THE GILLIBRAND LESSON. I am pleased to see credentialed deep-thinkers like Evan McMorris-Santoro of TPM discovering, as I did months ago, that Kirsten Gillibrand is one of the safer reelection bets among Democratic Senators. But McMorris-Santoro says:

She may have earned herself a second term simply by not being the controversial figure many in the Democratic party thought she would be.

Close, but "many in the Democratic Party" don't know what the fuck they're talking about. What could be controversial about her? She's as managed a candidate as I've ever seen. From the get-go Chuck Schumer and some other smart Dems have been packaging Gillibrand brilliantly:

• Lots of Listening Tours in the hinterlands (whence she came -- it's not just for carpetbaggers like Hillary);
• Unashamedly going "ahem" to the White House any time some rogue Democrat challenged her;
• Association with high-profile clean-water, safe-baby, and anti-gun legislation.

That last bit is the most interesting and, I think, has the widest applicability. I recall when Schumer pulled Gillibrand off the NRA gold-star list and handed her a typical New York liberal gun position -- namely, anti. It was supposed to be too radical for those anti-statists upstate -- and actually a little too anti for me. (Thank God I'm in Texas now, where I can easily get guns and drunk as God intended!)

But it's all in the way you spin it, and along with her other palaver, the gun stuff helps present Gillibrand as a goo-goo, family-friendly type, which position turned out to be formidable enough to scare away Giuliani and several other contenders.

The moral of the story is: When you read how them Tea Parties is sweeping the nation, look at your local theater listings; look at the anodyne, MOR crap that's popular. Look at your grocery aisles, your department store shelves, etc. How much has changed there in a year? It's rare that people stray very far from the models they're accustomed to follow, in politics or in anything else -- especially when the other side isn't making a good argument for change.

Considering the complete and almost unprecedented collapse of the Republican Party from 2006 onwards -- recession, sex scandals, and all -- Obama should have carried fifty states in 2008; as it was, he only got over at all because the GOP got on the wrong side of a real watershed. And a watershed is not the sort of thing you reverse quickly. Hell, the Democrats even got over all right in the 1978 Congressional elections.

This isn't an argument for the moral superiority of Obama or Gillibrand or anyone, but a caution against any lazy assessment of any incumbent as "weak" just because the papers are now full of anti-incumbent talk. Given all the big Democrats like Evan Bayh recently quitting and such like, a lot of people expect big Democratic losses this year. Most of them certainly don't deserve to hold their seats. But as Clint Eastwood once said, deserve's got nothing to do with it.

PANTLOAD AND THE PERFESSER DO AMERICA. Every once in a while some smartass tells me about something awful at Pajamas TV. That pisses me off, because PJTV wisely doesn't offer transcripts, which means I have to watch the fucking things if I want to keep up.

A few of you recently lured me to a chat between the Ole Perfesser and Jonah Goldberg. This promised the greatest team-up since Beavis and Butt-head, but alas, these two titans are not at their best. Nonetheless, some highlights:

• The Perfesser asks why "conservative intellectuals" like David Brooks have "not a lot of enthusiasm" for the totally awesome Tea Party movement. "There are different reactions from different people," muses Goldberg, "but you're right to generalize."

That could be the Shorter! But let's press on:

• Goldberg finds it "really bizarre" that Brooks compared the Tea Parties to the old New Left. Why, the New Left was "seeking to tear down existing institutions," says Goldberg, whereas the TP movement is "about restoration. There's a reason why they're buying all these books about the American Founding, why they're constantly talking about Thomas Paine and Don't Tread on Me."

That these alleged restorationists are attracted mainly to the most violent Revolutionary sentiments rather than, say, The Federalist Papers does not alert Goldberg to any contradiction, even when the Perfesser later elaborates that back in the colonial era, it was assumed that "if the government went too far, the people would just rise up in a body, it would be an organic thing" -- presumably like Shay's Rebellion, defeat of which began our long descent from the libertarian Valhalla of the Articles of Confederation to the Era of Big Gummint. (Or was it a false-flag operation?)

(BTW, do they know Paine thought Washington was an asshole?)

• Goldberg, in a semi-coherent ramble about the populism of the Ross Perot Reform Party, says that in '92 "the timing was just wrong because of Clinton and Bush I and the rest." Too bad there was no citizen journalist on hand to ask him the Tough Questions as to what he meant by that.

• The Perfesser gets down with The People! "The minute they do get interested in politics," he says, "everybody is basically saying 'why are all these ordinary Americans out there, shouldn't they just listen to their betters?' And actually that 'listen to their betters' is a lot of the tone I get not just from David Brooks but from a fair-number of sort of higher-level conservative intellectual types..."

The Perfesser quotes no examples of this, but as it's a matter of "tone," rather than actual words, he might have needed to express it via interpretive dance or his techno music, so it's just as well.

• "The Left," says Goldberg, "has bought into this idea that they have the monopoly on authentic protest" -- illustrated by a rant about "hippie kids" of the kind no one has heard since the days of Al Capp -- while conservative intellectuals are "trained to be skeptical of populism and mass-movement protest," which will certainly surprise anyone who's heard of Howard Jarvis and Proposition 13, the Moral Majority, etc.

Goldberg also chides the Left for being quick to call conservatives fascist, which I would find a charming piece of chutzpah if I had any faith that Goldberg knew what the fuck he was saying.

• After Goldberg claims National Review has always "had this internal debate about elitism vs. populism" -- Goldberg portrays William F. Buckley Jr. as a populist, which is like portraying Ernst Rohm as a scoutmaster -- the Perfesser pipes up, "I'm actually happy to be an elitist."

Well, of course he is -- after all, he's a Yalie and a tenured radical, and he's going to be among the elect for real when the Robot Rapture comes! But how's that square with his pitchfork Tea Party fervor? Simple:

I don't think the people running the country are an elite. I think if you look at it, they're not especially bright. They have no track record of especially good success.

What's happened in this country that's gone well over the last 50 years has mostly gone well in spite of the people running the country, not because of it. And so I don't think it's necessarily anti-elitist for groups of people to come up and say that the politicians and the journalists and the pundits are all a bunch of idiots because I think that's objectively a defensible position to take.

And I don't think that's anti-elitism. If you want to be an elitist, one of the things I think you have to be is an elite. It's like, you know, to be a diva, you're not actually just a woman who treats people badly, you're supposed to also be a woman who sings really, really well. And to be an elite, you have to be elite! You have to be good at something! And I look at Nancy Pelosi, or I look at, for that matter David Brooks, I think. what exactly are these people that good at, and I'm still waiting for an answer.

...says the guy doing a video in his rec room.

• "I think you make a good point," says Goldberg. Whereas "elite" is a meaningful term in plumbing, in politics "the word elite gets weird" -- because the political elite is really a "ruling class," or at least they are when they're Democrats, who are defending a "labor union-academic establishment and protecting their own interests to the detriment of society," in contrast to the altruistic oilmen behind George W. Bush.

• After a Perfessorial skein on his previous theme about how Politico is trying to work the "narrative" against the Tea Parties, Goldberg gently explains that Politico just likes to fuck shit up.

Corrected by Jonah Goldberg -- now that's a downfall! Fortunately for the Perfesser, the balance of the universe, and the ongoing cause of comedy, Goldberg immediately takes back the title of Clown Prince of Conservatism by offering as evidence of the Right's superior intellectual vibrancy the ongoing "healthy debate" between order and liberty as exemplified by... Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul.

Next time they should get Goldberg all hopped up on Pibb Xtra before they turn on the cameras. The same basic idea worked for Chris Farley!

JUST FOR FUN. A local correspondent (that means Texas, hoss!) has tipped me to an Austin rightblogger called Urban Grounds and his offering for the day:





This is, I believe, the Inigo Montoya Award Winner of the Decade.

UPDATE. "Honestly," the guy adds in comments, "do you actually believe I don’t know the definition of an antonym?" This reminds me of the TV version of Shogun, when they tried to give Richard Chamberlain a boy and he snarled, "Do you take me for a God-accursed sodomite?"

(Just to save us some time: No, guy, that doesn't mean I'm calling you gay.)

SHORTER ENTIRE RIGHTWING: All these claims of threats against Democratic legislators, hah! These sissies just can't face up to the will of the people. Plus how do we know it isn't all a fraud? Why, in olden times OH SHIT ERIC CANTOR SAYS SOMEBODY SHOT AT HIS OFFICE DEMOCRATZ ARE OBVS KRAZY MURDERERS!

Bonus: Confederate Yankee, who explained the necessity of violence yesterday, is outraged by this alleged assault, and blames Rep. John Lewis.

This is why I tend to be phlegmatic about this kind of story -- not because they're necessarily untrue, but because by the time such reports get to us punters, there's nothing left but bloody shirts and instructions for waving them.

IF AT FIRST YOU DON'T SUCCEED... Tom "Not the Total Wingnut in the CA GOP Senate Race" Campbell says everyone knew he supported gay marriage before Maggie Gallagher of the He-Man Faggot Haters' Club produced a smear ad based on that fact. Gallagher says no, they didn't:

But before we launched that ad, we polled... Bottom line? Tom is wrong. Just 2 percent of his own voters know he favors gay marriage...

Bottom line: I think Tom Campbell is about to find out, as Dede Scozzafava did, that it is not a good idea to be for gay marriage if you are Republican.

Despite the superfluity of bottom lines, this is a great comparison, and a great idea in general: Alert voters up and down the state how much Republicans despise homosexuals, and seek thus to replicate the results of the Doug Hoffman-Dede Scozzafava-Bill Owens race -- in which conservatives triumphed by dooming the Republican candidate and electing the Democrat. If it worked that well in conservative upstate New York, imagine how it'll go over in California!

Please, Republicans, more Maggie Gallagher! We could use the laughs.

WHAT COMES AFTER DERANGEMENT? Conservative rage at the passage of the health care reform bill provides many opportunities for hilarity, and Sadly, No! and others have been slatherin' on the schadenfreude. But some of the featured performers in this circus are, I find, getting a little too weird for funsies.

Take Confederate Yankee, tightly-wrapped even under the best conditions, and today particularly deformed by anger.

First there is, as you might expect from someone whose cognomen proudly celebrates treason in defense of slavery, a badly-encrypted threat of violence:

Some are calling for the armed revolt against this encroaching tyranny. It was for this specific reason, after all, that our Founders made sure Americans would not be denied the use of arms.

Some misguided souls seem to already be responding to this affront to liberty with violence. I fail to find the usefulness or utility of such symbolic and largely impotent acts. This sort of petty vandalism is not what the Founders sought to protect.

Nay, not for such as the Founders the mere breaking of windows:

They sought to protect our right to replace—yes, overthow—would-be tyrants and rouges that history has taught us always eventually arrive to usurp power and run roughshod over the rights of the people.

Yes, a big-time rightblogger is calling for insurrection over National Romneycare. I'd mischievously suggest we call on his bigger-time buddies to denounce him, but that's a mug's game, and what would be the point?

His follow-up is just sad. A North Carolina report finds an employed-but-not-yet-insured fellow with diabetes, DeCarlo Flythe, who is happy about the bill, because he and his family will soon have access to medicine -- "we are going to go ahead and pay our co-pay and be alright." Check your own feelings on this: Happy for him? Maybe a little cynical about the plan being as much "like Christmas" as Flythe wishes to believe? Unless you are an untreated survivor of horrific child abuse, you probably didn't feel anything like what the Confederate expresses toward "un-men like DeCarlo Flythe and other dependent wards of the welfare state":

For dim souls like Flythe, Obamacare certainly seems to be an answer to their worries. In the short term, IRS agents will confiscate monies from those of us who pay taxes to pay for his inability to take care of his own family. Obamacare will pay for his diabetic medicines, and his eventual blindness. After all, with me and you picking up the tab, there is little incentive for Flythe to change his behavior to help regulate his diabetes.

This is the sort of Randroidal contempt for the less-fortunate you usually get from Megan McArdle, and though I am inclined to give the Confederate credit for sparing us McArdle's trademark self-pity, he loses it by advancing a non-fact -- "Obamacare promises a near stasis in medical care" -- as a reason for his concern. He's already made himself quite clear, and that feint suggests he doesn't even have the courage of his loathsome convictions.

Confederate Yankee may be sui generis, but polling suggests there are plenty more like him back home, and some of them may yet learn to read and write.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP. Yeah, I'm still doing these on Mondays, for the time being. Today's is about the Jesus angle on that health care bill passage anguish. Some Catholic groups had gotten involved with the struggle, which afforded ripe opportunities for hilarity, as well as a chance to introduce new readers to The Anchoress at her most stupidly vicious, laying down Catholic doctrine to actual churchmen and churchwomen from her little suburban fake-nun castle. Jesus, what an awful person she is.

Part of me wanted to get in on the nigger/faggot tea party thing, but first-hand reporting was sparse and I wasn't sure whom to believe, frankly. On the one hand, of course Democrats and their fans can get an easy lay-up by reporting they were slurred by neanderthals -- who besides the Ole Perfesser and likeminded doofuses would disbelieve them?

And they'd have cause to believe -- despite the Perfesser's carefulness to find the few black folk at these events and get pictures of them, anyone who's been to one of these shindigs knows the score. My own coverage of the early tea parties as well as their Version 2.0 showed me that the overseers of the tea parties want to make them as mainstream as they possibly can, and have cooled out the original hot rhetoric insofar as they have been able to. But, let's face it -- it's not a grassroots movement, it's a rightwing movement that wants to look grassroots, and such gatherings are bound to, of necessity, pull in some straight, white, and loose cannons of the slur-slinging variety.

So the words may have been said. The irony is, even if they were, I doubt they'd reflect much more that the deep-seated prejudices of some of the participants -- and if that were a crime, as Hamlet said, who should 'scape whipping? That's America, folks. The real question is, why and how did the equivalent of Orange County John Birch Society meetings from the 60s gone al fresco become such a big media deal?

UPDATE. Thomas asks in comments about my remark on "grassroots" in this context.

It's not that I think rightwingers less able to community-organize than liberals, but that I think most "populist" movements in our own era are mere inventions of seasoned political operatives and big moneymen. Like Ross Perot; some populist! (And let's not forget the periodic insistence that Obama, of all people, is a populist too.)

While I wouldn't write off the Tea Parties (and the closely-related anti-health-care rallies) as pure astroturf, they too have some fishy roots and receive a lot of unpaid advertising (you can't reasonably call it "coverage") from the rightbloggers. Their organizers get the crowds to show up, and famously to make their own signs, but not to draw up the agenda; when the big dogs staged those Tea Parties in New York last year, I doubt the congregation was polled to choose S.E. Cupp, Deroy Murdock, and several local Republican candidates for public office as speakers. Those picks were straight off the rightwing comintern go-to list.

Thus, they're stage-managed events, but with an open door policy. Shouters and spitters will turn up at such things and, like I said, it can't be much helped. But the belligerent response of the rightwing press to this revelation suggests stronger message discipline than most grassroots movements could manage: If it were a movement over which they really thought they had NO control, they'd just denounce the racist nuts and move on, rather than try to explain to us, first, that the incidents didn't happen, and second, that they are actually a healthful sign that racism is over.

GREENPOINT APARTMENT, ANYONE? My landlady claims to need help renting my 1BR up here in North Brooklyn. It's relatively cheap. Drop me a line if you're interested.

DEFINING GALT DOWN. Dr. Mrs. Ole Perfesser talks with an Atlas Society Randroid about Going Galt. It appears they've lowered the bar considerably since they were predicting masses of Bigbrains fucking off to the Gulch and taking Amerika down. Now Dr. Mrs. offers new and "different definitions of Going Galt." There's "the Randian definition... producers going on strike." But it can also mean businesses moving to different states to get tax breaks, and some kid moving her bank account to a credit union. It's E-Z and fun, kids!

The Atlas Guy claims that, just as in the 60s there was a "rising consciousness among blacks about civil rights," people are no longer thinking of themselves as liberals and conservatives, but as "producers and moochers." (Put me down with the moochers! I've been working like a son of a bitch, but I'm willing to learn.) Also, the Tea Party people use Ayn Rand slogans on their signs, which means the revolution against Obama's "socialism" is near.

I wish the PJTV thing more success than they, alas, have so far managed. Tea Parties would last about ten minutes if people got a load of what their Great Minds actually think.

FOLLOW-UP.

DA, DA, WE LAUGH! I finally saw one of those "Obamafeld" things the Ole Perfesser is pushing. At least the Obama/Seinfeld concept is a new one, and I thought it was promising. But they don't do anything with it except Be Wacky -- you know, a Pizza Nazi throws pizza at Ben Nelson, Joe Biden's a drunk, Scott Brown is dreamy, etc.

I don't think the makers have ever actually seen a Seinfeld episode. It has the same off-the-mark, trying-too-hard feel as their attempted viralizing of catchphrases like "stuck on stupid" and their attempts to convince the world that everyone's Goin' Galt. It's like they don't have an actual sense of humor, but were still determined to create some comedy because the Central Committee ordered it.

You know, I want to like these things. First of all, I prefer jokes that are funny to those that are not. Second, I get tired of having to haul out Evelyn Waugh, yet again, as an example of a Tory who had some artistic and humorous sensibilities. Any kind of person can hear the muses and everyone has a sense of humor.

I think it's because they're eager to play populist but have forgotten what people are actually like. They have a list of talking points -- People love humor! And irreverence! And pop culture! -- and make sure to check off all the boxes when they create some cultural ordnance. But it doesn't seem like they do much actually laughing, as opposed to heh-indeeding.

And they sure flip out when someone makes fun of them -- which is something else they bizarrely think will endear people to them.

This is probably not advice I'd be offering if I didn't think they were too deranged to take it, but if they just relaxed a little it would not only improve their efforts, but also their electoral prospects and maybe even their lives.

SHORTER ROSS DOUTHAT. Liberal Hollyweird, just like that hack Mark Twain, cannot comprehend the Shakespearean tragedy that is the Iraq War. Were I a playwright rather than a pundit, Bush would be Hamlet, and Claudius his father, Saddam Hussein.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the schoolbook mishegas in Texas (my new home!). Many of the brethren approve of the proposed changes, but some seem a little guilty about it -- they're happy to see von Hayek in there, but don't say much about the weird, specific deletions of Anne Hutchinson, Thomas Jefferson, Colin Powell, et alia -- tip-offs that the new program is not just about showing a little pride in capitalism ('scuse, "the free market" -- that's planned to be changed, too), but an attempt to make history lessons less inclusive rather than more.

And more Jesusy. "If God were good enough for our founders and Creator-language important enough to be in pivotal documents like the Declaration of Independence," thunders World Net Daily, "then why can't our kids be educated about that Creator from at least their original documents?" But the original documents may not be emphatic enough, so the author is working to give them some modern conservative context:

Maintaining a balanced curricula in our public schools is the reason my wife, Gena, and I joined the board of "The National Council of Bible Curriculum in Public Schools," whose state certified Bible course (elective) has been implemented in 532 public school districts (2,035 high schools) in 38 states.

He counsels readers to "consider petitioning your state's education board, school district and local school to adopt 'The National Council of Bible Curriculum in Public Schools' curriculum about the influence of the Bible in history, civilization, law, literature and the founding of America." Highly recommended: the module about how that turn-the-other-cheek stuff was just rhetoric.

Jeremy Binckes has a great backgrounder on the conservative curricula reviewers here.

SERVICE ADVISORY. After a brief lull, you have reason to expect a great spike in production here at alicublog.

The spike will be because I'll soon be leaving the Village Voice. Amazingly, there is no related scandal or dispute; I'm only leaving the Voice because I'm leaving New York. I will be relocating to a small town in Texas to live with my girlfriend.

Yeah, I was surprised too. But beneath this gruff exterior, I am actually a terrible romantic, and once I decided I wanted to live with her, living without her was out of the question.

I felt that way for a long time about New York. This would be my cue to lament the decline of the place, as I have frequently done at the Voice blog, but I can't. God forbid I should become one of those sullen expatriates who tells everyone New York is over because he left.

No. New York remains the capital of everywhere. I went Friday evening to the Whitney to take in the Biennial, and even though most of the art was crap (though not Robert Williams, nor George Condo and Nina Berman and Stephanie Sinclair and Hanna Liden and a few others), it was still a good time, with the Black Monks of Mississippi singing in the basement and the sort of people who would find this sort of thing interesting swirling around me, and pizza at Totonno's afterward. You don't get this sort of thing where I'm going, or anywhere else.

More to the point, New York has been my home. It hasn't always been an easy place to live, but if I was ever bored it was my own fault. Here I've been chased by cops in the Tompkins Square riot, and heard Allen Ginsburg read poetry there some days after ("Look, I'm wearing a tie -- am I a yuppie?"); fretted with my Williamsburg neighbors as the ruins of the Twin Towers smoked on the horizon; walked over the Williamsburg Bridge during a blackout; spilled a giant thug's beer in a basement after-hours, apologetically bought him a new one, and been rewarded with fat lines of coke; read poetry at St. Mark's Church; played CBGB so many times I forgot it was a shrine; been advised by Jimmy Breslin on how to talk to cops, handed a flyer by Jean-Michel Basquiat, advised on my music career by Lieber and Stoller, given a tour of Terry Teachout's art collection, yelled at by Hilly Kristal and several members of the NYPD. And at the Voice I held a desk next to Tom Robbins. Everywhere I met remarkable people, because this is one of the places they like to be, and saw and did remarkable things, because here they happen all the time.

So, no. Not for me the route of that rootless anti-cosmopolitan Rod Dreher, telling people how mean the urban teens were to him before fucking off to Dallas. I was blessed to live here, and I'll always be grateful and proud. And if this poor woman ever figures out what a horrible mistake she's made, you may see me back in the Big Town, living under a bridge.

I've been to Texas a number of times but I barely know what I'm in for. I know it's pretty there, and they have some good people. And that it's the only place in the country that gives New York serious competition for the most self-regarding jurisdiction on earth (heard on the radio: "Thunderstorms and Tyler roses always make me think of you"), which I can appreciate. I expect I'll learn to two-step and handle a gun, and if I wear a hat I'll tip it to the ladies.

As for work, I'll be freelancing to start, so if you have any leads let me know. Also I expect to stop suffering and write that symphony, or something like that.

I thank the Voice for the platform and for more kindnesses than anyone has a right to expect, especially from journalists. (I expect to do some more work for them and I'll let you know when I do.)

Meanwhile, if you want me, you can find me here.

LA VIE BULLSHIT. Ann Althouse does one of those piquant posts (so clever, she is) where she affects to challenge Rush Limbaugh, who criticizes Nancy Pelosi for offering health care to artists and other parasites. It has nothing to do with anything (Pelosi is talking about employed people, not starry wannabees), but the boobs Althouse has cultivated for years react with the expected Ah hates me a art-faggitt! ("The only thing at which [art] succeeds is polishing the egos of the elite") responses.

My favorite among those:

I write, and I hope to be published and I hope to make decent money... but I'd love to do a thousand other creative things I'm not very good at, if I could afford to do them. The writer's life... an artists life... who wouldn't find long days of unfettered creativity delightful?

Oh, deary, you have no idea.

UPDATE. Further down it gets even better:

Even thick-skulled Hollywood types have been able to weasel in on the fun and turn it to their advantage. In order to be considered a person of brilliance and great compassion they simply suck up to some bullshit Lib cause. Nothing says "I'm a deep-thinking artiste" like getting the rubber stamp of approval from some shit-for-brains organization like Greenpeace or PETA. Blasting coke up your nose while smacking around strippers and driving 140 miles per hour is totally cool as long as you wear the right ribbon on your lapel.

Where does one get jobs like that? Oh right -- via the free market! I'm still unsure about Greenpeace's and PETA's roles in it, though; perhaps commenters can enlighten me. I could go for a gig like that, and I'm willing to wear ribbons.

UPDATE 2: Dan Riehl gets in on it: "We owe, not only our modern living standards, but our political freedom to capitalism... If the world were to run off to create mostly bad art, who is it that will be running the engine to subsidize it?" Yeah, you airy-fairies, some of us man up and blog, like Adam Smith intended. Hit my "Make a Donation" button and help keep capitalism alive!

This whole thing is giving me a retro thrill. I really thought even the denser types had stopped reacting to the Damned Artist of the Day as if he were their own no-good son who needs to cut out all the nonsense and go work at the plant like his daddy. Now the laughter is back, and every day is Footloose!

FUNDAMENTALLY UNSOUND. Some conservatives are enraged that that Politico did a story about evangelical disapproval of the Tea Parties -- mostly, though not exclusively, because the Party people don't engage social issues, which is an observable strategy of some TP organizers and seems calculated to broaden their appeal, like getting pictures of the dozens of black people who have attended the events.

As they're trying to bring new recruits into their anti-Obama juggernaut (they're always claiming that it's "non-partisan"), you wouldn't think the TP people would take so hard a story noticing one of their points of difference from traditional GOP feeder streams. If they just wanted another Moral Majority, they could always reanimate the old one, and maybe call it the Jesus Party and hand out loaves and fishes instead of teabags.

But the Ole Perfesser says Politico's Ben Smith "was used," and is part of the ominous "they" who are "afraid of this movement" and thus "trying to divide it." (Smith has gotten that kind of treatment from the other side as well, and I doubt he minds.) Gateway Pundit yells that Smith quoted an Obama supporter, but doesn't mention the quotes from Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council et alia. Evidently the differentiation of their movement is something they prefer to keep quiet.

Robert Stacy McCain, in a refreshing approach, takes the story for granted and yells at Christians who are not sufficiently attuned to the "moral argument for economic freedom."

This is all familiar from other recent dustups between conservatives and the fundies, whose coalition isn't what it used to be. I understand the dilemma -- they still want those godly votes, but don't want to run any more Terry Schiavo operations lest they scare the ungodly. But good luck keeping other people from noticing.

THE QUINTESSENCE OF DREHERISM. Rod Dreher repeats a story about "How rock killed the Soviet Union." He applauds when "Vitya pulled the new Zeppelin LP out of what at the time was a mind-blowing sleeve and put it on, and 'Whole Lotta Love' rose up with a beckoning howl. Corks formed of cloying Soviet music flew out of our ears..."

Then Dreher does the old needle-scratch:

But any force that powerful must be just as capable of being used for evil as for good. I recall reading Allan Bloom's "The Closing of the American Mind"...

I'll spare you; he used to think Bloom was an old fuddy-duddy. (And he was, though his fans are much worse.) But:

Now, I see that I was wrong, but I don't say that in an ideological sense. It's not that I've turned on rock and roll -- most of my music collection is rock -- but that I see that Bloom was onto something, that rock is a far more ambiguous a phenomenon than I could possibly have grasped at 21. To the extent that rock music hastened the demise of the despicable Soviet regime, hooray. But the same energies called forth from the human spirit by rock music, and its descendants, have affected our own institutions, traditions and self-understanding.

This is sort of a classic Dreher argument. Rock is a powerful force -- like gelignite or opposable thumbs -- but it can be used for good or for ill. To determine which is which, see Rod Dreher's music collection.

The ass-shaking music Dreher likes is good. (Like Thriller. That's okay.) The "barbarism" of George Michael's "I Want Your Sex," on the other hand, is bad, as Dreher discovered in college after a Christian gave him a hard time about it: "He did make me reflect on how the lyrics of so many songs I dearly loved expressed sentiments I found at the time distasteful, and, as I matured, would come to find gross."

But what about "Whole Lotta Love," which blew the corks out of the Russians' ears? You gotta admit that's pretty raunchy. Maybe Dreher can work up a project at Templeton that will extract the song's tyranny-defying power while leaving out the sexually suggestive parts -- which would include the bass, drums, guitar, and vocals.

George Michael, by the way, appears to be very popular in the former Soviet Union.

It's a good thing that no one told Dreher when he was young that he looked ridiculous when he was dancing, or, when he was a child, that playing with a ball was infantile. Or maybe they did; maybe that explains him.

A RINGER. I'm pretty sure this item at Big Government by one "Mytheos Holt" is a parody that got past the irony-deficient staff there. Holt posits that "the current youth ethos embodied by internet subculture is fundamentally conservative in character, even if its denizens have not yet caught on to that fact," and believes this will become apparently as die Kinder start attacking liberals with.... parody websites and 4chan.

...even if you accept the framing of such sites as hotbeds of craziness and rabid disorder, there is a method to their madness. As for what that madness is, once you get past the persistent ironic glorifications of perversity and take a look at how the people who frequent these sites actually behave, and more importantly, who they target, it becomes abundantly clear that not only are the values of such sites fundamentally conservative, but that their communications strategies, even if toned down for a mainstream audience, are nothing less than the perfect weapons for disassembling the Obama Presidency...

While one can disapprove of the tactics used against these institutions/individuals (some of which make the much vilified “enhanced interrogation techniques” look positively benign by comparison), it is worth noting that ultimately, the power of internet goons lies in their ability to enforce social norms against the most flagrantly vile members of society through private sanction – something which conservatives from Russell Kirk and Irving Kristol to Tom Coburn and Dick Cheney have endorsed.

A blazing tell: He refers with approval to the fanciful South Park Conservative craze. From the comments, he seems to have put it over. Unmask, young Holt, and take credit! You needn't keep the game up merely to encourage them to embarrass themselves; nothing can stop them from keeping it up.

UPDATE. Commenters include people who've been following Holt's career awhile and will attest that he does indeed believe crap like this. Damn! I thought I'd found a great parodist, and ended up with merely another in an endless series of raving lunatics.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the struggle to identify the Pentagon shooter John Patrick Bedell with one ideological faction or another. This sort of thing reminds me of a graffiti thread from a library bathroom in my college days that began "Adam and Eve Were Black" and went back and forth on this theme until someone thundered in bold marker BIG SHIT WHAT COLOR THEY WERE.

Such disputes, alas, are not as easily resolved online. There Bedell is associated with the left for several reasons, including the natural cheerlessness of liberals, which apparently drives us to kill. The need to operate a keyboard isn't the barrier to entry we once thought it was.

WHAT WE DO IS SECRET. Nick Gillespie on the libertarian content of punk rock in... San Francisco, taking off from a new book which "focuses on the Bay Area scene that ultimately gave rise to Green Day and other acts." A pretty damning indictment all around.

In the beginning, or near the beginning anyway, were groups such as the Dead Kennedys, whose scandalous name was of a piece with a wicked sense of humor that produced underground hits such as "California Uber Alles" (an attack on liberal Gov. Jerry Brown as a crypto-fascist who forced kids to "meditate in school") and "Holiday in Cambodia" (which taunted left-wing poverty tourists). "We weren't trying to tell people what to do," explains member East Bay Ray. "Our thing was to try to get people to think." (Sadly, this last directive seems to have escaped the defunct band's lead singer, Jello Biafra, whose recent interview in The Daily Beast is chock full of banal observations about politics and contemporary America.)

Jello changed, man. He's forgotten where he came from when he wrote songs like "Liberal Fascist Punks, Fuck Off."

(Here's an interesting article on Jerry Brown by Reason's Jesse Walker.)