrule their decisions.

UPDATE. How could I forget Ross Douthat and his proposed Supreme Court Supermajorities? The future of the Republican Party, ladies and gentlemen! Should bring the "Impeach Earl Warren Democrats" back into the fold.